#759: Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Todd McFarlane | The Tim Ferriss Show

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The Tim Ferriss Show.

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss.

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world -class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

This episode is a two -for -one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.

To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade i could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes and internally we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to yes enjoy the household names the super famous folks but to also introduce you to lesser known people i consider stars these are people who have transformed my life and i feel like they can do the same for many of you perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle perhaps you you missed an episode, just trust

me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together.

And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim .blog slash combo.

And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

and skin in the game.

Nassim is joined in this conversation by Scott Patterson, Wall Street Journal investigative reporter and author of Chaos Kings, How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis.

You can find Nassim on Twitter at NNTaleb, and you can find Scott on Twitter at PattersonScott.

Is it true that you wrote a resignation letter your first day at a trading job and put it in your desk drawer?

I read this on the internet.

I don't know if it's true.

You can't believe everything you read, but it was from The Guardian, so I thought it might be credible.

One thing is actually, as I said, I recommend people do that.

I wrote that not on the day I started, but I recommended that people, because you feel relief when you do it, because then you you can continue on your job without feeling like someone's controlling you you've got the gun loaded the whole idea of flying behind you thought about about that problem so you write the recognition letter and you don't date it yeah 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 2010, and you can correct me if I get any of the wording wrong, but it stuck with me.

This is in 2010. Here's the aphorism 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.

Fragility is when you care more about the few who hate your work than the multitude who loves it.

And then in quotation fashmarks politician?

Because I was never really someone who took, you know, established ideas at face value.

So you necessarily have, you know, violate some norms, some thinking norms. And often people protect those norms by, you know, attacking your reputation.

And I realized that while writing Fool by Randomness, I say, hey, you're saying that what I'm doing is random, we're using the wrong models, these don't work, so they attack your reputation.

So I realized quickly, it was time that my reputation was going to be under some kind of fire.

And I decided that, no, my reputation is how few important people, or people who know something about the subject, view me.

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.

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 going to help.

Haters are going to hate.

This resembles another aphorism inspired by Charlie Munger.

He's a lot more interested in literature and philosophy and not financial marketing.

It's just this thing that drives him.

He doesn't look at the stock market page every day like some people do.

You have to figure out who are people envious of.

So if you're in a hedge fund business and you have $500 million in a bank and someone else has $600 million, you're going to be envious of that person.

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, I don't believe in this, and say, oh, people having enough.

There's someone here from East Hampton, the fellow who wrote Caps 22.

A lot of interesting folks out there, yeah.

Yeah, he met a financier at the time, four hedge funds, and the financier said, what is it about you, because he was an author, a very successful one, what is it that distinguishes you from me?

He told him, I know the meaning of enough.

So in other words, you know you're upper bound.

And effectively, it was like, if you had an idea, say, oh, I had this idea, right?

Because I don't consider myself so different from others.

And then particularly when you look at history, 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 to think like that.

So I went into the empirics, the Eastern Mediterranean, Greco -Levantine, Greco -Roman, mostly using Greek language thinkers.

And then, of course, into others, this fundamental skepticism.

Because I noticed a lot of people are skeptical, particularly conspiracy theorists.

They're skeptical of small things, but not about big ones.

All right? They get taken for a ride.

It's find me a conspiracy theorist, or find me someone who's naturally skeptic of all things, and I'll show you a turkey.

So, I wanted to find people who are fundamentally skeptic, being skeptical, being skeptical about important things, not about small things.

What would be an example of a big thing?

Let me give you an example.

I wrote a paper—it was never ended up in a book—on the stock market and religion.

It's called The Bishop and The Economist. 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.

They believe in a stock market or believe in some kind of pseudoscientific theory on whatever it is, okay?

But they don't believe in religion and the reverse, all right?

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

There's a guy called Barhah Lahmi, Barhah Lahmi, I think, who did some studies about skepticism.

People go to religion about affairs, skepticism, where it matters.

And I wrote about it, I think, in the Black Swan.

Skepticism where it matters.

And I noticed that a lot of these big skeptics were not skeptical of God and things you can't do anything about.

They were skeptical of the charlatan.

They're skeptical of someone trying to take advantage of you.

That's where you exercise your skepticism.

Among the great skeptics, there is a Bishop Uwe.

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.

He could translate into Arabic Roman authors.

Latin authors, and vice versa, okay?

Scaliger, Scaligeri.

There are a lot of, Pierre Bale.

Pierre Bale has, you know, a lot of works.

He's one of those skeptics.

Hume was one of those skeptics, but these people preceded Hume.

Hume is known because he wrote in a language of a country that had a lot of ships and a lot of trade, you know, across the world.

But a lot of these ideas came from groups of people in France or among Protestants in France.

what's called the fideists, originates, of course, in Levant, and of course you have the great Al -Ghazal , 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.

I think Spinoza is coming out of that same tradition.

Spinoza came… he was skeptical about the text that was these people say okay trust sandy's text okay and be skeptical about things that really matter and there was actually a skeptical school of medicine practicing medicine so what i went back through history every time i've 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 all right okay and 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 with this book.

Well, we're here to talk about whatever comes up.

But I do want to hop over to you, Scott, and maybe discuss something that you had shared with me as a possible bullet in the prep stages for this conversation, which is related to poly crisis and the new age of crisis what does this refer to it's the subtitle of my book most people have focused on the first part of the subtitle is how wall street traders make billions second part is in the new age of crisis i feel like that hasn't gotten that much attention but part of what i'm trying to argue is that we are seeing a magnification of extreme events accelerating and overlapping.

There's an economist, Adam Tooze, who's coined a phrase called the polycrisis, which he says these crises that are happening on a global scale are interacting in ways that the whole becomes greater and worse than the sum of the parts.

So you've got pandemics, you've got economic instability, financial crises, climate change, which is a big focus of mine.

in my daily job at the journal which I think is sort of the big one in terms of risk mitigation standpoint using ideas from people like Nassim 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 streets for risk mitigation and borrow those and apply those to other forms of risk management and And what Nassim and Mark do is they think about the extreme events and how to protect against them.

Nassim co -wrote a paper about this exact issue called the precautionary principle.

It delineates specific categories of risk that you should take the precautionary principle and apply to.

He has some specific ideas and he can talk about it way better than I can.

but you know these are things that can be global that represents systemic risk to humanity things that can be exponential must be fatal or exponential things that have these properties that you need to take extreme precaution and not take that risk basically don't play russian roulette with these risks and that's kind of how the book was structured was first looking at the the growth of the strategy with Mark and Nassim, and then moving on to these other things that the world is facing and seeing if we could think about ways to protect against these risks.

