#310 Walt Disney and Picasso

What I learned from reading Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney by Paul Johnson. --- (3:30) Disney made use of the new technologies throughout his creative life. (4:45) Lists of Paul Johnson books and episodes: Churchill by Paul Johnson. (Founders #225) Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle by Paul Johnson.(Founders #226) Mozart: A Life by Paul Johnson. (Founders #240) Socrates: A Man for Our Times by Paul Johnson. (Founders #252) (5:55) Picasso was essentially self-taught, self-directed, self-promoted, emotionally educated in the teeming brothels of the city, a small but powerfully built monster of assured egoism. (7:30) Most good copywriters fall into two categories. Poets. And killers. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end. If you are both killer and poet, you get rich. — Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. (Founders #306) (10:00) Whatever you do, you must do it with gusto, you must do it in volume. It is a case of repeat, repeat, repeat. — Les Schwab Pride In Performance: Keep It Going! by Les Schwab. (Founders #105) (11:30) 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. (15:30) Power doesn't always corrupt. But what power always does is reveal. — Working by Robert Caro (Founders #305) (17:30) 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. In my judgment his monumental selfishness and malignity were inextricably linked to his achievement. 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 feelings whatever. He had no sense of duty except to himself, and this gave him his overwhelming self-promoting energy. Equally, his egoism enabled him to turn away from nature and into himself with a concentration which is awe-inspiring. (21:30) It shows painfully how even vast creative achievement and unparalleled worldly success can fail to bring happiness. (24:00) Walt Disney (at age 18) wanted to run his own business and be his own master. He had the American entrepreneurial spirit to an unusual degree. (27:00) Recurring theme: Knowing what you want to do but not knowing how to do it—yet. (26:20) All creative individuals build on the works of their predecessors. No one creates in vacuum. (28:30) Why Walt Disney moved to Hollywood: The early 1920s, full of hope and daring, were a classic period for American free enterprise, and for anyone interested in the arts—Hollywood was a rapidly expanding focus of innovation. (28:00) Filmaker episodes: Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life by Michael Schumacher. (Founders #242) Steven Spielberg: A Biography by Joseph McBride. (Founders #209) George Lucas: A Life by Brian Jay Jones. (Founders #35) (30:10) The relentless resourcefulness of a young Walt Disney! (34:30) This is wild: It is significant that Mickey Mouse, in the year of his greatest popularity, 1933, received over 800,000 fan letters, the largest ever recorded in show business, at any time in any century. (36:00) Something that Disney does his entire career —he has this in common with other great filmmakers— he is always jumping on the new technology of his day. (37:00) Lack of resources is actually a feature. It’s the benefit. — Kevin Kelly on Invest Like the Best #334 (38:45) Imagination rules the world. — The Mind of Napoleon: A Selection of His Written and Spoken Words edited by J. Christopher Herold. (Founders #302) (41:15) Disney put excellence before any other consideration. (41:45) Disney hired the best artists he could get and gave them tasks to the limits of their capacities. (47:45) Disney’s Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World by Richard Snow. (Founders #158) (49:30) I Had Lunch With Sam Zell (Founders #298) --- Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book --- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  The 20th century saw a transformation of our visual experiences comparable to the blossoming of the Renaissance in the 15th century. We saw many more things, and we saw them differently, both because they were different and because events and artists accustomed us to look with different eyes. Much of this altered vision was due to technological change, especially the beginning of cinema, television, videos, digital cameras, and the rapidity with which all were made accessible to humanity everywhere. But these visual revolutions were compounded by artists with the expression of what was going on in their own minds. The interplay between the new technologies and the new individualism created an element

• 0:45David Senra?

  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 is instructive. Both were outstanding creative individuals first and foremost. Each embraced novelty with shattering enthusiasm, but there were essential differences.

• 1:26David Senra?

