The Grey NATO – 309 – Ingrained With Callum Robinson

Published on Thu, 21 Nov 2024 06:00:00 -0500

Synopsis

In episode 309 of The Graynado podcast, hosts James Stacy and Jason Heaton interview Callum Robinson, a master craftsman and co-founder of Method Studio in Scotland. The episode explores Robinson's journey from learning woodworking from his father to establishing a prestigious design studio that creates bespoke mixed-material objects for luxury brands like Bentley, Burberry, and Vacheron Constantin. Robinson discusses his new memoir "Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman" which chronicles his path in craftsmanship, and shares insights about working with various materials, collaborating with prestigious brands, and the relationship between traditional crafts and luxury goods. The conversation also touches on the value of handmade objects, the importance of storytelling in craft, and Robinson's perspective on creating items that bridge functionality and artistry.

The hosts bookend the interview with announcements about their TGN merchandise collection and upcoming schedule changes, followed by their regular "risk check" segment discussing their current watch choices. They close with recommendations for entertainment and lifestyle products, including a new spy thriller series and the nostalgic appeal of lava lamps.

Transcript

Speaker
James Stacy Hello and welcome to another episode of the Graynado. It's a loose discussion of travel, adventure, diving, driving gear, and most certainly watches. This is episode 309 and it's proudly brought to you by the always growing TGN supporter crew. We thank you all so much for your continued support. And if you're listening and would like to support the show, please visit thegraynado.com for more details. My name is James Stacy and I'm joined as ever by my friend and co-host Jason Heaton. Jason, how are we doing? I'm doing really well.
Jason Heaton Yeah, it's kind of a moody gray November day here, but I just got done with a great chat with our guest today and I'm really excited about it. So yeah, I'm doing really well. How are you?
James Stacy You're coughing. Yeah, I've still got a little bit of a cough, still fighting it, but things are okay. I feel largely fine, sleeping okay, which is nice. And yeah, we've got a great chat on the show today that you just did with a fellow named Callum Robinson. And I'm really excited about it. It's also very long, like it's a better part of an hour. So we probably don't have to do like a ton of preamble. But you know, it's episode 309. We're now deep into November. So that means the PIP at 8 collection is live on the TGN shop. So that's the graynado.com slash shop. And so this is a collaborative sort of line of apparel and accessories, I guess. That sounds very official. There's a hoodie, there's two different t-shirts, there's a coaster, and there's an enamelware mug. You can also just get a mug with the TGN logo on it, but I'm pretty partial to the PippaDate logo as well. But just one note for people who might be ordering a t-shirt or really anything from that list of items I just mentioned. All of those are done through a fulfillment company called Printful, which allows us the ability to print much more locally to where it ships. So even if you're in Europe, the shirt or whatever would print in Europe and then send it to you. And we like that both for the lack of waste, no need of having boxes of unsold t-shirts in the basement, and the simplicity for shipping and taxes and all that kind of stuff. But it does mean that if you go on the shop and let's say you buy a t-shirt and one of our signature single pass straps, the straps will ship by hand by Jason out of Minneapolis and the t-shirts will come from Printful from wherever they decide to print and ship it. That's just our heads up. Otherwise, people seem to be getting them, enjoying them. I've seen a couple of pictures of the coasters. on the slack and I absolutely need a set of those for the office. They look really rad.
Jason Heaton Yeah, they're great and I love all this new stuff. I saw somebody posted a picture of the hoodie today and it really is a good one. I mean, you know, it's all fun stuff and I love these very obscure references that will make sense to those of us in the crew.
James Stacy For sure.
Jason Heaton I don't have much to report here. Um, I'm remaining on my social media hiatus that I started at the beginning of November and, uh, I don't really miss it. It's been going great. And, um, with specific reference to today's program, you know, we've got an author on the show and, and by, by not spending a lot of time on social media, I have had extra time to, to get through Callum's book. So that was a, that's been a real nice benefit to be able to kind of get back to reading actual books or kind of doing more hands on stuff around the house. So that's, uh, that's been. That's been going well.
James Stacy So, yeah, we are taking next week off for American Thanksgiving. So we had talked about that on the previous episode. So if you happen to be looking at your calendar or that concerned with the production schedule for the show, obviously this episode comes out on the 21st and then on the 28th, we're taking that week off. So there won't be an episode. There will be a Q&A somewhere in that area for those of you who are on the paid side. So watch the private channel for that. And then we'll be back on the 5th with episode 310. I think that's the majority of our kind of housekeeping.
Unknown Yeah.
James Stacy So why don't we jump into a quick risk check because I'm pumped for this chat. It's going to be a good one.
Jason Heaton Yeah. And I kind of came proper for this one with my unordained model one. You know those that know of Callum Robinson, might know that he has a connection with Honor Dane. Both are based in Scotland. We've had Honor Dane's founder, Lewis Heath on the program before, and these two are actually friends and have worked together, which is some nice, nice, nice synchronicity here. And yes, I'm wearing that today. I've got it on. They have an exciting project coming up that I'll be actually writing up for Hodinkee probably within the next few weeks so I'm excited about that but for now I've got it on a kind of a dark blue 18 millimeter NATO strap which is a weird fit for it but the blue sort of matches the the blued steel hands on this watch and kind of takes it down a notch in terms of kind of its formality and I'm just enjoying it today so that's what I've got on.
James Stacy And I'm blanking, what is the name of the dial version that you have? I want to say it's like iron something? Iron cream is what they call it.
Jason Heaton Iron cream, there it is. Yeah, vitreous enamel. Arguably it's probably the least kind of dynamic of their dials. They do a lot with color and texture and things like that. But Right. Years ago when I got this, I just, I just like a nice creamy dial and it looks great.
James Stacy So yeah, I'm enjoying it. Excellent. That's a great pick for today for sure. And I went with something very British-y as well. Although from a different part of, of the UK, I'm wearing my Arken Alterum. Nice. I've got a little bit of travel starting tomorrow. I'm not changing time zones, but this is a fun watch and I like the titanium and the lume dial and the rest of it. And yeah, I absolutely adore this thing. I haven't had a chance to do a proper hands-on with it, just because, as many of you are aware, I am months behind on stuff like hands-ons, but I absolutely love this watch. I've been wearing it a ton. Super comfortable, really light. I just like that I'm basically guaranteed to not see another one, even within watch circles. It's so much fun. Yeah, that's great. That's what I've got on. Shout out, Ken.
Jason Heaton Yeah, nice. Very cool. I actually saw one of these up on the Buy Sell Trade channel on Slack, which was, I don't even know if it's still there. I bet it got scooped up pretty quickly, but yeah, these don't come up very often, so keep your eye out. They're cool watches for sure.
James Stacy Yeah. All right. You want to get into this main chat with Callum Robinson?
