About this transcript: This is a full AI-generated transcript of #56: Pixar’s Ed Catmull on Steve Jobs, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Up & Building Creative Teams from Divot, published July 10, 2026. The transcript contains 17,100 words with timestamps and was generated using Whisper AI.
"I do believe that if you just accept that you're wrong half the time, then you find it faster, you spend less time on the things that don't work. And that's what counts. But you're still going to be wrong the same amount of time. Just don't spend as much time pursuing the wrong path. Give it. This..."
[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I do believe that if you just accept that you're wrong half the time, then you find it faster, you spend less time on the things that don't work. And that's what counts. But you're still going to be wrong the same amount of time. Just don't spend as much time pursuing the wrong path.
[00:00:26] Speaker 2: Give it. This episode is brought to you by Google for Startups. Today we're in Tiburon, California with Ed Catmull, the co-founder and former president of Pixar, almost some of the most beloved stories of the last 30 years. Long before Toy Story changed movies forever, Ed was a pioneer in 3D computer graphics, helping build RenderMan, the technology that made digital worlds feel alive. He led Pixar from a bold idea into one of the most influential creative companies in history, partnering with Steve Jobs, John Lasseter, and others to change how movies were made and stories are told. Disney acquired Pixar in 2006. And under his leadership, Pixar shaped the culture that's become part of our lives. From Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Bug's Life, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, WALL-E, and Up. He earned the A.M. Turing Award and multiple Academy Honors. For Creativity, Inc., his best-selling book on creativity and team building, he gave the world a playbook for building great teams and ways to help ideas survive and thrive. Hope you enjoy the conversation.
[00:01:31] Speaker 1: We taught a couple of two-day courses at MIT Sloan, and it was wrestling with a problem which has plagued me for a long time, is why is it the leaders of many companies cannot think long-term? Why they can't make long-term decisions even when they know that things are changing fast. So I'm not referring to sun and silicon graphics. So if you will notice or think about it, no workstation company survived until today. In fact, if you look at the history of computers as computers got faster and faster, then it was pretty obvious that the low-end was coming up and displacing the high-end. So part of it's a little obvious in that for the high-end, once they get a customer base and a way of working and a business model, that it actually makes it more difficult because they're pulled into thinking about what's serving the current customers within the short period of time. Even though they know that this phenomenon is happening, and very few people can think about that, the implication of the rate of change. And at the time, the term we were using, until fairly recently, was Moore's Law, which is just the compounding rate of increase of the number of transistors on a chip. Now, a problem was that this was the name of a phenomenon that was called Law. It wasn't actually the right thing to call it. Everybody knows that. It was just an observation. And even Gordon Moore said, due to physical limitations, it will probably only be true for a certain period of time. And these were real physical limitations. How close can they be together? How do you mask it? The reason that Moore's Law continued as long as it did was because it was so successful commercially, that is, computers were so successful, the amount of money poured into solving the problems was enormous. The book, the history of modern computing, it was actually in its preface, it said it very well, is that the society created the modern computer and the modern computer created society. But they went hand in hand. So the Moore's Law was the name of the result of this super complex process. Nevertheless, the rate of increase was basically you got every year 40% more compute power per dollar. So it's an annual compounding rate of increasing compute power per dollar at 40% for over 60 years. And it's increasing recently. All right, so now, if you just make some decisions saying this is true within a certain period of time, and you can look out.
[00:04:49] Speaker 2: You can forecast it, basically.
[00:04:51] Speaker 1: Yeah, for 15 years, you can say, if this is true, what does this mean for us? Now, it's only impactful if it impacts your business. But if you're in the computer business, it impacts your business. It is your business. So why couldn't these people make better decisions at the time based upon that rate of change? So that was a question that Hal and I wrestled with, and it's really taught the course, was to try to figure things out. One of the things we tried to figure out was, how do we explain exponential to people so they understand it? And what we realized was that, the only thing it means to executives is fast. It doesn't mean anything else. And it's a complete waste of time to try to use examples of rice on checkerboards or lily pads or water in the stadiums. It's all wasted effort. I use the term compounded growth now because it's a little closer to what the way business people think and the implications of compounded growth.
[00:06:03] Speaker 2: You're talking a lot about what Clay Christensen devoted his life to as well, the sort of idea that disruption, that actually the incumbents are making good decisions for their current customers, but they don't sort of see these market, it sort of blinds them to these market forces of things that are happening underneath them that are either the cost of things getting cheaper or the trends of what people are buying or what they want getting cheaper. And so you have these sort of slow erosions in the market where these companies that you're referencing, Sun or Silicon Graphics, these huge behemoth temple companies for Silicon Valley, and now where are they? And it's only been a few decades. And it seems like a lot of the newer generation founders, maybe because they were trained by many of these people that went through this change. Or I think about a lot of times with Mark Zuckerberg, he's had Mark Andreessen on the board there for 20 years. And he lived through the previous wave of disruption and just like coaching these entrepreneurs and saying, look, if you don't do something, someone's coming underneath you. And then you saw in Zuckerberg's case, he goes and gets WhatsApp and he goes and gets Instagram and he goes and gets, he thought maybe virtual reality was going to be the next thing. So he goes and buys Oculus. He kind of makes these big bets as in ways that both protect his advantage, but also potentially to build that next wave. And some have been right and some have been wrong.
[00:07:40] Speaker 1: But I think one of the reasons some of them were wrong because he didn't think about it. Well, first of all, in the case of Oculus and the virtual reality, they got way ahead of themselves and that was predictable at the time. But if you look at the company now in general, so we aren't just talking about the number of chips, is what are the things that are changing? Like sensors are changing, displays, and the device size, all of which are changing. And so if you look down the compute path, then you would say, well, an obvious next step beyond the phones would be devices that are on the body in some way. And there aren't many places you can put it. You might attach it here, not terribly convenient because you don't always have it in your ear, which we're used to. And they're now getting to the point where you can put Linux in your ear, in the glasses, or have whatever there is tethered to your phone. So all this is a path that's coming along. So if you look at the Oculus, when it came out, a lot of money was dumped into it, including by Google too, because the hype cycle ran out of control. If you look at what really took place with virtual reality, the first virtual reality system was built at Harvard by Ivan Sutherland. And he brought that whole device at Utah. So we were basically using that device when you were in college? When we were in college, yeah. Ivan brought it with him, built it. So we had the first one there. Henry Fuchs, who got his degree there, good friend, he went to spend his career at UNC, advancing virtual reality. So a lot of places got big Silicon Graphics boxes. They had the head-mounted displays. They were working with virtual reality and working on a number of issues with it. So when Oculus took place, then really only one thing happened. And that was that because of the advance in computing speed because of NVIDIA, then the lag time went away. Nothing else changed. Now, the lag was very important perceptually. When you move your head and the object doesn't move correctly, then your brain is always like, wrong, wrong. So at that point, now with this new thing, perceptually it has changed. So now the hype gets in and it's going to do all these things. It's a new art form. They're going to tell movies. And most of it was bullshit. And it was all said by people who didn't know what they were talking about. So the result was an investment of money as if this future had happened. So if you look at it and say, well, something is possible, you still have to go through the work of saying, okay, what are the other things necessary in order to get there? They weren't doing that. It threw money at this as if they were closer than they were. If when you played around with it, and we did a Disney unit, more at Disney than at Pixar, but now we're involved with storytellers, but even if you look at everything that was produced by other people, there were pretty fundamental problems with virtual reality in terms of storytelling. Now you have to say, what are the areas where it's good? So if you want, first of all, if your character is the environment, it's great. So if you want to explore Hogsworth or you want to see what it's like inside of an aircraft carrier or go into some fantasy land and you explore the land, it's awesome. so there are a lot of things that are really good. I've seen some documentaries where it's like they would go into a refugee camp and you look around and having...
[00:12:17] Speaker 2: The immersive experience.
