Robb Interview: Mate Rimac, CEO Bugatti Rimac
The Croatian entrepreneur and Rimac founder is driving the historic French marque – and wider auto industry – into the future.
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Mate Rimac sat at a table, facing a camera. To his right was Oliver Blume, the CEO of Porsche, and to his left its finance chief, Lutz Meschke. They were about to host a video conference to announce the deal to merge Bugatti, for which Porsche has responsibility within the vast Volkswagen Group, with Rimac’s eponymous start-up hypercar maker. A small number of journalists from the business media joined Robb Report on the call, among them the Financial Times and Bloomberg. Blume and Meschke were dressed in sober business attire, as you’d expect of German C-suite executives making a major announcement to the world’s press, and they sat stiff and upright. But as the 33-year-old Rimac relaxed into his chair, his sneakers emerged from beneath the table, followed by a pair of bare legs. The wunderkind of the hypercar world was about to be handed control of one of its most fabled marques, and he’d chosen to wear shorts for the occasion.
Rimac doubtless meant no disrespect, but his casual dress served as useful visual shorthand for a transfer of power extraordinary even by the turbulent standards of the supercar industry. Stewardship of arguably the world’s most prestigious marque, founded 112 years ago by one of the great automotive auteurs and maker of some of the most beautiful, powerful cars ever to grace the road, was passing from Europe’s largest manufacturing company to a start-up that began in a tiny nation 12 years ago by someone then barely out of his teens. Later that evening there would be a glossy event livestreamed from the spectacular 14th-century Lovrijenac fortress perched high over beautiful, ancient Dubrovnik and the opal waters of Croatia’s Adriatic coast. Rimac (his name is pronounced MAH-tay REE-mats) leapt on stage to acknowledge the significance of what was happening and the responsibility he was assuming. He was now wearing a well-cut suit but still kept the sneakers.
From left: A Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo, a Rimac Nevera and a Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport, a fitting troika. Rimac Automobili
Despite his youth, Rimac is already acknowledged by his peers as one of the preeminent modern supercar makers, a successor to Ettore Bugatti alongside Horacio Pagani, Christian von Koenigsegg and Gordon Murray. The club of engineers who have created the cars and companies that carry their names from scratch is exclusive, and Rimac had only officially joined it when the Bugatti deal was announced in early July. The Rimac Nevera, his first proper production electric hypercar, was tested by Robb Report and a handful of other media in June, and customer deliveries are just starting.
But Rimac is already an established player. While developing his own hypercar, he has built a multibillion-dollar business supplying his high-performance electric-propulsion technology to at least 15 major carmakers, including Ferrari, Aston Martin, Mercedes and Rimac’s fellow auteur Christian von Koenigsegg. Porsche and Hyundai are not only customers but also investors with significant equity stakes, and Pininfarina likes the Nevera so much that it’s using the car as the basis of its new 1400kW Battista. His business has grown so fast that Rimac simply hasn’t had time to get his own hypercar on sale until now.
The optics of the Bugatti-Rimac merger may seem odd at first, but the logic is indisputable. A new generation of electric Bugattis needs a transcendent level of performance, but Volkswagen has lost the will to fund it. Big car companies can spend like the US military. Analysts estimate that VW has invested at least approx. $3.2 billion in Bugatti since it took control in 1998 and lost around $6.86 million on every Veyron sold. It spent about $575 million creating the Chiron from the bones of the Veyron, and sources close to the deal say VW expected to spend the same again electrifying this 16-year-old platform.
Rimac is said to have offered to develop an all-new Chiron successor for around $330 million. Rather than write a check for that sum, VW proposed a merger. No cash is believed to have changed hands. The new Bugatti-Rimac will be 55 per cent owned by the Rimac Group and 45 per cent by Porsche, on behalf of Volkswagen. For now, the two brands will continue to be designed and built separately: Bugattis in Molsheim, France, and Rimacs from 2023 at its new campus headquarters near Zagreb.
The Rimac campus, set to be completed in 2023 outside the Croatian capital of Zagreb, will be the company’s global headquarters. Rimac Automobili
Rimac is putting only his hypercar-making business into the new joint venture. His fast-growing operation supplying high-performance EV power trains and other equipment to the global carmakers is a separate business: Rimac Technology, solely owned by Rimac Group. Only 150 Neveras will be made, and Bugatti currently builds fewer than 100 cars each year. Even when the combined Bugatti-Rimac is at full production, the venture will account for only 15 to 20 per cent of Rimac Group turnover. Rimac Technology will make up the rest, and it’s about to grow rapidly. It has contracts in place to supply major premium carmakers with components and complete power trains for the high-performance variants of their pure-electric models. With volumes of up to 100,000 each year, it’s a huge leap in scale for Rimac. Your next car might not be a Nevera, but there’s a chance it will have Rimac tech on board.
