Transcript for:
Walt Disney's Journey: Vision and Innovation

Walt Disney was the first to bundle television programs feature animation liveaction films documentaries theme parks music books Comics character merchandise and educational films under one corporate umbrella he created the first modern multimedia Corporation in the year of his death 240 million people saw a Disney movie a 100 million people watched a Disney television show 80 million people read a Disney book 50 million people listened to Disney records 80 million people brought Disney merchandise 150 million people read a Disney comic strip and nearly 7 million people visited Disneyland Walt Disney had changed the world he had created a new art form and then produced several indisputable Classics within it he had Advanced color films and then color television he had reimagined the amusement park he had encouraged and popularized conservation space exploration atomic energy urban planning and a deeper historical awareness he had built one of the most powerful empires in the entertainment world one that would long survive him yet all of these accumulated contributions paled before a larger one he demonstrated how one could assert one's will on the World Walt Disney had been not so much a master of fun or irreverence or innocence he had been a master of order that was an excert from the book book I'm going to talk to you about today which is this giant comprehensive 800 Page biography of Walt Disney it is called Walt Disney the Triumph of the American imagination and it was written by Neil gabler I read this book for the first time nearly eight years ago in fact it was episode two of Founders but the second reading after especially after reading you know almost 350 of these biographies of History great completely changes what I get out of the book the context the additional meaning and I think particularly doing it right now after doing Quenton Tarantino Steven Spielberg and George Lucas Tarantino Spielberg and Lucas all idolized Walt Disney they studied him intently he had a huge influence on their work and so over the last week I've spent well over 50 hours reading highlighting rereading the last few days just really trying to figure out what is the most important lesson that I'm trying to take away from this book and in 800 Pages it's absurd to think that you can distill it down to just one sentence but later in the book there's this there's this line that has really stuck with me as I go and read and reread all these highlights and notes and it said that Walt Disney's key traits were raw Ingenuity and a sadistic determination and I sat and thought about that raw Ingenuity and a sadistic determination I think that is a very accurate description of him why was he like that and what you realize is like he had to be he had to have this sadistic determination in large part because his dad the relationship that he had with his father his father Elias Disney was excessively controlling and simultaneously unsuccessful a man that was beaten down by life that failed at nearly every single thing that he tried there is another filmmaker that I did a podcast on Francis for Copo this is all the way back on episode 242 I'm going to put this book down and I'm going to pick up that biography because there's such a parallel before I get into this first story about this experience that Walt Disney is going to have with his father that he's having night nightmares nightmares of 40 years later again raw Ingenuity and sadistic determination and so let's go to what Francis Ford Copa said about he had this you know this drive as well and so he says this is Francis Ford Copa describing his childhood and his relationship with his father I had spent a lifetime with a frustrated and often unemployed man who hated anybody who was successful and that kind of person usually tries to belittle the aspirations or the dreams of the people around him even if it's their kids which is crazy and and he so Francis for cop is telling us what his dad said and he said there can only be one genius in the family and since I'm already that what chance do you have and so I want to pick up the story of Walt Disney he's 9 years old his father's already failed multiple times at trying to provide a living for his family they are now his father has a newspaper route delivering newspapers and he insists that all of his sons help him and this is how Walt Disney remembered this the route was not just a means of earning a living it became a way of life for Disney's everything had to be subordinated to the delivery of newspapers he was only 9 years old and yet Walt was already Tethered to the route I was working all the time he said I never had any playtime the route in its demands the unyielding routine the snow the fatigue the Lost papers it traumatized and haunted him 40 years later he was still Awakening in a sweat with nightmares about the route that he had missed some customers and he remembered how much of his life he surrendered to this route and how hard he had to work for so little reward and so that line there about he had to work so hard for so little reward Elias Disney had a very bad habit of taking the money that his sons made and just keeping it Walt had three older brothers two of them ran away because Elias kept taking their money Walt was terrified of his father he said his father was unapproachable that he barely talked to him his father had an explosive temper and he would take the frustrations that he had with his own life and the external World out on his sons so there's many stories in the book where he goes to the backyard cuts a branch off a tree they call it switching they did this to me when I was a kid too and they would lay into the boys you had to take your pants down and get a switching the beatings were so bad that his sons are talking about this many decades later so this my parents beat the living crap out of me when I was a kid they hit me with belts switches shoes fists and feet it's not very different than the descriptions that are in this book but what is fascinating is the decision that I made it it it just proves like whatever happened to you in the past like you don't have to keep that Trend going so Walt Disney the the main he's he's going to be criticized by a lot of people right he had this sadistic determination he was by far workaholic if his eyes were open he was working but he was also simultaneously a great dad his daughter wrote a biography of him which I just found in the bibliography of this book and I ordered but both of his daughters are in this book talking about how special he made them feel how much time he made uh for them how he made them a priority and one of the greatest things about Walt Disney is that he there's this other line in this book I read about him in the past that says that he put that Disney put Excellence before any other consideration I think that's a great one set in summary of His approach to his work but he also was a great dad and even though he was abused by his parents his dad hits him with a hammer which we'll get to in a minute he never did that to his kids and I remember growing up and just thinking this is very odd that the people are supposed to care for me and love me are beating the out of me and I knew the day my daughter was born there's no way I would ever do that to my kids she's 12 my son is four I've never laid a finger on them and this is a theme that has reoccurred in these biographies like you can it doesn't matter what Happ what passion narration did it only takes one person to change the entire trajectory of a family and you see that with Walt Disney the way he was a fantastic father and an undeniable success in the way that his dad wasn't his dad was not a good father his dad was a failed human being not only as a father but also as a he's a multiple failed entrepreneur and so I think that's important to sit and talk about right at the very beginning because again raw Ingenuity sadistic determination in this line I think ties in what I'm trying to tell you Walt Disney was so different from his father it was almost like he was the antithesis of Elias Disney almost as if he had willed himself to be so as a form of rebellion and so this continues until Disney himself Walt Disney himself makes it stop they're building him his father building an addition onto their house right and every time Walt would make a mistake Elias would try to hit him with either the side of a saw or the handle of a hammer and so the next time he made a mistake well it's 14 when this is happening okay Elias says hey go down to the basement it's time for a beating now this is nuts it says Elias follows him down to the basement grabs a hammer to try to strike him but this time Walt grabbed his father's hand and removed the hammer listen to what Walt Disney said about this he raised his other arm and I held both of his hands now again this is a you're a young man going through puberty you may not win a fight a one-on-one fight with your father but you can damn sure inflict some kind of damage back to him in a way when you're seven or eight or nine you can't and so Walt says he raised the other arm and I held both of his hands and I just held him there I was Stronger than he was I just held them and he broke down and cried his father never touched him after that Elias was broken broken by work and now defeated in the family too and that leads directly into another main theme of this book into how Walt Disney created himself he retreated into his own world and then built his own maybe more than any other entrepreneur you and I have studied this is the most obvious cuz he literally built Disney World Disneyland I guess was the was the one that was completed when he was alive that is a fantastic metaphor for what he was trying to do his entire career he wanted to escape and then control his environment and this tendency was so pronounced he only has like a seventh or eighth grade education okay when he's in school though the teacher thought he was the second dumbest person in the class that is literally a quote the second dumbest but if you would talk to him away from school you're like no no this guy's clearly quick wited he's clearly smart he's clearly driven so why is the teacher saying you're the second dumbest person in the class because all he wanted to do all day in class was not classwork he wanted to draw he would sit silently in a corner and draw he was secluded in his own world there's a line in the book it says he had never stopped drawing he spent hours decorating the margins of his textbooks with pictures and then entertaining his classrooms or classmates by riffing through them to make them move he drew constantly he drew even though it was not always a socially it was not always socially acceptable to draw people would make fun of him they said it was it was for a man or a young boy to draw but that did not deter Walt Disney it became the primary source of his identification Even in our seventh grade classroom we all knew you'd be a really great artist one day some kind of artist Genius of some kind because even in the seventh grade that all that's all you did and so it's remarkable that it mentions that hey he's sitting in class instead of paying attention to class he's decorating the margins of his textbook years ago I read a biography of Dr Seuss whose real name is Theodore geel I think is is how you pronounce it and one of the things that's in that's in that um it's episode 161 one of the things that's in the book is very fascinating it talks about how he met at his his wife and I think they're in college at this time and she's sitting next to him in class I don't even think they're dating yet and he's not paying attention to anything that's going on in class he's drawing and so there's three highlights I want to pull from that book real quick that is almost exactly what's taking place in in Walt Disney's life at this point she says you're not very interested in the lecture then she leaned in pointed at one of his drawings and said I think that's a very good Flying Cow and in this book it says maybe the most important thing that anyone ever said to him comes from her you're crazy to be a professor she told Ted what you really want to do is draw Ted's notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals so I set to work diverting him here was a man who could draw such pictures he should be earning a living doing that and just like George Lucas he's going to fight against what his father wants him do to do for work George Lucas's dad wanted him to work at the stationary store and George is like no I'm going to make a living doing