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Episode: #759: Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Todd McFarlane

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 02:16:42

Episode Shownotes

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" 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."Please enjoy!Sponsors:Momentous high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off)Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save $350 on the Pod 4 Ultra)LMNT 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, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_04
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What if I did the opposite?

00:04:20 Speaker_00
I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

00:04:35 Speaker_04
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.

00:04:38 Speaker_04
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.

00:04:52 Speaker_04
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.

00:05:01 Speaker_04
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.

00:05:13 Speaker_04
And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.

00:05:27 Speaker_04
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.

00:05:37 Speaker_04
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 slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

00:05:54 Speaker_02
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.

00:06:07 Speaker_02
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.

00:06:22 Speaker_02
You can find Nassim on Twitter at NNTaleb, and you can find Scott on Twitter at Patterson Scott.

00:06:32 Speaker_04
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.

00:06:41 Speaker_04
You can't believe everything you read, but it was from the Guardian, so I thought it might be credible.

00:06:46 Speaker_00
One thing is actually, as I said, I recommend people do that.

00:06:49 Speaker_00
I wrote that, but 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.

00:07:02 Speaker_06
You've got the gun loaded.

00:07:03 Speaker_00
The whole idea of Plan B, how you thought about that problem. So you write the recognition letter, and you don't date it. Yeah.

00:07:13 Speaker_04
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.

00:07:31 Speaker_04
Here's the aphorism of 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.

00:07:40 Speaker_04
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?

00:07:57 Speaker_00
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 a reputation.

00:08:16 Speaker_00
And I realized that while writing Food by Randomness, hey, saying that what I'm doing is random, or using the wrong models, these don't work. So they attack your reputation.

00:08:24 Speaker_00
So I realized quickly, it was time that my reputation was gonna 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, view me.

00:08:41 Speaker_00
And it's not like I don't care about reputation, I only care about 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.

00:08:54 Speaker_00
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 Mungers.

00:09:08 Speaker_00
Charlie Mungers is that you wanna be the most ethical person when people think that you're corrupt, or you wanna be the most corrupt person Or people think that you're ethical. Make your choice, and use it as guideline. It's the same thing.

00:09:23 Speaker_00
So, except there's something in between, and there's some people, I care about, and I want them to not lose respect for me.

00:09:31 Speaker_00
Of course, you start with your mother, you have your children, or whatever, your family members, but there are also a lot of people on the planet, and I care about my reputation, but in these circles, not with the general public.

00:09:44 Speaker_00
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 going to pick on something, and you don't care, so you're doing the right things.

00:09:56 Speaker_00
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?

00:10:04 Speaker_06
What are some of the things that make Nassim 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. He mentioned his contrarian nature.

00:10:17 Speaker_00
It's not a contrarian nature, it's independent. People think I'm contrarian. I'm with the conspiracy theorists on many things. I'm against them on many other things. Some are just contrarian because they have a father problem.

00:10:31 Speaker_00
So to me, contrarian is an expletive rather than an attribute. But the other thing is, I thought it was going to be about me. It should be about the idea, the precaution.

00:10:42 Speaker_03
He's a lot more interested in literature and philosophy and not financial markets. That's the thing that drives him. He doesn't look at the stock market page every day like some people do.

00:10:56 Speaker_00
You have to figure out who are 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.

00:11:09 Speaker_00
I was always envious of people who 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.

00:11:24 Speaker_00
I don't believe in this, to say, oh, people having enough. There's someone here from East Hampton, the fellow who wrote Caps 22.

00:11:29 Speaker_06
A lot of interesting folks out there, yeah.

00:11:32 Speaker_00
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.

00:11:51 Speaker_00
So in other words, you know your upper bound. And effectively, I don't play that game, meaning I am literally, and I say envious of people who are erudites. Like if someone knows Latin very well, I'm envious.

00:12:05 Speaker_00
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. And luckily, it was a combination with Universa.

00:12:18 Speaker_00
I had so much leverage, you know, with marketing and all that stuff, that the spillover on me was more than satisfactory. So I have knock on wood a lot more than I wished.

00:12:27 Speaker_04
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.

00:12:40 Speaker_04
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.

00:12:51 Speaker_04
For instance, like the Stoics and the Seneca of the Younger and so on or other philosophical inputs, did those come early and then aid you, you think, in your career when you were active in the markets?

00:13:06 Speaker_04
Or did those come later and you always had a deep interest but were able to explore them at a later point.

00:13:12 Speaker_00
You know, it's actually, I started liking the Stoics and other people I've talked about, I liked them much earlier on in my life. But I went overboard.

00:13:22 Speaker_00
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.

00:13:33 Speaker_00
And then particularly when you look at history, 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 things like that.

00:13:48 Speaker_00
So I went into the empirics, the Eastern Mediterranean, Greco-Levantine, Greco-Roman, mostly using Greek language thinkers.

00:13:58 Speaker_00
And then, of course, and 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.

00:14:12 Speaker_00
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, being skeptic about important things, not about small things.

00:14:25 Speaker_05
Because- What would be an example of a big thing?

00:14:28 Speaker_00
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.

00:14:38 Speaker_00
And I said that those who are skeptical about the existence of God and non-existence of God, skeptical about religious matters, typically tend to be complete suckers when it comes to stocks.

00:14:50 Speaker_00
They believe in a stock market, or believe in some kind of pseudo-scientific theory on whatever it is, okay? But they don't believe in religion, and the reverse, all right?

00:14:59 Speaker_00
And people who are religious, typically, they're harder, and there's some, I don't know, research on that.

00:15:05 Speaker_00
There's a guy called Barha Lahmi, I think, who did some studies about skepticism, people who go to religion, about affairs, skepticism where it matters. And I wrote about it, I think, in the Black Swan, so skepticism where it matters.

00:15:17 Speaker_00
And I noticed that a lot of these big skeptics were not skeptical of God and things you can't do anything about. They were skeptical of the charlatan. They're skeptical of someone trying to take advantage of you.

00:15:30 Speaker_00
That's why you should exercise your skepticism. Among the great skeptics, there is a Bishop Huey. He was probably one of the second most erudite person of his time. Second most. There's a guy called Scaliger. The guy is phenomenal.

00:15:43 Speaker_00
translate into Arabic, Roman authors, Latin authors, and vice versa, okay? Scaligeri. There are a lot of the—Pierre Bayle. Pierre Bayle has a lot of works. He's one of those skeptics. Hume was one of those skeptics, but these people preceded Hume.

00:16:01 Speaker_00
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. It was called the Atheists.

00:16:16 Speaker_00
It originates, of course, in the Levant. And, of course, you have the great Algazel.

00:16:22 Speaker_00
the Islamic theologian, Iranian origin, who definitely was showing you how all these arguments are weak, you know, could dismantle arguments by showing you to be skeptical about the human arguments about God.

00:16:36 Speaker_03
A lot more spinoza is coming out of that.

00:16:39 Speaker_00
Spinoza came, he was skeptical about the text that was, these people say, okay, try to send these texts, okay, and be skeptical about things that really matter. And there was actually a skeptical school of medicine, practicing medicine.

00:16:52 Speaker_00
So what, I went back through history.

00:16:54 Speaker_00
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, right?

00:17:09 Speaker_00
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.

00:17:20 Speaker_06
Yes.

00:17:21 Speaker_04
Well, we're here to talk about whatever comes up, but I do want to hop over.

00:17:25 Speaker_04
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?

00:17:43 Speaker_03
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,

00:17:53 Speaker_03
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.

00:18:06 Speaker_03
There's an economist, Adam Tooze, who's coined a phrase called the polycrisis. What she 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 got.

00:18:23 Speaker_03
Pandemics you got economic instability financial crises. Climate change which is a big focus of mine and my daily job journal which i think is sort of the. big one in terms of the ever-magnification of crises that we're seeing.

00:18:40 Speaker_03
We're seeing it in the news every day. And what I wanted to do 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.

00:19:00 Speaker_03
I think that the central idea was, as I was talking about, 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?

00:19:19 Speaker_03
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.

00:19:32 Speaker_03
it delineates specific categories of risk that you should take the precautionary principle and apply it to. He has some specific ideas, and he can talk about it way better than I can.

00:19:43 Speaker_03
But these are things that can be global, that represent systemic risk to humanity, things that can be exponential.

