Founders: #310 Walt Disney and Picasso

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The 20th century saw a transformation of our visual experiences comparable to the blossoming

of the Renaissance in the 15th century.

We saw many more things and we saw them differently, both because they were different and because

events and artists accustomed us to look with different eyes.

Much of this altered vision was due to technological change, especially the beginning of cinema,

television, videos, digital cameras, and the rapidity with which all were made accessible

to humanity everywhere.

But these visual revolutions were compounded by artists with the expression of what was

going on in their own minds.

The interplay between the new technologies and the new individualism created an element

of visual change.

New experiences for our eyes were the product both of relentless, impersonal forces marching

humanity forward and of powerful, creative individuals striving to rest control of change

in order to realize their personal ways of seeing things.

Among this group, none were more successful than Pablo Picasso and Walt Disney.

A comparison of the two is instructive.

Both were outstanding, creative individuals, first and foremost.

Each embraced novelty with shattering enthusiasm, but there were essential differences.

If Picasso created shocking novelties, he did so in a traditional, old-world manner in

an artist's studio and in the familiar capital of art, Paris.

Disney, on the other hand, was of the New World, a mid-westerner who eagerly embraced

both America's entrepreneurial evervescence and the new technologies leaping ahead of

popular taste.

He went from the open spaces to Hollywood.

Hollywood was not so much a place as a concept.

When he was born, it didn't yet exist.

During his lifetime, Hollywood became the global capital of the popular arts, thanks

in part to his creativity.

Disney made use of the new technologies throughout his creative life, just as Picasso exploited

the old artistic disciplines of paint, pencil, modeling, and printing to produce the new.

The influence of both Picasso and Disney continues in the 21st century, powerfully and persistently

raising a question, which man has been and is more potent?

Okay, so that was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today,

which is Creators, and is written by Paul Johnson.

Okay, so what this book is, is a collection of essays on some of history's greatest creators.

People like Mark Train, Shakespeare, Christian Dior, Balenciaga, Victor Hugo, T.S.

Eliot, Dickens.

But what I want to focus on today is Paul's essay comparing Pablo Picasso and Walt Disney.

And so just to give you a sneak peek, I'm working on what's kind of wind up being an

extremely comprehensive episode on Walt Disney.

And this initial essay was just, initially I was like, oh, I'll just use it as part of

the research.

And I got, I looked at how many highlights and notes that I made on the essay.

I'm like, oh, this is, it's the same amount of highlights and notes that I have for individual

episodes.

And I thought it was so interesting.

I'm a huge fan of Paul.

I'll have to look up the episode numbers and I'll have them in front of me.

But I've read five, maybe five of Paul Johnson's books.

He actually just passed away.

He's a fantastic historian and writer.

And I probably done episodes, I did episodes on his Winston Churchill biography, his biography

and Socrates, his biography on Mozart.

He's got another great collection of essays called Heroes where he wrote about Alexander

the Great, Julius Caesar, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln.

I did an episode on that.

So just a huge fan of his writing and his ability to synthesize all these different historical

figures.

And so it shouldn't have been a surprise to me that I had a hard time not turning the

page, reading this essay.

And then of course I was just obsessed with taking notes and highlights.

So I'm going to focus on his comparison.

He's going to give overviews of both the life of Pablo Picasso and Walt Disney.

Okay.

So he's born in Spain and says his father was an art teacher and an artist specializing

in birds, but fascinated by bullfighting.

Picasso's father continued to teach him until he was 14.

And then his father put him for a limited time at one of Barcelona's excellent fine

art school.

And then after that, Picasso sets up on his own as a teenage artist.

This is the next line.

This is what an incredible writing and a description of Picasso.

I guess I'll tell you up front, it'll be obvious as we go through the highlights and

notes today.

I always tell, like if you read between the lines, like what an author thinks, he's

Paul rightfully so in based on his descriptions and what he shows and to highlight, he has

a strong dislike for Picasso and a strong admiration for Walt Disney.

After reading this, I would say I would share like his perspective as well.

And so the note I left on this is what a description of Picasso.

He was essentially self-taught, self-directed, self-promoted, emotionally educated in the

teeming brothels of his city, a small but powerfully built monster of assured egoism.

Now one of the benefits of being an autodidact is the fact that everyone else is learning

in tracks, right?

They're just regurgitating what the formal education is telling them to do.

Picasso designs his own curriculum that obviously has both benefits and weaknesses.

He lacked the benefit, though also the inhibitions of full academic training.

He was exceptionally skillful from an early age at exploiting his many and ingenious artistic

ideas.

He always kept a sharp eye on the market and always knew what would sell.

He sold his paintings from the age of nine until he died.

And though his output became and remained prodigious throughout his long life, he never had any

difficulty in marketing.

When I got to that part, it reminded me of one of my favorite lines in that fantastic

book, The Almanac of Naval Ravikant, where Naval says, this had a huge effect on me when

I discovered it the first time, learn to sell, learn to build.

If you could do both, you'll be unstoppable.

David Ogilvy a few weeks ago expressed the same idea as Naval.

He called it killers and poets though, that if you could be both a killer and a poet,

you get rich.

And so then there's a few important events that happened in the early life of Pablo Picasso.

One, he experiences intense competition.

This is going to lead him to develop his own style and then go to where there's less competition.

Picasso seems to have grasped quite early on that he would not get to the top in the field

of conventional painting.

In Barcelona, the competition was severe.

And so at this point, Picasso is competing directly with what Paul Johnson calls perhaps

the greatest of the modern Spanish painters, this guy named Casas.

