#443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All

"I must never again put myself in a position where my work ethic can be undone by things totally beyond my control." — David Yarrow In his genre, David Yarrow (@davidyarrow https://www.instagram.com/davidyarrow/) is one of the world’s best-selling fine art photographers. Most recently, he has focused on capturing the animal and human worlds in fresh and creative ways, with philanthropy and conservation central to this drive. In 2019, charitable donations from the sale of David’s images exceeded $2.5 million. David’s photography of life on earth has earned him a large and ever-growing following among art collectors, and he is now represented by some of the top contemporary fine art galleries around the world. In the last two years, three of Yarrow’s works have sold for more than $100,000 at Sotheby’s auctions in London and New York, and UBS https://www.ubs.com/uk/en.html has also appointed David as its global ambassador. In this conversation, we'll talk about his photography, but also touch on how his double life as a hedge fund manager informed his art. You can buy David’s #1 best-selling book with a $50 discount and a one-year free subscription to his new quarterly photographic journal at davidyarrow.photography/Tim http://davidyarrow.photography/tim. Please enjoy! *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. 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• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

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• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:39Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:56Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:41Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:49Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:31Tim Ferriss?

  So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink AG1, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 4:49Tim Ferriss?

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

• 5:34Tim Ferriss?

  You just have to see some of these images. And this has really been partnered with, or coalesced with philanthropy and conservation. Those have been two primary drivers behind his work. In 2019, charitable donations from the sale of David's images exceeded 2.5 million US. Yarrow's Photography of Life on Earth has earned him a large An ever-growing following among art collectors and he is now represented by some of the top contemporary fine art galleries around the world. In the last two years, three of his works have sold for more than $100,000 each at Sotheby's Auctions in London, New York,

• 6:13Tim Ferriss?

  and UBS have also appointed David as their global ambassador. You can find all about David and see his work at davidyarrow.fotography. You can see some of his amazing images on Instagram, @davidyarrow. That's D-A-V-I-D-Y-A-R-R-O-W. I highly recommend following. Facebook, you can find facebook.com/davidyarrowphotography. And then on LinkedIn, also David Yarrow, pretty easy to find. And without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with yet another guest who should have their own podcast, and it'll be obvious why that is the

• 6:55Tim Ferriss?

  case soon, namely David Yarrow.

• 7:02Tim Ferriss?

  David, welcome to the show.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  It's very good to be here. It's an honor.

• 7:06Tim Ferriss?

  Likewise, I'm thrilled to connect. I have several of your large-format books of photography. They're both incredibly gorgeous and incredibly heavy. So, in quarantine, they're helpful for doing farmers' carries. And...

• 7:26Speaker 03

  It's partly because in Scotland, shoplifting is a problem. So, the heavier the book, the less chance they can actually nick them.

• 7:33Tim Ferriss?

  And we'll get to the current day, but I thought we would start, not initially at the beginning, but certainly some time ago. Could you please speak to what happened to you, or with respect to you, in Mexico in 1986?

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Sure, I I traveled uh to Mexico for the World Cup uh in nineteen eighty six. I was in my third year out of four at uh Edinburgh University uh studying business studies and economics. And uh my exams were um finished uh one week into the World Cup. And the the day for my final exam, I I flew to Mexico City. I'd never actually even been to America before. I was working um for a very modest magazine in Scotland that covers Scottish football, which um almost by definition of the very limited circulation.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  But the one benefit, the one benefit of uh of uh having that uh working for the magazine was that FIFA in those days would be much more accommodating with regard to accreditation. And

• 8:46Tim Ferriss?

  Just for the Yanks in our crowd because uh

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 8:50Tim Ferriss?

  The FIFA is like the NFL for football as in actually using your foot football. Please continue.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  And it is uh uh unlike the uh the NFL, it's been characterized by blazing corruption for many years, which your fine NFL hasn't. But putting that to once, it's like the IOC, but the IOC's been blatantly corrupt as well. But um this is before people uh knew that FIFA took bungs in order to to give World Cups to places like Qatar uh and to extend Russia. But it was nineteen eighty six, it was uh six years, six, sorry, six months after the earthquake that had devastated uh Mexico City. And I arrived uh as a Scottish fan first and foremost, and and they always used to say that Scottish journalists are

• 9:37Speaker 03

  are really just fans with typewriters. Uh but I did have, I did have an accra, I did have a press pass which allowed me to go on to the pitch of these games and and um the reality it was that I was uh twenty years old. Um I wasn't at all good. I was, I was very, very average. And also photographing Scotland became very, very difficult because uh The I really was much more interested in watching the game rather than taking photographs of it. And there was a moment when Scotland were playing Uruguay and Uruguay had a player sent off in the first minute of the game. So Scotland had to just to beat ten men to qualify to the the next round. They were managed at the time by someone I'm sure a lot of Americans

• 10:20Speaker 03

  would know Alex Ferguson, who for many years managed Manchester United, Sir Alec. And there was a moment when there was a Scottish centre forward who missed an open goal. And back in the Times newspaper, and I was working then for the London Times, all they could see was the striker with his head in his hand, and my head also with my head in my hands with my camera nowhere near. And they thought, well, this guy Yara is really not, he's not really focused on the football at all. The games were, a lot of them were played at midday or at three o'clock in the afternoon because of European TV time. And if you can imagine a high sun in Mexico, and maybe some African players or Latin

• 11:03Speaker 03

  American players, there was a great chance that you got very little facial detail because their faces were underexposed. And then the top of their heads had a kind of like biblical halo on top of them. But these were the days in sports photography where in order to get a moving figure in focus, you had to do a thing called follow focus. Because autofocus hadn't been invented then. This was also in the days of film. And follow focus basically meant that you moved the ring focusing rim of the camera in tandem to the movement of the player. So if you had a player coming towards you, like a hundred metre runner, you would try and get as many different pictures of him in focus. You'd

• 11:43Speaker 03

  have to move the focal rim manually. And it's a trade, it's a skill. And I was crap at it, basically, which meant that the only good pictures I got were of the players lining up at the beginning of the match because they weren't moving too much. The FIFA had another rule that if you're from a country that had qualified for the tournament.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Every single one of the, every single country that qualified for the tournament would be allowed one photographer on the pitch for the final. And Scotland obviously had been the first team to get knocked out. That tends to happen habitually. And of course, all the photographers that are on expense bills for the newspapers back home had been sent home with Scotland. And then they would just get their pictures through AP or Reuters or whatever. So I was left as a twenty year old with a a press pass for the pitch on the World Cup final. And I remember going to the stadium at six o'clock in the morning, the game is in midday. And I bribed the Mexican guard with a bit of whiskey. And I said, listen, do you, do you mind? It's my, one of my rules of the thumb to take whiskey everywhere, but

• 12:53Speaker 03

  I said, do you mind if I walk from onto the pitch? And in those days, the Azteca, they had a Monday night football there not too long ago, but the Azteca held around a hundred and twenty thousand people. And he allowed me just to walk from one goal to the other. And I could see my, my footprints in the dew in the ground. It was a bit of an epiphany for me. I felt well, I'm doing this at twenty, this has surely got to be a big part of my life. And you'll know the saying from Mark Twain where he says the two most important days in a person's life, the day they're born, the day they find out why. And that was my first inkling that it might be

• 13:35Speaker 03

  a decent part of my life. The problem was I was fairly shit as a photographer, which I think was very integral to becoming part of, part of my life. I was lucky, I had a good final. I was in the right position for the first Argentinian goal. And then when Maradona's Argentina won, the most extraordinary thing happened in that probably about twenty or thirty thousand Argentinians came onto the pitch. And it was just a scrum. I had a big, I had two lenses and two cameras, like most photographers in those days, you'd have one big lens recovering the midfield area and then a shorter lens recovering the the the goal mouth areas. And I thought if I take my wide angle lens and try and get as

• 14:20Speaker 03

  close to Maradona as possible, I might get a picture, but it's gonna, in order to be nimble, I'm gonna have to leave that four hundred two point eight lens in in the goal mouth. And I just took the split decision at the time that a lot of photographers weren't given the number of Argentinians coming on to the pitch, that it was a gamble worth taking. I thought, well, you know, if I lose the equipment, as long as I've got close to Maradona, it's the right call. And as it turned out, I got dead close to him, dead on to him, just as he was lifted on the another player's shoulders. And with a kind of biblical narrative behind of the stadium and thousands of people, he looked right in my eyes with with the World

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Cup. And of course, those are the days in film. So you didn't know what you'd got. You didn't know whether you got it sharp. You didn't know whether you got it in the lighting right. But I went back to the net where I'd left my seven thousand, which was a lot of money in those days, seven thousand dollars, seven thousand dollars of equipment. And there was my lens and my camera. And I've always had a bit of an affinity for Argentinians ever since that that day, that they were far more interested in celebrating than ever thinking about making some equipment behind the the goal. And the picture, the picture was picture really kind of saved my bacon from the whole tournament. It was photography

• 15:42Speaker 03

  is is about those one or two big pictures. It's not to me about portfolios of hundreds. And thank goodness, because I really didn't then. And it led to

• 15:54Speaker 03

  It led to doing an Olympics the next year. I still had to finish my my studying. And there was a lovely moment. I was flying over to LA about, I don't know, about six months ago. And the Maradona movie, you know, directed by the same guy that did this, the Ertan Senna movie, and Amy Wines. I thought, well, I should watch this. And about two thirds of the way through the movie, which is excellent, my picture came on my TV screen in front of me. And I couldn't believe it. And I don't know about you, but I always get quite emotional on planes. I don't know what it is about altitude and emotion. That's great. This is my bloody photograph. That's my photograph of Maradona. So I pressed for the stewardess because I didn't have anyone to talk to about it.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  And she came over expecting. I said, that's my picture of Maradona. And she's going, there's a nutter in J21. There's a nutter in J21.

• 16:46Tim Ferriss?

  Cut him off. No more Scotch.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, don't land in Halifax just yet. So luckily, we didn't land in Halifax. And I did try to explain to her that I was a photographer. That was that was my picture. But I was hoping to actually go down to BA and see Maradona. And I still very much hope to do that when the current crisis is over. It would be quite special to to meet him. And he's got the picture. He knows, obviously knows of the picture and and reminisce of when he was the greatest player in the world.

• 17:22Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing. So I want to, I want to add some color for perhaps the Americans or even just non-Argentines who are listening. So Maradona, M A R A D O N A, is a demigod in Argentina. It is hard to overstate how much of a cultural fixture he is, even to this day. And he is certainly decades past his his prime in playing. His His photographs are everywhere. There are murals of him. If you were to take for the US, let's just say, pick your favorite team sport, basketball, football, meaning

• 18:04Tim Ferriss?

  American football. If you were to take the most popular, say, 10 players of the last decade and wrap them into one person, that would be Maradona to Argentines. And they take their, their football very, very seriously. When I was living there in 2004,

• 18:21Speaker 03

  Of course, I forgot about this.

• 18:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  You, you, you're a tango dancer, you're a champion tango dancer.

• 18:27Tim Ferriss?

  A long time ago. This is previous lifetime, but living in Argentina, one of the most terrified moments that I had was waking up in my apartment building and thinking that the entire building was on fire because people were screaming their faces off at something like nine in the morning. I couldn't recall. And it was because the World Cup was on television and Argentina scored a goal and they went completely berserk. You could, you could pretty much track the morale of the country and probably the GDP based on soccer results. They take it so seriously. It is, it is hard to overstate.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And of course, your world and his world collided because the home of tango was Boca, wasn't it? But the Boca, Buenos Aires.

• 19:19Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly right.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  He played for, he played for Boca Juniors, which is one of the two great famous football clubs in the, in the big capital.

• 19:26Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  And Boca, Boca Junior fans are very partisan. He also, he, he had a habit of playing for clubs in cities that are renowned for wearing it on their sleeve. And, and for many years, he played in Naples and in Napoli in Italy. And there was a, he was, people would in, in, in Napoli, they would have two pictures above their bed. They would have Jesus Christ and Diego Maradona. And when the World Cup was in Italy, two World Cups, one World Cup after the World Cup I photographed. Um, the, the planners hadn't done a good job because Italy met Argentina in the semifinal in Napoli.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  And that for most Neapolitans constituted an enormous dilemma because who are they going to support? Were they going to support their, their home country? Or were they going to support, um, their son? And the person that had revitalized the city? And seventy-five percent of the people in the stadium that were Italian supported Argentina.

• 20:32Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing. I didn't, did not know that.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:35Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. What an incredible story. I don't mean to interrupt, but I, uh, I, I want to ask you what you learned from that experience? If, if anything, what did that, what did you take from that experience? After that photograph hit the wires, went everywhere? What, what did you take from that? Or what impression did that make on you?

