#759: Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Todd McFarlane

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #691 "Nassim Nicholas Taleb & Scott Patterson — How Traders Make Billions in The New Age of Crisis, Defending Against Silent Risks, Personal Independence, Skepticism Where It (Really) Counts, The Bishop and The Economist, and Much More https://tim.blog/2023/09/07/nassim-nicholas-taleb-scott-patterson/" and #639 "Todd McFarlane, Legendary Comic Book Artist — How to Make Iconic Art, Reinvent Spider-Man, Live Life on Your Own Terms, and Meet Every Deadline https://tim.blog/2022/11/30/todd-mcfarlane/." Please enjoy! Sponsors: Momentous https://livemomentous.com/tim high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off) Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra https://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save $350 on the Pod 4 Ultra) LMNT https://drinklmnt.com/tim electrolyte supplement: https://drinklmnt.com/Tim (free LMNT sample pack with any drink mix purchase) Timestamps: [00:00] Start [04:51] Notes about this supercombo format. [05:54] Enter Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Scott Patterson. [06:32] The joy of writing a preemptive resignation letter. [07:13] Developing resilience against criticism. [10:04] Nassim: contrarian, or simply independent? [12:27] Jiving with skeptical turkeys. [17:21] Persisting through the polycrisis. [19:18] Introducing the precautionary principle. [21:37] Nassim's preferred legacy. [23:50] Precautionary principle 101. [25:14] Fat tails, thin tails, the COVID vaccine, and GMOs. [32:51] Enter Todd McFarlane. [33:21] Baseball. [38:46] Rejection letters. [42:38] Compelling storytelling and meeting deadlines. [45:46] Deadlines pre-Internet vs. deadlines today. [48:36] How industry status quo led to the founding of Image Comic Books. [1:00:30] The Comics Code and the last straw. [1:06:52] The Marvel Dream Team exodus. [1:25:13] How is Todd's camel bladder a competitive advantage? [1:31:02] Career bouncing and double-shifting as a penciler and inker. [1:49:08] The happy accident of Venom. [1:55:46] De-Rockwelling the company icon and inventing "spaghetti webbing." [2:03:31] Bucking the status quo to become the status quo. [2:07:13] Parting thoughts and a promise for round two. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike, and I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it. Or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, et cetera, another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb, or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough.

• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low. But suffice to say, this is where Element, again spelled L-M-N-T, can help. My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which, as a side note, you can also use to make a kick-ass, no-sugar margarita. But for special occasions, obviously. You're probably already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created Element by scratching his own itch. That's how it got started. His Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer. Things clicked and bam, company was born.

• 1:27Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded. There's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite athlete friends, three Navy SEAL teams as prescribed by their Master Chief, Marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA Weightlifting and on and on. You can try it risk-free. If you don't like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have extremely low return rates. Get your free sample pack with any Element purchase at drinklmnt.com/tim.

• 2:12Tim Ferriss?

  Be sure to also try the new Element Sparkling, a bold 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Again, check it all out. Drinkelement.com/tim. Drinklmnt.com/tim.

• 2:30Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. I have been using Eight Sleep Pod cover for years now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top, like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod, and I'm excited to test it out. Pod 4 Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically. More on that in a second. First, Pod 4 Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool even in a heatwave. Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heat sensitive. I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets off, closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down. This solves all of that.

• 3:14Tim Ferriss?

  Pod 4 Ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience. And for those snore-heavy nights, the pod can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner from snoring. Plus, with the Pod 4 Ultra, you can leave your wearables on the nightstand. You won't need them because these types of metrics are integrated into the Pod 4 Ultra itself. They have imperceptible sensors which track your sleep time, sleep phases, and HRV. Their heart rate tracking, as just one example, is at 99% accuracy. So get your best night's sleep. Head to eightsleep.com/tim and use code TIM to get $350 off of the Pod 4 Ultra.

• 3:57Tim Ferriss?

  That's Eight Sleep, all spelled out, eightsleep.com/tim, and code TIM, T-I-M, to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question?

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Now is the appropriate time.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:35Tim 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 sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes, and internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage

• 5:18Tim Ferriss?

  you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser-known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog/combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy, and thank you for listening.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  First up, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, bestselling author of Anti-Fragile, The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, The Bed of Procrustes, and Skin in the Game. Nassim is joined in this conversation by Scott Patterson, Wall Street Journal investigative reporter and author of Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis. You can find Nassim on Twitter @NNTaleb, and you can find Scott on Twitter @PattersonScott.

• 6:32Tim Ferriss?

  Is it true that you wrote a resignation letter your first day at a trading job and put it in your desk drawer? I read this on the internet. I don't know if it's true. You can't believe everything you read, but it was from The Guardian, so I thought it might be credible.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  One thing is actually, as I said, I recommend people do that. I wrote that not on the day I started, but I recommended that people, because you feel relief when you do it, because then you can continue on your job without feeling like someone's controlling you.

• 7:02Tim Ferriss?

  You've got the gun loaded.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  The whole idea, Flandre, how you thought about that problem. So you write the resignation letter and you don't date it.

• 7:13Tim Ferriss?

  I'm very fascinated by your ways of thinking, the way that you've embraced different philosophies. And you emailed me an aphorism in 2010. And you can correct me if I get any of the wording wrong, but it stuck with me. This is in 2010. Here's the aphorism or the quote. "Robustness is when you care more about the few who like your work than the multitude who hates it." And then in parentheses, "Artists." "Fragility is when you care more about the few who hate your work than the multitude who loves it." And then in quotation marks, "Politicians." Have you always had that type of robustness or resilience against criticism? Is that something that is inborn?

• 7:57Speaker 03

  Maybe because I was never really someone who took, you know, established ideas at face value. So you necessarily have, you know, violate some norms, some thinking norms. And often people protect those norms by, you know, attacking your reputation. And I realized that, well, riding food by randomness. I say, hey, saying that what I'm doing is random, we're using the wrong models, these don't work. So they attack your reputation. So I realized quickly it was time that my reputation was going to be under some kind of fire. And I decided that, no, my reputation is how few important people or people who know something about the subject.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  View me. And it's not like I don't care about my reputation. I only care about my reputation in some circles. And it was people I can talk to to try to explain what it's about. And it has worked out. So, but if you have to go defend your reputation and you're doing the right thing, it's too much energy wasted and it's not gonna help. Haters are gonna hate. This resembles another aphorism inspired by Charlie Munger's. One of Charlie Munger's is that you wanna be the most ethical person when people think that you're corrupt, or you wanna be the most corrupt person when people think that you're ethical. Make your choice and use it as guideline. It's the same thing.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  So, except there's something in between, is that there's some people I care about and I want them to not lose respect for me. Of course, you start with your mother, you have your children, or whatever, your family members. But there are also, there's a lot of people on the planet, and I care about my reputation, but in these circles, not with the general public. So it allows you to take much, much more aggressive positions, which I've done over a long life. And Mark, for example, has a lot of enemies, and they're gonna pick on something, and you don't care, so you're doing the right thing. And how do you know you're doing the right thing? If people you respect approve of your action, not if the general public does.

• 10:04Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the things that make us seem different or unique in those you've interacted with? I have some of my own questions and thoughts on this, but I would love to hear yours.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  He mentioned his contrarian nature.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  It's not a contrarian nature, it's independent.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  I'll let him answer.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  People say I'm contrarian. I'm with a conspiracy theorist on many things, I'm against him on many other things. Some are just contrarian because they have a father problem. So to me, contrarian is an explicit rather than attribute. So but the other thing is, I thought it's gonna be about me, it should be about the idea, the precaution.

• 10:42Tim Ferriss?

  He's a lot more interested in literature and philosophy and not financial markets. It's just this thing that drives him. He doesn't look at the stock market page, you know, every day like some people do. He's

• 10:56Speaker 03

  You had to figure out what people envious of. So, you know, if you're in a hedge fund business and you have $500 million in a bank and someone else has $600 million, you're gonna be envious of that person. I was always envious of people had more erudition than me. Okay, so more erudite. And you realize that that's what makes me tick. Being envious is not good, you see. But at the same time, if you figure out who you tend to envy. I don't believe in this, say, oh, people having enough. There's someone here from East Hampton, the fellow who wrote Catch 22.

• 11:30Tim Ferriss?

  Lot of interesting folks out there.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, he met a financier at the time for hedge funds. And the financier said, what is it that about you? Because he was an author, a very successful one. What is it that distinguishes you from me? He told him, I know the meaning of enough. So in other words, you know, you're upper bound. And effectively, I don't play that game. Meaning I am literally, and I say envious of people who are erudite. Like if someone knows Latin very well, I'm envious. If someone knows Sanskrit, I'm envious, right? And I discovered that early on. So I made money on Wall Street because I wanted to make money on Wall Street, but I didn't think it was worth the effort.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  And luckily, it was a combination with Univerza. I had so much leverage, you know, with marketing and all that stuff. So the spillover on me was more than satisfactory. So I have, knock on wood, a lot more than I wished.

• 12:27Tim Ferriss?

  So part of the reason I'm asking, we're talking about the ideas, but the person who's acting as the vessel or communicator of these ideas, the developer of these ideas is integrally related to, I think, the sort of totality that I want to explore. So part of what interests me about your story and your thinking is how various inputs have impacted your thinking around not just markets, but other things. For instance, like the Stoics and the cynically younger and so on, or other philosophical inputs. Did those Come early and then aid you, you think, in your career when you're active in the markets? Or did those come later and you sort of always had a deep interest, but were able to explore them?

• 13:12Speaker 03

  You know, it's actually, I was, I started liking the Stoics and other people I've talked about, I liked them much early on in my life. But I went overboard. For every idea I've had, I did the exact opposite of what one should do is like, if you had an idea, say, oh, I had this idea. Right. Because I don't consider myself so different from others. And then particularly when you look at history, there's so many tens of thousands of scholars surviving works. So I went back and figured out of these scholars, who had similar ideas or who preceded the ideas. So and who started thinking like that. So I went into the empirics, the

• 13:52Speaker 03

  Eastern Mediterranean Greco-Leventine, Greco-Roman, mostly using Greek language thinkers. And then of course, to others, this fundamental skepticism, because I noticed a lot of people are skeptical, particularly conspiracy theorists. They're skeptical of small things, but not about big ones. All right. They get taken for a ride. It's find me a conspiracy theorist or find me someone who's naturally skeptic of all things and I'll show you a turkey. So I wanted to find people who are fundamentally skeptic, be skeptic, be skeptic about important things, not about small things.

• 14:25Tim Ferriss?

  What would be an example of a big thing?

• 14:28Speaker 03

  Let me give you an example. I wrote a paper, it never ended up in a book, on the stock market and religion. All right. It's called The Bishop and the Economist. And I said that those who are skeptical about the existence of God and not of this of God, skeptical about religious matters, typically tend to be complete suckers when it comes to stocks. They believe in the stock market or believe in some kind of pseudo scientific theory on whatever it is. Okay. So, but they don't believe in religion and the reverse. All right. And people who are religious typically, they're harder and there's some, I don't know, research on that. There's a guy called Barlahmi, Harlahmi, Barhalahmi, I think, who did some. Studies about skepticism, people go to religion about affairs, skepticism where it matters.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  And I wrote about it, I think, in The Black Swan, skepticism where it matters. And I noticed that a lot of these big skeptics were not skeptical of God and things, anything you can't do anything about. They were skeptical of the charlatan, they're skeptical of someone trying to take advantage of you. That's where you exercise your skepticism. Among the great skeptics, there is a bishop, he was probably one of the second most erudite person of his time. Second one, there's a guy called Scaliger, the guy is phenomenal, he could translate into Arabic Roman authors, Latin authors, and vice versa, okay, Scaliger, Scaligeri. There are a lot of, Pierre Bael, Pierre Bael has a lot of works, he's one of those skeptics.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Hume was one of those skeptics, but these people preceded Hume. Hume is known because he wrote in a language of a country that had a lot of ships and a lot of trade, you know, across the world. But a lot of these ideas came from groups of people in France or among Protestants in France, what's called the Fideists. Originates, of course, in the Levant, and of course, you have the great Al Gazal, the Islamic theologian, Iranian origin, who definitely was showing you how all these arguments are weak, you know, could dismantle arguments. By showing you could be skeptical about human arguments about God.

• 16:36Speaker 04

  I think Spinoza is coming out of that same tradition.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  He was skeptical about the text that was, these people say, okay, transcend these texts, okay, be skeptical about things that really matter. And there was actually a skeptical school of medicine, practicing medicine. So what, I went back through history, every time I had an idea, I would go back and see in history who preceded me. And sure enough, I haven't done enough because every year or so, I get a letter from someone, hey, how come you missed so and so? Okay, and sure enough, I go back to the inserto and I add that person. And this is why it has survived, the five books, the inserto. But we're not here to talk about these five books, but this book.

• 17:21Tim Ferriss?

  Well, we're going to talk about whatever comes up, but I do want to hop over to you, Scott, and maybe discuss something that you had shared with me as a possible bullet in the prep stages for this conversation, which is related to Polycrisis and the new age of crisis. What does this refer to?