00:19:51 Speaker_00
LRM And must be fertile. Must be fertile. Or exponentially.

00:19:53 Speaker_03
JG 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.

00:20:03 Speaker_03
And that's kind of how the book was structured, was first looking at the growth of the strategy with Mark and Seam, and then moving on to these other things that the world is facing and seeing if we could think about ways to

00:20:19 Speaker_03
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.

00:20:31 Speaker_03
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 Nassim and Mark, Nassim said, no way. I have no interest in doing that with you. It took a while.

00:20:44 Speaker_03
And then you were like, I have these black and white photos. You might want to take a look at it. So how did you convince him to do it? It was warm down. I think it was more Mark put the screws on. No, no, no. Let me tell you what happened.

00:20:59 Speaker_00
I actually don't know. I know that eventually he said he would talk. I extracted the promise from him to not be portrayed, to mention that I don't self-identify as a finance person.

00:21:10 Speaker_00
And once he made that promise, I said, okay, now we can talk because finance represents a significant part of my life.

00:21:19 Speaker_03
But I don't want to- This has been a theme with Nassim ever since I've known him. So to me, it was like- The identity piece. Yeah, that he's not a traitor. And I thought I agreed because it's true. He's not been a traitor for a long, long time.

00:21:33 Speaker_03
And it's obvious where his interests are.

00:21:37 Speaker_04
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?

00:21:46 Speaker_00
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 a thinker.

00:22:02 Speaker_00
Okay, he ended up making money and spending too much time in it and wrote drunk articles and books, or at least one book. So yeah, it was not what he wanted out of life.

00:22:13 Speaker_00
He's a middle European intellectual who would have liked to be remembered as someone who had ideas. And he envied, of course, Karl Popper, who he claims was his professor, but it was beyond. So I wrote about it in Full By Randomness.

00:22:29 Speaker_00
I said, here's this fellow who is, say, okay, but he also does, to distinguish himself from other financiers, he is also, or has intellectual aims. I said, I don't want to be that.

00:22:41 Speaker_00
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 still have some contact with reality. But I'm not cut for that.

00:22:56 Speaker_00
When I was writing Food by Random, so 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.

00:23:10 Speaker_00
Okay, so life took control of him. He didn't control life.

00:23:14 Speaker_03
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, and I never got around to it.

00:23:26 Speaker_03
So there you go with, you know, the Oracle of Omaha. Yeah. He wants to be thought of as an intellectual, too.

00:23:32 Speaker_00
Well, I mean, it's just not the same. The Sage 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 he doubts.

00:23:48 Speaker_00
And that's the precautionary principle.

00:23:50 Speaker_04
Could you give people the precautionary principle 101, just to back up?

00:23:54 Speaker_00
Okay, let me ask you. You're, Tim Ferriss, flying to go to Mexico. You go to JFK, and they tell you that you have uncertainty about the skills of the pilot. But we think he's good, but there's uncertainty. What do you do?

00:24:09 Speaker_00
You're not gonna get on that plane and say, okay, life is too important for me. You'll take a train, you'll walk, maybe you'll ride a bicycle, take a few months, but you're not gonna get on that plane.

00:24:21 Speaker_00
You change your plans and say, okay, there are other plans for other countries too, and other planes. That's Warren Buffett and his investments, and that's my Kirchner principle, the idea that there's an asymmetry.

00:24:32 Speaker_00
is that uncertainty about certain things is not good. So the climate, for example, if you have uncertainty about the climate, stop these models, all right? Just don't pollute. Try to use something else. Try to mitigate. So that's the first part of it.

00:24:47 Speaker_00
People get it right away when I give them a story of a plane, or I take water. I say, this is a glass of water on the table. There's no evidence that it's poisonous. Would you drink it? No, there's no evidence. There's no evidence that.

00:25:01 Speaker_00
But when you tell them, hey, you know, you should worry about GMOs, they say, there's no evidence they're harmful. Yeah, but there's no evidence that they're not harmful.

00:25:08 Speaker_00
Okay, so the asymmetry, where you put the burden of the asymmetry on, that's the Picardian principle. But then what we did is we noticed a lot of people, in fact, it was a counter.

00:25:18 Speaker_00
precautionary principle, because a lot of people are invoking it for nothing, to say we're going to 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 are the number one

00:25:37 Speaker_00
you need fat tails. Now, what does fat tail mean? Let me explain to you. 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.

00:25:51 Speaker_00
And then on the way back, you hear that a billion people died, okay? Which one is more likely to be the cause, Ebola or car accidents? Ebola. Now, but on a given day, if you hear Joe Smith died today, what's more likely, Ebola or a car accident?

00:26:12 Speaker_00
Car accident. Car accident. That's fat tales, fat tales. You have to identify, you do things backwards. If you hear of a big thing, where did it come from? And you have to get these, okay? So they have different dynamics because they scale differently.

00:26:26 Speaker_00
So in The Black Swan, I show the difference with the following metaphor. There are environments where you may have a large deviation, but it's not going to be consequential because it can't be very big.

00:26:38 Speaker_00
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, how much of the total will he or she represent? Say it's 30 basis points, nothing. Okay.

00:26:51 Speaker_00
And then if you go from a thousand to 10,000, 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,

00:27:04 Speaker_00
the wealthiest person on the planet, how much of the total will he or she represent? There'd be a running error. There'd be a running error. I mean, there'd be on average on the planet Earth, right?

00:27:15 Speaker_00
There'd be in total, maybe they have two or three million in total, and then you have hundreds of some billion right next to it. So this is where you have to focus on environment that produces fat tails. And this is what Mark did with Universa.

00:27:26 Speaker_00
Universa is named after the universal mechanism that generates fat tails. That was the name of the car. So everything we're in it, basically, intellectually, everything, all details.

00:27:37 Speaker_00
So we 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.

00:27:48 Speaker_00
So concentration, like, for example, you have a lot of people, all the wealth come from one person. It so happened that Under Fat Tales, the models that we use for risk management on Wall Street are BS. This is why I have a lot of enemies.

00:28:02 Speaker_00
This is why I have to protect myself against reputational damage, all right? So because all the economists hate me, all their models are based on that. So what is Fat Tales? Practically everything in the socioeconomic life is Fat Tales.

00:28:15 Speaker_00
What is not fat-tailed? Number of calories we're gonna eat tonight. How many calories can we have in one day? Tonight?

00:28:21 Speaker_05
We can only go for the gold, I'd say. I'd say we could each down a few thousand calories apiece. Two thousand, two thousand.

00:28:27 Speaker_00
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? Yeah. Not a single day is gonna make a difference. Can you lose all your money in a single day?

00:28:39 Speaker_05
Yes.

00:28:39 Speaker_00
There we go. So you have two environments, and they're separable. So this is why

00:28:44 Speaker_00
The universal approach that makes things separable, the fact that you can identify what is fat-tailed, 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.

00:28:57 Speaker_00
And then also, in fatness of tails, number one, pandemics. Number two, wars. I've got close, close second. Wars and pandemics.

00:29:06 Speaker_06
And so you can use that to prioritize application of the precautionary principle?

00:29:12 Speaker_00
Bingo. And let me tell you how. For example, if cancer is centails, nuclear centail, if you could diversify it, it's centails. If you can have a thousand nuclear reactors, all right? If you can insure it, rather than one, it is centail.

00:29:28 Speaker_00
If you can insure it, centail. 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.

00:29:39 Speaker_00
I mean, not for one of my co-authors, but I'll settle it with a beer or what is it, English?

00:29:45 Speaker_03
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 was Nassim.

00:30:01 Speaker_00
Which was written with him first, drinking, you know, in 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 ristretto, like you sip them.

00:30:17 Speaker_00
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.

00:30:25 Speaker_00
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 their swimming pool. That was something by a guy called Dr. Phil.

00:30:38 Speaker_00
Should we shut down pools?" at a time less than a thousand Americans had died of COVID. And then I presented the following argument. I said, if I die drowning in a swimming pool, my neighbor drowning in her or his swimming pool has not changed.

00:30:54 Speaker_00
If I die of COVID, the odds of my neighbor dying of COVID has increased. So you have that transmission that makes it fat-tailed, that mechanism of transmission.

00:31:03 Speaker_00
So this is why you cannot compare, as basically the press in the beginning, the so-called established press, was against our ideas, because it was racist against China.

