The Tim Ferriss Show - #799: Richard Taylor and Greg Broadmore, Wētā Workshop — Untapping Creativity, Stories from The Lord of the Rings, The Magic of New Zealand, Four Tenets to Live By, and The Only Sentence of Self-Help You Need

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Richard Taylor is the co-founder and creative lead at Wētā Workshop, which he runs with his wife and co-founder Tania Rodger. Wētā Workshop is a concept design studio and manufacturing facility that services the world’s creative and entertainment industries. Their practical and special effects have helped define the visual identities of some of the most recognizable franchises in film and television, including The Lord of the Rings; Planet of the Apes; Superman; Mad Max; Thor; M3gan; and Love, Death, and Robots.Greg Broadmore is an artist and writer who has been part of the team at Wētā Workshop for more than 20 years. His design and special-effects credits include District 9, King Kong, Godzilla, The Adventures of Tintin, and Avatar, and he is the creator of the satirical, retro-sci-fi world of Dr. Grordbort’s. He is currently working on the graphic novel series One Path, set in a brutal prehistoric world where dinosaurs and cavewomen are locked in a grim battle for supremacy.Sponsors:AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic broad spectrum 24-strain probiotic + prebiotic: https://Seed.com/Tim (Use code 25TIM for 25% off your first month's supply)Our Place's Titanium Always Pan® Pro using nonstick technology that’s coating-free and made without PFAS, otherwise known as “Forever Chemicals”: https://fromourplace.com/tim (Get 10% off today!)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is Tim Ferriss welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers to tease out how they do what they do so you can take their frameworks their tools their inspirations and apply them to your own lives. Today I am interviewing two people I would consider decathletes of creativity the first Richard Taylor. He is co founder and creative lead at wet a workshop, which he runs with his wife and co founder Tanya Roger. What a workshop is a concept design studio and manufacturing facility that services the world's creative and entertainment industries. And what you'll see is just how much they do. Believe it or not, it started by them assembling things and making things on top of their bed. We'll get to that. They've been recognized with five Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, three Thea Awards, and more than 30 other national and international accolades. Their practical and special effects

have helped define the visual identities of some of the most recognizable franchises in film and television. You will know some of them, including The Lord of the Rings, Planet of the Apes, Superman, Mad Max, Thor, Megan, and Love, Death, and Robots. If you haven't seen Love, Death, and Robots, check it out. There are some amazing, amazing shorts. In addition to that, they do a few other things. Get ready for this. Whatta Workshop offers tourism and retail experiences, consumer products, an interactive studio, public sculptures, and private commissions.

They've also done augmented reality and video games and all sorts of things. Richard now focuses much of his time on their immersive experiences, which I've had the chance to experience firsthand. I recommend them very highly, such as the Thea award winning Gallipoli, the scale of our war, what a workshop unleashed and the giant atrium installation Aura Forest at Edge of the Sky. Next we have Greg Broadmore. Greg is an artist and writer who has been part of the team at Weta Workshop for more

than 20 years. His design and special effects credits include District 9, King Kong, Godzilla, The Adventures of Tintin, and Avatar, and he is the creator of the satirical retro sci-fi world of Dr. Groddbortz. Featuring a myriad of collectibles, a world-touring art exhibition, four books, and a game for Weta's pioneering spatial computing platform. Most recently, Greg built Weta's video game division and directed multiple Dr. G video games for Magic Leap. He is currently working on the graphic novel series One Path, set in a brutal prehistoric

world where dinosaurs and cave women are locked in a grim battle for supremacy. So these two guys have their hands in a lot. They apply creativity to more things than I can count, and they do it with incredible endurance. How do they do it? That's what we're going to explore. And as you listen to this or as you watch it, you're going to hear a lot of moving around as they pull things from their offices, from their workshops, from around where they're sitting. So it will sound quite hyperactive. And I suppose that is totally appropriate given the nature of what we're discussing. So I'll leave it at that. You can find wetta workshop at wetta nz.com slash us. That's wetta nz.com of course, and

on Instagram at wetta workshop. You can find Greg at Greg Broadmore. That's B R O A D M O R E Greg Broadmore.com and on Instagram at Greg underscore Broadmore. that's B-R-O-A-D-M-O-R-E, gregbroadmore.com and on Instagram at greg underscore broadmore. So we're gonna get right into the conversation and lessons learned, things you can apply. But first, just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible. In the last handful of years,

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current vote for great gut health. You can start here, it costs less than two dollars a day, that is the DSO-1. And now you can get 25% off your first month with code 25 Tim and that is 25% off of your first month of seeds DSL one at seed.com slash Tim using code 25 Tim all put together that's seed.com slash Tim and if you forget it you'll see the coupon code on that page. One more time, c.com slash Tim code 25 Tim. So it's been maybe one to two years since we had a bite to eat and some drinks in Wellington, but here we are and I'm looking at the backgrounds in our respective videos and I'm accustomed to having a pretty good background. I've got a huge bear behind me. I've got some plants and I have without question lost this background competition if it were a competition. So, Craig said, but you have a bear and I said, yeah, but you have a Tyrannosaurus,

but it's not a Tyrannosaurus. What do you have behind you, Greg? We'll start there. That's an Albertosaurus. It was actually, Richard bought it as a Tyrannosaurus. What do you have behind you, Greg? We'll start there. That's an Albertosaurus. It was actually a, Richard bought it as a prop for Kong. The idea was as a pit scene in Kong, and then we were supposed to put a bunch of bones in there, like it's a predator trap. And so we, Richard bought all these bones and that was one of the leftovers.

Richard very kindly gifted it to me. I had it painted up and put on a stand. It's really my proudest position. I freaking love it. And you have a wall of guitars in addition. Yeah. And oh, actually that's a dinosaur egg. Not really my proudest position. I freaking love it. And you have a wall of guitars in addition to that. Oh, actually that's a dinosaur egg.

All right, dinosaur egg. The story behind that dinosaur egg we don't have time to go into, but we've got one each. And it is one of the most bonkers stories of our lives. Just how we acquired those dinosaur eggs, but we won't go there today. Well, that might be around too. After a beer and a visit back to Wellington.

All right. Deal. So Richard, I've been in your office briefly. I can see what's in frame right now, but could you describe for folks and maybe show folks what you have around you? I'm a big collector of garage kits. You know, people that make beautiful sculptures in their bedrooms, cast them in their garages, package them up and send them off to people like me. And I've been collecting for maybe, they're going on 40 years now.

I'd give you a quick tour of the office. Like I've got a Thunderbird 2 up there. And if I go around the office, you can see that there is just a... You have hundreds. You have hundreds, seemingly hundreds of... Yeah, this is the whiteboard where we do all our brainstorming at Weta for new creative projects. And behind me is just even more. There's my wonderful colleague, Ree, who'll give you a wave and it carries on and on and on. In fact, there's some of Greg's work hanging up. How do I show you?

There, those things hanging from the roof, those are Greg's designs that I've turned into some collectibles or some sculptures. They're not collectibles yet, but I love them. So I thought I'd make them as or some sculptures. They're not collectibles yet but I love them so I thought I'd make them as 3D sculptures. You just can't have enough cool stuff around you. My favorite possession in my life, which my wife gave to me so I stopped that rocking, is this beautiful sculpture here which is by a guy called Gilbert Bay who was part of an art movement during the Victorian era.

So this sits here as inspiration and next to me is the Gremlins from Gremlins 2. I painted it up, but Steve Wang was the original painter of that. So just got to be surrounded by things that inspire you, I always think. That's actually double-cluck on the inspiration. We could talk about, I guess it's Harry and the Hendersons. I believe you have something like that also in your office. Memory serves me. I've got a Harry above my head just up here and I've got another great Harry over there. Rick Baker's Harry is still my favorite animatronic character created for a movie.

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

with respect to sculpture? I grew up in rural New Zealand. My father was an aircraft engineer, my mother a science teacher. That's inspiration enough right there. I feel very lucky, but I wanted to do art, right? And my mom and dad really weren't focused on that type of thing. So I had the great fortune of going to a closing down sale

at my mother's teachers training college, and I was able to buy two things, one of them being the triptych of the Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. This is in my early teens possibly. And that was my first realization that running in parallel to our world is this visual fantasy world. Obviously I was reading fancy books, but I had not really comprehended. And because of the triptych,

you go from earth to heaven and to hell. So this concept of running in parallel, this came into my possession. What is the title of that right there? Well this isn't another language, it's called the rent collective courtyard. I've got multiple copies of it now because I've been collecting them and friends in China have gifted me other copies. It was a book of an unknown sculptor in an unknown land. It inspired me to start digging clay out of the creek on the

back of the farm. I taught myself to sculpt. I started wetter with my wife Tanya. I used this book as inspiration to other sculptors, hung pictures around the walls, taught people out of the book, copied the sculptures in the book, so pretty influential. By coincidence, then jumped forward 40 years and Greg, Ria and I are in Chengdu, raising in the Sichuan province, raising money for the Sichuan Earthquake Relief Fund, and at random we've been out doing a hopefully inspiration to a university that had lost people in the earthquake. Running late, back to have a meeting with the governor, pulled over to the side of the

road. I think we ran across a four-lane road to a random art studio. Went in, met the artist who owned the studio. He was sculpting a figure. He ran off, got his wife, brought back his portfolio, turned out to be the person that did the art and the book. Crazy. Wow.

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

of inspiration. So the name Ray Harryhausen, that is a stop motion master? Am I getting that right? Yeah, I'm going to run away from my desk one more time and I'll speak loud so you can hear me. This is pretty signature Richard. Of course I have a tribute sculpture to Ray Harryhausen in the form of... So that's Ray, and that's one of his characters. He's got a library of extraordinary characters that he's done on an amazing array of movies.

Sinbad is probably his better known, but yeah, he was a stop animator. When we were very fortunate to collect the Oscars for our colleagues back home, I wanted to give them a present. Now when we were 25, my wife and I made a, we went on our big OE to England and Europe. We got a combi. What does OE stand for?

A big overseas experience. There we go. We got a combi van like everyone did and we drove it for 10,000 miles around Europe. But I pre-wrote to Ray. He didn't know me and I didn't know him and I wrote to him and asked him if he would please allow us to come and say hello. We bought a bunch of flowers. We arrived an hour early. I gave the flowers to the housekeeper, thinking it was his wife. He forgot we were coming, so he came down in his pajamas with his comb over. But we ended up having this extraordinary day with him and Diana, his wife. It lasted into the early evening and we just hit it off together. So once again, jump forward 10, 15 years. We've now made Lord of the

Rings. We're very fortunate to win our first Oscars. And I wanted to give a lovely present to our crew. You know, you can throw a party or buy them all leather jackets. But I thought it wouldn't be great if they could get to meet someone that's a hero to them that they would normally never get to meet. So I wrote to Ray and Diane, and they came to New Zealand for two weeks and hung out in our workshop every day So I wrote to Ray and Diane, and they came to New Zealand for two weeks and hung out in our workshop every day and just spent the two weeks with our team,

learning what they're doing, telling stories. Ray put on a five-hour talk on the last night. His wife fell asleep on my shoulder as it went into the early hours of the morning. So riveting was he and so inspiring. When we were fortunate to win our second Oscars, I wrote to Dick Smith, the grandfather of makeup effects. And Dick Smith, I met via letter writing in my late teens where I wrote to him and told him that I was sculpting in margarine. The first 300 commercial sculptures I did in the film industry

were sculpted in margarine. So he forevermore used to call me the margarine guy. Sadly Dick has now passed on but he was one of the most inspiring beautiful humans you could ever hope to meet. And through his educational program, it has inspired and educated a very large number of the world's makeup effects people. And that concept of passing it on is something I've held firmly to as a company. No secrets, share everything that you're asked of.

And we'll still get kids ring up in the evenings asking how to make blood and I'm happy to tell them so. Fake blood. Fake blood. Fake blood. I should have said that. Fake blood. Not breeding vampires.

I was going to ask you about margarine. Now if it's what I'm thinking it is, is this the butter substitute? Maybe you can tell me if that is one in the same, but could you just tell the story of landing the job on public eye? Maybe this will paint a picture for people. And then why Marjan? Okay, so it's very simple answer to that story.

