The Tim Ferriss Show - #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

"I must never again put myself in a position where my work ethic can be undone by things totally beyond my control." — David YarrowIn his genre, David Yarrow (@davidyarrow) is one of the world’s best-selling fine art photographers. Most recently, he has focused on capturing the animal and human worlds in fresh and creative ways, with philanthropy and conservation central to this drive. In 2019, charitable donations from the sale of David’s images exceeded $2.5 million.David’s photography of life on earth has earned him a large and ever-growing following among art collectors, and he is now represented by some of the top contemporary fine art galleries around the world. In the last two years, three of Yarrow’s works have sold for more than $100,000 at Sotheby’s auctions in London and New York, and UBS has also appointed David as its global ambassador.In this conversation, we'll talk about his photography, but also touch on how his double life as a hedge fund manager informed his art.You can buy David’s #1 best-selling book with a $50 discount and a one-year free subscription to his new quarterly photographic journal at davidyarrow.photography/Tim. Please enjoy!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests.For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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things that need to get done. That's LegalZoom.com. LegalZoom, where life meets legal. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients.

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The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers to tease out how it is they do what they do and what you can possibly model, emulate, or apply in your own lives. My guest today is David Yarrow, Y-A-R-R-O-W. In his genre, David Yarrow is one of the world's best-selling fine art photographers. I have two collections of his work, and one of them is very, very heavy and sitting about 30 feet away from me right now. Most recently, David has focused on capturing the animal and human worlds in fresh and creative ways, which is probably an understatement. You just have to see some of these images.

And this has really been partnered with or coalesced with philanthropy and conservation. Those have been two primary drivers behind his work. In 2019, charitable donations from the sale of David's images exceeded 2.5 million US. Yarrow's photography of life on earth has earned him a large and ever-growing following among art collectors, and he is now represented by some of the top contemporary fine art galleries around the world. In the last two years, three of his works have sold for more than $100,000 each at Sotheby's auctions in London, New York, and UBS have also appointed David as their global ambassador. You can find all about David and see his work at davidyarrow.photography. You can see some of his amazing

images on Instagram at davidyarrow. That's D-A-V-I-D-Y-A-R-R-O-W. I highly recommend following. Facebook, you can find facebook.com forward slash davidyarrowphotography. And then on LinkedIn, also davidyarrow, pretty easy to find. And without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with yet another guest who should have their own podcast, and it'll be obvious why that is the case soon, namely David Yarrow. David, welcome to the show. It's very good to be here. It's an honor. Likewise. I'm thrilled to connect.

I have several of your large format books of photography. They're both incredibly gorgeous and incredibly heavy. So in quarantine, they're helpful for doing farmer's carries. It's partly because in Scotland, shoplifting is a problem. So the heavier the book, the less chance they can actually make them. And we'll get to the current day, but I thought we would start not necessarily at the beginning, but certainly some time ago. Could you please speak to what happened to you, or with respect to you, in Mexico in 1986?

Sure. I traveled to Mexico for the World Cup in 1986. I was in my third year out of four at Edinburgh University, studying business studies and economics. And my exams were finished one week into the World Cup. And the day of my final exam, I flew to Mexico City. I'd never actually even been to America before. I was working for a very modest magazine in Scotland that covers Scottish football, which almost by definition of very limited circulation. But the one benefit of having that working for the magazine was that FIFA in those days would be much more accommodating with regard to accreditation. Just for the yanks in our crowd, because the FIFA is like the NFL for football, as in actually using your foot to football. Please continue.

Unlike the NFL, it's been characterized by blatant corruption for many years, which you'll find the NFL hasn't. But putting that to one side, it's like the IOC, but the IOC's been blatantly corrupt as well. But this is before people knew that FIFA took bungs in order to give World Cups to places like Qatar and, to an extent, Russia. But it was 1986. It was six months after the earthquake that had devastated Mexico City and I arrived as a Scottish fan first and foremost and they always used to say that Scottish journalists are really just fans with typewriters but I did have I did have an

I did have a press pass which allowed me me to go onto the pitch of these games. And the reality was that I was 20 years old. I wasn't at all good. I was very, very average. And also, photographing Scotland became very, very difficult because I really was much more interested in watching the game rather than taking photographs of it. And there was a moment when Scotland were playing Uruguay, and Uruguay had a player sent off in the first minute of the game, so Scotland had to just beat 10 men to qualify to the next round.

They were managed at the time by someone I'm sure a lot of Americans would know, Alex Ferguson, who for many years managed Manchester United. And there was a moment when there was a Scottish centre-forward Americans we know Alex Ferguson whom for many years managed managed United Sir Alec and there was a moment when there was a Scottish centre-forward who missed an open goal and back in the Times newspaper and I was working then for the London Times all they could see was the striker with his head in his hand and my head also with my head in my hands with my camera nowhere near and they thought well this guy yarrow he's really not he's not really focused on the football at all the games were a lot of them were played at midday or at three o'clock in the afternoon

because of european tv time and if you can imagine a high high sun in mexico and maybe some african players or latin american, there was a great chance that you got very little facial detail because their faces were underexposed and then the top of their heads had a kind of like biblical halo on top of them. But these were the days in sports photography where in order to get a moving figure in focus, you had to do a thing called follow focus because autofocus hadn't been invented then. is also in the days of film and follow focus basically meant that you moved the ring focusing rim of the camera in tandem to the movement of the player so if you had a player coming towards you like a hundred meter runner

you would try and get as many different pitches of him in focus. You'd have to move the focal rim manually. And it's a trade. It's a skill. And I was crap at it, basically, which meant that the only good pitches I got were of the players lining up at the beginning of the match because they weren't moving too much. FIFA had another rule that if you're from representing if you're uh from a country that are qualified for for the tournament every single one of the every single country that qualified for the tournament

would be allowed one photographer on the pitch for the final and uh scotland obviously had been the first team to get knocked out that tends to happen habitually uh and of course all the photographers that are on expense bills for the newspapers back home had been sent home with Scotland. And then they would just get their pictures through AP or Reuters or whatever. So I was left as a 20-year-old with a press pass for the pitch on the World Cup final.

And I remember going to the stadium at six o'clock in the morning. The game was at midday. And I bribed the Mexican guard with a bit bit of whiskey and i said listen do you do you mind it's my one of my rules of the thumb to take whiskey everywhere but um i said do you mind if i walk from onto the pitch and uh in those days the azteca they had a monday night football there not too ago, but the Azteca held around 120,000 people. And he allowed me just to walk from one goal to the other. And I could see my footprints in the dew and the ground.

It was a bit of an epiphany for me. I felt, well, I'm doing this at 20. This has surely got to be a big part of my life and you'll know the saying from uh mark twain where he says the two most important days in a person's life the day they're born the day they find out why and that was my first inkling that it might be uh a decent part of my life the problem was i was fairly shit as a photographer which i think was very integral to becoming part of part of my life i was lucky I had a good final um I was in the right position for the first Argentinian goal and then when um Maradona's

Argentina won uh the most extraordinary thing happened in that probably about 20 or 30,000 Argentinians came onto the pitch and it was just a scrum. I had a big, I had two lenses and two cameras. Like most photographers in those days, you'd have one big lens recovering the midfield area and then a shorter lens recovering the, the, the, the goal mouth areas. Uh, and I thought if I take my wide angle lens and try and get as close to Maradona as possible, I might get a picture, but it's going to, in order to be nimble, I'm going to have to leave that 400mm f2.8 lens in the goal mouth. And I just took the split decision at the time that a lot of photographers weren't, given the number of Argentinians coming onto the pitch, that it was a gamble worth taking.

I thought, well, if I lose the equipment, as long as I've got close to Maradona, it's the right call. And as it turned out, I got dead close to him, dead on to him, just as he was lifted on another player's shoulders. And with a kind of biblical narrative behind of the stadium and thousands of people, he looked right in my eyes with the World Cup. And, of course, those were the days in film. So you didn't know what you'd got. You didn't know whether you got it sharp. You didn't know whether you got it in the lighting right. But I went back to the net where I'd left my 7,000, which was a lot of money in those days,

$7,000 of equipment. And there was my lens and my camera. And I've always had a bit of an affinity for Argentinians uh ever since that that day that they were far more interested in celebrating than ever thinking about making some equipment behind the goal and the picture the picture was picture really kind of saved my bacon from the whole tournament it was um photography is it's about those one or two big pictures it's not to me

about portfolios of hundreds and thank goodness because i really didn't uh then um and um it led to it led to doing an olympics the next year i still had to finish my my studying uh and there was a lovely moment i was flying uh over to la.A. about, I don't know, about six months ago. And the Maradona movie, you know, directed by the same guy that did the Earth and Center movie, and Amy Winans. I thought, well, I should watch this. And about two-thirds of the way through the movie, which is excellent, my picture came on my TV screen in front of me. And I couldn't believe it. I don't know about you, but I always get quite emotional on planes.

I don't know what it is about altitude and emotion. I was going, this is my bloody photograph. That's my photograph of Maradona. So I pressed for the stewardess because I didn't have anyone to talk to about it. And she came over and explained to me. I said, that's my picture of Maradona. And she's going, there's a nutter in J-21. There's a nutter in J-21 There's a nutter in J21.

Cut them off. No more scotch. Don't land in Halifax just yet. So luckily, we didn't land in Halifax. And I did have to explain to her that I was a photographer. And that was my picture. But I was hoping to actually go down to BA and see Maradona. And I still very much hope to do that when the current crisis is over. It would be quite special to meet him.

And he's got the pitch. He knows, obviously knows of the pitcher and reminisce of when he was the greatest player in the world. Amazing. So I want to add some color for perhaps the Americans or even just non-Argentines who are listening. So Maradona, M-A-R-A-D-O-N-A, is a demigod in Argentina. It is hard to overstate how much of a cultural fixture he is. Even to this day, and he is certainly decades past his prime in playing, his photographs are everywhere. There are murals of him. If you were to take, for the US, let's just say, pick your favorite team sport, basketball, football, meaning American football. If you were to take the let's just say, pick your favorite team sport, basketball, football, meaning American football. If you were to take the most popular, say, 10 players of the last decade and wrap them into one person, that would be Maradona to Argentines.

And they take their football very, very seriously. When I was living there in 2004, I remember— Of course, I forgot about this. Yeah. You're a tango dancer. you're a champion tango dancer. A long time ago. This was a previous lifetime. But living in Argentina, one of the most terrified moments that I had was waking up in my apartment building and thinking that the entire building was on fire because people were screaming their faces off at something like nine

in the morning. I couldn't recall. And it was because the World Cup was on television and Argentina scored a goal and they went completely berserk. You can pretty much track the morale of the country and probably the GDP based on soccer results. They take it so seriously. It is hard to overstate. Absolutely. And of course, your world and his world collided because the home of Tango was Boca, wasn't it? The Boca era, Buenos Aires.

Exactly right. He played for Boca Juniors, which is one of the two great famous football clubs in the big capital. That's right. And Boca Junior fans are very partisan. Oh, they are. He had a habit of playing for clubs in cities that are renowned for wearing it on their sleeve. And for many years, he played in Naples, in Napoli, in Italy. And there was a – he was – people would – in Napoli, they would have two pitchers above their bed.