00:31:14 Speaker_00
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.

00:31:34 Speaker_04
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 Momentus.

00:31:40 Speaker_04
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00:32:51 Speaker_02
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.

00:33:16 Speaker_02
You can find Todd on Instagram, at Todd McFarlane. Todd, welcome to the show, nice to see you.

00:33:24 Speaker_01
Tim, thanks for having me this morning, appreciate it.

00:33:26 Speaker_04
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.

00:33:41 Speaker_04
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.

00:33:50 Speaker_04
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.

00:34:07 Speaker_01
So here's what I would say about that. And I'll, I'll give you a little bit of back history. I would say it informed me more on the eventual business side, the competitiveness on the business side.

00:34:19 Speaker_01
So it's always interesting when you do certain interviews or with people, I always just 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?

00:34:35 Speaker_01
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 taught.

00:34:45 Speaker_01
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?

00:34:59 Speaker_01
So people go, oh my God, you're so tenacious. and you go up against people and you're such a rebel and 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.

00:35:13 Speaker_01
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.

00:35:27 Speaker_01
And 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?

00:35:38 Speaker_01
Everything is a competition. And then you take that and eventually, I was never gonna go to university. I remember being in class when they brought, in high school, they brought the,

00:35:48 Speaker_01
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.

00:35:56 Speaker_01
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? I wasn't even paying attention, sadly. And I go, well, what was the question? They're going, well, who wants to go to college?

00:36:09 Speaker_01
And I looked up, and every single person in my class had their arm up. 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, what are you talking about?

00:36:25 Speaker_01
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 them 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.

00:36:41 Speaker_01
Why would I then go and pay people money to eat more broccoli? It 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.

00:36:56 Speaker_01
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 of simplistic.

00:37:09 Speaker_01
If somebody is 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.

00:37:25 Speaker_01
And the other guy, 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 he's talking about was free.

00:37:35 Speaker_01
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.

00:37:47 Speaker_01
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, and 23 of my teammates decided they wouldn't get it in four years.

00:37:58 Speaker_01
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.

00:38:14 Speaker_01
So if nothing else, given that I'm sort of a cheapskate, I'm going, 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.

00:38:25 Speaker_01
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.

00:38:36 Speaker_01
And all of that sort of made me a freelancer, and I had to begin taking care of myself. And it's like, OK, it's just another game, another game of competition.

00:38:46 Speaker_04
First job in comic books, you've posted, I want to say, photographs of 350 or so rejection letters. When did you first start sending those out?

00:38:57 Speaker_04
And did you get any particularly helpful feedback that allowed you to modify things so that you were able to get that first job?

00:39:05 Speaker_01
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?

00:39:18 Speaker_01
At what point do you say, I'm gonna be an opera singer, and people keep giving you no's, and you go, man, look at how determined I am. At what point do you say, maybe I just can't sing opera?

00:39:28 Speaker_00
Right.

00:39:29 Speaker_01
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.

00:39:45 Speaker_01
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 school. So I didn't have a job. I was going to school. So I didn't care.

00:40:00 Speaker_01
I had four years to basically try and get a job. And then 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.

00:40:13 Speaker_01
And I thought I was going to be the guy who's going to do Michelin tire ads. I go, that's OK. 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.

00:40:24 Speaker_01
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. Because I sent it to every editor at every company.

00:40:43 Speaker_01
They used to have, let's say at Marvel, because my first job was at Marvel, they have like one submission editor.

00:40:48 Speaker_01
No no no no no the people who give you the work are the editors and they have sixteen editors so i would send it to all sixteen editors ultimately i went around the submission guy i just want what you gotta give it to the editors anyways my will send it directly to the editor so i would keep sending it to the editors over and over and over to every company every editor and i think.

00:41:10 Speaker_01
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.

00:41:28 Speaker_01
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 wore him out. And I got the job literally three weeks before I graduated, so I never even had to use my degree.

00:41:43 Speaker_01
What informed me in those, it was all constructive criticism. Let me tell you, because people say, oh, Todd, you got the last laugh. No, no, no.

00:41:52 Speaker_01
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.

00:42:01 Speaker_01
So everybody who took the time to write back actually gave a little bit of insight.

00:42:08 Speaker_01
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.

00:42:19 Speaker_01
So, you know, where I was making 20 mistakes eventually got down to 18 and then 16 and then 15. 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.

00:42:36 Speaker_01
So somebody give him a chance, see what he can do.

00:42:38 Speaker_04
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?

00:42:49 Speaker_04
And I suppose this leads into the question, 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.

00:42:58 Speaker_01
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, if not thousands, of people who can draw circles around me.

00:43:13 Speaker_01
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

00:43:29 Speaker_01
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.

00:43:42 Speaker_01
He's the one that created 300 that ended up getting turned into a movie, and Sin City, and all these things. He rejuvenated dead characters like Daredevil.

00:43:53 Speaker_01
I wouldn't say and i think frank would agree that he's not the best anatomically correct artist and his drawing don't get every muscle right. What he does is he tell stories better than anybody else in our industry period.

00:44:10 Speaker_01
So he could do it with stick men, and you would still be engaged because of his writing, the way he does it, and what's happening in it.

00:44:19 Speaker_01
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.

00:44:26 Speaker_01
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. But then I found out that really what they wanted was less flash and more clarity. on the pages, right?

00:44:40 Speaker_01
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.

00:44:52 Speaker_01
But that was kind of interesting because they understood what they were supposed to be reading in 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,

00:45:06 Speaker_01
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 monthly deadlines can have long careers and not be very good at drawing because you have to get product out every 30 days.

00:45:23 Speaker_01
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.

00:45:35 Speaker_04
And I'm embarrassed that I don't know this, but I never made it far enough.

00:45:39 Speaker_01
You can still lead a productive life, Tim. Don't worry about it. I'm working on it.

00:45:43 Speaker_04
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?

00:45:55 Speaker_04
What do the actual deadlines and deliverables look like for a full-time comic book artist?

00:46:01 Speaker_01
So it has shifted, as you can imagine, with technology.

00:46:05 Speaker_01
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 either phone FedEx, and they were called Federal Express at that point.

00:46:19 Speaker_01
And so I would have to phone Federal Express. When I used FedEx, my wife would go, oh, you're so hip, call them FedEx. And eventually they caught on.

00:46:27 Speaker_01
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.

00:46:37 Speaker_01
And so if I missed a driver, which is why I hired an assistant to help sort of package 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.

00:46:50 Speaker_01
And then we drive to the airport. Do you know how many times I ran down the tarmac? Cause it was a little sort of prop plane that flew to Vancouver, British Columbia.

00:46:59 Speaker_01
And they were, I think it was always looking over his shoulder going, Todd to be here in about two minutes. And I'd be running down the tarmac and I basically throw my package to him and he'd get it done today.

00:47:09 Speaker_01
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. All it means is you just get to push your luck with deadlines later and later.

00:47:23 Speaker_01
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. So that goes to print, because I just talked to the people at DC Comics yesterday.

00:47:39 Speaker_01
It goes to print on Monday. You and I are talking on Friday.

00:47:44 Speaker_01
I still have to write it's a forty page book i've only written eight pages i've gotta finish forty pages there's ten pages that haven't been colored i literally talk to the person who does the word balloons. After i give him the script to say hey.

00:47:59 Speaker_01
sorry, dude, we've got to 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 and make sure nobody, no pages are upside down or backwards.

00:48:10 Speaker_01
And then they're going to hit send and it's going to go to the printer and the printers 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.

00:48:19 Speaker_01
You can't swap out books and say, ah, we'll just swap out another book. Can you just substitute? Not of that magnitude. They've got, Lots of printer presses waiting for this one book, and we've got to deliver. So how does it work?

00:48:31 Speaker_01
By our chinny-chin-chin, like a lot of other things in the world. You just get it done.

00:48:36 Speaker_04
So let me back up for a second, because 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 know how to train, obviously.

00:48:47 Speaker_01
I've missed the plane a couple of times.

00:48:48 Speaker_04
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.

00:49:02 Speaker_04
Writing wise.

00:49:03 Speaker_01
Okay. Wow. Tim, 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 letter, the guy who actually converts your script into the word balloons. I talked to my letter and go, dude,

00:49:18 Speaker_01
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.

