The Rich Roll Podcast - Pixar Co-Founder Ed Catmull On The Art & Science Of Creativity, How To Do Your Best Work, Bring Out The Best In Others & Lead

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

Every once in a while there’s a generational thinker that emerges from the most unlikely of places. Someone capable of straddling the complexities of new industries without losing their grasp on historical and cultural perspectives. A person willing to forge new paths in new ways toward a brighter future for all. Ed Catmull is one such generational thinker. As co-founder of Pixar and later as President of Walt Disney Animation Studios, Ed played a key role in shaping a unique company culture of collaboration and creativity. He’s a mastermind of innovation, a pioneer of groundbreaking technology, and a leader when it comes to using great storytelling to forge a better world. If you’ve ever been captivated by the beloved films Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, you have Ed to thank for that. Today we discuss the leadership and management principles that built Pixar’s unique and successful studio. More specifically, we talk about the insights that fueled Ed’s career, the workplace practices he leverages to build creative teams, and his personal philosophy of embracing failure as a path to growth. We also dive into his fascinating life journey, one that included both personal and professional relationships with George Lucas and Steve Jobs. There is so much to be learned from Ed's story, including some wild industry insights during his stewardship at Pixar and Disney, where he navigated through the ups and downs of the entertainment industry, all while delivering blockbuster after blockbuster, garnering eighteen Academy Awards along the way. This is the stuff of legend. If you’re a creator or manager of any kind, or if you’re simply looking to glean wisdom from one of the most fascinating and accomplished people alive, then you’re in for a treat. I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Seed: Seed.com/RICHROLL On: On.com Ag1: drinkAG1.com/RICHROLL Faherty Brand: FahertyBrand.com/RICHROLL Athletic Brewing: AthleticBrewing.com/RICHROLL Indeed: Indeed.com/RICHROLL Plant Power Meal Planner: https://meals.richroll.com Peace + Plants, Rich

There was something about that unique combination of people that came together. How do you harness that energy, that desire of your own people to do something good, wherever you are? I think that's when the best stuff happens. Today, I'm joined by Ed Catmull. As co-founder of Pixar and later as president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, Ed played an absolutely key role in shaping that company's unique culture of collaboration, which has gone on to become the gold standard for creative workplaces worldwide.

If you've ever been captivated by a Pixar film, I'm sure you have. WALL-E is my favorite. Well, you got Ed to thank for that. He is a mastermind of innovation. He's a pioneer in both technology and storytelling and the absolute OG when it comes to creative leadership. It was quite the honor to engage him on the creative principles, the management principles that fuel Pixar's success. We talk about the insights that literally changed workplace practices all across the world to better foster creativity and

continuous learning, and how embracing failure creates this beautiful path to growth. Ed also shares incredible stories from his fascinating life, as well as from his close relationship with both George Lucas and Steve Jobs. Now 78, Ed is a profound thinker, and this conversation is action-packed with invaluable lessons on innovation, on leadership, and also on the magic and meaning of living a good life. You're in for a treat, so off we go. This is me and Ed Catmull. It is a real thrill to meet you. And it's an honor to have you here today to share your experience and your wisdom. Everything that's in this book, Creativity Inc., which is just a wonderful must read for anybody, whether you're a business person or not, because there's a lot of valuable wisdom

for not just how to manage people and get the best out of them and operate a creative, innovative business, but it's really a primer for life. And in reflecting on your life, it's a relatively unlikely story on some level. I mean, I know that as a young person, you had this idea that you

wanted to be the best in the world at something. And I'd be curious as to what prompted that in you. But you are brought up on a steady diet of physics and engineering. And these aren't the curriculums that one would think would contribute to a leadership position or a position in the creative arts. I think maybe it would be instructive to start a little bit at the beginning and talk about how you got into all of this from the start as somebody who was immersed in science and had certain heroes and had a vision for the life that you wanted to live. I was very fortunate to have grown up in the 50s in Salt Lake City. It was a safe environment. It was a supportive environment. And I did have this feeling I wanted to be the best in the world at something. I actually don't remember where that came from,

to be honest. Yeah, I'm interested. What were your parents like? Where did that come from? Like what were your parents like? Where did that come from? My father was one of, there were 14 children, but only nine of whom survived to adulthood on a farm in Idaho. So they were very poor. He was in the Marines during World War II. He was strict, but he was a very nice man.

And he was teaching high school as I was growing up. He was teaching math, and then later got his doctor's degree and became a principal. Honestly, it was a great environment to grow up in. When I left high school, I'd originally wanted to be an animator because my childhood heroes were Walt Disney and obviously influenced by him, but also Albert Einstein. So like these are the iconic figures of the time. And what is the shared DNA between those two individuals for you? Well, the shared experience for me was these are people that were changing the world. And they did it by creating something new. And I knew that Walt Disney had basically created a company when he'd made Snow White,

which is the first major animated film it wasn't the first animated film there are a couple that were done before that but that one was the one that changed the way storytelling was done so he was essentially figuring that out but in terms of knowing about him and reading about him and studying him i I could say, okay, this was a person who figured out how to do the storytelling, but then there was a series of films that were impactful for me as a child. Probably two most impactful films

were Peter Pan and Pinocchio. Was it the storytelling? Was it the art of animation? Was it you trying to deconstruct how they actually created these movies? What about it captured your imagination? This is what good storytelling does for children. And I think it's very important to have children

have their imaginations developed and challenged and pushed. That's what I experienced from those films. And I also experienced a childhood in which we played outside a lot. Parents read to kids. So there was some combination of all those things, which I thought were good for me when I was growing up. I like that going forward. It's like, okay, which I thought were good for me when I was growing up.

I like that going forward. It's like, okay, can I do something like that? So you end up at University of Utah, and this is where it gets really interesting, I think, because it was a very specific moment in time at a very particular place in which a group of individuals happen to congregate that end up going in their own unique ways to change the world in all kinds of ways. Like it was the birthplace of so much,

like you were involved in ARPA, like this is the original version of the internet and on the cutting edge of, you know, what computers could possibly do in animation, yes, but also in other disciplines. And you were surrounded by a lot of amazing young people at that time and also had some pretty significant mentorship. So talk a little bit about that magical period of time that really provided the foundation for everything that followed. When I was there, I did know the place, that it was special. I didn't know how special it was, but I knew it was special. It had been founded by Dave Evans and Ivan Sutherland. Ivan Sutherland had actually been one of the leaders at ARPA who was funding these kind

of programs around the United States. ARPA, who was funding these kind of programs around the United States. And Alan Kay was there, who also had a profound influence on computer science. And Alan Kay was one of my first teachers. And he taught this principle, which actually seemed natural to me. But it was that things are going to keep changing at a faster rate. And it was like, this is what's likely to happen. And it actually stuck.

