I'm Travis Bader, and this is The
Silvercore Podcast.
Join me as I discuss matters related to
hunting, fishing, and outdoor pursuits with the
people in businesses that comprise the community.
If you're a new to Silvercore, be sure to
check out our website, www.Silvercore.ca we can
learn more about courses, services and products
that we offer as well as how you can join The
Silvercore Club, which includes 10 million
in north America wide liability insurance, to
ensure you are properly covered during your
outdoor adventures.
Today I'm joined by wind surfer, helicopter
pilot, tech inventor, filmmaker, and founder
of the revolutionary company, Red6, which
uses an airborne tactical augmented reality system
to train fighter pilots.
Welcome to The Silvercore Podcast, my
friend, Nick Bicanic.
Hey Travis.
Thanks for having me on the podcast.
It's been a long time since we first met
back in that, uh, I think it was the
firearm safety course in British Columbia.
Oh my god.
It's been forever since then.
It's been what?
15, 16 years.
No, we're not supposed to say that.
Cause that makes us seem older than
we actually are.
It's been, it's been awhile, definitely
over a decade.
Ahh, it's been a hot minute if we're going
to use the parlance of today's youth.
That's right.
Yeah.
And I remember, I remember helping you pack
to move down to LA and that it doesn't seem that
long ago, but you've done so much with your time.
Well, I guess since I first met you and since
moving down to LA, it's been just amazing.
I, I don't know where to begin, but I think
maybe a fun place to start would be where we
first met, which would have been on, uh, one
of the basic firearms courses that we have
up here in Canada.
And you did really well on that course,
finish up the course and said, you know,
I'm looking for some more advanced training.
Is there anywhere around that that
you'd recommend?
And I jokingly said, hey, head over to Calgary.
There's a zero to hero, one week, become
a mercenary course.
And before I knew it, you were up there with a film
crew and it just kinda took on legs of its own.
Did you want to talk about that?
Yeah.
The, the project that, that ended up
becoming, uh, was called Shadow Company, it,
it actually did that spectacularly well, it
was my first ever long form documentary film.
And the basic idea was that I had the, I had,
I had a couple of good friends who had joined
the military, but one in particular, who I went
to university with, he joined the British army.
Uh, he was the infantry.
Um, and after spending a couple of years in
the infantry with the usual deployments, uh,
I think they had Arctic warfare training in
Canada and they had some stuff in Northern Ireland
as the usual rotations for British infantry.
Uh, he left, uh, he'd been a lawyer, and he
left and he was looking for something else to do.
And looking for adventurous, he ended
up working as a security contractor, uh, in
particular, he was going to look at a job in
Nigeria, uh, guarding, guarding diamond mines,
but for whatever reason, that didn't quite work
out, although I was supposed to come and
spend a bit of time with him while he was there.
So one day he called me and he said, you
know, forget Nigeria, we're going to Iraq.
And I said, what are you going to do?
And he goes, yeah, we're going to guard, you
know, the ministry of oil, guard refineries.
This there's like tens of thousands
of contractors here.
I'm like really tens of thousands because
at the time it wasn't talked about as, as
big a phenomenon as it eventually became.
This was prior to the Blackwater Fallujah
episode and the poor guys getting hung
off the bridge and prior to a number of
different incidents that, that brought the
world's attention to how much of the, of
the security ecosystem had been outsourced.
I was looking for a project to sink
my teeth into on the creative side.
And that's the fact that I had some unusual
access, uh, basically presented a really
interesting opportunity.
So the particular, I forget, I think it's
called the Shooting Edge.
Was it called the Shooting Edge.
Yeah, I think thats where you went to, yeah.
Called the Shooting Edge?
So I got in touch with a, an ex, uh, 2 2, um,
SAS special air services, British army special
forces operative by the name of Alan Bell.
Um, he was, his nickname was dinger when he was
in the British army and he operated then, and
still does, a security company based in Toronto
called Globe Risk.
So I got in touch with Alan and I got in touch
with Alan out of nowhere, I just remember I called
him up one day and I said, hey, um, I want
to do this documentary on security contractors,
who are they?
What do they do?
And what kind of people are they?
Why do they do it?
Because I was fascinated by the idea of what
kind of people chose this line of work.
They chose to put themselves in harm's way.
In other words, they've, they've had
military training, they've left the
military, and then what?
They could, they don't have to go
and do this anymore.
Nobody's compelling them to do it.
So of course you could argue, well, it's obvious
it's money, but it's not quite as simple as money.
It's often a bunch of other things.
It's, it's a sense of maybe, maybe searching
for the glory days.
Maybe, maybe you get bored being, for
sake of argument, you know, working as a
mall security guard, maybe you don't want
to be a local cop.
You want to have the experience you had
as part of a, a small unit fighting force.
And you don't, how do you do that in
a civilian context?
No, one's going to hire you to do sniper counter,
sniper work in a civilian context that sort of
work doesn't exist.
Anyway, I contacted Alan and Alan said,
initially, he, he was skeptical because he
thought, who's this guy and what's his agenda.
Why is he calling me?
Which makes sense.
Because especially guys like that, who had a
bunch of different, special forces training,
they don't really trust the media.
They and sadly, even then, and especially
now, media tends to be very polarized.
So whoever's looking for an angle.
And I said to him, early on, I said, no,
that there's no angle.
There's no agenda.
There's no media behind me.
It's just me.
I'm just trying to figure out who are these guys?
What are they doing?
Why?
I'm just trying to understand.
I obviously I'm looking for a story cause I'm
not, I'm not an idiot.
I've got to make something that's
compelling to watch, but I'm also trying
to understand what's happening in the world
because sadly, as much as polarization in the
media would like to have you believe, the world
isn't black and white never has been, it's all
different shades of gray.
And I'm trying to understand the gray.
So eventually Alan relented and said, hey,
listen, we're doing a a seven day predeployment
training at this place called Shooting Edge
with a bunch of, um, uh, J sock guys or, or
various different special forces train guys who
are trying to get jobs with security companies.
So if you really want this come
and do this thing.
So, so I show up day one of the course, I
meet Alan for breakfast at 0500 or some
equally crazy time.
And, and no one else is with me, it's just me.
And he sort of sits down.
We have a bit of a chat and breakfast finishes.
And I remember he said that he goes.
Just so, you know, there's a, there's a CBC
crew coming later today.
And I said, okay.
And he goes, you know, I hope you guys
are fine being there at the same time.
Like, I don't care, I mean, whatever, they
can do what they want.
And so, so he says, wait a second,
where's your gear?
Where's your crew?
And I said, what do you mean?
It's, it's a seven day course right?
And he goes, yeah.
And I said, well, I'm going to do
all my interviews on, on day seven.
And he said, well, what are you gonna
do for seven days?
So I'm going to run the course.
And he's like, wait, you want, you want to wake
up early in the morning, run up and down the
hills with heavy loaded backpack and then drive
and shoot and do all the training with the guys.
I'm like, yeah, absolutely.
He said, what do you want to do that?
And I said, well, two reasons.
One, because it's fun.
Uh, but two, because if I don't do that,
the guys are never going to talk to me.
I mean, sure, they might answer questions
if forced, but it'll be yes, no answers.
They don't care.
They're just doing it because they're
being forced to, I want them to trust me.
And I want them to understand that I'm
not trying to just exploit anything.
I want to understand what they're doing and
the only way to do that.
I mean, yes, there's a little bit of
chest thumping, alpha bullshit that happens,
but that's necessary.
So, so that means that I'd go off
and run with them.
And if I'm running up a pack of former special
forces guys, and I'm not in the end of it,
I'm in the middle of it.
And I start bitching them out to say, guys,
I'm a journalist, what are you doing?
Go faster.
That's fun because, because they're all,
we're all trying to get in this together.
So from that perspective, I think that was a
very, very sensible decision because by the
end, I'm not saying we were best friends, but
at least they knew me.
They knew what kind of person I was,
they knew that I was either dumb enough or
committed enough to go through the punishing
schedule with them.
So that meant that I got a lot more, shall we say
honesty and sincerity out of them because
they understood that I, that I gave a shit
about this stuff and that worked out very well.
Plus I ended up becoming very close friends with
Alan as a, as a result.
Cause he, he's, he's just, I can imagine he
thought, who is this idiot who wants to put,
put himself through this punishing course?
But by day three or four, he was like, okay, fine
and we became, we've become friends since,
we spoken quite a bit.
Um, and uh, you know, I've been over
to stay with him.
He's um, he's a solid guy.
He's uh, he's obviously it's been a long time
since, since he's been on the ground and active,
but let's just say that if push came to shove
in most scenarios, uh, I, I was still very much
trust Alan because, uh, he's, he's seen and done
pretty much everything.
Yeah.
It's kind of hard to, uh, lose that once
you've been through that.
Um, so it went on, I mean, you go on
rotten tomatoes.
I think it's got an 85% approval rating,
which is phenomenal.
Dammnit, it was higher before.
Yeah.
I mean, the story, the story of the movie,
like to give you a bit more, so that, that
was the very genesis of the beginning.
Uh, as a result of that, you see the bulk of the.
The early initial cadre of deployments to satisfy
the job requirements that came up in, uh,
in Iraq and Afghanistan to a greater or lesser
degree in those days, was filled with what was
euphemistically referred to as tier one operators.
In other words, ex SAS, ex SBS, uh, seals
just unite, like pick a pick a group, and
you could pretty much guarantee that the top
tier guys were going to go and do a rotation
there because the money was just too good.
And some cases, sadly, it was actually eroding the
ability of some high-end special forces unit to
keep their stuff, because guys were looking at this
going, hang on a second.
I could stay on for another two years and
make X, or I could make triple that with the same
risk level if I just quit now because hey, look,
I've got my seal badge.
I might as well leave the teams.
I don't need to stick around.
I'll go work for Blackwater for
X rotations and that's me done.
Then I can buy my house and retire.
So, so there was definitely lots of lots
of stuff going on, but in what happened is after
the initial conversations with Alan, those that
world is quite tough to break into in term, as,
from a media perspective, nobody trusts anybody.
Um, uh, certainly not members of the
media, unless they've actually worked with
people before, it ain't gonna happen.
But one, it's like a, like a set of dominoes.
One thing led to another, uh, knowing
Alan and having a seal of approval,
stamp of approval from him, certainly
opened some doors.
Um, I was able to reach out to a guy
called Cobas Clawson's.
Cobas is a, uh, former executive outcomes,
uh, fire force leader and the former officer
in the parachute regiment in the south
African defense force.
And he became, uh, a very good friend of
mine over the course of a number of years.
But in those days I started talking to
him initially, um, remotely of course
then eventually met him in person in London.
And finally, I spent a couple of weeks with
him in Sierra Leone.
And that was fascinating because the, um, what
happened in Sierra Leone in the, in the early
nineties, I mean, Sierra Leone, like sadly, a
bunch of west Africa hasn't had, shall we
say the most peaceful couple of decades.
But in particular, in the, in the early
nineties, a group of, well, a mix of different
librarian and foreign interests decided to
ferment unrest inside, uh, inside the country
and lots of problems and suits chief amongst them
being, um, a guerrilla army that was funded,
rebels shall we say, so-called revolutionary
united front.
Uh, that simultaneously took over the diamond
mines, thereby cutting off one of the biggest
revenue streams for the country.
The country ran out to the ability to
pay its own troops.
The troops didn't have food.
The troops then revolted and specifically went and
joined the rebel groups.
So the whole country is in disarray.
They've got no ability to keep the
peace whatsoever.
Into the vray a group of, uh, private
contractors who, in those days they openly call
the cells mercenaries because as far as
they were concerned, that's what they were.
They were soldiers for hire.
They came in to stabilize the country.
Ultimately they ended up preventing a genocide
and they certainly did it in, in a, in a, in a very
explicit, aggressive, uh, precise use of force way.
There was no, no question about it.
They came in there and if people were
causing problems, they killed them.
Unfortunately, those are complicated environments
to be, to be operating in under international law.
So even though they were able to stabilize the
scenario in ways in which the United Nations, not
only likely couldn't have done, but quite
explicitly failed to do when something similar
happened, both in Sierra Leone and in Rwanda.
Roundabout the same decade executive outcomes
did do this, uh, in a way that whether you
argue from an ethical perspective, whether
it was correct or not, it saved hundreds of
thousands of lives and stop the bloodshed cold.