• 17:42Speaker 04

  It's the subtitle of my book. Most people have focused on the first part of the subtitle is how Wall Street traders make billions. Second part is in the new age of crisis. I feel like that hasn't gotten that much attention, but part of what I'm trying to argue is that we are seeing a magnification of extreme events accelerating and overlapping. There's an economist, Adam Toose, who's coined a phrase called the Polycrisis, which he says these crises that are happening on a global scale are interacting in ways that the whole becomes greater and worse than the sum of the parts. So you've got pandemics, you've

• 18:24Speaker 04

  got economic instability, financial crises, climate change, which is a big focus of mine in my daily job at the Journal, which I think is sort of the big one in terms of the ever magnification of crises that we're seeing. We're seeing it in the news every day. And what I wanted to do in the, in the book is look at several of these crises and think about how we should be approaching them in a sort of a risk mitigation standpoint, using ideas from people like Nassim. I think that the central idea was, as I was talking about

• 19:03Speaker 04

  the germ of the idea of the book was, can you take ideas that were created on Wall Street for risk mitigation and borrow those and apply those to other forms of risk management? And what Nassim and Mark do is they think about the extreme events and how to protect against them. Nassim co-wrote a paper about this exact issue called The precautionary principle, it delineates specific categories of risk that you should take the precautionary principle and apply to. He has some specific ideas and he can talk about it way better than I can. But you know, these are things that can be global, that represent systemic

• 19:48Speaker 04

  risk to humanity, things that can be exponential.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Must be fat tail.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, exponential things that have these properties that you need to take extreme precaution and not take that risk. Basically, don't play Russian roulette with these risks. And that's kind of how the book was structured was first looking at the, the growth of the strategy with Mark and Nassim and then moving on to these other things that the world is facing and seeing if we could think about ways to protect against these risks. Something like climate change, you don't really want to mess with that. You know, it's a bit too late, but there's still lots of things that we can do. And that's, I think, the book in a nutshell. I was going to mention earlier, when you asked me about the birth of the idea of the book, when I first suggested it to

• 20:37Speaker 04

  Nassim and Mark, Nassim said, no way, I'm not, I have no interest in doing that with you. It took a while.

• 20:44Tim Ferriss?

  And then you were like, I have these black and white photos you might want to take a look at. So I had you convinced me to do it.

• 20:50Speaker 04

  It was, uh, it warmed down. I think it was more Mark put the screws on.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  No, no, no, let me tell you what happened.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  I actually don't know. I know that eventually he said.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  The promise from him to not be portrayed to mention that I don't self identify as a finance person. And once he made that promise, said, okay, now we can talk because finance represents a significant part of my life. But I don't want.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  Been a theme with Nassim ever since I've known him. So to me, it was like.

• 21:23Tim Ferriss?

  The identity piece.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, that he's not a trader. And I, and I thought I agreed because it's true. It's, he's not been a trader for a long, long time. And it's obvious where, you know, where his interests are.

• 21:37Tim Ferriss?

  And what would it mean or feel like for you to be broadly identified as a finance person, but to think of yourself more as a scholar?

• 21:46Speaker 03

  I wrote about it in Food by Randomness. George Soros, I met George Soros. One of the persons on the planet who impressed me the most, one of those. And I realized that George Soros missed his career. He wanted to be a philosopher and thinker. Okay, he ended up making money and spending too much time in it and wrote junk articles and books. Or one book.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  So, yeah, it was not, it was not, not what he wanted out of life. Okay, he's a Middle European intellectual who would have liked to be remembered as someone for, well, ideas. And he envied, of course, Karl Popper, who he claims was his professor, but it was beyond. So I wrote about it for my randomness. I said, here's this fellow who is, say, okay, but he also does to distinguish himself from other financiers. He's also, or has intellectual aims. I said, I don't want to be that. I want to be someone who produces intellectual work and who happens to have had contact with reality. Thanks to trading and thanks to Mark, guys, I'm still have some contact with reality.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  But I'm not cut for that. When I was writing for my randomness, it was 2019 that I realized I was not, I don't want to be like Soros. Because unlike Buffett and the other people, Soros had an identity crisis. He wants to be known as a philosopher. Okay, so life took control of him.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  Buffett told me he wanted to write a book. I used to cover him and I was leaving the journal at the time to write my second book. And he was like, oh, I really always wanted to write a book. Yeah, never got around to it. So there you go with, you know, the Oracle of Omaha.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 04

  He wants to be thought of as an intellectual too, but.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, this is not the same. The Savior of Omaha has something that I didn't put in a precautionary principle. But that's probably very inspiring because he understood the asymmetry. If you say no a thousand times, he says no if you doubt. And that's the precaution principle.

• 23:50Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give people the precautionary principle one on one, just to back up?

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Okay, let me ask you. You're the Ferris flying to go to Mexico. You go to JFK and they tell you they have uncertainty about the skills of the pilot. But we think he's good, but there's uncertainty. What do you do? You're not gonna get on that plane. You say, okay, life is too important for me. You'll take a train, you walk, maybe you ride a bicycle, you know, take a few months, but you're not gonna get on that plane. Okay, you change your plans and say, okay, there are other plans or other countries to and other planes. So that's Warren Buffett and his investments. And that's my precautionary principle, the idea that there's an asymmetry. Is that uncertainty about certain things is not good. So the climate, for example, if you have uncertainty about the climate,

• 24:39Speaker 03

  stop these models, all right? Just don't pollute. You gotta try to use something else, try to mitigate. So that's the first part of it. People get it right away when I give them a story of a plane or I take water. So this is last water on the table. There's no evidence that it's poisonous. Would you drink it?

• 24:57Tim Ferriss?

  The wording would spook me.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  There is no evidence that so, but when you tell them, hey, you know, you should worry about GMOs, this is there's no evidence they're harmful. Yeah, but there's no evidence that they're not harmful. Okay. So the asymmetry, where you put the burden of the asymmetry on, that's the precautionary principle. But then what we did is we've noticed a lot of people, in fact, it was a counter precautionary principle. A lot of people were invoking it for nothing to say, we're gonna have a non naive precautionary principle by delineating the areas where you should exercise such precaution, systematically as a planet or as a communal group. And what I'll say, number one, you need fat tails. Now, what does fat tail mean? Let me explain to you.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Let's say you go to planet Mars. Okay, Elon would help you get there. You have connection and you have no news from Earth. And then on the way back, you hear that a billion people died. Okay. Which one is more likely to be the cause? Ebola?

• 26:01Speaker 03

  Or car accidents, Ebola. Now, on a given day, if you hear Joe Smith died today, what's more likely Ebola or a car accident? Car accident. Car accident, that's fat tails, fat tails. You had to identify, you do things backwards. If you hear the big thing, where did it come from? And you had to give these, okay? So they have different dynamics because they scale differently. So in the black swan, I showed the difference with the following metaphor. There are environments where you may have a large deviation. It's not going to be consequential because it can't be very big. So if I take a thousand people and put them on a scale and add to that sample, the largest human being confined on the planet,

• 26:45Speaker 03

  how much of the total will he or she represent? It's thirty basis point nothing, okay? And then if you go from a thousand to ten thousand, it dilutes completely. So you can have a tail event that's not going to be consequential. Extremistan is different. Extremistan, if you gather a thousand people and add to that sample, the wealthiest person on the planet, how much of the total will he or she represent? All of it. There'd be a running error, there'd be a running error. I mean, they'd be on average on the planet Earth, all right? They'd be in total, maybe they have two or three million in total, and then you have hundred and some billion right next to it. So this is where you have to focus on environment that produces fat tails.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  And this is what marketed this universal mechanism that generates fat tails. That was the name of the car. So everything, we're in it, basically intellectually, everything, all details. So you have to identify what produces fat tails in the financial markets and why it's getting thicker. Fat tails means that you have the greatest contribution comes from smallest number of events. So concentration, like for example, you have a lot of people, all the wealth comes from one person. It so happened that. Under fat tails, the models that we use for risk management on Wall Street, RBS. This is why I have a lot of enemies. This is why I have to protect myself against reputational damage. All right.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  So because all the economists say to me, all their models are based on that. So what is fat tail? Practically everything in socioeconomic life is fat tail. What is not fat tail? Number of calories we're going to eat tonight. How many calories can we have in one day tonight?

• 28:21Tim Ferriss?

  We can only go for the gold. I'd say, I'd say we could each down a few thousand calories a piece.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  Two thousand, two thousand. Say I go three thousand for me. All right. I can play with fat and stuff. Three thousand, that's nothing. How many calories do I consume a year?

• 28:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  Not a single day is going to make a difference. Can you lose all your money in a single day?

• 28:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  There we go. So you have two environments and they're separable. So this is why the universal approach, it makes things separable. The fact that you can identify what is fat tail. You identify where models don't work. You can identify what you have to understand. And we have to use more refined tools to figure out stuff. And then also in fatness of tails, number one, pandemics. Number two, wars, I have a close, close second, wars and pandemics. Okay.

• 29:06Tim Ferriss?

  And so you can use that to prioritize application of the precautionary principle?

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Bingo. And let me tell you how. For example, if cancer is thin tails, nuclear is thin tail. If you could diversify it, it's in tails. If you can have a thousand nuclear reactors, all right? If you can insure it, or rather than one, it is thin tail. If you can insure it, thin tail. If you can't insure it, non-insurable, fat tails. So there are a lot of things that are believed to be very risky, but they're not like nuclear for me. I mean, not for one of my co-authors, but I'll settle it with a beer or what's the English?

• 29:45Speaker 04

  Rupert Reed is a co-author of, and also a major character in the book. He's a very environmentally focused person. He's a leader in climate these days. And yeah, he told me that's one thing that he disputed the precautionary principle paper with Nassim.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  Which was written with him first, drinking, you know, single malt scotch and then English, in an English pub in somewhere in Northern England. Where the portions are like smaller than what they give you for espresso in Italy. You know, the espresso, like you sip them. So we had to have like, again, it's like you and the eggs, all right? So to go back to the insurable, we don't have to worry about it. And a very simple example I give, that when Ebola started, or later on, when COVID started, people were using the arguments, yeah, you know, 3,000 Americans die every year drowning in a swimming pool. That was something by a guy called Dr. Phil. Should we shut down pools? At a time, less than a thousand Americans had died of COVID. And then I followed this, presented the following argument.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  I said, if I die drowning in a swimming pool, my neighbor drowning in her or his swimming pool has not changed. If I die of COVID, the odds of my neighbor dying of COVID has increased. So you have that transmission that makes it fat tail, that mechanism of transmission. So this is why you cannot compare as basically the press in the beginning, the so-called established press was against our ideas. Because they was racist against China, they could not distinguish between risks of car accidents and heart attacks and risks of things spreading. This is why, for example, I am in favor of vaccines, the risk is thin-tailed, and I'm against GMOs because they spread in the environment.

• 31:34Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Momentous. Momentus offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now and I have a few that I use constantly. Personally, I've been using Momentous Mag 3-8, L-theanine, and apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Momentous Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast,

• 32:18Tim Ferriss?

  like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrett. Their products contain high-quality ingredients that are third-party tested, which in this case means informed Sport and/or NSF certified, so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. So, check it out. Visit livemomentous.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout for 20% off. That's live momentus, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash TIM, and code TIM for 20% off.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  And now, Todd McFarlane, Emmy and Grammy-winning director and producer, co-creator of Marvel's top villain Venom, co-founder of Image Comics, and creator of Spawn, one of the world's best-selling comic books, and one that earned Todd the Guinness World Record for longest-running, creator-owned superhero comic book series. You can find Todd on Instagram, @ToddMcFarlane.

• 33:21Tim Ferriss?

  Todd, welcome to the show. Nice to see you.

• 33:24Speaker 05

  Tim, thanks for having me this morning. Appreciate it.

• 33:26Tim Ferriss?

  And I thought we could start with a confession on my side, which is, ever since I was a kid, and to this day, I still have a poster of The Incredible Hulk, number 340, Grey Hulk versus Wolverine, that features your artwork. And I am a longtime collector and fan of your work. So, it's exciting to have you here, and I'm excited to dig into all sorts of things. And I thought we would begin, and this might be a dead end, we'll see where it goes, but asking about how baseball informed your approach to art and comics, if at all, if those two things tie together for you.

• 34:07Speaker 05

  So, here's what I would say about that, and I'll give you a little bit of back history. I would say it informed me more on the eventual business side.

• 34:17Speaker 05

  The competitiveness on the business side. So it's always interesting when you do certain interviews or with people. I always sort of think that sometimes interviews are like laying on a psychologist couch. And they're like, Todd, why are you like that? What drives you? Here's the answer to that question. So we can get that out of the way. I think it was the day I came out of the womb and it was in my DNA. There's not a single day I don't recall not being Todd. So what is natural for me, I guess, for other people, because I now understand as I get older, their personalities, that my personality has been baked every day of my life. And it's not an effort to do what I've done in life. Right?

• 34:59Speaker 05

  So people go, oh, my God, you're so tenacious and you go up against people and you're such a rebel. And you, you fight for what you believe in. Of course, there's no other option in my brain. So it's not, I'm not fighting. I just, there's no other option. So it's just a natural progression on where I want to go. But I would argue that whatever that DNA is, got enhanced with two things. One, I had a brother that was a year older and one a year younger. And then you get three boys together. What are you talking about? Every day was a competition. Who could eat the cereal the fastest? Who could jump the most steps down? Who could run to school the fastest? What are you talking about? Everything is a competition.

• 35:39Speaker 05

  And then you take that and eventually, I was never going to go to university. I remember being in class when they brought in high school. They brought the recruit in the college and they sort of talked and I go, well, I'm not going. So I'll just put my head down and continue drawing because I was always doodling. And then somebody tapped me on the shoulder, I remember, and they went, son, why is your arm not raised? And I'm like, what? Like, I wasn't even paying attention sadly. And I go, well, what was the question? They go, well, who wants to go to college? And I looked up and every single person in my class had their arm up. Now, that's okay. But I looked at the two sort of druggies that I know, because I'm friends with all of them. And I'm looking at them going.