Because I was making decisions throughout my life based upon the fact that the rate of change is going to increase. So that was one major influence. The other one was that Ivan Sutherland was essentially the first person to really get computer graphics going. And it was Harvard that he built the first head-mounted display for virtual reality and artificial reality. But the key thing that Ivan had was that you can have a big vision. You don't know exactly where it's going or what's going to get there, but you can take some steps to get there. So everything at that program was taking

step-by-step developments towards that bigger vision. And as you took those steps, you were also modifying where you thought you could go. So our job as graduate students was to take the next step. Now, the other thing I will notice, this is just an observation of places that turn out a significant number of impactful people, is there is no real curriculum. The people who are doing it are figuring it out as they go. And there's something which is like, this isn't just educational working on problems, it's actually really educational in that you have to figure out

what it is that you should be learning. And Dave and Ivan set up the program so that we were all helping each other and sharing in the ideas. And we were the ones who were solving the problems. So by the time I graduated, four years after entering, I had made my own contributions. I had friends among these people,

but I realized that I loved it there. So when you were in school, you made your own animated film of your hand, right? Yes. And by some accounts, that was the first or one of the very first computer animated films, correct? Yes. Now, there was another student who made a movie of his wife's face. We actually showed them together. Okay. So you two together. But basically, if not the first, like one of the very first ever computer-generated films. Yes. You created that. You had this ambition of creating a feature computer animated film. Pixar is sort of organized around that principle. So a big part of the Pixar success equation

is this idea of developing talent in-house, bringing in these people with potential, nurturing them, surrounding themselves with, surrounding them with really competent people. And then on top of that, establishing this culture of feedback and permissiveness in which ideas could be shared and done in a way in which it wasn't about judgment

or about the value or the self-worth of the individual, but really about the ideas themselves, this notion of people over ideas. And the question is, how do you get people to think that way? And every time we made a film or every time we made a mistake, we would do some self-assessment. It is, okay, what was working, what wasn't working, and what was of value, and often realizing that our assumptions that we made in the past actually were the wrong assumptions. But because everybody was thinking this way, then we could challenge ourselves fairly early. then we could challenge ourselves fairly early.

So an example of that would be that we did recognize the value Disney provided us for Toy Story. So what we had was an outside force that had a vested interest in our success, and they weren't sort of lost in what we were doing. And that was very valuable. And that lasted through the first few films. It was Tom Schumacher was the president. And we respected him because he was really a creative. And he knew what we were doing.

And when he said something, it was, you know, objective, but objective as a person who understood making films but we also realized that as our film started to become successful and he was going to move over to uh the theatrical in new york for making their broadway musicals that we were going to lose that outside force. So Andrew Stanton brought this up, which was that let's have a brain trust to serve that role for the other directors that we're developing. So this is an idea. We put it into play, and it originally had six people in it.

Now it turns out this thing called the brain trust actually did not serve the roles and outside the original intent of this did not succeed for which it was intent in the way it was intended but we found that when we did this that it was extremely good at giving feedback to people and in helping them. So at this point, we sort of dropped the original thing for it, the original idea, and said, okay, let's develop this group as a great feedback mechanism. Now we had a new question. How do we have this group work?

What are the rules that make it work? So then we're learning from each film. Because what you see sometimes is people do have egos that get in the way or they don't want to embarrass somebody or they don't want to embarrass themselves. So these are not real human emotions that are in the way. And then we recognize also that if you're doing something new and you're presenting it to people who are very good at what they're doing,

something new and you're presenting it to people who are very good at what they're doing, you can feel a little nervous about it or vulnerable. And so it's to recognize, okay, if they're vulnerable, then how do we actually understand that and appreciate it and not threaten that? We also learned if a person with a powerful voice or with actual power started the discussion, started to talk, that it distorted the room because then people would respond to what the powerful person said. And so what it meant was that the person with power

needed to shut up for the first 15 minutes and then enter the discussion. Because if they enter, that's an entirely different thing than setting the tone. I asked Steve Jobs to never come to one of the meetings. Of course, he's dying. He's curious, like what's going, like he wants to be there, right? The minute he walks in, everybody's gonna,

the sphincter's tightened and everybody wants to make a good impression on him. It changes the dynamic completely. And I would suspect even yourself at some point walking into these meetings tilts the scales in a certain way. Well, actually, I don't because I have a very different personality and I don't impose myself in the room. And while it's fun to give a note, I've only made one note in all these years that I was there that had an influence on the film. But that says more about your unique kind of energy

and sensibility around these sorts of things. Because for the most part in any other organization, anytime a boss or a leadership authority enters one of these rooms, it's going to have that kind of negative impact. It screws things up. So the boss has to realize their impact on the room, and sometimes you just don't want to set the tone.

Now, the interesting thing was with Steve is that it wouldn't matter when he spoke, even if he shut up for 10 minutes, when he did talk, he's so powerful, it would be overwhelming. And he understood that. So he didn't come to the meetings. However, because at this point,

we're now a public company, the films were shown to the board of directors. And the board of directors is when he would give some notes. And what Steve would do the morning of any board of directors meeting, because we were shown the current film, and then we'd have a session where the board of directors would talk with the director and the producer just to give some feedback. In the morning, Steve would call me

and he would say, these are very short discussions, he said, Ed, how's it going on the film? And I would say, it's going well. Great. End of discussion. Or, we have a problem, okay, but I wouldn't tell him what to do because I never told Steve how to think.

So if he knew there was a problem, he would then come and he would start, when he got to this part of the discussion, he'd start off by he got to this part of the discussion, he'd start off by saying to the director, you can ignore everything I'm going to say because I'm not a director and you guys know things that I don't know. So these are just my comments from seeing it.

He would then give some, I would say, very insightful notes about the film that he would see. Now, the interesting thing to me was that the directors would say that Steve had an insight about the films that nobody else had, and they heard things from him they'd never heard before. Except that I'm in all of these meetings. I've heard everybody give all their notes. There was never, ever anything that Steve said about a film that had not been said by somebody else before, one of their colleagues. Right.

So what it meant was that people that work together often also learn how to ignore each other. That's a problem. That's why you need an outside force. But Steve understood it. And so for many years, he was the outside force. And he recognized by this time his impact on people. So sometimes, because he was, I would say,

became very empathetic after this 91 to 95 period. If he thought he had too large of an impact, he would take them for a walk to calm them down. Yeah, that's a great level of self-awareness around your own power. Yeah. Yeah. He knew it.

Yeah, it's interesting. There's a certain kind of interesting, perhaps somewhat ironic kind of veneer to this in that your original motivation into rethinking management and leadership and on some level the impetus of the book was trying to figure out why great companies, when they reach a certain level of scale scale suddenly no longer are great, right? For me, it's a fascinating thing because I see it just happen in company after company is what is actually going on? What are people thinking? One of the difficulties that companies have is that because of underlying changes that take place, In particular, it's true with computer-related companies, but now it's happening everywhere. There are fundamental changes that are taking place, not only in the technology, but in its applications,

and now because of the use of more computers and cell phones and the whole web system of transferring information, but also societal changes and environmental changes, a lot of things are happening pretty rapidly. And people have difficulty conceiving of what it means to change their business plan, let alone other things they need to do in their lives. But it's very hard for them to conceive of it.

And Steve was unusual in that his focus was on what is the right thing to do when they were working on the iPhone, but when it was secret. So he went up to the secret lab to see it. And what he said was, we're reaching the point where there isn't really any, a lot more growth in the laptop computers, including the portable computers. So we're going to need to have a different business model going forward now that in itself is very unusual right so that's one thing that I found interesting just okay that sort of sets me apart from other people and the second one and this is one that's difficult for people to see because they've got

a pretty deep understanding of the arc of steve's life there's a reason for that misunderstanding and that was he started off he had behaviors he had those those behaviors when I first knew him and he first acquired Pixar. It was not easy to work with when he was that way. But he changed over time because his story is more like the hero's journey. And now he's got his own kingdom, which is Apple. He's cast out for some reason. And in this case, it's a fairly public humiliation. And so he started Next, he bought Pixar,

and frankly, neither company was working out very well. Yeah. And in the case of Next, he made a brilliant software choice, brilliant software choice, brilliant software decisions, some questionable hardware design decisions, and some poor business decisions. But he's really smart. He could recognize them for what they were, and he learned from them. And I would say that from the years around 91 to 95, there was a dramatic change in Steve's life. And after he went through that change, the people who were with him stayed with him

for the rest of his life. And what was the nature of that change? Was it a result of kind of the excavation of the soul that came with getting cast out in this hero's journey? Or what did he do specifically that you're aware of that created a different growth trajectory for him? The underlying thing Steve did understand was that you have to find out what the truth is and adapt to it. If something wasn't right, he would switch. So I could see that happening.

