Motley Fool Money - Freaky Thinking and Pixar Creativity

Episode Date: April 14, 2017

On this week's Spring Break Special, we revisit two of our favorite interviews. Disney Animation Studios President Ed Catmull talks about the business of creativity. And Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner talks about how to think like a freak.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money. From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money. It's the Motley Fool Money Show. I'm Chris Hill and welcome to our spring break special. This week we are revisiting two of our favorite interviews. Coming up, Ed Catmel is the president of Pixar and Disney Animation. He joins me to talk about the business of creativity.

But first, it's time to think like a freak. Joining me now from Freakonomics Studios in New York City is Stephen Dubner. He is the co-author of the best-selling Freakonomics books. He's the host of the Freakonomics Radio podcast, which with 4 million downloads a month, makes it just a little bit more popular than Motley Fool Money. His latest book with co-author Stephen Levitt is Think Like a Freak. Mr. Dubner, thanks for being here.

Hey, Chris. Thanks for having me. Let's jump right into the book because this new book is all about helping us retrain our brains to think like a freak. I don't know if it is by mere coincidence that the release of this book comes just a few weeks before the start of the World Cup, but you kick things off in the book with an example from soccer. Can you walk us through thinking like a freak

when it comes to taking a penalty kick? Yeah, sure. So this is, you know, one incy-weensy, teeny part of, you know, any given soccer scenario or I've now been trained. My 13-year-old son is a fanatic, so he doesn't let me say the word soccer anymore. When I say soccer, you say, what's that?

I have to say football. Football, got it. Then when I, then when we talk about it, about the NFL, which we're big fans of, I have to say American football. So if I slip and say football, you'll know I'm actually talking about soccer, okay, but I'll try to say soccer. So obviously soccer is an interesting sport for a lot of reasons. But we look at one very minor instance in which a thought process, rethinking your thought process can help. And that's the penalty kick. So as you, as most people probably know, penalty kicks in soccer are not

that common. Scoring in soccer is pretty low. ergo penalty kicks tend to be really important. And especially if you're in a shootout, which doesn't happen that often, but it can in the World Cup, where there's a draw and you need to have a series of penalty kicks to decide who's actually going to win and lose. So if you look at the data on all penalty kicks at the elite level, which we did for a couple leagues, you find that 75% of them are successful, which is pretty good. So we ask a question, you know, if that's your baseline, if you want to think like a freak and you want to try to increase your eyes, a little bit, might there be a way toward thinking your way to greater success?

So then we look at where penalty kicks tend to be aimed. So most kickers are right-footed, which makes the left corner of the goal their strong-side target. For those kickers who are left-footed, obviously the right side of the goal is their strong-side target. And so because of the nature of a penalty kick, it's you standing there just, I think, 12 yards from the mouth of the goal with the keeper ready to try to stop you, but he's going to fail three, four, three, four.

three times out of four. So what he's got to do to try to stop you is guess which corner you're going in and jump in that direction. Because if he waits until after you kick it to try to jump and stop it, he's too late. So usually what you see is a kicker will get up, start to kick. And as he starts to kick, the keeper will leap either left or right. So as it turns out that the keeper leaps to your strong side, the left corner, I think about 47% of the time, leaps to the other side, about 41% of the time, and he almost never stays in the middle. So then we say, well, what would happen if you, rather than going for a corner, which seems to be a much smarter kick, actually kick it directly in the middle? What happens in cases where the kicker actually does

that? And it turns out that even at the elite level, a soccer player who takes a PK directly at the center, right where the keeper is now standing, but where he'll soon vacate, it turns out that That is about, you have about a seven percentage point better chance to succeed by kicking straight down the center. So one, I like the metaphor of this because sometimes in life, you know, going straight up the middle is kind of the boldest move of all. You think, why don't people do it all the time? Well, it's because if you kick center and fail, you kind of look like an idiot. You know, kicking to a corner and being stopped is sort of a noble failure. kicking center and being stopped would be a pathetic failure.

