#310 Walt Disney and Picasso

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/b9f13f2ddbfe076e

The twentieth century saw a transformation of our visual experiences
Comparable to the blossoming of the Renaissance in the fifteenth 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
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.
Умор сук сво.
Then Pablo Picasso
And Walt Disney.
A comparison of the two
Is instructive.
Both were outstanding creative individuals, first and foremost.
Each embrace 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 studio.
And in the familiar capital of art.
Paris.
Disney on the other hand
Was of the new world.
A midwesterner
who eagerly embraced both America's entrepreneurial evervesence
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
of the popular arts.
Think 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 twenty first 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 gonna 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 Twain, Shakespeare, Christian Dior, Balenciaga, Victor Hugo, T. S. Elliot, Dickens.
But what I wanna 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 gonna 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've probably done episodes, I did episodes on his Winston Churchill biography, his biography on 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 h 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 gonna focus on
His comparison, he's gonna give overviews of both the life of Pablo Picasso
And Walt Disney.
Okay, so let's jump into Picasso.
So he's born in Spain.
Um and he 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 fourteen.
And then his father put him
uh for a limited time at one of Barcelona's excellent fine art school.
And then after that, Picasso sets up I on his own as a teenage artist. This is
The next line, this is what a d an incredible writing and a description of Picasso.
I guess I'll I'll tell you up front, it'll be obvious as we go through the highlights and notes today. You can always tell
Like if you read between the lines like what an author thinks.
He's Paul rightfully so.
Uh 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
uh designs his own curriculum. Then it obviously has both benefits
Um and weaknesses.
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 Ravakant, where Naval says
Uh this had a huge effect on me when I discovered it the first time.
Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you'll be unstoppable.
David Ogy a few weeks ago expressed this very the same idea as Navall.
He called it uh 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 happen in the early life of Pablo Picasso.
One, he experiences intense competition. This is gonna 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 start out imitating other people.
Until we develop our own style.
So he sees what Casis is doing.
He's like, Oh, I'll do that too.
Casa superb full length charcoal portraits of people in Barcelona inspired Picasso.
At the age of eighteen 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 portress invited comparison
With Casas.
And are manifestly inferior.
And so Picasso is a deeply thought individual, as we're gonna 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 nineteen oh four he effectively left Spain for good, chiefly to get away from
Life under Casas's 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. I 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, there are 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
It's the the where is the best physical location on the planet for the work I'm doing?
And whatever that answer is, go there.
And so this may be my favorite attribute, my favorite thing about Picasso.
It's gonna remind me, one of my favorite quotes. I read this book, uh the 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 gotta read
you know, highly recommend reading Les Schwab's uh autobiography.
And in that book
Les has this great la this great lie that I try 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. Well, 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 ninety two.
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 headdresses 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 fav I I 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 go in 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've had thirty nine or forty separate episodes.
Based on Steve Jobs or the people that inspired him.
Picasso's the the glaring
missing piece and
I've
Right.
Two or three biographies, and I just cannot
I can't find a great one.
So I've I've a bunch of highlights and
in like past research on Picasso that I haven't included in any podcast. And so
One of my favorite quotes about just the insane amount of output.
that Picasso had.
Uh I have saved it says.
Picasso lived for a total of thirty three thousand four hundred and three days.
With twenty six thousand and seventy five published works, that means that Picasso average one new piece of artwork every day of his life and
From age twenty.
Until his death at age ninety one.
He created something new.
Every day.
For seventy one years.
And so this insane level of productivity also created an insane level of wealth for Picasso. Picasso was a millionaire.
by nineteen fourteen 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 of mine that intelligence manifests in many different ways.
So
You know, it's not at all clear how literate
Uh, Picasso actually was
that he said uh to him that writing a letter was more difficult and took more time.
an effort than him just doing a painting.
And so his intelligence wasn't academic, it was creative.
But if Paco'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, right? It is a compelling attractiveness or charm.
that it can inspire devotion in others.
on episode three oh nine, the one I just did on Arnold Schwinger when he was young, right? They said in there's a line in the book that says
he had a PhD in charisma. The reason that's a fascinating

Is because
It was written by his girlfriend of six years, I think from like tw age twenty to twenty six or twenty one to twenty seven, 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 gonna immediately like them.
Like him, you're gonna be drawn to him and you'll do whatever he wants you to do.
