0:00

Walt Disney was the first

0:02

to bundle television programs, feature

0:05

animation, live action films, documentaries,

0:07

theme parks, music, books, comics,

0:09

character merchandise, and educational films

0:12

under one corporate umbrella. He

0:15

created the first modern multimedia corporation. In

0:17

the year of his death, 240 million

0:19

people saw a Disney movie. 100 million

0:21

people watched a Disney

0:26

television show. 80 million people

0:28

read a Disney book. 50 million

0:30

people listened to Disney records. 80 million

0:33

people brought Disney merchandise. 150 million

0:36

people read a Disney comic

0:39

strip. And nearly 7 million

0:42

people visited Disneyland. Walt Disney had

0:44

changed the world. He had created

0:46

a new art form and then

0:48

produced several indisputable classics within it.

0:51

He had advanced color films and

0:53

then color television. He had reimagined

0:55

the amusement park. He had encouraged

0:57

and popularized conservation, space

1:00

exploration, atomic energy, urban

1:02

planning, and a deeper

1:05

historical awareness. He

1:07

had built one of the most powerful empires

1:09

in the entertainment world, one that

1:11

would long survive him. Yet all

1:13

of these accumulated contributions paled before a

1:15

larger one. He demonstrated how

1:17

one could assert one's will on

1:19

the world. Walt Disney had

1:22

been not so much a master of

1:24

fun or irreverence or innocence. He

1:27

had been a master of order. That

1:29

was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk

1:31

to you about today, which is this giant comprehensive 800 page

1:35

biography of Walt Disney. It is called Walt

1:37

Disney, The Triumph of the American Imagination and

1:39

is written by Neil Gabler. I read

1:42

this book for the first time nearly eight years ago.

1:44

In fact, it was episode two of Founders. But the

1:46

second reading after reading almost 350 of these biographies

1:50

of history, great entrepreneurs, completely changes

1:53

what I get out of the book, the

1:55

context, the additional meaning, and I think particularly

1:57

doing it right now after doing Quentin Tarantino.

2:00

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Tarantino,

2:02

Spielberg and Lucas all idolized Walt

2:05

Disney. They studied him intently. He had a

2:07

huge influence on their work. And

2:09

so over the last week, I've spent well

2:11

over 50 hours reading, highlighting, rereading.

2:13

The last few days, just really trying

2:15

to figure out what is the most

2:17

important lesson that I'm trying to take

2:20

away from this book. And

2:22

in 800 pages, it's absurd to think that

2:24

you can distill it down to just one

2:26

sentence. Later in the book,

2:29

there's this line that has really stuck with me

2:32

as I go and read and reread all these

2:34

highlights and notes. And it

2:36

said that Walt Disney's key traits were

2:39

raw ingenuity and a

2:41

sadistic determination. And

2:43

I sat and thought about that, raw ingenuity and

2:45

a sadistic determination. I think that is a very

2:48

accurate description of him. Why

2:50

was he like that? And what

2:52

you realize is he had to

2:54

have this sadistic determination in

2:56

large part because his dad, the

2:59

relationship they had with his father,

3:01

his father, Elias Disney, was excessively

3:03

controlling and simultaneously

3:06

unsuccessful. A man that

3:08

was beaten down by life that failed

3:10

at nearly every single thing that he

3:12

tried. There is another filmmaker that I

3:14

did a podcast on, Francis Ford Coppola. This is all

3:16

the way back on episode 242. I'm

3:19

going to put this book down and I'm going

3:21

to pick up that biography because there's such a

3:23

parallel before I get into this first story about

3:26

this experience that Walt Disney's going to have with

3:28

his father that he's having nightmares, nightmares

3:31

of 40 years later. Again,

3:33

raw ingenuity and sadistic determination. So

3:35

let's go to what Francis Ford

3:38

Coppola said about he had this

3:40

drive as well. And

3:42

so he says, this is Francis Ford Coppola describing his

3:44

childhood and his relationship with his father. And

3:47

that kind of person usually tries to belittle the aspirations of

3:49

the dreams of the people around

3:57

him, even if it's their kids, which is crazy. And

4:00

he's so Francis Ford Coppola is telling us what

4:02

his dad said and he said there can only

4:04

be one genius in the family and since I'm

4:06

already that what chance do you have? And

4:08

so I pick up the story of Walt Disney. He's

4:10

nine years old. His father's already failed multiple times. They're

4:13

trying to provide a living for his family. They

4:15

are now – his father has a newspaper

4:17

route delivering newspapers and he insists that all

4:19

of his sons help him. And this is

4:21

how Walt Disney remembered this. The route was

4:23

not just a means of earning a living.

4:26

It became a way of life for Disney's. Everything

4:28

had to be subordinated to the delivery of newspapers.

4:30

He was only nine years old and yet

4:33

Walt was already tethered to the route. I

4:36

was working all the time, he said. I

4:38

never had any playtime. The route

4:40

and its demands, the unyielding routine, the

4:42

snow, the fatigue, the lost papers, it

4:44

traumatized and haunted him. Forty

4:47

years later he was still awakening in

4:49

a sweat with nightmares about the route

4:51

that he had missed some customers. And

4:54

he remembered how much of his life he surrendered to

4:56

this route and how hard he had to work for

4:58

so little reward. And so that

5:00

line there about he had to work so hard

5:02

for so little reward, Elias Disney had a very

5:04

bad habit of taking the money that his sons

5:07

made and just keeping it. Walt

5:09

had three older brothers. Two of them ran

5:11

away because Elias kept taking their money.

5:14

Walt was terrified of his father. He

5:17

said his father was unapproachable, that he barely talked

5:19

to him. His father had an explosive temper. And

5:22

he would take the frustrations that he had with

5:24

his own life and the external world out on

5:26

his sons. So there's many stories in

5:28

the book where he goes to the backyard, cuts

5:30

a branch off a tree. They call it switching.

5:33

They did this to me when I was a

5:35

kid too. And they would lay

5:37

into the boys. You had to take your pants

5:39

down and get a switching. The

5:41

beatings were so bad that his sons were talking

5:43

about this many decades later. So this – my

5:46

parents beat the living crap out of me

5:48

when I was a kid. They hit me

5:50

with belts, switches, shoes, fists, and feet. It's

5:52

not very different than the descriptions that are in this book,

5:54

but what is fascinating is the decision

5:57

that I made. It just

5:59

proves like whatever happened. in the past.

6:01

You don't have to keep that trend going. So

6:03

Walt Disney, the main – he's going to be

6:05

criticized by a lot of people. He

6:07

had this sadistic determination. He was by far

6:09

a workaholic. If his eyes were open, he

6:11

was working. But he was also simultaneously a

6:13

great dad. His daughter wrote a biography of

6:16

him, which I just found in the bibliography

6:18

of this book, and I ordered. But both

6:20

of his daughters are in this book talking

6:22

about how special he made them feel, how

6:24

much time he made for

6:26

them, how he made them a priority. And

6:29

one of the greatest things about Walt Disney is that – there's

6:31

this other line in this book I read about him

6:33

in the past that says that he put – that

6:36

Disney put excellence before any other consideration. I think that's

6:38

a great one-sentence summary of his approach to his work.

6:40

But he also was a great dad. And

6:43

even though he was abused by his parents, his dad

6:45

hits him with a hammer, which we'll get to in

6:47

a minute. He never did that to

6:49

his kids. And I remember growing up

6:51

and just thinking this was very odd, that the people who

6:53

are supposed to care for me and love me are beating

6:55

the shit out of me. And

6:58

I knew the day my daughter was born, there's

7:00

no way I would ever do

7:02

that to my kids. She's 12. My

7:04

son is 4. I've never laid a finger

7:06

on them. And it's a theme

7:08

that has reoccurred in these bographies. It doesn't matter

7:10

what passion and art did. It always

7:13

takes one person to change the entire

7:15

trajectory of a family. And you see

7:17

that with Walt Disney, the way he

7:19

was a fantastic father and an undeniable

7:21

success in the way that his dad

7:23

wasn't. His dad was not

7:25

a good father. His dad was a failed

7:27

human being, not only as a father, but also

7:30

as a – he's a multiple failed entrepreneur. And

7:32

so I think that's important to sit and talk

7:34

about right at the very beginning because, again, raw

7:37

ingenuity, sadistic determination in this line, I think, ties

7:39

in what I'm trying to tell you. Walt

7:42

Disney was so different from his father.

7:44

It was almost like he was the

7:46

antithesis of Elias Disney, almost as if

7:48

he had willed himself to be so

7:51

as a form of rebellion. And

7:54

So this continues until Disney himself, Walt

7:56

Disney himself, makes it stop. They're building

7:58

him and his father. Building. On

8:01

addition onto their house rate and every time

8:03

what would make mistakes allies would try to

8:05

hit him with either the side of a

8:07

saw or the handle of a hammer. And

8:09

so the next time he made a mistake

8:11

was fourteen when this happening cooker. Elias.

8:14

As a go down to the basement it's time

8:16

for beating. Now. This is nuts

8:18

is says Elias falls and down

8:20

to the basement. grabs a hammer,

8:23

To try to strike him but this

8:25

time was grabbed his father's hand and

8:27

remove the hammer. Listen to what while

8:29

does he said about this He raised

8:31

his other arm and I held both

8:33

of his hands. Now against is the

8:35

you're a young man going through puberty.

8:38

You. May not win a fight a one on one by

8:40

with your father, but you can damn sure inflicts some

8:42

kind of damage back to him. In a

8:44

way, when you're seven or eight or nine, you can't.

8:46

And. Won't says. He raised the other arm and

8:48

I held both of his hands and I just

8:51

held them there. I was stronger than he was.

8:53

I just held them and he broke down and

8:55

cried. His. Father never touched him

8:57

after that. Elias was broken by

8:59

work and now defeated in the

9:01

family to. And.

9:04

That leads directly into another main theme

9:06

of this book, into how Walt Disney

9:09

created himself. He. Retreated into his own

9:11

world and then built his own. maybe more than

9:13

any other entrepreneur you know. I've studied this the

9:15

most obvious because did literally built Disney World. Their

9:17

Disney Land, I guess was the was of one

9:19

that was completed when he was alive as a

9:21

fantastic metaphor for what he was trying to do

9:23

his entire career. He. Wanted to escape

9:26

and control his environment. And this

9:28

tendency was so pronounced he only has august seventh

9:30

or eighth grade education ago. When he's

9:32

in school though, the teacher thought he was

9:34

the second dumbest person in the class. That

9:37

is literally a quote the second domus but if

9:40

he would talk to him away from schoolyard now

9:42

this has clearly quick witted, he's clearly smart his

9:44

whom he driven to wise the teacher saying you

9:46

the second dumbest person the class because all he

9:49

wanted to do all day and class was not

9:51

class where he wanted to draw. He.

9:53

Would sit silently inner corner and

9:55

draw. He. Was secluded in his own

9:57

world. There's a line in the book is. He

10:00

had never stop drawing. He spent hours

10:02

decorating the margins of his text books

10:04

with pictures and an entertaining as classrooms

10:06

are classmates by ripping through them to

10:08

make them move. He drew constantly. he

10:11

drew even though was not always a

10:13

socially it was that always socially acceptable

10:15

to draw people would make fun of

10:17

on they say was sissy. It was

10:19

sissy for a man or by young

10:21

boy to draw. But that did not

10:23

deter Walt Disney. It became the primary

10:25

source of his identification. even in our

10:27

seventh grade classroom. We all knew you'd.

10:30

Be a really great artist. One day some

10:32

kind of artist genius of some kind, because

10:34

even in the seventh grade, that or that's

10:36

all you did. And. So it's remarkable

10:39

that it mentions that hey, he sitting in

10:41

class instead of paying it has a glass.

10:43

He's decorating the margins of is textbook. Years

10:45

ago, I read a biography of Dr. Seuss

10:48

whose real name is Theodor Geisel. I think

10:50

this is how you pronounce it. And

10:52

one of things it's and that's in that are

10:55

it's absurd. One sixty one one of things it's

10:57

in the book is very facing Sasa how he

10:59

met his his wife. And. I think during

11:01

college at this time and she's sitting next to him

11:03

and class on who think they're dating at. And.

11:06

He's not paying attention that anything's going on

11:08

class, He's drawing and so this three highlights

11:11

I want to pull from map or grow

11:13

quick. That is almost exactly what had taken

11:15

place in. In. More disease life at

11:17

this point She says you're not very interested in

11:19

a lecture. Then she leaned in, pointed at one

11:21

of his drawings and said, i think that's a

11:23

very good flying cow. And in this book

11:26

is as maybe the most important thing that anyone ever

11:28

said to him. Comes. From her you're

11:30

crazy to be professor She told Ted, would

11:32

you really want to do is draw. Kids.

11:35

Know books were always filled with these

11:37

fabulous animals, so I set to work

11:40

diverting him. Here was a man who

11:42

could draw such pictures. He should be

11:44

earning a living doing that. And.

11:47

Just like George Lucas, he's going to fight

11:49

against what his father wants to do flew

11:51

for George Lucas's dad wanted him to work

11:53

at the stationery store and drawers. like know

11:56

I'm going to make a living doing what

11:58

I love. I'm going to be. Lawmaker.

12:00

You see the exact same thing here. Is.

12:02

Dad wasn't working like this jelly factory. He's

12:04

like, no, I'm going to be a cartoonist

12:06

now before he does that out. Before Vaduz

12:08

Disney. Has. His ideas like know I'm

12:11

going to be a cartoonist He has a design

12:13

his own curriculum and this is so important. So

12:15

he's spending all time practicing drawing. Living in his

12:17

own world right? But way. It is

12:19

even says as agree line of work. It's like when he wasn't

12:21

drawing he was thinking about it. But. Would

12:24

also seek out additional help.

12:26

So there's these cartoonists in

12:28

his original idea for his

12:30

life. With. Not to build.

12:32

You know the world's first multimedia corporation is I

12:34

do like oh well there's cartoonist the people get

12:37

paid to write to like draw pictures. Who does

12:39

it have newspaper cartoonist? Okay so that's when I'm

12:41

gonna do and so he would find. And

12:44

cartoonists. I worked in newspapers that

12:46

he admired, and in many cases

12:48

these cartoonists were also teachers, so

12:50

he starts attending classes at night.