what I love I'm going to be a filmmaker you see the exact same thing here his dad wants him to work in like this jelly Factory he's like no I'm going to be a cartoonist now before he does that though before Walt dis Disney has this idea he's like no I'm going to be a cartoonist he has to design his own curriculum and this is so important so he's spending all his time practicing drawing living in his own world right but even says there's a great line in the book it's like when he wasn't drawing he was thinking about it but he would also seek out additional help so there was these cartoonists in his original uh idea for his life was not to build you know the world's first multimedia Corporation his idea was like oh well there's cartoonists that people get paid to write to like draw pictures who does that oh newspaper cartoonists okay so that's what I'm going to do and so he would find uh cartoonists that worked the newspapers that he admired and in many cases these cartoonists were also teachers so he starts attending classes at night taught by some of his favorite uh newspaper cartoonists and there's a line here this is the first time it says this right but this is something he does over and over again it says he was Walt Disney was so entranced that he would not even take a bathroom break I'm not even kidding this was shocking to me how many times he gets so engrossed in his work that he he won't go even go he won't even stop to go to the bathroom and when I got to this paragraph it made me think of Steve Jobs because Steve Jobs talked about his Heroes over and over again two of his Heroes were Edwin Lan and Walt Disney and so this idea this total engrossment in his work that is very evident when Disney's first starting his career all the way till he's in the hospital dying he knows he's dying and he's going over drawings for Epcot and so a trait that both of two of Steve Jobs Heroes Walt Disney and Edwin land shared this is from one of the biographies of Edwin land uh that I read I want to read you this paragraph It's a 600 Page biography I read on this uh patent lawsuit between Polaroid and Kodak and it says Edwin Lan had learned early on that total engrossment was the best kind was the best way for him to work he strongly believed that this kind of concentrated Focus could also produce extraordinary results for others late in his career Lan recalled that this that his whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had and so there's one event outside of Walt Disney's control that is going to delay his getting a job as a Cartoonist and that is World War I I mentioned earlier that he had three older brothers they all go off to fight in World War I Walt Disney's not old enough he's trying to get his parents to to sign a waiver they refuse to do so he wants to join the Army and fight just like his older brothers do right because he says he he thought of the war the he thought of it not as a war but as an adventure which actually a very common uh theme of young young American men in both World War I and World War II so he they would refuse to do that but they did let him join the Red Cross where he would be an ambulance driver and so just after he turned 17 he he stationed in France to be an ambulance driver for the Red Cross now there's a line here I need to share with you because again everything is about escaping this world that he did not like this you know this childhood that he did not like so he regarded his time with the Red Cross as another Escape now I have a hilarious anecdote that I came across in another book that I read it is Ray Croc's autobiography I've read it twice the last time I did an episode on it it's episode 293 and what's hilarious is Ray Croc is around the same age right too young to fight in the war but uh he signs up to be an ambulance driver for the Red Cross okay and I'm reading the book one time and this is the the paragraph I come across in Ray Croc's autobiography he says in my company was another fellow who had lied about his age to get in he was regarded as a strange duck because whenever we had time off we would go out on the town to chase girls and he would stay in Camp drawing pictures his name was Walt Disney about a year later he gets back home and this is where he's just rebelling against his father's offer to work at a jelly Factory this is just like George Lucas what I just said and again this main theme of escaping I'm escaping from this world I do not like and I will create myself and build a new world that's exactly what Walt Disney did and him and his father go back to fighting verbally this time and well it says he never understood me he thought I was a black sheep he said it was nonsense that I wanted to draw pictures that I should secure a stable job he didn't understand why I would sacrifice the certainty of the jelly Factory for the uncertainty of Art and listen to this description so 17-year-old Walt Disney newly armed with confidence and determined to avoid his father's fate determined to avoid his father's fate the joylessness and the constant disappointment while Disney would pursue his opportunity he would escape and so now we have a very young Walt Disney he's 18 19 years old he goes to Kansas City and he's determined to be successful so this is where I I mentioned this is line in the George Lucas uh biography that I thought was interesting where he would like shoot so much footage as many as much as he can in like you know a handful of days and he SP spend like 10 weeks editing and really figuring out where this all goes together I did something similar this week just several days just rereading over and over again about like what is the main thing I'm trying to take away from this book and this is when I realized I might title this episode Walt Disney how Walt Disney created himself or something like that because it's very obvious like he made himself and in doing so that was the foundation which he can lay on top of the the company that he built the Empire that he built but first he had to make himself and so even when he's 18 and 19 he's meeting all these new friends in Kansas City almost all of them remark on the same ex they say the same thing these same descriptions over and over again they say that he was determined to be successful that sadistic determination raw Ingenuity and sadistic determination right he had Absolut abute faith in himself and this is why I always say that what's one thing that's obvious when you read a bunch of biography that belief comes before ability this is the Walt Disney version of belief comes before ability he brimmed with a self-confidence that was neither entirely Justified nor particularly well directed since he had arrived without a plan he was a go-getter who did not know where he was getting to only that he would get somewhere so there's all these companies in Kansas City that are are doing advertisements they're like drawing ads companies they're called Commercial Art shops is what they were called at the time and he sees an ad where they're looking for an apprentice and so he shows up here's the thing you when you show up he gets a one first of all they hire by the way that this company hires is just by trial it's like you're going to work here for a week we have no idea what you're going to get paid we have to see if like you're good or not and so he's so anxious during this first week what does he do again he never leaves the drawing board not even taking a break to relieve himself until lunch he doesn't this guy wants to pee his pants piece of pants but he holds it until the the meal breaks and I know I keep pounding on that but it it comes up over and over again I just think it's such an an interesting uh like total engrossment into his work and so this trial ends the founder of the company approaches him looks at over all of his work and immediately offers him a salary of $50 a month and I love this part I love this part Walt later admitted that he would have worked for much less and he was so grateful he said that I could have kissed him they're paying me to draw pictures they're paying me to draw pictures he told his aunt that's exactly what Steven Spielberg if you listen to Steven Spielberg episode right this is much later in his life uh I think he's probably 50 years old at the time a old friend of his comes and visits his movie set I think it's the movie 1941 if I recall correctly and he just looks around he goes do you know they pay me to do this and so this part is just incredible gets his first job and he's like I should start my own company one of my favorite facts about Walt Disney is by the time he was 20 his first company by the time he's 20 he's already gone bankrupt with his first company and then he just immediately starts over again and just does it better the next time so it says for someone virtually without training or experience for someone who had just lost his job he was cocky I felt well qualified he would say and he was already thinking of opening his own art shop so he lost his job because that work was uh seasonal it was just around the the holidays the Christmas holidays Walt had met another animator this guy named UB earworks I think is how you pronounce his name it's very weird and he he's like oh this guy's talented and then impuls he's like hey why don't we just go into business together and so even though they were both High School dropouts it says Walt Disney had grandiose Big Dreams he had outsized aspirations and one thing that his early partner said about him that Walt was completely self-absorbed but listen to this so he says uh he once remarked that while he and other artists played poker during breaks Walt would sit at his board drawing board practicing various Renditions of his signature he he knew he knew one day he was going to do everything he could he's going to make that signature world famous this is not very different this is very similar to a young step spelberg step Spielberg when he was a kid he would practice accepting his his he he would visualize himself winning an Oscar and then he would practice his acceptance speech in front of the academy Steph SPI he was doing this was like 12 years old and so then this is the first time that we're going to see something that while Disney does his entire career this is something that Disney has in common with other great filmmakers he is always always jumping on the new technology of his day think about the description of George Lucas in that biography they said he was the Thomas Edison of the modern film industry so he also did this as well there's many examples of Spielberg doing this and so he's like okay I can be a cartoonist but there's a lot of other cartoonists but there's this new field called animation and it really gripped Disney because he's like oh what gets what got him thinking he's like wait I animation is just making cartoons move it it brings life to my cartoons and then this part describes why that was so important it's five sentences two paragraphs this is Walt Disney but it might as well be Edwin land because I read this and then one two three times I'm like oh this is just like Edwin l so why is he going to do this one number one it was a way to make his marks since unlike newspaper cartooning animation was something that Walt thought he might do better than anyone else in the world because so few people at the time were doing it and so few people had any expertise in it the idea of being the best the most noted clearly appealed to him that's number one that reminds me of Edwin Lan his personal motto he said his personal motto was don't do anything that someone else can do and we'll see in animation there was nobody in the world that could do animation in the way while this he's going to wind up doing it and he knew it too there's a line that George Lucas says that uh that somebody was describing young George Lucas says that he knew how to do it he was going to make sure everyone knew that he knew Walt Disney he would hold his entire team to what many people would consider like an unreasonably High expectation of excellence and one of the lines he has about this he's like listen if we were not excellent we go to business right because he thought quality was the only moat that's not the word he uses but that's the way I would describe his his interpretation of that that the only thing like he's betting his entire company on excellence and quality of the product and if we let that go then our entire our company goes out of business and if our company goes out of business the quality of the entire animation industry would fall that is a wild wild statement wild that he said it and wild because it's probably