Good Life Project - Pixar Founder, Ed Catmull on Creativity, Culture and Steve Jobs

Episode Date: February 18, 2015

Do you remember being a kid and loving to draw? But at some point early on you learned that your art wasn't good enough? So you stopped.What if you had learned a different story? That your art WAS good, that your ideas WERE valid, that your perspective WAS valued?Today's guest is a master of cultivating and allowing for creativity in the art world. Children's animated films to be exact.Ed Catmull is the founder of Pixar, the world-renowned animation studio that has transformed the film world by creating the standard for computer graphics.In his recent book, Creativity Inc., Ed discusses how creativity is cultivated, what is required, and his own journey from studying physics in college to founding Pixar (which he still heads today).Our conversation goes down many fascinating avenues, including the misconceptions we have about what art teaches us, the connection between artistic thinking and entrepreneurship, and his long-standing friendship with giants like George Lucas and Steve Jobs.He explains what it was like to be on the frontier of computer science in the 70s and how he has learned to navigate the fear of failure.At the core of Ed's genius though, is what makes a good story, and throughout the interview he shares his wisdom on this topic.Get excited for a dive into the brilliant mind of the artist and visionary Ed Catmull.Some questions I ask:What made you talk yourself out of studying animation in college?How did you evolve from working in physics to technology?How important do you think it was for you to have an end goal of what you wanted to create?Who was the Steve Jobs you knew and how was he different than the general public's viewpoint?Follow Ed:Twitter | Website"The creative act is acting and responding in the face of change."Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So what would it be like, do you think, to simultaneously realize your wildest childhood fantasy, build a multi-billion dollar global entertainment business, and along the way, work with Steve Jobs over a period of decades to build something absolutely stunning. That's the journey that today's guest, Ed Codmill, who is the founder of Pixar, has gone through. And in this really kind of fascinating, wide-ranging conversation, we talk about his childhood, we talk about how he actually abandoned his dream of animation and then went and pursued computer science and a PhD and then came completely

full circle to literally create the technology needed to build the first fully animated computer film. And his amazing experience of building a company and working with Steve Jobs. And we get into a really fascinating conversation also about how he believes that the world really misreported and misunderstands Steve in his later years and some deep insights about who he had turned into and evolved. Really, I think I love this conversation. It's really fascinating. One quick apology before we dive into it. Ed was in his office in the Bay Area and I was in New York City and I had the opportunity to have this conversation. So of course I jumped on it.

And so while most of our conversations are filmed in person, filmed, we don't film anymore, are recorded in person and we try and really keep the audio quality as good as possible. The audio may be slightly less than the normal broadcast quality stuff that we do because we had to record this remotely. So I just ask your forgiveness there

and really just focus on the meat of the conversation. I think it was some pretty extraordinary stuff that we dove into. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him.

Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Such a fascinating book, such a fascinating story. And, you know, what you've built, not just in Pixar and now Disney Animations, is so compelling and inspiring and fascinating on a number of levels. But my curiosity when I see a journey like yours very often goes way, way, way back and says, okay, what were the nuggets? What were showing up when you were like a kid and where does the story begin? So I'd love if you're cool with it, taking a jump back in time and tell me a little bit about where you grew up and what kind of a kid you were like. Well, I grew up in the 1950s. I was born in 1945, so the memories start in the 50s. And at this time, this is post-World War II, so all of my parents' generation had gone through the Depression and through World War II.

And at this time, everything felt really safe as a kid. And the parents almost never, ever talked about what had just taken place. So it was like this idyllic environment. I grew up in Utah in Salt Lake City. And I grew up in Utah in Salt Lake City. And I grew up feeling safe. And there were the beginnings of the Cold War, and you heard things about that and so forth on the news. And for me, the idols of the time were Walt Disney and Albert Einstein,

these two really iconic figures. Yeah, yeah. And so it's like they're exciting, but at heart, I wanted to become an animator. So I was good at art. I studied art. I was good in school. I was always a good student. I would not say that I was good in school I was always a good student

I would not say that I was the best all the way through high school there were always a couple of people that were just outstanding people actually we just had our 50th high school reunion and it was extraordinary I mean it was really phenomenal

so we're talking over 50 years ago. And it was in leaving high school or in going to college when I realized that I didn't know how to become an animator. And I knew that my skills weren't at that level, and

I had no idea how to get there. So, as I entered college, I then switched over and went into physics. Which is a pretty substantial, I mean, at least from the outside looking in, you're kind of, I'm scratching my head saying, huh. Well, here's the interesting thing, because I thought about this. And initially, because I would tell people this and people would find it incongruous. And so I would, when I'm talking about the early days, I would mention that there'll be kind of a titter in the audience because it is incongruous. And it's only recently I thought, why is it incongruous?

Because the one thing I realized and believe is that when you take art, the thing that you're actually learning to do is to see. And there's this amazing misconception that art is about learning to draw. And therefore, it's discounted. And when the funding is tight, as it is, then art programs are usually the first thing to go because of the incredible misconception that it's about learning to draw, not learning to see. But if you turn it around and say, oh, learning to observe is an important skill to develop

both in art and in science and in medicine, psychology, and in management, then it gives you a different perspective. But I have to say I didn't tie all that together other than the fact that looking back at the time, I thought of both of them as exciting things to look at. Yeah. It's so interesting you bring that up also. And an odd coincidence that actually the article that's up on my website right now is titled First Learn to See. And it's about that exact same thing. I was a kid who was, I was an artist. I would steal away in a corner of my basement with a little swing arm light and a table made out of like an old door

on some boxes and paint. And I would paint, I would paint album covers on jean jackets. And one of the things I learned early on you know was that exactly what you said you know the mythology about not being able to draw anyone can draw you know like the real gift the real the real magic happens when you actually learn to see what's in front of you rather than that representative that you've learned to you know to substitute in as what you're really seeing yeah It's so fascinating. It's a hard concept, but for me, it's a really fundamental one. It's the recognition that our brain models the world, and we think it's the reality.