So as he was going through these things at both companies, he was changing things. Now, what started in 91 is 91 was when he got married. He had his son, Reed. Pixar entered into a relationship with Disney, the contract to make Toy Story. And the whole industry went through this massive transformation from 91 to 95, which had big implications,

bigger than most people are aware of. In 95, Pixar went public. So Pixar going public was the first actual real business success for Steve since he left Apple. It was a real stroke of genius also. And to your point about his uncanny ability to cast his gaze into the future and understand how things would play out, the decision to IPO Pixar on the cusp of releasing its very first movie

seems rather novel and must have struck all of you as somewhat strange thinking, why would we do this now? We have one movie. Let's establish ourselves. Let's make a couple why would we do this now? We have one movie, let's establish ourselves. Let's make a couple movies before we do that. But explain why Steve made that decision

and how that played out, because I think it's a great test case or a very kind of instructive lens into the way that this guy thought and what made him unique and different and special. We did think that this was pushing too fast. All of us thought that. This was like, okay, this is nuts to go public right after the movie came out.

I mean, you had this deal with Disney. You had Toy Story, which was completed and about to be released, but nobody knew how that was gonna do, right? Like the, like paint a little bit of a picture of the nature of Pixar at that time. Well, because basically we were failing as a company and he'd put like $50 million into it,

which was a substantial portion of his net worth. And you almost sold to GM at some point, right? Like you were going to be a 3D modeling company. Well, this is before then. This is when we were spinning out of Lucasfilm. company well this is before then this is when we were spinning out of lucasfilm so uh general motors and phillips uh medical were going to buy us and it fell apart at the last minute because of an internal conflict within general motors between the eds people and the and the car making people so it's a it's an obscure, but we were caught up in that.

And so it all fell apart. So we kept going through this difficult process of getting somebody to buy us. And we finally got General Motors and EDS to agree. And then after they agreed within a week of signing, they get into this argument, and it all fell apart. Then I ran into Steve, and Steve said, how's it going? And I said, no, actually, it's not going well at all. But he had formed Next Computer in the meantime, so now he had his computer company.

Now he was willing to buy us on our terms, which was that we wanted to do computer graphics and make computer animation. And he saw the value of graphics for the future. in, this is 1979, he was the first person in the film industry with credibility willing to put money into this. So basically, he was the only person in this industry that had any value. There was still nobody in the film industry

that wanted to, or that believed in technology with one other exception, and that was Roy Disney Jr., Walt's nephew. And he understood something that was not part of Disney at that time or any other company, and that was Walt believed that technology brought some energy into the artistic process. That was an unusual thing.

And when he died, that spirit didn't survive in the company. It was at Roy's insistence that Disney enter into a contract with us to write software for coloring cells. And their analysis of it was that it didn't make any sense to do that. But Roy said, this isn't about the money. It was about bringing in the energy. A very unusual thought process. And an investment in the future potentiality and possibilities that that that that might reap once the technology

you know continue to advance and mature so we ended the contract uh roy was an advocate um we the whole thing again was another educational process but we worked very hard to make sure that we did not let disney down from ste Steve's point of view, it was like, okay, this is our big opportunity. So we entered into a contract. None of us had made a computer animated film. None of us had made an animated film or a film of any kind. So we were all beginners.

We had to figure everything out in the process. But as we got near the end of it, Steve realized this is going to change the industry. And our deal actually isn't a very good deal. So we just aren't getting much from it. And also, Michael Eisner will realize that when the three pictures are up, that he delivered the three per the contract,

that he will have then just created his worst nightmare. Right. The idea being Toy Story is gonna come out. It's gonna be a huge hit. Steve could see this. There was a lot of excitement around that. And you would be stuck in this three-picture deal with unfavorable terms. And Steve's brilliance was, let's figure out a way to renegotiate this deal. And the best way to do that is to IPO and stockpile a bunch of cash so that when Michael Eisner inevitably calls and says,

I wanna renegotiate this deal to tie you up, you then have leverage by dint of all this money to go back to him and push for different terms. Basically an output deal, right? Where you would share, you're using Disney as a distribution arm in a partnership in which the revenue share was going to be on parity, like 50-50, as opposed to the typical deal

where you're getting a small slice of Disney's gigantic take on a project. Yes, and the interesting thing about this was that Wednesday was at Next. The interesting thing about this was that once he was at Next, he had made some deals which on the surface looked great for him, but in the end, they were bad deals. Essentially, he'd made some bad business decisions in the past, but he was smart and he learned from them. So he approached this one as saying, we need to be 50-50 partners.

I'm not trying to rake him over the coals. I don't want us to get raked over. It's like, we need to approach this as partners. So for me, this is the maturation that's coming out of the lessons he learned from the past. So he approached this of saying, we want to be partners with each other and think of it this way, which meant that we have to have the money to be able to say, yes, we're both investing equally in this.

It's an unbelievable story of foresight. Steve was a person who wasn't rigorous about whatever the business plan was, but was always looking forward and anticipating where the business should go, which requires not just a level of maturity and perhaps some level of genius as well, but the ability to hold loosely and remain really strident about your values and your conviction about moving the company in the direction of the future. So that you don't get out innovated and you don't end up like Sun Microsystems or Silicon Graphics or Kodak.

As Steve saw in the directors of our films, what he believed was necessary for anybody that was going to do something new. And that was, you commit to something with passion. And when you're wrong, you change. And that's hard for people to hold onto their head. Because you think if I'm committed, then I'm committed, I'm not going to listen to things that's going to change my course because I'm committed to the course. But if I'm committed then I'm committed I'm not going to listen to things that's going to change my course because I'm committed to the course but if I'm not committed then I change course too easily so what does it mean is to both be committed and at the same time say oh I've just realized I'm wrong we're going to change that's's very hard. And I'd say the best leaders and the best filmmakers,

that's what they do. We're going to get on this path. Okay, it's not working. We're going to change. Yeah. So how do you do both at the same time? And it is possible. But that's when the,

I think that's when the best stuff happens. Yeah. Well, the way that it's possible is through these many kind of systems and philosophies that you end up implementing at Pixar that creates this unbelievable run of extraordinary movies over the tenure of your leadership there. We're brought to you today by recovery.com.

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Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. On this idea of the brain trust though, the overarching idea here is how do we get the most compelling, innovative, creative work out of this group of people? And what is the environment that we need to cultivate in order to facilitate that? The brain trust is just one of many things

that I think you implemented during your tenure at Pixar. But before we move on to the others, so what became the rules of this brain trust? Like how was it organized and deployed to its maximum effect? Well, there are a few basic principles that went into running it. One of them is that it really needed to be a room of filmmakers

who knew about film. So it wasn't for gawkers or others who wanted to see, because a lot of people wanted to see what was going on in the room, but that's not what it was for. So it was peer talking to peer. The other one was that, which is important, is that that room and the people in the room could not override the director or the creative team.