They would have Jesus Christ and Diego Maradona. And when the World Cup was in Italy, two World Cups, one World Cup after the World Cup I photographed, the planners hadn't done a good job because italy met argentina in the semi-final in napoli and that for most neapolitans constitutes an enormous dilemma because who are they going to support were they going to support their home country or were they going to support um their son and the person that revitalized the city? And 75% of the people in the stadium that were Italian supported Argentina. That's amazing.

I did not know that. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. What an incredible story. I don't mean to interrupt, but I want to ask you what you learned from that experience, if anything. What did you take from that experience after that photograph hit the wires, went everywhere? What did you take from that or what impression did that make on you? you uh well to begin with i was just happy that it saved my bacon because it had diverted people's

attention away from the fact that 95 of the pictures i'd taken of the other matches were out of focus so it was in many ways it was um it was the outlier um but it gave me a chance. And a lot of these self-help books and your books are at a higher grade than the majority of them. But there is a lot to be said for the old idea that if you're the smartest person in the room, get out of the room. So whatever the polar extreme from being the smartest person in the room was, I was at that polar extreme in Mexico. I was the worst photographer of the British press corps. And that is good because that means that if you've got any sense of self-pride, the only way is up. And I just went back and practiced and tried to get better at the things that i wasn't good at um i think there's a lot to be said in photography the fact the older older you get

uh the better you should be as a photographer there's cartier braisson said the the first thousand pictures you take will be your worst thousand pictures that was certainly true of me and um the following year i did uh i just continued to work quite a bit in skiing skiing was easier to photograph because if you're doing the men's downhill whether it be kitzbühel or uh the the larbohorn and or aspen or lake placid or wherever it might be you can pre-focus on a gate and then wait for that skier to come around the gate. So there are still lots of difficulties in it, partly skiing down. And I always remember trying to photograph the toughest men's downhill in the world,

which is the Hahnem-Kalmen-Kitzbühel. And the start of the race in Kitzbühel in Austria. Oh, sorry. I didn't recognize Kitzbühel. Got it. Sorry, it's my Scottish accent. But you do, and it was the days when

you had some amazing skiers and then you had the crazy canoots, you know, the Rob Boyds, the Podorskis, the Ken Reeds, and you yourself, you had Bill Johnson, who of course won Olympic gold as well. And they were all crazy, mad, good skiersiers but that first stretch in kitzball is like the white cliffs of dover

stacked on top of each other and if you are trying to sidestep down inside the ropes with 20 000 austrians outside the ropes going look at that british idiot he doesn't know how to ski and you got your long lens around your neck and you're trying to sidestep down and you take one bad move and then you're at the bottom in a heap so you you're um getting to be in the position to take the photograph as part of the challenge in the first place but i did uh it was in the golden era of sw skiing and where there were the men's and the women's downhill and slalom was dominated by the Swiss and I got a bit better at photographing skiing and then I got the offer to photograph the Olympics in 1988 and that was in Calgary in Alberta, those Olympics were remembered for two things. Firstly, one of the most beautiful women ever to ice skate called Katerina Witt. So that's what most of the photographers that were good were given to do, to spend the evenings photographing Katerina Witt dancing around a nice ice rink, which is not a bad way to spend the evening photographing katarina dancing around a nice ice stadium which ice rink which is

not a bad way to spend the the evening in in in 1988 um the other thing that was remembered for uh was that britain had the world's worst ski jumper called eddie the eagle and he was so they gave that to me because they thought well that's a good pair up we'll get yarrow to photograph eddie the eagle and of course eddie the eagle they had a film about him as well quite So they gave that to me because they thought, well, that's a good pair up. We'll get Yarrow to photograph Eddie the Eagle. And, of course, Eddie the Eagle, they had a film about him as well quite recently. They did. They did. And so I enjoyed Calgary.

But I had my moment there where I, in those days, the Olympics would be sponsored. There'd be lots of sponsors, but two of the key sponsors would be Kodak and Fuji. That kind of dates me because we were still working on film. And at the end of the day, you go to these enormous labs that would be sent up, sponsored by the by Fuji and Kodak. And that you'd hand in all your 35 mil film. You'd hang around for three hours and then you get them back and then you'd wire them to your 35mm film, you'd hang around for three hours, and then you'd get them back, and then you'd wire them to whoever you were wiring them to. And I remember so vividly then worrying that no matter how hard I was trying to get a different type of picture,

that I would go around the editing room, because there's degrees. Photography, press photography is actually quite collegiate, in that everyone tends to try and help each other certainly the top at the bottom there's there's maybe people are in a hurry and then the people that are insecure can be a little bit bitchy I'm sure it's the same in every industry um but you would I would see too many photographs that were the same and it worried me with my very limited understanding of economics from my schooling that how on earth could you have a profession that would evolve if there was just so much supply of what you were doing you'd go and try and get a different photograph of a bobsleigh coming down the bobsleigh track and then before you knew it

there were 25 german photographers always watch the germans they're very good so there'll be 25 german photographers working for stern or whatever that would have exactly the same or a better image and i came home from that olympics full of um stories and i'd love being I love the glamour of it all and being where the world was focused to be at that men's downhill with the world watching it was hugely exciting but I just worried about what it was all about what my craft what I was what was I trying to do I was just getting another picture that perhaps the world didn't need. There was something else, Tim, that concerned me. I think a lot of artists are insecure, and I'm insecure. It manifests itself in lots of different ways. I think a lot of people

would see me as not having one ounce of insecurity, but I do i also and i worry about things that i probably shouldn't do but i had a problem that there was no one there in the photography world that was 20 years older than me or 25 years older than me that i looked up to and i said i really want to be that man when i'm older that's what i really want i I want to be him. There was no guiding light. And that's not meant to be disrespectful to any of these individuals who are great fun in the evenings most of the time. But a lot of them had fairly dysfunctional lives and didn't, I didn't really see where the end game was. They were, they were, they were pressmen. They were working for either big newspapers or in those days, of course, Sports Illustrated was so much of a bigger magazine than it is now, regrettably.

But I didn't see many people that set a goal for me to try and attain in terms of getting a job affirmation, getting better at what they're doing, really enjoying their life and taking pleasure from it. There was, I think, quite a lot of fairly unhappy pressmen on tour. And I remember coming back from that Olympics, and I had two job offers because I'd finished my – I graduated, and the two job offers were the identical salary. There was a job offer of what would equate now to $20,000 to work for what is now Getty Images, which you'll be familiar with. And then there was an offer of $20,000 to work for NatWest Bank. And to the enormous surprise of people at Getty,

but to the profound delight of my parents, I chose NatWest Bank. I think they're both nearly bust now, by the way. I think Getty's really well been bought back by the family because they had to buy it back after the private equity passed the parcel but and and nat west is certainly bust why did you choose nat west and banking because everyone else was doing it and i'd watched wall street and i thought gordon gecko and bud fox were super cool and uh it was just and it was inside there was it was no it was nothing like minus 25 in Calgary, and it just seemed like what everyone else was doing.

Way back in 1988, the Big Bang had happened, and in the UK, that was when there was a consolidation of the whole broking industry. And Oliver Stone had produced Wall Street the about 1985 that year of 1985 um and the books we read were books like barbarians of the gates and which is a fantastic book as an aside it's a great read and uh it was rjr and abisco wasn't it and then michael michael lewis who just a superb writer just brings it home and i think lars poker about the dealing room floor at salomon brothers yeah it was uh was almost like the bible if you were whether you i i'm sure it's true in america as well if you'd been at harvard or princeton mit and i was not at an ivy league college like that but edinburgh

university was it was a certainly a good platform for people building a career in those days uh in the uk and um it just seemed the normal thing to do i'll never forget a conversation with my father who i had a difficult relationship he was a kind of patriarchal um edwardian character that that was just the way he was he didn't mean it he just that's the way he was of that old school Downton Abbey type generation that would never express words like love and congratulations or whatever it'd be very difficult to get a to get that kind of appreciation out of him and I remember him saying to to uh to said, David, you should go into banking because it's a robust, honorable profession, whereas photography is just a hobby. And it kind of dates the conversation that anyone could say that because it says, well, that must have been in the 80s when someone said that. And my dad was he was a he was an industrialist, but he was also chairman of a bank in a kind of ambassadorial way.

What does that mean? I think that your banking system and our banking system are very different. the senior banks, the chairman of the banks that are being interviewed right now during this meltdown in financial markets and talk of depression, they are entirely fluid in the language of collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. If you're a chairman of a British bank, you just have to be familiar with opening an envelope and opening an office. And my father's role was very much more, there's a ceremony today, someone's got their 50-year, give them a watch, they've been working 50 years. I don't mean to sound that disrespectfully, but the chairman of American banks, they've got an executive role

and they've got to understand exactly what's going on in terms of their risk-weighted assets and the risk portfolio of those assets um whereas in the uk uh there was a period where you there were a lot of banks and you could have a figure at the helm that was just there to add a little bit of gray hair and gravitas without having a fucking clue what's going on so so if so if i if i if i got my homework done correctly your your father was involved with banking among other things your he was an industrialist. He built ships. Industrialist. So he was an industrialist, Yarrow shipbuilders. And then he had the banking involvement. Your mother was an artist. You end up at, after watching Gordon Gekko, reading Barbarians at the Gate, Liar's Poker, all great reads. Barbarians at the Gate,

for those people who don't want to read a book right now, also made into a fairly entertaining movie. You enter the banking world in part because it is the normal thing to do, but also because it was, I would imagine at the time, based on the stories told in these books and shown on the big screen, quite exciting. What did you learn in banking that informed your later exploration of photography, if anything? I learned so much. I learned failure, humility, surrounding myself with bright people. And I made a lot of friends. And I think you, I encourage younger people these days to remember that the friendships and the contact, the people you can call are so important, particularly at times like this, when you need to be calling people and need to have a degree of

contextuality. You're right, in 1988, going into a dealing dealing room whether it be a salomon's dealing room or in my case it was a investment bank called natwest markets having 500 people in one room uh was incredibly exciting uh you didn't again you didn't really have a clue what was going on and someone else was paying for you to learn um i um i moved to america for a while and when i was working in uh wall street i got to meet um some of the some of the first hedge fund managers some of them were in boston some of them were in new york and i thought this is a kind of cool job you actually you're the guy that can sit around and not have to make calls the whole time but maybe be slightly more cerebral um spend a bit more time uh just doing your own

research and be judged by the quality of your decisions not the quantity of your calls um the problem is that no one wanted to hire me as a hedge fund manager. So I thought in about 1995, 1996, I left the investment bank and set up my own fund management business. I wasn't married and didn't have any obligations. And I thought, don't do it now. I never will. And the idea of continuing to be that bud Fox and plenty of six figure numbers on that zip file kind of call. I'd,

I'd done that for eight years. And for most people, it's enough. It's a, that's a tough job. I do feel. And the, the job is slightly anachronistic now,

but that job of being your kind of Bud Fox salesman. And we'll come on to Jordan Belford because I spent quite a bit of time with him over the last 12 months. But it was a slightly more elevated phone call. The wolf of Wall Street, who don't recognize Jordan Belford. So I set up my own fund, and I didn't really know uh i was 31 at the time and the there weren't there were a few things i had to negotiate um in in the markets but it wasn't that demanding there was the there was the big run in tech stocks that you'll remember towards the tail end of the 1990s, 1998, 1999. The Icarus flying too close to the sun years.