true and so again don't do anything that someone else can do right I I want to I want to jump into a new industry because I have a chance of being bet the best in the world at that industry number two Walt Disney this is probably my favorite quote in the entire book Walt Disney seldom dabbled everyone who knew him remarked on his intensity when something intrigued him he focused himself entirely on it as if it were the only thing that mattered now animation mattered that is when he began an immersive self-education in the medium how many times is he going to use the same Playbook over and over again he jumps into something and he builds his own curriculum so that is number two Edwin land there's a rule that they don't teach you at Harvard Business School it is if anything is worth doing it's worth doing to excess and edwiin lych no because he dropped out of Harvard twice number three that idea that hey there we're not dabbling here we're not Dilly ding we're not dabbling you know uh everyone who knew him remarked on his intensity when something intrigued him he focused himself entirely it was the only thing that mattered that is another Edwin land ISM Edwin L said my whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had just like Edwin L was only focused on Polaroid we seen now that Walt Disney's doing the same thing Walt Disney was now focused on animation virtually to the exclusion of everything else he would go to the garage after work each day Walt Disney's first Studio do you want you want Walt Disney's first Studio it was a garage in the yard that was 15 square feet and this is his schedule so he'd go to the garage after a full day of work then he'd work right after work he'd come out for dinner then go back to the studio he'd come back inside long after everybody else in was in bed wall was out there puttering away working away experimenting trying this and trying that drawing and so on what his family did not seem to notice was that Walt Disney who for years had been determined to become a newspaper cartoonist was now suddenly just as determined to become something that to most Outsiders was even more impractical something for which he had no real training and something for which a job did not even seem to exist he wanted to become an animator when he began puttering in his garage animation was scarcely two decades old what is going on here why is he obsessed with this remember the animator creates his own world a world which he has completely under his control what did it say I don't think you know this but the intro to this podcast came from the introduction and the epilogue and it ends with saying that he was a master of order a master of control why why was that so important to him Walt Disney had a psychological connection to animation a connection forged by his childhood experiences the process of Animation was a process of giving life of literally taking the inanimate and making it animate it was a hubristic process everybody that meets Walt Disney talks about that he had a giant giant ego it was a hubristic process in which the animator assumed and exercised Godlike control over his material in the case of Walt Disney the S this surge of empowerment was so great one might even have concluded that animation took the place of religion for him for a young young man who had chaed under the stern moralistic world of his father animation provided Escape it provided absolute control in animation Walt Disney could be the power and again he does the exact same thing here determined to master ambition he immersed himself incompletely he take there's only this is how know you know you're early to a field so he's reading everything he can get he's taking classes he's practicing and it says uh he took out the one book from the Kansas City Library that there was on animation and so before his company's doing like these this these freelance jobs these advertisements but his first product is going to be selling one minute animated shorts and he sells them to movie theaters right these are little one minute cartoons that are shown before movies you know you start out okay what's the first thing you can do the most rudimentary almost like simple thing you could do I can make a you know one minute animated cartoon it's going to be black and white uh it's not going to have sound and then eventually I'm going to add sound and I'm going to add color and then instead of being one minute it's going to be you know six or seven minutes and then he has this idea which changes the the entire trajectory of his company and he's like I'm going to build the world's first full featurelength animated cartoon but it's fascinating I think that's the power of biography one of the poers of biography is like you just see it's like oh it starts here okay now you see him learning oh wait he's figuring out and then he keeps doing that unimpeded and he lets he compounds for four decades and then by that time he's got movies theme parks television show shows radio books merchandise everything and so he calls his first product laugh ofrs and his dad is like you're crazy you shouldn't do this says his father who had suffered so many economic setbacks of his own advised him not to do this warning that he could go broke but remember he's the antithesis of his father while Disney was too independent minded even at the age of 20 to think of himself as someone else's employee and that confidence that unusual self-belief is actually going to power him through because it's not like there's a giant market he's in a brand new industry there's not like a a strong demand for these cartoons it's not why people are going to the movies you know so if a if you're a movie theater and you want to cut back on some expenses it's not people are coming to see the main feature they're not coming to see these like one minute cartoons so he's launching into a market with rather weak demand and I think there's two things that serve him really well is this like intense drive and self-belief it says there such a great line he's one of the most unusual ual people you could possibly study in a with a podcast full of unusual people it says he had the drive and ambition of 10 million men and he had the self-confidence to match he says listen he he's struggling he's about to go bankrupt he's going to starve he's going to have to live in his office that is it's insane that he he he persevered through all this but he says I'm going to sit tight I have the greatest opportunity I've ever had and I'm in it for everything and he's relentlessly resourceful if he can't sell cartoons he starts doing more freelance work he'll go to companies and say hey I can build cartoons for you he winds up doing for to to to meet payroll and to feed himself he winds up even doing educational films on dental hygiene for a dentist this is the State of Affairs before he has a big hit he's going to do this live action cartoon called Alice's Wonderland not Alice in Wonderland it's called Alice's Wonderland and so they he can't pay rent so he's sleeping in his office he has to get his meals on credit when that credit runs out uh Walt remembers I would Walt remembered I was so damn hungry that he would subsist on cold beans that he ate from a can since he's living in the office he doesn't have any money he only takes a bath or a shower once a week and he goes down to like the you know the local YMCA and I think pays like a nickel or a dime so he can shower there and he's losing so much weight and he looks so bad that everybody around him the older like people in the community think he has tuberculosis and eventually he can't can't saave this off any longer so this is when he declares bankruptcy and it is during this time probably the darkest time in his young adult life that his one of his greatest traits is revealed he's got this bulletproof optimism listen to this throughout the failures throughout the days without meals and nights with Restless sleep throughout the constant begging for funds throughout it all Walt Disney seemed never to lose his faith I never once heard Walt say anything that would sound like defeat he was always optimistic about his ability and and the value of his ideas and about the possibilities of cartoons in the entertainment field never once did I hear him Express anything except determination to go ahead he seemed confident Beyond any logical reason for him to be so it appeared that nothing could discourage him and he has a great quote about this he says you have to take the Hard Knocks with the good breaks in life a life is going to be composed of both no one's going to get through it without Hard Knocks and good breaks and so what he realizes is like listen especially this time in the early 1920s if you want to be in the entertainment field you need to get your ass to Hollywood he's in Kansas City he's like listen there's nothing wrong with my aim I got to change my target is the way I I think about what his decision making here he's like okay Kansas City is clearly not the right place I'm going to scr heavy last dollar he winds up doing a bunch of freelance work again then winds up selling his camera just so he can make enough money uh and buy a train ticket and get from Kansas City to Hollywood this was one of the most important decisions he ever made think about how crazy this is cuz we you and I know from our vantage point the run that he's about to go on right he's going to have tons of ups and downs but he gets to holwood in 1923 he's going to die in 1966 and if you think about what he builds in Hollywood over the next four decades he arrives in Hollywood with nothing but a borrowed suit and it says A peculiar selfconfidence a borrowed suit and peculiar selfconfidence and so he takes the same idea he had this idea called Alice is Wonderland which is you combine liveaction with some you shoot like a live action like little girl right and then you draw in post-production you draw like animated characters around her and it looks like she's she's interacting with them right this is very rudimentary technology at the time we're in 1920s for God's sake but he had that idea he's like okay I had this idea in Kansas City I just ran out of money I still think it's a good idea he takes it Hollywood starts developing it there and he winds up immediately selling it to to a distributor named Margaret Winkler Margaret Winkler interesting enough was the first and only female distributor film distributor in the entire country so what Walt has sold is this series of very short films called alysis and Wonderland and he's making you know $1,500 each for the first six and $1,800 each for the second six so he's got a good break and then as is in the case of his entire career wal disne is going to be World Famous by the time he's in his 30s right but yet you look at him when he's in his mid-40s and he's just going through struggle after struggle his his entire career success is not a straight line success is not a straight line it is up and down valleys and Peaks over and over again up until he gets to Disney L and then entally doesn't have to worry about money uh for the rest of his life but he's struggling you know even with a lot of successes he has a ton of setbacks in his career that's why I find uh this book takes an unbelievable amount of time to read and to digest but I do think the end result is you feel incredibly inspired um you know throughout any normal week you're going feel you're going to have this entrepreneurial emotional roller coaster you have high highs and low lows and every time I feel like a low low I'm like oh I'm supposed to feel this way and the only response to the way I feel right now is to to be determined to push through it's exactly what Walt Disney would do and so even though he has a success his distributor is going to marry this guy named Charles minz Charles minz starts running uh the business because Margaret gets pregnant and Charles Mintz is the reason that Mickey Mouse exists because Charles minz steals Disney's company from him this is so important and to understand why this happened you understand what was important to Walt Disney he was not he's like a reluctant entrepreneur and I think these two sentences give you an idea of that Walt was never interested in building an operation or running a business he was interested in improving product as a matter of personal pride and psychological need what does that mean he sincerely wanted to make good animations and sincerely wanted to be counted among the best at his craft the the the one difference between Walt Disney and um Steve Jobs though Steve Jobs had that those exact same desires and needs he's like I have