Pod Insights The Tim Ferriss Show Ep 22: Ed Catmull, President of Pixar, on Steve Jobs, Stories, and Lessons Learned About this episode Ed Catmull is co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios (along with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter) and president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation. Ed has received five Academy Awards, and -- as a computer scientist -- he has contributed to many important developments in computer graphics. He is the author of Creativity, Inc., which Forbes has said "just might be the best business book ever written." (!)
This episode touches on a lot, including lessons learned from George Lucas and Steve Jobs, the origins of Pixar, personal challenges, routines, favorite books, and much more.
Enjoy!
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Tim Ferriss? Hello ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. Thank you for listening. We have an incredible guest today. And his name is Ed Catmull. He is the co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, which he started with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter, and president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation. Ed has also received five Academy Awards, and as a computer scientist, he has contributed to many of the most important developments in computer graphics. He has done a hell of a lot, and in this episode, we talk about many different things: the birth of Pixar, his background, going from a technician to more of a manager, president in this particular case, the creative process, storytelling, how they embrace it and developed it within
0:45 Tim Ferriss? Pixar, the mistakes they've made, what they've thrown out, and much, much more, including the lessons that he's learned, the things he's observed, working with people like George Lucas and Steve Jobs. Before we get to the interview, two things that I like to provide. The first is a quote, and this is from Harry Truman, and it is as follows: "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." And in fact, Ronald Reagan has a very, very similar quote to this effect. The next is a Japanese proverb. Of course, you know, I'm a Japanophile. I used to live there, and I love sharing koto waza, or Japanese proverbs, and there are many. We talked about the saru mo kigaro
1:29 Tim Ferriss? ochiru a few episodes back, and this time, we have shiranu ga hotoke. Shiranu ga hotoke. Shiranu is not knowing. Ga is a subject marker, basically. Hotoke, so not knowing is Buddha. What the hell does that mean? Shiranu ga hotoke means ignorance is bliss, or what you don't know can't hurt you. And the way that I interpret this, as it applies to this particular episode, is sometimes, to do the incredible, you have to go in somewhat naive. And if you knew what you were getting yourself into, you probably wouldn't sign up in the first place. So beginner mind, or being a novice, or jumping into the unknown, can sometimes allow you to do What you would otherwise be told is impossible.
2:13 Tim Ferriss? Without further ado, I want to get us to the interview. If you want all of the transcripts, the links, the show notes and everything else, please go to fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, all spelled out, fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. And if you'd like to support the show, please go to my book club and you can find a number of books that have changed my life. That's fourhourworkweek.com/books. Hope you enjoy and thank you for listening. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question?
2:46 Speaker 01 No, it is an inappropriate time.
2:48 Speaker 02 I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
2:59 Tim Ferriss? Ed, thank you so much for joining me today for a conversation. I hope you enjoy it and I've been looking forward to it for quite some time.
3:06 Speaker 01 My pleasure.
3:08 Tim Ferriss? This is somewhat of a landmark moment for me because I feel like destiny has had this in the cards. I remember 1995 very clearly for a lot of reasons, but one of them was that I bought my first ever share of stock and that was in Pixar. And it was also, I guess, the last year of Calvin and Hobbes, so it was a very emotional year for me. But I have been following comic book art, animation and Pixar for as long as I've known of it. And of course, as co-founder, you've had a key role in creating a lot of the stories that I can pretty much playback, sort of frame by frame, line by line.
3:49 Tim Ferriss? And of course, I'd like to talk about that, but also Creativity, Inc. and the book that you've put out, which Forbes has said might just be the best business book ever written, which is a very strong testimonial. What I'd love to ask you is perhaps starting with a defining moment, or maybe it wasn't a defining moment. When Pixar went public, what did that feel like? Do you remember that day extremely clearly or was it not a defining moment?
4:17 Speaker 01 Well, the time we went public, which is in 1995, was actually very close to a number of other events that happened around the same time. So I look at it as a period of time and for me it was a pivotal year. But we went public one week after the movie came out.
4:34 Tim Ferriss? Right, very smart.
4:36 Speaker 01 So, uh, Steve Jobs' logic was that, well, he wanted us to go public and he had some reasons for it, uh, which we were skeptical of, to be honest. But he wanted to do it after the film came out to demonstrate to people that in fact he knew our form was being born.
4:51 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
4:52 Speaker 01 And that was what we're investing in. So, the film came out, it was a big success. It was a success for me in the sense that we had made a film and it wasn't just a technical tour de force.
5:05 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
5:05 Speaker 01 I never thought of this as, we can demonstrate technically we can do it, but we actually wanted to make a real, honest to goodness, complete film. I always had that goal in mind. And that's what we achieved. It was also the culmination of twenty years of pursuing this dream.
5:22 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
5:23 Speaker 01 So, there is, within the short period of time, the culmination of twenty years, the achieving of a goal, going public.
5:32 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
5:34 Speaker 01 Starting off on our next film, and actually we began to think about two films, uh, the other being Toy Story Two.
5:42 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
5:42 Speaker 01 Having a relationship with Disney.
5:45 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
5:46 Speaker 01 And while all this was going on, I personally felt a sense of loss.
5:51 Tim Ferriss? Hmm.
5:52 Speaker 01 And it was a curious one.
5:53 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
5:54 Speaker 01 Because I had just achieved this goal, but the loss was, in having achieved the goal, I was now missing one of the defining frameworks.
6:07 Speaker 01 So I went through a, a period of a year of trying to sort this out, and I realized as I went through that year.
6:13 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
6:14 Speaker 01 That there were some really exciting things observed along the way. And one of them that I observed was that most successful companies have this arc where they rise, and then with that success, most of them fail.
6:30 Tim Ferriss? Right.
6:31 Speaker 01 They fail quickly, but a lot of them, they take longer, but ultimately they, they fall apart.
6:34 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
6:36 Speaker 01 And so the question was, okay, how do you make it so that it's sustainable?
6:40 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
6:41 Speaker 01 Because the, the people that I knew of who were in these companies, I had a lot of friends in Silicon Valley.
