Now, is that right . David over the past 15 years, one of the most successful ceos in the world has been bob iger. He led disney to its greatest heights, increasing the market value by 400 . He did that through acquisitions of 21st century fox, lucasfilm, pixar, and Marvel Entertainment. Now the question what is he going to do next . During the time that you were the ceo, the stock market value of the company went up about 450 and the market capitalization about 400 during time year period of my big regret is that i didnt back you and buy stock, but you must be very pleased with what you accomplished. Bob proud would probably be the right word to use. I inherited a company that was renowned and had been quite successful, but had also gone through a period of difficulty. There was a lot of work to do. My goal was to not only improve the company, but to ultimately leave the company in great hands for my successor. David you werent as successful in leaving the company, because you wanted to leave a few years earlier and the board said you had to stay longer, because you did the fox acquisition along with others. Why were you so good at running a company but not so good at leaving the company . Bob i am told that is a common ailment of ceos that have had decent tenure. I failed at a few times. The first time, we had a Succession Process that didnt work out as we had hoped. So i agreed to stay on a little longer. The last time was due to the largest acquisition we had ever made, and that was most of the assets of 21st century fox. When i proposed doing that to board, which was closed when i was supposed to step down, that they would say, we will support you in this effort as long as you agreed to stay. They did not want to go through a ceo transition just at the time we made the biggest acquisition wed ever made. David it was rumored in the press and in your book that you were thinking of leaving disney to run for president of the United States. Who ever heard of a businessman running for president of the United States . Where did you get that idea from . Bob crazy idea, right . There is some truth to that. Before and after the 2016 election i gave it some serious , thought. Post the election of donald trump, i did it a lot of thought and actually did a fair amount of homework. Im not sure i would have gotten as far as actually running. As the realist in me was sinking in, i was starting to think more about how difficult the path might be in the Democratic Party for a businessman to get the nomination. David what would you say is the chance you would be interested in serving in a senior position in the Biden Administration . When that be something of any interest to you or you wouldnt want to come to washington for that kind of thing . Bob ive always thought about what the next chapter in my life because postdisney, there will be a postdisney soon. Im not going to fail leaving again. Giving back in some fashion, serving our country in some fashion, is certainly something i would consider. A lot of it would depend on what it is, with the opportunity is, and whether i would be stimulated and be good at it. David lets go back to the disney situation. You announced you are going to step down finally at the end of 2019 and become executive chair. Then covid comes along. Did covid make it possible for you to leave the same way you thought you were going to be able to leave or we able to spend more time at disney as covid hit . Bob i stepped down from the ceo position. To focus all my time and energy on our creative assets, because i thought, obviously, what we create is the most valuable audit we have. I thought the best thing i could do in terms of enabling my successor to succeed at the job was to hand them a rich pipeline of creativity. In fact ive spent almost all my , time since i stepped into this role doing just that. However, i wanted to make sure he was successful in other respects as well. He had not handle a crisis that was anything like this. By the way, nor had i. So i wanted to make sure i was there for him, to help him through what is obviously a particularly challenging time, not only for the world, but specifically for our company. I have done just that. He has been the ceo. Hes been running the company from the day he stepped into that role. I feel confident that he will do a good job. I have probably been there for him a little more than i have been i would have expected. I think one of the hardest things is, in passing the baton expectomeone else, you in a situation where i was going to continue as an employee, an executive of the company i expected to spend more , time with him being more physically present as an advisor and support for him. That obviously has not happened. It has been a little more challenging. David if somebody was an outsider and they say, covid is hitting the United States and other places, the kind of companies that arent going to do well are the theme park business, the Live Entertainment business, the hotel business, and those are all the businesses they are in. Yet your stock has really rallied and done reasonably well. Why do you think you havent been as hardhit financially as you might think from the outside . Bob i think the reason our stock has been