I was unaware of plasticine. Obviously I played around with plasticine at school and I was using crude clay that I had mushed in my hands, but it was not possible to do the type of sculpting I was needing to do in those two mediums because you couldn't buy plasticine in large quantities, etc. My wife got a job working as a hotel duty manager at the Taz Hotel in upper Willow Street, Wellington. And in the evenings, she used to invite me in because she became friends with the chef, this guy called Alec. And the chef was doing margarine sculptures.

He was doing swans and ponies and things like that. And so I used to just hang out with him, this crazy, wonderful Scottish chef, and I started doing monsters and creatures and dragons and superhero sculptures and things like that for the tourists that would come in for dinner. So when I started working, I realized this medium, I had an affinity with it and I could work in it very quickly. So we got wind that the production company that I was doing art directing, art department for on very low television commercials and documentaries, I got the wind that they wanted to make a New Zealand version of spitting image, and I desperately wanted

to be the sculptor on this. So I actually snuck into the office late at night and I actually borrowed a couple of photographs of the boss, went home and sculpted in margarine and then Tanya and I cast it and made a puppet of it. I put it on his desk in a black plastic bag with a rubbish bag with my card on the top. I put it there at midnight. How did you get in? Is it you kept earlier?

Your way in? No, we were working in the building. So I had keys. I had the ability to go in and out because we're doing art department. So often working at midnight. So he phoned and he said, found your puppet, great, but you needn't bother with the efforts of making a puppet of me.

No one else has applied for the job. But I think that sort of speaks to the individual that I am actually, that you always got to go that nth degree. And that started two amazing years working for Gibson Group, making satirical puppets, one every couple of days. We had a third person working with us, a friend of ours called Clive, who did all the eye mechanisms.

We built those out of roll-on deodorant balls and the spring wire that you hang frilly curtains off in your grandma's kitchen. We built 72 puppets over those two years. It was ferocious timeframes, but because I could sculpt in margarine, and margarine is a bit of a misnomer, Tim. The true term is emulsified vegetable pastry fat. It's actually margarine before you whip in the water and the food coloring. I see. It has a greater solidity. So I used to actually microwave it to get it. I described sculpting in margarine as like using a 4B pencil sculpting in clay is like a 2B pencil and sculpting in plasticine is like a 4H pencil, let's say. So to give the people that understand illustration terms, that's how I started to use margarine. And I ultimately, as I said, did over 300 sculptures.

All of heavenly creatures were sculpted in margarine. In fact, we made sculpting tools as big as shovels because the idea is that the little sculptures that the girls had done in their childhood out of plasticine from school, that green plasticine that all New Zealand schools used to get, they come alive and so they're really big So we made sculpting tools out of shovels and other bits of equipment lumps of wood that would give the gestural Appearance as if the girls fingers had sculpted them. Well, I remember also taking a tour last time I was in Wellington at way to workshop and there was a

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

Well, it's lovely that you remember it fondly. The Tim Foyle, I guess, is allegorous to what we are trying to do as a company, what my wife and I try and do as individuals. Tanya, my wife, my business partner as well, is I say the thing we love to make today as other makers, right? We've had a lovely and amazing career, and we're continuing to do fun and wonderful things every day. But it's an imperative. And I actually feel that it's beholden on us to try and introduce as many people as possible, specifically

children, into the love of making and creating, because it is slipping out of our fingers and at one level some may say well so what it's been replaced by other things but I fundamentally believe that our connection as humans to the creative arts crafts are an imperative on the planet. I would even go as far as to say that the road markers that designate a specific culture's journey through history are based in craft, whether it's architecture, clothing, totems of religious or spiritual belief, etc. The things that remain across history are invariably main across history are invariably craft based objects of importance. So the reason tin foil,

and Warren Beaton, affectionately known as Wazzie, Waz came to us on Lord of the Rings as the chemist that mixed up all the gloop for the birthing sacks and so on. He's an extraordinary technician, makeup artist, animatronic engineer in his own right. But for the last five or six years, he's dedicated every day of his life to being on stage trying to inspire people, specifically children, to get off their iPhones for a moment and think about what these ten digits can do at the end of your hands. And the reason we use tinfoil is that no matter what the socioeconomic level of a family's life is, tinfoil invariably always exists in the family's kitchen. You can buy it extremely cheaply if it doesn't, and everyone owns a teaspoon. So we've made a sculpting curriculum out of the most accessible material you can get and a teaspoon, right?

The most accessible tool you can get. And one of our great reasons to celebrate, I think one of the highest reasons above other accolades is that we heard that the central Auckland supermarket sold out of tinfoil a few months after we opened our unleashed experience in Auckland where we do a very deep dive on tinfoil sculpting because kids wanted to go home and make things out of tinfoil. Do you own tinfoil stocks, Richard? I don't, unfortunately. I've tried very hard to get our team to package

wetter specific tinfoil to sell in the wetter case. You realize you should have been in the market from the start. I know, maybe it's been paid off by big tinfoil. Yeah, I wish. We'll all get Alzheimer's, that's the problem. So I have a lot of questions for Greg. I wanna ask a combo question for you, Richard, just to paint a picture for folks.

So could you paint a picture of what it looked like in the very beginning in terms of the organization? And then let's just say it, you can pick peak Lord of the Rings or post Lord of the Rings, what it looked like just to paint a before and after picture. So my wife and I have run our company together for 37 years. We started off the business in the back room of our flat. It was actually our bedroom. We used to have a sheet of MDF, we call it custom board, that we would flip onto the top of the bed and we would make things on that board.

Peter Jackson was interviewed once and he says, and I misquote, I remember coming into Richard and Tanya's bedroom and it stunk of the same rubber and fiberglass smells of my own bedroom, right? Because he was also making everything in the early years in his bedroom. So that's where we began. We moved workshops nine times. Our first collaborator, employee contractor collaborator, came about two years in, in the form of the gentleman Clive I mentioned, to do eyeballs. And today we have about 400 people operating across seven business centers. We have design and manufacturing for the world's creative industries,

which is about 170 of our team. We also make digital games. We do merchandising, collectibles. We've done hundreds of collectibles over the last 27 years. We also have a location-based experience division, and we work on some of the world's largest museums, immersive experiences. We've done the largest pavilion for the Dubai Expo, which remains open as a museum. We've done the largest traditional Chinese medicine museum in China, which Achi

Sora's designed the building, 37,000 square meters, etc. We have a creative media division where we are servicing people like Jay Chow, Asia's largest recording artist, a great Chinese musician, and we're doing work for him. He's actually Taiwanese. We are going on holiday. We also run two retail stores. We operate three tourism offerings, including our significant location-based experience called Weta Workshop Unleashed in Auckland. We have a robotics division developing and building very high performance humanoid robots, which we're trying to commercialize at the moment. Greg, help me here. What else have I forgotten? No, that's a bunch of it. And everything in between, right? We do a lot of service providing to private and public commissions.

A lot of very unique work for people's homes. We're just about to deliver two crazy objects or installations that we've built for someone's private home. These have taken each a year to build. So you can imagine how complex and how significant they are. So that's where we've got to today,

a multifaceted design manufacturing and entertainment company. And that's a desire to try and give creative careers to as many New Zealanders as possible basically. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would

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purchase. Learn more at www.drinkag1.com slash Tim. I would say, by the way, maybe you mentioned public sculpture in there, but we've done some amazing public sculptures as well. Huge works. You mentioned that, but one of the things that I think characterizes the workshop is that it is a workshop. You went through Tim. It's a workshop, concrete floor, lots of bandsaws and the sword makers, machinery and everything. It's a very tactile physical place. But Richard has created an environment where new technology, new interesting ways of approaching

things is always welcome. So as Richard says, we now do video games, we do location based experiences. Richard, as far as I knew, is the first person in the world that I saw around me that was bringing in 3D printing and 3D milling and 3D tools into this very physical place. I don't think you're afraid of any technology and you're very interested in all of it, regardless of your love and fascination with physical tactile things. It's like how do we solve the problem creatively?

It's just mesmerizing how many new technologies and new approaches turn up all the time. And it's interesting, just yesterday someone said to me, the perception is that you must run the company from a boardroom through executives, etc. etc. And that couldn't be further from the truth, as you saw Tim when you came. My wife and I are an integrated part of every component of our business. I'm on the workshop floor every day doing the work that we do. When I'm not traveling with Rhee around the world chasing work and delivering jobs, etc. We have an extraordinary group of senior management people that have grown up primarily in the building. A lot of our team have been with us over 25 years, over half the company have been with us over 15 years. So those people,

there's no need for a second language because they just know as deeply as I do what's required for each division and to get through each day. The diversity is our great benefit because if we had just remained as a manufacturing and design studio, we would be a small bureau in New Zealand. But the beauty of the diversity means that if one division drops off, which invariably is happening pretty much every year, the other divisions all come together to support that division and it fluctuates and flows. Luckily to this point, we haven't stumbled too heavily, but due to the cleverness of the team and the symbiotic collaboration of the teams to keep each division propped up when times are hard.

But it is a reality that the world is changing, the creative environment is changing, and most critically, the film industry, specifically the Hollywood film industry, is dramatically changing. So where film used to make 70% of our work, it now probably makes 30 to 40% of our work. So we'll come back to that because I do find the sort of 70% of our work, it now probably makes 30 to 40% of our work. So we'll come back to that because I do find the sort of diversified, not perfectly correlated nature of the company to be very,

very interesting. And I do want to ask you about Hollywood changes. But first, Greg, I want to come to you with a very important question related to naked ladies slipping on banana peels. I remember you and I were exchanging messages when I was inspired after my trip actually to attempt to learn digital painting and using Procreate and I was curious about some of your practice habits and so on. And I can't remember exactly what prompted you to send this to me, but it was a process capture of you creating many, many, I want to say 50, 60, who knows? dodgy slips. Okay, so Greg, can you explain and this will go somewhere. Can you explain

how that came to be? What the hell are we talking about? Yes. So do you remember the DS? What was the DS stand for? It was a Nintendo DS. It was a little flip over game console, right? It was made for video games. But the cool thing that Nintendo added was a touch screen. It was just hand, oh, actually it had a stylus, I think that's right. What they didn't tell anyone was that it actually had pressure sensitivity. I guess they just didn't include that feature,

but I was playing that a lot and found that someone had made an app, a mod for it, that made it into a little art app and actually utilized the pressure sensitivity. And that was the first handheld, like now they're everywhere, these little phones and so on with Procreate on your iPad and so on. But back then, little game console, you could actually draw pictures on it. And then this guy is a Swedish guy, Jens, I can't remember his surname, but he made

a little program for it, utilized the pressure sensitivity. And I just started drawing on it. And actually it happened, it would have been Christmas time in New Zealand, while my partner Kate was going out shopping for Christmas presents and going into every store, I sat outside bored to tears. I would just flip open my DS and start drawing. And I like drawing figures. I like drawing people. And I don't like drawing from life very much. I like drawing from my imagination. I just started drawing women falling over on banana peels. It's a very 1950s comic book kind of idea of slipping on the banana peel and breaking your neck.

And every single one of them provides a new opportunity to sort of creatively explore the human body doing interesting things. I like the stupidity of it, like sort of sexualized but making fun of it, right? Because it's like you can't be that sexy when you're falling over and hurting yourself. I don't know what's going on about that clash. It's interesting to me. Banana peel flying in the air. But I drew them and actually I hit 99 And we made an exhibition called 99 DS with my friend Christian

Pierce that Richard Itani was a patron of. And we put on an exhibition in town. But it was called 99 because I hit 99 drawings. And that was when Gens' operating system in his game, in his program that allowed you to draw, that's when it hit the file limit. So it's like, well, I've done 99, I would have gone to 500.

And so I hit 99 and I thought, well, that's that. And so my friend, so 99 dodgy slips from 99DS and my friend Christian, he did 99. What did he do? He did deadly sleds. Deadly sleds, these really cool, super creative hot rods in all different ways. Anyway, that's where that came from.

And for some reason, that ludicrous idea Richard decided, yeah, it's a great idea for an exhibition. I'll put it on in town. So thank you, Richard. Yeah, we put it on in sight. We got two shipping containers, painted them white, put a massive graphic of DS99 on the side of them. And then I had our engineers cut a hole through the insides of the shipping containers so you could walk from one to the other and then line them in white Maltica so they look like a medical laboratory and put LED strip lighting and so on. And then we printed every image of Greg's and Christian's off about this big.