6:46 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
6:47 Speaker 01 Were smart, and they were creative, and they were hardworking.
6:53 Speaker 01 So whatever the problem was that was actually leading them astray was really hard to see and the implication was that whatever that force was, it would also apply to us at Pixar.
7:06 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
7:07 Speaker 01 So this then became the interesting question. These forces are at work, can we find them before they do us in?
7:14 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
7:15 Speaker 01 And so at the end of the year, I I realized this is actually the next goal. It's not a film. It's how do we have an environment in which we can find and address these problems?
7:26 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
7:27 Speaker 01 So so that was the big thing that I got in that year at a personal level. There was another one also, which was not in the book, but I will just tell you about it because it was a a personal thing for me. And that was when I was younger, I can remember this, thinking at some point I want to be the best in the world at something.
7:47 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh. Good goal.
7:49 Speaker 01 All right, so this is a goal that I had. So now it's 20 years later, the film comes out and I know we're successful and there are these phenomenal people here. There are the technical people, most of whom aren't well known, but you've got Bill Reeve and Eben Ospi and people like that that helped build the technology. Uh and besides, uh, John Lasseter and Steve Jobs, there also is Andrew Stanton and Joe Raff and Lee Yonkerich and Pete Docter, but a whole bunch of people were a part of this.
8:15 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
8:16 Speaker 01 So now being part of this group that achieved something, there was a question that I asked myself, which I didn't admit to anybody at the time. And that was, well, all of this were of us were part of this, but how much of it was me?
8:32 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
8:33 Speaker 01 All right. So this is this background question. So, well, I know I'm part of it and I'm only part of it, but how much critical was I to this?
8:43 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
8:44 Speaker 01 And at the end of the year, as the goal became clear, I also realized that the question was not a useful question.
8:52 Tim Ferriss? Hmm.
8:54 Speaker 01 And that in somehow trying to do that, I was actually misleading myself. Now, the only reason I bring this up was that I now recognize that a lot of people, when they reach that place where they're successful, they ask that question. And most people won't admit it, but they do ask the question and a lot of people reach the wrong conclusion.
9:18 Tim Ferriss? Why is it misleading and what is the conclusion that they come to?
9:22 Speaker 01 Well, what I believe is that what we did together was not something that I can separate myself from.
9:31 Speaker 01 And this is true of most enterprises. It's a desire to separate oneself out is like asking for a clean answer to a question when there is no clean answer.
9:41 Tim Ferriss? Right.
9:42 Speaker 01 And it is true of most of the things in our lives, whether it's personal or business, is that the inner connection between them and the way they're all mixed together is inherently messy and confusing and there aren't clear boundaries. And the desire for complete clarity actually leads one away from addressing the mess that's in the middle.
10:07 Tim Ferriss? Hmm. You know, this is, uh, reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a very successful trader on Wall Street who said it's better to be roughly correct than precisely wrong. And it seems like that mess in the middle is something that a lot of people strive to avoid. You have an incredible technical pedigree and of course, we could talk about the ARPA Group, we could talk about, uh, your work early on with all sorts of technologies that then have, have become standard technologies in the use of animation, texture mapping and so on. One of my close friends, actually, who was a musician by training, ended up working at Pixar, I believe he's still there because he wrote his thesis at Princeton about texture mapping of all things and coded it himself.
10:49 Tim Ferriss? But what I'd love to get your thoughts on is as someone who's exceptionally well-trained in computer science and engineering. How did you take that precision of thought, that logical approach to problem solving and replicating issues and so on, which I find translates into many different areas, and apply it to storytelling? And what is, in your current role and in previous roles, would have been your sort of key observations with how to apply framework? And just one more comment that related to my one and only tour of Pixar. I live in San Francisco and ended up having a friend of a friend who was an engineer at Pixar, besides Rob, my previous friend. And I was so impressed by the process.
11:34 Tim Ferriss? I mean, you do have processes, and it doesn't mean everything is a home run, but I remember looking at the color, sort of the color coding of different segments of the films, and I had never observed it. And it was, it was so genius to me to see it laid out in front of me and that it was a deliberate decision. So that's a mouthful that I just put out there. But with an engineering mind, what have you observed about storytelling? And why can't other companies get it right so consistently? Or people?
12:06 Speaker 01 Well, okay, so I've got three or four things to respond to there. So let me take one of those, this has to do with the relationship between the precision of the science and then the art side. For that, I go back to when I was growing up in the 50s, in a rather unique time in post-World War II, but also a very safe time. And as I was growing up, my two people that I aspired to follow was Walt Disney and Albert Einstein. But for most of my childhood, I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be an animator. And I studied art, and I did very well in art in high school. And I also did very well in physics.
12:50 Speaker 01 But as I got to near the end of high school and going into college, I didn't see the path to get to the level of what the animators were at Disney. So when I went to college, I switched over into physics. Now, the interesting thing to me is that, over the years, I've actually told that anecdote to people when I've given talks, how I switched over. And I say it rather abruptly, like, I switched over into physics. And usually, there's a titter in the audience, sort of like, that's an incongruous statement.
13:24 Tim Ferriss? Right.
13:25 Speaker 01 But then that caused me to think about it. It's like, okay, why is that incongruous?
13:30 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
13:31 Speaker 01 Because most people to this day think of them as so radically different from each other.
13:35 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
13:36 Speaker 01 But I want to posit a different way to look at it. And it comes from, I think, what is a fundamental misunderstanding of art on the part of most people. Because they think of art as learning to draw, or learning a certain kind of self-expression. But in fact, what artists do is they learn to see.
13:59 Tim Ferriss? Hmm, right, observe.
14:00 Speaker 01 And the actual training is one of observation.
14:03 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
14:04 Speaker 01 So now, if you, if you look at it from that point of view, is, okay, so which are the professions in which observation's not important? About doctors, or engineers, or scientists?
14:17 Speaker 01 Is, you want the skills of observing. And for me, there are different ways of looking at things. And if you look at the storytelling side, then the first realization, and I think I understood this fairly early on, is that storytelling is the way we communicate with each other. And it's all the way from when you're reading to your children when they're young. But it's also the news, and magazines, and the movies, and television, and storytelling is a way we do things. But even our education, our good teachers, well, they're good teachers. They're telling us good stories.