Something like climate change, you don't really want to mess with that.

You know, it's a bit too late, but there's still lots of things that we can do.

And that's, I think, the book in a nutshell.

I was going to mention earlier when you asked me about the birth of the idea of the book, when I first suggested it Nassim and Mark.

Nassim said, no way.

I have no interest in doing that with you.

It took a while. And then you were like, I have these black and white photos.

You might want to take a look at it.

So I had you convince him to do it.

It was, it warmed down.

I think it was more Mark put the screws on.

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

I actually don't know.

I extracted the promise from him to not be portrayed, to mention.

You to be broadly identified as a finance person, but to think of yourself more as a scholar.

I wrote about it in Fool by Randomness.

George Soros, and I met George Soros, and 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, okay?

He ended up making money and spending too much time in it, and wrote drunk articles and books, works or is it one book?

Yeah, so yeah, it was not not what he wanted out of life.

Okay, he's a Middle European intellectual who would have liked to be remembered as someone for ideas.

And he had, of course, Karl Popper, who he claims was his professor, but it was beyond.

So I wrote about it full by randomness.

I said, Here's this fellow who is, okay, but he also does, to distinguish himself from from other financiers has intellectual aims, I say, I don't want to be that.

I want to be someone who produces intellectual work and who happens to have had contact with reality thanks to trading and thanks to Mark, and I still have some contact with reality, but I'm not cut for that.

When I was writing Fool by Randoms, it was 2019 that I realized I was not, I don't want to be like Soros Because unlike Buffett and the other people, Source had an identity crisis.

He wants to be known as a philosopher.

It's a life to control of him.

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.

I never got around to it.

So there you go with the Oracle of Omaha.

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

Well, I mean, it's just not the same.

The sage of Omaha has something that I didn't put on 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.

And that's the precautionary principle.

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

Okay, let me ask you.

You're Tim Ferriss flying to go to Mexico.

You go to JFK. and they tell you they have uncertainty about the skills of the pilot.

But we think he's good, but there's uncertainty.

What do you do? You're not going to 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, it'll take a few months, but you're not going to get on that plane.

You change your plans and say, okay, there are other plans or other countries too, and other planes.

That's Warren Buffett with his investments.

That's my precautionary principle, the idea that there's an asymmetry, is that uncertainty about certain things is not good.

So the climate, for example, if you have uncertainty about the climate, stop these models, all right?

Just don't pollute.

You've got to try to use something else, try to mitigate.

So that's the first part of it.

People get it right away when I give them a story of a plane or I take water.

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.

It would spook me. There is no evidence that… 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.

Okay. So, the asymmetry, where you put the burden of the asymmetry on, that's the precautionary principle.

But then what we did is, we noticed a lot of people… In fact, it was a counter precautionary principle because a lot of people were invoking it for nothing, to say, we're going to have a non -naive precautionary principle by delineating the the areas where you should exercise such precaution systematically as a planet or as a communal group.

And what I'll say, number one, you need fat tails.

Now, what does fat tails mean?

Let me explain to you.

Let's say you go to planet Mars.

Okay, Elon would help you get there, or she represent.

There'd be a running error, there'd be a running error.

I mean, they'd be on average on the planet Earth, all right?

There'd be in total, maybe they have two or three million, in total and then you have hundreds some billion, right next to it.

So this is where you have to focus on an environment that produces fat tails.

And this is what marked it with Inversa.

Inversa is named after the universal mechanism that generates fat tails.

That was the name of the - So everything, we're in it basically intellectually everything, all details.

So you have to identify what produces fat tails in the financial markets and why it's getting thicker.

Fat tails means that you have the greatest contribution comes from smallest number of events.

So, concentration. Like, for example, you have a lot of people, all of the wealth comes from one person.

It so happened that under Fat Tails, the models that we use for risk management on Wall Street are BS.

This is why I have a lot of enemies.

This is why I had to protect myself against reputational damage.

Because all the economists hate me, all their models are based on that.

So what is Fat Tail?

Practically everything in the socioeconomic life is fat tailed.

What is not fat tailed?

The number of calories we're going gonna eat tonight how many calories can we have in one day tonight we can only go for the gold i'd say i'd say we could each down a few thousand calories a piece two thousand two thousand say i go three thousand for me all right i can play with fat and stuff three thousand that's nothing how many calories do i consume a year yeah it's not a single day it's gonna make a difference can you lose all your money in a single day yes there we go person he's a leader in climate climate these days and yeah he told me that's one thing that he disputed the precautionary

principle paper with Nassim 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 like you sip them so we had to have like again it's like you and the eggs alright so So to go back to the insurable, we don't have to worry about it.

And a very simple example I give that when Ebola started or later on when COVID started, people were using the arguments, yeah, you know, 3 ,000 Americans die every year drowning in a swimming pool.

That was something by a guy called Dr. Phil.

Should we shut down pools?

At a time, less than 1 ,000 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.

If I die of COVID, the odds of my neighbor dying of COVID has increased.

So we have that transmission that makes it fat -tale, that mechanism of transmission.

So this is why you cannot compare, as basically the press in the beginning, the so -called established press, was against our ideas.

Because it was racist against China, 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 entailed and I'm against GMOs because they spread in the environment.

Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

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

You can find Todd on Instagram at Todd McFarlane.

Todd, welcome to the show.

Nice to see you. Tim, thanks for having me this morning.

Appreciate it. And I thought we could start with a confession on my side, which is ever since I was a kid, and to this day, I still have a poster of the Incredible Hulk number 340, Grey Hulk versus Wolverine, that features your artwork.

And I am a longtime collector and fan of your work.

So it's exciting to have you here, and I'm excited to dig into all sorts of things.

And I thought we would begin, and this might be a dead end, we'll see where it goes, but but asking about how baseball informed your approach to art and comics, if at all.

If those two things tie together for you.

With two things. One, I had a brother that was a year older and one a year younger, and then you get three boys together.

What are you talking about?

Every day was a competition.

Who could eat the cereal the fastest?

Who could jump the most steps down?

Who Who could run to school the fastest?

What are you talking about?

Everything is a competition.

And then you take that, and eventually—I was never going to go to university.

I remember being in class when they brought—in high school, they brought the recruit into college, and they sort of talked, and I go, well, I'm not going, so I'll just put my head down and continue drawing because I was always doodling.

And then somebody tapped me on the shoulder, I remember, and they went, son, why is your arm not raised?

And I'm like, what?

Like, what? I wasn't even paying attention.

bench, pay to finish it.