And we hung them along the wall like this, and they looked so amazing. And one container was dodgy slips, and the other container was deadly sleds. Ree, would you mind just going to Tanya's wall, and behind the door is a poster of deadly sleds? Just take it off if you can. I'll just show you what they actually are.

I unfortunately can't hang Greg's dodgy slips on the wall of our office. They are hung in the design room in a lovely collection. Yeah, there's a bit of nudity. And none of the girls are well groomed, if that's the right way to put it. So people did query me about that. It's not the modern way to leave.

I don't know what to say without getting you in trouble on YouTube. You're not going to get in trouble. So Greg, I do want to, while we're awaiting the arrival of my toys, show it to you quickly. So this is Christian's work, not Greg's work. So you see there's the graphic. 99 deadly sleds and there's a lovely thing that Christian's written to Tanya that's faded. But you can see the level at which they can be illustrated on this tiny little wall. That's wild. That is just incredible. Yeah, the guy that did it did an amazing job. Amazing job that you could make this little Nintendo make a beautiful little art app, right?

It was incredible. In fact, other people made all kinds of things for animation, stop motion animation apps and so on, which I played with and made little animations. And that guy, Jen's, again, I can't remember his surname, but he was so lovely. I wrote to him to say, you know, actually I wanted to export the images larger

because they came out of this tiny little file size, tiny little resolution. And so he made an image to a little program to upscale the images because it actually records all the pen stroke paths. And then he made us a little thing that did a process animation of it, like showed each brush stroke going down because that was recorded as well. And that is the video. That's what happened. That I saw.

The video. Yeah. Amazing. So now you have an amazing bio, Greg, and I want to get to the two week trial that started this whole dynamic do off. I'm still on two week trial. Yeah. So we're going to get to that.

Now if you could just refresh my memory, I believe that you learned your skills through private tutors given to you by your aristocratic parents and then art finishing school at the finest institutions? Am I remembering correctly? How did you learn your trade? That is a good question. Yeah, I did try and do art school. Richard, did you try and do art school? Yeah, I went through Polytech. You did go through Polytech. I tried to go to New Zealand's most prestigious art school and they turned me down. So I tried another one and they turned me down. In the end I went to an art college in a small town in New Zealand but it didn't last very long. I think for a little while they didn't

know what to do with me so they put me off campus in a little room and I just I was happy. I was like I made I bought bed sheets and acrylic paint and would just paint these weird Salvador Dali tortured scenes of people and I was like, I bought bed sheets and acrylic paint and would just paint these weird Salvador Dali tortured scenes of people. And I was happy and I thought, well, this is what school is. This is great, you know, to do all these paintings. And then very quickly they got me back again and found out what they wanted to do with me,

which was make me learn all the traditional things you're supposed to do in art and so on. And I was a young punk rocker. I didn't want anyone to tell me what to do and I still don't. And I was a young punk rocker, I didn't want anyone to tell me what to do and I still don't. So I was immediately out of my element and thought this is not for me, I don't want to learn perspective and blah, blah, blah.

Actually now, in retrospect, I wish I had learned perspective and all these fundamentals, but I just wanted to learn myself and I find that I love learning by doing. It's the only way. The act of illustrating or being creative in general I find most interesting when you don't actually know where you're going exactly and you don't know what your

are. You don't really know how to do it. You just throw yourself into it and do your best. And I love that process. Sort of finding out the shortcuts I find the least interesting if you like. I feel like I don't learn out of that. I learn just by constant failing towards success if you like. Building up the failures stack up. And luckily you end up seeing the horizon from that. Can I just say he's not been self-effacing there. That's literally how he works. I know it might seem to people listening that, oh,

you must never fail. You did all these incredible films, and your body of work is so amazing. But it's extraordinary watching Greg work because he almost massages the object out of the canvas, by playing with it, by adjusting it, shifting it. Very, very different way to what a lot of people do. And I give briefs to Greg almost daily.

And there's things that I assume entirely that Greg will be able to do. When you say brief is that a project description? Yeah a project description like here's a great example right next to me. Like I needed a set of lockers designed for our unleashed locker where you lock up your bags when you go through unleashed and Greg there's wall, there's a photograph of the lockers and Greg has designed a set of characters, right, on the lockers. So you don't remember a lock and number, you remember the character that you got and then he's made a sign for the top of

the lockers, right. That's a great example I just happen to have next to me because that's a discussion we're having today. But there's things I totally assume that Greg's just going to knock out of the park and he'll just say, no, I won't be able to do that. I wouldn't be able to get a result for you because the way I organically work and think can't yield something. So he's very honest with me so we don't waste money and time. Other things that seem so challenging, two hours later he'll fire back a sketch and he's nailed it. Absolutely. And it's very rare that I will go back to Greg and say could you please do X, Y and Z. I might scale things, I might ask for a bit more absurdity in the picture. I gave him a brief, imagine an alien vomiting creativity across the walls of Auckland.

That was the brief. That's ended up being one of the world's largest murals consisting of dozens of crazy characters rolling through brain vomit of creativity, right? And Greg nailed it in the first illustration. It did take me 10 weeks to then censor it so it could be seen by the general public. I was in a total flow state with that, by the way, which is what I love to do. You like to fall into the image and not even think about it,

just create it and it sort of just happens. And so you're trying to find this flow state. And so I was just doing this illustration, it's 60 meters long by six meters high, and doing it on Photoshop and put it in pencils. And I'm doing it and it's only it feels like at the end is when I woke up and then that the image was done. Even though this actually took weeks and weeks. How do you set the conditions such that that flow state is more likely to happen? What do you have? Do you have any rituals? Are there any patterns that you can spot in retrospect that seem to contribute to that?

I'm 53 this year and I still don't know. I would ask you that. I remember this artist, Josh Homme, he's a guitarist for Queens of the Stone Age, an amazing guy. And he actually just says, you've just got to work. He thinks of it as the muse and the muse is out there the music the universe right and it's hopefully gonna offer you creativity. Richard is dead but these are characters out of the mural i just want to reinforce the total of the brain works.

He works. But Josh says that, you know, that thing out there, the flow state, the muse, the magic of creativity, whatever it is, is out there. And it's good to think of it as external to yourself because that's what it feels like when it comes to you, when it comes to you in a powerful way. The only way is just to make yourself available to it, which is work, right?

It's just turning up. That's why we turn up every day and we work all day, right? And you just do the work and then hopefully it turns up. Is there a magic trick to make it happen more? I think anything that works that removes yourself somehow, it makes you fall away. Like I said, when I did the mural, the best parts of it were where I felt like I woke up at the end and it was done. And that was actually where Richard was pointing out where all the problems came from, because I, because I wasn't conscious during half of it, if you like.

There were things in there that were problematic. I'd broken IP, I'd put Lemmy from Motorhead in it, because I love Lemmy, and I just wasn't thinking. And Richard said at the end, you know, we don't own Lemmy, right? So I ended up chopping Lemmy's head off. And what did you do in its place? And I put Richard's head on.

Richard said, why don't you put your head on? And I'm like, no, I'm putting Richard's head on. Richard said, why don't you put your head on? And I'm like, no, I'm putting Richard's head on anyway. But it's full of those kinds of problems that Richard had to point out to me that were like, hey, you've done this and you've done this. And I'm like, oh really, have I? God, I didn't realize. But that's the flow state, that's the muse.

That's like the fact that it really didn't feel like it was me doing it, it just happened. So how did this start off? How did the two week trial happen? I started during the post-production of Lord of the Rings. So I think most of the actual creative work that I could have been involved with

was actually already done. But Richard was about to start on King Kong. I think Peter had brought up King Kong. And also Evangelion. Remember that never happened. It was a live action movie of Evangelion proposed. And I sent in a folio with dinosaurs and robots in it and Richard saw it and I actually did a comic book as well that had both of those things. Richard must have gone like oh that person looks like they can do something but I had never worked before I'd been unemployed for like seven or eight years before that almost continuously on the doll.

seven or eight years before that, almost continuously on the dole, which is not something I recommend. And so I had no idea about working professionally or doing anything like that. I'm just a sort of creative lost soul actually. But when I saw that there was a place that was, I saw the first Lord of the Rings film come out and it was like, you know, I was a fan of Peter Jackson's work and everything, but my mind was utterly blown. I was not prepared for the, for the scale, how good it really was and how it transported me. But then I realized, oh, there's this place in Wellington and I'm living here and it's got these crazy creative people. Maybe, please, maybe I could work there.

So the timing was perfect. Having that folio was some of the things that piqued Richard's interest. And Richard was so generous. He brought me in a couple of weeks after seeing my folio and showed me around. And I just said, so when do I start? And Richard was very gracious and said, well, you can, you know, you can come on in next week or whatever. And I sort of thought I was on a, I think I got a two week contract after a while and I don't, I think I'm still

on that two week contract. Just to renew your vows every two weeks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I constantly think I'm two weeks away from being out of a job, and I like that. So I'm very curious, Greg, as Richard was mentioning earlier, sometimes you'll get a brief and you'll say, sorry, no can do. This is not something I deliver. And then other times, something that Richard would think to be very complex gets turned around in two hours.

And what I'm curious about in the former category, how do you know when something just is not in your wheelhouse? Or how do you decide to respond with that type of answer where you're like, can't do it, can't deliver this one? I don't know. I'd have to probably see an example because I can't remember actually saying no, I always sit there, I guess here's what it is. If Richard or anyone asked me for something, if my brow really starts furrowing and won't unfurrow, then I know this isn't working.

There's a problem. I used to describe Greg as getting pinwheels in his eyes, right? His eyes were just pinwheel like this. And I go, this one's not for Greg. Tim, when I started listening to your podcast, the first one I listened to, or actually I listened to one years ago and I absolutely loved it. But then I came back, I listened to one of David Deutsch

in Navale, do you remember? Oh yeah. And the David Deutsch one just blew my mind. I'm reading his books at the moment. I've become absolutely obsessed with him. There's something in his philosophy and his science that I totally resonate with. It's not like I've changed my opinion.

It's like amplified my opinion. And he talks about really finding the fun, chasing the fun. It's about finding really what inspires you, what interests you. And then when that feeling happens, you know, you're going to be able to solve that problem where you have a chance of solving that problem because you're motivated, you're interested in finding that state of fun and

creativity is the perfect way to learn. You're motivated to learn and you'll overcome the challenges. Maybe when things are a little bit too hard, not fun, you know, when they're too easy, you know, you've already done it before, there's no point doing that again. And I get very bored very easily. So the things that I've already done before, I'd like, why do that? Let AI do that, you know, AI has already been trained or that's fine.

It can solve that problem. I want to solve the problem where it's fun. And so there's the things that Richard will suggest, and this is 90% of them, in my opinion, I hope so, Richard. I get excited, my brain ignites, and then I go like, I want to solve on that. And maybe, and I can't think of an example, there's the hopefully very few states where I go like, I just go, I don't know why that would work. But I would also try and say why I think it doesn't work or why I can't solve it.

And maybe even suggest why it shouldn't be solved and could be solved a different way. I always try and be constructive. Greg will always philosophize with me around art, right? It's one of the great benefits of our friendship, irrelevant of our working relationship, in that trying to find the purity of an idea requires a level of philosophical exploration. Doesn't have to be high brow by any means.

I don't think me and Greg are capable of high brow. But it does require you looking inside yourself and it does require a deep observational, inquisitive journey through an idea together. And we do that amongst a small group of senior creatives within the building. It's actually to me, one of the most joyful parts of my career is that those conversations

through relationship around creativity and what comes out of the end of them, which is really great. Richard, could you give an example that comes to mind, any example of what that looks like in practice, what it looks like coming in and then what it looks like at the end of such a conversation? And for people listening, I'm sure they're like, that sounds awesome, but what does it look like?

How can I try it? I do a real meta example of it. So we know that we want to own and operate our own location based experience because we're building them for other people. We don't really have an inkling to try and make a movie but we know that we want to do something that's our own IP of our own experience. So how does the seed of the idea come to be? We've built an exhibition in downtown Wellington in our National Museum called Gallipoli, The Scale of Our War.

I saw it. Great. It tells the story of a First World War campaign fought by New Zealanders, relatively what would appear to a foreign visitor, a relatively modest moment in history, but to New Zealand, a phenomenally important moment in the journey of our country, et cetera. And it's through that level of philosophical exploration that you come up with the seed of the idea.