And that was very important. And we also didn't do anything significant. Like if we knew there was a serious problem, we didn't actually make any moves before or within two weeks, roughly, after the brain trust meeting because we didn't want the meeting overloaded. Like if this doesn't go right, it's an utter disaster. We're just trying to make it so we can focus on the room and not be too worried about other things. The other rule is that you just have to be honest with each other.

But I would say, because people have done this for years and they know each other, that we've actually reached, they have a good state of being honest with each other. But part of that's a learned behavior. And as we bring in new people, they would observe it and they'd realize, oh, it's okay to say something which doesn't work.

And every once in a while, magic would happen. And by magic, I mean that egos left the room. That is, I want to say egos left the room is people could say something, they weren't attached to their ideas. If they worked, great. If they didn't work, that's okay too. I'm not attached to it.

And for me, that's the ideal state to be in. It's probably like flow, as you've heard in a light number of areas. But it's like when a room gets into that state then it's pretty amazing to watch yeah i would imagine i think that creativity isn't something that you can just summon it's not uh you know a product of a board meeting there's a there's a ethereal quality to it right and creating an environment that's conducive to the sparks and the flow and getting the best and brightest minds

to collide with each other, to have something emerge that's greater than the sum of its parts is a real art. Yes, and that's the job. Yeah. Is to get that done right. I'm sure people ask you this all the time. They come to you, maybe they run a small business

or a large organization, or they're a manager of a department at a company. And they say, Ed, how do I get the best out of my people? I just, everyone's operating sub optimally. I don't know how to motivate my people. The work that's coming out of my department just is stale. It's not creative. What is the advice that's coming out of my department just as stale, it's not creative.

What is the advice that you give to that person who's looking to instill that creative flair and a permissive environment in which new ideas and the opportunity to fail and fail fast can be part of the environment to make something new and better and different? Well, there are two things that sort of popped my mind on that.

One of them is I talked about failure in the book and the meaning of it. And then I realized, actually, we don't use the term failure very much inside of Pixar. Now, if we actually have something that fails we say that it fails we're not trying to avoid it but the word's too loaded

because you know starting a school if you fail in a class then that's a bad thing because it means you weren't smart enough or you didn't work hard enough. But also when you get out and bridges fail,

relationships fail, companies fail, and in business and politics, failure is a bludgeon with which you beat opponents. So there's a real and palpable aura of danger around failure while we also would say that we learn a lot from our failures because we have we all recognize that is that meaning of failure is actually sort of overridden by the danger part of failure and so so, okay, it's just true. It doesn't matter what we say about it.

We don't have the luxury of calling a failure educational until after it happens, not before it happens. If we recognize that and say, well, okay, there are a lot of times when we should be using a somewhat different terminology, which is that we're trying to make something work. Let's try this. The light didn't work. Let's try this. We don't need to overload it.

So I try to be very careful about the words and how they're used. It's a terrible word. There should be a different neutral word that encourages people to extend themselves irrespective of whether it works out or not without you know fear of losing their job or you know the kind of internal shame or guilt system that that happens when you know you quote unquote fail it's so loaded and i think it you know it it paralyzes people yeah so if say okay why do people get paralyzed so our terminology does it sometimes uh it's one of the reasons i try to use in general not always but i try to use candor instead of

honesty because honestly sort of like the opposite where uh you say well of course i'm an honest person when when actually that isn't the right word because the opposite of honest is dishonest. But there are times when you may not be candid for a variety of reasons. The opposite of candid is not candid. It's not as loaded. So these words have these subtle effects on people and failure is one that has an effect on how people think.

It's like, I think it should be used for things where you really do have a major problem. And the other one is people get stuck for different reasons. So in the case of making films, if you assign somebody, like you say, this person can be a director, then we came up with something which was very effective, which was, and it's just, all this was recognizing

that when people are trying to solve a problem, they get stuck. We all do this. You're trying to work on something, bang your head on the wall. And I remember this, you know, from like just doing homework or in school right yeah sometimes you're trying to do it you got to do it you got to schedule my I'm sorry my brain is fried I'm stuck

so the issue for us was how do we keep people from getting stuck so the thing we tried, which was quite effective, was to have people pitch three ideas for movies. Now, there are a couple of people who don't work that way. They've got the idea and they're gonna make it. That's fine. We're just trying to help people keep from getting stuck. And when we ask somebody to come up with the ideas for a film and we say three then what that lets them do

is bounce back and forth between them and they do this over a period of a year because if we're going to do a film we've got a director typically a writer and a couple of creative people supporting them like this really tiny team.

And this rather amazing phenomenon happens, and that is every time somebody pitches the film, they start off by saying, I love all three ideas equally. And now they don't. Yeah, that's a lack of candor. And now they don't. Yeah, that's a lack of candor. But it's also, you say, okay, that's what it means to be vulnerable, right?

It's what if I'm wrong? What if they see something I don't see? So essentially you're signaling the other people. It's like, you won't hurt my feelings if you pick one of the other things. So that's a self-protection mechanism. But actually what we want to know is which is the one that they want to do. And we know completely that if we pick one of them, it's going to change dramatically in any case. So my favorite story was with Leon Kreech on Coco.

The story, an idea would be presented, and there's artwork they'd picked up or drawn or whatever to convey the idea. Very rough. We all know that. It's not a final movie idea. It's a pitch for a start of an idea. Discuss it. 20, 25 minutes is what we'd take on this, and then we'd switch to the other story.

And then with Leonkrich, after we did this, we went into the other room, open up the door, the table, the back wall, both walls, the ceilings are covered with Mexican artwork. So without a word being said, everybody knows which film we're going to make. Now the thing about this is

the film that was made in the end was actually radically different than what was pitched at that point. But we didn't care. What we knew is he wanted to make a movie

in that front. In fact, is he wanted to make a movie in that front. In fact, originally he wanted to be a musical. And, you know, but a musical isn't in his DNA. So the very first song he had, which was Remember Me, then became a sort of a core theme that's built into the movie. It's sort of the nature of the change that happens. But it's an example of we put something in place to help someone actually solve their problems

because they could always switch and then come back to when they felt like they had. But the really important thing there was the excitement that this person had for that concept. Like that seemed to be one of the more kind of, you know, important aspects of all the pitches. Like this guy's onto something super motivated. He clearly, you know, wants to do this.

And that's something that we, as a company that supports people over ideas can get behind and marshal our resources to support. And over time, it will become something very different. But let's pay attention to what he's saying to us now, which is less about the pitch and more about the energy that he's gonna bring to what might be two years of working on something.

Is that, am I putting it originate? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Energy is contagious. And then he knows that the people around him are going to bring something and in this case because it's about the a mexican holiday then they went they visited the uh uh southern mexico in the villages to what's it really like uh and they went several times. And they had advisors because they didn't want to operate off of their biases.

In other words, we all know something about various things, just like we know something about cooking and so forth. But in the case of Ratatouille, you actually need to go into a high-end restaurant to see what it's really like. And with each one of those cases, as an audience, we don't really know. And the directors, when they start, they don't really know what it's like in these places. But if you get it right, if you actually bring something from the culture or from the place or

what you're doing and you put it in the film the audience senses that is correct yeah even if they don't know it's true there's a sense that they they can feel that energy right and that attention to detail yes and i think that's what it is with, it's like actually with any company or with any product that's out there, it's like, do people care about it? Are they paying attention to detail? And are they just slapping it out? You want people to care, whatever field they're in. And so how do you do that?