And if you can step back, and that's what observation is, to say, well, the world is actually telling you something, and I'm kind of distorting it on the way in. But if I learn not to distort it, or if I recognize that I'm distorting it, I can be open to listen to other people's viewpoints, because they're seeing things that are different than I see. And the thing that's different isn't competing with what I'm doing. It can be additive to it. Yeah. No, so I'm curious, what do you think is the reason behind, so at some point, I think,

you know, when we're little kids, and somebody says, draw a cat, you're just going to look at a cat and draw as much as, you know, that cat as you can see. And then at some point along the road, something changes where we start to draw the stick figure of a cat that we were taught to draw instead of the cat in front of us. And it happens pretty universally to so many people. I'm curious whether you've ever explored, what is that about? Why do we actually do that? Is it just an innate need for pattern recognition? Is it efficiency of cognition? What's your take on that? Well, I think there are a couple of different things going on. One is the particular phenomenon is that when really young kids are drawing and they're uninhibited, then their drawings tend to be abstract, but they also tend to be free and flowing and delightful to look at. And I believe what happens for a lot of children is that they self-judge. They say, oh, this doesn't look realistic. And so they shut down. And they'll shut down. And

I don't believe it's because the parents and the teachers in general want them to. They just observe that almost universally this happens they all say well i can't draw because they view what they put down on the paper as supposed to represent the reality that's in front of them and then they can see this different so it turns into i can't do that uh and and so it's it's robbing them of a path of development which which is why I like there to be art programs because it's saying, no, that's okay. Put other stuff down. And then after a while, you develop the ability to recognize what you're seeing and you develop that skill and then connecting it with the recognizer function with the creative function.

It was so interesting to me. Go ahead. I could rattle on forever about this. No, but it's such a fascinating topic. And I'm sure, well, of course, with what you do, I'm sure you've seen this. In my world where I'm surrounded by a lot of entrepreneurs, very often early stage, I have seen so many entrepreneurs who were early life or were trained in the arts beforehand. And I truly believe that it was that training that has allowed them to excel as entrepreneurs

and just see things that other people don't see. Yes. And I would add to that that I think that managing an entrepreneurial, obviously being an entrepreneur is a creative act, but I think that managing should be a creative act wherever we are. They're always dealing with issues. And what that means is we should always be observing and thinking and having some introspection added to our set of tools. Yeah, no, I completely agree.

So let's kind of jump back into your journey. So you make the jump and you say, okay, actually, there's one more thing I want to explore about this transition moment for you where you kind of graduate high school and say, I'm going to go into college and I'm going to focus on physics instead of animation. Was part of that decision, I'm curious, about you looking at the animation space and saying, well, A, I don't see what the path is to succeed there, but also, does anybody really succeed there? Do people really do this? Can you make a living, or is it just this rare few people that nobody knows about? Well, my perception at the time was that, was the one that came from Disney Studios,

was that they were very successful at what they did. So the only real measure of success in my mind in high school was could I join them? Could I be with them? Because these were the guys who were the best.

And in truth, there wasn't actually a path to get there. There was no CalArts. There was no school for it. That they had an original group of people and they trained them up and then they weren't growing. Ah, that's interesting. And I had another belief coming out of high school and out of my environment really and that was that I felt like I wanted to be the best in the world at something and

so I and I wanted to be on the frontier so I looked out of physics and said well I can see with the frontier it's a long ways to get there but and that's where I want to go. And so by going to physics, I was putting myself on the path where I could get out to the frontier or the edge of knowledge. Yeah, it's so interesting. It's funny, as you're saying this also, I'm reflecting. You're like, I'm taking myself back to high school. It just jumped into my mind that I actually, while I was painting and doing all of this other stuff, I also was getting top grades in physics, which is a little bit weird to me that we're sort of like having this conversation. So, yeah, there's this really interesting bridge there, I think, in the way that you're laying it out, saying for you it was about more than studying physics. It was about being on the frontier and being world class.

There's a bigger aspiration. As a kid, were you somebody who was always driven to be the best at something? Or was this something where you kind of hit college and said, okay, it's time to actually get serious and these are the things that I aspire to? Well, I do remember in high school thinking that having that thought was that I want to be the best in the world at something. And it wasn't I don't think I took this in the wrong spirit. And then I know that, well, it may not last forever. It's just like you want to get there and experience that. And it helped form me in the sense that I believe to this day that people should experience something where they excel,

but they should also have breadth. And they're kind of counter ideas because one could say, well, I want to have breadth and I want to know a lot of things, so you have a thin education. But I think if you take one of the topics and you go deep into it, you have an experience that's unlike the breadth. But if all you're trying to do is to be deep into one particular topic, you become narrow, which is what it says. It sounds like. And I appreciated the fact that I went to college.

It was University of Utah, where I had a liberal arts education. I took the required classes of a variety, and I enjoyed them. I completely enjoyed all these classes that I was in. And then I could take some areas in math and physics and try to dive in really deeply and master it. And I love that feeling. I think, well, that really should be the goal of a good education, is there is that roundedness there, but an experiential thing that comes with mastering something. And that something is going to be different for each person.

