Permission to Kick Ass

Collaboration, competition, and creativity with Paul Pape

• Angie Colee • Episode 191

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This week's guest is the phenomenally talented and creative Paul Pape, who's made a name for himself as a full-time artist and self-proclaimed 'Santa Claus for nerds.' We're breaking down his journey from disillusioned theater nerd to professional prop builder, and how he accidentally-on-purpose built his creative empire. 

Can't-Miss Moments:

  • Self-imposed summer school: what made Paul see school as a sanctuary, and how his acting attempt led to a surprising new career direction... 

  • Failure alert: why Paul and I are big fans of failing hard and failing often (and how you can use this to your advantage in your creative career)...

  • Cease and desist: both Paul and I have received these legal orders from companies with a lot more money and power than we had. Paul's response to Nintendo's notice had me taking notes...

  • Big twist: I confess to Paul that my MOST HATED class in grad school was - wait for it - Entrepreneurship. I bet you won't guess why...

  • Fixing the creativity crisis: Paul shares three solid ways to bring creativity and imagination back into the workplace so your company can thrive and innovate AND keep its people happy...

Paul's bio:

Paul Pape is a seasoned artist, designer, and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in the creative industry. His journey began with a passion for education stemming from a need to escape an abusive childhood. Eventually, he found my way to design and fabrication, which led to the creation of thousands of personalized products for clients worldwide as well as industry giants such as Disney, Universal, Nickelodeon and more.

In recent years, he’s pivoted to empowering Creatives, Companies and Corporations, sharing his expertise and insights to help them embrace innovation, reverse the Creativity Crisis and make life and work FUN again. As a speaker, educator, and mentor, he inspires others to unleash their creative potential and find fulfillment in their personal and professional lives.

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Angie Colee:

Welcome to Permission to Kick Ass, the show that gives you a virtual seat at the bar for the real conversations that happen between entrepreneurs. I'm interviewing all kinds of business owners, from those just a few years into freelancing to CEOs helming nine-figure companies. If you've ever worried that everyone else just seems to get it and you're missing something or messing things up, this show is for you. I'm your host, angie Coley, and let's get to it and welcome back to Permission to Kick Ass. With me today is my new friend, paul Pape. Say hi, hi. I'm still not quite over the fact that I'm so distracted and impressed by your background. Of course, everybody's listening to this, can't see it, but anybody who's watching the video gets to see all this cool stuff. I see Deadpool.

Paul Pape:

Is that Beetlejuice? Tell me a little bit about this background and where you're sitting. So this is my studio, and what you're looking at is just a small glimpse of what I call the nerd wall. It actually stretches about 22 feet behind me and is about eight and a half feet tall, and it is all the stuff that I've worked on over the years, and so you'll see little, I'm Santa Claus for nerds that's what they call me and so I literally make the most geeky, wonderful things that you can imagine, and so these are just a smattering of the stuff that I've either worked with or I've had the opportunity to use as, like, a reference material or something like that.

Angie Colee:

So yeah, that's awesome, like well, and you hinted at it a little bit. So tell us a little bit about what you do.

Paul Pape:

Okay, I am a full-time artist. I am, like I said, santa Claus for nerds. I'm a designer and fabricator of custom collectibles. I make the things that people want that they can't find anywhere else. What my wife would say is that I make memories tangible.

Angie Colee:

Oh, that's cool. She's got a way with words. I appreciate her.

Paul Pape:

She does, yeah, and so for the last 20 years I've had the opportunity to work for thousands of people around the globe. I also work with companies like Disney, universal, nickelodeon, the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon Fox. I've been all over the place and they call me up to ask me to do the weird things that they can't figure out how to do, and so I just work in my studio here in the middle of Nebraska and ship it all over the world.

Angie Colee:

Oh, that's fascinating. How did you get into this line of work by accident?

Paul Pape:

That's how everybody gets into anything fun, right.

Angie Colee:

Best stories by accident.

Paul Pape:

Yeah, so started off as a, as a. Uh well, I don't know how how far back do we want to go here, so um, whatever the spirit tells you.

Paul Pape:

So, uh, as a child I loved education, loved it. And, um, when I was in first grade, after first grade ended, I came home and I my mom says that I cried for three days until she enrolled me in summer school. And so I did self-imposed summer school like year-round school until I was in the 10th grade. Love my school, yeah. Well, the reason was is because home life sucked. It was, you know, physically and mentally abusive, and so sanctuary was calling, and that sanctuary was school, and so I really, really threw myself into it and I just have an absolute love of learning. But oddly enough, I'm super creative and so typically those two things don't go together and I kind of forced them to over many, many years.

Paul Pape:

And then in high school, I found theater, and theater was awesome because in theater you can be other things and you can be other places, and so it was like the land of make-believe, which is where I lived anyways, and so I was like, ooh, you can do this for real. And so I was an actor for a little while. And then I got into college. I was declared major the first day. I was like, I'm going to be a theater major. And then I'm going to be an actor, because while I have really good stage presence and I have a decent voice, I'm too distracted and bad with memorization of lines and so I'm like the worst person to act against. So so in theater, I was, I was, so I was bummed, I still major. And so I was working one day in the shop, in the scene shop, and the Dean of the department came up to me and he said hey, paul, how would you like to learn everything? I think I thought about it for like a millisecond and I was like yes, please. And so his name was Bob, and Bob taught me every aspect of theater that you can get into, from maintenance to stage management, to how to run the light boards and the dimmer packs, every aspect of it. But he also introduced me to design, and that's where I really kind of found my niche, niche, niche, whatever you want to call it. All of them, yeah, all of those. And yeah.

