Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► Gray, I am ruined.

00:00:02 ◼   ► Why are you ruined, Myke?

00:00:03 ◼   ► I got upgraded to business class.

00:00:05 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:00:08 ◼   ► [Ding]

00:00:10 ◼   ► Well, well, well.

00:00:12 ◼   ► You know what I'm gonna expect?

00:00:14 ◼   ► I'm gonna expect a big apology.

00:00:16 ◼   ► Because you and many other people always give me grief about flying standby.

00:00:23 ◼   ► But I didn't fly standby.

00:00:24 ◼   ► And trying to schedule things to get an upgrade to business class.

00:00:27 ◼   ► class, I'm not saying you flew standby, but you now have tasted the sweet, sweet nectar

00:00:33 ◼   ► of business class. And you're telling me that you're ruined! So now I'm imagining you can

00:00:39 ◼   ► understand why someone might make plans around even the mere chance of getting business class.

00:00:46 ◼   ► If it is statistically proven that it is more likely for you to receive business or upper

00:00:52 ◼   ► or first because of flying standby.

00:00:55 ◼   ► - Oh, it is.

00:00:56 ◼   ► The way I fly, it is.

00:00:57 ◼   ► - Then I can understand now.

00:01:00 ◼   ► So I was in the airport waiting to board.

00:01:05 ◼   ► - Where were you?

00:01:05 ◼   ► Where are you flying from?

00:01:06 ◼   ► Where are you flying to?

00:01:07 ◼   ► - From Dallas to London.

00:01:09 ◼   ► - Okay, that's a pretty long flight.

00:01:10 ◼   ► - So I think on the way there, it's 10 hours.

00:01:12 ◼   ► On the way back, it was like eight and a half or something.

00:01:16 ◼   ► And I'm sitting in the airport.

00:01:17 ◼   ► I like to be very early in airports.

00:01:20 ◼   ► Very early, I like lots of time.

00:01:22 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the only way to be.

00:01:23 ◼   ► - Drives everybody that I know in my life crazy.

00:01:26 ◼   ► But like, for example, for this flight,

00:01:28 ◼   ► I made sure I was at the airport like four hours before.

00:01:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's reasonable.

00:01:32 ◼   ► - I like that.

00:01:33 ◼   ► I like to just take my time,

00:01:34 ◼   ► but other people think I'm crazy.

00:01:36 ◼   ► - No, no, this is the right way to do it.

00:01:38 ◼   ► My feeling is like, we can wait at the airport

00:01:41 ◼   ► or we can wait at home.

00:01:42 ◼   ► We might as well wait at the airport.

00:01:43 ◼   ► - Good, I like that.

00:01:44 ◼   ► Do you wanna know my theory for this, my thinking?

00:01:47 ◼   ► - What?

00:01:48 ◼   ► - If you catch a bus or a train,

00:01:51 ◼   ► you could just get the next one.

00:01:53 ◼   ► That does not work so well with planes.

00:01:55 ◼   ► - No, it does not.

00:01:56 ◼   ► - You cannot just get the next one.

00:01:58 ◼   ► That is not a thing that happens.

00:02:02 ◼   ► I'll just wait at the gate until the next one pulls up.

00:02:04 ◼   ► No, you won't, sir.

00:02:05 ◼   ► You will give us another $1,000

00:02:07 ◼   ► and then maybe if you're lucky, you'll get there next week.

00:02:10 ◼   ► So I was getting ready to board, I was sitting at the gate

00:02:15 ◼   ► and they're like, had an announcement go out

00:02:18 ◼   ► and they said a bunch of names and they said my name,

00:02:20 ◼   ► please approach the desk for an important message.

00:02:24 ◼   ► And I was like, oh no, what have they done?

00:02:27 ◼   ► Like, am I not going home today?

00:02:29 ◼   ► Went up to the lady, gave her my passport,

00:02:30 ◼   ► she had like a real stern face on.

00:02:32 ◼   ► She typed in a bunch of things.

00:02:34 ◼   ► She gave me a ticket, she's like,

00:02:35 ◼   ► you've been upgraded to business class, thank you.

00:02:37 ◼   ► And I was like, I expected the first time this would happen

00:02:41 ◼   ► to there to be just a little bit more fanfare, you know?

00:02:44 ◼   ► Like even just a smile, like she just didn't care.

00:02:47 ◼   ► So, but I cared very much

00:02:49 ◼   ► I was very excited about all of this. So business class is amazing. I flew with British Airways.

00:02:56 ◼   ► So I basically had a bed that I could make up for myself.

00:03:01 ◼   ► Oh okay yeah so this is the thing like business class

00:03:04 ◼   ► varies wildly between airlines and also just between the model of planes. Like some business

00:03:11 ◼   ► classes you get screwed and what you really have is economy plus from 30 years ago. But some

00:03:18 ◼   ► business classes you get a space seat and so it sounds like you had one of those.

00:03:22 ◼   ► This was this was an older plane so it wasn't super fancy but I had like a little pod type

00:03:28 ◼   ► area there was like a divider between me and the two people that were on the other side

00:03:33 ◼   ► and I had a regular chair that had buttons that could basically recline me

00:03:38 ◼   ► and then it could go real down flat and I had this foot thing that I could bring up

00:03:42 ◼   ► and I was able to sleep on the plane only for a couple of hours because the time was a bit weird

00:03:50 ◼   ► but I got two hours of good uninterrupted sleep sleeping on my side as I like to sleep on a plane

00:03:58 ◼   ► Gray. I am ruined forever. Yeah now you'll never want to fly again unless it's business class.

00:04:05 ◼   ► See so this is my thinking right now as I've been flying more and more recently in economy plus

00:04:12 ◼   ► or premium economy, it's called in some places.

00:04:15 ◼   ► I've been flying more and more like that

00:04:16 ◼   ► because it is just far significant

00:04:20 ◼   ► for not too much more money in some cases.

00:04:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, and especially for a tall guy like yourself,

00:04:25 ◼   ► it really makes a difference.

00:04:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, you get the extra space, the cabins are more empty.

00:04:29 ◼   ► - People with babies for some reason

00:04:31 ◼   ► don't seem to often buy Economy Plus tickets.

00:04:33 ◼   ► Like that alone is worth it.

00:04:35 ◼   ► - You get like metal cutlery to eat your food with.

00:04:39 ◼   ► Like you basically feel more like a civilized human and less like cattle.

00:04:44 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:04:45 ◼   ► So I'm luckily in a position where I, for a lot of the trips I can't afford it or

00:04:50 ◼   ► their business expenses.

00:04:51 ◼   ► So, you know, it works out for me.

00:04:52 ◼   ► But now I'm thinking more about like for the really long ones, could I maybe

00:04:57 ◼   ► fly business class coming home?

00:04:59 ◼   ► That feels good.

00:05:01 ◼   ► Cause going there, you're excited to go.

00:05:03 ◼   ► So it doesn't feel so bad.

00:05:04 ◼   ► Like maybe coming home, a lot of the flights were like red eyes.

00:05:08 ◼   ► Could I get a few lines?

00:05:09 ◼   ► hours of sleep, it will improve my life significantly. So for San Francisco, I'm definitely gonna

00:05:16 ◼   ► do it. And flying with a friend, and we're considering doing that together and doing

00:05:23 ◼   ► Virgin and therefore going upper class.

00:05:25 ◼   ► B: Does Virgin call it upper class?

00:05:28 ◼   ► H: They only have upper.

00:05:29 ◼   ► B. That's fantastic. Way to own it, Virgin.

00:05:35 ◼   ► Their premium economy is incredible.

00:05:37 ◼   ► Like, it feels like you're in a plane in Mad Men.

00:05:40 ◼   ► All of their air stewards look incredible.

00:05:43 ◼   ► And they bring you like, champagne when you're getting on the plane.

00:05:47 ◼   ► Ah, it's fantastic.

00:05:48 ◼   ► It's the way to fly, Gray.

00:05:50 ◼   ► And now I'm ruined forever.

00:05:51 ◼   ► Because I wonder what it's going to be like past that curtain.

00:05:55 ◼   ► What this sounds like to me is you need to grow Relay into a much bigger company so that

00:06:02 ◼   ► you can always fly upper class.

00:06:04 ◼   ► Maybe I can set a goal for that.

00:06:06 ◼   ► You know, I think it's in Emirates where you can actually get like a room with a double

00:06:11 ◼   ► bed if you've seen that.

00:06:12 ◼   ► I've seen that stuff.

00:06:13 ◼   ► I've seen that stuff.

00:06:14 ◼   ► The thing with Emirates though, they have these crazy rooms and they're like $30,000

00:06:20 ◼   ► tickets.

00:06:21 ◼   ► You know, like it's ridiculous luxury, but all I can ever think is it looks so tacky

00:06:25 ◼   ► because they really like gold accented everything.

00:06:29 ◼   ► So I look at those things like $30,000 even if I had it to spare, like I wouldn't want

00:06:34 ◼   ► to be surrounded by that much tacky gold, it just looks gross. I don't like your design

00:06:38 ◼   ► aesthetic.

00:06:39 ◼   ► I've never really looked into them very much, because Emirates tend not to fly to the places

00:06:44 ◼   ► that I'm going. They tend to go the other way a lot more.

00:06:48 ◼   ► Right, yeah, of course. But yeah, so, you're ruined forever. You need Relay to earn more

00:06:52 ◼   ► money to fly business class.

00:06:55 ◼   ► Speaking of which, our dear listeners can help us fly business class when we go for

00:07:01 ◼   ► our acceptance speech for our campaign.

00:07:03 ◼   ► Oh right, of course, of course. You've been very busy, Myke.

00:07:06 ◼   ► We've been very busy. We have t-shirts! We have grey early 2016 t-shirts available.

00:07:11 ◼   ► We were working on a design. This is a little bit of the backstory of how this t-shirt came to be.

00:07:18 ◼   ► We were working on a design and I was showing you the designs.

00:07:21 ◼   ► I was going to say, what really happened here is you surprised me with the t-shirt design.

00:07:25 ◼   ► I was minding my own business and you sent me a design for yourself.

00:07:29 ◼   ► Which I really liked and we worked on developing it and then we had two colors.

00:07:34 ◼   ► We had a white and a blue. We only wanted to do one color because that was going to be our campaign color.

00:07:40 ◼   ► And we weren't sure what to do. So you suggested to me, "Why don't you put it to a Twitter vote?"

00:07:45 ◼   ► And then I got really carried away.

00:07:48 ◼   ► Yeah, you seem to run a bunch of runoffs and there was a lot of public deciding for the design of the Grey Hurley 2016 shirt.

00:07:57 ◼   ► And what we came down to was we are doing a blue t-shirt, a couple of different shades of blue

00:08:03 ◼   ► And there is a there is a men's a woman's and a unisex long sleeve t-shirt

00:08:10 ◼   ► So the men they have a men's and women's short sleeve and unisex long sleeve which we're doing with teespring

00:08:14 ◼   ► But we've got something a little bit different this time that we've never done before. I've never done before

00:08:20 ◼   ► There's a link in the show notes that you can click and teespring have been really good to us and they set up

00:08:26 ◼   ► distribution from the US and the EU.

00:08:30 ◼   ► So it should reduce shipping costs

00:08:32 ◼   ► for most people outside of the US.

00:08:36 ◼   ► This is something that, trust me, I feel this

00:08:38 ◼   ► 'cause I buy all the shirts from the US,

00:08:40 ◼   ► but they've hooked us up with this.

00:08:43 ◼   ► If there's a special link that you'll find in our show notes

00:08:45 ◼   ► and it does it by geolocation and it works out

00:08:48 ◼   ► which one to, which campaign to send you to.

00:08:50 ◼   ► So you'll be able to buy one of our great T-shirts

00:08:54 ◼   ► and support the campaign.

00:08:55 ◼   ► These are only available until April 1st, so this is the only time you're going to hear us talk about this.

00:09:01 ◼   ► So if you want one, you gotta go buy them because they will only be available until April 1st, and I think they look great.

00:09:08 ◼   ► I think they do look great. Yeah, you had two emojis drawn up for you.

00:09:13 ◼   ► They're custom emoji.

00:09:14 ◼   ► And for me, yes, custom emoji.

00:09:16 ◼   ► And yes, if people want to get their hands on the grey Hurley 2016 shirt,

00:09:21 ◼   ► shirt. If you are hearing the sound of my voice right now and you have just recently downloaded

00:09:26 ◼   ► the episode, you need to get in gear, click the link in the show notes, and grab the shirt before

00:09:33 ◼   ► this campaign season is over. We had a lot of people say "why is there no gray shirt?"

00:09:37 ◼   ► and they expected that there would have to be a gray shirt. Campaign is blue. You endorsed the

00:09:41 ◼   ► blue, right? What I endorsed was if you're having something that looks like a presidential campaign

00:09:46 ◼   ► logo, it has to be red, white, and blue. There's like, there's no choice about that. It's got to be red, white, and blue.

00:09:52 ◼   ► There we go.

00:09:53 ◼   ► You don't have presidential campaigns where someone is running a gray color. That just doesn't happen.

00:09:57 ◼   ► People thought that I was getting carried away without your blessing.

00:10:00 ◼   ► Well, I mean you kind of were. Like I came back after some instant message conversation to discover that you had run all of these

00:10:08 ◼   ► various votes on Twitter. Like I had, I was actually involved in some other things we will talk about later.

00:10:13 ◼   ► And I just came back to my phone and it's like oh Myke's been busy. Yeah, so yeah, you did

00:10:17 ◼   ► I mean like they're not they're not wrong. I got I got carried away, but within the constraints, you know

00:10:23 ◼   ► I just really went to the edges of those constraints. There were no constraints. I told you in instant message

00:10:28 ◼   ► You know you go you go right ahead Myke. Yeah, I know I

00:10:31 ◼   ► Trust you you asked me for some feedback. I made some suggestions. I there were no constraints given don't don't

00:10:37 ◼   ► Radically portray this in a different way from the way it actually unfolded

00:10:41 ◼   ► You know if you're gonna be my running mate, I I trust you to make these kind of decisions

00:10:46 ◼   ► But I am gonna complain when I don't like the look of it. That's what I was doing

00:10:50 ◼   ► yeah, that feels like a

00:10:53 ◼   ► President and VP situation. I think you can do whatever you want as long as I'm okay with it. Yeah

00:10:59 ◼   ► How are how's the search for campaign headquarters going? Okay. Listen, I know what you're trying to do here, right?

00:11:08 ◼   ► I know what you're trying to do here

00:11:10 ◼   ► because

00:11:12 ◼   ► listeners in the show notes

00:11:14 ◼   ► The thing that we are going to talk about next is my further adventures in finding an office

00:11:19 ◼   ► finding an office for me

00:11:23 ◼   ► As usual

00:11:27 ◼   ► Myke's trying to hitch along here because they were together in the show notes. I thought you were connecting them, you know

00:11:33 ◼   ► No, I was not connecting. Oh, no, they are separated by several carriage returns

00:11:40 ◼   ► There is no way anyone could actually confuse these as related topics.

00:11:45 ◼   ► They are just a simple related topics.

00:11:47 ◼   ► No, this is a this is the next bullet point not connected to the previous bullet point.

00:11:53 ◼   ► Today's episode of Cortex is brought to you by PDF Pen Pro from Smile.

00:11:59 ◼   ► You've heard me say before that PDF Pen is the Swiss Army knife for PDFs.

00:12:04 ◼   ► PDF Pen Pro is the knife with so many tools that it can barely fit in your pocket.

00:12:11 ◼   ► PDF Pen Pro has everything that you're going to need.

00:12:14 ◼   ► The ability to add signatures to PDFs, edit text and images within them,

00:12:18 ◼   ► performing OCR on scanned documents so you can use that text in other places,

00:12:22 ◼   ► and you can also export your PDFs into Microsoft Word format.

00:12:25 ◼   ► But only with PDF Pen Pro can you create an interactive PDF form,

00:12:31 ◼   ► build a table of contents for a PDF, set document permissions and convert websites to multiple

00:12:36 ◼   ► page PDF documents.

00:12:39 ◼   ► PDF Pen Pro 7 also allows you to easily export into Excel, PowerPoint and PDF archive formats

00:12:49 ◼   ► if you'd like to.

00:12:50 ◼   ► You can even create PDFs of web pages and add tooltips to your PDFs for voice over accessibility.