I go, finish it? The buffet was open the whole time you were there and you chose not to eat.

Like, oh my gosh. So if nothing else, given that I'm sort of a cheapskate, I'm going, they're going to give it to me for free.

I'm not paying another penny to come back here.

I'll take that degree.

So I got my degree and I was off to the races.

Now between the baseball, which is competitive, and my brothers, then all of a sudden, three weeks before I I graduate, I end up getting my first job in comic books.

And all of that sort of made me a freelancer and I had to begin taking care of myself.

And it's like, okay, it's just another game, another game of competition.

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 and did you get any particularly helpful feedback that allowed you to modify things so that you were able to get that first job yes so let's go through it real quick did i get over 300 rejections yes is that tenacious is that determination or is that delusion like how many like at what point do you say i'm going to be an opera singer and that and you people keep giving and you go, man, look at how determined it is.

At what point do you say, maybe I just. The people who give you the work are the editors, and they have 16 editors.

So I would send it to all 16 editors.

Ultimately, I went around the submission guy.

I just went, what? You got to give it to the editors anyways.

Might as well send it directly to the editors.

So I would keep sending it to the editors over and over and over to every company, every editor.

And I think, Tim, in hindsight, I think that they probably had a board meeting or whatever, one of those Monday morning meetings, and they just said something like, and I'm making this up, but said, oh, for the love of God, that Todd kid, that punk that keeps sending us, we keep getting like a box of mail from this guy every two weeks.

Would somebody in this room give him a couple pages just so we don't have to open up his mail every two weeks?

I think I just wore him out.

And I got the job literally three weeks weeks before I graduated.

So I never even had to use my degree.

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. Everything they put in those letters was constructive criticism because the people who just thought that I was not very good threw my portfolio, my samples in the garbage.

So everybody who took the time to write back actually gave a little bit of insight.

And so what I would do, they didn't know it was actually going to keep me fueled, is that I would take that insight and then redo another batch and send it to everybody again.

So, you know, where I was making 20 mistakes eventually 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, hey, he's getting better.

He's not perfect. And he seems to be enthusiastic.

So somebody give him a chance, see what he can do.

So for people who don't have any familiarity with comic books, penciling, anything along these lines, what were some of the things you were getting feedback on and getting better at?

And I suppose this leads into the question of like, what does it look like as a comic book artist to get better?

What are you getting better at?

Maybe that sounds like a silly question, but I'll give it a shot.

There's two things that I think make a good artist in the comic book industry.

One, and so I would have to phone Federal Express.

When I use FedEx, my wife go, oh, you're so hip, calling them FedEx. And eventually they caught on.

So you'd phone FedEx, they'd either come and pick it up, or sometimes you would miss the call on their deadline.

The drivers were passed.

I was living in a remote area up in Canada, on an island in Canada.

And so 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.

And then we drive to the airport.

Do you know how many times I ran down the tarmac?

Because it was a little sort of prop plane that flew to Vancouver, British Columbia.

And I think it was always looking over his shoulder going, Todd will be here in about two minutes.

And I'd be running down the tarmac, and I'd basically throw my package to him, and he'd get it done.

Today, all of that's taken away, because now you can scan your pages and hit 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.

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 uh dc comics yesterday it goes to print on monday you and i are talking on friday i still have to write it's a 48 page book i've only written eight pages i've got to finish writing the 40 pages there's 10 pages that haven't been colored.

I literally talked to the person who does the word balloons after I give them the script to say, hey, sorry, dude, we 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 no pages are upside down or backwards.

And then they're going to hit send and it's going to go to the printer and the printer's waiting.

Because when you've got a big print run, because like I said, it's going to be the biggest of this year, 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?

By our chinny -chin -chin like a lot of other things in the world.

You just get it done.

So let me back up for a second.

So I think I heard you correctly.

Now you have delivered so many deadlines, even if you've chased down the plane on the tarmac, you've, you know, had a train, obviously.

I've missed the You've missed the plane a couple of times.

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've, what does that mean?

Yeah, writing wise.

Okay, wow. Tim, I'll tell you what that means.

That means before I talked to you this morning, I talked to what they call the letterer, the guy who actually converts your script into the word balloon.

I talked to my letterer and go, dude, we're going all night.

I'm just, every three pages, I'm going to send to you.

So it's going to be, I do three, I send it to him, he works on it.

By the time he's done with those three, I feed him another three, and we're just going to see how it works.

And we'll get it done, Tim, we'll get it done.

Like you said earlier, a couple of years ago, I set a record. I mean, Spawn is the longest running Creator Room book.

We're up to issue 335.

That's over 30 years of of doing books.

And now I do a monthly book every week.

You just get it done.

It's just like going to the gym.

Every workout isn't awesome, but did you get your workout in?

Yeah, sure. Wow. By the hair of your chinny chin chin.

Nobody knows on the other side.

Nobody knows. Everybody's going to look at that book and go, man, it is, look at how professionally done it was.

So let's then come back to a word you used, which is important.

And that is the longest running creator owned superhero comic book series the creator owned piece when and how did you decide to start image comics because I remember as a kid I wanted to be a oh marvel's owned by disney marvel's owned by disney they don't share that too much and dc comic 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.

So one's owned by Disney, one's owned by Warner Brothers.

Okay, so you're Sony, you're Universal, you're Paramount Studios, you're Netflix, you're Apple, you're Paramount Plus.

What are you talking about?

Where are you getting product?

Not getting it from Marvel.

Why? They're not sharing and you're not getting it from DC because they're not sharing.

So you literally have to go and redact all those books and you're left with everybody else.

And in really, 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.

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 and offer them to Marvel or DC when I was working with them.

Did I create new characters when I got the plots from the writers?

Of course I did. I was a professional.

So I helped co -create, and I'm the visual creator of Venom.

So Venom's my guy. Why?

Because, you know, we came up with a story, and that was what it was.

Okay, fine. But I never said, oh, man, I'm having a good career at Marvel.

Let me reach into my portfolio and offer them my characters.

Never. Why? Why? Because in the back of my mind, those stories had been haunting me that were there.

And at some point, Tim, I was selling more comic books than any human being Marvel was employing, period.

To the point that I had set a record on one of the books.

I helped take over artistically Amazing Spider -Man.

It was sitting at like number 22 in the sales chart.

They came and they went, Hey, Todd, if you want to draw it, cool.

Because I had just finished a run on The Incredible Hulk that you had mentioned.

And they said, whatever you want to do, because it's sort of in a dumper.

Spider -Man's in the dumper.