Paul Pape:

So I found scenic design, which is designing the world of the theater, and I really liked that one a lot because I didn't have to deal with people. So my wife is a costume designer. I know I brought her up earlier so I can introduce her here and that's actually how we met. We met doing theater and so did that, and then went to grad school for theater design and then as soon as I graduated, like a week later, I promptly stopped doing scenic design because I talked to a guy who was at the apex of it in America and he just kind of was brutally honest with me. He kind of wiped away all the decisions and the mystical side of design and let me know, like facts, and I think he maybe saw in me that I wanted more out of it than just the hustle and so like, okay, now I don't know what to do. And so my wife, we lived in LA for a little bit and then my wife got tired of LA so she came back to Nebraska, cause that's where family's at, and so I followed her cause. I liked my wife.

Paul Pape:

And then, uh, so I was here, I didn't know what to do. I had a product that I had designed which is like paper furniture that I call it's called pop out furniture, and I was doing that from home, whatever. And then my old undergrad called me and said hey, we have an opening for a scene design professor. Do you want to do? You want it. I didn't even interview, like I'm sure I've got nothing else going on. And so I did that for three years and I love my education but I'd never seen behind the curtain and that killed it.

Paul Pape:

I liked the teaching, I liked the students, I hated the bureaucracy, hated it, and but while I was there, my last year that I was there, I had a student come up to me and say hey, paul, would you be able to make me and my girlfriend little me's from the Nintendo Wii, because I had just come out and he's like of us like holding hands for a Valentine's Day gift. I'm like, yeah, sure. And so I made that and, unbeknownst to me, he put it online and this is in the early 2000s, before there was an online for like blogs and all that fun stuff, and it went viral. And all that fun stuff and it went viral. It was the very first thing I ever did. That went viral and I started getting a lot of requests to make more and so I ended up making over a thousand Miis, which is a crazy amount of Miis. I got two C-synthesis from Nintendo about it, which was fun.

Paul Pape:

I learned a lot about the law and then I ended up starting I was making more money doing that on the side than I was teaching and I was miserable with the teaching part of it. So I asked my lovely wife if I could quit and try and do this full time. She said I'll give you one year. I had my second thing go viral about three months later and we did okay and she's like all right, you seem to know what you're doing here, so let's go. And so it's basically just been that. It's anybody who comes to me with a request, I just make it, and I've never I don't turn anything down, and so that's how I you end up going from me's to working building lego sets for the tonight show, I guess oh, my gosh, I wrote down so many things while you were telling that story.

Angie Colee:

Um, oh, where do I want to start? Okay, love that. Like the theater for you was the escape. For me, that was reading, Because I could always like fully picture it be immersive. I was that kid. That was like walking down the hall reading and trusting everybody else to get out of the way because, like, it doesn't matter whether you're in the way I'm reading here. Um, I also like the bit that caught my attention too was other people's. I don't know if fear is the right word, that's the one that I wrote down. But you talked about the man who told you about the reality of working in stage and set design. Um, I'm curious about that. Like, what was the reality that made you say this is not for me?

Paul Pape:

Well, I was assisting him. We were working on a show called Dracula, the Musical. This is for in theater, there's like different scales. It's called Lord B House. It's basically the staging ground before it goes to Broadway. So it's like the staging ground for that and I was assisting him on this and it was like a million dollar show or something like this huge thing.

Paul Pape:

And I was talking to him one day because we had done a lot of long hours and I said his name is John Arnone and I said hey, john, you you've got five, four or five shows on Broadway right now. This is like the apex of being a designer. I said so what is it like? I just graduated up going into this and he goes. Honestly, it's horrible. I'm like well, can you explain? He said you, he goes.

Paul Pape:

I live in New York or I have an apartment that I keep in New York, but I travel 42 to 46 weeks out of the year and the reason is is because theaters don't pay very well. He's like you're earning between $2,500 and $5,000 a show but I have to do so many to stay afloat, but I also have like a team of people that I have to pay to do all the drawings. He says he keeps my boyfriend in my apartment in New York just so that I have a place to stay. When I can go home, he goes. If you don't want to, if you ever want to put down roots, if you ever want to settle, this is not the job because it's just constant, constant hustling.

Paul Pape:

Ironically, my mentor from graduate school was from Transylvania, because we're actually in front of Roy, and I asked him. I said his name is Andre. I said Andre, I just talked to John and he said there's there's no money in this. And then it's a constant hustle. And he's like I don't know what he's talking about. I earned $60,000 a show. I'm like, well, how do I, how do I get into that? And he goes oh, that's because I go back to my home country and the? U the government there actually pays artists. We're a government employee and so we do two shows a year. They pay us $120,000.

Paul Pape:

And then I can do whatever I want on the side. I'm like, well, how do I get in on that? And he goes you can't, because you're all this. I'm like what's that supposed to mean? He goes you're American, not going to happen, it's just not the market for you, and that was eye-opening for me, because I I didn't, you know, I just I had literally just spent eight years like just throwing myself wholeheartedly into this design thing. And then I had I had won awards from the princess grace foundation. I met the prince of Monaco. I mean I've done like all these, like I'm I'm, I'm good at it.

Paul Pape:

But it was like a anvil had just been dropped and I'm like, and it's not always about money, but it's that hustle, and I didn't want to have to constantly travel. And so I was like, okay, what else can I do with all of this information? And I thought, you know, I hate to say it, but those who can't do teach. So I was like, okay, I'll become a teacher, but there's more to it than that. And so I'm like, well, I've always kind of mowed my own path. I don't always like to think outside the box. I was like I'm just going to try and do something with this, and really that's kind of how it evolved.

Angie Colee:

I love that and thank you for being willing to follow me down that shiny path, Because I think what you said demonstrates so perfectly how there are different realities to doing the same thing, and I don't think that that's something that's really talked about enough in entrepreneurship. Like is literally different structures in place, different ways that things operate in countries. Like to be able to do two shows a year and make six figures easy, because that's government backed right, Versus having to hustle for everything in the States and I'm not trying to like paint any country against each other, but we all know what hustle culture is like in the States right, it's totally okay to know that that's not the lifestyle that I want for myself. That's not really what I signed on for. But I think we often get so fixated on how things should have been or how we wanted things to turn out that when they hit reality, it's easy to like judge ourselves as having done something wrong when that's just part of the process.

