DO YOUR BEST WORK: Lessons from Pixar on Creativity, Leadership & Why Story Is King | Ed Catmull

[Music] there was something about that unique combination of people that came together how do you harness that energy that desire of your own people to do

something good wherever you are I think that's when the best stuff happens today I'm joined by Ed kmall as co-founder of Pixar and later as

president of Walt Disney Animation Studios Ed played an absolutely key role in shaping that company's unique culture of colle collaboration which has gone on

to become the gold standard for Creative workplaces worldwide if you've ever been captivated by a Pixar film I'm sure you have Wall-E is my

favorite wall well you got Ed to thank for that he is a mastermind of innovation he's a Pioneer in both technology and storytelling and the

absolute OG when it comes to creative leadership it was quite the honor to engage him on the creative principles the management principles that fueled

Pixar success we talk about the insights that literally changed workplace practices all across the world to better foster creativity and continuous

learning and how embracing failure creates this beautiful path to growth Ed also shares incredible stories from his fascinating life as well as from his

close relationship with both George Lucas and Steve Jobs now 78 Ed is a profound thinker and this conversation

is action-packed with invaluable lessons on Innovation on leadership and also on the magic and meaning of living a good life you're in for a treat so off we go

this is me and Ed [Music] katal I'm extremely proud to introduce

you to our newest brand partner on check out their lineup of super comfortable sleek and durable pieces for for yourself at

[Music] on.com it is a real uh thrill to meet you and it's an honor to have you here today to you know share your experience

and and and your wisdom everything that's in this book creativity Inc which is just a wonderful mustre for anybody whether whether you're a business person or not because there's a lot of valuable

wisdom um for not just how to manage people and get the best out of them and operate uh you know a creative innovative business but it's really a primer for life and then reflecting on

your life um it's a it's a relatively unlikely story on some level I mean I know that as a young person you had this idea that you wanted to be the best in the world at something and I'd be

curious as to what prompted that in you but you are brought up on a steady diet of physics and engineering and these aren't the curriculums that one would

think would contribute to you know a leadership position or a position in the creative arts I think maybe it would be instructive to start a little bit at the

beginning and talk about how you got into all of this from the start as somebody who was immersed in science and had certain Heroes and had a vision for you know the life that you wanted to

live I I was very fortunate to have grown up in the 50s in Salt Lake City it was a safe environment a supportive environment and uh I did have this

feeling I wanted to be the best in the world of something I actually don't remember where they came from to be honest yeah I'm interested like what were your parents like where did that

come from uh uh my father was one of uh uh there were there were 14 children but only nine of whom survived to adulthood

wow on a on a farm in Idaho so so they were you know very poor um

he uh uh he was in the Marines in during World War II he was uh strict but he was a very nice man and he

was teaching high school as I was growing up I was teaching math and then later got his doctor's degree and became a principal honestly it was a great environment to grow up in when when I

left high school I'd originally wanted to be an animator um because my childhood Heroes were Walt Disney and uh obviously

influenced by him and uh but also Albert Einstein so like these are the I iconic figures of the time and what is the shared DNA between those two individuals

for you well the shared experience for me was these were people that were changing the world and uh they did it by creating something

new and I knew that Walt Disney had basically created a company when he made uh Snow White which is the first major animated film it wasn't the first

animated film there a couple that were done before that but um that one was the one that changed the way storytelling was done so

he was essentially figuring that out but in terms of knowing about him and reading about him and studying him I I could say okay this was a person who

figured out how to storytelling but then there was a series of films that were impactful for me as a as a child probably two most most impactful

films were Peter Pan and Pinocchio was it the storytelling was it the Art of Animation was it you trying to deconstruct how they actually created

these movies what about it captured your imagination this is what good storytelling does for children and I think it's very important to have

children have these uh their imaginations uh developed and challenged and pushed I that's what I experienced from those

films and I also experienced the childhood in which we played outside a lot you know parents read to kids so um there was some combination of all those

things which I thought were good for me when I was growing up I like that going forward it's like okay can I do something like that so you end up at University of Utah and this is where it

gets really interesting I think because it was a very specific moment in time at a very particular place in which a group

of IND individuals happen to congregate that end up going in their own unique ways to change the world and all kinds of ways like it was the birthplace of so

much like you were involved in arpa like this is the original version of the internet and on The Cutting Edge of you know what computers could possibly do in

animation yes but also in other disciplines and you were surrounded by a lot of kind of amazing young people at that time and also had some pretty

significant mentorship so talk a little bit about that magical period of time that that really provided the foundation for everything that followed when I was

there I did know the place that it was special I didn't know how special it was but I knew it was special uh it had been founded by Dave Evans and Ivan

southernland uh Ivan sou had actually been one of the leaders at uh arpa who was funding these kind of programs around the United States um and Alan Kay was

there uh who also had a profound influence on on computer science um and Alan Kay was one of my first teachers and he taught this

principle which actually seemed natural to me but it was that things are going to keep changing at a faster rate and it was like this is what's

likely to happen and uh and it actually stuck because I was making decisions throughout my life based upon the fact that the rate of change is going to

increase so that was one major influence the other one was that Ivan Southerland was the essentially the first person to really get computer Graphics going and

it was Harvard that he built the first head-mounted display for virtual reality and artificial reality but the key thing that that Ivan had was that you can have

a big Vision you don't know exactly what where where it's going or what it's going to get there but you can take some steps to get there so

everything at that program was taking step by step developments towards that big bigger vision and as you took those steps you were also modifying where you thought

you could go so our job is graduate students was to take the next step now other thing I will notice this just an observation of places that turn out a

significant number of impactful people is there is no real curriculum the people who are doing it are are figuring it out as they go and there's something which is like isn't

just educational working on problems it's actually really educational and you have to figure out what it is that you should be learning and Dave and Ivan set up the

program so that we were all helping each other and sharing in the ideas and we were the ones who were solving the

problems so by the time I graduated four years after entering um I had made my own contributions I had friends among these

people but I realized that I loved it there so when you when you were in school you you made your own animated film of your hand right and by

some accounts that was the first or one of the very first computer animated films correct yes now there was another student who a student who made a a movie

of his wife's face uhhuh we actually showed them together okay so you two together but basically if not the first like one of the very first ever computer

generated yes films you created that you had this ambition of creating a feature computer animated

film Pixar is sort of organized around that principle so a big part of the Pixar success

equation is is this idea of of developing Talent inhouse bringing in these people with potential nurturing them surrounding themselves with

surrounding them with really competent people and then on top of that establishing this culture of feedback

and um permissiveness in in which uh ideas could be shared and uh and and and done in a way in which it wasn't about

judgment or about you know the value or the selfworth of the the individual but really about the ideas themselves this notion of people over ideas and the

question is how do you get people to think that way and uh every time we made a film every time we made made a mistake

we would do some self assessment is okay what was working what wasn't working and what was the value and often realizing that our

assumptions that we made in the past actually were the wrong assumptions but because everybody was thinking this way then we could challenge ourselves

fairly early so an example of that would be that we did recognize the value Disney provided us for Toy Story So we had was an outside force that had a

vested interest in our success and they weren't sort of Lost in what we were doing and that was very

valuable and that lasted through the first few films was Tom schumach was the president and we respected him because

he was really very creative and he knew what we were doing and when he said something it was you know objective but objective as a person who understood

making films but we also realized that as our films started to become successful and he was going to move over to uh the theatrical in New York for making their