And so Picasso is about to learn a very valuable lesson.

This is something that you and I see over and over again in the fact that imitation precedes

creation.

We just started out imitating other people until we develop our own style.

So he sees what Casas is doing.

He's like, I'll do that too.

Casas' superb full-length charcoal portraits of people in Barcelona inspired Picasso at

the age of 18 to do a similar series, which he exhibited in his first one-man show.

There were 135 drawings and paintings in the show, but it was not a success.

Indeed, it was a foolish move.

One of the few in Picasso's career for his portraits invited comparison with Casas and

are manifestly inferior.

And so Picasso is a deeply flawed individual as we're going to get to in a minute, but

he's definitely smart.

And he realized, oh, I need to avoid direct comparison.

I need to avoid competition.

And so it says in 1904, he effectively left Spain for good, chiefly to get away from

life under Casas' shadow and from the endless, disparaging comparisons with him.

Picasso also saw that Paris, with its preoccupation with novelty and fashion, was the place where

he could shine and rise to the top.

And so there's a bunch of thoughts that came to mind when I got to this section and was

really trying to think about what was taking place at this point in Picasso's life and

some ideas that we could actually take with us.

So number one, differentiate yourself.

Don't be the best.

Be the only.

And then move to the physical location that will be best for your career.

Most people underestimate how important this is and they won't jump at that opportunity.

And in some of the life stories that you and I go over, people are lucky enough to be born

in the place that just happens to be best for what they're doing.

Think of Enzo Ferrari.

But in many, many cases, they realize, oh, I'm in the wrong spot.

I need to get to where is the best physical location on the planet for the work I'm doing?

Whatever that answer is, go there.

And so this may be my favorite attribute, my favorite thing about Picasso.

It's going to remind me of one of my favorite quotes.

I read this book, it's the autobiography of this guy named Les Schwab.

And I read it because Charlie Munger kept bringing it up in like the Berkshire meetings.

He's like, you got to read, you know, highly recommend reading Les Schwab's autobiography.

And in that book, Les has this great lie that I tried to adapt to my life.

And he says, whatever you do, you must do it with gusto.

You must do it in volume.

It is a case of repeat, repeat, repeat.

Check out Picasso.

Picasso was perhaps the most restless, experimental and productive artist who ever lived.

But everything had to be done at top speed.

He was incapable of lavishing care, time, or sustained effort on a work of art.

By 1900, he was turning out a painting every morning and doing other things in the afternoon.

And from then until his death at age 92, he remained a master of spectacular output, working

on paper and canvas in stone, ceramics and metal in every possible variety of mixed media.

He also designed posters, advertisements, theater sets, costumes, dresses, logos, and

almost every kind of object from ashtray to headdress.

It's almost like there's something inside of this guy that just had to come out.

This is not in this book.

But one of my favorite, I've tried to do, I don't know if I've told you this before,

but I've tried to do multiple episodes on Picasso because if you going back and look

at all the historical figures that Steve Jobs studied and was influenced by, I've done podcasts

on almost all of them.

I think I have 39 or 40 separate episodes based on Steve Jobs or the people that inspired

him.

Picasso is the glaring, missing piece.

And I've read two or three biographies and I just cannot, I can't find a great one.

So I have a bunch of highlights and in like past research on Picasso that I haven't included

in any podcast.

So one of my favorite quotes about just the insane amount of output that Picasso had,

I have saved.

It says, Picasso lived for a total of 33,403 days with 26,075 published works.

That means that Picasso averaged one new piece of artwork every day of his life from age

20 until his death at age 91.

He created something new every day for 71 years.

And so this insane level of productivity also created an insane level of wealth for

Picasso.

Picasso was a millionaire by 1914 and a multi-millionaire by the end of World War One.

And his wealth continued to grow so that by the time of his death, he was by far the richest

artist who had ever lived.

The extraordinary success Picasso enjoyed from quite early in his career and then in

growing measure until his death is explained by a number of factors.

And so some of those factors is the fact that this is a personal belief in mind that intelligence

manifests in many different ways.

So it's not at all clear how literate Picasso actually was that he said to him that writing

a letter was more difficult and took more time and effort than him just doing a painting.

And so his intelligence was an academic, it was creative.

But if Picasso's brain was not academic, it was nonetheless powerful reinforcing his ability

to think visually with sharp clarity and cunning.

This cunning was closely linked to an overwhelming personality and a peculiar sense of moral values.

His ability to exploit both men and women, some of them highly intelligent and uneasily

aware of what he was doing to them, was by far the most remarkable thing about him.

So think about this.

A word for what they're talking about is charisma.

And so to define charisma, it is a compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion

in others.

On episode 309, the one I just did on Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was young, they said

and there's a line in the book says, he had a PhD in charisma.

The reason that's a fascinating story to think about is because it was written by his girlfriend

of six years, I think from like age 20 to 26 or 21 to 27, something like that.

And there's so many times in that book where she's like, I don't want to do what I'm doing,

but I'm so drawn that if you were in his presence, it was like some kind of magical force that

he's just, you're going to immediately like him, like him, you're going to be drawn to

him and you'll do whatever he wants you to do.

And so both Picasso and Arnold use this.

There's a lot of sex in both of these books.

In this chapter or this section on Picasso, it's going to go into way more detail I'm

going to read, but also in that book that Arnold's girlfriend wrote.

So they use it both to attract like sexual partners and business partners.

It works in both domains.

And so listen to this line.

It says his sexual appeal, meaning Picasso, was mesmeric.