Paul Pape:

Absolutely, and I think that's a great segue into what I'm doing now, which is I do this, but I also professionally speak on it and I teach people and companies how to embrace a creative mindset and how to actually, you know, put together imagination and education so that you can create innovation, because innovation is completely on the outs, especially in America, because we are at the hustle culture. We're about bottom lines, we're about results, we're not about new things. And one of the things and I actually got into an argument with one of my coaches about this because I embrace failure, I think, and so I said I'm a failure. He goes God, don't say that, it's so triggering, and I'm like okay, I'm a fail-er. I said, just take you out of it. It's like a teacher or a dancer.

Paul Pape:

I'm a fail-er because you don't learn doing anything correctly. You only learn by goofing up, and so it's only within failing that you actually learn, like what works, what doesn't work, and there's always like a nugget inside there that you can always take to kind of move things along, and some of the best innovations in our, in our entire history, have been by accident or by by effing up, and so, like we have, we've become so conditioned. I've got three kids and we're watching them go through school and the conditioning for not failing is so ingrained in school, like you know, because they have to pass the test, the standardized tests, because it affects the funding, it affects the teacher's career, and it's like don't don't fail, don't get a B, because a B is failing. I'm like what are you talking about? Like a C is an average amount of knowledge, you know A is an extraordinary amount of knowledge and everyone just assumes we're going to get this A and it's like we're not all extraordinary in everything. It's not going to happen, you know.

Angie Colee:

And it's such a conflict of interest too, to have it structured like that. Yeah, sorry, keep going.

Paul Pape:

No, no, you're, you're, you're not wrong, and it's and it's one of the things that I get passionate about, because it's one of those things that we forgot how to be creative. We literally forgot. There's something called the creativity crisis. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but they've been tracking creativity and IQ since the 60s and they have this pool of people that they have been interviewing and they psychologists to test the creative part. They use standardized testing to do iq. We all are familiar with iq tests and what they found is that up until the 1990s, iq and creative were at neck and neck they're both elevating and then in the 90s, iq kept going but creativity dipped and it's down 60% from the 1990s Holy shit.

Paul Pape:

And the hardest ones affected are K through third grade. Okay, now, if you think about being a child and being creative and using your imagination, that's K through third grade. That's the prime time to be creative. And we're smacking it out of them. We're literally saying, no, you cannot be creative, you have to take this test and you have to pass. And there's so much pressure on little ones and then, like I said, it conditions them that fail is bad. Fail is bad and I'm doing everything I can, because then you go into the workforce and if you want to do something different, you want to have, because one of the things I teach corporations is you know how to endorse creativity and innovative thinking.

Paul Pape:

And there's three things that you can do. You can pay them more. Nobody's going to do that. You can let them have ownership, which allows someone to take a job, take a task that they have. You say, okay, you're starting here, you're ending here. How you get there, as long as it's within a certain amount of time and you do it efficiently, we don't care. That's ownership, and that's one that's really easy to implement. And then the third one is give them time back. If you can complete all your tasks in a really short amount of time, let them have the rest of the time off. There's no.

Paul Pape:

The pandemic showed us that there's no need for a 40 hour work week. So ownership is like is like a big one, and we don't give that anymore. We feel so confined. And then when you go get a job anymore, the first thing they do is they sit you down and have you watch training videos.

Paul Pape:

And so this is how Bob did it 50 years ago, and I want you to be Bob, nobody's Bob. You know it's like I don't want to try and be somebody. I'm not like the tasks are fairly straightforward and as long as I've got a buddy of mine who works for this company and he's like I've become a master of doing my job in an hour and then and then hiding the fact that I'm on YouTube for seven yeah and it's and I'm like why don't they just give you that time back? I mean like Lee, you know your job is done, and he's like no, because they got to watch over us and whatever. And I'm like he's taken ownership of his job, so now he's super efficient, but now he's got to fake his way through being slow and so so he doesn't have that fear of failing, which would be losing his job If you're too efficient.

Angie Colee:

That's the funny thing about that too. I actually got into it with a coworker when I was still in corporate once, because their perspective was like well, if this is done for you, what do we have to do for everybody else? And I was like I don't care what you have to do for everybody else. If they can produce at my level, why not give them all that time off too? Right, and I'm not trying to say that I'm superior or spectacular or anything, but just like your friend, if I found a way to do this more efficiently, first of all, can we duplicate that and make everybody more efficient? Second of all, could you not fucking punish me for being really good at this job by adding everybody else's work onto my plate too? God, I got so resentful at that. Yeah, it's a big, huge problem that we're stuck in ways that used to work for like factory production and not for all this work that we do literally in our heads these days.

Paul Pape:

But it didn't work for factory production. Ford was even the one who invented the assembly line even recognized that it doesn't work that way. And now that we've gone to more automation and we're allowing machines to do a lot more of our work which I know sky is falling when you start talking about AI and all that fun stuff, but I embrace it because they are tools. And now that we have that, the one thing that we're giving back is we're allowed to have more shortcuts. Have that. The one thing that we're giving back is we're allowed to have more shortcuts. We can do our work more efficiently because the mundane is being taken over by a machine, because that's really what the machine should be doing Doing repetitive tasks over and over again, so that we can do what we are meant to do, which humans are the only species that we know of. There might be others, but we don't know of them yet. That can be creative, and the true definition of creativity is the ability to have original thought or use your imagination. Machines can't do that, but we can, and so we are given if we can give the mundane over, so that we're not because, like the big problem that we're running into, and especially right now with our markets, the way that they are and you know everything being so expensive is that we're not living.