Broadway musicals that we were going to lose that outside force so uh Andrew Stanton brought this

up and uh uh which was that let's have a Brain Trust to serve that role for the other directors that were developing so this is an

idea we put it into play and originally had like six people in it now it turns out this thing called The Brain Trust actually did not serve the rool of an

outside the original intent of this did not succeed for which it was intend in the way it was intended but we found that when he did this that it was extremely good at

giving feedback to people and in helping them so at this point we sort of dropped the original thing for it the original idea and said okay let's develop this

group as a great feedback mechanism now we had a new question how do we have this group work what are the rules tools that make it work so then we're learning from each

film um because what you see sometimes is people do have EG that get in the way or they don't want to embarrass somebody or they don't want to embarrass

themselves like so these are not real human emotions that are in the way and and then we recognize also that if you're doing something new and you're

presenting it to people who are very good at what they're doing you can feel a little nervous about it or

vulnerable and so you have to recognize okay um if they're vulnerable then how do we actually understand that and appreciate it and not threaten that we

also learned if a person with a powerful Voice or which act actually power with actual power started the discussion started to talk that distorted the

room because then people would respond to what the powerful person say mhm and so what it meant was that the person with power needed to shut up for the

first 15 minutes and then enter the discussion because if they enter that's an entirely different thing than studying the tone I asked Steve Jobs to never come to one of the meetings uhuh

of course he's dying It's Curious like what's like he it's he wants to be there right the minute he walks in everybody's going to you know the sphincter tighten and everybody wants to make a good

impression on him it changes the dynamic completely and I would suspect even yourself at some point walking into these meetings tilts the scales in a

certain way well actually I don't because I'm I have a very different personality and uh I don't impose myself in the room and while it's fun to give a

note I've only made one note the in all these years that I was there that had an influence on the film but that says more about your unique kind of energy and sense of ability around these sorts of

things because for the most part in any other organization anytime a a boss or a leadership Authority enters one of these rooms it's going to have that kind of

negative impact it screws things up yeah so the boss has to realize their impact on the room and sometimes you just don't want to set the tone now the interesting

thing was with with Steve is that it wouldn't matter uh when he spoke even if he shut up for 10 minutes minutes um

when he did uh talk he's so powerful it would be overwhelming and he understood that so he didn't come to the meetings uh however because at this

point we're now a public company the films were shown to the board of directors and the board of directors is when he would give some notes and what

Steve would do the morning of any board of directors meeting meeting because we were shown the current film and then we'd have a a session where the board of

directors would talk with the director and the and the producer just to give some feedback in the morning Steve would call me and he would say these are very

short discussions he said Ed how's it going on the film and I would say it's going well great end of discussion or we

have a problem okay but I wouldn't tell him what to do because I never told Steve how to think

so if he knew there was a problem he would then come and he would uh start uh you know when he got to this part of the

discussion he'd start off by saying to the director you can ignore everything I'm going to say because I'm not a director and you guys know things that I

don't know so these just my my comments from seeing it he would then give some I would say very insightful notes about the film and he would

see now the interesting thing to me was that the directors would say that Steve had an insight about the films that nobody else had and they heard things

from him they'd never heard before except that I'm in all of these meetings I've heard everybody give all

their notes there was never ever anything that Steve said about a film that had not been said by somebody else before one of their colleagues right so

what it meant was that people that work together often also learn how to ignore each other that's a problem that's why

you need an outside force MH but Steve understood it and so for many years he was the outside force and he recognized

by this time his impact on people so sometimes because he was I would say became very empathetic after this 91 to 95 period if he s if he thought he had

too large of an impact he would take them for a walk to calm them down yeah that's a great level of self-awareness around your own power

yeah I just yeah I me he knew it yeah it's interesting there's a certain kind of interesting you know perhaps somewhat

ironic uh kind of veneer to this in that your original motivation into rethinking management and Leadership and and on

some level the impetus of the book was trying to figure out why great companies when they reach a certain level of scale suddenly no longer are great right for me it's a it's a fascinating thing

because I see it just happened in company after company is what is actually going on what are people thinking the one of the difficulties

that companies have is that because of underlying changes that take place and this in particular it's true with computer related companies but now it's

happening everywhere is there are fundamental changes that are taking place uh not only in the technology but

in its applications and now because of the use of uh more computers and and and cell phones and the whole we system of

of transfering information but also societal changes and environmental changes uh a lot of things are happening pretty rapidly and people have

difficulty conceive conceiving of what it means to change their business plan let alone other things they need to do in their lives but it's very hard for

them to conceive of it and Steve was unusual in that his focus on is was on what is the right thing to do when uh he

they were working on the uh the iPhone but when it was secret yeah so he went up to the secret lab to see it and

what he said was we're reaching the point where there isn't really any you know a lot more growth in the laptop

computers or including the uh the portable computers so we're going to need to have a different business model going forward now that in

itself is very unusual right so that's one thing that I found interesting just okay that sort of sets them apart from other people and the second one and this is

one that's uh difficult for people to see because they've got a pretty deep understanding of the Arc of Steve's life there's a reason for that

misunderstanding and that was he started off he had behaviors he had those those behaviors when I first knew him and he first acquired Pixar it was not easy to

work with when he was that way but he changed over time because his story is more like the hero's journey and know he

he's got his own kingdom which is Apple he's cast out for some reason and in this case it's a fairly

public humiliation and uh uh so he started next he bought Pixar and and frankly neither company

was working out very well so and in the case of next uh he made a brilliant software choice and Brilliant software decisions

uh some questionable Hardware design decisions and some poor business decisions but he's really smart he could

recognize them for what they were and he learned from them and I would say that in from the years around 91 to 95 there

was a dramatic change in Steve's life and after he went through that change the people who were with him stayed with him for the rest of his life

and what was the nature of that change was it a result of you know kind of the the excavation of the soul that came with getting cast out in in this hero's

journey or what did he do specifically that you're aware of that created a different growth trajectory for him for him the underlying thing Steve did

understand was that you have to find out what the truth is an adapt to it if something wasn't right he would switch uh so I could see that happening

so as as he was going through these things at both companies he was changing things now what started in

991 is 91 when was when he got married MH uh he had a son Reed um Pixar entered into a

relationship with Disney the contract to make Toy Story and U the whole industry went through this massive transformation from 91 to