12:53

Taught by some of his favorite. A

12:56

newspaper cartoonists and there's a line. Here is

12:58

the first time it says this right, but

13:00

this is something he does over and over

13:02

again. He says he was a what does.

13:04

He was so entranced that he would not

13:06

even take a bathroom break on. Naive and

13:08

kidding. This was a shocking to me how

13:10

many times he get so engrossed in his

13:12

work that he's he won't go even goat

13:14

he won't even stop to go to the

13:16

bathroom. And. When I got to this paragraph

13:18

it made me think si vous, because Steve Jobs talked

13:20

about As Heroes over and over again to of As

13:23

Heroes. Were. Edwin Land and Walt

13:25

Disney And so this idea. This total

13:27

engrossment in his work that is very

13:29

evident. When. Disease A nice for

13:32

started his career. Already told he's in

13:34

a hospital dying. He knows he's dying

13:36

and he's going over drawings for Epcot.

13:38

And. So a trait that both have

13:40

to have. Steve Jobs Heroes

13:42

What is in urban land? Shared:

13:45

This is from one of the biographies of Admin

13:47

Land or that I read a want to reach

13:49

this paragraph it's a six hundred page vog. Fair

13:51

read on this. Ah, Pan lawsuit

13:53

between Polaroid and Kodak. And.

13:55

it is edwin lan have learned early

13:58

on that todo engrossment was the best

14:00

kind was the best way for him

14:02

to work. He strongly believed that this

14:04

kind of concentrated focus could also produce

14:07

extraordinary results for others. Late in his

14:09

career, Lan recalled that

14:11

his whole life has been spent

14:14

trying to teach people that intense

14:16

concentration for hour after hour can

14:18

bring out in people resources they

14:20

didn't know they had. And

14:22

so there's one event outside of Walt Disney's control

14:25

that is going to delay his getting a job

14:27

as a cartoonist and that is World War I.

14:29

I mentioned earlier that he had three older brothers.

14:32

They all go off to fight in World War I.

14:35

Walt Disney's not old enough. He's trying to get his parents

14:37

to sign a waiver. They refuse to do so. He

14:39

wants to join the army and fight just like his

14:42

older brothers do, right? Because he says he thought of

14:44

the war – he thought of it not as a

14:46

war but as an adventure which is actually

14:48

a very common theme of a

14:50

young American man in World War I and

14:52

World War II. So they

14:54

refused to do that but they did

14:56

let him join the Red Cross where

14:59

he would be an ambulance driver. And

15:01

so just after he turned 17, he

15:03

is stationed in France to be an ambulance driver

15:05

for the Red Cross. Now there's

15:08

a line here I need to share with

15:10

you because again, everything is about escaping this

15:12

world that he did not like, this childhood

15:15

that he did not like. So he regarded

15:17

his time with the Red Cross as

15:20

another escape. Now I have

15:22

a hilarious anecdote that I came across in another book

15:24

that I read. It is Ray Kroc's autobiography. I've read

15:26

it twice. The last time I did an episode on

15:28

it, it's Episode 293. And what's hilarious

15:31

is Ray Kroc is around the same age,

15:33

too young to fight in the war but

15:35

he signs up to be

15:37

an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. And

15:40

I'm reading the book one time and this

15:42

is the paragraph I come across in Ray

15:44

Kroc's autobiography. He says, In my company was

15:46

another fellow who had lied about his age

15:49

to get in. He was regarded as a

15:51

strange duck because whenever we had time off,

15:53

we would go out on the town to

15:56

chase girls and he would stay in camp

15:58

drawing pictures. was

16:00

Walt Disney. About

16:02

a year later he gets back home and

16:04

this is where he's just rebelling against his

16:07

father's offer to work at a jelly factory.

16:09

This is just like George Lucas, what I

16:11

just said. And again, this main theme of

16:13

escaping. I'm escaping from this world I do

16:15

not like and I will create myself and

16:17

build a new world. That's exactly what Walt Disney did and

16:20

him and his father go back to fighting verbally this

16:22

time and Walt says he never

16:24

understood me. He thought I was a

16:26

black sheep. He said it was nonsense that I

16:29

wanted to draw pictures, that I should secure a

16:31

stable job. He didn't understand why

16:33

I would sacrifice the certainty of the

16:35

jelly factory for the uncertainty of art.

16:39

And listen to this description. So

16:41

17 year old Walt Disney, newly

16:43

armed with confidence and determined to

16:46

avoid his father's fate. Determined to

16:48

avoid his father's fate. The

16:50

joylessness and the constant disappointment

16:52

Walt Disney would pursue his

16:55

opportunity he would escape. And

16:58

so now we have a very young Walt Disney.

17:00

He's 18, 19 years old. He goes to Kansas

17:02

City and he's determined to be successful. So this

17:04

is where I mentioned this is line in the

17:07

George Lucas biography that I thought

17:09

was interesting. Where he would like shoot so

17:11

much footage as many as much as he

17:13

can and like you know handful days and

17:15

he spent spend like 10 weeks editing and

17:17

really figuring out where this all goes together.

17:19

I did something similar this week. Just several

17:21

days of rereading over and over again about

17:24

like what is the main thing I'm trying to take

17:26

away from this book. And this is when I realized

17:28

I might title this episode Walt Disney, how Walt

17:30

Disney created himself or something like that

17:32

because it's very obvious like he made

17:34

himself. And in doing so that was

17:36

the foundation which he can lay on top of the company

17:38

that he built, the empire that he built. But first he

17:41

had to make himself. And so even

17:43

when he's 18 and 19 he's meeting all

17:45

these new friends in Kansas City. Almost all of

17:47

them remark on the same – they

17:49

say the same description over and

17:51

over again. They say that he was

17:53

determined to be successful that sadistic determination,

17:56

raw ingenuity and sadistic determination right. He

17:58

had absolute faith in a – And

18:01

this is why I always say that

18:03

what's one thing that's obvious when you

18:05

read a bunch of biographies is that

18:07

belief comes before ability. This is the

18:09

Walt Disney version of belief comes before

18:11

ability. He brimmed with a self-confidence that

18:13

was neither entirely justified nor particularly well-directed

18:15

since he had arrived without a plan.

18:17

He was a go-getter who did not

18:19

know where he was getting to, only

18:21

that he would get somewhere. So

18:24

there's all these companies in Kansas City that are doing

18:27

advertisements. They're like drawing ads for companies. They're called commercial

18:29

art shops, is what they were called at the time.

18:31

And he sees an ad where they're looking for an

18:33

apprentice. And so he shows up. Here's

18:36

the thing. When you show up, he gets a one

18:38

– first of all, they hire by the way that

18:40

this company hires is just by trial. It's like

18:43

you're going to work here for a week. We have no idea what you're

18:45

going to get paid. We have to see if you're good or not. And

18:47

so he's so anxious during this first week.

18:50

What does he do again? He never leaves

18:52

the drawing board, not even taking a break

18:54

to relieve himself until lunch. This

18:57

guy wants to pee his pants. He

18:59

never pees his pants, but he holds

19:01

it until the meal breaks. And

19:03

I know I keep hounding on that, but it comes up

19:05

over and over again. I just think it's such an interesting

19:08

total engrossment into his work. And

19:11

so this trial ends. The founder of the

19:13

company approaches him, looks at over all of

19:15

his work, and immediately offers him a salary

19:17

of $50 a month. And

19:20

I love this part. I love this part. Walt

19:22

later admitted that he would have worked for much

19:24

less, and he was so grateful he said that

19:27

I could have kissed him. They're paying me to

19:29

draw pictures. They're paying me to draw pictures, he

19:31

told his aunt. That's exactly what Steven Spielberg

19:33

– if you listen to the Steven Spielberg episode, this

19:35

is much later in his life. I

19:37

think he's probably 50 years old at the time. An

19:39

old friend of his comes and visits his movie set.

19:41

I think it's the movie 1941, if I recall correctly.

19:44

And he just looks around and he goes, do

19:46

you know they pay me to do this? And

19:49

so this part is just incredible. He gets his first

19:51

job, and he's like, I should start my own company. One

19:53

of my favorite facts about Walt Disney is by the time he was

19:55

20, his first company – by the time he's 20, he's

19:58

already gone bankrupt with his first job. And

20:00

then he just immediately starts over again

20:02

and just does it better the next time. So it

20:05

says, for someone virtually without training or experience, for

20:07

someone who had just lost his job, he was

20:09

cocky. I felt well-qualified, he would say, and he

20:11

was already thinking of opening his own art shop.

20:14

So he lost his job because that work was

20:16

seasonal. It was just around the holidays, the Christmas

20:18

holidays. Walt had met another animator,

20:20

this guy named Oob Eaworks. I think it's

20:22

how you pronounce his name. It's very weird.

20:25

And he's like, oh, this guy's talented. And

20:27

then impulsively, he's like, hey, why don't we

20:29

just go into business together? And

20:31

so even though they were both

20:33

high school dropouts, it says Walt

20:35

Disney had grandiose big dreams. He

20:39

had outsized aspirations. And

20:41

one thing that his early partner said about

20:43

him that Walt was completely self-absorbed, but listen

20:45

to this. So he

20:47

says he once remarked that while he

20:50

and other artists played poker during breaks,

20:52

Walt would sit at his board, drawing

20:54

board, practicing various renditions

20:56

of his signature. He

20:58

knew. He knew one day he was

21:01

going to do everything he could. He's going

21:03

to make that signature world-famous. This is not

21:05

very different. This is very similar to a

21:07

young Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg, when he was

21:09

a kid, he would practice

21:12

accepting his – he would visualize himself winning

21:14

an Oscar. And

21:17

then he would practice his acceptance speech

21:19

in front of the Academy. Steven

21:21

Spielberg, when he was doing this, was like 12 years old.

21:25

And so then this is the first time that we're going to see

21:27

something that Walt Disney does his entire

21:29

career. This is something that Disney has in

21:32

common with other great filmmakers. He is always,

21:34

always jumping on the new technology of his

21:36

day. Think about the description

21:39

of George Lucas in that biography. They said

21:41

he was the Thomas Edison of the modern

21:43

film industry. So he also did the swell.

21:46

There's many examples of Spielberg doing this. And so

21:49

he's like, okay, I can be a cartoonist,

21:51

but there's a lot of other cartoonists. But

21:53

there's this new field called animation, and it

21:55

really gripped Disney because he's like, oh, what

21:57

got him thinking? He's like, wait. animation

22:01

is just making cartoons move. It

22:03

brings life to my cartoons. And

22:06

then this part describes why that was so important. It's

22:08

five sentences, two paragraphs. This is Walt

22:10

Disney but it might as well be Edwin Land because

22:13

I read this and then one, two, three times I'm

22:15

like, oh this is just like Edwin Land. So

22:18

why is he gonna do this? Number

22:20

one, it was a way to make

22:22

his marks since unlike newspaper cartooning, animation

22:24

was something that Walt thought he might

22:26

do better than anyone else in the

22:28

world because so few people at the

22:30

time were doing it and so few

22:32

people had any expertise in it. The

22:35

idea of being the best, the most

22:37

noted clearly appealed to him. That's number

22:40

one. That reminds me of Edwin Land,

22:42

his personal motto. He said his personal motto

22:44

was don't do anything that someone else can

22:46

do. And we'll see in animation there was

22:48

nobody in the world that could do animation

22:50

in the way Walt Disney's going to end

22:52

up doing it. And he knew it

22:55

too. There's a line that George Lucas says that

22:57

somebody was describing a young George Lucas says that

22:59

he knew how to do it and he was

23:01

gonna make sure everyone knew that he knew. Walt

23:03

Disney, he would hold his entire team

23:06

to what many people would consider like

23:08

an unreasonably high expectation of excellence. And

23:10

one of the lines he has about

23:12

this, he's like, listen, if

23:14

we were not excellent we go to business, right? Because

23:17

he thought quality was the only moat. That's not the

23:19

word he uses but that's the way I would describe

23:21

his interpretation of that. That they only feel like he's

23:23

betting his entire company on excellence and quality of the

23:25

product. And if we

23:27

let that go then our entire company goes out of

23:29

business and if our company goes out of business, the

23:31

quality of the entire animation industry

23:34

would fall. That

23:36

is a wild, wild statement. Wild

23:39

that he said it and wild because it's probably

23:41

true. And

23:43

so again, don't do anything that someone else can do, right?

23:45

I want to I want to jump into a new industry

23:47

because I have a chance of being the best in the

23:50

world at that industry. Number two, Walt

23:52

Disney, this is probably my favorite quote in

23:54

the entire book, Walt Disney seldom dabbled. Everyone

23:56

who knew him remarked on his intensity. When

23:58

something intrigued him, he focused himself entirely

24:01

on it as if it were

24:03

the only thing that mattered. Now

24:05

animation mattered. That

24:07

is when he began an immersive self-education in the

24:10

medium. How many times is he going to use

24:12

the same playbook over and over again? He jumps

24:14

into something and he builds his own curriculum. So

24:16

that is number two. Edwin

24:18

Land. There's a rule that they don't

24:20

teach you at Harvard Business School. It is. If

24:23

anything is worth doing, it's worth doing

24:25

to excess. And Edwin Land should

24:27

know because he dropped out of Harvard twice.

24:29

Number three, that idea that hey, we're not

24:31

dabbling here. We're not dilly-dallying. We're not dabbling.