to make literally he's you never chased a market chair think about the decades people made fun of him because Microsoft had all this micos all this Market chair Steve's like I have to be the best I have to make the best products and that means I don't have the the most market share I don't give a I'm going to make the best products Walt Disney was the exact same way the difference was Steve understood that he had to build a great product or a great company because a great company was the foundation on which would allow him to continue to make great products Disney struggled with that for his entire career career nearly his entire career maybe the last like 10% he had finally figured that out and so one of the mistakes Disney makes here and I don't think he had a choice so I think he had to make this mistake I think this is inevitable and I think this wind up being one of the best undoubtedly it had to be one of the best things that ever happened uh to Disney because without there this it's not at all clear that he would have invented Mickey Mouse and later in his life Walt Disney said I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing that this was all started by a mouse and it's this this theft by Charles minz of his characters of not only Alice and Wonderland or Alice's Wonderland but also this rabbit Oswald the Rabbit that Disney invents and then mince is also going to lead a coup and and overthrow Disney out of his own company and so Disney has to start over again but again this this terrible thing had to happen for Disney to create his greatest invention and one of the mistakes is and again I don't think he had much of a choice at the time he did this but you're going to a middleman so Disney signs a contract with a middleman the middleman has a relationship with the ultimate distributor which is you know the main movie studios later on Disney's just going to go cut out you know the middleman and go direct and that's important because the middleman has the contract with the distributor the distributor controls all the the money and so the middleman can just say hey essentially reselling Disney's product and over time realizes hey I'm just going to cut Disney out instead of him making anything I'm just going to take his animators and do this myself and that's exactly what happens Disney's overthrown by a coup you know I've talked about this many time opportunity is a strange Beast it frequently appears after a loss this had to happen it made him made better and smarter it made him better businessman smarter person and help develop skills that he needed to continue to build his company cuz he's just going to start over again after this and so Charles Mintz starts doing these back channels to a bunch of the key employees that are working for Disney Disney's also like a Taskmaster you know very difficult time person to deal with very difficult person to work under he has like these unrelenting you know standards for excellence that he's going to hold you accountable to and he also is rather naive by his own admission he says he was never a good judge of people and so he didn't believe that his staff would ever double cross him and in the process Disney realized he had signed a bad deal because in the agreement Disney had no rights to the character that he created remember James Dyson episode 300 this happened to him well before and again this had to happen to him because he took it as a lesson he's like oh okay this is information I will improve next time he had this invention called the ball Barrow which is a wheelbarrow with a ball that doesn't get stuck in like dirt right he's like I can't understand why for hundreds of years people are using wheelbarrow it gets stuck I can improve this he wind up Dyson's mistake which he never made again was he signed over the patent that was in his name to the company then he gets kicked out of the company so then he loses the rights to his invention because he doesn't have access to the company the company owns the patent well very similar situation here he had signed a deal where the company that he no longer controls all the ownership of the characters that Disney invented relied uh resided rather with Charles min's company not his own and so it says Walt had no rights to the character that Walt had created thus leaving Walt no recourse this is so important why it says Walt had nothing no character no contract no staff safe for the very few who remained loyal no plan he would talk often of this episode as a betrayal saying that you had to control what you had or it could be taken from you and now he had seen how duplicitous the business world could be and so now he's on theack train back home to Los Angeles his wife is terrified they have no money he's got no characters it looks like he's he doesn't have a business she is crying and what happens there's a line in uh one of this interviews uh I heard I was watching on Kobe Bryant one day and he talked about this you know went through a ton of adversity and he says well when you're going through something what other choice do you have but to go through it and Kobe's perspective in other words was that the solution that you seek is found in the work the only thing you can do is get back back to work that is the only proper response so on the way home on the train he's got nothing his entire business has been taken from him and what is he doing he's spending the entire time on the train drawing and sketching and trying to create new characters and then using those characters as a basis to make more animated cartoons so he can sell the cartoons and get back on track and so it is on this train ride across the country that he starts drawing a mouse and thankfully his wife who was with him because he draws the mouse she thinks the character looks great but she's like that is a great character and a terrible name why because Walt Disney wanted to call Mickey Mouse morer Mouse and his wife said that was a horrible name and I made quite a scene about it so they go back and forth after a while and Walt asked her what do you think about the name Mickey and I said it sounded better than Mortimer and that is how Mickey was born so let's go back to this opportunity as a strange Beast if L appears after a loss this causes him to invent the sound cartoon okay so he starts drawing Mickey Mouse I think so everybody well maybe everybody doesn't know this but one of the probably his biggest hit that he needed when he was younger uh he's around 27 28 years old at this point in his life he makes the world's first sound cartoon it is Steamboat Willie it is actually the third Mickey Mouse cartoon but the first two didn't get distributed because it was missing something and Disney believed D that it was perfectly logical that you know you're watching other things they're like if sound is coming out of live action sounds how we communicate with one another why isn't sound coming out of cartoons at the time people would would would criticize this they said drawings are not vocal why should a voice come out of a cartoon character that criticism is coming from within his field that is other animators talking to Disney they said it was unnatural peculiar and offputting you know what he did you know what Disney did he previewed it he put it in front of customers in front of an audience and well how are they going to react to it I like this why wouldn't they like it and this is the result I never saw such a reaction in an audience in my life the sound itself gave the illusion of something emanated directly from the screen Walt was estatic he kept saying this is it this is it we've got it and so this is going to allow him to sign a distribution deal the distribution deal is going to bring money into the studio but how did he Finance Mickey he borrowed every single thing he had bought a house earlier him and his brother who's his business partner Roy they put mortgages and second mortgages on their house in addition to them taking out second mortgages on their house Walt Disney sold his car to finance his company Steve Jobs did this in the early day of apple he was driving like a Volkswagen boss if I remember correctly and he had to sell it so they get parts to build their first product and so the distributor is able to put Steamboat Willie in theaters all over the country the reaction from the audience is is unbelievable and so much so that they try to they try to Aqua hire uh Walt Disney this is very fascinating and there this one paragraph tells you a lot about Disney one that he's going to refuse to sell his company he's not doing it for the money he's doing it for like he wants to make great products so why would he sell his company and then he just believes that quality is his only Advantage the problem was that the Distributors all of them wanted to buy Walt's Studio not just his cartoons but Walt was adamant about not selling about not surrendering surrendering control no matter how badly he needed Revenue why because he didn't want to just be another animation producer he wanted to be the king of Animation Walt believed that quality was his only real advantage and so this commitment to Excellence is something that Walt would repeat decade after decade after decade Walt had passionately expressed his long-standing conviction that his salvation was in making a product that so excelled that the public would recognize it and enjoy it as the best entertainment and that they would Dem demand to see Disney pictures that is a direct quote from Walt Disney that the salvation our Salvation is in making a product that so excelled that the public would recognize it and enjoy it as the best entertainment and that they would demand to see Disney pictures now Walt Disney is expressing an idea that Warren Buffett picked up on and analyzed and turns out Warren Buffett thought Walt Disney was obviously successful in what he was trying to do because he talked about later on Warren Buffett would talk about the importance of building a brand that is special in the mind of your customers and he uses Disney as an example to illustrate the point that he was trying to make Warren Buffett said everyone has something in their mind about Disney when I say Universal Pictures or 20th Century Fox you don't have anything special in your mind if I say Disney you have something special in your mind so is a mother going to walk in and pick out a Universal Pictures video in preference to Disney that's not going to happen that is what you want to have in a business that is the moat you want that moat to widen and then the way that Disney did this it's very similar to the Steve Jobs quote Steve Jobs said be a yard stick for Quality some people aren't used to an environment where Excellence is expected Disney built an environment where Excellence wasn't expected at Disney the atmosphere may have been casual but when it came to work everything was carefully planned every cartoon had an exposure sheet precisely outlining each scene each movement and each individual draw drawing the biggest difference between the Disney Studio and every other Animation Studio was not in preparation or specialization it was an expectation listen to that the difference was an expectation Walt Disney had to be the best he insisted upon excellence and he would give you the advice train your own train and educate your own team he was so sick of these people coming from second class if you hire from experience the problem is their experience may be several levels below your expectation he says this it could be a struggle convincing men who had spent their careers thinking of Animation as a throwaway that they could and must accomplish something better I have encountered plenty of trouble getting my new man adjusted to our method of working Walt complained part of Walt's secret was that an insisting on quality from individuals of whom it had never been required he inspired commitment the this is one of his employees describing the environment we hated to go home at night and we couldn't wait to get to the office in the morning we had lots of Vitality and we had to work it off and so how did he train and educate his own team he talks about he uses this for animation he uses this for full length movies he uses this at Disneyland he would hire for enthusiasm and and and uh youthful enthusiasm over experience and he's just like I'm going to make my own people and so he winds up starting his own school and so they'd work all day and then at night he would preside over animation classes I did an episode on Walt Disney and compared and contrast him with Pablo Picasso and episode 310 there's a line in that book says Disney himself