95 which had big implications bigger than most people are aware of and 95 Pixar went public so Pixar going public

was the first actual real business success for Steve since he left Apple it was a real stroke of Genius also and and

to your point about his uncanny ability to cast his gaze into the future and understand how things would would play out the decision to IPO Pixar on the

cusp of releasing its very first movie seems rather uh and and must have struck all of you as as as somewhat strange thinking why

would we do this now we have one movie Let's establish ourselves let's make a couple movies before we do that but explain why Steve made that decision and

how that played out because I think it's a great test case or a very kind of instructive lens into the way that this guy thought and what made him unique and

different and special the it we did think that this was pushing too fast all of us thought that this is like okay this is nuts to go public right after the movie came out I mean you had this

deal with Disney you had Toy Story which was completed and about to be released but nobody knew how that was going to do right like the like paint a little bit

of a picture of of the nature of Pixar at that time well because basically we were failing as a company and he'd put like $50 million into it which was a

substantial portion of his net worth and you almost sold the GM at some point right like you were going to be a 3D modeling company well this is before then this is when we were spinning out

of Lucas film so uh uh General Motors and Phillips uh medical were going to buy us and it fell apart at the last minute

because of an internal conflict within General Motors between the Eds people and the and the car making people so it's a it's an obscure thing but we are caught up in that and so it all fell

apart so we kept going through this difficult process of getting somebody to buy us and we finally got General Motors and EDS to

agree and then after they agreed within a week of signing they get into this argument and it all fell apart then I

ran into Steve and Steve said how's it going and I said no actually it's not going well at all but he had formed next computer yeah

in the in the meantime so now he had his computer company now he was willing to buy us on our terms which was that we wanted to do computer graphics and make

computer animation and he saw the value of graphics for the future when

George hired me um in uh this is 1979 he was the first person in the film industry with credibility willing to put

money into this so basically he was the only person in this industry that had had any value there was still nobody in the film industry that wanted to or

believed in in technology with one other exception and that was Roy Disney jrh Walt's

nephew and he understood something that that was not part of of of Disney at that time or any other company and that was well believed that

technology uh brought some energy into the artistic process that was an unusual thing and when he died that Spirit uh didn't survive in the company it was at

Roy's insistence that Disney enter into a contract with us to write software for coloring cells and their analysis of it was that

it didn't make any sense to do that but Roy said this isn't about the money it was about bringing in the energy and very unusual thought process

and an investment in in the future potentiality and possibilities that that that that might reap once the technology you know continued to advance and mature

so we entered into the contract uh Roy was an advocate um we the whole thing again was another educational process but we worked very

hard to make sure that we did not let Disney down from Steve's point of view is like okay this is our big opportunity so we entered into a

contract uh none of us had made an a computer animated film none of us had made an animated film or a film of any

kind so we were all beginners we had to figure everything out in the process but as we got near the end of it Steve

realized this is going to change the industry and our deal actually isn't a very good

deal so we start getting much from it and also Michael Eisen will realize that when the three pictures are up that we

delivered the three for the contract that he will have then just created his worst nightmare right the idea being Toy Story is going to come out it's going to be a huge hit Steve

could see this there was a lot of excitement around that and you would be stuck in this three picture deal with unfavorable terms and Steve's Brilliance

was let's figure out a way to renegotiate this deal and the best way to do that is to IPO and stockpile a bunch of cash so that when Michael

Eisner inevitably calls and says I want to renegotiate this deal to tie you up you then have leverage by Dent of all this money to go back to him and push

for different terms basically an output deal right where you would share you're using Disney as a distribution arm uh in a partnership in which the revenue share

was going to be on parody like 5050 as opposed to the typical deal where you're getting a small slice of you know Disney you know gigantic take on a project yes

and the interesting thing about this was that once day was at next he had some he' made some deals which on the surface

looked great for him but in the end they were bad deals he' made some essential essentially he'd made some bad business decisions in the past but he was smart

and he learned from them so he approached this one as saying we need need to be 50/50 Partners I'm not trying to rake them over the co Kohls I don't

want us to get raked over it's like we need to approach this as partners so for me this is the maturation that's coming out of the lessons he'd learned from the

past so he approached this of saying we're we want to be partners with each other and think of it this way which meant that we have to have the money to

to be able to say yes we're both in investing equally in this it's it's an unbelievable story of of foresight Steve would was a person who wasn't rigorous

about whatever the business plan was but was always looking forward and anticipating where the business should go which requires not just a level of of

maturity and perhaps some some you know level of Genius as well but the ability to hold Loosely and remain really

striding about your values and your conviction about moving the company in the direction of the future so so that you don't get out innovated and you

don't end up like sun Microsystems or silicon Graphics or or Kodak if Steve saw in the directors of our films what he believ was necessary

for anybody that was going to do something new and that was you commit to something with passion and when you're you're wrong you

change and that that's hard for people to hold on to their head because you think if I'm committed that I'm committed I'm not going to listen to things that's going to change my course because I'm committed to the course but

if I'm not committed then I change course too easily so what does it mean to to both be committed and at the same time say oh um I've just realized I'm

wrong we're going to change that's very hard and I'd say the best leaders the best filmmakers that's what they do we're going to go down this path okay

it's not working we're going to change yeah so how do you be how do you uh do both at the same time and it is possible um but that's when the you I

think that's when the best stuff happens yeah well the way that it's possible is through these many kind of systems and philosophies that you end up implementing at Pixar that creates this

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on.com on this idea of the Brain Trust though the overarching idea here is how

do we get the most compelling Innovative creative work out of this group of people and what is the environment that we need to cultivate in order to

facilitate that the Brain Trust is just one of many things that I think you implemented during your your tenure at at at Pixar um but before we move on to

the others like what so what became the rules of this Brain Trust like how was it organized and deployed to its maximum

effect well there are a a few basic principles that uh that went into running it one of them is that it really

needed to be a room of of filmmakers who knew about film so it wasn't for gawkers or others who want to see because a lot of people wanted to see what was going on in the room but

that's not what it was for um so it was peer talking to Pier the other one was that uh which is

important is that that room and the people in the room could not override the director of that the creative team and and that was very important and we

also didn't do anything significant like if we knew there was a serious problem we didn't actually make any moves before or within two weeks roughly after the

Brain Trust meeting because we didn't want the meeting overloaded like if if this doesn't go right you know it's an utter disaster we're just trying to make

it so that we can focus on the room and not be too worried about other things the other rule is that as you just have to be honest with each other

and uh but I would say because people have done this for years and they know each other that we've actually reached they have a good state of being honest with each

other and but part of that a learn behavior and as we bring in new people they would observe it and they'd realize oh it's okay to say something which

doesn't work and every once in a a while uh Magic would happened and by magic I mean that uh Eagles left the room that is when I say

