Founders - #310 Walt Disney and Picasso

Starting point is 00:00:00 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, 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 wrest 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

Starting point is 00:01:14 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 Midwesterner who eagerly embraced both America's entrepreneurial effervescence and the new technologies leaping ahead of popular taste. He went from the open spaces to Hollywood. Hollywood

Starting point is 00:01:51 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,

Starting point is 00:02:41 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 going to 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

Starting point is 00:03:18 numbers. I don't 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 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.

Starting point is 00:03:48 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. OK, so let's jump into Picasso. 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 arts school. And then after that, Picasso sets up on his own as a teenage artist.

Starting point is 00:04:18 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. You can always tell, like if you read between the lines, like what an author thinks. Paul, rightfully so, based on his descriptions and what he shows 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

Starting point is 00:04:56 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.

Starting point is 00:05:31 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 can do both,

Starting point is 00:05:53 you'll be unstoppable. David Ogilvie, a few weeks ago, expressed the same idea as Naval. He called it killers and poets, though, that if you can 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 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

Starting point is 00:06:26 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, and 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

Starting point is 00:07:11 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. 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,

Starting point is 00:07:47 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 it's 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 going to remind me 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.

Starting point is 00:08:28 He's like, you got to read, you know, highly recommend reading Les Schwab's autobiography. And in that book, Les has this great line 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, repeat. Well, check out Picasso. Picasso was perhaps the most restless, experimental, and productive artist who ever lived. But everything

Starting point is 00:08:50 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, and 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

Starting point is 00:09:34 episodes on picasso because if you go 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's 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 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, I have saved. It says, Picasso lived for a total of 33,403 days with 26,075 published works. That

Starting point is 00:10:17 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 multimillionaire by the end of World War I. 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 Picasso actually was, that he said to him that writing a letter was more difficult and took more

Starting point is 00:11:11 time and effort than him just doing a painting. And so his intelligence wasn't 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, right? It is a compelling attractiveness or charm that can

Starting point is 00:11:51 inspire devotion in others. On episode 309, the one I just did on Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was young, right? They said, and there's a line in the book that 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 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 in in this chapter or this

Starting point is 00:12:38 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. Let's define 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.

Starting point is 00:13:23 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 who 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

Starting point is 00:13:56 there that gives me chills. 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 interests, his ambitions.

Starting point is 00:14:21 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,

Starting point is 00:15:00 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. I am God.

Starting point is 00:15:25 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. 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. 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 we want a more accurate representation of the world

Starting point is 00:16:04 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 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

Starting point is 00:16:48 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. 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, I would argue, maybe the most important, if you only took one lesson from this crazy odyssey that you and I are on, right? It's like reading hundreds of biographies and reading every single possible thing about history of 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 is like the importance and superhuman powers that intense

Starting point is 00:17:49 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 is 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 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

Starting point is 00:18:32 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, uh, uh, another episode right now that's blowing my mind. And the guy, he's a genius, straight-up genius, unbelievable, talented person. And you read about it and it's like, oh, 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 his writing and his synthesis of this information where he just hits

Starting point is 00:19:06 you with this idea. It's just one paragraph that it gives 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 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 quarrels over money.

Starting point is 00:19:58 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 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 but here's picasso we have an overview we have an idea i think what you and i just ran through even if

Starting point is 00:20:35 you'd never read anything else or even knew 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 is why I think undoubtedly Walt Disney is one of the most admired entrepreneurs ever. 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, 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

Starting point is 00:21:20 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 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:21:57 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 Disneys 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.

Starting point is 00:22:33 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. 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 a second company and Disneyland. So this idea where he's like, I want to be my own master. He was upset, like all of history's

Starting point is 00:23:01 entrepreneurs, 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. At 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.

Starting point is 00:23:36 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, 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

Starting point is 00:24:00 yet disney always felt that animation without sound was dead and that the nature and quality of the sound were the key to success. 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 dominated television in the early 21st century, where you get TV seasons, right? Disney lived from hand to mouth. $5 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.

Starting point is 00:24:48 At the beginning of the book, there was that line, all creative individuals build on the work of their predecessors. No one creates in a 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 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 letter 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-O-Gram Corporation made short animation films, animation plus

Starting point is 00:25:26 photography films and they would also create advertising for brands using cartoon figures and so that is the actual company that is 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

Starting point is 00:25:42 so what does he do? Essentially 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

Starting point is 00:25:59 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 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 I'm making the little money I'm making is coming

Starting point is 00:26:30 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 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. 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 it called California Unlimited. The early 1920s full of hope and daring were a classic period of American free enterprise. And for anyone

Starting point is 00:27:08 interested in the arts, Hollywood was a rapidly expanding focus of innovation. He has 40 bucks. 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'm about to read to you like all these companies. Imagine having the chance to hire a young Walt Disney a crazy thing. I'm 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

Starting point is 00:27:32 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

Starting point is 00:27:41 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 I'm about to share with you

Starting point is 00:27:58 in a lot of the biographies of filmmakers. I'll leave the links down below. George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg. I've read 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

Starting point is 00:28:32 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 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 him later on, for $1,500. This was his first real profit in his entrepreneurial career. Now, another interesting part of this essay,

Starting point is 00:29:26 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 in 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, eat iWorks.