Rimac remains the largest shareholder in the Rimac Group, with a 37 per cent stake. The latest funding round is believed to value the group in the mid-single-digit billions, giving him a nominal net worth of around $2.7 billion. In addition to Porsche AG’s 45 per cent stake in Bugatti-Rimac, Porsche’s venture-capital arm owns 24 per cent of Rimac Group, giving Porsche indirect majority ownership of Bugatti-Rimac. But Porsche is clear that there is no combination of voting rights, no de facto or de jure control, and that having Rimac as CEO of all three companies is one of the reasons it wanted the deal. “As a shareholder we want a real entrepreneur as CEO,” Blume says. “It is our clear strategy to pass operational control to Mate.”
The new Rimac Nevera assembly line in Croatia, where Rimac Group is based. Rimac Automobili
Perhaps most strikingly, the deal means that despite that storied history, a 10-figure investment by VW over 23 years of ownership and hundreds of Veyrons and Chirons delivered, Bugatti is valued at less than Rimac’s Nevera-making operation alone, which is only just beginning to deliver customer cars. The reason is simple: Bugatti is almost worthless without the ultrahigh-performance electric power train it will need in the EV age.
Volkswagen doesn’t want to make the investment required to develop one. Rimac has one already. Without it, VW was seriously considering putting the Bugatti brand into cold storage.
Even by the hyper-compressed standards of the young entrepreneurs remaking the modern world, this has been a wild few months for Mate Rimac. First the launch of the Nevera in June, then the Bugatti announcement in early July and, later that same month, marriage to his childhood sweetheart. Then a tour of the US, starting in Los Angeles and Pebble Beach in August, to meet not only customers for his approx. $3.29 million Nevera but also Bugatti’s established clientele, who might be a little wary of both the brand’s transition to electric propulsion and its youthful new boss. Next he headed back to Zagreb to complete the transfer of power from Bugatti’s current CEO, the urbane Stephan Winkelmann, who also heads Lamborghini. Then he’ll continue the process of creating a successor for the Chiron.
“This year, just as you say, it’s like everything is coming together. It’s just f—— insane for me,” he tells me from New York. I’ve spoken with him several times over the past, mad few months: first spending a relaxed couple of days with him on the bleak but beautiful Croatian island of Pag, where he launched the Nevera, and later on that conference call. He looks tired now, after his fierce travel schedule. But he is typically generous with his time, disarmingly honest, asking questions as well as answering them, and generally personable, approachable, funny and human: atypical, perhaps, for a tech entrepreneur.
Every cent of that $2.7 billion net worth is self-made. Rimac was born in Bosnia to an ethnically Croatian family of migrant construction workers, a tradition of exodus accelerated by the vicious conflict that raged as Yugoslavia disintegrated. Rimac moved to Germany at age 2 and then to an independent Croatia in his early teens, where he was teased for his hick Bosnian accent. But his talent for electronic engineering was spotted and encouraged by a teacher, and by age 18 he had registered a couple of patents and won a national prize for an early example of wearable tech: a “glove” that recognized hand gestures and could be used instead of a mouse. It’s still on display in a cabinet at Rimac’s HQ.
Rimac liked cars as much as gadgets and bought a battered BMW 3 Series, as it was the cheapest way to get a rear-wheel-drive car that he could race and drift. His best friend, Goran, inadvertently gave a multibillion-dollar business its start when he blew the BMW’s engine, prompting its 20-year-old owner to combine his two passions and replace the gas engine with an electric motor. It worked okay but not well enough for Rimac, who pulled it out again and tinkered with it, beginning a constant process of obsessive iterative improvement over 13 years, which he admits drives him and his staff crazy but has now resulted in his owning the best high-performance EV propulsion tech in the world. And most of Bugatti.
I ask him to define what makes Rimac stand apart—what has brought so many established carmakers to Croatia in search of a way to make a fast EV quickly?
“Look at the Nevera,” he says. “Almost everything in it was developed internally. This is what makes us different. There is no other car company that has developed so many things in a car by themselves. And the second thing is execution. There are many other start-ups working on their cars. Many of them have existed longer than us, and all of them have more funding than us. But we are the first after Tesla who finished the car and started production. Execution is everything.