  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 evolvence and the new technologies leaping ahead of popular taste. He went from the open spaces to Hollywood. Hollywood was not so much a place as a concept. When he was born, it didn't yet exist. During his lifetime, Hollywood became the global capital of the popular arts, thanks in part to his creativity. Disney made use of the new technologies throughout his creative life,

• 2:08David Senra?

  just as Picasso exploited the old artistic disciplines of paint, pencil, modeling, and printing to produce the new. The influence of both Picasso and Disney continues in the 21st century, powerfully and persistently raising a question, which man has been and is more potent? Okay, so that was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Creators, and is written by Paul Johnson. Okay, so what this book is, is a collection of essays on some of history's greatest creators, people like Mark Train, Shakespeare, Christian Dior, Balenciaga, Victor Hugo, T.S. Eliot, Dickens. But what I want to focus on today is Paul's essay

• 2:51David Senra?

  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 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,

• 3:35David Senra?

  Julius Caesar, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln. I did an episode on that. So just a huge fan of his writing and his ability to synthesize all these different historical figures. And so it shouldn't have been a surprise to me that I had a hard time not turning the page, reading this essay. And then, of course, I was just obsessed with taking notes and highlights. So I'm going to focus on his comparison. He's going to give overviews of both the life of Pablo Picasso and Walt Disney. Okay, so let's jump into Picasso. So he's born in Spain, 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 14, and then his father put him for a limited time at one of Barcelona's excellent fine art school. And then after that, Picasso sets up on his own as a teenage artist. This is...

• 4:19David Senra?

  The next line, this is what an incredible writing and a description of Picasso. I guess I'll tell you upfront, 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, in 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 of his city. A small but powerfully built monster of assured egoism.

• 5:02David Senra?

  Now, one of the benefits of being an autodidact is the fact that everyone else is learning in tracks. Right? They're just regurgitating what the formal education is telling them to do. Picasso designs his own curriculum. That obviously has both benefits and weaknesses. He lacked the benefit, though also the inhibitions of full academic training. He was exceptionally skillful from an early age at exploiting his many and ingenious artistic ideas. He always kept a sharp eye on the market and always knew what would sell. He sold his paintings from the age of nine until he died. And though his output became and remained prodigious throughout his long life, he never had any difficulty in marketing. When I got to that part, it reminded me of one of my favorite lines in that fantastic book,

• 5:45David Senra?

  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, you'll be unstoppable. David Ogilvy, a few weeks ago, expressed the same idea as Naval. He called it killers and poets, though, that if you can be both a killer and a poet, you get rich. And so then there's a few important events that happened in the early life of Pablo Picasso. One, he experiences intense competition. This is going to lead him to develop his own style and then go to where there's less competition. Picasso seems to have grasped quite early on that he would not get to the top in the field of conventional painting. In Barcelona, the competition was severe. And so at this point, Picasso is competing directly with what Paul Johnson calls perhaps

• 6:27David Senra?

  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, the fact that imitation precedes creation. We just start out imitating other people until we develop our own style. So he sees what Casas is doing. He's like, "Oh, I'll do that, too." Casas' superb, full-length charcoal portraits of people in Barcelona inspired Picasso, at the age of 18, to do a similar series, which he exhibited in his first one-man show. There were 135 drawings and paintings in the show, but it was not a success. Indeed, it was a foolish move, one of the few in Picasso's career for his portraits invited comparison with Casas and are manifestly inferior. And so Picasso is a deeply flawed

• 7:12David Senra?

  individual, as we're going to get to in a minute, but he's definitely smart. And he realizes, "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'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

• 7:53David Senra?

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

• 8:37David Senra?

  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 92, he remained a master of spectacular output. Working on paper and canvas, in stone, ceramics and metal, in every possible variety of mixed media. He also designed posters, advertisements, theater sets, costumes, dresses, logos,

• 9:21David Senra?

  and almost every kind of object from ashtray to headdresses. It's almost like there's something inside of this guy that just had to come out. This is not in this book, but one of my favorite, I've tried to do, I don't know if I've told you this before, but I've tried to do multiple episodes on Picasso. Because if you 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'd 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 podcasts.

• 10:03David Senra?

  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 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,

• 10:45David Senra?

  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 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.

• 11:30David Senra?

  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 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.

• 12:13David Senra?

  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 is just, you're going to immediately like him, like him, you're going to be drawn to him and you'll do whatever he wants you to do. And so both Picasso and Arnold use this, there's a lot of sex in both of these books. In this chapter or this section on Picasso, it's going to go into way more detail, I'm going to read, but also in that book that Arnold's girlfriend wrote. So they use it both to attract like sexual partners and business partners. It works in both domains. And so listen to this line, it says, "His sexual appeal," meaning Picasso, "was mesmeric."