And so both Picasso and Arnold use this all
There there's a a lot of
uh sex in both of these books.
Uh in in
in this chapter or this section on Picasso. It's gonna go into way more detail, I'm gonna read, but also in that book
that Arnold's girlfriend wrote. So they used 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.
Let's define mesmeric, causing a person to become completely transficed and un 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 you're gonna see this very there's gonna be like a 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 power.
There's this line uh on the book that he did on episode three oh five.
Uh the book Working by Robert Carrow.
And he says po it's a book on power, essentially. Like his entire fifty 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 poss the person in possession of that power.
And what we see is a true revelation of Picasso. It's a 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 interests, his ambitions, nobody else had to be considered.
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.
Um, his distorted paintings of women are closely linked to the pleasure he got from hurting them. This is why what I miss. Like I don't I don't need to read any more about this guy. Uh his most beautiful and gifted mistress
uh 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.
Uh, Picasso having set up the fight would calmly go on painting.
And 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. It's like I want 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 the historical evidence shows again and again.
That evil and creative genius can exist side by side in the same person. That is terrifying.
Let me 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 all s to be so all per
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 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. Equally 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 the
I I would argue maybe the most important
What if you only took one lesson.
From this crazy
Odyssey that you and I are on, right? He's like this reading hundreds of biographies and reading every single possible thing about history entrepreneurs.
Uh making podcasts about'em.
Uh
Compiling twenty thousand notes.
and highlights on this and then rereading those over and over again.
If you only took one thing from this entire thing is 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 law. 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 or 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're so
Inherently selfish.
And
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 gonna come from, you know, I'm gonna destroy marriages.
I mean how many of these people
It's extremely common. Like I'm working on another uh
Uh uh another episode right now.
That's blowing my mind.
And the guy's un he's a genius, straight up genius.
unbelievable per like talented person.
And you read about it, it's like oh like yeah, this makes sense that this guy's been married five times.
I completely understand why that is. So
Th this is why I'm such a big fan of Paul Johnson.
Because he just heard.
He his writing and his synthesis of this information where he just hits you with this
idea. It's just one paragraph.
That's
It will give you and 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 sycophanti 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.
Spring
From a deep
Unease of spirit.
His last years
Or punctuated.
By family quarrels 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. It shows painfully how even vast creative achievement
An 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 but here's Picasso. We have an overview, we have an idea. I think what
You and I just ran through.
Even if you had never read anything else or even knew who he was like heard of Picasso before, which is you know, 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
Yeah, I think
Undoubtedly, Walt Disney's one of the most admired entrepreneurs ever.
You gotta put'em if there's a Mount Rushmore and you know
of entrepreneurs, like you put'em up there. And I don't mean necessarily just financial achievement, although the financial achievement, you know, compounded decades after he died.
But his approach to his work and just s the sheer talent.
That this individual
Possessed. It's it's incredible.
Walt Disney like Picasso began his working life early.
But 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's I didn't I didn't and I've read three or four books on Walt Disney so far.
And
Maybe I knew it at one point, but I
I feel like I never maybe never 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.
Where 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.
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 dish distributing business.
And made Walt work very hard at all hours. By the age of eighteen, 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 I what's most 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 gonna 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 wanna be my own master.
He was upset like you know, all of his guest entrepreneurs.
Obsessive control.
By the age of twenty, he had already run his own company, gone bankrupt bankrupt, and then set up again. Second, he wanted to get into the art.
and craft of animation.
Okay, so eighteen year old Disney's making his living as a newspaper cartoonist at the same time
People are taking
uh newspaper cartoons or cartoons of all times.
And they're animating them. So they call them 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 kinda like an opening act.
to accompany like longer movies that are re 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.
Yeah.
Not only uh 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 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 ten, twelve, or twenty, believing that movie goers had to become accustomed to them.
So it
Paul makes a great point that the same belief dominates dominated television in the early twenty first century.
And where you get t T V seasons, right?
Disney lived
From hand to mouth. Five dollars was a lot of money to him 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 in a vacuum. We see that here. In nineteen seventeen, 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 combat combination himself.
And he makes this this uh cartoon or this movie.
Called Alice in Cartoon Land.
I would I guess movies 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.
Um, so around the same time Disney's original company, the Laugh of Gram Corporation, made short animation films.
uh animation plus photography films and
They would also uh
create advertising for brands using uh cartoon figures.