And I call it the grand idea. If you can't come up with the grand idea, then you're almost certainly not going to be able to achieve something that will engage the audience. It's like trying to make a movie before the script's written. With Gallipoli, we came, myself and my colleague Rick, came up with the grand idea in the first three hours that we sat together, because we philosophized around what Gallipoli meant to the people in New Zealand, what the men must have felt, what the realities of the situation.

The next exhibition that we did for the same client, which they said we want to build an exhibition around bugs. What was the great idea for Gallipoli? What did you land on? The great idea is the realization that most people only think of a past military conquest as visualized and quickly fading memories through sepia colored photographs of a time long past of people that no longer matter. That's sadly fact, right? And most museum exhibitions of military campaigns are told through statistics, told through the army, told through a meta-like view down on the war. Our grand idea, if you can call it that, is make pillars of the men of our past and present

them in a hyper-realistic, larger-than-life scale in bell jars to give people the opportunity to learn the story of the whole campaign through the intimacy of the connection to eight people, seven soldiers and one nurse. And that was the grand idea and the technique of achieving that. Going back to Unleashed, the LBE that we've built in Auckland, the location-based experience in Auckland, we oscillated around the idea for a year. Sorry, I should have finished off Bug Lab was a five month deadline, as opposed to the eight months that we had to do Gallipoli.

Three months in to Bug Lab, we still didn't have the grand idea. So we won't start until we have the grand idea, right? So it's very, very perilous and puts you on the very edge of potential failure because you are trying to find that grand idea. But without it, the work is a waste of time because it doesn't congeal around a central conceit.

And with Unleashed, it took us a year of exploratory ideation and philosophical discussion till we landed on the incredibly obvious but the thing that we really, really wanted to do and the story we wanted to tell. That's a good example at a large scale, but that stuff is happening most days of the week as well on micro decision making. Can I just add some color to that? Cause you brushed over it really quickly that they're huge sculptures, like most exhibitions of war, as Richard says, or even history in general.

This is for Gallipoli. Yeah. I really, they're either dioramas, small or recreations of soldiers at real scale and lots of photos and lots of documentation, right? And then you kind of supposed to pour through the documentation. Sometimes they have a little bit of audio and video, but this is these huge people, hyper realistic, down to the pores, like every...

I remember looking at the pores when I first walked in, the sweat and the pores and the hair and the eyebrows. A man picking up food. How large are these figures? Two and a half times life size. Massive. The biggest that we've built at Hyperrealism is eight times life size. So that's a 16 meter tall figure. If they were to stand, right?

One and a half kilometers of fabric in their garments. Even the fabric is scaled up, right? Everything is scaled up. People are complimentary about the heads and the hands because they can rationalize that to their own skin and how we've scaled it up. The challenges of making the heads and the hands pales compared to making the different fabrics and components within the costuming. Because to make a larger costume, you have to find a sheep with a two and a half times larger denier of hair density to what was used for the real costume. And then you've got to weave it. You've got to loom it and then weave it and then build it into a costume, then you can't just use a sewing machine because

the stitching won't be big enough and on and on and on it goes. So we want to tackle it at that level. Some listening may go, oh God, that just seems either obsessive or a waste of money and time. We take it to that degree because you are trying to pay a depth of respect To the memory of the people and if you shortchange the effort you've shortchanged the respect to those people These are veterans right there return servicemen or men that lost their lives in service to our country So what is it to us to make that extra 10% to try and? What is it to us to make that extra 10% to try and get it as good as we can possibly get it? A lovely thing with Gallipoli is over 4 million people have been through it now. Now that may not seem a great number to people listening,

but that's in a population of only 5 million people. We're very proud of Gallipoli. It's just been extended by a few more years, so means more people can get to see it. And Tim, when you experienced it, but when you stand there under the people, it is a different, it's very, very different. I don't think I've seen anything like that before. I didn't make it, so I can kind of hype it a little bit, I think. I just got to wonder it as well and sit there beneath these giant men and characters. And you feel, because they're hyper real and the beautiful way it's all presented and lit, you feel a magnitude, right? Literally, but emotionally, that's a very unusual approach.

If you, I think that idea on paper, hey, we'll make giant versions of these figures, it almost seems kind of weird and surreal, but it has an emotional impact that makes you feel the situation profoundly. Yeah. Richard, did I hear you correctly? You said the deadline was eight months on that. Yeah, we had eight months from first meeting with the board to deliver that. Wow.

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

you know, having that type of expertise and creativity along for the ride, is that we simply could not simply do many of the jobs that we do, because the inability to turn on a dime, to react that quickly, it's very rare that we will do a film job that has more than eight weeks. Very rare. Has more than eight weeks you said? More than eight weeks, yeah. We'll deliver, we've literally just done a job over Christmas that saw us deliver hundreds of, I think over a thousand weapons and hundreds

of suits of armour in less than eight weeks. So that comes down to innovating new methodology and having process. Obviously all the other things, passion, enthusiasm, tenacity, everything that comes along with a great crew of people, but being able to innovate new methodologies every year to be able to stay ahead of the deadline, basically. Yeah. So let me ask a question about process and then we're going to come back to you, Greg. But first, I do want to talk about because this certainly is so iconic and it's in the minds of probably most people listening which is Lord of the Rings. And I'd like to understand what some of the most, first of all, kind of how that came

to be, Richard, and then what some of the most crucial decisions were with respect to taking on a project of that scope, because for a lot of companies, I could see that being the hug of death, where you suddenly go from reasonably moderately contained and small to sprawling, taking on so much responsibility, and many companies would implode. I've seen it happen many, many times.

So how did that come to be and what were some of the most important decisions made that allowed you to grow the company and take that on? Yeah, that's a really big question. I'll try and answer it in a very condensed way. We have time. I just pulled this out, right? This is Sting from the movie. This is one of my

favorite things that we've made in the company and I keep it next to me and I pick it up and it gives you strength and it gives you a sense of wonder and it connects you back to a very happy time and it glows if there are challenging clients in the car. For people who can't see that that is a sword. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Those that can't see it here I'm showing all these visual aids because that's how I I'll drive people to the video. Yeah, I just held up the one point four eight times larger than life-size Sting that's carried by Elijah Wood at his scale. I likened it to teetering towards the edge of a precipice.

There's probably a much better visual metaphor than this. And you do this frequently in one's life, the decision to start a family, the decision to buy your first home or the home that you'll spend the decision to start a family, the decision to buy your first home or the home that you'll spend the rest of your life in, like the home that my wife and I bought way back on Meet the Feebles, right? The decision to X, Y and Z. But Peter Jackson offers this opportunity. And when he offered it, my wife and I, Tania and I, discussed with Peter,

and we ultimately settled on doing the design for and the manufacturing of the armor, weapons, creatures, miniatures, special makeup effects and prosthetics. Like five divisions of very, very large body of work. And you teeter to the edge of the precipice, and as a human, just as the human animal that we are, you've got a decision. You either step back from the edge and let others take up the slack and do it for you, and you follow, or you choose to leap.

And you either will then slam into the bottom of the cliff and make a mess with your guts and your brains everywhere or you will actually arrest your fall through a number of different mechanisms. Self-belief being the most important one. I have four very simple tenants that I operate by and four tenants that I try and operate our company by and the first one is love of oneself. That doesn't mean that you're egotistical or believe that you're better than you are, but if you can't see in yourself your virtues, how the hell are you going to expect anyone else following you to see your virtues?

Right? So love of oneself is the first of those four tenets. And there is mixed with that, as corny as it sounds, ignorance being your greatest ally. I think all of us operate to some degree where we are blinded by the love of what we do. Like Bertram Russell, if I've got the right person, has a lovely quote, And I think that's hindered by the love of what we do. Like Bertram Russell, if I've got the right person, has a lovely quote, work is more fun than fun.

And people that don't understand that struggle. Even if you're in a low level position that you're not really enjoying, you can still make the people that you work with really fun, right? I used to clean toilets on international aeroplanes, but man, the people I worked with, I put a cricket ball through the window of the international terminal because we were playing cricket out on the tarmac under the planes. You can turn anything into fun. So I had, once again, a very corny and I couldn't think of something better at the time, but we needed 158 crew working for seven and a half years on 48,000 separate things to deliver those five divisions to the trilogy of movies.

Our works are 98 to 99 percent of the films because our works in almost every image shot other than mountains with no one in it or etc. And you've got an inexperienced crew. You're highly inexperienced yourself, right? We'd done Hercules and Xena at the time and we'd had a career of about eight to ten years doing Peter's films. Peter of course is a inspiration in his own right and highly knowledgeable so he's helping as well. I used to say no matter how fine and how pale the thread that I give you, if you don't weave it with care into the tapestry, the tapestry will be in some way threadbare. What I'm talking about, that's sort of more of a silly poetic

way to say you're only as good as your weakest link. And in our case, we literally were linking, right? Handmade chainmail, 12.5 million links over three and a half years. And chainmail is only as good as how well you glue the top link on your shoulder, and whether the chainmail is going to fall off you. So trying to get us collectively, myself and my wife, and our team to believe that we could do it, didn't require, because there is a, I'm'm sure exists in other countries, but it is a fundamental part of New Zealand. I think it's because we're a young nation. We're at the back quarters of the world, a long way from marketplaces where you can buy

components to fix your tractor. So there is this intense can-do attitude that still exists today. Thankfully, we hire people that come with that beautiful can-do attitude. And we were able to benefit and bottle that so significantly on those three films. And the overjoyed nature of knowing that you're trying to prove something, prove that New Zealand could do it, that we could stamp our mark on the world stage. That was really important to us. To do justice to Tolkien's writing was really important to us. To meet Peter Jackson's vision was really important.

And to make sure that we had really good fun. That didn't mean that it wasn't brutally challenging, it was, but at no point in the seven and a half years did I ever think that I didn't want to be doing it. That was really a special part of that experience. Work is more fun than fun. What are the other tenets you mentioned for? Love of oneself, love of what you do, love of who you do it with and love of who you do it for. That is as a father of a family, well, as a husband or partner to a loved one,

a father or mother to a family, a president of a country, a CEO of a business. If you can't find those four tenets, obviously the first one, love of yourself, love of what you do, you've got to love being a parent, you've got to love being a lover, a husband, a wife, a partner. You have to love the people that you do it for. It is so easy to become cynical about your audience or your fans or your family or the person working above you, right? But that's who you're trying to capture it up in your passion for what you do. And you know, the other one's very obvious.

So that's how I think of things very simply. And that's after 30 plus years of working, it started to congeal that that's thinking about all these things that you might think about. That's the things that drive you forward. I think I've settled on those four simple and try not to be a dickhead is the and try not to be a dickhead is maybe the fifth. There are thousands of self-help books. I've actually only read one of them. I can't remember the title even. Someone said to me once, you only need one page,

a one page book on self-help. And it's simply, and there's only one line and it just says just don't be a dickhead right and if you put that against almost anything in life it's actually correct if we understand collectively what being a dickhead means and no doubt I for foul of that and invariably am sometimes you know we all are we can't it's very hard to not be, but you try really hard not to be, eh Greg?