“And we do it for a fraction of the cost of others. It’s not because Croatian salaries are lower. It’s because we do things very differently from the other carmakers. And lastly, of course, it’s performance. There’s nobody even close to us.”
The Rimac Nevera monocoque, the biggest and stiffest single piece of carbon fibre in the automotive industry. Rimac Automobili
This is demonstrably true. In August a Nevera was independently tested at the Famoso dragstrip in California. The Bugatti Chiron Sport held the previous world production-car acceleration record, covering the quarter-mile in 9.4 seconds. The 1427kW Nevera ate up Famoso’s sticky tarmac in just 8.582 seconds at a terminal velocity of 268km/h. That 0.8 second difference is a lifetime in these matters: Now combustion engines will never catch up. The Tesla Model S Plaid faced off against the Nevera in three races a few days later and, though it also beat the Chiron’s time, as promised, with a top time of 9.272 seconds, it was a long way behind the Nevera.
The Nevera’s stellar price automatically puts it in the beyond-premium segment of the car market, and while it’s surprisingly comfortable and practical for something with such terrifying performance, it was never intended to be a luxury good. Bugatti is different, though, and this young, egalitarian, unpretentious electronic engineer is now in control of one of the world’s great luxury brands. The glamour of running a marque like Bugatti and delivering a luxury customer experience doesn’t seem to drive him; the question of whether he has plans to reinvent super-premium motoring as comprehensively as he has reinvented electric performance cars remains.
“For me, it’s more about cars and ecology,” he says. “For the Nevera, luxury was not really a concern: It’s more about tech and performance. Luxury is much more important to Bugatti. That’s why I think the two brands can coexist. Over the last 20 years, no other car had Bugatti’s performance. That’s what made them special. Then came craftsmanship, quality and details, but number one was performance. But now performance is increasingly commoditized. You have a five-seat sedan like the Model S being faster-accelerating than pretty much anything else on the road. So what puts you at the top of the pyramid in the future? Is it really just performance?
“Of course we’ll still do hypercars for Bugatti. We are working on a Chiron successor. But looking at Bugattis of the past, there haven’t been only sports cars. When performance alone is no longer the top selling point, what puts you at the pinnacle? Is it still a two-seat, rear-engine hypercar? Or might there be something else? There’s an opportunity for Bugatti in the future to have very interesting cars that are completely different to other models on the market, while Rimac remains a maker of very high-performance sports cars. But we haven’t figured that out ourselves yet.”
The details haven’t been officially confirmed, but there will be two all-new Bugattis engineered by Rimac before 2030. The first will be a 1491kW, two-seat hybrid hypercar, due around 2025. The Chiron’s 8.0-litre W-16 engine shorn of its four turbos will make half of that power and a Rimac electric-drive system the rest. Next comes a pure EV by 2030. From his hints, we may reasonably expect a four-door grand coupe to differentiate it from future Rimacs and to continue where Bugatti’s fabulous but ill-fated Royale of the 1930s left off.
Rimac will be involved in every aspect of their design. While his fellow Croat Adriano Mudri heads the company’s design department and Rimac’s specific expertise is in electric power trains, he obsesses over every aspect of his car’s design in the broadest sense.
The hypercar’s 4-motor drivetrain and 120 kwh battery pack. Rimac Automobili
“With a car, everything is important,” he says. “I define every little detail. The company is still very dependent on me for that, but I don’t think that’s good. I think that’s a personal failure.”
It’s clearly the cars, their design and engineering, and the environment that enthuse him. And given the tiny volumes in which his own cars will be made, his attention may begin to turn to some unexpected new projects where the ecological benefit is greater.
“I love hypercars. I love doing this stuff,” he says. “But in reality, it has a low impact on society. Electrification is an important step, but on its own it’s not going to save the world. I believe there are much bigger levers. In automotive terms, the big impact comes from new mobility, and we want to be a significant part of it. It doesn’t mean that we will stop doing what we are doing now, but for the last few years we’ve been working on a robot taxi service and the whole ecosystem around it. I don’t want to say too much about it. I’d rather do it and then show it. But you’ll see it early next year.”
His fellow supercar auteurs may be glad to see Rimac’s intellect and energy distracted by more pedestrian projects, though at this level there’s little conventional rivalry: Many of their customers can simply buy every model that interests them, and the marques are as likely to collaborate as compete. “It has been amazing to follow and support Mate’s rise,” says Christian von Koenigsegg, whose Regera uses Rimac’s batteries. “He has stayed true to his calling since a young age. For sure it was a big bet for us to trust such a young company and founder as a supplier. Neither Mate nor myself are traditional engineers, as we don’t have academic engineering backgrounds, but are more self-taught. I even think this might be a prerequisite for what we do as we are less limited in our thinking, and by working together we showed the big boys there is a new era coming.