trained over a thousand artists and just like he held his staff to high standards he held himself to high standards too you have to understand unbelievably talented unbelievably obsessed unbelievably dedicated he was also ruthlessly ruthlessly competitive Walt Disney wanted domination domination that would make his position unassailable his larger Quest was to become the animation Overlord so at the time the most popular animated figure right Mickey Mouse is about to wax this guy uh was Felix the Cat he was determined that Mickey Mouse would supplant Felix the Cat and this was inevitable because it says Felix's Creator this guy named Pat Sullivan had none of Walt Disney's drive or foresight and so this is when we get into Disney building his cult that is exactly how it is described in the book and one way he did did this and I think this is a really good idea is like he made you believe that by working with him and at Walt Disney Studios you were part of an elite team that you were not just an animator you were part of the best animation team in the world there's a line in the book where one of his employees said we felt like we were the Elite Class like you would be at West Point and this is where he tells them that the quality of not just what we're making rests on us right the quality of the entire animation industry rest on us that self-belief that everybody notices from the time he's a young man you know now he's around his in his 30s it's still it's like ever presentent and it that belief that he had about himself and what he could do was transferable to his employees Walt struck me as being absolutely sure of himself he was positive about what he was going to do he was positive about what we could do and so Walt's modus operandi is Let's Make a bunch of money and then we're going to reinvest every single dollar and more so that they lose a bunch of money too into the quality of the product and there's many times and he does this in in animation he does this in movies he does this in Disneyland where people are like oh we're going to you know there's a great way to do it and there's a cheap way to do it he flips out his animations could not be compromised they had to be better than anyone else's or he would not survive in this business again Excellence was Walt Disney's business strategy his animations could not be compromised they had to be better than anyone else's or he would not survive in this business Excellence was Walt's business strategy if you want to know the real secret of Walt's success longtime animator Ward Kimble would say it's that he never tried to make money he was always trying to make something that he could be proud of his hobby is his work every moment of his time is given over to it there wasn't enough we didn't end up at the studio his wife recalled she would curl up on the couch in his office and sleep while Walt worked she would wake up at different intervals to ask how late it was to which regardless of the time Walt would answer oh it's not that late honey Walt admitted years later listen to this this is insane Walt admitted years later that he would turn back his office clock while Lillian slept so that she never knew how late he had worked and if you know that Improvement is his mantra that Excellence is his business strategy of course he's going to dedicate all this time to it a a couple weeks ago I did this book it's episode 343 it is uh the Eternal pursuit of unhappiness people love that episode if you haven't listened to it you should listen to it after this episode 343 Eternal pursuit of unhappiness being very good is no good you have to be very very very very very good it's by David olgy and the team at olgy and Ma and it is based it's a very short book it's very hard to find I think it sold out really fast after that episode came out but it's based on Oggi's idea of divine discontentment and ogi describes this he says we have a habit of divine discontent with our performance is an anecdote to smugness ogy had that and Walt Disney had it to never content with the quality of what the studio produced no matter how good a picture we turn out he said I can always see ways to improve it when I see the finished product his entire life he wanted something that was living that was ongoing a product he could always improve he didn't find that until he was 55 I think 55 or 56 when he made Disneyland so much so that he could make the world you know some of his many of his animated cartoons his animated feature films they won every single award they made a ton of money and Disney says I can't even watch them a decade later because all I see is the mistakes all I see is what I could do better today and yes this habit practiced over a long period of time by supremely talented individual like Walt Disney is going to build a great product but it can also break you down because just like he drove his staff mercilessly he drove himself like this he has multiple nervous breakdowns and health problems throughout his entire life because of this he's around 29 years old when this is happening when he talked on the phone he would suddenly and unaccountably find himself Weeping at night he couldn't sleep at the studio he became physically ill looking at his L cartoon and unable to see anything but its flaws the years of fighting and losing and then having to fight back the years of having to maintain a brave front in the face of loss and betrayal and the years of feeling compelled to produce cartoons so good that Disney would be unsalable in the industry while strug struggling against oppressive unrelenting Financial constraints that barely allowed them to survive and that even now had not loosened and then the setback in starting his own family talking about he's got all his pressures at work he wanted to he desperately wanted to be a dad but unfortunately had a few miscarriages but all this built up and it said all this had accumulated until Walt who you was usually so self-confident cracked and he suffered a breakdown this is such an important point it's why I said out of every single book that I've ever read my number one recommendation is still James Dyson's first autobiography against the odds by James Dyson it's episode 25 it's episode 20000 it's episode 300 it'll be episode 400 and 500 as well I'm going to read that book every 100 episodes it's so important because we can celebrate Disney and his accomplishments after the fact but going through this it's so difficult that any logical person would qu I'm going to read one paragraph from James lon's autobiography while it is easy of course for me to celebrate my doggedness now and to say that's all you need to succeed the truth is that it demoralized me terribly I would crawl into the house every night covered in dust after a long day a long day of failure by the way exhausted and depressed because that day's work had not worked there were times when I thought it would never work that would just keep on making he's trying to make a cyclone vacuum making Cyclone after Cyclone never going forward never going backwards until I died the source of his Excellence is also the source of this Divine discontent this dissatisfaction this Relentless pressure that he puts on himself over and over again and he's going to have many many times where he breaks and gets completely disengaged this is important to note because it is repeated over and over and over again in every chapter in every decade of his work Walt would not repeat would not okay any animation that did not meet with his very high standards of acceptance this meant that everything one did had to be analyzed endlessly analyzed to make sure it worked to make sure that it was up to standards to make sure that it could not be improved upon everything was drawn and redrawn until we could say this is the best that we can do and so there's obviously both negative and positive externalities to this positive externality is if you have to keep pushing the pace of your entire industry you're going to wind up inventing new technology a bunch of the tools right other animators are in this book saying almost every tool that we use was originated at the Disney Studio that emphasis on analysis would lead to the development of new techniques that would facilitate higher standards in animation and then soon become the standard operating procedure for the entire industry he did not just innovate in technology he innovated in company organization too before him animators animation was looked at as like some some silly thing not to be taken seriously it's all about gag it's about like oneoff he's like no no we're telling a story here and actions Express priority Walt demonstrated that story was King and he did so through his actions because he had appointed for the very first time in the industry a head of a new Department called the story Department there was no such thing as the story Department in any other it was something unheard of in any other Animation Studio at the time and this is not all upside like this Relentless pressure it's changing him just like his work's changing it's changing him too when he was young he was like outgoing it says uh he was gregarious and now growing now all of his enthusiasm all of his time it's eventually going to be split with his kids but at this point all of it is going into the studio and now he's change his personality Chang he is withdrawn outside of the studio he essentially has two modes of his entire life work and family family and work work and family remember the episode I did on the the founder of Red Bull if you haven't listened to it listen to it I think it's one of the best episodes I ever did it's episode number 333 Red Bull's billionaire founder I'm going to read from that book because it sounds a lot like what I'm about to tell you in Walt Disney this is the billionaire founder of Red Bull who just passed away he doesn't place a premium on collecting friends or socializing I don't believe in 50 friends I believe in a smaller number nor do I care about Society events it's the most senseless use of time when I go out from time to time it's just to convince myself again that I'm not missing a lot so diatric masit I'm probably still mispronouncing his name even though I spent dozens of hours studying that guy this idea it's like I don't I can't have 50 friends I have a handful of friends Walt Disney probably had less than that it says he socialized even less than before claiming that it took too much of one's energy and saying that he preferred to get a Goods night's sleep as it leaves me in a better condition in the morning to carry on the work he seldom traveled and admitted that he would rather spend vacation at home that changes later in life him and Lilian would travel a bunch especially after their kids are out of the house and then let's get into another Innovation this is a business model Innovation that Disney came up with and this is just blew my mind I this is the importance again everybody gets the top of the profession they understand that learning what did Charlie Monger say learning from history is a form of Leverage what I'm about to read to you and this entire thing this is a huge theme one of the largest parts of Disney's business is going to be merchandise for the life of me this is happening decades before George Lucas is negotiating with Century Fox about maintaining the merchandise George Lucas wanted to make sure he maintained the right to do sequels and the right to own the merchandise for Star Wars and they just gave it up like just completely collapsed here take me it's like a billion dollar multiple billion mistake how can you do that the only answer is you didn't even bother to study Walt Disney the value of merchandise for movies in television was a known thing when that was happening because as soon as Disney finds the right person to run his merchandise Vision it is an immediate and sustain sustained success Disney does not have a track record of you know successful he's a dictator for sure he does not have a track record of you know longtime successful Partnerships except with this guy named Herman Cayman Herman Cayman is going to die in a plane crash 17 years into the future his relationship he ran Disney's merchandise at the very beginning Disney made him like a partner it's like you get 50% of everything you bring in over time that that split would change and it would go like you know 70 30 80 20 in Disney's favor but this merchandise business was immediately successful and grew like weeds for decades there's something Napoleon said one time when I was reading about him that I thought was fascinating he says in war men are nothing one