Yeah. Yeah, trying, always. Trying. And have I answered your question well enough? I've sort of been a bit fringed around the outsides of it. No, you did. I'll have probably just one or two follow-ups related to that, but before I get to that,

you mentioned the can- do attitude of a fairly remote country and the resourcefulness that that engenders. And I'm wondering if there are any other advantages that you can think of, of doing this, whether it's the workshop or Lord of the Rings or the combination of the two in New Zealand. Are there advantages that you can think of? Tim, when I'm talking, I'm talking about Wedder Workshop, we were a small component of the overarching endeavor of making Lord of the Rings, right? We're very proud of the piece we played and we did a lot on it, but the art department, the costuming department, the props department,

the camera department, the grips department, the grips department, the directing department, et cetera, et cetera. The miniatures, there was phenomenal number of people all focused on the same mission. And I've actually said in the past, Lord of the Rings wasn't made by a director, it wasn't made by a film studio, and wasn't made by a film crew,

it was made by a nation of people coming together in that moment to try and make Lord of the Rings in New Zealand for the world. That speaks to the phenomenal number of people that Peter and his producer drew into the collaboration of making Lord of the Rings. I mean the government, the military, I mean, the whole country was buying it. Yeah, the government, the military, our tourism department, I think everyone felt you would have to have been pretty cynical at the time

to have not felt a certain level of pride in what Peter was trying to do in our country and get behind it. And a lot of people benefited because of it. The driving desire to that term punch above your weight. I don't specifically like that term, but that's a well-used one that speaks to it. New Zealanders do have a burning desire to try and achieve great things regardless of where we may come from and the scale of our country, that should

not restrict you at all. And you only need to look at our sports teams to see that, whether it's our national ballet, orchestra, contemporary dance, poets, writers, painters, artists in general, never mind the film industry or the creative industries, we have technology companies in New Zealand that are competing with the best in the world. Rocket Lab comes to mind that are doing astounding things on a fraction of the budget. You know, the robots that we're building in our workshop right now, probably at a 500th to a thousandth of the investment cost of some of the robots that we're seeing online, but we're pulling it off. We're getting there slowly, but getting there with five people and the money that we can

save from projects we're doing. It's that attitude. I think that plays a big part of it. Peter Jackson mustn't be missed in this equation to his self-belief and his just sheer drive. I've never ever seen Peter quiver in uncertainty to fluctuate in a sense of uncertainty that he isn't sure of what he's doing. That is an amazing thing to work around

because if your leader is confident, then you know, and there's a lovely quote, the Emperor will not remember you for your medals or your diplomas. He will only remember you for your scars. And I think there is a mentality of that very much in our country. You just got to knuckle down and do it, right? Grit is a important component in the journey, not the accolades at the end. It's the task of getting there that is seen as equal in accomplishment as winning baubles. Quick follow up on never seeing Peter fluctuate in uncertainty.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that. Is it because in your perception, he's very clear on the right thing to do and or is he also very good at identifying things that can be fixed later? In other words, he moves very quickly and values fast decision making with incomplete information over trying to get complete information. I don't know if that's a coherent question, but could you expand a bit on why you think

he's able to do that? It's a hard question because not to be disingenuous in any way to Peter because he is an extraordinary human being, a filmmaker, et cetera. But of course he makes mistakes, he leads things possibly in a challenging way. I'm not actually speaking to the outcome as much as the sense of self-belief and confidence that he's got it, that he knows what's right for him and he knows where to go with it. And maybe others have seen him but I've, as close as I've had the pleasure of working with them at Times through my

career, I've not walked into a meeting, which I do in front of my own colleagues here at the workshop. I'll go, guys, you know, with this one, I'm not completely sure where we should go with this. Could we talk it through? Could we philosophize on it? Could we... Peter doesn't need to do that. He'll come to us and say, I can't yet visualize it. I know what I want to do with it, but I don't know what it's going to look like yet. Could you do some concept art around it? But the conviction of how he's going to actually make the images on the screen is so certain. I think a lot of that is his self-education and what he has taught himself about most

of the ways film is made. If he had a thousand years, he could have made Lord of the Rings himself. So my assistant Ria is just trying to catch my eye to let me know. No problem. Do you have to exit stage left? I got to bug out very quickly. Sorry. No problem. No problem at all. Do we have time for stage left? I got to bug out very quickly. Sorry. Yeah.

No problem. No problem at all. Do we have time for 60 seconds? One last quick question. Okay. Yeah, of course. So Richard, you mentioned creating creators, making makers and also inspiring kids. And I'm curious for people listening, if they want it to be more creative to lay their 10

digits into making something, Are there any resources, books, exercises, anything you'd suggest they start with? Obviously today with the internet, there's a near infinite source of extraordinary training videos. I'm doing some sculpting of my own at home at the moment and why I'm sculpting, I just have a video playing, not that I can watch the video because I'm sculpting, but just listen to a guy that's talking through doing his own sculpture, right? Because I just love to think that maybe there's a sculptor

standing next to me and so I've been inspired by that. But in answer to your question, to me, the core attribute of creativity is to be inquisitive To be curious and I do see that a lot of people choose to journey through life Looking at the world but not studying the world. They don't find beauty and curiosity in the simplest of things And if you find it in yourself to start finding extraordinary lessons and beauty and inspiration in most if not everything around you, specifically the simplest things. Like there was that

great American movie that came out with a net bending with the dancing plastic bag that was caught in the wind. Oh, is that American Beauty, maybe? That's right. Yeah, we've all seen bits of plastic caught in the eddies of a a lusting wind in the corner of a building or in a rubbish bin or whatever. But that director remembered it, captured it, and shared it because his inquisitive mind loved it. And it became like my mind has instantly gone to that image when I've been trying to visualize how to answer your question because it resounded so fundamentally with me. And then there's only one thing that you can do is just start making. It doesn't matter what the medium is.

We have people turn up to interview with me, and you can see that they're slightly bashful. And I say, well, what do you do? And they will go, well, I do macrame, or as you guys call it, macrame, I think. Well, Makrame is about hand skills, dexterity, eye to hand coordination, pattern, weaving, color combinations, strength, engineering,

et cetera, et cetera, all these things add up. That person is possibly exactly someone that we'd want to hire. And it doesn't matter what the craft is, just start making something, leave something behind, right? If you think about who are the true immortals in the world, their teachers and parents, people that pass information to others to carry on into the next generation. But I do think about artists as crafts people as being creatively

immortal. Like this is not a prop. This is an artifact to me because it will carry on and bring joy long after I'm dead. The sword maker that made that imbued it with creative immortality. And to me, that's a good place to be as a human. Ree is losing her way. Thank you, Ree. Thank you, Ree. I thank you, Richard. I show her action of telling me to hurry up. All right, Greg, you and I have lots left to talk about.

Well, I'll leave you with Greg now. Give Greg a chance to get a word in after I blabbed for most of this. No, I'm learning. I'm sitting here. I love it, actually. So Greg, let's talk about some of your projects that are, I suppose, Greg projects as much as anything else, and how you chose them, why you chose them.

And let's begin with vintage inspired ray guns in 2006. Where did that lead? And then I certainly have questions about more recent projects, but let's start there. Yeah, the ray guns. Well, that's a childhood inspiration. I'm a 50, I was born in I'm 53, I think. Is that right? Done the maths?

Yeah, sounds about right. And I'm a child of Star Wars. But before Star Wars, I remember really fondly the black and white serials of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers and those things. And so those things are seared into my like four, five, six year old mind. And so when Star Wars came along, it was like all that stuff in technicolor and high definition and the sound and the music and everything. So there's always been this kind of love

for retro science fiction in there. And so the Ray Guns came from that love, really a flash Gordon, but in a way it's not really science fiction. Science fiction I like to think of as, it's actually very cleaver people who know about science and know about technology and then speculate on what could happen culturally or you know narratively with

those things. Dr. Grodbortz and the Ray Guns was not really about that actually it's a veneer of science fiction, right, technology and weapons and spaceships but it's actually a satire making fun of our current culture and that culture in that world and also making fun of how science fiction and science in general gets things wrong. How did you decide to do that? And I want you to tell people more about it, but how did you decide to do that? We all have finite time,

and people listening when they're listening to you and Richard, they're like, good God. I mean, they can't keep track of the number of projects and so on. Certainly the energy is a big piece of that, right? So you find the things that excite you and you focus on that. So you have the fuel in the tank

before you necessarily decide on the destinations. But how did you decide to go after that saga specifically and create that? So the first thing you just alluded to, and I said it before, that it really is just, that I found that so exciting. I thought about the ray guns and I started painting them and I found that so exciting. I thought about the ray guns and I started painting them and I found it so intriguing. I thought I could draw a thousand ray guns.

I could just keep on drawing them. Just drawing a ray gun. By the way, a whole world came out of it with characters and everything, but I could just draw a thousand ray guns. Like there's infinite variations. And so the creative potential in that just caught me and I would have done it. And I did do it. I did these nine, they're up on my wall over here, these nine illustrations. But really the decision to keep going is Richard. I was very, very lucky. So what happened, like how did you tip over

that domino of the ray guns? Like what was the germ? Because you alluded to it, right? But it's always interesting to me when you end up with like an immersive world, where did it start, right? So maybe you could tell that story. That's Richard fanning the flames. I had done these nine paintings just for myself because I love Ray Guns. Ray Guns. Yeah. 1930s style classic Ray

Guns. There's something beautiful and arcane about them that I really love and silly at the same time. But Richard was just as King Kong was finishing and Richard, one of the businesses we have is collectibles, but we don't own any of the IP that we make collectibles from generally. And so Richard had this aspiration like, and when you don't own the IP, right, you don't really control it. You don't get to do the exciting things you'd really want to do with it. You've got to go through the filtering process of whoever owns the IP or whoever manages it. And you don't necessarily make the lion's share of the money. So, you know.

Sure. So Richard wanted to do our own IP. So he put the word out to the entire workshop, said, we'd love to, if anyone got any creative ideas for collectibles, you know, and I was doing those ray guns. So it was perfect timing. I was like, Richard, we should make these ray guns.

Look at that. And luckily for me, he got the idea straight away. He saw it in real. And we almost said the same thing at the same time. We should make these as real. They'll be metal. They've got glass, right? They'll be in a case, right?

We'll just pretend they're real. They will be real as far as we're concerned. I had this vision that like, we'd even put, cover them in dust and put moths in there, right? And they are all stained in age. We didn't go as far as putting the moths and the dust on. You make them dusty and old

and then you put them in your loft or whatever so that you can pull them out and say, look, this was granddad's rag and he fought in the Martian wars right back in the day. So it was just this philosophy of doing that. And luckily, because Richard got it, before I even knew it, we were away and making them, really making them as real collectibles. And then the next step was provocation from Richard. I love comic books and it made them my whole life.

And he said, well, what's this world about? I know you've got these beautiful ray guns, but who made them? And so I'm like, I think I know who made them. And I just started making the books from there. So it went from ray guns to inventor of the ray guns. And then what came after that? I think that to me, there's something in that creativity.

The first spark, you don't really know where it comes from. Maybe it comes from your childhood or something random that you've picked up along the way and that just ignites your information. But then if you've created all these sort of why questions to start coming from it. So if you've got these Reagan's, who made them? Why did they make them?

What are they for? And your imagination starts presenting answers to that. Right, and then you just, I think about this a lot. Why choose any creative direction? This is a whole big metaphysical thing. I think about a lot about the, there's actually two different ways, I think, two distinct directions in which people create stories and narratives and worlds. And one way is directed where you kind of know where you're going to go. You know, the ending and the other way, which I've discovered I do more often than not, is I am just chasing these why questions, getting your imagination, giving

you answers back and you following with the one that is most profound to you, that makes you feel the most. It must make sense logically to you, but it also must excite you. And then also, I guess it feels the most powerful, but you can possibly see more branches coming out from there. And as soon as you see the more branches you like, that must be the way. And so you're taking all these choices as they pop up and present themselves to you. That world of starting off with a series of nine paintings of rayguns ended up being a whole universe. And we made games from it, made dozens of different collectibles and books and all kinds of things, all from that process of just chasing the right thing

and having Richard being the one going like, do more, do more, do more. So I was actually just having a conversation a few weeks ago in Utah with the fiction, mostly fantasy writer, Brandon Sanderson. And he was discussing exactly in different terms, but these two stylistic options, right? Or creative approaches.

And I think, can't recall exactly the terms used, but it was something like the improviser and the architect, right? Some people like to have the blueprint, the outline, they execute to outline, and that produces what they expected. Other people, let's just say in the realm of fiction writing might start with two characters or one character in an interesting situation and then they

just run with it right from there. They start with that germ of an idea and then they see where the tree branches, but they don't know where they're going to end up, which is such a fun and liberating approach, which I've only explored in a little bit of fiction that I've done, but most of the time I'm architecting in terms of nonfiction. I was going to ask. So you're more on that architect side. You can kind of see an endpoint potentially or see the thing you're trying to say. And then it's about like, okay, how do I plan to get there? Well, you know, now that I think about it and thinking it through out loud,

I would say that when I'm in the second phase of my work, that's true. And what I mean by that is my books are actually two broad buckets. The first bucket is research and experimentation. And when I'm doing the research and the experimentation, there is a lot of groping in the darkness and finding my way from one interesting thing to the next. So I can't really predict, otherwise it would be very boring, where the experimentation is going to lead for any of the books, which almost always include experimentation, especially the first three and the one that I'm working on right now.