Paul Pape:

We're surviving and societies really flourish and innovate and become better when people are past surviving and they're living. And we were that for a long time. And then we don't want to name names. But back in the 80s things got really good for a select few and kept going up, and then the rest of us just kind of started seeing this divide. And now we're back, you know, third, back in the thirties again, which is funny because we're in the twenties. Right now, in the 2020s, and we're seeing a replica of what happened in the 1920s is there's this huge divide between those who have and those who don't, and so a majority of us are surviving. We're not really living.

Paul Pape:

And giving over some of that technology, you know, giving over some of the mundane to those tasks, allowing our bosses to be like you can work from home because we know that you're going to get the work done, because we know you can't because of the pandemic, and then you have more time. Then you can actually go get another job if you had to, because you're not being paid enough in your current one. And then that way you can not just survive, you can start to actually live. Or, you know, start paying you worth what you're worth. Like, if they're going to start piling on more work, like they did for you, they should compensate accordingly.

Paul Pape:

But yeah, a lot of companies I was talking to, talking to a you know fortune 500 company the other day and they're like we have cut so much because we're we're in, we're not making as record profits as we want to be, and so now we're cutting all of our employees. And so now our employees are having to take on more and more responsibility. And I'm like oh, that's great, so you're compensating them for that? And they're like no, we just know that they'll do it, because if they don't they'll get fired. I'm like what's the motivation? And if you notice, with Gen Z or the alpha gen there, they're like why should I work so hard for someone else to get rich?

Angie Colee:

Yep and they're just like I'm not gonna.

Angie Colee:

I freaking love these kids because like this is beyond work-life balance. It's like why the hell am I doing this? If I don't even make enough to live? I'm going to go find another way. And I think that's why there's like of course I'm somebody who is older on the TikTok, but I totally identified with all the creators on TikTok about this government reaction to we need to ban it and I'm like, well, might as well ban all this freaking cell phones, by the way, which are made from the government that you claim is spying on us via TikTok.

Angie Colee:

But there are a lot of people who have found a way to create small businesses and connect with each other and lift up pieces of their community without going the traditional corporate path, the traditional university path. And it's so funny that you brought up education, because a lot of people find it surprising when I tell this story. I have a graduate degree. It's a hybrid creative business degree and it means I have a specialized expertise in turning ideas into assets right and into a business world of marketing. I don't know.

Angie Colee:

I had a weird disconnect and also my least favorite, my most hated class was entrepreneurship. We actually had a class called entrepreneurship and you want to know why. I hated that. I couldn't figure out how to get an A, couldn't figure out how to do it. There was no clear steps. She would come in every week with a weird assignment Well, not a weird, just an unspecific assignment. You are this company you are trying to get funding from this VC. Go make a presentation. What do you mean by that? How long does the presentation need to be? Are there specific elements? Like? I wanted the checklist to get the win, and I think so many of us are still in that mode as we enter this entrepreneurship space of like where's my checklist to winning this Surprise? Just like I learned in entrepreneurship, there is no a. You just got to do the best you can with what you've got and figure it out along the way. And then you know, of course, 15 years after the fact. I'm like man, everybody should have a class like that. She actually came in one night and it was evening classes, cause we did like full-time internships during the day and night and evening classes for this, and it was in the entertainment industry. So I spent some time in Pittsburgh and some time in LA doing that.

Angie Colee:

She comes in one night and we've got the same groups and teams that we were in all semester long and she hands each group $50 and says using this money, and only this money, go make me more money. You are not allowed to add your personal money to this, but you are allowed to reinvest your earnings from this back into the business to grow it. And, by the way, the team that makes the most money at the end of two weeks wins all of the money. Good luck and just like, dismissed us and that was the parameters. And so I think this is relevant to what you're talking about, because we were grade A overachievers, like in every sense of the word.

Angie Colee:

We figured out that there was no food in our hall. So, like I'm being a pastry chef's daughter, I'm baking snacks that we can sell, we're holding art classes, like we did all of this work and we generated, I think, like 400 bucks Not bad for broke grad students. The winning team generated about 500, I want to say they took their $50 to a local restaurant, bought a bunch of food, came back and sold it, bought more food and just repeated every lunch period for those two weeks and I was like they took our idea and they did it so much better. They probably had it independently of us too. But like just showed me in one fell swoop like it doesn't have to be as hard as you think it has to be. There's going to be a learning curve and you're going to mess up a lot of stuff, but like, don't associate how hard you work with how successful you're going to be.

Paul Pape:

I don't know. My favorite expression is what do they call the guy who graduated last with his MD Doctor?

Angie Colee:

I actually a high school English teacher, went. D is for diploma, just pass, it's okay.

Paul Pape:

And that's the. I think a hard lesson for anybody to learn is that you're not going to be great at everything, and that's okay, you know. And if you're not going to be great at everything, and that's okay, you know. And if you're not great at something, acknowledging it is the first step. And then find somebody who is because they're going to be, they're going to be poor at something else, and then maybe you can fill in that gap. And that's how teams are made.

Angie Colee:

Yeah, do you know how much life, how much better life got for me when I acknowledged that I didn't have to be the one doing everything and also that not everybody out there loves and excels at the things that I like to do, because I had this. I think a lot of creatives fall into this trap too. Everybody wants to be creative. If everybody could get paid for singing and dancing and creating and making all day, why wouldn't they do that? Because some people are allergic to that and they would like to be in spreadsheets and they'd like to be running calculations and doing scientific experiments, and they don't. They want to be as far away from creativity and the stage as possible, like there's something for everybody out there, you don't have to be good at it all.