“Bugatti always prided itself on being a part of a large group,” he continues. “We at Koenigsegg have always taken pride in standing on our own two feet. Now Bugatti has been taken over by a similar company with a similar philosophy to us, so now the extreme-sports car producers are more stand-alone than before. That’s a big shift. It’s interesting how the world changes.”
The world might be moving Rimac’s way, but there’s still risk. Those big contracts and the Bugatti deal make funding easy now, but he has to scale up fast, delivering power trains in far higher volumes than before and to perfect, German premium-marque quality levels from job one. By his own admission, he also has to make the business less dependent on him and maintain the energy and agility of a start-up while acquiring the scope of a proper, grown-up business. As even Elon Musk can attest, that’s not easy.
From New York, Rimac tells me that he has been looking at the stock tickers in Times Square and thinking again about an IPO. He doesn’t want to do it until he is shipping Neveras, fulfilling those new bigger contracts, has built his $240 million campus headquarters near Zagreb for the 2,500 employees he will have by 2023 and has revenues in the approx. $822 million range, which will happen rather earlier.
He wonders if he made a mistake in not going public sooner. “This is my first job, you know?” he says. “I don’t know how many things I’m doing good, or how many things I’m doing very badly. I guess there must be both.” Given Rimac’s current valuation of around $8.23 billion, and potentially much more if the robotaxi bet comes in, his investors and the major carmakers seem to think he’s doing okay. Maybe he’ll wear shorts when he finally rings the Nasdaq opening bell.
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Forever Young
You’re born, you live, you get old—right? Well, not according to a growing legion of death-dodgers who are prepared to pay any price to reverse the ageing process.
It is, by any estimation, a meeting of strange bedfellows. Gathered here tonight, at the table of a centi-millionaire venture capitalist living in Venice, California, are Kim and Khloé Kardashian, Kris Jenner and the manfluencer-neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. And the reason this hybrid crew has assembled? Part evangelism, part investment drive, and mostly about discussing how to never, ever die.
The menu that evening—black lentils over drifts of veg with berry-strewn nut pudding—nodded to what the head of the table eats every single day, albeit in separate sittings and all before 11.00 am. Bryan Johnson, who sold Braintree Venmo to PayPal for US$800 million (around $1.2 billion) in 2013, now devotes his life and fortune to winding back his biological age. What he calls his “Don’t Die Dinners” manifest a trend in health and wellbeing where the vision of living to 120, 150 and beyond, has moved from anti-ageing scientists, elite athletes and tech eccentrics to a whole new level of celebrity.
“The two futurist topics everyone is obsessed with right now are artificial intelligence and living forever,” says neuroscientist and futurist Joel Pearson. “Interest in longevity has exploded over the last eight months and that’s because of Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die campaign.”
In March, when doctors injected 300 million young Swedish bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) into Johnson’s knees, hips and shoulders, it was in a clinic in the Bahamian resort owned by Justin Timberlake and Tiger Woods. The 47-year-old—that’s in chronological years; his heart has the biological age of 37—consumes 32 kg of vegetables monthly and more than 100 pills a day, hits bed strictly at 8.30 pm and will repeat the MSC therapy next year so his joints match his already youthful bone mineral density. Other biomarkers show he has the cardiovascular fitness, muscle mass and nighttime erections of a fit 18-year-old. Johnson’s waking hours are devoted to a regimen of therapies and exercises continually recalibrated by a team of more than 30 doctors, with one goal: to slow down the ageing process. Or as Johnson is fond of saying: “Is death no longer inevitable?”
One of Johnson’s July dinner guests, the charismatic Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, has helped propel this notion of extreme longevity. Huberman Lab is Apple Podcasts’ most popular health and fitness show, and the 16th most popular podcast across all categories. His self-optimisation ethos appeals to the acolytes of the show’s manly backer, former UFC fighter Joe Rogan.
“It’s that bro science,” says Pearson, who heads the Future Minds Lab at UNSW and himself adheres to a routine of saunas, kava and red-light therapy to improve sleep. “It’s the young guys in the gym with the ice baths and the hormones and the hunting.” (Because testosterone declines in men starting from their 30s, attempting to boost the hormone through abstinence has become an ideology of a particularly butch patch of anti-agers; getting good-quality protein by shooting your own is another.)