Yeah. And this is such an interesting exploration for, I think, for so many people. You know, when Gladwell came out with the tipping point, or no, it was Outliers a number of years back, and he kind of popularized the research that was going on around the world of greatness and becoming world-class and, you know, the 10,000-hour rule. And it came into the popular lexicon, and people were saying, well, you know, it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become that good at something. You know, the question really became, well, how do you amass those 10,000 hours? And is it to the exclusion of

participating in all of the types of knowledge or all the other parts of life. And I think what you're saying is so interesting because I think you see people, you know, like your approach where you kind of say, you know, I'm going to dive into this and I'm going to go narrow and deep in this one thing but leave enough space in my life to still have some breath and some enjoyment outside of that. Richard Feynman is kind of a fascinating example from the world of physics. You know, he's this Nobel physicist,

but at the same time, he's a painter and he's a writer and a lecturer. And then you take people who are just the best, the best soccer player in the world or the best violinist in the world, and very often you see people where they jettison absolutely everything in their lives except that thing and I often wonder you

know what is what is the cost of becoming world-class great and does it have to be a cost well it's an important question because there are certain areas and sports is probably one of them where in order to achieve greatness, it takes great dedication and only a few make it. So if you jettisoned everything for that, but you aren't at the level to make it a professional level, then you have actually used up your 10,000 hours on something where you didn't actually get to the point where you reached it there. So that's why I look at it and say, okay, you should experience like being really good at something, but the breath allows you to say, okay, now that I've experienced it, I

might want to use my attention on an area which is better matched for what I can do. So it's not driven so much by a dream which is set by you when you're young, but it's to say, oh, as I grow and I learn new things, I may switch course. Because the thing that I was trying to be good at actually isn't the place where I should be putting my attention. And the reason i say that because that's what i did yeah right exactly so so let's kind of let's jump back into that journey then so you you know you went and pursued physics and then and then i guess at some point evolved into technology um so tell tell me a little bit about that journey well as i was uh finishing up

my bachelor's degree in physics. I was taking a lot of computer science, and computer science was really new at this time. So when I was starting, we were using punch cards. Right, so we're talking the 70s. Yeah, we're talking 69, late 60s. Right, so we've got like mainframes with racks. Yeah, and so when you go in there and you submit your deck and there's these big cloud

machines that read through a line at a time. And God forbid like you dropped your little thing of punch cards. Yeah, that's right. You learn to use elastic bands very well. Right. Yeah, exactly. So what I realized was right at the end, like, holy cow, this is a brand new field. And unlike physics, the frontier is right there. It was like being at an Easter egg hunt where you're at the front of the line. So I took a lot of computer science courses in the last year, and I had taken so many classes.

I really loved college. But by the end of the four years, I had accumulated five years' worth of classes. So I graduated with two separate degrees, one in computer science and one in physics. And then when I went to graduate school, I was going to go into computer languages. At that time, it was Fortran, basically, and COBOL, and a new thing called ALGOL. So I wanted to develop languages. And when I entered graduate school, there was this class in computer graphics that I took. It was taught by Ivan Sutherland,

one of the grandfathers of computer graphics and as soon as I took that course, it was like, ka-ching, ka-ching. So here's the art and the technology and the science all aligning up together in a brand new field and this was the frontier. If you're looking for flexible workouts,

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Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot himth. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Before you stumbled upon that course, was there anything in the back of your mind that said, one day I'm going to go back to animation or one day I'm going to, you know, like in some way integrate this again? No, there was not actually.

So fast. In fact, the only thing is switching over into computer graphics and filmmaking because I had spent four years intensely involved in physics, I've always had throughout my life this desire to, okay, go back and dive into physics things. I'm in an age where that's probably not going to happen. But I'm aware that in physics, it does take about 10 years for you to get to

the point where you're really making some contributions. So it's a hefty commitment. But there was always that sort of thing like, man, there's some really interesting problems there. I wish I could be part of that too, but you've got to make some choices in life. Yeah, and that's

such a big thing though, right? Because so many people would hit that point. They're like, okay, you know, I was a kid. I totally dug animation. You got to make'm invested in it. Whereas, you know, you kind of stumbled into this one class where these two worlds collide and all of a sudden, you know, it's like a light bulb goes off and says, wait a minute. This can all come together in a really powerful way. Yeah, so it was a really exciting time. The other thing was that the government through ARPA, as it was then called, now it's called DARPA, but they were funding programs across the United States in computer science. And it was, I would call this an enlightened program where they were funding professors and their students and they had very low bureaucratic overhead. And so they were trusting the intent of the people to solve the problems.

And it paid off big time for the country. I mean, it was a gigantic win. But even as a student, as I'm now a beneficiary of this, at the time, I recognized, wow, this is pretty good. It's like there are all these smart students around there, and we got this incredible support, and everything's changing around us. And it was just exciting, and the environment was exciting, and the professors were cool and supportive. And I think at Utah, because I was aware of other environments where they vary depending upon the personalities and so forth, but I would just say at Utah, all those personalities lined up in the right way. Jim Clark was a student there. He was the founder of Netscape and Silicon Graphics.

Alan Kay, who led an object-oriented programming, and John Warnock, who founded Adobe. We were all classmates together. Yeah, I mean, what an amazing time to be sort of swirling in this mix. So you end up in this one class that brings all the worlds together. And tell me how that changes. Where do you go from there? How does that make a pretty major change in path for you? Well, the first thing I did was I made a little animation.

So there were other people in the class, but most of them just used whatever crew tools they had to make some pictures. Only a couple of us actually ignored the software they provided and wrote our own, and we were the ones that stayed in the field. And so the next quarter, I went and did this animation of my hand. This was published in 1972, I think. And it was only pointed out to me later that the difference in time between that animation of my left hand and Toy Story was exactly the same number of years between Gertie the dinosaur and Snow White.