That's defined mesmeric, causing a person to become completely transfixed and unaware

of anything else around them.

That is the same description that Arnold's girlfriend gave about a young Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It was undoubtedly one of his superpowers.

He had gifts that the vast majority of human beings would give anything to possess, but

apparently innately he lacked two things that ordinary people take for granted, the ability

to distinguish between truth and falsehood and the ability to distinguish between right

and wrong.

And so when I bring up the charisma of Arnold or Picasso, Steve Jobs, I mean, you're going

to see this very, there's going to be like a huge positive correlation between, you know,

somebody accomplished great things and their levels of charisma.

What I'm really talking about is like, it's a source of power.

There's this line on the book that he did on episode 305, the book working by Robert

Caro.

And he says, it's a book on power, essentially, like his entire 50 year career has been trying

to explain to you and I, to all of his readers.

Like what power is and how it actually works in the real world.

And he says, there's a line in there that gives me chills.

And he says, power doesn't always corrupt, but what power always does is reveal, it reveals

the true character of the person in possession of that power.

And what we see is the true revelation of Picasso.

It's a very ugly human being.

So it says this lack was one source of his power at the center of his universe.

There was room only for Picasso, his needs, his interest, his ambitions.

He boasted, I do not give, I take.

To his harsh mind, kindness, generosity, and consideration for feelings were all weaknesses

to be taken advantage of by master figures like himself.

And so he is full of ego, of jealousy, of envy.

His ingratitude was compounded by jealousy, especially of other painters, which may have

sprung from insecurity about the merits of his own work and a feeling that it was all

a con.

He would periodically admit, I am nothing but a clown.

And then it gets even worse.

Picasso's attitude towards women was terrifying.

He said that for him, women were divided into goddesses and doormats, and that his

object was to turn the goddess into the doormat.

He told one mistress, nobody leaves a man like me.

He would steal a friend's wife.

Oh my goodness.

Oh, you ready for this?

He would steal a friend's wife, then tell the man that he was honoring him by sleeping

with her.

He was overheard saying to himself over and over and over, I am God.

I am God.

Apparently, Picasso was Kanye West before Kanye West.

His distorted paintings of women are closely linked to the pleasure he got from hurting

them.

This is why, what I meant, it's like, I don't need to read anymore about this guy.

His most beautiful and gifted mistress was beaten and left unconscious on the floor.

He would create situations in which one mistress angrily confronted another in his presence

and then both rolled on the floor, biting and scratching and fighting each other.

Picasso, having set up the fight, would calmly go on painting.

So the reason I keep giving all these details is because I think this is the main and most

important part of this entire section, and the point of studying history is we want a

more accurate representation of the world that we live in and the humans that inhabit

it, in my opinion.

Maybe many people find it hard to accept that a great writer, painter, or musician can

be evil, but historical evidence shows again and again that evil and creative genius can

exist side by side in the same person.

That is terrifying.

When we read that again, I'm not done with this paragraph.

Historical evidence shows again and again that evil and creative genius can exist side

by side in the same person.

It is rare indeed for the evil side of a creator to be so all pervasive as it was in Picasso,

who seems to have been without redeeming qualities of any kind.

In my judgment, his monumental selfishness was inextricably linked to his achievement.

That is the main and most important part of this entire section.

He was all powerful as an originator and aesthetic entrepreneur precisely because he was so passionately

devoted to what he was doing to the exclusion of any other feeling whatever.

He had no sense of duty except to himself, and this gave him overwhelming self-promoting

energy.

His egoism enabled him to turn away from nature and into himself with a concentration which

is awe-inspiring.

This is, I wrote, this is my note to myself.

This was fascinating.

I read that three times and then I stopped and just thought about this because one of

the, I would argue, maybe the most important, if you only took one lesson from this crazy

odyssey that you and I are on, right, is like this is reading hundreds of biographies and

reading every single possible thing about history's greatest entrepreneurs, making podcasts

about them, compiling 20,000 notes and highlights on this, and then rereading those over and

over again.

If you only took one thing from this entire thing, it's like the importance and superhuman

powers that intense focus can give you.

But on the other side of that, taken to too far extreme, right, is this intense focus

is inherently selfish, and so therefore you can get a lot, this is what I'm most concerned

about myself, and you can get lost so much in your work at the exclusion of everything

else.

This is why, you know, when people say, hey, do you have any advice about like how to

be, how to, how to live a balanced life or to be a good father, to be a good husband?

It's like, yeah, listen to founders and do, in the personal life, you basically have to

do the opposite of what most of these people do because they are so inherently selfish in,

I'm not like passing judgment, I'm just like documenting what I see.

They're so inherently selfish and focused on what they're doing that that time, right,

because time is the finite resource, has to come from somewhere else.

And so they decide, hey, it's going to come from, you know, I'm going to destroy marriages.

I mean, how many of these people, it's extremely common, like I'm working on another episode

right now that's blowing my mind.

And the guy's, he's a genius, straight up genius, unbelievable, like talented person,

and you read about it.

I was like, oh, like, yeah, this makes sense that this guy's been married five times.

I completely understand why that is.

So this is why I'm such a big fan of Paul Johnson, because he just, he, his writing

and his synthesis of this information where he just hits you with this idea, it's just

one paragraph that it gives you, I have chills on my arm right now, you just stop, it stops

in your track.

It's like, oh my God, the source is the same.

And then he does an even better job of saying, hey, pay attention, this is a cautionary tale.

You think you want everything, right?

Picasso had the fame, the wealth, the women, and he was miserable, the all powerful machinery

of the Picasso industry.