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Uh, well, to begin with, I was just happy that it had saved my bacon because it had diverted people's attention away from the fact that ninety-five percent of the pictures I'd taken of the other matches were out of focus. So it was, in many ways, it was, um, it was the outlier. Um, but it gave me a chance and a lot of these self-help books, uh, and, and, and your books are at a higher grade than the majority of them. But there is a lot to be said for, um, if the old idea that if you're the smartest person in the room, get out of the room. So whatever the polar extreme from being the smartest person in the room was, I was

• 21:44Speaker 03

  at that polar extreme in Mexico. I was, I was the worst photographer, um, of the British press corps. And that, uh, is good because that means that if you've got any sense of self-pride, the only way's up. Um, and I just went back and practiced and, and tried to get better at the things that I wasn't good at. Um, I think there's a lot to be said in photography, the fact the older, older you get, uh, the better you should be as a photographer. There's Cartier-Bresson said, the, the, the first thousand pictures you take will be your worst thousand pictures. That was certainly true of me. And, um, the following year.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  I did, I just continued to work quite a bit in skiing. Skiing was easier to photograph because if you're doing the men's downhill, whether it be Kitzbühel, the the Lumberhorn and or Aspen and or Lake Placid or wherever it might be, you can pre-focus on a gate and then wait for that skier to come around the gate. So there are there are still lots of difficulties in it, party skiing down. And I always remember trying to photograph the toughest men's downhill in the world, which is the Hanau and Karmen Kitzbühel. And the the star racer in Kitzbühel in Austria.

• 23:02Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, sorry. Didn't recognize Kitzbühel. Got it.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, sorry. It's my Scottish accent. But you you do you and it was the days when you had some amazing skiers. And then you had the crazy canuts, you know, the the Rob Boyd's, the Podorskis, the Ken Reeds. And you yourself, you had Bill Johnson, of course, won Olympic gold as well. And they were all crazy, mad good skiers. But that that first stretch in Kitzbühel is like the White Cliffs of Dover stacked on top of each other. And if you're trying to sidestep down inside the ropes with twenty thousand Austrians outside the ropes going, look at that British idiot, he doesn't know how to ski. And you got your long lens around your neck and you're trying to sidestep that. And you take one bad move

• 23:50Speaker 03

  and then you're at the bottom in a heap. So you you're getting to be in the position to take the photograph as part of the challenge in the first place. But I did, it was in the golden era of Swiss skiing and where there were the men's and the women's downhill and Slalom was dominated by the Swiss. And I got a bit better at photographing skiing. And then I got the offer to photograph the Olympics. In nineteen eighty-eight, uh, and that was in Calgary in Alberta. Um, those Olympics were remembered for two things. Firstly, one of the most beautiful women ever to ice skate called Katarina Witt.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  So that's what most of the photographers that were good were given to do to spend the evenings photographing Katarina Witt dancing around a nice ice stadium, which ice rink, which is not a bad way to spend the, the evening in, in, in nineteen eighty-eight. Um, the other thing it was remembered for, uh, was that Britain had the world's worst ski jumper called Eddie the Eagle. And he, he was, uh, uh, so they gave that to me because they thought, well, that's a good pair up. We'll get Yarrow to photograph Eddie the Eagle. And of course, Eddie the Eagle, they, they had a film about him as well quite recently and, and, uh, They did, they didn't do it.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  And, uh, so I, I, um, I enjoy Calgary, um, and, but I had my moment there where I, um, in those days, the Olympics would be sponsored, there'd be lots of sponsors, but two of the key sponsors would be Kodak and Fuji. That kind of dates me, uh, because we were still working on film. And at the end of the day, you'd go to these enormous labs that would be sent up sponsored, uh, by the, by, um, Fuji and Kodak. And that you'd hand in all your thirty-five mil film, you'd hang around for three hours. And then you get them back and then you'd wire them to whoever you're wiring them to.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  And I, I remember so vividly then worrying that no matter how hard I was trying to get a different type of picture, that I would go around the editing room because there's, there's degrees. Photography, press photography is actually quite collegiate in that everyone tends to try and help each other. Certainly the top, the bottom, there's, there's maybe people are in a hurry and then the people that are insecure can be a little bit bitchy. I'm sure it's the same in every industry. Um, but you would, I would see too many photographs that were the same. And it worried me with my very limited understanding of economics from my schooling,

• 26:31Speaker 03

  that how on earth could you have a profession that would evolve if there was just so much supply of what you were doing? You'd go and try and get a different photograph of a bobsleigh coming down the bobsleigh track. And then before you knew it, there were twenty five German photographers. Always watch the Germans, they're very good. So there'd be twenty five of German photographers working for Stern or whatever, that would have exactly the same or a better image. And I came home from that Olympics full of stories and I'd love being, I love the glamour of it all and being where the world was focused, to be at that men's

• 27:10Speaker 03

  downhill with the world watching it was hugely exciting. But I just worried about what it was all about, what my craft, what I was, what was I trying to do? I was just getting another picture that perhaps the world didn't need. There was something else, Tim, that concerned me that I am, I think a lot of artists are insecure and I'm insecure. It manifests itself in, in lots of different ways. I think a lot of people would see me as not having one ounce of insecurity, but I, I do, I also, and I worry about things that I probably shouldn't do. But I had a problem that there was no one there in the photography world that was

• 27:52Speaker 03

  twenty years older than me or twenty five years older than me, that I looked up to and I said, I really want to be that man when I'm older. That's what I really want. I want to be him. There was no guiding light and that's not meant to be disrespectful to any of these individuals who are great fun in the evenings most of the time. But a lot of them had fairly dysfunctional lives and didn't, I didn't really see where the end game was. They were, they were, they were pressmen. They were working for either big newspapers or in those days, of course, Sports Illustrated was so much of a bigger magazine than it is now, regrettably. But I didn't see many people that, that were, set a goal

• 28:35Speaker 03

  for me to try and attain in terms of getting job affirmation, getting better what they're doing, really enjoying their life and, and, and taking pleasure from it. There was, I think, quite a lot of fairly unhappy pressmen on, on tour. And I I I I remember coming back from that Olympics and I had two job offers because I'd finished my I graduated and the two job offers were the identical salary. There was a job offer of what would equate now to twenty thousand dollars to work for what is now Getty Images, which you'll be familiar with. And then there was an offer of twenty

• 29:20Speaker 03

  thousand to work for NatWest Bank. And to the enormous surprise of people at Getty and but to the profound delight of my parents, I chose NatWest Bank. I think they're both nearly bust now, by the way. I think Getty's really well been bought back by the family because they had to buy it back after the the private equity passed to parcel. But and and NatWest is certainly bust.

• 29:50Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you choose NatWest and banking?

• 29:53Speaker 03

  Because everyone else was doing it. And I'd watched Wall Street and I thought Gordon Gekko and Bud Fox were super cool. And it was just it's and it was inside. It was it was no it wasn't like minus twenty five in Calgary. And it just seemed like what everyone else was doing way back in nineteen eighty eight. The Big Bang had happened and in in the UK, that was when there was a consolidation of the whole broking industry. And Oliver Stone had produced Wall Street about the about nineteen eighty five, that era of nineteen eighty five. And the books that we read were books like Barbarians of the Gates and Lars Poker.

• 30:33Tim Ferriss?

  Which is a fantastic book, as an aside, is a great read.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  And it was RJR Nabisco, wasn't it? And then Michael Michael Lewis, who just a superb writer, just brings it home. And I think Lars Poker about the the dining room floor of Salomon Brothers was was almost like the Bible. If you were whether you I I I'm sure it's true in America as well. If you'd been at Harvard or Princeton MIT and I was not in a Ivy League college like that, Edinburgh University was it was a certainly a good platform for people building a career in those days in the UK and. It just seemed the normal thing to do. I'll I'll never forget a conversation with my father, who I had a difficult relationship. He was a kind of patriarchal Edwardian character.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  That that was just the way he was. He didn't mean it. He just that's the way it was of that old school Downton Abbey type generation that would never express words like love and congratulations or whatever. It'd be very difficult to get a to get that kind of appreciation out of him. And I remember him saying to to to me, he said, David, you should go into banking because it's a robust, honorable profession, whereas photography is just a hobby. And it kind of dates the conversation that anyone could say that because it says, well, that must have been in the eighties when someone said that. And my dad was he was a he was an industrialist, but he was also chairman of a bank in a kind of ambassadorial way.

• 32:06Tim Ferriss?

  What does that mean?

• 32:09Speaker 03

  I think that your banking system and our banking system are very different in the if you look at right now, if you look at the big, the senior banks, the the chairman of the banks that are being interviewed right now during this meltdown in in financial markets and and talk of depression. They are entirely fluid in the language of collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. If you're a chairman of a British bank, you just have to be familiar with opening an envelope and opening an office.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  And and my father's role was very much more. There's a ceremony today. Someone's got their fifty year, give them a watch. They've been working fifty years. I don't mean to sound that disrespectfully, but the the chairman of American banks, they've got an executive role and they've got to understand exactly what's going on in terms of their risk-weighted assets and the risk portfolio of those assets. Whereas i- i- in the UK, there was a period where you there were a lot of banks and you could have a figure at the helm that was just there to add a little bit of gray hair and gravitas without having a fucking clue what's going on.

• 33:28Tim Ferriss?

  So so so if so if I if I if I got my homework done correctly, your your father.

• 33:37Tim Ferriss?

  Was involved with banking, among other things.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  He was industrialist.

• 33:42Tim Ferriss?

  Industrialist. So he was an industrialist, Yarrow Shipbuilders. And then he had the banking involvement. Your mother was an artist. You end up at, after watching Gordon Gekko, reading Barbarians at the Gate, Liar's Poker, all great reads. Barbarians at the Gate, for those people who don't want to read a book right now, also made into a fairly entertaining movie. You enter the banking world in part because it is the normal thing to do, but also because it was, I would imagine at the time, based on the stories told in these books and shown on the big screen, quite exciting.

• 34:20Tim Ferriss?

  What, what did you learn in banking that informed your later exploration of photography, if anything?

• 34:31Speaker 03

  I learned so much. I learned failure, humility, surrounded myself with bright people. And I made a lot of friends. And I think you, I encourage younger people these days to remember that friendships and the contact, the people you can call are so important, particularly at times like this when you need to be calling people and need to have a degree of contextuality. You're right, in 1988, going into a dealing room, whether it be a Salomon's dealing room or in my case, it was an investment bank called NatWest Markets, having 500 people

• 35:13Speaker 03

  in one room was incredibly exciting. You didn't, again, you didn't really have a clue what was going on and someone else was paying for you to learn. I moved to America for a while. And when I was working in Wall Street, I got to meet some of the first hedge fund managers. Some of them were in Boston, some of them were in New York. And I thought this is a kind of cool job. You actually, you're the guy that can sit around and not have to make calls the whole time, but maybe be slightly more cerebral. Um, spend a bit more time, uh, just doing your own research and be judged by the quality of your decisions, not the quantity of your calls.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  Um, the problem is that no one wanted to harm me as a hedge fund manager. So I thought, uh, in about nineteen, it was about nineteen ninety five, ninety six. I, um, I left the investment bank and set up my own fund management business. Uh, I, uh, I was, wasn't married. And didn't have any obligations. And I thought, if I don't do it now, I never will. And the idea of continuing to be that bud fox. And plenty of six-figure numbers on that zip file kind of call. I'd, I'd, I'd done that for eight years. And for most people, it's enough.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  It's a, that's a tough job. I do feel, and the, the job is slightly anachronistic now, but that job of being your kind of bud fox salesman. Um, and we'll, we'll come on to Jordan Belford because I spent quite a bit of time with him over the last twelve months, but it was a slightly, uh, slightly more elevated phone call.

• 36:56Tim Ferriss?

  The Wolf of Wall Street, who don't recognize Jordan Belford.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  Um, so I, I set up my own, uh, fund and I didn't really know, uh, I was thirty, uh, one at the time. And, uh, the, there weren't, there were a few things I had to negotiate, um, in, in the markets, but it wasn't that demanding. There was, there was the big run in tech stocks that you'll remember in the, in the, towards the tail end of the nineteen nineties, nineteen ninety eight, nineteen ninety nine.

• 37:30Tim Ferriss?

  The Icarus, the Icarus flying too close to the sun years.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  Yep. And, and then the big Scandinavian telephony stocks, the Nokias, the Ericsons. And then there was the whole Y two K, turn of the millennium situation. I, I often say to people, if you get, uh, if you set up a business on Monday and you get married on a Tuesday, metaphorically.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  A lot of things are gonna have to go right in your life for that decision making, crammed into one kind of week, albeit wasn't. But I, I kind of set up a business on Monday and kind of got married on a Tuesday.

• 38:13Tim Ferriss?

  And what's that, did you get married?

• 38:15Speaker 03

  Well, I, I did get married, but it wasn't on the Tuesday, but there wasn't a huge gap between the two.