24:34

You know, everyone who knew him

24:36

remarked on his intensity when something intrigued

24:38

him. He focused himself entirely. It was

24:40

the only thing that mattered. That is

24:42

another Edwin Land-ism. Edwin

24:44

Land said, my whole life has been

24:46

spent trying to teach people that intense

24:49

concentration for hour after hour can bring

24:51

out in people resources they didn't know

24:53

they had. Just

24:55

like Edwin Land was only focused on Polaroid, we

24:57

see now that Walt Disney is doing the same

24:59

thing. Walt Disney was now

25:01

focused on animation virtually to the exclusion of

25:03

everything else. He would go to the

25:05

garage after work each day. Walt Disney's

25:07

first studio, do you want to… Walt

25:10

Disney's first studio, it was a garage in the

25:12

yard that was 15 square feet. And

25:15

this is his schedule. So he'd go to the garage

25:17

after a full day of work. Then he'd work right

25:20

after work. He'd come out for dinner, then go back

25:22

to the studio. He'd come back

25:24

inside long after everybody else was in

25:26

bed. Walt was out there, puttering away,

25:28

working away, experimenting. Trying this and trying

25:30

that, drawing and so on. What his

25:32

family did not seem to notice was

25:34

that Walt Disney, who for years had

25:36

been determined to become a newspaper cartoonist,

25:38

was now suddenly just as determined to

25:40

become something that to most outsiders was

25:42

even more impractical. Something for

25:44

which he had no real training and

25:46

something for which a job did not

25:48

even seem to exist. He wanted to

25:50

become an animator. When he

25:52

began puttering in his garage, animation

25:55

was scarcely two decades old.

25:58

What is going on here? why is he

26:01

obsessed with this? Remember the animator creates

26:03

his own world. A world which he

26:05

has completely under his control. What

26:07

did it say? I don't think you know

26:09

this but the intro to this podcast came

26:11

from the introduction and the epilogue and it

26:14

ends with saying that he was a master

26:16

of order. A master of

26:18

control. Why? Why was

26:20

that so important to him? Walt

26:22

Disney had a psychological connection to

26:24

animation. A connection forged by his

26:26

childhood experiences. The process of animation

26:28

was a process of giving life.

26:30

Of literally taking the inanimate and

26:32

making it animate. It was

26:35

a hubristic process. Everybody

26:37

that meets Walt Disney talks about

26:39

that he had a giant, giant

26:41

ego. It was a hubristic process

26:43

in which the animator assumed and

26:45

exercised god-like control over his material.

26:48

In the case of Walt Disney, this

26:50

surge of empowerment was so great one

26:53

might even have concluded that animation took the

26:55

place of religion for him. For

26:57

a young man who had

27:00

chafed under the stern, moralistic

27:02

world of his father, animation

27:04

provided escape. It provided

27:06

absolute control. In

27:09

animation, Walt Disney could be the

27:11

power. And again he does

27:13

the exact same thing here. Determined to

27:15

master ambition. He immersed himself in completely.

27:17

This is how you know

27:19

you're early to a field. So he's reading

27:21

everything he can get. He's taking classes. He's

27:24

practicing. And it says he took out the

27:26

one book from the Kansas City Library that

27:28

there was on animation. And so

27:30

before his company's doing like these freelance

27:33

jobs, he's advertising. But his first

27:35

product is going to be selling

27:37

one minute animated shorts. And

27:39

he sells them to movie theaters. These

27:41

are little one-minute cartoons

27:44

that are shown before movies. You

27:47

start out, okay, well what's the first thing

27:49

you can do? The most rudimentary, almost like

27:51

simple thing you can do. I can make

27:53

a one-minute animated cartoon. It's going to be

27:55

black and white. It's not going to

27:57

have sound. And then eventually I'm going to add sound and then I'm going

27:59

to add... color and then instead of being one minute

28:01

it's gonna be you know six or seven minutes and then

28:03

he has this idea which changes the entire

28:06

trajectory of his company and he's like

28:08

I'm gonna build the world's first full feature length

28:10

animated cartoon but it's fascinating I think that's the

28:12

power of biography one of the powers biography is

28:15

like you just see it's like oh it starts

28:17

here okay now you see him learning oh wait

28:19

he's figuring out and then he keeps doing that

28:21

unimpeded and he lets he compounds for four decades

28:24

and then by that time he's

28:26

got movies theme parks television shows

28:28

radio books merchandise everything and

28:31

so he calls his first product Laffogram's and

28:33

his dad is like you're crazy you shouldn't

28:35

do this since his father who had suffered

28:38

so many economic setbacks of his own advised

28:40

him not to do this warning that he

28:42

could go broke but remember he's the antithesis

28:45

of his father while Disney was too independent

28:47

minded even at the age of 20 to

28:49

think of himself as

28:51

someone else's employee and

28:54

that confidence that unusual self-belief is actually

28:56

gonna power him through because it's not

28:58

like there's a giant market he's

29:00

in a brand new industry this is not like

29:02

a strong demand for these cartoons it's not why

29:04

people are going to the movies you know so

29:06

if a movie if you're a movie theater and

29:08

you want to cut back on some expenses people

29:11

are coming to see the main feature they're

29:13

not coming to see these like one-minute cartoons

29:15

so he's launching into a market with rather

29:17

weak demand and I think there's two things

29:19

that serve him really well it's like intense

29:22

drive and self-belief it

29:24

says this is such a great line he's

29:26

one of the most unusual people you could

29:29

possibly study and with a podcast

29:31

full of unusual people it says he had the

29:33

drive and ambition of 10 million

29:35

men and he had the self-confidence

29:37

to match he says listen he's

29:40

struggling he's about to go bankrupt he's gonna

29:42

starve he's gonna have to live in his

29:44

office that is it's insane

29:47

that he persevered through all this but

29:49

he says I'm going to sit tight I

29:51

have the greatest opportunity I've ever had and

29:53

I'm in it for everything and

29:55

he's relentlessly resourceful if he can't

29:57

sell cartoons he starts doing more

29:59

free He'll go to companies and say, hey,

30:01

I can build cartoons for you. He winds up doing –

30:05

to make payroll and to feed himself,

30:07

he winds up even doing educational films

30:09

on dental hygiene for a dentist. This

30:11

is the state of affairs before he has

30:14

a big hit. He's going to do this

30:16

live-action cartoon called Alice's Wonderland. Not Alice in

30:18

Wonderland. It's called Alice's Wonderland. And so

30:21

there – he can't pay rent, so he's

30:23

sleeping in his office. He

30:26

has to get his meals on credit when that

30:28

credit runs out. Walt

30:31

remembers, I was so damn hungry

30:33

that he would subsist on cold

30:35

beans that he ate from a can. Since

30:38

he's living in the office, he doesn't have any money. He only

30:40

takes a bath or a shower once a week. And

30:42

he goes down to the local

30:44

YMCA and I think pays like a

30:46

nickel or a dime so he can shower there. And

30:49

he's losing so much weight, and he looks

30:51

so bad that everybody around him, the older

30:53

people in the community, think he has tuberculosis.

30:56

And eventually he can't stave this off

30:58

any longer, so this is when he

31:01

declares bankruptcy. And it

31:03

is during this time, probably the darkest time

31:05

in his young adult life, that

31:08

one of his greatest traits is revealed. He's got

31:10

this bulletproof optimism. Listen to this. Throughout

31:13

the failures, throughout the days without meals and

31:15

nights with restless sleep, throughout the constant begging

31:17

for funds, throughout it all Walt Disney seemed

31:19

never to lose his faith. I never

31:22

once heard Walt say anything that would

31:24

sound like defeat. He was always optimistic

31:26

about his ability and the value of

31:29

his ideas and about the possibilities of

31:31

cartoons in the entertainment field. Never once

31:33

did I hear him express anything except

31:36

determination to go ahead. He seemed confident

31:38

beyond any logical reason for him to

31:40

be so. It appeared that

31:42

nothing could discourage him. And

31:45

he has a great quote about this. He says, you

31:47

have to take the hard knocks with the good breaks

31:49

in life. A life

31:51

is going to be composed of both. No one's going

31:53

to get through it without hard knocks and good breaks.

31:56

And so what he realizes is, listen, especially

31:58

this time in the early 1920s, If

32:00

you want to be in the entertainment field, you need

32:02

to get your ass to Hollywood. He's in Kansas City.

32:04

He's like, listen, there's nothing wrong with

32:06

my aim. I got to change my target is the

32:08

way I think about what his decision making here. He's

32:10

like, okay, Kansas City is clearly not the right place.

32:13

I'm going to scrounge every last dollar. He went

32:15

to doing a bunch of freelance work again, then

32:17

was up selling his camera just so he can

32:19

make enough money and buy

32:21

a train ticket and get

32:23

from Kansas City to Hollywood. This

32:26

was one of the most important decisions he ever makes. Think about

32:28

how crazy this is because we – you and I know from

32:30

our vantage point the run that he's about to go on, right?

32:32

He's going to have tons of ups and downs, but

32:34

he gets to Hollywood in 1923. He's

32:37

going to die in 1966. If

32:40

you think about what he builds

32:42

in Hollywood over the next four

32:44

decades, he arrives in Hollywood with

32:47

nothing but a borrowed suit. It

32:49

says a peculiar self-confidence, a borrowed

32:51

suit and peculiar self-confidence. He

32:55

takes the same idea. He had this idea

32:57

called Alice's Wonderland, which is you combine live

32:59

action with some – you shoot a live

33:02

action like Little Girl, and then you draw

33:04

– in post-production,

33:06

you draw animated characters around her and

33:08

it looks like she's interacting with them.

33:10

This is very rudimentary technology at the

33:13

time. We're in 1920s for God's sake. But

33:15

he had that idea. He's like, okay, I had this idea in Kansas City. I

33:18

just ran out of money. I still think

33:20

it's a good idea. He takes it to

33:22

Hollywood, starts developing it there, and he winds

33:24

up immediately selling it to a distributor named

33:26

Margaret Winkler. Margaret Winkler, interesting

33:28

enough, was the first and only

33:30

female film distributor in

33:33

the entire country. So what Walt has

33:35

sold is this series of very short

33:37

films called Alice's Wonderland, and

33:40

she's making $1,500 each for the first six and $1,800

33:42

each for the second six. So

33:46

he's got a good break, and then as is

33:48

in the case of his entire career, Walt

33:51

Disney is world-famous by the time he's in his 30s.

33:54

But you look at him and he's in his mid-40s,

33:56

and he's just going through struggle after struggle. His

33:58

entire career – success is not a straight line. Success is

34:00

not a straight line. It is up and down, valleys

34:02

and peaks over and over again, up until he gets

34:05

to Disneyland. And then essentially he doesn't have to worry

34:07

about money for the rest of his

34:09

life, but he's struggling even with a lot of

34:11

successes. He has a ton of setbacks in his career. That's why

34:13

I find this book takes

34:15

an unbelievable amount of time to read

34:17

and to digest. But I do think

34:19

the end result is you feel incredibly

34:21

inspired. Throughout any normal week, you're

34:23

going to have this entrepreneurial, emotional

34:25

roller coaster. And

34:28

every time I feel like a low low, I'm like, oh, I'm supposed to feel

34:30

this way. And the only response to the

34:32

way I feel right now is to be determined to

34:35

push through. It's exactly what Walt Disney would do. And

34:37

so even though he has a success, his

34:39

distributor is going to marry this guy named Charles

34:42

Mintz. Charles Mintz starts running the

34:44

business because Margaret gets pregnant. And

34:46

Charles Mintz is the reason that

34:49

Mickey Mouse exists because Charles

34:51

Mintz steals Disney's company from him. This is

34:53

so important. And to understand why this happened,

34:55

you understand what was important to Walt Disney.

34:58

He was not – he was like a reluctant entrepreneur,

35:01

and I think these two sentences give you an idea

35:03

of that. Walt was never interested in building an operation

35:05

or running a business. He was

35:07

interested in improving product as a matter

35:10

of personal pride and psychological need. What

35:12

does that mean? He sincerely wanted to

35:14

make good animations and sincerely wanted to

35:17

be counted among the best at his

35:19

craft. The one difference

35:21

between Walt Disney and Steve Giazzo – Steve

35:24

Giazzo said that those exact same desires and need.

35:26

He's like, I have to make literally – he's

35:28

like, you never chase the market share. Think about

35:30

the decades people made fun of him because Microsoft

35:32

had all this market share. Steve's

35:35

like, I have to be the best. I have to make

35:37

the best products. That means I don't have the most market

35:39

share. I don't give a shit. I'm going

35:41

to make the best products. Walt Disney

35:43

was the exact same way. The difference was

35:45

Steve understood that he had to build a

35:47

great product or a great company… … because

35:49

a great company was the foundation on which

35:51

would allow him to continue to make great

35:53

products. Disney struggled

35:56

with that for his entire career, nearly his entire

35:58

career, maybe the last like 10%. He

36:00

had finally figured that out. And

36:02

so one of the mistakes Disney makes here – and I don't think

36:04

he had a choice, so I think he had to make this mistake.

36:06

I think this is inevitable, and I think this is one of being

36:08

one of the best – undoubtedly it had

36:11

to be one of the best things that ever happened to

36:13

Disney because without this, it's not at

36:16

all clear that he would have invented Mickey Mouse. And

36:18

later in his life, Walt Disney said, I only

36:20

hope that we never lose sight of one thing,

36:22

that this was all started by a mouse. And

36:26

it's this theft by Charles Mintz of

36:29

his characters of not only Alice in Wonderland

36:31

or Alice's Wonderland but also this rabbit, Oswald

36:33

the Rabbit, that Disney invents. And

36:35

then Mintz is also going to lead a

36:37

coup and overthrow Disney out of his own

36:40

company. And so Disney has to start

36:42

over again. But again, this terrible thing had to happen

36:44

for Disney to create his greatest invention. And one of

36:46

the mistakes is – and again, I don't think he

36:48

had much of a choice at the time he did

36:50

this, but you're going to a

36:52

middleman. So Disney signs a contract with a

36:54

middleman. The middleman has a relationship with the

36:57

Ultimate Distributor, which is the main movie studios.