How do you get the people working within your organization to care on the level that's required for that to get transmitted into the product, whatever it is, and give the consumer or the customer that feeling? Well, for me, the big step is that when you see that there's a problem you have to ask why and you it isn't one of those things that you can force on them you say you need to do this you need to fix it this way which is a natural thing for people to do i don't think it's the right thing to do though it's like okay this isn't going the way i would hope it is going why isn't it going this way what's getting in their way and what can i do to this way? What's getting in their way?

And what can I do to solve the thing that's getting in their way? Because they may not see it. And if they don't see it, and I'm not paying attention, then we all miss it. And then it sits there and it festers and it affects people. But we can ask and figure out what actually happened. Why did it happen? And what can we do about it?

Pixar's in the business of taking creative ideas and putting them into a story, crafting a story and sharing that story with the world. By its very definition, it is a creative business. But is there not an argument that every business is a creative business. But is there not an argument that every business is a creative business? Like how do you define creativity and what is the role that creativity plays in an organization or a business or an industry that people don't typically think of as being creative with

quote marks around it? Well, it's clear that people would consider the arts and film and writings for it to be creative. So that's clear. I think most people would say it's, if you're designing products, that's creative. Or if you're in the sciences or certain things, that's creative. But they kind of stop around there. And personally, I believe solving problems is creative.

So if you've got problems in your family or in your neighborhood and you're able to work them out with people, that's a creative act. And for me, solving problems is a creative act. And I think that creating an organization that is better for people and that brings the best out of them is a creative act also.

And I look at a lot of what I've done, it's like trying to solve the problems. And so I said, oh, that's actually the bigger contribution I've had because the original thing that I did, it's like, yeah, that was gonna happen anyway. But trying to create a culture, well, that applies everywhere. And because people are so incomprehensible, the problem of trying to create a culture

that motivates people and creates a sustainable output of innovation and creative ideas that trickle into the products that it makes or whatever it is that it does is a creative act in and of itself. Like I think that creativity is at the core and is of the essence of anybody who's trying to do anything, either individually or as a collective, as a group, call it a corporation, a school, whatever it is. And I think appreciating the power of the creative impulse and understanding how to initiate that

and cultivate that and respect that in the people that you're working with and and in yourself really feels to me like super important if not the most important thing that you're trying to kind of instill in the people around you who have a collective goal that you're all kind of working towards yeah that overstating it to you no no that seems like that's really the the kind of heart and soul of what your book is about and what you were trying to do at Pixar. It is.

It's how those people do it together. What's our responsibility in enabling it, making it safe? How do we send messages to people? How do we send messages to people? You know, in a room where things are sort of rushed, is it safe for the least powerful person in the room to talk? Like, is it like a message? In fact, there's one example that took place.

It's one I loved at Pixar, because usually we've got these really tight schedules and so you get a group of people who are working on it and they're very good at what they do, but they never have enough time. So when they have their meetings, there's a lot, they're under a lot of pressure. So we had one of the leaders in one of these groups

where they're, you know, really smart and high-powered people. But this leader said he wanted to make sure that every person in the room could talk. But in the room, there are production assistants. So these are people that are hired because of high potential, but actually they don't have any experience and they don't know anything about the particular problem in any case. So he told them, he told the people,

this is the way he wanted to work. And the other people were objected only on the ground so they didn't have enough time. They didn't have anything against the person. I thought the others were nice. They were good people. They had high potential. All those things they had agreed on

is we literally don't have the time. So he said, no, this is the way we're going to work. Now, the interesting thing was by the end of the film, everybody thought it was the right thing to do because when he did that, they knew they were sending a message to the person who was the production assistant that they were valued.

But for the people who were supposed to be in the discussion, it was a message to them that we value everybody. And they ended up feeling a lot better about it also. Oh, that's interesting. It's one of those things where he was trying to do one thing, but he actually got two, because it's basically giving a signal about a value. There's a quote that's super interesting to me,

in which he said, if you don't try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill-prepared to lead. And your story reminds me of this quote, but I thought I'd give you an opportunity to explain what you mean by that. I do feel like there are so many things that we can't see in the world or we don't know what's going to happen. It's just the nature of reality. And we tend to hold on to things that we can see or grab onto the experiences that we've got because they're solid they may be good experiences but they think that's you know if we just repeat that i don't know what the right terminology for it is i mean i've used the term the unknown i don't the thing was i haven't found a word that works well because it's unknown. You can't see what it is. It's obscure. For some people, conceptually, it's like a two-by-two chart. It's like you fall into

one of these categories. The problem is it doesn't give any notion of the size of each of them. So the stuff that we know, we know, like that's one piece. But we also acknowledge, I think clearly, that there are physicians or physicists or experts in these fields and the total amount of stuff that we don't know, that we kind of have a sense like, so that's a bigger thing. We can kind of get our head around it. But the stuff that we don't know that we don't know,

it's like, that's gigantic it's huge so how do you actually operate in a world in which there's so many possibilities of things and in this case you're actually working off of the way you think about change or opportunity or your value system because you don't know what's going to happen you know positive or negative coming in your life i've just accepted okay i don't know a lot that's why i can't be right a lot and if i can accept the fact that i really don't know then i think it opens this up to say oh I really do need help from anybody at any level. So if they come in and say there's a problem, then I damn well better listen

because they are seeing things that I can't see. And it would be actually very foolish of me to assume that I know more than I do. And you know in a lot of companies, there's this notion of there's a prep meeting before the meeting because if the leader, in a lot of places, if the manager or the leader gets surprised in the meeting, they're not happy they got surprised.

Basically, it's disrespectful. It's the way it's treated. What's the surprised in the meeting, they're not happy they got surprised. Basically, it's disrespectful. It's the way it's treated. What's the purpose of the meeting if you have to know ahead of time what it is? Right. Well, there's a, you know, people are complicated and there's politics and there's ego.

I mean, essentially what I'm getting from what you're sharing is a sense of humility and a almost beginner's mind of curiosity to lead not from a place of, I know all the answers and I'm going to tell you what to do, but an appreciation that you don't have all the answers and to, you know, kind of come to a meeting with a spirit of tell me more about what I don't know, that then percolates down and gives everyone else permission beneath that leader to have that same kind of vibe about themselves.

Yes. There are times when I've made serious mistakes and people have come to me afterwards to tell me that I made a serious mistake. And I'm grateful I felt like they could do it. And for me, that's one of the most important things. It's like, if I make a mistake and somebody tells me I screwed up,

that they could come without fear doing that. And it's like, for me, that's like, I feel good about that. It makes me actually feel better. You're going to feel bad about the mistake. But there's probably a lot of leaders or bosses out there who will tell their, you know, the people beneath them, like, I want you to tell me the truth. I want you to come to me if I'm getting it wrong. But something about their energy or some other aspect of how they're leading creates a situation in which that underling

still doesn't feel comfortable doing that. What are the consequences to them if they say something that you don't like? Right. The leader says they want that, but do they really want that? Usually when you have something like that,

something happened to which you don't want and it's the nature of things like, oh, it's a bad thing, but okay, something like that, something happened to which you don't want. And it's the nature of things like, oh, that's a bad thing. But okay, what does it mean to the person who told you this? Whether it's something you did personally or even something you disagree with. Often people have disagreements about things and they're valid disagreements. But in some way, you have to make a choice.