00:12:56 ◼   ► The list of features goes on and on.

00:12:59 ◼   ► This is a powerful piece of software.

00:13:16 ◼   ► You can try the free demo of PDFPEM Pro 7 today by visiting smile software.com/cortex.

00:13:23 ◼   ► PDF Pen Pro 7 requires Yosemite or later and works great on El Capitan.

00:13:28 ◼   ► Thank you so much to Smile for their support of this show and Relay FM.

00:13:32 ◼   ► [BEEP]

00:13:33 ◼   ► So actually I am not looking for a private office because I currently have an office.

00:13:42 ◼   ► [GASP]

00:13:43 ◼   ► Yes, I know.

00:13:44 ◼   ► Look at this!

00:13:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:46 ◼   ► Are you in it?

00:13:48 ◼   ► Not right now, no.

00:13:49 ◼   ► Okay.

00:13:50 ◼   ► I'm in my house right now.

00:13:51 ◼   ► Okay.

00:13:52 ◼   ► Yeah, you mentioned last time on the show about like surely there are services that can try to help you find office space and

00:14:01 ◼   ► long story short that is

00:14:03 ◼   ► essentially what I did was I was using like a website that specializes in trying to find people office space instead of just

00:14:09 ◼   ► Interrogating buildings or searching around and just trying to find things which was not working super great

00:14:15 ◼   ► and

00:14:18 ◼   ► Yeah, it's it's been interesting

00:14:20 ◼   ► because

00:14:21 ◼   ► you know when you are searching for anything you have a bunch of criteria and

00:14:25 ◼   ► Whenever you're having a hard time finding something you know like one of your criteria has to give and so as mentioned last time

00:14:35 ◼   ► I really really really didn't want anything that was not within walking distance and that is already such an incredible

00:14:41 ◼   ► constraint about like what is the exact area that I want an office in

00:14:46 ◼   ► Then you add in a couple of other things that I wanted and it's like oh this is gonna be a hard thing to find

00:14:50 ◼   ► So the thing that had to give was of course price

00:14:54 ◼   ► So I do have this private office that is in a big building

00:15:00 ◼   ► But it is very expensive. So I have for the moment

00:15:05 ◼   ► I have only signed a lease for six weeks

00:15:08 ◼   ► Because I need to make sure that this is a place that I am actually going to use that I'm actually going to

00:15:14 ◼   ► work at because otherwise the fixed cost of this office is

00:15:20 ◼   ► many multiples of the co-working space in which I currently am and so it is one of these things where it's like

00:15:26 ◼   ► Will this be worth it? Will it not? I don't know. I've been

00:15:30 ◼   ► Working there for let's see. What's today? Today's

00:15:34 ◼   ► Thursday, I just moved in

00:15:37 ◼   ► four days ago

00:15:39 ◼   ► So I've been going there and and working there a little bit in the mornings and in the evenings and it's been going well

00:15:45 ◼   ► but I need to make sure that I'm actually going to

00:15:48 ◼   ► Very very efficiently use this space. Otherwise, it will not be worth keeping but this is the progress so far

00:15:54 ◼   ► Oh, would you like to see a picture Myke? Mm-hmm. I should show you a picture

00:15:57 ◼   ► Make sure you remove the geo tags from the picture so I can't show up

00:16:01 ◼   ► Morning I

00:16:06 ◼   ► Brought you a coffee. I was one step ahead of you with that

00:16:11 ◼   ► You think I'm ever gonna share with you a geo tagged picture of my office?

00:16:16 ◼   ► No, of course not. Here, let me show you a picture of what it looked like before I moved in.

00:16:20 ◼   ► Okay.

00:16:21 ◼   ► And I'll, these will be appropriate for the show notes.

00:16:24 ◼   ► They will be?

00:16:25 ◼   ► Yeah, I think this will be fun.

00:16:26 ◼   ► Oh wow.

00:16:27 ◼   ► Is that very exciting?

00:16:29 ◼   ► It is. What if there's, is there a window?

00:16:31 ◼   ► You don't want people to like spot landmarks and then, you know.

00:16:34 ◼   ► I can imagine someone with all the pictures on the wall with like string connecting them and stuff.

00:16:39 ◼   ► I specifically selected an office that has no windows. I did not want the distraction of a window.

00:16:45 ◼   ► That is, uh, that... okay. This is a sad... this is a very sad looking office.

00:16:54 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:16:57 ◼   ► Paint a word picture for the people, Myke.

00:17:00 ◼   ► Basically, it looks like an interrogation room.

00:17:04 ◼   ► I think that's a little harsh.

00:17:06 ◼   ► No, there are two tables, there's a lamp, and there's no windows and a fluorescent light.

00:17:11 ◼   ► That is very interrogation room.

00:17:13 ◼   ► It's just a square room.

00:17:17 ◼   ► There's two chairs, there's two telephones.

00:17:20 ◼   ► There is some obscure artwork of a building on the wall.

00:17:24 ◼   ► Yep, generic corporate artwork.

00:17:26 ◼   ► It's not lit very well, this office.

00:17:28 ◼   ► No, it is not.

00:17:29 ◼   ► No, it's not.

00:17:31 ◼   ► And there is a cup of coffee sitting on the table,

00:17:34 ◼   ► and there is a cabinet in the corner, I guess.

00:17:37 ◼   ► Have you done anything to make the office feel more homely?

00:17:42 ◼   ► Did you paint the walls gray or something?

00:17:44 ◼   ► - This office is set up for, theoretically,

00:17:48 ◼   ► two people up to four people,

00:17:51 ◼   ► which I find slightly horrifying.

00:17:53 ◼   ► - That is impossible.

00:17:54 ◼   ► That is impossible.

00:17:56 ◼   ► You couldn't.

00:17:57 ◼   ► How?

00:17:58 ◼   ► - Let me tell you, I mean,

00:18:00 ◼   ► the place where I'm standing to take the photo,

00:18:02 ◼   ► there is a tiny bit of space behind me,

00:18:05 ◼   ► but what you could do,

00:18:06 ◼   ► and what I have seen other offices in this building do is put four desks all around the perimeter of the wall.

00:18:12 ◼   ► Right, so you could get four people in there.

00:18:14 ◼   ► So that's nice, you can just look directly at the wall.

00:18:17 ◼   ► Right. Or in the current setup, you can look directly at the person who's sitting directly opposite you.

00:18:24 ◼   ► It's... we discussed office layouts once before on the show and...

00:18:30 ◼   ► This building that I am in, it's... I don't know, it's like ten stories tall.

00:18:35 ◼   ► All of the floors are nothing but open office spaces.

00:18:40 ◼   ► And there's an elevator that I can take up where you happen to be able to see

00:18:43 ◼   ► into all of the floors. And so just like I go up all the floors,

00:18:46 ◼   ► you can see like these endless, endless open offices.

00:18:49 ◼   ► This one floor happens to have this section that's carved off for individual

00:18:53 ◼   ► offices. But from my perspective, all it is, is it's the same thing, but again,

00:18:58 ◼   ► on a smaller scale where every private office that I walk into actually

00:19:02 ◼   ► has two to six people crammed in what seems like a terribly small space and

00:19:10 ◼   ► like it's still fundamentally an open office. As far as I can tell I am the

00:19:13 ◼   ► only person who has a private office in this whole place because I rented their

00:19:19 ◼   ► smallest one which is for two people but I rented it just for me. So there are

00:19:23 ◼   ► other people that have these rooms but they have more than one person in them.

00:19:26 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah there's there two people or four people in a room this size all

00:19:31 ◼   ► working together. But so yes, Myke, I did spend quite a while making it much more homey.

00:19:37 ◼   ► So would you like to see what it looks like now?

00:19:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm just anticipating that all it is is your computers on the desk. That's the

00:19:45 ◼   ► only change.

00:19:46 ◼   ► Oh no, they're radical changes. I spend a whole day moving stuff around.

00:19:53 ◼   ► That definitely feels like the productiveness that you're looking for, you know. Get an

00:19:57 ◼   ► office spend up okay what okay um paint a word picture mike okay i do you know what i can if you

00:20:09 ◼   ► look at the first photo and you imagine that all of the office furniture in that photo is actually

00:20:15 ◼   ► a transformer and in the second photo it has taken on its fighting stance i like that that's good

00:20:25 ◼   ► Because all you did, you just took the furniture and put it all on top of each other.

00:20:30 ◼   ► Okay, well first of all, first of all, most importantly, I took the painting off the wall.

00:20:38 ◼   ► Oh yeah, where is that?

00:20:39 ◼   ► Who needs that? No, where it is, is it's in storage in this office place. I got rid of it.

00:20:44 ◼   ► I was like, I don't need your painting of a building or your photo of a building,

00:20:48 ◼   ► like this is gone. There were two desks. Now this is my attempt,

00:20:53 ◼   ► Like the whole reason I have this office is that this is my attempt to make like a little mini Amsterdam situation

00:21:01 ◼   ► like we have talked about on the podcast before

00:21:03 ◼   ► where I have a space where I can regularly go and I write.

00:21:06 ◼   ► And one of the key things about the way that I most effectively write

00:21:10 ◼   ► is I pace back and forth and I talk out loud and I type.

00:21:14 ◼   ► Right? So what I don't need is a desk to sit at.

00:21:19 ◼   ► I'm at home right now where I have a desk to sit at.

00:21:21 ◼   ► like there are plenty of cafes in London where there are places to sit at.

00:21:24 ◼   ► I don't need another place to sit at, so I took the one desk and I stacked it on top of the other desk,

00:21:29 ◼   ► and then I set it up as a standing desk.

00:21:32 ◼   ► So I have my keyboard is on the first one at standing typing height with a little bit of a stand,

00:21:38 ◼   ► and I have my iPad Pro is on the top desk,

00:21:42 ◼   ► so that is at eye level for looking at what I'm writing.

00:21:46 ◼   ► And so this is now a space where I can walk back and forth,

00:21:50 ◼   ► I have this set up all in place, and I don't want any pictures in the room, I don't want anything in the room.

00:21:56 ◼   ► I was trying to spread it out over a period of time so I didn't seem like too much of a weirdo to the people running the office,

00:22:02 ◼   ► but I was like, "Uh, can you take out all the phones?"

00:22:05 ◼   ► And they're like, "Uh, can you take out all of this other stuff that you have in here? Can you remove the garbage can?"

00:22:10 ◼   ► Like, "I won't be needing the garbage can." And they're like, "Okay."

00:22:13 ◼   ► I just wanted everything out of there except the very few things that I was going to use

00:22:18 ◼   ► and so I'm pretty happy with this.

00:22:20 ◼   ► I can also see that like having the floor space for your pacing nature is good, right?

00:22:26 ◼   ► So pushing all the furniture into one corner basically is good because you can move around

00:22:31 ◼   ► a lot.

00:22:32 ◼   ► It's just some little parts that I want to dig into a little bit more.

00:22:36 ◼   ► So what is that circular thing?

00:22:40 ◼   ► On the bottom desk?

00:22:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:42 ◼   ► a speaker that is connected to the iPad via Bluetooth so that it can play thunder sound

00:22:50 ◼   ► noises all the time when I'm in there. So it's like an imaginary thunderstorm that's

00:22:53 ◼   ► taking place in the room when I'm working. I recommend the app Thunderscape to accomplish

00:22:58 ◼   ► this. It's very good.

00:23:01 ◼   ► Hm.

00:23:02 ◼   ► Mhm.

00:23:03 ◼   ► So, you're in a nondescript building.

00:23:07 ◼   ► Mhm.

00:23:08 ◼   ► With no windows.

00:23:10 ◼   ► In the room that you're in.

00:23:12 ◼   ► Right.

00:23:13 ◼   ► On your own.

00:23:14 ◼   ► Mhm.

00:23:15 ◼   ► With thunder sounds playing.

00:23:16 ◼   ► Mhm.

00:23:17 ◼   ► I need some kind of white noise.

00:23:19 ◼   ► I need some kind of white noise whenever I'm working.

00:23:21 ◼   ► I'm just saying, I don't know if anybody's ever described you as an evil supervillain

00:23:25 ◼   ► before, but you're really painting that picture for them now.

00:23:28 ◼   ► No!

00:23:29 ◼   ► This is just an accessibility issue.

00:23:30 ◼   ► Uh huh.

00:23:31 ◼   ► I have tinnitus, I need to have some kind of white noise, I can't be in a silent room.

00:23:35 ◼   ► I could just imagine somebody walking by your room, something makes you laugh, right?

00:23:42 ◼   ► And they hear the thunder.

00:23:45 ◼   ► And they're like, "Is Dr. Frankenstein renting a place here?"

00:23:49 ◼   ► Okay, that's interesting, very interesting.

00:23:53 ◼   ► Why thunder?

00:23:54 ◼   ► Why not like rain or whale music or anything like that?

00:23:57 ◼   ► Whale music!

00:23:58 ◼   ► Oh, you gotta be kidding me.

00:24:00 ◼   ► No, yeah, no, that's not what I need. That's not helpful. That's not helpful.

00:24:05 ◼   ► I find like thunderstormy rain is just good. It's just in the background.

00:24:08 ◼   ► It's easy to kind of forget that it's even there.

00:24:11 ◼   ► So that's what I use.

00:24:13 ◼   ► Like I don't like, some people use waves and things.

00:24:15 ◼   ► I don't like that. It's too periodic.

00:24:17 ◼   ► It's distracting.

00:24:18 ◼   ► Thunderstorms, that's what you want.

00:24:20 ◼   ► There's not a lot on that iPad.

00:24:23 ◼   ► Oh yeah, so there's an iPad which is on the top.

00:24:25 ◼   ► Is that an iPad Pro?

00:24:26 ◼   ► That is my iPad Pro.

00:24:28 ◼   ► Is it the iPad Pro or an iPad Pro?

00:24:31 ◼   ► - It is the only iPad Pro that I own.

00:24:34 ◼   ► I see where you're trying to go with this.

00:24:36 ◼   ► - Just checking.

00:24:37 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:24:39 ◼   ► - No, I only own one iPad Pro

00:24:41 ◼   ► and I got a little stand for it

00:24:43 ◼   ► so that it can be mounted vertically on the desk there.

00:24:46 ◼   ► And I just have my couple of writing apps

00:24:48 ◼   ► on the main screen.

00:24:49 ◼   ► It's a perfect office setup so far anyway.

00:24:51 ◼   ► - I'm gonna just attempt to drive the listeners crazy here.

00:24:54 ◼   ► you can kind of make out the apps.

00:24:57 ◼   ► We're not gonna talk about them today.

00:25:00 ◼   ► - Okay.

00:25:01 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:25:02 ◼   ► - There's some new ones in there,

00:25:03 ◼   ► but we're just not gonna talk about it.

00:25:05 ◼   ► We'll leave it for another time.

00:25:06 ◼   ► - Some people will notice some new ones in there.

00:25:08 ◼   ► - Uh-huh.

00:25:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, I didn't even notice that when I sent it to you.

00:25:10 ◼   ► I should have down-res'd it further, but.

00:25:12 ◼   ► - Oh, I like that you can kinda see.

00:25:14 ◼   ► We'll come back to that.

00:25:15 ◼   ► There is some stuff that I wanna talk about,

00:25:17 ◼   ► but I wanna build the intrigue.

00:25:18 ◼   ► We gave you sleep on the calendar.

00:25:22 ◼   ► Now we're giving you something else to worry about.

00:25:25 ◼   ► Whilst we're talking about office spaces

00:25:27 ◼   ► and closed offices, I took a trip to Facebook last week.

00:25:32 ◼   ► - Oh yeah? - Yeah.

00:25:33 ◼   ► A friend of mine comes over from San Francisco

00:25:36 ◼   ► who works for Facebook and he invited me

00:25:38 ◼   ► to go visit the London offices.

00:25:41 ◼   ► You would hate it.

00:25:42 ◼   ► Oh my, would you hate it?

00:25:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, is it open?

00:25:45 ◼   ► - Oh, it's as open as an office space could be.

00:25:48 ◼   ► - Well, I would expect no less from Facebook

00:25:51 ◼   ► because they had that, I remember reading the article

00:25:54 ◼   ► about their new headquarters that they built,

00:25:55 ◼   ► which is the largest open floor space in the world.

00:25:59 ◼   ► - My buddy works there.