Paul Pape:

And that's what I tell my kids. I'm like if you want to go be a burger flipper, be the best damn burger flipper you can be. I don't, you know no judgment. You want to pick up trash, be the best at it. That's all I ask you know. And that's really what creativity is. Creativity is an art, you know, and I tell that to a lot of people because I always say you know I'm an artist, but I talk about creativity and they're like oh well, I'm not creative. I'm like I bet you are because you do your job and I bet you have found creative solutions to doing your job. So I think that's a big part of it is recognizing that creativity, like you said, is multifaceted. It doesn't have to be one thing, it can be any aspect of your life that you're just really good at.

Angie Colee:

Well, and the nature of this work too, is that for every solution you find, you're going to create another problem, sometimes 10 additional problems, Like. I think this circles back nicely to something that you mentioned earlier. You started making all of these we's and suddenly you're in business and suddenly you're getting a cease and desist from a big and scary company. I've also been on the receiving end of those that was. That was a learning curve, but tell me a little bit more about that experience.

Paul Pape:

I call them pirate lawyers. I love them, I've got, I've got a book of them. I've got a book of cease and desist and, like I said, I love my education. And so, instead of being terrified, what I did is I started asking questions. They don't like it when you ask questions because I'm like what exactly are you having me stop for? They're like well, you're using our IP. I'm like explain your IP. And so they they started talking about it. I'm like you cannot use the word we or me. I'm like okay, cause you own that trademark. I get. That trademark has to be fought, otherwise you can lose your trademark. I said I have, you know I. And they like well, we also own the look of the me. I'm like okay, technically, you own the copyright to me's, but do you have a copyright for every variation? Because I think there was like 1.2 billion variations. Do you have copyrights on all of those? And they're like no. And I'm like okay, cool, so there's nothing you can do, right, cool? I said so I will stop using your IP, which is the me and the we. And so I went with MJJ with a font that just kind of they're straight lines, but they sat below the line. So I'm like, okay, that's falls under parody law. So what I did is I ended up learning the law so that I can use the, so I stay with it.

Paul Pape:

I work in a gray area, and how I actually found about it is I went online and I had a blog at the time and I was like, hey, everybody, I'm just letting you know I have to stop production on these, because pirate lawyers showed up and they said stop, or we're going to sue. And I actually had two corporate copyright lawyers get a hold of me and they were former clients and they said well, actually, and then they're the ones who helped me navigate through it. And so then the next time I'm having these conversations with the pirate lawyers, I can feed them information back. And don't get me wrong, I'm a guy who owns copyrights of my own, I own trademarks and all that, and I understand the necessity for it. But there's this great like you work in entertainment. I've done enough comic cons that you know it's fine.

Paul Pape:

But if you go to a comic con this is my favorite example to give is you could have two booths next to each other selling Spider-Man. One of them is the guy who actually works for Marvel who's actually making Spider-Man. And then he's doing original art, he's signing it and he's charging a thousand dollars a picture. And right next to him is a fan who, just as an artist who makes Spider-Man drawings, he's signing them but he's selling them for 10 bucks a piece. Now Marvel could come by and go hey, knock it off, we own this, you're not allowed to sell it. But there's going to be a nine-year-old walking through who loves Spider-Man and he's going to say, mom, I want a Spider-Man picture that's drawn for me here. And the mom's going to be like, how much is yours? He'll go thousand dollars. Hell, no, next guy, how much is yours? 10 bucks, sold American.

Paul Pape:

And I think that's a big part of it, because if Marvel stomped on every single one of them, if they, if everyone, enforced their copyright to the extent that they should, then what happens is you kill all fandom. Yep, you know that nine-year-old is going to grow up and he's going to love Spider-Man and eventually he may become a comic book buyer. He'll buy all the DVDs, he'll buy the costumes and eventually he'll pay that thousand dollars for that signed art because he remembers that time he saw it, couldn't afford it, but got another cool one next to it, and that's really what copyright is like. If we truly enforced every bit of it, there would be no comic cons, there'd be no halloween, we would be so.

Paul Pape:

And now you watch movies. I watched their first wonder woman and I was sitting next to my wife in the theater and they did this like long, like you know, shot on the shoe in the armband, and my wife is is like what? That's the weirdest shot. I'm like that's the cosplay shot. They're doing it on purpose so the cosplayers can pause it there and know exactly what it's supposed to look like. And that's the important thing. And so it's about knowing the law and that kind of stuff. So that's what happened with the cease and desist, and I've had some from Blizzard Activision. They were probably more stodgy than Nintendo ended up being. But if you know the law enough, while we do work in the gray areas, you can still get away with a lot of it.

Angie Colee:

I'm curious how does this relate to? Okay, so I have a little bit more background information on you than the listeners perhaps, but I know before we started recording you were telling me a little bit about Disney and the situation with that. Is that the same kind of situation, something different?

Paul Pape:

No, I'm actually hired by Disney now and they hire me to make the interesting one. I don't. Are you a Star Wars fan?

Angie Colee:

My sister and brother are huge Star Wars nerds.

Paul Pape:

OK, so I do this thing called custom carbonites, which is people frozen in carbonite, and make it look like them. About 10, 12 years ago, when they opened the first Star Wars area in Disneyland, you had the ability to get a custom carbonite. But what they did is they took Han Solo's body and they just put your head on it. So if you were a 300 pound man or a six year old girl, you still had Han Solo's body and it just didn't look right. What I was doing is I was actually sculpting like the whole thing, so it'd be like really you in any pose that you wanted or whatever. Well, when it first came out, they're like we didn't. They didn't have the publicity photos or any of that, but I had them online. And so they're like hey, can we use yours until we get enough? And so they're publicizing their custom carbonites using my photos from my custom carbonites for that. And so I'm like well, yeah, technically you're on it, so sure, but nowadays I actually do projects for them.