00:49:25 Speaker_01
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. I believe you. Like you said earlier, a couple of years ago, I set a record.

00:49:37 Speaker_01
I mean, Spawn is the longest-running creator-owned 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 get it done. It's like going to the gym.

00:49:50 Speaker_01
Every workout isn't awesome, but did you get your workout in? Yeah, sure.

00:49:54 Speaker_06
Wow. By the hair of your chinny-chin-chin.

00:49:57 Speaker_01
Nobody knows on the other side. Nobody knows. That's true. Everybody's going to look at that book and go, man, look at how professionally done it was.

00:50:07 Speaker_04
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?

00:50:22 Speaker_04
Because I remember as a kid, I wanted to be a penciler for about 10 years. So 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.

00:50:36 Speaker_04
where Jim Lee had been the previous graphics editor.

00:50:39 Speaker_01
So I had a… Jim Lee's ahead of DC Comics, for those that don't know.

00:50:42 Speaker_04
And he had these sketches in the desk that he'd done after getting hammered in college. And I thought these were 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.

00:50:54 Speaker_04
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 this story.

00:51:04 Speaker_01
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?

00:51:18 Speaker_01
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.

00:51:30 Speaker_01
As a matter of fact, those first couple 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

00:51:38 Speaker_01
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 Marvel's owned by disney.

00:51:50 Speaker_01
They don't share that too much and dc com books is 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.

00:52:02 Speaker_01
So one's owned by disney one's owned by warner brothers Okay, so you're sony You're universal. You're Paramount Studios. your Netflix, your Apple, your Paramount Plus. What are you talking about? Where are you getting product? Not getting it from Marvel.

00:52:17 Speaker_01
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 a really good position.

00:52:33 Speaker_01
Now, let's go back, because that doesn't answer your question. How did we get to image comic books? For me personally,

00:52:39 Speaker_01
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.

00:52:50 Speaker_01
And what I found was I was coming across a common theme and the common theme was that everybody, no matter how,

00:53:03 Speaker_01
Big you're 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 these are artists. These are artists, writers, whatever.

00:53:20 Speaker_01
These stories 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?

00:53:34 Speaker_01
To put it in perspective to people who are laymen listening, that they called him the king for a reason, because he was

00:53:43 Speaker_01
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

00:54:01 Speaker_01
I remember reading those articles, 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.

00:54:13 Speaker_01
And so when I got my first job in comic books, 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.

00:54:32 Speaker_01
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.

00:54:47 Speaker_01
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.

00:55:00 Speaker_01
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 we came up with a story, and that was what it was.

00:55:14 Speaker_01
OK, 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. And at some point, Tim,

00:55:31 Speaker_01
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.

00:55:47 Speaker_01
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 a dumper. Spider-Man's in the dumper.

00:55:57 Speaker_01
In short order.

00:55:59 Speaker_01
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 it's really what catapulted my career And just so you know all the things that I was doing artistically to help move it from number 22 to number one

00:56:17 Speaker_01
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 to your messing with the icon that's not how we do it let me tell you ladies and gentlemen has old man now the single greatest danger you are gonna meet in your life is status quo, it is the thing that they're gonna fight and battle you against more than any,

00:56:44 Speaker_01
other thing in the world. And what's staggering about what I just said, which is a truism, is that there's only two hundred percenters in the world that I can give you. One, we're all going to die. Hate to break it to you. It's just a matter of time.

00:57:00 Speaker_01
The second is everything is going to eventually change. Otherwise, we'd be living in caves right now. Change is part of the human condition.

00:57:12 Speaker_01
And yet every day you run into systems that are crushingly holding on to status quo, are holding on to yesterday. And for those of us that are wired to think about tomorrow, we become the rebels. We become the outcasts.

00:57:31 Speaker_01
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 going to tell you.

00:57:40 Speaker_01
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.

00:57:52 Speaker_01
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.

00:58:04 Speaker_01
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. And there's only one way. I've got to be a little bit different.

00:58:17 Speaker_01
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.

00:58:39 Speaker_01
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.

00:58:53 Speaker_01
They go, no, no, no, because you're selling so many books. We'll give you a new Spider-Man book. They were going to 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.

00:59:04 Speaker_01
I'm going, you're going to 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.

00:59:14 Speaker_01
And they said, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that book set a record. It's in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most sales by a single creator. I also own that record on the other side with Spawn.

00:59:25 Speaker_01
I own the corporate and non-corporate record for a single issue by a single person. Done. Now, I'm not saying that bragging.

00:59:31 Speaker_01
I'm just saying it has a fact so that now that guy who's setting records, when he comes into the office in New York from Canada, a little Canadian hick, You would think that they would say, thank you, not fuck you, right?

00:59:47 Speaker_01
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,

01:00:02 Speaker_01
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.

01:00:18 Speaker_01
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.

01:00:29 Speaker_04
They wore me out. 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'd developed.

01:00:41 Speaker_04
So what was the day or the conversation where you're just like, fuck this, now is the time, I'm splitting off?

01:00:48 Speaker_01
I remember with clarity. they had been doing, comic books have this thing in the corner called the Comics Code.

01:00:55 Speaker_01
And the Comics Code was created because in the late 50s, there was the whole wortham scare 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

01:01:09 Speaker_01
sort of the advent of Marvel Comics. Because Marvel was a company called Timely Comics. But then they went, uh-oh, we don't want to get caught up in this whole Senate hearing. Let's sort of whitewash, if you will, our presentation.

01:01:23 Speaker_01
And they changed their name to Marvel. And the 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, right?

01:01:32 Speaker_01
So you can argue that thanks to some loony 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.

01:01:44 Speaker_01
We should be giving it to McCarthy and Dr. Wortham, who was the one who wrote the book, The Seduction of the Innocent, right? So look it up. Anyways, I'm doing the books because of that comics code. Every now and then, they would get you to fix a panel.

01:02:00 Speaker_01
Todd, you can't do that. Why? Because of the comics code.

01:02:03 Speaker_01
Okay now i used to ask him 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 gotta redraw something because i have deadlines and i don't like to redraw and redo anything and so.

01:02:18 Speaker_01
It's like burning your pasta. Then you go, oh, man, I got to cook it and boil the water again. You get aggravated the second time around. So at some point, they kept doing that, and then the day came.

01:02:28 Speaker_01
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,

01:02:38 Speaker_01
the sideways issue my last issue at marvel it was a sideways issue of the spider-man book the one i had i was writing myself except for we were doing a crossover with some of that 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

01:02:57 Speaker_01
there was a bad guy and his name was a juggernaut. 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 isolates.

01:03:09 Speaker_01
He's got to look out those isolates. 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.

01:03:23 Speaker_01
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 unedited version even better. I don't even have the edited version.

01:03:40 Speaker_01
I have the unedited version. And so they phoned me up and they said, Todd, you got to redraw it. And I went, what? Redraw what? You can't stab somebody in the eye with a knife. And I go, what are you talking about? Like the comics quote.

01:03:56 Speaker_01
I go, well, of course you can. Because just not long ago, there was this great cover. Not only was it in the book, 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.

01:04:15 Speaker_01
And so I go, of course you can stab people. And they go, well, yes, you can stab people, but you can't have a rear exit wound. And I went, what are you talking about? Did you look at that cover?

01:04:27 Speaker_01
The guy's killing electors, going in the front, he's coming out the back. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can stab them, and it can come out a rear exit wound, but you can't tear the cloth.

01:04:37 Speaker_01
So if you look at the drawing, you're going to 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 cheap, but it hasn't cut. So I go, so I just want to be clear.

01:04:51 Speaker_01
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 him in the eye.

01:05:11 Speaker_01
Yeah, but you know what?

01:05:12 Speaker_01
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 are… So, I just want to be clear.

01:05:29 Speaker_01
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.

01:05:46 Speaker_01
And so I had at that moment, I stopped the conversation because you never want to have a conversation with anybody where two plus two equals giraffe, right? Never talk to somebody who comes up with that equation.

01:05:59 Speaker_01
So I said, guys, here's, what's going to happen. I'm going to 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.

01:06:16 Speaker_01
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.

01:06:28 Speaker_01
These guys have worn me out, and all I do is sell books for them, and I just called Uncle, and that was it. That was the day I walked away. Now, did I have a plan B? Of course I didn't, Tim. Of course I didn't.