It's not like everything is done by committee. It's not. And the person who's on the losing end of that argument has to still feel respected. Yes, they need to feel like they were listened to. to. In fact, for me, it's clear that it's more important for people to feel they're listened to than it is for them to believe that they were correct or that they want some argument or whatever is they need the respect of being listened to. When I think about all of these principles that you instilled at Pixar and the way it's laid out in the book, which on some level, on a surface level, I think, you know, reads like a management book,

like this is how to run a creative business, whether it's the brain trust or reframing failure or the rigorous testing that Pixar would do and this understanding that every project at the beginning was terrible and it was only made better through, you know, this process of, you know, bringing that brain trust to all the big creative decisions to make it better. Is it too bold to suggest that these ideas that you're proposing to get the best out of people and to promote a culture of creativity has a broader universality beyond business and an applicability as to how to kind of comport yourself in the world,

as to how to live. It's almost like a primer for how you can interact with people and engage with people and get together with people to create things. These are in many ways, not necessarily just principles for business, but they are principles for life.

I think the principles of treating people well and learning from them and growing and helping them, treating people well and learning from them and growing and helping them. I think they're unified. It's always messy. It's always hard and it keeps changing. You don't actually reach the point where everything is static

and it's going to stay that way forever. So it is a statement of life. I do think, like I've seen this, people get lost in their goals to be in charge or to make a lot of money. Those things do happen. They get in the way. But I don't think it's the way we should be living

as people, as humans with each other is to let those other aspirations get in the way of how we treat people. Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking we can tease out any one of these ideas or principles, like take the brain trust. Like everybody should have their version of a brain trust in their life.

We think about friends who give us feedback or seeing a therapist or finding a mentor. But what you're suggesting is a committee of trusted people who contribute to the betterment of a project or in the case of my example, the individual. Like everybody should sort of go out into their community and find people who can give them that kind of trusted feedback

and create a structure around that as a vehicle for improving your decisions and basically living your life at a higher level of quality. But it doesn't seem like we think that way. It should be a continual searching process for us. And, you know, because for some people, I think they're looking for what is the right thing to do,

you know, give me the answer. It's like, maybe they'll call one guy or, and that guy will say, do this or don't do that. Or maybe they'll just decide themselves without any kind of feedback or they'll call their therapist. Yes, how do we- But what if there were 12 people

that were weighing in on that, each with their own unique set of life experiences who you could weigh their input and then make a decision based on that. I mean, I have this in my life. I have different groups that I go to for various reasons that really have been invaluable in my life. And I just, I want everyone to have their version of that. And it's obviously something that we're trying to instill in our, you know, in our office here with our little media company as students of, you know, what you advocate. And we've been, you know,

with great effect, been able to kind of put that into practice. And I just think there's so much value in doing that, not just as professionals, but as individuals for the quality of one's life. individuals for the quality of one's life. Yeah. So then the, the, the interesting part is, okay, how do you then think about it to, to get there? Like it becomes part of the search. So it's, it isn't just having the group that does that, but it's okay. If it's not working, how do I get it to work? What's, what's not working? Why doesn't it work? And to me, it's part of the discovery, the continual discovery. Because it's not stable.

Whatever, it's not stable. But still, there's that underlying value that we have. And if we build on that value, which is really a trust in people, assume that everybody is well-meaning. Assume they've got it. They might do something to lose it, but they don't have to earn it. Yeah. How can you be open? How can you hold your ideas loosely?

How can you be a champion for your colleagues and the best idea? How can you be a better, more active listener? And also, how can you ask better questions? Like if you want better solutions, you have to learn how to ask better questions. And I know this is something you've thought about and have written about how does one figure out how to ask better questions it's a good question how do you figure this out but for me it was always you pay attention and if it's not working then you say why is it not working for me that's the question it's like why isn't something going the way I want? So if you essentially start with a question, you don't want to start with an answer.

Because if you start with the answer, then you've already figured it out. Well, that's not a start. That's an ending point. And it's one of the reasons why I have some problem with mission statements. I mean, I recognize in some cases the mission statement actually helps people get some alignment um so it's not that i'm black and white about it but the problem with a lot of mission statements is that it actually is starting with an answer and uh that doesn't generate new discussion so we never had anything, our goal is to make the best films or anything like that.

Our mission statement is to make the best films. I'd rather be in a position where people say, well, what are we doing here? What is our goal? What are we trying to do? Because every time they ask that question, then they're thinking about it. And it's fluid. It's's fluid it should always be fluid because the world is fluid the world's fluid then we should be able

to respond fluidly and one of the reasons i added to the book was some people thought somehow after doing all this we had sort of reached the point where we had solved the problem of how we run a creative environment. That isn't actually what I meant. What I meant was we have a way of thinking about it so we can continue to adapt and change and ask questions and figure things out because the problems keep changing. Is that one of the reasons why you decided to update the book?

Yes. There were things that I had learned in the intervening years because that was eight, nine years ago that I wrote it. Well, there were events that took place after that. And the other one was like rethinking certain things. I felt I needed to be a little clearer about the brain trust and its development rather than like there's just a brain trust.

It's like, this is something that was a special purpose adaptation of the way we were doing things. And if you're in a different environment or in any company, it's like, okay, how do you think about adapting it or building something for yourself? What's your mechanism for getting really good feedback but also good camaraderie with people for helping each other?

But that's really the point of it. So that was one of the things the other one was the realization that um the the failure thing was actually i don't think i fully was talked was was explaining well the notion that there's a human psychology coming behind failure which is actually getting in the way i know what's meant by it. People say, you learn from it, so just do it and get it over with. And we've said the same thing too, but it's not actually what we're doing. What we're trying to do is make it possible for us to learn things,

try things quickly, and then if they don't work, we move on to something else. So trying to explain this concept of holding on to something and having a core of what you're holding on to, but at the same time, you change what you do. Each person's different in the way they do that. I mean, the way Steve does that was very different the way I did it. And I never, ever thought that I wanted to be like him and he didn't want to be like me either.

It's like, why would you do that? I'm not him. You said that you want people to fail the elevator pitch test. What does that mean? What I really said was, is a certain percentage of what we're doing should fail the elevator test not everything does it's like i'm not trying to make another rule it's that if you have a certain percentage

of films to fail the elevator test then this is something about your ability to take risk and do something that's risky so the concept of the elevator pitch is that you have an idea and you want to pitch the idea to somebody who's got the authority to make it happen, an executive or whoever it is. And you can convey the idea so succinctly and clearly that in a short period of time, hence the elevator test, in a short period of time, you can do something which gets their interest so that they would want to do it. Now, the problem with it is that the way to always pass that elevator test is to do something that's derivative right because if you can explain it quickly you're essentially using examples of things that they get they pretty much understand and so if all you do that is you end up actually becoming a fairly derivative company

now that being said sometimes you have a great idea, and when you hear it, it's like, oh, yes, we want to do that. So there are examples of that. Pete Docter saying, I want to do this, although he would typically do the three-pitch test too. But in the case of one film we had where he said, since we're starting over, I've got an idea that takes place inside the head of a little girl

and deals with her emotions. And we all thought, oh, that's a great idea. So boom, we're done. Right. But actually playing, like to actually explain what that movie's about is there's no way you're gonna be able to do that. No, yeah.

But the notion was, okay, what piques your interest that that's worth doing so some things you actually you get it okay let's go off and try that it's still nothing more than just like this really rough idea and it goes through just as long as any other film and just working out even what that means um that's all we had was you know inside they have a little girl and then there are some films like uh up and ratatouille where okay you say a movie i want to make a movie about a rat that cooks well you know you can't explain why that's a good idea in one minute you can't explain why it's a good idea in a week you can't explain why that's a good idea in one minute. You can't explain why it's a good idea in a week.

You can't explain why it's a good idea in three months. It actually sounds like a bad idea. Right. Well, it's all about the execution. Yes, and the thing is when you do something that's really hard, and some of these ideas are really hard ideas, that once you've said, I'm going to solve it, you have to become more creative.