In short order, at some point, Amazing Spider -Man became number one or two every single month in total sale to the point then that they were like, oh, and 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 from number 22 to number one, I was getting pushback from the corporate entity up above and the executives up above and the editor in chief up above that you can't do what you're doing, Todd.

You're messing with the icon.

That's not how we do it.

Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, as an old man now, the single greatest danger you are going to meet in your life is status quo.

It is the thing that they are going to fight and battle you against more than any other thing in the world.

And what's staggering about what I just said, which is a truism, 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.

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.

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.

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.

And what I'm saying that happened to me has happened to millions of people throughout history that wanted to do something different, not better.

Let me be very clear, not better, different.

So when I was doing my different Spider -Man, I wasn't doing it because I thought, with the editors going, dude, you don't have to like me personally.

You don't have to like my drawing style.

You don't have to like anything I do.

You hired me for one job, sell comic books.

You guys are in the commerce business.

Don't you realize? You're a money -making machine.

You want to sell books.

I do that better than anybody that you employ.

Why are we continuing to have these conversations?

And they wore me out, Tim.

They wore me out. So when was there a particular moment when you knew?

It seems like you had basically in your back pocket the plan to eventually go out on your own because you had all these characters you developed.

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

I remember with clarity.

They had been doing, comic books have this thing in the corner writing myself, except for we were doing a crossover with some of the mutant X -Men, and in this case, X -Factor characters, the ones that were sort of Deadpool and Cable came from, those characters.

And there was a bad guy and his name was a juggernaut and a juggernaut was like, you couldn't beat the juggernaut, right?

He's big giant dude.

And he had armor and you couldn't do it.

So my thing was, well, he's got isolates.

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. 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.

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 cult.

And I go, well, of course you can.

Because just not long ago, there was this great cover.

Not only was it in the, it was on the cover of Daredevil, Frank Miller.

And he's got Bullseye on the cover and he's stabbing Elektra, a character, on the cover.

And so I go, of course you can stab people and they go well yes you can stab people but you can't you can't have a rear exit wound and I went what are you talking about did you look at that cover the guy's killing Electra it's going in the front it's coming out the back no no no no no no no you don't know you can stab them and it can come out of your exit wound but you can't tear the cloth 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 It's like a teepee.

It's like a teepee.

The back of her costume is like, it's teepee, but it hasn't cut.

So I go, so I just want to be clear.

You can gut somebody and you can have it come out the other side after you gut them.

You just can't rip the cloth and that won't offend the mothers and the children.

Yes. Wow. Okay. So there's no rear exit wound.

I'm just stabbing them in the eye.

Yeah. But you know what?

people are sensitive to eyes because if everybody gets something in their eye we all know how much pain that is and teeth because if you go to the dentist and he drills you wrong and I'm having this absurd conversation with five or six of my editors and I'm just going what are so I just want can I stab them in the chest yes in the knee yes in the elbow yes in the eye no in the cheek yes Yes.

In the neck? Yes. In the mouth?

No. Wow. Wow. So somehow I was in bizarro land.

And so I had, at that moment, I stopped the conversation because you never want to have a conversation with anybody where two plus two equals giraffe, right?

Never talk to somebody who comes up with that equation.

So I said, guys, here's what's going to happen.

I'm going to send you the page.

homepage I'll do a little quick drawing over if you want you guys fix it any way you see fit by the way I'm handing in my resignation I am done I am exhausted I also was a few days away from becoming a father for the first time and I just want you know what it's time to catch my breath I don't know what being a dad's about these guys have worn me out and 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.

The plan B was I had Spawn as a character, and I just went, I guess I'll just have to self -publish, right?

Not ideal, but okay, here we go.

The upside of it was that I was talking to a couple other people.

people. Let me also say, before me quitting, I also was going around trying to create a union.

I was like the normal Ray.

I'd go, come on, man, power to the people, right?

If we stop drawing, put pencils down, they got nothing to print.

We show them our power.

It was frustrating for me when I tried it for a few months that the most scared people that will say, yeah, let's join going together are those that don't have a job.

It was weird to me.

I'd be talking to dozens of people that I knew that wanted to be in the business, that were in the business, but weren't getting steady work, that needed a better life.

And I go, come on, let's just go.

Let's just create like an enclave of people.

And again, you know, and deal with the whole is better than the parts.

And they would say, no, Todd, I can't because what if they blackball me?

And I'm like, blackball you?

you. What are you talking about?

You're not getting any work from them right now.

Yeah, but what if they blackball me?

I'll go. So here's what I'll do for you.

Right now, you have no job, no car, no girlfriend, no house, no money.

If you join this enclave, I will promise I will make all of those equal to you, right?

You've got nothing to lose other than to go up.

Come on, man. I'm selling more books than anybody else.

I'm making more money than anybody else in our our industry, and I'm willing to throw it away.

You should be 10 times more fearless than me.

It was actually oddly the opposite.

So during that time, I had been talking to two of my friends and peers that were also in the industry, a gentleman by the name of Rob Liefeld and another one named Eric Larson.

And both of them had that same entrepreneurial, let's just call it rebellious trait in them.

And we were always talking.

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.

And then Eric was on the call going, yeah, I'm going to go do my own book.

And I hit 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.

So I've got a meeting with Terry Stewart, the top dog, and to basically say, we're quitting.

Here's our reasons why.

And if it was me, I would close this barn door because you may have some more people quitting next week or the week after the week after.

So we land the day before and I got to blow some time.

So I happened to walk around.

I heard there's an auction.

Somebody somebody's 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 at DC comic book.

Jim Lee is at the auction and he's like, Hey, Tom, what are you doing here?

And two, 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. 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 now Mark Silvestri to me at that time was the best artist like just in terms of skill Mark Silvestri so leave a thing that my son is saying yeah that's my that's my dad I'm taking care of here yeah yeah okay no problem Yeah.

So Mark Silvestri's 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?

And so I sit down and like Mussolini from the balcony, I give him the speech, right?

And I give it to him and he's like, oh my God.

He goes, Todd, that sounds good.

And Jim Lee's on board?

Yeah, he just signed on.

Let me think about it.

Report it on it. And we went into the meeting and essentially it went like this.

And here would be a fun interview is to get Terry Stewart's perspective of it, because not only has he literally lied about it, he will tell you otherwise, but 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?

He doesn't want to say that it was on his watch that all these people left. But here's his lie.

And it is. I got witnesses because there's more than one of us in that room.

He's saying we came in and we asked for the copyrights of our characters.

What are you talking about?

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.

No, no. The way that it went down was simply like this.