01:06:42 Speaker_01
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 OK, here we go. The upside of it was that I was talking to a couple other people.

01:06:58 Speaker_01
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 going, come on, man, power to the people, right? If we stop drawing, put pencils down, they got nothing to print.

01:07:12 Speaker_01
We show them our power. It was frustrating for me when I tried it for a few months that the most scared people that will say, yeah, let's join together. are those that don't have a job. It was weird to me.

01:07:27 Speaker_01
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.

01:07:39 Speaker_01
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.

01:07:52 Speaker_01
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. If you joined this enclave, I will promise. I will make all of those equal to you, right?

01:08:08 Speaker_01
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.

01:08:24 Speaker_01
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.

01:08:39 Speaker_01
And both of them had that same entrepreneurial, let's just call it rebellious trait in them. And we were always talking.

01:08:48 Speaker_01
And I remember in one conversation, Rob was saying, yeah, I'm going to maybe go, you know, he's still working for Marvel, so is Eric. And it's like, yeah, I'm going to go do my own book.

01:08:56 Speaker_01
And then Eric was on the call going, yeah, I'm going to go do my own book. And I had just quit.

01:09:01 Speaker_01
And at some point during the conversation, the topic came up, go, well, if you're going to do your own book on your own, Rob, and you're going to 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?

01:09:14 Speaker_01
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'll go get another player. So you lose another.

01:09:27 Speaker_01
But what if 10 of your players on a championship team quit the same 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,

01:09:44 Speaker_01
who 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, uh, Andre Agassi, I think.

01:09:57 Speaker_01
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.

01:10:11 Speaker_01
You don't overthink people. People think that we come up with all this stuff and we know what we're doing. No venom in and of itself was a happy accident. We can go back to that in a minute if you want to.

01:10:22 Speaker_01
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. Is it OK if he comes? And it's like, what are you talking about? This is a group. The more, the merrier.

01:10:37 Speaker_01
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.

01:10:57 Speaker_01
We fly to New York and I land the day before. We have a meeting with the top people, 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.

01:11:11 Speaker_01
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,

01:11:19 Speaker_01
I would close his barn door because you might 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.

01:11:30 Speaker_01
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 the beginning, who's now the head of DC Congo.

01:11:40 Speaker_01
Jim Lee is at the auction and he's like, Hey, Tom, what are you doing here? I'm like, oh, and I told him. 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.

01:11:59 Speaker_01
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.

01:12:13 Speaker_01
He was my competition. Like, I was Magic Johnson, he was Larry Bird, OK? 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.

01:12:26 Speaker_01
And then, to my surprise, says, I think I can go with that. Now, this is a monumental moment from my perspective. And here's why, ladies and gentlemen. Todd, the rebel, leaving.

01:12:41 Speaker_01
was going to be easy for Marvel to basically discount, because they were going to 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.

01:12:54 Speaker_01
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 and artists, Jim Lee was the mold.

01:13:14 Speaker_01
And so when Jim said he would go, that was a thunderclap in my head to go, oh my God, if the choir boy can go.

01:13:24 Speaker_01
then that means all bets are off, and they are going to 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 Pertaccio.

01:13:39 Speaker_01
Is it OK if I phone him? Because he's looking for his work. I think he'll join too. Shoot, he was doing another X-Men book. I'm going, what? We're going to get two X-Men? The X-Men books are the number one selling book at that point. Bring them on.

01:13:53 Speaker_01
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 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.

01:14:07 Speaker_01
Now, Mark Silvestri, to me at that time, was the best artist, like just in terms of skill, Mark Silvestri.

01:14:16 Speaker_05
Don't believe a thing that my son is saying.

01:14:18 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's my dad. I'm taking care of here.

01:14:20 Speaker_05
Yeah, yeah, no problem.

01:14:23 Speaker_01
So Mark Silvestri is there, and it's about 11 o'clock at night, and I go, hey, Mark, what are you doing? He goes, oh, I'm going to bed. You got five minutes for me, right?

01:14:31 Speaker_01
And so I sit down and like Mussolini from the balcony, I give him this 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.

01:14:46 Speaker_01
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.

01:14:56 Speaker_01
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. Yeah, that's it.

01:15:04 Speaker_01
Now, I don't know what he did or how well he slept that night, but in the morning at 7 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.

01:15:19 Speaker_01
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,

01:15:34 Speaker_01
There's probably a every year about that year was probably about six seven thousand 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 books at 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

01:15:55 Speaker_01
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.

01:16:10 Speaker_01
We were literally the comic book equivalent of the dream team, the basketball team that was happening in basketball at that time. So I knew this was going to reverberate somewhere.

01:16:22 Speaker_01
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, and essentially it went like this.

01:16:30 Speaker_01
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.

01:16:43 Speaker_01
But not only has 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?

01:16:55 Speaker_01
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.

01:17:10 Speaker_01
What are you talking about? None of us is that crazy. We understood the dynamics of the business. We would like, 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.

01:17:23 Speaker_01
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.

01:17:37 Speaker_01
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?

01:17:50 Speaker_01
Do what you gotta do, it's your company, whatever. 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.

01:18:05 Speaker_01
The one that used to tell me, can't do that, Todd, you can't do that, Todd, on Spider-Man.

01:18:11 Speaker_01
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.

01:18:20 Speaker_01
So that was classic Rob, like, oh, you guys just finished this world-changing conversation. I go get my wife and got to 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.

01:18:35 Speaker_01
Anyways, we get in the elevator at the end of this conversation, and I will never forget the words, as the elevator doors are closing, just like in a movie.

01:18:45 Speaker_01
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. And the doors shut. And I remember turning to Jim Lee.

01:18:59 Speaker_01
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.

01:19:14 Speaker_01
The one thing that I knew. It's printing and if not i knew lots of people who did so the doors close and i looked at jim and i go oh my god.

01:19:24 Speaker_01
They think we're dumb and i'm not that we're smart him not that we're smart him but you know what printing comic books is. Ink on paper. That's it.

01:19:34 Speaker_01
Ladies and gentlemen ink on paper done Maybe there's a couple 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

01:19:53 Speaker_01
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.

01:20:09 Speaker_01
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 quit DC Comics, you quit and you walked across the street to Marvel. That's all you did.

01:20:23 Speaker_01
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.

01:20:34 Speaker_01
And DCCs, I had started, you know, I had done about a year, year and a half there. Rob Liefeld had done a year there. But Jim Lee and I walk in there. Jim Lee has never stepped foot.

01:20:47 Speaker_01
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 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

01:21:07 Speaker_01
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.

01:21:23 Speaker_01
I go, hey, guys, just so you know, we're not here to work for you. 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?

01:21:37 Speaker_01
And it's like, no, no, no, we're not here to work for you. And you could just see, so we're just clear. 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?

01:21:53 Speaker_01
That's 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.

01:22:06 Speaker_01
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.

01:22:15 Speaker_01
And then I asked them the question for me that was like the dagger for me, where they go, Hey, you don't know that was super cool. That was super, super cool. You wrote up that new contract for the creative community.

01:22:25 Speaker_01
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?

01:22:40 Speaker_01
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.

01:22:55 Speaker_01
This is why we're quitting DC. Because of your disregard for your community 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.

01:23:18 Speaker_01
And we thought that that was it. And that was when the collective whole, not me, the collective whole of the seven of us started Image Comics.

01:23:28 Speaker_04
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... No, we put them on alert and gave them the same sort of speech we gave Marvel.

01:23:41 Speaker_01
If you think that the dissatisfaction of the seven of us is unique to the seven of us, you guys are blind.

01:23:48 Speaker_04
I see. So it was a change your ways or become a fatality.

01:23:52 Speaker_01
Right. Every conversation is the exact same.

01:23:56 Speaker_01
And if we prove that there's any success on the outside of the only two bubbles that exist in most freelancers' brains, which is Marvel, DC, or you get another job, and I mean another job in another industry,

01:24:10 Speaker_01
So 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.

01:24:23 Speaker_01
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 on royalties because they knew

01:24:38 Speaker_01
That what we were saying at some point that reality sunk in that we could start losing almost all of our.

01:24:46 Speaker_01
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.

01:24:56 Speaker_01
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.