14:54 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
14:55 Speaker 01 Their way of communicating understanding. And what are scientists, biologists, and neuroscientists trying to do? They're trying to reach an understanding, and then they're trying to find ways of communicating that understanding to other people.
15:11 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
15:12 Speaker 01 These are all different elements of the way we communicate with each other. And, and it's even stronger than most people think. Because if you, if you take something complicated like making a movie, as an example. So you've got a few hundred people working on a movie, like it could be Toy Story, but it could be more recent films. Well, what is the story of the making of the film?
15:35 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
15:36 Speaker 01 It turns out, it's too complicated to tell. Nobody writes that story down.
15:40 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
15:41 Speaker 01 And if you wrote down all the complexities of what it took to do any one of these major complexities,
15:48 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
15:48 Speaker 01 That full story is too boring.
15:51 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
15:52 Speaker 01 It's too long. So, what do you do when you tell a story, but you edit it down and you simplify it?
15:58 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
15:59 Speaker 01 So, you simplify it in order to convey certain of the ideas that are critical, but you can't capture all of them. So, you end up with a kind of mythology, and a mythology is a way of us teaching basic principles to each other. But the mythologies don't capture everything, and they never can.
16:19 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
16:21 Speaker 01 So, we are in a continual state of trying to create our own mythologies. And even when we come up with a mythology, like the things we did on Toy Story 2,
16:31 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
16:31 Speaker 01 The people who are here at Pixar, a lot of them weren't here when we made Toy Story 2.
16:38 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
16:38 Speaker 01 So, the pivotal experiences that are there, which are part of our history, were not experienced by a lot of the people who are here. And you can't actually pass that on as a story, because then it begins to take on, like it fades over time.
16:53 Tim Ferriss? Right.
16:54 Speaker 01 To a pithy essence, but it no longer is a personal thing.
16:58 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
16:59 Speaker 01 So, what you want is a new crisis. And in solving the new crisis, which they experience,
17:07 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
17:08 Speaker 01 Then they get something different than they can get by hearing about somebody else's story. So, we have a combination of both storytelling and experiencing, and we need both.
17:20 Tim Ferriss? In the crisis case, are these crises that organically appear in the making of every movie? Or are they things that you deliberately bring to a head, or manufacture in some way to galvanize the troops and spur creativity?
17:40 Speaker 01 Well, I, I think in order for them to be successful, they essentially need to be organic.
17:44 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
17:45 Speaker 01 So if you manufacture a crisis, and you can affect it somewhat, obviously, because if you set a budget or you set a schedule.
17:53 Tim Ferriss? Right.
17:53 Speaker 01 For instance, and it's very difficult, then to some extent you are creating a crisis.
17:59 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
17:59 Speaker 01 But even that's a little artificial, because the fact is if you don't meet the schedule or if you don't meet the budget, you have a different crisis.
18:06 Tim Ferriss? Right.
18:07 Speaker 01 So what you want are the kind of crises that arise out of the thing that you're doing, but, but you don't artificially generate it.
18:18 Tim Ferriss? Got it.
18:19 Speaker 01 So I, I don't think of setting a, a budget or a schedule as an artificial generation of a crisis.
18:24 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
18:25 Speaker 01 But if we have a surprise that happens because things never go according to plan, then what you want to do is use the problem that's there as a way of getting you as a group to force the change in the process or to figure out problems in order to solve it. And in doing so, it becomes a combined joint effort to move everybody forward and everybody has ownership in it.
18:50 Tim Ferriss? To come back to one of the things you said earlier, or one of the terms you used, mythology, looking at, say, Joseph Campbell, of course, he's cited quite a lot in The Hero's Journey or The Hero of the Thousand Faces. Are there any other books or resources, besides your own, of course, which I would recommend to everybody, that people can use to learn about mythology or these sort of archetypal structures to aid them in developing their own ability to tell stories? Are there any other books or resources that come to mind as being particularly outstanding? Or people, for the matter?
19:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's fairly broad, because I've been influenced by so many people and so many different things. I will say one thing that I did, which was inform me, but in ways that are hard to articulate.
19:36 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
19:36 Speaker 01 It came from this thing, it's just my, my brain works differently. It turns out I am unable to read poetry.
19:43 Tim Ferriss? Huh, no kidding.
19:44 Speaker 01 Because reading poetry, within a few seconds shuts my brain down.
19:50 Tim Ferriss? Why is, why is, okay.
19:52 Speaker 01 Well, it was just differences. I was, I was actually describing this to somebody, this is many years ago. And they said, well, don't read it, listen to it. And all this came about because there was a new translation of the Iliad. By Thomas Fagels, and it was in verse form.
20:10 Speaker 01 So, the thing is, I couldn't read it. So, this woman at a dinner said, well, don't read it, listen to it. So, I bought the tape. And I listened to it, and I found I was completely enthralled with it. And then I was surprised by the fact that here's a story that was orally transmitted twenty eight hundred years ago in a different language to a different culture. And it was meant for oral transmission, of course, because it has kind of that rhythm to it.
20:42 Tim Ferriss? Right.
20:42 Speaker 01 But now, translated all these years later into English. The fact that it had this oral nature to it still worked and captivated me, and I was able to enjoy and pull in this entire story. So that, so that got me started down this path. So, what I did was I then started listening to these lectures from the teaching company. And they have these actually marvelous lectures. So what I did was, I tried to listen to lectures of all of human history. So there's ancient Egypt, and Mesopotamia, and Israel, and China, and India. Uh, and going up through the Roman era, through the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance.
21:26 Speaker 01 It took a few years, so every day in the car I would listen to this, but I felt like I had this grand sweep of history. Now, at some level, it's all pretty high level, because it's listening to lectures in a car.
21:40 Tim Ferriss? Right.
21:42 Speaker 01 But there was something about that which gave me a sense, which I loved. And it gave me a different feeling about people and how things relate to each other. So that was one level of things. The second is, there are like the wisdom books out of various traditions in China and India and meditation and things coming out of Greece and Israel and so forth. And somehow, reading all of those and the way people wrestle those things, which are the foundations of our culture, I found informative.