Yeah. And then the big Scandinavian telephony stocks, the Nokias, the Ericssons. And then there was the whole Y2 y2k turn of the millennium situation i i often say to people if you get uh if you set up a business on monday and you get married on a tuesday metaphorically um a lot of things are gonna have to go right in your life for that decision making crammed into one kind of week that albeit wasn't but i i kind of set up a business on monday and kind of got married on a tuesday um in what sense did you get married well like i did get married but it wasn't on the

tuesday but there wasn't a huge gap between the two you mean and married physically married to yeah so you got married uh um my girlfriend and got it all right we uh we so we were um and in 2000 uh we uh we had uh she had our first daughter um and everyone looked at me and said, bloody hell, Yara, you've not done bad. You've got a lovely young family. You've got your own business. And then she was barely one year old. We went over to America for a wedding in September 2001 and at the end of the wedding we said well table. Why don't we? Rather than going back to the UK. Why don't we just go on a little bit of a US road trip and

On the Tuesday morning I was getting ready and I was just in a in the the lobby of the hotel when I saw the first plane Go in or or or what looked like the repercussions of the first plane going in. And of course, because it was 2.15 or sort of 5 to 2 European or British time, our markets were open. And I was running a very, very small pot of money at that time but it's I still had responsibility I probably had about 60 or 70 investors and I just it was just in say I just didn't like what I saw on a markets would been tough anyway Ericsson the Swedish mobile telephony company had warned the previous day and

also I was with my wife and I was on a road trip in America, and I thought, you know what, this just doesn't look good. And because I'd read all the books, I just thought, why don't I just take my risk off? And because markets were open... So this is 9-11, this is on the day of 9-11. This is on-11. This is on the day of 9-11. This is on the day. And so by the time the second plane went in, we'd cleared the decks for every client that we had of every holding that we had. I think Goldman Sachs, I think it was in those days.

Well, it's still now, but they were looking after me. They sold everything that we had um and the mark if you go back to those whatever they were 19 minutes or 18 minutes between the two planes and when one of the cnbc anchors died two or three years ago mark holmes they played his i thought extraordinary performance on time incredibly professional of those 19 20 minutes and what i find still extraordinary was that it was really only two minutes before the second plane went in that things became the first there was no impact on the markets of the first plane going in absolutely none at all because people just assumed it was an accident and the whole i'm sure you remember the

visuals of that hole on the on the tar it just seemed a bloody big hole for i'm not trying to be you know monday morning quarterback but i took the decision um it was there was no skill and it was just instinct so after the the the whole denouement of 9-11 and whatever, I went from being someone that was seen to be a nobody. I hasten to add, we didn't make any money from this. We just avoided our clients losing any money. So when they got their returns for the month of September in the post, their return was 0.3%, whereas, of course, a lot of people had lost

15, 20% of, of, of their money. And that's why the book, uh, Nassim Tlaib's book full by randomness plays a big role in my thought processes. I was just lucky, but I went from running a small amount of money to employing 45 people to running a billion dollars. And over what period of time did that happen? About six months and six to nine months. It was, and the reality, Tim, was that I was not equipped for it. I was not equipped suddenly to be having a wife, a daughter, 45 people, a billion dollars, whereas wind back two years before, I was just a kid with a dream. And it was actually too much for me. And I couldn't cope because suddenly everyone wanted a little bit of my time at home or in the office. And I had to add a lot of stakeholders in my life.

I'm not saying that that's a bad thing I do again now, but I'm more mature. I can cope with it. But then I just couldn't. And I just felt lonely. I just felt unhappy. And I didn't know when the me time was. There was no real time for me. And when markets are your way, when your fund is performing through luck or judgment, those cracks can be papered over in a cocktail of champagne and good food and wine and people playing up to you

because you're the, you're the guy. But of course, as soon as there are, uh, the performance deteriorates, which inevitably it will from time to time, um, those cracks become very conspicuous and my life kind of blew up i i uh my marriage didn't survive um i i probably took it out of myself quite a bit in the evenings um and what do you mean by that i would drink too much yeah um and uh i would i think i'd leave it at that but i it was not i don't think i was I would drink too much. Yeah. Um, and, uh, I would, I think I'd leave it at that, but I, it was not, I don't think I was,

I wasn't a happy person. Then you go in the following day to, um, to face more hell. And with, and also that if you, if you do, and so many people do get divorced,

uh, sadly, uh, but it can, it's, it it's it's about as big a test uh as as you can have and unless there is someone the the other side and you've fallen in love with somewhere else and i hadn't um neither of us um were there was no infidelity it was just like ships in the night two people that were one was being a mother which is the most important job in the world and the other was being a depressed hedge fund manager were full of self-inflated ideas of their own importance potentially and something had to give and it gave and of course if there is a little bit of money knocking around because of previous

success well then the lawyers can take their teeth in and all hell breaks loose and and the the um this was all this is i'm moving forward now to when the world really did start financially to implode which was around the first signs in 2006 with, I think it was the investment bank Bear Stearns, and then just continued to spiral downwards from there. And because I was going through the kind of final parts of that divorce, I had a disposition to being cautious anyway. I just couldn't, maybe subconsciously, my whole mindset was to be cynical and miserable. So when, and also something's got to be wrong. I mean, Scots, we're quite a savvy bunch.

I think the three oldest universities in the world are Scottish from about 1450. a savvy bunch i think the the three oldest universities in the world are scottish from about 1450 but in 2007 a nation of six million people and we've got two of the top 10 banks in the world that doesn't stack up it stacks up we might have had three of the oldest universities and one of the worst football teams but not two of the biggest banks in the world and so i was i was very cautious about about that a royal bank of scotland bought one of your bank's citizens and it just it just didn't stack up that these were where they were in terms of 300 years of prudence a culture of prudence had gone to five years of a culture of building the balance sheet anyway to cut a long story short we got

through 2008 uh and on the i think it was the 8th of december i had a christmas lunch with my team and said well listen you know it's been a shitty time but most people um have had their bollocks put on a plate and we've lost three or four percent of people's money so we're going to come out of this okay and then i get for the yanks just uh subtitle bollocks equals balls yeah please continue yeah no i'm quite two languages i'm quite enjoying this yeah please continue anyway so i get this phone call um saying this guy bernie madoff uh madoff madoff has got has handed himself over to the fbi and it's the biggest ponzi scheme and i go who's he and they say well he's he's he runs a big hedge fund uh out of out of new york i said well it won't

affect us silly idiot um bunch of crooks in this game. I knew about a group of people called Fairfield Greenwich that were a feeder to him because this was a well-known fund, but I thought it had no impact on us. And how wrong was I? Because what I didn't know was that so much of the money that had got invested with Bernie Madoff had also invested with us. And when I set the fund up in 1997, the only people that are going to put money with me were my dog and my sister. So in 1997, I said, you can have your money back in a week's time. And I kept that.

Oh, man. 1997, I said, you can have your money back in a week's time. And I kept that rule from 1997 to 2000. If you need your money, you can have it in a week. So the next day, I got redemptions over the next week of $600 million. And that was it. That was it. So something that I was exposed to that was an exogenous variable effectively, to all intents and purposes, killed the business. And you asked a question quite a long time ago. It might have been in the previous millennium.

But you asked me the question, what did you learn from investment, from your time in banking i think the the thing that i took away from it most was that i must never again put myself in a position where um your your your work ethic can be totally undone by uh things be totally beyond your control it's rather ironic i say this as the coronavirus is about to hit its peak in parts of Europe and to hit its peak in America soon, because clearly that is an exogenous variable that means that right now what I do is not something that people want to hear an awful lot about. But they'll always remember that time. It told me a lot of humility. I think if you're selling a product, you and your career have sold all sorts of things.

And a huge admiration for the polymath that you are. I've really only sold two things. I've sold hedge funds and pictures of elephants. Now, by and large yeah there's a bit more to it than that but please continue yeah but by and large one is quite an easy sell because you turn around to the guy that wants the picture of the elephant say that's always going to be an elephant it's not going to you're not going to wake up tomorrow morning and it's a giraffe you're getting what you see whereas the whole concept of selling a product on the basis of future returns you cannot guarantee i really struggled with and i know i'm not alone but the whole premise that, and the words, a salesman as well, slightly gives an uncomfortable

shiver down my spine because you shouldn't really be selling. Selling investment products is a very tricky compromise. It's a difficult thing to get right because you cannot make an aggressive sale because you cannot guarantee. You've just got to say, i promise to do my best i promise to try and exercise maximum judgment try not to panic if i'm going to panic i'll panic early and i'll show total integrity at all times i don't think you can do more than that um but i think it's a tough i have huge admiration for the people that do it well yesterday on your on your cmb show one of your icons in hedge fund management uh paul tudor jones spoke and i listened i wrote to him afterwards i listened so you could hear a

pin drop in in my living room for half an. And he was so precise, passionate when he needed to be passionate, dispassionate when he needed to be dispassionate, but all the time entirely considered. But he's the exception. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. We all shop online, and we've seen that promo code field that taunts us at checkout. You see it all the time. Thanks to Honey, you never have to manually search for coupon codes ever again.

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So I can't not go down this rabbit hole for just a second since you mentioned PTJ. There's also a great documentary on his early days, if people can track it down. I can't recall the name of it right now, but really sharp guy. And well, I'll leave it at that for now. But you know much better than I. It just so happens that two of the most successful photographers I know both have backgrounds in finance. You and Brandon Stanton, who created Humans of New York. And that's not always the case. I also know Chase Jarvis and a few others

who do not have finance or banking backgrounds. But you, in this current set of world circumstances, in lieu of going outside and photographing elephants and so on, since it's difficult to do that at the moment, I would imagine, correct me if I'm wrong, but have probably been unable to escape the temptation to put your investor slash trader hat on, at least in observing world events. So Paul Tudor Jones has his perspective, which as you noted, can be seen on CNBC, on the web. There's a two-minute video. There's a longer interview with him. He is reasonably optimistic. It's hard to know how much of that is informed by what his current book looks like or anything else, but I happen to believe he's

a pretty good guy overall. And what do you think the world looks like in a month, three months, six months? I know I'm asking you to kind of look into a crystal ball or through turtle shells and so on and so forth. But if you had to speculate, what do you think things look like, whether referring to markets, economies, or otherwise? What is your view of the world, and what do you see coming?