man is everything in war men are nothing one man is everything Herman Cayman was that one man when it came to Disney merchandise and listen to his pitch he goes in he's like listen he sees what they're doing for merchandise like this is dog okay he walks in he goes I don't know how much business you're doing but I guarante you that much business that to match what you're doing and I'll give you 50% of everything I do over and so cayman's pitch is like I'm going to innovate in merchandise it's like you guys are innovating animation this is a great pitch Cayman set out to do for Walt Disney Enterprises which is the new merchandise armor of the studio what Walt Disney had been doing for Walt Disney Productions the film making arm he was going to reinvent it transform it into a Sleek quality controlled Revenue producing operation that would in time have the added effect of making M Mickey Mouse even more popular as a brand than he was as a movie star Cayman was a whirlwind within a year there were 40 licenses uh licenses for Mickey Mouse products within the first year Cayman brought in $35 million of sales in Disney merchandise in the United States alone and an equal amount overseas that's $70 million in $1 1934 and just like George Lucas is inexcusable to not study history to not use learning from history as a formal leverage this is just like George Lucas this was a known thing Walt made more money from the rights to Mickey merchandise than from the cartoons it was a line in George Lucas's biography something like he made three times as much on Star Wars toys as he did the movies and Star Wars printed money if I remember correctly had $11 million budget and made 775 million at the box office that's just Star Wars 1 and yet he's tripling that on toys and merchandise Disney became the first Studio to recognize that one could Harvest enormous profits from film related toys games clothing and other products so I want to go into this few ways that Disney built his cult remember like there's a these chapters in this book are huge some of them are like 100 pages long and one of them you I could do individual episodes just on each chapter this is how dense and and um detailed this book is but in the chapter on the cult it really talks about like his approach and there's several pages that just remind me it's like wow this is just there's a lot of similarities between Steve Jobs number one Walt Disney operated almost entirely by Instinct he trusted his intuition Steve Jobs is famous for saying that he believed intuition was more powerful than intellect and that intuition following his intuition had a large impact on his career but unlike Steve Jobs trying to figure out what Walt Disney actually wanted you to do they said uh there's hilarious line in the book where one of his um employees I think said something like figuring sussing out what Walt Disney wanted was a matter of Osmosis that in many ways is the anti Steve Jobs I I always say Steve Jobs is the clearest thinker that I've ever come across there's this book called creative selection that I talk about over and over again because I read it a bunch of times it's episode 281 if you haven't listened to it but listen to this description of Steve which is kind of like the opposite of Walt I in this case I'd want to be more like Steve and less like Walt it says Steve was the center of all the circles he made all the important product decisions from my standpoint as an individual programmer demoing to Steve was like visiting the Oracle of Deli the demo was my question and Steve's response was the answer while the pronouncements from the Greek oracle often came in the form of confusing riddles this was not true with Steve he was always easy to understand he would either approve a demo or he would request to see something different next time whenever Steve reviewed a demo he would say often with highly detailed specificity what he wanted to happen next he was always trying to ensure that the products were as intuitive and straightforward as possible and he was willing to invest his own time effort and influence to see that they were through looking at demos asking for specific changes then reviewing the changed work again later and giving a final approval before we could ship Steve could make a product turn out like he wanted much like the Greek oracle Steve foretold the future the opposite of that would be your employees needing to decide for what you want through osmosis something you don't want to happen and then one area where Steve and Walt Disney were of like minds and so completely eye to eye is Steve Jobs once said that the Storyteller is the most powerful person in the world Walt used this in his own products and in run his own company he was a superb Storyteller Walt himself seemed to think it was his primary attribute of all the things I've ever done I'd like to be remembered as a Storyteller Walt was a super salesman who believed so devoutly in his studio and its cartoons that he could convince anyone even the stest banker who he'd fight with all the time of their value Don Valentine founder of seoa capital has one of my favorite quotes of all time he says learning to tell a story is critically important because that's how the money works the money flows as a function of the story he also went on to say that most entrepreneurs are incapable they're really bad storytellers you should work on that skill another way that Disney built his cult he was a micromanager he was a micromanager he stuck his his nose into everything and he actually has a really beautiful metaphor about the role of a Founder uh his way to do this is by you know T putting his hands on every single part of the product he compared it to a symphony with him as a conductor who took all the employees the story men the animators the composers the musicians The Voice artists the ink and paint people and got them to produce one whole thing which is beautiful and when he was excited and enthusiastic he put He had a reality Distortion field it said he had an overwhelming power of people and the voice of a prophet that is how one of his employees described him a voice of the Prophet another employee was at home talking about Walt and how amazing he is and his wife gets snippy with him and she's like you talk about him as if he were a God to which he replied he is and then to summarize this entire section the Disney Studio did not operate like a commercial institution at all the Disney Studio operated like a cult with a Messianic figure inspiring a group of of devoted frenzied acolytes they were disciples on a mission and so at this time they're doing a bunch of short animated films they're making a decent amount of money but they they can make they could have a good year and then a couple things don't perform well they're never too far ahead where their success is assured and so he has this idea and he's always he called it plusy which is basically Improvement is my Mantra and he's like okay like there's a lot of energy in short it's like what if we just did one featurelength animated movie and people were like this just like Pixar and people like you can't can't make a computer the world's first computer animated feature film they go on to do it it changes the course of their entire company this is Disney's version of that is with snow with Snow White he's just like how much would a full length if we're making a little bit of money on these animated shorts like how much would a fulllength feature film cartoon make and everybody's like you can't do it it's never been done again and again this goes back to storytelling this goes back to Cult of Personality this goes back to enthusiasm Walt told us this idea of developing the story Snow White and honestly the way that boy can tell a story is nobody's business I was practically in tears during some of it and I've read that story many times as a child without being particularly moved by it if it should turn out on10th as good as the way he tells it it would be incredible he was a Spell binder he was a Spell binder we were just carried away and so he sells his entire company on hey let's Marshall our resources let's be focused no one's ever done this before but if we can do it we can make it a massive success here's the problem to make a feature length card tune Disney is going to need a lot of animators I love weird ways people hire weird ways people recruit so what he does he's like okay let's send letters to all the art schools across the country we're going to list the kinds of skills that we need and encourage people that have those skills to apply they do this for a long time not just for Snow White in the next decade they're going to get 30,000 new applicants from just sending letters to our school saying hey these are the skills we have are you interested in being the best of the best apply here his demand for animators far out strip Supply and so he has to to to bridge the gap he's got to hire these like veteran animators and he's so pissed off about doing this and so he says he griped that when he hired veteran animators he had to put up with their godamn poor working habits from doing cheap pictures it was easier he believed to start from scratch with young art students and indoctrinate them in the Disney system and so their education doesn't stop when they graduate art school and come to Disney again he has this he has Disney University or whatever they call it this these mandatory classes for the entire Studio what is he doing he's brainwashing them the intention was not just education it was infatuation as always Walt wanted the studio employees to be besided as he was with the notion of Excellence he wanted Obsession and so just like George Lucas went all in he bet every single thing he had on the sequel to Star Wars Walt Disney so believed in Snow White he's going to be proven right here by the way that he was willing to bet every single thing so he's like oh I could probably do this for $250,000 his estimates on money are never right by the way and so he's got to take uh he's like oh we could do it for 250 nope go they run through the $250,000 budget then he got he gets another his main Banker Bank of America he gets another loan for $630,000 less than a year later he goes back to them for another 650,000 and this is what Walt said to a reporter at the time I had to mortgage everything I owned including Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and everything else to make Snow White and so there's this constant theme throughout the book where he's fighting with financiers over and over again this is why George Lucas said that he was intent he was hellbent on controlling the money I think he learned that in part by not his own personal experience but studying the struggles that Walt Disney had with all the bankers but one thing that was so fascinating it did really did speak to the Excellence of the product that he was making is his main Banker comes and sees like a rough cut like it's not fully but it's still unlike anything he's ever seen so he's very quiet during it he's like got no reaction you know kind of making him nervous because he needs like another loan of like 350,000 or the whole thing's going to go up and smoke and so the Banker's name is Rosenberg they walk out into the parking lot he's real quiet there's no read on him at all and he gets in the car rolls down the window says goodbye and then just slowly says hey uh that thing is going to make you a handful of money and he was right Snow White made a ton of money this is what we're 19 39 the end of the Great Depression there's a there's a line here that may be may be true the nine months after Snow White debuted may have been the best months of Walt Disney's adult life remember he's been struggling for two decades he's unbelievable successful building great products he's never making a lot of money Walt Disney was not a very wealthy man Snow White would go on to become the highest grossing American Film up until that point it had been seen by more people in America than any other Motion Picture theaters were it was so popular you had to make a reservation 3 weeks in advance to see it at a movie theater and it was a merchandise Cash Cow there were 2,183 different Snow White products they let me just give you one example drinking cups drinking glasses Snow White themed drinking glasses they sold 16.5 million units just of that they had never experienced an influx of money like this so this is fascinating so this is something that I love idea um I don't it's in George Lucas book I don't think it put in the George Lucas podcast but he kept making like hundreds of millions of dollars because