36:59

Later on, Disney is just going to cut

37:01

out the middleman and go direct. And

37:03

that's important because the middleman has the contract with

37:05

the distributor. The distributor controls all the money. And

37:08

so the middleman can just say, hey, he's

37:10

essentially reselling Disney's product, and over time

37:12

realizes, hey, I'm just going to cut Disney out

37:14

instead of him making anything. I'm just going to

37:16

take his animators and do this myself. And

37:19

that's exactly what happens. Disney is overthrown by a coup. I've

37:22

talked about this many times. Opportunity is a strange

37:24

beast. It frequently appears after a loss. This had

37:26

to happen. It made him a better businessman, smarter

37:28

person, and helped develop skills that he needed to

37:31

continue to build his company because he's just going

37:33

to start over again after this. And

37:36

so Charles Mintz starts doing these back channels

37:38

to a bunch of the key employees that

37:41

are working for Disney. Disney is

37:43

also like a taskmaster, very difficult

37:45

person to deal with, very difficult person

37:47

to work under. He has these unrelenting

37:50

standards for excellence that he's going to

37:52

hold you accountable to. And

37:54

he also is rather naive. By his own omission, he says

37:56

he was never a good judge of people, and

37:59

so he didn't believe that. that

38:01

his staff would ever double-cross him. And

38:03

in the process, Disney realized he had signed a bad

38:05

deal because in the agreement,

38:08

Disney had no rights to the character

38:10

that he created. Remember James Dyson, Episode

38:12

300? This happened to him well before

38:14

and again. This had to happen to him because he

38:17

took it as a lesson. He's like, oh, okay, this

38:19

is information. I will improve next time. He had this

38:21

invention called the ballbarrow, which is a wheelbarrow with a

38:23

ball that doesn't get stank in dirt.

38:25

He's like, I can't understand why for

38:28

hundreds of years people are using a wheelbarrow. It gets

38:30

stuck. I can improve this. He winded

38:32

up Dyson's mistake, which he never made again,

38:34

was he signed over the patent that was

38:36

in his name to the company. Then he

38:38

gets kicked out of the company, so then

38:40

he loses the rights to his invention because

38:42

he doesn't have access to the company. The

38:44

company owns the patent. A very similar situation

38:46

here. He had signed a

38:48

deal where the company that he no longer

38:50

controls, all the ownership

38:53

of the characters that Disney

38:55

invented, relied – resided,

38:57

rather, with Charles Mintz's company, not

39:00

his own. So it says,

39:02

Walt had no rights to the character that

39:04

Walt had created, thus leaving Walt no recourse.

39:07

This is so important. Why? He says Walt had

39:10

nothing. No character, no contract, no staff,

39:12

save for the very few who remain

39:14

loyal, no plan. He

39:16

would talk often of this episode as a betrayal,

39:18

saying that you had to control what you had

39:20

or it could be taken from you. And now

39:22

he had seen how duplicitous the business world could

39:24

be. And so now he's

39:27

on the train back home to Los Angeles.

39:29

His wife is terrified. They have no money.

39:31

He's got no characters. It looks like he

39:33

doesn't have a business. She is crying. And

39:36

what happens? There's a line in one

39:38

of these interviews I heard –

39:40

I was watching on Kobe Bryant one day, and he talked

39:42

about this. He went through a ton of adversity,

39:45

and he says, well, when you're going through something, what other

39:47

choice do you have but to go through it? And

39:49

Kobe's perspective, in other words, was that the

39:52

solution that you seek is found in the

39:54

work. The only thing you can do is

39:56

get back to work. That is the only

39:58

proper response. on

40:00

the way home on the train. He's got

40:02

nothing. His entire business has been taken from

40:04

him. And what is he doing? He's

40:07

spending the entire time on the train drawing

40:09

and sketching and trying to create

40:11

new characters and then using

40:13

those characters as a basis to make more animated

40:15

cartoons so he can sell the cartoons and get

40:18

back on track. And so it

40:20

is on this train ride across the

40:22

country that he starts drawing a mouse.

40:25

And thankfully his wife was with him because he

40:27

draws the mouse. She thinks the

40:29

character looks great but she's like

40:31

that is a great character and a

40:34

terrible name. Why? Because Walt Disney wanted

40:36

to call Mickey Mouse Mortimer Mouse. And

40:39

his wife said that was a horrible name

40:41

and I made quite a scene about it. So

40:44

they go back and forth after a while and Walt

40:46

asked her what do you think about the name Mickey?

40:49

And I said it sounded better than Mortimer

40:51

and that is how Mickey was born. So

40:54

let's go back to this opportunity as a strange

40:57

beast. It frequently appears after a loss. This

40:59

causes him to invent the sound cartoon. Okay so

41:02

he starts drawing Mickey Mouse. I think so everybody

41:04

well maybe everybody doesn't know this but one

41:07

of the probably his biggest hit that he

41:09

needed when he was younger. He's around 27, 28

41:11

years old at

41:13

this point in his life. He makes

41:16

the world's first sound

41:18

cartoon. It is Steamboat Willie. It is

41:20

actually the third Mickey Mouse cartoon but

41:22

the first two didn't get distributed because

41:24

it was missing something. And Disney

41:26

believed that it was perfectly logical that

41:28

you're watching other things. They're like if

41:31

sound is coming out of live action,

41:33

sound is how we communicate with one

41:35

another, why isn't sound coming out of

41:37

cartoons? At the time people would criticize

41:39

this. They said drawings are not vocal.

41:41

Why should a voice come out of a cartoon

41:44

character? That criticism is coming from

41:46

within his field. That is other animators

41:48

talking to Disney. They said

41:50

it was unnatural, peculiar

41:52

and off-putting. You know what

41:54

he did? You know what Disney did? He previewed it.

41:56

He put it in front of customers, in front of

41:58

an audience and they Well, how are

42:01

they going to react to it? I like this. Why wouldn't

42:03

they like it? And this was the result. I never saw

42:05

such a reaction in an audience in my life. The

42:08

sound itself gave the illusion of something

42:10

emanated directly from the screen. Walt

42:12

was ecstatic. He kept saying, this is it. This

42:14

is it. We've got it. And

42:16

so this is going to allow him to sign a distribution

42:19

deal. The distribution deal is going to bring money into the

42:21

studio. But how did he finance Mickey? He

42:23

borrowed every single thing that he had bought

42:25

a house earlier. Him and his

42:27

brother, who's his business partner, Roy, they

42:29

put mortgages, and second mortgages is

42:31

on their house. In addition

42:34

to them taking out second mortgages on

42:36

their house, Walt Disney sold his car

42:38

to finance his company. Steve

42:40

Jobs did this in the early day of Apple. He

42:42

was driving like a Volkswagen bus, if I remember correctly,

42:44

and he had to sell it so they could get

42:46

parts to build their first product. And

42:48

so the distributor is able to put Steamboat Willie

42:50

in theaters all over the country. The reaction from

42:52

the audience is unbelievable.

42:56

And so much so that they try to

42:58

acquire Walt Disney. This is

43:00

very fascinating. And this one paragraph tells

43:02

you a lot about Disney, one that he's going to refuse to

43:04

sell his company. He's not doing it for the money. He's doing

43:06

it for – he wants to make great products, so why would

43:08

he sell his company? And then he just

43:10

believes that quality is his only advantage. The

43:12

problem was that the distributors, all of them, wanted

43:14

to buy Walt's studio, not just his cartoons. But

43:17

Walt was adamant about not selling,

43:19

about not surrendering control, no matter

43:22

how badly he needed revenue. Why?

43:24

Because he didn't want to just be

43:26

another animation producer. He wanted to be

43:28

the king of animation. Walt

43:31

believed that quality was his

43:33

only real advantage. And

43:37

so this commitment to excellence is something that

43:39

Walt would repeat decade after decade

43:41

after decade. Walt had

43:43

passionately expressed his long-standing conviction that

43:45

his salvation was in making a

43:48

product that so excelled that the

43:50

public would recognize it and enjoy

43:52

it as the best entertainment. And

43:54

that they would demand to see

43:57

Disney Pictures. That is a direct

43:59

statement. quote from Walt Disney, that

44:01

the salvation, our salvation, is in making

44:04

a product that's so excelled that the public

44:06

would recognize it and enjoy it as the

44:08

best entertainment and that they would demand to

44:10

see Disney pictures. Now, Walt Disney is

44:13

expressing an idea that Warren Buffett picked up

44:15

on and analyzed, and it turns out Warren

44:17

Buffett thought Walt Disney was obviously successful in

44:20

what he was trying to do because he

44:22

talked about later on, Warren Buffett would talk

44:24

about the importance of building a brand that

44:26

is special in the mind of your customers.

44:29

And he uses Disney as an example to illustrate the

44:31

point that he was trying to make. Warren Buffett

44:33

said, And

45:01

then the way that Disney did this, it's

45:03

very similar to the Steve Jobs quote. Steve

45:05

Jobs said, Be a yardstick for quality. Some

45:07

people aren't used to an environment where

45:09

excellence is expected. Disney built

45:12

an environment where excellence wasn't

45:14

expected. At Disney, the

45:16

atmosphere may have been casual, but

45:18

when it came to work, everything

45:20

was carefully planned. Every cartoon had

45:22

an exposure sheet precisely outlining each

45:24

scene, each movement, and each individual

45:26

drawing. The biggest

45:28

difference between the Disney studio and

45:31

every other animation studio was not

45:33

in preparation or specialization. It was

45:36

an expectation. Listen to that. The

45:39

difference was an expectation. Walt

45:41

Disney had to be the

45:43

best. He insisted upon excellence.

45:47

And he would give you the advice. Train

45:50

and educate your own team. He was

45:52

so sick of these people coming from second class.

45:56

If you hire from experience, the problem

45:58

is their experience may be serenade. several

46:00

levels below your expectation. He says this,

46:02

it could be a struggle convincing men

46:04

who have spent their careers thinking of

46:06

animation as a throwaway, that

46:09

they could and must accomplish something

46:11

better. I have encountered plenty of

46:13

trouble getting my new men adjusted

46:15

to our method of working, Walt

46:17

complained. Part of Walt's

46:19

secret was that in insisting on

46:21

quality from individuals of whom it

46:23

had never been required, he inspired

46:25

commitment. This is one of his

46:27

employees describing the environment. We hated to go home at

46:30

night and we couldn't wait to get to the office

46:32

in the morning. We had lots of vitality and we

46:34

had to work it off. How

46:37

did he train and educate his own

46:39

team? He uses this for animation, he

46:41

uses this for full length movies, he

46:43

uses this at Disneyland. He would hire

46:46

for enthusiasm and youthful

46:48

enthusiasm over experience and he's just like,

46:50

I'm going to make my own people.

46:53

He winds up starting his own school.

46:56

He'd work all day and then at

46:58

night he would preside over animation classes.

47:01

I did an episode on Walt Disney and compared it

47:03

and contrast him with Pablo Picasso in episode 310. There's

47:06

a line in that book. It says,

47:08

Disney himself trained over a thousand artists

47:11

and just like he held his staff

47:13

to high standards, he held himself to

47:16

high standards too. You have to understand, unbelievably

47:19

talented, unbelievably obsessed, unbelievably

47:21

dedicated. He was also

47:23

ruthlessly, ruthlessly competitive. Walt

47:26

Disney wanted domination, domination

47:28

that would make his position

47:30

unassailable. His larger

47:32

quest was to become the

47:34

animation overlord. So at the

47:36

time, the most popular animated figure, Mickey

47:39

Mouse was about to wax this guy was

47:41

Felix the Cat. He was determined

47:43

that Mickey Mouse would supplant Felix

47:45

the Cat and

47:48

this was inevitable because it says

47:50

Felix's creator, this guy named Pat

47:53

Sullivan, had none of Walt Disney's

47:55

drive or foresight. And

47:58

so this is when we get into Disney. Building

48:00

his cult that is exactly how it is

48:02

described in the book and one way he

48:04

did this And I think this is a

48:06

really good idea It's like he made you

48:08

believe that by working with him and at

48:11

Walt Disney Studios You were part of an

48:13

elite team that you were

48:15

not just an animator. You were part

48:17

of the best Animation team in the

48:19

world There's a line in the book

48:22

where one of his employees said we felt like we were

48:24

the elite class like you would be at West Point And

48:26

this is where he tells them that the quality of

48:29

not just what we're making Rest

48:31

on us right the quality of the

48:33

entire animation Industry rest

48:36

on us that self belief that

48:38

everybody knows this one time. He's a young man, you

48:40

know now He's around his start in his 30s

48:43

It's still it's like ever present and it's that belief

48:45

that he had about himself and what he could do

48:47

was Transferable to his

48:49

employees Walt struck me as being

48:51

absolutely sure of himself He was

48:53

positive about what he was going

48:55

to do. He was positive about

48:57

what we could do and So

49:00

Walt's modus operandi is let's

49:02

make a bunch of money and then we're gonna

49:04

reinvest every single dollar and more so

49:07

that they lose a bunch of money to into

49:09

the quality of the product and There's

49:11

many times he does this in animation. He does this

49:13

in movies. He does this in Disneyland Well people like

49:15

oh we're gonna you know, there's a great way to

49:17

do it. There's a cheap way to do it He

49:19

flips out his animations could not

49:22

be compromised They had to be better

49:24

than anyone else's or he would not

49:26

survive in this business again Excellence

49:28

was Walt Disney's business strategy his animations

49:30

could not be compromised They had to

49:32

be better than anyone else's or he

49:35

would not survive in this business Excellence

49:37

was Walt's business strategy If

49:39

you want to know the real secret of

49:41

Walt's success longtime animator Ward Kimball would say

49:43

it's that he never tried to make money

49:46

He was always trying to make something that

49:48

he could be proud of His

49:51

hobby is his work every moment of his

49:54

time is given over to it There wasn't

49:56

a night we didn't end up at the

49:58

studio his wife recalled She

50:00

would curl up on the couch in his office

50:02

and sleep while Walt worked. She

50:05

would wake up at different intervals to ask how late

50:07

it was, to which regardless of the time, Walt would

50:09

answer, oh it's not that late honey. Walt

50:11

admitted years later, listen to this,

50:13

this is insane, Walt admitted

50:16

years later that he would turn back

50:18

his office clock while Lillian slept so

50:20

that she never knew how late he

50:22

had worked. And if

50:25

you know that improvement is his mantra, that

50:27

excellence is his business strategy, of course he's

50:29

going to dedicate all this time to it.

50:31

A couple weeks ago I did this book,

50:33

it's episode 343, it is the Eternal Pursuit of

50:35

Unhappiness. People love that episode, if you haven't listened

50:38

to it you should listen to it after this.