Jason Heaton Yeah. Let me give a brief intro and then we'll dive right into it. Callum Robinson is the eldest son of a master woodworker who learned his craft of woodworking and furniture making from his father. He went on to co-found with his wife Method Studio in Scotland. which has moved beyond wood to create bespoke mixed material objects for a really impressive client list. They've worked with brands like Bentley, Burberry, Jaguar Land Rover, Vacheron Constantin, On Ordain, of course, and Struthers Watchmakers. Another person, Rebecca Struthers, who's been a guest on TGN and actually helped make an introduction to Calum. So thanks for that, Rebecca. Callum's memoir which is available in the UK now and will be published in the US on December 3rd is called Ingrained the Making of a Craftsman and it is an excellent read whether you're into woodworking or not it's just a great behind-the-scenes look at Callum's life and kind of what his appreciation for craftsmanship. So without further ado let's dive into this chat with Callum Robinson. All right, Callum Robinson, thank you so much for coming on The Gray NATO. It's a real pleasure to have you on. My pleasure, my pleasure.
Callum Robinson It's a thrill. I've been listening to some of your episodes. They're fantastic.
Jason Heaton Oh, that's great. Well, we were connected by a couple of mutual friends, actually, Rebecca Struthers and Lewis Heath, both of whom have been on the show in the past. And you represent a very intriguing sort of culture of makers and craftspeople in the UK. And the timing for our chat today actually kind of comes around the publication of your book, Ingrained, The Making of a Craftsman. It really is a fantastic book and we'll go into that in a little bit here, but before we do, I'd love to get a little bit of your background. If you don't mind, for those that haven't read the book yet and don't know where you're from or what you do, could you go into that a little bit?
Callum Robinson Yeah, absolutely. Those two people you mentioned are legendary people, they really are. Rebecca, amazing. Her book is fantastic and we've been working with her and her husband Craig for, oh I don't know, more than 10 years. And Lewis is also a total legend. and a very lovely man. Yeah, so my background is, well, how to put this? I'm going to go back a generation. That's where I have to begin, if that's okay. My dad, who I trained with, and I'm putting trained in air quotes here, he was a landscape architect and a kind of obsessive maker and builder and designer and In the 70s he and my mum bought a ruinous stone farmhouse for the princely sum of £10,000. Huge building in the Scottish countryside near Edinburgh, sort of out east coast way. Very near, if anyone's a golf fan, what I would think of as the golf coast. Gullen, Muirfield, North Berwick, Darylton, you know, beautiful Lynx Gulf, very close to where I grew up. So they bought that place and it was really just sort of four walls. And he then spent, I mean, he still is rebuilding it after 50 years. And he had no idea how to do it. He, you know, he was just kind of obsessed with it and big hair and all that sort of thing. Huge beard in the seventies. So when I came along, you know, the place was a building site and very, very quickly I got roped into helping from, I don't know, four or five years old. There's pictures of me as a tiny little tot, you know, with a wheelbarrow and a spade and things, trying to spend some time with my dad because, of course, every minute he had he was rebuilding the house. sort of spool forwards to when I was a teenager. And I, if I wanted to spend any time with my dad, I would have to do it in his workshop, which is where he just always was whenever he wasn't working. And so I kind of got into woodwork fairly young, and it was just a thing that we did because wood was an accessible material. We could use old salvaged wood from pretty much anywhere. So our house is this extraordinary kind of repository for everything from old sort of dying Land Rovers decomposing on their chassis and piles of bricks and soil and wood and just kind of everything you can possibly imagine because they had a lot of space and they had no money and so absolutely anything that was going they would get kind of dumped there by whoever was offloading it. And so I sort of cut my teeth making things out of whatever was to hand. spoke forward a bit more to when I was 19. I was working in a bar and I was spending rather too much time on the wrong side of the bar and my dad offered me a job, I suspect partly to keep me out of trouble, and I started working with him. At that time he had been working with wood professionally for maybe five years, because when he was 40 he lost his job as a landscape architect and the one thing he knew how to make money at was making things. So he'd started being a furniture maker and so I started being a furniture maker. Unfortunately I was kind of under the impression at that point that I knew what I was doing because I'd been around it for so long. So I think I was a very difficult, if I know I was a very difficult person to have around. What 19 year old doesn't have a slightly fractious relationship with their dad? So I was in there with him And it's just the two of us in this tiny little ramshackle workshop trying to figure out how to make things. It took a long time, but I got reasonably good at it and he got very good at it. So now I'm sort of, let's say 23, 24, and I'm really beginning to get into being a woodworker. I'm beginning to feel like maybe this is what I'm going to do. I didn't go to university. I didn't really have any other skills. I didn't really know who I was, but I kind of knew how to do that one thing.
Jason Heaton If I can just jump in, what sorts of things were you making at that time?
Callum Robinson Are we talking furniture, or are we talking... We were making absolutely anything out of wood that would make a couple of pounds, you know. So I've worked on wooden, handmade wooden toilet seats. I've sanded down and reclaimed old toilet seats, which is a thoroughly unpleasant business, I can tell you. You know, we used to make key rings where he would slice in half with an angle grinder, big old keys, and weld them. He welded one to the handle of a potato masher, and we would heat that up with a blowtorch and brand a key, this big sort of silly key, onto bits of scrap wood and we would use those as key rings and we would make knife blocks, we would make chopping boards and then latterly kind of cabinets and then whole kitchens and offices and just absolutely anything. And you were doing this with your father or on your own at that point? No, this was both of us. So I worked for him, but he was making it up more or less as he went along. And so one of the difficult things now is that I like to think I'm sort of a recording of a recording. So, you know, he used to record a cassette tape. It would be a sort of poor quality thing. And then I've picked, I'm even worse than that. So I picked up all his bad habits and invented a few of my own. So we did that for, I don't know, about sort of seven or eight years maybe. I mean in a tiny workshop, really really small, to the point where it was like a double car garage. If we would build a kitchen, gradually as the kitchen got more and more complete, we would run out of space. So we were both sort of fighting over the one square meter of room that was left on the one bench that wasn't covered in cabinet. I learned to use very minimal machinery, very old and very kind of rubbish tools, lots of double-sided tape, a Makita 3612 half-inch router, like, I mean, for me that's sort of a battered old router like that is like a guitar that you really love, you know, that I just kind of, as soon as I hold one, I just kind of feel like everything's going to be okay. Yeah, we did that for quite a long time. And then I sort of started to get itchy feet and I went traveling. I went around the world. And when I was in New Zealand, I didn't take my tools such as they were. I wasn't really planning to do woodwork. You know, I'd kind of been doing it for a while. When I was there I sort of realized that I didn't have any other marketable skills and more than that I really didn't like the idea of any other kind of job. I looked at what other people do and I suppose what I was going to be able to get a job doing and None of it seemed interesting or creatively fulfilling, and so I went and tried to get a job as a furniture baker, which I eventually did, and it was a real baptism of fire. I worked in my first proper commercial workshop making furniture, handmade furniture, and it was a bit like going into a kind of commercial Commercial's perhaps the wrong word. A bit like going into a serious kitchen after you've just been in your mum's kitchen for your whole kind of, you know. And they were not messing around. And we had a very short amount of time to do things. It was very hot. I'm from Scotland. It was the summer. It was a real surprise. Very high pressure, lots of machinery I didn't understand, and I really had to learn quite quickly. And so by the time I came home, I'd really sort of toughened up. It was kind of a boot camp for me. And I think my dad hoped I would come back and work with him. In fact, I know he did. Unfortunately for him, I met my now wife, who was an architect at the time, and immediately took off around the world again. And then when we did finally come home, I set up with her what has become a company called Method Studio, which is a designing and making company that started out making furniture, which we were trying to do something a bit different, a bit more architectural than what I'd done with my dad, which was kind of slightly more traditional wooden joinery, perhaps, would work. Integrated with a lot of his carving, which latterly is the thing that he's concentrated more and more on. And we wanted to do something radically different, as everybody, I guess, does when they've done one thing with their dad or their mum. And we brought Marisa's design skills in and my kind of making abilities and we thought that would work really well. And it was a very tough start, you know, working. If anyone works with their spouse, it takes a while to get used to that dynamic. But now I don't think we could work apart on creative stuff of that sort of nature. So we started to make interesting things. The one that really kind of changed things for us, I was in fact still in my dad's workshop, was we designed a sort of modern version of a steamer trunk, a contemporary kind of version, as what I thought of as a collaboration with a company called Denim in Amsterdam, who were at the time absolutely tiny. It was like three people.