• 36:24Speaker 05

  What are you talking about? You're not going to college. You got Fs like across the board. You might even drop out in grade 12. So anyways, I gave him my reason, which is, I don't enjoy education. And so let's just convert it to broccoli. And let's say I don't like broccoli. Why would I then go and pay people money to eat more broccoli? Doesn't make much sense, does it? So I go, I'm not going. Now, did I go to college? Of course I did. Why? Because I'm an athlete. And so I played baseball, getting back to your question. And somebody offered me a scholarship to go to play baseball. So my last three years, I was on a Pac 10 baseball scholarship. And at some point, now you have to get sort

• 37:08Speaker 05

  of simplistic. If somebody's going to give you free education, I'm going to grab it. Did I want it? Not really. But if it's free, I'm going to grab it. And oddly, Tim, of the 25 guys on our team, only two of us graduated with a degree in four years. And the other guy was, I'm Canadian, the other guy was Canadian. I remember the coach going, because Canadians don't want to hustle as much in sports, right? Because we got a degree? Like, what are you talking about? It was free. And the reason I took it and I got it done for free, because the dumb athlete was alive and well, but they're not really dumb. They just don't go to class. And if you don't go to class, you don't get your marks. And if you don't get your marks, then eventually you don't get your degree. Here's the funny thing about that. Somebody is offering you a free degree,

• 37:53Speaker 05

  and 23 of my teammates decided they wouldn't get it in four years. So either they would never get a degree, or, gun to my head, this is weird, they're going to come back and pay to finish it. I go, finish it? The buffet was open the whole time you were there, and you chose not to eat? Like, oh, my gosh. So if nothing else, given that I'm sort of a cheapskate, I'm going, if they're going to give it to me for free, I'm not paying another penny to come back here. I'll take that degree. So I got my degree, and I was off to the races. Now, between the baseball, which is competitive, and my brothers, then all of a sudden, three weeks before I graduate, I end up getting my first job in comic books.

• 38:35Speaker 05

  And all of that sort of made me a freelancer, and I had to begin taking care of myself. And it's like, okay, it's just another game, another game of competition.

• 38:46Tim Ferriss?

  First job in comic books, you've posted, I want to say photographs of 350 or so rejection letters.

• 38:54Tim Ferriss?

  When did you first start sending those out? And did you get any particularly helpful feedback that allowed you to modify things? So that you were able to get that first job?

• 39:05Speaker 05

  Yes, so let's go through it real quick. Did I get over 300 rejections? Yes. Is that tenacious? Is that determination? Or is that delusion? Like, how many? Like, at what point do you say, I'm going to be an opera singer? And that, and you, people keep giving you nose and you go, man, look at how determined is it? What point do you say, maybe I just can't sing opera?

• 39:28Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 39:28Speaker 05

  But again, so there's a fine line. People give me way too much credit for those 300. I think a normal sane person with sort of less enthusiasm, we'll leave it at that word, than me would have probably at 200 rejections, found another option to make money. But the reason I was able to assimilate that many rejections was because I was going to college. So I was sending off samples almost continuously while I was in, in school. So it's like, I didn't have a job. I was going to school. So I didn't care. I had four years to basically try and get a job. And then it probably at the end of those four years, I was going to look at that pile and say, maybe I need to find something else. My degree is, I thought is in graphic designing.

• 40:13Speaker 05

  And I thought I was going to be the guy who's going to do Michelin tire ads. I go, that's okay. It's an admirable job, but you know, it's a graphic designer. That was sort of where I thought the reality of it was going to be. But three weeks before I graduate, I get my first job. And how did I get it? By sending literally 700 samples over the course of those four years. And just on one level, I think I just wore them out. Cause I sent it to every editor at every company. They used to have, let's say at Marvel, because my first job was at Marvel. They have like one submission editor. No, no, no, no, no. The people who give you the work are the editors and they have 16 editors. So I would send it to all 16 editors. Ultimately, I went around the submission guy.

• 40:59Speaker 05

  I just went, what? You gotta give it to the editors anyways. Might as well send it directly to the editors. So I would keep sending it to the editors over and over and over to every company, every editor. And I think, Tim, in hindsight, I think that they probably had a board meeting or whatever, one of those Monday morning meetings. And they just said something like, and I'm making this up, but said, oh, for the love of God, that Todd kid. That punk that keeps sending us, we keep getting like a box of mail from this guy every two weeks, would somebody in this room give him a couple pages? Just so we don't have to open up his mail every two weeks. I think I just, I think I just wore them out. And I got the job literally three weeks before I graduated. So I never even had to use my degree. What informed me in those?

• 41:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 41:45Speaker 05

  It was all constructive criticism. Let me tell you, because people say, oh, Todd, you got the last laugh. No, no, no. Everything they put in those letters was constructive criticism because the people just thought that I was not very good through my portfolio, my samples and the garbage. So everybody who took the time to write back actually gave a little bit of insight. And so what I would do, they didn't know it was actually going to keep me fueled, is that I would take that insight and then redo another batch and send it to everybody again. So, you know, where I was making 20 mistakes, eventually it got down to 18 and then 16 and then 15.

• 42:26Speaker 05

  And I think probably when I was at six mistakes, I think they finally said, hey, he's getting better. He's not perfect and he seems to be enthusiastic. So somebody give him a chance, see what he can do.

• 42:38Tim Ferriss?

  So for people who don't have any familiarity with comic books, penciling, anything along these lines, what were some of the things you were getting feedback on and getting better at? And I suppose this list leads into the question, like, what does it look like as a comic book artist to get better? What are you getting better at? Maybe that sounds like a silly question, but I'll give it a shot.

• 42:58Speaker 05

  There's two things that I think make a good artist in the comic book industry. One is just pure drawing skills, right? So there are hundreds and not thousands of people who can draw circles around me. If you can just draw pretty pictures, you can go a long way. The second piece is storytelling. And if you can do great storytelling and be average drawer, you're still going to have a pretty good career because people then will be entertained by everything you do. So I'll use an example and I hope, because I'm friends with him, I hope he doesn't take it. Frank Miller is a great, great storyteller. He's the one that wrote The Dark Knight for Batman.

• 43:42Speaker 05

  He's the one that, you know, created 300 that ended up getting turned into a movie and Sin City and all these things. He rejuvenated dead characters like Daredevil.

• 43:53Speaker 05

  I wouldn't say, and I think Frank would agree, that he's not the best anatomically correct artist and his drawings don't get every muscle right. What he does is he tells stories better than anybody else in our industry, period. So he could do it with Stickman and you would still be engaged because of his writing, the way he does it and what's happening in it. So Frank has been able to take that storytelling, which to me, as I've gotten older, is way more important than whether you've got flashy lines. I came in as a kid who wanted to do flashy lines because it would, people go, oh my God, look at all the detail he's doing.

• 44:32Speaker 05

  But then I found out that really what they wanted was less flash and more clarity on the pages, right? You should be able to give a comic book to a non-comic book writer, go next door to your neighbor, give it to your mom, and at the end, they should be able to say, hmm, you know, not my cup of tea, I don't collect comic books, but that was kind of interesting because they understood what they were supposed to be reading and the sequence they were supposed to be reading it. And if you don't do that, you're no good in our industry. One more thing, if you can't keep a deadline, then you're for sure not good at anything. As a matter of fact, people who can keep a deadline in an industry that is driven by

• 45:13Speaker 05

  monthly deadlines can have long careers and not be very good at drawing because you have to get product out every 30 days. So go ahead, if you want to be the kid that's flashy and do a bunch of lines and take twice as long, but they're never going to give you a regular gig because you have to get books out on time, period, out.

• 45:35Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm embarrassed that I don't know this, but I never made it far enough.

• 45:39Speaker 05

  You can still lead a productive life, Tim. Don't worry about it.

• 45:42Tim Ferriss?

  I'm working on it. Working on the productive side. But what are the deliverables on a monthly basis? Are you shipping out a few pages at a time? Are they waiting until you have the entire book done, so to speak? What do the actual... Deadlines and deliverables look like for a full-time comic book artist?

• 46:01Speaker 05

  So it has shifted, as you can imagine, with technology.

• 46:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 46:05Speaker 05

  So the way that it used to work, and I'll age myself because I got into the business sort of pre-internet. I'd have to do my pages, take them to the, either phone FedEx, and they were called Federal Express at that point. And so I would have to phone Federal Express. When I use FedEx, my wife'd go, "Oh, you're so hip calling them FedEx." And eventually they caught on. So you'd phone FedEx, they'd either come and pick it up, or sometimes you would miss the call on their deadline. They were, the drivers were past. I was living in a remote area up in Canada, on an island in Canada. And so if I missed a driver, which is why I hired an assistant to help sort of pack it stuff up. He would drive to the airport, which was about an hour and 15 away, while I was finishing up pages. So I go, "Oh, I've got another hour."

• 46:50Speaker 05

  And then we'd drive to the airport. Do you know how many times I ran down the tarmac because it was a little sort of prop plane that flew to Vancouver, British Columbia? And they were, I think he was always looking over his shoulder going, "Todd'll be here in about two minutes." And I'd be running down the tarmac, and I'd basically throw my package to him and he'd get it done. Today, all of that's taken away because now you can scan your pages and hit a, literally a download. Boom, it's gone. It doesn't solve anything, Tim. Alls it means is you just get to push your luck with deadlines later and later. So let's give you an example currently happening. The biggest comic book that's going to come out this year in our industry is a book called Batman Spawn.

• 47:33Speaker 05

  So that goes to print, because I just talked to the people at DC Comics yesterday. It goes to print on Monday. You and I are talking on Friday. I still have to write, it's a 48-page book. I've only written eight pages. I've got to finish writing the 40 pages. There's 10 pages that haven't been colored. I literally talked to the person who does the word balloons after I give them the script to say, "Hey, sorry dude, we gotta both work." Pretty hard over the weekend. They're going to probably get the last pages at midnight on Sunday. They're going to look at it, make sure nobody, no pages are upside down or backwards. And then they're going to hit send and it's going to go to the printer and the printer's waiting. Cause when you've got a big print run, cause this can, like I said, it's going to be the biggest of this year.

• 48:18Speaker 05

  You can't swap out books and say, ah, we'll just swap out another book and you just substitute. Not of that magnitude. They've got lots of printer presses waiting for this one book. And it, we've got to deliver. So how does it work? By our chinny chin chin, like a lot of other things in the world, you just get it done.

• 48:36Tim Ferriss?

  So let me back up for a second. Cause I think I heard you correctly. Now you have delivered so many deadlines, even if you've chased down the plane on the tarmac. You've, you know how to train, obviously.

• 48:47Speaker 05

  I've missed the plane a couple of times.

• 48:48Tim Ferriss?

  You've missed the plane a couple of times. So this is a huge book, biggest in the industry of this year. Did I hear you correctly? That you said you have eight pages done out of 48? I guess I'm just wondering if you, what does that mean? Yeah. Writing wise. Okay. Wow.

• 49:04Speaker 05

  That means, Tim, I'll tell you what that means. That means before I talked to you this morning, I talked to my, what they call the letterer. The guy who actually converts your script into the word balloon. I talked to my letterer and go, dude, we're going all night tonight. I'm just every three pages I'm going to send to you. So it's going to be, I do three, I send it to him, he works on it. By the time he's done with those three, I feed him another three and we're just going to see how it works. And we'll get it done, Tim. We'll get it done.

• 49:33Tim Ferriss?

  I believe you.

• 49:34Speaker 05

  Like you said earlier, a couple of years ago, I set a record. I mean, Spawn is the longest running crater on book. We're up to issue 335. That's over 30 years of doing books. And now I do a monthly book every week. You just got it done. It's just like going to the gym. Every workout isn't awesome, but did you get your workout in? Yeah, sure.

• 49:54Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. By the hair of your chinny chin chin.

• 49:57Speaker 05

  But nobody knows on the other side. Nobody knows.

• 49:59Tim Ferriss?

  That's true.

• 49:59Speaker 05

  Everybody's going to look at that book and go, man, it is, look how professionally done it was.

• 50:07Tim Ferriss?

  So let's then come back to a word you used, which is important. And that is the longest running creator owned superhero comic book series. The creator owned piece. When and how did you decide to start Image Comics? Because I remember as a kid, I wanted to be a penciller for about 10 years. So I was, I was really tracking all of this. And then I was an illustrator in high school and then part of college. I actually had the, I was the graphics editor at a magazine where Jim Lee had been the previous graphics editor. So I had a

• 50:39Speaker 05

  Jim Lee's had a DC Comics.

• 50:42Tim Ferriss?

  And he had these sketches in the desk that he'd done after getting hammered in college. And I thought, these are just treasures at the time. So this is a lot of fun for me to explore. And I remember Image being a very big deal. So for people who have no context, can you explain why and when Image was founded? Because I think that's a big piece of the story.

• 51:04Speaker 05

  Look, and I assume that the majority of people listening don't collect comic books and whatever. So we'll keep it simple. Everybody knows Marvel and DC, everybody, right? If you ask the next natural question, huh? Who's number three? That has been Image Comic Books for 30 years. We were celebrating our 30th anniversary. So was the Spawn character because it came out that first year. And we've been number three for 30 consecutive years. As a matter of fact, those first couple of months we came out, we actually passed DC Comic Books. We were number two for a few months. So when people sort of get past, you know, the Marvel and DC, and even in the industry of Hollywood and or people that are looking for ancillary products, which you have to, because people don't know Marvel's owned by Disney.