His stable of women, his chateau, his unlimited fame, his vast wealth, the sycophancy that

surrounded him, none of these brought him serenity as he aged.

It seems to me that his personal cruelty and the evident savagery of much of his work sprang

from a deep unease of spirit.

His last years were punctuated by family corals over money.

His widow shot herself.

His eldest child died of alcoholism.

And this is the punchline.

It is an appalling tale, though edifying in its own way, it shows painfully how even vast

creative achievement and unparalleled worldly success can fail to bring happiness.

And so now this is where we start to get into the gift of this entire essay because it's

like, no, here's Picasso.

We have an overview.

We have an idea.

I think what you and I just ran through, even if you'd never read anything else or even

knew who he was, like heard of Picasso before, which is very unlikely, you have an idea of

who he is.

And then he does this exact same thing for Walt, and they start to compare and contrast.

And this is why, you know, I think he's a great artist, he's a great artist, he's a

great artist.

Same thing for Walt, and they start to compare and contrast.

And this is why, you know, I think undoubtedly Walt Disney is one of the most admired entrepreneurs

ever.

You got to put them, if there's a Mount Rushmore of entrepreneurs, you put them up there.

And I don't mean necessarily just financial achievement, although the financial achievement

compounded decades after he died, but his approach to his work and just the sheer talent

that this individual possessed, it's incredible.

Walt Disney, like Picasso, began his working life early.

He had a much harder struggle to earn a living or achieve recognition and success.

Much of his childhood was spent on a farm in rural Missouri.

And he delighted all of his life in observing and drawing animals.

That is huge.

This idea of Walt Disney, and I've read three or four books on Walt Disney so far, and maybe

I knew it at one point, but I feel like maybe I knew it at one point and forgot, but I feel

like I never made the connection until Paul helped me put this idea in my mind, or it's

like his entire, his main inspiration was always from the very beginning, from when

he was a child to when he was, you know, on his death, dying, was nature.

And so it says, he grew up on a farm, delighted all of his life in observing and drawing animals.

Their movements and idiosyncrasies gave him great pleasure.

Where Picasso tended to dehumanize the women he drew or painted, Disney anthropomorphized

his animal subjects.

That was the essential source of his power and humor.

His family had little money and his father was demanding, but despite this, or perhaps

because of it, Disney always saw the family as the essential unit in society and the only

source of lasting happiness.

When the farm failed, the Disney's moved to Kansas City, where his father started a

newspaper distributing business, and made Walt work very hard at all hours.

By the age of 18, he was making his living as a newspaper cartoonist, but Walt developed

two passions.

First, he wanted to run his own business and be his own master.

He had the American entrepreneurial spirit to an unusual degree.

And so I want to pause there real quick.

What's one of the most surprising things I learned about Disney from reading biographies

in the past is that towards the end of his life, he said that he was most proud of two

things, keeping control of his company, because he's going to lose control of his first company.

So starting and keeping control of his second company and Disneyland.

So this idea where he's like, I want to be my own master.

He was upset.

Like, you know, all of history gets on Twitter is obsessed with control.

By the age of 20, he had already run his own company, gone bankrupt and then set up again.

Second, he wanted to get into the art and craft of animation.

Okay.

So 18 year old Disney's making his living as a newspaper cartoonist.

The same time people are taking newspaper cartoons or cartoons of all times and they're

animating them.

So they call it animated funnies, right?

And the animated funnies are being animated and drawn to run before movies in what is

at the time, at this point in history, a very new motion picture industry.

So it's kind of like an opening act to accompany like longer movies that are regular movies

like filmed with actual people, right?

And let's get into like what Disney realized like, oh, there's a missing piece.

And I would say is a common, common theme, not only, and you'll see it multiple times

throughout Disney's career.

But I think in general, it's like in these, these life stories that you and I go over

of knowing what you want to do, but you don't know how to do it yet.

Disney always felt that animation without sound was dead and that the nature and quality

of the sound were key to the key to success.

Okay.

But initially the sound dimension baffled him.

So did a lack of capital.

I don't know how to make sound.

I have no money, even if I knew how to do it.

The burgeoning movie circuits would buy cartoons only in series of 10, 12 or 20, believing that

moviegoers had to become accustomed to them.

So Paul makes a great point that the same belief dominates dominated television in the

early 21st century, where you get TV seasons, right?

Disney lived from hand to mouth.

Five dollars was a lot of money time at this time, and he often had to borrow cash, but

he was determined to keep abreast of what was a rapidly evolving technology, both in

animation and in moving photography.

At the beginning of the book, there was that line, all creative individuals build on the

work of their predecessors.

Okay.

No one creates an vacuum.

We see that here.

In 1917, this guy named Max Fleischer makes the first movie that combines moving photography

of actors with animated cartoon characters.

Disney sees that.

So six years later, Disney uses this combination of himself, and he makes this cartoon or this

movie called Alice in Cartoonland.

I guess movies are not the right.

It's like a short, I think it's like six minutes long or eight minutes long, something

like that.

So like a short film, I guess.

So around the same time, Disney's original company, the Laugh of Graham Corporation,

made short animation films, animation plus photography films, and they would also create

advertising for brands using cartoon figures.

And so that is the actual company that it's going to go bankrupt.

So it goes bankrupt from after the bankruptcy, all he has left was the camera and a print

of Alice to use as a sample.

So what does he do?

He just takes on freelance work to survive before he's going to start another company.

He's around 22 or 23 years old when his first company goes bankrupt.