Jason Heaton They're a bit of a traditional sort of work wear clothing with some nice sweaters and coats and things, right?
Callum Robinson Yeah, I mean at the time they were just doing jeans and they had kind of branched out. There were a few really key people there. Jason, who started it, the eponymous jean maker, who was a kind of like real sort of traditionalist with, you know, he'd cut him and his blood would be blue, I suspect.
Jason Heaton Well, with a name like Denham, I mean, I think.
Callum Robinson Yeah. Even though it's spelled differently. Absolutely. But there was also a guy there called Liam Mayher, who he had been at Timberland and he had been at Burton. He's now the creative director of Echo. And he was just starting as design director at Denham. And he is a kind of very visionary storyteller and designer. And we worked with him and with Jason I think I just emailed them. I was very naive and I wanted to do a collaboration and essentially I would kind of pay for it and make it all if they would put their name to it and, you know, help us promote it. And in the end it was very serendipitous. We did this project with them. We went down to London with the sort of last of our money in the world. I think we probably told them, oh yeah, we're going to be in London that day anyway. And then we went down and met Jason and I think we kind of flew down just for this meeting. And it was terribly exciting. And we came up with Liam with this sort of really, even now I think I'm really proud of it, really kind of interesting version of a kind of steamer trunk that was made out of ash and birch. And it was inspired by birch bark canoes and biplane wings. And I got really kind of geeky with trying to figure out how I could make this thing kind of lightweight and flexible. And I gave it inwardly curving sides so that when you put it down, it couldn't, the surfaces couldn't touch the, the ground, which I thought was incredibly clever. And I only later discovered that Moyna had been doing that for 150 years or something. And I absolutely thought I'd come up with it. And so we created this thing and it had all kinds of like their stuff in it. So we used their rivets and we used their kind of leather and we used their like all kinds of things from their world and we tried to create this trunk which would be a mobile kind of workstation for a jeanmaker. So it had all these little carousels and it had places for scissors and it had hanging space and a salvaged denim flysheet and all kinds of stuff and it was just incredibly detailed and it sort of took My dad's theatrical side, because he always does ridiculous things. If you've seen any of his carving, you know he's a very kind of playful guy. Marisa's kind of unbelievable design chops. She's a spectacular designer, very disciplined and very, very clever and very neat and elegant. And then my kind of obsession with the thing having lots of fun, clever, thoughtful little details that are made out of things that I found and used in some way that they're not really designed to be used for. Those things kind of came together and we were very fortunate in that they promoted it, Hypebeast picked it up, and then a couple of serious magazines picked it up, and then Gestalten put it in a book of cutting-edge collaborations with was right next to an amazing trunk that Louis Vuitton had done and I was just, you know, completely made up about that because by that point I had become totally obsessed with the romance and the kind of elegance and practicality of the world of travel trunks, which is, you know, completely gone now because we don't have armies of porters to carry things around. But I just, I was completely fascinated by all this, so it was really exciting for me. And off the back of that, we had an email, might even have been a phone call, from somebody who was about to, who worked at a big agency in London, who was about to launch the new, as was then, the new Range Rover. Which was, I think, the first kind of major new iteration of a Range Rover that had been for a while, and it was at the Paris Motor Show, and they wanted to do a whole series of trunks. And I've been doing this a while now, and you know, one of the things that you learn about trunk making is that there are a few people in France that still do it. And then there are the big names, of course, you know, Goyard and Moinard and Louis Vuitton. And they're very, rightly very protective of the way they do things. They don't want to change any of the branding. They don't want to do anything that isn't the way they've always done it. I had no such qualms about, you know, doing a kind of modern reinvention of it. unfortunately for me I did not understand that they wanted them as props because I just don't didn't have never worked that way and I've never worked that way so we designed them and built them as working things even though they were only going to be used like a handful of times.
Jason Heaton Did they put them in the back of the vehicle at the display or was it kind of arranged around the vehicle?
Callum Robinson It was the whole VVIP area. Okay. Yeah, the whole kind of these. So we had audio visual in one of them, we had all their kind of like material palettes and they had all these kind of drawers that had their different leather swatches and all the kind of different things you could do. But it was, I mean it was huge undertaking and it was at the time it was just me. Wow. And I also didn't really know how to make things like that. So the way that we designed it was kind of to be made as a big kind of kit that I would then put together. So I've had to find, and I did find, a leather worker who I then I worked pretty closely with for about eight years, who helped me because he did the leather work. And then I had to find an engineer who I then also worked with for quite a lot of years, And then a lot of kind of hardware and stuff that sort of felt like it was off a Land Rover or a Range Rover, but wasn't. And I had to try and do all of this in a very under equipped, drafty, dusty woodworking workshop in the countryside and make them look as if they were, you know, out of some incredible French studio.
Jason Heaton So I have to interject here and ask, you know, it seems like your trajectory was pretty vertical. I mean, or, and maybe you've skipped over some steps or amended your story or shortened your story for the sake of brevity. But, you know, you were working as a, as a woodworker in your father's shop, went to New Zealand, got kind of cut your teeth there, came back and now you're into steamer trunks and working with leather workers and engineers for some big brands. Like what informed your, um, tastes and abilities and like, that's a big expansion of your, and maybe I'm misrepresenting you, but a big expansion of your skillset. What the things you had learned personally. Yeah. Well, where did the interest in steamer trunks come from? But that's a whole different skillset. We're talking hinges and we're talking fittings and the leather and you had to have connections with people to work with and how did that all come about?