you just hold on long enough and then eventually there'll be a technology invented that can benefit your business that you didn't have to develop so VH uh VHS tapes DVDs and then Blu-ray every time there's a new better format he would just resell like oh now you can get Star Wars on VHS now you can get it on HG DVD and now you can get on Blu-ray it would literally drop hundreds of millions of dollars down to his bottom line Steve Jobs realized that because when he was doing Pixar he said this what I'm about to read you comes Steve Jobs said this in 1997 1998 he says Pixar is putting something into culture that will renew itself with each generation of children Snow White was released on video 2 years ago and sold over 20 million copies it's 60 years old I think people will be watching Toy Story in 60 years just the way they're watching Snow White now he made the point in another book I read on him too that that he's talking about putting it on I think VHS or DVD at that point that the that 20 million copy dropped a quarter of a billion dollars directly to Disney's bottom line 60 years after Snow White was invented and so it's this influx of money why it said this might have been you know these nine months is might be the best in his life because it's also going to be tragedy so he makes so much money their parents never you know they struggled their whole lives so now the brothers Roy and Walt were able to chip in and buy their parents a house and relocate them closer to them in Los Angeles so he had a problem obviously the you know you kind of read between the lines about his relationship with his dad even when he was an adult because his dad dies Walt doesn't even go to his funeral but he thought his mother was a saint and I think the way his mother parented had a huge influence on the way Disney chose to parent his two daughters so it says as preoccupied as he was when it came to Diane and Sharon he was a doting father this is one of when you have kids you read this and like I get like choked up when he talks about this so he says he was a doting father who sheltered them from his own Fame he enjoyed telling how six-year-old Diane asked him if he was Walt Disney you know I am he answered the Walt Disney she questioned when he said that he was she asked for his autograph he would chase the girls around the house C cackling like the witch from Snow White or he would twirl them endlessly by their heels for hours and hours and hours Diane would say he would stand in the swimming pool and let them climb on his shoulders I thought my father was the strongest man in the world and the most fun she recalled at night he read to them and on weekends he would take them to either Griffin Park to ride the marryg go around or to the studio where they would follow him as he snooped about and pedal their bikes around the empty grounds while he worked this is the part that really chooks you up if you have kids cuz he's saying this you know they're not little kids anymore and I've already gone through this like the difference between a four-year-old and a 12-year-old you know like you're not the first five like you're my daughter her friends are so important to to her more important than I am you know and that's kind of heartbreaking but when you're PA you are the most important person in their life and Walt really just hits on this beautifully he said they used to love to go with me in those days he would reminisce and that was some of the happiest days of my life they were in love with their dad woo that get you right in the heart okay he did say something was fascinating and again he he's not he never rests on his Laurels if he's going to go out and do something great he's going to try to top it with something else he's not going to just sit here he has a saying that he actually keeps in in his hat that reminds him uh but I'll get there in one minute so he talks about you know Snow White's successful Donald Duck is a fantastic cartoon at this time Donald Duck has like become more popular with Mickey but his belief in Mickey Mickey Mouse never subsided he said of course you know Donald is the big thing now but it won't last Mickey is forever he'll have Mickey will have his moments in the shade but he'll always come out in the bright lights again so almost a hundred years after he said that Mickey Mouse is still going strong and so even after this success he's got this persistent need to challenge himself he was never going to stay in one field or build only one product that was very obvious if you if you read about him he has this ongoing need for Challenge and I think it comes from this inner turmoil and he was afraid to get into a rut he said if we quit growing mentally and artistically we begin to die I do not want to be relegated to the cartoon medium it should not be limited to cartoons we have worlds to conquer here that is his line we have worlds to conquer here and so at this point he is right now at the Apex of his career he has never known successes he has at this point moment in time and the one of the worst tragedies that happens for his in his entire life happens he buys his mom and dad a house there's this gas furnace and it Powers essential gas heater and it keeps getting backed up and his mom is going to die in the house that he gave her a year after Snow White which is his greatest success Walt is 37 years old when this happens we better get this furnace fixed or else some morning we'll wake up and find ourselves dead Flora told her housekeeper Alma Smith Flora is his mom obviously on the morning of November 26th 1938 Flora went into the bathroom when she didn't return Elias got up to investigate and found her collapsed on the bathroom floor feeling overcome himself he staggered out into the hallway and fainted luckily downstairs the uh housekeeper was there she and a neighbor dragged Flor and Elias down the stairs and outside Elias revived Flora did not she died of carbon monoxide poisoning from the defective heater this was the most shattering moment of Walt Disney's life his beloved mother had died in the new home that he had given her Walt never spoke of her death to anyone thereafter when years later Sharon asked him where her grandparents were buried Walt snapped I don't want to talk about it and so after the success of white he has a couple flops and he needs to figure out a way to get his business on more solid footing and so this is the first time where they they're considering selling shares to outside shareholders and what was fascinating is one of Walt Disney's Heroes was for Henry Ford and Walt Disney shortly before Henry Ford dies goes to Michigan to visit him and he's talking about he talks with Henry Ford about this idea for this issuing of stock to outside shareholders and this was Ford's response Ford was blunt if you sell any of it you should sell all of it Ford had famously bought out his investors you know probably 25 years before this conversation and owned 100% of his company so saying if you sell any of your company you should sell all of it Disney said later on this left me thinking and wondering for a while wondering if I had crossed a bridge and could never go back wondering if he had surrendered ultimate control and so even with taking outside funding he's going to have three battles and this is where he gets in one of the most depressed states of his life so some of these are outside of his control uh he's going to have battle battles with the bankers he's going to have battles with unions and then the United States government during World War II essentially just takes over his studio so during World War II something between like 75 and 94% of all the production that came out of Walt Disney Studios was films and media for the government and something Walt Disney has quoted as saying is after one of these battles that he has with the bankers made me think of a line that I read in will Durant the lessons of history and so he's fighting with Bank of America because now he owes them millions and millions of dollars and one when he gets back to the studio they ask him like Hey did you win the battle with the bankers and Walt Disney snapped you never win with the bankers and that just speaks to this reoccurring theme that's really important to control uh the money as much as possible not to rely on on people for outside financing because if they they can control you there's a line in uh the lessons of history from will Ando Durant which I covered a few weeks ago says history reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things and the men who can manage money manage all and so in addition to money troubles and he's having to cut back on salaries is having to lay people off they they wind up a bunch of his animators and a bunch of people inside the company which Walt Disney later on calls Communists uh winds up organizing and they form into unions and they eventually go on strike and Walt Disney Animation never never recovers from from the strike the strike broke Disney's spirit and it never recovered what happens after this is it causes him to you know have a half a decade of depression and to be in this constant search for something else that he could direct his obsession and his talent to and pour his entire love and soul into like he did in animation in the earlier in his career and so Walt is 40 years old just a few years removed from his greatest commercial and artistic Triumph now he has a studio that he dislikes because of the strike the world war III's full in full flames and now his studio is essentially you know commandeered by the US government again success is rarely a straight line he's 20 years into his career he is 40 years old and he's in a terrible position Disney Studio was no longer the Disney Studio it was now an educational and Industrial film facility and an arm of the government with Walt virtually commuting from Los Angeles to Washington he was always frustrated that minor bureaucrats would review his storyboards and issue warnings and orders where previously he had been the ultimate power it's exactly what he wanted he wanted ultimate power ultimate control he wanted to micromanage anything that got in his way his ability to micromanage it he hated he disliked Disney like a lot of the entrepreneurs of unit study he hated committees and the level of his micromanagement uh it can't be overstated this is crazy so he would micromanage every detail down to the point where he even knew the entire inventory he had memorized he knew the entire inventory of studio equipment including the number of light bulbs they had in stock that is when he's making films he is like that later too when he he he walks over every single inch of Disneyland he memorized the exact Heights of every single B building in Disneyland this is the only way he knew how to work and it was the biggest complaint for the people that work for him the most prevalent complaint I recorded about Walt by his producers writers directors and management is that he would not delegate creative Authority in Walt's own words a studio cannot be run by a committee somebody one person has to make the final decision and so he is looking for a new way to micromanage a new thing to pour everything all of his Outlets into because here's the thing the war lasts there's like a five-year break between doing all this war work and getting trying to go back to you know featurelength animation try to capture Disney's former glory and it's it's over you can't do that after a fiveyear break break and you just see that he's completely checked out he begun to lose his footing and his confidence his brother Roy was pressuring him to slash budgets and begin another round of layoffs he had come to a terrible almost crippling realization remember this is a terrible crippling realization because Disney put Excellence above Excellence of the product above everything else even if he were to move ahead with a few of his feature film ideas they would never be good as the films he had made before the war never as beautifully animated never as deliberately plotted never as painstakingly fussed over never as fully the product of a near religious commitment to Greatness the studio simply did not have the financial resources the time or the talents the cult was over and if the films could never be as good as they had been what was the point in making them he began to talk about selling the studio or leaving it for ever he was no longer the king of Animation only one among a group of Pretenders to the throne for years everyone else was in a pack of greyhounds chasing a mechanical rabbit everyone had imitated Disney one might imitate Disney but one couldn't