50:41

Episode 343, Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness, being very

50:43

good is no good, you have to be

50:45

very very very very very good. It's by

50:47

David Ogilvy and the team at Ogilvy and

50:50

Mather. And it is based, it's

50:52

a very short book, it's very hard to find,

50:54

I think it sold out really fast after that

50:56

episode came out. But it's based on Ogilvy's

50:59

idea of divine discontentment.

51:02

And Ogilvy describes this, he says, we

51:04

have a habit of divine discontent with

51:06

our performance as an anecdote to smugness.

51:09

Ogilvy had that and Walt Disney had it

51:11

too, never content with the quality of what

51:13

the studio produced. No matter how

51:15

good a picture we turn out, he said, I can

51:18

always see ways to improve it when

51:20

I see the finished product. His entire

51:23

life he wanted something that

51:25

was living, that was ongoing, a product he

51:27

could always improve. He didn't find that until

51:29

he was 55 I think,

51:31

55 or 56 when he

51:33

made Disneyland. So much so

51:35

that he could make the world, you know,

51:37

some of his, many of his animated cartoons,

51:40

his animated feature films, they won every single

51:42

award, they made a ton of money and

51:44

Disney says I can't even watch them. A

51:47

decade later because all I see is the mistakes,

51:49

all I see is what I could do better

51:51

today. And yes this habit

51:53

practice over a long period of time by a

51:56

supremely talented individual like Walt Disney is going to

51:58

build a great product but it can and also

52:00

break you down. Because

52:03

just like he drove his staff mercilessly,

52:05

he drove himself like this. He has

52:07

multiple nervous breakdowns and health problems throughout

52:09

his entire life because of this. He's

52:12

around 29 years old when this is happening. When he talked

52:14

on the phone, he would suddenly and unaccountably find

52:16

himself weeping. At night he couldn't sleep. At the

52:18

studio he became physically ill looking at his latest

52:21

cartoon and unable to see anything but its flaws.

52:23

The years of fighting and losing and then having to

52:26

fight back, the years of having to maintain a brave

52:28

front in the face of loss and

52:30

betrayal and the years of feeling compelled to produce cartoons

52:32

so good that Disney would be

52:34

unassailable in the industry while struggling

52:36

against oppressive, unrelenting financial constraints that

52:39

barely allowed them to survive and

52:41

that even now had not loosened.

52:44

And then the setback in starting his own

52:46

family is talking about he got all his

52:48

pressures at work, he desperately wanted to be

52:50

a dad, but unfortunately he had a few

52:52

miscarriages. All this built up

52:54

and he said all this had accumulated

52:57

until Walt, who was usually so self-confident,

52:59

cracked and he suffered a breakdown.

53:02

This is such an important point. It's why I said

53:04

out of every single book that I've ever read, my

53:06

number one recommendation is still James Dyson's first autobiography, Against

53:08

the Odds by James Dyson. It's episode 25, it's episode

53:10

200, it's episode 300, it'll be episode 400 and 500

53:12

as well. I'm

53:15

going to read that book every hundred episodes.

53:17

It's so important because we can celebrate Disney

53:19

and his accomplishments after the fact,

53:22

but going through this, it's so difficult

53:24

that any logical person would quit. I'm

53:26

going to read one paragraph from James

53:28

Dyson's autobiography. While it's easy of

53:30

course for me to celebrate my doggedness now

53:33

and to say that's all you need to

53:35

succeed, the truth is that it demoralized me

53:37

terribly. I would crawl into the house every

53:39

night covered in dust after a long day,

53:42

a long day of failure by the way,

53:44

exhausted and depressed because that day's work had

53:46

not worked. There were times when

53:48

I thought it would never work that I would

53:50

just keep on making – he's

53:52

trying to make a cyclone vacuum –

53:55

making cyclone after cyclone, never going forward,

53:57

never going backwards until I died. The

54:00

source of his excellence is also the

54:02

source of this divine discontent, this dissatisfaction,

54:04

this relentless pressure that he puts on

54:06

himself over and over again and he's

54:08

going to have many many times where

54:10

he breaks and gets completely disengaged. This

54:12

is important to note because it is repeated

54:15

over and over and over again in every

54:17

chapter, in every decade of his work. Walt

54:19

would not repeat, would not, ok any animation

54:21

that did not meet with his very high

54:23

standards of acceptance. This meant that everything one

54:25

did had to be analyzed, endlessly analyzed to

54:27

make sure it worked, to make sure that

54:29

it was up to standards, to make sure

54:31

that it could not be

54:33

improved upon. Everything

54:35

was drawn and redrawn until we could

54:38

say this is the best that we

54:40

can do. And

54:42

so there's obviously both negative and positive externalities

54:44

to this. Positive externalities is if you have

54:46

to keep pushing the pace of your entire

54:48

industry, you're going to wind up inventing new

54:50

technology. A bunch of the tools, other

54:53

animators are in this book saying every tool

54:55

that we use was originated at the Disney

54:57

studio. That emphasis on analysis

55:00

would lead to the development of

55:02

new techniques that would facilitate higher

55:04

standards in animation and then soon

55:06

become the standard operating procedure for

55:08

the entire industry. He did not

55:10

just innovate in technology, he innovated

55:13

in company organization too. Before

55:15

him animation was looked at as

55:17

some silly thing not to be taken seriously. It's

55:19

all about gag, it's about one off. He's like,

55:21

no, no, we're telling a story here. And

55:24

actions express priority. Walt demonstrated

55:26

that story was king and he did

55:29

so through his actions because he appointed

55:32

for the very first time in the industry a head

55:35

of a new department called the story

55:37

department. There was no such thing as

55:39

the story department in any other, it

55:41

was something unheard of in any other animation studio at

55:43

the time. And this is not

55:45

all upside. This relentless pressure,

55:48

it's changing him, just like his work's

55:50

changing. It's changing him too.

55:52

When he was young, he was outgoing.

55:54

It says he was gregarious and outgrowing.

55:57

Now all of his enthusiasm, all of

55:59

his. time is eventually

56:01

going to be split with his kids. But at this point,

56:04

all of it is going into the

56:06

studio and now he's changing his personality

56:08

change. He is withdrawn outside of the

56:11

studio. He essentially has two modes of

56:13

his entire life, work and family. Family

56:15

and work, work and family. Remember

56:18

the episode I did on the founder of Red Bull?

56:20

If you haven't listened to it, listen to it. I

56:22

think it's one of the best episodes I ever did.

56:24

It's episode number 333, Red Bull's Billionaire Maniac Founder. I'm

56:26

going to read from that book because it sounds a

56:29

lot like what I'm about to tell you in Walt

56:31

Disney. This is the billionaire

56:33

founder of Red Bull who just passed away.

56:35

He doesn't place a premium on collecting friends

56:37

or socializing. I don't believe in 50 friends.

56:39

I believe in a smaller number. Nor do

56:41

I care about society events. It's the most

56:44

senseless use of time. When I go out

56:46

from time to time, it's just to convince

56:48

myself again that I'm not missing a lot.

56:50

So Dietrich Mastersitts, I'm probably still mispronouncing

56:53

his name, even though he spent dozens

56:55

of hours studying that guy. This idea is

56:58

like, I can't have 50 friends. I have

57:00

a handful of friends. Walt Disney probably had

57:02

less than that. It says he socialized even

57:04

less than before, claiming that it took too

57:06

much of one's energy and saying that he

57:08

preferred to get a good night's sleep as

57:11

it leaves me in a better condition in

57:13

the morning to carry on the work. He

57:15

seldom traveled and admitted that he would rather

57:17

spend vacation at home. That changes later in

57:19

life. Him and Lillian would travel a

57:21

bunch, especially after their kids are out of the house.

57:24

And then let's get into another innovation. This

57:26

is a business model innovation that Disney came

57:29

up with. And this just blew my mind.

57:31

This is the importance. Again, everybody gets to

57:33

the top of their profession. They

57:35

understand that learning, what did Charlie Munger say?

57:37

Learning from history is a form of leverage.

57:41

What I'm about to read to you, and this entire

57:43

thing, this is a huge theme.

57:45

One of the largest parts of Disney's business

57:47

is going to be merchandise. For the

57:50

life of me, this is happening

57:52

decades before George Lucas is

57:54

negotiating with 20th Century Fox about maintaining

57:56

the merchandise. George Lucas wanted to make

57:58

sure he made the right to do

58:01

sequels and the right to

58:03

own the merchandise for Star Wars and they

58:05

just gave it up like

58:07

just completely collapsed here take me

58:10

it's like a billion dollar multiple billion dollar

58:12

mistake how can you do that the

58:14

only answer is you didn't even bother

58:16

to study Walt Disney the value

58:19

of merchandise for movies and television

58:21

was a known thing when that was

58:23

happening because as soon as Disney finds

58:26

the right person to run his merchandise

58:28

division it is an immediate and

58:30

sustained sustained success Disney does not

58:33

have a track record of

58:35

you know successful he's a dictator

58:37

for sure he does not have

58:39

a track rate record of you

58:41

know longtime successful partnerships except with

58:43

this guy named Herman came in Herman came in is going to

58:46

die in a plane crash 17 years

58:48

into the future his relationship he ran

58:50

Disney's merchandise at the very beginning Disney made him

58:52

like a partner so you get 50% of everything

58:54

you bring in over time that that

58:56

split would change and we go like you know 70

58:58

30 80 20 in Disney's

59:01

favor but this merchandise business was immediately

59:03

successful and grew like weeds for decades

59:05

there's something Napoleon said one time when

59:08

I was reading about him and I

59:10

thought it's fascinating he says

59:12

in war men are nothing one

59:15

man is everything in

59:17

war men are nothing one

59:19

man is everything Herman came in was

59:22

that one man when it came to

59:24

Disney merchandise and listen to

59:26

his pitch he goes in he's like listen he sees

59:28

what they're doing for merchandise like this is dog shit

59:30

okay he walks in he goes I don't

59:32

know how much business you're doing but I guarantee you that much

59:35

business that's to match what you're doing and I'll

59:37

give you 50% of everything I do over and

59:39

so Cayman's pictures like I'm gonna innovate in merchandise

59:41

just like you guys are innovating animation this is

59:43

a great pitch came in set out

59:45

to do for Walt Disney enterprises which is

59:47

the new merchandise armor of the studio what

59:49

Walt Disney had been doing for Walt Disney

59:51

productions the filmmaking arm he was going to

59:53

reinvent it transform it into a sleek quality

59:55

controlled revenue producing operation that would in time

59:57

have the added effect of making Mickey Mouse

1:00:00

even more popular as a brand than he

1:00:02

was as a movie star, Cayman

1:00:04

was a whirlwind. Within a year there were 40

1:00:07

licenses for

1:00:09

Mickey Mouse products. Within

1:00:11

the first year Cayman brought in 35

1:00:14

million dollars of sales in Disney

1:00:16

merchandise in the United States alone

1:00:18

and an equal amount overseas at

1:00:21

70 million dollars

1:00:23

in 1934 dollars.

1:00:26

And just like George Lucas is inexcusable to

1:00:28

not study history, to not use learning from

1:00:30

history as a form of leverage. This is

1:00:33

just like George Lucas. This was a known

1:00:35

thing. Walt made more money

1:00:37

from the rights to Mickey merchandise than

1:00:39

from the cartoons. There's a line in

1:00:41

George Lucas's autobiography, something like he made

1:00:43

three times as much on Star Wars

1:00:46

toys as he did the movies and

1:00:48

Star Wars printed money, if I remember

1:00:50

correctly, had 11 million dollar budget and

1:00:52

made 775 million at the box office.

1:00:54

That's the Star Wars one and

1:00:56

yet he's tripling that on toys and

1:00:58

merchandise. Disney became the first

1:01:01

studio to recognize that one

1:01:03

could harvest enormous profits from

1:01:06

film related toys, games, clothing

1:01:08

and other products. So

1:01:11

I want to go in this few ways that Disney built

1:01:13

his cult. Remember like there's a these chapters in the book

1:01:15

are huge, some of them are like 100 pages long and

1:01:18

one of them you I could do individual

1:01:20

episodes just on each chapters so

1:01:23

Dan sin and detailed this

1:01:25

book is but in the chapter on

1:01:27

the cult it really talks about like his approach

1:01:29

and there's several pages that just

1:01:31

remind me it's like wow this is just there's

1:01:33

a lot of similarities between Steve Jobs number one

1:01:36

Walt Disney operated almost entirely by

1:01:38

instinct he trusted his intuition

1:01:40

Steve Jobs is famous for saying that

1:01:43

he believed intuition was more powerful than

1:01:45

intellect and intuition following his intuition had

1:01:47

a large impact on his career but

1:01:50

unlike Steve Jobs trying

1:01:52

to figure out what Walt Disney actually wanted you

1:01:54

to do they said there's a whole hilarious line

1:01:56

in the book where one of his employees

1:01:59

I think said something like figuring, sussing

1:02:01

out what Walt Disney wanted was a

1:02:03

matter of osmosis. That in

1:02:05

many ways is the anti Steve Jobs. I always say

1:02:07

Steve Jobs is the clearest thinker that I've ever come

1:02:10

across. There's this book called Creative Selection I talk about

1:02:12

over and over again because I read it a bunch of times. It's

1:02:14

episode 281 if you haven't listened to it. But

1:02:16

listen to this description of Steve which is kind of

1:02:18

like the opposite of Walt. In this case I'd want

1:02:20

to be more like Steve and less like Walt. It

1:02:23

says Steve was the center of all the

1:02:25

circles. He made all the important product decisions.