Callum Robinson Well, I think part of it was I was very lucky, and I still count myself tremendously lucky, that at the time social media hadn't really come of age. So there wasn't really, in my memory anyway, I was probably still using an old Nokia phone, there wasn't any Instagram or anything like that, so I had to sort of seek out other forms of inspiration. And if I'm honest, the one kind of inspiration I didn't seek out ever was furniture. I never really looked at any of that stuff. I was fascinated with, you know, kind of cars and like luggage. I've always been a big luggage guy, even though I can't really afford it. And sort of, you know, adventure and travel and and architecture and just kind of interesting things. And the thing I knew how to make stuff out of was wood, and so the two kind of came together. In some ways it was always remains are very difficult because we try and make things out of wood that we shouldn't really. I mean, I'm just making a piece right now, we're just finishing it off for Vacheron Constantin, which is another trunk, an extraordinary trunk in wood and leather and gold. And I mean, you know, it's not really for travel, but if it was, the idea of making out of oak and gold and metal and glass is sort of the dumbest things to make this sort of thing out of, but there's something about the romance of the object and then also they're the materials that I know and they're the most kind of sumptuous materials. But you're right, the trajectory was quite vertical. In in sort of every way except financial, because we never made any money. If we were doing really well, we could just about afford the workshop rent. I maybe got fractionally better at it now, but I don't know if I have. The money was just... whatever budget was there meant that we could afford to... we had an excuse to do the thing. I never really chose materials or the design or anything about the project, that was never informed by how much money there was. Whatever they were going to pay us, we were going to do the same thing. And that's not a very good way to run a business. So we just really wanted to have an excuse to do cool stuff. And sorry, I'm answering your first question with a huge answer. But we were then very fortunate in that we managed to get into this sort of design business kind of incubator program that was run by a group called Walpole, who are kind of like the Freemasons for luxury brands, is the sort of mean way of putting it. They're sort of stronger together, and it was quite small when we were there, and it's since got bigger, and it was, I guess, to give them more bargaining power and for networking, all that kind of thing. They had a small kind of offshoot of that that was called Crafted. It was started by a guy called Guy Salter who believed that craft was at the base of all of these luxury brands even though it might have been well in their past that they were little kind of workshops. They had all started out that way. All these kind of beautiful shoemakers and carmakers had all started out as coachbuilders and cobblers. So he really thought that it was important that they had a small kind of part of it that helped new craft businesses. So they had this kind of mentorship program. Well, they brought a few people on. I think Struthers did it. That may be where we met them. I remember exactly when we did meet them, and it was in the Royal Academy. I was showing stuff at the Royal Academy, and they sort of sidled up. But through that, we got put in a room with all the other people who were networking, who were from Bentley and Aston Martin and Fortnum and Mason and all these kind of places. And you know, I was, I don't know, 28 and there was free champagne and I was nervous and I had been in my workshop the whole time and they'd never met anybody who did what I did and I'd never met anybody who did what they did. And so after I'd had 20 or 30 drinks, I would tell them I could do amazing things. And then when we sobered up, I'd have to try and figure out how to do them. Marisa was also very good at the networking too, so she's a very charming woman. we got some really unusual projects. They didn't pay any money, but we got to do things like I made a tea chest for Kate Hobhouse, who's the chairwoman of Fortnum & Mason, this sparkling effervescent wonderful woman. And she had showed us this vintage hamper that she had, and she said, I want to do a tea chest. that kind of looks like, doesn't look like this, but is inspired by the energy of this object. Could you do that? And we did it for an exhibition and we set ourselves the challenge of making every single part of it from something that was British. So right down to the hardware and the glass and everything. It was incredibly challenging. You know, we kept getting those kind of projects and I don't really understand why, but the drive was always to do really interesting, kind of exciting artistic work and to build a brand. I was sort of obsessed with the idea of building a brand. That's why we didn't call it, name it after ourselves because we wanted it to be you know, its own thing. But all through all this, the thing that I know how to do is to make things out of wood and then laterally out of leather. So all of these things were made predominantly like pieces of furniture. So they look a little bit unusual.
Jason Heaton Your story is inspiring because I'm a firm believer in personal reinvention and sort of cliche of fake it until you make it. I'm not saying you were faking it, but just networking with people and promising things that you're not sure you can do is a really bold thing to do. But I think it requires that boldness to to move forward in so many cases and it sounds like you've done that. I would encourage any of our listeners that aren't familiar with you or your work or Method to go to your website methodstudio.co.uk. I was looking at it just before we got on and some of the examples of your work are just amazing. To look at the cover of your book and to read it or to just talk to you and hear about woodworking is a gross understatement in terms of what you do because some of this stuff, wood is almost a secondary part of it. I mean, it's, or, or maybe a basic part of it, but, but there's so much more to it. I was looking at the work you did for, you mentioned Vacheron and of course we're, we're largely a watch related podcast and, and your work with Struthers and then with Vacheron, the, the, the little cabinet you made for that million dollar tourbillon or whatever, with the little drawers that come out and all. I mean, it, it's just, it's, it's incredible stuff. And You've somehow now moved into this watch space, which I'm really curious about. You know, you worked with Honor Dane on their Model 3 Method, which presumably was named after your studio. And the dials of those watches mimic that hand chiseling work that you've done on the boxes. The Vacheron projects and then the Struthers stuff, the deck watch boxes. there's a real sort of overlapping parallel between what you do and these traditional watchmakers, I think, the craft element of it, right?