You have to do something which is unexpected to make it work. Ratatouille was probably one of the more extreme ones. But Up was, okay, you know, what does that even mean? You know, it's sort of an odd idea. I want to tell a story about this man that is starting off with his girlfriend and then they get married and then they learn they can have children, and so they want to go on a trip around the world, but then she dies, and he's depressed.

He floats away into the stowaway. That doesn't sound like a good idea. But you know, when you take something like that, and you're willing to change it, and you have the group that's working really well together, then as long as the group is working well together, then you say, okay, they'll figure something out. They'll do it.

How do you know when you've got it? You've got an idea, you're iterating on the idea. You want it to be innovative. You want it to be at the highest level of your creative capacities. You're stress testing it. You're failing. You're improving upon it.

On some level, at some point, you have to say, this is the script or this is what the character looks like or we've all signed on that this is the way that it's going to be. And I would assume some of those decisions are more democratic than others, but there has to be a sense of this is it. And that's another kind of ephemeral, mystical thing. Like, how do you know when you've chosen the right path, decided on the right project, you know, approved of this or approved of that? Like, there's a billion decisions that go into a movie getting made or a product ending up on a shelf. And you have to have some conviction as a leader to say, this is what we're doing. And on other occasions to say, it's not quite there yet.

There are two parts to that. One of them is just in in supporting people and and trying to solve the problem or support them as they try to solve the problem is that we support them along the way but there's one thing that the creative leader can't do and that is they can't lose the confidence of their crew. And at that point, we will stop it or we'll pull the plug or we'll replace them, and we have done that. And these are good people. They're put in position because they're talented.

We like them. But if they've lost the confidence of their crew, then we have to make a big change. And Ratatouille was one of those, to be honest, where we started with an idea that was an unlikely idea. The truth is the final movie was actually, if you looked at it, that it was the fruition of that original pitch.

More than some- You just had to go all the way around the planet to come back to the same place? Well, no, not that. In the case of Up, for instance, it kind of wandered around in different places and ended up in an unpredictable place from where it was. But in the case of Ratatouille,

the concept of what it was actually was there all along. But it had a couple of serious, difficult problems, and they kept trying to solve it. And it went through a variety of things, but they couldn't actually lick the problem, and it wasn't working. And so when it wasn't working, we lost the conference with the crew. Then at that point, we brought in Brad Bird to take it over. And Brad resonated with the idea of the film. Now, the difference is, as a filmmaker, he was able to solve the problem. Because it was essentially a storytelling problem and figuring out what was getting in the way.

So some of the things that were in there were actually blocking the film. I'll give an example, and that is in the first version, there was this chef, Gusteau, and in that first version, Chef Gusteau was alive. And then there was Remy, the rat, who had these aspirations to be a great chef. So part of the problem was, whose story is this?

Is it a redemption story for uh for gusto or is it a aspirational story for remy back and forth so and there were complications as a result of that and so we go we go on it's like okay we like the idea of this artistic aspiration but it isn't working so So we brought in Brad Bird. He talked with a friend of his who was a writer, just part of his group of people that he trusts, and came back and said, we're going to kill the chef. The chef is dead.

So now all of a sudden, boom, things clicked. And then the question was also, how do you actually capture the essence of what takes place inside of a kitchen? So Brad, being a great filmmaker, came in and put in those pieces with this, the woman chef, who essentially was, you know, talking about the right ways of

doing it in an abrupt way, but it's very funny, but it's very informative. It was short, but it told you a lot. So in the end, you end up with something that had the design, because the first director was the one who just had the, who led the design of the characters, the look because the first director was the one who just had the who led the design of the characters the look of the film that was all the first one in the end the intent was there of what it was all along it's just that he was able to do it now i'm kind of telling you you know stories on the inside about how it is because it was hard it was painful it's very painful for the person who couldn't do it and yeah and i would imagine many moments of you know kind of gnashing of teeth and

is this ever going to work and you know this is terrible it's not working and we've made a huge mistake and how are we going to fix this yeah that's right so i mean that's like all of it right like i think you know there's this idea that every, you know, Pixar movie is this perfect jewel box and, you know, it was divinely inspired and, you know, crafted by geniuses and ends up on the screen. And it's a long and arduous process, but relatively conflict-free and failure-free.

And that's just not the case. Like you have said many times, every single Pixar movie was an absolute disaster before it was good. They were bad, like truly bad before they got good. And certainly before they became great. And I think there's a lot of wisdom to extract from that and how we think about how we approach challenges and projects in our own life and how we think about that terrible word failure and how it inhibits us from doing the grappling and the kind of having the patience

and the diligence and the hard work to see it through and get to the other side of it. Yeah, and that's, and it's still true today. And they haven't gotten any easier. They're not supposed to get easier. They're all supposed to be hard. And you can't, there's, no matter what, you could take your engineer brain and your physics mind and try to apply a template on top of this that's going to create a hit every time. And we're just going to check these boxes and move down this assembly line and create something that people are going to enjoy.

But creativity doesn't work that way. No matter how much you try to impose that, it's not going to work. Was there a moment where you thought maybe it would work? Yes. So here's the funny thing is because if you look at what we were doing, because it was becoming more expensive, and we knew that part of the problem is we kept redoing things. And we thought, well, if we could just get it right or closer at the beginning, it wouldn't cost as much money.

The truth was if you brought in any MBA to examine what we were doing, they would come to the same conclusion. Quit changing things so much and it'd be a lot cheaper to make. Well, we knew that. It's like a duh. We finally had a film that was pitched to us by Andrew Stanton, where the first pitch was brilliant. This was after finding Nemo. He pitched this thing. He's actually probably one of the best people at pitching I've ever seen. He's glorious, entertaining. It's like, okay, this is a no-brainer.

We're going to do this. And I thought, okay, since this is so good, this is probably the one where we get it right up front and it's going to be easier and cheaper to make. It turned out it had just as many problems, just as much drama, cost just as much. So no, actually, if we couldn't do it on that one, to even think it as the goal is the wrong thing to do.

The goal is to make a good movie. Well, you're just creating additional suffering for yourself by having an expectation that somehow you screwed up because you still can't figure out how to avoid all of these issues that come up with every single project. It's just going to happen. It's just going to happen. Now, I know, we all know that, you know, if films cost too much to make, then we have a problem. So everybody's realistic about it.

It's like, okay, it does cost too much. We have to do things to try to address it. But we shouldn't start off by solving the problem with the illusion that we aren't going to have problems. So it's how do we keep the cost down within the reality that we're going to hit with surprises that are unexpected? Well, that's what a surprise is. It's unexpected. So it's just you accept the fact that that's the way it is.

How do we do the best that we can within that? And then you're faced with different challenges, like with cost, when do things run away? Why do they run away? What can we do? And we did a lot of things to bring that back in, but we didn't solve it by trying to find some illusion, by just dealing with the realities that we had

and why people do things. Right, being in acceptance that this is just the nature of the beast, these things come up. And your attempt to solve it might actually, you're sometimes trying to solve that problem that can screw things up. What you can't do is let go of the fact

that you have to do something which is good. Right, if I were to ask you, of all the things that you've done and everything that you have to do something which is good. Right. If I were to ask you, of all the things that you've done and everything that you've learned over the course of your career, what to your mind made Pixar special? And what can I learn from what you learned running that company that could improve my life?