So it says he was forced to disband his team and use his camera for freelance news photography,

making Kansas City his base and selling his footage to all these other, I'm not going

to name the companies, there's a bunch of different names, and he's selling the footage

to a bunch of these companies, and these companies are all located in Hollywood.

This is an undoubtedly low part of his life.

He also took on private jobs.

He would film weddings and funerals.

He'd make $10 or $15 to film a wedding or a funeral.

He often had so little money that he could only eat canned beans.

And so he realizes, I got to get out of here, I got to go to where like I'm making the little

money I'm making is coming from these new studios, right?

So it says his contracts with new studios persuaded him that he had to establish himself

and a new production company in Hollywood.

So he sold his camera and with the proceeds, he bought himself a ticket and he headed to

Hollywood with $40.

He's got $40 to his name, and it was interesting.

He traveled on the famous train California Limited in July 23rd, or excuse me, July 1923.

And if you think about all that happens after he moves to California, it shouldn't be called

California Limited.

It takes many years for this to happen.

She called California Unlimited.

The early 1920s full of hope and daring were a classic period of American free enterprise,

and for anyone interested in the arts, Hollywood was a rapidly expanding focus of innovation.

He has $40.

He has the initiative.

He's like, I need to go where I think is best for my career that does not mean it's going

to be immediately easy.

This is a crazy thing.

I got about to read to you like all these companies, imagine having the chance to hire

a young Walt Disney like, nah, I'm good.

The early 1920s full of hope and daring were a classic period for American free enterprise

and for anyone interested in the arts, Hollywood is a rapidly expanding focus of innovation.

But Disney had a very hard time getting work of any description in the movie industry,

trudging from studio to studio and borrowing money just to eat.

He had to go back to making animated cartoons.

Now this is incredible.

This is the relentless resourcefulness of a young Walt Disney.

You will find stories like the one about to share with you in a lot of the biographies

of filmmakers.

I'll leave the links down below.

George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, write all their biographies, done

episodes on them.

They all have stories like this in their biographies.

It's why filmmakers are one of my favorite people to read biographies.

I have actually a bunch coming very soon, a bunch more.

He also used his Alice sample to get a series going.

The camera cost him $5 a day.

He then drew cartoons around her.

So the actual actress, right, the physical person, he organized a group of local children

and paid each 50 cents a day to act skits around Alice.

And he trained his great-uncle Robert's dog to be part of the fun.

This is what you do when you have no money.

You're forced to be creative, forced to be resourceful.

Each reel consisted of 900 feet of film, of real children and the dog, and 300 feet of

animated cartoon.

Disney wrote the script, built the sets himself.

His studio was a small back room in a real estate office that he rented for $5 a month.

He made all of the props he needed himself.

He produced and directed and filmed it himself.

And then he sat down and drew the animation himself.

The first movie cost him $750 all in, and he sold it East, meaning to New York Syndicate,

who's going to wind up screwing them later on, for $1,500.

This was his first real profit in his entrepreneurial career.

Now another interesting part of this essay.

This is on the similarities of Disney and Picasso, and the immense contribution to your

collaborators, only keeping the very best people around you because they're going to

influence the quality of your work and the trajectory of your business.

He made a contract for a dozen movies, and the first six he made entirely by himself.

Or excuse me, he had a contract for a dozen movies.

So he makes the first six by himself.

He's like, all right, then I need help.

He goes to this guy named Herb, he eye works.

He was working back with him in Kansas City, so he brings out eye works to Hollywood to

help him with the animation.

There is a curious similarity between his work with eye works and Picasso's collaboration

with this, I'm not going to pronounce this guy's name, George Brack, in the invention

of cubism nearly two decades earlier.

Okay, don't worry about the name.

So closely did Picasso and Brack share their ideas and techniques that a few years later,

it was sometimes impossible to tell which of them had produced a certain canvas, or if

both of them had.

Neither painter could tell either.

In some cases, the mystery remains to this day.

Now, why is that important?

Because you see the same thing in Disney's career, that's why I'm bringing it up to you.

Equally, the precise roles of Walt and eye works in the early successful animations can

no longer be determined with certainty.

It is clear that the basic ideas came chiefly from Disney, but many of the most effective

touches sprang out of the animation process himself.

And here, eye works was important.

Now, here's another comparison to Picasso that I would have never drawn this connection.

It's the same, I guess, trade of human nature or this like insatiable desire that humans

have for novelty.

Actually, it's going to lead to the creation of the greatest thing that Walt, like the

foundational character, Mickey Mouse, right?

So it says it's impossible to exaggerate the need for a producer like Disney to respond

quickly to changes in public tastes and there in the public's need for novelty.

Just as Picasso and Paris went from one phase to another to cater to the insatiable appetite

for ideas of the art world, so Disney had to adapt and change his cartooning.

The audiences were tiring of Alice and they needed more characters.

They wanted a new character.

Disney invents a rabbit called Oswald.

And Oswald was so successful that it invited competition.

The problem is he doesn't have the resources to fight back with competition.

All he can fight back with is creativity.

He's got to innovate his way out of this problem.

It's another way to think about what's happening here.

Oswald was a success, but Disney found that once his shorts acquired a reputation, other

studios bigger and with more capital would raid his staff and steal his animators by

offering them more money.

He could frustrate this process by inventing a new character.

The result was a mouse.

And so 30 years after where we are in the story, Disney would later say, I love this

idea.

He says, I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing, that it all started with a mouse.

And it also started with a terrible name for the mouse.

And so God bless Walt Disney's wife.