[00:12:18] Speaker 1: The immersive one, where we actually see the people in the refugee camp is a different experience than a good reporter presenting it. So there are areas where it is very good. If you look at storytelling, the thing that hype generators were saying and the people were falling for was that storytelling doesn't take place in linear time. So telling a story, they're screwing with time always. So if you don't screw with time, then it's boring. So as an example, and we're used to this. Yes. Somebody opens a door into a hotel room and the next time you see them look in the balcony down at the pool. You cut out walking across the room. You don't even think about it. You know exactly what it means. And the editing process is they're always fudging time and lengthening it, strengthening it, weighting it, so forth. It's not in real time. In stage, where things are in real time, they have to do other things in order to convey the story. They're suited to the art form. The issue of telling a story in VR has not been worked out yet. The hype ran ahead of it and a huge amount of money was put into it. Anybody that knew the storytelling would say, this isn't going to work yet. It's a long ways away.
[00:13:53] Speaker 2: This show is brought to you by Google for Startups. If your startup is looking to integrate AI-generated images, video, or audio into your product, you need to read Google's new Future of AI report. It's a no-nonsense look at generative media designed specifically to help founders and builders deploy real apps in production. Grab your free copy at g.co slash future of gen media. Or as I read back in the work that you did over many decades at Pixar and before, they hadn't... They sort of cheated the process in some ways. They hadn't gone through the iterative process that's required the peaks and the valleys of figuring out how to solve this technology. It just sort of, if I'm understanding what you're saying, they had something interesting, something that had been started decades earlier. It was maybe catching on in a new way, but then they kind of jumped to the end of like, okay, we're just going to make this a thing. And really, the creative experience hadn't been fully worked out yet. And so, and even now, it's been, what, probably a decade since Oculus was bought by Facebook. It still hasn't been worked out fully. There's new iterations of it. Now, Snap does the glasses or Meta does, you know, the glasses. There's different virtual reality experiences, but it's still, they haven't figured it out either. It's still very much in this sort of like iterative process phase of, and not really at that, like, hey, this is an incredible experience. Everyone's going to want this. Yeah, I love the research.
[00:15:28] Speaker 1: Research. And companies, whether it's Meta or Apple or others, should be doing that because it's coming. But the question is, is it a product yet? And is the product, is the product to the point where it actually becomes an educational experience for the company? And I argue, in many cases, it's, it's an expensive education to the company and sometimes a failed expense to the company because it was too far ahead of its time. I mean, another example, although a lot of people aren't aware of this, was General Magic. Okay, so in the early days as cell phones started to come out and started to get smarter, then at a conference, I forget the name of the one that founded General Magic, he could see that there's going to be a smart portable phone. So this was General Magic. He got funding. Sony put money into it. Why wouldn't they put a small amount in? It might be right. So I'm going to have a piece of it. They, and there's a great documentary about it. It illustrates something which I think most people don't know and it may be too abstract for this, but there were two tracks of, of smart people in the computer industry. There was a, that track that went through the universities, funded through ARPA, where they're working on operating systems and, and complex systems at MIT and Utah and, and Caltech and Berkeley and all those places using more Unix-based. Then you have this group coming in as the PCs were coming out with Windows and DOS and those early systems and then Apple with the, the Apple II and then off to the Mac. They didn't go through that other educational process, but they were smart and they were figuring things out as they went, but it was one of the reasons why those early systems didn't conceive of, of, of multitasking and the things that were already in Unix. And, and part of it was because the machines were really small. So they were smart, but they, they, they weren't grounded in the same way that this other group was. So, when they found General Magic, they took some of these guys from Apple. The way it was run wasn't very good just for generating a product. But more importantly, the concept of what they were trying to do could not be supported by the existing telecommunication structure at the time. So they were trying to build a product for which there was not the bandwidth to support it if they were successful. So they were, in other words, they were committing a company around something which is still something that should have been developed.
[00:18:28] Speaker 2: The technology couldn't catch up, was, was too far ahead of where the infrastructure was. So that, and that all fell apart.
[00:18:35] Speaker 1: Steve later hired somebody who went through that because they had learned a lot in that experiment. They were smart people.
[00:18:39] Speaker ?: Yeah.
[00:18:40] Speaker 1: And that's a separate story about the steps getting to the iPhone and then the surprising outcome that neither Google nor Apple saw. That's a different rabbit hole. I had 50 years of rabbit holes. So the question is how do you think about the future and the rate at which it's going to come? Because you can't predict things. There's certain elements which are more predictable like, say, Moore's law, but a lot of things are highly unpredictable. They're all going on at the same time. In the case of Lucasfilm, when I went to Lucasfilm, we had competitors who also wanted to make animated films. And it was a small community, so I knew all these people. We're all friends with each other and still are years later. But one of them got their company to buy a Cray-1 supercomputer. The Cray-1 supercomputer is around 1980, 81, something like that. Cost $10 million. And, of course, that was, you know, far faster, 100 times faster than what we had. But we did, and as soon as they did this, because it was a rather shocking thing to find that they spent $10 million on this computer. So we just pulled out the paper, you know, the napkin on the table, and so forth, and now tried to make a rough estimate about how much compute power we thought it would take to make a feature-length build. Now, because no one had ever made one, these are just rough numbers. What kind of complexity, what resolution, how do you, you know, handle the shading if they have to compute it. So it made this rough guess. Now, with that rough guess, we believed that we would need 100 Cray-1 computers to make a feature film. I mean, we've made enough pictures to know roughly what a computer would be. So it would take 100. But we would need, in order for it to be economical, and we thought a lot about the economics in the early days, in order to be economical, those 100 Cray-1 computers, or those 100 whatever they were, would need to cost one-tenth of what one Cray-1 computer cost. So we needed three orders of magnitude improvement before it would be economical, regardless of what we did. And we didn't even know how to solve some of these rendering and graphics problems. So that meant the three orders of magnitude, which at the rate of change, because we could say with some confidence that it would take 14 to 15 years before the chips reached the point where it would be economical.
[00:21:50] Speaker 2: You did all of that math. So just back up a little bit. You had this sort of singular, almost obsessive vision to create the world's first feature-length computer animated film. And you're thinking about this in college. When did you first start thinking about that? Do you remember when that first came into your head that I need to do this, I need to be the person who does this?
[00:22:17] Speaker 1: It was 14 years after we made that calculation that Toy Story came out.
[00:22:22] Speaker 2: Wow.
[00:22:23] Speaker 1: So we actually had come pretty close to the numbers, both to determine the amount of compute power and the cost. But now to go back to Utah, that's where it starts for me. I went to Utah intending to go into either artificial intelligence or computer languages. My first two teachers, though, at Utah were Ivan Sutherland and Alan Kay. Actually, Alan Kay was first. He was a graduate student. incredibly inspiring and talked a lot about the rate of change and thinking about the future and that one of the advantages of computers is that you can emulate the future out at some point. So it may not be economic at the moment, but you can emulate what it might be as the economics change. So that was a way of thinking. Well, that was the beginning. Think that way. And the second was Ivan Sutherland who said, you may have these grand visions, but you've got to go a step at a time. So, you know, you keep that vision out there, but you solve the next problem. And so there was a train of people who had solved problems and the expectation was take the next step. And when I left Utah, then I was ready to go on. And at that moment, I thought it may take 10 years to make a film. I have to say, almost immediately, I realized that it was not 10 years, but I didn't make another prediction after that. What I learned was, we're so far away, it's pointless to even try to make a prediction. There just was not enough information. So I never made any other prediction about a timeline until we did that calculation in 1981. But when I left Utah, one of the best takeaways that I had was that the environment there was incredibly supportive. I loved it there. The University of Utah. The University of Utah. I love working with the people.
[00:24:57] Speaker 2: It was a unique environment. And some of the very best technologists came out of this place. You had companies like Atari, Adobe, Pixar. I mean, this was like this incredible magnet of talent, of people who would go on to build some companies that are still, all these decades later, still huge companies.