Paul Pape:

I've actually created custom action figures for the head of Disney animation, disney home animation. There's a retirement gift. I'm like you guys are the Imagineers, you can make an action figure. They're like yeah, but you can make one better. I'm like, okay, cool.

Paul Pape:

And then recently I just worked on something for the it's called the Creator, which was a movie that came out with androids in it, and they wanted headphones for a publicity giveaway type thing, but they wanted it to look like people had holes in their heads and they weren't sure how to do it, because that's what the androids have. They have the giant hole and that's how you know that they're robots. And so they called me up and they're like we don't know how to do this. And I'm like, uh, I worked for magician for a while, so I'm like, oh, we can do infinity mirrors on either side. And so when you look through it, you just see a light path that goes forever on both sides, and they're like, wow, that's awesome, you know, and that's really where education comes into play, and so, yeah, things. Then you know your brain will put A and B together to create something innovative.

Paul Pape:

And that's so that's so. Yeah, I work with Disney for that. I've worked on Teenage Mutant, ninja Turtles for Nickelodeon. Even though I make custom Teenie and Mentee figures for people, they actually hired me to use those same skills to create products for them to sell. And then, most recently, there's a movie called Death Becomes Her, which came out in the nineties. Stars Bruce Willis and Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn, and it's the one where it's okay. So you're familiar with the Broadway, it's going to Broadway.

Paul Pape:

And so they contacted me because I sell the vial and the egg and the onk box and the wood box that goes with it, and I'm the only one who does. And I actually managed to get all the designs because they sold them an auction and the people who bought them came to me and said reproduce it, because we don't want to put this really expensive thing out, but we want the replica on there. So now I have all the designs. And so they came to me and they said hey, we'd love one of your vials so we can use it for publicity. I'm like, okay, and then the design team's like you've got all the other parts that we need'm like, yeah, sure, do that. And I'm like I just want to be in the program and then you know, get paid.

Paul Pape:

But I had a friend who works in the industry and he's like how can you own the copyright to something that is owned by another company? And I'm like I, because I designed it. It's not a hundred percent the original, it's got it's, it's different enough, but it looks so close. And I'm actually working for the company that made the movie. Like they created the contract to hire me to give them the thing that they already owned because they didn't want to have to do the work. I don't know, but they recognize the talent in that, like why spend the time to reinvent the wheel? The original designs are gone, they're lost, they're in the ether somewhere, and so they're like well, let's just take a fan and then elevate that up or give them the money, since they've done all the work. And that's really where it comes from.

Angie Colee:

Oh, that's fascinating. Well, and I mean, the cool thing about all of this is like it sounds fantastic. It sounds so much fun. You're making me want to take some sculpting classes and get back into my artwork. How was the progression like for you along this path? Because, like, as we've been talking about it on a superficial level obviously we've only got an hour to talk right, it sounds like it was like well, I discovered the me thing and then raw, but I know that that's not the case. Like, what was it like actually building this thing and what were the rough patches?

Paul Pape:

Well, okay, first thing, I believe in bending, not breaking. Don't be so rigid in what you think you need to be doing that you get broken when you don't get to do it. I bend, and so people would ask me hey, paul, can you make this? Yep, okay, how are you going to do it? I don't know, I'll figure it out. And I think that comes from a curious mindset. It comes from having a lot of like again, that education. It's like learning all these different things and then, but being able to use my imagination to imagine the potential.

Paul Pape:

And what a lot of people forget is that when somebody comes to you with a request, they've given you the solution. They're like here's the answer to the problem. How do we get there? And that's all you have to do. Is you're like oh, okay, you want this thing, all right. Well, I'm like holding TARDIS right here, there's a TARDIS ring box that I'm making. I'm like okay, you want a TARDIS, you want it to be a ring box. Okay, you want it to be hidden. So I got to a ring be inside here. That's hidden, that you can't see it, but it looks like a tardis. You know it's. It's that it's working the problem backwards in the tiny chunks.

Paul Pape:

And so, when it was the me's is like, okay, sculpt all these different me's. Well, the good thing was I had a nintendo wii and so I could look at all the different figures and be like, all right, I can figure that out. But then somebody's like, well, I want an xbox avatar. Well, that's similar. Okay, now I'll go buy, buy an Xbox and I'll go look at those. And then it became well, can you do wedding cake toppers? What about world of Warcraft? What about the? And it was just oh, okay, let's do that. Now I want to propose I love Harry Potter, can you make a sorting hat ring box? Sure, I can do that. And it's just bending to here and to here. And if I was rigid in it, I started off making sculptures of people in the meet. Well, who uses a Nintendo Wii these days? I think it was gone since 2009,. You know, so I would have my business would have been dead.

Paul Pape:

But instead I'm like well, what else can we do? And it's always this bending in the wind to kind of get where you need to be. And then eventually you look back and you're like look at this skillset. This is a crazy amount of skills that I've got to do these silly things, and I mean I love prop building and you know, along the way, my dad used to teach me when I was like when I was a kid.

Paul Pape:

He's like whenever you take on a new project by one tool, that's your reward. You get paid, but buy yourself a tool, instead of going out and buying all the tools that you need to do everything right at the beginning, cause that's too expensive. Find a job. You're like oh, I don't know how to do this one, I want to buy one thing for it. So you did like today I had to cut a bunch of pipe, I went out and bought this pipe cutter, so now I got this tool, it's going to last me forever because I needed it for one job. But now I could be like oh, I need to do something where I can cut pipe. Yeah, sure, I've got that tool already. And that the flow rather than being rigid.