And Cobas was a key part of that.
And I was fascinated by that story.
And, and again, it wasn't, I wasn't there
to make comment on whether or not this was
the right thing to do.
I was mostly trying to understand
the human angle.
I was trying to understand what kind
of people do this, uh, what are they doing and
why they're doing it?
So, um, the, the movie ended up running
the gamut of looking at aspects of, uh,
shall we say, north American contractors.
So that would be companies like,
uh, Blackwater and triple canopy, uh,
south African focus companies like airiness.
And so this was present day stuff in the middle
east, and then some of the historical stuff,
including Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea.
And the initial thing that I made was the
feature length doc.
The feature length doc ran remember exactly, but
roundabout 90 minutes.
And it was incredibly well recieved.
I ended up testifying in front of the us Senate as
a subject subject matter expert on the usage of
contractors and warfare.
And I ended up, um, you know, a number
of different channels asked to license
the documentary.
I said no to a lot of the initial deals.
And one of the reasons I said no to a lot of
the initial deals was ironically similar to
why I had a bit of a falling out with a CBC.
I don't know if you remember the story,
but I was living in Vancouver at the time.
And early on, when I put together the package
for the documentary with some initial interview
material, uh, I came to the CBC and I thought,
well, you know, I don't really know how these
things are made, but presumably you guys fund
documentaries like this, hey, let's, let's see
if we can work together.
And they immediately said, this is amazing.
Let's do this.
This is amazing access and it's really timely
and we like the style.
Uh, we'd love to be involved.
We'll fund the whole documentary and
the one condition.
And I said, what's that?
And they said, you need to make sure the tone of
the documentary is anti security contractor.
And you need, you need to show them running
rough shot over a Rocky civilians.
And I said, hang on a second.
Am I suggesting for a second that this
stuff never happens.
Absolutely not.
It does happen.
And it certainly happens because when
you're a, because people make mistakes
be because there's bad apples around, some
people are stupid.
And moreover, as I mentioned earlier in the
talk in the early stages of the recruitment cycle,
the first jobs were always filled by very,
very qualified people.
But so many thousands of individuals were needed.
The criteria ended up becoming relaxed.
So you ended up paying guys who didn't have the
right level of experience going over and screwing
things up and getting some cases themselves.
In some cases, others killed in the process
point being with a CBC, as I said, my
aim is not to verify, vilify or to glorify.
Um, but the, the whole idea is that this is
neither anti, nor pro security contractor.
And they said, no, this is pro security
contractor by virtue of the fact that
it's not auntie.
And I said, screw this, this is bullshit.
I'm not doing it right.
So, sorry, refuse to work with the CBC for
that reason alone.
And it's, it's kind of sad because the, the
year after the movie was completed, que que
a couple of years worth of traveling around war
zones, doing lots of interviews, securing the
right people, talking to some politicians
and lobbyists in Washington, DC, the usual
stuff that you would need to put together,
a story like this.
And I was very proud of what we achieved and
finally we submitted it to, at the time it
was the Leo awards.
I'm trying to remember the name of the awards
for British Columbia film and TV awards.
So it was, it was a nice little, uh, I
guess, bittersweet victory against the
CBC because there were seven documentaries
I believe, submitted that year for the
best documentary, best directing, best writing
and best editing prize.
All other six, other than ours were funded
purely by the CBC.
We won in all categories.
So.
That's fantastic.
It's like, you know, it's, it's
sad because the CBC really didn't need to
take this position.
Uh, they just did for, I guess, ideological
reasons, but ultimately what, you know, the,
the, the, the, I guess the quality of
the storytelling and the fact that we did
not take sides, uh, prevailed because
people really liked it.
And I definitely enjoyed showing the
documentary and I enjoyed the Q and A's
that went alongside it.
For example, I um, when we did our theatrical
premiere in New York, I did a Q and A afterwards,
and I put on stage, uh, um, a guy who
worked for Blackwater and a representative
of the United Nations.
Now these are not traditionally the
kind of people you would see on stage
together at any panel.
But I did that deliberately because I
wanted to see what kind of discussion we could
have, because I think both, both entities, not
only have a voice, but deserve to have a voice.
And the, there, there are discussions that need to
be had with, with, with, uh, with both elements
of that ecosystem.
So, and I did that quite a lot, and I
thought that was, that was fascinating.
In fact, at the world premier, which was at
the south by Southwest film festival, I flew
out, uh co-vice I think it was his, his first
high profile interview.
And I flew out Alan Bell.
And that was really interesting.
There was all the recordings of that
somewhere, just doing, doing a kind of, after
you see this whole movie.
So in the end for I'm sure that we'll be able
to include a link here.
Absolutely.
But while I, while initially this is
a little while ago, obviously this movie
came out while initially the bulk of people were
seeing this on DVDs.
And I don't know, many of us probably don't
even have a DVD player anymore, but, uh, I got.
Just to give you an idea of the enduring
popularity of, of the, of the, of not
just the theme and the subject, but also
this particular story.
Uh, after, I'd say maybe four years of this being
out on DVD and steadily being viewed, including
many, many academic educational institutions
who would buy the license to be able to
use this as part of their teaching material.
Um, I got sick of seeing and taking down
on YouTube people who had illegally uploaded
versions of the movie in its entirety.
And they'd racked up to 3 million views in
some cases with ads.
And I thought, okay, goodness, I'm not going
to fight these guys.
I'm just going to do my own.
So I put the official version up and of course,
Google being Google.
Uh, I never got the money back for the
revenue that those guys got from the ads.
They just struck them down.
And the movie still, I think my official
version is now at 2 million something views.
Nice.
But the other ones all between them, if you add
up all the illegal ones over the years, it's
probably 10 million plus, and that's on top of
that a couple of years.
I did sign a foreign sales deal with a company
called Journeymen and Journeyman's entire
back catalog got put on Amazon Prime.
So I was surprised about a year ago, this
friend of mine was watching The Kingdom.
I don't know if you remember the movie,
Jamie Fox and a bunch of other people go to
investigate a bombing in, uh, uh, in Saudi Arabia.
So he sends me a photograph that he
quickly took with his phone at the
end of The kingdom.
They put up, if you like this movie,
you should check out Shadow Company cause
it's on Amazon Prime.
And so I was like, wow, that's awesome.
And surprise, surprise, that was when they
were just promoting it.
And ever since then, let's just say that
for a movie that's 10 years old at this
point, if not longer, the there's a continuous
monthly revenue stream just from people who
are watching this thing on Amazon Prime.
So there's still an audience for this and
I'm still as fascinated by the subject as I was.
In fact, there's a segue here.
If we want to into executive outcomes,
because the company that Cobas worked for,
that he was one of the, one of the, um, one
of the key players in, uh, they, they occupy
a special place in history as far as on the
security contractor side.
And I thought it was interesting enough to
explore essentially a story of bad guys doing
good things that I ended up, uh, writing a
screenplay about this.
Screenplays called Executive Outcomes.
And there's been lots of interest from
various different Hollywood players in the
screenplay, but Hollywood being Hollywood, they
want this for Ridley Scott to direct or pick
another famous director.
In this case, Ridley Scott, it was because
of Black Hawk Down.
And lots of people have asked to buy the
screenplay, but I don't want to do that because
I want to direct it.
So.
Good for you.
That's the plan.
And in the process, one of the things I made is,
this little thing, which is a graphic novel of
the entire screenplay, which was actually two
reasons to do that.
One was that from a director perspective,
it was a fascinating exercise because the
whole thing is sort of like doing a storyboard
for every shot.
Right.
So if I can feel the movie visually, if I
can visualize it, I can do the graphic novel.
But second of all, because I'm fascinated
by discovering new things and figuring
out new ways to work in different environments.
So understanding, understanding
storytelling in a, in a comic book
is fascinating.
I'll give you an example of something.
So I don't know, let's pick one, just
one panel and trying to make this, so the
reflections aren't there.
Yeah.
It's obvious if you think about the story
that takes place in the panel, because you're
looking at something, looks like a movie frame,
some of these speaking, you see composition
there's stuff going on in the background.
The interesting thing is the story that
happens in the gap because you're asking
the reader to imagine the transition from this
visual, to this visual.
And it's those kinds of things in a movie,
this happens in a cut.
So it happens very rapidly.
It's just a brief second and you're
already guiding the viewer, but in the
comic book, the story that happens in the gap
is kind of interesting to conceptualize.
And it was for me, a fascinating challenge
to took much longer than I expected to
make the graphic novel.
But yeah, the first printing sold out
lots of great reviews.
Um, the process of making the actual movie.
Yeah.
Let's just say it's taken awhile.
And I believe that it'll get there, especially
nowadays with, with the likes of Amazon
and apple and, um, and Netflix, very hungry
to, to fill that.
Databases with material that people
find compelling and the performance of
movies like, uh, Triple frontier or
extraction, uh, neither of which I thought were
particularly great, but, uh, they they're
extremely popular and they indicate that people
want thoughtful action.
We're not talking about one guy Rambo style
coming in and fighting an entire army single-handed
with two rocket launches.
Yeah.
That's stuff worked in the eighties, but
now nowadays there's no reason why we can't
have an action movie, which is, which is, um,
a thinking man's movie.
But at the same time, when violence is
necessary, it should be authentic for I'm
talking about something.
That's I don't know if you remember the movie
Syriana but for example, Sierra is a very, it's a,
it's a very complicated movie to watch.
It's not a lot of fun to watch, even though it's
important subject matter.
And I think that there's an unnecessary
distinction.
Like somehow if you're serious, you're
supposed to be serious.
You're not allowed to be fun.
But if you're a fun movie, then you were only
really allowed to be fun.
If you're a superhero movie, you can't be a
fun movie about war.
So I think there's scope here to make something
that's a hybrid that there's no, there's no
reason why you can't have black humor inside
a serious narrative about a dysfunctional
foreign policy.
So that's my plan.
My plan is to stay true to the style that I
established from the narrative dynamic of
the documentary and make a drama around that.
But we'll see, Hollywood takes a lot of convincing
one step at a time.
That's good, incredibly
exciting.
And I like the way that you look at it
from those, from those different perspectives,
I've never actually thought about.
A graphic novel and the story that's being
told in between frames that's uh, what was your
background in filmmaking?
You're basically self-taught aren't you
pretty much.
Yeah, I'm I, um, so from the filmmaking
perspective, what happened was, I
obviously like, like, you know, millions of
people in the world, I like consuming movies.
And I started dabbling in, in recording
my own stuff.
When I was spending a lot of time doing outdoor
activities, primarily focused on wind surfing
and skiing, uh, in particular, the first,
slightly longer format thing I did was when I
sold my first startup and I moved to Hawaii.
So I was living on the north shore of Maui
and I recorded lots of different interviews
with people and lots of different ways.
This was, this is a long time ago, I'm
old, but, uh, this was, this was pre GoPro.
Believe it or not.
So you couldn't just slap a GoPro on a helmet.
We were making custom waterproof housings
with remote triggers for cameras that would stick
on a nose of the board or somewhere on the sale of
the mast in order to be able to record different
water sports activities.
But from.
You know, I don't know how many surfing or
snowboarding movies you've watched,
but there's only a certain number.
Yeah.
There's only so many times that I can see a
guy doing bottom turn and a cutback with some
cool thrashing rock track in the background.
It gets a little boring to me.
I wanted more it's the human angle that
I was interested.
So the particular piece I made was called stuck.
And it was because specifically the
Hawaiian islands for a European, I mean,
I was born and raised in, in what was then
Yugoslavia eventually became Croatia.
So very much European, every aspect of my
upbringing and Maui is really far it's halfway
around the world.
But I found that there was a lot of people
there who come there for one reason and
then they ended up, you know, one thing leads
to another and suddenly five years has gone by
and they're still there.
So that's why I called the project stuck
because people get stuck there for a variety
of different reasons.
So I made this 15 minute short film called stuck,
which I really liked.
And I wasn't sure exactly whether I didn't for me,
this wasn't the career.
This was just, it was a fun thing
to do on the side.
And when I, uh, round towards the
tail end of my time, living in Hawaii,
I had just, I had.
The I was lucky and the timing was right.