• 38:21Tim Ferriss?

  You mean, got married?

• 38:23Speaker 03

  I actually got physically married, yeah. So got married, uh, um, uh, my girlfriend and

• 38:31Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  We, we, so we were, um, and in two thousand, uh, we, uh, we had, uh, she had our first daughter, um, and everyone looked at me and said, bloody hell, Yari, you've not done bad. You could, you could have got a lovely young family. You got your own business. And then in, uh, uh, she was, she was barely one, one year old. We went over to the America, uh, for a wedding in September two thousand and one. And at the end of the wedding, we said, well, I'll tell you what, why don't we, uh, rather than going back, uh, to the UK, why don't we just go on a little bit of a US road trip?

• 39:15Speaker 03

  And on the Tuesday morning, I was getting ready and I was just in a, in the, the lobby of the hotel when I saw the first plane, uh, go in or, or the, the, what looked like the, the repercussions of the first plane going in. And of course, because it was, uh, two fifteen or, uh, sort of five to two, uh, European or British time, our markets were open and I was running a very, very small pot of money, um, at that time. But it's, I still had responsibility. I probably had about sixty or seventy investors. And I just, it was just insane. I just didn't like what I saw and markets would have been tough anyway.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  Ericsson, the Swedish mobile telephony company, had warned the previous day. And also, I was with my wife and I was on a road trip in America and I thought, you know what? This just doesn't look good. And because I'd been, I'd read all the books. Um, I just thought, why don't, why don't I just take my risk off? And because markets were open.

• 40:19Tim Ferriss?

  So this is nine eleven, this is on the day of nine eleven.

• 40:22Speaker 03

  This is on the day. And um, so by the time the second plane went in, we'd cleared the decks for every client that we had of every holding that we had. I think Goldman Sachs, I think it was in those days, it was still, it's still now, but they were looking after me. They sold everything that we had. Um, and the more, if you go back to those, whatever they were, nineteen minutes or eighteen minutes between the two planes. And um, when one of the CNBC anchors died two or three years ago, Mark Holmes, they played his, I thought, extraordinary performance on time of incredibly professional of those nineteen, twenty minutes.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  And what I find still extraordinary was that it was really only it two minutes before the second plane went in that things became, there was no impact on the markets of the first plane going in, absolutely not at all, because people just assumed it was an accident. And the hole, I'm sure you remember the visuals of that hole on the, on the tar. It just seemed a bloody big hole for, I'm not trying to be, you know, Monday morning quarterback, but I, I took the decision, um, it was, there was no skill in it, it was just instinct. So after the, the, the, the whole denouement of nine eleven and, and whatever,

• 41:44Speaker 03

  I went from being someone that was seen to be a nobody. I hasten to add, we didn't make any money from this. We just avoided our clients losing any money. So when they got their returns for the month of September, uh, in the post, their return was not point three percent. Whereas, of course, a lot of people had lost fifteen, twenty percent of, of, of their money. And that's why the book, Nassim Taleb's book Fooled by Randomness, plays a big role in my thought processes. I I was just lucky, but I went from running a small amount of money to employing forty five people, to running a billion dollars, um, and.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Over what period of time did that did that happen? About about six months and six to six to nine months. It was, and the reality, Tim, was that I was not equipped for it. I I I was not equipped suddenly to be having a a wife, a daughter, forty five people, a billion dollars, whereas, wind back two years, two years before, I was just a kid with a dream, and it was actually too much for me. And I couldn't cope because suddenly everyone wanted a little bit of my time uh at home or in the office. And I had to, I had a lot of stakeholders in my life.

• 43:12Speaker 03

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

• 43:58Speaker 03

  um, those cracks become very conspicuous and my life kind of blew up. I I uh, my marriage didn't survive. Um, I I probably took it out of myself quite a bit in the evenings. Um, and. What do you mean by that? I would drink too much. Yeah. Um, and uh, I would, I think I'd leave it at that, but I I it was not, I don't think I was, I wasn't a happy person, then you go in the following day to, um. To face more hell and with and also then if you if you do and so many people do get divorced.

• 44:43Speaker 03

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

• 45:27Speaker 03

  The lawyers can take their teeth in and all hell breaks loose and. And the the um this was all this is I'm moving forward now to. When the world really did start financially to implode, which was around the first signs in two thousand and six with. I think it was the investment bank Bear Stearns and then just uh continued to spiral downwards from there. And because uh I was going through the the kind of final parts of that divorce. Uh I was I had a disposition to be cautious anyway. Uh I just couldn't maybe subconsciously my whole mindset was to be cynical and miserable.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Um so when the and also something's got to be wrong. I mean, it's it's Scots. This we're we're quite we're quite a savvy bunch. I think the the the three oldest universities in the world. Are Scottish from about fourteen fifty, but in two thousand and seven. A nation of six million people and we've got two of the top ten banks in the world. Uh that doesn't stack up. It stacks up. We might have had three of the oldest universities and one of the worst football teams, but not. Two of the biggest banks in the world. And so I was I was very cautious about about that. A Royal Bank of Scotland bought one of your banks, Citizens, and it just it just didn't stack up that these were where they were in terms of.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  Three hundred years of prudence, a culture of prudence had gone to. Five years of a culture of building the balance sheet. Anyway, to cut a long story short, we got through two thousand and eight. Uh, and on the, I think it was the eighth of December, I had a Christmas lunch with my team and said, well, listen, you know, it's been a shitty time, but most people um have had their bollocks put on a plate and we've lost three or four percent of people's money. So we're going to come out of this. Okay.

• 47:26Tim Ferriss?

  And then for the Yanks, just subtitle bollocks equals balls. Please continue.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 47:35Tim Ferriss?

  No, I'm quite enjoying this. Yeah, please continue.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Anyway, so I get this phone calls um saying this guy Bernie Madoff uh Madoff Madoff has got has handed himself over to the FBI and this biggest Ponzi scheme. And I go, who's he? And they say, well, he's he's he runs a big hedge fund uh out of out of New York. I said, well, it won't affect us, silly idiot. Um, bunch of crooks in this game. I knew I knew about a group of people called Fairfield Greenwich that were a feeder to him because this was this was a well, it was a well-known fund, but I thought it had no impact on us. And how wrong was I? Because what I didn't know was that so much of the

• 48:25Speaker 03

  money that had got invested with Bernie Madoff had also invested with us. And when I set the fund up in nineteen ninety seven, the only people that are going to put money with me were my dog and my sister. So in nineteen ninety seven, I said, you can have your money back in a week's time. And I kept that rule from nineteen ninety seven to two thousand. If you if you need your money, you can have it in a week. So the next the next day, I got redemptions or the next week of six hundred million dollars. And that was it. That was that was it. So something that I was um exposed to, there was an exogenous variable, effectively, to all intents and purposes, uh, killed the business. And um

• 49:13Speaker 03

  You asked a question quite a long time ago, it might have been in a previous millennium, but you asked me the question, what did you learn from investment, from your time in banking? I think the thing that I took away from it most was that I must never again put myself in a position where your work ethic can be totally undone by things be totally beyond your control. It's rather ironic, I say this as coronavirus is about to hit its peak in parts of Europe and to hit its peak in America soon, because clearly that is an exogenous variable that means that right now what I do is not something that people want to

• 49:57Speaker 03

  hear an awful lot about. But they'll always remember that time. It taught me a lot of humility. I think if you're selling a product, you and your career have sold all sorts of things. And a huge admiration for the polymath that you are. I've really only sold two things. I've sold hedge funds and pictures of elephants. Now, by and large.

• 50:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's a bit more to it than that, but please continue, yeah.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  But by and large, one is quite an easy sell because you turn around to the guy that wants the picture of the elephant and say, that's always going to be an elephant. It's not gonna, you're not gonna wake up tomorrow morning and it's a giraffe. You're getting what you see. Whereas, the whole concept of selling a product on the basis of future returns, you cannot guarantee, I really struggled with. And I know I'm not alone. But the whole premise that, and the words.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  A salesman as well slightly gives an uncomfortable shiver down my spine because you shouldn't really be selling selling investment products is a very tricky compromise. It's a difficult thing to get right because you cannot make an aggressive sale because you cannot guarantee. You've just got to say, I promise to do my best. I promise to try and exercise maximum judgment, try not to panic. If I'm going to panic, I'll panic early and I'll show total integrity at all times. I don't think you can do more than that. But I think it's a tough, I have huge admiration for the people that do it well.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  Yesterday on your on your CMB show, one of your icons in hedge fund management, Paul Tudor Jones spoke and I listened, I wrote to him afterwards, I listened. So you could hear a pin drop in in my living room for half an hour and he was so precise, passionate when he needed to be passionate, dispassionate when he needed to be dispassionate, but all the time entirely considered. And but he's the exception.

• 52:20Tim Ferriss?

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• 53:01Tim Ferriss?

  its 17 plus million members more than $2 billion in savings. So check it out. Get Honey for free at joinhoney.com/tim. That's joinhoney.com/tim.

• 53:15Tim Ferriss?

  So I can't not go down this rabbit hole for just a second since you mentioned PTJ. There are some, there's also a great documentary on his early days. If people can track it down, I can't recall the, the name of it right now, but really sharp guy. And well, I'll leave it at that for now, but you know much better than I.

• 53:39Tim Ferriss?

  It just so happens that two of the most successful photographers I know, both have backgrounds in finance. You and Brandon Stanton, who created Humans of New York. And that's, that's not always the case. I also know Chase Jarvis and a few others who do not have finance or banking backgrounds. But, but you, in this current set of world circumstances,

• 54:13Tim Ferriss?

  in lieu of going outside and photographing elephants and so on, since it's difficult to do that at the moment, I would imagine, correct me if I'm wrong, but have, have probably been unable to escape the temptation to put your investor slash trader hat on, at least in observing world events. So, so Paul Tudor Jones has his perspective, which as, as you noted, can be seen on CNBC on the web. There's a two minute video, there's a longer interview with him. He is reasonably optimistic. It's hard to know how much of that is informed by what his current book looks like or anything else, but I happen to believe he's a pretty good guy overall.

• 54:56Tim Ferriss?

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

• 55:22Speaker 03

  I've got to be very, very careful that I don't become an instant expert in viruses because we've seen so many of those get airtime recently. The first thing I'd say, without wanting to copy what Paul said, is that we are at the end, from a financial markets perspective, we're coming to the end of a first quarter, and that always means that bizarre things happen. The fact that the Dow should have its biggest run since 1933, at the very time that New York is being considered the epicenter

• 56:02Speaker 03

  of this virus. If you're looking from another planet, you really would think the humans are quite mad that those two things should happen simultaneously. And I'm sure the history books will look at what's happened over the last week. It's been a historic week, following a historic week, and next week will be a historic week.

• 56:22Tim Ferriss?

  And just for timing, so we just show where we're frozen in the amber here. We're recording this on Friday, March 27. Please continue.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  So, the first thing I'd say is that I, I am following it. I want to be an optimist. I want to get out and photograph. I want to go out and see people. I want to come back to America. I want to go to Africa. Couple of things that I, I'm concerned about, and, and Paul touched on one, Africa, I'm very concerned about. I spend a lot of time in East Africa. A lot of people turn around to me and say, David, you spend, you spend quite a bit of your year in Africa. You must love Africa. I turn around, it's like dispersing, I say, I hate Africa. I said, it's the most corrupt continent in the world. For a start, it's four continents wrapped into one, whether it be the Arabic North, the Alrich West, colonial

• 57:13Speaker 03

  East, or Sub-Saharan Africa. And the one thing that unites those four subcontinents within the continent is they're all corrupt from top to bottom. That corruption and lack of infrastructure is going to be laid very bare in the next two or three months. So, you take some of the, the townships in Johannesburg, goodness knows what's going to happen. I, I see them made a lockdown today, but you worry about the spread. You, you've got to kind of assume that whether you're in Nairobi, or Dar es Salaam, or Johannesburg, or Lissaka.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  The the whole the whole population is gonna have it, that you just gotta work on that basis. The idea of um human distancing and townships, I think are mutually exclusive. So you you you worry about that. America is uh in many ways the right country for uh this to be uh the epicenter, for it to be the epicenter, because your country, time and time again, has found a way out of things. And that can-do mentality and ethos has never been more needed. It's also very good for entertainment factors, because the one the one the one thing our family all do.

