Take me back into the past, to the moment when the love affair between you and Lego began. Loading I got my first ever Lego set for my third birthday, from my grandmother. It was a little blue boat. Lego people – the little minifigs – didn’t even exist back then, it was a very long time ago. It stayed with me up until I was about 12 or 13: then it stopped, then sport took over, footy and cricket and cycling. I never played with Lego again until my 30s, when my kids came along. I’ve got twin boys and once they came along, Mum had kept all my Lego from when I was a kid, she said: “You better have all your junk back.” And that included my Lego, and I was like wow, I remember this, and I got back into it that way. So I had a very long period without it; started young and had a bit of a break in the middle. You have an official title in the Lego world. Yeah, Lego Certified Professional – that’s on the business card. But people call me whatever they want, I don’t really mind. There’s 14 of us in the world that hold that title, so I’m very fortunate in that regard.

How does one become a Lego Certified Professional? All 14 of us are very different, and we all do different things with Lego bricks. We all push the limits of Lego in different ways. You can’t go to Lego uni and get a degree in Lego-ology. Me, for example, about 10 or so years ago, Lego had this really cool thing in schools called Mindstorms, which was teaching kids about robotics. It was brand new but it was really hard to use; you had to be a Danish mathematician to figure it out, it was almost impossible. Apple had just released the iPad, and I used to be in IT, so what I did was I wrote a piece of software that allowed kids to control this robotics system using the iPad. So I got two letters from Lego: one letter saying this is awesome, we love what you’re doing, let’s do some stuff together; and another letter which was a cease-and-desist for breaking into their software and trying to change things. I had to tell them to talk to each other. It’s one way to get attention. So you’re at the cutting edge of Lego technology. It’s funny … Lego’s developed a lot since I did that; they’ve taken what I did and amplified it 5000 times over with many more clever people than me. But what I like to do nowadays is really push the physical limits of what the brick is capable of doing and that means doing big, stupid, crazy things with Lego bricks. Things that not even Lego knew that it was capable of doing. So my charter over the past 10 years has been to do things that people don’t expect with Lego bricks.

What’s an example of something that people don’t expect that you’ve done? Well, a life-size car out of Lego bricks. Weighs more than a real car. Things like, we built a 10-metre-high Christmas tree, the one that was in Fed Square a couple of years back – you’ve got to use cranes and big machinery and that kind of stuff. You don’t think about Lego in that kind of mindset, so it’s my job to inspire people to go wow, Lego can do that? Imagine what I could do at home. You’ve pushed the limits of Lego to such an extent – when you go on the show can the contestants still impress you? Definitely is the short answer. The long answer is: the trick about Lego Masters is that six Lego bricks – plain two-by-four Lego bricks – can go together 900 million different ways. So when we give the contestants a couple of million Lego bricks, there’s not a supercomputer on Earth that can work out the permutations. Every single build is unique in its own way. So watching the creative process of these amazing people is inspiring for me.