resilient and the company has been resilient is we were on extremely solid footing as a Company Going into this. Meaning, our businesses were all doing well and prospects for the future were actually quite bright. I think the street has looked at beennowing that we have effective and dramatic but also , realizing that when it ends, we will have the ability to rebound in a significant way. In addition to that, we have the direct to Consumer Digital entertainment direction. We launched disney plus, espn plus, the acquisition of 21st century fox, so we moved into a space that is not only very exciting, and in many respects the future of entertainment, but one that the Investment Community is looking at very positively. David how did a nice jewish boy from new york wind up running disney . Bob it is a pinch yourself moment. David the covid situation has put you in your house like it put me in my house, remotely. What is the experience . What did you learn about yourself in this company in the covid situation. Bob i think we are all starved for physical interaction, meaning being in the same space. I think there is huge value to that we have also learned there. Is a lot we can get done remotely from home and not with one another and operate quite efficiently in the process. I would say, at least in my case, we have managed to do more than we ever thought was possible. It took a little time for us to find our equilibrium or gain our equilibrium, but once we did and we established a pattern of munication and an effective way creatingg, including we have really done all right. ,i do not think this is optimal especially on the credo side of the business. David and you expect that when covid is behind us, there are things you and the company have learned about will do in the future in terms of how to manage the company differently or with more technology or not . Bob one of my instinct tells me that when this ends hopefully, it will soon people are going to be starved for being outside, being among other people, and i think theres going to be a huge rush out, meaning getting out of their homes, and that might include going to offices. Even though a lot has been said about people never going back to offices, i actually think the opposite will be case initially. Do we have to be there every day . Probably not. We dont have to be there as much as we used to be. I think there are definitely economies we have learned to operate with and under covid where that will apply in the future. David so how did a nice jewish boy from new york wind up running disney . Lets go through that. You grew up in the new york area, is that right . Bob it is kind of, by the way, a pinchyourself moment. I grew up in relatively modest background, lower middle class. My dad was a welleducated man in the advertising business, but suffered from terrible manicdepression. It made it very difficult for him to hold a job. My mother became employed at a Junior High School library later on in my childhood to help support our family. It was a modest background, but i never felt poor and i never felt deprived of anything. Including love, by the way, of my family. David your parents didnt say, you need to be a lawyer or a doctor or Something Like that . They didnt say anything like that to you . Bob there was a little bit of a push for me to be a doctor, but no. They were pretty good at letting me pursue whatever my dreams were. My dreams early on were to become Walter Cronkite or a Television News person. I became a weatherman when i left college for a local tv station. That was sort of the start, get a job on camera and hopefully work your way up from there, all the way to possibly becoming an anchor man. I lost confidence in myself and my ability to fulfill that dream. So i pivoted and took a job behind the scenes in production. Production at abc in the middle of 1974. David have you ever thought that you could bl rocher al rocher and be a good weatherman . Bob that is true. I tease every once in a while, i will go into one of our tv stations and worn them that my next job might be theirs. I may become the weather person on good morning america. David initially, you were doing some production at abc. Eventually you went into the sports area. Did you think your career was going to be running abc sports . Bob that would have been fine with me. There are a number of steps along the way that if i had achieved them i would have been absolutely fine with that kind of being the last job. I would have loved to have been president of abc sports. Interestingly, i never got that opportunity. The people who have purchased abc from Capital Cities took meation, actually out of that role and sent me out to l. A. To l. A. To run the Entertainment Division of abc for prime time programming, which is a huge step for me into an area of the business that i had very little familiarity with. But they believed in me and gave me that shot david you are. Doing very well, then abc says, we want you to come back to new york and help run the whole company. Did you want to go back to new york at that point . Bob i was ready. I had done my stint in l. A. But i was ready to go back to new york. They offered me the job to be president of the abc network. David now you are