• 58:32Speaker 03

  I just loves it when when I I I don't do politics, but the your your your president's uh press conferences are a lot of fun, because when he's asked a question, you you wouldn't tolerate him on your show, Tim, because if he's asked a question, he will he will take the subject matter and then give his personal experience of the subject matter. So yesterday, when he's asked about um when will insurance protection kick in for second-tier restaurants? He then goes on some sort of Gettysburg Address, except it's not about we the restaurants, you get some really good meat and fish. And then you just get one bad fish and it ruins all the thirty good fish you've had.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  And you're going, where's this come from? Because that wasn't what you're asked. But he just takes it as an opportunity just to let go on his own personal experiences with all the same magics and pronouns. But um that that is a little bit of light entertainment away from it. I worry for New York. Um I was in the last American city I was in was New Orleans uh two weeks ago. We had a show there and uh that was about a week before the Mardi uh week after the Mardi Gras. And obviously uh they're concerned about that city now. Um we're all fine. If I had to put, and my bet is as good or as bad as anyone else's, this the uh we've I can I can be better than anyone else, it's absolutely not.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  I I fancy, this is six months, and then the claw at the other side will have many disappointments on the way. Um when this time yesterday, our European uh stock markets were around about fifteen percent, sixteen percent.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  Off their moving average from twelve, about twelve weeks ago. That seems far too high. Now, markets have been weak today, but that would be my, my only comment is that. Uh, this strikes me, if you were looking at it from another planet. This is a thirty to fifty percent off risk assets event until it's sorted. And you don't want to be short of your economy. Uh, and your economy, if we'd had this conversation two or three months ago. Your economy is quite extraordinary, has been extraordinary. Um, we benefit, that's why we spend so much time there.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  We, we, if you take the second city in, in Great Britain for luxury spend. Let's imagine you're Tom Ford and Tom Ford wants to have a new store in the UK. But he's got London, so he says London's fine. But where are we going to go outside London? And he thinks, well, maybe should we go to Manchester? Should we go to Edinburgh? Should we go to Leeds? Maybe Glasgow? But then he's probably a bit stuck after that. What, and no one knows what the answer is, what that second city should be. What we think is in below the forty eighth.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  There are thirty seven cities in America that will be stronger than our second city in the UK. And that just shows the strength and breadth of your economy, which, which is going to be tested in the short term. That, that, that's for sure. Um, and, uh, uh, I, I think I'd slightly agree with what Paul said yesterday. That you could see at some stage in the next couple of weeks. Now that the Fed have played their cards, um, that the lows might be retested. But what we do know from the last three days is. There's nothing like a big bear short squeeze and the speed of that rise,

• 1:02:18Speaker 03

  the speed of that rise in the markets, you know, there are a lot of people that are short, short this market. So I think in a year's time, um, the markets will be higher than where they are now. But we're all going to have to go through, um, cutting for whatever your job is, whether you're running, um, do what you do, you do what I do. The next 12 months are going to be from a purely cash generation perspective. There's so many other parts to life as you try and instill in us. Um, but purely from a cash generating perspective, the next 12 months are going to be tough.

• 1:02:53Tim Ferriss?

  One or two last questions on this and then we'll, we'll get back to photography because I have a lot of questions about that. And they're, they're partially informed by all of this background and context, but if we take one piece of Paul Tudor Jones' video and look at it for a second, I'd love to get your opinion. How much, since I don't know the UK markets at all, but how much of the pop that we're seeing in the US or in the UK, do you think is accounted for by the front running that he mentioned of, I'm guessing index funds or other large institutionals who have to rebalance effectively,

• 1:03:35Tim Ferriss?

  right? Or, or forced purchasing. How do you, how do you think about this, this current jump? You have the, you have the stimulus package thrown in as another variable and many other things, people covering shorts. Who the hell knows? But how do you explain this, the, the run up just in the last few days? And at the end of this month, I suppose more broadly.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, 20% is an awful lot to explain.

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  By one variable alone, it's gonna, it's gonna have to be, uh, an amalgam, an aggregation of variables that sort of self propagate themselves. Uh, but short covering, um, the viciousness of the moves, particularly in the last hour of trading, um, spank of emotion, um, and machines. So actually I've been, I'm saying two totally contradictory things, but emotion and machines have one thing in common, which is not about considered decision making. It's not about anyone turning around and saying, I think these numbers in New York are they're going to plateau earlier or whatever.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  Or perhaps their their their their balance sheets aren't quite as weak on the worst case scenario in the final quarter of this year. It is panic buying to rectify a situation that's not going to be comfortable going into the the year end. I when I um when I uh when I got rid of my fund, actually, someone took the fund over. And the person that took the fund over um was worked, used to work for another great American fund manager, Julian Robertson, who had the Tiger Fund Management in the old days.

• 1:05:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, quick, quick side note, if people want to know Julian Robertson's story, the the book More Money Than God is effectively liar's poker for hedge funds and has has some great stories related to him. Please continue, sorry to interrupt.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  So so all these Tiger Cubs were characters that were Errol Flynn would have played them all. They're all they're all they're all heroes from uh from a romantic novel, swashbuckling, normally athletic individuals that all had big degrees from big colleges or whatever. I um my fund was taken over by one of the Tiger Cubs. And um I think he's one of these individuals that even if a meteor like that film, whatever it was, the double impact or Armageddon or whatever, even if it's going to hit the earth, he will not hedge.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  So we got our last Friday, I got our year to date numbers from the fund and I haven't really been looking at the the the fund too much because I'm just getting on with my own stuff and I'm not trading it. Hopefully it'll be there in 10 years' time. And I saw he was down 68% year to days, which obviously, so I thought this is a fund that's now been going for uh 23 years and we've managed in six weeks to.

• 1:06:45Speaker 03

  Lose sixty eight percent. The reason I say this is because I take my hat off to the individual involved, not for losing sixty eight, because he would just say that's a mark to market thing. He had the confidence, stoicism, the belief uh that when he was down sixty eight, because I think if I was down sixty eight, I'd either throw myself in the river, take all bets off. Um, I don't think I would have just done nothing. I, I, and I say that as a criticism of me, not a compliment to me. Whereas this individual would turn around and say, no, it's just bars and sellers and Marcus in a panic.

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  And of course, this week, he's, he's cut those losses in half. So he's not far behind the market now. I would have been dreadful in those circumstances. So I've given it to the right, the, the, the right guy. Um, who, who knows, who, I mean, I, I, who, who knows what, but I, I do think on your TV shows, there is a dispositional bias in the commentary towards hope and towards blue on the screen. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. The whole history of your country has been built on the basis of positivity. And us Brits could learn a thing or two about that. I just think that if a market loses a thousand points in the day

• 1:08:12Speaker 03

  and rallies fifty points in the last ten minutes, the headline should not be, Dow rallies fifty points in the last ten minutes. It should be, it should be Dow down nine hundred and fifty on the day. It's a bit like that Titanic story, you know, about, uh, you know, I don't know whether you have it in America, but I'm talking about the UK's provinciality. Um, and when the Titanic went down, the, the headline in my local newspaper, I come from a village in Scotland called Greenock. And the headline was Greenock man dies at sea, rather than the Titanic when, when he was on the Titanic. But I think that the, uh, the, there is a little bit of a dispositional skew towards wanting

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  hope and wanting to see the other side of, of, of, of this. And we all share that, but in the short term, I'd worry a little bit.

• 1:09:06Tim Ferriss?

  Great. Thank you for, thank you for answering that. And we're going to hop back into some other subject matter, although people may see some through lines in maybe the, the thinking that you bring to your life and also to this conversation. So I want to go to 2012 and it would have been around 2012. I don't know if, I don't know if it's exactly 2012, but in that range of 2011, 2013, I believe two things happened that I'd like

• 1:09:40Tim Ferriss?

  to talk about. One was the, your story of the Texan attorney nicknamed Jaws and everything around that. And then also a paper that you, that you wrote, a discussion paper titled, correct me if I'm wrong, The Smart Way to Monetize Strong Photography. And you can tackle these in either order, but could you please describe and tell the stories of these two things?

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  Sure. I think we should all have heroes and I have two or three heroes that there's a big gap from those two or three to the next. And actually, the top two are filmmakers. Martin Scorsese is someone I looked up to enormously, but in gold medal position is Steven Spielberg. And when Spielberg shot Jaws, he was 25 years old. And I was listening to your podcast with Vince Vaughn two nights ago, and I heard him mention how emotionally empathetic he was on, on set. Tom Hanks, who obviously collaborated with, with Spielberg

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  an awful lot. When, when Tom Hanks was asked, what is it that makes Spielberg the director cinematographer of our generation? Hanks replied, it's because he has a fluency in the language of what it takes to elicit an emotional reaction. Uh, I think that's a very important sentence, um, but I'll come on to that later. But in two thousand and two thousand and eleven, our worlds collide a little bit, albeit I wasn't twenty five. Uh, which I think was still Jaws is still, I think, one of the top twenty grossing films of all time.

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  Um, but I got obsessed with great white sharks and then the best place in the world to photograph great whites. Uh, was in False Bay, round the corner from Cape Town. It's not now for other, for reasons that like we can talk about later, maybe. Um, if you're, if you're going to try and photograph great whites not uh, swimming in the water, which is boring. Because it's been done before. I go back to my Calgary analogy of too many people doing the same thing. You, I want a shark coming out of the water. I want a shark predating on something. Uh, and I'd, I'd um, fly down to Cape Town or from London on a Thursday night.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  Arrive Friday morning, too late to, to go on my vessel. And then on um, Saturday morning, Sunday morning, Monday morning. I would spend four hours from five in the morning till nine at sea. In this place called Attack Channel, uh, trying to photograph the great whites. Attacking a seal, coming out, predating, come flying out of the water to get the seal. Breaching. Uh, breaching, yeah, exactly. And um, I worked with a great marine biologist who's now a good friend called Chris Fallows. He's uh, taking the best two pictures of great whites breaching that I, that I know of.

• 1:12:56Speaker 03

  And my friends back in London were saying, you know, David, just, isn't it cheaper just to go and see a therapist rather than just go to Cape Town to see them? Well, what a, what a effing waste of money. I mean, because every trip was costing me about, because I was still working, every trip is costing me like about ten thousand bucks. Uh, because then I had the boat and then the hotels and it's their winter as well. So at the height of everyone in London going and getting blasted at Glastonbury or watching Wimbledon tennis or whatever, or being on holiday in Ibiza, Mykonos, I would be shivering my arse off in their winter on my own. Um, trying to photograph a shark breaching out of the water.

• 1:13:38Speaker 03

  And I do think a lot of people worried about my, my sanity. Um, anyway, I wasn't going to quit. You cannot.

• 1:13:47Speaker 03

  You cannot quit, you you've just got to continue and I but equally there were practical considerations and the season would run from June till July and on the the final possible journey out and no one knows why Great Whites breach in the half hour before sunrise and the two hours after sunrise, the the general supposition is it's because the seal pups cannot see them coming to attack them and therefore this is their best time to to to predate but no one knows the answer to that. Anyway, the final day I get the shot and

• 1:14:27Speaker 03

  um I remember my my my heart beating so quickly and and you you've then got a you've got about a forty minute journey to come into a very modest little village in near Cape Town called Simonstown, it's actually where the South African Navy, I don't know why South Africa has a navy, they might need it for a set of hospital ships in the next two weeks, but I don't know why they need a navy. Anyway, the navy is at Simonstown um and you can never on on digital cameras, you can't really find out whether something is what we call in the in the trade, and I hope my accent doesn't make a mess of this, but out of whack,

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  out of whack means out of focus. Either something is in focus, emphatically in focus, or it isn't. And there's no ambiguity, if it's if it's two percent out, it's two percent out. And my sports photography days taught me that. I I'm very, very tough on myself uh on focus. You're never going to be able to see that on the back of your screen on a camera on a choppy water. So I got back to the cafe and uh was able to look at it um or um in the cold light of day and it was in focus. The shark attacking the seal, everything was in focus. And I got quite emotional. It was a bit like my story on

• 1:15:53Speaker 03

  the plane with Maradona, except I was at sea level, not thirty six thousand feet up. And I knew it was a big picture. Uh so I sent it to The agency in London, I was on my own. Um, I didn't really have, it was a Sunday morning, didn't have anyone to, to, to celebrate with. In a beautiful, ever you want to, ever you want a great restaurant in, and you're, you're, happened to be in Cape Town. In a place called Quok Bay, there's a fish restaurant over the railway line. I think it's called Harbor Lights. And, and because the, the South African rand is under a lot of pressure, you can have the best seafood, bottle of wine and get change for twenty bucks. So I had lunch on my own, like the loser I am, with my camera.

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  And, uh, the picture, um, was, I think in the next week. Around a hundred, uh, magazines, newspapers in the world, all around the world. And I got my cheque, uh, about six months later because they're all playing, you know, the game in terms of the delay between them getting the, the income in and then being sent to you. Uh, my cheque was around about, I don't know, around about seventeen thousand dollars. And I thought, this has got to be the worst industry in the world because it must have cost me at least twenty five thousand to finally get that picture.