[00:25:20] Speaker 1: Well, it was... Because I believe at the time, there's always this question, like who did what or how, but a major part of it was that Ivan and Dave, when they set the place up, they set it up so they brought in kind of an eclectic group to give the expectations, but they weren't telling us what to do or how to do it. So the environment also shaped us. It wasn't... And this is... In general, it's true. It isn't just like, oh, but you're... It's lucky that you get the right people together is part of what makes it work is the right kind of environment which lets people become better than they might be in another environment. And there's no separation really between them and there is, you know, some statistical difference like people who are drawn to the new. So if you've got a new program, it's not uncommon to find that some of the pioneers that come out of these new programs are pioneers because they were entering into a new program that didn't have too much structure. The same is true on the artistic side of CalArts is there was this phenomenal group when they just formed the school. So Brad Bird and several of the lead animators at Disney and John Lasseter were all of this early program. Well, the program was just beginning. There was no curriculum in place. The students had to invent their own curriculum and they ended up, I think, better off because they didn't have a curriculum. They had to invent it, figure out what it is
[00:27:02] Speaker 2: they were trying to learn. That makes a lot of sense that the environment plays such a key role. There were smart people in places, at universities all over the country and yet, whatever the environment that these leaders created and then maybe you all as extension, this created this sort of melting pot of creativity and this place where people felt like they could sort of become their best selves where maybe once those people left, I mean, there's sort of this unique decade or decade and a half at the University of Utah where these incredible ideas came from. There are some great ideas that have come out of the University of Utah since then, but like really something special happened then and then maybe the environment changed and we see that maybe at somewhere like a Stanford that has maybe fostered this type of some type of innovative environment over many, many decades and continued to do it through many iterations of people and leadership and Pixar too. Like just, I think the thing, I moved here, I moved to the Bay Area in 2005, which is just before you sold to Disney, but one of the things that you just always heard was like, and I worked in, I worked in at Electronic Arts, so we're kind of adjacent you know, the animation, you know, category and sort of world is kind of adjacent there, but everybody knew that you were really smart if you worked at Pixar. Like there was a few companies in the Bay Area when I first graduated from college, it was like, man, if you can get into Google, incredible. If you can get into Pixar, like, wow, you are incredible and it's sort of like it's both magnet of talent, but the environment that you created just had those people doing the very best work they could and that seemed to be happening at the University of Utah and probably at Lucas as well when you came here. It was...
[00:28:59] Speaker 1: I mean, a lot of people to understand is that there was some intention behind each one of these environments. At Utah, Ivan Southern and Dave Evans, who was the chairman of the department, had a philosophy about how to bring in and let students loose. And they were very eclectic what they did. It's like that Alan Kane didn't have the qualifications to come into most graduate programs, but there was something about him that Dave Evans liked. And I basically, because I was easily intimidated at the time, I went to a professor that, I don't even know what happened later, but I got him to sponsor me to get in because I was afraid to go through the normal route. I sneaked in the back door. Once you're in, nobody cares how you got in. Sure. So like everybody had a different story of how they got into the place, but I would say in retrospect, the time I didn't have much to compare with, is that while there was structure, it was not over-structured. And the tendency of companies is to basically get their structure together, to get it to work. Part of their job as managers is to have that structure work right. Now, the thing is, yes, you do need structure, you have to have ways that things get done, but your primary product is not the structure, it's the people and what they do. And it's easy to actually flip those. This happens over and over again. They flip what's important for their business. So in the case of the school, it was this environment which made it so great. So when I left, what I took away was I wanted to have that kind of environment for the rest of my life. So when I went to New York Tech, there's a brand new lab. The reason I went to New York Tech, this is, you know, it was a tech school, trade tech school, except the man who ran it wanted to do animation. But in the field of computer graphics, other than two schools that had computer graphics and computer science, computer graphics was not considered to be a legitimate part of computer science. It was like a science application. So since I said I wanted to work in computer graphics, there was no other school that would make an offer. And the schools were Utah. I just left them so I couldn't work there. and Brown where Andy Van Damme was and they weren't hiring. Cornell had a graphics program but it was not in computer science. The same was true at Ohio State. That's it. So my job office came from, you know, IBM Research in Yorktown and I think they wanted to San Jose. That isn't what I wanted to do. And then I got this call from New York Tech to start an animation program. And he's willing to put money into it and it's on Long Island which is not a Mecca for people to go to. So, but in starting that place up and now looking for people, my second hire was Alvaro A. Smith who had been at who had become your co-founder later later become co-founder and excellent friend. So we made a decision that unlike there's still two or three other groups who are trying to do computer graphics like we were. But what they thought it was a mindset they had for many, many years was to develop the algorithm and make the pictures and that would be that would distinguish them. We didn't think that way. I knew that we were so far away that there was no secret algorithm that we were going to come up with in order to accomplish what we wanted. So we made the decision to engage completely with the emerging computer graphics community and we published everything we did. And as a result we then became deeply embedded in this broader community which helped bring some people there. Alex Schur also gave us the funding to make this possible. And we built out this phenomenal group. And then because we had this good group when George was successful with Star Wars and they had used technology in making Star Wars then he was the first person with credibility in the film industry since Walt Disney who thought that technology was a part of the creative process. And so I was hired and left bringing a major lesson from New York Tech when I went to.
[00:34:10] Speaker 2: While at University of Utah you went down to Disney to kind of pitch them on an idea of like an internship program and kind of working with Disney and the university to which they basically balked at and said no but we'll hire you if you want to come work here. And this was like this place that you had grown up watching you sort of idolized Walt Disney and now they're giving you an opportunity to work. This seems like this sort of good, better, best. This seems like a really good option of the things you could have done. You go work for Disney to your dream company but instead you kind of have this again this like somewhat maniacal you know singular vision around building the first feature film animated feature film and so instead of choosing that path which any reasonable person would have said would have been an amazing path out of college you go to New York you go to Long Island you pick up and pack up and move across the country which now looking back seems like the most obvious clear smartest decision to have made and you start attracting all these incredible people who are also kind of thinking about the same things as you but as you put yourself back in those shoes back talking to Disney as a college student how did you think through like sort of getting over the pressure of just saying I could just pick this my family will be proud of me like you know I might start this career path here but instead really kind of took what looked like the more uncertain path but it was clearly the way that your heart this sort of this inner voice this goal that you had was really driving you towards well it was clear to me
[00:35:55] Speaker 1: that in meeting with them that if I went there that I would then be in a structure in which I couldn't go down the path I thought that things should go but there's nothing about that structure which said that I could succeed I'd just be an engineer working at Imagineering I mean I had to say just I mean there are great people that it isn't what I wanted to do and so it was clear the particular job was they wanted me to help design the new space mountain ride for Disney World yeah okay fine that's not what I wanted to do and that same was true with Yorktown Yorktown and your incredible research they still did some rather amazing research and have for many many many years great place to work but it wasn't a structure in which they could do something so I choose to actually went into a holding pattern for a while at another company hoping for something to open up and it did due to some coincidences took place that's why I ended up at New York Tech now I had the chance to put together a group and I had a bunch of theories some of them worked and some did not and one of the theories was that engaging with the broader community was a big success and when I went to Lucasfilm again we published everything we did and George was fine with it because George wanted to change the industry then here comes the surprising part Steve bought Pixar well Steve is very secretive and Steve never questioned my decision to publish everything we did
[00:37:49] Speaker 2: why is that
[00:37:50] Speaker 1: because he knew the reason we were doing this is this the way we were getting talent in the company and that was value the reason he bought Pixar in the first place is we had more graphics talent than anybody else and so whatever we were doing to get the talent was working so he wasn't going to screw with it and he never tried to and then when Disney bought us Disney had all sorts of rules about publishing and so forth by that time we had enough credibility but he just ignored all you weren't running the group at that point I know well it was corporate things yeah all sorts of things he says now there isn't a way to do it and it was like okay you guys know what you're doing so and Disney and Pixar for several years publish more