Well, I mean, to be honest, it is somewhat difficult to answer that because there was something about that unique combination of people that came together. Again, this happened because Steve and Andrew and Pete and John, that group that came together, but also people that others wouldn't know about in terms of the ones who developed the technology, like Bill Rees and Evan Osby and some rather remarkable people there. So how did they come together?

I do think that, first of all, there was some serendipity involved um and because i don't believe i should take credit for having a thought of things or just like got it on myself because i didn't um but i also believe that if you recognize that serendipity happens you can also lose serendipity because you don't do something with it. So there was that element of it. I think there was something about the fact that we were all trying to figure it out

and that none of us, like neither Steve nor I, were also interested in sort of not developing that as a way of thinking. Not developing what? In other words, here we had a group that was trying to figure things out, but it was the group that did it.

But what I'm saying is that Steve didn't ever say he was the one that was doing that. So he wasn't trying to take credit for it now he was you know the one that was funding it and he was obviously a key protector of what we were doing but he also didn't impose on us what we did and i wasn't trying to impose on other people what they did. And likewise, when we start up each production, we try to think of each one as trying to do something like that. Like they have to figure it out. Because there is something about figuring something out which makes a group special.

I know it's hard to describe. But whenever I've seen a group work together to figure things out, then some rather remarkable things happen. And so then the question is, how do you set it up wherever you are so that people feel like they own it, they own the culture,

that it's their problem to solve? You're an avid meditator, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, which is not surprising because I think my view on this or kind of how I interpret this is an elevation of consciousness. Like I see somebody who went into an organization,

tried to look at what was happening objectively, tried to think of a creative solution that would help create a better environment for people to do their best work. And you deployed certain strategies towards that end. But ultimately, to me, they're all a reflection of this desire to elevate the collective consciousness of an organization. Like if you can create an

environment where pettiness and politics and judgment and backstabbing and all of that fades into the background because there's a higher purpose and a shared sort of sense of togetherness around that that comes with a mindful approach to, you know, being present with the people that you work with and finding a conscious way to lead them. Everything else is a product or a reflection of that practice. Yeah, I believe very strongly in that.

I almost made a mistake once too. And that's why I want to add this in, is that after we went public in the year afterwards, I did ask this question of myself, was how much of it was me? And at the end of the year, I realized, oh, actually, trying to answer the question is a bad thing to do because it's...

You're thinking about yourself. Yeah, and it's separating myself from others. And so part of meditation, which came later, was like, I think sort of a, and the weird thing is like you're, it's something you're by yourself, but one of the things that comes out of it is like a genuine connection and the appreciation of what other people do, and that we're not separate. We really aren't separate.

And to try to think that we are, that it's all by ourselves like that. It's actually not good. It's not healthy to think that way. Did that come to you as a result, like over time as a result of your meditation practice or was that? No, I was at the end of that year.

A lightning bolt? No, it was actually in the year of 1996 in which I was wrestling with two personal things. One of them was, okay, I had this goal for many years, which was one of my driving forces. Well, we just did it. Now what? Right, a loss of purpose after achieving your goal of

creating a computer animated film that goal being realized and then suddenly having a now what moment yes and and part of it was well okay just repeating it actually doesn't feel creative so okay we do a film again let's just repeating what we've done this we've stopped so no actually uh there's a big problem the big problem was is how does a group do because we so as a group we do something rather special but i know that that groups are fragile so now the question is how do you keep doing it and it was was one of the things Steve said before we did this. He said, the thing that happens to all companies is right after they get their first product,

they come out with a dud. So that's like a, I mean, he's just making a comment, right? I mean, other people said this similar sort of thing. But for me, it was like an internal challenge. Okay, how do we not do that? So that's a special kind of challenge. So that was like the next 10 years, addressing this thing.

How does this script work? And so for me personally, that's the thing to do. But the other one was the realization that whatever that is, it isn't something I do by myself. And that to try to say, okay, how much is me, is actually a bad question. And the reason I even brought it up was, although it's a little embarrassing to say that I was saying something

which is obviously a fairly self-oriented thing to do. But I recognize that other people say the same thing, except they think they need to answer the question. And if they work to answer the question, then that means they separate themselves from the group. And I did hear, this is from a director of one of our short films. And after he made the short film, it was a nice short film, but then he left because he said, I want to know what I can do without the safety net.

The safety net? This group of people, is this safety net? No, they're not. They're the integral fabric in which we're working these are our friends and they're like we're all helping each other um so uh you know it's just how you think about these things i think matters yeah and the genuine appreciation of what others do is critical where is your head in terms of the direction that technology is headed and how that's going to impact storytelling?

In other words, you were witness to the first, you know, VR headsets 50 years ago, we're seeing rapid developments in AR, VR, AI. How is this going to impact how we tell stories and how people are going to enjoy stories? It almost feels like the first computer-generated graphics and animation, which you were integral in, has matured to the point where those tools on some level are going to reach some kind of tech singularity with all these other tools that are out there

where the effects that you see in a live action motion picture and the computer animation for animated films, there's going to be a blurring of the lines. And these two genres are going to start overlapping more and more. It affects every industry now, but it is true because we've had this underlying exponential activity that's been driving this, and the interaction between graphics and the games world.

So it was actually the funding that came out of selling things into the games world, which enabled the chips to be fast enough to enable machine learning, neural networks, an idea that was first written about in 1948. The thing about exponential growth is it can't continue forever. So what happens is it either runs out or it morphs into something else. Now it's pretty unpredictable, except that it can't continue like it's doing forever, so it's going to have dramatic changes.

Dramatic changes are more difficult to predict. The important thing is to know that it is going to change and that it's unpredictable. And that's a hard concept for people to get, just as rapid change is hard to get. So we're definitely at one of those points in the next while where something fairly dramatic will happen just because of all the changes that are going on. So just in terms of storytelling, the way we communicate with each other is through stories.

And if you hold a child on your lap, then you're communicating something to them. If you hand them a pad, then that's also communicating something to them. And so it's telling a story, but it's not the same kind of story. All these things are at play at the same time. And storytelling is one of the major components of this. But are you, would you say that overall, you're a tech optimist or are you fearing what some of these powerful technologies portend? Well, I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I've always felt like- You're a pessimist. I've always felt like I- You're a neutralist. I mean, yeah. And just like I am with politics or whatever,

it's like, okay, we don't get swayed too far because we've got to, this is all very complicated. We have to wind our way through it and not get derailed because the problems are hard. And since the problems are hard, we think, okay, how do we solve it? Who solves it? What are the consequences? And so you get opinions.

As you know, you can get all sorts of opinions written on all sides of it. I like to know what the opinions are because they're saying things that I can't see. I want to know what they see. And it also helps inform us in terms of what we do how we behave how we marshal the resources that we have most people come as you want to do good in the world that's a force of of a source of energy so how do you how do you harness the energy of your own people to do something good and uh so that's the always the big questions how do you harness that energy that desire in a way that they feel good about it and you feel good about it and you actually end up with something that has a positive impact that's a pretty good mission question isn't it? Yes, and for me personally,

because it isn't really part of a mission statement, it's like, okay, what kind of impact we make? What's a positive impact that we can make in the world? I think that's a beautiful question to end this. Thank you, Ed. My pleasure. I really enjoyed talking with you. It was great to talk to you.

I just, you know, I adore the book Creativity Inc. I think the work that you're doing is really vital and important work. And I just have a tremendous amount of respect for what you've built and how you comport yourself in the world and what you represent. So it was an honor to spend time with you today. Thank you. Well, it's been a true joy. As a conversationalist, you were wonderful. I appreciate that. Thanks. Come back sometime.

All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything

discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful.

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