And at first I thought, well, that big of a coincidence because once you come up with a new thought, a new way of doing it, building the infrastructure and the technological base and the skill set underneath it just takes a certain period of time. And that was about what it took at that time to make the progress. But when I first did that hand, it was like, okay, even though this is made out of polygons and it's all black and white and as crude as can be, it is the starting point and the end game for this is to get to the point where we can make a feature film. And so I just took on the goal and said, okay, what are the big problems that need to be solved in order to make a feature film? Huh. So that becomes sort of like your beacon, your guiding light is, you know, okay, let me invest my energy in the things that will fill in the gaps in ideas and technology and animation that will someday allow me to make a feature film that's animated. How important do you think it was for you to have that?

Well, at the time I called it a goal, but in retrospect, I look back and realize that it was a framework. And I do draw a distinction there because the goals continually change as you learn new things and what you thought was important is going to change over time. But trying to both make a film but at the other time

trying to make pictures that look realistic provided a framework in which to solve problems. So I started off figuring out, okay, how do you really make curved surfaces? Um, and how do you put textures on them? And so, and so this was what my dissertation was about. Um, and then when I graduated from Utah, I went wanting to bring the same kind of mindset that was in that environment to the other places. But I went off to New York Tech where here was somebody who was willing to continue supporting, trying to develop the technology for filmmaking at a time when nobody else would. This is New York Tech. And the studios had completely zero interest in this.

It had no relevance to them. But here I found a place that for five years was willing to support it. And at that time, I had some theories, but basically I wanted to develop the technology, and I had contradictory feelings. One of them was I liked being in charge of the lab, but the other was I didn't want to manage. So

I had these theories about how to manage a group that let me be in charge and not do any managing. And we hired some amazing people there at the lab, but we also decided to participate in the wider community of SIGGRAPH. The interesting thing to me was there were other people out there who had similar goals about making a movie.

I certainly wasn't the only one. But the thing I believed early on was that we were so far away that the best thing to do was to basically engage completely with other people in solving the problems. Whereas the other people trying to do it were trying to get ahead so they were secretive. and I quickly learned and understood the fact that I would make or we would make much better progress by engaging with the broader community and in fact that is what happened it's what paid off the best people came because we were the most open community

so over the years we found wow we've got a phenomenal group here. And then five years at New York Tech, George Lucas hired me to bring high technology into the film industry. So now here we're with a successful filmmaker, but we still have the philosophy of let's engage with the broader community. And you might think that with a successful studio, it's a way I'm funding all this, funding all this. I want to benefit from it. So let's keep it secret. But George wasn't like that at all. He had no problem at all with us publishing the stuff that we were developing.

And as we were publishing it, we kept getting stronger and stronger people. And it was just a remarkable time. Yeah, and it's so interesting because even, I think we're seeing a lot more of that happen today where a lot more people are becoming much more open with sharing intellectual property and technology. But there is still a whole lot of completely complete secrecy complete siloed

and and it and it is on the surface counterintuitive to say well if i give this away you know that will allow that would give me the edge but but in fact it sets in motion a set of dynamics and responses you know that attract the best people to you and allow you to accelerate things faster um which i guess for some people is intuitive and for others is pretty counterintuitive. But it's amazing to see how when you went to Lucas that that ethic was preserved because you would figure the exact opposite would happen. You know, like this is proprietary. We need to have the edge so we can do what nobody else can do.

And you're right. So there are a couple of interesting follow on to this train of thought. One of them is, of course, Stephen bought us out. Now, Steve is known for being very secretive. All right. And and Pixar coming out of Lucasfilm had always been open to publish. And what people didn't realize is is Steve never cared that we published. So people find that surprising.

And just for context also for anyone listening, the Steve we're talking about is Steve Jobs from Formula. So in all the time we were publishing papers and we were engaging in the community and so forth, I never had pushback on Steve in publishing. And so while he had his own view about how he wanted to run things there, when it came to Pixar, as far as he was concerned, it was, oh, it's a different culture. You guys do it your way.

That's so interesting because Apple is so known for being, you couldn't be more opposite. Well, it was, for me, it was an interesting thing because there was, I view, the view of Steve, the last few years of his life, the general public view is completely wrong. That they didn't get him. And there's a reason for it. But I saw a different side to Steve that other people saw. Yeah. Let's talk about that a little bit, actually, because you address the end of your book, Creativity, Inc., to almost like wanting to set the record straight to a certain extent.

So tell me a little bit about your Steve Jobs and also why you felt it was important to share your lens on it. Well, the first part of it is that there is the notion of the hero's journey, right? So the hero is cast out in disgrace and goes out on a journey and then learns something and comes back as a different person. Okay, so this was Steve's story. So the early stories of Steve are well known, and a lot of the stories probably are correct that his way of interacting with people weren't all that good to begin with. And I saw that when we were first with him. But what happened, which I think people missed, is while they knew that Steve was smart, Steve was extraordinarily smart.

Smart in the sense that when he did things and he realized they weren't working, he could think about it and alter his behavior. So he was known early on for swinging for the fences. So when he would strike deals, he would really go for it big time. It was built into him. He was very ambitious in what he wanted to do, and every once in a while, he would get it. But while we were with him, there were a couple of deals I saw him do where he got an amazing deal, but in the end, it didn't actually accomplish

what he wanted. So one of them, for instance, was a $100 million sell of the rights to the Next Step operating system to IBM. It was an amazing deal, but it actually was so good of a deal that it was detrimental to the company. But Steve figured that out and as he watched this, he changed his behavior

and he became an empathetic person in the way he dealt with people and the way he interacted with people. Once he changed, then basically almost everybody who was with Steve stayed with him throughout the rest of his life.