• 51:49Speaker 05

  Marvel's owned by Disney. They don't share that too much. And DC Comic Books has for a long, long time has been owned by Time Warner, now Warner Brothers, Discovery, AT&T. You know, but let's call it Warner Brothers. So one's owned by Disney, one's owned by Warner Brothers. Okay, so you're Sony, you're, you're Universal, you're Paramount Studios.

• 52:11Speaker 05

  Your Netflix, your Apple, your Paramount Plus. What are you talking about? Where are you getting product? Not getting it from Marvel. Why? They're not sharing. And you're not getting it from DC? Because they're not sharing. So you literally have to go and redact all of those books. And you're left with everybody else. And that puts our books in really good position. Now, let's go back because that doesn't answer your question. How did we get to Image comic books? For me personally, when I was trying to break into comic books, like I said, in all those years leading up to breaking in those, I was reading everything I could get my hands on about our industry. And what I found was I was coming across a common theme.

• 52:56Speaker 05

  And the common theme was that everybody, no matter how big your standing had been in our industry, eventually got pushed out against their will. And in some cases, got the short end of creative and financial sticks.

• 53:17Tim Ferriss?

  These are artists.

• 53:18Speaker 05

  These are artists, writers, whatever. This, these stories were, had been written over and over and over again. And so I remember one in particular, reading about, there's a gentleman, his name was Jack Kirby, and his nickname was Jack the King Kirby, right? To put in perspective to people who are layman listening, that they called him the king for a reason. Because he was. And he got the short end of the stick. And Jack Kirby's a guy who helped create the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, and even created the costume for Spider-Man and the Hulk and Iron Man and on and on. That's who Jack Kirby was. He helped create it with Stan Lee. So I remember reading those articles,

• 54:03Speaker 05

  and this is long before I break into the industry. And I went, man, if they can do that to Jack King Kirby, they can do it to anyone. And so when I got my first job in comic books, when, you know, three weeks before I graduated, I went in with my eyes wide open. And so I knew what the game was. And I go, okay, their job is to exploit me as much as possible. Can I? Do the same in reverse at the same time. The win is they're getting something of value out of you. You're getting something out of them. And the value that I was getting out of them was twofold.

• 54:47Speaker 05

  One, I had all these dozens of characters in my portfolio, including Spawn. And I never ever had one second of temptation to ever pull any of those out and offer them to Marvel or DC when I was working with them. Did I create new characters when I got the plots from the writers? Of course I did. I was a professional. So I helped co-create and I'm the visual creator of Venom. So Venom's my guy. Why? Because, you know, we came up with a story and that was what it was. Okay, fine. But I never said, oh, man, I'm having a good career at Marvel. Let me reach into my portfolio and offer them my characters. Never. Why? Because in the back of my mind, those stories had been haunting me that were there.

• 55:27Speaker 05

  And at some point, Tim, I was selling more comic books than any human being Marvel was employing, period. To the point that I had set a record on one of the books. I helped take over artistically Amazing Spider-Man. It was sitting at like number 22 in the sales chart. They came and they went, hey, Todd, if you want to draw it, cool. Because I had just finished a run on The Incredible Hulk that you had mentioned. And they said, whatever you want to do, because it's sort of in the dumper. Spider-Man's in the dumper. In short order, at some point, Amazing Spider-Man became number one or two every single month in total sale. To the point then that they're like, oh, and it's really what catapulted my career.

• 56:09Speaker 05

  And just so you know, all the things that I was doing artistically to help move it from number 22 to number one, I was getting pushback from the corporate entity up above and the executives up above and the editor in chief up above that you can't do what you're doing, Todd. You're messing with the icon. That's not how we do it. Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, as an old man now, the single greatest danger you are going to meet in your life is status quo. It is the thing that they are going to fight and battle you against more than any other thing in the world. And what's staggering about what I just said, which is a truism.

• 56:50Speaker 05

  Is that there's only two hundred percenters in the world that I can give you. One, we're all gonna die, hate to break it to you, it's just a matter of time. The second is, everything is gonna eventually change. Otherwise, we'd be living in caves right now. Change is part of the human condition. And yet, every day you run into systems that are crushingly holding on to status quo, are holding on to yesterday. And, and for those of us that are wired to think about tomorrow, we become the rebels. We become the outcasts.

• 57:31Speaker 05

  We become the people who are rocking the boat, who are just, Todd, why don't you just relax, get along, all the things that they're gonna tell you. And what I'm saying that happened to me has happened to millions of people throughout history that wanted to do something different. Not better, let me be very clear, not better, different. So when I was doing my different Spider-Man, I wasn't doing it because I thought I was better. I wasn't doing it because I thought what they were doing was worse, which is how they took it. I was doing it because I'm a young kid with a career and I need to figure out how to stand out in a sea of people that are doing the exact same job as me.

• 58:14Speaker 05

  And there's only one way, I've gotta be a little bit different. So I started doing some funky, fun little stuff on Spider-Man. And guess what? The fans liked it. And more importantly, it was enjoyable for me to draw because drawing is a lonely occupation, like a novelist, where you sit in a room for 12 hours a day with you and your thoughts. That's your day. And if you can't entertain yourself, it's a long day. So I was coming up with crazy little silly things I was putting in the book. They were having a heart attack. I was getting called on the carpet. As the sales are going up, I finally quit Spider-Man. They go, no, no, no, because you're selling so many books, we'll give you a new Spider-Man book.

• 58:57Speaker 05

  They were gonna do a fourth Spider-Man book anyway, so they could have one every week. Of the month. So they gave it to me. I've never written before. I'm going, you're gonna give it to me. I've never written before, but I got to write, which is why I quit. I go, I want to write. And that's because I don't want to draw other people's stories. I want to tell my story. And they said, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that book set a record. It's in the Guinness Book of World's Record for the most sales by a single creator. I also own that record on the other side with Spawn. I own the corporate and non corporate record for a single issue by a single person. Done. Now, I'm not saying that bragging. I'm just saying that has a fact. So that now that guy who's setting records, when he comes into

• 59:37Speaker 05

  the office in New York, from Canada, little Canadian hick, you would think that they would say, thank you, not fuck you. Right? And instead, they're calling me on the carpet going, Todd, you've got to stop doing this, and this, and this. All the things that got me and their books were there. And I remember having these bizarre conversations with the editors going, dude, you don't have to like me personally. You don't have to like my drawing style. You don't have to like anything I do. You hired me for one job. Sell comic books. You guys are in the commerce business. Don't you realize you're a money making machine?

• 1:00:18Speaker 05

  You want to sell books. I do that better than anybody that you employ. Why are we continuing to have these conversations? And they wore me out, Tim. They wore me out.

• 1:00:30Tim Ferriss?

  So when was there a particular moment when you knew, it seems like you had basically in your back pocket, the plan to eventually go out on your own because you had all these characters you developed. So what was the day or the conversation where you're just like, fuck this. Now is the time. I'm splitting off.

• 1:00:48Speaker 05

  I remember with clarity. They had been doing comic books have this thing in a corner called the comic scope. And the comic scope was created because in the late 50s, there was the whole war them scared that comic books were degrading the youth of America. And they had the Senate hearings. And it actually, in a weird way, ended up leading to the sort of the advent of Marvel Comics. Comics, because Marvel was a company called Timely Comics. But then they went, oh, oh, we don't want to get caught up in this whole Senate hearing. Let's sort of whitewash, if you will, our presentation. And they changed their name to Marvel and their first book out Fantastic Four. And then after that, here comes Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, and all the other things that we all know.

• 1:01:32Speaker 05

  Right? So you can argue that thanks to some Looney Tune in the Senate in the late 50s. Marvel exists, right? Maybe minus him, there is no Marvel. So we actually, we shouldn't be giving all the credit to Stanley. We should be giving it to McCarthy and Dr. Wertham, who was the one who wrote the book, The Seduction of the Innocent, right? So look it up. Anyways, his, I'm doing the books because of that comics code. Every now and then they would get you to fix a panel. Todd, you can't do that. Why? Because of comics code. Okay. Now, I used to ask them, could somebody actually send me the comic code? So instead of having to guess what's in the comics code. And then you guys tell me I got to redraw something because I have deadlines and I don't like to redraw and redo anything.

• 1:02:16Speaker 05

  And so it's like burning your pasta. Then you go, oh, man, I got to cook it and boil the water again. It just, you get aggravated the second time around. So at some point they kept doing that and then the day came. And then it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Because I'd been doing it for years and they sat there and it was this issue. And it was the sideways issue, my last issue at Marvel. It was a sideways issue of the Spider-Man book, the one I was writing myself. Except for we were doing a crossover with some of the mutant X-Men, and in this case, X Factor characters. The ones that were sort of Deadpool and Cable came from those characters. And there was a bad guy and his name was a juggernaut.

• 1:03:00Speaker 05

  And the juggernaut was like, you couldn't beat the juggernaut, right? He's a big giant dude and he had armor and you couldn't do it. So my thing was, well, he's got eye slits. He's got to look out those eye slits. And so the way that I was going to get to him was I had one of the mutants take their sword and put it in the eye and jam it in the eye. Because then it would be like, oh, my gosh, right? You'd catch him off guard and then if you team tackle him, you're going to win the day. So I drew that. I still have that page today, Tim, because it's the page that broke the camel's back, right? I have the, I have the unedited version even better. I, I don't even have the edited version. I have the unedited version. And, and so they phoned

• 1:03:44Speaker 05

  me up and they said, Todd, you gotta redraw it. And I went, what? What? Redraw what? You can't stab somebody in the eye with a knife. And I go, what are you talking about? Like the comic's code. I go, well, of course you can, because just not long ago, there was this great cover. Not only was in the, it was on the cover of Daredevil, Frank Miller. And he's got Bullseye on the cover, and he's stabbing Elektra, a character on the cover. And so I go, of course you can stab people. And they go, well, yes, you can stab people, but you can't, you can't have a rear exit wound. And I went, what are you talking about? Did you look at that cover? The guy's killing the lectures, going in the front, is coming

• 1:04:29Speaker 05

  out the back. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can stab them, and it can come out of rear exit wound, but you can't tear the cloth. So if you look at the drawing, you're gonna see that it's like, you don't really see the sword coming out. It's like a teepee. It's like a teepee. The back of her costume is like, it's a teepee, but it hasn't cut. So I go, so I just want to be clear. You can gut somebody, and you can have it come out the other side after you gut them. You just can't rip the cloth. And that won't offend the mothers and the children. Yes. Wow. Okay. So there's no rear exit wound. I'm just stabbing

• 1:05:09Speaker 05

  them in the eye. Yeah, but you know what? People are sensitive to eyes, because if everybody gets something in their eye, we all know how much pain that is, and teeth. Because if you go to the dentist and he drills you wrong, and I'm having this absurd conversation with five or six of my editors, and I'm just going, what? So I just want to be clear. Can I stab him in the chest? Yes. In the knee? Yes. In the elbow? Yes. In the eye? No. In the cheek? Yes. In the neck? Yes. In the mouth? No. Wow. Wow. So somehow I was in Bizarro Land. And so I had, at that moment, I stopped the conversation because you never want to have a conversation with anybody where two plus

• 1:05:53Speaker 05

  two equals giraffe, right? Never talk to somebody who comes up with that equation. So I said, guys, here's what's gonna happen. I'm gonna send you the page. I'll do a little quick drawing over if you want. You guys fix it any way you see fit. By the way, I'm handing in my resignation. I am done. I am exhausted. I also was a few days away from becoming a father for the first time. And I just went, you know what? It's time to catch my breath. I don't know what being a dad's about. These guys have worn me out. And alls I do is sell books for them. And I just called Uncle. And that was it. That was the day I walked away.

• 1:06:38Speaker 05

  Now, did I have a plan B? Of course, I didn't, Tim. Of course, I didn't. The plan B was I had Spawn as a character. And I just went, I guess I'll just have to self publish, right? Not ideal. But okay, here we go. The upside of it was that I was talking to a couple other people. Let me also say, before me quitting, I also was going around trying to create a union. I was like the normal Ray. I was go, come on, man, power to the people, right? If we stop drawing, put pencils down, they got nothing to print. We show them our power. It was frustrating for me when I tried it for a few months, that the most scared people

• 1:07:20Speaker 05

  that will say, yeah, let's join together, are those that don't have a job. It was weird to me. I'd be talking to dozens of people that I knew that wanted to be in the business, that were in the business, but weren't getting steady work, that needed a better life. And I go, come on, let's just go. Let's just create like, an enclave of people. And again, you know, and deal with the whole is better than the parts. And they would say, no, Todd, I can't. Because what if they blackball me? And I'm like, blackball you? What are you talking about? You're not getting any work from them right now. Yeah, but what if they blackball me? I'll go, so here's what I'll do for you. Right now, you have no job, no car, no girlfriend, no house, no money.

• 1:08:03Speaker 05

  If you join this enclave, I will promise I will make all of those equal to you. Right? You've got nothing to lose, other than to go up. Come on, man. I'm selling more books than anybody else. I'm making more money than anybody else in our industry, and I'm willing to throw it away. You should be 10 times more fearless than me. It was actually oddly the opposite. So during that time, I had been talking to two of my friends and peers. They were also in the industry, a gentleman by the name of Rob Liefeld and another one named Eric Larson. And both of them had that same entrepreneurial, let's just call it rebellious trait in them. And we were always talking.