• 12:55David Senra?

  Let's define mesmeric, "causing a person to become completely transfict and unaware of anything else around them." That is the same description that Arnold's girlfriend gave about a young Arnold Schwarzenegger. "It was undoubtedly one of his superpowers. He had gifts that the vast majority of human beings would give anything to possess, but apparently innately, he lacked two things that ordinary people take for granted, the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong." And so when I bring up the charisma of Arnold or Picasso, Steve Jobs, I mean, you're going to see this very, there's going to be like a huge positive correlation between, you know, somebody accomplished great things and their levels of charisma. What I'm really talking about is like, it's a source of power.

• 13:38David Senra?

  There's this line on the book that he did on episode 305, the book Working by Robert Caro. And he says, it's a book on power, essentially, like his entire 50-year career has been trying to explain to you and I, to all of his readers, like what power is and how it actually works in the real world. And he says, there's a line in there that gives me chills, and he says, "Power doesn't always corrupt, but what power always does is reveal. It reveals the true character of the person in possession of that power." And what we see is a 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.

• 14:19David Senra?

  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

• 15:04David Senra?

  object was to turn the goddess into the doormat. He told one mistress, "Nobody leaves a man like me." He would steal a friend's wife, oh my goodness. Oh, you ready for this? "He would steal a friend's wife, then tell the man that he was honoring him by sleeping with her. He was overheard saying to himself over and over and over, 'I am God, I am God.'" Apparently Picasso was Kanye West before Kanye West. His distorted paintings of women are closely linked to the pleasure he got from hurting them. This is why, what I meant, it's like, I don't, 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

• 15:46David Senra?

  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 is like, 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.

• 16:27David Senra?

  It is rare indeed for the evil side of a creator to be all, to be so all pervasive as it was in Picasso, who seems to have been without redeeming qualities of any kind. In my judgment, his monumental selfishness..." Was inextricably linked to his achievement. That is the main and most important part of this entire section. He was all powerful as an originator and aesthetic entrepreneur precisely because he was so passionately devoted to what he was doing, to the exclusion of any other feeling whatever. He had no sense of duty except to himself, and this gave him overwhelming self-promoting energy.

• 17:06David Senra?

  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 this, reading hundreds of biographies, reading every single possible thing about history's greatest entrepreneurs, making podcasts about them, compiling 20,000 notes and highlights on this, and then rereading those over and over again. If you only took one thing from this entire thing, it's like the importance and superhuman powers that intense focus can give you.

• 17:50David Senra?

  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 lost, 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 live a balanced life? Or to be a good father, to be a good husband? It's like, yeah, listen to founders and do, in the personal life, you basically have to do the opposite of what most of these people do. Because they are so inherently selfish in, I'm not like passing judgment, I'm just like documenting what I see. They're so inherently selfish and focused on what they're doing that that time, right? Because time is the finite resource, has to come from somewhere else.

• 18:34David Senra?

  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, another episode right now that's blowing my mind. And the guy's, he's a genius, straight up genius, unbelievable, like talented person. And you read about it, and it's like, oh, like, yeah, this makes sense that this guy's been married five times. I completely understand why that is. So this is why I'm such a big fan of Paul Johnson. Because he just, he, his writing and his synthesis of this information where he just hits you with this idea, it's just one paragraph that it gives you, 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

• 19:16David Senra?

  the same. And then he does an even better job of saying, hey, pay attention, this is a cautionary tale. You think you won 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. His widow

• 19:59David Senra?

  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 you'd never read anything else, or even knew who he was, like heard of Picasso before, which is, you know, very unlikely, you have an

• 20:41David Senra?

  idea of who he is. And then he does this exact same thing for Walt, and they start to compare and contrast. And this is why, you know, I think undoubtedly Walt Disney's one of the most admired entrepreneurs ever. You gotta put him, if there's a Mount Rushmore and, you know, of entrepreneurs, like you put him 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 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 delighted all of his life in observing and drawing animals. That is huge. This idea of Walt

• 21:25David Senra?