01:25:13 Speaker_04
Okay, so I just came back from a bathroom break. You mentioned before we started recording you had a camel bladder and that you would talk until I had to take a bathroom break, which was true. So how is a camel bladder a competitive advantage?

01:25:26 Speaker_01
It is. And so, because people go, so what? So why? So you don't go to the bathroom?

01:25:30 Speaker_01
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.

01:25:40 Speaker_01
And they had to, now again, other human beings have to eat and go to the bathroom, so I go, you better have two teams, then you're going to have to rotate them. Let me just

01:25:49 Speaker_01
sort of quickly get out of the way first, how you can not 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? It's just basic.

01:26:01 Speaker_01
So I don't eat and I don't drink, That's a whole other conversation, but like they're going, well, how do you do that? That's another conversation. But if you don't put anything, nothing in, nothing out. Simple, easy.

01:26:13 Speaker_01
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.

01:26:22 Speaker_01
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.

01:26:33 Speaker_01
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 can outlast you if you've got to go away.

01:26:46 Speaker_01
So people would take off at conventions and go away for lunch or bathroom breaks or whatever. Guess who didn't?

01:26:53 Speaker_01
Me 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 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 kids going what I've already been in line for three out like I can't do it I can't look at somebody in the eye.

01:27:20 Speaker_01
I won't do it. So I said no, I'll just figure out how to not do this thing that most humans do.

01:27:27 Speaker_01
And here's where the upside is, is that 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 signing. What's his name? Todd, Tom, Tim, whatever. What's he do? Spider-Man.

01:27:40 Speaker_01
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 lines moving. I'll get in his line.

01:27:51 Speaker_01
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.

01:28:00 Speaker_01
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?

01:28:09 Speaker_01
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. Number two on the business end. And this one is sadly even easier.

01:28:23 Speaker_01
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.

01:28:36 Speaker_01
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.

01:28:47 Speaker_01
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, usually when I'm in my room, I bring down drapes, and I put up the AC, and I'm comfortable.

01:29:03 Speaker_01
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. Because why? I can endure it.

01:29:17 Speaker_01
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.

01:29:29 Speaker_01
And then I put a giant pitcher of water in front of them. And then I uttered 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.

01:29:50 Speaker_01
And during those conversations, they either poured 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.

01:30:09 Speaker_01
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 0.10. I'm not moving. It's a deal breaker. If I don't get it, this whole deal.

01:30:21 Speaker_01
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 0.10. Are we done? Yes. Are we done? Yes. Where's your bathroom? The very next thing is, where's your bathroom?

01:30:35 Speaker_01
Because I think in my mind that they literally caved in.

01:30:40 Speaker_01
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.

01:30:56 Speaker_01
Too bad, how sad, right? You find your advantages wherever you can get them.

01:31:03 Speaker_04
Oh, Macfarlane 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.

01:31:17 Speaker_01
Happy accident.

01:31:18 Speaker_04
Yeah. So how did it come together?

01:31:20 Speaker_01
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.

01:31:31 Speaker_01
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.

01:31:43 Speaker_01
So, cause 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.

01:31:57 Speaker_01
It literally was starting in the mail room. But eventually, I got a steady job over at DC because they canceled Coyote. And I got a monthly book over at DC.

01:32:08 Speaker_01
Unfortunately, Tim, and this is where sometimes one person's break is another person's tragedy, an artist on another book

01:32:17 Speaker_01
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.

01:32:27 Speaker_01
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 months? And I at that point they had cancelled coyote.

01:32:38 Speaker_01
I literally took me years to get in I was employed for four months and then they cancelled coyote And i'm like man 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.

01:32:53 Speaker_01
I was now able to say I am Todd McFarland, the professional from Marvel Comic Books. The drawing was exactly the same. It'd only been four months.

01:33:01 Speaker_01
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 professional's looking for work pile. So I get the job, go, yeah, woo, I've got some work.

01:33:15 Speaker_01
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, do you want to take over the book? It was a book called Infinity Incorporated.

01:33:27 Speaker_01
And I stayed on the book for two, three years. So when I went over to Marvel, they went, okay, you can keep a deadline check.

01:33:33 Speaker_01
The question is you got to stop doing, and here's a bizarre thing that was happening at Marvel at that point, you got to stop doing what they called They dubbed the big, your big dice drawing style.

01:33:45 Speaker_01
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.

01:33:59 Speaker_01
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. I knew that.

01:34:14 Speaker_01
Like, at some point, you got to be realistic about your skills. I was mediocre. And I had two choices. I could either put mediocre drawings and boring

01:34:24 Speaker_01
layout 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.

01:34:38 Speaker_01
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,

01:34:48 Speaker_01
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.

01:34:58 Speaker_01
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.

01:35:05 Speaker_01
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.

01:35:15 Speaker_01
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 going to be easy, right?

01:35:25 Speaker_01
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 give me the first job back at Marvel. They go, hey, problem. You usually have 30 days to do a book, right, once a month.

01:35:38 Speaker_01
But we're behind the eight ball. We can give you this job, but you only got 10 days. I gave it to him 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?

01:35:51 Speaker_01
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

01:36:05 Speaker_01
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?

01:36:16 Speaker_01
So up to then, everything I was doing was like, I don't know if he's ever going to make it. I was still working at Marvel in DC. It just wasn't for books.

01:36:23 Speaker_01
But if you can go to the neighbor's 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.

01:36:33 Speaker_01
So it's important to have characters that know because it helps the relatives in your circle sort of 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.

01:36:45 Speaker_01
So, OK, 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 in all your questions. I wish I was better.

01:37:01 Speaker_04
I'm into it.

01:37:02 Speaker_01
Okay. So I do the Hulk, I'm doing penciling, and then I go, I'm going to 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.

01:37:13 Speaker_01
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?

01:37:25 Speaker_01
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 the real American heroes, this might be a bit of a problem, but nobody's going to tell there was no internet.

01:37:37 Speaker_01
So I did the first issue of G.I. Joe, and I was doing The Hulk, 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.

01:37:50 Speaker_01
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 the 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?

01:38:06 Speaker_01
You're going to 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 writer's view of comic books were so diametrically opposed.

01:38:20 Speaker_04
Where did you guys clash on that? What kind of decisions or what type of stuff?

01:38:25 Speaker_01
He probably sees it a little bit differently, but I'll just show you, given 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.

01:38:37 Speaker_01
Assume your reader is an—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.

01:38:50 Speaker_01
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.

01:39:01 Speaker_01
grab the door, open the 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.

01:39:19 Speaker_01
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.

01:39:37 Speaker_01
You don't have to do it. But anyway, He had his way of seeing the world. I had my way of seeing the world. Fine, no big deal. Got it. So he fires me off it. And I remember I was sitting in my apartment up in Vancouver.

01:39:51 Speaker_01
And I leaned back, and I looked at the clock, and it was like 12.06. And I was a little bit bummed, because I'm like, man, I've never been fired, right? So it was like, oh, man, at 12.14, bring, I am telling you, no lie, seven minutes.

01:40:06 Speaker_01
I was unemployed for seven minutes. Bring Todd. Yeah. Hey, this is Dip Giordano 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.

01:40:22 Speaker_01
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.

01:40:33 Speaker_01
It's a four-part story, and the artists quit after the first one. Can you finish the last three? What? Like what? You're saying my choice right now is either stay on, which I didn't have an option, but stay on G.I.

01:40:46 Speaker_01
Joe that I just got fired from that was basically like putting daggers in my eyes or do Batman and that was the only character I'd come back for? So I jump on Batman year two. Now,

01:40:58 Speaker_01
It gets a little crazier by that point, 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.

01:41:14 Speaker_01
I thought I had my drawing styles, what I would call sort of this new wave 90 style. And I was constantly getting anchors that were like these 1960s old school brush guys.

01:41:27 Speaker_01
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. And it was so

01:41:37 Speaker_01
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.

01:41:45 Speaker_01
So I do this part two of Batman year two, then I do part three and then they send me the samples.

01:41:52 Speaker_01
And I, and I finally, I get another one of those moments in my life with clarity that I look at it and I see the splash page and a splash page has a commissioner Gordon and he's holding the gun. And to me, it looks hairy. Right. I go, it's metallic.

01:42:07 Speaker_01
Why is it looking hairy? And it's because the inker was doing these lines that work for him, I guess. And then I looked at like another panel and it was the hallway. And when you're doing like a downshot of a hallway, you, the lines get closer.