the big shot. You are running the whole company. All of a sudden, guess what, we are going to sell the company to disney. Was that something you were happy with or did you think there was a role for you then . Bob it was an incredible time. It was the summer of 1995. I had been told by tom murphy , who was then chairman, it was likely i would become the next ceo. I was coo, which was great. Warren buffett was our largest shareholder. I thought he had enough faith in me. Michael eisner approached us and made an offer that not only we felt we couldnt refuse, but we felt was in the best interest of the shareholders and the company. It turns out we were right. In the back of my mind, even though michael made it clear that there was never going to be a guarantee, i thought if i played my cards right, and if i performed well, i could potentially run the Disney Company at some point. David eventually Michael Eisner decides to retire maybe a little earlier than he thought he would retire. The board says, we have to look for somebody to run the company. Did they call you up and say, it is your job are did you have to go through a little of a beauty contest . Bob a little beauty contest would be an understatement. I mentioned earlier in this question, we had gone through a tough period of time. The board felt, and rightfully so, that they had to be expansive in their thinking about who the next ceo should be. They created a true contest. They considered a number of outside candidates. They interviewed outside candidates. They said to me that i was the only inside candidate. They may pretty clear at the beginning that not only was it not a guarantee, it was less likely that i would get it. They seemed intent on bringing change to the company. They felt it was needed. As the insider, i actually had the outside track. David eventually they call you up and say the job is yours. Subsequently, as i mentioned, at the outset, your stock is up about 400 plus percent. And market cap is 400 plus percent. Did anybody ever call you up and say, we are sorry we made you go through that process . Did anybody do that . Bob no one said, we are sorry we made you go through the process. On a number of occasions, Board Members were very generous in in there complements of me and to me about the job i was doing. Looking back, they thought they made the right decision. The numbers speak for themselves. The position of the company today is far different than it was back then. A lot of that was due to the strategy laid out. I discussed some of the things i wanted to accomplish and being able to execute that strategy over the years. Disney in your book, you point to four acquisitions you made. Let me go through them with you. One of the first ones was pixar. Disney had a complicated relationship with pixar. How did you convince steve jobs to sell you pixar . Was that an easy decision to convince the board to pay what was considered a high price . Bob we paid over 7 billion for pixar. An idea that i had right away, i brought that idea to the board, which im not sure was the right way to start. But we had gone through a time where disney animation had been faltering almost a decade. , we had a lot of success with pixar in what was basically a joint venture with them. That was ending and steve jobs in a very difficult and inyourface manner told us publicly, meaning he made an announcement publicly that the , pixar relationship with disney would end. I felt that disney animation , that it needed huge improvement and i thought the fastest way to accomplish that , albeit the most riskiest and expensive, was to buy pixar. Not only to bring pixar in as part of the company, but to bring the executives in and have them turn disney animation around. That was my pitch to the board. It took on the board side, it took from october to january two convince them it was the right thing. I used up all the capital i had, and i didnt have much. I also was able to convince steve jobs that it was a good idea. When the notion of buying pixar came to me, i was quite nervous. I got on my phone and said, ive got a crazy idea i want to talk to you about. I didnt think i should broach the subject on the phone. I dont know how well you knew steve, but anyone who knew steve would know that if you said, i have a crazy idea, he would have to hear it right away. So the notion i would say that to him but say i would come up and talk to him was ridiculous. He made me tell him on the phone in like a minute what i had in mind. He said, it is not that crazy. Why dont you come up and we will talk about it . That led to a very interesting very on the subject interesting discussion with him on the subject of us playing pixar and steve becoming largest shareholder of the walt Disney Company, and a true friend of mine. David right before the disney board is about to approve the acquisition, he tells you that his cancer had returned. You ever think about changing to proceeding to Going Forward with the deal are not . Bob we were on the pixar campus, basically preparing for the announcement, and he said, can we go for a walk . He said he was going to tell me something only his wife and doctors knew, and that was the cancer that had come back in a had had a few years earlier