And so we argue that this is one, again, really small example of how if you want to think like a freak, you'll think about what's my real incentive here? If my incentive is to win the match for my team, then I want to go center because the numbers say that's better. If my incentive is to protect my reputation personally, kind of the private incentive versus the public incentive, then I'll kick corner. And so we use this as an example to show how much, how very much of our behavior. behavior, which we think is meant to be kind of good for everybody or pro-social or whatnot, that in fact, you know, we're pretty self-interested animals. Now, I'm not saying that as a bad thing or a good thing. It's just a thing.

It's the way that humans are. We respond to incentives. So if your idea is to solve problems in life and to help more people do better, and that's kind of the message of think like a freak, how can the average person help solve a bunch of problems, whether for him or herself or for everybody else. You know, what are some ways to think a little bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally, and that's the story. Let's talk about wine for a moment.

Absolutely. Nassim Taleb, best-selling author of the book The Black Swan, was on this show a while back. And one of the things I asked him about was wine because he's a connoisseur. He knows a lot more about it than I do. And he basically said to me, never pay more than 50. $15 for a bottle of wine. Just don't ever do it.

And I thought that was just someone smarter about wine than me giving me his best advice. But in your book, Think Like a Freak, you guys actually have the data that backs up what Nassim Taleb said. We do. So honestly, I didn't know that he's a wine guy. I know him a little bit, and I love his brain. He has got a ginormous and very unusual brain, which I love to, you know, listen to. And I happen to, in this case, yes, run very parallel. So we've done, you know, my co-author, Steve Levitt did a little bit of an experiment.

And then we interviewed on Freakonomics Radio, two guys, another one of whom did a little experiment. But one guy, Robin Goldstein's name is, who did a big experiment of blind wine tastings. And this was really nicely done. I'm sure there are, I know there are wine people who argue with it because they feel they're ticked off at what he found. But the question he was basically out to ask was, do more expensive wines taste better? So if you think about that, you know, if you think about do more expensive X's, are more expensive X's generally better than less expensive ones, you know, we think we have a pretty good grip on what function price serves in modern society. Things that cost more are generally better than things that cost less. And we also understand that there's such a thing as style and trend.

And, you know, I might pay $1,000 for a $1,000. purse by some fancy designer that no, will not be, you know, a hundred times better than a purse by, you know, a lesser known designer. Personally, I don't know if I'd, even if I'd ever pay even $100 for a purse if I were the kind of people, person who uses purses. But that said, we tend to think that price correlates pretty well with quality. In the case of wine, however, wine is one of those things where there's a lot of mysteries, a lot of intimidation, and there's a lot of subjectivity. And so what Robin Goldstein did is ran a ton of blind tastings with expensive wines, medium-priced wines, cheap wines, red, white, rosé, on and on, people who are

experts, people who are novices, people who were wannabes. And at the end of the day, the long story short is that, no, more expensive wines do not taste better. Therefore, if you want to reach a conclusion from this research, you probably couldn't do any better than what Nassim says, which is don't spend more than $15 because the chances that you're going to get a great bottle of wine just because it's expensive are pretty slim. And the chances that you might get a pretty good one for $7 are pretty good. And therefore, drink what you want, what you like, and don't be intimidated by the kind of unicorn quality of the correlation between price and quality. The legendary American football coach, Vince Lombardi, said that winners never quit, quitters never win.

You guys write about the upside of quitting. It's a good thing Lombardy's not still around. He might have issue with that. He'd beat the crap out of us. We should say he didn't invent that phrase. That actually came from, I want to, I'm probably going to miss quote. I think it came from a fellow named Nathaniel Rich, and I may have that wrong off the top of my head, a guy who was writing kind of advice books in the early part of the 20th century and kind of

feeding off Andrew Carnegie's gospel about how to, how self-made people and so on. But yeah, so Lombardi was famous, a winner never quits, a quitter never wins. Churchill famous for, I believe the quote was never, never, never, never, never, never, never give up. And then he went on to say in matters large and small and so on. And you know what? If you're Winston Churchill and you were the prime minister of a great nation that is literally facing extinction at the hands of the German Nazi government, then I would say, yeah, not giving up is the way to go. But most of us, the stakes aren't so high. Most of us are in situations routinely, whether it's a job or a career or a startup or a project or a relationship or whatever it is, where we're afraid to quit because

we've been told that quitting is bad and we are failures for doing so. And so we make the argument that if you want to think like a freak, you should see the upside of quitting. What is the upside of quitting? The biggest one is that, you know, every time you do something, there's something else you can't do. It's known as opportunity cost. So for every dollar or hour or brain cell, I spend on something that's an hour or dollar or brain cell, I can't spend on something else. And so the upside of quitting can be real. Now, we try to make this argument as empirical as we can. It's hard.