• 1:17:15Speaker 03

  So I've taken this picture and I've lost eight thousand dollars from taking this picture. I thought this is, I mean, I may as well go back to try to do something else. I mean, what a, what a stupid industry. And then I got a call from someone, um, and I spent a lot of time in Texas, y'all. Um, no, and the guy was, that's a bad Texan accent there. He said, he said, are you the kid that took the photograph of the shark? He says, cause I'm an attorney, I'm called Jaws and I, I want one of them picture in my wall because I want to be the prayer of God into anyone that litigates against me. And, um, it went from Texas to Forrest Gump in about ten seconds.

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  Anyway, so he, he, um, he said, uh, how much do you want for the picture? And, uh, and this is eleven, ten, eleven years ago. And people weren't looking at photography as an air where you could, for, for fine art. And I, I said, well, maybe we'll put it in a nice frame and all, uh, maybe, but, uh, maybe charge you ten thousand, ten thousand dollars.

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  Um, but he said ten thousand dollars. So I ob- I obviously thought I'd gone way too, way too high. So I said, well, listen, um, I'm sorry to think that's a lot. He's, I said, we'll, we'll, we'll deliver it, we'll deliver it to Texas for, for free. We might even install it. He goes, no, I'm gonna have three of them, shark. And that was when the penny dropped for me. It was just in that one conversation that photography at an editorial level, selling pictures to Stern Magazine, or Parry Match, or Sports Illustrated, or the New York Times, the London Times printed picture, one of my pictures, half a page, London Times, like the New York Times, I don't want

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  anything for it. It's, it's, it's the best PR you can have in, in, in the world. So that was when the penny dropped. The, the way to monetize it, if that's not a vulgar word, um, but the way to make a living, um, was through fine art. And so I wrote this piece. It's my ode to Cameron Crowe in a way, because when Jerry Maguire did it, in, in Jerry Maguire, when, when Cruz did it, and you remember he wrote that missive, and then he put it in everyone's cubby hole. Uh, and he said the sports managers should look after fewer sports stars and give them more personal attention. I wrote my mission statement. Um, I didn't do it quite as glamorously as Tom

• 1:19:49Speaker 03

  Cruise, and it took more than an evening with a towel around my neck, but I did a lot of homework. And the basic essence was that the future for me, uh, in photography was going to be to not just encroach art's law, A R T's law with my photography, but for it to be an integral part of, of art, to be something that is quite clearly art, full stop. And that was, if you got that right, and from there, it was gonna be a long old journey, um, that there was a marketplace. And I look back now, yeah, it was a hundred and twenty months ago, probably a hundred and twenty, twelve, ten years, um.

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  I I I think we we uh we've the journey's not ended and the journey's just having a massive uh bump for everyone right now, but I've got so many things wrong in my life, but I I got it right. Um, and you you write in your um in your books, which I've read and some of the podcasts which I've I've listened to. You you use a word which is very important, you use the word self-propagating and the importance of self-propagation. And if you can get to a position where your brand is recognized and strong.

• 1:21:15Speaker 03

  So many good things come from that in a in a way that you don't actually have to, as long as you look after the brand. The position can reinforce itself. Um, when we were starting selling pictures for five thousand dollars, five thousand dollars seems an awful lot for a photograph. Uh, I I look back at, and we had one subject we haven't talked about, when I did a sports, when I did sports photography. My claim to fame was that John McEnroe spat at me at Wimbledon and he got a fifteen point code violation for many years. That was my, that was my biggest claim to fame. But I used to sell pictures outside the tube station, underground, what uh um the, yeah.

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, the metro, the subway. Metro, yeah, um, for twenty bucks. Um, way back in, way back in the day, nineteen eighty seven of, it was the great days when you had, America had fantastic tennis players. Not saying you don't know, um, you have amazing uh women's tennis players and Coco is quite something. But in the days of, on the men's side, you had McEnroe and Connors and Garalitis. And it was just like one big party. I mean, you just want to go and party with those guys. Uh, but but I would I would sell pictures for twenty bucks. So in Art Miami last year. Um, I did say to people, we sold a picture for $200,000 and someone said, well, that's

• 1:22:43Speaker 03

  an awful lot. Um, David, that's quite, I said, well, how I could be accused of taking my time because that was 35 years after I was selling pictures for 20 quid outside a subway station in London. So it's, um, I think there are a lot of lessons to be, to be learned from that.

• 1:23:06Tim Ferriss?

  Let's look a little more closely at that discussion paper. The smart way to monetize strong photography. So my understanding is that it included an analysis of the business models or approaches of two, at least two. I'm not sure if there are more very successful photographers at the time. Could you speak to what observations or conclusions you made of those successful photographers?

• 1:23:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And the first thing I'd say about photography and almost more than anything else that I will say in this interview with you, Tim, I so believe in this from the bottom of my heart that photography is collegiate. I don't compete against other photographers. This is not a zero sum game job. I think you've used that expression just because you're doing well. It doesn't mean that someone else should do badly and vice versa.

• 1:24:13Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  I always, I, I remember that, uh, in the World Cup semifinal, I did the first 10 minutes of, uh, West Germany against, they were still called West Germany, West Germany against France. Um, and my camera broke, uh, 10 minutes into the World Cup semifinal. And the Italian photographer next to me, he can see I was having problems and he said, uh, my friend, he said, except he said it in Italian, here is my camera. He just gave me his camera. Uh, and he had no, he had no right to do that. And that's what photography, I think is like. The, the two photographers that I mentioned in that piece were, uh, both,

• 1:24:53Speaker 03

  uh, live, I think in America, one's Australian, one's actually British. Um, the first one is a guy called Nick Brandt and Nick, uh, First got involved in photography as a cinematographer, I think he was doing the filming of a Michael Jackson video that happened to be shot in the Serengeti in Tanzania. Was it called Earth Song? I can't remember the Michael Jackson, I think it might have been called that. And he fell in love with the plains of Serengeti. He was a creative guy and he decided to spend more and more time in East Africa filming. And he focused

• 1:25:34Speaker 03

  on part of, all the big elephants in the world are in Kenya. If you want to go and photograph a big elephant, and I'm very much, I'm a romanticist, but I'm also a magnifier as well. If I want to go and photograph an ABBA tribute band, I'll do it in Stockholm. I will go to where it's at. So with elephants, the best place to photograph elephant, big elephants in the world is Kenya. There are about twenty-two what are called big Tusker elephants left in the world. They're the elephants that look half like an elephant and half like a mammoth from Ice Age where the tusks touch the ground. And they're only in two national parks. They're in a national park called Amboseli and a national park

• 1:26:19Speaker 03

  called Sava where Peter Beard, who I'm sure you know Peter Beard's work, he's from the Andy Warhol School and a great storyteller, a photographer. He spent a lot of time in Sava. Nick spent a lot of time in this place called Amboseli. And he photographed in black and white, and I always have photographed, tended to photograph in black and white. We can maybe come on to that later. And his work was shot on film, not digital, but he was achieving very high prices for his work. And I admired it. And I still do. He got

• 1:27:00Speaker 03

  there before me. We don't know each other, but I have total respect for him. And I know printers that he's used to use. I've known a lot of galleries who know us both. And he gives an awful lot back to conservation. And he is not um someone that likes uh socializing. And I respect that as well, which is why you need to use the wholesale marketplace um for other people to extol the virtues of your work. We have an acronym in the UK, which I'm sure, Tim, you have in America called uh Figjam. Do you have, do you have an acronym called?

• 1:27:43Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know what that means.

• 1:27:46Speaker 03

  So Figjam means in Britain, um fuck, I'm good, just ask me. Fuck, I'm good.

• 1:27:52Tim Ferriss?

  So, so please also explain what you mean by using the wholesale market. Uh, so I'd love you to explain both of those.

• 1:28:02Speaker 03

  So wholesale means using galleries because you, if you're a photographer and you want to sell your, your, your work, you've got really two options in the fine art market. Number one is you can go to the best galleries in the world that one week might be selling uh Picasso's or Warhol's or Baskin's or whatever and say, or, or, or photographic galleries and say, here's, here's my work and they'll take 50%. They will take 50% of the sale. That's standard. Um, and Nick embraced that model to the full and to the party because he didn't, to go and be selling it yourself all around the world is a lot of work and you could get the

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  content. It's not like original content providers like Netflix. You've not got the guy that's making the latest episode of The Crown the next week trudging around Berlin trying to flog it. But it, but you know, because he's not going to have much of a home life if that's the basis. But if you need wholesalers to distribute, our biggest market in the world outside London is in Dallas. Now, I went to Dallas seven years ago.

• 1:29:15Tim Ferriss?

  By, by your market, you mean our, our biggest market, you mean you personally? Or do you mean fine art photography?

• 1:29:22Speaker 03

  No, for me personally. So uh seven years ago, I didn't know anyone in Dallas. Um. But in order to get to that position, you need a gallery. And then you just build up contacts and I mean, uh, Dallas, I go to Dallas now more than I go to uh, New York or LA. Um, and uh, even culminated, I couldn't quite, my family and friends certainly can. I even had the pleasure of having lunch at SMU with um, George W. And that was, that was a great thrill. And that, that all just came from Texan hospitality and just getting to know people. But with the gallery, with the gallery at the epicenter of that, with the gallery to talk about me.

• 1:30:03Tim Ferriss?

  So why, just let's, let's, I know we're gonna get to Fig Gem, but uh, why honor Dallas? I know Texas actually has a lot of art, but you could also say that of Los Angeles, you could say that of New York, you could say that of Chicago. How did Dallas come to be your number two?

• 1:30:19Speaker 03

  Um, I think uh, Texans, as you know, there is a, it's a great sense of hospitality there. People, people want to help. Um, I might uh, be losing, looking here with roast into spectacles, but by and large, we've been welcomed with open arms. There is irrespective of where the oil price is 24 bucks a barrel or 70 bucks a barrel. I think that intense correlation between Texan wealth and oil price has loosened a little bit. I'm sure life in Houston isn't quite as good right now with the oil prices it was when it was 60 or 70. But I think there's enough money there that it doesn't matter so much. Um.

• 1:31:01Speaker 03

  You then get into this extraordinary contradiction between conservationists and hunters. You go back in the history of America, so many of your great men were hunters and conservationists, Roosevelt, Estelle. Um, in a, in Texas, there are an awful lot of. These like safari clubs and whatever the hunters and then they go on safaris to Africa. So, and I'm a conservationist that I don't really wanna get aggressively into the debates as to whether you should spend your weekend shooting ducks. Um, but I, I certainly am someone that can't really be seen to be shooting ducks at the weekend. I think that would open uh the doors to a degree of double standards.

• 1:31:44Speaker 03

  But there are big walls, big homes, the areas like the Highland Parks of this world, um, there's a great client base there and we got to know we shot recently with the, the Dallas Cowboys and which was great fun and uh Troy Aikman actually came along to the shoot. We closed down the city center of Dallas. And I thought, what are, what are we gonna, what are we gonna put in the city center of Dallas? And I thought, well, we're gonna have the cheerleaders and then we get a bunch of longhorn cattle and some cowboys. And, and we did it. We closed down, closed down the city center. And we got, we got some cattle, some cowboys and some cheerleaders and just let's see what, let's see what happens.

• 1:32:22Tim Ferriss?

  So I wanna come back to that, but how did it start? Did it come from you reaching out to someone? Did it come from an agency who represents you reaching out to someone? Did it start with a cold email from some, you know, big hat? Uh, plus cattle, uh, money family in Dallas? How did it start?

• 1:32:40Speaker 03

  Which, which the comes, the, the Dallas itself or the, the idea of? Um, so wearing my old hat, um, I, I'm the geek at school that knows all the detail on the baseball cards. But if you substitute baseball cards for American cities, I think, I don't think I'd, I'm not, I don't think I'd do too badly telling you, you, you name an American city, we'll tell you what the art market's like in, in, in, in, in growth second cities, Nashville, Charlotte, Austin, the Carolinas. How strong are these markets? Where, where are the big markets?

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  And there are some tough markets in America that I think the two toughest markets that people assume are slam dunks are bizarre. Let's forget about what everything that's going on at the moment. But Los Angeles is a tough market. And New York is a tough market. Los Angeles is a tough market because the wealth lives in, tends to live in two different places, either on the beach or in the hills or around West Hollywood. And to best of my knowledge, they're one hour apart. So having a locating a gallery, you immediately eliminate half of them. Also, people in L A, a bit like Sam Fram, and you have experienced of this, they're invitation rich, particularly in in L A, they're,

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

  they're time poor, they're friendship rich, and they they really don't want to go to things. It's not a treat to go to an art gallery opening. They just think they'd rather avoid it. They'd rather what take the dog to the vet than go to an art gallery, unless it's one of, um, or the therapist. Um, whereas you go to, and in New York, it's it's similar in a way in that my my work's quite large. And and Peter Beard had had a similar issue. You and if you got it in in in New York, you can go to the kind of Wasby Upper East Side. But the galleries are small there by definition because the rents are so high. And if you've got a gallery in Upper East Side, they could probably only fit three or four of my pictures

• 1:34:49Speaker 03

  in there. Uh, then you go down to to Soho and West Broadway, where where we've been before. And the rents in some of those places are enormous. And maybe the galleries are more kind of pop art galleries than galleries with the provenance of some of the ones in in Upper East Side. So you're two lead cities in a way for for, and I don't think I'd be the only person to say this, um, do present challenges. Whereas Dallas and Chicago are fantastic. They're not quite as invitation rich, with the greatest respect to the the my friends in both Chicago and Dallas. They're they're slight maybe slightly more genuine.