00:26:00 ◼   ► He says he gets like 5,000 steps a day

00:26:02 ◼   ► just trying to do his job.

00:26:03 ◼   ► - Oh, God.

00:26:05 ◼   ► So when you tell me that London has a big open office space,

00:26:10 ◼   ► I'm not surprised.

00:26:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's over a couple of floors,

00:26:12 ◼   ► but like I went in there and there were four people

00:26:14 ◼   ► really enthusiastically playing ping pong.

00:26:17 ◼   ► Like really enthusiastically playing, it was no joke.

00:26:20 ◼   ► They had a couple of floors, they had snacks everywhere.

00:26:25 ◼   ► We had lunch at the canteen, which is like completely free food, and there was like sweets

00:26:30 ◼   ► and stuff, it was great.

00:26:31 ◼   ► But everybody where there was like working spaces, it was just like rows and rows of

00:26:35 ◼   ► desks.

00:26:36 ◼   ► It was interesting to me because everything was really cool and fancy and it looked lovely,

00:26:42 ◼   ► but when you look at the desks there's just nothing you can really do, it always just

00:26:45 ◼   ► looks not that nice.

00:26:46 ◼   ► Yeah, it's always just gonna be a computer and a flat surface, like that's just what

00:26:50 ◼   ► to have. Yeah and it just seems funny to me. It's like you can spend all this money and time and

00:26:54 ◼   ► effort into like creating these great spaces but the actual places that you sit down and work,

00:26:59 ◼   ► they're just rows of white desks like there's nothing you can do about it and it was just

00:27:03 ◼   ► interesting to me to see it. Now hopefully when I visit San Francisco next I'm going to go and take

00:27:08 ◼   ► a look at the Facebook office there and I'm interested to see what that one looks like as well.

00:27:13 ◼   ► Yeah I would be very curious to see that on the inside as well. Yeah because I can

00:27:19 ◼   ► I can imagine it's everything I saw last week turned up to 11.

00:27:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:27:25 ◼   ► But I can't imagine you thriving in an environment like that.

00:27:29 ◼   ► I just don't think I would be able to do good work in an environment like that.

00:27:35 ◼   ► I mean, I would just have to be doing some kind of very different job in order to do work.

00:27:41 ◼   ► I saw a lot of people in kind of corners and things like that, like on bean bags and stuff.

00:27:47 ◼   ► Like it seemed like there were a lot of people that were like, "I can't work in these banks of desks."

00:27:51 ◼   ► Everyone seemed really spread out.

00:27:54 ◼   ► Even though there were all these desks, but most of them were empty.

00:27:57 ◼   ► People were in other places.

00:28:00 ◼   ► Yeah, there have been...

00:28:02 ◼   ► Let's just say there have been big open office environments that I have been in where I have noticed the same phenomenon.

00:28:08 ◼   ► Like there are tons of desks.

00:28:11 ◼   ► There's clearly personal items on all of these desks.

00:28:14 ◼   ► And as far as I can tell, every available space that is not a desk is the space that people are actually using to do work.

00:28:21 ◼   ► Like if they can get away from their desk, they are going to.

00:28:25 ◼   ► And then you're like, "Well isn't that interesting? Maybe you, company, might want to take note of this."

00:28:31 ◼   ► It's like, if you have other spaces for people to work, they will work there.

00:28:36 ◼   ► They will not work at their infinite rows of white desks with computers in front of them.

00:28:42 ◼   ► Just like, just a thing to note, companies. Just saying.

00:28:45 ◼   ► So the plan, the plan, Myke, with this office,

00:28:50 ◼   ► is that I'm going to be writing here,

00:28:54 ◼   ► and so for the moment what I'm doing is

00:28:57 ◼   ► I am trying to treat this very much as like a holy,

00:29:01 ◼   ► like a sacrosanct place.

00:29:03 ◼   ► Like I'm taking it very, very seriously, the idea that

00:29:07 ◼   ► you go here,

00:29:09 ◼   ► You're only going to do one thing, which is pacing and writing, and when you're not doing that, you're going to leave.

00:29:16 ◼   ► So this feeds back into what we were talking about on previous episodes, that I am trying to teach my own brain, to train my own brain, that like, this is the thing that happens in this room.

00:29:30 ◼   ► Nothing else happens in this room. We don't do emails here, we don't look at Reddit here, we don't do anything else.

00:29:36 ◼   ► which is part of the very reason why I didn't even want chairs in the room.

00:29:40 ◼   ► Like, I don't want the option to sit down, because if I need to sit down, I can do that plenty of other places.

00:29:45 ◼   ► So that's what I'm trying to

00:29:48 ◼   ► establish this, and I'm trying to build little routines. Like, when I'm walking towards this office,

00:29:54 ◼   ► there's a certain landmark that I pass when it's like, "Ooh, when I pass that landmark, if I'm listening to music or

00:30:00 ◼   ► podcasts or anything, like, it has to go off. Like, we have to get ready as we're approaching this place to start doing the work."

00:30:06 ◼   ► And like all this stuff, I think like it sounds kind of crazy

00:30:09 ◼   ► But I'm just I'm trying to be super strict about it in the same way that like I was really aware that in that Amsterdam trip

00:30:17 ◼   ► It was very easy to feel like I'm being very serious about this and kind of taking away my own

00:30:23 ◼   ► decision-making ability. Now, whether or not this works is a question that I will only have the answer to

00:30:30 ◼   ► Six weeks from now, so we'll have to see in the future like does this work?

00:30:35 ◼   ► Because if it's just another office space then it doesn't make sense for me to continue to rent it

00:30:39 ◼   ► But I am I'm trying to be very very

00:30:43 ◼   ► Yeah, sacrosanct about this little writing monastery that I have at least for the time being

00:30:49 ◼   ► So we'll have to check in later and see how it goes. Are you just writing no research in that room? The short answer is

00:30:57 ◼   ► Yes

00:30:59 ◼   ► the slightly longer answer is

00:31:01 ◼   ► that I do let myself take a look at if I have some stuff in, say, Evernote, or I do have some notes files

00:31:08 ◼   ► that I like to access sometimes when I'm writing,

00:31:11 ◼   ► but I am not allowing myself to go out on the internet on like a fun fact-finding mission, right?

00:31:18 ◼   ► Because that can just end up taking forever and it's not the same kind of thing.

00:31:23 ◼   ► Like as I have discussed before, the bottleneck for me is the writing process and like anything I can do to get more

00:31:31 ◼   ► high-quality writing out in a month is good. And so like that is what will make this office

00:31:37 ◼   ► make sense. And again, so far just for the first, you know, four days that I've had it when it's super easy,

00:31:44 ◼   ► but it's been great. Like I get up early in the morning, I

00:31:46 ◼   ► walk right out, I go straight to the office, and I just start writing immediately. And it's like this is what I need.

00:31:53 ◼   ► There's nothing in the morning to interrupt, like there's nothing to go wrong.

00:31:56 ◼   ► I'm just gonna wake up and walk right to this place and just try not even to think about it. So

00:32:01 ◼   ► So far so good, but it is over the long haul that really matters.

00:32:06 ◼   ► Because what I was going to say is, why don't you just not connect to the Wi-Fi at that office on the iPad?

00:32:13 ◼   ► I already had a little conversation with the receptionist at the front desk.

00:32:17 ◼   ► They were like, "Oh, we'll sign you up for our telephone and internet package."

00:32:21 ◼   ► And I had to explain to them, "No, I don't want your telephone or internet package."

00:32:26 ◼   ► And then that was one of the many ways in which I draw attention to myself when I'm really just...

00:32:31 ◼   ► This is what I'm saying, right? You don't want connection to the outside world.

00:32:35 ◼   ► You moved all the furniture, you took down the picture, and you play thunder noises.

00:32:40 ◼   ► People must think you're like... evil... or crazy.

00:32:47 ◼   ► Let's just say like the "I don't want the internet" was just one in a sequence of things that I was like

00:32:52 ◼   ► I really don't want to be drawing attention to myself, but literally everything I'm doing is drawing attention to myself.

00:32:57 ◼   ► Like I just want to move in nice and anonymously.

00:32:59 ◼   ► Day one the manager comes in at the end of the day to see how I'm doing and he takes one look at the place

00:33:06 ◼   ► and he goes

00:33:07 ◼   ► "What are you doing in here?" Like at this point

00:33:11 ◼   ► at this point

00:33:13 ◼   ► I like I had pulled up part of the false floor to get at some of the wiring because I wanted to hide the telephone wires

00:33:19 ◼   ► that were coming in. Like, I don't need to see these wires. Like, I just want to put

00:33:22 ◼   ► them back under the false floor. Like, I don't need these wires. It's just... it

00:33:27 ◼   ► wasn't... it was like, I just want to be anonymous. Please don't walk in here

00:33:32 ◼   ► right now. Like, just... I'm just gonna come in and I'm just gonna leave and I'm

00:33:36 ◼   ► gonna talk to nobody. Like, you never have to worry about me office people. Like, I'm

00:33:39 ◼   ► just here doing my own thing. Playing my thunder noises.

00:33:45 ◼   ► [wind howling]

00:33:54 ◼   ► [chime]

00:33:55 ◼   ► This episode of Cortex is also brought to you by Hover.

00:33:58 ◼   ► Quite simply, Hover is the best way to buy and manage domain names.

00:34:03 ◼   ► It's my place of choice and has been for years.

00:34:07 ◼   ► It's the first place I think of to go when I have an idea for a new project.

00:34:12 ◼   ► And in fact, just yesterday, I bought two new domain names with Hover for projects that I am thinking about under the hashtag #yearofless(me).

00:34:27 ◼   ► I might not do anything with them for a very long time. I might not do anything with them ever. I don't know. We'll have to see what ends up happening.

00:34:33 ◼   ► happening. But what I do know is that I came up with two great names that I

00:34:37 ◼   ► really wanted to grab. And so the first thing I did was I went to Hover, checked

00:34:43 ◼   ► that they were available. Indeed they were, which is always exciting, and I got

00:34:48 ◼   ► them immediately. And what I like with Hover is that when you want to grab that

00:34:52 ◼   ► domain name, you never know. There might be somebody else in the world at this

00:34:56 ◼   ► very moment also trying to get a domain name, but if they are using one of the

00:35:01 ◼   ► other registrars, it's going to take them a long time to do it. With Hover, you can

00:35:05 ◼   ► get that domain in seconds. It's just simple, it's clean, it's straightforward.

00:35:11 ◼   ► You know what you want with Hover. You want a domain name and they let you get

00:35:15 ◼   ► it. Easy peasy. While they have all of the domain names you would expect, they also

00:35:20 ◼   ► have just tons of the little ones and the funny ones like .coffee and .limos

00:35:26 ◼   ► and all the weird things that are there. The domains that I registered happen to be

00:35:29 ◼   ► one of the smaller domain names. So it was nice to be able to do that just through

00:35:33 ◼   ► Hover. They have Whois privacy for free so that you can keep your private

00:35:38 ◼   ► details private. There's a Hover valet service where if you're using an

00:35:42 ◼   ► inferior registrar you can get everything just moved over to Hover

00:35:46 ◼   ► automatically in a way that you just don't have to care about. Hover will take

00:35:50 ◼   ► care of it all for you. And they have a new feature called Hover Connect which

00:35:55 ◼   ► makes it easier than ever to get your domain name connected with a website.

00:35:59 ◼   ► So if you have bought a domain name and you want to connect it to some other service,

00:36:04 ◼   ► like you want to make your Tumblr blog use the domain name or whatever, you can just

00:36:09 ◼   ► have Hover use that automatically for you.

00:36:12 ◼   ► Have everything connected up behind the scenes.

00:36:14 ◼   ► It's great.

00:36:15 ◼   ► It's simple.

00:36:16 ◼   ► So right now, go to Hover.com and use the code "creativity" at checkout and you will

00:36:22 ◼   ► get 10% off your purchase at Hover and show your support for Cortex and all of Relay FM.

00:36:29 ◼   ► There's tons of stuff that Hover has. I only talked about a little bit of it, but they're

00:36:34 ◼   ► what I always use to register my domain names. So thanks to Hover for supporting the show.

00:36:39 ◼   ► I think it's probably the first time this has happened. In between our two episodes,

00:36:44 ◼   ► you released two YouTube videos.

00:36:46 ◼   ► Ah yeah, yeah, I did.

00:36:48 ◼   ► What happened to you? Amsterdam happened!

00:36:52 ◼   ► Yeah, partly. That's actually no joke.

00:36:56 ◼   ► I was able to move both videos forward quite a lot during that period of time.

00:37:01 ◼   ► And it just happened to work out that they were both finishing up around the same time.

00:37:06 ◼   ► And you know me, if I have something done, I just want to release it.

00:37:10 ◼   ► So they were finished a week apart, so I released them a week apart.

00:37:12 ◼   ► There was the video, the second part to the AmericaPox video.

00:37:17 ◼   ► Right.

00:37:18 ◼   ► Which I really liked that video.

00:37:20 ◼   ► I have to say I've seen that video now about four or five times for various reasons.

00:37:25 ◼   ► Oh excellent, let's get that view count up.

00:37:27 ◼   ► Yep.

00:37:28 ◼   ► I think that might be one of my favorite videos of yours.

00:37:31 ◼   ► It's interesting you say that because I'm not sure...

00:37:36 ◼   ► I think that the section which is the very end of that video, the zebra section, like

00:37:44 ◼   ► zebras versus horses, I think that might be the best thing I have written to date.

00:37:49 ◼   ► particular section. I'm not sure if this is like my favorite video that I've ever made. I wouldn't say that. I still think

00:37:55 ◼   ► Humans Need Not Apply is my favorite thing that I have done, but that little

00:37:59 ◼   ► section about like horse herds hierarchy and like all the zebra stuff, like I think that just came out amazingly and

00:38:05 ◼   ► without a doubt that was all done in Amsterdam.

00:38:09 ◼   ► Embarrassingly, my favorite line from the video, which nobody appreciated, but I just loved, was the line about "For zebras

00:38:17 ◼   ► There's no such thing as society when I came up with that in Amsterdam

00:38:21 ◼   ► I literally did like a little fist pump to myself in the hotel room. I was like, that's gold like I love this

00:38:28 ◼   ► That's amazing. Right? I was super excited about that. Like nobody commented on that line

00:38:35 ◼   ► Absolutely, nobody. No, cuz that wasn't the gold of the video man. The gold is top chicken

00:38:42 ◼   ► Everybody loved Top Chicken and nobody loved my "For Zebras There's No Such Thing as Society" line.

00:38:48 ◼   ► Like if you go back and you watch that video, you can hear me really sell

00:38:52 ◼   ► "There's No Such Thing as Society" in the reading. But it's like nobody cared.

00:38:56 ◼   ► This is where you just never know what people react to.

00:38:59 ◼   ► That delivery of Top Chicken though. That's what...

00:39:01 ◼   ► No, yeah, Top Chicken. And it zooms in on the gray phase?

00:39:04 ◼   ► Perfect. So that's why I think I like this video is there were lots of little flourishes

00:39:12 ◼   ► in the delivery and the animation

00:39:14 ◼   ► that I really enjoy and I spoke about these on this show before like the things that I really like like

00:39:20 ◼   ► the visual jokes that tie up with something that you're saying and there were a lot of those types of things in there like

00:39:26 ◼   ► The way that the llamas were jumping out of the pen and a lot of the stock footage that you used

00:39:31 ◼   ► Really tied up very nicely

00:39:34 ◼   ► I there were just lots and lots of little parts of that video that I really enjoyed and

00:39:39 ◼   ► the more I watched it because it's quite a complex one.

00:39:42 ◼   ► The more times I watched it, the more times I understood what was going on and also enjoyed a lot of the little details.

00:39:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I have to say that one I'm pretty pleased with. I probably haven't been as

00:39:54 ◼   ► pleased with the release since the Netherlands video I did, I mean many years ago now.