We are leaving. There's nothing you can give us that's going to keep us.

And, oh, by the way, here's some of our reasons.

If it was us, you may want to do something about those reasons because next week you may have another seven quitting.

I don't understand why you want to keep having people quitting, but you know what?

Do what you got to 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, the one that used to tell me, can't do that, Todd, you can't do that, Todd, on Spider -Man.

Anyway, at the end of this conversation, because Rob Liefeld, who was in there, and my wife was there, and Jim Lee was there, Rob left because he had to go pick up his girlfriend.

friends. So that was classic Rob.

Like my dad, who you just heard, was in the printing business for 40, 50 years.

The one thing that I knew, it's printing.

And if not, I knew lots of people who did.

So the doors closed and I looked at Jim and I go, oh my God, they think we're dumb.

And not that we're smart, Tim, not that we're smart, Tim, but you know what printing comic comic books is ink on paper.

That's it, ladies and gentlemen, ink on paper, done.

Maybe there's a couple of details beyond that, but that's it.

Every time you pick up a pen and you write on a piece of paper, it's sort of kind of like doing comic books.

It's just, if you keep going and draw it in the shape of Spider -Man or the Hulk, you got a comic book.

It's not rocket science.

clients. And so I was like, oh my God, they don't think, wow, wow, why would you guys do that?

And I go, well, because, you know, we got some other plans.

And then they start giving their sales pitch. Well, here's why you should work for us.

Don't do that. DC is your place to be, DC, DC, DC.

And they go, and by the way, we just did a new contract that's for the betterment of the creative community.

And then I asked them the question for me that was like the dagger for me, where they go, Hey, you don't know.

That was super cool.

That was super, super cool.

You wrote up that new contract for the creative community.

Could I just ask you just like one, one question here, just before we get going, did you ask one fucking creator to have any input in that contract that is to better the creative community?

Did you ask one single creator?

And let me tell you, Tim, when you get pregnant pauses in rooms, it's all you need to know.

you get your answer at the pregnant pause.

Of course they didn't.

And that was the reason.

This is why we're quitting Marvel.

This is why we're quitting DC, because of your disregard for your community.

And Jim and I are examples, and we've climbed the top of the ladder, just like Jack King at some point that reality sunk in, that we could We could start losing almost all of our top talent, if not a big portion of our talent, period.

And this isn't good for business.

So even those that were jealous in our creative community and or thought that we were crazies or whatever, they still, whether they know it or not, prospered by us leaving because all their contracts got upgraded while they were still throwing darts at us, our own community, as you can imagine, saying, you guys go take your big egos and go do your job.

thing. 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?

It is. And so, because people go, so what?

So why? So you, you don't go to the bathroom.

I mean, I went to a signing not long ago and I got there at seven and I signed from seven in the morning to midnight and I didn't move from the desk where I was signing.

And they had to, now again, Again, other human beings have to eat and go to the bathroom.

So I go, you better have two teams and you're going to have to rotate them.

Let me just sort of quickly get out of the way.

First, how you cannot go to the bathroom for 17 hours.

How to not do this thing that most humans do.

And here's where the upside is.

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.

Well, I like comic books.

I know Spider -Man. And guess what happens, Tim?

They get in your line.

They don't care really at that point about you.

They just go, he's signing.

The line's moving. I'll get in his line.

And then they come up.

You've got 20 seconds.

You become as gracious as you can to them.

And maybe you peel off, and you've got a new couple of fans.

And all of a sudden, it's like, you know, I only collect X -Men.

But you know, that Todd was a gentleman.

And he was very nice, and he smiled at me.

He was very kind. You know what?

on, 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.

And it's just pathetic at times.

I live in Phoenix, Arizona.

And Phoenix, Arizona can be 110 degrees.

Let me tell you, I'm like a cockroach. I don't care what the weather is.

I'll survive. Don't worry about me.

I'm good. But here's what I know about other people.

They have comfort zones.

And so whenever I was in some big legal dispute or contract dispute, I would say, especially the people in LA, I go, you fly them to me.

You fly them to me.

Now, this is just the art of war.

So my desk is facing a big giant glass window, right?

And I know when the sun comes down that window.

Now, usually when I'm in my room, I bring down the drapes and I put up the AC and I'm comfortable.

but when the enemy's coming i .e the people hotter and they keep having to get more and more water and at some point nature calls and then we get down to the last one and they go 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 and you know how many times i've had people in my room go fine this is how it works it goes like this time 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?

Because I think in my mind that they literally caved in on the 10th point because they couldn't hold it anymore.

And if they could have held it, they could have argued longer with me.

And perhaps I might've conceded or we could have compromised on that point, but their bladder cost them.

Too bad. How sad, right?

You find your advantages wherever you can get them.

Oh, McFarland 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.

Happy accident. Yeah.

So how did it come together?

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 I could keep deadlines.

So I knew then that that was good to me, Tim.

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.

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 is looking for work pile.

So I get the job, go, yeah, woo, I've got some work.

The guy who was supposed to take over that book because I was only supposed to fill in for two months, decided to bail.

So after the first issue, they said, do you want to take over the book?

It was a book called Infinity Incorporated.

And I stayed on that book for two, three years.

So when I went over to Marvel, they went, okay, you can keep a deadline.

Check. 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.

And the only reason it was called that because on one page in infinity incorporated i drew this page layout and it was these big giant dice and then i did panels inside drawings inside the big dice and somebody i guess in editorial saw that page and so it was like oh he's the big giant dice guy and so and the reason i was doing giant dice and doing all these crazy flamboyant layouts in an infinity incorporated because because Tim, my drawing was mediocre.

I knew that. 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 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 ice cricket, right?

And it worked and it worked.

So people were like, oh my gosh.

And so by the time I left infinity, I think I had risen to the point that I was like voted the fifth most popular penciler at that point.

So I'm like, wow. So I go over to Marvel and then they say, which was weird because Marvel was always the house of ideas.

And at this point they were in, they had flopped with DC and they were, they were boring.

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 they go, we just want you to do like a grid.

Now, let me just tell you, anybody listening, that means you take a piece of paper and you divide it into six equal panels, and you go.

It is the most boring, easiest thing to do.

So essentially, they took a guy like me, who I thought was an artistic sprinter, and they said, could you put lead boots on?

Shoot, this is going to be easy, right?