01:42:24 Speaker_01
It's basically perspective. I won't bore people, but it's just the illusion of depth. And I'd done all 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.

01:42:37 Speaker_01
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. Again, I just sort of try to get as simple as possible.

01:42:53 Speaker_01
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, I fucking wanted them to go up and down vertically.

01:43:07 Speaker_01
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've meant horizontal.

01:43:24 Speaker_01
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.

01:43:39 Speaker_01
And I don't mean to do power play 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 and let me be completely honest, I've never inked before. So I'm a complete noob.

01:43:52 Speaker_01
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.

01:44:08 Speaker_01
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, well, they let me ink the Batman.

01:44:20 Speaker_01
And so he's like, oh, okay, I guess you can ink the Hulk. And now I'm gonna eventually get to your question about Venom. So it was a long-winded way, sorry. Eventually- That's okay.

01:44:29 Speaker_04
Let me pause you for 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.

01:44:43 Speaker_01
You simplify it.

01:44:45 Speaker_04
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

01:45:01 Speaker_04
learned or felt, or if it just mapped over really easily, what was it like to do your first inking?

01:45:06 Speaker_01
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, because it's like, what are you doing, Todd? So then I learned the magic.

01:45:21 Speaker_01
I'm now going to do two jobs, right? 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.

01:45:33 Speaker_01
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.

01:45:47 Speaker_01
Essentially, you're doing twice the work and you have to do it 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?

01:46:01 Speaker_01
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. But that comes a little bit later in the career.

01:46:19 Speaker_01
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?

01:46:28 Speaker_01
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 efficiencies. And this goes into business now, right? And even though we're doing art, this is just efficiencies.

01:46:42 Speaker_01
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.

01:46:54 Speaker_01
I have to do it all in one fell swoop, which is horrifying to people who've never inked themselves because every person I've shown amongst some amazing peers, I'm on some amazing peers.

01:47:06 Speaker_01
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'll just kind of finish it with the ink. And I go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't go with the ink. I'm like, why? Cause it's permanent.

01:47:19 Speaker_01
I'm 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.

01:47:30 Speaker_01
What happens if you draw on pencil and you make a 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.

01:47:42 Speaker_01
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 and go, why couldn't you, why couldn't you have done that with ink?

01:47:53 Speaker_01
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 going to make a mistake, but you know what?

01:48:04 Speaker_01
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.

01:48:20 Speaker_01
Of course I didn't. But if you look at my inking at the beginning, it's very, very crude.

01:48:26 Speaker_01
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.

01:48:39 Speaker_01
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, for sure, there's a dramatic difference visually. So I was constantly learning that trade.

01:48:51 Speaker_01
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.

01:49:00 Speaker_01
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 yet to venom. Okay.

01:49:14 Speaker_01
So, so very quickly, I finished the Batman project and now I'm back down to only one book so I can do two book. And so again, I I'm looking for another book and all the editors at Marvel said, Hey, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:49:26 Speaker_01
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.

01:49:41 Speaker_01
And so you don't tell me, don't go into that office. Right. Cause to me, unless you want Todd to go into the office, what are you guys doing?

01:49:49 Speaker_01
So I went, I went into the office and it was, it was he, 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, my picked up the book, it was like at number 21, 22.

01:50:05 Speaker_01
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.

01:50:20 Speaker_01
And he's like, well, you know, just give me a couple of months. How about starting at 300? You can ink the book. And I'm like, Yeah, OK. We'll do it. But the other piece of it was, oh, just one other sort of slight problem.

01:50:34 Speaker_01
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. Maybe I'm just old school.

01:50:47 Speaker_01
Spider-Man's that guy in the blue and the red with the webs on it. Spider-Man. So can we just get rid of that black costume and get back to Spider-Man? Then this is sort of the happy accident. He said, wow.

01:51:01 Speaker_01
You know, the editor-in-chief really likes the black costume, and I don't think he's going to go for that. So he's not going to want to get rid of it. He had something to do with Secret Wars, and, you know, they're kind of digging it.

01:51:12 Speaker_01
And I went, oh, man, I don't want to draw Spider-Man in a black costume. It's like doing Batman in polka dots. It doesn't make any sense to me.

01:51:20 Speaker_01
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.

01:51:29 Speaker_01
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.

01:51:43 Speaker_01
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.

01:51:56 Speaker_01
Like here, we didn't have a name at that point. I 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. We'll give it to the writer. And so they gave it to the writer.

01:52:06 Speaker_01
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. The writer's name was David.

01:52:18 Speaker_01
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.

01:52:32 Speaker_01
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 human humanoid form.

01:52:44 Speaker_01
And this is sort of the geeky stuff that us creators go through. 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.

01:52:58 Speaker_01
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...

01:53:13 Speaker_01
Again, there was no internet, but the mail kept getting bigger and people were like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh.

01:53:18 Speaker_01
And so now fast forward with hindsight and venom is, you know, a worldwide brand, you know, made a billion dollars for Sony and movies. So again, there's the happy accident. And if you look at issue 300, if you want to go buy it,

01:53:32 Speaker_01
It comes with a couple of things one it's an anniversary book sales gone way up on it wanted to anniversary book issue three hundred amazing spider man goodbye some of the very first early work of me on spider man and my first job on spider man but more importantly.

01:53:49 Speaker_01
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, so 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?

01:54:00 Speaker_01
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.

01:54:12 Speaker_01
It 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.

01:54:22 Speaker_01
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.

01:54:37 Speaker_01
299, nope, black costume. And every page but one. of issue 300, but that last page, it even says, I think, a caption that says, and a new beginning. And to me, I go, finally, I get to draw a spot. This was, for me, finally.

01:54:51 Speaker_01
Now, somehow, Venom was the byproduct of that, right? Now, here's what should happen, Tim. Employees should come into the office.

01:55:00 Speaker_01
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. When is the book due? I don't know. Todd is Todd.

01:55:15 Speaker_01
And yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And so I just was like, no, I need the red and blue costume.

01:55:22 Speaker_01
And, and, and, but because of some of that arrogance, ego, immaturity, whatever you want to call it, your by-product 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,

01:55:39 Speaker_01
All of that maybe never materializes. That's the true possibility of that. And then I just take all of that. Remember Marvel's, they're boring storytelling. I start pushing the boundaries of storytelling to make it more, I thought, dynamic.

01:55:53 Speaker_01
I thought everything we do in comic books is just a Broadway play. Everything should be big, and you should be talking 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.

01:56:06 Speaker_01
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, OK. But I just kept doing it. And then eventually I was asking them, and I go, why can't we?

01:56:21 Speaker_01
And they go, well, the editor in chief, Jim Shooter, he doesn't like that. I found that to be impossible to believe. Impossible to believe. Jim Shooter wants vanilla when he can have tutti frutti or a banana split? Hard to believe.

01:56:38 Speaker_01
So we went and had a meeting one time, my editor, was Bob Harris, who ended up being the top dog at DC. I think he still is, maybe.

01:56:46 Speaker_01
And we went into this meeting with Jim Shooter, the editor-in-chief, where every editor was literally shaking in their boots from Jim Shooter. He was like this authoritarian sort of figure.

01:56:56 Speaker_01
And as we're walking in the meeting, all Bob says is, don't ask him about storytelling, Doug.

01:57:02 Speaker_01
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. We have a nice, pleasant conversation.

01:57:13 Speaker_01
And then it's like, he goes, OK, I've got to get to my next meeting. And I go, yeah, yeah. And as we get up, because I want Bob to be moving, I went, oh, hey, Jim, just have one quick question. Can I change storytelling?

01:57:24 Speaker_01
Like, let me just ask you, am I allowed to have characters burst out of the panels? Cause 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 inquisitively and went, yeah, sure. Why?

01:57:37 Speaker_01
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, cause I go, I think I heard somebody, it wasn't Bob, my editor standing in front of you.

01:57:49 Speaker_01
It must've been somebody else told me that somehow that you said you can't have things punch. You can't have panels overlapping and you can't have characters punching out.

01:57:59 Speaker_01
And I walked them through a couple of things and he was horrified and he was like, what, what are you saying, Todd? And I'll go, yeah, yeah. That's just what they're telling all the artists. And he was like, No, and he got angry at that moment.