And so that is the actual company that it's gonna go bankrupt.
Um 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? So he just takes on free work freelance work to survive.
before he's gonna start another company. He's around twenty two.
are twenty three years old when his first company goes bankrupt.
Uh, 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 gonna name the companies, it'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 ten or fifteen dollars to film a wedding or a funeral.
Um he often had so little money that he could only eat canned beans.
And so he realizes I gotta get out of here. I gotta go to where like I'm making the little money I'm making is coming from these
New Studios, right? So it says his contract 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 forty dollars.
He's got forty dollars to his name.
And it was interesting. I uh he travelled on the famous train
California Limited.
In July twenty third.
Or excuse me, July nineteen.
twenty three. If you think about all that happens after he moves to California, it shouldn't be calling limited.
Takes many years for this to happen. She call it called California Unlimited.
The early nineteen twenties 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 forty bucks.
His initiative is like I need to go where I think this is best for my career, that does not mean it's going to be immediately easy.
This is a crazy thing. Like I'm about to read to you, like
All these companies.
Imagine having the chance to hire a young Walt Disney be like, nah, I'm good.
The early nineteen twenties, uh, full of hope and daring, were a classic period for America 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.
Uh I'll leave the links down below. George Lucas.
Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg. I've 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
uh people to read biographies. I have actually a bunch coming very soon.
Uh a bunch more.
Uh he also used his Alice sample to get a series going.
The camera cost him five dollars a day.
He then drew cartoons around her, so the act the actual actress, right? The physical person.
He organized a group of local children and each and paid each fifty 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 nine hundred feet of film.
Of real children and the dog.
And three hundred 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 five dollars 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 seven hundred and fifty dollars all in, and he sold it east.
meaning to New York City syndicate, who's gonna wind up screwing him later on.
For fifteen hundred dollars. 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 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.
All right.
Then I need
Help.
E I works.
He was working back with him in Kansas City, so he brings out IWorks
To Hollywood to help him with the animation. There is a curious similarity between his work with Irworks and Picasso's collaboration.
With the
This I don't like where pronounce this guy say.
George S.
George Breck.
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?
'Cause you see the same thing in Disney's career. That's what I'm bringing up to you.
Equally the precise roles of Walt and Iworks.
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 Irks was important.
Now here's another comparison to Picasso that I would have never drawn this connection.
The same thing.
I guess trait of human nature or this like insatiable desire that humans have for novelty actually is gonna lead to the creation of the greatest thing that
Walt, uh 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 taste and the and there in the public's need for novelty.
Just as Picasso and Paris went from one phase to another to c to cater to the insatiable appetite for ideas of the art world, so Disney had to adapt and change his cartooning.
The audience is
uh were tiring of Alice and they 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 gotta innovate his way out of this problem.
That's another way to think about what's happening here.
Oswald was success, but Disney found that once his shot his shorts acquired a reputation.
Other studios.
bigger and with more capital.
Would raid his staff and still his animators.
by offering them more money. He could frustrate this process
By inventing a new character.
The result
was a mouse and so
thirty years after the where we are in the story, Disney would later say
I love this idea. He says, uh I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing.
Then 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.
Right.
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, thirty years later, say, Hope we never forget that it all started with a mouse? Another comparison to Picasso. Picasso had in fact
Turn the bodies and faces of his women models.
into caricatures.
Cubist cartoon characters.
animated awfully enough by contempt and even hatred.
She's like the the evil
Version of Disney.
But Disney produced a mouse animated by admiration.
And even by love.
It is a s it is significant that Mickey Mouse
in the year of his greatest popularity, which is nineteen thirty three.
received over eight hundred thousand 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.

Ever.
Therein lay Disney's genius. He could make people, especially children,
Love his creations.
And so what I would summarize what he's trying to teach us about the difference between Picasso and
Disney is 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 a element of what I'm about to read to is the the importance of time, right? Because you look at what Mickey Mouse looked like when you first invented and when he looked comes to like be lovable, it's like oh big difference.
But also Disney realized that you know, he has no still has no money.
So I have to use 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, he's this is the very beginning of animation.
Uh, within uh with every month that passed, animation was becoming more complex and Disney to outpace his competitors forced the pace. Let's go.
