Episode #1: Damian Taggart of Meow Wolf — Creative Flow through Yoga

Welcome to my podcast, Beautifully Broken, where we interview creative people, founders, artists, or engineers about their meditation practices and how those practices help them reliably reach a state of creative flow. Today I interviewed Damian Taggart, who is chief Business development Officer at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe.

So I originally started working for Meow Wolf. Let's see, it was like maybe 2014. I came on as a contractor. Originally. I owned a business called Mindshare Labs that got hired to do a bunch of web work for Meow Wolf. Prior to that, I had done some other projects with Vince and had become connected to him through like, the mayor's campaign and a couple other smaller projects that he was working on kind of independently before Meow Wolf really sort of took off as a business. And then. And then, let's see, like early on, Meow Wolf said, hey, it looks like we're gonna have a significant chunk of work that we want to take through your company. Would you be willing to come on as like kind of in kind investor? And this was like, you know, before the building, the bowling alley was secured and everything. But I was like, really jazzed on it and said, sure, let's figure out what that looks like.

So it was right around the time that Meow Wolf was shifting from an art collective, only an art collective, to an art collective and a business, essentially.

Totally. It was like right before the original LLC was formed, I guess, and after the Kickstarter. Before the Kickstarter, yeah. So then, yeah, like, I don't know, fast forward a couple years and I just had been kind of increasingly pulled into Meow Wolf. Just like more and more of my time was focused on Meow Wolf. And. And then maybe two years ago, I came on part time and so I was splitting my time between that and my old company also, at the same time kind of grooming one of my employees to kind of take over the business. And then I ended up selling that business to him. So he's taken over my old company and is running it. And I came on full time with Meow Wolf. So it just kind of made a transition, which was really healthy for me. It was like having been in that business for like almost 11 years and like having built it myself, like, I was just so deep in it and I couldn't really. I had sort of hit a limit of growth, I think, in this small town for that company and. But didn't see any other real path. And like, also, yeah, like, I think I just had been kind of had an unhealthy relationship to work For a long time where I was just like putting in ridiculous amount of hours and you know, sacrificing like my personal well being for this like vision of what I wanted to turn the company into and stuff. So I don't know. So it was good for me. I got to a point where like, I recognized that being no longer sustainable and like shifted. And that was like actually before I joined Meow Wolf, but. But then just having the total change of pace and change of direction that Miyao Wolf presented was really great for me.