DJ Steve Aoki (46, but biologically 33) has equipped his Las Vegas home with ice plunge tubs, saunas, pulsed electromagnetic field mats, a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and a tea bar . He has “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” tattooed across his neck and says he’s signed up for “the full-body freeze”—the cryopreservation of his body for future revival.
While US-based futurist Dr Divya Chander says this euphoria around stretching longevity has not extended to women—“I think they still feel limited by their biology”—Hailey Bieber has shown that the gender divide might be shifting. On an episode of The Kardashians, the 27-year-old model (biological age unknown) underwent an intravenous infusion of NAD with her friend Kendall Jenner. NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) is a compound in the body that supports cellular process. “I’m going to NAD for the rest of my life and I’m never going to age,” Bieber said on the show. She was visibly joking yet Jennifer Aniston, 55, told the Wall Street Journal last year that she’s also used NAD+ IV drips, and Kourtney Kardashian, 45, calls her liquid form of NAD “the genetic key to longevity”.
The Sydney-based founders of UAre, an app designed to increase longevity, say that in the early years of testing, men and women responded differently to the product. “The conversation with men was more about winning,” says co-founder Marc Pasques. “‘I extended my lifespan by a year by doing more exercise’, or ‘I extended it by two’. Women talked about hanging out with grandkids.” But he goes on to admit that gap in motivation is closing.
Are has just opened a $1 million seed round and forecasts $10 million in revenue in 2025 and $30 million in 2026. There’s money to be made in extending youth, if not eternal life. Bryan Johnson sells Blueprint basics for US$333 (around $495) a month. The Harvard biologist and author of Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To, David Sinclair (chronologically 55; biologically 42), who controversially advocates for resveratrol—a plant compound found in red wine and grapes—as an anti-aging drug and who says there are no limits to how long we can live, has co-patented a skincare line with Caudalie.
Professional services giant PwC argues that the oft-used estimate of the global market value of longevity therapeutics at around $65 billion by 2030 does not take into account the potential for these to replace conventional therapeutics in healthcare. Australia’s first medical facility to offer personalised longevity programs, Longevity Medicine Institute, opened in Sydney’s Double Bay in July. “People are coordinating their aesthetic care with longevity doctors,” says New York-based celebrity cosmetic dermatologist Dr Paul Jarrod Frank, whose clients include Madonna. “They’re using supplements like NAD, newer peptides and various manipulative efforts to try and look younger and live longer.”
Similarly Don Saladino, the personal trainer who’s shaped up Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, emphasises age-extending practices in his star clients’ programs as strongly as any aesthetic goals. As Ryan Reynolds readied himself to assume a “tight-as-hell” costume for this year’s Marvel movie Deadpool & Wolverine, Saladino coached the 47-year-old through better sleep practices, walking and increasing dietary fibre. He reframes strength training as not just body-sculpting but as creating “body armour” for later life, to prevent the falls so catastrophic for the elderly.
And Chris Hemsworth, who plays another Marvel superhero Thor, included efforts to stave off the onset of dementia through meditation and exercise alongside Arctic ice plunges in his bid to increase longevity in the TV series Limitless.
The man who was Australia’s deputy chief medical officer during the Covid-19 pandemic questions the lure of many supplements and longevity interventions. As host of the 9Network’s Do you Want To Live Forever series, Dr Nick Coatsworth visits Okinawa, a “blue zone” where an astonishing number of inhabitants live past 100 in good health. There he watches some local elderly dance to hip-hop. “All that biohacking people do, it’s just a waste of time,” he says. “To live longer, you have to spend time with good friends, keep moving and have a good diet.”
Joel Pearson, who stopped taking resveratrol and NMN supplements years ago after research showed mixed results, agrees. “If there’s compelling evidence showing frequent sauna users can get a 40 per cent drop in all-cause mortality, then why would you spend time worrying about a molecule that has very small effect?”
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Only The Good Die Young
In a future of floating
billionaire summits,
do we really want to
live forever?
Two thousand tech moguls, shamans, CEOs and DJs packed together on a cruise ship for what organisers call “invitation only, one of a kind experiences where super humans make magic”. What could go wrong? That’s the pitch for Summit at Sea, an event billed as a “floating Davos” for millennial technocrats, staged in international waters off Miami. But even if the marketing lingo sometimes threatens to sink under its own weight (“Wherever your gravitational force takes you, our constellation offers wonder”), Summit at Sea captures something about the zeitgeist of what billionaires are looking for now.