I've got to be very, very careful that I don't become an instant expert in viruses because we've seen so many of those get airtime recently. The first thing I'd say, without wanting to copy what Paul said, is that we are at the end, from a financial markets perspective, we're coming to the end of a first quarter and

that always means that uh bizarre things happen the fact that the dow should have its biggest run since 1933 at the very time that new york is being considered the epicenter of this virus if you're looking from another planet you really would think the humans are quite mad. Those two things should happen simultaneously. And I'm sure the history books will look at what's happened over the last week. It's been a historic week following a historic week. And next week will be a historic week. And just for timing, so we just show where

we're frozen in the amber here we're recording this on friday march 27th please continue so the first thing i'd say is that uh i i am following it i want to be an optimist i want to get out and photograph i want to go out and see people i want to come back to america i want to go out and see people. I want to come back to America. I want to go to Africa. A couple of things that I'm concerned about, and Paul touched on one, Africa, I'm very concerned about. I spend a lot of time in East Africa. A lot of people turn around to me and say, David, you spend quite a bit of your year in Africa. You must love Africa. I turn around. It's like dispersing.

I say, I hate Africa. I say, it It's like dispersing. I say I hate Africa. I say it's the most corrupt continent in the world. For a start, it's four continents wrapped into one, whether it be the Arabic north, the all-rich west, colonial east, or sub-Saharan Africa. And the one thing that unites those four subcontinents within the continent is they're all corrupt from top to bottom. That corruption and lack of infrastructure is going to be laid very bare in the next uh two or three months i you take some of the townships in johannesburg goodness knows what's going to happen i see them made a lockdown today but you worry about um the spread you've got to kind of assume that whether you're in nairobi or dar es salam or

johannesburg or lissaka that the whole the whole population is going to have it that you just got to work on that basis the idea of um human distancing and townships i think are mutually exclusive so you you worry about that america is is in many ways the right country for this to be the epicenter, for it to be the epicenter, because your country time and timeos has never been more needed it's also very good for entertainment factors because the one the one the one thing our family all do i just loved it when when i i'm i don't do politics but the your your president's uh press conferences are a lot of fun because when he's asked a question you wouldn't tolerate him on your show tim because if he's asked a question he will he will take the subject matter and then give his personal experience of the subject matter so yesterday when he's asked about um when will

insurance protection kick in for second tier restaurants he then goes on some sort of Gettysburg Address, except it's not about the restaurants. You get some really good meat and fish, and then you just get one bad fish, and it ruins all the 30 good fish you've had. And you're going, where does this come from? Because that wasn't what you're asked. But he just takes this as an opportunity

just to let go on his own personal experiences with all the same adjectives and pronouns. But that is a little bit of light entertainment away from it. I worry for New York. The last American city I was in was New Orleans two weeks ago. We had a show there, and that was about a week after the Mardi Gras. And obviously, they're concerned about that city now. We're all fine.

If I had to put my bet as good or as bad as anyone else's, how can it be better than anyone else's? Absolutely not. I fancy this is six months, and then the claw out the other side will have many disappointments on the way when this time yesterday our european stock markets were around about 15 16 off their moving average from uh 12 about 12 weeks ago that That seems far too high. Now, the markets have been weak today, but that would be my only comment is that this strikes me,

if you were looking at it from another planet, this is a 30% to 50% off risk assets event until it's sorted. And you don't want to be short of your economy uh and your economy if we'd had this conversation two or three months ago your economy is quite extraordinary has been extraordinary um we benefit that's why we spend so much time there we we if you take the second city in in great britain for luxury spend let's imagine you're Tom Ford, and Tom Ford wants to have a new store in the UK. But he's got London, so he says, London's fine. But where are we going to go

outside London? And he thinks, well, maybe should we go to Manchester? Should we go to Edinburgh? Should we go to Leeds? Maybe Glasgow? But then he's probably a bit stuck after that. And no one knows what the answer is, what that second city should be. What we think is in below the 48th, there are 37 cities in America that will be stronger than our second city in the UK. And that just shows the strength and breadth of your economy, which is going to be tested in the short term. That's for sure. And I think I slightly agree with what Paul said yesterday,

that you can see at some stage in the next couple of weeks, now that the Fed have played their cards, that the lows might be retested. But what we do know from the last three days is there's nothing like a big bear short squeeze and the speed of that rise in the markets. You know there are a lot of people that are short, short in this market.

So I think in a year's time, the markets will be higher than where they are now. But we're all going to have to go through cutting for whatever your job is, whether you're running do what you do, you do what I do. The next 12 months are going to be from a purely cash generation perspective. There's so many other parts to life as you try and instill in us. But purely from a cash generating perspective, the next 12 months are going to be tough. One or two last questions on this, and then we'll get back to photography because I have a lot of questions about that. And they're partially

informed by all of this background and context. But if we take one piece of Paul Tudor Jones' video and look at it for a second, I'd love to get your opinion. How much, since I don't know the UK markets at all, but how much of the pop that we're seeing in the US or in the UK do you think is accounted for by the front running that he mentioned of, I'm guessing, index funds or other large institutionals who have to rebalance effectively, right, or forced purchasing? How do you think about this current jump? You have the stimulus package thrown in as another variable and many other things,

people covering shorts, who the hell knows. But how do you explain the run-up just in the last few days and at the end of this month, I suppose, more broadly? Yeah. 20% is an awful lot to explain by one variable alone. going to have to be an amalgam, an aggregation of variables that sort of self-propagate themselves. But short covering, the viciousness of the moves, particularly in the last hour of trading, spank of emotion and machines. So actually, I'm saying two totally contradictory things, but emotion and machines have one thing in common,

which is not about considered decision-making. It's not about anyone turning around and saying, I think these numbers in New York, they're going to plateau earlier or whatever, or perhaps their their their their balance sheets aren't quite as weak on the worst case scenario in the final quarter of this year it is panic buying to rectify a situation that's not going to be comfortable going into the year end I when I um when I uh when I got rid of my fund. Actually, someone took the fund over.

And the person that took the fund over used to work for another great American fund manager, Julian Robertson, who had the Tiger Fund management in the old days. Yeah, quick side note. If people want to know Julian Robertson's story, the book More Money Than God is effectively liar's poker for hedge funds and has some great stories related to him. Please continue.

Sorry to interrupt. So all these tiger cubs were characters that werebuckling, normally athletic individuals that all had big degrees from big colleges or whatever. My fun was taken over by one of the Tiger Cubs. And I think he's one of these individuals that even if a meteor like that film whatever it was the double impact or Armageddon whatever even if it's going to hit the earth he will not hedge so we got our last Friday I got our year-to-date numbers from the fund and I haven't really been looking at the the fund too much because I'm just getting on with my own stuff and i'm not trading it hopefully it'll be there in 10 years time and i saw he was down 68 year to date which obviously so i thought this is a fund that's

now been going for uh 23 years and we've managed in six weeks to lose 68 the reason i say this is because i take my hat off to the individual involved not for losing 68 because he would just say that's a mark to market thing he had the confidence stoicism the belief uh that when he was down 68 because i think if i was down 68 i'd either throw myself in the river take all bets off um i don't think i would have just done nothing i i and i say that as a criticism of me not a compliment to me whereas this individual would turn around and say no it's just bars and sellers and markets in a panic and of course this week he's he's cut those losses in half so he's not far behind the market now i would have been dreadful in those circumstances so i've given it to the right the the right guy um who knows who i mean i i who who knows what but i do think on your tv shows there is a

dispositional bias in the commentary towards hope and towards blue on the screen i'm not saying that's a bad thing the whole history of your country has been built on the basis of positivity and and us brits could learn a thing or two about that i just think that if a market loses a thousand points in the day and rallies 50 points in the last 10 minutes the headline should not be dao rallies 50 points in the last 10 minutes it should be it should be dao dao 950 on the day it's a bit like that titanic story you know about uh you know i don't know whether you have it in america but i'm talking about the uk's provinciality um and when the titanic went down the the headline in my local newspaper i come from a village in scotland called greenock and the headline was Greenock man dies at sea rather than the Titanic

when he was on the Titanic. But I think there is a little bit of a dispositional skew towards wanting hope and wanting to see the other side of this. And we all share that. But in the short term, I want to go to 2012. And it would have been around 2012. I don't know if it's exactly 2012. But in your story of the Texan attorney nicknamed Jaws and everything around that. And then also a paper that you wrote, a discussion paper titled, correct me if I'm wrong the smart way to monetize strong photography and you can tackle these in either order but could you please describe and tell the stories of these two things sure um i think we should all have heroes and um i have two or three heroes uh that there's a big gap from those two or three to the next and they're

actually the top two are filmmakers uh martin scorsese's uh someone i looked up to enormously but uh in gold medal position is steven spielberg and when when spielberg shot jaws he was 25 years old and uh i was listening to your podcast with Vinnie Vaughan two nights ago, and I heard him mention how emotionally empathetic he was on set. Tom Hanks, who obviously has collaborated with Spielberg an awful lot, when Tom Hanks was asked, what is it that makes Spielielberg the director cinematographer of our generation uh hanks uh replied it's because he has a fluency in the language of what it takes

to elicit an emotional reaction uh i think that's a very important sentence um but i'll come on to that later but in 2000 and 2011 our uh worlds collided a little bit albeit i wasn't 25 uh which i think was still jaws is still i think one of the top 20 grossing films of all time um but i got obsessed with great white sharks and then the best place in the world to photograph great whites uh was in false bay around the corner from cape town it's not now for other for reasons that like we can talk about later maybe um if you're if you're going to try and photograph great whites not uh swimming in the water which is boring because it's been done before i go back to my cargory analogy of too many people doing the same thing you i want a shark coming out of the water i want a shark predating on something uh

and i'd i'd um fly down to cape town or from london on thursday night arrive friday morning too late to to go on my vessel and then on um saturday morning sunday morning monday morning i would spend four hours from five in the morning till nine at sea in this place called attack channel uh trying to photograph the great white attacking a seal coming out predating come flying out of the water to get the breaching uh breaching, exactly. And I worked with a great marine biologist who's now a good friend called Chris Fallows. He's taken the best two pictures of great whites breaching that I know of. And my friends back in London were saying,

you know, David, isn't it cheaper just to go and see a therapist rather than just go to Cape Town to see him? What an effing waste of money. I mean, because every trip was costing me about, because I was still working, every trip was costing me like about 10,000 bucks because then I had the boat and then the hotels, and it's their winter as well.

So at the height of everyone in London going and getting blasted at Glastonbury or watching Wimbledon tennis or whatever, or being on holiday in Ibiza or Mykonos. I would be shivering my arse off in their winter on my own, trying to photograph a shark breaching out of the water. And I do think a lot of people worried about my sanity. Anyway, I wasn't going to quit. You cannot. You cannot quit. You just got to continue. But equally, there were practical considerations.