But it's the things that were chasing some people away. He stopped those behaviors. Well, then they're all staying with him. So now when reporters call to ask about Steve, well, anybody that's working with him is not going to psychoanalyze their boss. And I wouldn't either. So people would say things. Then I'm not going to psychoanalyze their boss. And I wouldn't either.

So if people would say things, then I'm not going to be talking about Steve because Steve's still alive. So the result is this part of Steve is missing from the public record. And the perceptions then are a mixture of this phenomenal comeback of Apple with the perception of a behavior that he had earlier in his career. Not recognizing that part of the change in Apple was because he had changed his behavior. And that he became an empathetic person

and he learned how to listen. And he learned things that were new skills. And he learned them in a very deep way. Yeah, I mean, it is interesting, and I'm thinking even Isaacson's book on him was researched while Steve was still alive. So it would be interesting to have actually started the research for that book and garner the information after he had passed,

and I wonder if he would have gotten a lot more people speaking to him or different people saying different things. But it was just really fascinating for me to see your lens on how he evolved in your relationship with him. But it was also interesting for me to see how in a body of work that you were putting out, you felt that this story was being told. There was such a big gap that you felt compelled. It was important for you to actually say, this is an incomplete story. Let me fill in a piece of the puzzle from my 20-some-odd years of experience of seeing his evolution so that you get more of an accurate view. Yeah, and I mean, to be fair to Isaacson,

I think this material was hidden from him and hidden by me in addition to the others. And while it's an example, for me it's one of the themes that I believe and I see all the time is that a lot of information is difficult for us to see. I use the term hidden, but I actually mean it in a very general sense is that there are certain things and for a variety of reasons that we can't see. And either because of our position or our own way of distorting the reality or our limits of our ability to see or the limits of the way information's come to us,

as well as things that, given the complexities of the life, we can have influences that there is no way in the world that we can see or understand. Yeah, it's so interesting. A friend of mine who's somebody who's been deep into the world of psychology and marketing once shared with me that when you're trying to gather information from somebody, there

are three levels. There are things they will tell, things they won't tell, and then there are things they can't tell because they don't yet understand that they know them or that they're buried deep down. They're latent. They're not actually on the surface. So they're there, but they're not even aware of them. Yes, and I believe deeply in that. And I also believe that if you spend some time trying to suss out the deeper things, then you're opening yourself up.

And there will always be things that you can't see. But there are things on the margin where if you pay some attention, then you can dive beneath the surface level conclusions. And most companies and in most places, the conclusion about whether something was worthwhile doing or whether or not it was a mistake is actually a very shallow analysis. So if you are successful as a company, then what you were doing was right. And if you failed, what you were doing was wrong. And you see that over and over again, and it doesn't represent what happened at all, is that when you were successful, you probably had a mixture of things that were wrong and that were right, and that the fact that you were successful allows you to ignore the things that were wrong, and most people actually prefer to do that because they're kind of painful.

So the better position to take is, well, every once in a while, we as individuals or we as companies should spend some amount of time being introspective. Most of our time, most of our lives, we're looking outwards. We deal with customers or we deal with the various problems. So it's outward facing. But being introspective is not the same thing as like looking outwards, only you're directing it inwards. It's actually a different kind of experience. And you can't do too much of it, but you need to do some introspection and then you need to do some integration between the observations you make as you try to look for these subtle, more difficult things, and then you integrate that with your outward-facing way of dealing with the world, which is where you spend most of your time. Yeah. If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered.

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The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Which is really interesting, too, and it ties into some of your ideas on building a company culture. You know, within Pixar, you've got, you build this legendary, not just company that puts out, that begins to not raise the bar,

but literally create the bar. I mean, you come out with the first animated feature length movie and a string of astonishing wins after that. And from the outside looking in, it would be easy for somebody who didn't really go deeper into your journey and Pixar's journey to look at that and say, well, you know, just a series of nonstop wins. Whereas the real story is a willingness

to do what you just said, to be introspective, and go in and see what are our wins and what are our failures. And I think one of the big stumbling points for so many people to actually own that that's an important part of a personal process as an entrepreneur, a corporate culture building process from a larger company, is that it requires vulnerability and it requires a willingness to sit with uncertainty. And we are wired not to like those two feelings. Yes, that's right. We're wired and we have got contradictory feelings inside of us. And one of them is just the notion of failure and mistakes,

where we have two big meanings for them. There's the intellectual, which is to say that it's failures and mistakes that are part of our background and we've learned a lot from them. So intellectually, we know that we're going to make mistakes and that's, and, and, and have these failures, but there's another side to failure, which is the one that we learned in school, which is that if you fail, it's because you screwed up or you didn't work hard or you were stupid. And it's deeply built into us. But it's even worse than that. Every day when you read the newspapers or listen to the news, then you'll find that

as companies or government officials make mistakes, their opponents will use the mistake to bludgeon them. So mistakes and failures have a palpable aura of danger about them. So built into us is not only this memory from our school days, but the real danger we see in the world when there are failures and mistakes. And what that does is it gives each one of us an internal contradiction. And they're not going to go away. It isn't as if, okay, I'm going to resolve those. They're still going to be there. So if you recognize it, then you can begin to adapt it and say, well, okay,