22:11 Tim Ferriss? Now, do you mean the, both the classics and the religious texts and scriptures, like the, whether it's the Torah or the Tao Te Ching? What type of?
22:23 Speaker 01 Yes, all of those.
22:24 Tim Ferriss? All of the above?
22:25 Speaker 01 I mean, you take all of those and say, okay, there's something about a breadth. So I don't try to grab one of them, I try to get the breadth there. Because I do believe that we are better off if we experience wide breadth, that's what a general education is. And then, there's some point at which we dive really deep. And some people want to specialize, like, I just want to do this, I just want to be an artist, or I just want to be a scientist, so forth. So, I understand that. And there's an experience of diving deep into something which is indescribable. So it's good to have that experience. And I think one has the breadth, that you need a combination of the two. And once you experience the depth in something, you're actually in a better position to go
23:08 Speaker 01 deeper into an area, once you've discovered what your area of love is. Then there's the more modern thing, in terms of neuroscience and how we work. And then the other is just the observation of, if you look at what took place in Silicon Valley, and continues to take place in Silicon Valley and in San Francisco, and the rise and the fall of the companies, and the way they interact, and the amazing things that happened, and the bad things that happened. That human drama, I find very interesting. And we're kind of in the middle of it.
23:40 Tim Ferriss? Absolutely.
23:41 Speaker 01 And that's cool. So, and how do you look at the mess that we, that we're in, and the good things that we're in?
23:48 Tim Ferriss? Part of the reason I moved to the Bay Area and then gravitated up to San Francisco from the peninsula was because of that chaos and the creation in that chaos. You mentioned specialization. When you've obviously done a lot of work with George Lucas and Steve Jobs, do you view them as generalists, specialists, or both? What were some of the key habits or routines, rituals, anything that either of them had that still stick in your memory?
24:18 Speaker 01 Well, on George, what was particularly interesting there is that while he was a successful filmmaker, even though he was not a technical person, he viewed and believed to his core that technology was going to change the art of filmmaking. So with the success that he had with Star Wars, he was willing to do something that was not done anywhere else in the industry. So he was the sole person that did this. And he said, "I'm going to invest in bringing technology into filmmaking." And so that meant not only graphics, but also meant digital audio and video editing.
25:00 Speaker 01 So I was fortunate to be connected with George at that time, but he was unique in this.
25:07 Tim Ferriss? Why do you think he decided that? What led him to have that prescience where it seemed to be lacking in other people? What allowed him?
25:16 Speaker 01 Well, I think the thing that triggered him, and it's not that he ever told me exactly what the trigger was, but in the making of Star Wars, it required the best use of the advanced state of the art of special effects at that time. And there were two parts to that. One was the precision control of optical printing and blue screen matting. So this is an optical process and required a great deal of technical skill on the part of the people who were there. And the second thing, which was a new idea for Star Wars,
25:54 Speaker 01 But was critical for effects, not really appreciates this, but it was one of the breakthroughs for the film, is that it's important to have objects blurred in the direction of motion.
26:06 Tim Ferriss? Oh, interesting. Yeah, that's, that makes perfect sense. Okay.
26:10 Speaker 01 Okay. And if it doesn't happen because of the way the projection systems work, then I picked it up and we actually see a double image, but we're not conscious of it, but we're conscious of it, something is wrong.
26:21 Tim Ferriss? Hmm.
26:22 Speaker 01 So what they did was they had a technical group that moved the spaceships while the shutter was open. So they captured the blur on the blue screen matting film.
26:35 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
26:35 Speaker 01 And then with great precision worked to keep that blur of these spaceships as they then matted the objects together. So this was, for the time, very high level technical skill. And then Star Wars was this enormous success.
26:51 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
26:52 Speaker 01 And George realized that technical expertise that was brought in by this amazing group of people was one of the things that helped elevate this film and put it into a different category. So with that success, he said, well, let's keep going down this path. How far can we go?
27:08 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
27:08 Speaker 01 Because that world outside there is continuing to change. Now, what's different about George was he made that little leap, or big leap, depending how you view it, from saying, technology was a key part of this, to saying, oh, that world outside is still changing. I'm going to be part of it and try to incorporate it.
27:28 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
27:29 Speaker 01 All right. So that was why he was that way. I don't know. But he was the guy that did it.
27:35 Tim Ferriss? He reminds me of Alfred Lee Loomis during World War II at Tuxedo Park, who was an amateur scientist, but who took a keen interest in radio and later had a huge impact on detecting U-boats and whatnot in the war itself. Did George and Steve have anything in common or much in common?
27:55 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, they were quite different. I mean, they're very different from each other. Steve was an extraordinary person, and I wrote about him at the end of the book, but I allude to him throughout the book. But there was something there which I find it stressing because I watched the arc of Steve over his life.
28:13 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
28:14 Speaker 01 And the image of Steve that people know publicly about the way he worked was from when he was younger. And I witnessed some of those behaviors.
28:22 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
28:23 Speaker 01 And a lot of them weren't nice at that time.
28:25 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
28:26 Speaker 01 But as a result of being cast out of Apple and starting next and then buying Pixar from Lucasfilm and then being part of starting up Pixar. Steve, who was so incredibly intelligent, he actually, he just figured out that some of those things that he did in the past didn't work and he changed his behavior. And he became a more empathetic person and he changed in the way that he dealt with them.
28:53 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
28:54 Speaker 01 Now, what the outside world sees is the mythology of the young Steve.
28:58 Tim Ferriss? Right.
28:59 Speaker 01 And then this, all of a sudden, this gigantic success of Apple and then the iPhone.
29:04 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
29:05 Speaker 01 And they connect the two together, but they didn't realize the arc that Steve went through.
29:09 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
29:10 Speaker 01 Why did they miss it?
29:11 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
29:12 Speaker 01 And the reason they missed it was that once Steve went through this change in his life, and he figured this out about fifteen years ago, then basically everybody that knew Steve stayed with Steve for the rest of his life.