[00:38:38] Speaker 2: papers than anybody else and this is all documented so well in creativity inc the back and forth of when George Lucas basically has to sell this animation division because of a divorce he's going through and so you're looking for buyers there's all these different people that have kind of looked at it and then finally Steve Jobs comes in he kind of comes in he leaves he comes back he's going through his own things you know with Apple I love this quote from that's attributed to George Lucas to Steve Jobs when he was looking at buying the company and he kind of wanted to point it more towards personal computing and George Lucas allegedly says to Steve Jobs these guys are hell bent on making animated movies and I just tried to sort of visualize this scene of like you've got on the one hand George Lucas who's this incredible creative genius and leader and then you've got Steve Jobs on the other hand this legendary creative leader and visionary and then you know maybe George wanted to do this with it and Steve wants to do this with it and here you are with you know this small group of people and you're saying this is our vision for it and really somehow like holding on to that in the midst of like all these other competing things and voices of very accomplished smart people but you're saying hey like no this is where we need to go and I just wonder like how did you maintain that conviction how did you not get distracted in this whole cycle of like where you're still waiting for the technology to catch up you're still waiting for the sort of Moore's law fact to kick in for this process for you you you stay true to what you thought and and and kind of held on in the midst of these very big personalities saying do this do this do this and no we're gonna we need to do this part of it was
[00:40:48] Speaker 1: understanding what it meant for culture and a group of people to work together that this wasn't like a pure technical thing or I don't even how to describe it it's like if you're going to get there then there are things you need to do and you also need to account for the unpredictable things that are going to happen in the future and in the case of had we folded into ILM for instance then we would have gone down and become part of a special effects group which is extremely successful and dramatically bigger as a result of the work that was done by us and by ILM to make this happen that wasn't actually the path that I wanted so I can see that was a path and the implications of going down that way and I understood that in the hardware business because initially Pixar was selling hardware that on that path and we could express this is that we might have with that Pixar image computer 100 times more computing power than anybody else had which meant that we could do things that nobody else could do but in the long run that path was doomed so we knew it early that the hardware path was a new path but because we knew it we said okay how do we do this so that we survive as a company and we were prepared for the next round that was a dodgy period to go through and it was an expensive one for Steve Steve in the end stayed with us because he knew that people were very good and he put more money into Pixar than he did into next it was about half of his net liquid worth was put in 50-ish million dollars somewhere around there 54 million dollars yeah is what the number was yeah we were debt financed and at some point he just paid the whole thing down and you know cut his liquid network in half he never sold any Pixar stock when it went public and then it all got converted into Disney stock in which case at which time he was on the board of directors so I was still reporting to him because we had a steering committee over us which consisted of three people from Pixar Steve John and me and then three from Disney Bob Iger the head of the studio and the CFO of the company meeting quarterly to manage us so in this time of making these decisions it's saying okay what do we what is the long term and how do we get there and initially it was focused on just getting the film done but we had to make a lot of decisions about how we maintain Disney's trust when we reached the point where we could no longer afford to keep the hardware business going so we actually sold the hardware business to somebody else to keep it alive because by this time the commodity product I shouldn't call it commodity but at this time it's still in Gravix and Sun had enough compute power to solve the problem so we contracted with Disney to port all of our software onto Sun computers so that they could continue so we maintained a relationship without a hiccup with Disney which put us in a trust position when it came to make
[00:44:35] Speaker 2: the film you talk about Steve Jobs sticking with Pixar and continuing to find the company really being related to team and this is one of the core themes in your writings that's really inspired me over the years is this often times there's this question of like is it about having a great idea or is it about building a great team and you write in the book getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they're mismatched this means that it is better to focus on how a team is performing and not the talents of the individuals within it a good team is made up of people who complement each other getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea is that universal is that in any scenario that if you just have smart great people sort of working in the right environment that they're going to get to the right idea or is the idea a critical component of it
[00:45:40] Speaker 1: it is a blend of those you have to pay attention to each one of them so while we obviously try to get really smart and talented people with complementary skills at the same time I do believe that the right environment causes a lot of people to raise up in what they're able to do they become better and the relationship between them is it is an example of what's true in a lot of things in life where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and in any organization that's over organized or over structured then the whole is less than the sum of the parts but it isn't a matter of like okay how do you add up the parts together it's if you if you get the right organization and mindset in place then a nonlinear thing happens that is a result of sort of that magic of the way they work together and I and I I'm going to use the magic in other the phrase magic in other contexts but it's one in which ego leaves the room you don't become attached to your idea and that's actually the ideal for a group is you're actually trying to solve the problem that isn't about who said what or who did what is that when that you become you don't become attached to your idea then the ideas in aggregate become better now in in terms of teams like if I think about a story team that's an example we pick the directors to make the film they're going to get behind and have their their passion behind and they will they'll work on it and they'll come up with an idea and we have a thing that we do not every director works this way because they don't like like whatever Andrew wants to do then Andrew does so and he's really good likewise with Brad but the general case for basically all of them is we ask them to pitch through ideas and the reason we we have them pitch through ideas is you can get stuck on an idea often frankly the idea they first start with is the one that they end up making but the purpose of the three things to keep it from getting stuck so it's a we're not hiding it it's like a trick but in some sense it's sort of like a mental trick is instead of beating your head against the wall and really getting stuck switch to something else it's okay and sometimes the people do switch they have something better but at the end of the year they pitch it through ideas and nominally in their minds they're pitching it to the creative leaders of the company to say which one is the best to make into a film now in fact what takes place in the discussion after the presentations but an hour and a half to go through all the presentations and they leave the room the discussion is always which one do they really want to make because they say they love all their ideas equally they're lying but they just have the realities sure they're vulnerable people are vulnerable like accept it and help them through it so part of it is like okay go on with the game they've all been through this they've all been on the other side but they still say the damn thing i love the same thing i love them all equally and our job is which one do you really want and so we succeed if at the end of that they say yes that's the one they wanted but now having said that they then start to make it and then something goes wrong okay it doesn't work big big problems right here's a question i think it's true for any product for project is if it doesn't work then what do you do you get the wrong leadership and you go through this with films and we can't measure the output by whether or not what they have is good at the time because it's in development they haven't solved the problems so i can't really judge the team by the output that they've got i don't think that's obvious to people so the only thing that we can measure is how well is this team functioning are they excited are they engaged having fun so the only thing that will cause us to make a major change is if the leader loses the team and if they lose the confidence they won't make a change we've done that and it's very painful when it happens because they're picked because they're very good i mean a number of our films have been that way we've made it a change unlike baseball where various pitchers get credit for their contribution yeah in the end with the film it's like the director gets the credit but in fact there are a lot of people along the way that made it happen
[00:51:22] Speaker 2: i love the idea of of not of having these leaders pick three ideas and pitch three ideas and when you're starting a company for instance or you're an early stage entrepreneur a lot of times these people are they're working on like 10 10 things and it kind of it kind of like takes the pressure off i mean i i love the adage that you the best ideas are the ones you can keep a project as long as possible that you like you don't put this unnatural amount of weight and pressure on it before it has time to sort of become what it needs to become and that can sometimes be years of just and many of the best startup ideas started as you know somebody's project okay maybe some in silicon valley in their garage but also just some creative passion that they had that they worked on on the side until it became enough that it sort of materialized into a possible vision and i i think you're the way you talk about failure and this iterative process has really inspired me you say this in the book we need to think about failure differently it's not the first to say that failure when approached properly can't be an opportunity for growth mistakes aren't a necessary evil they aren't evil at all they are an inevitable consequence of doing something new and as such should be seen as valuable without them we have no originality and so it's it seemed like at pixar you created this environment where incredibly creative and yet people wouldn't get offended when somebody iterated on an idea they wouldn't get offended when somebody else would come in and add to it they weren't holding on so tightly to things that that they wouldn't let it naturally flow and go to where it needs to go and i think some people think like the lightning needs to strike me and i need to go down this path and i'm like i'm true to my vision here which you were true to this vision of creating the animated the first animated film but the way that you got there and the things that you did along the way were were totally flexible and and um really the most creative way you could possibly get there and you couldn't possibly imagine in the beginning the path you would go to where you ended up but you fostered this this thing that you're saying you fostered that but it seemed like across the entire company with all these incredibly creative talented people you got them to the culture through the culture you were able to get them to think in this way and and um and work in a way that let the ideas kind of evolve the way they needed to evolve