I know what it means to, like, I want this thing to be right. But at the same time, it's really important for me personally and for the people around me to make it safe for when the failures and mistakes happen because they will continue to happen. It's like it's the one guarantee you've got, but you never arrive at that place where it's nirvana and it's no failures because you've figured it out. And in fact, if you go to any organization,

and I would say it's true here, it's true at Disney, but it's true in most companies, is people think, well, after we've been successful for a while, it's about time we have it figured out. And there's that notion and expectation that you reach the point of having figured it out. And that thinking is extraordinarily dangerous. It's like we never get it figured out. We are always figuring it out. And it's that mental leap to realize that it's an ongoing process and that our desire is to jump around the problem. If you can somehow tell me the right thing to do or the right words to say,

I can easily solve or get around the problem, when in fact what you have to do is to say, okay, this is the problem. I'm going to go through the problem, and I will probably have to alter some of my thinking when I do it. And that never stops. And I think that's the big awakening for anybody who wants to make something different or better or something that didn't exist before, whether you're animating a feature length film or a short or building a company or writing a book, whatever it may be, is that this notion of there is no there there, that the process begins anew and there's no ending point to the learning, but there's also no ending point to putting yourself back into that place of ambiguity and uncertainty

and the risk of failure and exposure and judgment and loss. And I see so many people dial back their genius and dial back doing the very things that have gotten them to that first big success because now they have so much more to lose, so much more to be judged by, so much more that's on the table if they fail. So they stop doing all the things that got them there in the first place. I completely agree with you. I think it's a fascinating phenomenon. A curiosity around that, the last book that I wrote was called Uncertainty. And the question I was asking was, I noticed that a lot of world-class creators across

a wide spectrum of fields, when you study them, it seems that they're this small group, this small thin slice of those people who seem to be able to go to that place to take the risks, to live in that place of ambiguity and uncertainty and just keep throwing stuff up against the wall and be okay there. And then while the rest of the world suffers substantially more. And I got curious, you know, is that genetic? Is that capacity trainable?

And if it's trainable, how? And it's interesting because I had a lot of conversations with people, some of whom said, no, you either have it or you don't. But increasingly, it became apparent that the vast majority of people, it actually is trainable and with not very hard things to do. And one of the big things that makes a huge difference in your ability to find equanimity in that place and continue to live there and operate and ideate until the really good stuff comes, really basic things like meditation and mindfulness and exercise. It wasn't a big complex thing or app or technology.

And so it's really interesting to see high-level innovators and entrepreneurs and creators now adopting these practices on an increasing level. Well, for me, it's one of the fundamental questions because I recognize fully that everything that I thought that I had come up with, that I could find somebody else had said previously and had discovered and had gone through before. That's so interesting. And I thought, well, okay, so part of the problem that we have in any one of these is can you say something which will connect with people to touch them? I mean, it's what storytelling is about, right, is how you connect with people. And there certainly is a genetic component in that we are pattern-making creatures. We're very good at it. And so we'll look at the pattern of events and we will draw conclusions from it

and we will take comfort from it and we'll draw the wrong conclusions from it. So then the question is, well, okay, so we work that way and we're good at, at, at finding patterns. Can we train ourselves to understand that, that, that, that some of the patterns actually are false patterns, but that we have, we've incorrectly connected the dots and, and, and go back with new experiences. And now we're going to get new experiences and with new experiences we will still get patterns but they won't be the old ones because we will change and we continue to modify ourselves over our lives.

How many people want to do that? I found this interesting thing is that a lot of people say they want to do it, but they're afraid of the change. Yeah. What is it that they are afraid of? And I think part of it is the fact that where we are going in the future actually is unknown. That at one sense, deep down inside of us, that we know that our patterns can't always be relied on. That is, we know at some point we're going to die, that companies change. So at an intellectual level, we say these things are going to happen. A bus could come out of

nowhere that you don't expect, or somebody could have a heart attack. And you see these things happen. So we live in an environment where unexpected things happen and we instinctively want safety. But the response to the change that's out there is one of now trying to be conservative or hang on to things in the past. And I think the training is to say it's fine that you learn a lot in the past. You use that. But there is something about the future which actually really deeply is unknowable. And so if you face towards it, you're saying, I'm putting myself in a position where something unexpected is going to happen and I'm going to change course as a result.

Yeah. And then I think also building the skills, if you don't have them already, to be okay there. It was one of the – when I was doing a bunch of research around this, there's an interesting study that may interest you that came up that I came across where – are you familiar with sort of the classic Ellsberg paradox? Ellsberg, who most of us know from the Pentagon Papers, was also an emerging decision theorist. And he started to look at the way that people handle risk in the real world. And what he realized was that it's not the same in the laboratory as it is in the real world. It's not just expected return where you can plug in

probability and magnitude. There's uncertainty. We can't get those numbers. So he did this experiment where he essentially said, okay, imagine you have two jars. They both have 100 marbles, black and white. In one of them, you know there are 50 black and 50 white. And in the other, it's some other distribution. You're not told what it is. It could be 99 and 1, 80, 20, or it could be 50, 50. You can't see through them. And then he said, you have to pick a marble from one of these jars and then place a wager on what color it's going to be. And you get to choose which jar you pick from. And what he found was that especially as the stakes went up, people would choose from the jar with the known distribution. And mathematically, there's no basis for that.