And then once I have all of the material, more or less, then I decide how I'm going to pick and choose and massage and create a sort of interwoven puzzle, so to speak. Maybe that's not the right metaphor, but you kind of get the idea, like an advent calendar maybe, for the reader to experience as they go from one page in one chapter to the next and to the next. So I would say that in the beginning, it's exploration, improvising, and it gives me the dopamine hit and the rush of energy

necessary so that when I end up having to do the blueprinting and the bricklaying, which I intrinsically find less enjoyable, then I have gas in the tank to push me through that second phase. There's probably not a hard distinction between either. And in fact, you're probably oscillating back and forwards between both approaches all the time to some degree.

It's just some people naturally veer more towards exploring and some wanting to know a place. I discovered it a little bit when I was showing the early stage of my current book to a friend and had a character in it. And they wanted the character to resolve a certain way, right? And they said, I hope you have this character beat that character. I'm being really reductive,

so I'm not being specific about anything. But they're saying, you know, they hope that happens. And that was the realization for me that I wasn't doing it in the way that they were thinking. Because I was thinking, well, actually, really? I don't know. I don't know who's gonna win. I don't know where it's gonna go.

I'm just following it and seeing where it goes. Part of that might just be a choice of that feels more fun. That is riding the wave. That's being on the skateboard, not knowing whether you'll fall off or not. If you can keep it fun, then you keep on going, right? And so not knowing where it's gonna go is good. But you know that your imagination will present you these options and that if it feels powerful, then you know you've hit somewhere good.

I think you touched on a key component there, at least for me, which is effectively if you have confidence in your imagination in the muse also to present you with discoveries along the way. Having that confidence seems to be a prerequisite. And I think I've always had quite a lot of self-doubt when it came to taking something from beginning to end, idea to final product without a blueprint. And that's part of the reason why I've, in the last few years

and moving forward, I want to do many more creative sprints, short deadlines with really capable people, where I don't know exactly where the end product is going to end up. And to play around with honing that confidence in more of an improv jazz way, as opposed to a orchestral piece where you have everything figured out in advance

and executed to spec. Oh, and it's been catching one thing you said there though, but there is a missing ingredient in that you do need to have the deadline, right? Or the reality, you need to have the wolf at your back to some degree, right? If you're completely creatively open and just gonna find your way, but there's no deadline,

there's no pressure on you, you can kind of wander anywhere. There is something about making a commitment to someone else, however you do that, to a publisher, to whatever, or taking money on to do the project and knowing that you have to pay it back or whatever. That wolf at your back is so important, even if you don't know where you're going to go, because now you have to go somewhere and you have to beat the wolf. So you've got to be careful not to take that away from yourself.

I think that can be maybe something I'm speculating, but maybe if you get too successful, that can be dangerous because now you know you can just kind of freely float along and explore. Maybe you find something, maybe you don't. But when you know that failure is an option, you go, I can't, I have to, I have to keep on going. I have to solve this. Yeah, for sure. So the new book, tell us about the new book and how you ended up deciding on this

as a project to put your energies into. Yeah, that's one path. There it is, ah, pretty. It's my first time seeing it. It's my first time seeing it in this form. I saw the early digital way back. That is gorgeous. It came out really, really good. I'm very, very happy with it. I've gone with a publisher called Mad Cave, who I didn't know before, but they've been fantastic. So I started our

game studio. I was one of the few people at Witta Workshop that had a real keen interest in games, and I wanted to make our own games. And really luckily for us, we partnered up with this guy, Roni Ebbavitz came along to our lives who started Magic Leap, a company that make 3D goggles, like AR goggles, they call them spatial computing. And we started a studio through them and he was massively supportive of me, even though I'd never made video games before. I had a vision of how to do that, of what I wanted to see and I understood what he was massively supportive of me. Even though I'd never made video games before, I had a vision of how to do that,

of what I wanted to see, and I understood what he was trying to do. And so we were very lucky that we formed a relationship with him and then made the game studio. And I made a series of games, and I'm really proud of them. They were great.

They're very pioneering and very challenging. But sadly for us, not that many people saw them magically, only got to a certain level and needed more funding. And then COVID came along. And luckily, Magic Leap managed to limp its way through and is now continuing on, which is great for them. And hopefully they continue to grow and get back to strength.

But they were massively punched in the guts and my whole team was gone almost overnight. It was crushing, you know, all the speculative money, as you'd know, sucked up at that moment and went into the safe things, which is totally understandable. It went in traditional games and it went into food and you know, all the basics that we actually need when we're in a crisis. But it disappeared from Magic Leap's endeavor at that time. And so I actually had games halfway through production, some almost entirely finished. Brittle. Yeah, dude. Emotional punch in the guts for me. And so we all went home and I actually sat here thinking about, well, what next?

And so I handed over reins of the game studio. I didn't really want to make traditional games. I was so in love with making the kind of wild and crazy technological things that Magic Leap was aspiring to do that I kind of went back to basics. I thought, I need to go back and do something that I can do on my own. I also discovered about myself that maybe I should take a break from running a big team. It's an amazing thing that someone like Richard can do to have so many people you know doing these things. It's an art unto itself but I realized I needed to get back to basics and I'm a lover of dinosaurs. I grew up in a very dinosaur-y kind of place in the bush. And so this world of cave woman and dinosaurs, it's been in my head for years

and it kind of crystallized, it started to crystallize. And sitting here looking out my window at the bush, back at home, away from civilization, as civilization seemed to be falling down a little bit, I had these very primal thoughts of this kind of world and the story started to form around those ideas. And it is very much a little bit. I had these very primal thoughts of this kind of world and the story started to form around those ideas. And it is very much a cave thing. I felt like I was going back into my cave like a weird little shaman and concoct something new, something

I knew I could do more or less on my own as well. A comic book is a beautiful thing because you can do the entire thing yourself. That said, I have two other writers, Andy Lane and Nick Boschier, who co-authored it with me. And they really helped me to sort of shape it and put a lot more depth into it. But to your point, you knew that it couldn't be taken away, in a sense. And I thought, I can do this. I don't need to hire 20 people to do this. I can do this all on my own. And emotionally, it became a story about technology and about collapse

and about, you know about being back to basics. I think going from such a technological world, working with Magic Leap, who are doing the most highfalutin crazy stuff and thinking about that every day about what the future of computing could be to like, know I'm gonna work on dinosaurs and blood and gore and people living at the edge of survival.

Yeah, that's what really motivated it. What was the set of tools that you used and when you were originally concepting this and working on layout and so on were you doing the majority of it in Photoshop? What did the set of tools look like? I tend to draw first mainly in pencil and then go into Photoshop from there if it's interesting But the first thing was really conversations I would be having conversations with my co-authors just bouncing back and it was really just percolating ideas in the broadest possible sense

of everything that could happen, why the world would be the way it was and everything and all the ingredients. And then some idea really catches your mind and I can see a spark of it, see a little vision. And then it's like, okay, I'm gonna draw that. I'm gonna draw that moment. And then I started drawing a bunch of those moments that some of them went on to become key plot points

in the story. And other things are more matter of fact of like, well, I know there's a character, it's named One Path after this character called One Path. And so I needed to see her, you know, your mind's kind of searching around for who she really is. So that's an exercise into itself. I need to draw her. Normally in a film that would be conceptual design, you might draw

a hundred versions of her. But for me, luckily, because I'm creating it, I just like draw one drawing and I know that's her, you know? And then doing that for all of the elements of the story, doing that for all the dinosaurs, the places, the characters. So I essentially concepted it all out. I don't need to be as methodical and full as you would with a film, because in a film, you need to design every single thing and every single place because it's gonna go on and someone's gonna actually have to build it.

But in this case, I know I'm gonna be drawing all the comic panels, so there's a lot I can fill in in the future that I'll solve when I get to it. But I wanted to draw a high level of it and see it in front of me and get that feeling of like, is this a place, is this actually a thing know that drawing it all and spending the time with it gives you a chance to live in it and Feel does it make sense and do you want to move further into it? Do you want to explore more? You know, what are the best places for people to visit or maybe a better way to phrase the question is how can people get a

taste of your artwork and storytelling? That certainly includes one path so you can give people an idea of where and when they will be able to get that. But also if they want to get a taste for the many flavors of Craig Broadmoor, I don't know, wording's a little awkward, but you get the idea. Where should they go? I've just actually released a new website at longlonglastcregbroadmoor.com. My partner made it for me. I've always just relied on Blogspot and Instagram and all that kind of

stuff. Never actually done a decent website. So finally I've got a good website and it's got a bunch of content out there actually. And I'm also on Instagram. But yeah, it's probably not comprehensive, but it's got a ton of my work. Beautiful. And then OnePath. What's the timeline and how are people going to be able to get it? So OnePath Beautiful. And then One Path. What's the timeline and how are people going to be able to get it? So One Path comes out April the 8th. That's like a month from now. That's very soon.

I don't know when they release this, but yeah, hopefully very soon for your audience. Within a few weeks of recording this. It's a 200 page book, but there's three more books altogether. There'll be four books in total, each about the same size. So I've already been doing it for like, uh, when was the pandemic? When did that start?

I've lost track of time already. Boy, 2020. Yeah. 2020 has been five years. I feel like I've just started it, but I've already been making it for five years and I'll probably be doing it for another two years yet. So yeah, that's wild. Now, do you foresee, do you have any aspirations to see it expand beyond comic books?

Have those ideas started percolating or have you put those on a leash so that you can focus on getting the work done that's at hand? Yeah, I really pushed that stuff away actually. I work in the world of film and video games and so on. So everyone would ask me, you're making a new IP, is it going to be a game? Is it going to be merchandise? Is it going to be film and so on? And actually, I was completely uninterested in that.

And I don't know why I'm not being dismissive of those things, because I've made them and helped to make some of those sorts of things. I realize it's because I wanted to keep the thing as pure to itself as possible. There's a bunch of weird and possibly challenging ideas in one path that I knew, let's say, I would just run the simulation in your head,

there's going to be nudity in this book, right? If I think this creative world has to solve these other paradigms, film, games, whatever, then I know I have to curtail some of the decisions or... You'll start censoring or you'll start editing. Censoring is the worst, but editing in ways that sort of take all the edges off and make it less unique. So I thought, no, it's a comic book. It's purely a comic book and I'm going to do the things that I can do there. And then if I'm so lucky down the line that the opportunity arises for it to be other things, then great, we can adjust it there.

But I'm not going to think about those things at all. In fact, if I'm honest, I was almost a little disdainful. I was like, this is a comic book. This is like pure baby. I should say graphic novel. That's a grown up word for it, but I still. Yeah, graphic novel. Oh yeah, no, the tuxedo. The sort of black tie version of the comic book.

And let me, and I'll point people to One Path, certainly in the show notes and linked to the website as well. When you reflect back on your work and time with Weta Workshop, can you think of an example of something that was particularly hard to pull off that you ended up being very proud of? I'm just deeply interested in following you through that journey, having you tell a story

of any project that comes to mind. The one that resonates for me is District 9. I got to work on District 9, which was Neil Blomkamp's debut film. I'll tell you the whole arc of that and jump into a couple of moments from it, but I know other people had this experience. It started as Halo, and actually we started working on Halo,

the feature film adaptation of the video game, amazing video game. It started there with no director. So Richard just said, you know, we might be working on this, Peter's trying to produce it, he's going to try and find someone, let's just go. We don't have a script, we don't have anything, we just have the game. And so we actually spent a long time creatively exploring that. And then we met Neil Blomkamp and it was like, that was a revelation. I had my doubts about that as a film because I thought it's a great game but how can this be a film? I wasn't even quite sure. Then when Neil turned up and he'd never made a film before I'd seen his little shorts. I was like, holy hell, okay, now I get it. This guy has got a style and a vision and it's completely unlike anything else. Now I can see the film. This is gonna be amazing.

But then all of a sudden one day that whole film fell over. Now at the time, just for context, at the time what had you been brought on to do exactly? I was doing concept design. What Workshop would have done I don't know, but the aspiration would have been to make many of the props and vehicles. In fact, we were making a warthog

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

I'd done hundreds of drawings, and my friends had done hundreds and thousands of drawings and illustrations. It's just so much more work. And then one day it was just gone. Film and illustrations. It's just a astonishing amount of work. And then one day it was just gone. Film's done. And then one day you're depressed. And then the next day you're just like, well, got to keep on going.