00:40:01 ◼   ► The Netherlands one was the first video I made where I felt like, oh, this was just smooth

00:40:06 ◼   ► sailing from start to finish like I had an idea and it came out pretty much exactly the way I wanted and and this one

00:40:12 ◼   ► it wasn't smooth like that, but it is

00:40:14 ◼   ► Most of the time when I'm releasing a video I feel like oh, thank God

00:40:19 ◼   ► Like this is over and it's done and I can just put it up online

00:40:22 ◼   ► And I will probably never watch it again because I kind of cringe about it

00:40:25 ◼   ► But this one is one of the ones was like oh no

00:40:28 ◼   ► This is this is great

00:40:29 ◼   ► Like I'm pretty happy with the way it came out like it worked out well in the end

00:40:32 ◼   ► And so it's up and I'm it's like it was much more of like a happy day of like oh well releases to the world

00:40:37 ◼   ► And then also people will stop yelling at me for the second part of the America pox video

00:40:41 ◼   ► Which I was getting a lot of on Twitter

00:40:42 ◼   ► I cannot believe that you got it out as quickly as you did you never know with me

00:40:46 ◼   ► You never know what's gonna have expecting at least two more videos before part two. I like to keep people guessing

00:40:52 ◼   ► Mm-hmm keep them on their toes and then you release the Star Trek transporter video

00:40:57 ◼   ► Yep, which I know is one you've been working on for a very long time. Yeah, really long time

00:41:03 ◼   ► That one's been in the been in the books

00:41:05 ◼   ► these two videos are actually quite similar to me in some ways because both of them are are

00:41:11 ◼   ► not so reliant on my

00:41:13 ◼   ► Drawing anything like the America pox part 2 is largely

00:41:17 ◼   ► stock footage and then the Star Trek video is

00:41:22 ◼   ► entirely the artwork of Knut, who I've worked with on several projects before, including the Lord of the Rings videos and

00:41:29 ◼   ► the single transferable vote video.

00:41:32 ◼   ► So both of these have a very, very

00:41:34 ◼   ► different style.

00:41:36 ◼   ► But I wanted to look today and think like, "Oh, when did I really get started on the Star Trek video?"

00:41:41 ◼   ► And I went back into the

00:41:43 ◼   ► Slack that I use for people that I work with, and I got the first concept drawings from Knut on

00:41:51 ◼   ► October 11th for the Star Trek video was the very first time I had approached him and I asked

00:41:59 ◼   ► I want to do something on Star Trek. Give me a couple of visual styles and he dropped something in the slack

00:42:05 ◼   ► I mean, what is that now like four months ago? That's a long time ago from from the current day

00:42:11 ◼   ► So these things are in progress for quite a while

00:42:14 ◼   ► So, I mean this answers one of the questions that I had which is would you consider doing more videos in this style?

00:42:21 ◼   ► Because this animation, oh my word, is so fantastic.

00:42:26 ◼   ► It's just superb.

00:42:28 ◼   ► Yeah, Knut does an amazing job, without a doubt.

00:42:31 ◼   ► I mean, that's why I like working with him.

00:42:33 ◼   ► His depiction of you, I love it.

00:42:38 ◼   ► You know, like just giving that character more life and making it more human.

00:42:48 ◼   ► It's not an easy task to take something that is a stick figure and then say, "How are we going to represent this in a more fully fleshed out way?"

00:42:56 ◼   ► While still keeping what is recognizable about it, but he totally succeeded.

00:43:01 ◼   ► Like even more so than that, taking something that is iconic in its own way.

00:43:05 ◼   ► To the people that are familiar with you and like your work,

00:43:10 ◼   ► the way that you portray your character in the video is a massive part of it.

00:43:16 ◼   ► And he really evolved that character

00:43:21 ◼   ► Just excellently, I think it's fantastic that like the life that he brought to it like one of my favorite parts is

00:43:30 ◼   ► When you're crying on the sofa

00:43:33 ◼   ► Like in the fetal position and it's like that is such a great depiction

00:43:38 ◼   ► Yeah, I just thought the whole thing was was fantastic that that right there is a great example of like, okay

00:43:45 ◼   ► So people want to know like, "Oh, why did you use this different artwork?

00:43:48 ◼   ► Like, why didn't you do it yourself in your own stick figures?" For both the Star Trek video and

00:43:52 ◼   ► for the domestication video, they had the same thing in common of

00:43:57 ◼   ► "Man, if I was going to sit down and actually try to draw out these videos in some way,

00:44:03 ◼   ► there are many parts where 1) I just simply wouldn't have the artistic ability to do so and 2)

00:44:11 ◼   ► where both of these things just require a level of detail that you could not do in stick figures, right?

00:44:18 ◼   ► It is just simply not possible. And this is the same reason why I went to

00:44:23 ◼   ► Canute to do the Lord of the Rings video because

00:44:26 ◼   ► when I was going through that one

00:44:28 ◼   ► I thought like, "Oh, let me do a video about Lord of the Rings and I want to talk about

00:44:32 ◼   ► Ents and elves and men and hobbits and all this stuff." And I realized really quickly like, "You know what?

00:44:36 ◼   ► You can't do this with stick figures man like it. Just there's not enough that looks

00:44:40 ◼   ► Visually different and so once again for the Star Trek one when I was thinking about

00:44:46 ◼   ► Doing this it was it was the same thing all over again of I was originally going to have much more of the crew and talk

00:44:53 ◼   ► About specific examples like that's how it began as like I can't draw stick figures that are obviously

00:44:59 ◼   ► The different captains like that's just not possible to do in my usual style

00:45:04 ◼   ► It's like I have to bring on someone to to do this

00:45:07 ◼   ► And so that's that's what some of the original concept artwork was was I had Knut giving me like various characters

00:45:12 ◼   ► Like how would they look what you know?

00:45:14 ◼   ► What are we gonna have this look like on screen because there's no way I can adequately with stick figures have two Rikers and

00:45:22 ◼   ► Just as the as the project went on

00:45:24 ◼   ► I eventually realized like oh I like this artwork so much that Knut and I came to an agreement where

00:45:31 ◼   ► He was going to just do all of it like like we're just gonna make this

00:45:35 ◼   ► 100%

00:45:37 ◼   ► Your artwork up on the screen and I think it came out really well

00:45:40 ◼   ► It did I loved it like the the actual topic. I'm not a Star Trek guy

00:45:46 ◼   ► But you know, I understand enough about I've seen the movies. Mm-hmm

00:45:51 ◼   ► But for me it wasn't really about the topic

00:45:55 ◼   ► It just all that's the design and just the way that everything looked it really really made it work

00:46:02 ◼   ► It really worked in a different way to how your videos normally do it was just very different very refreshing

00:46:09 ◼   ► I think and I really enjoyed it. I wish that they could be more like it, but I know how hard it is to do

00:46:15 ◼   ► you know, yeah, well, I mean this is

00:46:17 ◼   ► This is one of these things because when I eventually came to the conclusion of like oh I can have someone else

00:46:24 ◼   ► do all of the artwork instead of trying to think of mixing this with my regular style and his drawings and say like

00:46:30 ◼   ► Oh, let me just entirely

00:46:32 ◼   ► Have someone else do this. My initial thought was like, oh well, this is gonna be a huge time saver, isn't it?

00:46:38 ◼   ► But the answer was like no, it's not actually a huge time saver

00:46:41 ◼   ► There is the potential for it. And and the reason I think that is

00:46:46 ◼   ► Looking at mine in your working relationship

00:46:50 ◼   ► And how that's developed because we collaborate on this project and over time

00:46:56 ◼   ► We've learned

00:47:00 ◼   ► Each other's preferences in the way that things should be done

00:47:04 ◼   ► Like I think that if you were willing to put the time and effort into it

00:47:08 ◼   ► It could be possible that somebody could do the work for you

00:47:11 ◼   ► I especially if you know the thing that you're best at and the thing that takes you the longest is the writing

00:47:17 ◼   ► You know, then you could focus completely on that and have somebody else help you out with the artwork

00:47:22 ◼   ► So I was thinking about this and it's like okay the way that I was currently working

00:47:26 ◼   ► Was we were going back and forth about the art, you know, he was sending me stuff

00:47:31 ◼   ► almost all of which was like it's amazing do more or we like have a back and forth about how things should be represented and

00:47:37 ◼   ► and and the rest of this and

00:47:39 ◼   ► Ultimately in the end what I got from Knut was about a hundred

00:47:46 ◼   ► drawings, vector drawings for the various scenes.

00:47:53 ◼   ► But even then, the additional thing which takes up a huge amount of time is that he

00:47:59 ◼   ► is not the animator.

00:48:01 ◼   ► I am still the animator.

00:48:02 ◼   ► And so even though I have these drawings, because they're vectors, each drawing can

00:48:08 ◼   ► be broken down into the various elements.

00:48:11 ◼   ► And then I am animating the various elements.

00:48:14 ◼   ► So anytime something moves on the screen, anytime something fades in or fades out or has a wobbly effect or whatever,

00:48:20 ◼   ► like I am doing all of that.

00:48:22 ◼   ► And so what I have sent you, so that you can see and will be in the show notes for the listeners, is

00:48:27 ◼   ► what the video looks like on my end to animate when I'm working with it in Final Cut Pro. And so

00:48:35 ◼   ► while I start with a hundred drawings, in the end there are probably somewhere between

00:48:43 ◼   ► you know, maybe 200 to 400 animation elements of where I'm saying, "Okay, this transition happens now,

00:48:50 ◼   ► this special effect comes on screen, this image transitions into this other image, this guy moves from point X to point B,

00:48:57 ◼   ► here's a sound effect that is going to play underneath what's going on the screen."

00:49:02 ◼   ► So even though all of the artwork was done, I was shocked by how much

00:49:08 ◼   ► animation work there was still to do even after this point.

00:49:12 ◼   ► So if I was ever to try to completely outsource all of this,

00:49:18 ◼   ► it's like I would need an additional person to be the animation person.

00:49:23 ◼   ► Like it can't just be the artwork because

00:49:26 ◼   ► it's surprising. You think like, "Boy, a hundred images, it sounds like a lot."

00:49:31 ◼   ► But if you just have the images on the screen over the course of four minutes,

00:49:35 ◼   ► like it's not actually nearly enough action that's taking place.

00:49:39 ◼   ► Like you need to have more going on to keep it interesting

00:49:42 ◼   ► Hence all of all of the motion or all of the transitions or all of the effects a little later on in a moment

00:49:49 ◼   ► We're gonna be talking about creativity and focuses on Pixar, which is a movie studio and animation studio

00:49:55 ◼   ► It's like you would need to and it's not impossible to do this have like a mini version of that

00:50:02 ◼   ► Right, so like you would come up with the story

00:50:04 ◼   ► You would maybe do some storyboards and then have an animator have like an artist and an animator

00:50:11 ◼   ► Put them together for you

00:50:14 ◼   ► Yeah, well there is a world in which that could be the same person as well

00:50:18 ◼   ► Yeah, there is a world in which that could be the the same person. It's

00:50:21 ◼   ► The thing is always is difficult to find people talented in one area let alone two areas

00:50:27 ◼   ► Sure. So by trying to find someone who is an amazing illustrator and who also is great at

00:50:33 ◼   ► doing animation work in Final Cut Pro, like that's a whole different, that's a whole different thing.

00:50:38 ◼   ► Which is why I just said like I would say, oh, I'd be looking for someone who is good at animating,

00:50:43 ◼   ► which is a different skill. But yeah, of course, like I am never under the illusion that like I am

00:50:48 ◼   ► somehow like a magic person who is doing unreplicable work. Like, most of the people I know

00:50:56 ◼   ► are working with teams. Like, it's interesting and weird that like there are, I know, very few

00:51:03 ◼   ► YouTube people who don't have teams around them at this point. Like, I am one of the very few

00:51:09 ◼   ► people I know who is genuinely a one-person YouTube operation at this scale who doesn't

00:51:17 ◼   ► have employees, like permanent full-time employees. So it's an interesting position, but it's just,

00:51:24 ◼   ► as with many of these things, because I had never had this much artwork done before,

00:51:32 ◼   ► I had falsely assumed like, "Oh, this is gonna be super easy to put together!" And I was like, "No,

00:51:41 ◼   ► It is still not easy.

00:51:43 ◼   ► And so like if you wanted to ever outsource it, like

00:51:46 ◼   ► you need one more person to to help with this.

00:51:50 ◼   ► I would bet that it still took up less of your time in the aggregate.

00:51:56 ◼   ► But it maybe didn't feel that way.

00:51:59 ◼   ► The question is, did it take

00:52:01 ◼   ► less time than it takes me to animate an average video?

00:52:06 ◼   ► The answer to that is no.

00:52:10 ◼   ► Like, it took the same number of days plus the back and forth with Knut spread out over a couple of months.

00:52:17 ◼   ► Like, there's no way that it took me less time.

00:52:20 ◼   ► But the real question is, if I didn't have the artwork done, and I attempted to do this all on my own,

00:52:29 ◼   ► that would have taken me months and months of work.

00:52:32 ◼   ► So there is a way in which this saved me a huge amount of time.

00:52:36 ◼   ► in the same way that like getting all the stock video for the domestication video, like, if I tried to animate that,

00:52:42 ◼   ► that would have been months and months of work instead of

00:52:45 ◼   ► four days of animating. So like, there's a sense in which I saved a lot of time,

00:52:50 ◼   ► but not like actual number of hours out of my working schedule. Like it's a slightly different question.

00:52:57 ◼   ► You know, I love your work, but like, you couldn't have done this.

00:53:00 ◼   ► No, no, of course not. I have no skill whatsoever.

00:53:03 ◼   ► You couldn't even come close to it.

00:53:05 ◼   ► No.

00:53:06 ◼   ► You wouldn't be able to do it.

00:53:07 ◼   ► And I'm looking at it now, one week, 1.4 million views.

00:53:10 ◼   ► Yeah, it's pretty good.

00:53:11 ◼   ► Maybe it was worth it.

00:53:15 ◼   ► I think I have to have the right topic in mind for this kind of style.

00:53:22 ◼   ► I don't think that I could just generally say like, "Oh, I'm always going to do videos

00:53:28 ◼   ► with all of this artwork."

00:53:31 ◼   ► If I'm ever doing something that has anything to do with countries, I always want to use

00:53:35 ◼   ► the country girls that I have.

00:53:37 ◼   ► Like I just love the way that looks.

00:53:39 ◼   ► I think that's a real signature style at this point.

00:53:42 ◼   ► Like I'm always going to want to do anything that has to do with countries using those

00:53:46 ◼   ► particular stick figures.

00:53:48 ◼   ► But I can, but like you can see the commonality between the Star Trek video and the Lord of

00:53:53 ◼   ► the Rings video is both of them.

00:53:55 ◼   ► It's like there's more detail than can possibly be represented with stick figures.

00:54:01 ◼   ► So if I come to that situation again,

00:54:04 ◼   ► if there's a topic that I'm working on

00:54:05 ◼   ► where that feels like it's the case,

00:54:06 ◼   ► I will definitely, definitely think about doing it again.

00:54:09 ◼   ► - I hope so.

00:54:11 ◼   ► I miss, I haven't got a name for him,

00:54:13 ◼   ► but I'll miss that little CG be gray.

00:54:15 ◼   ► - Maybe he'll come back someday.

00:54:17 ◼   ► - I hope so.

00:54:18 ◼   ► I would like to also thank igloo

00:54:20 ◼   ► for helping support this week's episode,

00:54:22 ◼   ► igloo make the internet you'll actually like.

00:54:25 ◼   ► What does that mean?

00:54:26 ◼   ► Well, it means that you have the tools

00:54:28 ◼   ► to create an internet that looks and works

00:54:30 ◼   ► the way you want. It looks and works the way that you're used to with the way that you're

00:54:35 ◼   ► used to using the internet rather than looking at something which looks like it was built

00:54:39 ◼   ► in the 90s by somebody who obviously couldn't see into the future and had no idea how we'd

00:54:43 ◼   ► be using our computers. Like for example now we're able to do work wherever we want with

00:54:48 ◼   ► our phones and tablets and laptops. Igloo works on all of them. It has responsive design

00:54:54 ◼   ► so it's going to work everywhere and you can do everything. You can manage your task list

00:54:58 ◼   ► from your iPhone, you can manage your projects and speak to your colleagues from your Android

00:55:03 ◼   ► tablet, it doesn't matter what device you're using, if it can connect to the internet,

00:55:07 ◼   ► you can use igloo.

00:55:10 ◼   ► Talking about design, you're able to customise it, give it the look and theme and colours

00:55:14 ◼   ► of your company so it feels right at home in your organisation.

