What I learned from reading Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney by Paul Johnson.

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The 20th century saw a transformation of our visual experiences, comparable to the blossoming of the Renaissance in the 15th century.

We saw many more things and we saw them differently, both because they were different and because events and artists accustomed us to look with different eyes.

Much of this altered vision was due to technological change, especially the beginning of cinema, television, videos, digital cameras, and the rapidity with which all were made accessible to humanity everywhere.

But these visual revolutions were compounded by artists with the expression of what was going on in their own minds.

The interplay between the new technologies and the new individualism created an element of visual change.

New experiences for our eyes were the product both of relentless impersonal forces marching humanity forward and of powerful creative individuals striving to 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.

Both were outstanding creative individuals first and foremost.

Each embraced novelty with shattering enthusiasm.

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 was not so much a place as a concept.

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?

that was an excerpt from the book that I'm gonna talk

to you about today, which is Creators and is written by Paul Johnson.

Okay, so what this book is is a collection of essays on some of history's greatest creators, people like Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Christian Dior, Balenciaga, Victor Hugo, T.S.

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

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.

I'll have to look up the episode numbers.

of me, but I've read 5, maybe 5 of Paul Johnson's books.

I did episodes on his Winston Churchill biography, his biography on Socrates, his biography on Mozart.

of essays called Heroes, where he wrote about Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln.

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.

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

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 1 of Barcelona's excellent fine arts school.

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

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.

He's, 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 of his city, a small but powerfully built monster of assured egoism.

Now, 1 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 9 until he died.

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

part, it reminded me of 1 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.

If you can do both, 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.

own style and then go to where there's less competition.

Picasso seems to have grasped quite early on

the top in the field of conventional painting.

In Barcelona, the competition was severe.

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

the modern Spanish painters, this guy named Casas.

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

This is something that you and I see over and over again,

and the fact that imitation precedes creation.

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

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, 1 of the few in Picasso's career for his portraits invited comparison with Casas and are manifestly inferior.

And so Picasso is a deeply flawed individual, as we're going to get to in a minute, but he's definitely smart.

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

And so it says in 1904, he effectively left Spain for good, chiefly to get away from life under Cossus'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.

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.

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

I need to get to where it's the where's the best physical location on the planet for the work I'm doing.

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

It's going to remind me 1 of my favorite quotes.

I read this book, this autobiography of this guy named Les Schwab, and I read it because Charlie Munger kept bringing it up in the Berkshire meetings.

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

And in that book, Les has this great, this great line I try to adapt to my life and he says whatever you do you must do it with gusto You must do it in volume.

It is a case of repeat repeat repeat Well, check out Picasso.

Picasso was perhaps the most restless Experimental and productive artists 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 and 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.

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 and 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.

And I've read 2 or 3 biographies and I just cannot, I can't find a great 1.

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

And So 1 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 1 new piece of artwork every day of his life from age 20 until his death at age 91.

He created something new every day for 71 years.

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

Picasso was a millionaire by 1914 and a multi-millionaire by the end of World War 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 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 it can inspire devotion in others.

On episode 309, the 1 I just did on Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was young, right, they said, and there's a line in the book says he had a PhD in charisma.

The reason that's a fascinating story to think about is because it was written by his girlfriend of 6 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 gonna immediately like him, like him, you're gonna be drawn to him and you'll do whatever he wants you to do.

And so both Picasso and Arnold use this, there's a lot of sex in both of these books.

In this chapter, or this section on Picasso, it's gonna go into way more detail I'm gonna read, but also in that book that Arnold's girlfriend wrote.

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

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.

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

But apparently, innately, he lacked 2 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 gonna see this very, there's gonna be like a huge positive correlation between 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.

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.

So it says, this lack was 1 source of his power.

At the center of his universe, there was room only for Picasso, his needs, his interests, his ambitions.

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.

Picasso's attitude towards women was terrifying.

He said that for him, women were divided into goddesses and doormats, and that his object was to turn the goddess into the doormat.

He told 1 mistress, nobody leaves a man like me.

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.

Apparently, Picasso was Kanye West before Kanye West.

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

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 1 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 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.

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 achievements.

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.

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.

I read that 3 times and then I stopped and just thought about this because 1 of the, I would argue maybe the most important, if you only took 1 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'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 1 thing from this entire thing, it's like the importance and superhuman powers that intense focus can give you.

But on the other side of that, taken to 2 to 4 extreme, right?

Is this intense focus is inherently selfish.

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.

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

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

And so they decide, hey, it's gonna come from, you

I mean, how many of these people, it's extremely common.

Like I'm working on another episode right now that's blowing my mind.

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

And you read about it, it's like, oh, like, yeah, this makes sense that this guy's been married 5 times.

So this is why I'm such a big fan of Paul Johnson, because he just, his writing and his synthesis of this information where he just hits you with this idea, it's just 1 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.

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 evidence savagery of much of his work sprang from a deep unease of spirit.

His last years were punctuated by family quarrels over money.

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.

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#310 Walt Disney and Picasso