And the season would run from June till July. And on the final possible journey out, and no one knows why Great White's breach in the half hour before sunrise and the two hours after sunrise the general supposition is it's because the seal pups cannot see them coming to attack them and therefore this is their best time to to to predate but no one knows the answer to that. Anyway, the final day I get the shot and I remember my my my heart beating so quickly and and you you've then got a you've got about a 40-minute journey to come into a very modest little

Village and near Cape Town called Simon's town. It's actually where the South African Navy I don't know why South Africa has a Navy. They might need it for hospital ships in the next two weeks, but I don't know why they need a Navy. Anyway, the Navy is at Simon's Town. And you can never, on digital cameras, you can't really find out whether something is, what we call in the trade,

and I hope my accent doesn't make a mess of this, but out of whack, out of whack means out of focus. Either something is in focus, emphatically in focus, or it isn't. And there's no ambiguity. If it's, if it's 2% out, it's 2% out. And my sports photography days taught me that i i'm very very tough on myself on focus you're never going to be able to see that on the back of your screen on a camera on a choppy water so i got back to the cafe and uh was able to look at it um or um in the cold light of day. And it was in focus, the shark attacking the seal. Everything was in focus.

And I got quite emotional. It was a bit like my story on the plane with Maradona, except that was at sea level, not 36,000 feet up. And I knew it was a big picture. Uh, so I sent it to the agency in London. Uh, I was on my own. Um, i didn't really have it was a sunday

morning didn't have anyone to to celebrate with in a beautiful ever you want to ever you want a great restaurant in and you're you're happen to be in cape town in a place called quark bay there's a fish restaurant over the railway line i think it's called harbor lights and and because the south african rand is under a lot of, you can have the best seafood bottle of wine and get changed for 20 bucks. So I had lunch on my own, like the loser I am, with my camera. And the picture was, I think, in the next week, around 100 magazines, newspapers in the world all around the world and I got my check about six months later because they're all playing you know the game in terms of delay between them getting the the income in

and then being sent to you my check was around about I don't know around about $17,000 and I thought this has got to be the worst industry in the world because it must have cost me at least 25 000 to finally get that picture so i've taken this picture and i've lost eight thousand dollars from taking this picture i thought this is i mean i may as well get back to trying to do something else. I mean, what a, what a stupid industry.

And then I got a call from someone. Um, and I spent a lot of time in Texas, y'all. Um, now, and the guy was, that's a bad text and accident.

He said, he said, are you the kid that took the photograph of the shark? He says, cause I'm an attorney. I'm called jaws. And I, I want one the shark? He says, because I'm an attorney. I'm called Jaws. And I want one of them pictures of my wall because I want to be the prayer of God and to anyone that litigates against me.

And it went from Texas to Forrest Gump in about 10 seconds. Anyway, so he said, how much do you want for the picture? And, and this is 11, 10, 11 years ago. And people weren't looking at photography as an air where you could for, for fine art. And I, I said,

well, maybe we'll put it in a nice frame and all, uh, maybe, but, uh, maybe charge you 10,000, $10,000.

Um, he said $10,000. He said, $10,000? So I obviously thought I'd gone way too high. So I said, well, listen, I'm sorry to think that's a lot. I said, we'll deliver it to Texas for free. We might even install it. He goes, no, I'm going to have three of them, Shark. And that was when the penny dropped for me it was

just in that one conversation that photography at an editorial level selling pictures to stern magazine or parry match or sports illustrated or the new york times the london times printed picture one of my pictures half a page London Times like the New York Times I don't want anything for it it's it's it's the best PR you can have in the world so that was when the penny dropped that the way to monetize it if that's not a vulgar word but the way to make a living was through fine art and so i wrote this piece it's my ode to cameron crow in a way because when jerry mcguire did it in uh in in jerry mcguire when when uh chris did it you remember he wrote that missive and then he put it in everyone's cubbyhole uh and he said the sports management

should look after fewer sports stars and give them more personal attention i wrote my mission statement um i didn't uh do it quite as glamorously as tom cruise and it took more than an evening with the towel around my neck but i did a lot of homework and the basic essence was that the future for me uh in photography was going to be to not just encroach art's lawn, ART's lawn with my photography, but for it to be an integral part of art, to be something that is quite clearly art, full stop. And that was, if you got that right, and from there it was going to be a long old journey,

that there was a marketplace. And I back now yeah it was 120 months ago probably 120 12 10 years um i i think we we uh we've the journey's not ended and the journey's just having a massive uh bump for everyone right now. But I've got so many things wrong in my life, but I got it right. And you write in your books, which I've read, and some of the podcasts which I've listened to, you use a word, which is very important, you use the word self-propagating and the importance of self-propagation. And if you can get to a position where your brand is recognized and strong, so many good things come from that in a way that you don't actually have to, as long as you look after the brand the position can reinforce itself um when we've we're starting

selling pictures for five thousand dollars five thousand dollars seems an awful lot for a photograph uh i i look back at and we have one subject we haven't talked about when i did a sports when i did sports photography my claim to fame was that John McEnroe spat at me at Wimbledon he got a 15-point code violation many years that was my that was my biggest claim to fame but I used to sell pictures outside the tube station Metro, the subway. Metro, yeah. For 20 bucks. Way back in the day, 1987, it was the great days when you had America had fantastic tennis players. I'm not saying you don't know. You have amazing women's tennis players.

Coco is quite something. But in the days of on the men's side, you had McInerney and Connors and Garolaitis. And it was just like one big party. I mean, you just want to go party with those guys. But I would sell pictures for 20 bucks. So in Art Miami last year, I did say to people, we sold a picture for $200,000.

And someone said, well, that's an awful lot. David, that's quite i said well how i could be accused of taking my time because that was 35 years after i was selling pictures for 20 quid outside a subway station in london so it's um i think there are a lot of lessons to be learned from that. Let's look a little more closely at that discussion paper. The Smart Way to Monetize Strong Photography. So my understanding is that it included an analysis of the business models or approaches of two, at least two, I'm not sure if there were more, very successful photographers at the time. Could you speak to what observations or conclusions you made of those successful photographers? Yeah, absolutely. And the first thing I'd say about photography and

almost more than anything else that I will say in this interview with you, Tim, I so believe in this from the bottom of my heart that photography is collegiate. I don't compete against other photographers. This is not a zero-sum game job i think you've used that expression just because you're doing well it doesn't mean that someone else should do badly and vice versa right i always i remember that uh in the world cup semi-final i did the first 10 minutes of uh west germany against they were still called west germany west germany against france um and my camera broke uh 10 minutes into the world cup semi-final and the italian photographer next to me he could see i was having problems and he said uh my friend he said except he said it in italian

here is my camera he just gave me his camera uh and he had no right to do that and that's what photography i think is like the two photographers that i mentioned in that piece were um both uh live i think in america one's australian one's actually british um the first one uh is a guy called nick brandt. And Nick first got involved in photography as a cinematographer. I think he was doing the filming of a Michael Jackson video that happened to be shot in the Serengeti in Tanzania. Was it called Earth Song? I can't remember the Michael Jackson. I think it might have been called that.

And he fell in love with the planes of serengeti uh he was a creative guy and he decided to spend more and more time uh in east africa filming and he focused on uh part of all the big elephants in the world are in kenya uh if you want to go and photograph a big elephant and i'm very much i'm a romanticist but i'm also a magnifier as well if i if i want to go and photograph a big elephant, and I'm very much, I'm a romanticist, but I'm also a magnifier as well. If I want to go and photograph an ABBA tribute band, I'll do it in Stockholm. I will go to where it's at. So with elephants, the best place to photograph big elephants in the world is Kenya. There are about 22 what are called big tusker elephants left in the world.

They're the elephants that look half like an elephant and half like a mammoth from Ice Age where the tusks touch the ground. And they're only in two national parks. They're in a national park called Amboseli and a national park called Savo where Peter Beard, who I'm sure you know Peter Beard's work. He's from the Andy Warhol School and a great storyteller and photographer. He spent a lot of time in Sava. Nick spent a lot of time in this place called Amberselly. And he photographed in black and white. And I always have photographed, tended to photograph in black and white.

We can maybe come on to that later. And his work was shot on film not digital but he was achieving very high prices for his work and i admired it i and i still do uh he got there before me we don't know each other but i have total respect for him um and i know printers that he's used to use i've known a lot of galleries um who knows knows both uh and he gives an awful lot back to conservation and he is not um someone that likes uh socializing and i respect that as well which is why you need to use the wholesale marketplace um for other people to extol the virtues of your work we have an acronym in in the uk which i'm sure tim you have in america called

uh fig jam do you have do you have an? I don't know what that means. So Fig Jam means in Britain, fuck I'm good, just ask me. Fuck I'm good. So please also explain what you mean by using the wholesale market. So I'd love for you to explain both of those. So wholesale means using galleries

because if you're a photographer and you want to sell your work, I'd love for you to explain both of those. So wholesale means using galleries. Because if you're a photographer and you want to sell your work, you've got really two options in the fine art market. Number one is you can go to the best galleries in the world that one week might be selling Picassos or Warhols or or whatever and say or or or photographic galleries and say here's here's my work and they'll take 50 they will take 50 of the sale that's standard um and nick embraced that a model to the full and to partly because he didn't to go and be selling it yourself all around the world it's a lot of work and you've got to get the content it's not like original content providers like netflix you've not got the guy that's making the latest episode of the crown the next week trugging around berlin trying to flog it but you know because he's not going to have much of a home

life if that's the basis. But if you need wholesalers to distribute, our biggest market in the world outside London is in Dallas. Now, I went to Dallas seven years ago. By your market, you mean, or our biggest market, you mean you personally? Or do you mean fine art photography? No, for me personally. So seven years ago ago i didn't know anyone in dallas um but in order to get to that position you need a gallery and then you just build up contacts and i mean dallas i go to dallas now more than i go to new york or la um and uh

even culminated i couldn't quite my family and friends certainly couldn't, I even had the pleasure of having lunch at SMU with George W. And that was a great thrill. And that all just came from Texan hospitality and just getting to know people. But with the gallery at the epicenter of that, with the gallery to talk about me. So why, just, let's, I know we're going to gallery to talk about me so why just yeah let's let's i know we're going to get to fig jam but uh why honor dallas i know texas actually has a lot of art but you could also say that of los angeles you could say that of new york you could say that of chicago how did dallas come to be your number two um i think uh texans you know, there is a great sense of hospitality there.

People want to help. I might be looking at it with rose-tinted spectacles, but by and large, we've been welcomed with open arms. Irrespective of whether the oil price is 24 bucks a barrel or 70 bucks a barrel, I think that intense correlation between tax and wealth and oil price has loosened a little bit. I'm sure life in Houston isn't quite as good right now with the oil prices it was when it was 60 or 70, but I think there's enough money there that it doesn't matter so much. You then get into this extraordinary contradiction between conservationists and hunters. You go back in the history of America, so many of your great men were hunters and conservationists, Roosevelt, et al.