Callum Robinson Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, we were very, very lucky to get to do stuff for Struthers that, you know, really they shouldn't get us to do because, you It's expensive to make things the way we make them, just as it's expensive to make things the way they make them. And you could put one of their watches in a very simple box and save yourself some money, and their watches are so extraordinary that it shouldn't matter. And to a lot of pretty serious watchmakers and watch brands, the box doesn't matter. But Craig and Rebecca believe, as I believe, that the whole kind of theatre and ceremony of the thing doesn't just begin as soon as you get it out of the box and throw the box away. It's all part of it. It's all about storytelling and theatre and a sense of fun, I guess, and it gives us and gives them, I hope, a way to kind of add an extra dimension to the thing. And we've been working with them for years and getting to have huge fun. The deck box you mentioned, they sent us a vintage deck box and that was what they wanted it to feel like. We really went to town with it and it was a hugely enjoyable thing to do. The way it moved and the way it kind of stood up and everything was just great fun. There's a couple of things we've done for them that, in fact, aren't on the website. I'm not sure if we have photographs of them, but they've been just tremendously entertaining. Partly because Craig and Rebecca both have this absolute obsession with making things, and we share that method, certainly Marisa and I especially. And I guess trying to make things that you haven't seen before and just being really, really fascinated by the mechanics of the thing and the bits that no one ever sees just being as beautiful and elegant and thoughtful as the bits that people do see. So that's one of the kind of, if not the most kind of enjoyable creative relationship we've had with a client ever. Vacheron Constantin were, and remain, an amazing client of ours too. We met them on that incubator program I was talking about, that was sponsored by Vacheron Constantin the year that we did it. And it was the year that they opened their first British boutique, which was on Bond Street. And so that commission was for the million dollar watch, an extraordinary tourbillon minute repeater that had a kind of guilloché that was The Union Jack, if you look really closely, it's absolutely an extraordinary thing. Done on this kind of, I can't remember what they're called, this big engine thing that... Oh yeah, the rose turning sort of, yeah, yeah. Amazing thing. And we made that out of some brown oak from the Althorpe Estate. which is the seat of the Spencers and Princess Diana. And we wanted to do something really, really special. And it's one of the things I'm most proud of. It had in the back of it, I don't know if you can see it on the website, but a resonator so that you could put the watch around it. A wooden kind of trumpet thing, because the chimes were just so beautiful. And so you could kind of listen to it. And then all these drawers. Hidden inside there was a sort of another case because I think it's probably me and the brand director at the time decided that the travel case that comes with it just wasn't cool enough. And so I said, we'll make one. And then we had to figure out, because we'd already started making the box, where we were going to put it. So if you look at the pictures, there's where the watch slides out and there's a sort of compartment underneath it. And we had to kind of figure out where we were going to hide this thing and how small it could get away with and it had still fit the watch inside. Yeah, it was a really, really beautiful thing. I actually had a terrible experience building that because, not the whole thing, right at the very end. It's made of brown oak and we fumed it, which is to expose it to ammonia and bring out the dark tones in the timber. So oak particularly is chock full of tannin. And if you expose it to, I mean this will happen in the air in like 400 years, but if you want to speed that process up, you expose it to ammonia in a sealed environment and kind of overnight it will get this dark, really rich dark color like dark chocolate. So I wanted to try and bring all these tones out and so we use oils to really kind of protect and enrich and finish the furniture. And if you want to really, really bring the depth out, you use linseed oil. The problem with linseed oil is it doesn't really ever dry. And so one thing I've learned to do is, you know, you use linseed oil for the first coat and then you would use a different oil, which has the sort of other things in it that will dry for the other one, because you've got a lot of leather and suede and all kinds of things. Yeah. I put this oil on, and I must have not cleaned some of it out of one of the joints properly, and I had started to apply all this calf leather, and I came in the next morning and it was just a tiny little mark. And over the course of the day, it just got bigger and bigger and bigger, and it was bleeding into the side of the leather, and I think I had like about 24 hours before I had to deliver this thing, and I had to sort of figure out how I was going to fix it. You know, we've done some projects with them. We did one recently, Aside from the Trunk, which may be my favorite project we've done with them actually. We were asked if we could produce some pieces for their Edinburgh boutique, because they've just opened just off Princess Street in Edinburgh. It's a beautiful location. And we said, well, how about instead of us making some stuff, we'll make one or two small things. we'd like to take the budget that we have and to work with a selection of artists and creatives who are friends of ours, and to create a whole suite of pieces that are inspired by Edinburgh and by Scotland to go into this boutique. We got to do some really, really fun stuff because some of the people we worked with... Well, this was the pottery. There's some pottery or ceramics. Yeah, yeah. I saw that, yeah. Partly I also wanted to do it because I wanted to write a book about it, and so they let me do that. And we took lovely photographs and made a nice film of it. But the people we worked with, they took this idea of provenance you know, really, really seriously. And so everything was inspired either by Vacheron Constantin's heritage or the city or both. So yeah, there's some pottery in there that's made from clay that was dug up in Leith for the new tram works. And the lady that did it just took a bucket down to these builders and threw the bucket over and said, give me some clay. And then it was smoke glazed with leaves that had been collected from Princess Street Gardens. So it's very kind of Edinburgh. I think there's another clay in there that's from a slightly different part of Scotland. My favorite thing in there is this cast called Scaliola and it is a technique that was used hundreds of years ago really, it's kind of fake marble, which makes it sound bad, but it's sort of this beautiful polished plaster that looks like marble. And it kind of looks like swirling kind of stratocella chocolate, it's black and white. And the way that the guy did that, well the company did that, a company called Chalk Plaster, who are based just across the water from us, When I told him what we were doing, he said, oh, I've got the perfect thing for that. He had collected oyster shells that had been found in a bing, also during the leaf tram works, hundreds of years old, dug up these white oyster shells. So that was the white. And the black was scraped from its soot. that was scraped from the inside of a sort of 200-year-old building in Edinburgh. Because Edinburgh is kind of traditionally called Old Reekie, which is partly because of the sort of soot and the smoke. And so this is, you know, Edinburgh soot that had been gathering on this building because So they use those two materials together to kind of make this, you know, swirling kind of plaster. So it's just incredibly good fun to get to do that kind of thing. And I think watch companies, they have a really kind of strong appreciation of craftsmanship and of heritage and of theater.
Jason Heaton As you're talking, I'm thinking about these very base, earthy elements that are going into everything. Wood, I mean, what's more basic and earthy than wood? Or mud and oyster shells and things like this that are going into all of these things and what you're turning them into. And this is a bit of a conundrum that I battle with a lot, um, having spent enough time kind of tangentially in the, in the luxury industry, writing about watches and things. And that is, you know, craftsmanship, uh, and, and the materials that you use are, they're so basic and it's very hands-on and it's very gritty work. I mean, I've, you know, in reading your book, I mean, you're working in a dusty old shed, you're, you're crawling around in, in, you know, um, woodsheds with rats and spiders and driving your old Land Rover, which we'll get to in a bit. But what it ends up being is these high luxury products. And I'm often troubled by that because I want these things to be accessible to everybody, and yet they aren't. Luxury is very complicated in my mind because I didn't grow up, and it sounds like you didn't either, clearly. You know, your old house that your father was constantly rebuilding. But Luxury is not something that I grew up with or that is a part of my life other than a few watches that I own in my work. What's your relationship with luxury? Because that's the space you work in as well.
Callum Robinson Yeah, it's difficult. You know, I was at a book event the other day and somebody asked me, you know, how does it feel that the stuff that you make almost nobody can afford it? And it is really difficult. It's something I've struggled with over the years. I mean, maybe less so when I was younger because All I really cared about then was trying to prove that I could do something really kind of extraordinary. And I didn't really care who it was for. And if there were luxury brands who wanted to have something really extraordinary made, I was up for the challenge. I think the older you get, and the more time you spend exposed to people and the effect of those kind of things on them, and the more difficult that becomes, it is really, really difficult. I mean, I think probably most people with you, I would guess it's watches. I have my own things. Even if you don't have an awful lot of money, there'll be something that you love enough that you will try and find a way to have a relationship with that thing. I always used to get really annoyed when people would say, oh, it's terribly expensive. how much was your mountain bike? There are certain things that people will find a way to afford, and it just kind of depends what it is. It seems rather pedestrian sometimes if it's furniture, but for some people that is what it is, and it's having something beautiful in their home. And I guess because we've been able to work in that space, we've got to learn some really good techniques and tricks. And one of the things that I talk about in the book, being in a position where I'm able to leverage some of those skills for people who will really treasure that thing, it's difficult. It took me a whole book to try and wrestle with the idea in my head of not necessarily who deserves these things, but where should the energy be going? I think one of the wonderful things though, particularly in like the watch space, is that these things are so well crafted that they'll last a really, really long time. And also that, you know, for some people they can, my father-in-law's like this, he can't really afford luxury watches, but he does have them, he loves them. And the reason he can excuse it to himself is because he knows that he can sell them again if he needs to. And maybe if he buys the right ones then, you know, he might even do reasonably well out of them. I actually found this to be the case when, this is very sad, but when I had to sell the Land Rover, which unfortunately I did have to do, is that those kind of things hold their value. So I do think that there's some elements of luxury which are kind of grotesque, and then there are some elements of luxury which are things that are made so well and that are so iconic that they will always be able to be repaired and always have a market value. So I think it's, um, that stuff I'd have much less of a problem with. Um, then, then there are some things that just feel very expensive and also kind of very disposable, which I, that is difficult.