I don't know why you want to do it but it was frustrating because there was no artistic freedom to do it so I did it they gave me the first job back at Marvel they go hey problem you usually have 30 days to do a book right once a month but we got we're behind the eight ball we can give you this job but you only got 10 days 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 they were amazed I gave it to him in eight days boom within weeks they're offering me the Incredible Hulk now once you get the Incredible

Hulk this is the next step in climbing the ladder all of a sudden look I'd been in the business probably two three four years at that point and when I get the Incredible Hulk finally I hear the words from my mom and dad oh my god you finally made it and the reason was because they had heard of the Hulk right and so up to then everything I was doing was like I don't know if he's ever were going to make it i was still working at marvel in dc it just wasn't for books but if you can go to the neighbor's you know halloween party and say my son draws a hulk they've heard of the word hulk too so all

of a sudden it's like oh my gosh your son he must be good so it's important to have characters that know because it helps the relatives in your circle so to think that you're a bigger shot than you are even though it's the exact same amount of work and the same pay on top of it so okay so you get to the next step and now you're going ha now you're just fighting for the next step up and i'll quickly sort of get you to this and i know i'm long -winded and all your questions i wish i was better that i did i'm into it okay so i do the i do the hulk i'm doing penciling and then i go i'm gonna do inking

because at this point i got fast enough that i could do two books there weren't too many people that could do two books i was doing two books so So they give me a second book.

The same editor who gave me The Incredible Hulk gives me another book.

It's called G .I. Joe, Real American Hero, right?

Now, the thing that's sort of ironic about that is I was living up in Canada, right?

And it never really sort of, I was going, wow, if they only knew that this Canadian, and I'm Canadian, up here in Canada drawing their real American heroes, this might be a bit of a problem, but nobody's going to tell there was no internet.

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 we were bashing heads every single page of that.

And finally, after the first issue, my editor phones up and says, Todd, I've got to let you go.

I'm like, one issue, I'm one issue in 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? You're going to fire me?

But let me just tell you, it was a relief leaf, 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.

Where did you guys clash on that?

What kind of decisions or what type of stuff?

He probably sees it a little bit differently, but I'll just show you, give him my point of view.

I assumed the people that were reading the comic books had eyes and brains.

He assumed, from my perspective, they didn't, because he said it assume your reader isn't his words not mine assume the reader is an aboriginal bushman and he just came out of the tundra in australia and he's never seen a comic book your storytelling must be that clear which basically meant you can't have somebody walk into a house and then cut to them inside the house or even closing the door on the inside sorry.

You have to grab the door, open the door, walk in the room because, and I just want, I just want, Larry, I guess I see the world differently.

I assume, silly me, that the people reading the comic books, watch fucking TV, go to movies, read books.

They understand how stories are told.

And as a matter of fact, on a movie, when you cut scenes, they don't even have a caption in 99 .9 % of the time.

People just know that it's different people in a different setting.

It must be a scene cut.

They bring in another person who is the inker.

Some people call him the tracer.

It's not true. Good inkers add a lot to pages.

I thought I had my drawing style is what I would call sort of this new wave 90 style.

And I was constantly getting inkers that were like these 1960s old school brush guys.

I was drawing in a way that I thought you should be using a pen because there's a different technique with it.

And they kept putting brush guys on me.

And it was so transforming.

Like they literally would bury the artwork from, if you saw what I was drawing, you saw the printed page.

It was like, to me, night and day.

So I do this part two of Batman Year Two.

Then I do part three.

And then then they send me the samples 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 the splash page has a commissioner gordon and he's holding the gun and to me it looks hairy right i go it's metallic why is it looking hairy and it's because the inker was doing these lines that 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 down shot of a hallway, you, the lines get closer.

It's basically perspective.

I won't bore people, but it's just the illusion of depth.

And I'd done all these drawns or these lines to give that illusion.

And they were horizontal.

And then I looked at the panel and he had done the exact same thing.

It was brilliant, except for he did them vertically.

And it was these moments.

And so So it wasn't that one was better than the other, right?

They both worked. It was, again, I just sort of try to get as simple as possible.

The reason, and I don't know if anybody sort of could understand this concept, but the reason I made them go up and down vertically was because, silly me, I fucking wanted them to go up and down vertically.

Because if I had wanted them to go horizontally, which was another option, I would have drawn them I can draw horizontal lines equally as well as vertical lines the reason they were vertical because so I'm a complete noob I can't do this I can't have people literally going in the opposite direction of my artwork I can't do it so he kind of was in a tough spot he was like oh okay fine Todd can you get it done by the deadline yeah sure so So I did my first inking.

So thanks to all those inkers for turning me into an inker.

And from there on out, I was my own inker.

I started inking the Hulk.

If you look at it, I went back to my editor on the Hulk and I go, well, they let me ink the Batman.

And so he's like, oh, okay, I guess you can ink the Hulk.

And now I'm going to eventually get to your question about Venom.

So it was a long -winded way, sorry.

That's okay. 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, I mean, lots of maybe obscuring.

You simplify it. Yeah.

You simplify it, right.

And so when you went from penciling to, I need to ink this or I'm out, what were the biggest differences between penciling and inking?

As someone who's never inked, I'd be curious to know what you learned or felt, or if it just mapped over really easily.

What was it like to do your first inking?

Hey, Tim, here's the first shock.

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.

I'm now going to do two jobs, right?

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.

If I want to pencil and ink, they don't give me 30 plus 30.

Right? There's two of us.

It's 30 plus 30. I get 30, you get 30.

They're going, you can do two jobs, Todd, but you still only got 30 days.

Essentially, you're doing twice the work and you have to do it twice as fast because the book's still comes out.

And so lesson learned, if you're going to pick up more work, you might want to ask how much extra time do you have?

And when the answer is zero, you might want to rethink your ask.

So, because eventually I got to the point going, I'm going to write my own stories too, right?

And that extra time also is zero.

So, but that comes a little bit later in the career.

So the first shock is I've now got to go faster.

What it taught me personally, because now I'm doing two books and I'm inking, right?

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.

So I do the efficiency and I go, I don't have time to do a lot of what they call underdrawing.

I got to literally draw with ink.

I don't have time to do the job twice.

I can't pencil and then ink my own work.

I have to do it all in one fell swoop, which is horrifying to people who've never inked themselves because every person I've shown amongst some amazing peers, amongst some amazing peers, when they see what my process is, they go, I can't even make out what's on your page.

And I go, that's okay.

I'm just going to finish it with the ink.

And they go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't go with the ink.

ink i'm like why because it's permanent i'm like what if you make a mistake uh there's a thing called white out you just white it out and they're going yeah but what if you make another mistake i just use white out let me ask you a question in reverse 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 white out it's the same thing yeah but it's ink it literally was this mental wall for people and 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've done that with ink?