He chose, Disney chose the name Mortimer Mouse, but his wife Lily objected.

And so that is when Disney picked the name Mickey.

And why would Walt Disney 30 years later say, hope we never forget that it all started with

a mouse?

Another comparison to Picasso.

Picasso had, in fact, turned the bodies and faces of his women models into characters.

Cubist cartoon characters animated awfully enough by contempt and even hatred.

Right?

The evil version of Disney.

But Disney produced a mouse animated by admiration and even by love.

It is significant that Mickey Mouse in the year of his greatest popularity, which is

1933, received over 800,000 fan letters, the largest ever recorded in show business at

any time in any century.

Think about that.

An animated character received more fan letters than any other celebrity or known person in

one period ever.

There in late Disney's genius, he could make people, especially children, love his creations.

And so I would summarize what he's trying to teach us about the difference between Picasso

and Disney as this is love versus hate.

You might get temporary attention by engaging in hate and negativity, but a durable, beloved

brand can only be rooted in one thing and that is love.

And to fall in love with something takes time.

So there's an element of what I'm about to read to you is the importance of time, right?

Because you look at what Mickey Mouse looked like when he first invented and when he comes

to be lovable.

It's like, oh, big difference.

But also Disney realized that, you know, he still has no money.

So after you speed as a competitive advantage.

The earliest Mickey does not look lovable to our eyes nearly a century later.

His jerkiness was technical rather than deliberate.

Remember, this is the very beginning of animation.

With every month that passed, animation was becoming more complex and Disney to outpace

his competitors forced the pace.

Let's go.

He used 16 drawings to make Mickey move once.

About 14,400 drawings went into a 10 minute cartoon short.

So he uses speed and he also, something that Disney does his entire career.

And in common with a bunch of other great filmmakers, is he's always jumping on the

new technology of his day.

Warner Brothers released the first integrated sound picture called the Jazz Singer.

This I think is 1927.

Disney jump for joy at the idea of talkies.

Those are the funny name of movies with sound sounds ridiculous to us now, but at that time,

that's what they're called.

So Disney's jumping for joy at the idea of talkies because he had always believed sound

to be the true third dimension of movie cartooning.

Disney had no sound equipment and proceeded on a do it yourself basis, which is a model

of entrepreneurial improvisation.

Yes, it is.

Amen.

He got a person to play a harmonica.

He bought a nightclub, noisemaker, cowbells, tin pans, washboards for scrubbing noises.

So he's just essentially trying to build this, you know, with very inexpensive tools, I guess

is the way you would think about this, right?

So I'm reading all that, not so you memorize all that, but the main idea here is like this

is just an unbelievable level of resourcefulness.

I just heard Kevin Kelly on the podcast, Invest Like the Best.

It's episode 334.

I highly recommend listening to that episode.

I think Kevin Kelly's got a very unique way of just a philosophy in life.

I took a bunch of notes on that episode, but one of my favorite things that he says is

like, you know, he studied the history of creativity to a great degree and he's like,

listen, lack of resources is actually a feature.

It is the benefit.

And for our purposes, like that's why, you know, new smaller companies can always, you

know, usually out-compete and overtake larger companies if they're remaining focused because

the lack of resources forces them to become more creative.

Sam Walton talks about this even in his business, the fact that Walmart starts out undercapitalized.

Not part of a large company.

And so he said that constraints were actually his friend because it forced him to learn,

it forced him to become resourceful.

And then this accumulation of knowledge that Disney is forced to learn, like that becomes

an asset he can use for his entire life.

And that's also, I think, illustrates just his, he's just completely dedicated.

I think I have another highlight here that comes from a different book.

It talks about, you know, he never, the secret to his success was he was never doing things

out to make money.

He was just obsessed with making the absolute best product he could.

I took a great deal of effort, time and rerecording to get the system working smoothly.

And by the time the composite print was made with fully synchronized sound, the Disney

brothers had run out of cash and even had to sell their father's car.

But here is the end result.

The first sound movie using the mouse was called Steamboat Willie.

I think a lot of people will be familiar with what that is even, you know, hundreds later.

And it came out in 1928.

It was a huge success, not only because of Disney's technical triumphs of synchronized

animation, but because of the ingenuity of what Disney got the mouse to do in producing

noises.

Therein lay his extraordinary gift, the imagination, what did Napoleon tell us a few weeks ago?

Imagination rules the world.

The imagination to enter into the head of a half mouse, half man and devise weird and

hilarious things to do as the mouse steered a boat down the river.

Disney had invented the sound cartoon, a combination of imaginative drawing, scripting, and engineering

science.

It was and remains a wonderful example of creativity, the birth of a new art form.

That is the startup paradox.

This was not done by better funded competitors.

By the end of that decade, Mickey Mouse was the best known figure in movies.

Here's a little fun fact for you.

Mickey's voice was originally done by Disney himself.

And so if you study the very early parts of Walt Disney's career and as, you know, he

starts out with not any money, not resources.

He accumulates resources.

The source of that inspiration remains the same.

It's nature.

This underlined Walt's emphasis on the study of nature for inspiration.

The studio, his studio, regarded nature as the one and only true source of Disney art.

Animators led by Disney himself constantly watched movies of animals and live animals

were brought into the studio for study.

It was Disney's view that nature was a richer source of humor than human imagination.

What his and his team supplied was just the anthropomorphism.

Back to the fact that Disney always embraced latest technology, he regarded color as a

godsend, almost as crucial sound because it enormously increased realism.

He experimented widely with color systems before he adopted Technicolor and signed an

exclusive contract with its manufacturer.