He used sixteen drawings to make Mickey move once.
Авартез
four hundred drawings went into a ten minute cartoon short.
So he uses speed and he also something that Disney does this his his entire career. He has this in in common with a bunch of other great filmmakers.
is he's always jumping on the new technology of his day. Warner Brothers uh released
The first integrated sound picture called the Jazz Singer. This I think is nineteen twenty seven.
Disney jump for joy at the idea of talkies.
Is there
the the funny name of movies with sound. Sounds ridiculous to us now, but at that time that's what they were called.
So Dizzy'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 uh a person to play a harmonica.
He bought
Uh nightclub noise maker cowbells, tin pans, washboards for scrubbing noises.
So he's just essentially trying to build this, you know, with

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 uh Kevin Kelly.
on in the podcast Invest Like the Best. It's episode three thirty four. Highly recommend
uh listening to that episode. I think Kevin Kelly's a he's got a very unique way
of just a philosophy on life. I took a bunch of notes.
on that uh episode. But one of my favorite things that he says is like, you know, he's he studied the 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 remain focused.
because the lack of resources a focus forces them to become cre more creative. Sam Walton talks about this.
Even in his business.
The fact that Walmart starts uh starts out.
undercapitalized he w 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 h his entire life. And it's also, I think, illustrates just his.
He's just completely dedicated. I think I have a another um highlight here that comes from a different book. Talks about, you know, he never the secret to his success was that he ne he was never doing things out to make money. He was just obsessed with making the absolute best product he could.
Uh it took a great deal of effort, time, and re-recording 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 Willy.
I think m a lot of people will be familiar with what that is even, you know, hundred years later.
And it came out in nineteen twenty eight. 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.
There in 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 D 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
Waltz
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 D uh 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 in normalcy increased realism.
He experimente widely with color systems before he adopted technicolor.
and sign an exclusive contract with its manufacturer. He spent money free at
Freely.
And as fast as it came in, there's another line.
uh 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 over 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 w like to me in my mind.
I when you read about Disney you study and it's like oh that that's a 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 nineteen thirties, Disney's production costs
for an eight minute movie worth thirteen thousand dollars and over.
At a time when rival studios spent a maximum
of twenty five hundred.
Disney put
Excellent.
before any other consideration. Disney put excellence before any other consideration.
There's a great line in this biography that I've read w the 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 nineteen thirties was not
Totally unlike the big European studios.
of the seventeenth century.
Disney hired the best art h history doesn't repeat, human nature does, right?
Just doing the same thing that
was happening.
What, three hundred years, four hundred 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 learn 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 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 nineteen thirties.
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. Uh let me read it and then I'll read the note that I left to myself to like apply to my own work. So it says the arrival of color.
the improvement of background technique, the perfection of the soundtrack.
Uh 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. The result 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 another 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 cumulating
Snow White comes out in nineteen I think he starts working on nineteen thirty four, comes out in nineteen thirty eight.
He had been thinking about the
some of these ideas for over eighteen 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 forty thousand years before in the caves of France and Spain.
Again, that's why you gotta love Paul Johnson. He's
That's a very Paul Johnson Paul Johnson might be the only person that 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 it 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 um I wrote my read wise
And was searching for uh I know Steve talked about Wall quite a bit. And so I've been thinking about that and and I'm
also compiling it for the research of this other Walt Disney episode I told you I'm working out.
Are working on.
You know, I that thing might not be ready for like another month or two, I have to figure it out. But
Um, I've just been like seeping myself on this uh little by little.
And
What what's fascinating is like uh Steve Jobs talked about, hey, you know, once they they figured out
Pixar wasn't gonna produce
Uh they were they were trying to sell hardware and then trying to sell software to other companies like no no we're just gonna go all in on developing the first computer animated movie.
So Steve does this like intense
uh like research into the industry, like how lucrative is is animation, couldn't find anything because
He says uh
You can't uh you can't go
to the the library and check out a 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 y you hold on as long as possible'cause you have no idea what new technology
will be invented in the future that unloc 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.
Job says good storytelling can last for decades.
I don't think you'll be able to boot up any computer today in twenty years.
But Snow White has sold twenty eight million copies.
And it's a sixty year old production. He's talking about the fact that they sold tw when it was released on DVD or or tape. I can't remember which one.
They sold twenty eight million copies of a movie.