[00:54:04] Speaker 1: all of this
[00:54:05] Speaker ?: all of this
[00:54:05] Speaker 1: is coming from people then the question is how do they work together and what are their barriers and there is just the reality of those barriers that is people do feel vulnerable especially if they do something new and they don't know what's going to work even in retrospect after I wrote this I realized that I was overusing the word failure that in reality within Pixar we didn't use the word failure very often if there was a failure there was a real failure we call it a failure but in general the terminology in working on a film was it didn't work and people look at it that way well okay that doesn't solve the problem what if we try this what if we try this so you get to the point where people didn't think of the things that didn't work as failures as they're just they were experiments that worked or didn't work and retry them and retry them might get stuck but then the part of the job is to say okay what is it that might have somebody get stuck what frees them up what's the nature of the group the brain trust that we developed fairly early on but not at the beginning was a mechanism for trying to arrive at better ideas it wasn't the only mechanism we had I would say that at the beginning we were somewhat lucky because we had attracted really good people and because John Lasseter felt confident to hire really strong people and he hired Andrew Stanton and Pete Doctor but they even proved to rise far above what we had thought and likewise Lee Unkrich and so there's really phenomenal group to begin with and they worked well together to solve the problems but we also had something else when we made that first movie none of us had ever made a computer animated film before nobody ever had but nobody had ever made an animated film before or any feature film so none of us knew really how to solve the problem and you
[00:56:21] Speaker 2: didn't hire the incumbents from the best people from Disney or these other places that have made animated films you just hired great engineers great animators and then trained you
[00:56:31] Speaker 1: with exception of the one artist John we were all technical when we started so we didn't even add Andrew and Pete until after three or four years at Pixar before we could in order to try to make commercials to subject ourselves to the pressure of production so it was an intentional step that we took but we started as a technical group but I had observed it at Lucasfilm there's a visited companies whether it was Microsoft or Disney is there's sort of this unspoken class structure in companies we don't usually use the terminology of class structure in companies because people wouldn't say I'm first class in the company or you would never say that there are people in companies who will say they feel second class okay so and I observed that happening so at Disney there was a technical group down there and I knew these people and they were second class to the artists and at Microsoft when the CD-ROMs were not capable of doing storybooks and CD-ROMs they brought in some artists to do it well the artist clearly felt and could say articulate they were second class within that company so my view visiting these companies was this can't be a good idea so we worked hard as we built out the group and then as we built out Pixar to make sure that we didn't have somebody feel like they were second class they had to feel like they were peers with each other and we worked at that and three times in Pixar's history it did creep in so then our job was to say why did this what are the mechanisms that would make some group feel lesser there are reasons for it but you have to pay attention because this is a human endeavor that we're engaged in in the case of Toy Story we did have a producer from Disney assigned to help us guide us and have some instruction name was Kathleen Gavin and we had some feedback initially from Katzenberg but then he left in dispute fairly early on and Tom Schumacher who was the president of the studio would give us feedback he was external feedback and he wanted us to succeed so and we valued that so our group is intensely trying to learn but also welcoming the feedback that took place then we as we started to work on our subsequent films we realized as we were going uphill Disney is going downhill and that we were about to lose our external force because Tom Schuchemacher was about to go to New York to run the musical business for Disney in which case we wouldn't have an external force so we thought let's take the group that works well together Andrew called them the brain trust and they would become the external force for other directors now it didn't work as an external force because they weren't external so in other words he said we failed at this original thing but actually what we discovered was it was an incredibly powerful tool at helping solve problems it just wasn't the same thing as an external force and it turns out the external force we only had two one is we had one chance late in the game where we have an audience screening and the audience just said what they thought and so a couple of films went through major changes at the end but that's painful it's late in the progress the other external force is Steve Jobs and I asked Steve to never come to a brain trust meeting why is that well in the brain trust meeting we recognize that the creative team the director and the people around it know their film doesn't work entirely well and they feel vulnerable so they come in sort of feeling threatened and they're presenting to the others and there's a dynamic in a group dynamic and there are things that can go wrong like people might want to show how good they are or impress others or pounce on weaknesses or things like that dynamics which aren't helpful so if you're aware of those you can set it up so that it becomes a safe environment because what you really want is for people to tell to attach to their own ideas and if you get that right that's why the magic happens is somebody will throw something out and it doesn't work and it isn't like oh you're trying to deflate it because I didn't solve the problem if you let go of it then the group behaves better and the other thing is that for the director and for the team they've got this thing in their head
[01:01:59] Speaker ?: this
[01:02:00] Speaker 1: conception of what it is they're trying to build and they know it doesn't work after it's in their head so if we have an offsite of the brain truss which is like a two day true offsite then what happens is you pull on these strings and the whole thing to follow a mess on the floor you can make some progress but typically at dinner which is sort of open we talk about whatever we want but after dinner the creative team prepares for the next day and they put the mess back together in their heads so they undo the progress from the previous day at which point since everybody just lived through the previous day together then they can sort of not dismantle it in such a way that they make the advances stick that's sort of like the rhythm of it so we try to figure out what's the rhythm in order to overcome people hanging on to things even though they know they don't work now in order for this to work then you've got to have this group working well together so even in our short to our reviews of movies which we did every quarter for a film we have a two hour brain trust meeting then the people who with powerful voices either because they had power their actual real authority or just their powerful voice is they had to shut the hell up for the first 10 to 15 minutes and the reason is if a powerful voice speaks at the beginning it alters the room sure and you don't want that it is better for a powerful voice to enter a discussion than to start it now with Steve Steve was so articulate and had such a powerful presence that there was no point when he would say anything in which he wouldn't alter the direction of it and he understood that so I said please don't come to the meetings and so he saw them at our quarterly board meetings at which point he would then become the outside force so before Steve would see a movie at a board meeting I would get a call in the morning I was typically exercising at my little home gym and just breathing hard and say hi Ed how's it going and I would say it's nice it's going pretty well nice to know see you later today or I might say oh we got some problems with this film he say it's nice to know okay I'll see you later today I would never tell him what to think and he would see the film then afterwards get together for a note session by him and the board of directors and he would because he's extraordinarily articulate he would sort of really say things very well sometimes it was like a gut punch record here was the phenomenon this is why to me it's interesting was that a lot of the directors said they heard things and got insights from Steve that they never got from anybody else but I was in every one of these meetings there was never ever anything that Steve said that had not been said by somebody earlier is they people when they worked together also learn to filter out or ignore what others are saying and Steve is so articulate that they actually could break through the filter but the ideas were there before so this is this it's like a sociological experiment what's going on here how do people think
[01:06:02] Speaker 2: what's being said it's who's saying it and how that impacts you and this idea that really good ideas do come from anywhere and some of the most creative and the most successful people I have met mostly in Silicon Valley their door is always open I feel like I've cold emailed people in the middle of the night and they're not doing everything they're not engaging in everything I cold emailed you to have this conversation you're not speaking everywhere everything but the most successful people they're at least opening the door and listening and knowing the good ideas and good opportunities can come from anywhere and maybe we're all guilty of this phenomenon that you're saying that if the CEO or leader says something it has a bigger impact on me than if some creative random individual contributor on the team says the exact same thing and that's probably something we all need to fight to really make sure that we're hearing what's being said versus listening to who is saying it
[01:07:10] Speaker 1: yeah and it's there's a phenomenon which I observed and one of the advantages I had was that I learned slowly like a little bit like every place I went I would learn something so I didn't have an expectation never had an expectation I was going to be president of anything yeah and nor would I end up at Disney in fact there were things that I ended up doing which I would not even have thought I would want to do years ago
[01:07:41] Speaker 2: but