that he was operated on had come back in a different form. He wanted me to know because he wanted to give me a chance to back out of the deal. At that point i looked at my watch. It was incredible. It was 30 minutes before we were announcing a 7 billion deal that everybody needed to approve. It is not like i had an opportunity to phone anybody and ask for their advice. He demanded confidentiality. I made a decision kind of on the spot, which was that we were buying pixar. While steve was important to the acquisition, he was not material to the pixar deal itself. Therefore i thought i was exercising the right set of responsibilities as ceo of the company and asked the shareholders ultimately to approve a large acquisition. Off we went to make the announcement with me carrying that incredibly heavy news. It was a secret that held for a few years that the world didnt know. That was in early 2006. And he lived until october of 2011. So i had the benefit of, not only his friendship and advice, his position on the board, but of the wisdom that steve jobs brought to any room, any situation. Wisdom and incredible talent in instinct. David disney has a lot of characters. Donald duck, mickey mouse, so forth. Why did you need to buy the characters from Marvel Entertainment . That was your next big acquisition, another comic book series of characters. Why did you feel that was such an important deal . Bob in 2005, we were starting to see a huge amount of disruption to our business. One of the things, mostly thanks to technology, and one of the things that new technology was bringing was an explosion of what was being produced. Creativity and Consumer Choice in the entertainment field. I thought that with so much more Consumer Choice, that high quality branded entertainment would be even more valuable. So after the pixar acquisition was successful, we created a list of acquisition targets at disney. They all were consistent with what i just laid out. High quality branded entertainment. Marvel and star wars where the top of the list. David you then went to talk to george lucas and said, by the way, i would like to buy your company and we will make star wars in the future and you can watch the movie but we will make it. Was that hard, for him to give up the Creative Control of star wars . Bob it was, but we saw in star wars something that was extraordinary. Like marvel, exec, and disney, like i talked earlier. The difference being that george was the creator of it and the sole shareholder of it. It was really who he was. He explained to me at some point that when he passes, it will say star wars creator george lucas. This was like selling his birthright. It was an incredibly difficult thing. I had a lot of empathy for him. It was hard. I dont know whether hes had second thoughts about it, but i would guess that it has worked out well for him and his family. It has certainly worked out well for us. David i cant speak for him, but i think hes happy with the stock price increase he got. I again cant speak for him. Let me ask about the last acquisition. Of the ones youve made, they werent what i would call bet your company acquisitions. They were expensive, but they 50t exactly 50 willing out in 60 million acquisitions. When Rupert Murdoch said he might be interested in selling part of his company, did you worry about, if it didnt work out, it could be the end of your job, the end of your career, things like that . Bob no, ive gone into every one of these acquisitions with a level of confidence that not only were they the right acquisitions at the right price, but we could execute the vision and the reasoning behind the acquisition. Maybe i had too much confidence, but so far, so good. David as executive chairman, you have a little more free time then when you are the ceo. If you dont go into the Biden Administration, what are you going to do to top what youve done and keep yourself energized . I read that you just went onto the board of a food company. What do you want to do to top what youve already done . Bob i dont need to top what ive done at all. Im extremely satisfied with what ive accomplished. If i could do it again, i wouldnt change anything. Im not looking to do that at all. Im looking for things that are stimulating. Whether that is in the public or private sector, i dont know. David have you considered the highest calling of mankind, which is private equity, another career . Bob im not ruling anything out. Private equity has served extremely well. I have had some feelers from that space. I have not made any decisions. I think im very excited about the next chapter. Im sure it will be a sorry day for me to leave disney because it has been my home for 46 years, almost 47. On the other hand, theres a whole world out there. I still have a lot of energy and a huge amount of curiosity. Im looking forward to it. [honking] our world is changing. Every day, it changes a little faster. Some changes are too small to see. Others, too big to handle. Sometimes, change feels slow. So slow, you dont even notice. Other times, it happens all at once. We cant keep up. For our climate, change means many things. In between too small to see and too big to handle, theres a whole world of difference. The clock is ticking