And obviously some element of scale, et
cetera, came into play, but there's a lot of
luck involved, but I sold a startup successfully
when I was 20, just, just before my 24th birthday.
And so I was lucky to be able to have
lots of freedom.
I spent somewhere in the order of a year and a
half on the north shore of Hawaii, trying to
figure out what to do next in the process,
fell in love with where the girl that I'm still
with still in love with, and which is good thing,
because if I wasn't in love with her, it'd be a
bit of a problem together for a very long time.
And she became, you know, she's used a soulmate
as well as a creative partner, as well as a
professional partner.
And actually she was the one who challenged me
to transition into film because she saw some
stuff that I'd made and she thought it was pretty
good, but she, herself as a professional, she was
an actress and a writer.
And she'd worked on a number of different
shows as a lead, uh, and or guest star,
uh, in, in Vancouver.
And she, she started into movies.
And so at some point, I think after, if you
listened to me a bitch about, you know, the
third project in a row saying this was
bad, it should be done like this, this, this
is not interesting.
Here's how it would be better.
She said, you know what, why don't you
stop criticizing other people's work
and make your own?
And I went, oh, that's right.
I don't actually have a comeback to that.
So.
So, I didn't know.
I mean, you said self-taught, I mean,
behind every, as the joke goes, you know,
behind every great man, there's a, something
behind every filmmaker.
There's a team of creative collaborators
and some of them are people who.
Perhaps gave you input along the
way, but weren't actively involved.
Some of them are people who give you feedback
during the edits and help tighten everything up.
But in some cases, whether it's the
sound guy or the DP or, or someone who's
just advising as the project's being made,
no, there's no such thing as a one man show
on the filmmaking side.
So yes, I carry the credit of director and
writer and producer and editor, but let's
just say that there was a lot of people
involved to help make that documentary
as good as it was.
Uh, but yes, the, it was, it was definitely
a baptism by fire.
So whether it was from the equipment perspective
or from the scope, cause it was very ambitious.
Shall we say?
I mean, just to give you an idea, uh, I
was when I edit, I often edit to music.
So I put music in to help drive the
rhythm of the piece.
So by the time the documentary was finished,
there were 14 commercial music tracks in there.
Now, normally what people do is, is if you're,
if you're a normal, low budget, independent
filmmakers, you go, okay, well, I've got
these commercial music tracks, but I can't
just go out and get the rolling stones because
that's too expensive.
So I'm going to swap it with something
that kind of sort of sounds like it.
Yeah, well, I was stupid enough to not do that.
So, so I took my that's not strictly true.
Some, two of them we swapped out, but
because we couldn't get the rights, but what
we ended up doing is I ended up learning.
Let's just say more than I expected to
about, about rights and negotiations and likeness
rights and dealing with lawyers to get releases.
But in the end, You know, we ended up, I mean,
we interviewed Stephen J Cannell, who was the
creator of the, a team.
And we had a sequence in there with, which had the
ATM opening theme tune and the opening titles.
Right.
And I didn't want to drop it because I
thought it was important.
This particular sequence of the, of the film
discusses, how the concept of mercenaries
is treated by the media and what, what role
that plays in the way they're perceived.
So I thought it was fundamental to the
structure of it.
But, you know, phoning up the studio and saying,
Hey, can we have the license to the 18 theme
tune was met with a resounding no, right.
Slowly but surely we wore them down.
And that ended up, I had to talk to, um, Mr.
T's manager.
I had to talk to, um, Dwight Schultz who played
howling, Matt Murdoch.
Uh, I talked to Dirk Benedict himself.
He's he played face, man.
Uh, and I can't remember who played Hannibal
George per part.
Yes.
Uh, George for part, unfortunately is no
longer with us, but, uh, but yes, his,
his state willingly licensed all this stuff,
so it took a while, but, but we got there.
So, yeah, that was definitely a very
interesting couple of years of my life.
Trying to, um, understand the hard way shall we say
how to tell compelling stories, but however
much effort it was then, as I mentioned with the
Amazon stuff, that's happening to this day,
uh, it goes to show you that if you, I think
if you make something, if you're, if you're a
discerning judge of your material, if you make
something that satisfies your standards, then you
can hold your head high.
And even though, uh, it's possible that I
could have met a lot more money if I had.
Plates to one side of the political equation
and made, for example, I don't know either an
extremely right-leaning who Rob pro war gun
movie, or the other way around and made
extremely left-leaning a war is hell.
And these companies were all evil.
Perhaps it could have made more money, but I
didn't want to do that.
I wanted to make something that I felt
was honest and sincere.
And th and I'm glad I did that.
Uh, one thing I've always kind of wondered
you get a pretty famous person narrating this
video, you had Dre Butler doing the, uh, the
narration on that one.
So,
so there is a backstory here, and since I don't,
since I don't want to embarrass her, uh,
there's a, there's a girl involved in this mix.
Let's just say a long time ago.
Um, someone who I knew fairly well as one might
when one is young and single, um, happened
to know Jerry, um, and she just said, oh,
you should meet Jerry.
He'd be kind of a, he's a cool guy.
This is way before the movie was being made.
So, so I'm, you know, I met Jerry in a
strange context at a nightclub in London.
He was very friendly.
I think he was, he was up there shooting some
movie about dragons.
I can't for the life of me, remember what it's
called, but, uh, Um, I'm sure I will, but anyway,
so he students move about dragons and he, he's
very, very friendly to me and we stayed in touch.
And so when I'm thinking about who would be a
great guy to narrate this, I thought, you
know, I need this kind of Husky weather, the
voice, and it would be kind of cool if it
was an accent in it.
And what about if we got someone Scottish and I
didn't think, oh, Jerry, and then randomly, I
can't remember why it popped into my head.
I think, I think I remember Dominique was
invited to some gifting lounge, a gifting lounges
of these things they do for four actresses
and actors where they were companies give
them products in a, in an attempt to promote
and spread the message.
She invited to gifting lounge.
And Jerry was there.
And as I started talking to him, I'm
like that voice.
That's what I need.
So I said, Hey, do you want to do this thing?
And he goes, how much money do you have?
And I'm like, I don't have any money.
You idiot.
So he's like, it doesn't work that way.
And I'm like, dude, it's going to take you like
40 minutes to do it.
Just shut up and do it.
And he's like, okay.
And I'm like, I can't believe that worked.
So, so we get them in the studio and uh,
and of course there's a big sign that says.
No smoking in the studio and, and the
woman, who's the manager, uh, effectively
producing the, the shoot, this particular
recording session.
She, she comes in and she goes, yeah, you're
not allowed to smoke.
And he just looks at her and lights up a
cigarette and continues.
So she just walks away.
And as it happens, the, the kind of the
tobacco rasp, I think, is helpful because as
it ends up sounding more authentic in this case.
So he did, he did a great job doing that.
I mean, I, he didn't really need much
direction at all, if any, if, if anything,
what we needed, cause it was being done pretty
quickly as he needed a little bit, a little bit
of explanation of the terms and the context,
but I mean, he's, uh, you know, the is a very, very
experienced performer.
So he understood from reading it what we
were trying to do.
And, uh, it's um, I think it was very happy
with the final work.
I mean, he, as I said, he, he didn't
do this for money.
He did it because he thought it was an
interesting story and he wanted to contribute.
And frankly, it wasn't that much effort for
him to just read a bunch of stuff in character.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
It's, you know, when I, when I look at your
life and I keep seeing things popping up, I was
looking for that video.
Cause at one point I saw a video of
you actually you're testifying before Senate.
I think it was that actually I couldn't
find it again.
Yeah.
That video does exist somewhere.
So what happened.
I, uh, I was trying to get as much
awareness of the documentary as possible.
So I went to the media liaison.
I sent a copy of the documentary to the
media liaison of every Senator, both democratic
and Republican, uh, on the Senate
armed subcommittee.
And all of them got back to me essentially saying
verses of the same thing, which is, this is great.
Can we have another 20 copies of this?
Because we want to use it as training
material for our, for all of our interns
and our other staff.
But, uh, we can't give you an official
statement because, and it depends on whether
they were Democrat or Republican in the
case of the Democrats.
They said, because it isn't sufficiently
on brand for what we're doing.
And in the case of the Republicans, they said,
well, you know, it takes slight digs of the
current administration, so, and their handling
of the conflict in Iraq.
So therefore we don't really want to
publicly support it, but it's amazing.
Can we have some more?
So I thought that was pretty funny.
I'm in particular, the line they wanted taken
out because there was a line and there were
one of the characters says, um, George Bush
creates a wild west scenario in Iraq.
If you've got near for hire there's
work for you.
So I say to the guy, I'm talking to him
on the phone, I go, but, but that's true.
And he goes, yeah, I know that's true, but
we just don't want to officially say that.
And I'm like, oh, well, you know,
it is what it is.
Right?
So, so in the end, what happened was the
late Ted Kennedy, uh, was the exception.
And he said, this is great.
And I would like to officially, uh, hold
a screening on Capitol hill with a Q and a,
uh, and we did do that.
They, we hired a private theater somewhere and
we invited a bunch of staffers and a number
while, while very few actual members
of Congress came to that screening.
Uh, they did send almost everybody sends
a representative as there was a lot of media
coverage of that event.
Uh, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, I believe
was the main person who was there at the Q and
a, and then, uh, as a result of the response
to that screening, there was an actual event.
I forget what it's called, but I guess
it's a testimony that was a testimony in
front of, uh, in front of the U S Senate.
And that was the, the so-called subject
matter expert testimony on the usage of
mercenaries in Iraq.
But the funny part is that.
For someone who's never done this before.
Namely me, it's a really, really
interesting introduction into how this stuff
actually works.
You see, I thought that the idea was, as you
know, I come there, I make my five minute
statement, which I'm being asked to prepare.
And then I'm asked questions and I'm
assuming that they want to know the answers
to the questions.
That's why I'm, that's why I'm there to ought
to be, to answer those questions because I'm
the expert because that's not what, that's not
what actually happens.
What actually happens is they want to get the
questions on record.
They carry what a bit less about the answer
that I give than they do about getting their
statement on record.
And I mean this across the board, both on
the Republican and the Democrat side, because
when all is said and done what's necessary
is for them to show that they're making
an effort and thinking about a particular thing.
So I was frankly, astounded.
By how, how their questions demonstrated
how little they knew about the subject.
And I mean, I can understand if you just
get plucked in the middle of nowhere at a
barbecue, and somebody starts talking to you
about a particular subject, that's very,
very niche that you may not know about it.
But if it's the usage of contractors in a
major conflict that the country is involved
in, and on top of that, it's a session that
you're preparing for.
And on top of that, somebody is preparing
questions for you.
It was baffling to me that the question
seemed a bit inane.
And that's why when I look at, for example, I
don't know the testimony of people like mark
Zuckerberg or, or when various different
executives are called in front of Congress and
the Senate to testify and look at some of the daft
questions that are asked.
I don't even roll my eyes anymore because
I remember what it was like for me.
And when I thought, wait a second, you're asking
something that, that doesn't make any sense.
That means you fundamentally
misunderstood what your.
What the problem is, I believe, I
don't remember.
It's been a long time, but I believe
the opening line of my, of my five minute
testimony testimony was that it's baffling
to me that the highest level of law makers in
this land are asking for expert testimony
from a first time documentary filmmaker.
Whereas, whereas it should be the
other way around.
Right.
And I don't, I mean, let's just say, I,
I didn't anticipate ever being invited
back, put it that way.
So I had nothing, I had nothing to lose.
I just thought I'm just going to say my
bit and answer the questions as best I can.
And we'll see what happens.
I don't know that I'd make a good politician,
but that, wasn't why I was there.
I was there because I thought I'm going
to answer questions because that's what I
believe I'm here for
a whole different stage on the political level.
Isn't it?
Yeah.
Now you also did something with vice
documentary, didn't you?
That was on the, uh, the Boko Haram.
It was.
Yeah.
So what happened as a result of, uh, working
in and around this space of contractors?
I, as I mentioned, I'm, I became quite close to
a couple of individuals, chief amongst them,
Alan and cobras.
And, uh, one day, a couple of years had
gone by, and one day I received this call, um,
from, from Cobas saying.
Hey, listen, there's a, there's a contract coming
up and, um, I need some media coverage for it.
And I said, what, what does that mean?
What's a contract.