Eagles left the room is people could say something they weren't attached to their ideas if they worked great if they didn't work that's okay too I'm not

attached to it and for me that's the the ideal state to be in it's probably like flow you've heard in light a number of areas but it's like when a room gets

into that state then it's pretty amazing to watch yeah I would imagine I think that creativity isn't something that you can just summon it's not uh you know a

product of a board meeting there's a there's a ethereal quality to it right and creating an environment that's conducive to the Sparks and the flow and

getting the best and brightest Minds to collide with each other to have something emerge that's greater than the sum of its parts is a real art

yes and and that's the job yeah is to get that done right I'm sure people ask you this all the time they come to you maybe they run a small business or a

large organization or they're a manager of a department at a company and they say Ed how do I get the best out of my people I just everyone's operating

suboptimally I don't know how to motivate my people the work that's coming out of my department just is stale it's not Crea creative what is the advice that you give to that person

who's looking to instill that creative flare and a permissive environment in which new ideas and uh and you know the

opportunity to fail and fail fast uh can be part of the you know the environment to make something new and better and different well there there are there are

two things that sort of popped my mind on that one of them is I talked about failure in the book and the meaning of it then I realized actually we don't use

the term failure very much inside of Pixar um now we do if we actually have something fails we say that it fails we're not trying to avoid it but the

word's too loaded um because uh you know starting a school if you

fail in a class then that's a bad thing because it means you weren't smart enough or you didn't work hard enough um but also when you get out and

bridges fail uh relationships fail um companies fail and in business and politics failure is a bludgeon with

which you beat opponents so there's a real imp palpable Aura of danger around failure while we also would say that we've learned a lot from our failures

because we have we all recognize that is that meaning of failure is actually sort of overridden by the danger part of

failure and so okay I just it's just true it doesn't matter what we say about it we don't have the luxury of calling a failure educational until after it

happens not before it happens if we recognize that then say well okay there are a lot of times when we should be using a somewhat different terminology

which is that we're trying to make make something work let's try this though that didn't work let's try this we don't need to overload it so I try to be very careful about the words and how they're

used it's a terrible word there should be a different neutral word that encourages people to extend themselves irrespective of whether it works out or

not without you know fear of losing their job or you know the kind of internal shame or guilt system that that happens when you know you quote unquote

fail it's so loaded and I think it you know it it it paralyzes people yeah so if say okay why do people get paralyzed so our terminology does it sometimes uh

it's one of the reasons I try to use in general not always but I try to use cander instead of honesty because honesty is sort of like the opposite where uh you say well of course I'm

unhonest person when when actually that isn't the right word because the opposite of honest is dishonest but there are times when you may not be candid for a variety of reasons the

opposite of candid is not candid it's not as loaded so these words have these subtle effects on people uh and failure is one that has a

a an effect on how people think it's like I think it should be used for things which are uh where you really do have a a major problem U and the other one is people

get stuck for different reasons so in the case of of making films if you assign somebody uh like you say this person can be a

director then we came up with something which was very effective which was and this just all this was recognizing that when people are trying to solve a problem they get stuck we all

do this you're trying to work on something Bang Your Head on the wall and I remember this you know from like just doing homework work or Mak in

school right yeah sometimes you're trying to do it you got to do it you got to schedule my I'm sorry my brain is fried I'm stuck so the the issue for us was

how do we keep people from getting stuck so the thing we tried which is uh was quite effective was to have people pitch

three ideas for movies now there are a couple of people who don't work that way they've got the idea and they're going to make it that's fine we're just we're just trying to help people uh keep

from getting stuck and when we ask somebody to come up with the uh the ideas for a film um and we say three

then what that lets him do is bounce back and forth between them and they do this over a period of a year because if we're going to do a film we've got a

director uh typically a writer and a and a couple of creative people are supporting them like it's really tiny team and this rather amazing phenomenon

happens and that is every time somebody produces or or pitches the film they start off by saying I love all three ideas equally MH and now they they don't

yeah that's a lack of Candor and it say but it's also you say okay that's what it means to be

vulnerable right it's what if I'm wrong what if they see something I don't see so you're essentially you're signaling the other people it's like you won't

hurt my feelings if you pick one of the other things so like that's a self protection mechanism but actually what we want to know is which is the one that they want

to do and we know completely that that if they if we pick one of them it's going to change dramatically in any case

so my favorite story was with uh Leonor on on uh Coco a story an idea would be presented and there's artwork they'd picked up or drawn or or whatever to

convey the idea very rough we all know that it's not a final movie idea it's a pitch for a start of an idea discuss it

20 25 minutes is what we' take on this and then we'd switch to the other story and then with Leonor after we did this we went into the other room open up

the door the table the back wall both walls the ceilings are covered with Mexican artwork mhm so without a word

being said everybody knows which film we're going to make now the thing about this is the film that was made in the end was

actually radically different than what was pitched at that point like but we didn't care what we knew is he wanted to make a movie and in that front in fact

originally he wanted to be a musical and you know but a musical isn't in his DNA so the very first song he had which was remember me then became a sort

of a Core theme that's built into the movie sort of the nature of the change that happens but it's an example of we put something in place to help someone

actually solve the problems because they could always switch MH and then come back to when they felt like they had but the really important thing there was

the excitement that this person had for that concept like that seemed to be one of the more kind of you know important aspects of all the pitches like this

guy's on to something super motivated he clearly you know wants to do this and that's something that we as a company

that supports people over ideas can get behind and Marshal art resources to to support and over time it will become something very different but let's pay attention to what he's saying to us now

which is less about the pitch and more about the energy that he's going to bring to what might be you know two years of of working on something is that is

that energy is contagious and then and then he knows that the people around him are going to bring something and in this case because

it's about the a Mexican holiday then they went they visited the U uh southern Mexico and the villages to

what's it really like uh and they went several times and they had advisors because they didn't want to operate off of their biases other words we all know

something about various things just like we know something about cooking and so forth but in the case of rouille you actually need to go into a high-end

restaurant to see what it's really like and with each one of those cases as an audience we don't really

know and and and the directors when they start they don't really know what it's like in these places but if you get it right if you actually bring something from the culture or from the place or

what you're doing and you put it in the film The Audience senses that is correct yeah even if they don't know it's true there's a sense they they they can feel

that energy right and that attention to detail yes and and I think that's what it is with it's like actually with with any company or with any product that's

out there it's like do people care about it are they paying attention to the detail and are they just slapping it out you want people to care wherever

whatever field they're in and so how do you do that how do you get the people working within your

organization to Care on the level that's required for that to get transmitted into the product whatever it is and give

the consumer or the customer that feeling well I for me the big step is is that when you see that there's a problem you have to ask

why and and you it isn't one of those things that you can force on them you say you need to do this you need to fix it this way which is a natural thing for people to do I don't think it's the

right thing to do though it's like okay this isn't going the way I would hope it it's going why isn't it going this way what's getting in their way and what can I do to solve the thing that's getting

in their way because they may not see it and if they don't see it and I'm not paying attention then we all miss it and then it still it sits there and it

festers and it affects people but we can ask and and figure out what act happened why did it happen and what what can we do about it Pixar is in the business of

taking creative ideas and putting them into a story crafting a story and sharing that story with the World by its very definition it is a creative

business but is there not an argument that every business is a creative business like how do you define creativity and what is the role that

creativity plays in in an organization or a business or an industry that people don't typically think of as being creative with quot marks around it well