That they made sixty 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 it's just uh it's just wild.
I l I love how all these things relate and like you know, everybody's learning from each other and studying. It just it it brings a big smile on my face.
Alright, 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 nineteen thirty eight and nineteen forty four. So they're talking about Pinocchio.
Fantasia.
Dumbo and Bambi.
All of those movies.
Wind up being 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 Two, 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.
construc 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.
His first Disneyland
Open in nineteen
fifty five.
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
uh the world.
I'd read the whole book. Listen to the podcast if you haven't. It's episode one fifty eight. I think it's a excellent.
The book is fantastic. I've given that book to quite a few friends.
It's all about
The way he thought about Disney.
But this is the other thing that came to my mind.
Which is like really important. It's like
Listen, we wanna move fast. We w obviously speed is a competitive advantage you in early days of your company, but you wanna maintain a speed that you can last for decades.
Why?
Because nobody creates their best product when they're twenty.
Twenty five.
Thirty.
How old was Steve Jobs when the iPhone came out?
He'd been he'd been making products
gr 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 fifty four.
Disney was fifty four.
When he made his greatest creation. If he had lived, he winds up dying, I think, at sixty six. From lung cancer, he smoked.
Constantly? Smoke cigarettes all the time?
If he had lived.
He'd been seventy one when Disney World would o when Disney World opened, which is like the you know, his he's like, Oh I prove my kind of like my proof of concept.
Was Disneyland and he took it to
I don't know, like much
greater scale and grandiosity.
In Disney World, he would have been seventy one.
I love thinking about that. Like
go and study somebody's career. When do they do their best work? Think about if as the as an entrepreneur and as creator,
in an innovator, the stuff that is in the fifty four year old brain of Walt Disney compared to like the twenty five year old brain.
Knowledge compounds just like everything else.
And just imagine if you could get inside that brain and that experience.
I I I experienced this uh to some degree when I got to sit down.
Um and have a two hour long lunch with Sam Zell.
You know, he's eighty one years old the time does sh
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 is like we're d a different species. It's incredible to think about the compounded business knowledge that was in his brain. Luckily enough, you know, he tried to document as much as he could in his autobiography, in speeches.
you know, some degree uh to the podcast. That's why he was we I don't know if I said this publicly, but
Uh
I was supposed to have dinner with him.
He w I was supposed to have dinner with him uh a few I had lunch with him and then like about two months later, I was supposed to have dinner with him'cause he literally wanted to give me more content.
to make an episode about what he learned, so I could share it with you.
'Cause he was like adamant about sharing everything he learned with future generations of entrepreneurs, unfortunately.
wind 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. It's if
the amount of compounded experience and knowledge that it w that was in like a fifty four year old Disney
I don't know, I I 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 resonate with me. So when that happens, I obviously share it with you and hopefully like you you find it valuable. Okay.
This revealed again.
Going back to Disneyland.
You see the theme reappear reappears. What is his main talent? It 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 make you know, serving 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 twentieth century and beyond was immense, almost past computation. Disney himself.
Train 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 twenty first 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 so realizing 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 twentiet century.
Will gradually fade.
In the end.
Nature.
Is the strongest force
Uhhuh.
And that is where I'll leave it. I absolutely loved
I love I mean I'm a huge fan of Paul Johnson's writing in general.
I I'd buy this book.
Just this essay alone. The good thing about the book, I think there's fourteen different essays in the book.
You don't have to read it chronologically. He will reference past like ideas from like you know, episode or episode.
S A two.
into like I say fourteen or whatever.
Um, but you really could just pick it up and be like, Okay, I I just want to learn about Shakespeare right now. Let me read about that. Or I wanna learn about
you know, uh Dior the chapter on Dior and Balenciaga, or whatever you're interested in.
I think Paul Johnson's work speaks for itself. It's worth, you know, the investment of of buying the book. If you buy the book using the link.
And I'll include all his other books too,'cause I think, you know, he he writes this these fantastic like
Hundred and eighty, two hundred page biographies.
Anyways, I'll leave all the those links down below too. If you buy a this book or any of the other books, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.
And one more thing, make sure you're already on my personal email list.
I send out a email of the top ten highlights that I do from every book.
And so I will leave a link down below. It shows like 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.
So that is three hundred and ten books down.
One thousand ago.
And I'll talk to you again soon.