So he became really curious as to why that happened. And it ended up being known as the Ellsberg paradox. Why do people move away from the option where they perceive to have uncertainty, even if the certain one has no rational basis, no absolute better odds of success. And I got curious about that too. And much more recently, people started to do fMRI studies of people while making these decisions. And a recent one got curious and they said, I wonder if there's something bigger going on here. I wonder if there's a social context to this. So they arranged a similar experiment, but the people were told that their choices would never be exposed to anybody. So they removed what they call the fear of negative evaluation or fear of being judged, you know, ostracized if they chose wrong. And what was

fascinating is that when people then had to make this decision in the face of, you know, choosing certain option or uncertain, and they knew that nobody would ever know, so there was no risk of judgment or being kicked out of the tribe, the bias away from uncertainty almost entirely evaporated. So what that experiment started to show was it's not only that we're wired to run from making decisions in the face of uncertainty, but there's a social context. We're wired to not want to make those decisions, be wrong, and then be judged and potentially outcast. So it's kind of fascinating how that works. So now if you follow that, so the implication, I believe, in a managing sense, and I don't

think it's just a creative environment, I think it's a need environment, is that in most of our social environments, our decisions are not secret, which means that people will make a subconscious mental calculation about the cost or the risk of having made the wrong decision. And they're going to do that, right? Because we're wired for it. But we don't have the option of saying, well, we're going to make the secret decisions here. Right, yeah.

So what that does is it says, okay, what we have to do is to say, given the fact that that is the reaction people have, how do we then address the sources of the fears to minimize the fears? And we can't get rid of them entirely because, as we know, they are seen by your colleagues. They may not be seen by the outsider, but they're seen by the colleagues. But if you go through, let's say, some mistakes together and you learn and you all survive, then one of the consequences is that the penalty for making a mistake in front of your colleagues is now lower each of the groups, and we use the brain trust as an example, but it applies everywhere else, is to say, what are the sources of the things in the room that would cause people to hold back? And if we can address those fears, we're more likely to let them open up and make contribution. And so, here's where we get to some, like a counterintuitive notion. we're more likely to let them open up and make contribution. And so here's where we get to some, like a counterintuitive notion.

And that is with our brain trust, which is our collection of our good storytellers, is that we don't give them any authority to override the director. Even if John Lasseter is in the room, John can't override them and I can't override them. It's the director's final decision. And the purpose behind that is to send the message to the director that he can't be overridden. Therefore, we're making it freer for him to listen. But that's just one example. It's like in each case you say, okay, why wouldn't somebody say what they think? Well,

there are perfectly good reasons. I don't want to embarrass themselves or they don't want to embarrass somebody else. So if you, if you can address those, think about the dynamics of the room that goes on and then work on them, recognizing that those things keep creeping back in, but we address them, then it frees them up, and they will then make more contributions.

And it's also fascinating because there's another, it's not a paradox, but it's a question of where the minimum is. So here's my example. I'll take one extreme. If you take the example of the aircraft industry where zero errors is a meaningful concept to you, to the airlines and the manufacturers. So it's meaningful and it's desirable.

But it's also clear to understand. And so a lot of people apply this easy-to-understand concept to a lot of things in life. But a lot of activities, zero errors is not a meaningful concept. Like education, for instance, is one where talking about zero errors in training a child is not a meaningful or a helpful concept. So let's take now the example of making movies, where zero errors in making movies is a harmful concept. That is the notion that you deliver a perfect film without any errors, telling that to the makers of the film would actually screw the things up.

So zero is a harmful concept. All right, so now here's where we get to the central problem. And I mentioned we've got this brain trust, where in the brain trust, we're making it a safe environment for people to say what they think, but also to come up with outlandish ideas. Now, what that means is they must be able to say something stupid or that's really crazy and it's OK. Now, everybody gets that. Right. So you need to be able to say something really crazy. All right. What happens if somebody says 40 crazy things? Then the people around them would say, well, that person obviously isn't

contributing. They're just distracting from the room because they keep saying crazy things and it's not helping anything. Actually, they're screwing things up. 40 40 is bad and zero is bad so we're between zero and 40 should you be right it's like what's the sweet spot i think it's i don't know right and and and that's what it means to operate in the environment where things are happening is you're in this place in the middle and it's not well defined. And you need to be comfortable actually being in this particular place. And it's one of the reasons why I like to draw the distinction between stability and balance because people conflate the two together. And one of the reasons is if you think of balance and you talk about it, it sort of

implies sort of a calm in the middle. I've got forces going in different directions, but I found this sweet spot in the middle. But in fact, the balancing act in all of our environments in our lives is highly dynamic. And balance is an activity in which things are changing all the time. And that's what balance means. So it's the opposite of stable. Stable is like, nothing's changing. You're either asleep or dead. But balance is one where things are continually changing, and you can't even define exactly where that point is because the point keeps moving.

Yeah, so it's really not, there's no state of balance. There's the pursuit, or there's the dynamic exploration. Precis a dynamic exploration. It's so interesting. It must be so fascinating from your standpoint and from the director's standpoint, managing those teams and trying to figure out where is that moment between zero crazy ideas and 40 crazy ideas where it's like, okay, now we're at the top of the bell curve. It's got to be different with every team and every group and every project. I guess that's part of it.

The truth is people do look for the patterns to say, okay, where did we spot it? Yeah, I'm sure. We can't find the pattern. They're all different. In fact, if we found the pattern, we'd stop being creative. Right, exactly. It's like, well, that can't be right because there shouldn't be one thing that fits all.

It's got to be the dynamic process. The definition is the creative act is, to me, acting and responding in the face of the reality of change. Yeah, love it. And I don't want to say repeated, but you keep raising the bar and pushing in a series of incredible things. And you've got this fantastic company with a legendary culture, tremendous creative output. At this point in the company's history, in your life, I'm curious, what's your why? What's moving you to, you know, where do you want to go? Well, I look back retrospectively. I could always have planned this out.