It's not really, it's a hard empirical argument to make because there's no counterfactual. We can't take, you know, a million people and divide them in half and say, hey, half of you, quit your jobs. The other half don't quit. If we could do that, you know, we might do it. So we try to answer it as empirically as we can. We also acknowledge that, you know, we're biased. We, you know, Levant and I are probably as biased as the next. people we try not to be, but I've quit a few big things in my life, and it worked out well. And so it's

easy for me to say, you know, hey, people appreciate the upside of quitting because it worked for me. But, you know, I appreciate that's not necessarily the sensible or an easy thing for a lot of people to do. Coming up, Stephen Dubner talks about thinking like a kid. Stay right here. This is Motley Full Money. Welcome back to Motley Full Money. I'm Chris Hill. Let's get back to my interview with Stephen Dubner, co-author of Think Like a Freak. Much has been written about financial incentives for parents and their kids, for companies and their employees. When do financial incentives work and when do they not work?

So great question, hard question. Turns out that, you know, one thing I'll say is that there are a lot of different kinds of incentives that we often don't think about so much. moral incentives, social incentives, reputation, things like that. And we like to think that financial incentives are the be all and end all, and they're plainly not. There are a lot of things that people will do for other reasons that they wouldn't do for money and vice versa. That's that when you look at purely financial incentives, it turns out that, you know, scale really matters. And it turns out that when you give a little bit of money, people may respond in the

short term, and then it wears off. We see this with research when you pay children for getting better grades in school. Turns out that giving them five or ten or twenty dollars to do well on, you know, if you can move from a C minus to a B, you'll get 20 bucks. And that sounds great. And then a lot of kids will try that and they'll respond to that financial incentive. But then the next time around, they're thinking, wow, that was a lot of work to go from a, you know, it's not as simple as flipping a switch.

I actually have to do a lot of work. I have to show up for all my classes. I have to study. I have to not do that thing I want to do at night. instead do my homework for 20 bucks. And all of a sudden, what seemed to be a pretty big financial incentive seems pretty small. So it's very delicate. And an incentive that will work for a while will wear off. So whether it's a bonus on Wall Street or a kid getting paid for grades, these are susceptible to a lot of different, you know, circumstances in the context where something

that might seem to work or might even work for a little while will no longer work. So there's no easy answer, but yeah, people like money for sure. You're listening to Motley Fool Money talking with Stephen Dubner, co-author. I love how you say that. You just bring on this radio guy's voice. I want to learn how to do that. What are you talking about? You do that every week.

Yeah, but I'm a total amateur with the radio. But like you have that thing where you're talking, you're listening, and then you come in like half a degree, half an octave lower. And you listen. I just like, it's such a good signal. It's like a good reset. You know, I feel it's a palate cleanser. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm just trying to cleanse the palate of the ear before we move on to the final topic. What is the palette of the ear called, you know? I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out your use of the word pundity. So, uh, yeah, I think I made that up. Sorry. I think you did.

You and your co-author, Steve Levitt. You are both married. You both have kids. I am curious, as your kids are getting older, and this is now your third book. What? I know what your son thinks of your use of the word soccer, but what do your children, to the extent that they are thinking about what you and Steve do for a living and freakinomics? I'm just curious. I'm assuming as they are getting older, they are starting to pay attention and possibly even, unbeknownst to them, helping you in your research. Oh, honestly, they do. And it is my favorite thing. So Levitt's kids, I can't really speak so much. I don't know, you know, I know them pretty well.