  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. 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.

• 22:06David Senra?

  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. First, he wanted to run his own business and be his own master. He had the American entrepreneurial spirit to an unusual degree. And so I want to pause there real quick. What's 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.

• 22:50David Senra?

  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, you know, all of history's greatest 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, 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.

• 23:36David Senra?

  So it's kind of like an opening act to accompany like longer movies that are regular movies, like filmed with actual people, right? And let's get into like what Disney realized like, oh, there's a missing piece. And I would say is a common, common theme. Not only you'll see it multiple times throughout Disney's career, but I think in general is 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, were 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.

• 24:15David Senra?

  The burgeoning movie circuits would buy cartoons only in series of 10, 12, or 20, believing that moviegoers had to become accustomed to them. So Paul makes a great point that the same belief dominates dominated television in the early 21st century, where you get TV seasons, right? Disney lived from hand to mouth. $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. 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 1917, this guy named Max Fleischer makes the first movie that combines moving photography

• 25:00David Senra?

  of actors with animated cartoon characters. Disney sees that. So six years later, Disney uses this combination himself and he makes this cartoon or this movie called Alice in Cartoon Land. I would, I guess movies, it's like a short, I think it's like six minutes long or eight minutes long, something like that. So like a short film, I guess. So around the same time, Disney's original company, the Laffgram Corporation, made short animation films, animation plus photography films, and they would also create advertising for brands using cartoon figures. And so that is the actual company that it's going to go bankrupt. So it goes bankrupt from after the bankruptcy, all he has left was the camera and a print of Alice to use as a sample.

• 25:43David Senra?

  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 and selling his footage to all these other..." I'm not going to name the companies, there's a bunch of different names. "And he's selling the footage to a bunch of these companies, and these companies are all located in Hollywood." This is an undoubtedly low part of his life. He also took on private jobs. He would film weddings and funerals. He'd make $10 or $15 to film a wedding or a funeral. He often had so little money that he could only eat canned beans. And so he realizes, "I gotta

• 26:26David Senra?

  get out of here. I gotta go to where, like, I'm making..." The little money I'm making is coming from these news studios, right? So it says, "His contracts with news studios persuaded him that he had to establish himself and a new production company in Hollywood." So he sold his camera, and with the proceeds, he bought himself a ticket. And he headed to Hollywood with $40. He's got $40 to his name, and it was interesting. He traveled on the famous train California Limited in July 23rd... or, excuse me, July 1923. 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. It should be called California Unlimited. "The early 1920s, full of hope and daring, were a classic period of American free enterprise,

• 27:08David Senra?

  and for anyone 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 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, like, "Nah, I'm good." "The early 1920s, full of hope and daring, were a classic period for American free enterprise, and for anyone interested in the arts, Hollywood is a rapidly expanding focus of innovation." But Disney had a very hard time getting work of any description in the movie industry, trudging from studio to studio and borrowing money just to eat. He had to go back to making animated cartoons.

• 27:50David Senra?

  Now, this is incredible. This is the relentless resourcefulness of a young Walt Disney.

• 27:56David Senra?

  You will find stories like the one I'm about to share with you in a lot of the biographies of filmmakers. I'll leave the links down below. George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg. 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 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.

• 28:40David Senra?

  You're forced to be creative, forced to be resourceful. Each reel consisted of 900 feet of film of real children and the dog, and 300 feet of animated cartoon. Disney wrote the script, built the sets himself. His studio was a small back room in a real estate office that he rented for $5 a month. He made all of the props he needed himself. He produced and directed and filmed it himself. And then he sat down and drew the animation himself. The first movie cost him $750 all in, and he sold it east, meaning to New York Syndicate, who's gonna wind up screwing him later on, for $1,500. This was his first real profit in his entrepreneurial career.

• 29:24David Senra?