29:25 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
29:26 Speaker 01 Right, so we all witnessed that part of Steve. And he was always intelligent and incisive in what he did, but his way of working with people changed.
29:36 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
29:37 Speaker 01 So when it came to the mythologizing about Steve and people would call me, for instance, to talk about him. Well, I was not going to psychanalyze Steve while he was alive.
29:47 Tim Ferriss? Right.
29:47 Speaker 01 And nobody would.
29:48 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
29:49 Speaker 01 So.
29:50 Tim Ferriss? Why was that? Now, was that, uh, why, why was that?
29:52 Speaker 01 But he's still our boss.
29:53 Tim Ferriss? Right.
29:54 Speaker 01 And he's our friend.
29:55 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, yep.
29:55 Speaker 01 So Steve's my friend, he's, I mean, at the end, he wasn't actually my boss. He was on the board of directors at Disney.
30:01 Tim Ferriss? Uh huh.
30:01 Speaker 01 But for all those years afterwards, he still checked in all the time and talked and he had this passionate interest in what was going on and. And he was a caring person and you know, when I was in the hospital with my hips being replaced, you know, there was Steve in there visiting and checking up and wanted to make sure that had the best medical help and.
30:19 Tim Ferriss? Mm hmm.
30:20 Speaker 01 So that image of Steve was not conveyed to people because the people that knew about him viewed him as just like, well, it's their private relationship with Steve, so nobody talked about it.
30:31 Tim Ferriss? Right.
30:32 Speaker 01 So the mythology about Steve was actually a mixture of things without recognizing that, as in, as you point out in Campbell's book, there was this hero's journey.
30:43 Tim Ferriss? Right.
30:44 Speaker 01 And Steve went through that journey and by the end of his life, he was a very different person than he was at the first.
30:50 Tim Ferriss? What were the reasons, this has been sort of an itch that I have to scratch now, but what were the reasons for IPO-ing that people were skeptical of that he had?
31:02 Speaker 01 Well, okay, so we're, we're now making the first film.
31:05 Tim Ferriss? Mm hmm.
31:06 Speaker 01 And to then become a public company for the rest of us, because none of us had ever been even in a public company, let alone knowing what it means. It's like this could be a major distraction. And you hear the stories about, well, okay, what does Wall Street expect? Does this actually kind of mislead you into the wrong directions? Do you have the wrong values in place?
31:26 Tim Ferriss? Mm hmm.
31:27 Speaker 01 So there was the view of, well, let's make some films and prove our worth and get that under our belt before we go public.
31:34 Tim Ferriss? Mm hmm.
31:35 Speaker 01 But Steve had a different logic. He said, right now, we have a three picture deal with Disney. And the financial terms of the deal, while they were as good as we could have gotten under the circumstances, once we're a successful company, then our share of the profits were actually pretty small.
31:54 Tim Ferriss? Mm hmm.
31:56 Speaker 01 So Steve wanted to renegotiate the deal, although he had a, and all of us had a very good relationship with Disney.
32:04 Tim Ferriss? Mm hmm.
32:06 Speaker 01 But Steve said, at the end of three years, if we then split off as a separate company, and we're no longer with Disney, we will be their worst nightmare.
32:14 Tim Ferriss? (laughing)
32:16 Speaker 01 Because we'll have, they will have helped launch a successful competitor.
32:20 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
32:22 Speaker 01 So what will happen is that when Toy Story comes out, now, all of this is before it happened, so we're guessing about scam, but this is Steve prognosticating, because he now believes the film's gonna be a big success.
32:35 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
32:36 Speaker 01 So he said, what will happen is as soon as the film is out, that Michael Eisner will realize that he's helped create a competitor, so he will want to renegotiate.
32:46 Tim Ferriss? (laughing)
32:48 Speaker 01 And if we renegotiate, then what we want is to be 50-50 partners.
32:54 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
32:55 Speaker 01 In an incident, I should say, right there, that's a different Steve than years before, where years, where Steve's sort of shot for the fences and trying to get almost everything for himself.
33:03 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
33:04 Speaker 01 He now has reached the point where he said, that's not a good place to be.
33:07 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
33:08 Speaker 01 A good place to be is a 50-50 partnership, so it's like a good standing, and it's a high road to take.
33:16 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
33:17 Speaker 01 But if we're 50-50 partners, it also means that we have to put up half the money.
33:23 Tim Ferriss? Right.
33:24 Speaker 01 Well, Pixar doesn't have any money.
33:25 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, you need a war chest.
33:27 Speaker 01 So we need a war chest, so if we go public, we will get a war chest, then, when we renegotiate, we can come in and go for the kind of deal which is a 50-50 deal. So the film came out, and within a few months, Steve got the call from Michael Eisner saying, "Let's renegotiate," and so Steve says, "Okay, we want it to be 50-50," and all of that happened as Steve predicted it would. And for me, it was rather amazing.
33:57 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
33:58 Speaker 01 She's, "Wow, he completely called it correctly."
34:01 Tim Ferriss? That's incredible.
34:02 Speaker 01 And it was coming from a place of the high ground of a true partnership. That's the way he wanted to think about it.
34:10 Tim Ferriss? It's a more sustainable structure, right?
34:11 Speaker 01 And through all the years, he ultimately had trouble with Eisner, but it was because he didn't think Eisner was a partner with him.
34:19 Tim Ferriss? Why did he think that?
34:21 Speaker 01 Well, you know, it had to do with certain things that Eisner said about the public and so forth and about Disney and so forth. He just didn't feel like it was a partner relationship that he would expect.
34:32 Tim Ferriss? Right.
34:33 Speaker 01 And at this time, Steve had now placed value on equitable partnerships.
34:39 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
34:40 Speaker 01 And that was a value he brought to the table.
34:42 Tim Ferriss? Hmm.
34:43 Speaker 01 And in bringing that, because it was a value, it was actually one we could hang on to. But he was always very careful to say, Disney itself as a corporation is one that we really admire. They've done a great job of marketing our films. They've done a fantastic job with the parks and so forth. So through all of this, he worked very hard to keep a great relationship with Disney because he believed in the end that it was going to lead to something good. No guarantees.