And, you know, he talks about the kids quite a bit. But I don't really know the for instances. But I know, like, with my kids, like, they couldn't care less that, you know. I mean, they like that I do this thing I do. And once in a while, they come and they're guests on the podcast. So my son is going to be a guest on an upcoming World Cup episode we're doing. And my daughter almost made this episode. It was great, great, great tape.

But the lawyers wouldn't let us use it for reasons that I've been. better not get into. But she didn't do anything wrong. But I do love, you know, I love how children have ideas that are so native to them and which don't seem at all amazing to them. They're just ideas. And to us, they seem so fresh. And that's partly because we get conditioned out of thinking like kids. You know, we get conditioned out of bringing up those crazy suggestions or asking those wild questions because, you know, we think that someone will think we're not so sophisticated or smart. And so it is just one of the great joys in life is when your kids will just have an idea that just, you know, it may work or it may not work, but it just shows that, like,

the synapses are firing. And in fact, you know, we do kind of give that advice in this book is that we should all think like a child more. And it was more about the kind of, you know, practical, structural end, which is what I was saying a minute ago. Kids ask questions that we may not. They make observations. We don't. But as we went on and you begin to look at the brain science of it, you see that the human brain is never more, is never sharper, you know, more perceptive, more cognitively adroit, more faster than between the ages of, I guess, roughly, you know, let's say 13 to 24, let's say. So, you know, the bad news is that everybody on the other side of 24, we're all just in a state of slow, slow, steady decline, which we kind of know. We fake it. You know, we cover it up with experience

and BS, but we're getting dimmer by the day. And the good news is that for the kids, not only are they really good at thinking, but we should exploit them more. So I think rather than looking at kids as kind of inchoate, sloppy, inattentive versions of ourselves, I think we should look at them as kind of better, wilder versions of ourselves. You know, as one child psychologist I interviewed recently put it to me, you know, we're kind of, adults are kind of like the marketing and sales divisions of the human team and the kids are the hardcore R&D. And you got to give them the room to do what they do. And so I try to do that with my kids.

I'm sure I fail a lot because once they go really off the rails, I get all, you know, parenting and say, oh, I don't think that's a very proper idea for you to have. But, you know, the older I get, the more I try to catch myself doing that stupid stuff in reverse field. Stephen Dubner is a best-selling author and host of the very popular Freakonomics radio. Up next, we'll dig into the business of creativity with Ed Catmull from Disney Pixar. Stay right here.

You're listening to Motley Full Money. All right, before we get to my conversation with Ed Capmel, I'll go to say thanks to Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. When it comes to the big decision of choosing a mortgage lender, and it is a big decision, you want to work with someone you can trust. You want to work with someone who has your best interest in mind. And with Rocket Mortgage, you get a transparent online process that gives you the confidence to make an informed decision. Don't waste time searching through stacks of paperwork. With Rocket Mortgage, you can securely share your financial information to get a mortgage approval in minutes. You can even adjust the rate and the length of your loan in real time

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The second highest is Pixar's Toy Story 3. And it is not a coincidence that the same man is in charge of both companies. Ed Catmull is the president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation. And in his 40 years in the business, he has helped revolutionize not just animated films, but the movie industry writ large. It is a journey that he captures in his film. his new book, Creativity Incorporated, overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. Ed, thank you so much for being here.

Oh, it was my pleasure. I think for a lot of people, their first encounter with Pixar is the movie Toy Story, which came out in the mid-90s. But one of the things that you write about is that, boy, Pixar was around for a lot longer than that. What is sort of the origin story of Pixar and how did you get involved? Well, the origin for me was growing up in the 50s. And at that time, the two iconic figures were Albert Einstein and Walt Disney, both of whom I deeply admired. And by the time I got to college, I realized I didn't even know what the path was to get there. So graduate school, foundation school, and I realized on getting my doctors, amazing people, George Lucas bought into this.

he was the first person in the film industry willing to bring high technology into the film industry John Lasseter joined us who is a unique genius in the field of Steve bought us out or Steve Jobs bought us out in

1986. At that time there was no business for selling hardware Lucasfilm for imaging and medical process. Steve at the time had also bought next He had left Apple companies that he owned our dream of making an animated film. We finally got our chant. At Disney, they decided to let us also make an animated film. Contract in 1991, and in 1995 we came out with Toy Story.