• 1:08:48Speaker 05

  And I remember in one conversation, Rob was saying, yeah, I'm gonna maybe go, you know, I'm working, he's still working for Marvel, so is Eric. And it's like, yeah, I'm gonna go do my own book. And then Eric was on the call going, yeah, I'm gonna go do my own book. And I had just quit. And at some point during the conversation, the topic came up, go, well, if you're gonna do your own book on your own, Rob, and you're gonna do your own book on your own, Eric, and I'm planning on it, why don't we do all of them together in the same place? It's never been done. What's happened is people have left Marvel and DC one at a time, or they pushed them out the door. Think of it like a sports team. So you lose a free agent, you go get another player. So you're losing, but what if 10 of your players on a championship team quit the same

• 1:09:33Speaker 05

  year? That would be detrimental to that competition of that team. So the conversation was, why don't we just join forces? So all of a sudden, very quickly, it was three. Rob, who's super energetic, came up with the name Image Comic Books. And the reason why he came up with the name, so he tells me, is that there was a commercial that was on TV, and it was Andre Agassi, I think, and it was a, it was a camera commercial. And he says, "Image is everything." So that was the punchline of the commercial. So he was like, "Let's do image, right? If image is everything, let's do image." Right? So that was it. Image Comic Books was born. You don't overthink. People, people think that we come up with all this stuff and we know what we're doing. No.

• 1:10:18Speaker 05

  Venom in and of itself was a happy accident. We can go back to that in a minute if you want to. So the three of us get together and then, and then Rob says, "Todd..." I've got a buddy, Jim Valentino. He does some independent comic books. Uh, is it okay if he comes? And it's like, what are you talking about? I like there, this is a group. The more the merrier. So we've got four. And then we find somebody to help us publish. And we say, that's it. We're flying to New York and we're going to break the news to Marvel that we're quitting. Four of us. Rob, Eric, Todd, Jim. Jim Valentino. We fly to New York and I land the day before. We have a meeting with the top people.

• 1:11:03Speaker 05

  Terry Stewart, who was the publishing head at that point. And later at that meeting, I'll get to was the editor in chief, who happened to be walking down the hall. So I've got a meeting with Terry Stewart, the top dog. And to basically say, we're quitting. Here's our reasons why. And if it was me, I would close this barn door because you may have some more people quitting next week or the week after, the week after. So we land the day before and I got to blow some time. So I happened to walk around, I heard there's an auction, somebody selling some artwork. I go to the auction and Jim Lee, the person you know, you talked about at the beginning, who's now the head at DC Comics. Jim Lee is at the auction and he's like, hey, Todd, what are you doing here? I'm like, oh, and I told him.

• 1:11:47Speaker 05

  And then I start giving the sales pitch. Tim, let me tell you one thing. When I have my passion involved, I'm a good salesman. I'm a good salesman. And so I start pounding on Jim Lee. And Jim Lee, at this point, just so you know, is doing the X-Men and it is the number one selling book. He's doing the number one selling book. The only time I ever got beat was Jim Lee. That guy, he was, he was my competition. Like I was Magic Johnson, he was Larry Bird. Okay. And so we just, we had a rival, but we liked each other and we got along. And so I tell him what we're doing and he starts thinking about it. And then to my surprise says, I think I can go with that.

• 1:12:31Speaker 05

  Now, this is a monumental moment from my perspective, and here's why, ladies and gentlemen.

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

  Todd, the rebel, leaving was gonna be easy for Marvel to basically discount because they were gonna go, ah, that kid's always sort of rocking the boat and he's always a bit of a pistol. You know what? That's fine. Rob Liefeld had the same attitude. So it's like, ah, we were the bad boys. Ah, so the bad boys left. Good riddance. Jim Lee was the golden child. He was the chef's kiss. He was the guy. He was perfect. If they could clone employees, an artist, Jim Lee was the mold. And so when Jim said he would go,

• 1:13:16Speaker 05

  that was a thunderclap in my head to go, oh my God, if the choir boy can go, then that means all bets are off and they are gonna have to sit up and pay attention because not only are you losing the bad boys, you are losing the model citizens. And so Jim then says, oh, by the way, I got a pal, Wills Protasio. Is it okay if I phone him? And because he's looking for work, I think he'll join too. Shoot. He was doing another X-Men book. I'm going, what? We're gonna get two X-Men? The X-Men books are the number one selling book at that point. Bring them on. So we got six and I'm walking now back to my hotel with the biggest grin on my face because I go, they don't even know what's

• 1:13:59Speaker 05

  about to come. And as I'm walking into my hotel, I see another sort of peer, a guy by the name of Mark Silvestri. Now, Mark Silvestri to me at that time was the best artist, like just in terms of skill, Mark Silvestri.

• 1:14:15Speaker 04

  Don't believe a thing that my son is saying.

• 1:14:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's my, that's my dad I'm taking care of here.

• 1:14:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, no problem.

• 1:14:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. So Mark Silvestri is there and it's about 11 o'clock at night and I go, hey, Mark, what are you doing? Goes, oh, I'm going to bed. You got, you got, you got five minutes for me? Right? And so I sit down and like, Mussolini from the balcony, I give him the speech, right? And I give it to him and he's like, oh my God. He goes, Todd, that sounds good. And Jim Lee's on board? Yeah, he just signed on. Let me think about it. I go, Mark, here's the gig. We've got a meeting at eight o'clock tomorrow morning. I need to know if you're in or not by eight o'clock in the morning. He goes, so I've got to, I've got to go to bed. I've got to think about it, whether I'm going to change my entire career. And I've got nine hours of which eight of them, I'm going to sleep.

• 1:15:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's it. Now, I don't know what he did or how well he slept that night, but in the morning at seven 30, the phone rings and he goes, Hey, Todd, Mark, I'm in seven. We went to New York. I flew to New York with Rob with four of us, with four of us. And by the time we walk into that office, we've got seven. Oh, by the way, Mark Silvestri was doing the Wolverine comic book. We had literally the dream team. To put in perspective for people listening, again, that don't know, there's probably every year about that year was probably about six, 7,000 comic books come out, but from all companies, right? Because again, Spider-Man comes out once a month. So it's 12. And then you've got three Spider-Man

• 1:15:46Speaker 05

  books. That's 36 and then Iron Man's another 12 and 12 and you add it all up, literally thousands of comic books come out. The people who gathered together to create Image, we had accomplished 44 of the top 50 sales that year. Just to put in perspective who we were 44 of the top 50 sales of 6,000. We were literally the comic book equivalent of the dream team, the basketball team of that was happening in basketball that time. So I knew this was going to reverberate somewhere. And again, the stock went down at Marvel the next day. Take a look at it because CNN reported on it. And we went into the meeting

• 1:16:29Speaker 05

  and essentially it went like this. And here would be a fun interview is to get Terry Stewart's perspective of it because not only has he literally lied about it, he will tell you otherwise, but now as he lied about it, but then 30 years later, I met up with him and my wife went and talked to him and he still is spewing the lie. And I get it. He's corporate. What's he going to do? He doesn't want to say that it was on his watch that all these people left. But here's his lie. And it is. I got witnesses because there's more than one of us in that room. He's saying, "We came in and we asked for the copyrights of our characters." What are you talking about?

• 1:17:11Speaker 05

  None of us is that crazy. We understood the dynamics of the business. We would, "Yes, give me Spider-Man and give him the X-Men." What are you talking about? He's saying he had to let us go because that was our demand. No, no. The way that it went down was simply like this. We are leaving. There's nothing you can give us that's going to keep us. And, oh, by the way, here's some of our reasons. If it was us, you may want to do something about those reasons because next week you may have another seven quitting. I don't understand why you want to keep having people quitting, but you know what? Do what you gotta do. It's your company, whatever.

• 1:17:53Speaker 05

  Now, during that conversation, the editor in chief had coincidentally happened to be up on the upper floors. Don't know why, and just came in and whatever. He was a good man, Tom DeFalco. The one that used to tell me, "Can't do that, Todd. You can't do that, Todd, on Spider-Man." Anyway, at the end of this conversation, because Rob Liefeld, who was in there, and my wife was there, and Jim Lee was there. Rob left because he had to go pick up his girlfriend. So that was classic Rob, like, "Oh, you guys just finished this world-changing conversation. I go get my wife and gotta grab a burger." So, and this is why I like Rob so much because he's just, he's by the cuff and it's what makes him special to me. Anyways, we get in the elevator at the end of this conversation.

• 1:18:39Speaker 05

  And I will never forget the words. Has the elevator doors are closing, just like in a movie. The doors are closing and you can see the editor in chief looking at us and he says, "Hey, if it doesn't work, you're welcome back."

• 1:18:55Speaker 05

  And the door shut. And I remember turning to Jim Lee. Now, just to give a little background on Jim Lee, Jim Lee went to college to become a doctor. I think his dad's a doctor. This is a smart, intelligent human being. And for me, my dad, who you just heard, was in the printing business for 40, 50 years. The one thing that I knew, it's printing. And if not, I knew lots of people who did. So the doors closed and I looked at Jim and I go, oh my God, they think we're dumb. And I'm not that we're smart, Tim, not that we're smart, Tim. But you know what printing comic books is? Ink on paper. That's it, ladies and gentlemen.

• 1:19:35Speaker 05

  Ink on paper. Done. Maybe there's a couple of details beyond that, but that's it. Every time you pick up a pen and you write on a piece of paper, it's sort of kind of like doing comic books. It's just if you keep going and draw it in the shape of Spider-Man or the Hulk, you got a comic book. It's not rocket science. And so I was like, oh my God, they don't think we can print? Oh my God. So that was it. And from there, the collective whole of the seven of us left. Here's sort of this silly, funny part of the rest of that day. Historically, what was happening, Tim, is that if you quit Marvel, you only had one choice. You went literally across the street to DC Comics. Or if you

• 1:20:19Speaker 05

  quit DC Comics, you quit and you walked across the street to Marvel. That's all you did. You literally ping ponged your whole career, back and forth, back and forth. Whenever you got mad, you just went to the other date that was across the street. So we went across the street to DC Comic Books. And DC sees, I had started, you know, I had done about a year, year and a half there. Rob Liefout had done a year there. But Jim Lee and I walk in there. Jim Lee has never stepped foot. In DC comic books and he's the golden child at Marvel. And they just go, there's only one reason he's in the office. Somebody got mad and we're getting the golden child and we're getting Todd.

• 1:20:59Speaker 05

  We'll take the bad boy too, because he's like, that's, these are the number one and number two selling guys in the industry. Woo, we hit the mother load, the mother, oh my God. And quickly they assemble 15, 16 people in this room and they pour the coffee and they get us the refreshments. And they just go, oh my goodness, we are sitting here and we sit down and then they hear the fateful words. I go, hey, guys, just so you know, we're not here to work for you. I just a couple of things, we just quit Marvel, their eyes light up, but we are not here to work for you either. You could just see the lead balloon and they were like, pardon? And it's like, no, no, no, we're not here to work for you. So, so you could just see the, so we're just clear here.

• 1:21:41Speaker 05

  So you came here with Jim Lee and walked into our offices and are now dangling and teasing us. And saying it's for nothing is exactly what we're saying. Wow, wow, why would you guys do that? And I go, well, because you know, we got some other plans. And then, then they start giving their sales pitch. Well, here's why you should work for us. Don't do that. DC is your place to be, DC, DC, DC. And they go, and by the way, we just did a new contract that's for the betterment of the creative community. And then I asked them the question for me, that was like the dagger for me, where they go, hey, you know, no, that was super cool. That was super, super cool. You wrote up that new contract for the creative community.

• 1:22:25Speaker 05

  Could I just ask you just like one, one, one question here, just before we get going? Did you ask one fucking creator to have any input in that? Contract that is to better the creative community? Did you ask one single creator? And let me tell you, Tim, when you get pregnant pauses in rooms, it's all you need to know. You get your answer at the pregnant pause. Of course they didn't, of course they didn't. And that was the reason. This is why we're quitting Marvel. This is why we're quitting DC because of your disregard for your community.

• 1:23:03Speaker 05

  And Jim and I are examples, and we've climbed the top of the ladder, just like Jack King Kirby and all those hundreds before him. This is just a repeat of history and it's time. And we thought that that was it. And that was when the collective hole, not me, the collective hole, the seven of us, started Image Comics.

• 1:23:26Tim Ferriss?

  So the DC visit, I'm trying to think of the names involved. Was there anyone who was quitting DC or did you just go in there to put them on alert and say?

• 1:23:36Speaker 05

  No, we put them on alert and gave them the same sort of speech we gave Marvel. If you think that the dissatisfaction of the seven of us is unique to the seven of us, you guys are blind.

• 1:23:47Tim Ferriss?

  I see. So it was a change your ways or become a fatality?

• 1:23:52Speaker 05

  Right. Every conversation is the exact same. And if we prove that there's any success on the outside of the only two bubbles that exist in most freelancers' sort of brains, which is Marvel, DC, or you get another job. And I mean another job in another industry. So if we, if we move on and we create a third possibility, why do that? Now, to their credit, let me say, Tim, to their credit, they did start changing. They did start bettering pay and, you know, even starting to give medical, which was never a part of the equation, and giving bonuses and being a little more fair-minded

• 1:24:34Speaker 05

  on royalties because they knew that what we were saying at some point, that reality sunk in, that we could start losing almost all of our top talent, if not a big portion of our talent, period. And this isn't good for business. So even those that were jealous or in our creative community and/or thought that we were crazies or whatever, they still, whether they know it or not, prospered by us leaving because all their contracts got upgraded while they were still throwing darts at us, our own community, as you can imagine, saying, you guys go take your big egos and go do your thing.