00:55:18 ◼   ► You're also able to turn on and off different pieces of functionality for different members

00:55:22 ◼   ► of your teams so you can give them just the tools that they need.

00:55:26 ◼   ► You can share files of your co-workers who you auto collaborate on.

00:55:30 ◼   ► You can track who has read documents with read receipts.

00:55:33 ◼   ► This is super useful for making sure that everybody has seen that important document

00:55:36 ◼   ► that must go around the company.

00:55:38 ◼   ► You can also integrate with services like Box, Google Drive and Dropbox so people have

00:55:42 ◼   ► access to all of their files wherever they need them wherever they are.

00:55:45 ◼   ► igloo is secured with 256 bit encryption, single sign on and has active directory integrations

00:55:50 ◼   ► as well so it's going to integrate perfectly into your organisation.

00:55:54 ◼   ► The best thing about igloo is that you can try it for free with any team of up to 10

00:55:59 ◼   ► people for as long as you want so you can make sure that it's right for your team and

00:56:03 ◼   ► your organisation.

00:56:04 ◼   ► It's time to break away from an internet you hate.

00:56:07 ◼   ► Sign up now at igloosoftware.com/cortex.

00:56:09 ◼   ► Thank you so much to igloo for their continued support of this show and all of relay FM.

00:56:17 ◼   ► Alright so the second Cortex Business Book Club is now in session.

00:56:23 ◼   ► It's time.

00:56:24 ◼   ► It's time. So we read Creativity Inc. Yes. You pick this book this time.

00:56:28 ◼   ► This is a book that I've wanted to read for some time, um,

00:56:32 ◼   ► but never gotten around to it.

00:56:33 ◼   ► But then when it came to be my turn to pick a book after the tragedy of,

00:56:38 ◼   ► uh, the e-myth revisited,

00:56:41 ◼   ► I decided to go for a book that I really enjoyed the thought of.

00:56:46 ◼   ► I'm a big Pixar fan, so I was very intrigued to read this.

00:56:51 ◼   ► So I did listen to the audiobook, the unabridged audiobook.

00:56:56 ◼   ► It was much longer then.

00:56:57 ◼   ► Like twice the size I think.

00:57:01 ◼   ► But I got through it all in like a week and a half.

00:57:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's like 12 hours in audiobook form.

00:57:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, something like that.

00:57:08 ◼   ► - Looking through my notes, I originally read this

00:57:12 ◼   ► back in November 2014, according to all of my

00:57:17 ◼   ► Kindle highlights, back when I was still reading books

00:57:20 ◼   ► on Kindles with their appalling typography. And so I hadn't read it since then and I also, I re-listened to

00:57:27 ◼   ► probably about 80% of the book

00:57:30 ◼   ► this week on audiobook, and then I sort of skimmed the last few chapters as well. So I re-read it

00:57:36 ◼   ► recently, although you may have some more detail towards the end than I do. And I also have all of my notes

00:57:43 ◼   ► from last time. It's a funny experience to reread a book like this because I'm listening to it in an audiobook and I think

00:57:49 ◼   ► I read it the first time, right, but I'm listening to it in audiobook now, and I'll hear the author say something

00:57:55 ◼   ► and I'll go like, "Oh, that's an excellent point."

00:57:56 ◼   ► And so I opened up my Kindle app to highlight that section and I was like, "All right, two years ago

00:58:00 ◼   ► me thought the same thing and highlighted exactly the passage I'm going to highlight."

00:58:05 ◼   ► It's a funny experience. Like, "Oh, look at me and past me agreeing on what is an interesting point."

00:58:10 ◼   ► "You're so clever, me. Yes, me." Yeah.

00:58:14 ◼   ► Don't we agree on the importance of this passage so smart? Yes, but so tell me Myke you as this this is your first

00:58:22 ◼   ► Experience with creativity Inc. What did you think of the book? It wasn't completely what I expected and and very different

00:58:30 ◼   ► To other books that I've read like this because it was a lot more biographical

00:58:36 ◼   ► Mm-hmm Ed Catmull tells his story and through telling his story

00:58:42 ◼   ► Hits upon some of the things that have been important in helping him build and manage and run Pixar and now Disney animation

00:58:50 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. So it was unexpected, but I think I enjoyed it more because of that

00:58:56 ◼   ► I like biographies of people that are interesting more people that I respect

00:59:00 ◼   ► And whilst I have only known a little bit about Ed Catmull from from other books mainly Apple books

00:59:06 ◼   ► Because there's obviously a big crossover, right? Right. I

00:59:11 ◼   ► respect the company so much that he was basically it was kind of like the biography of him and

00:59:17 ◼   ► Pixar together. Yeah without a doubt. Yeah, there's a ton of

00:59:21 ◼   ► early Pixar

00:59:24 ◼   ► Stuff in this and also like where where does Ed Catmull come from? How did he end up to be in this situation?

00:59:31 ◼   ► and also there's a lot of Steve Jobs related stuff in this especially the

00:59:36 ◼   ► afterward that whole section is basically Ed Catmull telling his

00:59:41 ◼   ► Story of Steve and why the stories that have been out and circulated aren't about aren't the full picture of the man

00:59:49 ◼   ► Mm-hmm a fascinating part. It's got nothing to do with the creativity part, which is why it lives right at the end

00:59:54 ◼   ► It was a good place to put it, but I could tell like from him

00:59:57 ◼   ► It was like I need to tell this story because I hate what everyone's saying. Yeah

01:00:01 ◼   ► Yeah, it was it was a total total non sequitur to the rest of the book

01:00:05 ◼   ► but I was like, this is the most logical place

01:00:07 ◼   ► to put this section about what is his impression

01:00:11 ◼   ► of Steve Jobs.

01:00:12 ◼   ► - So in a similar way to how we went through the last one,

01:00:16 ◼   ► I'll kind of go through my notes

01:00:17 ◼   ► so it kind of follows the book chronologically.

01:00:20 ◼   ► One of my favorite things,

01:00:22 ◼   ► and tying back into the biographical part,

01:00:24 ◼   ► is that this book is about a man who had a dream,

01:00:29 ◼   ► who achieved it, right?

01:00:32 ◼   ► The idea of wanting to make a computer animated movie when he started out, it was impossible.

01:00:38 ◼   ► You couldn't do it.

01:00:40 ◼   ► But he wanted to do it.

01:00:42 ◼   ► And then did it.

01:00:44 ◼   ► And I love those kind of stories because I think that there is something nice in knowing

01:00:49 ◼   ► that people achieve their dreams with the right amount of work and effort.

01:00:54 ◼   ► I think that that is a good story.

01:00:55 ◼   ► I think it's possible.

01:00:58 ◼   ► I think that me and you have both done that to certain degrees.

01:01:02 ◼   ► I expect quite a lot of people listening to the show have people that have creative work.

01:01:06 ◼   ► It usually tends to be part of a dream or a long-term goal.

01:01:10 ◼   ► And I also assume there are probably quite a lot of people listening to the show that

01:01:13 ◼   ► have one they're trying to achieve.

01:01:15 ◼   ► So I think it's always good to hear these stories of people that have something that

01:01:19 ◼   ► they want to do and then go out and do it.

01:01:23 ◼   ► So this is a good one for that as well as a lot of the lessons that Ed tries to teach.

01:01:29 ◼   ► Yeah, I agree with that and this is a time to just interject, you know, since a lot of people after our last Book Club episode wanted to know like why the hell I would read a book like that, like the E-Mythra we visited and why I would read these business books, even though people often hear that I don't have always great things to say about them.

01:01:51 ◼   ► But I think that this falls into the category of, like, when you are reading, you are shaping your own mind,

01:02:00 ◼   ► and you are shaping, like, the kind of person that you can possibly be.

01:02:05 ◼   ► And this falls into the category of, like, if you want to do something different,

01:02:10 ◼   ► it is useful to read about people who have done things differently.

01:02:15 ◼   ► What like whether or not the particulars of their situation exactly matters for your situation is not relevant

01:02:21 ◼   ► It's a it's a case of like showing your brain like oh, okay

01:02:25 ◼   ► Here's the story of this person and how he went to achieve an unusual thing and like here

01:02:32 ◼   ► Here is the way he did this and look brain like this is the thing to think about like I'm going to keep exposing you

01:02:39 ◼   ► to this idea

01:02:40 ◼   ► Over and over again like people can achieve things and they can they can reach their goals and like here's how

01:02:46 ◼   ► Here's how this person has done it. Here's how maybe that person has done it and you brain like pick from that what you think is

01:02:53 ◼   ► useful, but just be aware that like

01:02:56 ◼   ► It's almost like you want to create for your own single brain like a culture of success right like things things can happen

01:03:03 ◼   ► Well brain and just be aware of that and that's why I think these things are

01:03:07 ◼   ► Useful to read and why I've been reading them for you know many years at this stage

01:03:12 ◼   ► Camel himself is also pretty critical of business books, which I like and and multiple points in the the

01:03:19 ◼   ► the book talks about

01:03:22 ◼   ► Why a lot of these types of books are pointless, right?

01:03:26 ◼   ► Which I really like he just addresses it and he's like look a lot of these things don't really help people

01:03:33 ◼   ► they're full of empty lessons and like even at the end he kind of distills a lot of the things that he believes in into simple sentences

01:03:41 ◼   ► And he's like these aren't

01:03:43 ◼   ► Statements that are true. They are what I think of as talking points and places to go from

01:03:49 ◼   ► so like look at all of these lessons these takeaways as they would be called in other types of books as

01:03:55 ◼   ► Food for thought rather than just like lessons. I'm trying to teach you

01:04:02 ◼   ► And I quite like that approach.

01:04:04 ◼   ► I agree that perhaps one of the values of this is not so much him telling you here's the way to do it,

01:04:15 ◼   ► as opposed to him describing lots of the other people he works with and how they think about things.

01:04:22 ◼   ► And it's a bit of a, like, when you are reading it, he's just like throwing a whole bunch of stuff at your brain

01:04:28 ◼   ► and maybe some of it will stick and some of it won't.

01:04:30 ◼   ► it won't. But you know, he talks about like, "Oh, here's how Brad Bird thinks about making a movie."

01:04:35 ◼   ► Like, "This is not how I think about making a movie. I think Brad Bird is wrong, but he made The Incredibles."

01:04:41 ◼   ► Right? And so, like, you take from that what you want and then he goes through a bunch of the other directors and talks about

01:04:45 ◼   ► like, "Here's how this person thinks about it. Here's how that person thinks about it."

01:04:49 ◼   ► And you know, it's like some of them think about, like, they're on an archaeological expedition and they're uncovering things and others

01:04:56 ◼   ► Imagine it as though they are building a structure brick by brick and he's just he's just going through how other creative people

01:05:03 ◼   ► He works with think about their own work and like maybe some of that will resonate with you and maybe some of it won't

01:05:09 ◼   ► But the book is not super

01:05:12 ◼   ► prescriptive

01:05:14 ◼   ► It's he doesn't have like a one two three punch for here's here's exactly what you need to do

01:05:23 ◼   ► There

01:05:24 ◼   ► I've kind of

01:05:26 ◼   ► Recorded in that vein a few of the things that spoke to me of what he had instituted at Pixar

01:05:32 ◼   ► Mm-hmm, one of the clear themes that runs through this book is the idea of giving creative people autonomy to create

01:05:40 ◼   ► Mm-hmm, like provide them with the resources that they need don't try and box them in and let them see what they can do and

01:05:48 ◼   ► that's such an interesting thing to me a lot of what I'm going to be basing my thoughts on is the companies that I have worked

01:05:54 ◼   ► in and

01:05:55 ◼   ► How different they are to the way that cat mall describes how he builds his company?

01:06:01 ◼   ► And the idea of kind of like and there's a lot of this that could give people challenges see how they do with them

01:06:07 ◼   ► You know

01:06:08 ◼   ► It talks about hiring

01:06:10 ◼   ► Good teams and giving them good work and you will get great stuff rather than hiring like mediocre people

01:06:17 ◼   ► and giving them things to work on you like you're just not going to get the results out of them and there's just a lot of

01:06:22 ◼   ► Give people the autonomy that they need to allow their brains to work and come up with something interesting

01:06:29 ◼   ► So I guess this is right this is where I have to ask you as the company man of the podcast yeah this

01:06:37 ◼   ► Strikes you as different from the places that you're familiar with. Oh, yeah

01:06:43 ◼   ► Yeah, okay because like this is my rereading of the book

01:06:47 ◼   ► I was much less charitable toward it than the first time I read it. Okay, and this was one of the

01:06:51 ◼   ► the places where I kept thinking like

01:06:53 ◼   ► Yeah, duh, like right, but it's not like that

01:06:57 ◼   ► Yeah

01:06:57 ◼   ► Like it's hard to find creative people and when you find good creative people let them do what they want to do

01:07:04 ◼   ► It's it's like like there were plenty of times when working with canoe whereas like I don't have specific instructions for you

01:07:10 ◼   ► But like you just keep going like the whole reason I'm working with you is because you are talented like that's that's why we're here

01:07:15 ◼   ► Together right like I trust you to do stuff

01:07:18 ◼   ► So go like just just run with it man, and so yeah like when I was reading this

01:07:23 ◼   ► I was feeling a bit like yeah of course at Catmull like what else would it be?

01:07:28 ◼   ► But it sounds like you know what else it would be

01:07:30 ◼   ► so I was working in marketing right for the company that I worked for so I

01:07:35 ◼   ► Had a semi kind of creative role

01:07:39 ◼   ► that we would help come up with the marketing campaigns

01:07:42 ◼   ► along with external agencies that we hired.

01:07:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, that totally counts as creative though.

01:07:48 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Like in any role

01:07:49 ◼   ► in marketing counts as a creative field.

01:07:51 ◼   ► - Sure, but there are different ones

01:07:52 ◼   ► where we weren't coming up with the campaigns.

01:07:54 ◼   ► We weren't like an internal agency or anything like that.

01:07:57 ◼   ► We would have agencies that would help us.

01:07:59 ◼   ► So you would admit there's like two levels

01:08:01 ◼   ► of creativity here.

01:08:03 ◼   ► And there was a time where as I was leaving my company

01:08:08 ◼   ► that another team somewhere had decided the 15 images

01:08:13 ◼   ► that could be used in all marketing campaigns

01:08:15 ◼   ► for the next six months.

01:08:17 ◼   ► - Like 15 stock images?

01:08:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, and they said it may expand,

01:08:22 ◼   ► but this is like the set that you've got right now.

01:08:24 ◼   ► Now you are asking two levels of creative people

01:08:29 ◼   ► to work within this constraint.

01:08:31 ◼   ► - That sounds pretty terrible.

01:08:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I know people that work

01:08:33 ◼   ► in other advertising agencies,

01:08:35 ◼   ► and this is a relatively similar thing

01:08:37 ◼   ► that maybe like a, so it might be the me,

01:08:39 ◼   ► and I know that I did this to our agencies,

01:08:42 ◼   ► so I was like, I gave them very prescriptive guidelines

01:08:45 ◼   ► of what I was looking for with certain campaigns.

01:08:48 ◼   ► So even I would put a restriction on those creative people,

01:08:51 ◼   ► mainly because I was being restricted in some way.

01:08:54 ◼   ► - Right, right, it's restrictions all the way down.

01:08:57 ◼   ► - Exactly, and so this is what I'm,

01:09:00 ◼   ► there are places where this will not be the case,

01:09:02 ◼   ► but I know this is the case in a lot of areas.

01:09:04 ◼   ► It is for a big company, it is very rare for them to just do.

01:09:09 ◼   ► You see it when he goes to Disney later, right?

01:09:12 ◼   ► - Yeah. - And he talks about how

01:09:14 ◼   ► people that have never made movies

01:09:16 ◼   ► gave mandatory notes and changes to the movies

01:09:20 ◼   ► that they would see, the other executives.

01:09:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, that is true, that is true.

01:09:24 ◼   ► - So it's like that shocked them when they went in there,

01:09:27 ◼   ► and of course it did, because he thinks in a way

01:09:29 ◼   ► which is not normal.

01:09:30 ◼   ► There were many times in this book

01:09:32 ◼   ► where I had to check myself,

01:09:34 ◼   ► Because I'd hear Catmull say something, be like, "He's lying.

01:09:36 ◼   ► There's no way they do that."

01:09:38 ◼   ► - See, that's very interesting.