And he's like, well, and he, and he's, he's
being evasive, but also careful, but he
eventually does reveal that there is a, uh,
there's a, the Nigerian government has contracted
with a group, um, from South Africa to,
to essentially stamp out the vocal Harambe
problem, uh, PRI in the run-up to the elections.
Now, as it happens, the president lost those
elections, the president who had contracted with
them, which created all kinds of problems
for, for contracts and payments, but that's
well beyond the scope of, of this conversation.
From my perspective, what was fascinating
for me is that, uh, is knowing ahead of time
that there would be an, there would be activity,
which would, which would be fascinating
to explore from a storytelling perspective.
So while between that initial conversation and
the actual deployment of the crew on the ground,
I think two or three months past that most,
perhaps even less than that, but let's just say
that I ended up having to rapidly put together
a crew as well as structural story, as well
as find a broadcast or in this case of ice was,
was a really good fit.
So, um, The hunt for book or Harambe, I
believe is the, is the name of this piece.
And it's, it's easily find-able.
And I ended up for a variety of different
reasons, primarily to do with my green card.
For, for those who don't know when you're in your
final steps of getting your green card, you
can't leave the country.
So, uh, and I was literally two or
three weeks out.
If I'd left the country, I would have,
I either had to get it.
In which case, if I got it, I could be involved,
uh, on the ground in this project or I had to, or
I had to wait because if I left prior to getting
it, the whole cycle resets and I might have
to wait for another year or two before I got it.
So I had to quickly find someone who was
dumb enough and brave enough to, to run
point instead of me.
And I found a guy called Carl Larson.
So if you do look up this piece, a former Navy
seal called cars Larson.
Couple of stints advice news.
Um, I, so I set up the entire project, talked
everything up on the ground and control
the whole thing.
Creative would remotely.
But if you do look up this piece, you, you
won't find, you won't find me on the screen.
Uh, you will find me as an executive producer
of the project, but yeah, there was lots of
conversations since about doing various different
things with vice vice has changed quite a lot.
The vice doesn't take into near as many
risks as they used to in the material
they've become too big.
But, uh, but it was, it was certainly fun to get
involved in that project, especially because I
remember a couple of unusual things happening,
for example, uh, um, college, a nine Cobas,
and I would communicate quite regularly.
And, uh, one day in, uh, in the middle of the
night, like about 2:00 AM or something, phone rings
and answer the phone.
Cause I don't know what's going to happen.
And there's an active project in an active
war zone going on.
So for all I know there's a satellite
phone call coming in and ready to answer it.
So I answered the phone as department of state
and I go, Hey, what's up?
And they go a unique business.
Should I go?
Yep.
And they said, yeah, one of our assets is
missing in Nigeria.
And I go, I'm sorry, what?
And they said, yeah, one of our assets will sort
of come onto cause Larson is missing in Nigeria.
And I'm like, what do you mean missing?
Define missing.
Cause my next check-in with them is in three
hours and he goes, yeah, he missed his last check.
And then I go, not with me here.
As far, as far as I'm concerned, uh, he's not
there on, on an active government mission, he's
there on a vice project.
And he said, yeah, that's right.
Something, something, something, the point is
they'd lost track of him turns out that the reason
this happened is because some girl that caused
was semi involved with, at that time, he told
her he was going to call her at a certain point.
He didn't call her.
She didn't answer the phone.
She went bananas.
She thought something happened.
She pushed the panic button, happened
to know someone at department of state.
All of a sudden one plus one equals a thousand.
So I thought it was a fun.
It was, it was pretty funny that, uh, let's
just say that domino effects are, or butterfly
effects are quite a real thing in this scenario.
So yeah, lots of, lots of interesting side stories.
The tail end, you know, vices, vices, a lovely
place to be if they're willing to take certain
risks, but it's also nasty place to be.
Um, because it's very easy to get screwed
over as an independent filmmaker by price.
And sadly that happened in this case because
they wanted to do another piece about
vocal Harum and they did it using some
contexts that were mine.
Um, but without any, without asking you about
this, I didn't even know it was happening until
my guys called me and said, what's going on?
Why is vise doing a follow-up piece?
So it's a shitty thing to do, but it's
the prerogative of big broadcasters.
So you gotta be careful because you're playing
with fire when you play with companies.
No kidding.
Well,
it's a hell of a good documentary.
I'm going to put a link to it in the,
uh, in the podcast on YouTube as well.
Uh, very interesting.
Same with the executive outcomes.
I mean, that was what 120 550 professional soldiers
that stabilized an entire
country.
Yeah, it was 150 versus 15,000.
So, so a little bit magnificent seven ask.
But, uh, but obviously, you know, one side just
had a case and they were kids and the other
side were highly trained soldiers with gunships,
but nonetheless, it's still, it's not,
it's not a normal scenario by any means.
And it's, it's that very thing that makes
it a fascinating story to explore.
So I'm definitely looking forward to telling
that story at, uh, on a larger dramatic scale.
So, um, if there's anyone here who knows people
at Amazon tell them they should make a movie
version of this because they should it's ready.
Absolutely.
So then I watched echo echo, and that was a
neat adventure that you started working on.
But I think an Apple's find me kind of a mess
with that one a little bit, but it seemed
like it was completely, completely different from
all of the other things that you've been doing.
You seem to be able to pivot really,
really well.
They, um, I mean, there's a term, a
Renaissance, man.
It sounds a little bit sort of lofty, but
what it really means is that I like to skip
between the left and right side of my brain.
One side is quite technical.
The other side is quite creative.
So the creative side is constantly looking
for stories, stories that I find interesting
to read about, to be a part of, to create, or
I want to essentially when I read something
or watch something that I'm curious about, I
like the way that makes me feel the curiosity
is vital to driving me, to making me want to
wake up every morning.
I constantly want to learn.
And when I do that, I want to share that
with other people.
Sometimes it's as simple as going, oh look, here's
an interesting story.
He's interesting medium post an instinct podcast.
I'm going to share it with my friends, but
sometimes it's a lot more complicated and
that's sometimes it's my particular way of
looking at the story.
And I connect this fact with this fact and in the
middle, I add a little bit of a spin to it.
So that often meant that sometimes I would
write about stuff I did write on medium
for, for a fair while.
And sometimes it would require more than that,
whether it was making a documentary or creating
a product or creating a company, or in this case,
writing a screenplay for executive outcomes.
But there were, there were all very
similar things.
So in the case that you mentioned, which
is echo echo, this was, this was a couple
of different things.
One was that I was frustrated with Hollywood
because Hollywood, there's a bit of a catch
22 inside a catch 22 in Hollywood, whereby
it doesn't matter how good your material is.
There's gotta be a reason why somebody
will give you the money to make a project.
And usually the reason is because you made a
project before and it was really successful.
Yeah.
That's great.
But how you make the first project because
it's all well, and good.
If you've just directed, I don't know.
Iron man three and they go, Hey, we're
doing Ironman for you.
Want to do it again?
We'll surprise.
Surprise that it's easy, but how do you
get the first one?
And it's always an interesting problem
because either you have a shit ton of money, so
you do it yourself or your, the son or daughter
or husband or boyfriend of somebody super famous
and you effectively get them to be in it.
They do it for you or you, or, you know, a
famous director or, you know, a famous producer.
It's very, very rare that you can just brute force
to use a sort of, um, a computer security term.
You can brute force your way to, to getting
a project greenlit.
So I was slowly but steadily learning
the ropes of how to make things
happen in Hollywood.
And, uh, ultimately I got frustrated waiting
and I decided, well, hang on a second.
Perhaps Silicon valley is a little more
meritocratic because of Silicon valley.
If you come with a good idea, you
really only have one level of gatekeeper.
If you can cook, if you need money
for the project, if you can convince a
venture capital firm.
And usually it's a, either a junior partner
or senior partner, depending on the size
of the firm, but it's usually only one or two
levels of pitch meeting that you have to go
through and you can get.
A seed round funded, whether it's depends on
what you need, $250,000, $1 million, but up to
$1 million worth of initial funding rounds
are not uncommon.
If you know what you're talking about.
If you have a compelling enough product that
you can articulate correctly to investors.
So that's exactly what happened with echo echo.
Uh, I was, this was prior to the days
of find my phone.
And prior to the days of being able to send,
send your location very easily, I was
frustrated because I had just moved to Los
Angeles and I found it hard to meet up with
my girlfriend because I would constantly go,
okay, it's a giant city.
I'm driving everywhere.
There's no, there's no real core that
you can walk around.
Like there isn't in many other cities,
including Vancouver or wherever where we'd be
living up until then.
So my most common text message I was
sent to my girlfriend was where are you?
And, um, she'd go, oh, I'm at the corner of, I
dunno, Melrose and third.
Well, that's great, but I have no idea where
that is because I don't know LA, so I would type
into my phone to Google Melrose and third, an
upward pop-up a blue dot.
With where mellow, sorry, not a blue dot up, but
pop up a dot of Melrose.
And third, the problem is I now know where
she is, but she doesn't know where I am.
So that's annoying.
So I thought this is ridiculous.
There's got to be a better way of doing
this has gotta be a simple way that I can
ping that's the echo.
And if she responds, pops up on her phone
saying Nick was through where you are.
Yes or no.
And if she says, no, nothing happens.
If she says, yes, we see each other
immediately and we can find each other.
And we even have the ability to click and
suggest a meeting point.
It would suggest a meeting point like you
could say hit, okay, I want this Starbucks.
Then we would both get a ping saying, Hey,
meeting at the Starbucks, go and we'd find each
other super simple, super elegant surprise,
surprise, Google ventures back this because it's an
easy and obvious addition to Google maps and for
a variety of different reasons, lots of lessons
learned along the way.
It didn't quite work out as a startup, but
it was a fascinating, um, accelerated learning
experience of how to structure a startups.
How does venture capital work in Silicon
valley, um, how to make cross-platform
applications?
Because ultimately we ended up doing this
on Android and iPhone and Blackberry and
Nokia was well for, for a hot second there,
it looked like Nokia might actually be a
platform, which for all intents purposes, they
should have been, but they dropped the ball.
So yeah, that was a.
That was my first, certainly not my first
technology startup.
Cause my first technology startup was the one
back in the UK that I sold successfully,
but this was my first mobile application.
And also my first Silicon valley rodeo, not the
last by any means.
So it was, uh, an interesting time because
w what, what I ended up realizing fairly
rapidly was that where I'm happiest and also
most valuable to, to, to accompany, because
essentially it's fine to go to myself,
but ultimately when you're part of the
company, the company is greater than you.
Not, not just because of the fact that there
are other employees involved in as a team,
but also because you are ultimately responsible
to your investors.
It's not just about you, even though you might be
an interesting part of the company's, uh, fame
and growth, potential, and PR it's about return
on investment, because ultimately if you can do
that bit successfully, then investible
Bacchae for other things, because you've
given them success.
Once I realized that where I add the most
value is in being able to, shall we say.
Uh, see into the future a little bit further than
other people can see.
There's a, there's an old phrase, which is, which
is, which is a funny one, which is that, um, uh,
the difference between talent and genius.
I don't know if you've ever heard that one
before, but so-so talent hits a target that
other people contact.
Right.
That makes sense.
Right.
You know, there's a target there and people
are trying to hit it and they can see it.
They can hit it to keep missing a talent can
go bang and hit it.
Um, genius hits a target that no one else can see.
So it means that you're looking slightly
ahead and slightly around the corner.
Cause if you can't see the target, well, you
can't hit the thing that doesn't make any sense.
Right.
Except that's the point is that you need to be
aiming at something that other people can't see.
Now, I, without at the risk of, I say
this, obviously at the risk of sounding,
Hey, I'm a genius.
But what I mean is the flip side of
that is madness.
Right?
Because you could also say madness
hits a target.
No one else can see.
Well, yeah, because if there's no target,
why the hell are you aiming at it?
That's nothing.
What if there's nothing there?
And that's a problem, but, but that's exactly
the line that I live in on a daily basis is I
I'm slightly ahead of the curve constantly.
Which means that if I'm right, then that's
an phenomenal success, but if I'm wrong, then
I'm just some idiot.
Who's doing something that no
one else is doing.
So all I've got to do is just keep on the
right side of that line.
And a, and I'll be fine.
So in weather now, if I'm a little bit.