In Texas, there are an awful lot of these like safari clubs and whatever, the hunters, and then they go on safaris to africa so and i'm a conservationist that i don't really want to get aggressively into the debate as to whether you should spend your weekend shooting ducks um but i i certainly am someone that can't really be seen to be shooting ducks at the weekend i think that would open uh the doors to a degree of double standards but there are big walls big homes the areas like the highland parks of this world um there's a great client base there and we've got to know we shot recently with the the dallas cowboys and which was great fun and uh troy actually came along to the shoot we closed down the city center of dallas and i thought what what are we going to what are we going to put in the city center of Dallas. And I thought, what are we going to put in the city center of Dallas? And I thought, well, we're going to have the cheerleaders. And then we'd get a bunch of

longhorn cattle and some cowboys. And we did it. We closed down the city center. And we got some cattle, some cowboys, and some cheerleaders. And just let's see what happens. So I want to come back to that. But how did it start? Did it come from you reaching out to someone? Did it come from an agency who represents you reaching out to someone? Did it start with a cold email from some big hat, plus cattle, money family in Dallas? How did it start? Which the Dallas itself or the idea of. So wearing my old hat, I'm the geek at school that knows all the detail on the baseball cards. cities i think i don't think i'm looking i don't think i'd do too badly telling you you you name an american city we'll tell you what the art market's like in in in in growth second cities nashville

charlotte austin the carolinas how strong are these markets where where are the big markets and there are some tough markets in amer America that I think the two toughest markets that people assume are slam dunks are bizarre. Let's forget about everything that's going on at the moment. But Los Angeles is a tough market and New York is a tough market. Los Angeles is a tough market because the wealth lives in tends to live in two different places, either on the beach or in the hills or around West Hollywood. And to the best of my knowledge, they're one hour apart. So locating a gallery, you immediately eliminate half of them.

Also people in L.A., a bit like Sam Fram, and you have experience of this, they're invitation rich, particularly in L.A. They're time poor. They're invitation rich particularly in in la they're they're time poor they're friendship rich and they they really don't want to go to things it's not a treat to go to an art gallery opening they just think they'd rather avoid it they'd rather take the dog to the vet than go to an art gallery unless it's one or the therapist um whereas you go to and in new york it's it's similar in a way in the my my work's quite large and and peter beard had had a similar issue you and if you got it in in in new york you can go to the kind of waspy upper east side but the galleries are small there by definition because the rents are so high.

And if you've got a gallery in Upper East Side, they can probably only fit three or four of my pictures in there. Then you go down to Soho and West Broadway, where we've been before, and the rents in some of those places are enormous. And maybe the galleries are more kind of pop art galleries than galleries with the provenance of some of the ones in Upper East Side. So your two lead cities, in a way, and I don't think I'd be the only person to say this, do present challenges, whereas Dallas and Chicago are fantastic. They're not quite as invitation rich with the greatest respect to My friends in both Chicago and Dallas there. There's slight maybe slightly more genuine friendships maybe have more substance they want to introduce you to more people and

The gallery competition maybe isn't quite so stiff. And both economies, present circumstances excluded, are strong. So there's a big gap for us between Dallas, Chicago, and the next market we have in the States. was this was a research driven decision on your part to target dallas and chicago as primary primary cities is that right yeah i mean i think that's right and i think uh the kind of founding father of photography in the states um lives in uh palm beach and the gallery is uh on that worth avenue with all the smart golf clubs and the luxury goods stores and whatever and he turned me down uh five times and uh there's nothing you write an awful lot about uh in in your work about what you take out of rejection and not quite hitting it uh and everyone has different responses to it i mean i'm a great believer that you have to experience those times to get better and if you're a british guy and you turn up at the most important art

gatekeeper for contemporary photography in america and he looks at you and he says thank you but no thank you and then you have to roll your portfolio up and then get a taxi or whatever to miami international and then get a flight back to london that's That's a lot of time to do a little bit of self-loathing or say, well, sooner or later, he's not going to turn me down. And I'm just going off on a tangent here, but Scottish writer, J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame, and her lovely expression of his rock bottom was the solid foundation which had built my life. And my rock bottom was probably in 2012. So after I'd written my Jerry Maguire piece,

but no one really wanted to listen too much. And the guy in Palm Beach had turned me down four or five times. And he represented Nick, actually. He represented Nick Branton and Nick, and justifiably so. And there was a Christmas in 2012 where I'm sure so many of your viewers, this will resonate with them. Unfortunately, that sometimes when a marriage doesn't work, there'll be one day in a year. If you have children, that it can be tricky. And Christmas Day can sometimes be that day in terms of whether you're going to see your children or not and um my ex-wife and i now have a wonderful relationship and she's here um cohabiting with me in our house with the family now but this those eight years ago

um things weren't so good and so it was very clear to me that i wasn't going to see my kids on christmas day and there's there's two ways you can react to it i felt that you could be around the corner with with friends watching love actually for the 20th time and feeling miserable and pretending to keep a brave smile on being a loser or you can get the fuck out of there um so i decided on the latter and uh i felt a kind of calling in a way that I needed to go and do something. And South Sudan was going through a civil war. I'd seen some imagery there, and I'm kind of led quite a bit by the imagery of others without wanting to plagiarize it. And it looked like there was stuff there that if I could just get far enough north in South Sudan,

I could get a picture that could stand the test of time if I got my lighting right and my logistics right. And I got it. So on Christmas Day, I spent Christmas Day at a United Nations refugee camp in South Sudan with a lot of guns knocking around and just drove north with my minders in tough areas where the civil war was going on and i on the 27th of december minders are people watching after you these are chaperones yeah guys with guns i think you know that my my food uh i think cost me about a dollar a day and the accommodation was about a dollar a day and then the accommodation was about a dollar a day, and then security detail was about a thousand a day. Anyway, I got the picture, and I think the best pictures

can be looked at for a long time, and this picture could be looked at for a long time, I felt. So I left South Sudan on about the 28th of december um i get all my printing done in los angeles uh and so eventually found my way from east africa to la got the picture printed and then took it to uh the gatekeeper in palm beach and uh this is the same person that had rejected me for five times, five times. And he, he looked at it and he said,

he said, how old are you? Which I thought he should probably have known by now, but why should he? So I said, so I lied as we all do these days. And I probably pretended I was younger than what I was. I might,

I might've said, I don't know, 42 or I don't know, 43. He said, he said, this picture is going to change the second half don't know 43 but he said um he said uh this picture is going to change the second half of your life and i said i said well hopefully for the better because the last 10 years i haven't been up too much and he said no it's going to change

for the better uh i said why is that he said because it's a picture people need to see and he said i'll represent you from tomorrow and that that was that was the that was the moment and i remember going getting absolutely drunk hammered uh pissed whatever the british expression american expression back in miami and uh again on my own um and that was the kind of that was the moment and so palm beach is a is a very important market, albeit it's seasonal, as you know. It kind of starts in November and goes through to May. The extraordinary thing about your country is the geographical mobility of people that have done well. They will have homes.

Sure, they might have a home where they work. But quite so many people from Palm Beach you find in Aspen at times or up in Nantucket or whatever. In your holiday destinations, there does seem to be quite a lot of – it's an expression you've got to be careful with right now, but cross-fertilization. There does seem to be people do hop and scotch and your your resort markets we have we have we've had no we have no doubt in our mind that if you take all the top 20 ski resorts in the world in terms of um the um uh what you can learn the quality of the people that are there and i know you're going to get many people that disagree with this to an extent the wealth the connections and in europe you have five or six big ones where we'd have shows but uh aspen for all its things that i don't necessarily embrace it takes a lot of beating as as as a resort to have a get to be shown in and we had a show

in uh christmas this year it's quite funny actually because they the gallery said um we will give you a discount on your hotel because obviously you're gonna have to come with your family and i before i i asked what the discount was from i said that's very kind of you we'll all be there. And then when you get to Aspen at New Year, you get a room about the size of, I don't know, a shoebox, and they ask you for like 800 bucks for your discounts down to 720. But it's still, you do meet some fascinating people there,

and that's another great place to show in America. So two quick questions. Is Palm Beach an important market for revenue? In other words, a percentage of, let's say, income? Or is it important symbolically because the tastemakers there influence representation and purchase decisions and so on elsewhere or both you're very good tim that was that you're very good that's that's the right question and the answer the answer is a bit of both um um part of your dream team and that they rep you um serves two purposes direct sales and also the provenance that someone that is seen to be a

scholar in the art of the selection of artists has for whatever reason deemed to include you in their squad so uh in new orleans i mean that's an extraordinary place isn't it i i love it um i don't know it that well i was there three weeks ago uh and the the art district is clearly being uh uh done up quite a lot now and developing quickly and we work work with, I think, one of the most celebrated galleries in Southern America, people called Arthur Roger. And he's been a big donator to NOMA, the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art. Arthur will not necessarily be selling at the levels of galleries in London or Dallas or Chicago

but he is so loved and so respected that the fact that you're part of his stable only Curry's favor elsewhere I guess you're you're allowed isn't it a bit like some of the actors that you interview they will do stage performances they will go on broadway from time to time it might earn the big bucks but it's good for their spirit and good for their soul and uh not every gallery we've got we've got 25 around the world and not everyone um they shouldn't all be clones of each other. And some are higher ticket galleries that have less charm. And then some are galleries you just love spending time with and asking questions and tapping into their extraordinary life and knowledge. And Palm Beach is a bit like that.

And New Orleans is a bit like that. And New Orleans is a bit like that. But in Palm Beach, you do see the incredible mobility of – I used to go to the Masters in Augusta quite a bit. And I know it's a smart event. But when you just as an outsider, when you listen to the conversations that are going around under that oak tree by the clubhouse, it shows the extraordinary geographical mobility of your nation. You'll meet people for saying, where are you now? I'm living in Seattle. Last time I was living in in Chicago. And then before, oh, you've moved you've moved up from from Austin or whatever.

Those conversations don't happen in most countries in the world. They just happen in your country. And that means that if you've got, if you've got galleries in 11 or 12 of the hotspots, you do get that, uh, great cross fertilization. Yeah, that's very, very true. And, uh, I promised I had a second question. In fact, I have many questions, including the second I had in mind was getting back to Fig Jam. There's your obsession with the Netflix business model in Montana. There's making versus taking photographs, all sorts. But would you mind if we take a brief bathroom break since I've been mainlining green tea for this entire conversation. Well done, mate. Five minutes? Yeah, let's do five minutes and we'll be right back. We are back from respective bathroom breaks, ready to go, and made a few promises before my bladder was on the verge of exploding. Fig Jam, Netflix business model, Montana. We may not cover it all because we have some time limitations today,

but let's jump into Fig Jam. What was the thread on Fig Jam? So the other photographer that I talked about in my piece, my mission statement, was a photographer, Australian photographer called Peter Lick. Peter decided, he's a very strong, smart photographer,

hardworking photographer, but he decided to vertically integrate the food chain. But what I mean by that is that he would take the pictures but it would be his galleries that would sell his own pictures and that that is um it's not a unique business model there are quite a few american photographers in the rockies if you go to places like jackson hole or even aspen you you'll see guys that take the pictures and then they have the galleries selling their own pictures. Obviously, their margins are way higher because they're not splitting the take with the gallery because they are the gallery.