01:09:40 ◼   ► That's very interesting to hear you say that.

01:09:45 ◼   ► And I feel like I almost have to defer to your opinion here.

01:09:50 ◼   ► Like, I need your opinion to supplant mine on this one.

01:09:53 ◼   ► Because there were so many times where I was reading this

01:09:55 ◼   ► and I just, because of my experience in the last few years

01:09:59 ◼   ► and the people that I work with

01:10:01 ◼   ► and like how I know other people run their teams,

01:10:03 ◼   ► I feel like, isn't it obvious that if you have someone who's a creative person,

01:10:06 ◼   ► like you, you let them run with stuff. Like who doesn't do that?

01:10:10 ◼   ► Like what are you like, Oh wow Ed Catmull, like telling me the sky is blue. Uh,

01:10:14 ◼   ► but, but it's, yeah,

01:10:15 ◼   ► it seems like I am in the wrong here and that I have a perspective which is like

01:10:19 ◼   ► a tiny,

01:10:20 ◼   ► tiny minority of people working in creative fields out in the corporate world

01:10:25 ◼   ► that this, that you, you are coming from the side where you think this is so

01:10:30 ◼   ► unusual that you assume that the author must be lying because no one would run their business

01:10:35 ◼   ► that way. And I'm like, "Duh, man."

01:10:38 ◼   ► This is a view of mine, which is obviously not the same for everyone, but I just know

01:10:43 ◼   ► that I went through this and I know other people that did. Like, I worked with people

01:10:47 ◼   ► who'd worked for other companies and it was the same. And I think part of the problem

01:10:52 ◼   ► is there's always someone who thinks or does know better. That's part of the problem, right?

01:10:58 ◼   ► So it's like you're being told by someone,

01:11:00 ◼   ► this is how the campaign goes.

01:11:02 ◼   ► You know, it's like I would consider myself as a creative

01:11:05 ◼   ► and I would show the work to a product manager

01:11:09 ◼   ► and then they would try and make changes to it.

01:11:11 ◼   ► And I would have to say to them, no, this is not what you do.

01:11:14 ◼   ► I was very difficult to work with.

01:11:17 ◼   ► - But that's why you're here right now.

01:11:22 ◼   ► - My boss really liked it.

01:11:23 ◼   ► And it was always something that she brought up to me

01:11:26 ◼   ► to be like, you stand up for yourself

01:11:28 ◼   ► in a way that nobody else does.

01:11:30 ◼   ► Just because I'm very, I mean, you know what's nice,

01:11:32 ◼   ► I'm just very principled.

01:11:33 ◼   ► If I believe in something, it can be quite difficult

01:11:35 ◼   ► to change my mind on it.

01:11:37 ◼   ► My mind can be changed, but if I truly believe in something,

01:11:40 ◼   ► I will fight for it.

01:11:41 ◼   ► And not a lot of people that were in my scenario did that.

01:11:44 ◼   ► And it's because I believed that what I was doing

01:11:47 ◼   ► was creative work.

01:11:48 ◼   ► Like I believed that it shouldn't have

01:11:50 ◼   ► just been prescriptive.

01:11:52 ◼   ► One of the reasons I left when I did

01:11:53 ◼   ► was because of the constrictions that were being put

01:11:57 ◼   ► people, you know, like what I mentioned about like the very limited images that could be used, right?

01:12:02 ◼   ► It was like no, I can't I can't do this. This is really good.

01:12:04 ◼   ► But anyway, so like it's interesting to hear about the freedom that they have at Pixar

01:12:11 ◼   ► And it seems like even in the animation world that is not a given that you get that.

01:12:16 ◼   ► I was just looking through my notes

01:12:17 ◼   ► And I think there's a section I highlighted here, which I think summarizes a lot of his his points

01:12:23 ◼   ► but he's talking about like changes that he made within Pixar and

01:12:27 ◼   ► basically he says here

01:12:30 ◼   ► "Going forward the department's charter would be not to develop scripts

01:12:35 ◼   ► but to hire good people to figure out what they needed, assign them to projects, and make sure they functioned well together."

01:12:42 ◼   ► He says "We keep adjusting and fiddling with this model, but the underlying goal today remains the same.

01:12:49 ◼   ► find develop and support good people and they in turn will find develop and

01:12:55 ◼   ► own good ideas

01:12:57 ◼   ► This actually goes right back to what we were just talking about if you bringing in people like canoe

01:13:03 ◼   ► it's like he is talented and

01:13:06 ◼   ► Is good at what he does

01:13:08 ◼   ► So you find people like that and give them the work to do and see what they come up with

01:13:13 ◼   ► yeah, but it's also like like it's

01:13:16 ◼   ► Again, this to me is where I feel like my own opinion of the book is maybe not super relevant here

01:13:21 ◼   ► But in my own field it seems like because this highlighted section that I have here

01:13:26 ◼   ► comes after a long discussion about what matters like is it good people or is it good ideas and

01:13:31 ◼   ► He has a big description where he talks about like bringing this up in meetings and people are really split and that's the part where I

01:13:38 ◼   ► Felt like oh come on Ed Catmull like people can't really be split over that like it's obvious

01:13:43 ◼   ► that the people matter more than the ideas.

01:13:46 ◼   ► Like no, no one would disagree.

01:13:48 ◼   ► Yeah, but the thing is like,

01:13:50 ◼   ► I do recognize that I have some kind of bias on this,

01:13:55 ◼   ► and if I think about it, I realize like,

01:13:59 ◼   ► perhaps the kind of compliment that I like the most

01:14:02 ◼   ► on videos is when I see people leave comments

01:14:05 ◼   ► where they'll say something like,

01:14:07 ◼   ► I would have expected that this topic is really boring,

01:14:10 ◼   ► or I thought that this would be really uninteresting,

01:14:12 ◼   ► but I really like the video on this thing.

01:14:14 ◼   ► And I think maybe that's partly why I have this clear feeling

01:14:18 ◼   ► of like, it's not the topic that matters.

01:14:22 ◼   ► Like I know lots of people who make videos on topics

01:14:25 ◼   ► that you would think are boring,

01:14:28 ◼   ► but the way they make it is the thing

01:14:30 ◼   ► that makes it interesting.

01:14:32 ◼   ► So it seems really obvious to me,

01:14:33 ◼   ► like of course people matter.

01:14:34 ◼   ► But then again, if I think about it more,

01:14:36 ◼   ► I realize like all day long,

01:14:39 ◼   ► People want to pitch me on good ideas for videos to do.

01:14:44 ◼   ► And it feels like, oh no,

01:14:46 ◼   ► but it's not the idea that matters.

01:14:47 ◼   ► Like it's the execution that matters.

01:14:50 ◼   ► - I wonder if this book made a real big impact on you

01:14:54 ◼   ► the first time you read it.

01:14:55 ◼   ► Because you have basically said that to me at one point.

01:15:01 ◼   ► My kind of thinking about talented people

01:15:04 ◼   ► came from a conversation me and you had

01:15:06 ◼   ► maybe about six or so months ago.

01:15:09 ◼   ► We were talking about this, about the idea of finding talented people and how difficult that can be and how useful it is.

01:15:15 ◼   ► And you said like the book made a bigger impact on you the first time than it did this time.

01:15:20 ◼   ► I wonder if like part of this stuff has been embedded into you and now you think it's obvious because you already read it.

01:15:25 ◼   ► Well, I'll tell you I mean, here's the thing. Here's the thing for the listeners,

01:15:30 ◼   ► which is the short version of my thesis here that I have

01:15:33 ◼   ► Let's say I have discussed with many people in many different circumstances

01:15:38 ◼   ► is that I am always trying to beat the drum of

01:15:42 ◼   ► talent is rarer than people think it is and that I often

01:15:47 ◼   ► I often run up against people have some expectation that like there is talent just everywhere waiting to be found

01:15:55 ◼   ► And I don't I do not think that is the case, but that is a no small part

01:16:00 ◼   ► Like I am totally aware that that idea was first

01:16:03 ◼   ► dramatically and

01:16:06 ◼   ► unwelcomedly

01:16:07 ◼   ► introduced into my brain through my years of teaching.

01:16:10 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:16:11 ◼   ► - Ah.

01:16:11 ◼   ► - I'm like, oh.

01:16:13 ◼   ► - Oh.

01:16:13 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:16:15 ◼   ► - Like--

01:16:16 ◼   ► - Some kids.

01:16:16 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:16:17 ◼   ► - You know what?

01:16:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:16:19 ◼   ► Little Tommy's never going to be an astronaut.

01:16:22 ◼   ► - No, poor Tommy.

01:16:24 ◼   ► - This is a battle that originally came out

01:16:26 ◼   ► of my teaching days of much against my own beliefs

01:16:30 ◼   ► going into things.

01:16:31 ◼   ► Like I was forced to come to the conclusion

01:16:33 ◼   ► that like, you know, not everybody's a winner.

01:16:37 ◼   ► Like it's just that's just not the way things are going to work and that has been since extended into like the entertainment field as

01:16:43 ◼   ► we have discussed on previous podcasts is a bit of a weird special case and it's like even thinking like

01:16:51 ◼   ► Reading about the early Pixar stuff is very interesting

01:16:54 ◼   ► But I was also just so aware of like yeah

01:16:57 ◼   ► But you just totally lucked out with your first three directors like Pixar had great people

01:17:06 ◼   ► working on those first three movies and if they didn't have

01:17:09 ◼   ► unusually successful people working on those first few movies we wouldn't be talking about Pixar today.

01:17:16 ◼   ► Well, okay, so yeah they did but

01:17:19 ◼   ► these weren't traditional movie directors like they were

01:17:24 ◼   ► developed by Pixar, discovered by Pixar, given a chance by

01:17:29 ◼   ► So I think it's completely luck.

01:17:31 ◼   ► Well, it's interesting because there's one part in the book where Ed Catmull addresses this exact thing where their first three directors were not traditional

01:17:39 ◼   ► directors, they're people that that Ed was working with and

01:17:43 ◼   ► that when they started bringing on more directors, like he ran into this same thing of like, "Oh, I'm sure we can just like turn people

01:17:50 ◼   ► into directors." And there's a little part in the book where he's like, "Actually, you can't."

01:17:54 ◼   ► We tried it and it was when he talks about the whole part of like trying to set up a separate

01:17:59 ◼   ► Part of Pixar right that's working on what movie were they working on Toy Story 2?

01:18:04 ◼   ► I think it was I don't remember what it was

01:18:06 ◼   ► but but there's a few parts where and I'm just like you're trying to read between the lines a little bit because it's cuz Ed Catmull is

01:18:13 ◼   ► You know, he's he's very nice talking about everybody but you definitely get the feeling that like after their first three directors

01:18:19 ◼   ► They spent a little while like kind of floundering trying to bring the next people on

01:18:24 ◼   ► You notice the point where he doesn't name someone. When he doesn't give a name, he's about to slam them.

01:18:30 ◼   ► He doesn't slam them, but it's just like, how interesting you are, unmentioned brave director.

01:18:38 ◼   ► Like, it's, you know, just like, who are you? Who knows? There's a few points like that, and so

01:18:44 ◼   ► I guess what I'm just saying here is like, Pixar is also in an interesting situation where

01:18:50 ◼   ► by definition they had to be really lucky at the start.

01:18:53 ◼   ► And that is almost true of any entertainment venture.

01:18:58 ◼   ► Like you have to be lucky at the start.

01:19:01 ◼   ► And then I think the interesting fundamental question of Creativity Inc.,

01:19:05 ◼   ► almost like the thesis of the book,

01:19:09 ◼   ► is very clearly like, can Pixar

01:19:13 ◼   ► survive the replacement of its founding members?

01:19:17 ◼   ► Those original people who were on board, can they engineer a system that will outlast them?

01:19:25 ◼   ► I think that is the heart of the book.

01:19:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:19:28 ◼   ► And I think it's an open question about whether or not they have.

01:19:33 ◼   ► Like reading through it the second time, I felt very much almost like less convinced

01:19:40 ◼   ► that they have accomplished that than the first time reading through the book.

01:19:45 ◼   ► Like, I think they've given it the best of all possible shots, but they also still haven't

01:19:51 ◼   ► had a complete turnover of the original people working there.

01:19:55 ◼   ► And I was looking through some of their upcoming projects and it's like, "Oh, interesting.

01:19:59 ◼   ► You're bringing back Brad Bird to work on Incredibles 2 in the future."

01:20:04 ◼   ► And so I was like, "We won't know the answer to this question of 'Will Pixar outlast the

01:20:10 ◼   ► original team or will it, like Disney did, go through like a half century of wandering

01:20:17 ◼   ► in the wilderness after their initial founder was lost?

01:20:21 ◼   ► Well one of the funny things right now is that Disney is producing better movies than

01:20:28 ◼   ► Pixar in some places.

01:20:30 ◼   ► I think that is also the interesting context of reading this book two years later than

01:20:34 ◼   ► when I first read it.

01:20:36 ◼   ► Yeah, something that really annoys me in the book is they keep talking about failure, like

01:20:40 ◼   ► "We need to have a failure, we need to have a failure," but they don't address that.

01:20:44 ◼   ► Like, "Cars 2" was a failure, but he doesn't talk about it.

01:20:49 ◼   ► "Cars 2" is the huge elephant in the room of this book, right? There is...

01:20:55 ◼   ► 'Cause that movie was out and had flopped.

01:20:58 ◼   ► I did a search of the text of like, "Did he mention it anywhere?" and like, "Nope."

01:21:02 ◼   ► There is no reference to "Cars 2."

01:21:05 ◼   ► And it's really interesting to me because throughout the whole book they're talking about like,

01:21:09 ◼   ► We haven't had a failure.

01:21:11 ◼   ► What will happen when we have a failure?

01:21:13 ◼   ► Like people were scared because they don't want to be the one

01:21:16 ◼   ► that responsible for the first failure.

01:21:18 ◼   ► And I really wanted to hear the story of what happened after cars two.

01:21:22 ◼   ► But it just doesn't get addressed.

01:21:25 ◼   ► Yeah, I remember the first time I was reading the book, I thought like,

01:21:28 ◼   ► this has to come up and it doesn't. Mm hmm. And

01:21:32 ◼   ► that's that to me is like one of the one of the little pieces of like,

01:21:38 ◼   ► I feel like they're like you're you're you have this big section where you're talking about

01:21:43 ◼   ► candor and making sure everybody is really open about what happens and there's there's no shame

01:21:48 ◼   ► in anything and yes worrying about failures and it's like you've got to tie this together with

01:21:54 ◼   ► cars too like but he never does right it just never comes. I feel that is like the direct result

01:22:00 ◼   ► of Nice Guy Ed. Yeah. He doesn't want to throw the cars team under the bus in the book. Yeah and and

01:22:06 ◼   ► The other thing which is I think this is more subjective.

01:22:11 ◼   ► But okay, so here's the running list for the movies.

01:22:15 ◼   ► So because I made a note of it in the beginning.

01:22:17 ◼   ► So this book came out after Pixar had made 14 movies.

01:22:22 ◼   ► So here we go, right?

01:22:24 ◼   ► It's 1995 is where they start.

01:22:26 ◼   ► So it's Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc.,

01:22:30 ◼   ► Finding Nemo, The Incredibles.

01:22:32 ◼   ► Then you have Cars at number seven in 2006,

01:22:36 ◼   ► which is like maybe a little shaky, maybe not, I don't know.

01:22:39 ◼   ► Then you have Ratatouille, Wall-E,

01:22:42 ◼   ► then it's up in 2009, Toy Story 3,

01:22:46 ◼   ► Cars 2, two years before this book,

01:22:49 ◼   ► Brave, one year before this book,

01:22:52 ◼   ► and Monsters University is the last movie

01:22:55 ◼   ► that comes out before the book is published.

01:22:57 ◼   ► I gotta say, I think the second half of that list

01:23:00 ◼   ► is weaker than the first half of that list.

01:23:02 ◼   ► - Monsters University, I really like that one.

01:23:05 ◼   ► I have to say, I really like Monsters University precisely to--

01:23:09 ◼   ► Look at this, we're gonna tie it back before,

01:23:11 ◼   ► because the fundamental message of Monsters University is,

01:23:14 ◼   ► you can't always be what you want to be.

01:23:16 ◼   ► Like, sorry, Myke Wachowski, you were born not scary.