He spent money free at freely and as fast as it came in, there's another line in one

of the biographies I've read on Disney in the past where him and his brother.

So, you know, creative aspect of the business, it comes from Walt's head and the finance

part of the business is his brother Roy.

And they're having a fight about this and he has a great line where he's like fighting

with his brother for money where he says something like, I'm innovating, I'll tell you what it

costs when I'm finished.

So that's a great, like to me in my mind, when you read about Disney, you study, it

was like, oh, that's Disney through and through.

Disney always bought the best paint, the best film and other materials.

He insisted on reanimation, however time consuming and expensive until the results were right.

In the early 1930s, Disney's production costs for an eight minute movie were $13,000 and

over at a time when rival studios spent a maximum of $2,500.

Disney put excellence before any other consideration, Disney put excellence before any other consideration.

There's a great line in this biography that I've read, this line I've read multiple times

and here's the quote, if you want to know the real secret of Walt's success, it's that

he never tried to make money.

He was always trying to make something that he could have fun with or be proud of.

Incoming cash instantly went for investment in new technology and better artists.

The 1930s was not totally unlike the big European studios of the 17th century.

Disney hired the best art history doesn't repeat human nature does, right?

Just doing the same thing that was happening, what 300 years, 400 years before him, Disney

hired the best artists he could get and gave them tasks to the limits of their capacities.

The studio was a highly creative interactive place, tense and sometimes hysterical as new

ideas were presented, debated, boosted and discarded.

There were arguments and animators sometimes left after disputes.

Disney and his studio by trial and error and of industry and skill acquired the art of

animating figures making them seem as real as humans on the stage in essentially the

same way as the Florentine painters learned to reproduce people in fresco or on walls.

What took the early Renaissance painters to, this is such a great, this is like the most

Paul Johnson paragraph ever, what took the early Renaissance painters two centuries,

the Disney studio did in a decade, but then Disney's animators had the whole tradition

of Western art on which to build, just as the countless animators of today are inspired

by Disney's work in the 1930s.

And so then we get to the point where the technology finally catches up and he's able

to invent yet another new art form, this is the note, let me read it and then I'll read

the note that I left to myself to like to apply to my own work.

So it says the arrival of color, the improvement of background technique, the perfection of

the soundtrack, allowing high quality orchestra music and singing and financial factors persuaded

Disney to break out of the limitations of the funny cartoons and make a feature length

fairy tale.

So it was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The idea was Disney's of course, he had been preparing for human animation for some time

by holding live classes at his studio.

Wait for, this is what I left myself, wait for the technology to catch up, ask yourself

what is possible today that I could not do a year ago?

Start practicing that and wait for the technology to catch up.

These ideas that are now culminating, Snow White comes out in 19, I think he starts working

on 1934, comes out in 1938.

He had been thinking about some of these ideas for over 18 years up until that point.

He just again, I know what I want to do, can't figure out how to do it yet.

And this is the result, the movie introduced numerous artistic and technical innovations

that transformed the art of movie cartooning.

It involved over two million drawings and formed the largest single project in the history

of draftsmanship.

That is insane.

Which had begun 40,000 years before in the caves of France and Spain.

Again, that's why you got to love Paul Johnson, he's a very Paul Johnson, Paul Johnson might

be the only person that would write a sentence like that.

It was a huge critical and commercial success and marked the point at which animation achieved

maturity as an art form.

He was the most, the most financially successful thing I think he'd ever done by a long shot

up until that point.

But the crazy thing is, I have another, I went through my read wise and was searching

for, I know Steve talked about Walt quite a bit and so I've been thinking about that

and I'm also compiling it for the research of this other Walt Disney episode.

I told you I'm working on, you know, that thing might not be ready for like another

month or two.

I have to figure it out.

But I've just been like seeping myself on this little by little.

And what's fascinating is like Steve Jobs talked about, hey, you know, once they figured

out Pixar wasn't going to produce, they were trying to sell hardware and then try to sell

software to other companies like, no, no, we're just going to go all in on developing the

first computer animated movie.

So Steve does this like intense like research into the industry, like how lucrative is animation,

couldn't find anything because he says, you can't go to the library and check out a book

called the business model of animation because there's only one company's ever done it well,

which is Disney and they don't want anybody else to know how lucrative it was.

And so he's discovering as he's researching this how lucrative it is.

And he's like, this is insane, because again, this is you hold on as long as possible because

you have no idea what new technology will be invented in the future that unlocks value

in the business that you're creating.

So at the time that he's doing this research, people are buying a ton of like VHS, VHS tapes

and DVDs.

And he's like, wait a minute, Jobs says good storytelling can last for decades.

I don't think you'll be able to boot up any computer today in 20 years, but Snow White

has sold 28 million copies and it's a 60 year old production.

He's talking about the fact that they sold, when it was released on DVD or tape, I can't

remember which one, they sold 28 million copies of a movie that they made 60 years ago.

That is insane.

I think he put the number on it.

I don't, I think he's like, they made like a quarter billion dollars on that.

So it's just, it's just wild.

I love how all these things relate and like, you know, everybody's learning from each other

and studying it just, it brings a big smile on my face.

All right, let's go back to this.

Disney's instinct was always to get back to nature, whereas Picasso's was to get away

from it.

The success of Snow White financed a series of four big feature movies.

All of them were made by Disney between the years 1938 and 1944.

So they're talking about Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi.

All of those movies wanted to be massively successful and every single one of them explored

natural phenomenon.