35:14 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
35:15 Speaker 01 And Steve was always realistic about that. But he believed that if we behaved well with them as partners, that we would end up in the right place.
35:21 Tim Ferriss? Amazing. I really enjoy these stories. And when you get into the war stories, and I think people would look at Steve, or they oftentimes would look at Pixar and say, well, my God, they're batting a thousand. They've always gotten it right. And what I'd love to ask you is sort of a two-part, it won't be one of my eight parts, questions. But what was the hardest film for you to make and why? And then secondly, related to George Lucas, I've heard on numerous accounts that he was hospitalized at least once during the making of Star Wars with, you know, he was, I mean, a really young guy at the time, but it was just from overexertion and panic attacks and whatnot. That's at least what I've heard. Which has been the hardest for you to make and why? And then do you
36:03 Tim Ferriss? think for a film to truly be a landmark film, that it is necessary for at least one person to make a sacrifice of that magnitude, where they just are at the brink of falling to pieces? Or not?
36:15 Speaker 01 Well, I'll answer them in reverse order. First, and George, I wasn't here for Star Wars one, or four, whatever it's called, the first Star Wars.
36:21 Tim Ferriss? Right.
36:22 Speaker 01 But in fact, I never heard that. So I don't know whether it was true or false. I just, I just didn't hear it. So I don't know.
36:28 Tim Ferriss? Okay.
36:29 Speaker 01 But the bigger question, like, which is the hardest? They do vary in their hardness. I would say there have been several which were extremely difficult.
36:39 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
36:40 Speaker 01 And some were only difficult. And I think originally we thought, well, if you do a sequel, it's easier. But we found that if you can do something original, it's always hard.
36:49 Tim Ferriss? Right, even if it's a sequel, it makes it, I would imagine, more difficult in some ways.
36:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, because you have to take them in a different place and you're constrained by the certain world that you've got. But you're expected to add something in terms of that world that really is interesting, not obvious. So the only thing that makes a film hard is if you keep going at it and it's not working. So you can't solve the problems. And then what happens is for all directors, they are emotionally invested in their films and they also get lost in them. It happens to everybody, doesn't matter who they are, whether they're new or whether they're experienced. And what we have found is that since it happens to all of them, what you want is this collection of people.
37:35 Speaker 01 We call it the brain trust, but essentially it's a group of colleagues who have been through it to help navigate it when you're kind of lost in this swirling mass because it's very difficult.
37:51 Speaker 01 And so the most difficulty is on the people themselves. And we've had some films where the original director who had the idea got lost in it and couldn't get out.
38:02 Tim Ferriss? Right.
38:03 Speaker 01 And so we had to make some changes in order to get the film done. So in our view, we've had failures, but we basically, we try to keep the failures inside. I mean, it's not that they're secret that we've had failures. But we don't release the film that fails. We will abandon it or we'll restart. And we've had several restarts. We just get to a point, say it's not working, we have to do a major rethink to get this to be where it is. So we had to do that with Toy Story and we had to do it with Ratatouille.
38:35 Tim Ferriss? Wow, no kidding. I've seen, I've seen both those movies dozens of times. At what point do you stop trying to fix something and abandon it? Are there cases of total abandonment? And in which case, or shelving something permanently? In which case, how do you decide to go completely scorched earth, blank slate as opposed to reworking something? If that's been done, I don't know.
38:56 Speaker 01 Well, usually there's a buildup that is, since all of our films to begin with suck.
39:02 Tim Ferriss? Why do you say that? Just the rough draft is always really rough?
39:07 Speaker 01 Well, now, what it is, is, and this is like the big misconception that people have is that a new film is like the baby version of the final film, when in fact, sometimes the final film bears no relationship to what you started off with.
39:21 Speaker 01 And what we found is that first version always sucks. And I don't mean this because I'm self-effacing or that we're modest about it. I mean it in the sense that they really do suck.
39:33 Tim Ferriss? Now, is this at the storyboarding level? Or what, how is it appearing? What's the form for that sucky first version?
39:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, you're going through phases of where you come with the ideas, you pitch the ideas, you rework them, then you do a script, and you have a script read, you have actors read through it, and then you go through a couple of versions of that, and then you start to storyboard it up, and you put it up. And it isn't until you get to, you know, a few versions in, that you begin to find, okay, these elements of it are sticking, they're holding, we've now got the tent poles for the film that we can build around. But it's a discovery process. Now, and the reason it takes long is you're trying to do something that's new.
40:17 Tim Ferriss? Right.
40:18 Speaker 01 If we just want to throw up a story, well, it turns out, we know how to do that really quickly, and we know how to make it quickly. But it's not a good movie unless you can try to find some way of touching people's emotions, or bringing something new to the story. So, the reason we go out on field trips and do, and research trips, is that we're trying to take ourselves and our directors into a place where they bring something that they didn't know, or the general audience wouldn't know.
40:50 Speaker 01 And, I mean, I'll use an example of Ratatouille, where the filmmakers went to, into the three-star restaurants in France, and then went to Thomas Keller's French Laundry and so forth. Now, a lot of people have seen the Cooking Channel, but the Cooking Channel is not like a real, the inside of a real restaurant.
41:08 Tim Ferriss? Right.
41:09 Speaker 01 Okay, so, the thing is, almost nobody has been inside of a real high-end restaurant. So, they don't actually know what goes on inside there.
41:18 Speaker 01 So when we take elements of the way they work in the audience and we put them in the Ratatouille as elements, then the audience doesn't know whether they are true or not because they haven't been there.
41:30 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
41:30 Speaker 01 But they sense that it is.
41:32 Tim Ferriss? Right.
41:34 Speaker 01 So when you're watching those people in that kitchen, the way they're working and the way she's talking because she was teaching him how to cook.
41:40 Tim Ferriss? Right.
41:41 Speaker 01 You have the sense like, oh, this is real.
41:44 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
41:46 Speaker 01 And you you only get that by going out into the world and finding something new. And then you bring that in and you have to meld it into a story.