• 1:25:13Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so I just came back from a bathroom break. You mentioned before we started recording, you had a camel bladder and that you'd talk until I had to take a bathroom break, which was true. So how is a camel bladder a competitive advantage?

• 1:25:26Speaker 05

  It is. And so, because people go, so what? So why? So you, you don't go to the bathroom? I mean, I went to a signing not long ago and I got there at seven and I signed from seven in the morning to midnight and I didn't move from the desk where I was signing from. And they had to, now again, other hu- other human beings have to eat and go to the bathroom during, so I, so I go, you better have two teams then, you're gonna have to rotate them. Let me just sort of quickly get out of the way first, how you cannot go to the bathroom for 17 hours. It's really sort of easy stuff. If you don't put anything into your top hole, nothing comes out of any of the bottom holes, right? Just, it's just basic. So I don't eat and I don't drink, that's a whole nother conversation, but like they're going, what, well, what, how, how do you do that? That's another conversation. But if you don't put

• 1:26:10Speaker 05

  anything, nothing in, nothing out. Simple, easy. And I know this to be scientifically true because I've used it to my advantage. Now, because I have a camel bladder, two things have happened in my career that I think have been advantageous. One, everybody, when I go to the conventions, would have to go and take a lunch break. Why? Because they're hungry. They're hungry. Right? My wife would tell you, I have never uttered those words, I'm hungry. I eat because science says I need to. My body needs fuel, so I put it in, not because I'm hungry, because I have to. It's an essential ingredient, food. So I do it. But I cannot last you if you gotta go away. So people would take off at conventions and go away for lunch, or bathroom breaks, or whatever. Guess who didn't? Me.

• 1:26:54Speaker 05

  And here's why that matters. Because there's people in line, and if you've got, at the time of our popularity, when they used to open it up, you'd have at times, I'm telling you literally, thousands of people in line waiting for your autograph. First off, in good conscience, I can't have somebody waiting in line for two hours, three hours, and then look at them and say, cut, I'm going for an hour and a half lunch break. And the kid's going, what? I've already been in line for three hours. Like, I can't do it. I can't look at somebody in the eye. I won't do it. So I said, no, I'll just figure out how to not do this thing that most humans do. And here's where the upside is. Is it when all my peers have gone to lunch, then people are waiting in line, and then they're just sitting there going, well, that guy's still

• 1:27:35Speaker 05

  Signing, what's his name? Todd, Tom, Tim, whatever. What's he do? Spider-Man? Well, I like comic books. I know Spider-Man. And guess what happens, Tim? They get in your line. They don't care really at that point about you. They just go, he's signing. The line's moving. I'll get in his line. And then they come up. You've got 20 seconds. You become as gracious as you can to them. And maybe you peel off and you've got a new couple of fans and all of a sudden it's like, you know, I only collect X-Men, but you know, that Todd was a gentleman and he was very nice and he smiled at me. He was very kind. You know what? Maybe I'll go buy one of his Spider-Man books or, you know, in the future, his Spawn books. And so that's it. Good, right? I'll always be nice to anybody, no matter who they are.

• 1:28:18Speaker 05

  Number two, on the business end, and this one is sadly even easier. And it's just pathetic at times. I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and Phoenix, Arizona can be 110 degrees. Let me tell you, I'm like a cockroach. I don't care what the weather is. I'll survive. Don't worry about me. I'm good. But here's what I know about other people. They have comfort zones. And so whenever I was in some big legal dispute or contract dispute, I would say, especially the people in LA, I go, you fly them to me. You fly them to me. Now, this is just the art of war. So my desk is facing a big giant glass window, right? And I know when the sun comes down that window. Now, when, usually when I'm in my room, I bring down the drapes and I put up the AC and I'm comfortable.

• 1:29:03Speaker 05

  But when the enemy's coming, i.e. the people I've got to negotiate with, come, I make sure that the blinds are up and that I turn the air conditioning so that it's actually stuffy in that room. Cause why? I can endure it. I've done it plenty of times. And then they always come dressed in a three-piece suit. Wrong move, guys. Wrong move. And then they come in and they come into the room and I close the door and I know it's going to get stuffy. And then I put a giant pitcher of water in front of them.

• 1:29:35Speaker 05

  And then I utter the words, guys, this has been going on far, far too long. Here's the deal. We're not leaving this room until we settle every single outstanding point. And during those conversations, they either pour their own water on a constant basis because they've got their three-piece wool suit on. I've got my T-shirt and I'm in my Nike shorts. And I can just see them getting hotter and hotter and hotter. And they keep having to get more and more water. And at some point, nature calls. And then we get down to the last one and I go, I'm not moving on point 10. I'm not moving. It's

• 1:30:19Speaker 05

  a deal breaker. If I don't get it, this whole deal. And you know how many times I've had people in my room go, fine. This is how it works. It goes like this. Fine. You can have point 10. Are we done? Yes. Are we done? Yes. Where's your bathroom? The very next thing is, where's your bathroom? Because I think in my mind that they literally caved in on the 10th point because they couldn't hold it anymore. And if they could have held it, they could have argued longer with me. And perhaps I might have conceded, or we could have compromised on that point. But their bladder cost them. Too bad. How sad. Right? You find your advantages wherever you can get them.

• 1:31:01Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, McFarlane, the barbarian. What a savage. Nice work. So let's come back to Venom. You mentioned that Venom came together, I think, as an accident, maybe was the phrasing that you used. I mean, this is an iconic character known the world over.

• 1:31:17Speaker 05

  Happy accident.

• 1:31:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So how did it come together?

• 1:31:19Speaker 05

  So we'll go back early in my Marvel career. Like I said, early in the podcast, if you can keep deadlines, that's a giant value in that industry. So I was showing them that I could keep deadlines. So I knew then that that was going to be getting me continuous work. So once you get continuous work, the next upgrade Is can you draw characters that people have heard of? Right? So, because the first job I got at Marvel was on a book. And it was like an obscure book. It was called Steve Englehart's Coyote. And it wasn't even Coyote. I was doing a backup in the Coyote. I was doing an obscure backup in an obscure book. It literally was starting in the mailroom.

• 1:32:00Speaker 05

  But eventually I got a steady job over at DC because they canceled Coyote. And I got a, I got a monthly book over DC. Unfortunately, Tim, and this is where sometimes one person's break is another person's tragedy. An artist on another book who was a fit human being, was super awesome artist. I followed him, was a health freak, drank some unpasteurized milk, went into a seizure and had an allergic reaction and died. And so I get a phone call and they go, hey, Todd, my artist just passed away. Can you come on and help us for a couple of months? And I, at that point, they had canceled Coyote. I literally took me years to get in. I was employed for four months and then they canceled Coyote. And I'm like, man.

• 1:32:45Speaker 05

  So I sent my samples back to all the people that were gracious enough to give me constructive criticism, except for a thing changed on the resume, Tim. I was now able to say, um, I am Todd McFarland, the professional from Marvel comic books. The drawing was exactly the same. It'd only been four months. It was just as horrible as it was four months earlier, except for instead of being an amateur, I got to go now into the smaller pile, which is the professionals looking for work pile. So I get the job, go, yeah, woo, I get, I've got some work. The guy who was supposed to take over that book, because I was only supposed to fill in for two months, decided to bail. So after the first issue, they said, you wanted to take over the book. It was a book called Infinity Incorporated, and I stayed on that book for two, three years.

• 1:33:29Speaker 05

  So when I went over to Marvel, they went, okay, you can keep a deadline. Check. The question is, you gotta stop doing, and here's a bizarre thing that was happening at Marvel at that point. You gotta stop doing what they called, they dubbed the big, your big dice drawing style. And the only reason it was called that, because on one page in Infinity Incorporated, I drew this page layout and it was these big giant dice. And then I did panels inside, drawings inside the big dice. And somebody, I guess in editorial, saw that page. And so it was like, oh, he's the big giant dice guy. And so, and the reason I was doing giant dice and doing all these crazy flamboyant layouts in Infinity Incorporated, because Tim, my drawing was mediocre.

• 1:34:13Speaker 05

  I knew that. Like at some point, you gotta be realistic about your skills. I was mediocre and I had two choices. I could either put mediocre drawings and boring layouts, or I could be flamboyant and baffle them with my BS and get them to look at all this sort of window trimming and not sort of pay attention that maybe I'm drawing my eyes crooked, right? And it worked, and it worked. So people were like, oh my gosh. And so by the time I left Infinity, I think I had risen to the point that I was like, voted the fifth most popular penciler at that point. So I'm like, wow. So I go over to Marvel and then they say, which was weird because Marvel was always the house of ideas. And at this point, they were in, they had flopped with DC and they were, they were boring.

• 1:34:57Speaker 05

  And they said, you can come, but you can't do the giant dice style. And I go, so what do you want me to do? And I go, we just want you to do like a grid. Now, let me just tell you, anybody listening, that means you take a piece of paper and you divide it into six equal, equal panels and you go. It is the most boring, easiest thing to do. So essentially they took a guy like me, who I thought was an artistic sprinter, and they said, could you put lead boots on? Shoot, this is gonna be easy, right? I don't know why you want to do it, but it was frustrating because there was no artistic freedom to do it. So I did it, they gave me the first job back at Marvel. And they go, hey, problem, you usually have 30 days to do a book, right? Once a month, but we got, we're behind the eight ball. We can give you this job, but you only got 10 days.

• 1:35:42Speaker 05

  I gave it to them in eight. Was it my best job? Of course it wasn't. But was it done in eight? Yeah. Did it get me brownie points right on the spot? They were amazed I gave it to them in eight days. Boom. Within weeks, they're offering me the Incredible Hulk. Now, once you get the Incredible Hulk, this is the next step in climbing the ladder. All of a sudden, look, I'd been in the business probably two, three, four years at that point. And when I get the Incredible Hulk, finally, I hear the words from my mom and dad. "Oh, my God, you finally made it." And the reason was because they'd heard of the Hulk, right? And so up to then, everything I was doing was like, I don't know if he's ever gonna make it. I was still working at Barville in DC. It just wasn't for books.

• 1:36:23Speaker 05

  But if you can go to the neighbor's, you know, Halloween party and say, "My son draws the Hulk." They've heard of the word Hulk too. So all of a sudden it's like, "Oh, my gosh, your son, he must be good." So it's important to have characters that know because it helps the relatives in your circle, so to think that you're a bigger shot than you are, even though it's the exact same amount of work and the same pay on top of it. So, okay, so you get to the next step, and now you're going, ha. Now you're just fighting for the next step up. And I'll quickly sort of get you to this, and I know I'm long-winded and all your questions. I wish I was better.

• 1:37:00Tim Ferriss?

  I'm into it.

• 1:37:02Speaker 05

  Okay, so I do the Hulk, I'm doing penciling, and then I go, "I'm gonna do inking." Because at this point, I got fast enough that I could do two books. There weren't too many people that could do two books. I was doing two books. So they give me a second book. The same editor who gave me the Incredible Hulk gives me another book. It's called G.I. Joe: Real American Hero. Right? Now, the thing that's sort of ironic about that is I was living up in Canada, right? And it never really sort of, I was going, "Wow, if they only knew that this Canadian, and I'm Canadian, up here in Canada, drawing their real American heroes, this might be a bit of a problem, but nobody's gonna tell. There was no internet." So I did the first issue of G.I. Joe, and I was doing the Hulk.

• 1:37:41Speaker 05

  And I get a phone call, and I was going back and forth with this writer, and it was, we were bashing heads. Every single page of that. And finally, after the first issue, my editor phones up and says, Todd, I've got to let you go. I'm like, one issue, I'm one issue in a G I. Joe. I'm making my marks on the Hulk. I'm now in the top three of some of the voting artistically. And I go, what? You're gonna fire me? But let me just tell you, it was a relief because it was such a pain for that one month. And that my view of comic books and the writers view of comic books were so diametrically opposed.

• 1:38:20Tim Ferriss?

  Where did you guys clash on that? What kind of decisions or what type of stuff?

• 1:38:24Speaker 05

  He probably sees it a little bit differently, but I'll just show you, give my point of view. I assumed the people that were reading the comic books had eyes and brains. He assumed, from my perspective, they didn't. Because he said it. Assume your reader isn't, his words, not mine. Assume the reader is an Aboriginal bushman. And he just came out of the tundra in Australia, and he's never seen a comic book. Your storytelling must be that clear. Which basically meant, you can't have somebody walk into a house and then cut to them inside the house, or even closing the door on the inside. You have to grab the door, open the

• 1:39:03Speaker 05

  door, walk in the room because, and I just went, I just went, Larry, I guess I see the world differently. I assume, silly me, that the people reading the comic books, watch fucking TV, go to movies, read books. They understand how stories are told. And as a matter of fact, on a movie, when you cut scenes, they don't even have a caption in 99.9% of the time. People just know that it's different people in a different setting. It must be a scene cut. You don't have to do it. But anyways, he had his way of seeing the world. I had my way of seeing the world. Fine, no big deal.

• 1:39:44Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:39:45Speaker 05

  So, he fires me off it. And I remember I was sitting in my apartment up in Vancouver. And I leaned back and I looked at the clock and it was like 12:06. And I was like, a little bit bummed. I'm like, man, I've never been, never been fired. Right? So it was like, oh, man. At 12:14, bring, I am telling you, no lie, seven minutes, I was unemployed for seven minutes. Bring.