So let's skip ahead to when he's going to invent another unique art form.

During World War II, Disney had brooded on the possibility of creating these worlds,

meaning his animated worlds, not in the studio, but in real life.

He thus produced the idea of a Disney park constructed around a theme.

He recreated his, this is incredible, he recreated his scenery in three dimensions in the open

air and invited the public to enter.

This first Disneyland opened in 1955.

So I want to pause here to tell you two things.

One, if you're interested, I'd order this book immediately.

I did an entire episode.

There's this book called Disney's Land, Walt Disney and the Invention of the amusement

park that changed the world.

I'd read the whole book.

Listen to the podcast if you haven't.

It's episode 158.

I think it's excellent.

The book is fantastic.

I've given that book to quite a few friends.

It's all about the way he thought about Disneyland, but this is the other thing that came to my

mind, which is like really important.

It's like, listen, we want to move fast.

We will obviously speed as a competitive advantage in early days of your company, but you want

to maintain a speed that you can last for decades.

Why?

Because nobody creates their best product when they're 20, 25, 30.

How old was Steve Jobs when the iPhone came out?

He'd been making products, fantastic products for three decades, but his greatest creation

came three and a half decades into his life.

Disneyland was by far Walt Disney's greatest creation and he was 54.

Disney was 54 when he made his greatest creation.

If he had lived, he winds up dying, I think at 66, from lung cancer.

He smoked constantly, smoked cigarettes all the time.

If he had lived, he'd been 71 when Disney World opened, which is like the, you know,

he's like, oh, I proved my, kind of like my proof of concept was Disneyland and he took

it to like a much greater scale and grandiosity in Disney World.

He would have been 71.

I love thinking about that, like go and study somebody's career.

When did they do their best work?

Think about it as the, as an entrepreneur and a creator and an innovator, the stuff that

is in the 54 year old brain of Walt Disney compared to like the 25 year old brain.

Knowledge compounds, just like everything else.

And just imagine if you could get inside that brain and that experience.

I experienced this to some degree when I got to sit down and have a two hour long launch

with Sam Zell.

You know, he's 81 years old time, just, I didn't know, but like, you know, happened

a few months, unfortunately before he passed away and just the way his brain was working

and the stuff that was in it and the business knowledge that came out of it effortlessly.

The guy had been seeing deals and thinking about entrepreneurship for six decades, like

me sitting across from him is like, we're a different species.

It's incredible to think about the compounded business knowledge that was in his brain.

Unfortunately enough, you know, he tried to document as much as he could in his autobiography

and speeches, you know, some degree to the podcast.

That's why he was, I don't know if I said this publicly, but I was supposed to have dinner

with him.

I was supposed to have dinner with him a few, I had lunch with him and then like two months

later I was supposed to have dinner with him because he literally wanted to give me more

content to make an episode about what he learns so I could share it with you because he was

like adamant about sharing everything you learn with future generations of entrepreneurs.

Personally, you end up getting sick and then, you know, a few weeks later passed away.

So just this idea, it's like, man, like that is such a fascinating idea.

It's if the amount of compounded experience and knowledge that was in like a 54 year old

Disney, I don't know, I just got to this part and it really like struck and like had to

sit here for a while and really think about what like it just resonated with me.

So when that happens, I obviously share it with you and hopefully like you find it valuable.

Okay.

This revealed again, going back to Disneyland, you see the theme reappears.

What is his main talent?

They've revealed again, Disney's creative genius for satisfying the human demand for

popular art as entertainment.

And then they make the point.

That's not just, it's not just important because it's serving and, you know, serving

the customers, making somebody else's life better, right?

At the time that he lived.

It's what that influences all the generations and all the entrepreneurs and creators that

come and innovators that come after that, clearly the influence of Disney on the presentation

of visual images in the 20th century and beyond was immense, almost past computation.

Disney himself trained over a thousand artists, almost as many as the most successful art

school in history.

Disney was an entrepreneur and a highly successful one.

The founder of a business, which in his own day employed thousands of people and which

in the first decade of the 21st century survives and flourishes.

Disney pursued his own individual way until his death.

Picasso, on the other hand, set his faith against nature and burrowed within himself.

Paul's about to answer his own question that he started this, who had a greater impact.

Disney worked within nature, stylizing it, anthropomorphizing it and surrealizing it

and ultimately reinforcing it.

That is why Disney's ideas will continue to shine through while the ideas of Picasso,

powerful though they were for much of the 20th century, will gradually fade.

In the end, nature is the strongest force of all.

That is where I'll leave it.

I absolutely loved, I mean, I'm a huge fan of Paul Johnson's writing in general.

I'd buy this book, just this essay alone.

The good thing about the book, I think there's 14 different essays in the book.

You don't have to read it chronologically.

He will reference past ideas from episode, essay two into essay 14 or whatever, but you

really could just pick it up and be like, okay, I just want to learn about Shakespeare

right now.

Let me read about that.

I want to learn about the chapter on Dior and Balenciaga or whatever you're interested

in.

I think Paul Johnson's work speaks for itself.

It's worth the investment of buying the book if you buy the book using the link and include

all his other books too, because I think he writes these fantastic like 180, 200 page

biographies.

Anyways, I'll leave all those links down below too.

If you buy this book or any of the other books, you'll be supporting the podcast at

the same time.

One more thing, make sure you're already on my personal email list.

I sent out an email of the top 10 highlights that I do from every book.

I will leave a link down below.

It shows a sample of what it looks like, and then you just enter in your email and you'll

get every book that I do from there on in.

That is 310 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.