  Now, another interesting part of this essay, this is on the similarities of Disney and Picasso, and the immense contribution to your collaborators, only keeping the very best people around you because they're going to influence the quality of your work and the trajectory of your business. He made a contract for a dozen movies, and the first six he made entirely by himself. Or, excuse me, he had a contract for a dozen movies. So he makes the first six by himself, he's like, alright, then I need help. He goes to this guy named Herb E. Iwerks. He was working back with him in Kansas City, so he brings out Iwerx to Hollywood to help him with the animation. There is a curious similarity between his work with Iwerx and Picasso's collaboration with this, I'm not gonna pronounce this guy's name, Georges, George Braque,

• 30:06David Senra?

  in the invention of cubism nearly two decades earlier. Okay, don't worry about the name. So closely did Picasso and Braque share their ideas and techniques that a few years later, it was sometimes impossible to tell which of them had produced a certain canvas, or if both of them had. Neither painter could tell either. In some cases, the mystery remains to this day. Now, why is that important? Because you see the same thing in Disney's career. That's why I'm bringing it up to you. Equally, the precise roles of Walt and Iwerx 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, Iwerx was important. Now, here's another comparison to Picasso that I would have never drawn this connection.

• 30:51David Senra?

  The same, I guess, trait of human nature, this like insatiable desire that humans have for novelty, actually is gonna lead to the creation of the greatest thing that Walt, like the foundational character, Mickey Mouse, right? So it says it's impossible to exaggerate the need for a producer like Disney to respond quickly to changes in public taste and there in the public's need for novelty. Just as Picasso in Paris went from one phase to another to cater to the insatiable appetite for ideas of the art world, so Disney had to adapt and change his cartooning. The audiences were tiring of Alice, and they, 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.

• 31:35David Senra?

  All he can fight back with is creativity. He's gotta innovate his way out of this problem. It's another way to think about what's happening here. Oswald was a success, but Disney found that once his shorts acquired a reputation, other studios, bigger and with more capital, would raid his staff and steal his animators by offering them more money. He could frustrate this process by inventing a new character. The result was a mouse, and so... 30 years after where we are in the story, Disney would later say, I love this idea. He says, I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing, that it all started with a mouse. And it also started with a terrible name for the mouse. And so God bless Walt Disney's wife. Right?

• 32:18David Senra?

  He chose, Disney chose the name Mortimer Mouse, but his wife Lily objected. And so that is when Disney picked the name Mickey. And why would Walt Disney 30 years later say, I 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 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

• 33:03David Senra?

  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. So there's an element of what I'm about to reach to is the importance of time. Right?

• 33:47David Senra?

  Because you look at what Mickey Mouse looked like when he first invented and when he comes to be lovable. It's like, oh, big difference. But also Disney realized that he 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, this is the very beginning of animation. With every month that passed, animation was becoming more complex and Disney, to outpace his competitors, forced the pace. Let's go. He used 16 drawings to make Mickey move once. About 14,400 drawings went into a 10-minute cartoon short. So he uses speed and he also, something that Disney does his entire career, he has this in common with a bunch of other great filmmakers, is he's always jumping on the new technology of his day.

• 34:32David Senra?

  Warner Brothers released the first integrated sound picture called The Jazz Singer. This, I think, is 1927. Disney jumped for joy at the idea of talkies. Those are the funny name of movies with sound. Sounds ridiculous to us now, but at that time, that's what they 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.

• 35:11David Senra?

  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 main idea here is like, this is just unbelievable level of resourcefulness. I just heard Kevin Kelly on the podcast Invest Like the Best. It's episode 334. Highly recommend listening to that episode. I think Kevin Kelly's got a very unique way of, just a philosopher 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, the lack of resources is actually a feature. It is the benefit. And for our purposes, like, that's why new, smaller companies can always,

• 35:55David Senra?

  usually outcompete and overtake larger companies if they remain focused because the lack of resources forces them to become more creative. Sam Walton talks about this even in his business. The fact that Walmart starts out undercapitalized, not part of a large company. And so he said that constraints were actually his friend because it forced him to learn. It forced him to become resourceful. And then this accumulation of knowledge that Disney is forced to learn, like, that becomes an asset he can use for his entire life. And that's also, I think, illustrates just his... He's just completely dedicated. I think I have another highlight here that comes from a different book. It talks about, you know, he never, the secret to his success was he was never doing things out to make money. He was just obsessed with making the

• 36:36David Senra?