I it's clear that people would consider the Arts and film and writing forth to be creative so that's clear I think most people would say it's that if you're

designing products that's creative or if you're in the Sciences or certain things that that's creative but they kind of stop around there and I personally I

believe solving problems is creative so if you got problems in your family or in your neighborhood and you're able to work them out with people that's a

creative act and for me solving problems is a creative act and I think that that creating an organization that is better for people

and that brings the best out of them is a creative act also and I it's because I look at a lot of what I've done it's like trying to

solve the problems mhm and so so oh that's you know that's actually the the bigger contribution I've I've had because the original thing that I did

like yeah those can happen anyway but but trying to create a culture well that applies everywhere and because people are so

incomprehensible the problem of trying to create a culture that motivates people and creates a sustainable output

of innovation and creative ideas that trickle into the products that it makes or whatever it is that it does um is a creative acting and of itself like I

think that creativity is at the core and is of the essence of of anybody who's trying to do anything either individually or as a collective as a

group call it a corporation a school whatever it is and I think appreciating the power of uh of the creative impulse and and

understanding um how to how to initiate that and cultivate that and and respect that in the people that you're working with and and in yourself really feels to

me like super important if not the most important thing that you're trying to kind of instill in the people around you who have a collective goal that you're

all kind of working towards is that overstating it to you but like that's really the the kind of heart and soul of what your book is about and what you were trying to do at Pixar it is

it's it's how those people do it together you know what's our responsibility in enabling it making it

safe how do we send messages to people uh you know in in a a room where things are sort of rush is is is it safe for

the least powerful person in the room to talk talk uh like is like a message in fact there's one example that took place it's

one I I loved it at Pixar because usually we've got these uh really tight schedules and you you get a group of people who are working on it and they're

very good at what they do but they never have enough time so when they have their meetings there's a lot they're under a lot of pressure so we had one of the

leaders uh and one of these groups where they're just you know you know really smart and high-powered people but this leader said he wanted to make sure that

every person in the room could talk but in the room they're production assistants so these are people that are hired because of high potential but actually they don't have any experience and they don't know anything about the

particular problem in any case so he told them he told the the people this is the way he wanted to work and the other people who were objected

only on the ground so they didn't have enough time they didn't have anything against the person I thought they the others were ni they were good people they had high potential all those things

they could agree on is we literally don't have the time so he said no this is the way we're going to work now the interesting thing was by the end of the

film everybody thought it was the right thing to do because when he did that uh they knew they were sending a message to the person who was the

production assistant they were valued but for the people who were supposed to be in the discussion it was a message to them that we value everybody and they

ended up feeling a lot better about it also oh that's interesting it's one of those things where he was trying to do one thing but he actually got two

because it's basically giving a signal about a value there's a quote uh that's super interesting to me uh in which he said if you don't try to uncover what is

unseen and understand its nature you will be ill prepared to lead and your story reminds me of this quote but I thought I'd give you an opportunity to explain what you mean by

that I do feel like there are so many things that we can't see in the world or we we don't know what's going to happen uh it's just the nature reality

and we we tend to hold on to things that we can see or grab on to the experiences that we've got because they're solid they may be good experiences but they

think that's you know if we just repeat that I don't know what the right terminology for it is I mean I've used the term the unknown MH I don't the

thing was I haven't found a word that works well because it's unknown it's you know you can't see what it is it's obscure it's for some people

conceptually it's like a you know a 2X two chart you know it's like you know you fall into one of these categories the problem is it doesn't give any

notion of the size of each of them so the stuff that we know we know like that's one piece but we also acknowledge I think clearly that there are Physicians or physicists or experts in

these field and the total amount of stuff that we don't know we kind of have a sense like so that's a bigger thing we can kind of get our head around it but the stuff that we don't know that we

don't know it's like that's gigantic it's huge so how do you actually operate in a world in which there's so many possibilities

of things and um in this case you're actually working off of the way you think about change your opportunity or your value system you don't know what's

going to happen you know positive or negative coming in your life I've just accept that okay I don't know a lot

that's why I can't be right a lot and if I can accept the fact that I really don't know then I think it opens us up

to say oh I really do need help for anybody at any level so if they come and say there's a problem then I damn well

better listen because they are seeing things that I can't see and it would be actually uh very foolish of me to assume

that I know more than I do and and you know in a lot of companies there's this notion of there's a prep meeting before

the meeting because if the leader in with in a lot of of places if the if the manager or the leader gets surprised in a meeting they're not happy

they got surprised basically it's disrespectful it's the way it's treated what's the purpose of the meeting if you have to know ahead of time what it is right well there's a you know people are

complicated and there's politics and there's ego I mean essentially what I'm getting from what you're sharing is is a sense of humility and a almost

beginner's mind of of curiosity to lead not from a place of I know all the answers and I'm going to tell you what to do but an appreciation that you don't

have all the answers and to uh you know kind of come to a meeting with a with a spirit of tell me more about what I

don't know that then percolates down and gives everyone else permission beneath that leader to have that same kind of vibe about

themselves yes and there are times when I've made serious mistakes and people have come to me afterwards to tell me that I made a serious

mistake and I'm grateful they felt like they could do it and for me that's one of the most important things is like if I make a mistake somebody tells me I screwed

up um that they they could come without fear doing that and it's like for me that's like I feel good about that makes me actually feel better even though I

feel bad about the mistake probably a lot of leaders or bosses out there who will tell their you know the people beneath them like I want you to tell me the truth I want you to come to me if I'm getting it wrong but something about

their energy or some other aspect of how they're leading uh creat a situation in which that underlaying still doesn't feel comfortable doing that yeah what

what are the consequences to them if they say something that you don't like right the leader says they want that but do they really want that usually when you have something like that something

happened which you don't want um and it's just it's a nature of things like oh you know that's a bad thing but okay what does it mean to the

person who told you this mhm or something you did personally MH um or even something you disagree with often uh people have disagreements about

things and uh and they're valid disagreements but in somewhere you have to make a choice it's not like um everything is done by committee it's not

and and the person who's on the losing end of that argument has to still feel respected yes they need to feel like they were listened to in fact I I for me

it's clear that it was more it's more important for people to feel they're listen to than it is for them to believe they were correct or they the on some argument or whatever is they need the

respect of being listened [Music] to when I think about all of these principles that you instilled at Pixar and and the way it's laid out in the

book which on some level on a surface level I think you know reads like a management book like this is how to run a creative business whether it's the