So this is now 20 years after starting down this path, that we finally achieved the goal. I was going to say it seems like the overnight success that I think a lot of people just sort of attributed, obviously took you close to 20 years to get there. You mentioned Steve Jobs. It's almost like Pixar is an afterthought when people think about Steve Jobs and his impact on the business world and everything that he did at Apple and reshaping the music industry with iTunes and the iPod and mobile phones with the iPhone. But walk me through a little bit of your experience with Steve Jobs because he could come off as very forceful, even egotistical. What was your first meeting with him like? Well, at the first meeting, he was actually still being out from Lucasone. And he disappeared from the race. Of course, learned later it was because of his conflict with Apple.

And then he wanted to buy us to turn us into what later became next. but we declined the first time. He then formed next. And again, Wanda Acquires, and the thing about Steve, which a lot of people don't realize, is that Steve went through what is classically called the hero's journey.

His Apple, and then he was, and he was, he formed Next, and he formed Apple. He was initially the kind of typical view of him. And he did have those characteristics when he began with. what people didn't realize is that while he was starting up almost overachieving he would get deals that were too good in fact they were so good they were good in the short term but not good in the long term

but steve was so smart that he realized that these ways of working weren't giving him the results that he wanted so he changed his behavior the way he interacted with people changed he became pathetic the way he delivered hard news and intense, but the way he delivered the news changed. And what's interesting is that after he made this change about 15 or 20 years ago, everybody that was with him stayed with him through the rest of his life because he was a good friend of them. They all stayed with him. Nobody talked with the press or reporters or anybody else writing about him because

Mark in Steve's life is missing from the public record. You're listening to Motley for Money talking with Ed Catmull, His new book is Creativity Incorporated, overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. I was telling you during the break, I love the subtitle because this really is a theme that pops up repeatedly in your book and in the history of Pixar and even carrying over into Disney animation. It seems like there are so many points along the way where either a film is on the verge of collapsing or in some cases the company is on the verge of collapsing. or in some cases the company is on the verge of collapsing, where Pixar is facing financial troubles, or in the case of some of the movies, it takes years to really figure out how to get the story right. What is it about the culture at Pixar that enables you and your team to really work through these things?

Because let's face it, some of these movies that have turned out to be phenomenal Academy Award-winning, films, at various points along the way, they are absolute train wrecks. Well, the beginning of the movie, when we first basically mock it up, draw what you think is going to happen, and then you edit it together with temporary music and temporary voices. And you get a feeling for what it's going to be. And these early versions, as John Lasser would say, you need to go through several iterations. But by definition, if they're terrible, you can't judge the team by what they've produced. because I just said it was terrible.

So you have to judge them by the spirit of the team. How well they're working? Are they intent? You put all those things together, and you protect them at that early stage. So that was one of our lessons, realizing that's how they all start, and that the front end is different than the back end.

I always say that when we were first struggling with Picks, Disney, because Disney, in the 90s produced this, this set of four phenomenal films, which was Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Lion King. And then they started to go downhill. And the question is, okay, what's going on? Why are they going downhill? But I looked at other companies because I had friends in Silicon Valley, classmates formed well-known companies. But I would watch a lot of these companies rise and then fall, and yet they had smart and creative people. So something was going screwy with them.

So I began to formulate this question of what's going on when you're successful? There's something mysterious that's happening. Because these aren't dumb people. They're really smart people. Manufacturing, because Pixar initially had to sell a computer, so we had to figure out manufacturing. And, of course, the role model at that time production line was a creative act. So this was an aha moment, and not just seeing how do they get to creating it on the line

and the way they give authority to people down the line. But you recall a few years ago they had a break problem, and the management actually hid from the public. So the question was, what is going on in that company that would make them go counter to a deep cultural value? So whatever the forces are, they're really strong, they operate all the time, and they're hidden, and the implication is that they're hidden for me, and I can't see them either. We can easily get blindsided and do some dumb things. Human nature is always at work here. There are things that we can do to be more aware of it.