• 1:40:10Speaker 05

  Todd, yeah, hey, this is Dip Jaradono over at DC. Now, remember, I'd left DC to go back over to Marvel. You remember when you left, you said the only reason you would come back is to draw Batman? Yeah. Well, we've got this book. First, there was Batman: The Dark Knight, then there was Batman Year One, and they had another project called Batman Year Two. We've got a book called Batman Year Two. It's a four-part story, and the artist quit after the first one. Can you finish the last three? What? Like, what? You're saying I, my choice right now is either stay on, which I didn't have an option, but stay on G.I. Joe that I just got fired from that was basically like putting daggers in my eyes?

• 1:40:51Speaker 05

  Or do Batman? And that was the only character I'd come back for? Phew! So I jump on Batman Year Two. Now, it gets a little crazier by that point because, because at this point, I was only being the pencil artist. And in comic books, they bring in another person who is the inker. Some people call him the tracer. It's not true. Good inkers add a lot to pages. I thought I had my drawing style is what I would call sort of this new wave 90s style. And I was constantly getting inkers that were like these 1960s old-school brush guys. I was drawing in a way that I thought you should be using a pen, because there's a different technique with it, and they kept putting brush guys on me.

• 1:41:35Speaker 05

  And it was so transforming, like you, like they literally would bury the artwork from, if you saw what I was drawing, you saw the printed page. It was like, to me, night and day. So I do this part two of Batman Year Two, then I do part three, and then they send me the samples. And I, and I finally, again, another one of those moments in my life with clarity, that I look at it and I see this splash page, and this splash page has a Commissioner Gordon, and he's holding a gun, and to me, it looks hairy, right? I go, it's metallic. Why is it looking hairy? And it's because the inker was doing these lines that worked for him, I guess. And then I looked at like another panel and it was the hallway.

• 1:42:19Speaker 05

  And when you're doing like a down shot of a hallway, you, the lines get closer. It's basically perspective. I won't bore people, but it's just the illusion of depth. And I'd done all these drawings or these lines to give that illusion and they were horizontal. And then I looked at the panel and he had done the exact same thing. It was brilliant, except for he did them vertically. And it was these moments. And so it wasn't that one was better than the other. Right? They both worked. It was, again, I just sort of tried to get as simple as possible. The reason, and I don't know if anybody sort of could understand this concept, but the reason I made them go up and down vertically was because, silly me,

• 1:43:04Speaker 05

  I fucking wanted them to go up and down vertically. Because if I had wanted them to go horizontally, which was another option, I would have drawn them. I can draw horizontal lines equally as well as vertical lines. The reason they were vertical, because I must have meant horizontal. That's why I did, like, what are you talking about? Just copy the lines and do your thing with the lines that are there. And so I phoned the editor and I go, hey, Denny, I don't mean to do this to you because you already lost one artist. And I don't mean to do power plays because I don't like doing that. I don't want to be that guy, but here's the gig. If I can't ink the last chapter of this book,

• 1:43:47Speaker 05

  and let me be completely honest, I've never inked before. So I'm a complete noob. I can't do this. I can't have people literally going in the opposite direction of my artwork. I can't do it. So he kind of was in a tough spot. He was like, oh, okay, fine, Todd. Can you get it done by the deadline? Yeah, sure. So. I did my first inking. So thanks to all those inkers for turning me into an inker. And from there on out, I was my own inker. I started inking The Hulk. If you look at it, I went back to my editor on The Hulk and I go, will they let me ink The Batman? And so he's like, oh, okay, I guess you can ink The Hulk. And so, and now I'm going to eventually get to your question about Venom. So it was a long winded way. Sorry.

• 1:44:28Tim Ferriss?

  That's okay. Let me pause you for just a, just a quick sec. So for people who have no context on your art, I mean, very fine details. And when you're talking about the older school inking, lots of thick black, lots of maybe obscuring.

• 1:44:43Speaker 05

  You simplify it.

• 1:44:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:45Speaker 05

  So.

• 1:44:45Tim Ferriss?

  You simplify it. Right. And so, when you went from penciling to, I need to ink this or I'm out. What were the biggest differences between penciling and inking? As someone who's never inked, I'd be curious to know what you learned or felt, or if it just mapped over really easily. What was it like to do your first inking?

• 1:45:06Speaker 05

  Hey, Tim, here's the first shock that my, sometimes my enthusiasm gets the better of me. And there's nobody that hates Todd more than Todd at times. Cause it's like, what are you doing, Todd? So then I learned the magic. I'm now going to do two jobs, right? If you, if you pencil a book, you get 30 days. If you ink a book, like I pencil it, they give me 30 days, then they hand the pages to you, Tim. You ink it, you get 30 days. If I want to pencil and ink, they don't give me 30 plus 30, right? There's two of us. It's 30 plus 30. I get 30, you get 30. They're going, you can do two jobs, Todd, but you still only got 30 days. Essentially, you're doing twice the work and you have to do it

• 1:45:51Speaker 05

  twice as fast because the book still comes out. And so, lesson learned. If you're going to pick up more work, you might want to ask, how much extra time do you have? And when the answer is zero, you might want to rethink your ask. So, because eventually I got to the point going, I'm going to write my own stories too, right? And that extra time also is zero. So, but that comes a little bit later in the career. So, the first shock is I've now got to go faster. What it taught me personally, because now I'm doing two books and I'm inking, right? I like, so I'm a bit of a unicorn at this point because very few people can even pencil two books, was I had to create for myself.

• 1:46:35Speaker 05

  efficiencies and this goes into business now right and even though we're doing art this is just efficiencies so I do the efficiency and I go I don't have time to do a lot of what they call under drawing I got to literally draw with ink I don't have time to do the job twice I can't pencil and then ink my own work I have to do it all in one fell swoop which is horrifying to people who have never inked themselves because every person I've shown amongst some amazing peers among some amazing peers when they see what my process is they go I can't even make out what's on your page and I go that's okay I'm just gonna finish it with the ink and I go no no no no no no you can't go with the ink I'm like why cuz it's permanent I'm

• 1:47:19Speaker 05

  like what if you make a mistake uh there's a thing called whiteout you just white it out and they're going yeah but what if you make another mistake I just use whiteout let me ask you a question in reverse what happens if you draw on pencil and you make mistake oh I just use an eraser well why can you use an eraser and I can't use whiteout it's the same thing yeah but it's ink it literally was this mental wall for people and these are people that I would sit next to at a convention that would do 20 sketches with a pencil and never erase one line and I used to turn to them go why couldn't you why couldn't you've done that with ink and their answer was always the same what if I made a mistake you didn't I've been watching you for four hours you haven't made one mistake why is it if I changed the tool that somehow you're

• 1:48:02Speaker 05

  gonna make a mistake but you know what you do you I'll do my thing and so I had to just pull back the drawing and figure it out kind of in one step so I could keep the deadline that was my learning experience now question number two did I hit the ground running of course I didn't of course I didn't but if you look at my inking at the beginning it's very very crude and even on spider-man which is the book that catapulted me if you look at the thickness of the webs on his costume you will see a noticeable difference I think from issue 300 when I started inking spider-man and if you look at like about issue 320, for sure, by the time I get in the new Spider-Man book that I'm drawing,

• 1:48:46Speaker 05

  for sure, there's a dramatic difference visually. So I was constantly learning that trade. It was Todd, the professional, who'd been penciling for five, six years. And Todd, the newbie inker, I wasn't going to be a five or six-year vet inking. I was a new inker. So I had to learn that trade and catch up those five or six years that the other half of my brain had already sort of tackled with penciling. So, go ahead. So I, because eventually now this is going to get me to Venom.

• 1:49:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, to Venom.

• 1:49:14Speaker 05

  Okay, so, so very quickly.

• 1:49:15Tim Ferriss?

  No fireware.

• 1:49:16Speaker 05

  Then I finished the Batman project, and now I'm back down to only one book, so I can do two books. And so, again, I'm looking for another book. And all the editors at Marvel said, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, come and talk to me. But whatever you do, don't go into the Spider-Man office, because it's a shambles. Now, you may or may not have gathered that Todd doesn't seem to color inside the lines a lot of the times. And so, you don't tell me, don't go into that office, right? Because to me-

• 1:49:46Tim Ferriss?

  Unless you want Todd to go into the office.

• 1:49:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, what are you guys doing? So I went, I went into the office, and it was, it was. The editor, Jim Salakrep, at that time, good man, was losing and turning over artists. The books were in a bit of a sales decline. Like I said, when I picked up the book, it was like at number 21, 22. And I said, hey, I can do another book. And we had a chat. And I said, I want to ink the book. And then they're like, well, you know, maybe in a couple of months. And I go, I'm inking the Hulk, right? Come on, go talk to Bob, the editor, on that book. And he's like, well, you know, just give me a couple of months. How about it's starting at 300? You can ink the book. And I'm like, yeah, okay, we'll do it. But the other piece of it was, oh, yeah, this is one other sort of slight problem.

• 1:50:33Speaker 05

  Spider-Man's got a black costume. And this is this costume that was created for this book called Secret Wars, which is the black costume with the white spider on it. And I go, that's not Spider-Man to me. And maybe I'm just old school. Spider-Man's that guy in the blue and the red with the webs on it, Spider-Man? So, look, can we just get rid of that black costume and, and get back to Spider-Man? Then this is sort of the happy accident. He said, wow. You know, the editor in chief really likes the black costume and I don't think he's gonna go for that. So he's not gonna want to get rid of it. He had something to do with Secret Wars and you know, they kind of digging it. And I went, ah, man, I just, I don't want to draw Spider-Man in a black costume. It's like doing Batman in polka dots.

• 1:51:18Speaker 05

  Doesn't make any sense to me. So what if I come back to you with some designs? We just rip the costume off him. We put it on somebody. I'll create another character. Give it to the writers. We'll just figure it out. And then we still have the black costume. And then we can get the red and blue back on Peter Parker and it's a win, win, win. He was like, okay, that might work. So I go away. I do the drawing. The costume was alive. So I go, oh, it must be an alien. So I created this big, giant hulking alien and gave him the big eyes and the slobbering teeth. And to me, it was a gorilla. It's like an alien gorilla and then the claws and everything else. And that was a design for Venom. Like here, we didn't have a name at that point. I'd just go, here, here's the new bad guy. Here it is. Go. And they looked at it and went, oh, that's kind of cool.

• 1:52:04Speaker 05

  We'll give it to the writer. And so they gave it to the writer. They cleared it through upper management. They said, yeah, yeah, yeah, that seems like a reasonable thing. The writer comes back to me and says, Todd, the guy is Eddie Brock. And I went, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The writer's name was David. Whoa, David, Eddie Brock, Eddie Brock's a human. Did you see my design? Like information I could have used earlier. I would have designed it differently if I knew it was a human that I was putting the black costume on. But I sort of liked the design. I thought it was cool and it was giant. And I thought that it would be more formidable for Spider-Man to go up against something that was way bigger than him, than another humanoid form. And this is sort of the geeky stuff that us creators go through.

• 1:52:47Speaker 05

  And so I said, but man, if Bruce Banner, little shit, can turn into the Hulk, then by gosh, why can't Eddie Brock somehow be buried in this costume somewhere? Right? So we never sort of wavered from it. Venom comes out, has a big play in issue 300, Amazing Spider-Man 300. Sales go crazy. We knew we had something on our hand because every time Venom kept coming back, the mail. Again, there was no internet, but the mail kept getting bigger and people were like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. And so now, fast forward with hindsight, and Venom is, you know, a worldwide brand, you know, made a billion dollars for Sony in a movie. So again, there's

• 1:53:28Speaker 05

  the happy accident. And if you look at issue 300, if you want to go buy it, it comes with a couple of things. One, it's an anniversary book. Sales have gone way up on it. One, it's an anniversary book, issue 300, Amazing Spider-Man, Goodbye. Some of the very first early work of me on Spider-Man, and my first inking job on Spider-Man. But more importantly, it's the origin of Venom. And so for people, they spend hundreds of dollars, if you get these books, great, it's thousands of dollars, you can get the origin of Venom. I don't consider that book, if you were to ask me, is that the origin of Venom? No, it's the issue, how do we get that damn black costume off Peter Parker, so I can draw the classic red and blue costume? Because that's Spider-Man to me, right? Venom, I didn't care at that moment about Venom. It

• 1:54:12Speaker 05

  was like, get rid of it. The last page of that issue, Peter Parker gets rid of the black costume, because he has a fight with Venom, Venom goes on his way, and he pulls a box out from underneath the bed, and he pulls out the classic uniform, the red and blue, the one that to me is Spider-Man, and the last page, which I still have today, because it was like, finally, I'm drawing Spider-Man, because I started on issue 298, nope, black costume, 299, nope, black costume, and every page but one of issue 300, but that last page, it was, it even says, I think a caption, it says, "And a new beginning." And to me, I go, finally, I get to draw Spider- this was, for me, finally. Now, somehow Venom was the byproduct of that, right? Now, here's what should happen, Tim.

• 1:54:58Speaker 05

  An employee should come into the office, they should say, no, he's wearing the black costume, we want to give you the job on Amazing Spider-Man, one of the granddaddy books of the company, and most sane employees will go, yes, sir, yes, ma'am. What does the book do? I don't know. Todd is Todd and yai yai yai, right? And so I just was like, no, I need the red and blue costume. And, and, and, but because of some of that arrogance, ego, immaturity, whatever you want to call it, your byproduct is you've got a character called Venom that now creates carnage in this whole slew, right? So if I was that guy, that employee, all of that maybe never materializes. That's the true possibility of that.