Jason Heaton Yeah, that's a good point. And I think luxury is probably an oversimplification of a lot of these things that we work in and deal with. And I think a quote unquote luxury wristwatch is actually a really finely crafted machine, in many cases made by hand and finished, et cetera. And yes, it's often sold to somebody that is incredibly wealthy and most of us will never get an opportunity to have that. But the fact that it just exists in the world is reassuring. And I think I've learned over the years, and I've had these conversations many times with my co-host James, who has had the opportunity to drive a lot of supercars, but neither of us will ever afford a McLaren or whatever. And I guess we come down to this idea that you can appreciate things without having to own them. To look at the trunks and the products that are on your website and things that you've had the honor of making and spending time with. And then whoever they go to, at least there's some photos and videos and people got to experience them. And I think that's a good outcome.
Callum Robinson Yeah, I mean, I absolutely agree. I am very fortunate that I have one or two nice pieces of furniture, but mostly I can't afford anything that I do. But I do think it's really cool that we live in a world where people do get to do things that are really extreme examples of how good we can do things. And actually, you know, I don't want to get started on it, but even though a wristwatch costing X number of thousand pounds, if you break down what's in there and the amount of training and skill and how much it cost and how long it took the company to get to a point where they could do it for that kind of money, If you tried to make one of them now, starting from scratch, that thing is actually unbelievable value. And then if you consider that it will probably still be working if it's maintained properly in 100 years, in 200 years, in 300 years. And I think I probably make the point in the book, the same thing about wooden furniture, is that if it's properly maintained, it will last certainly a lot longer than you. And so if you don't need to buy another one of those things, It is difficult to excuse sometimes, but I agree with you. I think, you know, I'd rather live in a world where these things can exist and that we try and make beautiful objects and beautiful things. Like everything, it's about balance.
Jason Heaton You know, your work with these brands, I'm looking at a list that I was making, you know, you've worked with numerous whiskey brands, which is appealing to me as well. Burberry, Bentley, Of course, we talked about Struthers and Unordain and Vacheron, Jaguar Land Rover, you mentioned the Range Rover project. These are brands across disciplines, in many cases, very traditionally high-end, very crafty brands, but across disciplines and areas that aren't your areas of expertise. I'm guessing you draw inspiration from working with creatives in other spaces, for instance, in the automotive space. The modern Range Rovers, certainly they're nothing like the old ones, which I have a soft spot for, but they're beautiful machines. They're beautifully sculpted, very well outfitted, but they're nothing like the work you do, and yet you must draw some inspiration in collaborating with these brands, whether it's a whiskey or a car.
Callum Robinson Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I agree with you. I have a real soft spot for the old Range Rovers as well. And as gorgeous as the new ones are, I'd be absolutely terrified to own one. And, you know, so there's something wonderfully kind of reassuring and comforting and comfortable about being in a battered old Land Rover or old Range Rover. We've definitely drawn a lot from a lot of these companies. I mean, one of the wonderful things is that most of them, if not all of them, have a really deep well of heritage to draw from. You know, I've been asked to do things that kind of evoke new parts of sort of supercars and new parts of things like the Range Rover and stuff. it's very, very, very difficult to do because my workshop is not equipped with CNC, that kind of thing. And we've always sort of resisted that. So yeah, I think, you know, one of the things I love is the different kind of materials that they will use and I have a real soft spot for there's a car that Bentley brought out I think it was a Continental GT kind of special edition that they did that was all in kind of it was like silver and copper and it was it was just a concept car, really. I think it was a driverless car. I'm not really sure if it worked or not, but we were very lucky to be invited down to Crewe for wallpaper invited us down for the launch of this thing a few years ago. And one of the things I loved about it was that it had all these beautiful copper elements. And I got talking to the head industrial designer and said, like, how did you, how did you do this? Because whenever we try and work with copper, it's a nightmare. You can't touch it. And you know, it, it patinates really, really quickly. And he was like, yeah, it's, it's a nightmare. We can't, we can't figure it out either. And so I love that, like, everybody's kind of battling with the same kinds of things, but they were putting kind of leather with glass, with sculptural elements, with kind of organic elements, with copper, and then, you know, kind of like, it's just a mixture of materials and a mixture of techniques and shapes and forms. Yeah, I mean, I'm really, really inspired by that. And the storytelling, you know, there's something I hope comes through in our work is that they're sort of more than just objects. One of my favorite ones that's on the website, one of my most favorite projects we've done recently, was for the Glen Turret and it was for a 50 year old whiskey. They didn't have very much of it, and they wanted to do something really special. And they had the barrel that this 50-year-old had come out of. And they said, we want to do something really cool with this. Can you come up with something? And the problem with making things out of whiskey casks is that the oak is usually not of a very high quality. It's been steeped in liquor for 50 years, so it's not very dry. It's an odd shape. They're slightly bent. it's very obvious that it's been made out of a barrel if you try and do anything, you know, because it feels a bit derivative. I got talking to my dad about this and we were saying, well, whatever we do, we got to burn the rest of the cask so that no one can make anything out of the rest of it, right? And what we decided to do in the end, and unfortunately once I'd had this idea, there was no getting out of my head, was that we should burn the whole thing and make charcoal out of it, which is actually a very volatile business when that thing is full of alcohol. And then we worked with this artist, an Edinburgh-based artist, who does these unbelievable kind of dynamic charcoal and pastel paintings. And he went to the loch that feeds the distillery and he made these extraordinary kind of paintings of that loch and the mountains behind it. out of this sort of spirit infused charcoal. And then we built this sort of carved diptych encasement. It's almost a kind of like it was a religious artifact. And you know, for me, 50 year old whiskey is about as close to religion as I like to get. And we made a film of it and you know, we commissioned some music for it and stuff. And for me that was just this incredibly wonderful kind of way of combining all the materials and all the spirit and all the storytelling and the location and everything that goes into that whiskey, but taking it a step back from where, you know, even where they had asked, which is like from the cask, taking it right back to the to the water source, to something really elemental. So yeah, I mean there's obviously inspiration in the way that they do things and the tradition and the quality and all that kind of thing, but then there's also these extra layers of inspiration that don't necessarily reveal themselves until you start really looking under the skin of a project.