[01:07:42] Speaker 1: along the way because I conceived of myself as a technical researcher trying to solve the technical problems to enable filmmaking I didn't think of myself and never have thought of myself as the filmmaker I understand the process I love to participate and watch in it I'm not the filmmaker I'm really good at certain things and not at others but I could just observe that as I progressed that as new people would come in they would treat me differently than the people I had known for a long time and I felt like well I don't feel like I've changed that much but the position alters how people perceive me and what they might be willing to say so that means I'm actually become blinded by the fact of I'm in a different position so which means I have less access understanding and truth so I have to work at that and make it safe so there are a number of signals I try to do to make it safe and when I feel good at Pixar when I feel the best at Pixar is typically when somebody comes maybe even timidly and I know them but I don't know them that well but they feel like you have to tell me that I just screwed up and the fact that they would do that would say okay if I'm approachable for someone to tell me to screw it up then I I
[01:09:19] Speaker ?: at I
[01:09:19] Speaker 1: at least got that right even if I did screw up on something and likewise if we're in meetings and we have a variety of problems which we always did in the discussions I'm just a member of the people that
[01:09:36] Speaker ?: are
[01:09:36] Speaker 1: discussing it the thing that makes me feel the best was when the other people feel like they own the problem it's not like they're not looking at me saying what should we do for them it's like they already own the problem why did they ask me what they should do and it made feel good to find that they own the problem but it was us trying to figure out how we wanted to work so this group 's been together for a very long time and the group that had met together for a long time are also the ones who are least fearful of tools coming in because of various forms of neural networks or AI and so forth because they know what it means to go through change
[01:10:27] Speaker 2: we were talking about Steve Jobs you maybe worked with Steve Jobs the longest of almost anyone on earth 26 years you worked together and you worked closely together and you worked with him a very tumultuous part of his career where a lot of people churned and burned over a very short time working with him I first wonder where you list this on your rank of accomplishments professional accomplishments to be able to have worked with him for that long which seems like just an incredible feat of strength and then two what allowed you to work so closely with someone so mercurial and someone that so many other people couldn't figure out how to work with
[01:11:21] Speaker 1: first of it was hard at the beginning because Steve was difficult to work with at the beginning to be sure and the behaviors that had him cast out of Apple were the same behaviors had what we started with overreaching now even at that time I did recognize that he did have a unique capability that as soon as he realized he was wrong he would switch so he wouldn't hang on to something because he thought of it he would argue for a position vehemently a lot of he would back down from that and while I'm not I'm easily intimidated and I always have been I've never gotten confused that if somebody has a powerful voice it doesn't make them right so there have been times when like with Ivan Sutherland he told me twice what I did was wrong and I couldn't even speak I was just proven but I knew he was wrong and I just proved it but it was just a character but so with Steve he did have strong opinions and just like didn't make it right I don't actually particularly respect strong power or disrespect but it's just like it's not relevant to the truth but so he had this capability of changing his mind on a dime and thought it was right but it was hard for me there was a period from 91 to 95 in which there was there were two simultaneous transformations going on one of them was in the film industry we've been doing all this work at Lucasfilm and then at Pixar but in the years of 91 to 95 the film industry made a dramatic switch to using digital it started with the first character that was CG which is that liquid robot plus the year we signed a contract to make Toy Story but that was in 91 Steve got married in 91 the son we was born 91 in 93 Jurassic Park came out it was electrifying across the industry a masterful storyteller with Steven Spielberg almost almost anybody that seen it if they were to guess how many minutes the dinosaurs the CG dinosaurs were in the movie what would you be your guess for instance yeah 30 40 minutes
[01:14:01] Speaker 2: maybe I mean it felt like it was the whole movie but now that you're saying that it couldn't have been
[01:14:06] Speaker 1: you know it's obviously set up right because you know it had to
[01:14:10] Speaker ?: be
[01:14:10] Speaker 1: number it was four and a half minutes
[01:14:11] Speaker 2: yeah
[01:14:12] Speaker 1: so Steven Spielberg is a master of doing a lot with a little
[01:14:16] Speaker 2: yeah
[01:14:16] Speaker 1: and it was so powerful that everybody including me I would have said 15 minutes probably
[01:14:23] Speaker 2: yeah
[01:14:23] Speaker 1: I did actually I said 15 minutes but the person I hired him he's president of ILM so he was there when they made it and then he came and produced WALL-E for us and he was then made the general manager now the president of Pixar so he knows the actual numbers like it's 54 shots
[01:14:44] Speaker 2: yeah four and a half minutes I can't imagine the cost by the way those four and a half minutes probably was just I don't know tens of millions of dollars I don't even
[01:14:53] Speaker 1: know yeah because we're a separate company I don't know the economics other than the fact that the fix business in general is a low margin business
[01:15:01] Speaker 2: yeah
[01:15:02] Speaker 1: but a huge impact and then in 95 Toy Story came out and then picture public the week after the movie came out and the day it went public and Steve became a billionaire in fact by the time Steve died the bulk of his net worth was a result of Pixar not because of Apple
[01:15:26] Speaker 2: yeah
[01:15:27] Speaker 1: pretty incredible yeah but it was for for Steve he got married by the end of that time he had his first success since he left Apple in something like 1984 I think 84 yeah is when he left Apple so that was his did it
[01:15:48] Speaker 2: kind of did it allow him to just sort of exhale this sign of like he's feeling this kind of like was that the moment where like hey look I've now arrived I'm back and I can I'm not like running as hard I'm not there's not so much to prove or well he was still
[01:16:09] Speaker 1: at that time he's still next and his his heart was in that business yeah so even though I felt to be honest a little threatened because I thought crap we're successful and they're not he's gonna want to come on replace me yeah I went down to talk with him about it and and it's because I was I did feel threatened so I didn't know what he was thinking and so we went down and had dinner in Palo Alto at one of his favorite places to eat I had read this press release I wish I had kept it which in which he was talking about the companies they were selling to the in the businesses yeah and so but it was all very business oriented you know B2B kind of products and I thought you know crap we got this really sexy thing here and he's talking B2B and that's not what his where his heart's at so I just said I wanted to talk but I didn't tell him why and I don't normally do that so and we when we started dinner I didn't tell him why I wanted to talk he was probably pretty alarmed well he was curious yeah because you could be resigning
[01:17:30] Speaker 2: or who knows what he
[01:17:31] Speaker 1: didn't know it was going to happen
[01:17:33] Speaker 2: yeah
[01:17:33] Speaker 1: so and then finally said okay why are we talking so I said and I drew it out a little I said well I just read this press release in which you said the following he didn't know where this is going and he said he said yeah and then I finally said but that's not you steve and he went like this I know it I mean they're nice people but I hate this so he's unloading like he's feeling relieved and I'm thinking oh crap oh crap but the reality is that he he wanted his long-term vision that he wanted his long-term vision that he had which is what he finally did do he got both the system and the hardware and the software together he was the only one that did this right but that was this long-term thing for him and his twists and turns but it wasn't like a moment of exhale for him it was like that period because he had next he'd made a number of decisions that that the did not work out for him did not work out for him and they're painful lessons often have to do with overreaching or trying to do things before they were ready to be done yeah so that's that coming back the first thing we talked about is you might have a vision but if you try to get there too soon you screw it up that's kind of what the next was is they were building it for software and infrastructures which weren't ready for it yet and he could see that it was coming but he didn't have the timing right for it and the overreaching wasn't working but because he's really smart that at at the end of going through that for a certain period of time starting around a new one I realized this isn't working so he changed the way he worked so in that period of 91 to 95 then he stopped the overreaching uh before toy story came out this is probably on 93 he realized that our deal with disney to make our original deal was not a very good one and it wasn't economically a good deal yeah he didn't he knew that we would have to renegotiate um and that the way to negotiate was to do it on a 50 50 basis but that wasn't the way he used to work he would always try to overreach instead he wanted to have the high ground of let's be the partnership uh and he'd take time to talk with people and he was always warning people not to smoke if he saw them smoke why is that well his uh um his mother died of lung cancer because he was an avid anti-smoker yeah very avid so and you know we had an area outside people who could smoke at least before it was like every was forbidden everywhere but right to begin with and and basically for the most part we weren't smokers so there was no question about this but
[01:20:46] Speaker 2: there was something on the outside but he saw them outside were you were you considered a bozo if you were a smoker or could he could he get over it if you were a really talented person