They want woo-woo; they want to microdose mushrooms, ketamine and LSD (as championed by the likes of Sergey Brin and Elon Musk), and they most certainly don’t want to die. This issue is about those issues. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel are among the squillionaires bankrolling longevity initiatives— presumably to live long enough to be able to spend all their money. But as Alison Boleyn reports in her first story for Robb Report, even those outre efforts—Thiel is said to receive blood transfusions from people under 25—pale when compared to Bryan Johnson, who reportedly spends $2 million a year on anti- ageing methods. For those of us who can’t afford eternal life, however, the good news is the world is still full of earthly delights.
Take the healthful effects of the Greek island of Tinos or driving the new Rolls-Royce around Ibiza, for example. We also check into an integrated wellness clinic in Thailand and a luxury resort in Spain that focuses on gut health—miso soup and a side of algae, anyone?—and luxuriate in Guerlain’s stunning new day spa outside of Athens. And we spend time with Rory Warnock, a breathwork practitioner and ultra-marathon runner whose tips for curing anxiety and promoting wellbeing are being sought by everyone from CEOs and Olympians to companies like Google and Bupa. And like us, he’s also partial to a well-made negroni. Oh, waiter? Maybe we’ll let the ship sail without us.
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Breathing New Life
Ancient cultures have used it for thousands of years to cure anxiety and promote wellbeing; now everyone from CEOs to Olympians are discovering the health benefits of breathwork.
Rory Warnock is not your typical new-age guy. When we meet him, he’s sipping a negroni overlooking the ocean at Casa Amor in Saint-Tropez, dressed in an open-neck shirt, expensive sunglasses and a jaunty Hermès silk scarf tied around his neck; no kombucha teas or healing-crystal necklaces here. His relaxed posture is a far cry from 10 days ago when he was preparing to run a 200 km marathon through the Tian Shan mountain range in remotest Kyrgyzstan. “I carried everything I’d need for six days in the mountains. My pack weighed 10.8 kg on day one, excluding water. And I surprisingly ended up coming third,” he says.
According to Warnock, this staggering feat of endurance was mainly down to one thing: breathwork.
Proclaimed as an all-natural wonder drug by an ever-growing chorus of scientists, doctors and fitness enthusiasts, breathwork describes the act of inhaling and exhaling in a way that brings an overwhelming, sometimes euphoric, sense of calm and balance to your body. Though it dates back thousands of years—evidence has been found to suggest the practice was adpoted in ancient India, and shamanic cultures in South America, Africa and Australia—modern-day breathwork broadly falls into two different categories.
The first is the mindful breathing that forms an essential part of yoga and meditation: alternate nostril breathing, or box breathing, are taught as simple physiological tools to downregulate the nervous system and move the brain from fight or flight mode. It’s believed these simple methods re-tune brain chemistry, by reducing the amount of noradrenaline to the organ—akin to popping Valium or taking a perfectly safe mini-tranquiliser.
The second is holotropic breathing, which is deep, transformative breathwork. Devotees says it’s more like taking a mushroom trip. Pioneered by Dr Stanislav Grof in the ’70s, it invloves laying on your back in the dark and following a sequence of breathing patterns as you’re guided by a trained facilitator—and is often set to music. It’s claimed that this more intensive work can yield powerful results by connecting to the subconscious, releasing accumulated trauma and accessing inner wisdom.
Nine years ago, Scottish-born Warnock took a risk. He traded working for a successful packaged goods company in London for a career as a breathwork coach in Sydney—long before his passion was an internet buzzword. The move, however, was not necessarily driven by financial motives. “I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression at a pretty young age, like 21 or 22 years,” he says, taking another sip of his negroni. “I was pretty much crying myself to sleep for about three years and I didn’t really understand what was going on.”
Dissatisfied with being prescribed “a little white pill” by his doctor and given a “pat on the back”, Warnock began to look for new ways to heal his condition. “I tried to do everything I could to improve myself in a more holistic way and so I got into running,” he says. “I changed my lifestyle.”
And more significantly, he discovered breathwork, giving him a new mission in life. “When I first heard about it, I thought ‘breathwork’, that sounds a bit ridiculous. Someone is going to tell me how to breathe in a certain way and it is going to change how I think and feel and ultimately perform day-to-day? But I went along to one session and that one hour changed the direction of my whole life. I was hooked on the feeling. I was hooked on the immediate effects, hooked on feeling joyful, happy, strong, empowered.”