• 1:35:33Speaker 03

  Friendships maybe have more substance. They want to introduce you to more people. And, um, the gallery competition maybe isn't quite so stiff. And both economies, present circumstances excluded, are strong. So our, um, there's a big gap for us between, uh, Dallas, Chicago, and the next market we have in the States.

• 1:35:59Tim Ferriss?

  And so it was, this was a research driven.

• 1:36:05Tim Ferriss?

  Decision on your part to target Dallas and Chicago as primary, primary cities. Is that right?

• 1:36:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. And I think the kind of founding father of photography in the States lives in Palm Beach and the gallery is on that Worth Avenue with all the smart golf clubs and the luxury goods stores and whatever. And he turned me down five times. And there's nothing, you write an awful lot about in your work about what you take out of rejection and not quite hitting it. And everyone has different responses to it. I'm a great believer that you have to experience those times to get better. And

• 1:37:01Speaker 03

  if you're a British guy, and you turn up at the most important art gatekeeper for contemporary photography in America, and he looks at you and he says, thank you, but no, thank you. And then you have to roll your portfolio up and then get a taxi or whatever to Miami International and then get a flight back to London. That's, that's a lot of time to do a little bit of self loathing or say, well, sooner or later, he's not going to turn me down. And just going off on a tangent here, but probably my worst time, you know,

• 1:37:40Speaker 03

  our Scottish writer, the J K Rowling of Harry Potter fame and her lovely expression of is rock bottom was the solid foundation on which I built my life. And my, my, my, my rock bottom was probably in 2012. So after I'd written my Jerry Maguire piece, but no one really wanted to listen too much. And the guy in Palm Beach had turned me down four or five times. And he represented Nick, actually, he represented Nick Branton and Nick and justifiably so. And there was a Christmas in 2012 where

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  I'm sure so many of your viewers this will resonate with them. Unfortunately, that sometimes when a marriage doesn't work. There'll be one day in a year. If you have children that it can be tricky and Christmas Day can can sometimes be that day. Uh, in terms of whether you're going to see your children or not. And uh, my ex-wife and I now have a wonderful relationship and she's here. Um, uh, cohabiting with me in our house with the family now. But this, those eight years ago, um, things weren't so good. And so it was very clear to me that I wasn't going to see my kids on Christmas Day. And there's, there's two ways you can react to it. I felt that you could be around the corner with, with friends.

• 1:39:07Speaker 03

  Watching Love Actually for the twentieth time and feeling miserable and pretending to keep a brave smile on being a loser. Or you can get the fuck out of there. Um, so I decided on the latter and uh, I felt a kind of calling in a way that I needed to go and do something. And, and um, South Sudan was going through a civil war. I'd seen some imagery there and I'm kind of led quite a bit by the imagery of others. Without wanting to plagiarize it. And it looked like there was, there was stuff there that if I could just get far enough north in South Sudan. I could get a picture that um, could stand the test of time if I got my lighting right and my logistics right.

• 1:39:50Speaker 03

  And I got it. I, I saw on Christmas Day, I spent Christmas Day um, at a United Nations refugee camp in, in, in South Sudan. With a lot of guns knocking around and uh, just drove north with my minders. In, in tough areas where the civil war was going on and I, on the 27th of December.

• 1:40:11Tim Ferriss?

  Minders are people watching after you. These are chaperones.

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, guys with guns. I think, you know, the, the, my, my food, uh, I think cost me about a dollar a day. And the accommodation was about a dollar a day and then security detail was about a thousand a day. Anyway, on, on a, on a, we, I got the picture and it had a, I think the best pictures can be looked at for a long time. And this picture uh, could be looked at for a long time, I felt. Uh. So I I left South Sudan on about the twenty eighth of December. Um. I get all my printing done in Los Angeles, uh, and so eventually found my way from East Africa to L A, got the picture printed, and then took it to uh the gatekeeper in Palm Beach.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  And uh this is the same person that had rejected me for five times, uh five times. And he he looked at it and he said, uh, he said, how old are you? Which I thought he should probably have known by now, but why should he? So I said, so I I lied, as we all do these days, and I probably pretended I was younger than what I was. I might I might have said, I don't know, forty two or, I don't know, forty three. He said, um, he said, uh, this picture is gonna change the second half of your life. And I said, I said, well, hopefully for the better, because the last ten years I haven't been up to much. Uh, he said, no, it was gonna change for the better. Uh, I said, why is that? He said, because it's a picture people need to see. And he said, I'll represent you from tomorrow.

• 1:41:43Speaker 03

  And that that was, that was the, that was the moment. And I I remember getting getting absolutely drunk, hammered, uh pissed, whatever the British expression, American expression, back in Miami. And uh again, on my own, um, and that was the kind of, that was the moment. And so Palm Beach is a, is a, is a very important market, um, albeit it's uh it's seasonal, as you know. It kind of starts in November and goes through to May. Um, the extraordinary thing about your country is the geographical mobility of of people that have done well. They will, they will, they will have homes, sure, they have, might have a home in the place where they work.

• 1:42:25Speaker 03

  But quite so many people from Palm Beach you find in Aspen at times, or up in Nantucket, or whatever. Your holiday destinations, there there does seem to be quite a lot of, uh, an expression you've got to be careful with right now. But cross-vertigation, there does seem to be, people do hop and scotch in your, your resort markets. We we have, we've had no, we have no doubts in our mind that if you take all the top twenty ski resorts in the world in terms of, um, the, um.

• 1:42:58Speaker 03

  What you can learn, the quality, the people that are there, and I know you're going to get many people that disagree with this. To an extent, the wealth, the connections. And in Europe, you have five or six big ones where we have shows, but Aspen,

• 1:43:15Speaker 03

  for all its things that I don't necessarily embrace, it takes a lot of beating as a resort to have a get to be shown in. And we had a show in Christmas this year. It was quite funny actually, because the gallery said, we will give you a discount on your hotel, because obviously you're going to have to come with your family. And I, before I, I asked what the discount was from. I said, that's very kind of you, we'll all be there. And then when you get to Aspen at New Year, you get a room about the size of, I don't know, a shoebox. And they ask you for like eight hundred bucks for your discount, stand to seven hundred and twenty.

• 1:43:56Speaker 03

  But it's still, you do meet some fascinating people there and that's another great place to show in America.

• 1:44:03Tim Ferriss?

  So two quick questions. Is, is Palm Beach an important market for, as a, for revenue? In other words, a percentage of, of let's say, income? Or is it important symbolically because the tastemakers there influence representation and purchase decisions and so on elsewhere? Or both?

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  You're very good, Tim. That was, you're very good. That's, that's the right question. And the answer, the answer is a bit of both.

• 1:44:35Speaker 03

  There are galleries that we show at that might not ring the bell in sales all the time. But the fact that they are part of your dream team and that they rep you

• 1:44:53Speaker 03

  serves two purposes, direct sales and also the provenance that someone that is seen to be a scholar in the art of the selection of artists has, for whatever reason, deemed to include you in their squad. So in New Orleans, I mean, that's an extraordinary place, isn't it? I, I love it. I don't know it that well. I was there three weeks ago. And the The art district has clearly been done up quite a lot now and developing quickly. We work with, I think, one of the most celebrated galleries in in southern America. A people called Arthur Roger, and he's been a big donator to Noma, the New Orleans Museum

• 1:45:36Speaker 03

  of Modern Art. Arthur will not necessarily be selling at the levels that galleries in London or or Dallas or Chicago, but he is so loved and so respected that the fact that you're part of his stable only curies favor elsewhere. I guess you're you're allowed, isn't it a bit like some of the actors that you interview? They will do stage performances, they will go on Broadway from time to time, it might earn the the big bucks, but it's good for their spirit and good for their soul.

• 1:46:13Speaker 03

  And not every gallery, we've got we've got twenty five around the world, and not everyone. They shouldn't all be clones of each other, and some are a higher ticket galleries that have less charm, and then some are galleries you just love spending time with and asking questions and tapping into their extraordinary life and and and and knowledge. And Palm Beach is a bit like that, and and New Orleans is a bit like that. But Palm Beach, you do see the incredible mobility of, I used to go to the the Masters

• 1:46:53Speaker 03

  in Augusta quite a bit, and I know it's a smart event, but when you just as an outsider, when you listen to the conversations that are going around under that oak tree by the clubhouse, it shows the extraordinary geographical mobility of your nation. You'll meet people for saying, where are you now? I'm living in Seattle. Last time I was living in in Chicago. And then before, oh, you've moved, you've moved up from from Austin or whatever. Those conversations don't happen in most countries in the world, they just happen in in in your country. And that means that if you've got if you've got galleries in eleven or twelve of the hotspots, you do get that great cross fertilization.

• 1:47:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's very, very true. And I promised I had a second question. In fact, I have many questions, including the second I had in mind was getting back to Fig Jam. There's your obsession with the Netflix business model in Montana. There's making versus taking photographs, all sorts. But would you mind if we take a brief bathroom break since I've been mainlining green tea for this entire conversation?

• 1:48:04Speaker 03

  Well, well done, mate. Five minutes?

• 1:48:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, let's do five. Let's do five minutes and we'll be right back.

• 1:48:13Tim Ferriss?

  We are back from respective bathroom breaks, ready to go and made a few promises before my bladder was on the verge of exploding. Fig Jam, Netflix business model, Montana. We may not cover it all because we have some time limitations today, but let's, let's jump into Fig Jam. What was the thread on Fig Jam?

• 1:48:37Speaker 03

  So the other photographer that I talked about in my piece, my mission statement, was a photographer, Australian photographer called Peter Lick. Peter decided, he's a good, very strong, smart photographer, hardworking photographer, but he decided to vertically integrate the food chain. But what I mean by that is that he would take the pictures, but it would be his galleries that would sell his own pictures. And that, that is, it's not a unique business model. There are quite a few

• 1:49:17Speaker 03

  American photographers in the Rockies. If you go to places like Jackson Hole, or even Aspen, you'll see guys that take the pictures and then they have the galleries selling their own pictures. Obviously, their margins are way higher because they're not spending the take with the gallery because they are the gallery. The problem is, is that it is fake jam. It is fuck, I'm good, just ask me. There is nothing better than third-party affirmation. If you're asking um your best mate about a potential new girlfriend and your best mate, or vice versa, the best mate says, I think, I think she's excellent. I think she's perfect.

• 1:49:59Speaker 03

  That means so much more to you. Uh if your girlfriend's asking her girlfriend about a potential guy and says the same, we look for third-party affirmation. I don't like to talk about my work too much, other than when it's my job, when I'm on show, when I'm on a stage or whatever, or uh something like this. You need third parties to do it. A lot of people turn around and say, you know what? The last unregulated market in the world is the art market. I don't believe that's true. I think it's one of the most regulated markets because it's self-pleased. And something that is self-pleased, that regulation can actually be much more onerous than something that is regulated by law.

• 1:50:43Speaker 03

  Um and if you do something that is seen to be out with what is perceived to be right by the art market, you've got to be careful. Um and I use Peter as an example in because no one has succeeded more in the vertical integration of their business than Peter. Uh but he he ruffled quite a few feathers by doing it. Because if he turns around and says he sold a picture for a million dollars, well, how do we actually know the provenance of that? I'm not suggesting that, but the New York Times did. Uh it's a it's a tough market to to own the stores that sell your own work.

• 1:51:27Speaker 03

  Um Warhol didn't do it. Baskett didn't do it.

• 1:51:31Tim Ferriss?

  So is this a counterpoint to where you ended up going? Was it a cautionary tale more than a best practices?

• 1:51:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, I am, I thought Breaking Bad, you weren't expecting I was going to go from there to Breaking Bad.

• 1:51:47Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about, let's talk about meth, let's go there.