Right. You get up and move on to the next thing. And then all of a sudden, Neil's making the idea of District 9 came along. And we'd seen Live in Joburg as short. That was the basis for that. And that was like, this is even more exciting, right? No disrespect to Halo, but now we get to create, if this can happen, we get to create a science fiction world from the ground up.

It can be whatever we dream up, right? And Neil has a crazy imagination, so this is gonna be fun, and it was. But Neil is, like many directors, he knows what he wants. He has complete confidence and faith in himself, knows when he doesn't like something, right? But is happy to change course immediately if he feels like that's not working.

And so the story I would say of like the challenging thing overcoming it, this happened to me, but it happened to other artists as well. I designed many aspects of the film, mainly the robotics and the weapons and spaceships and stuff like that. And I was working on the ExoSuit robot and we designed a full organic alien that I really loved. It was like it was not a grown robot as if it had like skin and you know, it was actually manufactured using organic techniques.

So I thought it was a really interesting idea to add hair and it looked robotic, but it also looked really different. And I thought it looked cool. You know, I had my own little doubts about parts of it, but I really liked it. And we even went so far as to build a huge prop and ship it to South Africa. And they shot scenes with Shalto Copley in the thing. So I'm like, this is cool.

And then all of a sudden Neil just changes his mind. Like, no, it's not gonna work. That thing doesn't quite work. I want something bigger, scarier, heavier, right? And so again, I had that same moment at the end of Halo of being like, ugh, right? quite work. I want something bigger, scarier, heavier. Right. And so again, I had that same moment at the end of halo of being like, so, right. My design that I poured months into that my friends built, it's just, that's nothing. That's just, that's just air now. Goodbye.

And then you have to like, go snap yourself out of it. You cannot be depressed. You can't be bummed. You just gotta be like, okay, now I've got this new problem to solve. I've got to figure out what this next version is. And I think I probably did like 30 designs in the course of a week, right? Just working my ass off to create as many options as possible. Part of this competition is like, I wanted to make sure I got my design in there. That's the wolf at your back.

And the thing that came out of it was even better. Neil was absolutely right. He got the thing that solved the creative problem that was this threatening, scary, but also superpower for Shalto to wield. So, and by the way, just for someone else's experience, the guy who designed the aliens is a friend of mine, David Meng, amazing sculptor. He had a similar experience where he worked for months on an alien design and we made it as prosthetics. It was we made it as prosthetics It was all gonna be prosthetics. You put guys in suits and then they walk around with these alien prosthetics He sculpted this beautiful design beautiful prosthetic. They painted it sent it South Africa and then Neil went like don't work

Did Neil give reasons or was it just a very simple doesn't work. We need I can't remember in my mind. It's just doesn't work No doesn't have a lot of fluff. It's just like, you know. But he may have given more. I can't remember. I saw in Dave what I felt, right? Which is this like, oh. He had made a Faberge egg of astonishing detail, right?

This beautiful thing and then goodbye is dust. That experience is just so common in making film. But anyway, the alien that he made out of that, he just went, he collapsed to the floor and then he pulled himself back up. And the next day he was sculpting the new thing and what finally made it to the film was even better than the other designs. So I want to hear more about this. I want to dig into this psychological resilience piece a little bit because I've spent time with a lot of artists. You certainly have spent time with more artists,

but it's easy for an artist, whether that person is a visual artist or a writer or otherwise, to get attached to their darlings. To get very attached. It's incredibly understandable. to get very attached. It's incredibly understandable. And then I recall distinctly, this is a few years ago, maybe it was two years ago, and I did my first creative sprint, coming back to what I want to do more of, with a number of concept artists who had done a lot of work for Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering, really incredible with fantasy concept art, but also really fully fleshed out covers of you name it, any iconic player's handbook, etc. from D&D or otherwise. They just created these masterpieces. But what struck me most was not their capabilities, it was two aspects.

They were both good at quality, but exceptionally good at speed. So number one, it was just the speed and their ability to hear an idea, sit down for an hour with a pot of coffee and like start with silhouetting a lot of the times and then smashing out ideas. But the characteristic that stuck out to me most, and I don't know if this is born or built, that's what I want to ask you about, is how unattached they were. Meaning, like they would produce so much work and I was working with, let's just say a project manager, we were all in person, shacked up in the middle of the countryside at this hotel just to do this work on this fantasy world that has been kind of renamed. Initially it was a

this fantasy world that has been kind of renamed. Initially it was the legend of cock punch, long story, but later legends of Varlata and could actually be modified very easily to be a serious viable full-blown fantasy world, which might be something I explore. But the reason I bring it up is I would have a decent idea of what I wanted to do, because I also grew up collecting comics, wanted to be a comic book penciler, so I think very visually, but they were accustomed to having 70 plus percent of their stuff X'd out by IP holders and starting over. And they were so unfazed by it, it stuck with me ever since my first day watching them be so unattached. And I brought up the project manager because he's done actually have this new book here. I'll just give him a quick shout out. Hold on one sec. So one of them was Adam Lee. And

you can see here this is worlds and realms, Dungeons and Dragons, it runs through basically 50 years of gameplay and different worlds within the D&D ecosystem. But he is and his writing partner both said to me, they're like, be super blunt. You don't have to wear kid gloves and dance around it. They're like, if you don't like something, just say you don't like it. And it was very, very hard to do because I get so attached to my own little middling attempts at artwork. So how do you develop that? Is it just brute force repetition where you've built up so much scar tissue over time that you get better at handling

it? Maybe those guys sound very, very good at handling that. I would probably be a more emotionally fragile even than that because I do get protective. But I did realize early on, working at Weta Workshop, because I'd never done professional work before, especially not at the speed. I love the speed, by the way. I think speed gives a work a quality of its own, which I think is what I love and chase after. But I realized you have to generate a ton of work, whether you like it or not, you're in competition with your other artists, which is a great camaraderie, but it's still a competition.

And you're all bouncing ideas off each other. And most of your ideas will be rejected. And you kind of know this because if you're doing a hundred versions of a character and your team's doing, you know, a hundred more each, it's only going to be one of them. You kind of know whether you think it or not, that when you're aware of it or not, that a lot of that stuff's gonna be thrown away. But it does hurt when it is thrown away, especially an idea that you're passionate about. And so you realize very early on that you have to become unattached.

You do need to care about the work deeply, right? It is your baby. You have to care about it. And if you don't care about it, the work won't be any good. So you cannot become cynical to the work. You have to love it. And you have to be able to let go of it.

Those two things are really in opposition because you're fighting with yourself. It's so hard to just let go when you care so deeply. But that's what you have to learn. And those guys obviously mastered it. They knew that they could be in the state of loving the work and enjoying it, and then just be like, whatever will happen will happen.

And know that the joy is not actually in what happens next with that, it's actually in the doing of the work itself. As long as you did something great there, and now I have an opportunity to do something great again, or try. I think they obviously have mastered that. And that's what I tried to chase after was like, well, I love the work, the process of doing it. I want to enjoy that process and whatever will be will be after that. At least you're trying to get there. That's easier said than done because you still care about it going on and becoming a part of the movie. So there's a competitive part of you that wants to win. That doesn't go away. Yeah, I feel like you need that though. Right. And that strikes me as the crux of the challenge.

It's easy to, I shouldn't say it's easy, it's not easy. But it's easier to either care a ton or not care at all. But it's really hard to care a lot and then also have the what will be will be attitude with the work. Like that strikes me as a combination that is super tricky but it's really really important. I think I've become better at it with writing. I'm still very precious about anything that I paint or draw. I mean ridiculously precious but with the writing it's like look, it doesn't matter how cute and clever you think that page or that chapter or that character is,

if your test readers say it's fucking boring or it's confusing, you got to kill it. It is, right? Yeah. Well, they've given you a, even though it's subjective to them, it's an objective fact. And right, it's not like you could argue with them. No, this is why it's good.

No. Yeah, yeah. That's something in the art, right? argue with them no this is why it's good that's something in the art right your artists probably realize this if it didn't make sense to you if it didn't solve the problem if that's not the character you were after they can't argue into saying why it is you felt it and it's true right and so the way to solve that problem is to go back and do it again and do I have another go at it because that's how you would actually solve the problem and actually come up with the right answer.

You won't solve it by like some meta analysis of this is why, look, here's my study, here's all my diagrams of why this drawing is just the one you should want. That don't make any sense. Are there any particular, and I suppose they would need to have work that people can see. They don't have to be concept artists or concept designers, but are there any particular artists who have really? inspired and informed how you do what you do that could be

The aesthetic but it could also be I mean you mentioned Salvador Dali earlier, right? It could be process it could be philosophy could be anything. I'm just wondering if you could sort of mention any of your influences or inspirations whether past tense or could be philosophy, could be anything. I'm just wondering if you could sort of mention any of your influences or inspirations, whether past tense or current. I'm not really very influenced by technical. I'm not very interested in the technical a lot of the time, like how something is done.

I find it interesting, but it doesn't really motivate me. But there are artists, and it doesn't really matter how they do their work, that have absolutely inspired me. Salvador Dali was one of those ones where it's like, I love realistic looking stuff, or quasi-realistic looking stuff, and then someone who twisted reality in such a way, it was just like mesmerizing.

I've actually got a book here, I should, the artist that really blew my mind, the teenager, I grew up reading 2000 AD, Judge Dredd. Oh, fantastic. British series of comics. Oh, unreal. British series of comics. Oh, unreal. Best, right?

Oh yeah. I think that's how I was introduced to, might've been how I was introduced to Simon Bisley for the first time. Oh, Slaying the Horn God. Oh my God, look at that. This is the book. So my, I was 15 and reading 2000 AD

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

Actually, the book before this came out was ABC Warriors, which he did in black and white. I saw penmanship, but that work, his work, just freaking blew the little fine line. Oh my god. It's so nuts. It's still unparalleled. It's Frank Frazetta and Corbin and all of that dialed to a totally unique level and I don't know how he does it. I know he's just a magician. He's on another planet. He summoned true magic here. I'm interested in how he does it. Can I just have a super nerd fest with you for a second?

Hold on for one second. All right. So for people who don't have any idea what the hell we're talking about, you can look him up. But this is Simon Bisley. The Art of Simon Bisley. Heavy Metal Man. What a great magazine that was too.

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

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

Dude, go ahead and buy it now. I don't know if you can still, they're still in print, but there, there's two volumes of it and they're absolutely incredible. Wow. Yeah. Really raw, but just the beautiful, but you're to your point, it was both deflation. Like that rug pulled out from under you. Like I thought I was maybe good enough.

And then you realized, no, no, this, the level is up here somewhere that, you know, the ceiling just went way up and the ceiling was already very high. So, and so it was, this was a great thing to happen. Really. It was, it was depressing. I was actually really like punched in the guts by that as well. But then you have to, you know, you're like, well, I just need to get better. And I did something actually that I weirdly still feel a slight shame for.

Cause I never draw from life or from anyone else's drawings. I always draw from my own imagination. But I started copying some of his drawings for a while, thinking that if I could just like figure out like how he does his line work or something like that, it was useless. It was a waste of my time, but I did it for a little while. You mentioned two other names. So Frazetta, Frank Frazetta.

And for people who don't know Frank Frazetta, Frank Frazetta. And for people who don't know Frank Frazetta, I mean, go look at everything you can find. I remember being so enthralled by this, not going to do it justice, but Viking like character with the kilt, with the polar bears pulling the chariot and his mastery of not just the male figure, but also his women are just like, I mean, come on. Unbelievable. Like that woman coming out of the water slash Merck with the snake wrapped around her with that huge creature in the background. The artwork is just, it's hard to describe, but he was such a genre breaker in so many ways. You mentioned another name that I didn't recognize, Corbin.

Yeah, Richard Corbin. I don't know where he's from. I think he was an American artist, but he was in a lot of heavy metal. And in fact, there's an homage. One of my favorite moments in Slane is, I won't find the page, but there's a homage. They talk about the Slane being the king of kings. And in the background of the shot, there's Slane being thrown as the king of the Celts or whatever and behind him is Den I think is the character from Richard Corbin and Conan and they're both. In the back of one tiny panel are these two masterful paintings of Conan in the style of Frazetta but in the front is Slane in the style of Bisley and behind that is Den in the style of Corbin. And he had a very specific way of painting. In fact, he's lit a bit like you are

now. Blue light on the side. Right? Yeah. Corbin had this very specific way of lighting his characters. Anyway, but he did a heavy metal series. I actually don't even know what the story is about. I don't think I even read them. I just looked at them. I just sat there looking at his work and find his work, you'll absolutely love it. He does big, powerful, masculine figures as well as bucksome, beautiful, strong women that blow your mind. Yeah, you'll love it, you'll love it.