The problem is, is that it is fake jam. It is, fuck, I'm good, just ask me. There is nothing better than third party affirmation. If you're asking your best mate about a potential new girlfriend and your best mate or vice versa, the best mate says, I think she's excellent. I think she's perfect. That means so much more to you. If your girlfriend's asking her girlfriend about a potential guy and says the same we look for third-party affirmation i don't like to talk about my work too much other than when it's my job when i'm on show when i'm on a stage or whatever or something like this you need

third parties to do it a lot of people turn around and say, you know what, the last unregulated market in the world is the art market. I don't believe that's true. I think it's one of the most regulated markets because it's self-policed. And something that is self-policed, that regulation can actually be much more onerous than something that is regulated by law and if you do something that is seen to be out with what is perceived to be right by the art market you've got to be careful and i use peter as an example in because no one has succeeded more in the vertical integration of their business than Peter. But he ruffled quite a few feathers by doing it. Because if he turns around and says he sold a picture for a million dollars, well, how do we actually know the provenance of that?

I'm not suggesting that. But the New York Times did. It's a tough market to own the stores that sell your own work. Warhol didn't do it. Basquiat didn't do it. Was this a counterpoint to where you ended up going?

Was it a cautionary tale more than a best practices? Yeah. I thought Breaking Bad, you weren't expecting I was going to go from there to break let's talk about let's talk about mess let's go there let's just go straight in to there's so many of those meth vans on the way to the mexican border by the way from martha everyone looks like

that one that they used in breaking about anyway putting that to one side, Breaking Bad to me should be not only in every cinematography class manual, but it should be on every economics class manual. So the cinematography side, I think it was emphatically the series that showed the power of immersive filmmaking. We live in an era of wanting to be there. My photography, I hope, is immersive because I use wide-angle lenses rather than largely telephoto lenses, so you feel you're part of there rather than compressing distance. If you compress distance, it compresses emotion. If I'm going to photograph a man or a woman, I'm not going to photograph them from 100 yards away. i'm going to photograph a man or a woman uh i'm not going to photograph them from 100 yards away i'm going to photograph them from a foot and a half away with a wide angle lens um and breaking bad did that it also should be an economics rule books

because from the moment that he went from supplying the crystal meth himself to a wholesale business model the career in the series took off. It was just that was the tipping point. Just go wholesale, baby. And that's when he saw the power of being able to just have sales everywhere. Don't worry about the margin so much. But if you've got sales coming out of your arse in every big city in the world then or in his case every big city in new mexico or hudson new mexico it's going to make a difference and so breaking bad it was instructive for me to me for two different reasons so that means that you you looked at the if i'm remembering the name correctly p Peter Lick as an example of commercial success

but one wrought with difficulties and risks that ended up being a cautionary tale of sorts that steered you towards wholesale while embracing some of the best practices from the other gentleman who you, I don't know if he's a gentleman, but the other man who you i don't know if he's a gentleman but the other man you're um you're so articulate and you summarize that brilliantly well yes that's that's right

peter peter um you want to have um he has a brand and he has constancy in his product, in his product quality. I have a few expressions in our business. One is Tom Ford, Tom Ford, Tom Ford. When we go Tom Ford, Tom Ford, Tom Ford, what do we mean? Everything has to be constant in the commitment to the pursuit of excellence and taste. And so the people, when they're looking at the frame of our picture, they'll go, that's a David Yarrow frame. Even if the photograph wasn't there,

even if the photograph was the poster for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, they go, yeah, I know that film. That's a David Yarrow frame. The second thing I used to and I still do stay close to the creative director at Victoria's Secrets. Now Victoria's Secrets has had a stunning fall from grace over the last 18 months but and we don't have the time to go into the wherewithal and the reasons for that and whether they're right reasons or not but clearly the brand is not of the hour it is not what people want in 2020 and i understand that um when victoria's secret um their head office uh was

in columbus ohio and when you used to go into their head office um in the foyer they had two things they had um uh the newspaper from 21st of november 1963 with the headline kennedy dead uh and then they had another saying that said perhaps you should be tougher on yourself i think we should be tougher on ourselves i think you you you and your writings tim and i've i've i've i've seen quite a bit you use the example of an athlete um that has the expression no one owes us anything and i think that's the kind of corollary of perhaps you should be tougher on yourself i think the world of uh there's no reason for anyone to go and buy david yarrow work tomorrow unless it's constantly the best that i can do and it's given third party advocacy um it's not for me to tell them to buy it is for someone else to tell them and um i admire

peter for trying to circumvent that. I think he's the only person that succeeded. It just wouldn't be for me. I wouldn't like to have 25 retail stores right now in America of my own. Yes, I would agree with that conclusion for these times right now in particular. Where does your fascination with Netflix and Montana, I'm not saying those two are related, come into the picture, so to speak? I know that's probably a little too on the nose. No, no, no. But where, yeah, could you speak to either of those?

Because Netflix is a fascinating business model it finally dawned on the commentators on television today to say because they were trying to find businesses that were immune from the crisis that we're currently staring in the face of and you hear this this word Netflix coming up time and time again. And I'm wanting to kick the TV in because I'm sitting at home, unable to film, unable to travel. And I'm going, Netflix can't produce any new content. Of course, they're exposed to this. What do you mean that they're immune to coronavirus? They're right at the heart of it. Where's their new content?

They are original content. It's in their mission statement. They fascinate me because their courage and investment, the crown, take the series The Crown. And for all the Americans, please don't believe everything that's in there. I know people say, i watch it because it's educational half this bullshit but it's good fun nevertheless anyway so it's like 10 million an episode or throw in a couple for post-production marketing 12 million so you do a series of eight so you're kind of talking about 100 million a series their accounting fascinates me because they'll amortize that cost over the expected

worth of the crown. Now, far be it from me to criticize the accounting of Netflix, but if we spent, as we did last week, 250 grand in Texas, we'll take that through the P&L last week. I'm not going to spread that over eight years. But what they have taught us is the importance of investing with confidence. And the mistakes that we've made, my goodness, we make a lot, is when we decide, should we go for option A of a replica 1850s wagon that was made actually in 1970 by Ford? Or do we go for an original 1850s wagon that's going to cost double the amount of the replica? If you take the 6,000 saving, it's a false economy in our own little modest way. So we have to have courage in our investment. And Netflix instills that in us.

I think you have, America has the most visually spoiled country in the world. Of that there is, for me, of everything that I've said that some people might find contentious or even be interested in, I think you have, by far and away the the most extraordinary canvas on which to tell stories of any country in the world because you have such

diversity whether it be the urban beauty of chicago the swamps of lou and then the Rockies of Wyoming and Montana. And for an artist, which I hope that's what I am, it is a dream. And of all the states, the one that I get most excited of coming back to is probably Montana. Because I think it's still the least dense. I don't know. Have they got a coronavirus uh um i don't know what the numbers are but they're going to be single digit i think everyone lives remotely in the mountains there anyway and then they do they um uh when i arrived

there uh and you get the big sky feel and you think this is amazing but then you meet the people that are there and some of them that live up in the mountains it's just the the people that time forgot there is a coordinate kind of time warp and high up some of the bed I've always had some sort of visceral attraction to ghost towns maybe it's a maybe it's a manifestation of my my childhood fears of abandonment that i've now got it's now manifesting itself in in a love of ghost towns it happened to you too so i um we we stumbled across this ghost town right up in the hills and of course

because they're high they've been preserved better than the ghost towns maybe in in california and arizona and it's the characters there that we we meet and we we met this guy i was so cold filming outside and i just wanted to get a a drink at the end of the day and i walked into this bar that should have been looked like it should have been closed uh in the ghost town and there was a guy behind the bar that looked like he killed about 10 people and it was open and i looked at it and it was your quintessential american saloon bar with the the wagon wheel on the top and the long bar going back and back and back and the stuffed moose head and all that kind of stuff.

And I thought, this has got to be a great place for a shoot. We talk about making pictures and taking pictures, and I do tend to have preconceptions, but you are allowed to have spontaneity. And I said, well said well listen can we bring a wolf in here and he said we have wolves here monday wednesday thursday is fine wolves come in here the whole time and nothing was too much trouble for him and i put some chicken wings around my on a string around my head um around my chest and lay on the bar and then the wolf would walk along the bar to try and bite the chicken off my chest it's a hell of a hell of a sentence right there it's just the great thing is so we

got the picture and every friday night now people try and replicate the wolf on the bar so it's the only time in my life i've something i've done has given rise to a bar game in the evening so you've got to try and reenact we took cindy crawford up to that bar and uh she was great sport and she played she played along with the wolf and these guys who they're pissed pissed. Is that a British word? Pissed. Shitfaced. Shitfaced. Yeah, pissed to us means upset.

But yeah, shitfaced. And he's, this guy, he's at the bar. And one of my rules is whenever we shoot in a bar in the mountains, it's an open bar all day. So throughout the day, everyone gets absolutely, other than me, hopefully gets hammered. And this guy, when Cindy's one side, you've got an American sweetheart, an icon. And there she is looking graceful, splendid. And then on the right hand side, you've got a mountain guy, age 85. And he's so excited to be standing next to Cindy Crawford.

He actually pisses in his pants and you can see the wet coming through the leather. So if you don't believe me, it's in the picture. But we have a love affair. We went to this place called Butte, Montana and it was a big old copper mining place in the old days and it was abandoned in about 1950 uh but a lot of it's as it was left and we shot there in January in the cold and there's in the it was in its heyday when prohibition came in and with it kind of speakeasies and stuff like that

and we found a few of these speakeasies and uh it was such a wonderful canvas on which to tell uh painting uh to tell stories whenever i talk about your wild west uh i i get energized because to me that final frontier expansion and the stories of goodbye good guys bad guys outlaws endeavor drunkenness whatever crime is one of the great periods of history and there it there's a there's a romanticist within me that just loves that pushing to the final frontier i can't articulate it but what a great story in which to tell uh what a great canvas in which to tell pictures and so where we've been we've been attacking wyoming on montana and then the next move seemed to go to texas because it's the home of the real cowboys and so much but we we we shot there two weeks ago and um right down i think you know the area well given where you live now

but we were shooting on the rio grande in a big bend national park which is one of the i think the least visited but most beautiful american parks the only people that live there are kind of in witness protection program otherwise or the crystal meth operations otherwise he wouldn't be there or the mexican but the uh the you you we crossed to the mexican border four times in the morning because all you have to do is cross a 25 yard stream and we were we were working with some game of thrones uh people which is great fun and he just said, well, we're in Mexico in two minutes and would photograph herself in Mexico. And then we're,

we'd go back and forth. Uh, and we had some proper cowboys down there. And to me, those are my most exciting days to be, to be doing that in, in, in your country,

which is there's so much history, but recent history. I think your 19th century history is more exciting than Europeans' 19th century history. It has to be. So I have one more question. We'll have to do a round two because I want to ask you about Scorsese. I want to ask you about your near-death experiences. I want to ask you about all sorts of things.

So we'll have to do, if you're up for it, around two at some point. But you have, and this is a whole area that we could talk about, really honed the craft of not just photography, but collaboration with different people in different groups. I think you've been very smart, very methodical, it would seem, in how you've approached that. So you mentioned Cindy Crawford. Of course, you've done a lot with many, many household names. How did you get your first celebrity collaboration? And you can interpret or define celebrity, however you like it, but how did you get the first one or whichever early day story comes to mind? Um, it, the, the, the first, the first point I'd make, um, is that I'm not,

I'm not drawn to celebrity per se. In my younger life, I dated someone that was much more famous than I'll ever be by a multiple of 100. And the whole concept of being famous, that way it scares me slightly. Some people say when you meet some of these individuals, does your ego go up? And actually, it suppresses any kind of ego at Huff because they're just so outstanding as individuals.