• 1:51:50Speaker 03

  Let's just go straight in to, there's so many of those meth vans on the way to the Mexican border, by the way, from Marfa, everyone looks like that one that they used in Breaking Bad. Anyway, putting that to one side, Breaking, Breaking Bad, to me was, um, should be not only in every cinematography class manual, but it should be on every economics class manual. So the cinematography side, I think it was emphatically the series that showed the power of immersive filmmaking. Uh, we live in an era of wanting to be there. My photography, I hope is immersive because I use wide angle lenses rather than largely

• 1:52:33Speaker 03

  telephoto lenses. So you feel you're part of there rather than compressing distance. If you compress distance, it compresses emotion. Uh, if I, if I'm going to photograph a man or a woman, uh, I'm not going to photograph them from a hundred yards away. I'm going to photograph them from a foot and a half away with a wide angle lens. Um, and Breaking Bad did that. It also should be in economics rulebooks because from the moment that he went from supplying the crystal meth himself to a wholesale business model, the career in the series took off. It was just, that was the tipping point. Just go wholesale, baby. And that's when he saw the power of being able to just have sales everywhere.

• 1:53:17Speaker 03

  Don't worry about the margins so much, but if you've got sales coming out of your arse in every big city in the world, then, or in his case, every big city in New Mexico or Hudson, New Mexico, it's going to make a difference. And so Breaking Bad did, was instructive for me, to me for two different reasons.

• 1:53:35Tim Ferriss?

  So that means that you, you looked at the, if I'm remembering the name correctly, Peter Lick.

• 1:53:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, L I K.

• 1:53:44Tim Ferriss?

  As, as an, as a, an example of commercial success, but one wrought with difficulties and risks, uh, that ended up being a cautionary tale of sorts that steered you towards wholesale while embracing some of the best practices from the other gentleman who you, I don't know if he's a gentleman, but the other man you profiled.

• 1:54:07Speaker 03

  You're so articulate and you summarize that brilliantly. Well, yes, that's that's right. Peter, Peter, you want to have, he has a brand and he has constancy in his product and his product quality. We I have a few expressions at our business. One is Tom Ford, Tom Ford, Tom Ford. When we go Tom Ford, Tom Ford, Tom Ford, what do we mean? Everything has to be constant in the commitment to the pursuit of excellence and taste. And so the people, when they're looking at the frame of our picture, they'll go, that's a David Yarrow frame. They were, even if the

• 1:54:51Speaker 03

  photograph wasn't there, even if the photograph was the poster for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, they go, yeah, I know that film. That's a David Yarrow frame. The second thing, I used to, and I still do, stay close to the creative director at Victoria's Secrets. Now, Victoria's Secrets has had a stunning fall from grace over the last eighteen months. But and we don't have the time to go into the wherewithal and the reasons for that and whether they're right reasons or not. But clearly, the brand is not of the hour. It is not what people want in 2020. And I

• 1:55:33Speaker 03

  understand that. When Victoria's Secret, their head office was in Columbus, Ohio. And when you used to go into their head office, in the foyer, they had two things. They had the newspaper from 21st of November, 1963, with the headline Kennedy dead. And then they had another saying that said, perhaps you should be tougher on yourself. I think we should be tougher on ourselves. I think you, you, you and your writings, Tim, and I've, I've, I've, I've, I've seen quite a bit. You use the example of an athlete that

• 1:56:13Speaker 03

  has the expression, no one owes us anything. And I think that's the kind of corollary of perhaps you should be tougher on yourself. I think the world of, uh, there's no reason for anyone to go and buy David Yarrow work tomorrow unless it's constantly the best that I can do and it's given third-party advocacy. It's not for me to tell them to buy it, it's for someone else to tell them. And I admire Peter for trying to circumvent that. I think he's the only person that's succeeded. It just wouldn't be for me. I wouldn't like to have 25 retail stores right now in America of my own.

• 1:56:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, I would agree with that conclusion for, for these, these times right now in particular. Where, where does your fascination with Netflix and Montana, I'm not saying those two are related, come, come into the picture, so to speak. I know that that's, that's probably a little, a little too on the nose.

• 1:57:20Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:57:21Tim Ferriss?

  But, but where, yeah, could you speak to either of those? Because

• 1:57:25Speaker 03

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

• 1:58:10Speaker 03

  They fascinate me because their their courage and investment, the Crown, say the series of Crown, and for all the Americans, please don't believe everything that's in there. I know people say, I I watch it because it's educational. Half is bullshit, but it's good fun nevertheless. Anyway, so it's like ten million an episode, or throw in a couple for post-production marketing, twelve million. So you do a series of eight. So you're you're kind of talking about a hundred million a series. Their accounting fascinates me because they'll amortize that cost over the expected worth of the Crown. Now, I'm far be it from

• 1:58:52Speaker 03

  me to criticize the accounting of Netflix, but if we spent, as we did last week, two hundred and fifty grand in Texas, we'll take that through the P and L last week. I'm not going to spread that over eight years. But what they have taught us is the importance of investing with confidence. And the mistakes that we've made, my goodness, we make a lot, is when we decide, should we go for option A of a replica eighteen fifty's wagon that was made actually in nineteen seventy by Ford, or do we go for an original eighteen fifty's wagon that's going to cost double the amount of the replica? If you take that for, if you

• 1:59:36Speaker 03

  take the six thousand saving, it's a false economy, in our own little modest way. So we have to have courage in our investment. And Netflix instills that in us. I think you have, America has the most visually spoiled country in the world. Of that, there is, for me, of everything that I've said that some people might find contentious or be even be interested in, I think you have, by far and away, the the most extraordinary canvas on which to tell stories of any country in the world, because you have such diversity, whether it be the urban beauty of Chicago, the swamps of Louisiana, the John Ford scenery

• 2:00:21Speaker 03

  of Arizona, and then the Rockies of Wyoming and Montana. And for an artist...

• 2:00:30Speaker 03

  Which I hope I'm, that's what I am, it is a dream. And of all, of all the states, the one that I get most excited of, of coming back to is probably Montana. Uh, because I think it's still the least dense. I don't think, have they got a coronavirus? Uh, uh, I don't know what the numbers are, but they're going to be single digit. I think every, everyone lives remotely in the mountains there anyway. And they don't, they, um, uh. When I arrive there, uh, and you get the big sky feel. And you think this is amazing, but then you meet the people that are there. And some of them that live up in the mountains, it's just the, the, the people that time forgot.

• 2:01:14Speaker 03

  There is, they're, they're caught in a kind of time warp. And high up some of the, I've always had some sort of visceral attraction to ghost towns. Maybe it's a, maybe it's a, uh, manifestation of my, my childhood fears of abandonment that I've now got this.

• 2:01:34Speaker 03

  It's now manifesting itself in, in a love of ghost towns. It happened to you too. Kind of, so, um, so I, um. We, we stumbled across this ghost town right up in the hills. And of course, because they're high, they've been preserved better than the, the ghost towns, maybe in, in, in California and Arizona. And it's the characters there that we, we meet and we, we met this guy. I was so cold filming outside and I just wanted to get a, a drink at the end of the day. And I walked into this bar that should have been, looked like it should have been closed. Uh, in the ghost town. And there was a guy behind the bar that looked like he killed about 10 people on it.

• 2:02:14Speaker 03

  And it was open and I, I, I looked at it and it was your quintessential American saloon bar with the, the wagon wheel on the top. And the long bar going back and back and back. And the, the, the stuffed moose head and all that kind of stuff. And I thought this has got to be a great place for a shoot. Uh, I want to, uh, we talk, we talk about making pictures and taking pictures and I do tend to have preconceptions. But you are allowed to have spontaneity. And I said, well, listen, can we bring a wolf in here? And he said, we have wolves here Monday, Wednesday, Thursday is fine. Wolves come in here the whole time and nothing was too much trouble for him. And I put some chicken wings around

• 2:02:56Speaker 03

  my, on a string around my head, around my chest and lay on the bar and then the wolf would walk along the bar to try and bite the chicken off my chest.

• 2:03:10Tim Ferriss?

  It's a hell of a, hell of a sentence right there.

• 2:03:15Speaker 03

  It's just, the great thing is, so we got the picture and every Friday night now, people try and replicate the wolf on the bar. So it's the only time in my life I've, something I've done has given rise to a bar game in the evening. So you've got to try and reenact. We, we took Cindy Crawford up to that bar and she was great sport and she played, she played along with the wolf. And these guys who, they're pissed. Is that a British?

• 2:03:45Tim Ferriss?

  Pissed. They're shit, shitfaced.

• 2:03:47Speaker 03

  Shipfaced.

• 2:03:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Pissed to us means upset, but yeah, shitfaced.

• 2:03:51Speaker 03

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

• 2:04:28Speaker 03

  coming through the leather. So if you don't believe me, it's in the picture. But we, we, we have a love affair. We went to this place called Butte, Montana, and it was, it was a big old copper mining place in the old days. And it was abandoned in about nineteen fifty. But a lot of it's as it was left. And we shot there in January in the cold. And there's, it in the, it was in its heyday when prohibition came in and with it kind of speakeasies and stuff like that. And we found a few of these speakeasies and it was such a wonderful canvas on which

• 2:05:12Speaker 03

  to tell painting, to tell stories. Whenever I talk about your Wild West, I get energized because to me, that final frontier expansion and the stories of good guys, bad guys, outlaws, endeavor, drunkenness, whatever, crime, is one of the great periods of history. And there's a romanticus within me that just loves that pushing to the final frontier. I can't articulate it, but what a great story in which to tell, what a great canvas

• 2:05:52Speaker 03

  in which to tell pictures. And so we've been, we've been attacking Wyoming on Montana, and then the next move seemed to go to Texas because it's the home of the real cowboys. And so much, but we shot there two weeks ago. And right down, I think you know the area well, given where you live now, but we were shooting on the Rio Grande in a Big Ben National Park, which is one of the, I think, the least visited but most beautiful American parks. The only people that live there are kind of in witness protection program otherwise, or the crystal meth operators, otherwise he wouldn't be there, or the Mexican. But we crossed to the Mexican border four times in the morning because all you have

• 2:06:36Speaker 03

  to do is cross a 25 yard stream. And we were, we were working with some Game of Thrones people, which is great fun. And we just said, well, we're in Mexico in two minutes and would photograph ourselves in Mexico and then we'd go back and forth. And we had some proper cowboys down there. And to me, those are my most exciting days to be, to be doing that in your country, which is, there's so much history, but recent history. I think your 19th century history is more exciting than Europeans 19th century history, has to be.

• 2:07:12Tim Ferriss?

  So I have one, one more question. We'll have to do around two because I want to ask you about Scorsese. I want to ask you about your near death experiences. I want to ask you about all sorts of things. So we'll have to do, if you're up for it, around two at some point.

• 2:07:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:07:28Tim Ferriss?

  But you have, and this is, this is a whole area that we could talk about. Really honed the craft of not just photography, but collaboration with different people and different groups. You're, I think you've been very smart, very methodical, it would seem in how you've approached that. So you mentioned Cindy Crawford. Of course you've, you've done a lot with many, many household names. How did you get your first celebrity collaboration? And you can interpret or define celebrity, however you like it, but how did you get the first one?

• 2:08:08Tim Ferriss?

  Or whichever early day story comes to mind.

• 2:08:17Speaker 03

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

• 2:08:56Speaker 03

  And, and you're humbled by their normality, by their pursuit of excellence, by their family values, by their manners. I think that's important manners, by their self deprecation. I remember, uh, I remember going, in your writings, you talk about when you were a lecturer at Princeton, and I've talked at Princeton several times because my daughter wants to get in and because you're not allowed to bundle them any money these days. I thought that the ethical way to do it was to give a few free speeches, and it didn't work. Um, speeches were fine, but she just stayed in the UK.

• 2:09:34Speaker 03

  Um, but you talk about you gave your, your class a test of making an uncomfortable phone call or email to someone to try and have a conversation or a meeting or a message from someone very high powered, um, whether it be the, um, chairman of Google, whoever it was. I, I'm quite shy at those things, but I've got better at it. Uh, and I would also encourage people to say that we've all been rejected in our life. There's no shame in rejection. Uh, rejection is part and parcel of the game. I think you, you maybe being rejected 10 times in one day can maybe be a little bit

• 2:10:19Speaker 03

  too much for someone, but you can, you can stagger your rejection rate, but never be afraid to do it. The one thing that I know from every person that people put on a pedestal as to how extraordinary they are and their, their, their celebratory status is that they're all like us. As Bill Gates said yesterday in his 15 things we've learned about coronavirus, um, ego and fame has, they don't differentiate. We're all the same and everyone that I've met that's a celebratory in some eyes, the

• 2:11:00Speaker 03

  vast majority of, are 90% of the time just like us. Uh, sports stars are, I've found are very nervous about art. In the same way, if you took an artist to Amen Corner of the Augusta Masters, he would be nervous to ask where the par three was and the pair, par fives were. And, you know, how, how does the 13th play or whatever? In the very same way, um, sports stars that I've met are nervous about art. And therefore, if you can, I think people by people.