  absolute best product he could. It took a great deal of effort, time in 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, 100 years later. And it came out in 1928. It was a huge success, not only because of Disney's technical triumphs of synchronized animation, but because of the ingenuity of what Disney got the mouse to do in producing noises. Therein lay his extraordinary gift. The imagination, what did Napoleon tell us a few weeks ago? Imagination rules the world. The imagination to enter into the head of a half-mouse, half-man, and devise

• 37:20David Senra?

  weird and hilarious things to do as the mouse steered a boat down the river. Disney had invented the sound cartoon, a combination of imaginative drawing, scripting, and engineering science. It was and remains a wonderful example of creativity, the birth of a new art form. That is the startup paradox. This was not done by better-funded competitors. By the end of that decade, Mickey Mouse was the best-known figure in movies. Here's a little fun fact for you. Mickey's voice was originally done by Disney himself. And so if you study the very early parts of Walt Disney's career, and as, you know, he starts out with not any money, not resources, he accumulates resources, the source of that

• 38:02David Senra?

  inspiration remains the same. It's nature. This underlined Walt's emphasis on the study of nature for inspiration. The studio, his studio, regarded nature as the one and only true source of Disney art. Animators, led by Disney himself, constantly watched movies of animals, and live animals were brought into the studio for study. It was Disney's view that nature was a richer source of humor than human imagination. What his and his team supplied was just the anthropomorphism.

• 38:35David Senra?

  Back to the fact that Disney always embraced latest technology. He regarded color as a godsend, almost as crucial as sound because its enormity increased realism. 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 over money where he says something like, "I'm innovating. I'll tell you what it costs when I'm finished."

• 39:17David Senra?

  So that's a great, like, to me, in my mind, when you read about Disney, you study, it was like, oh, that's Disney through and through. Disney always bought the best paint, the best film and other materials. He insisted on reanimation, however time consuming and expensive, until the results were right. In the early 1930s, Disney's production costs for an eight-minute movie were $13,000 and over, at a time when rival studios spent a maximum of $2,500. Disney put excellence before any other consideration. Disney put excellence before any other consideration. There's a great line in this biography that I've read, this line I've read multiple times. And here's the quote, "If you want to know the real secret of Walt's success, it's that

• 40:02David Senra?

  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, tense and sometimes hysterical as new ideas were presented, debated, boosted and discarded. There were arguments and animators sometimes left after disputes.

• 40:44David Senra?

  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. What took the early Renaissance painters two—this is such a great—this is like the most Paul Johnson paragraph ever. What took the early Renaissance painters two centuries, the Disney studio did in a decade. But then Disney's animators had the whole tradition of Western art on which to build, just as the countless animators of today are inspired by Disney's work in the 1930s. And so then we get to the point where the technology finally catches up and he's able to invent yet another new art form. This is the note—let me read it and then I'll

• 41:29David Senra?

  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 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 what I left to 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

• 42:14David Senra?

  out in 19—I think he starts working on 1934, comes out in 1938. He had been thinking about some of these ideas for over 18 years up until that point. He just, again, I know what I want to do, can't figure out how to do it yet. And this is the result. "The movie introduced numerous artistic and technical innovations that transformed the art of movie cartooning. It involved over 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 gotta love Paul Johnson. I'd say very Paul Johnson—that 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

• 42:56David Senra?

  at 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 out or working on. You know, that thing might not be ready for like another month or two. I have to figure it out, but I've just been like seeping myself on this little by little. And what was fascinating is like Steve Jobs talked about, hey, you know, once they they figured out Pixar wasn't going to produce, they were they were trying to sell hardware and then try to sell software to other companies.

• 43:39David Senra?

  Like, no, no, we're just going to go all in on developing the first computer animated movie. So Steve does this like intense like research into the industry, like how lucrative is is animation? Couldn't find anything because he says, you can't, you can't go to the the library and check out a book called the business model of animation because there's only one company's ever done it well, which is Disney, and they don't want anybody else to know how lucrative it was. And so he's discovering as he's researching this, how lucrative it is. And he's like, this is insane because again, this is you hold on as long as possible because you have no idea what new technology will be invented in the future that unlocks value in the business that you're creating.

• 44:20David Senra?