That's okay.
So long as I can convince the right people to
back me, I'll align things up correctly.
But when you're ahead of the curve like that,
the, the ability to articulate and define
the vocabulary, uh, explain, um, motivate
and convince people to join you on your journey.
Um, understand how to communicate to, to a
technical audience, a commercial audience, a
financial audience, and kind of sit in the middle
of all those things.
That's where the value add lies.
Um, so, or if you wish the genius slash
madness coin, depending on how you flip it.
So, so that's where I constantly live.
It's um, that's, that's how I invent.
So if I, if I look at, for example, um,
People sometimes ask me, you know, how do
you come up with ideas?
Well, it's easy to come up with ideas because
fun for me, because fundamentally things out
there are often broken.
Um, I'll give you a ridiculously
simple example that I never actioned.
Uh, for example, I'll go into, I don't know.
I go into a restaurant and I'll pick up
a salt shaker.
That's clearly full of salt and I shake
it and nothing comes out and I look at it
again and I shake it and nothing comes up.
Then I on screw it.
And I realized that because of condensation,
a bunch of salt, we've all seen this in our
lives before a bunch of salt is kind of
coagulated near the top and it won't come out
and you scrape it out and then you shake it.
And then it works perfectly.
And I look at that and I go, how annoying
there's a better way to solve this, but
I don't care enough.
So I put the salt chicken down, I eat my food and
I carry on with my life.
But that's a simplistic example of an idea
because if in the middle of that idea
or sorry, a simplistic idea, generally.
Process if in the middle of that
process, I go, Hmm, I do care about this.
I want to solve this because I really care
about soul check again.
I'm giving a ridiculous example.
That's where the ideas come in.
So one example, if you'll permit me to segue.
Absolutely.
Nobody going to talk about this?
Yeah.
This, this little camera over here.
So this is called, this is the Zicam eat too.
Yeah.
And there are multiple different versions of
this, but the key thing to remember, forget
about the lens and forget about the battery.
In fact, let's pop the battery off.
In fact, why don't we just pop the
lens off also?
So the camera body itself is pretty small.
You know, it's like, it's essentially a sensor
of some compute unit in there and then there, and
then everything else is just the bare minimum.
It's, it's giant heat sink.
It's a blob of metal because the chip gets
quite hot, but that's really all you have.
Zika.
Isn't the only company that has a camera in
this kind of form factor.
Black magic definitely led the idea of making
small form factor cinematic cameras,
but nowadays, even red with the red Komodo
has a camera in this kind of form factor.
It's the problem with this is you try to use
this kind of PR in a real world context, the
economics are insane.
I mean, look, there's one button here.
There's four buttons here.
And this formal buttons here, you want to change
the aperture or change the shutter speed.
Need to click one button twice, another button
twice, and then the first button again.
So it's five clicks to make something
that should really be a click of a dial.
So I remember getting sent this to evaluate it
because I was working a lot in, uh, in virtual
reality and augmented reality, making various
different projects.
And these small cameras are quite useful for
reasons that are boring to explain, but let's
just assume they were.
So I remember I was evaluating this, the
first thing I thought it was, I'm like, there's
gotta be a better way.
There's gotta be some kind of a handle that
we can connect to camera like this and, uh, and
make it so that you have these dials right
at your fingertips.
And I looked around and I thought, Hmm,
nobody's made one.
So I thought, well, maybe I'll just make one.
See if it works.
I made one.
I don't know exactly where the first prototype
is, but it looked a little bit like this.
Uh, this is actually a retail model.
Uh, there's a, there's a, there's a metal chassis
and the metal chassis mounts on the camera.
And then there's two dials.
It's hard to tell, but these dials rotate and
click in words as well.
And then there's a main record
start, stop button.
And then there's a wooden CNC doubter body.
And there was no real reason to make this in
wood other than I like the touch of woods.
So I thought, screw it.
I'm going to use wood.
So in the process, I had to learn a lot
about 3d printing and machining and CAD
cam design as well as electronics design.
So, uh, when, when I made this, I made an
initial prototype and I figured, I didn't think,
oh, this is a product.
I thought this is a problem.
And this is how I would solve it.
And I showed it off to a couple of people
in the industry and they all said, give
me this immediately.
I want this because this is I can't,
the camera can't function without it.
So I thought, okay, fine.
It's a product.
Um, made the first batch of a hundred.
Put up a pre-sale they sold out within two
hours and I thought, oh, okay, wow.
Really is a product.
So then we did a batch of 200.
Then we did a batch of 300 and slowly
but surely it becomes essentially the main
camera handle for, for the entire Zicam range.
This, I believe this is all of woods.
So there's different flavors of wood.
This has bamboo, uh, there's a
zebra lying around somewhere, but this
is, this is multijet.
So this is 3d printed, but on a much more
expensive 3d printer has a bit of a texture to it.
So the idea was that, uh, you could connect
this thing to the camera using this
port right there, and then you could program
it using the USBC.
And we made it as simple as possible
because there's a.
That's an important thing in product design.
It's not just about identifying the
problem set and it's not just about having
a bunch of features.
It's for me, at least it's knowing
what features to say no to, because
it's very easy to.
To just add crap to things.
It doesn't matter whether it's a car dashboard or
whether it's a, whether it's a weapon system.
The point is you can always add crap onto it.
What's difficult by, you can always add features
by adding more crap.
What's difficult is how do you add features
by removing crap?
How do you make things that are streamlined
and simple to control?
And I don't mean, oh, let's make
everything controllable by one button.
Then if you click the button for two seconds,
then it does one thing.
If you click it for three seconds, it does
another thing, because then you're just
shooting yourself in the face and things need
to need to be usable.
As, as the rule goes, there are multiple
different quote-unquote rules of thumb in user
experience design.
But when you're making something for humans
to use, they've got to be able to rapidly
know three things.
One is where are they?
And I mean, I don't mean physically located.
I mean, in, in the product cycle and whether
it's a menu system or whether it's a particular
lever selection switch, where are they?
What are the options and how do they get
to them at the end?
If you can, if you can intuitively understand
all three of those things, then you can
optimize and design a system to make, to make
things streamlined while they're being used.
And I apply that principle to product
design, to storytelling, to software design, to
architecture design, and.
And this was so for me, as I said, this
whole thing started because Nick got a
pepper shaker, except it wasn't a pepper shaker.
It was a camera that didn't work.
Like I wanted it to, and I thought this is
a solvable problem.
But in this particular case, I cared
about solving the problem enough to
make a prototype.
And the market told me the rest, namely, we
want this thing to exist.
And, uh, that's, that's how that product
came into being.
But the main, the main overall through line
here is the one about invention and product
design, namely, uh, invent things that you
actually care about.
Even if somebody presented to me, I don't
know, you know, Hey, look, here's the greatest
way in which you might be able to change car
tires more efficiently.
You'll, there'll be 20% faster than
changing a car tire with your jacket.
I would just go, I don't care enough
about the problem.
So if from, from my perspective, if, in terms
of words, to impart to people who are curious
about solving, cause a lot of people out there
who are practically oriented, solve problems
in different ways, if you care enough about
something for me, when something happens,
once it's an accident, when a problem happens,
once it happens more than once, that's not
just a coincidence.
That probably means that this is a problem
that needs to be solved.
And then it's a question of, so a,
something happens more than once B I care
enough to solve it.
Now, somewhere in there, if you're actually
trying to be a good businessman, C would be
other people also care enough about this because
it's all well and good.
If you have all the money in the time in
the world, you can build a custom product for
just yourself to use.
But a lot of people don't have that including me.
So even though this was a fairly simple product
to prototype nowadays, between between 3d
printers, that you can get on your desktop and
perhaps some 3d printing studios and people
you can find online to outsource some CAD cam
design, you can make an initial prototype pretty
quickly, but making something at scale is
quite a lot more common.
It looks like you leaned on your firearms
background on that design as well.
Did you copy any pistol grip
for that one?
Um, as it happens, no, there was not, not a
pistol grip, but firearms demonstrate the necessity
to have a very, very acute, uh, focus on,
on design efficiency.
There should be no random bits hanging off your
firearm that are not necessary when you see
the guys at the range and then have like six
different flashlights and infrared pointers
and all kinds of slings.
Chances are, they're not actually an operator
because people who are operators tend
to have something extremely streamlined.
If there's no, uh, if there's no
specific reason for something to be on
your firearm, a very, very specific reason.
It shouldn't be there because it's
just going to snag or cats from break.
So there are, while we may not have used any
specific firearm pistol grip in the design of
this, I would certainly say that the, the
efficiency of design of the way in which some
firearms and firearms related products work
was an influence in, in my approach to
simplicity of design.
So I got
a wonder, riding that knife sedge between.
Genius and insanity.
That's gotta be stressful at times.
I mean, if you care about what other people
think, I guess, and if you're in the process of
trying to sell your ideas or sell your concepts,
there's going to be a certain level of caring.
What other people think is that stressful
for you and how do you deal with it?
Uh, so that's a big, big question in general,
because there is definitely people who
I'm friends with, who say, how do you handle
the rollercoaster ride of not having money
than having money?
So, so for example, if you want to play games
in the startup world, you either have a crap
ton of money and you don't care, which is
definitely not the case for me, or you accept
the fact that you're going to be doing this.
And what I mean by that is that there will be
times when, for example, Um, on a given day,
um, a couple of years ago, I might've said,
Hey, this is awesome.
We got Google ventures involved.
We just closed $1.5 million worth of venture
capital and to the untrained person or
inexperienced person, they might go, wow,
you just made a million and a half dollars.
Uh, you're done well, no, I didn't make anything.
The company raised a million and a half
dollars that million and a half has to be used
in order to rapidly, try to gain market
traction, develop the product, pay a bunch
of salaries for people.
And guess what happens when you're
the CEO of a company?
How much of a salary do you draw?
The answer is not that much because yeah, sure.
You can draw a little bit, but not only is
it a, is it something that's, that's a little
bit tough to justify because if you're trying
to make your company succeed and you've got a
small amount of money to do it with putting money
in your pocket, isn't necessarily going to help
your company succeed.
Of course you need to be able to survive,
but in addition to you.
To you as a, as an ethical individual,
finding it difficult to do that.
It's also frowned upon to do that.
If you, if you line your own pockets and
the company tanks investors are going to
look down on you and go, buddy, that's not
really how this supposed to be done, you're you,
or be less likely to pull investment again.
So what I'm trying to say is if you, if you
want to play in this space, you've got to be
prepared for the fact that, um, you know, you,
your, your personal net worth is kind of a yo-yo.
So on paper, you might be worth a lot of money
because the stock you have is very valuable,
but you can't sell that stock until there's an
acquisition event or, or an IPO or somebody
else wants to become involved in some way.
So the first and foremost, the most
important thing from a stress perspective
is to, to, to be able to uncouple, in my
opinion, your stress from your financial net.
Now that is a very easy thing to say, but a
much harder thing to do.
And it's certainly a lot harder to do if
you have dependence.
So for example, if you have a wife and two kids
and you've got to put a roof over everybody's
heads and you've got to pay for all their food
and you're concerned about what's going to
happen, and what if you get injured, who's going
to pay for medical, et cetera, et cetera.
These are all real stressors that people
deal with in various different ways.
So there's a reason why they say that start-up
is a young man's game, a tech startups,
at least that young doesn't necessarily
mean young in age.
It means, I mean, I was born in 74, so.
What does that?
47 48.
I don't even know anymore.
I stopped counting at 40.
I just figured 40 I'm older than 40.
So, so the, uh, the, what they mean is not
necessarily young in age.
They mean young and attitude because when
you're traditionally, when you're in your
mid twenties, you're, you're more carefree.
You don't, you know, you go skiing and you
don't go, oh shit.
If I turn left here too aggressively, I
could hit the rock.
I could blow out my knee.
I could do this.
You just go, you just do it.
And most of the time, the just do it bit is
what gets you through it?
Because if you sit and hesitate,
well, guess what?
You won't make that turn.
I'm talking about skiing specifically, but it
applies to any, any risk taking activity.
And it's a little bit similar again, when
you're in your twenties, you're trying to do
business decisions.
You might go, Hmm.
Uh, wait, I've got to gamble my entire net
worth on this idea.
And if I screw up, I'm screwed and you
might go fuck it.