In person, Rory’s enthusiasm is infectious, but his testimonials are, increasingly, backed up by science. A 2014 study by the Stanford Research Unit found breathing exercises to be effective for treating PTSD in combat veterans; and by 2016, US Navy seals started using breathwork to achieve calm and focus before battle. British neuroscientist Professor Ian Robertson calls it the “the most precise pharmaceutical you could ever give yourself, side-effect free”, while some researchers claim breathing exercises are an effective, low-cost treatment for PTSD, bi-polar, insomnia, and can even help combat grief.
The general public are buying into the movement, too; according to a report by the Global Wellness Institute, breathwork has experienced a 400 percent uptick in popularity since 2019. And, unsurprisingly, billionaire technology titans, who are always looking for the next big health panacea, are buying in. “It’s all very steeped in Silicon Valley tech culture,” said Jag Gill, a New York-based banker turned tech CEO in a recent interview with The Washington Post.
Dr Smita Dsilva is an ayurvedic doctor (ayurveda being an ancient Indian alternative medicine) at the RAKxa Integrative Wellness in Bangkok, Thailand, a clinic that received celebrity patronage in July when supermodel Kate Moss passed through. “Breathing exercises have been used for centuries as a powerful tool to manage stress and anxiety, increase focus, and improve overall wellbeing. In the high-pressure business world, this is a simple yet effective practice, she says. “Giving attention to the breath promotes the purification of both the mind and body, while also raising the energy. It also frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts that promote anxiety… regular practice can release up to 80 percent of the body’s toxins through the breath.”
And breathwork is not just an elixir for various negative mood states. According to Dsilva, the practise can also help with aesthetic issues: “Kapalbhati pranayama is a specific breathing technique in yoga that involves forceful exhalations and passive inhalations, engaging the abdominal muscles throughout the practice. The vigorous breathing and abdominal contractions help reduce bloating and support the removal of toxins, potentially leading to reduced belly bloating and weight loss.”
These findings will not be news to the clients who flock to Rory Warnock’s breathwork school in Sydney’s Bondi suburb. Or to the Olympic athletes, AFL players and CEOs who are huffing and puffing his studio door down on a regular basis. Most likely due to his soft Scottish accent and self-effacing manner, Rory has been adpoted by a raft of high-calibre companies, including Google, Amazon, BUPA and Energy Australia, eagre to learn how mindful breathing can bring better productivity to the workplace. He’s an ambassador for Apple and Lululemon, and has evolved into a seasoned conference speaker. Warnock’s brave career-change gamble has clearly paid off.
When he’s not teaching the world’s movers and shakers how to harness the power of something that we all do around 20,000 times a day without even thinking, Rory has gotten into the habit of bookending his year with long-distance races; for him, breathwork and ultra-marathon running are intimately linked. But he insists that mental issues can be addressed on a more prosaic level.
“You don’t have to go for a 45-minute yoga class or a run,” he insists. “You can just do a few minutes or even a few seconds of breathwork and you can move from a low state, to a better mood state. And it is exactly the same with anxiety; if you are feeling stressed and overwhelmed, there are breathing exercises you can do in real time to shift how you feel.” Negronis are allowed, too.
Rory Wornock, discover Rory Wornock’s breath lessons on Spotify.
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The Bird Man
Neil Perry returns to the Cantonese coop
with a sensational new Sydney eatery.
When Neil Perry was casing a potential venue for a new restaurant, a heritage-listed, modernist masterpiece in Double Bay designed by the architect and former Woollahra mayor Neville Gruzman, it reminded the celebrated chef of a birdcage. The image of the columbary building, all windows and dramatic vertical panels, captivated him. A year later, it has inspired the opening of Sydney’s most hotly anticipated new restaurant, Song Bird.
The three-level, 230-seater joins Perry’s other joints in the swank block —the award-winning seafood restaurant Margaret, the adjacent bar Next Door and the Baker Bleu bakery two doors up. It also marks a return to Cantonese fare for Perry, who made his name partly on the success of renowned Sydney eateries Wokpool and Spice Temple, and a welcome coming home for quality Chinese in the area.
“Bizarrely, there were two really great Chinese restaurants in Double Bay,” Perry recalls. “The Imperial Peking, just upstairs from where Scanlan Theodore is now, was terrific, and the nearby Cleveland was probably the best Chinese restaurant in Sydney in the early ’90s. That’s what I’m aspiring to.” What made these two erstwhile locations so good, Perry adds, was that they didn’t overreach: “Just beautiful Chinese food and great service. That’s the secret sauce.” It won’t be all Spencer Gulf king prawn dumplings, Peking duck, and steamed ginger and shallot coral trout. Rebel-rousing is also on the menu. Downstairs, in the old Pelicano space, will house Bobbie’s, a speakeasy in conjunction with Linden Pride and Nathalie Hudson of New York’s renowned Caffe Dante, named after Pride’s grandfather, the legendary Australian broadcaster Bob Rogers.