01:58:09 Speaker_01
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.

01:58:24 Speaker_01
And then he explained to me the difference between a bad version and a good version. 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 drawing of the next panel.

01:58:39 Speaker_01
As long as you're doing it in some negative space, you're okay. Just as long as the storytelling is clear, I don't care how you designed it, Todd. I knew it. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

01:58:49 Speaker_01
and shoot from that meeting on you take a look at my layout in spider man it started getting crazier and crazier now jim shooter get push out very quickly i keep doing my talking on spider man i keep,

01:59:02 Speaker_01
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.

01:59:11 Speaker_01
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 the dynamics

01:59:23 Speaker_01
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 have been done this way for 30 years.

01:59:39 Speaker_01
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 drawn on a 2D piece of paper.

01:59:53 Speaker_01
Again, all these silly things that would bore people, but I was doing it. And oh, by the way, it fucking looks cool.

02:00:00 Speaker_04
It doesn't bore me. No, this stuff is, this is key.

02:00:02 Speaker_01
This is, these are important decisions. So I go and it looks cool. And here's the moment I was talking about earlier. The moment you start missing with anybody's icon, status quo comes into the equation and I'm now messing it.

02:00:18 Speaker_01
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.

02:00:29 Speaker_01
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.

02:00:47 Speaker_01
No, no, no, no, no. Here is the reality of it, and I've said it plenty of times.

02:00:51 Speaker_01
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.

02:01:05 Speaker_01
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 going to be a painter, never paint like Norman Rockwell.

02:01:17 Speaker_01
The best you're going to 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 hill and make it your own.

02:01:30 Speaker_01
You can take pieces of Norman Rockwell. but you can't be that 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.

02:01:43 Speaker_01
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.

02:01:53 Speaker_01
And every single time I walked into the offices, 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 are moments of clarity in my life. This is one of them.

02:02:09 Speaker_01
Tom DeFalco was the editor in chief. He's an Italian guy. And he was giving me heck again, wiggling his finger going, you got to stop doing the big eyes and this and that. And then he got so mad.

02:02:20 Speaker_01
I remember his face getting a little red and he goes, and that rubbing those damn Spaghetti webbing, you gotta stop it. Now, from my perspective, ladies and gentlemen, if you're in my head, it's like a Charlie Brown sort of cartoon.

02:02:32 Speaker_01
All's 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.

02:02:44 Speaker_01
They've been known ever since as 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 a name for it.

02:02:56 Speaker_01
He then says, in that same meeting, you just got to control this stuff. And my answer was, and if anybody is under the age of 30-ish listening, I'm going to give you a bit of a golden rule.

02:03:09 Speaker_01
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.

02:03:16 Speaker_01
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

02:03:32 Speaker_01
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.

02:03:41 Speaker_01
And by the time I came back the next time... I've seen the books.

02:03:44 Speaker_04
I've seen them. I've seen them.

02:03:45 Speaker_01
I have at home. 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.

02:04:00 Speaker_01
And at one point, again, I had that conversation 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,

02:04:20 Speaker_01
from 21 up the ranks. And it's at number two right now, Jim Lee and the 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.

02:04:29 Speaker_01
And he just sat there silent the whole time. He had this big fat book. I didn't know who he was.

02:04:33 Speaker_01
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.

02:04:44 Speaker_01
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. But he just said, yes, sales are going up.

02:05:00 Speaker_01
And 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 bizarre thing now that years have passed.

02:05:15 Speaker_01
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.

02:05:23 Speaker_01
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.

02:05:35 Speaker_01
So the guy who was told not to create it, I've now bizarrely, as I was going, no, I'm not gonna draw that status quo, I'm gonna do something funky, that my style is now the new status quo.

02:05:48 Speaker_01
And I don't think anybody should draw in Todd McFarland'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,

02:06:03 Speaker_01
coming up with an idea and glomming onto it so hard. Yes, I'm talking to you, IBM.

02:06:10 Speaker_01
And then these little dudes in the garage come up with this little computer, and they call it an Apple, and somehow they beat you eventually because you become dinosaurs. And this is the thing.

02:06:26 Speaker_01
There is nobody in the world that's ever made change and everybody like them, especially the people who were had the power and the prestige and the money ahead of them. Nobody.

02:06:40 Speaker_01
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.

02:06:55 Speaker_01
Are you out of your mind? They will take out bazookas and blades and put down the strips and the throwing darts and they will do everything in their powers to discourage you because they are industry leaders.

02:07:07 Speaker_01
But eventually they become their own worst enemy.

02:07:13 Speaker_04
Todd, we are at almost two hours now. I've realized that we've barely scratched the surface.

02:07:20 Speaker_04
We've 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

02:07:34 Speaker_04
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?

02:07:47 Speaker_04
I think people would certainly be interested in listening to one. Could I convince you to come back for a round two?

02:07:53 Speaker_01
Tim, you'll find that I'm not shy at opening my mouth and talking to the point I'm always going, am I boring people? Because I actually know all these stories because I lived them.

02:08:05 Speaker_01
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.

02:08:19 Speaker_01
I've been talking about what I had to do 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

02:08:41 Speaker_01
the sharks when you're a guppy, right? So, uh, yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll come back. I appreciate you giving, hopefully we haven't bored people these two kids. I'll go, why would I want to listen to another two? So I'll it's your show.

02:08:52 Speaker_01
I'll let you decide whether that works.

02:08:56 Speaker_04
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 got to keep your artwork interesting to you because otherwise, and even maybe still, it can be really lonely.

02:09:10 Speaker_04
So for me, I just try to scratch my own itch in asking 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.

02:09:18 Speaker_04
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, Twitter Todd underscore McFarlane.

02:09:28 Speaker_01
People, they type it, you can find it. These are hipsters, right? I'm the old guy.

02:09:32 Speaker_04
They type in your name, they'll find it.

02:09:33 Speaker_01
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.

02:09:42 Speaker_01
And I need a 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.

02:09:52 Speaker_01
But I think that a little bit of backstory to get to the reasoning why when you make that call at that moment matters.

02:10:03 Speaker_05
Oh, yeah. It's critical.

02:10:05 Speaker_01
Yeah. So, 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.

02:10:20 Speaker_04
Yeah. We'll get into the trenches and we can hear more of your art of war stories. Right. And creative and business.

02:10:28 Speaker_01
The day I almost killed Eddie Vedder. We'll talk about that one.

02:10:32 Speaker_04
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 TimDotBlogs slash podcast.

02:10:44 Speaker_04
And until next time, don't be afraid of rocking the boat and consider your upside downside, just like you were talking about those those artists earlier and image. It's human nature. What a thing. Todd, thank you for making the time today.

02:10:58 Speaker_04
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.

02:11:07 Speaker_04
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 people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

02:11:19 Speaker_04
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.

02:11:32 Speaker_04
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.

02:11:44 Speaker_04
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.

02:11:58 Speaker_04
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep.

02:12:12 Speaker_04
I have been using 8Sleep 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.

02:12:24 Speaker_04
8Sleep 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.

02:12:35 Speaker_04
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.

02:12:47 Speaker_04
I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets off, closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down. This solves all of that.

02:12:54 Speaker_04
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.

02:13:02 Speaker_04
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.

02:13:11 Speaker_04
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.

02:13:19 Speaker_04
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.

02:13:30 Speaker_04
Head to 8sleep.com slash Tim and use code Tim to get $350 off of the Pod 4 Ultra. That's 8sleep, all spelled out, 8sleep.com slash Tim, and code Tim, T-I-M, to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra.

02:13:46 Speaker_04
They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. 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.

02:14:01 Speaker_04
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.

02:14:10 Speaker_04
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.

02:14:22 Speaker_04
Or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, etc., another application.

02:14:26 Speaker_04
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.

02:14:35 Speaker_04
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.

02:14:45 Speaker_04
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.

02:14:55 Speaker_04
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 best-selling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat.

02:15:07 Speaker_04
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.

02:15:19 Speaker_04
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.

02:15:33 Speaker_04
And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element, who's recommended to be by one of my favorite athlete friends.

02:15:39 Speaker_04
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.

02:15:53 Speaker_04
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 purchased at DrinkLMNT.com slash Tim.

02:16:04 Speaker_04
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 slash Tim. DrinkLMNT.com slash Tim.