1:02:27

From my standpoint as an individual programmer, demoing

1:02:29

to Steve was like visiting the Oracle of

1:02:32

Delphi. The demo was my question

1:02:34

and Steve's response was the answer. While

1:02:36

the pronouncements from the Greek oracle often

1:02:38

came in the form of confusing riddles,

1:02:40

this was not true with Steve. He

1:02:42

was always easy to understand. He

1:02:44

would either approve a demo or he would

1:02:47

request to see something different next time. Whenever

1:02:50

Steve reviewed a demo he

1:02:52

would say often with highly

1:02:54

detailed specificity what he wanted

1:02:56

to happen next. He was always trying to

1:02:58

ensure that the products were as intuitive and

1:03:00

straightforward as possible and he was willing to

1:03:02

invest his own time, effort, and influence to

1:03:04

see that they were. Through looking

1:03:07

at demos asking for specific changes

1:03:09

then reviewing the changed work again

1:03:11

later and giving a final approval

1:03:13

before you could ship, Steve could

1:03:16

make a product turnout like he

1:03:18

wanted. Much like the

1:03:20

Greek oracle Steve foretold the

1:03:22

future. The opposite of that would

1:03:24

be your employees needing to decipher what you want

1:03:26

through osmosis, something you don't want to happen. And

1:03:29

then one area where Steve and Walt Disney

1:03:31

were of like minds and saw completely eye-to-eye

1:03:33

is Steve Jobs once said the storyteller is

1:03:35

the most powerful person in the world. Walt

1:03:38

used this in his own products and

1:03:40

in running his own company. He was

1:03:42

a superb storyteller. Walt himself seemed to

1:03:44

think it was his primary attribute. Of

1:03:46

all the things I've ever done I'd

1:03:48

like to be remembered as a storyteller.

1:03:50

Walt was a super salesman who believed

1:03:52

so devalue in his studio and its

1:03:54

cartoons that he could convince anyone, even

1:03:57

the stodgiest banker who he'd fight with all the

1:03:59

time. of their value. Don

1:04:02

Valentine, founder of Sequoia Capital,

1:04:04

has one of my favorite quotes of all

1:04:06

time. He says, learning to tell a story

1:04:08

is critically important because that's how the money

1:04:10

works. The money flows as a function of

1:04:12

the story. He also went on to say

1:04:15

that most entrepreneurs are incapable of

1:04:17

really bad storytellers and you should work on that

1:04:19

skill. Another way that

1:04:21

Disney built his cult, he was a

1:04:23

micromanager. He was a micromanager. He stuck

1:04:25

his nose into everything. He actually has

1:04:28

a really beautiful metaphor about

1:04:30

the role of a founder. His way

1:04:32

to do this is by putting his hands

1:04:34

on every single part of the product. He

1:04:36

compared it to a symphony with him as

1:04:39

a conductor who took all the employees, the

1:04:41

storymen, the animators, the composers, the musicians, the

1:04:43

voice artists, the ink and paint people and

1:04:45

got them to produce one whole thing which

1:04:47

is beautiful. When

1:04:49

he was excited and enthusiastic, he

1:04:52

had a reality distortion field. It said

1:04:54

he had an overwhelming power of people

1:04:56

and the voice of a prophet. That

1:04:58

is how one of his employees described

1:05:00

him, a voice of the prophet. Another

1:05:02

employee was at home talking about Walt

1:05:04

and how amazing he is and his

1:05:07

wife gets snippy with him. It's like

1:05:09

you talk about him as if he

1:05:11

were a god to which he replied

1:05:13

he is. And then to summarize this

1:05:15

entire section, the Disney studio did not

1:05:17

operate like a commercial institution at all.

1:05:20

The Disney studio operated like a cult

1:05:22

with a messianic figure inspiring

1:05:25

a group of devoted frenzied

1:05:27

acolytes. They were disciples on

1:05:29

a mission. And so

1:05:31

at this time they're doing a bunch of short animated

1:05:33

films. They're making a decent amount of money but they

1:05:35

can make, they could have a good year and then

1:05:38

a couple things don't perform well. They're never too far

1:05:40

ahead where their success is assured. And so

1:05:42

he has this idea and he's always, he called

1:05:44

it plussing which is basically improvement is my

1:05:46

mantra. And he's like okay, like

1:05:48

there's a lot of energy in your shorts. Like what

1:05:50

if we just did one feature length animated

1:05:53

movie? And people were like this just like Pixar

1:05:55

and people you can't make a computer the world's

1:05:57

first computer animated feature film. They're going to do

1:05:59

it. It changes the course of their

1:06:01

entire company. This is Disney's version of that is

1:06:04

with Snow White. He's just like, how

1:06:06

much would a full length – if we're making

1:06:09

a little bit of money on these animated shorts,

1:06:11

like how much would a full length feature film

1:06:14

cartoon make? And everybody's

1:06:16

like, you can't do it. It's never been

1:06:18

done again. And again, this goes back to

1:06:20

storytelling. This goes back to culture personality. This

1:06:22

goes back to enthusiasm. Walt told us this

1:06:24

idea of developing the story Snow White, and

1:06:27

honestly, the way that boy can tell a

1:06:29

story is nobody's business. I was practically in

1:06:31

tears during some of it. And I've read

1:06:33

that story many times as a child without

1:06:35

being particularly moved by it. If it should

1:06:37

turn out one tenth as good as the

1:06:39

way he tells it, it would be incredible.

1:06:41

He was a spell binder. He was a

1:06:43

spell binder. We were just carried away.

1:06:46

And so he sells his entire company on, hey, let's

1:06:48

marshal our resources, let's be focused. No one's ever done

1:06:50

this before, but if we can do it, we can

1:06:52

make it a massive success. Here's the problem. To make

1:06:54

a feature length cartoon, Disney is

1:06:57

going to need a lot of animators.

1:07:00

I love weird ways people hire, weird

1:07:02

ways people recruit. So what

1:07:04

he does, he's like, OK, let's send letters

1:07:06

to all the art schools across the country.

1:07:08

We're going to list the kinds of skills

1:07:10

that we need and encourage people that have

1:07:12

those skills to apply. They do this for

1:07:14

a long time, not just for Snow White. In

1:07:16

the next decade, they're going to get 30,000 new

1:07:19

applicants from just sending letters

1:07:21

to our school saying, hey, these are the skills we have. Are

1:07:23

you interested in being the best of the best? Apply here. His

1:07:26

demand for animators far outstrips

1:07:28

supply, and so he has to bridge the

1:07:31

gap. He's got to hire these veteran animators,

1:07:33

and he's so pissed off about doing this.

1:07:36

And so he says he griped that when

1:07:38

he hired veteran animators, he had to put

1:07:40

up with their goddamn poor working habits from

1:07:42

doing cheap pictures. It was

1:07:44

easier, he believed, to start from

1:07:46

scratch with young art students and

1:07:49

indoctrinate them in the Disney system.

1:07:51

And so their education doesn't stop when their

1:07:54

graduate art school come to Disney. Again, he

1:07:56

has this, he has Disney

1:07:58

University, whatever they call it, this man. Mandatory

1:08:00

classes for the entire studio. What

1:08:03

is he doing? He's brainwashing them. The intention

1:08:05

was not just education. It was infatuation

1:08:09

as always Walt wanted the

1:08:11

studio employees to be besotted

1:08:13

as he was with the

1:08:15

notion of excellence. He wanted

1:08:17

obsession and So

1:08:20

just like George Lucas went all-in he bet

1:08:22

every single thing he had on the sequel

1:08:24

to Star Wars Walt

1:08:27

Disney so believed in Snow White He's gonna be proven

1:08:29

right here by the way that he was

1:08:31

willing to bet every single thing So he's

1:08:33

like, oh I could probably do this for $250,000

1:08:36

his estimates on money are never right by the way

1:08:39

And so he's got to take he's like, oh we could do it

1:08:42

for 250. Nope go they run

1:08:44

through the $250,000 budget Then he got

1:08:46

he gets another his main Bank of America. He

1:08:48

gets another one for six hundred and thirty thousand less

1:08:50

than a year later He goes back to them for

1:08:52

another six hundred fifty thousand and then

1:08:54

this is what Walt said to a reporter at

1:08:56

a time I had to mortgage everything I owned

1:08:59

including Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and everything else

1:09:01

to make Snow White And so

1:09:03

there's this constant themes of the book where he's fighting

1:09:05

with financiers over and over again This is why George

1:09:07

Lucas said that he was intent. He was hell-bent on

1:09:09

controlling the money I think he learned that

1:09:12

in part by his own personal experience

1:09:14

But studying the struggles that Walt Disney had with all the

1:09:16

bankers But one thing that was so fascinating it didn't really

1:09:18

did speak to the excellence of the previous that he was

1:09:20

making It's his main banker comes

1:09:22

and sees like a rough cut like it's

1:09:24

not fully finished, but it's still unlike anything

1:09:26

he's ever seen So he's very quiet during

1:09:29

he's like got no reaction you

1:09:31

know kind of making them nervous because he needs like another

1:09:33

loan of like 350,000 or the

1:09:35

whole thing's gonna go up in smoke and So

1:09:38

the banker's name is Rosenberg. They walk out into

1:09:40

the parking lot. He's real quiet There's no read

1:09:42

on him at all and he

1:09:45

gets in the car rolls down the window says goodbye

1:09:47

and then just slowly says hey That

1:09:49

thing is gonna make you a handful of money, and

1:09:51

he was right Snow White made a ton of money

1:09:53

This is what we're in 1939 the end of the

1:09:55

Great Depression There's

1:09:58

a line here that may be Maybe

1:10:00

true. The nine months after Snow White debuted may

1:10:02

have been the best months of Walt Disney's adult

1:10:04

life. Remember, he's been struggling for two decades. He's

1:10:07

unbelievably successful in building great products. He's

1:10:09

never making a lot of money. Walt

1:10:11

Disney was not a very wealthy man.

1:10:13

Snow White would go on to become

1:10:16

the highest-grossing American film up until that

1:10:18

point. It had been seen by more

1:10:20

people in America than any other motion

1:10:22

picture. Theaters were—it was so

1:10:24

popular, you had to make a reservation

1:10:26

three weeks in advance to see it at a movie

1:10:28

theater. And it was

1:10:30

a merchandise cash cow. There were

1:10:32

2,183 different Snow White products. Let

1:10:38

me just give you one example. Drinking

1:10:41

cups, drinking glasses, Snow White-themed

1:10:43

drinking glasses, they sold 16.5

1:10:46

million units just of that. They

1:10:49

had never experienced an influx of money

1:10:51

like this, so this is fascinating. So

1:10:53

this is something that I love, this idea. It's

1:10:56

in George Lucas book, and I'm thinking put it in the George

1:10:59

Lucas podcast, but he kept making like hundreds of millions of dollars

1:11:01

because you just hold on long enough.

1:11:03

And then eventually there would be a technology invented that can

1:11:05

benefit your business that you didn't even have to develop. So

1:11:08

VHS tapes, DVDs, and then Blu-ray,

1:11:10

every time there's a new, better format,

1:11:13

he would just resell like, oh, now you can get Star Wars

1:11:16

on VHS. Now you can get it on HD

1:11:18

DVD and now you can get it on Blu-ray. It would literally drop

1:11:20

hundreds of millions of dollars down to his bottom line. I'm

1:11:23

not going to realize that because when he was doing Pixar, he said this – what

1:11:25

I'm about to read you – Steve Jobs said this

1:11:27

in 1997, 1998. He

1:11:31

says Pixar is putting something into culture that will renew

1:11:33

itself with each generation of children. Snow

1:11:35

White was released on video

1:11:37

two years ago and sold over 20

1:11:39

million copies. It's 60 years old. I

1:11:43

think people will be watching Toy Story in 60 years

1:11:45

just the way they're watching Snow White now. I think

1:11:47

that's a good point in another book I read

1:11:49

on too. He's talking about putting it on, I think,

1:11:51

VHS or DVD at that point. That

1:11:53

20 million copies dropped a quarter of

1:11:56

a billion dollars directly to Disney's bottom

1:11:58

line, 60 years. years after

1:12:00

Snow White was invented. And

1:12:03

so it's this influx of money why

1:12:05

it said this might have been these

1:12:07

nine months might be the best in

1:12:09

his life because it's also going to be tragedy. So he makes so

1:12:11

much money. Their parents never – they struggle

1:12:13

their whole lives. So now the brothers, Roy and

1:12:15

Walt, were able to chip in and buy their

1:12:18

parents a house and relocate

1:12:20

them closer to them in Los

1:12:22

Angeles. So he had a problem.

1:12:24

Obviously, you can kind of read between the lines

1:12:26

about his relationship with his dad even when he was

1:12:28

an adult because his dad dies. Walt doesn't even go

1:12:30

to his funeral, but he thought his mother was a

1:12:32

saint. And I think the way

1:12:34

his mother parented had a huge influence on

1:12:36

the way Disney chose to parent his two

1:12:38

daughters. So it says, as preoccupied

1:12:41

as he was, when it came to Diane

1:12:43

and Sharon, he was a doting father. This

1:12:45

is one of – when you have kids,

1:12:47

you read this and like I get like choked

1:12:49

up when he talks about this. So

1:12:51

he says he was a doting father who sheltered them

1:12:54

from his own fame. He enjoyed telling how six-year-old Diane

1:12:56

asked him if he was Walt Disney. You

1:12:58

know I am, he answered. The Walt Disney,

1:13:00

she questioned. When he said that

1:13:03

he was, she asked for his autograph. He

1:13:05

would chase the girls around the house, cackling like

1:13:08

the witch from Snow White. Or he

1:13:10

would troll them endlessly by their heels, for

1:13:12

hours and hours and hours. Diane would say

1:13:14

he would stand in the swimming pool and

1:13:16

let them climb on his shoulders. I thought

1:13:18

my father was the strongest man in the

1:13:21

world and the most fun she recalled. At

1:13:23

night he read to them and on weekends

1:13:25

he would take them to either Griffin Park

1:13:27

to ride the merry-go-round or to the studio

1:13:29

where they would follow him as he snooped

1:13:31

about and peddle their bikes around the empty

1:13:33

grounds while he worked. This is the part

1:13:35

that really chucks you up if you have

1:13:37

kids because he's saying this, you know, they're

1:13:39

not little kids anymore. And I've already

1:13:42

gone through this. Like the difference between a four-year-old

1:13:44

and a twelve-year-old, you know, like you're not –

1:13:46

the first five, my

1:13:48

daughter, her friends are so important to her.