01:23:18 ◼   ► Like, you gotta figure something else out.

01:23:20 ◼   ► No amount of studying is gonna make you scary, Myke.

01:23:23 ◼   ► You know, it's like, the Dean is portrayed as the villain,

01:23:26 ◼   ► but she's not wrong, like, you're not scary.

01:23:30 ◼   ► And I have to say, like, I think that is quite a bold stance

01:23:33 ◼   ► for a movie to take as like the fundamental storyline of like, no,

01:23:36 ◼   ► you're not going to achieve your dream.

01:23:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:23:38 ◼   ► I think it's a good message because it's like, all right,

01:23:40 ◼   ► but there is something that you could be really good at.

01:23:43 ◼   ► You just need to find it.

01:23:44 ◼   ► Accept this and move on.

01:23:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:23:47 ◼   ► Like I went through my own version of this when I was younger,

01:23:49 ◼   ► where it's like for a long time, I wanted to be a fiction writer.

01:23:52 ◼   ► Like I wanted to write novels.

01:23:54 ◼   ► And I spent a lot of time trying to write novels.

01:23:57 ◼   ► And at one point I had to just grow up and be like, you know what, man?

01:24:02 ◼   ► you write some really shit fiction. Like you just have to understand this and move on.

01:24:07 ◼   ► I don't even want to know how many thousands of words like I attempted to put out but it's like but it's an important moment, right?

01:24:13 ◼   ► To recognize that like you're just you could spend from now until the end of your life trying to write a novel and you will never

01:24:20 ◼   ► succeed. So like

01:24:22 ◼   ► recognize it and move on. So I like that in Monsters University. I think it's a rare movie that kind of goes against

01:24:28 ◼   ► that goes against the grain, but it is

01:24:31 ◼   ► But so the question about like

01:24:33 ◼   ► Pixar as an entity that can survive in the indefinite future producing great movies now

01:24:40 ◼   ► The thing that we have to mention is even though I think the second half of that list is weaker than the first half of that

01:24:47 ◼   ► list

01:24:48 ◼   ► Nonetheless like the average

01:24:50 ◼   ► Batting for Pixar is great like like a mediocre Pixar movie is better than most movies that are made

01:24:57 ◼   ► Not even just animation, just flat out.

01:25:00 ◼   ► Yeah, just flat out movies.

01:25:02 ◼   ► But...

01:25:04 ◼   ► Yeah, it's just like I'm... I was really... I really felt a lot less

01:25:09 ◼   ► convinced by Ed Catmull's own

01:25:11 ◼   ► story about

01:25:14 ◼   ► Pixar

01:25:15 ◼   ► like two years on than I was the first time I read it. And partly that's because it's like, okay,

01:25:22 ◼   ► I haven't seen it yet, but they put out The Good Dinosaur, which didn't really get great reviews and then looking at their future movies

01:25:29 ◼   ► It's like okay for the next five movies you have planned

01:25:34 ◼   ► four of them are sequels.

01:25:37 ◼   ► I think part of this though is that there has been a problem with some of those sequels because like he talks about like

01:25:43 ◼   ► Three movies every two years one of them a sequel to new properties, right?

01:25:48 ◼   ► They haven't put out a sequel in a while, but they've had a bunch of new ones

01:25:52 ◼   ► So I feel like there's been some production bottlenecks with the sequels. Yeah, maybe because they had like what?

01:25:58 ◼   ► brave

01:26:00 ◼   ► Inside out the good dinosaur, right? So those are all those are all new. Yeah

01:26:05 ◼   ► And then it's going to be

01:26:07 ◼   ► Finding Dory is next cars

01:26:10 ◼   ► three

01:26:13 ◼   ► Coco which is their new one. Did you say Cars 3? Cars 3. They're making a Cars 3? Cars 3.

01:26:20 ◼   ► The thing is with Cars though, it is a monster merchandise seller.

01:26:25 ◼   ► Monster. Yeah I'm sure it is and that but that's also where you know it's the same thing with like

01:26:31 ◼   ► Monster's Inc. like I'm sure it's a that's a pretty good merchandise one as well and I just

01:26:37 ◼   ► think like when he's talking about oh we don't think about the merchandise it's like okay but

01:26:43 ◼   ► But like, here I am sitting here in 2016 and knowing that you're going to produce Cars 3.

01:26:51 ◼   ► And it's like, I mean, here's the thing, I want to make it really clear.

01:26:55 ◼   ► Like, there's nothing wrong with a movie studio making money off of merchandising.

01:26:59 ◼   ► I don't have a problem with that, but it's a different thing when I'm reading a book about how great Pixar is

01:27:07 ◼   ► and how Pixar is different and how I think quite rightly,

01:27:10 ◼   ► what one of the things that makes them different

01:27:12 ◼   ► is not putting an emphasis on this stuff,

01:27:15 ◼   ► but now knowing that it feels like we're in a place

01:27:18 ◼   ► with "Cars 3" and "Toy Story 4"

01:27:21 ◼   ► that the merchandising really does matter.

01:27:23 ◼   ► - I don't think "Toy Story" is a good example

01:27:25 ◼   ► 'cause there hasn't been a bad one

01:27:27 ◼   ► and I will take another one.

01:27:29 ◼   ► "Toy Story 3" is arguably the best "Toy Story" movie.

01:27:32 ◼   ► You know, like I get it with "Cars",

01:27:36 ◼   ► I just think the Toy Story one is just like everybody just wants more Toy Story.

01:27:40 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean, and now this is, this is of course always a problem with movies.

01:27:43 ◼   ► That you start getting into like the realm of the realm of subjectivity.

01:27:46 ◼   ► Yeah. Toy Story 25.

01:27:47 ◼   ► Right. Again, you know, we'll just, we'll, it'll be there eventually like Jaws.

01:27:51 ◼   ► But so I guess like just bringing, bringing it back,

01:27:56 ◼   ► I think the book is, is interesting. Um,

01:27:59 ◼   ► but

01:28:03 ◼   ► I'm not sold on the second reading that they have actually solved the problem that they have aimed to solve.

01:28:11 ◼   ► Yeah, one of the things that I struggle with in this book is the idea of candor.

01:28:16 ◼   ► So basically, we've mentioned it already, but if you haven't read the book,

01:28:21 ◼   ► one of the tenets that they believe in is people being honest to each other and being able to be honest about ramification.

01:28:29 ◼   ► This is in feedback, you know, and they enable that, like they continue to enable that, but

01:28:34 ◼   ► like anybody can talk to anyone, you don't have to go through chains of command.

01:28:38 ◼   ► And they call it candor because truth and honesty and they're two harsh words.

01:28:44 ◼   ► I just can't get on board with people being completely honest to each other in creative

01:28:50 ◼   ► work.

01:28:51 ◼   ► I just can't get on board with it.

01:28:53 ◼   ► I just can't imagine people being completely honest.

01:28:58 ◼   ► It just doesn't sit with me.

01:29:02 ◼   ► There might be an idea in Pixar

01:29:05 ◼   ► of people being more honest,

01:29:07 ◼   ► but I can't imagine someone saying to somebody

01:29:13 ◼   ► that they really don't like a piece of work

01:29:14 ◼   ► and the majority of people that work at Pixar

01:29:16 ◼   ► being able to accept that for what it is,

01:29:18 ◼   ► brush it off and move on.

01:29:19 ◼   ► It can't work everywhere.

01:29:21 ◼   ► It just can't because people are humans

01:29:23 ◼   ► and they have emotions and their emotions get hurt.

01:29:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, but see, that's where I think,

01:29:26 ◼   ► like that's some of the best stuff in the book,

01:29:29 ◼   ► is his harping repeatedly on the idea

01:29:34 ◼   ► that in creative work, you should not associate yourself

01:29:36 ◼   ► with the creative work, right?

01:29:38 ◼   ► - Maybe like if you live in Pixar, you can do this,

01:29:43 ◼   ► but I don't think that this is an easy thing to do,

01:29:47 ◼   ► to have people do it.

01:29:48 ◼   ► Maybe, you know, they talk about it

01:29:50 ◼   ► and work on it so much inside of Pixar that it works,

01:29:54 ◼   ► but I just struggle to see it like that.

01:29:57 ◼   ► - This is where I think he is trying to convince the reader

01:30:02 ◼   ► of an idea that is not the normal idea.

01:30:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, oh, definitely.

01:30:05 ◼   ► - And so, yeah, in my experience,

01:30:07 ◼   ► in all of my working experience with other people,

01:30:10 ◼   ► people are impossible to separate from their ideas.

01:30:14 ◼   ► Like someone comes up with a dumb idea

01:30:16 ◼   ► for how they wanna change the curriculum next quarter,

01:30:19 ◼   ► and if you attack that idea, they take it as an attack on them and it's like, "Oh,

01:30:24 ◼   ► Christ! Can we talk about the thing? We're not talking about you." That is a far too prevalent

01:30:34 ◼   ► natural human reaction. But I think that's what I really like in this book is him just repeatedly

01:30:40 ◼   ► hammering on this. Yeah, this might be my bias of just believing it can't be true.

01:30:47 ◼   ► you know like because it does it really i think anybody that works with creative people can see how

01:30:53 ◼   ► far-fetched or difficult an idea this seems to be because people do get upset yeah but you can't

01:31:02 ◼   ► produce really good stuff if you are associating yourself with the idea and you know again with

01:31:10 ◼   ► with people i know like everybody is kind of in agreement that um you know like the negative

01:31:14 ◼   ► Negative feedback is the feedback that is valuable.

01:31:17 ◼   ► Like if you are making stuff for the internet and you're making stuff for people to enjoy,

01:31:23 ◼   ► you have to pay attention to negative feedback in the production process.

01:31:27 ◼   ► It's super, super valuable.

01:31:30 ◼   ► No matter how much it hurts.

01:31:31 ◼   ► Yeah, no matter how much it hurts, because it's going to hurt more when everybody laughs

01:31:35 ◼   ► at you.

01:31:36 ◼   ► Like, "Oh, this thing is terrible."

01:31:37 ◼   ► Like it's just that is just the way that it has to work.

01:31:44 ◼   ► I just think as my friend Derek has said like the value of positive feedback trends towards zero.

01:31:51 ◼   ► And so when you know when you're talking about someone's work it's like okay you open with like oh yeah I like this I like this.

01:31:56 ◼   ► Right but very quickly you get three positive comments in and it's like okay but now these positive comments are worthless and like let's get down to brass tacks and tell me what's terrible.

01:32:03 ◼   ► Yeah, because like that's that's what I really want to know like we had a nice little polite opening

01:32:08 ◼   ► But now let's like let's really get to business

01:32:10 ◼   ► and so I think a lot of the stuff that he talks about in Pixar with this idea of trying to

01:32:16 ◼   ► Set up what he calls this brain trust where people are

01:32:20 ◼   ► Reviewing the movie and trying to evaluate it as a thing

01:32:25 ◼   ► Separate from the person who has created it and talk about what is the problems with?

01:32:31 ◼   ► this movie and not like what is the problem with your movie. I think that is

01:32:37 ◼   ► valuable valuable stuff for anybody who works on a team in creative work.

01:32:44 ◼   ► I have definitely recommended creativity Inc. to a lot of people and

01:32:49 ◼   ► seems to get interesting feedback from people saying like oh yes, this is quite valuable to think about.

01:32:54 ◼   ► Really try hard to make it explicit in feedback sessions that we are discussing the thing

01:33:00 ◼   ► We're not discussing the people and like that is the most important thing that you can do.

01:33:06 ◼   ► But I still just like, my little asterisk in my brain about this is it still just falls back about like

01:33:12 ◼   ► the most important thing though is that you have good people on that brain trust. Like there's no

01:33:18 ◼   ► He talks about systems and all the rest of it. It's like yes, that's useful

01:33:22 ◼   ► but like ultimately you need some really good people on that brain trust. Like that is the thing

01:33:28 ◼   ► That makes it work. And that's that's what I wonder about like Pixar trying to put in systems for the future is like, okay. Yes

01:33:36 ◼   ► But what happens when those original teams are no longer there like your brains about the growth of the brain trust though

01:33:43 ◼   ► so the brain trust is a group inside of Pixar of

01:33:45 ◼   ► That it ranges across the company of people that seem to have a real good grasp on developing stories

01:33:53 ◼   ► And these people get together and they review the work that's being produced and help

01:33:59 ◼   ► unstick a movie

01:34:02 ◼   ► Or they maybe help develop a story that isn't working or can those you know that really aren't working

01:34:08 ◼   ► they offer

01:34:10 ◼   ► Candid feedback to each other and as he says sometimes the brain trust doesn't necessarily fix a problem

01:34:16 ◼   ► But it might highlight something that isn't working. Mm-hmm. This is the best thing

01:34:23 ◼   ► for me to take away from the book and I can't remember where I first heard this

01:34:28 ◼   ► but in the internet circles that I have run in in the past there has always been

01:34:34 ◼   ► a phrase of your board of directors which I've always really latched on to

01:34:38 ◼   ► is like a group of people that you think are important to you and that you value

01:34:43 ◼   ► their opinions that you trust and get feedback from and use to help further

01:34:51 ◼   ► your work. So I've always had a thought in my mind of the people who I will send work

01:34:56 ◼   ► to to get feedback. But what I've been thinking about is how could Relay FM be more like Pixar?

01:35:04 ◼   ► Aiming high, Myke.

01:35:06 ◼   ► No, but like from a structure perspective. So I've been trying to like distill what they

01:35:11 ◼   ► are and distill what we are and seeing how there are similarities in that it's like a

01:35:19 ◼   ► production company that helps produce and grow different properties.

01:35:26 ◼   ► That's why I've tried to take it right down to the very basics and then

01:35:29 ◼   ► try and think about it from there. So I'm thinking if we... because we don't

01:35:33 ◼   ► really do this so much. Let's say we wanted to create a new show. We don't

01:35:38 ◼   ► really go very deep into like somebody has an idea and then we like really

01:35:43 ◼   ► develop it. There is an element of it but I mean like months of work and

01:35:47 ◼   ► and pilots and then we scrap the idea and we start over.

01:35:52 ◼   ► That real intense work doesn't really happen.

01:35:57 ◼   ► I don't know anybody that does what I do

01:36:01 ◼   ► that really looks at it in that way.

01:36:03 ◼   ► So I wonder what the value of something like that would be

01:36:07 ◼   ► in having a group of people that would work

01:36:09 ◼   ► on a new project together like that.

01:36:11 ◼   ► And not even that they're necessarily involved

01:36:13 ◼   ► in the production, but involved in the judging

01:36:16 ◼   ► and development of it.

01:36:17 ◼   ► I just think how interesting that could be.

01:36:21 ◼   ► That's one of the things that's now rattling around

01:36:23 ◼   ► in my brain a lot is this brain trust idea

01:36:27 ◼   ► helping develop and produce a show

01:36:29 ◼   ► and what that could look like.

01:36:31 ◼   ► And I think it could be quite an ambitious project

01:36:34 ◼   ► to work on.

01:36:35 ◼   ► - Like a brain trust for podcasts is what you're thinking.

01:36:39 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:36:40 ◼   ► - It's an interesting idea.

01:36:41 ◼   ► - So I don't know.

01:36:43 ◼   ► It's just something that's been rattling around

01:36:45 ◼   ► my brain as like hey how could we try and think more like that because you know it's

01:36:52 ◼   ► very different but when really kind of just stripped back to its essentials not crazily

01:36:59 ◼   ► different in what the businesses do.

01:37:04 ◼   ► Pixar works very differently to my old company. The idea of honesty, trust, people making

01:37:10 ◼   ► themselves accountable, being respectful of time, not living in fear and an actual desire

01:37:15 ◼   ► to teach people, not just to tick boxes, those things are all the complete opposite of the

01:37:22 ◼   ► environment that I have worked in and environments that I know other people have worked in.

01:37:28 ◼   ► And I'm sure that Pixar isn't perfect, but it really feels like they try their best to

01:37:35 ◼   ► create a company that tries to do its best for people.

01:37:39 ◼   ► I've really felt that.