Brain Trust or reframing failure or the the rigorous testing that Pixar would do and this understanding that every project at the beginning was terrible

and it was only made better through you know this process of of of you know bringing that Brain Trust to all the big creative decisions to make it better is

it too bold to suggest that these ideas that you're proposing to get the best out of people fall in to promote a culture of

creativity has a um broader universality Beyond business and in applicability uh as to how to kind of

comport yourself in the world as to how to live it's almost like a primer for how you can interact with people and engage with people and get together with

people to create things these are in many ways not not necessarily just principles for business but they are principles for life I think the principles of treating people well and

learning from them and growing and helping them um you know they're I I think they're unified mhm uh it's it's

always messy it's always hard and it keeps changing and you don't actually re reach the point where everything is static and it's going to stay that way

forever uh so it it is a a statement of life I do think like I've seen this get lost in their goals to be in charge or to make a lot of

money those things do happen they get in the way but I I don't think it's the way we should be you know living as as people

as humans with each other is to let those other aspirations get in the way of how we treat people yeah I mean I'm just thinking we can tease out any one

of these ideas or principles like take the Brain Trust like everybody should have their version of a Brain Trust in their life we think about friends who

give us feedback or seeing a therapist or finding a mentor but what you're suggesting is a committee of trusted

people who contribute to the betterment of a project or in the case of my example the individual like everybody should sort of go out into their

community and find people who can give them that kind of trusted feedback and create a structure around that as a a vehicle for you know improving your

decisions and you know basically living your life at a higher level of quality but it doesn't seem like we think that way it should be a a continual searching

process for us and you know because for some people I think they looking for or what is the right thing to do you give me the answer like and maybe they'll call one guy or

and that guy will say do this or don't do that or maybe they'll just decide themselves without any kind of feedback or they'll call their therapist yes how do we what if there

were 12 people that were weighing in on that each with their own unique set of Life Experiences who you know you could weigh their input and then you know make

a decision based on that I mean I have this in my life I have different groups that I go to for various reasons that really have been invaluable in in my

life and I just I want everyone to have their version of that and it's obviously something that we're trying to instill in our you know in our office here with

our little Media company as students of of you know what you Advocate and we've been you know with great effect been able to kind of put that into into

practice and I just think there's so much value in doing that not just as professionals but as individuals for the

quality of one's life yeah so then the the the the interesting part is okay how do you then think about it to to get there like it becomes part of the search

so it's it isn't just having the group that does that but it's okay if it's not working how do I get it to work what's what's not working working why doesn't

it work and uh to me it's part of the the discovery the continual Discovery because it's not stable whatever it's

not stable but there still there's there's that underlying value that we have and if if we build on that value which is is really a trust in people MH assume that everybody is

well-meaning is assume they've got it they might do something to lose it but they don't have

to earn it yeah how can you be open how can you hold your ideas Loosely how can you be a champion for your colleagues

and the best idea how can you be a better more active listener and also how can you ask better questions like if you

want better Solutions you have to learn how to ask better questions and I know this is something you've thought thought about and have written about how does one figure out how to ask better

questions that's a good question how do you figure this out and for me it was always you pay attention and if it's not working then you say why is it not working for me

that's the question like why isn't something going the way I want so if you you essentially start with a question you don't want you don't you don't want to start with an answer because if you

start with the answer then you've already figured it out well that's not that's not a start that's an ending point uh and it's one of the reasons why I have I have some problem with mission

statements I mean I recognize in some cases the mission statement actually helps people get some alignment um so it's not that I'm black and white about it but the problem with

a lot of mission statements is that it actually is starting with an answer and uh that doesn't generate new discussion so when never had anything

like our goal is to make the best films or anything like that our mission statement is to make the best films I'd rather be um in a position where people

say well what are we doing here what is our goal what are we trying to do because you know what every time they ask that question then they're thinking about

it so and it's fluid it's fluid it should always be fluid because the world is fluid the world's fluid then we should be able to respond

fluidly and one of the reasons I added to the book was some people thought that somehow after doing all this we had sort of reached the point where we had solved the problem of how we run a creative

environment one said that isn't actually what I meant what I meant was we have a way of thinking about it so we can continue to

adapt and and change and uh and ask questions and figure things things out because the the problems keep changing mhm is that one of the reasons why you

decided to update the book yes there there were things I had learned in the intervening years because that was eight eight nine years ago yeah that I wrote

it well there were there events took place after that uh and the other one was like rethinking certain things I felt I need to be a little clear about the Brain

Trust and its development rather than like there's just a Brain Trust it's like this is something that was a special P purpose adaptation to the way we were

doing things and if you're in a different environment or in any company it's like okay how do you think about adapting it or building something for

yourself what's your mechanism for getting really good uh feedback but also good camarad with people for helping each other but that's really the point

of it so so that was one of the things um the other one was the realization that um the the failure thing was

actually I don't think I fully was T was was explaining well the notion that there's a human psychology coming behind failure which is actually getting in the

way I know what's meant by it people say like you learn from it so just do it and get get it over with and we'll we've said the same thing too but it's not actually what we're

doing what we're trying to do is make it possible for us to uh learn things try things quickly and then if they don't

work we move on to something else so trying to explain this concept of holding on to something and having a core of what you're holding on to but at the same time you change what you do each

person's different in the way they do that I mean the way Steve does that was very different the way I did it and I never ever thought that I wanted to be like him and he didn't want to be like

me either like why would you do that I'm I'm not him you've said that you want people to fail the elevator pitch

test what does that mean no what I what I really said was is a a certain percentage of what we're doing should fail elevator test not everything does

it's like I'm not trying to make another rule it's that if you have a certain percentage of films that fail the elevator test then this is something

about your ability to take risk and do something that's risky so the concept of the elevator pitch is that you have an

idea and you want to pitch the idea to somebody who's got the authority to make it happen you an executive or or whoever

it is and you can convey the idea so succinctly and and clearly that in a short period of time hence the elevator

test in a short period of time you can do something which gets their interest so that they would want to do it now the

problem with it is that the way to always pass that elevator test is to do something that's derivative right because if you can explain it quickly you're essentially

using examples of things that they get they pretty much understand and so if all you do that is you end up actually becoming a fairly derivative

company now that being said Sometimes you have a great idea and when you hear it it's like oh yes we want to do that so there are examples of that P doctor

you know saying I want to do this uh although he would typically do the three pitch test too but but in the case of uh one film we had where he said c starting

over I I've got an idea that takes place inside the head of a little girl and deals with her emotions and we all thought oh that's a great idea so boom

we're done right uh and but actually playing like to actually explain what that movie is about is there's no way you're going to be able to do that noide so but the the notion was okay what

pequs your interest that that's worth doing so some things you actually you get it okay let's go and try that it's still nothing more than just like this

really rough idea and go through just as long as any other film and just working out even what that means um that's all we had was you know

inside they head a little girl and then there are some films like uh up and Ratatouille where okay you say a movie I

want to make a movie about a rat that cooks well you know you can't explain why that's a good idea one minute you can't explain why it's a good idea in a

week you can't explain why it's a good idea a good idea in 3 months right it actually sounds like a bad idea

right well it's all about the execution yes and and the thing is when you do something that's really hard and

some of these ideas are really hard ideas that once you've said I'm going to solve it you have to become more creative you have to do something which is unexpected to make it

work Ratatouille was probably one of the more extreme ones but uh up was okay I you know what does what does that even

mean you know it's it's sort of an odd idea I tell a story about this old this man that um is with his uh starting off with his girlfriend and then they get

married married and then they they learn they can have children and so they want to go on a trip around the world but then she dies and he's depressed floats away in

the stow away like that doesn't sound like a good idea but you know when you take something like that uh and you're willing to change it uh and you have the group that's