Starting point is 00:29:51 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 iWorks and Picasso's collaboration with this, I'm not going to pronounce this guy's name, George S, George Brack, in the invention of

Starting point is 00:30:07 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 what I'm bringing up to you. Equally, the precise roles of Walt and Iwerks 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

Starting point is 00:30:44 process himself, and here Iwerks was important. Now, here's another comparison to Picasso that I would have never drawn this connection. The same, I guess, trait of human nature, this like insatiable desire that humans have for novelty actually is going to lead to the creation of the greatest thing that Walt, 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 public's need for novelty. Just as Picasso and Paris went from one phase to another

Starting point is 00:31:13 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.

Starting point is 00:31:33 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.

Starting point is 00:32:10 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, right? Disney chose the name Mortimer Mouse, but his wife Lily objected. And so that is when Disney picked 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 caricatures, cubist cartoon characters animated awfully enough by contempt and even hatred, right? She's like the evil version of

Starting point is 00:32:45 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:33:43 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 like be lovable, it's like, oh, big difference. But also Disney realized that, you know, he still has no money.

Starting point is 00:33:56 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, this is the very beginning of animation. With every month that passed, animation was becoming more complex and Disney, to outpace his competitors,

Starting point is 00:34:12 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 used his speed and he also, something that Disney does his entire career, he has this 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 jumped for joy at the idea

Starting point is 00:34:40 of talkies. Those are the funny name of movies with sound. Sounds ridiculous to us now, but at that time, that's what they were 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 nightclub noisemaker cowbells, tin pans, washboards for scrubbing noises. So he's just essentially trying to build this 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

Starting point is 00:35:23 main idea here is 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, he'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

Starting point is 00:35:54 can always, you know, usually outcompete and overtake larger companies if they remain focused because the lack of resources focuses 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 it's also, I think, illustrates just his, he's just completely dedicated. I think I have another

Starting point is 00:36:28 highlight here that comes from a different book. It talks about, you know, he never, the secret to his success was that he was never doing things out to make money. He was just obsessed with making the absolute best product he could. 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 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

Starting point is 00:37:02 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.

Starting point is 00:37:47 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 he starts out with not any money, not resources, he accumulates resources, the source of that inspiration remains the same. It's nature.

Starting point is 00:38:06 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 the latest technology, he regarded color as a godsend, almost as crucial as sound, because it enormously increased realism.

Starting point is 00:38:42 He experimented widely with color systems before he adopted Technicolor and signed an exclusive contract with its manufacturer. He spent money 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.

Starting point is 00:39:21 I 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

Starting point is 00:39:59 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? He's 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,

Starting point is 00:40:34 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 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.

Starting point is 00:41:00 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 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

Starting point is 00:41:45 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 an LLF 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 accumulating 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.

Starting point is 00:42:28 Can't figure out how to do it yet. And this was the result. The movie introduced numerous artistic and technical innovations that transformed the art of movie cartooning. It involved over 2 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. That's a very Paul Johnson.

Starting point is 00:42:50 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 in which animation achieved maturity as an art form. He was 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 ReadWise 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. That thing might not be ready for like another month or two. I have to figure it out.

Starting point is 00:43:23 But I've just been like steeping myself on this uh little by little and what's fascinating is like uh steve jobs talked about hey you know once they they figured out pixar wasn't going to produce uh they were 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 uh like into the industry, like how lucrative is animation. Couldn't find anything because he says you can't you can't go to the library and check out a book called The Business Model of Animation because there's only one company has 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,

Starting point is 00:44:09 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 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.

Starting point is 00:44:44 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, it's just, uh, it's just wild. I love how all these things relate. And like, you know, everybody's learning from each other and studying it. 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.

Starting point is 00:45:17 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 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 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

Starting point is 00:45:58 dimensions in the open air and invited the public to enter. His 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.

Starting point is 00:46:22 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 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.

Starting point is 00:46:36 We obviously speed is 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

Starting point is 00:46:58 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 be 71 when Disney World opened, which is like the, you know, he's like, oh, kind of like my proof of concept was Disneyland. And he took it to a much greater scale and grandiosity in Disney World. He would have been 71.

Starting point is 00:47:34 I love thinking about that. Like, go and study somebody's career. When did they do their best work? Think about 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.

Starting point is 00:47:54 I experienced this to some degree when I got to sit down and have a two-hour long lunch with Sam Zell. You know, he's 81 years old at the time. I didn't know, but it 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,

Starting point is 00:48:17 we're 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 and speeches, you know, to some degree, uh, to the podcast. That's why he was, I don't know if I said this publicly, but, uh, I was supposed to have dinner with him. He, I was supposed to have dinner with him, uh, 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 learned so I could share it with you. Because he was adamant about sharing everything he learned with future generations of entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, he wound up getting sick and then a few weeks later passed away.

Starting point is 00:48:55 So just this idea, it's like, man, that is such a fascinating idea. It's the amount of compounded experience and knowledge that was in 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?

Starting point is 00:49:19 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 important because it's 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 20th century and beyond was immense, almost past computation. Disney himself trained over 1,000 artists,

Starting point is 00:49:52 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.

Starting point is 00:50:32 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. You don't have to read it chronologically. He will reference past like ideas from like, you know, episode or episode essay two into like essay 14 or whatever. But you really could just pick it up and be like, OK, I just want to learn about Shakespeare right now. Let me read about that. Or I want to learn about, you know, the investment of buying the book. If you buy the book using the link, and I'll include all his other books too, because I think, you know, 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. And 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.

Starting point is 00:51:45 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 310 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.

Founders - #310 Walt Disney and Picasso

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