1:13:51

More important than I am, you know, and

1:13:53

that's kind of heartbreaking. But when you're small,

1:13:55

you are the most important person in

1:13:58

their life and won't really – He

1:14:00

just hits on this beautifully. He said, they

1:14:02

used to love to go with me in those days, he would

1:14:04

reminisce. And that was some of the

1:14:06

happiest days of my life. They were

1:14:08

in love with their dad. Oh,

1:14:12

that gets you right in the heart. Okay. He did say

1:14:14

something that was fascinating. And again, he's not – he never rests

1:14:16

on his laurels. If he's going to go out and do something

1:14:18

great, he's going to try to top it with something else. He's

1:14:20

not going to just sit here. He has a

1:14:22

saying that he actually keeps in his hat.

1:14:24

They remind him, but I'll get

1:14:26

there in one minute. So he talks about

1:14:29

Snow White's successful. Donald

1:14:31

Duck is a fantastic cartoon. At this

1:14:33

time, Donald Duck has become

1:14:35

more popular with Mickey, but his belief

1:14:37

in Mickey and Mickey Mouse never

1:14:40

subsided. He said, of course

1:14:42

you know Donald is a big thing now, but

1:14:44

it won't last. Mickey is forever. Mickey

1:14:47

will have his moments in the shade, but he'll

1:14:49

always come out in the bright lights again. He's

1:14:52

almost 100 years after

1:14:54

he said that. Mickey Mouse is still

1:14:56

going strong. And so even

1:14:58

after this success, he's got this persistent need

1:15:00

to challenge himself. He was never going

1:15:03

to stay in one field or build only one product. That

1:15:05

was very obvious if you read about him. He

1:15:07

has this ongoing need for challenge. And

1:15:09

I think it comes from this inner

1:15:11

turmoil, and he was afraid to get

1:15:14

into a rut. He said, if we

1:15:16

quit growing mentally and artistically, we begin

1:15:18

to die. I do not want to

1:15:20

be relegated to the cartoon medium. It

1:15:22

should not be limited to cartoons. We

1:15:24

have worlds to conquer here. That is

1:15:26

his line. We have worlds to conquer

1:15:28

here. And so at this

1:15:30

point, he is right now the apex of his

1:15:32

career. He has never known success

1:15:34

as he has at this moment in time,

1:15:36

and one of the

1:15:38

worst tragedies that happens in his entire

1:15:40

life happens. He buys his

1:15:43

mom and dad a house. There's this gas

1:15:45

furnace, and it powers a central gas heater,

1:15:47

and it keeps getting backed up. And

1:15:50

his mom is going to die in the

1:15:52

house that he gave her a year

1:15:55

after Snow White, which is his

1:15:57

greatest success. when

1:16:00

this happens. We'd better get this furnace fixed

1:16:02

or else some morning we'll wake up and

1:16:04

find ourselves dead, Flora told her housekeeper Alma

1:16:07

Smith. Flora is his mom, obviously. On

1:16:09

the morning of November 26, 1938, Flora went into the bathroom. When

1:16:13

she didn't return, Elias got up to investigate

1:16:15

and found her collapse on the bathroom floor.

1:16:17

Feeling overcome himself, he staggered out into the

1:16:19

hallway and fainted. Luckily, downstairs, the housekeeper

1:16:22

was there. She and a neighbor dragged

1:16:24

Flora and Elias down the stairs and outside. Elias

1:16:27

revived. Flora did not.

1:16:29

She died of carbon monoxide poisoning

1:16:31

from the defective heater. This

1:16:33

was the most shattering moment of Walt

1:16:35

Disney's life. His beloved mother had died

1:16:37

in the new home that he had

1:16:39

given her. Walt never

1:16:42

spoke of her death to anyone

1:16:44

thereafter. When years later, Sharon asked

1:16:46

him where her grandparents were buried.

1:16:49

Walt snapped, I don't want to talk about

1:16:51

it. And

1:16:53

so after the success of Snow White, he has

1:16:56

a couple flops. And

1:16:58

he needs to figure out a way to get

1:17:00

his business on more solid footing. And so this

1:17:02

is the first time where

1:17:05

they're considering selling shares

1:17:07

to outside shareholders. And

1:17:09

what was fascinating is one

1:17:11

of Walt Disney's heroes was

1:17:14

for Henry Ford. And

1:17:17

Walt Disney, shortly before Henry Ford dies,

1:17:19

goes to Michigan to visit him. And

1:17:21

he's talking about, he talks with Henry Ford

1:17:23

about this idea for this issuing

1:17:26

of stock to outside shareholders. And

1:17:29

this was Ford's response. Ford was blunt. If

1:17:32

you sell any of it, you should sell all of

1:17:34

it. Ford had famously bought

1:17:36

out his investors, you know, probably 25 years before his

1:17:38

conversation and owned 100% of his company. So saying if

1:17:40

you sell any of your company, you should sell all

1:17:42

of it. Disney said

1:17:44

later on, this left me thinking and wondering

1:17:46

for a while, wondering if I had crossed

1:17:48

a bridge and could never go back, wondering

1:17:51

if he had surrendered ultimate control. And

1:17:53

so even with taking outside funding, he's going to

1:17:56

have three battles. And this is where

1:17:58

he gets him one of the most depressed, statey. So

1:18:01

some of these are outside of his control.

1:18:03

He's going to have battles with the bankers.

1:18:05

He's going to have battles with unions. And

1:18:08

then the United States government during World War

1:18:10

II – essentially it just takes over his studio. During

1:18:13

World War II, something between like 75% and

1:18:16

94% of all the

1:18:18

production that came out of Walt Disney Studios was

1:18:20

films and media for the government. And

1:18:23

something Walt Disney is quoted as saying is after one of

1:18:25

these battles that he has with the bankers made

1:18:28

me think of a line that I read in

1:18:30

Will Durant's The Lessons of History. And

1:18:32

so he's fighting with Bank of America because now

1:18:34

he owes him millions and millions of dollars. And

1:18:37

when he gets back to the studio, they ask him,

1:18:39

it's like hey, did you win the battle with the

1:18:41

bankers? And Walt Disney snapped. You never win with the

1:18:44

bankers. And that just speaks to

1:18:46

this reoccurring theme that's really important to control

1:18:48

the money as much as possible and not

1:18:50

to rely on people for outside financing because

1:18:52

if they can control you, there's a line

1:18:54

in The Lessons of History from Will

1:18:56

and Aaron Durant, which I covered a few weeks ago. It

1:18:59

says history reports that the men who

1:19:01

can manage men manage the men who

1:19:03

can manage only things, and the men

1:19:05

who can manage money manage all. And

1:19:09

so in addition to money troubles, and he's having to cut

1:19:11

back on salaries, he's having to lay people off, they

1:19:13

wind up – a bunch of his animators

1:19:16

and a bunch of people inside the company,

1:19:18

which Walt Disney later on calls communists, winds

1:19:21

up organizing. And they form into unions,

1:19:23

and they eventually go on strike. And

1:19:25

Walt Disney Animation never, never

1:19:27

recovers from the strike. The

1:19:29

strike broke Disney's spirit, and

1:19:32

it never recovered. What happens after this

1:19:34

is it causes him to have a

1:19:36

half a decade of depression and to

1:19:38

be in this constant search for something

1:19:40

else that he could direct his obsession

1:19:42

and his talent to and pour his

1:19:44

entire love and soul into like he

1:19:46

did in animation earlier in his career.

1:19:50

And so Walt is 40 years old, just

1:19:52

a few years removed from his greatest

1:19:55

commercial and artistic triumph. Now

1:19:57

he has a studio that he dislikes because of the

1:19:59

strike. World War II's full

1:20:01

and full flames and now his studio is essentially, you

1:20:04

know, commandeered by the US government. Again,

1:20:06

success is rarely a straight line. He's

1:20:08

20 years into his career. He is

1:20:10

40 years old

1:20:12

and he's in a terrible position. Disney

1:20:14

Studio was no longer the Disney Studio.

1:20:17

It was now an educational and industrial

1:20:19

film facility and an arm of the

1:20:21

government, with Walt virtually commuting

1:20:23

from Los Angeles to Washington.

1:20:25

He was always frustrated that

1:20:28

minor bureaucrats would review his

1:20:30

storyboards and issue warnings and

1:20:32

orders where previously he

1:20:34

had been the ultimate power. That's

1:20:36

exactly what he wanted. He wanted

1:20:38

ultimate power, ultimate control. He

1:20:41

wanted to micromanage. Anything that got in

1:20:43

his way, his ability to micromanage, he

1:20:45

hated. He disliked Disney like

1:20:47

a lot of the entrepreneurs in the

1:20:50

United States. He hated committees and the

1:20:52

level of his micromanagement, it

1:20:54

can't be overstated. This is crazy. So

1:20:56

he would micromanage every detail down

1:20:59

to the point where he even knew

1:21:01

the entire inventory he had

1:21:04

memorized. He knew the entire inventory of

1:21:06

studio equipment, including the number of light

1:21:08

bulbs they had in stock. That is

1:21:10

when he's making films. He is like

1:21:13

that later too. When he

1:21:15

walks over every single inch of Disneyland,

1:21:18

he memorized the exact heights of every

1:21:20

single building in Disneyland. This is the

1:21:22

only way he knew how to work

1:21:24

and is also the biggest complaint for

1:21:26

the people that work for him. The

1:21:28

most prevalent complaint I recorded about Walt

1:21:31

by his producers, writers, directors, and management

1:21:33

is that he would not delegate creative

1:21:35

authority. In Walt's own words, a studio

1:21:37

cannot be run by a committee. Somebody,

1:21:39

one person has to make the final

1:21:41

decision. He is looking

1:21:44

for a new way to micromanage, a new

1:21:46

thing to pour everything all of his outlets

1:21:48

into. Because here's the thing, the war lasts.

1:21:50

There's like a five-year break between doing all

1:21:52

this war work and getting trying to go

1:21:54

back to feature-length animation, try to

1:21:56

capture Disney's former glory, and it's

1:21:59

over. you can't do that after

1:22:01

a five-year break and you just see that he's completely

1:22:03

checked out, he began to lose his footing

1:22:05

and his confidence. His brother Roy

1:22:07

was pressuring him to slash budgets and

1:22:09

begin another round of layoffs. He had

1:22:11

come to a terrible almost crippling realization.

1:22:13

Remember this is a terrible crippling realization

1:22:15

because Disney put excellence above excellence

1:22:18

of the product above everything else. Even

1:22:20

if he were to move ahead with

1:22:22

a few of his feature film ideas,

1:22:24

they would never be as good as

1:22:26

the films he had made before the

1:22:29

war. Never as beautifully animated, never as

1:22:31

deliberately plotted, never as painstakingly fussed over,

1:22:33

never as fully the product of a

1:22:35

near religious commitment to greatness. The

1:22:38

studio simply did not have the financial

1:22:40

resources, the time, or the talents. The

1:22:43

cult was over and

1:22:45

if the films could never be as good as they had

1:22:47

been, what was the point in making

1:22:49

them? He began to

1:22:51

talk about selling the studio or leaving

1:22:54

it forever. He was no

1:22:56

longer the king of animation, only one among

1:22:58

a group of pretenders to the throne. For

1:23:00

years everyone else was in a pack of

1:23:02

greyhounds chasing a mechanical rabbit. Everyone

1:23:04

had imitated Disney. One might imitate

1:23:06

Disney but one couldn't have matched

1:23:08

him. Disney is the Tiffany of

1:23:11

this business and we were

1:23:13

all the Woolworths. Animation

1:23:15

was a sacred obligation to Walt

1:23:17

Disney, a way to reimagine the

1:23:19

world. For the rest of us,

1:23:22

it had just been a product. So

1:23:25

knowing Disney like we know up until

1:23:27

this point, you know what his next

1:23:29

move is, he needs. He has. It's

1:23:31

not that he wants, not that he

1:23:33

desires, he needs to do something new,

1:23:35

something different, something unusual. He has this

1:23:37

maxim that he would remind himself that

1:23:39

you can't top pigs with pigs and

1:23:42

he talks a little about this. He says,

1:23:44

the thing I resent most is people try

1:23:46

to keep me in well-worn grooves. We have

1:23:48

to keep blazing new trails. He

1:23:51

kept a slogan pasted inside of

1:23:53

his hat. From the time he

1:23:55

had been urged to make a sequel to the Three Little

1:23:57

Pigs, he made the Three Little Pigs movie, it

1:23:59

was wildly successful. So they're like, make up

1:24:01

three little pigs number two and three little pigs number

1:24:03

three. And he didn't because he

1:24:05

had this mantra and he repeated it and then

1:24:07

he put inside of his hat to remind him.

1:24:10

He says, you can't top pigs with pigs. And

1:24:13

so this is where he gets his new

1:24:16

obsession. This is Disneyland. This is

1:24:18

a remarkable thing. So when shortly before

1:24:20

he died, he said the two things

1:24:22

he was most proud of was keeping

1:24:24

starting and keeping control of a second

1:24:26

company. And then Disneyland. Disneyland is

1:24:28

his greatest creation. And if you look

1:24:30

at the arc and the

1:24:33

career of most entrepreneurs, like world class,

1:24:35

history's greatest entrepreneurs, they do almost

1:24:38

every case. They do the best work many, many decades

1:24:40

into their career. Steve Jobs was what,

1:24:42

25, 30 years into his career when

1:24:44

he did the iPhone. Walt Disney is 35 years

1:24:47

into his career when he does Disneyland. Surprisingly,

1:24:49

there is only one chapter in this book

1:24:51

on Disneyland. It is far too important just

1:24:53

to dedicate one chapter to it. What

1:24:55

I'm going to do is a day after, maybe

1:24:57

a day or two after I release this

1:25:00

episode, I'm going to re-release this episode I

1:25:02

did on this dedicated, this entire book I

1:25:04

read called Disneyland, which is about how he

1:25:06

built Disneyland. And so almost as a

1:25:08

way to preview that, I'm going to pull out a

1:25:11

couple of interesting ideas from this chapter. And one is

1:25:13

like, what is he doing? As we've seen for his

1:25:15

entire life, he's like building these internal worlds. And then

1:25:17

now he's like, okay, it doesn't have to just be

1:25:19

internal. I will build, his company

1:25:21

was an external world, but now he's going

1:25:23

to be, he's going to build an external

1:25:26

world that other people that don't work at

1:25:28

his company can actually partake in actually experience.