[01:20:54] Speaker 1: but also smoke no no he didn't judge anybody by that i mean i know about what they did he just didn't sell them smoking in there in the place on the outside or as designated here it says no really this is not good for you so but he wasn't judging anybody uh by that or saying by the end of that period he was a changed person now the thing to note is after that period of time the people who were with him stayed with him stayed with him for the rest of his life and that was the part of the story that was missed in walter isaacin's book because he interviewed all these people including me and nobody was going to psychoanalyze steve while he was still alive yeah we didn't know it was going to be written so this part of the story wasn't told by anybody sure so it it was about an important part of computer history the open versus closed systems steve and bill gates all that's true and important but it missed this transformation steve so but the other thing about steve to note is that we were a public company starting in uh at the end of 95 and then we were public company for the next 10 or 11 years we were acquired by disney in that 10-year period as a public company steve fired two members of the board of directors the reason he fired them was they never disagreed and he said if they never disagree then they're not bringing any value to the company and most people don't know that story but it's sort of fundamental like the brain trust is it's people disagreeing in trying to solve a problem if you're doing something new you don't really know exactly what you're doing so how do you actually get to insight how do you change how do you change course how do you think about the problems along the way and and what's your expectation as a leader are you always right do you think of your job as being right and it's it's one of the problems with a lot of corporations is that ceos think their job is to know the answer their job is to always be in a position where they're faced with things where they don't know the answer i don't know maybe it's too abstract but for me it's very real is i don't know what's going to happen it was actually one of the great lessons i learned it was a follow-on this is between new york tech and lucasfilm is where i left new york tech to go to lucasfilm i could look back my theories about how to build a group and recognize that half of them worked great it was the way we worked together published engaged awesome and some of the things i did were complete disasters i boxed myself into a corner and i didn't have enough experience to get out of it but about half my ideas were just wrong but i realized that that my ratio of right to wrong ideas probably would be out the same at lucasfilm and probably continue for the rest of my life now um not not that you have an easy way to count what those things are but i i did tell an executive at disney this once i said you know i'm half right and half wrong i have been my entire life and he said no your record is actually better than that and uh but but the reality is it's not i do believe if you just accept that you're wrong half the time then you find it faster you spent you spend less time on the things that don't work the match would count but you're still going to be wrong the same number of times just don't spend as much time pursuing the wrong path i've heard you answer a
[01:25:01] Speaker 2: a lot what it was like to work with steve jobs if if he were alive today what do you think he would say it was like to work with you i don't know he never told me he never gave you any feedback around
[01:25:13] Speaker 1: why he worked with you for no i can't figure out why he did because i was so stubborn you know i i mean i wrote this in the book because we never argued yeah but we did disagree a lot yeah and but that must
[01:25:26] Speaker 2: have been unique to almost any relationship he had wouldn't it that he never argued i mean how many people i i don't know i can't think of like johnny ives saying that he he argued with him a lot but they did have i i can remember that they battled other people tim cook and others but like to never i mean it's a it's an incredible beat on on your part it's really about you that that you could work and really talented people can be really hard to work with and you and what it may have been one of the most talented people ever uh and one of the most difficult people ever to work with you had a multi-decade long incredible relationship with how did you do that even for the people like who was
[01:26:15] Speaker 1: known for arguing within let's say at apples it's apple 2 not not the first one is that uh they might have been loud but the question is did they perceive them as as uh the wrong kind of argument not not describing this very well i i remember once when uh disney wanted to show us film they were working on because we had we had this brain trust and so they brought the group up for the brain trust to look at along with the creative directors and a person from disney who was on the management side who was observing this i i wasn't at the meeting at this time so i only heard about the meeting and when i talked with the the people who were in the meeting after it had taken place at pixar they said that was great we had a great discussion there was some really good things and so forth and we later asked the woman she's back up here and i said you know how was it she says oh it was awful your pixar guys were each other's throats it was just yelling this this is a terrible experience or two different views of the same thing now i did learn many years later but the directors actually enjoyed the discussion it was good for them but it was that perception of that argument is that is the intensity of it as being negative when in fact the intensity is what they liked so you call that an argument you just you you you call it a passionate discussion there was another example which i love and that was that uh brad bird was first at uh pixar and he was working on something and uh they were in a discussion on something and brad bird and uh andrew were yelling at each other and andrew turns red this incredibly intense and then uh after this discussion i ran into andrew and andrew said god that was so great i'm so happy to have somebody here who just has this passion this is awesome and then i ran into brad bird he said oh thank goodness i came here this was wonderful at last i've got what i need so how do you perceive the
[01:28:46] Speaker 2: intensity yeah and how do you view your role in it and how open are you to it one thing your your co-founder said in relation to you and steve was that ed could go with the flow and that's a i i think if somebody asked my wife like how how can you be with this man for and we've been married 20 years i think she that's what i think someone would say is like you did you you've been you've gone with the flow with his madness and uh but i it's it's an incredible to be able to push the org but also to be able to work with these kinds of people and keep them adding value in the organization and you adding value to them it's um you know it's it's it's a very unique skill uh and and as evidence there but but you're steve jobs never you never did like a you know you didn't do annual reviews with him or you never had like uh 360 you know uh where he was giving you feedback or anything it was just kind of hey we're working we're rowing let's keep going and if he had something to say he would just say it and if but there was there was never a kind of regular feedback of this is what i like this is what i you know and there
[01:29:59] Speaker 1: are times i said why is he still backing me because it was rough i was there for a while financially for him so yeah he did what no bc would do and when he when disney acquired us we have this unusual thing where it was unlike anything else within disney where there is a list of 54 items that disney agreed not to change for five years and uh with the exception of one thing which we gave up early because we knew that at the end of the five-year period the fact that we issued we gave stock options to every employee which is not the way that the disney works that that would not hold up so we actually gave that away and went to an alternate scheme in order to make it so there was no reason yeah well it wasn't conformity it was that we didn't want to discuss any of the other items because they were working so why have a discussion which could take you back down the wrong path so pixar even to this day is like they're not on the sap disney's on sap and pixar is on oracle uh and the vacation schedule is different insurance is different all these things are just different wow so that is unique so 13 years later these things are still in place well steve helped set this up with the intention of protecting them but some of these things were silly i mean we're putting things all this because we didn't know what's going to happen there's big companies are going to buy us sure what's what is going to happen so we know like you listen on on it was our annual airplane contest i think we only had one or two more passed what was that what was the airplane contest well the airplane contest was uh because we have this uh bridge over the atrium and uh so people would have contests and see you throw paper airplanes through airplanes across the uh the whole atrium that's cool and uh but it's also one of my favorite moments it was like actually it was the last one that we did it was an airplane contest in which the producer and the technical lead on finding nemo had a contest with each other and everybody knew what it was they were going to do it so the the first person uh threw the airplane out and it went up and then straight down and everybody laughed all right so the other one took his airplane and wadded it up and everybody laughed and so he threw it out over the atrium but hit the beam and bounced back behind the other one so you know just like that kind of fun nonsense
[01:33:01] Speaker 2: i love that when it happens what's a lesson in life that's been hardest for you to learn i don't have a
[01:33:08] Speaker 1: good answer um largely because of the big lessons that i've learned um even if there's some difficulty with them i don't in their in retrospect i don't think of them as hard as more like it's kind of what i needed to go through so now now it's looking back and not capturing what i might have felt in time the one thing i should note is that i was president of pixar three times which meant that i was unmade the
[01:33:44] Speaker 2: president of pixar twice this is part of the transactions when you went from lucas no or different
[01:33:51] Speaker 1: time i was talking about pixar so i was president of pixar when it started and at some point steve said you don't know enough in order to do this because we're manufacturing selling these products and so i need to bring in somebody else to be president and that was painful to hear um and he did not want to lose me so he made up some sort of i think maybe chairman of the board or something like that but that didn't in truth mean anything so somebody else was brought in a very nice man we became good friends just in the manufacturing side and then at at some point when we sold the hardware business then he left and i was back being president again the picture so that was my second time being the president um and then we we got the contract to make the film and as we're getting to the point where we're going to go public steve said you aren't you don't have the right kind of presence in order to be the ceo or the president of a public company so um we aren't going to be the president anymore so he made up something and i learned just recently because of this book called steve jobs in exile he did something similar next where he had what was called the office of the president yeah uh where he was in it and i was in it and uh uh warrants leave me the cfo the cfo to this public um so that so now i was no longer the president of the company and then i i forget two three years later something like that then uh at lawrence uh uh left because they he wanted to start a uh a uh meditation group uh done tibetan based group in redwood city uh he's a very good friend that was a course that he wanted to go on and so uh steve got up in front of the company announced that that i was now the president of pixar without telling you well no he told me i mean but but the thing is when he announced it everybody was surprised because they all thought that i