Paul Pape:

And this is something that businesses need to learn as well it's like, as long as you're willing to stay super rigid, accept that it's going to end, it's going to fail. You need to progress and they do a lot of well. We do these think tanks or we'll do these focus groups and all this, and I'm like you're not thinking far enough out because all you're doing is giving yourself an incremental. You're moving the finish line this much further instead of trying to get to here Like we're trying. You know. You know, if you want to blaze new ground, you got to start a fire. You got to think that's the only way blazes happen. You know, and you've really embraced that. But it's scary because those who are in power stay in power by earning the money and and you know, they get comfortable in that. It's the dragon with their gold, you know. But if they want there to be new things you've got to, you've got to be willing to take a risk. Yeah, it's scary. Risk is scary.

Angie Colee:

A lot of people are very scared of that one. I feel like I was talking about that just yesterday. I was like we, we know what happens. Oh, I wrote about it in an email. So you know, refusing to be open to doing things differently, refusing to listen to your people, is how behemoths go bankrupt. And then I typed I remember typing Adobe, get it together.

Angie Colee:

Everybody's talking about this. You remember Blockbuster, you remember all the guys before you and, of course, blockbuster is making some sort of weird comeback. But I digress, you've got to talk to people. But it's funny. I think this circles back to what you were talking about with the assembly line and Henry Ford. He's famous. I might be bastardizing this quote a little bit, but he said something along the lines of if you'd ask people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse, not an automobile. So I think that ties in perfectly to what you were saying with like you got to listen to your people. I think you should listen to your people and also you got to trust your gut and your vision and find that balance and be flexible. That's fantastic.

Paul Pape:

Absolutely.

Angie Colee:

And the other thing that you said that I really wanted to highlight for people because, damn it, just start doing this. Make it part of your practice. I did it in an exercise in a mastermind this morning and it was fantastic. Look back on how far you have come. Stop only looking forward to how much left you have to do. That is so demoralizing. Like you just constantly get overwhelmed and sad by like, oh, look at how much further I have to go until I get to where I want to be. Like, no, turn around and look back and pay attention to the people who are behind you, looking at you as their next goalpost and going, oh my God, I want what Paula has. Oh, my God, I want what Angie has.

Angie Colee:

And they don't even know what you've gone through to get to what you have. They don't even technically know what you have. They only know what they see on the surface. So, like, just practice the 360. Okay, like, look behind you, look to the sides, look ahead of you. It's never as as bad or as good as you think it is. Just keep moving.

Paul Pape:

Absolutely. I mean, it's always a journey and what's cool about it is I'm always taught like. This is if this is your journey and you're right here, you know you're always trying to get further ahead, but the goalpost is always moving, but there's always people behind you that are moving with you, and so you can always teach the people behind you, because they're trying to get to where you are. But you're always learning looking at the other people, and so we're always constantly moving. So there will always be someone who is trying to catch up to you, and there are always be people that you're trying to catch up to. But the thing is is don't you know? What do they say? Comparison is the thief of joy. Yes, you know, don't, don't live in that Like.

Angie Colee:

So I replaced that with your ordinary is everyone else's extraordinary.

Paul Pape:

And so, like, look at what you've accomplished. I mean like literally what you've accomplished. And if you don't feel that you've accomplished anything, have someone tell you, like, ask somebody to write you an obit, mm-hmm, oh, you know, because they'll be like or hell, write your own, yep, you know, put it out there and say what do you want to be remembered? Because you'd be surprised. You're like oh yeah, I did that and I did that and I did that. Oh shit, I've got, I've gotten some. Because I mean, if you've made it this far, if you've made it this far, you've done something.

Paul Pape:

Yes, you know we float on a lot of it, don't get me wrong, because we all have those days or times or periods or whatever, and where we have, where we have to float through it, because it's just a lot, but you still accomplish in that. I mean, you know, what did they say with people with utter depression is that fear and trepidation by seeing a finished product, like the Tonight Show called me up and they're like, hey, we need a singing, dancing robot in four days. It can't look like any robot that's ever existed because of copyright. So you got to design a robot that's completely new. You have three or four days to do it. Can you do it? And the answer is always, yes, I can.

Paul Pape:

And then figuring it out Now. I could absolutely have been just stopped figuring it out Now. I could absolutely have been just, you know, stopped dead in my track by like I, you know, but instead I was like, okay, what does it really need to do? What is in breaking it down, instead of looking at things as the finished product? You know, when we're, whenever you're, building or designing something, you know we start with that goal. We already know what the answer is. But don't look at it as a whole, look at it as all the different parts that go into it, and then you're like oh well, these are just incremental steps to get to this whole, and then you put it all together at the end, and that's a lot easier for us to acknowledge when you're depressed do one thing, because that one thing will lead to the next thing and eventually you'll progress your way out of it. And it's the same with any challenge that you encounter in your life.

Angie Colee:

Yep, I've advised people on that before when I work with them in like a coaching capacity. I think a lot of especially creative people want to have the plan ahead of them. Like I just want to be prepared for this straightforward path, but also the 20 potential paths that branch off and like all of the okay, yes, it's good to have a plan and at some point planning becomes counterproductive and you're not actually moving forward. At some point you just got to trust that the staircase is going to take you to the next level and not just drop off in a cliff. If I take a step, I'm not just going to fall off into oblivion.

Angie Colee:

And the funny thing you mentioned the obituary and I had a very visceral reaction when you said that. It reminded me of a challenge I did years ago. I think it was called the 20X your Potential Challenge or something like that was run by a Navy SEAL, I think his name is Mark Devine and I just remember thinking, especially as a kind of chubby girl. Right the day one was to do, I think, like a thousand pushups or 20 minutes of planking, and I picked what I thought was the easier one 20 minutes of planking and it's not like 20 straight minutes it was like however long it takes you to get to a total of 20 cumulative minutes.

Angie Colee:

I thought that was going to be the hard one. The hardest part was two days later when I had to call my loved ones and ask them what they thought I could improve at and what they thought I was really good at I mean talk about. I was nervous, I didn't know I was going to feel that way when I called them. Thought I was really good at I mean talk about. I was nervous, I didn't know I was going to feel that way. When I called them, I was anticipating them ripping me as hard as I rip myself.