• 1:55:43Speaker 05

  And then I just take all of that, remember Marvel's, that they're boring storytelling. I start pushing the boundaries of storytelling to make it more, I thought, dynamic. I thought everything we do in comic books is just a Broadway play. You must, everything should be big and you should be talking and, and performing for the lady with bad hearing that's in the last row at the theater. So that's what comic books are, it's bravado. And so I was doing all this fancy storytelling and my editors were going, Todd, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. But I just kept doing it. And then I, eventually I was asking them and I go, why can't we? And I go, well, the editor in chief, Jim, Jim Shooter, he doesn't like that.

• 1:56:26Speaker 05

  I found that to be impossible to believe, impossible to believe. Jim Shooter wants vanilla when he can have tutti fruity or a banana split? Hard to believe. So we went and had a meeting one time, my editor, Bob Harris, who ended up being the top dog at DC, I think he still is maybe. And we went into this meeting with Jim Shooter, the editor in chief, where every, every editor was literally shaken in the boots from Jim Shooter. He was like this authoritarian sort of figure. And he, as we're walking in the meeting, all Bob says is, don't ask him about storytelling, Todd, because he just wanted to say hi to me because I was, you know, this new guy on the Hulk and my career was starting to bud. And he just wanted to say hi to me. It was just a casual conversation.

• 1:57:11Speaker 05

  We have a nice, pleasant conversation. And then it's like, he goes, okay, I've got to get to my next meeting. And I go, yeah, yeah, yeah. And as we get up, because I wanted Bob to be moving, I went, oh, hey, Jim, just have one, one quick question. Can I change storytelling? Like, let me just ask you, am I allowed to have characters burst out of the panels? Because that was what they, I was doing with Spider-Man, and they're going, "You can't, you can't." And he was like, looked at me quizzitively and went, "Yeah, sure, why? Okay, but can I, can I do this other thing?" And he went, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure." And I went, "So, it's okay for me to, to..." Because I go, "I think I heard somebody," it wasn't Bob, my editor, standing in front of you. It must have been somebody else, told me that somehow that you said you can't have

• 1:57:53Speaker 05

  things punch, you can't have panels overlapping, and you can't have characters punching out. And I walked him through a couple of things, and he was horrified. And he was like, "What? What are you saying, Todd?" And I'm going, "Yeah, yeah, that's just what they're telling all the artists." And he was like, "No." And he got angry at that moment. He goes, "No, I never said that." He goes, "Here's what I said." And I knew this was the answer, Tim. I knew this was the answer. He said, "You can't do bad overlapping panels and bad drawings of people jumping out." And then he explained to me the difference between a bad version and a good version, right? And I knew what the bad and good version was. Basically, don't have a guy jumping out of a panel, and you're covering up half the

• 1:58:37Speaker 05

  drawing of the next panel. As long as you're doing it in some negative space, you're okay. Just as long as the storytelling's clear, I don't care how you design it, Todd. I knew it. Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. And shoot, from that meeting on, you take a look at my layouts in Spider-Man. It started getting crazier and crazier. Now, Jim Shooter gets pushed out very quickly. I keep doing my Todd thing on Spider-Man. I keep, and here's what I did on Spider-Man that literally catapulted my career. It was a simple move. They were doing Spider-Man, emphasis on man. I flipped it to Spider-Man, emphasis on the word spider. So when he put the costume on, I thought he was an insect. And I didn't care about anatomy. I didn't care whether it mattered. I just cared about

• 1:59:22Speaker 05

  the dynamics of this character looking like a bug man and crawling in a way. And then as part of that, I added more webbing on his costume. And then I had to come up with a new way of doing his webs that had been done this way for 30 years. I go, it doesn't work if you want to shoot it towards camera, or if you want to create a false sense of volume, which is the only thing we have as artists, you must give the illusion of 3D, given that you're drawing on a 2D piece of paper. So, again, all these silly things that bore people. But I was doing it. And oh, by the way, it fucking looks cool.

• 1:59:59Tim Ferriss?

  It doesn't bore me. Now, this stuff is, this is key. This is, these are important decisions.

• 2:00:04Speaker 05

  So I go, and it looks cool. And here's the moment I was talking about earlier. The moment you start messing with anybody's icon, status quo comes into the equation. And I'm now messing, I probably could have done what I did with a lower tier character, but not Spider-Man. Spider-Man, at this point, again, they're a public company. He is on their checks. Every check's got a little spidey on it. He's on their, he's on their quarterly reports. He's on their internal memos. And I'm messing with that look, right? And so, they came and they were sitting there and they took it as I was doing something. I thought they were doing it wrong and I was right. No, no, no, no, no. Here is the

• 2:00:49Speaker 05

  reality of it. And I've said it plenty of times. I thought that the look that had been presented, the classic look that was there, the one that everybody, if you close your eyes, you have in your mind if you're a certain age, was literally the Norman Rockwell version of Spider-Man. It was perfect. And the best I could hope for as a young budding artist is to do a bad version of that and go, man, that's almost as cool as Norman Rockwell's painting. Let me tell you, if you're gonna be a painter, never paint like Norman Rockwell. The best you're gonna get is, man, he's almost as good as Norman. That's the best you can hope for. You will never be better than Norman, right? He's already conquered that hill. Go find another. And make it your own. You can take pieces of Norman Rockwell, but you can't be that

• 2:01:34Speaker 05

  exact same look. So I was putting all these different looks together and coming up with some crazy stuff and just making the spider part of it. The eyes got bigger, more webs. I reinvented the webbing. I made the blue a little bit darker. I forgot about anatomy and I put them in these cool funky poses that the readers just went crazy for. And every single time I walked into the offices, what? So I didn't go there that often. They would call me on the carpet and they would say, no, no, stop it, stop it. And Tom denies it. But my Tom, there were moments of clarity in my life. This is one of them. Tom DeFalco was the editor in chief. He's an Italian guy. And he was giving me heck again, wiggling his finger going, you gotta stop doing the big

• 2:02:17Speaker 05

  eyes and this and then, and then he got so mad. I remember his face getting a little red and he goes, and that webbing, those damn spaghetti webbing, you gotta stop it. Now all the now, from my perspective, ladies and gentlemen, if you're in my head, it's like a Charlie Brown sort of cartoon. Alls I heard was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah spaghetti webbing. And I went, oh, my gosh, I've got a name for them now. So I was like so happy in that moment because Tom gave me an official name for him. They've been known ever since has the spaghetti weapon. Thank you, Tom DeFalco. I think he was cussing me out and giving me heck at that point. I wasn't paying attention though, because I was like, oh, super cool. I've got, I've got a name for it. He then says, in that same meeting, you gotta, you just gotta control this stuff. And my answer

• 2:03:01Speaker 05

  was, and anybody is under the age of 30 ish, listening, I'm going to give you a bit of a golden rule. Anybody asks you to do something, especially somebody in authority, always say yes, even if you're not going to do it. It's just way easier. You get out of the room faster, no confrontation, just nod your head yes in agreement and go do whatever the hell you want. And I knew that the editors would only circle back like every 90 days and look at the books and do their evaluation. And I walked out of that room. Not only did I not make the webbing smaller, I'll show you the issue. They got twice as long, right? Because they just look cool. I gotta tell you, Tim, they look cool. And by the time I came back the next time,

• 2:03:43Tim Ferriss?

  I've seen the books. I've seen them. I've seen them. I have been home.

• 2:03:46Speaker 05

  They wiggle their finger at you and they go, no. And next time I go to New York, they'll go, no, Todd. But here's what was happening. And here was their conundrum. Sales were going up. Sales were going up. And at one point, again, I had that conversation of that it's like, Tom, what do you care how I draw? What do you care? All you should care about is that I am selling you comic books. And you gave me the task of moving Spider-Man, Amazing Spider-Man, from 21 up the ranks, and it's at number two right now. Jim Lee and X-Men were beating us. And I was at one meeting, it was odd, there was this stranger in the room, I never met him before, didn't know who he was. And he just sat there silent the

• 2:04:30Speaker 05

  whole time. He had this big fat book. I didn't know who he was. And then at the finally, at the end of an hour conversation, when I said that, I go, I'm selling more damn books than almost anybody you employ right here, right now. This dude, I found out later, was an accountant. He opened up his big giant accounting book. Tom came behind him. The accountant didn't utter a word. He just pointed at something on his data sheet, and he shook his head, yes.

• 2:04:56Speaker 05

  What he just said, yes, sales are going up. And it was, you could just see that it was like, what do we do? Right? It's working, but we disagree with it because the status quo is getting. Let me tell your audience, here's the bizarro thing. And now that years have passed, everything they told me not to do on Spider-Man that I was rebellious against, and I just stuck to my guns, and I did it. And the sales are, do you know that if you're a young person right now, and you go to Marvel, and you draw Spider-Man, do you know what style you have to draw Spider-Man in? Todd McFarlane?

• 2:05:35Speaker 05

  So the guy who was told not to create it, I've now bizarrely, as I was going, no, I'm not going to draw that status quo, I'm going to do something funky, that my style is now the new status quo. And I don't think anybody should draw in Todd McFarlane's style, because the next person they should be encouraging to do their thing, because it might be five times better than what I ever came up with. I don't understand corporations of just coming up with an idea and glomming. Onto it so hard. Yes, I'm talking to you IBM. And then this little dudes in the garage come up with this little computer and they call it an apple.

• 2:06:16Speaker 05

  And somehow they beat you eventually because you become dinosaurs. And this is the thing, there is nobody in the world that's ever made change. And everybody liked them, especially the people who were had the power and the prestige and the money ahead of them. Nobody, if you go to any corporation and you say, I've got this new idea. You will never hear the words from the people that are the industry leaders. That sounds super cool. Let us get out of your way so you can just do that on your own unfettered.

• 2:06:55Speaker 05

  Are you out of your mind? They will take out bazookas and blades and put down the fucking the strips and the throwing darts. And they will do everything in their powers to discourage you because they are industry leaders. But eventually they become their own worst enemy.

• 2:07:13Tim Ferriss?

  Todd, we are at almost two hours now. I've realized that we've barely scratched the surface. We have established a lot of the background, of course, the personality, the rule breaking, the camel bladder. And we have not even touched upon your personal relationship with Stanley, which is of great interest to me. We have not talked about the toy empire. We have not talked about how any of that started. TV, film, music, spawn. I mean, there's a long list of things that I would love to cover with you. Would you be open to doing a round two? I think people would certainly be interested in listening to one. Could I convince you to come back for a round two?

• 2:07:53Speaker 05

  Tim, you'll find that like I'm not shy at opening my mouth and talking, you know, to the point I'm always going, am I, am I boring people? Cause I actually know all these stories because I lived them. But yeah, I think there are some interesting forks in the road. That may be not interesting for my career, but just sort of the human condition of what happens when you get to certain walls. I've been talking about what I had to do.

• 2:08:24Speaker 05

  In one industry, but now because of that success, what you just mentioned, I was able to break into multiple industries and found some of the same sort of repetition and how you navigate the sharks when you're a guppy, right? So, yeah, I'll come back. I appreciate you given, hopefully, we haven't bored people these two, because they'll go, why would I want to listen to another two? So it's your show, I'll let you decide whether that works.

• 2:08:55Tim Ferriss?

  Ultimately, I mean, let's call it selfish, self-interested. If I keep it interesting for me, just like you in those 10, 12-hour days, you gotta keep your artwork interesting to you, because otherwise, and even maybe still, it can be really lonely. For me, I just try to scratch my own itch and ask any questions about the things I'm interested in. So I'm very interested, I'm sure we'll have plenty of people along for the ride. And people can find you on all the social handles that I mentioned, of course. Are there any other places you'd like to point them, so they can find you on Instagram, at Todd McFarlane?

• 2:09:26Speaker 05

  Nah, whatever. People, you can find it, these are hipsters, right? I'm the old guy.

• 2:09:32Tim Ferriss?

  Type in your name, they'll find you.

• 2:09:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, whatever. People, if you're interested, you can find it. What I'll try and endeavor the next time is to answer more than three questions, because I think that's all you got in. And I need to temper and get, like, Todd, he just asked you how old you are, you don't have to talk about the entire sort of evolution of humanity to get to that answer, but I think that a little bit of backstory to get to the reasoning why, when you make that call at that moment, matters.

• 2:10:03Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. It's critical.

• 2:10:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we've now painted, hopefully, some of the personalities, so now we can just maybe be a little more varied in the questions, and we can pepper and jump around a bunch of industries, and I can tell you some silly stories about those ones, too.

• 2:10:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we'll get into the trenches, and we can hear more of your Art of War stories.

• 2:10:25Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:10:26Tim Ferriss?

  And creative.

• 2:10:27Speaker 05

  The day I almost killed Eddie Vedder. We'll talk about that one.

• 2:10:31Tim Ferriss?

  There we go. So that'll be the cliffhanger, and everybody listening, as usual, we will put show notes and links to everything in the show notes, at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, don't be afraid of rocking the boat, and consider your upside-downside, just like you were talking about those artists earlier. And image, it's human nature. What a thing. Todd, thank you for making the time today. So to be continued and we'll figure out a time for round two. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million

• 2:11:13Tim Ferriss?

  people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

• 2:11:58Tim Ferriss?

  If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. I have been using Eight Sleep Pod Cover for years now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod and I'm excited to test it out, Pod4Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically. More on that in a second. First, Pod4Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit

• 2:12:39Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:13:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:14:50Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:15:33Tim Ferriss?

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