had always been the president right from the beginning like they never knew that i was never made the president twice now and i tell this because sometimes if if there's a leadership change and it's hard on people that i can go through and say yeah i've i've been there um but i wasn't going to give up my long-term dream just because i had a little bit of setback in my own expectations yeah and uh that all worked out fine in the end so now i look back on it and say okay was that hard i mean yeah it was a little hard at the time but it wasn't devastating um but also there was an element of truth and i wasn't ready at the time and i would by the time that whatever we made president for the the third time then i was ready when someone says your name 50 years from now what do you hope they say next i think in terms of what might be known in 50 years outside around families is i i hope that there's something residual that comes from my book i i did write it to try to uh get to get the principles out um when i asked bob if i could write it in the first place his first answer was nobody visual leave and i said no i don't want to leave i want to establish things because this isn't just about what it took to make a film it's how to build a group and the there's a part of my life leading up to the the film when it came out in which i would say there's a rather singular a moderately well-defined goal but there were there was that year period and i wrote about it in the first version of the book i tried to correct in the second i actually wrote about both problems and first time but in the process of making it he got clipped away but i i wrestled through something in that first year and that is having achieved the goal what what should the next one be and it took me a year to realize that the actual next goal was to build a sustainable group that was going to continue to change into the future and it's probably a thing i think i feel most proud of from a professional point of view was working through it so that pixar continued to make this incredible set of films um the other thing that i wrestled with which was um you know a little it was embarrassing at the time but once we you know with toy story i knew about the contributions that that made because of george lucas or and john lasseter and leon creation i understand and uh and everybody that supported it as well as the people that nobody knows about which were these technical people would solve the problems to make it possible in the first place so i knew all that but i had this question was since i started it how much of it was me and i wrestled with that for that same year while i was thinking about the goal at the end of the year i realized that well i know why i asked the question but trying to answer it was an act of separation i was trying to figure out how i was different from others when the reality is there was no separation there was only because we were together and to try to figure out where the dividing line is is the wrong way to even think about it it is to truly appreciate and deeply appreciate the combinations that we make
[01:40:26] Speaker 2: together outside of family who's the human being you most admire that one i thought a lot about and
[01:40:34] Speaker 1: i can't say there's a single person um there are even at let's say at utah the reason i thought about this is people would say you know who was your mentor and i and i thought well who was my mentor um and i looked back on it and i think well what changed me was the environment that dave evans and ivan soliland put together but what taught me was the environment itself and people they brought into it and it's the reason i had difficulty saying who is that single mentor because it he was really the fact that they and some others put together something which transformed my life and then along the way each one was you know i i think i added something in the conversation but i also would say that going through the things with steve's he went through his own personal transformation all through me if you could implant one idea into everyone in the world what would it be i do think one of the issues in the world is that since the world as a whole is and always has been very complex and not getting less complex over time that people like for the simple answer i mean it's a disease we see in the world today it's who's at fault who's responsible and and people try to say okay what is this thing and then you stop at that point and the thing is like you don't stop at that point is that you keep looking deeper and deeper and if you don't go down two or three levels you end up in the wrong place um i uh the example for my book for me which is an example was on toy story 2 when somebody was in the wrong directory and deleted the entire movie before we were supposed to deliver it all right so um and the backup systems didn't work and uh but we we never knew who made the mistake or even if they knew they made the mistake they were trying to delete something and they were in the wrong directory when they did it you never looked up to see who did that no i mean we i mean if if we had then we would talk about but the reality is the uh we had all failed because we hadn't made sure that the system was robust we had made assumptions we hadn't checked certain things and i didn't need to go to anybody and say you guys better screw this up when this happened this entire team knew that that they had made a mistake and the fact that there was a triggering event which was somebody making that mistake but whatever that mistake was um was not the real problem and if you stop and say okay who did that say well you know you know that person should be held responsible in some way for me holding somebody responsible usually is an abdication of of the responsibility of digging deeper and so the idea which is a complex idea is that first level of conclusion that you reach he's almost always wrong is you have to go down level the same is also true if you're successful you know who made that film this person made this film this person directed this person made it uh that's not right sure all right and if somebody's screwed up well isn't it they screwed up there's this systemic thing if one thinks of like how it fits together you perceive it in a different way then you can look at life i think more broadly and deeply and you sort of go down you know several layers to figure out okay what do you have to do and if you've got a team that works well together you don't have to tell them they all see the same thing it's like oh we we barely dodged a bullet on that one but we then they self-organized like the leaders and the people this is okay there's
[01:45:01] Speaker 2: a bunch of things we have to fix yeah the the easy way out is to kind of just blame this person that they made this mistake if we fix this person or get rid of them then this mistake won't happen again but actually the the reason that in this case that the film uh was deleted and the backups failed and then it subsequently someone had a backup at home that you were able to get and and restore the film sort of save the film but if you just sort of found the single person that hit the delete button then that would have erased all the ownership responsibility and actually potentially even this from happening again in the future because then you went back and said okay all of you know where are the failures dig deeper dig deeper dig deeper dig deeper so you get to sort of the root of of what needed the problem
[01:45:48] Speaker 1: that existed for that to happen you see this a lot of companies it's and it's disguised as as accountability you got to hold somebody accountable and i mean we we should feel personally accountable of something but the phrasing hold somebody else accountable is looking for somebody to blame at which point you stop thinking and it's a polarizing notion in jet in general when it's like a disease and when it's affected companies as is how do you actually think about problems and finding solutions and there and i've never found the solutions to be simple ones they're complex interpersonal interrelated solutions both positive and negative what accomplishment are you most proud of it was actually that 10-year period in which we we made that transition for picture we made it so that it was long lasting from a single film to this is a repeatable yes to being a studio where the people worked and stayed together yeah and i will it i by the time i retired from pixar we completed 21 of the 23 films we started there's nobody else in the industry that's ever worked like that and we picked movies sometimes that were very unlikely we didn't make everyone those unlikely because sometimes he's like okay that's the right thing to do but there are films being made where it's like why in the world would we do that this cannot be commercial if you pick something that's very hard you pretty much you got to have to be creative in order to make it work so there was nothing about making ratatouille it seemed like a commercially good idea and the same was true with up so right up okay you got a buona girl grow up fall of get married can't have kids she gets old and dies and he's depressed it wants to float away there um it doesn't sound like a commercial idea and you're
[01:47:57] Speaker 2: never going to sell a lot of toy walkers i've heard you say that before and you think of lucas and all the you know star wars and i i've you know just pictured you know the the uh the up walker toy that uh my child might have bought at some point but now it doesn't seem very feasible i mean
[01:48:15] Speaker 1: there may be a toy walker in my future or walker who knows but it's uh you know you you the fact that we always wanted to do something these that were hard and the fact that we completed them meant that we spent the the pain was to make them work and of the the 22nd film we were going to restart it and we asked peep doc the doctor to do the restart and he he was working on the restart and he said uh that same idea he was trying to make it work and we'd spent time trying to make it work and he said you know i've got a better idea it would take place inside the emotions of a little girl and everybody said you're right that does sound more interesting so the 22nd film actually became one of the 21 they got made
[01:49:04] Speaker 2: and if you die and you meet god what do you hope he says to you okay the job just beginning and my last question for you is just uh in the words of clay christensen how do you measure your life
[01:49:19] Speaker 1: i do think it's by your your connections and the the good that you've done both locally and in the world i would say in general it's probably more locally but as people live a good life have you know it's like i've got this for this last summer three of the kids were here with their kids and uh the house is big enough they're all had places in the house and but but the thing was i looked at them and i thought you know they're really good parents their kids are growing up and they're really nice and i thought this is awesome my parents are my kids are good parents it's just this but my wife and i had this wonderful feeling of watching that and uh and i think for anybody if you can achieve that kind of relationship not everybody has children of course but you know the kind of relationship the people around them where they feel good and they feel like they're part of making happen and what a great way to measure your life appreciate that thank you so much
[01:50:54] Speaker ?: For more information, visit www.fema.org