41:53 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
41:54 Speaker 01 And it's a long, slow, painful process. It involves a lot of people and a lot of time. So now the question is, or what your question was, like, you know, what do you do to abandon it or restart? How do you do that?
42:06 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
42:07 Speaker 01 Okay, in our history here, we have only abandoned one film.
42:11 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
42:11 Speaker 01 The other ones, we either they evolved into what they were or we did a restart.
42:16 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
42:17 Speaker 01 And the one that we abandoned, the only reason we abandoned it is that we we realized we needed to bring fresh blood in. And so the person we brought in said, yes, I will do a restart on the film. But since we're restarting, I have an idea which I think is even better, which is a completely different idea.
42:36 Tim Ferriss? Hmm.
42:36 Speaker 01 And we pitched that idea, we said, you're absolutely right. That's a brilliant idea.
42:41 Tim Ferriss? What movie did that turn into?
42:43 Speaker 01 It's the one that's coming out next month.
42:45 Tim Ferriss? Oh, okay.
42:47 Speaker 01 Okay.
42:48 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
42:48 Speaker 01 So rather than being a restart, we'll say, okay, this is this is the film you're going to do. So because we believed it was a brilliant idea.
42:57 Tim Ferriss? Hmm.
42:57 Speaker 01 But for the others, it was a restart.
42:59 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
43:00 Speaker 01 If you compare it with baseball, like, baseball has got this notion that you got the starting pitcher and then you got the relievers and then you got the finisher. So you've got multiple pitchers in a game.
43:10 Tim Ferriss? Right.
43:11 Speaker 01 So there's an ideal, and the ideal is that you'd like to pitch the perfect game. So one guy takes it all the way through the game and finishes up with a win.
43:21 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm.
43:21 Speaker 01 So that's the ideal.
43:22 Tim Ferriss? Right.
43:23 Speaker 01 But the ideal use rarely happens. The concept which we accept is there are multiple people that do it. Now, in film, when we do something, we have someone who starts it. But their ideal, which is to take it all the way through, if they don't take it all the way through, then they think of themselves as having failed.
43:41 Tim Ferriss? Right.
43:42 Speaker 01 But if you step back and say, you know, they launched the idea, they had a good idea. They couldn't finish it because it's a different kind of thing when you finish and when you start.
43:53 Speaker 01 The the value of the world is frequently you devalue the first person, then you give high value to the second person. But the reality is, it's kind of all part together. You have to acknowledge the the fact that the contributions came from a lot of people over a great length of time. And it's what makes it painful is that in this world, if if you have to make that change, it's a personal thing that somebody has, and that's where the pain comes. It's not the work.
44:21 Tim Ferriss? Yeah.
44:22 Speaker 01 The feelings.
44:23 Tim Ferriss? Definitely. Well, Ed, I know that you have some time constraints. I'd love if we have a few more minutes just to ask a couple of rapid fire questions.
44:32 Speaker 01 Yes, okay.
44:32 Tim Ferriss? Uh, that are very short form. You can answer them as briefly as you'd like. And the first of that is, what is the book you've given most often as a gift?
44:44 Speaker 01 The book I've given most often as a gift? I wouldn't say, there is a single one. I it actually, I customize it every time.
44:53 Tim Ferriss? Okay.
44:53 Speaker 01 For who the person is.
44:54 Tim Ferriss? Mm hmm. Okay, got it. Is there any that you've given more multiple times than others?
45:00 Speaker 01 No, I I would say there are certain children's books which I've given out a few times.
45:05 Tim Ferriss? That's okay.
45:06 Speaker 01 One monster after another.
45:07 Tim Ferriss? Ah, okay.
45:08 Speaker 01 By Mercer Meyer.
45:10 Tim Ferriss? Perfect.
45:10 Speaker 01 I love that book.
45:11 Tim Ferriss? Yeah, perfect. What is your favorite documentary or any favorite documentaries?
45:17 Speaker 01 Oh, the documentaries. You know, I used to go to Sundance. I love documentaries. Is there a favorite one, though? Honestly, I can't remember a favorite one. For me, the documentary gives us a slice into something we don't see. And so I actually, I like them as a class.
45:33 Tim Ferriss? Mm hmm.
45:33 Speaker 01 I've been so busy the last couple of years, I haven't.
45:35 Tim Ferriss? No problem.
45:37 Speaker 01 Watched many recently.
45:38 Tim Ferriss? Are there any lectures specifically from the teaching company that stick out in your mind?
45:43 Speaker 01 Well, for me personally, there it is. Well, they have a range of things. Some are video, they're science oriented and so forth. They've got them on economics, on Shakespeare and so forth. But the thing that had the greatest impact on me was the set of them, which was the whole sweep of world history. You have to take it like section at a time to do it. Although I must admit, there was one which was around the time of King Henry VIII, there's that, or the Tudors and the Stuarts.
46:12 Tim Ferriss? Hmm.
46:13 Speaker 01 I was so blown away with that that as soon as I listened to it, I listened to it again.
46:16 Tim Ferriss? [laughing]
46:18 Speaker 01 The Tudors and the Stuarts. I loved that that particular one.
46:22 Tim Ferriss? I'll have to check that out. I will trade you one, which is there's a podcast that only puts out an episode every three months or so, three to four months, called Hardcore History. And there's a series called The Wrath of the Khans, which I highly, highly recommend. It might have the same effect on you. When you think-
46:38 Speaker 01 So it's called Hardcore-
46:39 Tim Ferriss? Hardcore Hardcore History is the podcast, and there's a series, there are four or five parts, called Wrath of the Khans. And it's about, as it turns out, Genghis Khan, as opposed to Genghis Khan. It's incredible. And the delivery-
46:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, I did read a book on Genghis Khan, which I thoroughly enjoyed. So this sounds great. So it's all the Khans, or?
47:00 Tim Ferriss? It covers, it covers a number of different Khans, but provides the pretext, the current, I would say, the then-current context. And the delivery, it's a synthesis from many different sources. But give the first episode a listen, and I think that you will very quickly then devour the entire series. It's-
47:19 Speaker 01 Oh, I will do that.