But there was the 20-year pursuit of the goal of making the feature film. And then for the next 10 years, it was, okay, how do we make it sustainable? What are the implications of the things that we've not only learned but observed in Hollywood and other Silicon Valley companies? And then we were acquired by Disney eight years ago. And so then there was this challenge of, can we take the principles and apply them to a group that had failed? And in doing so, we did a lot of things that were counterintuitive, which turned out

to have worked out for us and turned Disney completely around. It's basically the same people who were there when we started. So they went from being a failed group to a group that just had the highest grossing animated film in history and a phenomenally different spirit. But it was now applying the principles of trying to remove the fear from this group or the obstacles. And then it was trying to capture this. So that's what the book was about. And so but things keep changing at Pixar and at Disney. So there are the challenges here. Um, and as people change or are they mature, um, then, then the question is, okay, well, we've made it sustainable over this period of time. How do we set it up so

new people come in or the people who are here who are younger come in who, well, they may have witnessed it on the side. They didn't actually experience the decision-making process to get us here. How do we get it so that they own the solutions going forward? And these are solutions that I don't know about and they have to figure them out. So how, how do we set it up? And because I've seen places where when the, the founders move on or get hit by a bus or whatever happens, then things fall apart

because the people that follow them are picked because of their organizational skills, but not because they had those same experiences, because they couldn't. Nobody can ever have the experience that we had in building Pixar.

So what are the experiences that they have So what are the experiences that they have and what are the challenges and how do they solve our current problems so that they own them? And so this is a different kind of activity. It's to say, okay, I got some period of time now to make sure that the other people here own it,

and it's not a repeat of what I'm doing because that would be a huge mistake. Yeah, and I think that's one of the big mistakes we see so often is that people want to deconstruct what somebody has done, even what you've done in the past, and reapply it. But it's a different moment in time. It's a different culture. It's a different – the people are different. It's so fascinating to see. Everything kind of keeps going back to this one concept that we were talking about, which is that there is no there there.

And I think that freaks some people out. For some people, it lights them up because it's just possibility. How amazing is it that the challenge is always there and that the learning never stops should you choose to continue to embrace that possibility. For me, that's one of the key concepts. And it is a hard one. Some people look at the future as something that they are building and some get that. There are some who create, but they need their metaphors to grab onto. And I think that's good. So frankly, a lot of what the storytelling doing is to give them

metaphors, but at heart, they know the metaphors are just things to grab onto because they're actually grasping with the unknown and they get that. And then for some people, the future is kind of scary. So they try to repeat what's done and they've got their skills of their job. And so they go back and they rely upon the skills, but they're avoiding that unknown of the future and seeking refuge in the skills instead of using the metaphors or even just fully embracing, it's like, okay, I'm making plans. Great. I should always make plans. They're going to get derailed almost immediately.

I'm going to adapt and repeat. That just keeps happening. Right. Yeah, it was really fascinating. I had the opportunity to sit down last year with Milton Glaser, the acclaimed designer. And he's, I believe now he's 86 years old, still incredibly prolific, runs one of the powerful design studio in New York. And we had this conversation where he was sharing that once you become known and

highly successful for having, okay, it's this style. And then all these people want to come and hire you and pay you good money to do the glazer thing. But he wanted to keep learning. He doesn't believe in styles. He's like, look, I don't want to have a style. I want to be able to keep evolving what I do. But there's this really interesting dance between people who'd want to hire him, having some expectation of what the look and feel it will be of what he'll create for them,

but at the same time, him wanting to have the freedom to actually be able to dance. Yeah, that's right. That's beautiful. And it's this really interesting dance. And it is the tension. And you're right, that expresses it very well. It's that you've done something, it's good, but I like a director who's like, the good ones, okay, I can't do the same thing again. I have to do something different.

Yeah, which is also interesting in the context of making a movie, right? Because fundamentally, heart, we communicate to each other through stories. And that what differentiates a good movie from a poor movie is whether or not you've found some way to connect with somebody emotionally. And it's that emotional connection which causes changes in people's lives and that's what you want so it isn't it isn't just entertaining i mean obviously there's an entertainment aspect of this but hold some people to it but ultimately you want to be able to touch people and make some mark on the world yeah and and i think that's one of the things that you guys have been tremendous about. The technology, cool. But it's the fact that without any real live people on the screen, you can move people deeply and emotionally

because you understand how to tell that story fundamentally on a powerful enough level, on a personal enough level, relevant and tangible enough level that it goes past the rational filters and goes straight to the heart and evokes a response. And that's where you want to go. So final question I ask everybody when we wrap

is just the name of this is Good Life Projects. When they offer that term to live a good life, what does that mean to you? For me, it is that we intend in everything we do to do good for other people. We don't always know what's going to happen, but I think we say, okay, I want my intents to be right. Then we can use that as a pole to grab onto as we go off into unknown areas. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Ed. I really appreciate the great conversation, your wisdom, and your time. Well, thank you, Jonathan.

I really enjoyed talking with you. Great. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Thanks. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks so much for joining.

This has been really just, I've loved this conversation with Ed about his personal journey, about his work with Steve Jobs, about just the realization of a childhood fantasy and dream through a pretty circuitous route where he, in a way, kind of abandoned it for a chunk of time and then circled back to literally create the technology that allowed him to realize that dream and then build a giant company with a string of incredible successes that has put smiles on the faces of hundreds of millions of families and kids. Super, super cool. I loved being able to dive into that story with him. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, if you would love to head on over to iTunes, if it felt great to you, and just giving us an honest review or thumbs up if it feels good to you, that would be so appreciated

always. And if that Good Life Project immersion sounds like something that'd be interesting for you, spend seven months hanging out with me and some great mentors and a really beautiful family. The group that's coming together this year is kind of blowing my mind, actually, to do something amazing, both on a personal level and an entrepreneurial level. Go ahead and check out goodlifeproject.com slash immersion.

I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for this week and wishing you a fantastic week to come. Thank you. We'll see you next time. thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot if we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

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