Hollywood Trouble, Big Tech & The Crisis With Kids - Jeffrey Katzenberg & Hari Ravichandran - #967

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Jeff, what made you so good at what you did? I don't actually understand what your skill set is. It's obvious that you're talented, but I don't actually know-

**Jeffrey Katzenberg** (0:09)
You're not the first person to accuse me of-

**Chris Williamson** (0:11)
I don't actually know what you're talented at.

**Jeffrey Katzenberg** (0:12)
I'm not sure I am either. Let's see. Certainly a good storyteller. I think, I'm a truffle hunter. I know how to find a good idea, recognize a good person, a talented person. I think that's probably the most valuable skill set, which is having an instinct for quality, for smarts, for ambition, vision, dreams.
You know, I've spent most of my career helping other people realize their dreams, their stories, their ideas. And, you know, in order to, I think, recognize a dreamer, you need to be a bit of a dreamer yourself. You have to be an optimist. You have to believe in, you know, the unknown, the, you know, unimaginable. And you have to have a lot of enthusiasm. And I think those qualities are, I'm a happy person and an optimist, bottomless well of optimism.

**Chris Williamson** (1:34)
I've heard you say that you're a good home run hitter, but you don't do singles and bunt.

**Jeffrey Katzenberg** (1:38)
Well, yeah, that's sort of a different, that's, you know, sort of in my ambition column, you know, sort of different lanes that, you know, I like to take on things that are very, very, very challenging. And, you know, I like to say that, you know, I like doing things that are, you know, improbable, if not impossible. That's kind of my home address. And, you know, the outcome of that is, is that, you know, when you, one, you can't hit a home run if you don't swing for the fence. And more time, at least many times, you will swing for the fence and you won't get there, you know. So, you got to accept that, you know, with success comes failure.

**Chris Williamson** (2:22)
You mentioned being able to pick a good story, one of the core skill sets with 400-something movies, 80 animated, da-da-da. What, in your opinion, makes for a good story?

**Jeffrey Katzenberg** (2:37)
Well, there are many things. You know, I have been very lucky to have many great mentors and teachers over my career, one of which I actually never met because he had passed away by the time I arrived at the Walt Disney Company in 1984, which is Walt Disney himself. And he had this amazing archive of his work, his work process, his creative sort of blueprints. And so many great lessons learned about storytelling from him, particularly around his animated movies. One of my favorite ones, he says, you know, there's no such thing as a great story without a great ending. It's pretty obvious, right? There's no such thing as a great story.
Your story, let me say, my movies are only as good as their villains. It's one of the things he said. And you think about that through, you know, his filmography and it's pretty extraordinary. And so, you know, for me, I look at Ursula or Scar or Jafar or Farquaad or T'ai Lung or I can go on and on and on. Because when I read that and I understood it, it became a kind of a north star.

**Chris Williamson** (4:15)
What is it about the villain?

**Jeffrey Katzenberg** (4:17)
Well, the better the villain, the greater the challenge for the protagonist, right?
So whatever you have to overcome, whatever you have to defeat, the greater that is, the greater your victory is in it. Walt Disney said, I make movies for children and the child that exists in every one of us. That's kind of the north star of the company. It was for him, it was for my decade there, it continues to be today in it. And so, lots of these great lessons along the way around storytelling and what are the essential ingredients of a great story.

**Chris Williamson** (4:58)
It's interesting to think about the ending of this great idea from psychology called the peak end rule, which you might be familiar with. Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize, found that across a person's memory of an experience, the most memorable parts were the peak intensity, the highest, and then the end. They did this study with colonoscopies. In one iteration of the study, people went through it and you can tell the amount of discomfort by the amount of movement and they were asked to rate the discomfort afterward. How did you remember it afterward? In the next iteration of the study, different cohort, they did the exact same, but then just left the endoscope in for a while, but didn't move it for a couple of minutes. The final part, the end of the experience was less discomfort, and the self-rated after the fact pain was lower. Implications for that, if you're a comedian, finish on your best joke. If you're a rock band, finish on your biggest song. If you are making a movie, finish on an emotionally salient, real high-energy sort of feel-good.