• 2:11:37Speaker 03

  I don't think that people necessarily buy products when the product is um the work of a single person. They'd much rather tell the story about the person. Ninety-five percent of our art is being bought by uh people that have met me one way or other, or listened to me speak, which you could argue makes it a non-expanding business model and that's a work hard. But I think by and large, you've got with celebs, if you can, celebrities or people that have been, I hate the word actually celebrity, people that have been

• 2:12:18Speaker 03

  champions of their industry. If you can find a way to engage them, uh I, with someone as, to go right to the top, right to the top, and the glue, if you like, the glue that stuck it all together is fundraising for charity. Uh I've, I've been lucky that uh my work is valued and because when we produce this print, there'll be sixteen in a series, sixteen, um to allow two or three of those to go to good causes, doesn't cost me anything. It marginally cannibalizes the addition, but so what? That's fantastic. Uh and through

• 2:13:00Speaker 03

  that, that's forged uh many links. And so for something like with Cindy, um she um she lost her brother to leukemia at a very young age. She, she would work with me for nothing, as long as a good percentage of the proceeds went to the hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, that looked after her brother. So that's now equated to half a million dollars. That's much more exciting for her than her getting a cheque of forty grand for a boring photo shoot. She doesn't want that. She's done enough of that. She's earned the right not to have to do that. And she is a champion for those kind of things. So

• 2:13:42Speaker 03

  the more advocates we have like that, um the better. They're all, Tim, you know, you interview a lot of them. They're, I think they are so long of kindness most of the time. I don't know about you. And this is a rhetorical comment. When you're dealing with these people, it's the entourage that I can't deal with. When you actually meet, I mean, it's a bit like, it's a bit like you, mate. Your entourage, I mean, but you seem quite a decent guy. So people underneath you.

• 2:14:13Tim Ferriss?

  My team's great. You know that.

• 2:14:18Tim Ferriss?

  I don't, I don't have an entourage. I think it's the big bald head that scares them off. But, but yeah, I, in my, in my experience, fame is like, if we're talking about fame, I mean, which often accompanies accomplishment in different fields. It's, it's a non-specific amplifier, just like alcohol, in the sense that if you're a small time asshole, you're going to become a big time asshole. And if you're kind of heart and jovial and compliment people, then you're going to become probably a magnified or exaggerated form of, of that. So I think it just, it amplifies the best and worst of people. So the folks that I've

• 2:15:00Tim Ferriss?

  spent time with, whether that's the Edward Nordens or the Jamie Foxes, whoever, they're, they're great. I really have seen.

• 2:15:09Speaker 03

  Edward's a big conservationist, isn't he?

• 2:15:11Tim Ferriss?

  He's huge. He's huge. Yeah. And, and, and then on the flip side, those who shall remain nameless, I've met some very, very well-known A-listers who are just fucking awful. And I think that you end up finding people on opposite ends of the spectrum when you get up to that level of visibility. And there's, there's, I haven't run into much in the middle either. And I've heard you, what you're saying about Cindy from friends of mine who know her, I've never met her, that she's just one of the sweetest, most kind-hearted, easy to work with people they've ever met. And I've heard that about Jennifer Garner as well. And.

• 2:15:54Speaker 03

  We had a, we had a moment with Cindy where in order to get a wolf's attention, you can either make it an aggressive movement one way or other, a bit like a dog, or you can make an aggressive noise. Um. But wolves like dogs are smart, so they get bored of that after a while. So your your third option is to use meat and we're shooting outside. It's minus fifteen. And I've got the wolf uh in the car next to Cindy. And I'm just trying to get the wolf to look me in the eyes. And to get the attention, we're using meat and the wolf wrangler has this chicken drumstick that uh has been in icy water, uh and it's about minus twelve and he's got a glove on.

• 2:16:38Speaker 03

  And to my horror, he loses his throw of it and the drumstick from ten yards whacks Cindy straight on the in the eye on the face. Cold chicken, raw drumstick at nine in the morning.

• 2:16:54Speaker 03

  And because she doesn't know him, the only person that really has accountability without responsibility is is me. And I'll never forget it. She just looked me straight in the eye and went, David. And it was the gap after David. It was David. That was inappropriate and the

• 2:17:16Speaker 03

  the gap between David and that that was was probably only two seconds, but it felt like about an hour to me. Uh, but anyway, he was fine. She's brilliant. Um, and that hospital, uh, you go up to, I've never been, I'm I'm digressing and I know we're short of time, but I went to, there's a football team in Wisconsin, Madison called the Badgers. And when when when the Madison Bad, Wisconsin Badgers or whatever, um. In the UK, our college sport is watched by six people. So we go to this this place in Wisconsin. There's like seventy five thousand people in the stadium. And it was it's for us, British people, it's just a huge eye opener to your college system and and how fantastic it is.

• 2:17:59Speaker 03

  And I love the fact that in your college games, people turn up. In the UK, people leave sports games at halftime because your team's losing. In America, people arrive at halftime so they can be drunk because they're not allowed to drink in the stadium. So it's the only place in the world where I've seen, and I've probably been to more football sports stadiums than most in the world. You your college games, this is the only place I know where they fill up at halftime rather than people leave at halftime. And the people that arrive are all drunk. It's fantastic.

• 2:18:28Tim Ferriss?

  David, I think it's probably a good point. To put a bookmark in conversation number one on the podcast, I think it would be fun to have another if you're up for it at some point. We certainly have lots and lots and lots of ground that we could cover, topics to explore and so on. But is there anything that you would like to say before we close? And where can people best find you and your work, learn more about you on the internet?

• 2:18:58Speaker 03

  My website is David Yarrow Photography. We show in galleries in America and in Europe and a little bit in the Far East. But on Instagram, we've got a recent presence on Instagram. My favorite story is a metaphor to my career is the one that you'll know well of Thomas Edison, when he's trying to create permanent light and he fails for the umpteenth time, yet another time. And they have a press conference and one of the

• 2:19:37Speaker 03

  young journalists at the front says, Mr. Edison, you seem to have failed again to create permanent light. You've been trying this for five years and it feels like we've made no progress at all. And Edison replies, on the contrary, young man, I've learned a hundred ways how not to create permanent light. And there is an element in terms in my work with all animals in that by learning how to get it wrong, we've learned how to get it right. I mean, with the pictures we've managed to take with mountain gorillas in Rwanda, with lions in Africa, with polar bears in Alaska or Norway, with orangutans,

• 2:20:20Speaker 03

  with the biggest elephants in the world. It is by an iterative relationship between taking a picture, recognizing its inherent weaknesses, and the areas where we can quite plausibly improve. That you get towards the kind of work you're looking for. I don't think that process is any different from what you do or what ninety nine percent of people do is how determined you are that uh to fulfill that virtuous circle upwards of just saying, no, we need to get better at that bit or this bit or whatever. And sometimes people say, the easiest question I could ask him is, well, you know, what's your best picture?

• 2:21:04Speaker 03

  And of course, the answer is, it hasn't been taken yet. Because if you if you feel that it was taken in two thousand and thirteen, how dispiriting that seven years ago, you took your greatest picture. I would hope that when um all this dreadful virus repercussions for people, which we've been blessedly unaffected, um comes to its denouement, that I'll go out and I'll take far better pictures than ever taken before. Well, what's the point of believing anything else? Gotta gotta gotta believe that your best work's ahead of you. Um, this this podcast will be a blip in your bottom left to top right, perfect linear upward trajectory of your podcast.

• 2:21:49Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, I wouldn't, I feel strange saying, I hope this is a blip, but I certainly hope that my best work is ahead of me. I agree with you that there's a there's a strong case for optimism, uh, because what other choice do you have? In a lot of respects, it doesn't mean you're not practical. It doesn't mean you don't learn from your mistakes. But especially in times like these, if you don't have some glimmer of hope, I think you don't just lose your morale, but you also lose your ability to to plan in in many cases, if there isn't a future worth looking forward to that you can imagine. So.

• 2:22:29Speaker 03

  There's a there's a wonderful line in um talking about Tom Hanks films, uh, Bridge of Spies. Um, and you remember Mark Rylance, who pays the uh the the spy in Russia? And uh, when he's imprisoned, one of the the Russian spy in America, and and when Tom Hanks uh interviews him in the cell for the first time, Tom Hanks says, um, do you understand the severity of the circumstances that are currently upon you? And he replies. What if I did, would it make me feel any better? And I think that's quite apposite for this time that you have to, you have to be an optimist.

• 2:23:13Speaker 03

  You have to look, you have to believe in the world improving at some stage. Um, and if we were to examining of just how miserable this is right now for, from every facet of society and business and finance, it's going to make for a fairly miserable evening. So one would hope that you just got to look over, over the hill a little bit.

• 2:23:38Tim Ferriss?

  Bridge of Spies is a great movie and that scene, if we dig into it a little bit more, because it is all, it is one of my favorite scenes. He, he asks him if he understands the severity. And the, the Russian spy has been caught by the, by the, by the, by the US government says, yes, and then the Tom Hanks character asks, aren't you worried? And he says, would it help in response? So he's full.

• 2:24:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, you've articulated much better than me.

• 2:24:08Tim Ferriss?

  No, but you, but you brought, but you brought it up. And the lesson is, I think, very apropos of the moment that we, we find ourselves in. And that is you can be informed to the extent that it's relevant to your lives and actionable. You can be aware without being paralyzed by pessimism and worry. Not to say that I don't struggle, I have struggled in the last few weeks. But it is in fact possible to be aware and informed without being paralyzed. And that, that's something that I'm certainly striving for myself. And so I, to that end, I appreciate the, the reminder. It is a fantastic scene.

• 2:24:53Tim Ferriss?

  And David, this has been such a pleasure. I, I really appreciate you taking the time, especially during these times.

• 2:25:01Speaker 03

  You are, you are, you're an example and an inspiration to so many people and I'm very flattered to occupy your extraordinary mind for a brief period of time and hopefully we can, we can, we can just add to it when, when it's issued, but I'm very flattered and humbled to be part of this exchange.

• 2:25:22Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely, and one, one final question, when you got hammered in celebration after you were represented by your Palm Beach man with no name tastemaker, what was your drink of choice or drinks of choice for that evening?

• 2:25:41Speaker 03

  I think it would have been quite a, quite a big range, it would take up another 20 minutes to discuss the, its breadth, but I think the thing is, if you're Scottish, you, you live under this belief that there's a mass conspiracy around the rest of the world to conceal how wonderful the nation is and it just hasn't got out. So when we, when we go abroad and we go to America, we just have to, we have to drink a lot of Scotch, a lot of single malt Scotch, and then talk to the barman that we're actually, that's where we're from. It's my, it's my ode to patriotism. So I like a good Scotch and maybe when I'm in Austin, we can, we can share a Scotch.

• 2:26:25Tim Ferriss?

  Deal, I would love to do that. And David, again, thank you for the time, to be continued. And for everybody listening, thank you for tuning in, be safe out there, practice well, hold yourselves to a high standard, but try to be forgiving also if you struggle during these times in particular. And I will include links to everything we've discussed, including all of David's work that we can link to without violating any types of intellectual property. And we will, we'll showcase everything that we talked about in this conversation at tim.blog/podcast where you'll be able to find the show notes alongside show notes for every other episode. And until next time, thanks for listening.

• 2:27:13Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 2:27:55Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom. It's a whole new world out there and we're all facing new challenges. You may need legal help to overcome some of yours and that's where LegalZoom fits in. Maybe you've been wondering about the best way to protect your family or maybe you're thinking about starting a business, but you don't know the best way to do it. Don't let legal questions hold you back. LegalZoom has been dedicated to helping you find the right solutions for nearly 20 years. If you're looking to protect your family with a will or a living trust or something

• 2:28:39Tim Ferriss?

  else, or you're thinking about the right way to start a business with an LLC, nonprofit or more, LegalZoom's got you covered. It's easy to get started online and if you need guidance, their network of attorneys can provide advice to ensure you make the right choices. And since LegalZoom isn't a law firm, you won't get charged by an hour. So check it out. Visit LegalZoom.com today to take care of the important things that need to get done. That's LegalZoom.com. LegalZoom, where life meets legal. This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market. Thrive Market saves me a ton of money and it's perfect for these crazy times. Thrive Market is a membership-based site on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone. You can regularly save 25 to 50% off of normal retail prices with member-only prices for

• 2:29:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:30:07Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:30:51Tim Ferriss?

  So go to ThriveMarket.com/Tim to give Thrive Market a try. You can, like I said, choose between the membership models you'd like to test out. If it doesn't work for you, you can cancel for any reason within 30 days for a full refund. And on top of that, you will make back your membership and savings, as I have, or they give you credits to make up for the difference. So it's really win-win-win all And I would suggest check it out. Go to thrive market.com forward slash Tim. You can receive up to $20 in shopping credit. That's thrive market.com forward slash Tim for up to $20 in shopping credit. Plus all of the other great stuff that I mentioned. One more time, check it out. Thrive market.com forward slash Tim.