  So at the time that he's doing this research, people are buying a ton of like 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 or tape. I can't remember which one. They sold 28 million copies of a movie that they made 60 years ago. That is insane. I think he put the number on it. I don't, I think he's like, they made like a quarter billion dollars on that. So it's, it's just, it's just wild. I love how all these things relate and like, you know, everybody's learning from each other and studying.

• 45:03David Senra?

  It just, it brings a big smile on my face. All right, let's go back to this. Disney's instinct was always to get back to nature, whereas Picasso's was to get away from it. The success of Snow White financed a series of four big feature movies. All of them were made by Disney between the years 1938 and 1944. So they're talking about Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi. All of those movies wound 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.

• 45:47David Senra?

  He thus produced the idea of a Disney park constructed around a theme. He recreated his, this is incredible, he recreated his scenery in three dimensions in the open air and invited the public to enter. 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. 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.

• 46:30David Senra?

  But this is the other thing that came to my mind, which is like really important. It's like, listen, we want to move fast. We 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, he'd been making products, fantastic products for three decades, but his greatest creation came three and a half decades into his life. Disneyland was by far Walt Disney's greatest creation and he was 54. Disney was 54 when he made his greatest creation. If he had lived, he winds up dying, I think at 66 from lung cancer. He smoked constantly, smoked cigarettes all the time.

• 47:16David Senra?

  If he had lived, he'd been 71 when Disney World, when Disney World opened, which was like the, you know, his, he's like, oh, I proved my, kind of like my proof of concept was Disneyland and he took it to like a much greater scale and grandiosity. In Disney World, he would have been 71. I love thinking about that, like go and study somebody's career. When did they do their best work? Think about if as the as an entrepreneur and a creator and an innovator, the stuff that is in the 54 year old brain of Walt Disney compared to like the 25 year old brain. Knowledge compounds, just like everything else. And just imagine if you could get inside that brain and that experience. I experienced this to some degree when I got to sit down and have a two hour long lunch with Sam Zell.

• 48:00David Senra?

  You know, he's 81 years old time, just I didn't know, but you know, 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, 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, at some degree to the podcast, that's why he was, I don't know if I said this publicly, but I was supposed to have dinner with him. He was, I was supposed to have dinner with him a few, I had lunch with him. And then like two months later, I was supposed to have dinner with him because he literally wanted to give me more content

• 48:44David Senra?

  to make an episode about what he learns or I could share it with you. Because he was like adamant about sharing everything he learned with future generations of entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, he wound up getting sick and then, you know, a few weeks later passed away. So just this idea, it's like, man, like that is such a fascinating idea. It's if the amount of compounded experience and knowledge that was in like a 54 year old Disney. I don't know, I just got to this part and it really like struck and like had to sit here for a while and really think about what, like it just resonated with me. So when that happens, I obviously share it with you and hopefully like you find it valuable. Okay, this revealed again, going back to Disneyland, you see the theme reappears. What is his main talent? 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

• 49:29David Senra?

  serving and, 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 20th century and beyond was immense, almost past computation. Disney himself trained over a thousand artists, almost as many as the most successful art school in history. Disney was an entrepreneur and a highly successful one. The founder of a business which in his own day employed thousands of people and which in the first decade of the 21st century survives and flourishes. Disney

• 50:09David Senra?

  pursued his own individual way until his death. Picasso, on the other hand, set his faith against nature and burrowed within himself. Paul's about to answer his own question that he started this. Who had a greater impact? Disney worked within nature, stylizing it, anthropomorphizing it, and surrealizing it, and ultimately reinforcing it. That is why Disney's ideas will continue to shine through while the ideas of Picasso, powerful though they were for much of the 20th century, will gradually fade. In the end, nature is the strongest force of all. And that is where I'll leave it. I absolutely loved, I love,

• 50:51David Senra?

  I mean, I'm a huge fan of Paul Johnson's writing in general. I'd buy this book, just this essay alone. The good thing about the book, I think there's 14 different essays in the book. You don't have to read it chronologically. He will reference past 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, okay, I just want to learn about Shakespeare right now. Let me read about that. Or I want to learn about, you know, 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 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.

• 51:35David Senra?

  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. 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 ago, and I'll talk to you again soon.