Angie Colee:

And when they're telling me like oh my gosh, you've got such wonderful compassion, you've got more ambition, you've got like this and that, and I'm just like I can't listen to this anymore. I feel like the theme recently has been there are people out there that are talking good shit about you behind your back Always. I consider myself to be one of them, because I would much rather lift people up than tear them down. So like, remember that it's never as bad as it seems and that people out there are rooting for you.

Paul Pape:

And 99% of the time, people are not even thinking about you. They're thinking about their own stuff. It's the truth. I mean, like we have the long, like I I'm sure I'm gonna say everybody, you included angie you lie in bed and you have that argument that you didn't win in your head and you're gonna. Oh, if I would have just said that. You know it's like you think about this way more than anybody else. My mother called me up because we accidentally like crossed streams, we didn't read the text correctly, whatever. I was supposed to meet her in one place it ended up being like three minutes away where I had to meet her, and she text messaged me the next day and she's like I am so sorry, I won't ever let this happen. I'm like why are you even thinking about this? I'm like we got together, we laughed about it and that was it. And I'm like why are you still thinking about it? Don't let it go, it's not that damn.

Angie Colee:

Yeah, well, it's so, like you mentioned, that I call it um writing, writing the script or or being the the director. Uh, would that we had that much power? Like, if only the other part person follows this script that I have written for them, everything will turn out perfectly. And surprise, it's another human being and you may just find out that they haven't given it a second thought. Just like Paul, with this situation, my mom is the same Like, oh my God, I'm so embarrassed that I let that happen. I'm like I forgot about that the moment that it happened. It's totally.

Paul Pape:

I used to say a lot that I just don't, I don't care, I don't care, because really that is the essence of it. But saying you don't care has a different meaning to a lot of other people, so I've had to change it. It's like I forgot about. That is an easier way of saying it, because honestly, it's out of the ranking of things that I got to deal with in my life that falls so below the like, I don't, I can't care.

Paul Pape:

If that falls so below the like, I don't, I can't care, I can't care about that because I got other things I got to care about and that's really where that's kind of falls into that. And I think that if a lot, a lot of people would be a lot happier if they realize that people aren't thinking about them at all and the things that we do, that we think like I mean, I I've tripped on my own feet in front of a large group of people and I thought, oh my God, they're going to remember this forever, and then I'll bring it up, like a week later and like you did what when? But I've been thinking about dreading it or you know whatever, because I thought, oh, this is going to be the thing I'm going to be known as that guy. And no, nobody cares, oh yeah.

Angie Colee:

I held myself back for auditioning. I and I wrote about it a bit in my book but I wouldn't audition for bands for years. I'm a singer and I was like I'm going to forget the words, I'm going to blow a note, I'm going to humiliate myself on stage Spoiler alert I have done all of those things multiple times, including the time, and you can't make this stuff up, right? We had just ended a set with a cover of Tush by ZZ Top, after which I tripped wearing a cute flirty skirt and high heels, hint as to what's to come, and accidentally flashed my butt to the entire audience.

Angie Colee:

And I remember laying there on the stage with my butt still hanging out because I'm just like too stunned to do anything, thinking well, whether the show goes on or not is up to me. Like I can run screaming into the night or I can get back up and like in an instant I just got back up and cracked a very mortified and embarrassed joke about well, apparently I can't sing Tush without showing you mine, we'll be back in 10 minutes. And then, like, bolted off the stage, they're never paying it. I doubt that anybody out there even remembers that night like I do. Maybe the other guys in the bands, but all the patrons are probably they're.

Angie Colee:

They're well past it in their own lives and they don't care anymore it doesn't matter, it doesn't, it really does oh, this has been fantastic and I want to go for like three more hours, but for now I will say thank you so much for being on the show. Please tell us more where we can learn about your work.

Paul Pape:

If you're interested in art and I am the guy who can make anything, so you can find me at paulpapedesignscom it's like paper without the R paulpapedesignscom or anywhere on any of the social medias at Paul Pape Designs. Also, if you're interested in having me come and speak, talk to you about being creative and embracing your creativity, you can find that over at paulpapeit, because I like to teach people how to paulpape it, so that is where yeah, see, hi I wondered where that came from, because I saw your site and I was like is that for Italy?

Angie Colee:

What's?

Paul Pape:

going on. It is actually for Italy, but I'm like, no, I want you to paulpape it. Like I own the phone number. Like I look for the phone number, paulpape, and people are like people still do that. I'm like, yeah, it's like four. I don't even remember what it is at this point, but it's like four, seven, paul Pate. Nice, that's so clever. I'm like why not make it easy to remember?

Angie Colee:

Exactly, oh, I love that. All right, I'm gonna make sure that there are clickable links in the show notes so that it's easy as possible to check you out.

Paul Pape:

Would out to your, to your viewers. So I have this booklet that I made, called. So you want to be a creative? Now what? And it is the starting steps to launching a creative career from figuring out what to charge to you know, uh, understanding what it is that you're actually trying to sell. And I will give you the first chapter for free and I'll give that to you, and then you can set up a nice little link for that.

Angie Colee:

Oh, fantastic. Thank you so much. I read it. Everybody better go get that. Just saying what an incredibly generous gift. Thank you again for being such an awesome guest and for sharing your story with us. I appreciate you.

Paul Pape:

Well, thank you, Angie. I appreciate you having me on.

Angie Colee:

That's all for now. If you want to keep that kick-ass energy high, please take a minute to share this episode with someone that might need a high-octane. You can do it. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the permission to kick ass podcast on Apple podcasts, spotify and wherever you stream your podcasts. I'm your host, angie Coley, and I'm here rooting for you. Thanks for listening and let's go kick some ass.