01:37:41 ◼   ► Yeah, it is definitely

01:37:45 ◼   ► It definitely comes through that that is that is the case in the book that like they want to

01:37:52 ◼   ► Create an environment where people can try to achieve their best

01:37:58 ◼   ► Like I think that I think that is that is pretty obvious from the way the book is written

01:38:02 ◼   ► But that that is that is what their their goal is. You know, like like I I like the part where they talk about

01:38:08 ◼   ► about the Pixar shorts that they put together as an example of like somebody has an idea

01:38:17 ◼   ► like let's just let just let them go with it like some just go ahead and produce a short

01:38:21 ◼   ► and how they very consciously don't think of those shorts as commercial endeavors.

01:38:26 ◼   ► They tried to didn't they like they tried to think oh this could be a way to help develop

01:38:30 ◼   ► our technology and then realize very quickly that they don't do that they don't help at

01:38:35 ◼   ► all they just cost money and don't do anything.

01:38:38 ◼   ► They just they just cost money and time and people and yeah, it's like there's there's no line on a spreadsheet which

01:38:45 ◼   ► Justifies those shorts, but that they have some some ambiguous difficult to pin down feeling

01:38:51 ◼   ► That allowing people to work on those short creative projects is worthwhile

01:38:56 ◼   ► And so they do it even though there is no business justification for it whatsoever

01:39:00 ◼   ► I think like like that is a that is precisely the kind of thing that I think is a great sign from a company and

01:39:08 ◼   ► And would for me be in the future like a huge red flag if Pixar ever stopped doing shorts.

01:39:14 ◼   ► Be like hmm, okay.

01:39:17 ◼   ► Yeah that's a big fat slow fish in a barrel to shoot if you are a beam counter.

01:39:23 ◼   ► Like that's the obvious thing to shoot and so like its absence would be quite notable

01:39:28 ◼   ► if they ever stopped doing that.

01:39:29 ◼   ► It's like he says at one point kind of the idea of like you can measure things but be

01:39:35 ◼   ► okay with the fact that you can't completely measure everything.

01:39:39 ◼   ► And this is one of those things.

01:39:40 ◼   ► Yes, without a doubt.

01:39:41 ◼   ► That is definitely the case.

01:39:45 ◼   ► My favorite part of the book is the part, I think it's like part four, which is the

01:39:51 ◼   ► Disney Pixar merger.

01:39:54 ◼   ► Because what it does is throughout the whole book, they're talking about the things that

01:39:58 ◼   ► they do and the things that they believe in and how they think that the things that they

01:40:01 ◼   ► do can help build a great company.

01:40:04 ◼   ► And then this was the case study.

01:40:05 ◼   ► Catmull and Lasseter had to go into Disney and make Disney work more like Pixar and see

01:40:12 ◼   ► if it helped.

01:40:14 ◼   ► And it did.

01:40:15 ◼   ► Mm.

01:40:16 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:40:17 ◼   ► I think it's pretty easy to say that the...

01:40:22 ◼   ► It's the flat-out proof for his thesis, right?

01:40:25 ◼   ► And it also has the interesting mirror of almost like a reverse merger in the same way

01:40:29 ◼   ► that Apple bought Next.

01:40:31 ◼   ► And it's like, yeah, but did you like, maybe next took over Apple?

01:40:34 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:40:35 ◼   ► I mean, and who was responsible for those?

01:40:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:40:38 ◼   ► It's like Steve jobs.

01:40:39 ◼   ► Like, Oh, hi, Steve jobs showing up again, like this exact same maneuver.

01:40:43 ◼   ► And there is definitely a feeling of like, did Disney buy Pixar?

01:40:50 ◼   ► Like legally?

01:40:51 ◼   ► Yes.

01:40:51 ◼   ► But it certainly feels like Disney has been very Pixar-ified.

01:40:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:40:58 ◼   ► It's why it's a merger and not an acquisition.

01:41:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:41:00 ◼   ► you know, the smaller companies' leaders came in and run the new team.

01:41:06 ◼   ► Right, yeah. It's interesting to see.

01:41:10 ◼   ► It's interesting to see. But it also does give this funny feeling of like,

01:41:15 ◼   ► "Is Pixar as ahead as they used to be?" Like, "Oh, maybe not."

01:41:19 ◼   ► But it's also entirely their fault in some ways with Disney.

01:41:22 ◼   ► Like, "Oh, Disney seems to be making much better stuff than they used to."

01:41:27 ◼   ► You know getting out of the wilderness finally with their ownership of Pixar. So I gotta say

01:41:32 ◼   ► Like I've really enjoyed this book. I enjoyed it from an entertainment perspective

01:41:36 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. I found it very very interesting just to hear the story

01:41:40 ◼   ► but there were things in it that really I have pulled out like the idea of

01:41:44 ◼   ► The brain trust and thinking about what that looks like for me and the idea of thinking about people with talent

01:41:51 ◼   ► Thinking about giving people the ability to do work. Like there are a lot of things in this book

01:41:56 ◼   ► book that really I think I'm going to put a lot more thought into.

01:42:02 ◼   ► And there are still things from E-Myth that I think about though, genuinely, and there

01:42:06 ◼   ► are still things that we need to do and want to do for our business that we've spoken

01:42:10 ◼   ► about in that book.

01:42:11 ◼   ► There is benefit in these books and I hope that we're able to distill these down for

01:42:16 ◼   ► people if they don't want to take the time to listen to these 12 hour books.

01:42:20 ◼   ► I have to say one of the biggest things for me though from this is Pixar has now joined

01:42:24 ◼   ► the very small group of companies that I would take a job at.

01:42:28 ◼   ► I don't think I would, there's a job for me at Pixar,

01:42:31 ◼   ► but listening to their culture and the way that they work, like I could,

01:42:36 ◼   ► I could work in that. I could work in that culture.

01:42:38 ◼   ► That's high praise indeed. What are the other companies on that list?

01:42:41 ◼   ► Cards Against Humanity.

01:42:43 ◼   ► Okay.

01:42:44 ◼   ► And Field Notes.

01:42:45 ◼   ► And Field Notes. Okay. All right. That seems,

01:42:49 ◼   ► that seems a very Myke list of places that, uh, places that he would,

01:42:53 ◼   ► He would work?

01:42:54 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:42:55 ◼   ► Like, I think people would say, like, "Apple, I don't know if I could do it."

01:42:59 ◼   ► No!

01:43:00 ◼   ► God, who would want to work at Apple?

01:43:01 ◼   ► I don't know if I could do it.

01:43:03 ◼   ► I don't know if I would want to be as quiet as they would want me to be.

01:43:07 ◼   ► Too much pressure, major secrecy.

01:43:08 ◼   ► Like, I'm very grateful for all the people who do work at Apple, but man, I think, like,

01:43:14 ◼   ► that's a tough path, perhaps, in life.

01:43:21 ◼   ► I would not take a job at Pixar.

01:43:23 ◼   ► I would do voice work for Pixar, but I would never take a job at Pixar.

01:43:29 ◼   ► I don't think that would be what I would do. Like I'm pretty happy with my one man totally unscalable,

01:43:36 ◼   ► frustrating in some ways, but

01:43:39 ◼   ► incredibly liberating in other ways business.

01:43:42 ◼   ► There's just a couple of

01:43:44 ◼   ► final points just looking through my notes,

01:43:47 ◼   ► some of which were double highlighted from me from two years ago and me from now. One of the things which is a

01:43:52 ◼   ► a point often reiterated in creative work, but I think is always always useful to emphasize is

01:43:58 ◼   ► Ed Catmull talks about the baby, like the ugly baby, and how the early drafts of all creative work are

01:44:06 ◼   ► horrifying. Like they're not good to look at.

01:44:10 ◼   ► That they take a lot of work to go through.

01:44:14 ◼   ► And perhaps one of the things that I liked the best in the book was him going through

01:44:20 ◼   ► What some of the movies look like before they became the movie so valuable

01:44:25 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think up was a great example of that where he goes through

01:44:29 ◼   ► The you know, it's like that the first the first version was all about like a magical ostrich and it's like what like, okay

01:44:38 ◼   ► But but they go through like here were the three or four

01:44:42 ◼   ► iterations of up before we settled on on what the eventual story would be and monsters Inc as well was really

01:44:50 ◼   ► Yeah, Monsters Inc was essentially like the delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic.

01:44:55 ◼   ► That was draft one of Monsters Inc.

01:44:59 ◼   ► I feel like the idea for Inside Out came from that original draft of Monsters Inc.

01:45:04 ◼   ► Yeah, you could maybe see a lineage between those two.

01:45:08 ◼   ► It's like, "Can the monsters die?" It's like, how...

01:45:11 ◼   ► So this guy can see monsters and they are his feelings and his emotions

01:45:17 ◼   ► and his problems, following him around as monsters.

01:45:20 ◼   ► And then the idea at the end of the movie is,

01:45:22 ◼   ► he feels better, his life gets better,

01:45:24 ◼   ► and the monsters go away.

01:45:26 ◼   ► And it's like, I can't, so they're killing the monsters.

01:45:29 ◼   ► Which is what the kids would relate to,

01:45:30 ◼   ► 'cause I'm sure they'd be fun looking monsters.

01:45:32 ◼   ► - Right, yeah, it's like, I don't understand

01:45:34 ◼   ► how you could ever think that this was going to work.

01:45:37 ◼   ► But like, that is the whole point of it,

01:45:39 ◼   ► is that when you go through the first drafts,

01:45:42 ◼   ► when you are creating something,

01:45:44 ◼   ► it's not always obvious that a thing is terrible,

01:45:46 ◼   ► terrible like but it doesn't matter like just get the idea out and then we'll just we'll just work on this and and so you know

01:45:52 ◼   ► They talk about how it's like we like the monsters

01:45:54 ◼   ► We don't really like the main character

01:45:56 ◼   ► Like what can we do with the monsters and and they go through all these different variations of like

01:45:59 ◼   ► Oh, maybe we can have this character called boo and she's like she's like an angry teenager

01:46:05 ◼   ► I was like, oh no, it's better if she's a toddler like I think it's just useful to see some examples of how things

01:46:10 ◼   ► Change like how they go from being awful to how they go to being better

01:46:15 ◼   ► Like if you do any kind of creative work, it's always useful to hear that kind of stuff to be like, "Wow!

01:46:20 ◼   ► It was terrible in the beginning!

01:46:21 ◼   ► This makes me feel better about my terrible first version of whatever it is that I'm working on."

01:46:27 ◼   ► So, you know, his version of this is called, you know,

01:46:31 ◼   ► "The Ugly Baby," that this is the idea that like they're all ugly in the beginning,

01:46:35 ◼   ► some of them will grow up to be great, but not all of them.

01:46:38 ◼   ► The other thing which really

01:46:42 ◼   ► Struck out to me in this reading of it, which didn't strike me so much the first time

01:46:47 ◼   ► was his flip side of the ugly baby is what he calls the beast and

01:46:52 ◼   ► He talks about feeding the beast where like you as a company end up

01:47:01 ◼   ► creating this pressure for you to keep producing stuff and

01:47:06 ◼   ► He talks about how like you start having all of these fixed costs like you have

01:47:12 ◼   ► employees and you have buildings and you have electrical bills and all of this is the

01:47:17 ◼   ► beasts that will just eat you alive unless you keep producing stuff and

01:47:22 ◼   ► I think there's a very interesting section where he talks about from his perspective. It was partly like the beast that

01:47:28 ◼   ► ate up Disney that they became very concerned about like we have to just constantly keep pushing movies out and

01:47:37 ◼   ► that like the the the beast is this thing which if you will let it

01:47:42 ◼   ► will try to like chain you to an assembly line schedule of like we've got to have a movie out every six months like go go

01:47:49 ◼   ► Go because we have all these animators and we have to pay them and I feel like it's it's a really interesting

01:47:54 ◼   ► thing to keep in mind and

01:47:57 ◼   ► obviously as a person who's not super fan of schedules like I I

01:48:04 ◼   ► align with that idea very much. But it particularly caught me this time because at least in my own personal

01:48:10 ◼   ► experiences, like I am aware that

01:48:13 ◼   ► you know, having been self-employed for four years now that I have

01:48:17 ◼   ► slowly but surely built up more of my own beast than I had even the first time

01:48:24 ◼   ► I read this book where I was like, "Oh, yeah, the beast. Okay, whatever. This is like an interesting idea."

01:48:28 ◼   ► But now I really feel this idea of like, "Oh god, I do have

01:48:33 ◼   ► fixed costs like and I do have people that I work with who I pay and like I have

01:48:37 ◼   ► these expenses with like an assistant and with lawyers and with stock footage and like this office that I'm renting and like all of this

01:48:45 ◼   ► kind of stuff and that was just it was useful to read that and just keep in mind like

01:48:49 ◼   ► With many of these books the utility is putting a word to a thing

01:48:54 ◼   ► It's useful to have this idea of like the beast and you have to keep the beast at bay like it's it's

01:49:00 ◼   ► provide some motivation, but you can't let it become the controlling factor, and you can't let it like

01:49:06 ◼   ► chain you into, like, tricking you into just producing stuff just to get something out the door

01:49:12 ◼   ► so that you have money coming in to pay your fixed costs, because as he points out, like, if you get into that cycle,

01:49:19 ◼   ► the more successful you are, like, the bigger the beast will get, like, the more expenses you'll start incurring, which then just

01:49:26 ◼   ► pushes you to produce even more low quality stuff just to get things out the door. So

01:49:31 ◼   ► yeah, it's uh

01:49:33 ◼   ► especially in the last couple months which have been unusually expensive for me like that really that really struck home in the in the

01:49:39 ◼   ► second reading of the book. So last time we told you not to read "Ema Revisited"

01:49:45 ◼   ► and I maintained begging you not to

01:49:48 ◼   ► But I would recommend people read this book. I think it's very interesting

01:49:55 ◼   ► I think there's stuff that you should listen to we didn't I don't even think we covered every all of the lessons

01:50:00 ◼   ► We definitely didn't cover all of the lessons that are in this book

01:50:03 ◼   ► There might be things that resonate with you more than they did with me and gray. I

01:50:07 ◼   ► Recommend reading creativity ink. Yeah, I'm going to definitely

01:50:12 ◼   ► Second recommend the book as I mentioned like there were things I didn't like as much the second time around

01:50:18 ◼   ► Small small nitpick. I really don't like the the narrator for the audiobook. I hate an area

01:50:24 ◼   ► Oh man, okay. Can we talk about that for just a split second?

01:50:27 ◼   ► He's not as bad as our previous narrator, but I just I don't like I don't like his voice

01:50:33 ◼   ► I don't like the way it sounds. I don't know what Ed Catmull sounds like I have no idea but the narrator is like

01:50:38 ◼   ► Okay, so I kept having this feeling that the narrator is basically like an

01:50:43 ◼   ► over-enthusiastic grandpa who's telling you stories that should be interesting but it's his very

01:50:51 ◼   ► enthusiasm and the way he is emphasizing stuff that makes it uninteresting.

01:50:55 ◼   ► So it's like, "Oh, you're telling me stories from about when you used to work with Walt Disney in the 1920s, Grandpa,

01:51:00 ◼   ► but like your over,

01:51:02 ◼   ► I don't know, over friendly way is just like killing any interest in this story."

01:51:07 ◼   ► Like there's one point where like the author is reading about like a car crash that Ed Catmull was in,

01:51:11 ◼   ► it's like, "You can't use the same voice, the same like super over friendly old man voice to do this part of the story."

01:51:19 ◼   ► It's just like,

01:51:20 ◼   ► Not a fan of the narrator for the audiobook. So maybe I would read this

01:51:25 ◼   ► I know you don't read books Myke, but I read it the first time didn't like the narrator for the audiobook

01:51:31 ◼   ► um, I

01:51:34 ◼   ► think it does suffer a little bit of what I think of as the

01:51:37 ◼   ► the DVD extra problem where

01:51:41 ◼   ► Everyone is always talking about how great everybody else is to work with and so there are there are many things which just

01:51:48 ◼   ► irritate me in the book where it's like, "Ed Catmull, I cannot read another description where you are talking about how amazing and ingenious and bold

01:51:55 ◼   ► the idea for this next movie is." Like,

01:51:58 ◼   ► I can't deal with that anymore, man. Like, there's just too much of it. So that kind of grated on me after a while. But

01:52:04 ◼   ► those things aside, I have recommended this book many times over the years since I first read it and

01:52:12 ◼   ► for anybody working on a team, I would definitely continue to recommend it. So, creativity, Inc.

01:52:18 ◼   ► Check it out.