Let's do it because I can always get another job.
But you make yourself older.
You add a wife and kids and mortgage
payments is difficult to make those kinds of
risk-taking decisions.
Same way.
As oftentimes, as you get older, you start
questioning your own physical abilities,
go back to the skiing analogy and you go, Hmm.
I better be careful because you know, my
back and my knees and my hips, I might not
be able to do that.
So I've.
Lucky in this, I mean, either lucky or stupid,
or going back to the whole genius and madness
thing that we've been talking about, where
I'm still willing to take significant
amounts of risks.
Now, while I have a very happy, long
relationship, which is not, it's not a, it's
not officially labeled under the standards of,
of a marriage because we we'd never been married,
but for all intents and purposes, you know, we've
lived together for better part of 16, 17 years now.
The while there's obviously a level
of, of, of respect.
And shall we say responsibility that's
mutual in that equation?
There are no kids.
So perhaps that allows me to think about things
in a slightly different way, but frankly, I
don't think it's that.
I don't think it's as simple as that one thing.
I think it's a mental attitude.
I think it's just deciding that.
I want to trying to think about it.
Parts of the way in which I live my life
is to stay, uh, to, to, to hold on to the
ability to make tea for the, to make these
creative free choices.
If I'm not able to make them, I'm, I'm
not going to be happy.
And if I'm not happy, I'm not creative.
So it's like a vicious circle in a sense.
I force myself to take the leap in order to be
happy about it, which then helps me succeed
in making the leap.
I know it might, it might sound like a little bit
like mumbo-jumbo, but to, to loop that back to your
question about how do you handle the stresses?
Uh, I choose to get.
Uh, I don't know if that's, I know it's, it's
easier said than done.
I mean, if you go to someone who is suffering
from extreme anxiety, I don't know something
simple, like they're really nervous about
public speaking and you're, they're about
to go and talk to present a big group of
people who are their peers and they're
shitting themselves.
Because even though they've rehearsed
absolutely everything, they know their material,
they're still nervous because you know what,
if it doesn't work, what if the suffering from
imposter syndrome, I'm not suggesting that these
are things that people shouldn't feel that
it's complete natural.
Having the butterflies being nervous when
you're being tested, when there's a magnifying
glass in front of you and you have to perform,
everybody's nervous.
Anybody who doesn't tell you who tells you that
they're not nervous.
They don't care.
They're they're lying.
I don't care if you're LeBron, James, uh,
or, or anybody else, professional race, car
driver, professional athlete, very
experienced politician.
Everybody's always nervous when they're
being examined.
The question is, can you harness that energy
and just go, okay, I'm going to take this and
I'm going to work with it and use it, use that,
use that anger and use that adrenaline to focus.
You have to learn to enjoy it because if,
if you are nervous about it and you're
scared of it, it's just going to make it worse.
This is a, this is a slight aside to, to
a story which, which I know you didn't ask
about, but I'll, but I'll tell you anyway, cause
I think it pertains.
Yeah.
And it's, and it's to do with, um, it's to
do with my dad, um, and how my dad passed away.
So I was, um, my dad died of a heart attack and I
was fortunate because I was, we didn't know what
was going to happen.
It was sudden, but although we knew that
he had a weak heart, so it wasn't at the same
time as being sudden.
It also wasn't a total surprise.
Um, he'd had mild heart attacks before
and a mild stroke.
Um, he'd had, he was a diabetic, he had two
stents installed, so it's not like it came out of
nowhere and he got hit by a truck, but nonetheless,
it was a surprise.
And fortunately for me, I was able to
spend two weeks with both my parents.
I was on holiday at the time.
And this happened at the very last day.
So we'd had a really great time.
We'd spend a bunch of time together and, and
the reason I bring up the story is because.
Uh, I remember in the weeks and months
afterwards, um, both my friends and my mother
would frequently ask me, uh, how do you, how
are you handling this?
How are you not freaking out about this?
How are you not freaking out about, uh,
about what happened?
And I said, what do you mean?
And mum would say that she finds herself, you
know, waking up in the middle of the night and
suddenly remembering the last few moments.
And then she tries to hide it and stop
thinking about it.
But she can't and it bubbles up again.
And then it takes over and she gets completely
consumed by it.
And she gets really sad and upset and she can't
handle normal life.
And I said, and I said, that's interesting
mum, because the thing I think you're doing
wrong, or at least wrong is the wrong word.
I think, I think you're doing different, which
is a key thing is you're trying to not feel it.
And she said, what do you mean?
And I said, the story you just told me, you
said that you start thinking about it and
then you try and force yourself to stop.
And I said that she, she goes, what do you mean?
I said, don't do that.
Just think about it fully, every detail.
And, and she says, I don't understand,
but that's horrible.
And I said, no, no, no, no.
It's not think about it.
If, if I, cause what happened to me is
of course I would think about it.
I was there when it happened.
I gave him CPR, um, waiting for the
paramedics to arrive and I was unable to
restart his heart.
Um, When I start thinking about it, I,
I D I do the opposite of trying to stop.
I think about every detail, I think about
the noise and the rasping of the breathing, the,
the rhythm of the, of the chest compressions,
the cracking of the ribs, as you'll hear
under the pressure of the chest compression.
And the reason I think about it is
because then it's mine and I control it.
Whereas what mum was doing is she was, she
was trying to hide it, which meant that it
controlled her because it would constantly
keep coming up.
And I, and I bring that up as a story, because
I think it's, it's similar to how you end
up handling stress, where when stress can easily
be overwhelming and it can easily control every
aspect of what you're doing, whether it's,
whether it's lack of confidence or anxiety,
or many other aspects of, of nerves when you're,
when you're putting yourself into emotional
roller coasters.
And if you try to push it away, ultimately, unless
you're, unless you're some kind of sociopath,
you, you will fail because you can't hide
these things, they're stronger than you.
So instead, I think you have to just accept it.
And if anything, you have to run towards
it, because if you run towards it, then
you're in control of it.
And then ultimately that's the way you
get through it.
Sorry, this went a little bit serious,
perhaps more serious than
I, I quite like that, honestly,
it's funny because.
That attitude towards stress.
I've never actually thought of that
correlation.
When my kids are afraid of something, I sit
them down and I say, are you afraid of it?
Or are you excited?
And they say, well, what do you mean?
And I do my best to help them reframe whatever
that nervous energy is or whatever that
fear is into something that's positive.
It's positive because it's exciting.
You're doing something you haven't done before.
Not I'm afraid because I'm doing something I
haven't done before, but you take the exact same
approach with stress.
You're essentially reframing what, what
you're feeling into something that's more
positive and something that you have control
over.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
And in many instances, as I think we both
know the most important thing is the first step.
Because once you, once you get out onto that
stage, once you start the pitch meeting,
once you start the phone call, whatever it
might be at that point, you can't back out.
I mean, obviously you still can, but, but
the balls are rolling.
So, so the idea is that so long as you
get the reframing, it's a mental, the whole
thing is a mental game.
Stress always is.
And it's a game you play with yourself
to see if you can make that first step.
And once you do that, then you're okay.
And obviously the more times you do it, the
easier it ends up being.
And yes, of course, a past history is
extremely helpful.
For example, it's much easier that the 15th
pitch to investors is a hell of a lot easier
than the first one.
And once you've, once you've run out of
money once before and bounced back to do
something else it's much.
If you feel less worried about running out of
money again, because you go, Hey, you know what,
uh, easy come easy, go.
I'll figure out the I'll figure out a solution,
but this is not, this is not a path for
everybody there are.
And I, and I should, I should stress
forgiving the pun.
I should stress that.
Uh, I, in no way, look down on people who.
Who decide that this is not for them, that
they would rather have the safe job,
the nine to five that guarantees them a
certain amount of income.
And then they have their weekends that
are completely carefree to spend time with
their families.
In fact, while my opinion towards that kind of
life is actually kind of funny because it's
very conflicted because on the one hand I looked
down on it, cause I go, oh, how boring?
But on the other hand, I'm also jealous of it
because I can't do that.
My work has never been nine to five,
which guess what?
That means.
That means there's no distance or no, no
separation between work and non-work right.
Which means that if I'm the last thing I think
about most times before I go to bed is the
particular project that I've been working on, the
problem that I'm trying to solve and what I'll
be solving in the future.
And the same thing I think about when
I'm on weekends or when I'm on holidays,
I can't switch off.
Yeah.
So that's what I mean by I'm jealous of the
ability of people who have that attitude of,
Hey, it's just nine to five and hard separation
between work and play.
I'm jealous of their ability to switch off.
But at the same time, I also kind of
looked down on it.
Cause I think, uh, you're just taking
the easy road.
So, so it's a, it's a funny, funny
approach to things.
I'm trying to, I'm trying to be as, as
open as possible.
I hope I agree.
Okay, cool.
Yeah,
no, absolutely.
That's exactly what I want.
I mean, when I, sometimes I bemoan the fact that
the last thing I think about is the first thing
I think about and that there is no actual time
off from work, if you are entrepreneurial
minded, because you're always thinking about
the next thing and what you could do with what
you currently have.
And I'll look at friends who, um, you know, I
good friend of mine, he's a firefighter.
And I look, and I say, man, you know,
four on four off that ain't too bad.
I could probably, I could probably run
a business on the side, on my four off.
And my wife says, yeah, but you'd hate
those four on you.
Wouldn't fit in that mold on that four on when
you're in there, because you'd be constantly
thinking about new things or trying to
do things differently.
And that's not what, that's not what the
fire fighter group mentality is like, you
wouldn't fit in there.
So for sure, you mentioned imposter
syndrome and that's something that a lot of
people who are trying to break new ground or
do something that's sort of revolutionary either
in general or within their realm will feel.
Is that something that you have to deal with?
Often as it happens, I've never had to deal with
imposter syndrome and I find it hard to, uh, to.
To kind of understand exactly what people are
going through, who I have worked with in the
past, who I feel are quite talented, who tell
me they suffer from it.
And I think that's, that comes down to some of the
reframing of stress that you had talked about.
I think I just instinctively ended up
if, if I do feel it, I reframe it so quickly
that I don't even notice meaning there
are certainly, there are certainly environments
that I've been in.
For example, when I made the documentary
film, it's the first documentary I've ever
made and I'm sitting there in a room, uh,
doing a talk or winning an award, surrounded
by people who are on their eighth or
ninth documentary.
And it's, uh, by, by all accounts, I
should be going like, who the hell am I?
I don't really deserve to be here except I'm
comfortable with the product that I've made
or, and, or invention and or whatever it is.
I'm just using one story to turn on for another.
So from that perspective, I, as I said, I either
don't feel it or if I do feel it, I reframe
it so quickly that it doesn't really, it
doesn't really affect me.
I mean, there's a, there's a nasty part
to this that hopefully doesn't happen, but I've
seen it happen to some people and that's it.
You need to be very self-aware for this
stuff, not to come off as sociopathic ego,
because if you're, if you're on the wrong
side of that, in other words, if you don't, if
you take the view that I'm the best thing in
the world, and I don't listen to criticism, so
screw you you're either with me or against
me, that's a problem.
And the reason that's a problem is number one,
because you'll never improve because you have
to be able to take input from other people very
quickly and pivot as it were building before.
I know you meant it a slightly different
way, but I think, I think by definition,
we're constantly pivoting as people.
And certainly from a product perspective,
you constantly have to keep accepting
tweaks from others.
But there are definitely people out there who,
who can mask, uh, deep insecurities with
copious quantities of arrogance and bluster,
and sometimes the idea of, oh, it's okay.
I'll just reframe all my fear and
nerves and stress and anxiety as confidence.
It's not really, that's not a reframe.
That's a false confidence.
Yeah.
What you're really doing is you're just
hiding it and you're masking it and the
problem and that that'll trick some people.
But as the saying goes, you know, you can trick
some of the people.
Some of the time, but you contract
all, how does it go?
Wait, you can trick all of them all the time.
Some of them all the time or all of them, some of
the time you can't track all of them all the time.
So eventually that facade breaks down.
So yeah, it's an, it's a, there's a dance in here
and it's definitely, as I said, the more self-aware
you are the better, because if you, in my
case, I, whatever it is that I do, whatever,
whatever mental games I play with myself to
be able to handle this stuff, as long as I can
go to sleep at night comfortable, that I'm
being honest to myself and the people around
me, I'm fine with it.