The good times will also be rolling on September 17, when Robb Report takes over Song Bird to serenade Perry, our Culinary Master of the Year. When it came time to select the year’s standout gastronomic talent, the choice was easy. Ditto the avian-esque venue. As such, be sure to pick up our next issue for a special section devoted to Culinary Masters. It’s bound to make gourmands chirp with delight.
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Shooting Star
As her four-decade retrospective embarks on a national tour, convention-challenging Australian photographer Anne Zahalka is looking backwards to move forward.
Anne Zahalka’s office is a museum-worthy cabinet of curiosities. Located on the first floor of the photographer’s terrace in Sydney’s inner city, next to a room that serves as a makeshift studio, it is replete with the standard ephemera and clutter of an artist’s lair. On the wall in front of her desk hangs a portrait (taken by Zahalka’s aunt, a fellow photographer) of her mother as a young woman and a shelf filled with CDs, floppy disks and other outdated technology; on another, mounted shelves heave under the weight of 40 years of project folders.
“Maybe it’s because I’m getting older,” Zahalka, now 68, says over tea while flicking through the pages of documentation from her first show in 1981, “but I’m feeling increasingly nostalgic, and these folders are invaluable. Being able to go back to the year the works were made and looking at the documentation and research is beyond helpful. I turn to them all the time.” Behind Zahalka’s desk, a bookshelf teems with magazines and publications she has been featured in and go-to reference books on everything from trompe l’oeil to Goya and portraiture.
The curated miscellany is not only an invaluable source of daily inspiration, but as a maquette on top of a filing cabinet suggests, it is also a focal point of a new exhibition. Running through October 19 at Sydney’s National Arts School (NAS) before a national tour, Zahalkaworld—An Artist’s Archive is the most comprehensive survey of the photographer’s work since she emerged in the early 1980s and bloomed into one of Australia’s most thought-provoking artists. At the heart of the exhibition is Kunstkammer, a life-size immersive recreation of Zahalka’s office—albeit a bit tidier than in reality. “It’s the centrepiece of the show,” says the softly spoken artist. “I like to be generous about how my work is made and the thinking behind it. People don’t get to see that often, and this is an opportunity to open that up and share where I have lived and worked.”
Staged over the two floors of the NAS Gallery, Zahalkaworld, which debuted at the Museum of Australian Photography in 2023, presents more than 100 original prints from 15 series over the years, and assorted curios and collectibles from her office and studio. Her initial reworkings of Old Master and Early Australian paintings presaged a fondness for collage and photomontage, working with found historical images to tell new stories about underrepresented members of society. In one of her most famous works, The Bathers (1989), a recreation of Charles Meere’s Australian Beach Pattern (1940), she recasts the all-white original with a diverse cast of characters she encountered in the late ’80s after returning to Australia from a Berlin residency. “I’m interested in how we are represented and in our national image,” she says. “My work often tries to decode and untangle that and come up with other figures not represented in the culture.”
The exhibition marks a poignant homecoming of sorts for Zahalka, having studied at the NAS in the late ’70s before returning a few years later to teach photo-media. Sharing pride of place alongside six of her works from the gallery’s collection are five recent works that deal with natural history and incorporate images of old museum dioramas in her sharp, often humorous criticisms of tourism and other environmental interferences wreaking havoc on the planet. Cast aways (2024) is set against the background of a 1939 diorama of Lord Howe Island at the Australian Museum. But in Zahalka’s reworking, pioneering conservationists (lifted from another painting) examine plastic pollution while planes fly overhead, and contrails replace clouds.
Something is comforting, she adds, about recreating and reimagining these historical scenarios, even if it is to comment on the consequences of ocean pollution. As for revisiting her past, what has looking in the rearview mirror revealed about herself and her work? “Some things, like making these disruptions on history to speak about the current place we’re in, have remained the same,” she says. “But if this whole process of preparing for the show has taught me anything, it’s that there are a lot of parts to me.” The studio may be messy, but nostalgia has never looked so fresh.
Visit NAS Gallery for all ZAHALKAWORLD showing until 19 October.
Top image: Anne ZAHALKA, The Artist (self portrait) 1988, taken from the series Resemblance II. Silver dye bleach print, 50.0 x 50.0 cm. Image supplied courtesy of the artist, represented by ARC ONE Gallery (Melbourne) and Dominik Mersch Gallery (Sydney).
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