Jason Heaton Well, we're, we're getting close to the end of our time and we haven't really even talked about the book yet. So I want to move kind of quickly from, from your work with, with method and your own background into, you know, how did this book ingrained come about? Was it something you always wanted to write or did somebody convince you to, that you should write a book? And again, talking about switching disciplines, writing was not your background, presumably, maybe you were a good writer, maybe you enjoyed it, but. to move to writing a, you know, a long book requires a skill set and discipline that, you know, maybe you drew from your other work, but how did it all come about, and how was it to write?
Callum Robinson Well, I definitely had practiced over the years with writing about the projects that we do, and if you were to ask my wife, she would probably tell you that in some ways all the projects were done so I could write about them, and so I could tell stories about them. But I was always very kind of overblown and very sort of over the top and it's sort of in many ways really kind of like amplified marketing speak because I was sort of helping clients to write the captions, but then I was writing them 50 times longer than they should be and no one's ever reading them. So kind of trying to bring that under control, particularly when I was talking about woodwork, was something of a disciplinary challenge. In answer to your question, I love to write, I love to read, and woodwork has been my whole life really. I don't really have any friends, I don't really have any hobbies, it's really kind of all I do is make things. But I do love to read and I could never find a book that sort of spoke about my experience in the way that something like Kitchen Confidential talks about what it's like to be a chef, a young excited kind of hungover chef, or you know James Herriot's books talk about like what it feels like to be a vet, and what it feels like to be in the country, or Jack London, or you know any kind of adventure books, or what does it feel like There are some wonderful books about, not many, but some wonderful books about craft and about what that means and about woodwork. Books like Shop Class's Soulcraft and Why We Make Things and Why It Matters and they're excellent books but I just couldn't find anything that really spoke to me about how I'd found the experience. And as we may have already covered, if I can't find the thing I'm looking for, I try and make it myself. And so that was what I wanted to try and do. Every time I go to a party, I'd meet three people who said, I'd love to do that. That sounds like I've always wanted to do that. And yet I couldn't find the book that helped them to live that experience. So I wanted to try and do that. And I also wanted, after working with my dad for, you know, I still work with him now, so 20, 25 years, I didn't want that book, and I was always going to try and do it at some point, I didn't want the foreword to be to the memory of my dad. And it's the kind of book that would be. I wanted him to read it, and I wanted him to guffaw and say, that never happened. And I wanted him to see how much he'd meant to me before it was done and after the fact. So that's sort of what spurred me on as to what it was like to write it. It was a bit like kind of everything I've learned to do over the years where I shut myself into a shed and I drove myself completely mad until I could see the deadline coming. And then, um, and then I really got really, really got going. Um, but I absolutely loved it. You know, I sort of joke that it's the only thing I've ever tried to make with 80,000 moving parts. Um, But I loved the challenge of trying to kind of make readers feel how I felt and what it felt like and what it feels like. And it was also an emotional thing to delve back into what it felt like when I was that age and to try and remember and try and make it fun and try and make it light and try and make it read like a like a novel, you know, that's what I was going for. So I've loved it and I am really excited that it's coming to America. I can't quite believe that. So December 3rd it comes out in America and yeah, that's a real dream come true because America is a place I've only visited a couple of times but it's just sort of so kind of evocative for me of the kind of literature that I love and such a big sort of exciting kind of outdoor sort of place. If you come from the UK it's tiny and most of it is pretty manicured so to have the even if I don't get to go there a lot, to know that that book's making its way over there and to have these experiences like today is just like a super, super exciting and something that in, you know, 20 years of making things, I've never, my work has never brought me to America until now. So yeah, I mean for that too, it's tremendously exciting.
Jason Heaton To your earlier point about how good wood furniture or a wristwatch or pocket watch for that matter can last for generations, so too does a book. It'll live on well beyond you and people will be reading it and be inspired by it and decades and centuries for that matter, who knows.
Callum Robinson It would be really cool to think that somebody might read it and be inspired to try and make stuff instead of something digital.
Jason Heaton It really is a wonderful book and definitely want to encourage everybody listening to check that out. Before we sign off here, what's the future? What are you working on? What do you hope to work on? Any dream projects?
Callum Robinson Well, we've been making some really exciting stuff in the workshop and I've been enjoying that. I think I might try, everyone keeps asking me if I'm ever going to try and do any carving like my dad does. And I don't know, you know, if anybody's looking at my work, I would very strongly encourage them to have a look at my dad's work, which is David Robinson design. He does the most extraordinary things, particularly, sort of famously, these otters swimming through the surface of solid wood. You know, I've always resisted, but I'm really interested to have a crack at trying to do some carving. He'll be furious because he'll think I'm horning in on his territory. I'm really interested to try and kind of learn some of that stuff. And I'm working on a new project, a new writing project, which is in the same kind of realm, but it's taking me to some other places rather than the shed, the beautifully appointed shed that you can see behind you. And so yeah, I'm going to try and combine those two exciting things and hopefully meet lots of interesting new people who are interested in working with their hands and making things. That's fantastic.
Jason Heaton Well, I really appreciate your coming on The Great NATO today. This is a real pleasure and a long time in the making. We've been communicating for several months and where can people, where can they find your book and where can they follow you or follow your work?
Callum Robinson Yeah, so they can find the book most places in America, but certainly through HarperCollins' website, or through my writing website, which is CallumRobinson.org, or my Instagram, which is CallumRobinsonWrites, or method.studio. But basically, if you type in my name, Callum Robinson, and it would work. a whole list of pictures of me posing in woody sort of areas will lead you to the book. And I should say that I'm also a great fan of your books. I've thoroughly enjoyed them. I absolutely love kind of adventure books of a certain era and of a certain type. And, you know, anybody who adores Clive Custler books, as soon as they start reading your books, It's like, oh, I find a kindred spirit here, you know.
Jason Heaton Well, I appreciate that. That's great. Thank you. I was, one of my inspirations was, and maybe you're familiar with it, Alastair Maclean's When Eight Bells Toll, which was actually an adventure thriller set in the islands of Scotland.
Callum Robinson I haven't actually, I've read some Alastair Maclean, but I haven't read that. So that's, I'm looking forward to checking that out.
Jason Heaton Well, Callum, I'm going to let you go here. And I really appreciate you coming on the gray NATO. And, uh, I hope our listeners enjoy this as much as I did. So thank you so much. Thanks, Jason. I really appreciate it.
James Stacy Okay, that was an awesome chat and a huge thank you to Callum Robinson for coming on the show. You can follow along Callum on Instagram. That's Callum.Robinson.Writes. And all you have to do is go to the show notes. You don't have to remember that. I will have it linked in there. No trouble. And if you're not on the Instagram, maybe you're doing a little social media. break like Jason, you can actually check out CallanRobinson.org for more details. And be sure to keep up with him. Let him know if you enjoyed the show, all that sort of stuff. It seems like a really fantastic sort of personality. And I'm all the more excited to get further into his book, which I'm only a few pages into at this point.
Jason Heaton Yeah, it was great. And, you know, really appreciate Callum coming on the show. And, you know, James, when you're done with that book, you should hand it off to your siblings as well, because I know a few of them are working, and I think they'd appreciate it as well.