We're not changing the nature, but if we're aware of the nature, then we can adapt to the changes and the random things that life throws out. Coming up, what do animators at Disney and Pixar think about competition like the Lego movie? More with Ed Catmell. This is Motley Full Money. There's no life I know to compare with pure imagination living there. Welcome back to Motley Full Money, talking with Ed Catmull. His new book is Creativity Incorporated.

Disney is obviously a huge corporation with many divisions. If you just look at the studio division, it makes up, I think less than 10% of the overall company's revenue. And yet, I think, Ed, if I were the head of merchandising for the Walt Disney Corporation, I would be calling you every other week just bugging you about what is the next thing in the pipeline so I can sell more dolls, so I can sell more T-shirts, et cetera. How much pressure do you get from other divisions within Disney? because I have to believe that merchandising and theme parks are increasingly dependent on the creative output of Pixar and Disney animation.

Well, there are trying to do things to satisfy their particular needs. It would screw up the process. So everybody from Bob Eiger through the consumer products says, okay, just make great. And that's worked really well. And a lot of people assume that they don't like something we do, they'll say, well, Disney made us do it. Disney's always painful. The second thing is

we didn't want to be an island because we and actually that's what happened before when Disney animation was that even when they were very successful in the 90s the needs were so large that it could be overwhelming to the studio. So basically what you will.

We wanted a different approach And so what we did was we put in a person who had responsibility to both sides, that is to us and the marketing, and to between us and consumer products. So the model that, like we're an island, we need the ownership of the local culture, but we do not want to be isolated. So we have good flow of communication back. And when you have the right people in there, then it just works wonders on both sides. But the third element in terms of the, when we make our films, we have a span.

We want them to all be great films, so that goes without saying. If you make, as an example, then the public wants it, consumer products wants it. It will be difficult. It will be difficult. It's a low-risk idea. There's a certain range of our films with which are low-risk. When you do a cars film, then you know that there's less risk with it. But at the same time, we've got the other end.

Films would not pass to the idea of a rat-coucial idea, or if you make a film about, well, no matter how successful the film is, you were never going to sell a lot of toy. So what we try to do is say, okay, let's span this range, because you do want to do some things that are commercially likely to succeed because we want to be healthy, and we're in a business. It's important for our films to do it. But also a group of artists sometimes really hard to figure out.

But by saying and explicitly people, we're spanning that range from the very hard, conceptually hard, to those that are likely to do well, then we make ourselves financially healthy, and that allows us to continue to take risk. One of our guests in the past on the show has been Jim Sinigal, the co-founder of Costco, currently the chairman of the board, and for a very long time, the CEO. And one of the things we had talked about was how he would, from time, to time, check out the competition. He would walk into a Walmart, he would walk into a target, and just see how they are doing business and pick up what he could and put it to use for Costco.

How much do you check out the competition? I'm curious with the success of a recent animated film like the Lego movie, if that's something that people at Pixar or Disney animation are studying in any way? Well, the movie business, is unlike a lot of other businesses, in that you want to help the ecosystem. Our advantage, Fox or Warner Brothers or DreamWorks, puts out a good movie, and people go and have a good experience. So if they have a good experience, they're more likely to want to go back another time and see another movie from somebody else. Friends of a lot of people, a lot of these different companies.

So we want them to do well. But of course, when our film is out there, We don't want any of them to be around. So we have this like split personality on this. It's like, do great. Just don't do it near us. I know you got a lot on your plate, but before I let you go, I have to ask when it comes to the creative process. What's been the biggest change in your thinking since you first started your career?

Well, I would say that a small number of people on what they do and just people want to turn into them, every element of our life. It's how we think about the problems in our life. And it's our intentions and our freedom to think that we can make a difference that allows us to do something that makes a mark in the world. He is the president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation. He's an Academy Award winner. He can now add best-selling author to his resume.

Ed Catmull's book is Creativity Incorporated, overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. It is a great read. Ed, thanks so much for being here. Thank you, Chris. That's going to do it for this week's show. Our engineer is Steve Broido. Our producer is Mac Greer.

The show's mixed by Rick Engdahl. I'm Chris Hill. We'll see you next week.