And you're humbled by their normality, by their pursuit of excellence, by their family values, by their manners. I think that's important, manners, by their self values by their manners i think that's important manners by their self-deprecation i remember uh i remember going in your writings you talk about when you were a lecturer at princeton and i've talked at princeton several times because my daughter wants to get in and because you're not allowed to bungle him any money these days the ethical way to do it was to give a few free speeches anyway it didn't work um the speeches were fine but she just stayed in the uk um but you talk about you gave your your class a test of making an uncomfortable phone call or email to someone to try and have a conversation or a meeting or a message from someone very high powered um whether it be the chairman of google

whoever it was i i'm quite shy at those things but i've got better at it uh and i would also encourage people to say that we've all been rejected in our life there's no shame in rejection uh rejection is part and parcel of the game i think you you maybe being rejected 10 times in one day can maybe be a little bit too much for someone but you can you can stagger your rejection rate but never be afraid to do it the one thing that i know from every person that people put on a pedestal as to how extraordinary they are and their celebratory status is that they're all like us. As Bill Gates said yesterday in his 15 Things We've Learned About Coronavirus, ego and fame,

they don't differentiate. We're all the same. And everyone that I've met that's a celebrity in some eyes, the vast majority are 90% of the time just like us. Sports stars, I've found, are very nervous about art. In the same way, if you took an artist to Amen Corner at the Augusta Masters,

he would be nervous to ask where the par 3 was and the par 5s were. And how does the 13th play or whatever in the very same way? Um, sports stars that I met are nervous about art. And therefore, if you can, I think people buy people. I don't think that people necessarily buy products when the product is, um, the work of a single person.

They'd much rather tell the story about the person. 95% of our art is being bought by people that have met me one way or other or listened to me speak, which you could argue makes it a non-expandable business model unless I work hard. But I think by and large, with celebs, celebrities or people that have been – I hate the word actually, celebrity – people that have been champions of their industry, if you can find a way to engage them uh i with someone as to go right to the top right to the top and the the glue if you like the glue that stuck it all together is fundraising for charity uh i've i've been lucky that my work is valued and because when we produce a print there'll be 16 in a series 16 um to allow two or three of those to go to good causes doesn't cost me anything it marginally cannibalizes the addition but so what that's fantastic and through that that's forged many links. And so for something like with Cindy, she lost her brother to leukemia at a very young age.

She would work with me for nothing as long as a good percentage of the proceeds went to the hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, that looked after her brother. So that's now equated to half a million dollars. That's much more exciting for her than her getting a check of 40 grand for a boring photo shoot. She doesn't want that. She's done enough of that. She's earned the right not to have to do that. And she is a champion for those kind of things. So the more advocates we have like that um the better they're

all tim you know you interview a lot of them there i think they are so long of kindness most of the time i don't know about you and this is a rhetorical comment when you're dealing with these people it's the entourage that i can't deal with when you actually meet them i mean it's a bit like it's a bit like you mate your entourage i mean but you seem quite a decent guy so people underneath you my team's great you know that uh i don't know i i don't have an entourage i think it's the big bald head that scares them off. But yeah, in my experience, fame is like, if we're talking about fame, I mean, which often accompanies accomplishment in different fields. It's a nonspecific amplifier, just like alcohol, in the sense that if you're a small-time asshole, you're going to become a big-time asshole.

And if you're kind of heart and jovial and compliment people, then you're going to become probably a magnified or exaggerated form of that. So I think it amplifies the best and worst of people. So the folks that I've spent time with, whether that's the Edward Norton's or the Jamie Foxx's, whoever they're, they're great. I really, it's a big, Edward's a big conservationist,

isn't he? He's huge. He's huge. Yeah. And, and, and then on the flip side, those who shall remain nameless,

I've met some very, very well-known A-listers who are just fucking awful. And I think that you end up finding people on opposite ends of the spectrum when you get up to that level of visibility. And I haven't run into much in the middle either. And I've heard what you're saying about Cindy from friends of mine who know her, I've never met her, that she's just one of the sweetest, most kind-hearted, easy-to-work-with people they've ever met. And I've heard that about Jennifer Garner as well. We had a moment with Cindy where, in order to get a wolf's attention, you can either make it an aggressive movement one way or the other, a bit like a dog, or you can make an aggressive noise. But wolves, like dogs, are smart, so they get bored of that after a while. So your

third option is to use meat, and we're shooting outside, it's minus 15, and I've got the wolf in the car next to Cindy, and I'm just trying to get the wolf to look me in the eyes and to get the attention we're using meat and the wolf wrangler has this chicken drumstick that uh has been in icy water and it's about minus 12 and he's got a glove on and to my horror he loses his throw of it. And the drumstick from 10 yards whacks Cindy straight in the eye, on the face. Cold chicken raw drumstick at 9 in the morning. And because she doesn't know him, the only person that really has accountability without responsibility is me. And I'll never forget it. She just looked me straight in the eye and went david and it was the gap after david it was david that was inappropriate

and the gap between david and that that was was probably only two seconds but it felt like about an hour to me um but anyway she was fine she's brilliant um and um that hospital uh you go up to i've never been i'm digressing and i know we're short of time but i went to there's a football team in wisconsin madison called the badgers and when when when uh the madison bad wisconsin badgers or whatever um in the uk our college sport is watched by six people so we go to this this place in wisconsin there's like 75 000 people in the stadium and for us british people it's just a huge eye-opener to your college system and how fantastic it is and i love the fact that in your college games people turn up in the, people leave sports games at halftime because your team's losing. In America, people arrive at halftime so they can be drunk because

they're not allowed to drink in the stadium. So it's the only place in the world where I've seen, and I've probably been to more football sports stadiums than most in the world, your college games, it's the only place I know where they fill up at halftime rather than people leave at halftime and the people that arrive are all drunk. It's fantastic. David, I think it's probably a good point to put a bookmark in conversation number one on the podcast. I think it would be fun to have another if you're up for it at some point. We certainly have lots and lots and lots of ground that we could cover, topics to explore, and so on. But is there anything that you would like to say before we close, and where can

people best find you and your work, learn more about you on the internet? um my um website is david yarrow photography uh we we show in galleries in in america and uh in in europe and a little bit in the in the far east uh but the the and on instagram we've got a reason presence um on on instagram um i am my my favorite story is a metaphor to to my career is the one that you'll know well of Thomas Edison when he's trying to create permanent light and he fails for the umpteenth time, yet another time. And they have a press conference and one of the young journalists at the front says, Mr. Edison, you seem to have failed again to create permanent light you've been trying this for five years and it feels like we've made no progress at all and Edison replies on the contrary young man I've learned a hundred ways how not to create permanent light and there is an element in terms in my work with all animals in that by learning how to get it wrong, we've learned how to get it right. I mean, the pictures we've managed to take with mountain gorillas in Rwanda, with lions in Africa, with polar bears in Alaska or Norway, with orangutans, with the biggest elephants in the world it is by an iterative relationship between

taking a picture recognizing its inherent weaknesses and the areas where we can quite plausibly improve that you get towards the kind of work you're looking for i don't think that process is any different from what you do or what 99% of people do is how determined you are that to fulfill that virtuous circle upwards of just saying, no, we need well, you know, what's your best picture? And of course the answer is it hasn't been taken yet. Because if you feel that it was taken in 2013, how dispiriting that seven years ago you took your greatest picture. this dreadful virus and repercussions for people which we've been blessedly unaffected um comes to its denouement that i'll go out and i'll take far better pictures than ever taken before but what's the point of believing anything else gotta gotta gotta believe that your best works out of you um this this podcast will be a blip in your bottom left to top right, perfect linear upward trajectory of your podcast. Well, you know, I wouldn't, I feel strange saying I hope this is a blip,

but I certainly hope that my best work is ahead of me. I agree with you that there's a strong case for optimism. Because what other choice do you have? In a lot of respects, it doesn't mean you're not practical. It doesn't mean you don't learn from your mistakes. But especially in times like these, if you don't have some glimmer of hope, I think you don't just lose your morale, but you also lose your ability to plan in many cases if there isn't a future worth looking forward to that you can imagine. There's a wonderful line in talking about Tom Hanks' films, Bridge of Spies.

And you remember Mark Rylance, who plays the spy in Russia, and when he's imprisoned, one the the Russian spy in America and when Tom Hanks interviews him in the cell for the first time Tom Hanks says do you understand the severity of the circumstances that are currently upon you and he replies what if i did would it make me feel any better and i think that's quite apposite for this time that you have to you you have to be an optimist you have to look you have to believe in the world improving at some stage um and uh if we were to examine just how miserable this is right now from every facet of society and business and finance it's going to make for a fairly miserable evening

so one would hope that you just got to look over the hill a little bit Bridge of Spies is a great movie and that scene, if we dig into it a little bit more because it is one of my favorite scenes, he asks him if he understands the severity. And the Russian spy who's been caught by the US government says, yes. And then the Tom Hanks character asks, aren't you worried? And he says, would it help in response? So he's fully... Yeah, you've articulated it much better than me. No, but you brought it up, and the lesson is, I think, very apropos of the moment that we find ourselves in, and that is you can be informed to the extent that it's relevant to your lives and actionable. You can be aware without being paralyzed by

pessimism and worry. Not to say that I don't struggle. I have struggled in the last few weeks. But it is, in fact, possible to be aware and informed without being paralyzed. And that's something that I'm certainly striving for myself. And so to that end, I appreciate the reminder. It is a fantastic scene. And David, this has been such a pleasure. I really appreciate you taking the time, especially during these times.

You're an example and an inspiration to so many people and I'm very flattered to occupy your extraordinary mind for a brief period of time and hopefully we can just add to it when it's achieved but I'm very flattered and humbled

to be part of this exchange. Absolutely and one final question. When you got hammered in celebration after you were represented by your Palm Beach man with no name, tastemaker, what was your drink of choice

or drinks of choice for that evening? I think it would have been quite a big range that would take up another 20 minutes to discuss its breadth. But I think the thing is, if you're Scottish, you live under this belief that there's a mass conspiracy around the rest of the world to conceal how wonderful the nation is, and it just hasn't got out. So when we go abroad and we go to America, we just have to drink a lot of scotch, a lot of single malt scotch, and then talk to the barman that we're actually, that's where we're

from. It's my ode to patriotism. So I like a good scotch, and maybe when I'm in Austin, we can share a scotch. Deal. I would love to do that. And David, again, thank you for the time to be continued. And for everybody listening, thank you for tuning in. Be safe out there.

Practice well. Hold yourselves to a high standard, but try to be forgiving also if you struggle during these times in particular. And I will include links to everything we've discussed, including all of David's work that we can link to without violating any types of intellectual property. And we will showcase everything that we talked about in this conversation at tim.blog forward slash podcast, where you'll be able to find the show notes alongside show notes for every other episode. And until next time, thanks for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you

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