Pixar Founder, Ed Catmull on Creativity, Culture and Steve Jobs
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2015
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Do you remember being a kid and loving to draw? But at some point early on you learned that your art wasn't good enough? So you stopped.
What if you had learned a different story? That your art WAS good, that your ideas WERE valid, that your perspective WAS valued?
Today's guest is a master of cultivating and allowing for creativity in the art world. Children's animated films to be exact.
Ed Catmull is the founder of Pixar, the world-renowned animation studio that has transformed the film world by creating the standard for computer graphics.
In his recent book, Creativity Inc., Ed discusses how creativity is cultivated, what is required, and his own journey from studying physics in college to founding Pixar (which he still heads today).
Our conversation goes down many fascinating avenues, including the misconceptions we have about what art teaches us, the connection between artistic thinking and entrepreneurship, and his long-standing friendship with giants like George Lucas and Steve Jobs.
He explains what it was like to be on the frontier of computer science in the 70s and how he has learned to navigate the fear of failure.
At the core of Ed's genius though, is what makes a good story, and throughout the interview he shares his wisdom on this topic.
Get excited for a dive into the brilliant mind of the artist and visionary Ed Catmull.
Some questions I ask:
- What made you talk yourself out of studying animation in college?
- How did you evolve from working in physics to technology?
- How important do you think it was for you to have an end goal of what you wanted to create?
- Who was the Steve Jobs you knew and how was he different than the general public's viewpoint?
Follow Ed:
"The creative act is acting and responding in the face of change."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So what would it be like, do you think, to simultaneously realize your wildest childhood |
| 0:10.1 | fantasy, build a multi-billion dollar global entertainment business and along the way work |
| 0:19.4 | with Steve Jobs over a period of decades to build something absolutely stunning? |
| 0:25.0 | That's the journey that today's guest Ed Codmal, who is the founder of Pixar, has gone through. |
| 0:32.8 | And in this really kind of fascinating, wide-ranging conversation, we talk about his childhood, |
| 0:37.7 | we talk about how he actually abandoned his dream of animation and then went and pursued |
| 0:45.9 | computer science and a PhD and then came completely full circle to literally create the technology |
| 0:51.8 | needed to build the first fully animated computer film. |
| 0:57.2 | And his amazing experience of building a company and working with Steve Jobs, and we |
| 1:02.6 | get into a really fascinating conversation also about how he believes that the world really |
| 1:07.7 | misreported and misunderstands Steve in his later years and some deep insights about |
| 1:12.8 | who he had turned into and evolved. |
| 1:15.8 | Really I think I love this conversation, it's really fascinating. |
| 1:19.4 | And quick apology, before we dive into it, Ed was in his office in the Bay area and I |
| 1:24.8 | was in New York City and I had the opportunity to have this conversation, so of course I jumped |
| 1:30.0 | on it. |
| 1:31.0 | And so while most of our conversations are filmed in film, we don't film anymore, are recorded |
| 1:37.2 | in person and we try and really keep the audio quality as good as possible. |
| 1:41.6 | Yeah, you'll maybe slightly less than the normal broadcast quality stuff that we do because |
| 1:48.5 | we had to record this remotely. |
| 1:50.0 | So I just ask your forgiveness there and really just focus on the meat and the conversation. |
| 1:54.4 | I think it was some pretty extraordinary stuff that we dove into. |
... |
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