Okay, cool. I'll check it out. I saw, believe it or not, not far from where I'm sitting here in Austin, Texas, I saw my first original Frank Frazetta piece which is owned by Robert Rodriguez. He's a famous film director He did you know Sin City's worked with James Cameron on Alita Battle Angel. He's done tons and tons of movies and he collects objects kind of like you and Richard also. He's just got the best toys.

And he has a Frazetta piece when you walk into his house and it's lit as if it's in a dungeon of sorts with this very dramatic lighting. And it's just, it's amazing work. There was a museum somewhere in New York of Frazetta's work, but I think there was some family issues. So I don't know what state it's in now. But I had the chance once once, I was in New York and me and my partner, we could either go

to the Frazetta Museum, or that's what I wanted to do, but I actually didn't know how to get there. I didn't know where it was. And to be honest, if I'd gone there, I don't think I would have found it. But the other choice was to go, and to mention one more artist, was to go down to Delaware to where NC Wyeth had a studio.

Do you know NC Wyeth's work? You know, I was gonna try to bullshit, Ieth had a studio. Do you know NC Wyeth's work? Ah, you know, I was going to try to bullshit. I don't know. He's an illustrator, an illustrator from the turn of the last century. He did like famous book illustrations of like pirates. I was going to say, was he kind of like Leyendecker's vintage? Yeah, yeah. In that era, maybe a little earlier. Through Rockwell. That's why I do think I've come across the name. I wasn't totally bullshitting. There was like a flicker of recognition. Howard Pyle. That's why I do think I've come across the name. I wasn't totally bullshitting. There was like a flicker of recognition.

Howard Pyle was another great American illustrator and he was one of the students or compatriots. Anyway, his work is astonishing. I went to see that and that was semi-religious standing in front of his paintings. They were huge. N.C. Wyeth? Yeah, the letter N.C. Wyeth.

There he is. Yeah, yeah. N.C. Wyeth. That absolutely mind boggling and religious experience. Oh, wow. Standing in front of those paintings. I recommend if you're in that part of the world going there, it might still be there.

In fact, it's where his studio is. This stuff's incredible. Yeah. Super mesmerizing. But he is a great painter on the caliber of the great painters of Europe and that illustrious history of great paintings. He's up there, but yet he'd be called an illustrator, which is like a word that trivializes really

what he does. This was true for a lot of those artists in that generation. Maybe it's just because it was commercialized. I mean, Norman Rockwell dealt with a lot of this as well, of course. But you know, Leyendecker, when he was creating sort of iconic male figures for selling button-up shirts and suits or whatever, I mean, as works of art, they're spectacular. They take you there, right? You feel them.

You fall into those images and you feel like you're there in a way that even a photo sometimes can't achieve. I find that mesmerizing. I tell you something, I just want to throw another name out there. Bill Waddeson, Calvin and Hobbes. Oh, 100%. When you say Rockwell, my mind jumps to Bill Watterson. Like absolutely mind boggling illustrations.

I know they're comic books, right? Little cartoons in a newspaper. But when every now and then he got to play with his illustration and take it to another level and you could really see that he was a true master. Yeah. Unbelievable. I still remember to this day, I mean, I have, I own just about every companion of Calvin and Hobbes, but for whatever reason sticks in my mind are his color paintings of Calvin and Hobbes outside during the fall with the leaves

changing color with the birch or aspens, probably birch and other trees and just the kaleidoscopic autumnal colors. That foliage is partially what I remember. And also as a side note, now this could be apocryphal. I don't know if it's true story, but I like the story, which is Bill Watterson, to my knowledge, kind of like you with One Path was quite a purist with his characters and with Calvin and Hobbes. And I recall at one point, I think it was one of his partners or maybe a pitch for licensing to create a Hobbes plush toy that was really large. And so the story goes, I believe he took a pair of scissors

and just attacked it and ripped it to shreds. Really? Yeah, as his way of saying, fuck no over my dead body. We're not gonna do it. Which I found so endearing. I mean, I like to believe it's true. Is he still going? Do you know?

I don't know what he's up to. He's very, as I understand it, you know, very reclusive for years. Since I started the podcast, he's been on kind of my top 10 list. I was like, you know, if he would ever play ball, that's the key ingredient. But if Bill Watterson would ever really sit down and just have a really open conversation where we could just shoot the shit, have a cup of tea or a drink, who knows, whatever his preference is, and talk like this. Man.

I would love to know what you've just intimated there and talked about, you know, why that emotional reaction to that merchandise. Even if that's not specifically true, it's true that he didn't really want to commercialize it in those other ways. Why? I would find that really interesting because I totally understand. I'm maybe not as adverse to that as he sounds like he was, but I think all the time about the reasoning for making art. Why are you doing it? What is art about? It is more than just drawing pictures and making

stories. It is finding truth. Maybe he found some real profound truth and he found that he's expressed it and that anything else was actually watering down to that truth perhaps. I'm just guessing. Because I feel that art and the act of creativity broadly and generally, well actually no, come back to me specifically making art as comic books and stories, is this quest to find truth or to point towards truth, it is like science.

I don't think science and engineering and art are very different in all. I just think that, like the way I was describing with the way I create, your imagination is throwing up explanations, ideas, theories, possibilities, and then you are the instrumentation, if it's a scientific analogy. You are the instrument. Your emotions are the instrument. Some part of you throws up conjecture and then your body tells you that feels right, right? And that's the scientific instrument confirming or giving you the measurements, right? Yeah. It's a little bit different than science in this way, but you know when it's true, you know when it's right, and that's why you go down that path of chasing that

thing. And I'm not saying that means that it's going to be true for everyone, but you know it's true for yourself. And so, you know, that there's something in that and that the BMAT is one of the most liberating ways of creating. Can you think of a project that fundamentally, maybe that's too big a word, but changed you in some way, right? So you before the project and you after the project are different. That could be a skill set. It could be a set of beliefs. Could be anything, but do any projects come to mind where you before and you after are quite different in some respect?

It's not a project I'm going to cheap out in a way, but also talk about something very meaningful. And I know it's something you think about that's having a child. I was talking about Aaron Stubble before, but it's having a child. I was not prepared. Not that a child is a project, right? I guess in a way. But having a child when my boy came out, it was like instant.

Whoa, I just snapped and you moved your head at the same point. That was cool. It's like I'm in control. Trent, I've been well trained. I'm like the main Sherian candidate, all your work bearing fruit. I cannot tell you this most changes in your life. You're working on a project. Something goes right. Something goes wrong.

You have to internalize it. You have, you feel something about it. You have to sit there, internalize it. It might take you a, maybe it takes you a few minutes. Maybe it takes you a week. Maybe it takes a it. You have to sit there and internalize it. Maybe it takes you a few minutes. Maybe it takes you a week. Maybe it takes you a month. Maybe it takes you the rest of your life.

But you internalize it and then you figure out a new thing from it. But weirdly enough, having a child was instantaneous. I felt like I was a different person. I had a different realization. All my priorities just got reshuffled in a split second. I felt like a profound connection to that person. And I realized all these things like, holy hell, he's going to discover that there are elephants, you know, like what? Or this whole world of possibility for him. And then also you start thinking, this is maybe one of the profound things that I think

most parents get is you instead of thinking of your own life, you start thinking beyond your life. You start thinking multi-generationally without even wanting to. You just can't help it. You start thinking that way because you start thinking, oh my God, I've got to make sure things are good for them in the future. I've got to give them the best possible chance. So you start thinking your horizon goes way out into the distance, which is a beautiful thing. And then there is the mirror of a child and that everything you do is gonna be reflected back at you. So you can see the good and the bad, right? And selfishly, it's a chance to learn

because you go, you realize when you're doing something and this is a bad choice, I shouldn't have talked to him that way. I shouldn't have pushed him to do that. I shouldn't have, right? You can immediately know you feel it. And it's like, oh boy, it, oh boy, you want self help? Be a parent.

It will teach you what you're doing wrong very quickly. I'm not saying you have the solutions, but you know when you're getting it wrong, so it gives you this opportunity to improve, because you see where you've done something that didn't quite work, you see it really clearly. Well, that's hopefully my next big adventure. I gotta work on some prereqs,

but that's definitely the orientation at this point. Do it, man. Do it. You won't regret it. Yeah. I'm excited about it. Really excited about it. And Greg, we've covered a lot of ground here. You know, we didn't even, you know what work of yours has stuck in my mind selfishly because at some point I'd still like to do a collaboration of some type. But it's the bestiary that you created with the scaling for human size. Oh yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, for the Dr.Grodebot's world.

Exactly. And I just remember flipping through that and it gave me such a nostalgic dopamine hit because I was thinking of the Fiend folio and these various hardcover books from Dungeons and Dragons. But what they did not have, which you put in, were the sizing for the human figures so people could envision their proportions and so on, which for whatever reason just got locked in my brain. I mean, from start to finish. I love national geographic and creatures in general, animals and so on. And just rendering the body of something like that is just really, really fun and mesmerizing.

You kind of lose yourself in it. But I had this book as a kid. I think so, yes, Dungeons and Dragons and the fiend folio, those kind of things. I loved all of that with all the stats. And if you read the Graubert's books, I'm kind of riffing on that and making fun of that. It's kind of like someone who's clearly not a scientist writing this information. Maybe they've heard a third hand and they really don't know what they're talking about it. So it's sort of taking the piss out of itself. But the other thing was a book and

I've forgotten the name of it now, but it was a book from the late 60s, early 70s. And I found it in the public library as a kid on alien worlds. Man, I'm forgetting the name. I'll end that story because I don't remember the name and it's terrible not to remember the name. Maybe you can flash it up. But there was this 1970s book, I want to say MacDougall or Dougall or something like that was the artist. He had invented an entire alien world, much like Wayne Barlow has done before, invented an entire alien world and drawn every creature in it and written about everything as if they were real. And I saw that book at probably seven or eight years old.

And that's something about that, creating something out of your imagination. But utterly being convinced that it is real and pretending that it's real to the point that you summarize all of it. I love that. I don't know why I love that so much, but it's super fun. Grand pops ray guns. Take it out of the case, dust it off. Yeah, exactly. Maybe they'll need them for when we get, when we land on Mars. Got to take some ray guns.

We may need them. We may need them. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure we'll need something like that. So Greg, let's land the plane. We've been going for two and a half hours here. And is there anything else you would like to say to my audience, request of my audience, point them to anything at all that you'd like to say before we wind up close? My new book, One Path, is coming out very soon, April the 8th.

So yeah, please come and check it out. I hope you like it. If you like dinosaurs, you're going to enjoy it. There's a lot of dinosaurs in there. If you like blood and gore, there's also a lot of that. It is a graphic novel and yeah, I hope you really dig it. Come and check it out. Would the best place to look be your website or would it be somewhere else?

I think so. Probably come to gregbrodmore.com and you can be directed from there. Perfect. Well, we will drive people there. Greg, so nice to see you, man. We'll need to share a drink and scheme up some wild ideas in person, hopefully, in the not too distant future. I would love that.

And we do share a pin shell for heavy music as well, which we didn't have a chance to get into. Maybe some juvenile delinquency also. But for people listening, gonna include everything we mentioned in the show notes, as per usual, tim.blogslashpodcast is where you'll be able to find that. Just search Greg's name or Richard's name or I guess Weta is probably the easiest, W-E-T-A

and you'll be able to find everything. Greg can be found at gregbrodmore.com and we'll link to that in the show notes as well. Until next time, folks, as always, be just a bit kinder than is necessary fun before the weekend. Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bold Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends,

including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blogslashfriday, type that into your browser, tim.blogslashfriday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. I have been fascinated by the microbiome and probiotics, well as prebiotics for decades, but products never quite live up to the hype. I've tried so many dozens and there are a host of problems. Now things are starting to change and that includes this episode's sponsor, Seeds DS01

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