James Stacy Yeah, me too. It's fun to add in a guest, especially one, again, with toes in the watch space and watch friends, but also this entirely other perspective. And certainly, I really enjoy woodworking. I cannot compare myself to somebody like Callum, of course. I can barely figure out how to make a clean cut, but it is a nice journey and obviously an absolutely beautiful pastime as far as what you're able to make if you spend the time and invest into it. And I think Callum's words about creativity and craftsmanship kind of hold true to things outside of that space, but definitely make sense for him and his work.
Jason Heaton Yeah. And as I mentioned in the chat with Callum, you've got to go check out methodstudio.co.uk and just click through some of their selected works.
James Stacy The website's incredible. I have it up on my screen now and there's some really, really beautiful stuff. A big thank you, like we said, to Callum for being on there and best of luck with the book as it launches in the States in just a couple of weeks. Be sure to check it out if this is something that you found interesting as far as the chat or even just the topic at large. All right, man, how about some final notes and we'll put a bow on it.
Jason Heaton Yeah, sure. I actually started binging a new program, a new series on Peacock, kind of NBC's streaming service, but it's also available outside the US, probably in the UK on Sky TV. It was kind of a collaborative series between those two. with Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch and it is The Day of the Jackal. So this is a series that's based on the Frederick Forsyth thriller from the 1970s as well as there was an earlier movie with Edward Fox playing the jackal. Uh, and I loved the original movie. I loved the book. It's, it's a great, um, great thriller, great topic, uh, about an assassin. Um, this series has nothing to do with the book or the, or the original movie. Um, if you, so if you're expecting that, uh, it will not, uh, ring, uh, similar at all, but it's good. It's very good. I'm a few episodes in, I believe there's five or six episodes total. LaShonna Lynch is great. Eddie Redmayne is good. Yeah, it's kind of one of these globetrotting spy thrillers, you know, like, like most of us like. And yeah, it's really good. So check it out. I highly recommend it. Really good stuff.
James Stacy And is it more is it more sort of in the tone of like a Mission Impossible or more like the killer?
Jason Heaton You know what, I would say it's a blend between the killer trailer looks very exciting. Sort of a, you know, I would say almost Bourne-esque from what I'm watching. Yep, a little bit Bourne. Kind of a British version of Bourne with the killer thrown in there. Redmayne isn't quite as sociopathic-seeming as Fassbender's killer in that film, but it's good, yeah.
James Stacy Definitely something worth checking out. Have to figure out how I can watch that in Canada. Oh, yeah. But how quick, how many episodes are we talking about? I think it's five or six. Four days. Yeah, right. Well, I could probably get through those during Thanksgiving. That could be fun. Oh, yeah, right. Oh, perfect. Perfect. Might be easier to get Peacock down there than trick some computer into giving it to me up here. Well, that's a good pick. Looking forward to it. And I'm a big fan of both of those stars. So I'm just pumped to see people back in sort of stuff. You know, Redman's had a weird career. yeah um where i think people had some trouble placing him into like an idealized role but i think he has there's something about him that does kind of work for an action-y sort of stoic yeah uh spy-like role and lashana lynch is just a 10 out of 10 no matter what i've seen her do so i'm pumped that's great yeah yeah Alright, you've got something very different. I do. This is a silly one. Sometimes I just walk around my house and I go like, what's bringing me joy these days? And the most recent one is a silly purchase I made in a little town in Ontario called Stratford, which is known for its Thespian Festival. But they have a couple of cool sort of like random gear and toy shops that I'm not sure how else to describe them. And one of them I ducked into recently, they had a bunch of lava lamps. Lava lamps. And I had a lava lamp as a kid. I was probably like 12 or 13 when I had one.
Jason Heaton Yeah.
James Stacy And I just felt like I needed a lava lamp. And it was, you know, $40 Canadian, so not like a big deal. And I got it home, and originally I had planned on putting it in my office. Yeah. So it could be in the background of Zoom calls. Oh, sure. But, you know, just because my daughters were curious, I think lava lamps skipped a couple generations. I think so. my daughters were curious as to like what it does and you know you turn it on and it's still this little halogen incandescent bulb that does all the heating and lighting so it takes hours to warm up but once it was warmed up it was just it's sitting on our shelf in the in the living room and i think it looks so cool and sort of out of place but in a charming way on that shelf with you know the family photos and plants and sarah's pottery and that sort of thing yeah And I just, every time I walk into the room or I sit in my chair, I just kind of get mesmerized. I guarantee it's just because I have a very simple mind. It's glowing lava that's moving around in a sealed jar. But it brings me a lot of joy. And for $30 or $40, I highly recommend it. This is crazy.
Jason Heaton I've never had one of these. And you're right, it did skip a generation. I think it was more Guessing it's my parents' generation, you know, kind of 60s, 70s. Yeah. I don't think I've actually even seen one in person, but these are these are really cool. And it's funny when this Amazon link that you provided actually goes to the original lava brand. So this is this is not just a lava lamp in the generic sense. This is the this is from the original company. Pretty cool.
James Stacy Yeah. So there's a ton of different options. I got one that's probably about 15 or 16 inches tall silver. The liquid is purple, the lava is orange, as lava is supposed to be. But I absolutely love this. I think it's one of the better $40 purchases I've made recently. It's kind of cool. It's weird. It's very entertaining and it suits weirdly just kind of suits like an eclectic taste. Yeah. Now I think when I was a kid, they had like, I remember when I got it and had it in my room with, you know, a big screen TV and too many speakers and all these things that younger James had, uh, when I was, you know, in my late teens and then into, into university. And I think at the time it kind of had more of like a stonery, druggie sort of vibe, which wasn't my, my speed back in the day. But now it kind of feels a little kitschy, but it works and it's a nice lamp. And if the room is otherwise dark, it's like hard not to watch it. It's just so much fun. Nice.
Jason Heaton Very cool. And again, another might be another candidate for a gift guide. That's a, that's kind of a neat quirky gift that like, you know, you get someone who has everything, but they don't have a lava lamp.
James Stacy Yeah, I was actually in Stratford with Thomas Holland of Throttle House. Yeah. And our families were hanging out for the day. We went and had lunch. We ended up at this store and he bought one as well. So we both have lava lamps and give each other the occasional lava lamp update. Oh my gosh. Which is really fun. Anyways, that's probably more minutes than we've ever talked about lava lamps for sure. on this show, but hey, 309 episodes in, we still got surprises. This is a fun one. Like we already said, but a huge thank you to Callum for coming on the show and having such a great chat with you.
Jason Heaton Yeah, it was a good time and a long time in the making. And yeah, thanks to Callum for coming on and to Rebecca and Louis for connecting me with him. And yeah, check out his work. Good stuff. And as always, thanks so much for listening. If you want to subscribe to The Show Notes, get into the comments for each episode, or consider supporting the show directly, maybe even grab a new TGN signed NATO, please visit TheGreyNATO.com. And keep in mind, we will not be here next week due to the US Thanksgiving holiday. Music Throughout is siesta by Jazz Art via the Free Music Archive.
James Stacy And we leave you with this quote from Johannes Brahms who says, Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.