working really well together then as long as that group is working well together and say okay they'll figure something out they'll do

it how do you know when you've got it you've got an idea you're iterating on the idea you want it to be Innovative you want it to be at the highest level

of your creative capacities you're stress testing it you're failing you're improving upon it on some level at some point you have to say this is the script

or this is what the character looks like or we've all signed on that this is the way that it's going to be um and I would assume some of those decisions are more

democratic than others but there has to be a sense of this is it and that's another kind of ephemeral mystical thing

like how do you know when you've chosen the right path decided on the right project you know approved of this or approved of that like there's a billion

decisions that go into a movie getting made or a product ending up on a shelf and you have to have some conviction as a leader to say this is what we're

doing and on other occasions to say it's not quite there yet there there are two parts to that one of them is just in in supporting people and and trying to

solve the problem or support them as they try to solve the problem is that we support them along the way but there's one thing that the

creative leader can't do and that is they can't lose the confidence of their crew and at that point we will stop it or we'll pull the plug or we'll replace

them and we have done that and these are good people they're put in position because they're talented we like them but if they lost a

confidence the crew then we have uh we have to make a big change and uh Ratatouille was one of those to be honest where um the we started with an

idea that was an unlikely idea the truth is the final movie was actually if you looked at it that it was the fruition of that original

pitch more than some I just had to go all the way around the planet to come back to the same place well no not not

that um in the case of of of of up for instance it kind of wandered around on different places and ended up in an unpredictable place from where it was

but in the case of rou the concept what it was actually was there all along but it had a couple of serious difficult problems and they kept trying to solve

it uh and uh it went through a variety of things but they couldn't actually lick the problem and it wasn't working and so when it wasn't working we

lost the confidence with the crew then at that point um we brought in Brad Bird to take it over and Brad resonated with the idea of the film now the difference

is as a filmmaker he um he was able to solve the problem because it was it was

essentially a storytelling problem uh and figuring out what was getting in the way so some of the things that were in there were actually blocking the film so

I'll I'll give an example and that is in the first version there was this Chef um gusta only in that first version Chef gustau

was alive and then there was uh Remy the rat who had these aspirations to be a great

chef so part of the problem was whose story is this is it a Redemption story for uh for gustau or is it a

aspirational story for Remy back and forth so and there were complications as a result of that and so we go we go on it's like okay we like the idea of this

artistic aspiration but it isn't working so we brought in uh Brad Bird he talked with a friend of his who was a

writer just you know part of his group of people that he trusts and came back and said we're going to kill the

chef the chef is dead so so now all of a sudden boom things clicked um and then uh the question was also how do you actually capture the

essence of what takes place inside of a kitchen so Brad being a great filmmaker came in and put in those pieces with

this uh the woman Chef who essentially was um you know talking about the right ways of doing it in her abrupt way but but it was very funny but it very

informative it was short but it told you a lot so in the in the end you end up with something that had the design because

the first director was the one who just had the who led the design of the characters the look of the film that was all the first one in the end the intent

was there of what it was all it's just that he was able to do it now I'm kind of telling you you know stories on the inside about how it is could because it was hard it was painful it very painful

for the person who couldn't do it and yeah and I would imagine many moments of you know kind of nashing of teeth and is this ever going to work and you know this is terrible it's not working and

we've made a huge mistake and how are we going to fix this I mean that's like all of it right like I think you know there's this idea

that every you know Pixar movie is this perfect Jewel box and you know it was divinely inspired and you know crafted by Geniuses and ends up on the screen

and it's a long and arduous process but relatively Conflict Free and failure free and that's just not the case like you have said many times every single

Pixar movie was an absolute disaster before it was good they were bad like truly bad before they got good and certainly before they became great and I

think there's a lot of wisdom to extract from that and how we think about how we approach challenges and and and projects in our own life and how we you know

think about that terrible word failure and and how it inhibits us from you know doing the grappling and the kind of having the patience and the diligence and the hard work to see it through and

get to the other side of it yeah and that's and there it's still true today and they haven't gotten any easier they're not supposed to get easier they're all supposed to be hard and you

can't there's no matter what you could take your engineer brain and your physics mind and try to apply a template on top of this that's going to create a hit every time and we're just

going to check these boxes and and move down this assembly line and create something that people are going to enjoy but creativity doesn't work that way no

matter how much you try to impose that it's not going to work was there a moment where you thought maybe it would work yes

so so so here's the funny thing is because if you look at at what we were doing because it was you know we BEC be more expensive and we knew that that uh

part of the problem is we kept redoing things and we thought well if we could just get it right or closer at the beginning it wouldn't cost as much money

the truth was if you brought in any MBA to examine what we were doing they' come to the same conclusion quit changing things so much it it' be a lot cheaper

to make well we knew that it's like a duh we finally had a film that was pitched To Us by Andrew Stanton where

the first pitch was brilliant this was after for Finding Nemo mhm you know pitch this thing he's actually probably one of the best people

at pitching I've ever seen it's glorious it's entertaining um it's like okay this is no-brain we're going to do this and I

thought okay since this is so good this is probably the one where we get it right up front and it's going to be easier and cheaper to

make it turned out it was ju had just as many problems just as much drama cost just as much so no actually if we

couldn't do it on that one to even think it as a as the goal is the wrong thing to do the goal is to make a good move well you're just creating suff additional suffering for yourself by

yeah having expectation that that somehow you screwed up because you still can't figure out how to avoid all of these issues that come up with every single project this they're just going

to happen now I know we all know that you know if if if cost if films cost too much to make then we have a problem so everybody's realistic about it it's like

okay it does cost too much we have to do things to try to address it but we shouldn't start off by soling problem with the illusion that we aren't going

to have problems so it's how do we keep the cost down within the reality that we're going to hit with surprises that are

unexpected well that's what a surprise is it's unexpected so just you accept the fact that that's the way it is how do we do the best that we can within

that and uh and then you're faced with different challenges you know like with cost when do things run away why do they run away what can we do and

we did a lot of things to bring that back in but we didn't solve it by by trying to find some Illusion by just dealing with the the

realities that we had and why people do things right being in acceptance that this is just the nature of the Beast these things come up and your attempt to solve it might actually you know

sometimes trying to solve the problem can screw things up what you can't do is let go of the fact that you have to do something which is good right if I were to ask you of all the things that you've

done and everything that you've learned uh over the course of your career um what what to your mind made Pixar

special and what can I learn from what you learned running that company that could improve my life well I uh I mean

to be honest it's a it is somewhat difficult to answer that because there was something about that unique combination of people that came together

again this happened because Steve and uh Andrew and Pete and John that that group that came together but also people that others wouldn't know about in terms of

the ones who develop the technology like Bill re and eban Osby and some rather remarkable people there um so how did

they come together I I do think that first of all there was some Serendipity involved um and because I don't believe