1:25:30

And it's all about control. It has always

1:25:32

been about control, about crafting a better reality

1:25:34

than the one outside the studio and about

1:25:36

demonstrating that one had the capacity to do

1:25:38

so. Walt Disney hid

1:25:41

an iron will behind a

1:25:43

facade of affability. And

1:25:45

so now he's going to use that iron

1:25:47

will to literally craft and build a world,

1:25:49

an entire land where there was nothing. I think

1:25:52

it was an orange grove before he developed

1:25:54

it. And he has no inclination on

1:25:57

doing this inside this old studio. eventually

1:26:00

been taken over. It's like this big old unyielding bureaucracy.

1:26:02

He's like, I don't want to do that. So he

1:26:05

actually sets up a bungalow. He starts doing

1:26:07

the initial work. He has this old bungalow

1:26:09

at the edge of the studio

1:26:11

lot. It's a different company entirely. And

1:26:13

that excitement of working in a small

1:26:15

company with talented people chasing an unlimited

1:26:17

opportunity is what he's captured again. And

1:26:19

he talks about this. He's happier than

1:26:21

he had been in years. He's

1:26:24

running into this company called WED, which is

1:26:27

his initials. He says, so he's

1:26:29

in the bungalow all the time, the very initial

1:26:31

planning stages, working hand in hand

1:26:33

with the people developing the idea from Disneyland. He had

1:26:35

this idea that Disneyland should be an outdoor movie set,

1:26:37

by the way. And he says, damn it. I

1:26:40

love it here. This is just like the Hyperion studio.

1:26:42

This is way before Disney was successful. It was like

1:26:44

the very early days. This is just

1:26:46

like the Hyperion studio used to be in the years when we

1:26:48

were always working on something new. It was a small,

1:26:50

joyous community. At WED, you no longer had

1:26:52

any big departments to deal with. It was

1:26:55

just fun to get back into that small

1:26:57

scale again, he said. And so he

1:26:59

has this idea for the park, but he's got no money again.

1:27:01

So he's like, what am I going to do? What do you

1:27:03

think he does? He goes to build the prototype and to get

1:27:05

the basic idea going. He goes and borrows

1:27:08

another mortgage, and he borrows against his

1:27:10

life insurance policy. He also

1:27:12

talked to a bunch of true believers

1:27:14

inside the company, and employees started loaning

1:27:17

money to them to bridge the gap

1:27:19

before he can get financing. And

1:27:21

then he does something that's absolutely genius. So I didn't

1:27:23

even cover this part in the book. But one of the

1:27:25

most fascinating things is Charlie Chaplin

1:27:27

was one of Walt Disney's heroes. And Charlie

1:27:30

Chaplin starts this company with a bunch of

1:27:32

other artists called United Artists. And

1:27:34

eventually, they started distributing some of Disney's films. They

1:27:37

wind up having a falling out, Disney and

1:27:39

United Artists has falling out, because

1:27:41

they wanted him to

1:27:43

relinquish rights for

1:27:45

his intellectual property, for

1:27:47

this new medium called television. And

1:27:50

he's willing to disrupt and break up with his

1:27:52

distributor at a time. He said no. He's like,

1:27:54

there's no way in hell I'm retaining these rights.

1:27:56

And you're like, okay, well, that makes sense. Why would you

1:27:58

retain the rights television today? No. That's

1:28:01

not when he did that. When he said no,

1:28:03

there was only about 4,000 TVs in existence. And

1:28:07

so many years later, now TVs

1:28:10

are much more established, he understood

1:28:12

that this is a new technology.

1:28:14

It is not a threat but a tool, and

1:28:16

that is where he's going to get the money to

1:28:19

do Disneyland. I go into way more detail

1:28:21

in the episode that I'm going to release

1:28:23

in conjunction with this episode, okay? But what

1:28:25

he realizes is television is going to save

1:28:27

him. And all these other motion picture moguls,

1:28:30

which you could describe Walt Disney as at

1:28:32

this point, are telling him that television is

1:28:34

a threat. He's like, bullshit. It's

1:28:37

the next coming thing. It's a phenomenon. We

1:28:39

can't stop it. You're not stopping the wave.

1:28:41

It's not the enemy of the motion picture.

1:28:43

It's its ally. And

1:28:45

he realizes this is just going to help us advertise movies. I

1:28:47

think it's so crazy. I'm going to – there's much more detail,

1:28:49

but let me give you an example. This

1:28:53

movie, I think 20,000 Leagues

1:28:55

Under the Sea that he releases. Before he releases

1:28:57

that, he releases because he's going to do this

1:28:59

deal with ABC. This is how

1:29:01

he gets his funding from Disneyland. But they start producing a bunch

1:29:03

of content together. And so what

1:29:05

he does is like, oh, let's make a documentary, an interesting

1:29:07

documentary, a standalone, interesting documentary about how we made the movie.

1:29:11

It ends up just drastically increasing because if you

1:29:13

sit to an hour-long documentary on how this movie

1:29:15

was made and you find it interesting, what do

1:29:17

you think it's going to do? You're

1:29:19

going to go buy a ticket. He's like, no,

1:29:21

this isn't a threat. It's going to actually help

1:29:23

advertise everything else that we're doing. It's going to

1:29:26

help advertise his movies. It's going to help advertise

1:29:28

Disneyland. He does – he did this a bunch

1:29:30

of times. He would re-release. Remember, David Ogilvy gave

1:29:32

you and I the advice that you're not advertising

1:29:34

to Standing Army or advertising to a moving parade?

1:29:38

And so he'd run the same ad in the same magazine for

1:29:40

like 20 years. Disney would do

1:29:42

that. He's like, well, if you like Snow White

1:29:44

15 years ago, you'll like it now five years

1:29:46

ago or five years later and 10 years later

1:29:49

and 15 years later. So he starts taking all

1:29:51

the movies that were successful and replaying them on

1:29:53

television and reselling them. Remember, the

1:29:55

movie's done. There's no other outline. He's not spending any

1:29:57

more money. So then all that money just like

1:29:59

– Steve Jobs realized when they resold Snow White on

1:30:01

DVD, he's like, oh shit, they just dropped a quarter

1:30:04

billion to their bottom line. He's now

1:30:06

selling Snow White, which he doesn't have to pay

1:30:08

for anything else, to TV,

1:30:10

to the television stations, to ABC, and

1:30:12

then they rebroadcast it. The point

1:30:14

he's making to the movie mogul is like it's

1:30:17

making your existing assets more valuable and you're looking,

1:30:19

and you're afraid of this. And so

1:30:21

I just wanna read you one sentence about this. But

1:30:23

what the special really did was prove

1:30:25

Walt's thesis about the value of television

1:30:27

to the film industry that he was

1:30:29

correct. A Gallup poll indicated that the

1:30:31

program created new awareness of Alice, this

1:30:33

is Alice in Wonderland now, and prompted

1:30:35

Walt to talk about using TV as

1:30:37

a point of sale. So he

1:30:39

goes to ABC and he's like, I'm gonna develop a

1:30:42

television show about me building Disneyland. I

1:30:44

will host it, it'll be every week. It's like one of

1:30:46

the most popular, I think it becomes

1:30:48

the second most popular show on TV

1:30:51

behind I Love Lucy, if I remember

1:30:53

correctly. And in return for producing content

1:30:55

on your show, when he does this

1:30:57

to ABC, there's NBC and

1:30:59

CBS, right? They're so far, ABC's

1:31:01

like an afterthought. And the content

1:31:03

that Walt Disney makes for ABC makes

1:31:05

them one of the big three. And

1:31:08

this was hilarious. ABC would have

1:31:10

its Disney program. Walt Disney would have his

1:31:12

money for Disneyland. Or as Walt would later

1:31:14

joke, ABC needed a television so, so damn

1:31:17

bad they bought an amusement park. And

1:31:19

so this love and obsession that Disney had for

1:31:21

his entire career that had been absent for maybe

1:31:23

half of a decade, maybe longer, is

1:31:26

now restored in the larger theme here, if you're just reading between

1:31:28

the lines. It's like, what do you think about all the time?

1:31:31

Like what do you think about all the time? Whatever

1:31:33

that is, do that. That's something Disney did at

1:31:35

his entire career and when he didn't have that,

1:31:37

he was depressed. It was Disneyland that Walt Disney

1:31:39

cared about. The park was his dream now. Television

1:31:41

was just a means to that end. Everyone

1:31:44

knew that he was only tangentially involved with the

1:31:46

other projects. The studios were still doing animated movies.

1:31:49

He's completely checked out. The

1:31:51

difference was that on weekends and evenings and sitting

1:31:54

on the toilet and all that stuff, he

1:31:57

wasn't thinking about our pictures. He was

1:31:59

thinking about Disneyland. He was

1:32:01

always thinking about Disneyland, and

1:32:04

he uses the same idea for Disneyland that

1:32:06

he did for the studio. He goes out,

1:32:08

and he visits. He's planning Disneyland. And at

1:32:11

the time, amusement parks, they were looked at as

1:32:13

like places for suckers. They were dirty. They

1:32:16

were terrible. And everybody

1:32:18

was telling Disney, he's like, why would you do that? They're

1:32:21

horrible places. That's the point. Ours won't. While

1:32:23

we were planning Disneyland, every amusement park operator

1:32:25

we talked to said it would fail. And

1:32:27

Walt would come out of these meetings even

1:32:30

happier than if they'd been optimistic. He loved

1:32:32

to fight. He loved the idea that he

1:32:34

had to prove himself right again, waging the

1:32:36

same old battles that he once had to

1:32:38

wage when making the animated features. He

1:32:41

didn't want anyone on the staff who had amusement

1:32:43

park experience because he told them Disneyland wouldn't be

1:32:45

an amusement park and because we want young, talented

1:32:47

people that are willing to learn and

1:32:50

make mistakes. And of course,

1:32:52

he's micromanaging. Another line here. He walked

1:32:54

over every inch of Disneyland. Another

1:32:56

great line. Walt did not want to cut

1:32:58

corners. He did not want to compromise his

1:33:01

vision. When an employee suggested that he use

1:33:03

cut glass instead of stained glass in an

1:33:05

attraction, Walt objected. Listen to this line. Look,

1:33:08

the thing that's going to make Disneyland unique

1:33:10

and different is the detail. If

1:33:12

we lose the detail, we lose it all.

1:33:15

It is the detail. If we lose the

1:33:17

detail, we lose it all. He

1:33:19

wanted to change everything about amusement parks,

1:33:22

including the language that you use to

1:33:24

describe it. I

1:33:26

did an episode – it sounds funny, but

1:33:28

one of the most impressive entrepreneurs I've ever studied

1:33:30

is Balenciaga, which is episode 315. Balenciaga

1:33:33

now, the brand, not

1:33:35

good, right? The founder for sure,

1:33:38

based on what I read about him, would be rolling

1:33:40

over in his grave. At the time, he was considered

1:33:42

the best of the best. Coco Chanel said Balenciaga was

1:33:44

the best. Christian Dior said he was the

1:33:47

best fashion designer. Everybody

1:33:49

in Paris thought he was literally the best, which is

1:33:52

surprising given the position of the brand is now. But one

1:33:55

of the things that I took away

1:33:57

from studying Balenciaga is that you should create your own

1:33:59

language. So he would say, like, you don't

1:34:01

wear a Balenciaga dress, you present it. You're

1:34:04

not a customer, you're a patron. He

1:34:06

would tell staff, we want to make the highest quality dresses in

1:34:08

the world, one where you don't give it away, you bequeath it.

1:34:11

You bequeath your dress to your daughter. And

1:34:13

you see an echo of that idea in the

1:34:15

way Disney talked about Disneyland. It's an outdoor movie

1:34:17

set. We don't hire, we cast. This

1:34:19

is not a park, it is a set. You

1:34:22

can't go on stage unless you're ready

1:34:24

to give a pleasant, happy performance. That's

1:34:26

how he would train the early employees

1:34:28

of Disneyland. He had an obsession

1:34:30

with cleanliness. It was calculated that a

1:34:32

discarded cigarette butt will lie dormant for

1:34:34

no longer than 25 seconds

1:34:37

before one of the cast members pick it

1:34:39

up. And the opening day of

1:34:41

Disneyland caused the largest traffic jam in Orange

1:34:43

County history. You have 50 million

1:34:45

people, whatever the number was, watching the TV show. Of course,

1:34:48

that's going to translate. People are going to – they've been

1:34:50

watching a show about the creation of this thing. When the

1:34:52

thing's ready, they're going to come. And

1:34:55

on the opening day, his daughter said that

1:34:57

she had never seen him happier, that it

1:34:59

was one of the best days of his

1:35:01

life. And even on one

1:35:03

of the best days of his life, this

1:35:05

micromanaging trait, this – it was just

1:35:09

part of him. Listen to this. He

1:35:11

had never been a man to indulge his pride

1:35:13

or rest on his laurels. At the end of

1:35:16

the day, the longest and quite possibly the best

1:35:18

day of Walt Disney's life, in spite of the

1:35:20

numerous calamities, he had dinner on

1:35:22

the patio with another one of his employees of

1:35:24

the apartment that he had on apartment.

1:35:26

He lived at Disneyland. That's how obsessed he

1:35:28

was with it, right? So he's having dinner

1:35:30

with somebody – one of his employees on

1:35:32

the patio of the apartment, and he watched

1:35:34

the fireworks display over the park. His employee

1:35:37

noticed that Walt kept taking notes during the

1:35:39

show. What was he doing? A

1:35:41

stickler for detail, even amid the

1:35:43

pandemonium. He was counting the rockets being

1:35:45

shot off to confirm that he was

1:35:48

getting the full number. And

1:35:51

35 years into his career, he finally

1:35:54

found what he wanted – a living,

1:35:56

breathing, endless masterpiece. He told one interviewer that

1:35:58

Disney's life was a part of Walt Disney's life. will

1:36:00

never be finished. That it will be

1:36:02

a living thing that will need changes.

1:36:05

He called Disneyland my baby and said

1:36:07