So, so yeah, I think from the imposter
syndrome side, certainly something, as I said,
that I've seen and the people I know
suffer from and people choose to mask it in
various different ways.
But yeah, not something that I feel I've
always, I'm sorry, just to just the thing.
I think it's also very important to be honest.
And it's important to be honest with yourself
as well as with others.
And I mean that not just in a, in a personal,
emotional context, I also mean it in a
professional context.
So for instance, 'cause you never know when the
person who's sitting across from you, whether
they're a potential collaborator or an
employee or a potential investor, you never know
whether they're actually a subject matter expert
in what you're doing.
And if you choose to lie, uh, yeah, sure.
You can get lucky and you can spin something.
And if someone calls you on it, you, you might
be quick enough or, or agile enough with your
wordplay to be able to work around the problem.
But you do that shit to me.
I'll remember.
So when I notice, when people make mistakes, I
noticed when they define things incorrectly,
I notice when they gloss over something,
when I've asked them a difficult question.
And I assume always when I'm that I'm talking
to people who notice things the same way
that I do, which is why, if I don't know
something, I'll be the first one to admit it.
'cause, I don't want to give you as a
quote-unquote adversary, whether it's an adversary
in a friendly way or in an, or in an aggressive
way, I don't want to give you the power of
thinking that you saw me make a mistake.
And now, you know, that I made a mistake and
I'm trying to hide it.
If I catch myself making a mistake, I'll call
it out right away.
And the reason I'll do that is because, as I
said, that that honesty is I think an important
part of my continuous improvement process,
but it also, as it happens, deep powers,
the other person, cause I don't want to give
him a leg to stand on in terms of going ha ha.
I caught that guy and now I know that he's lying.
So anyway, I love it.
I love it.
So I remember when he started getting into VR
and I'm watching this, I'm like, I don't know,
is VR going to be the wave of the future?
Is, is this really going to be such a big thing?
And then you're talking about storytelling
through virtual reality and saying like, you
know, it's one thing to have this whole
virtual environment around us that we can
all kind of look at, but how do you direct
somebody's attention through storytelling?
I'm like, okay, I can, I'm starting to see
kind of what you're trying to do here.
And then next thing you know, you've got
red six, which is.
Piggybacking on the virtual reality
background that you have in the filmmaking
background and the left and right.
Brain kind of thing.
And you've got something and you're using it to
train fighter pilots.
Can you, can you talk about this
a little bit?
Yeah, for sure.
I can't go into too much detail on the core
of the technology, but obviously a fair amount
of it has been, has been written about so we can
certainly address it.
So first things first I'd been interested in,
in, as you mentioned in virtual reality
and by association augmented reality for
a number of years.
And the biggest reason I was interested initially,
even though the headsets were cumbersome, a bit
of a bane to wear, and it was complicated to
get the tech to work correctly, you needed to
have a powerful computer.
You couldn't really do it on your mobile phone.
And so on.
Uh, the reason I was particularly interested
was because of the intensity of emotion
and, uh, let me describe what I mean by that.
Uh, Uh, it'll sound like a bit, a very base
comparison, but I think it's apt a long time ago.
One of the first VR experiences I
tried, I mean, sure.
You know, there's the old story of, you know, you,
you, you feel vertigo cause you look down and
you're on the edge of a, of a building, but
you're not actually on the edge of a building
and that's fine.
Um, but I'm talking about something else, which
is that somebody asked me to try some sort of
a pornography experience in VR and it was very
simple, meaning nothing wasn't interactive in
any way whatsoever.
It was just, just some just, just nudity.
But I remember.
As, as I was looking at the video that was
happening, I remember noticing my hands
came up and I thought, wow, that's really
bizarre because I know I'm watching a video.
I know exactly how the technology works.
That's tricking my brain into thinking that this
person is actually right in front of me yet.
My hands instinctively start to come up anyway.
I can leave it up to the viewer to think about
why that's a conversation for another time.
Anyway.
So I stopped the thing right away and I take
the headset off and I go, okay, this is
really bizarre because if within, we're talking
about within two seconds, this happened, if within
two seconds, I can short circuit my brain
with this technology to think that I'm actually
somewhere that I'm not to the point that
my hands will move.
There's something here, because that means that
if I'm telling you a story and I want you
to feel a certain way, whether it's because of,
I dunno, refugees in a refugee camp or, or some
sort of a love story or some sort of an action
movie, it doesn't matter.
The point is.
Something about the idea of being able to
immerse you into an environment, to the
point that you feel like you're actually there,
which means you will, you will, because filmmaking
and storytelling is all about manipulating the
emotions of the viewer.
Making you feel as though you are the hero or
you are in danger, you are saving the world.
Whatever the case might be.
It's sometimes not as simple as sometimes it
could be just a jump scare with zombies
jumping out of the ground and need to scare you.
But nonetheless, we're trying to elicit
emotional responses.
So I was fascinated by the idea of how
emotional responses could be manipulated in
using this technology.
So I've spent a lot of time trying to
figure out what does this mean for editing?
What does this mean for filmmaking?
What does this mean for interactivity?
Because as, as obviously, people, either who are
listening to podcasts or, or watching movies
nowadays know you have, what's referred to you
have no agency, you can't control the narrative.
In other words, somebody listening to this
podcast can change the next question.
They can certainly pause it, rewind it
fast forward it, but they can't change the
answer that I'm about to give or the questions
you're going to ask.
Now, there are certain environments that
you can do this in.
And one common one is video games
in a video game.
If you're playing, I don't know, call of duty
or you're playing, um, playing pub G uh, you
can, or Fortnite, you can move your character
whichever way you.
And so can anybody else who's playing
the game with you at the same time, but
guess what suffers story, because sure.
You can make an environment.
I can have you for the sake of argument, be
playing, I don't know, let's pick star wars,
so I can, you can be playing on the death
star and you're running around doing whatever you
want, but how can you at the same time have the
narration happen that happens in the star wars
movies that we all grew up loving most of us,
uh, while I'm letting you do whatever you
want, because if you want to run around and
blow stuff up, well, guess what, you're
going to miss the story.
So I was fascinated by, by the kind of
conflicting forces of the immersion and
the, the emotional immersion and what that
does to my brain, uh, by short-circuiting
certain aspects of it.
And then understanding the technology involved
and the interactivity that was possible.
And the transition to read six happened, uh,
roughly around having spent a number of
years in this space, looking for a challenge
to build, to solve an interesting problem.
And the reason why it happened.
Missed a lot of the pro the technology was
so young that a lot of the stuff that we were
doing was as I like to call it a solution in
search of a problem.
In other words, we'd be like, Hey, look,
we can do a headset.
We can track your hands.
So look, cause you can track your hands.
And then the competition would kind of tail
away there because if you go, well, why
would you do that?
You go, well, I don't know, but
look, isn't it cool.
You can track your homes.
So what would happen is, uh, we, it wasn't
clear because it was so many things that
we're building and it wasn't just me.
It was a number of people in the industry who were
building solutions in search of a problem.
I just thought, wouldn't it be cool if we found
a real problem so we can apply all this
knowledge to, and all this technology to
solve something real.
So I got together with, with three
other guys, um, Glenn Snyder, Adam Amarillo,
and Dan Robinson, uh, Glenn and Adam
were very experienced in the VR world.
They've done a lot of different VR
solutions and a lot of digital software and
hardware development.
While Adam, myself and Glenn were all
technologists and spent a number of years in
the VR and AR space on both software, hardware,
and content then was not a technologist,
but as a fighter pilot, he had some unique
understanding of the problem set, specifically
the danger and the complexity of training
with other physical aircraft as often.
People have seen at the very least in Hollywood
versus of this stuff.
For example, in Topcon, when in those days they
had the F fourteens as the good guys, and then I
believe F fours and fives playing the part of mics.
And when they're trying to fly against each
other, yeah, it looks cool filmmaking wise, but
it's also quite dangerous even though the training
quality is quite high.
So the idea was, was it possible to do this
kind of training using augmented reality?
So for the sake of argument, if, if it was
going to be possible, you would need to take
off in an aircraft as a fighter pilot, and then
look out the window and see an enemy aircraft
that wasn't there, that you could maneuver
against that would be driven by AI in order to
be a pretend bad guy for you to train against,
but it would have to be realistic because
this wasn't a game.
If this wasn't going to be realistic, if it
wasn't going to give you so-called positive
training value, then it would at best create a
false sense of security.
And at worst, it would be worse than that.
It would give you negative training value.
So the only way this was going to work
is if it would be sufficiently realistic,
it's a fairly high.
So the physics are correct.
And the so-called, uh, range, aspect and
angle are correct, so that the pilot can
judge the position of the enemy aircraft and
maneuver accordingly.
And we, we didn't know this was possible.
Absolutely.
No, it never been tried before.
I mean, certainly head up displays of various
different kinds had existed in certainly
in the military.
And in some cases, in some high-end cars,
they have the ability to project your Speedo
or some additional information onto your
dash in front of you.
But no one had ever tried wide field of
view, high resolution, full color, low latency
visuals, essentially we're building a
video game in the sky.
And, um, so I was one of the co-founders of the
business as well as, uh, the CTO for the, I can't
remember exactly when I transitioned to being
the chief strategy and science officer, but I
was CTO for a good two years and a bit of the
business and the, uh, the, the key task here
was first and foremost, establish whether this
is possible and to prove this out in an aircraft.
But when, when I started to broaden the stack was
when it became really interesting because
it wasn't just about solving a key problem
for the military.
That was certainly the reason why the company
got a lot of attention and got an initial and
then a follow up contract with the us air force.
But it was also because you see the broader.
Training ecosystem is obviously not
just one aircraft.
There's an aircraft there's tanks, there's
infantry, there's combined joint force
multi-domain operations.
And the idea is that could you build a
training ecosystem so that any one of these
people, whatever vehicle they're in or whether
they're a dismounted or mounted infantry,
uh, could they see an enemy threat in the same
place at the same time, even though the enemy
threat wasn't there.
So the whole now obviously fancy things
can be accomplished with screens.
So lots of you sensor fuse, a bunch of data.
You look at your screen, you can see
on your radar, certain things are happening,
but that's not what we were interested in.
What we were interested in is what happens at
close range is what happens when you have to
look up and look around and engage with an enemy
that isn't actually physically there because
the traditional training in traditional synthetic
training, that's where things break down.
That's where the simulation ends
and you just go.
Yeah.
Okay.
If, and when that happens in reality,
you'll figure it out.
You know, the problem is if the only time that
you're seeing a, for the sake of argument,
Chinese, J 20 is when you actually see a
Chinese J 20, uh, that's a problem because if
up until then, the only time you've flown
against the J 20 is in an actual simulation of
a simulator, not in your actual physical aircraft.
And again, I know it started with fighter
pilots, but it doesn't matter whether you
replace aircraft with helicopter or with
Breguet or with armored personnel carrier.
It's the same problem.
The problem is how do you train against actual
physical assets if they're not available
for you to train against gone are the days of
the early Warsaw pact when the U S enjoyed
such military dominance.
So they could use their older vehicles as a
SIM physical simulator with the same kind
of capability as a modern Warsaw pact
or Chinese vehicle nowadays, the Chinese
and the Russian forces are so significantly
advanced that it's impossible to do that.
You have to commit.
If you want to do that, if you want to train the
physical asset against the physical asset,
you have to commit your most expensive assets
into playing dummy enemy and that's expensive.
And also not a good idea.
Uh, in general, there was a, there was a
lot of money riding on being able to solve
this problem correctly.
So we spent a lot of time proving out that
this was possible.
We had an experimental aircraft that we,
that we did this in, but the key thing, as
I was mentioning was the transition from
purely making this a fighter pilot focused
solution into being a multi-domain solution.
I came up with, um, with a concept that I named
carbon carbon stands for combined augmented
reality battlespace operational network.
And the idea is that carbon is a, is a
multi-domain environment where multiple entities
see the same augmented reality assets at
the same time and in the same place.
And the idea is of course, for this to
grow into becoming a, a, a, shall we say,
platform agnostic.
So it works with every single interoperates
with every single system that's out
there, but allows an unprecedented level
of fidelity and, uh, accuracy in the training.