I should take credit for having U thought of things or just like got it on myself because I didn't um but I also believe that if you recognize that Serendipity happens you

can also lose Serendipity because you don't do something with it um so I there was that element of it I think there was something about the fact that we were all trying to figure

it out and um that none of us like you know

like neither Steve nor I were also interested in sort of uh not developing that as a way of thinking not developing

what in other words here we had a group that was trying to to figure things out but it was the group that did it but but what I'm saying is that Steve didn't

never say he was the one that was doing that so he wasn't trying to take credit for it now he was you know the one that was funding it and he was obviously a

key protector of what we were doing but he also didn't impose on us what we did and I wasn't T to impose on other people what they did and likewise when

we start up each production we try to think of each one as trying to do something like that like they have to f fig it out because there is something about figuring something

out which makes a group special I know it's hard to describe um but whenever I've seen a group work together to figure things out

then some rather remarkable things happen and uh so then the question is how you how do you set it up wherever you are so that people feel like they

own it they own the culture they have the U the it's their problem to solve you're a Avid meditator right mhm yeah

um which is not surprising because I think you know my view on this or or you know kind of how I interpret this

is um an elevation of consciousness like I see somebody who went into an organization tried to look at what was happening objectively tried to think of

a creative solution that would help um create a better environment for people to do their best work and you deployed

certain strategies towards that end but ultimately to me they're all a reflection of this desire to elevate the

collective Co consciousness of of an organization like if you can if you can create an environment where pettiness

and politics and judgment and backstabbing and all of that Fades into the background because there's a higher

purpose and a shared sort of sense of togetherness around that that comes with a mindful approach to you know being present with the people that you work

with and and finding a conscious way to lead them everything else is is is a product or reflection of that practice

yeah I believe very strongly in that um I almost made a mistake once too and and also I I want to add this in is that after we went public in the year

afterwards um I did ask this question of myself was was how much of it was me and uh and at the end of that year I realized oh actually trying to answer

the question is a bad thing to do because it's you're thinking about yourself yeah it's and it's separating myself from others and um and so part of meditation

which you know came later was like think sort of and the weird thing is like you're to something you're by yourself but one of the things that comes out of

it is like a genuine connection and the appreciation of what other people do and they we're not separate we really aren't

separate and uh to try to you know think that we are it's it's all by ourselves like that's a it's actually not good that's not healthy to think that

did that come to you as a result like over time as a result of your meditation practice or was that no I I at the end of that year light bolt no it was

actually in it was in the year of 1996 in which um I was wrestling with uh two personal things one of them

was okay you know I had this goal for many years which is which was one of my driving forces well we just did it now

what so by had a loss of purpose after achieving your goal of creating a computer animated film that goal being realized and then suddenly having a a

now what moment yes and and part of it was well okay just repeating it actually doesn't feel creative so okay we do a film again let's just repeating what

we've done this we stopped so no actually um there's a big problem and the big problem was is how does a group do because we so as

a group we did something rather special but I know that that groups are fragile so now the question is how do you keep doing it and it was one of the things

Steve said before we did this he said the thing that happens to all companies is right after they get their F their first product they come out with the

dud so that's like a i he's just making a comment right I mean other people people said this a similar sort of thing but for me it was like an internal

challenge okay how do we not do that so that that's a a special kind of challenge right so uh so that was like

the next 10 years like addressing this thing how does this grrip work and so for me personally that's the thing to do but the other one was the realization

that that whatever that is it is something I Do by myself and that to try to say okay how much is me is actually a bad question and the reason I even

brought it up was although it's a little embarrassing to say that I was saying something which is you know obviously a fairly self-oriented thing to

do um but it's I recognize that other people say the same thing except they think they need to answer the question and if they work to answer the question

then that act means they separate themselves from the group and I did hear this is from a a director of one of our short films and after he made the short film

it was nice short film but then he left because he said I want to know what I can do without the safety

net the safety net this group of people is a safety net no they're not they're the integral Fabric in which we're working these are our friends and they're

like we're all helping each other um so uh you know it's just how you think about these things I think matters yeah and the genuine

appreciation of what others do is critical where is your head in terms of the direction that technology is headed and

how that's going to impact storytelling in other words you were witness to the first you know VR headsets 50 years ago

we're seeing rapid developments in in AR VR AI how is this going to impact how we tell stories and how people are going to

enjoy stories like it almost feels like the first computer generated graphics and animation which you were integral in

has matured to the point where those tools on some level are going to reach some kind of tech Singularity with all these other tools that are out there

where the effects that you see in a liveaction motion picture and the computer animation for animated films there's going to be a blurring of the

lines and these two genres are going to start overlapping more and more it affects every industry now but it is true because we've had this underlying

exponential activity that's been driving this and um and the interaction between graphics and the games world so it was

actually the funding that came out of selling things into the games World which enabled the in uh the the chips to be fast enough to enable machine

learning neural networks an idea that was first written about in 1948 the thing about exponential growth is it can't continue

forever so what happens is it either runs out or it um or it morphs into something else now we're it's pretty

unpredictable except that it can't continue like it's doing forever so it's going to have dramatic changes dramatic changes are more difficult to

predict the important thing is to know that it is going to change and that it's unpredictable and that's a hard concept for people to get just as rapid change

as hard to get so we're definitely one of those points in in the next while where something fairly dramatic will happen just because of all the changes

are going on um so uh just in terms of Storytelling the way we communicate with each other is through stories and if you hold a child on your lap then you're

communicating some to them if you hand them a pad then that's also communicating something to them and so it's telling a story but it's not the same kind of

story all these things are at play at the same time and storytelling is one of the major components of this but are you would you say that overall you're a tech

Optimist or are you fearing what uh some of these powerful Technologies portend well I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist much that I've

always felt like you're a neutralist I'm a yeah and just like I am with you know politics or whatever it's like okay we're not we don't get swayed too far

because we got to this is all very complicated we have to wind our way through it and not get derailed because the problems are hard and since the

problems are hard we think okay how do we solve it who solves it what are the consequences and uh so we you get opinions as you know you get all sorts

of opinions written on all sides of it I like to know what the opinions are because they're seeing things that I can't see I want to know what they see

and it also helps inform Us in terms of what we do how we behave how we Marshall the resources that we we

have most people come want to do good in the world that's a force of of uh a source of energy so how do how do you harness the energy of your own

people to do something good and uh so that's the always the big question is how do you harness that energy that desire in a way that they

feel good about it and you feel good about it and you actually end up with something that um has a positive impact that's a pretty good Mission question isn't it yes and and and for me

personally because it isn't really part of a mission statement it's like okay what kind of impact we make what's what's a positive impact that we can make in the world I think that's a beautiful question uh and this thank you

Ed my pleasure I really enjoyed talking with you it was great to talk to you um I just you know I adore the book creativity Inc I think the work that you're doing is is really vital and

important work and I just have a tremendous amount of respect for what you've built and how you comport yourself in the world and what you represent so it was an honor to spend time with you today thank you well it's

been a a true Joy you're uh as a conversationalist you were wonderful I appreciate that thanks come back sometime all right thank you thank you

thanks that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources

related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at Rich roll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch my

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