And their answer was always the same.

What if I made a mistake?

You didn't. I've been watching you for four hours.

You haven't made one mistake.

Why is it if I change the tool that somehow you're going to make a mistake?

But you know what? You do you, I'll do my thing.

And so I had to just pull back the drawing and figure it out kind of in one step.

so I could keep the deadline.

That was my learning experience.

Now, question number two, did I hit the ground running?

Of course I didn't, of course I didn't.

But if you look at my inking at the beginning, it's very, very crude.

And even on Spider -Man, which is the book, The Catapult Man, if you look at the thickness of the webs on his costume, you will see it's only one book, so I can do two books.

And so again, I'm looking for another book and all the editors at Marvel said, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, come and talk to me.

but whatever you do don't go into the spider -man office because it's a shambles now you may or may not have gathered that todd doesn't seem to color inside the lines a lot of the times and so you don't tell me don't go into that office right because to me unless you want todd to go into the office yeah what are you guys doing so i went i went into the office and it was it was the editor editor, Jim Sallowcrop at that time, good man, was losing and turning over artists.

The books were in a bit of a sales decline, like I said, and I picked up the book.

It was like at number 21, 22.

And I said, hey, I can do another book.

And we had a chat. And I said, I want to ink the book.

And then they're like, well, you know, maybe in a couple months.

And I go, I'm inking the Hulk, right?

Come on, go talk to Bob, the editor on that book.

And he's like, well, you know, Just give me a couple months.

How about it starting at 300?

You can ink the book.

And I'm like, yeah, okay, we'll do it.

But the other piece of it was one other sort of slight problem.

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.

Spider -Man's that guy in the blue and the red with the webs on it.

Spider -Man. So, look, can we just get rid of that black costume and get back to Spider -Man?

Then this is sort of the happy accident.

He said, well, 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.

And I went, oh, man, I don't want to draw Spider -Man in a black costume.

It's like doing Batman and polka dots.

It doesn't make any sense to me.

So what if I come back to you with some designs, we just rip the costume off him, we put it on somebody, I'll create another character, give it to the writers, we'll just figure it out and then we still have the black costume and then we can get the red and blue back on Peter Parker and it's a win -win -win.

He's like, okay, that might work.

So I go away, I do the drawing.

The costume was alive.

So I go, oh, it must be an alien.

So I created this big, giant ain't hulking alien and gave them the big eyes and the slobbering teeth.

And to me, it was a gorilla.

It was like an alien gorilla.

And then the claws and everything else.

And that was a design for Venom.

Like here, we didn't have a name at that point.

I 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.

They cleared it through upper management.

They said, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That seems like a reasonable thing.

The writer comes back to me and says, Todd, the guy is Eddie Brock.

And I went, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

The writer's name was David.

Whoa, David, Eddie Brock, Eddie Brock's a human.

Did you see my design?

Like information I could have used earlier, I would have designed it differently if I knew it was a human that I was putting the black costume on.

But I sort of liked the design.

I thought it was cool and it was giant.

And I thought that it would be more formidable for Spider -Man to go up against something that was way bigger than him than another human humanoid form 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 so we never sort of wavered from it venom comes out has a big play in issue 300 amazing Amazing Spider -Man 300.

Sales go crazy. We knew we had something on our hand because every time Venom kept coming back, the mayor, finally, I get to draw a Spider -Man.

This was, for me, finally.

Now, somehow, Venom was the byproduct of that, right?

Now, here's what should happen, Tim.

An employee should come into the office.

They should say, no, he's wearing the black costume.

We want to give you the job on Amazing Spider -Man, one of the granddaddy books of the company.

and most sane employees will go yes sir yes ma 'am when is the book due I don't know Todd is Todd and yeah yeah yeah right and so I just was like no I need the red and blue costume and and and but because of some of that arrogance ego immaturity whatever you want to call it your byproduct is you've got a character called Venom that now creates carnage in this whole slew right so So if I was that guy, that employee, all of that maybe never materializes.

That's the true possibility of that.

And then I just take all of that, remember Marvel's boring storytelling, I start pushing the boundaries of storytelling to make it more, I thought, dynamic.

I thought everything we do in comic books is just a Broadway play.

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.

And so I was doing all this fancy storytelling and my editors were going, Todd, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't.

And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

But I just kept doing it.

And then eventually I was asking them and I go, why can't we?

And I go, well, the editor -in -chief, Jim Shooter, he doesn't like that.

I found that to be impossible to believe, impossible to believe.

believe jim shooter wants vanilla when he can have tutti frutti or a banana split hard to believe so we went and had a meeting one time my editor bob harris who ended up being the top dog at dc i think he still is maybe and we went into this meeting with jim shooter the editor -in -chief where every every editor was literally shaken in the boots from jim shooter he was like this authoritarian sort of figure and he is walking in the meeting all bob says is don't ask him about out storytelling Doug 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 and then it's like he goes okay I've got to get to my next meeting and I'm going yeah yeah and as we get up because I wanted Bob to be moving I went oh hey Jim just have one one quick question can I change storytelling like let me and he was like looked at me quizzitively and went yeah sure why okay but can i can i do this other thing and he went yeah yeah yeah sure and i went so it's okay for me to to because i go i think i heard somebody it wasn't bob my editor standing

in front of you it must have been somebody else told me that somehow that you said you can't have things punch you can't have panels overlapping and you can't have characters punching out and i walked him through a couple things and He was horrified.

He was like, what? What are you saying, Todd?

I'm going, yeah, yeah, that's just what they're telling all the artists.

He was like, no. He got angry at that moment.

He goes, no, I never said that.

He goes, here's what I said.

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.

out. And then he explained to me the difference between a bad version and a good version, right?

And I knew what the bad and good version was.

Basically, don't have a guy jumping out of a panel and you're covering up half the drawing of the next panel.

As long as you're doing it in some negative space, you're okay.

Just as long as the storytelling's clear, I don't care how you design it, Todd.

I knew it. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

And shoot, from that meeting on, you take a look at my layouts in Spider -Man.

It started getting crazier and crazier.

Now, Jim Shooter gets pushed out very quickly.

I keep doing my Todd thing on Spider -Man.

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.

And I'm now messing.

I probably could have done what I did with a lower tier character, but not Spider -Man.

Spider -Man at this point, again, They're a public company.

He is on their checks.

Every check's got a little Spidey on it.

He's on their, he's on their quarterly reports.

He's on their internal memos and I'm messing with that look.

Right. And so they came and they were sitting there and they took it as I was doing something.