47:20 Tim Ferriss? It's amazing. When you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind?
47:25 Speaker 01 Oh, successful. Well, you know, that's kind of a, I mean, the way I view success is actually in terms of people's happiness. And so there are people that others normally know about.
47:38 Tim Ferriss? That's okay.
47:38 Speaker 01 I mean, that's, that's the real success. I mean, there are friends and so forth that- I think while they've achieved this equanimity in life and I just value that a lot when I receive people.
47:47 Tim Ferriss? Do you meditate by chance, not that you have to, I'm just curious?
47:51 Speaker 01 I do, I meditate between a half hour, an hour a day and half for several years.
47:56 Tim Ferriss? Do you do that in, in multiple sessions or single session typically?
48:00 Speaker 01 Single session, in the morning.
48:02 Tim Ferriss? In the morning. Any particular type of meditation, Vipassana or TM or anything else?
48:07 Speaker 01 It's Vipassana. I actually got started because of visiting the Sambhala Mountain Center, which is Tibetan. But in fact, because I lived in Marin, although I live in San Francisco, we're close to Spirit Rock, I
48:20 Tim Ferriss? Oh, wonderful.
48:21 Speaker 01 Become, you know, quite engaged with the community out of Spirit Rock, which is of that particular style.
48:26 Tim Ferriss? Mm-hmm. Fantastic. Two last questions, second to last, if you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
48:33 Speaker 01 Well, I, it's hard to ask because I view myself as constantly needing to change. So I deal with, with others and looking and saying, okay, well, how can I do a better job? So it's not like there's one thing, it's like, well, there are a whole bunch of things where I would like to evolve or improve and alter the view and, and look at the world in different ways. So for me, it's not so much changing something as can I take on a different perspective so I understand or view things I didn't see before.
49:02 Tim Ferriss? And very perhaps related, if you could give a piece of advice or a few pieces of advice to your, say, 20-year-old self, what would that advice be?
49:12 Speaker 01 Well, you know, that's a, it's a tough one because to some extent, if I had told my 20-year-old stuff, a lot of things that I know now, just about life, I don't know if I would have understood it.
49:28 Tim Ferriss? Hmm.
49:29 Speaker 01 So I come to the position where, because I think, I mean, the reason I wrote a book was to try to explain things to people.
49:35 Tim Ferriss? Right.
49:36 Speaker 01 It's like explaining things to myself at 20 years old. But the way I view this or any other book is that you read things or you learn about them because you want to figure out how to Address issues and problems in life.
49:50 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
49:50 Speaker 01 But the danger is always that whether it's me or somebody else, if we can look at these things as a way of somehow sidestepping the problems.
49:59 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
50:00 Speaker 01 And there's a subtle distinction there, and not everybody knows what they're doing.
50:04 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
50:05 Speaker 01 But I think advice is actually one of, like, you've you always face towards the problem. You actually can't avoid the mess in the middle, which you want our mechanisms to deal with the mess.
50:15 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
50:16 Speaker 01 And and in doing that, you will end up in a better place, and you'll get experiences that you can't get any other way than by experiencing them.
50:23 Tim Ferriss? What what do you think the advice, whether he would have taken it or not, your twenty year old self most would have needed to hear would have been?
50:31 Speaker 01 Well, the reason it's hard is is like, I I've so much enjoyed my life and the people around it.
50:35 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
50:36 Speaker 01 And I'm aware that if you make a change, then then the little miniscule changes can actually send you down radically different paths.
50:44 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
50:45 Speaker 01 And so I say, well, okay, even if I'd made mistakes at the time.
50:49 Tim Ferriss? Right.
50:50 Speaker 01 Would I want to give myself advice which would have had me avoid that mistake? Because the mistake was part of whom I am that made me where I am.
50:58 Tim Ferriss? Right.
50:59 Speaker 01 So I can look back and say, well, some of those things were painful. I I wish I hadn't done them, or done that, or said that. But it's not like I could say, well, avoid doing that, because to some extent, going through the pain of making that mistake helped alter me.
51:14 Tim Ferriss? Right, make you who you are.
51:16 Speaker 01 Makes it really hard to go back and say, okay, do something differently.
51:18 Tim Ferriss? Right, the the unknown butterfly effect, or the unpredictable butterfly effect, and what it could do to the rest. Well, Ed, this has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate you making the time. Where should people learn more about you? Or what would you encourage them to go check out? Of course, I will also put in the show notes links to the book and other resources. But any any parting thoughts?
51:42 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, we've only touched on the topics, of course, and we've been, you know, like, fifty minutes on this. But for me, the all the issues of what it means to engage with others, and dealing with uncertainty, and and how you address fear, and how you make safe environments are critical ones, and how you look at the world and perceive it, and. And our moral and ethical position in that environment are all really important. And I don't have any short way of saying them, but to me, they're important and I hope I get at least a touchdown a few of them in the book and talking about some of our experiences as we grew as a company. And I want to make it clear that we haven't figured it out. The challenges in front of us are every bit as big as they've always been.
52:26 Tim Ferriss? Well, as it should be, right? Mountains to climb, I suppose. Well, I can't wait to see what you guys produce next. And given how many mutual friends we have, hopefully we'll at some point bump into each other in the Bay Area. But for now, at least, I will let you get back to your day. And thank you very much for taking the time.
52:43 Speaker 01 All right. Thank you very much, Tim. It's great talking with you.
52:46 Tim Ferriss? All right. Thanks, Ed. Take care.
52:49 Speaker 01 Bye-bye.
52:50 Tim Ferriss? Bye-bye.
52:51 Speaker 04 If you want more of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or go to fourhourblog.com.
52:59 Speaker 05 F-O-U-R-H-O-U-R-B-L-O-G dot com.
53:03 Speaker 04 Where you'll find an award-winning blog, tons of audio and video interview stories with people like Warren Buffett and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, the books, plus much, much more. Follow Tim on Twitter, it's twitter.com/TFerriss.
53:16 Speaker 05 That's T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S.
53:18 Speaker 04 Or on Facebook, at facebook.com/TimFerriss. Until next time, thanks for listening.
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