And I can't unfortunately go into details of
exactly what the technology does and how
it works, but suffice to say that, uh, there are
a number of high profile entities that have either
have direct relationships with the company or
contracts with it.
Or are in some cases, actual investors.
If you did a little bit of Googling, you could
find out some of this information because some
of it has been publicly released, but it's
certainly been exciting working at the highest
end of, as I say, not solutions in search of a
problem, but applying my many years of technical
acumen into being able to articulate the vision and
fine tune it, to be able to use the technology,
to solve a real problem, but make no mistake
the, to touch on the storytelling aspects.
Uh, the transition from, shall we say the
abstraction going back to UX again, of a keyboard
and a mouse and a screen.
Into something that you touch, like a
touch screen phone into the, uh, an iWatch
or a smart watch that you use to interact
with information.
And then you go in, there's a, if you think
about it information or sorry, the devices
by which we consume information of a
networked variety are shrinking at the
same time as they're shrinking, they're
becoming more intimate.
So the mechanism by which we interact with them
becomes more intuitive.
And the augmented reality headsets
are just the natural evolution of that.
And for me, this is fascinating
because this is.
This is, I would argue possibly the largest
inflection point in the way in which humans
interact with each other and humans interact
with information since the very first iPhone.
So augmented reality is a massive leap and
it is still not fully understood exactly what
this means in the same way that, you know, when
the iPhone one first came out or people had
an idea that Google maps would be a thing, but
nobody knew Instagram would be a thing.
Nobody knew Snapchat would be a thing.
Nobody knew Pokemon go or, or NFTs or
crypto would be a thing that people would
do on mobile phones.
They just kind of thought let's build it
and see what happens.
So the augmented reality world is, is
a little bit similar.
It's, it's massive.
And the idea, there are many fantastical
dystopian views of what this could look like.
For example, if you're, if people want to really
Google for things, you can look for something
called a reality.
It's, uh, a guy who made, uh, a mock-up
video of what augmented reality run a muck
would look like.
Every single thing is an ad.
So you're walking down the road and instead
of seeing a wall of a house that would
be a personal ad.
That's done precisely for you because companies
like Facebook or whatever, the future
versions of Facebook would look like,
capture a significant amount of data.
They know who you are, they know your
demographic, they know what you last bought.
They know what webpages you browsed.
And because of that, they conserve your
personalized ads and you can't stop it because
you're just walking around and you've got
your multimillion dollar mentored reality had
said, which, by the way, you didn't pay for it.
It's entirely advertising subsidized, or because
of that, you're, you are forced to have a constant
barrage of advertising invading every
aspect of your life.
So, as I said, there are tons of dystopian
versions of what AR could look like.
And I'm very aware that I, and many other
people who are in the key parts of this
industry are on the cutting edge of defining
what this looks like.
But the way I see it, I have two choices.
I ignore it in which case it's going to
happen anyway, uh, or I take an active role
in shaping what this stuff looks like, and
hopefully I can make it less dystopian and more
practical and efficient, just like I've done
with many other things.
So the biggest reason for me, the fascination
with the Red6 is twofold.
One, is this an incredibly challenging
problem to try and solve?
Because it's very fast moving aircraft,
complicated physics split-second,
decision-making required extremely low latencies
and high speeds and high fidelity required.
But also it's for me scratching the surface
of what the what's now being referred
to as the metaverse could look like, what
does it look like when you're fusing real and
digital information in various different ways?
And I feel that it's, it's an inevitable
future, as I said.
And it's extremely interesting for me to, to
understand which parts of it are critical problems
to solve that I feel like could that I'm the
right person to shape.
Holy crow.
Honestly, if we had a few more hours to talk, and I
know we don't, you just, there's so many points
in what you just brought out that I would love to
delve into, into further.
I mean, we can, you know, we can always do another
one at some 0.1 side.
Once I pick up another project, there's all
kinds of stuff that we can talk about.
But yeah, look, I mean the, there, there's no
question that there are, if you start digging,
uh, you can very quickly find out that somewhere
between AI and AR and crypto and robotics is
this weird future that, that some people have
looked at in episodes of black mirror and gone,
whoa, hang on a second.
This is horrible.
Robot dogs are going to kill us all.
What's going to happen next.
Uh, and then there's other fascinating
things that might be positive, but there's,
there's certainly a lot of negativity out
there because yes, of course it's possible.
You take a look at AI and you just fast
forward the clock and you get some version
of the terminator.
So that's going to kill us all.
And there are some people out there who are
building things so that if you say to them, hey,
you're building Skynet.
They might go.
Yeah.
In fact, one of our projects is
called Skynet.
So they don't quite realize the joke that
you're making, but there is, there's
an inevitability to technological progress.
That's kind of what I was alluding to, um,
digging our heads in the sand, unless we're all
gonna destroy everything.
And send us back into the stone ages with
some giant sequence of electromagnetic pulses,
which is theoretically possible, but highly
unlikely technological progress is inevitable.
The question is, what do we do with it?
Uh, do we, do we do something that makes
things better or do we, do we do something
that just makes things more profitable?
And there's an interesting line
there because as, as, uh, as, as woke as
some venture capital investors might claim,
they are ultimately their investors,
they're seeking a return on investments.
So they're trying to make money.
It's up to us as the inventors to, to use
that money, to create things that are obviously
provide a healthy return on investment.
Otherwise you're not going to get the money
again, but also steer the, the objects in
such a way that they are both useful and usable.
And all of this ties back to, to some of
the UX stuff we talked about with pepper
shakers, and these handles, it's all about
trying to understand what's the problem
we're trying to solve.
Why are we trying to solve it?
How do we make it something that's
interesting and valuable that people want?
And from the perspective of people like
myself, people who are the creators,
how do we continue to challenge ourselves?
To, to make things I guess, interesting
and valuable.
I mean, as far as I'm concerned, I'm going
to do this thing that I'm going to continue
to do these kinds of things forever.
I don't see any reason to stop so
long as I continue to remain interested.
And of course, as long as I continue to find
the kind of people that I want to work with
to, to, to go along for the journey, as I
mentioned in connection with the documentary,
it's all well and good me having interesting
ideas, but first and foremost requirement,
before you even.
Try to convince an investor to part with
their dollars is you've got to find people
who are going to join you for the journey,
which means your first problem is to convince
someone else that your idea is something
that they can risk X amount of months or
years of their life on.
Because if you can't do that, then maybe you
should reconsider maybe the idea that if you,
if you're not able to articulate the idea, to
describe it, to have the requisite passion, to use
the kind of vocabulary that people understand,
there's a lot of names of very important the way
in which you talk about things, the way in which
things are structured.
That's, that's what I spend a lot of time
doing is defining and articulating
product lines.
So there's a, there's a thing called Elif.
I don't know if you've heard the term elephant,
L E L I F stands for explain like I'm five,
uh, because, because here's the thing, there
are a lot of, there's a lot of smart people
around and in some cases, those smart
people, whether they're suffering from, as you
talked about before, uh, imposter syndrome or not,
there's a lot of people who, when you ask them
to explain a complicated concept, they'll can
quick look quickly dastardly with a bunch of
scientific terminology.
But if you ask them to explain like I'm
five, hence the term, if they can't do it.
It probably means they don't understand it.
Not really, if they can't break it down
into fundamentals, I'm not suggesting
that you need to be able to, I don't know,
explain microbiology, using simple block
diagrams and people are supposed to understand
every aspect of it.
That's not, it, it's not, it's not
reductive in that way.
I'm saying that if you are not able to
articulate your vision in a simplified way so that
it can be compelling to both technologists and
business people who you might need along for the
ride, then you should reconsider whether you
truly understand what you're talking about.
So I spent a lot of the time, I often advise
startups and investment.
A lot of times the startups that I'm
involved in doing exactly that is trying to take
nuggets of technological information and structure
them in such a way that they're more clearly
understandable because I think that's important
because ultimately.
As, as leaders of companies, we
often do end up being storytellers.
Yes.
In the early days you were extremely
hands-on when you're, when you're needing to
actually mold the clay and figure out how to
make it into something.
But afterwards, as the team starts to grow, uh,
it ends up oftentimes being just explanation,
story, passion, investing, pitching it's,
uh, your role changes your role as a leader,
definitely changes.
And I, I enjoy, always have done.
I definitely enjoyed the zero to 60 miles an hour,
a lot more than 60 to 70, and certainly a lot
more than 73 to 74 miles an hour at some point.
Yes.
If the company gets big enough, a small
change in efficiency ends up meaning
millions of dollars.
And that's extremely valuable, but I like
to live in the crazy land, those zero to
60, they, Hey, here's a bunch of Lego bricks.
Can you make something in the next six months?
How do you do that?
I don't know, but let's wait.
Oh, that doesn't work.
Try this.
Okay.
Good.
It worked.
So that's the bit that I enjoy.
That's fantastic.
And hopefully I'll continue to have, I know
there's a, there's a little bit of childlike.
Um, shall we say, uh, And ambition is
the wrong word, a childlike stubbornness
in this adherence to wanting to solve the
problem from zero.
But I think, I think for me, it's really necessary
because it keeps me focused and motivated.
Um, the more things become slow and
incremental progress.
I'm not suggesting that I don't see
the value in that.
I absolutely do.
It's just not where I Excel, which means
that for me, is a sign that there needs to be
someone else brought in.
And some people really love that.
Some people love pushing a thing that's
90% efficient to being 92% efficient.
They live for those kinds of breakthroughs I live
for, as I mentioned for the, for the target that
no one else can see.
That's where I, that's my sweet spot.
I am so glad that you agreed to come on this
Silvercore Podcast.
Is there anything else that we should
chat about before we wrap things up here?
Uh, I'm sure there are a lot of things, but
I don't know them all because I like, I mean,
I don't, I know we haven't talked about this
that much, but I rarely tend to prepare for
these kinds of things.
And I find, I find it more natural that way.
So I don't really know where the conversation's
going to go.
I've done a number of different keynotes, uh,
for conferences where people asked me to talk
about, I don't know, invention or what I see.
This is the future of media as a recent
one that I did.
And it's interesting cause I know
some people who.
Viewed as, uh, as, as, as good speakers and sure.
On the surface of it, you know, you go, okay,
this sounds like the sounds kind of compelling
and passionate.
But then you realize that the entire thing
is pre-rehearsed down to every single inflection.
And again, it works right.
If the audience has happy, it works,
but I can't do that.
And the reason I can't do that is because I get
bored of my own voice.
If I have to say the same thing over and over
again, I can't stand it.
So I tend to just, I have bullet points.
I have a vague outline of what I want to say,
but I guess I know if there's one thing that
I wanted people to walk away from this.
I did a, when we took a quick break, I did a bit
of thinking, thinking if I'm watching this or
listening to this the first time, and I think,
I don't want to say anything, trite like, oh,
just follow your dreams.
Everything will always be fine.
No, that's nonsense because it depends
on the person.
It depends on what you really want.
What I would like to say though, is that like
with most things in life, the most important thing
is the first step as you and I talked about
before, when we were talking about stress and
in particular, we were talking about the idea
of coming into this pitch meeting or an interview
or a presentation or something that
you're nervous about.
Uh, opening the door.
Isn't usually the problem because in many cases,
the doors already open.
You just have to take the first step, but taking
the first, the problem isn't the presentation.
The presentation will happen, whether you like
it or not, if you're able to step through the door.
So it's the taking the first step bit that I
think is the, is the thing that I would like
to encourage people to try to reframe as
you put it from is something that's that's.
If you can, if you can constantly keep
yourself excited about exploring and learning
something new, then it really doesn't matter.
In some cases what happens afterwards,
because as the saying goes, if it
doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger.
So obviously yes, don't do stuff like this with
knives or with poisons.
And certainly if someone tells you that
horse dewormers, a good idea, maybe think
twice about that.
But, um, at the risk of going into rabbit
hole that we won't get out of four, then, uh,
we'll we'll perhaps leave it at that.
So be sensible.
But if you want to stay youthful and
energetic, don't be afraid to take risks.
That's all.
Nick you've led an extraordinary life.
And I know for a fact the best is yet to come.
Thank you for, I really appreciate
being invited on this.
And I apologize if I went slightly deep
into some rabbit holes.
If I did, it was only because I
enjoyed talking.