I thought they were doing it wrong.

And I was right. No, no, no, no, no. Here is the reality of it.

And I've said it plenty of times.

I thought that the look that had been presented, the classic look that was there, the one that everybody, if you close your eyes, you have in your mind if you're a certain age, was literally the Norman Rockwell version of Spider -Man.

It was perfect. And the best I could hope for as a young budding artist is to do a bad version of that and go, man, that's almost as cool as Norman Rockwell's painting.

Let me tell you, if you're going to be a painter, never paint like Norman Rockwell.

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.

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.

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 just went crazy for.

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 were moments of clarity in my life.

This is one of them.

Tom DeFalco was the editor -in -chief.

He's an Italian guy.

And he was giving me heck again, wiggling his finger going, you got to stop doing the big eyes and this and this.

And then he got so mad.

I remember his face getting a little red.

And he goes, and that webbing, those damn spaghetti webbing.

You got to stop it.

Now, from my perspective, ladies and gentlemen, if you're in my head, it's like a Charlie Brown sort of cartoon.

All I heard was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, spaghetti webbing.

And I went, oh my gosh, I've got a name for them now.

So I was like so happy in that moment because Tom gave me an official name for him.

They've known ever since has the spaghetti webbing.

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.

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.

Anybody asks you to do something, especially somebody in authority, always say yes, even if you're not going to do it.

It's just way easier.

You get out of the room faster.

No confrontation. Just nod your head yes in agreement and go do whatever the hell you want.

And I knew that the editors would only circle back like every 90 days and look at the books and do their evaluation.

And I walked out of that room.

Not only did I not make the webbing smaller, I'll show you the issue.

They got twice as long, right?

Because they just look cool.

I got to tell you, Tim, they look cool.

And by the time I came back the next time...

I've seen the books.

I've I've seen them.

I've seen them. I have them 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.

And at one point, again, I had that conversation of that.

It's like, Tom, what do you care how I draw?

What do you care? All you should care about is that I am selling.

selling you comic books.

And you gave me the task of moving Spider -Man, Amazing Spider -Man from 21 up the ranks.

And it's at number two right now, Jim Lee and 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.

And he just sat there silent the whole time.

He had this big fat book.

I didn't know who he was.

And then at the, finally at the end of an hour conversation, when I said that, I go, I'm selling more damn books than almost anybody you employ right here, right now, this dude, I found out later was an accountant.

He opened up his big giant accounting book.

Tom came behind him.

The accountant didn't utter a word. He just pointed at something on his data sheet and he shook his head.

Yes. But he just said, yes, sales are going up.

And it was, you could just see that it was like, what do we do?

Right. It's working, but we disagree with it because the status quo is getting.

Let me tell your audience, here's the bizarro thing.

And now that years have passed, everything they told me not to do on Spider -Man that I was rebellious against and I just stuck to my guns and I did it in the sales art.

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. so the guy who was told not to create it i've now bizarrely as i was going no i'm not going to draw that status quo i'm going to do something funky that my style is now the new status quo and i don't think anybody should draw on 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 I don't understand corporations of just coming up with an idea and glomming onto it so hard. Yes, I'm talking to you, IBM.

And then 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.

There is nobody in the world that's ever made change and everybody liked them, especially the people who had the power and the prestige and the money ahead of them.

Nobody, if you go to any corporation and you say, I've got this new idea, you will never hear the words from the people that are the industry leaders.

That sounds super cool.

Let us get out of your way so you can just do that on your own, unfettered.

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.

But eventually, they become their own worst enemy.

Todd, we're at almost two hours now.

I've realized that we've barely scratched the surface.

We've established a lot of the background, of course, the personality, the rule -breaking, taking the camel bladder.

And we have not even touched upon your personal relationship with Stanley, which is of great interest to me.

We have not talked about the toy empire.

We have not talked about how any of that started.

TV, film, music, spawn.

I mean, there's a long list of things that I would love to cover with you.

Would you be open to doing a round two?

I think people would certainly be interested in listening to one.

Could I convince you to come back for a round two Tim you'll find that like I'm not shy at opening my mouth and talking to you know to the point I'm always going am I am I boring people because I actually know all these stories because I live them but yeah I think there are some interesting forks in the road that may be not interesting for my career but just sort of the human condition of what happens when you get to into certain walls.

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 the sharks when you're a guppy, right?

right? So yeah, 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.

I'll let you decide whether that works.

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.

So for me, I just try to scratch my own itch and 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.

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 we think you can find you on Instagram at Todd McFarlane, Twitter Todd underscore McFarlane.

People, you can find it.

These are hipsters, right?

I'm the old guy. They type in your name, they'll find it.

Yeah, whatever. People, if you're interested, you can find it.

What I'll try and endeavor the next time is to answer more than three questions because I think that's all you got in.

And I need 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.

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

Oh, yeah. It's critical.

Yeah. So we've now painted, hopefully, some of the personalities.

so now we can just maybe be a little more varied in the questions and we can pepper and jump around a bunch of industries and i can tell you some silly stories about those ones too yeah we'll get into the trenches and we can hear more of your art of war stories right and creative they almost killed eddie vetter we'll talk about that one there we go so that'll be that'll be the cliffhanger and everybody listening.

As usual, we will put show notes and links to everything in the show notes at Tim .blog slash podcast. And until next time, don't be afraid of rocking the boat and consider your upside downside, just like you were talking about those artists earlier and image.

It's human nature. What a thing.

Todd, thank you for making the time today.

So to be continued and we will figure out a time for round two.

Hey, guys, this is Tim again.

Just one more thing before you take off.

And that is five bullet Friday.

Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

Between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday, easy to sign up easy to cancel.

It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.

It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you.

So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim .blog .com slash Friday.

Type that into your browser tim .blog .com slash Friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one.

Thanks for listening.

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[The Tim Ferriss Show: Super Combo Episode featuring Nassim Taleb and Todd McFarlane]-[#759: Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Todd McFarlane]

📋 Summary

Introduction to the Super Combo Episode

Nassim Taleb: Robustness, Skepticism, and the Precautionary Principle

Todd McFarlane: The Art of Rebellion and Entrepreneurship

Conclusion

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📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Tim Ferriss Show: Super Combo Episode featuring Nassim Taleb and Todd McFarlane]-[#759: Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Todd McFarlane]

📋 Summary

Introduction to the Super Combo Episode

Nassim Taleb: Robustness, Skepticism, and the Precautionary Principle

Todd McFarlane: The Art of Rebellion and Entrepreneurship

Conclusion

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