have matched him Disney is the Tiffany of this business and we were all the Woolworths animation was a sacred obligation to Walt Disney a way to reimagine the world for the rest of us it had just been a product so knowing Disney like we know up until this point you know what his next move is he needs he has this it's not that he wants it's not that he desires he needs to do something new something different something unusual he has this maximum that he would remind himself that you can't top pigs with pigs and he talks a little about this he says the thing I resent most is people who try to keep me in well-worn grooves we have to keep blazing new trails he kept a slogan pasted inside of his hat from the time he had been urged to make a sequel to The Three Little Pigs he made the Three Little Pigs movie he was wildly commercially successful so they're like make a three little pigs number two and three little pigs number three and he didn't because he had this Mantra and he repeat it and then he put inside of his hat to remind him he says you can't top pigs with pigs and so this is where he gets his new obsession this is Disneyland this is the remarkable thing so when shortly before he died he said the two things he was most proud of was keep being starting and keeping control of a second company and then Disneyland Disneyland is his greatest creation and if you look at the the the arc and the career of most entrepreneurs like world class history greatest entrepreneurs they do almost every case they do the best work many many decades into their career Steve Jobs was what 25 30 years into his career when he did the iPhone Walt Disney is 35 years into his career when he does Disneyland surprisingly there is only one chapter in this book on Disneyland it is far too important just to dedicate one chapter to it what I'm going to do is a day after maybe a day or two after I release this episode I'm going to re-release this episode I did on that's dedicated there's an entire book I read called Disney's land which is about how he built Disneyland and so almost as a way to preview that I'm going to pull out a couple interesting ideas from this chapter and one is like what is he doing as we've seen for his entire life he's like building these internal worlds and then now he's like okay it doesn't have to just be internal I will build his company was an external world but now he's going to be it's going to be he's going to build an external a world that other people that don't work at this company can actually partake and actually experience and it's all about control it has always been about control about crafting a better reality than the one outside the studio and about demonstrating that one had the capacity to do so Walt Disney hid an iron will behind a facade of affability and so now he's going to use that Iron Will to literally craft and build a world an entire land where there was nothing I think it was an Orange Grove before he developed it and he has no inclination on doing this inside this old cuz now his his Studio has essentially been taken over it's like this big old unyielding bureaucracy he's like I don't want to do that so he actually sets up a bungalow he starts doing the initial work he has this old Bungalow at the edge of the studio lot it's a different company entirely and that excitement of working in a small company with talented people chasing an unlimited opportunity is what he's captured again and he talks about this he's happier than he had been in years he's running it to this company called wed which is his his initials he says so he's in the Bungalow all the time the very initial planning stages working hand hand inand with the people developing the idea from Disneyland he had this idea that Disneyland should be an outdoor movie set by the way and he says damn it I love it here this is just like the Hyperion Studio this is way before Disney was successful it's like the very early days uh this is just like the Hyperion Studio used to be in the years when we were always working on something new it was a small joyous community at wed you no longer had any big departments to deal with it was just fun to get back into that small scale again he said and so he has this idea for the park but he's got no money again so he's like what am I going to do what do you think he does he goes to build the Prototype and to get the idea basic idea going he goes and borrows another mortgage and he borrows against his life insurance policy he also talked to a bunch of True Believers inside the company and employees started loaning money to them to bridge the gap before he can get financing and they needed something that's absolutely genius so I didn't even cover this part in the book but one of the most fascinating things is Charlie Chaplain was one of Walt Disney's Heroes and Charlie Chaplan starts this company with a bunch of other artists called United Artists and eventually they start distributing some of Disney's films they wind up having a falling out Disney and United Artist has falling out because they wanted him to relinquish rights for his intellectual property uh for this new medium called television and he's willing to disrupt and break up with his distributor at a time he he said no he's like there's no way in hell I'm retaining these rights and you're like okay well that makes sense like why would you retain the rights television today no that's not when he did that when he said no there was only about 4,000 TVs in existence and so many years later now TVs much more established he understood that this is a new technology it is not a threat but a tool and that is where he's going to get the money to to do Disneyland I go into way more detail on the episode that I'm going to release in conjunction with this episode okay but what he realizes like television is going to save him and all these other Motion Picture Mogul which you could describe while Disney s at this point are telling him that television is a threat he's like it is a it's the next coming thing it's a phenomenon we can't stop it you're not stopping the wave it's not the enemy of the motion picture it's its Ally and he realizes like this is just going to help us advertise movies it gets so crazy I'm going to there's a bunch more detail but like let me example uh this is this movie uh I think 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that he releases before he releases that he releases because he's going to do this deal with ABC this is how he gets his funding from Disneyland but they start producing a bunch of content together and so what he does is like oh let's make a documentary interesting documentary Standalone interesting documentary about how we made the movie and it winds up just drastically increasing because if you sit through an hourlong documentary on how this movie was made and you find it interesting what do you think you're going to do you're going to go buy a ticket he's like no this isn't a threat it's going to actually help advertise everything else that we're doing it's going to help advertising his movies it's going to help advertise Disneyland he does he did this a bunch of times he would re-release remember David oovy gave you and I advice that you're not advertising to standing army you're advertising to a moving parade and so he'd run the same ad in the same magazine for like 20 years Disney would do that he's like well if you like Snow White 15 years ago you'll like it now five years ago or you know five years later and 10 years later 15 years later so he starts taking all the movies that were successful and replaying them on television res selling them remember the movie's done there's no other outly he's not spending any more money so then all that money just like Steve Jobs realized when they resold Snow White on DVDs like oh he just dropped a quarter billion to their bottom line he's now selling Snow White which he doesn't have to pay for anything else to TV to the television stations to ABC and then they rebroadcast it the point he's making to the movie Mogul is like it's making your existing assets more valuable and you're looking and you're afraid of this and so I just want to read you one sentence about this but what the special really did was prove Walt's thesis about the value of Television to the film industry that he was correct a Gallop poll indicated that the program created new awareness of Alice this is Alice in Wonderland now and prompted Walt to talk about using TV as a point of sale so he goes to ABC and he's like I'm going to develop a television show about me building Disneyland I will host it it'll be every week it's like one of the most popular I think it's the it becomes the the second most popular show on TV behind I Love Lucy if I remember correctly and in return for producing content on your Show when he does this do with ABC there's NBC and CBS right they're so far ABC's like an afterthought and the content that Walt Disney makes for ABC makes them become makes them one of the big three and this was hilarious ABC would have its Disney program Walt Disney would have his money for Disneyland or as walwood later joke ABC needed the television so so damn bad they bought an amusement park and so this love and Obsession that Disney had for his entire career that had been absent for maybe half of a decade maybe longer is now restored and the larger theme here if you're just reading between the lines is like what do you think about all the time like what do you think about all the time whatever that is do that that's something Disney did at his entire career and when he didn't have that he was depressed it was Disneyland that Walt Disney cared about the park was his dream now television was just a means to that end everyone knew that he was only tangentially involved with the other projects studios are still doing animated movies he he's completely checked out uh the difference was that on weekends and evenings and sitting on the toilet and all that stuff he wasn't thinking about our pictures he was thinking about Disneyland he was always thinking about Disneyland and he uses the same idea for Disneyland as he did for the studio he goes out and he visits he's planning Disneyland and at the time amusement parks you know they were looked at as like places for suckers they were dirty they were it was they were terrible and Disney everybody was telling Disney Disney's like why would you do that like they're horrible places like that's the point ours won't while we were planning Disneyland every amusement park operator we talked to said it would fail and wal would come out of these meetings even happier than if they' been optimistic he loved to fight he loved the idea that he had to prove himself right again waging the same old battles that he once had to wage and making the animated features he didn't want anyone on the staff who had amusement park experience because he told them Disneyland wouldn't be an amusement park and because we want young talented people or that are willing to learn and make mistakes and of course he's micromanaging another line here he walked over every inch of Disneyland another great line Walt did not want to cut Corners did not want to compromise his vision when an employee suggested that he used cut glass instead of stained glass in an attraction Walt objected listen to this linee look the thing that's going to make Disney Land unique and different is the detail if we lose the detail we lose it all it is the detail if we lose the detail we lose it all he wanted to change everything about amusement parks including the language that you use to describe it I did an episode it sounds funny but one of the most impressive entrepreneurs I've ever studied is Balenciaga which is episode 315 Balenciaga now you know the brand not good right the founder for sure based on what I read about him would be rolling over in his grave at the time he was considered the best of the best Koko Chanel said Balenciaga was the best Christian Dior said he was the the the the best fashion designer you know everybody in Paris thought he was literally the best which is surprising given like the position of the brand is now but what I one of the things I I took away from studying Balenciaga is that you should create your own language and so he would say like you don't wear a Balenciaga dress you present it you're not a customer you're a patron he would tell staff we want to make the highest quality dresses in the world one where you don't give it away you Beque it you bequeath your dress to your daughter and you see an echo of that idea in the way Disney talked about Disneyland it's an outdoor movie Set we don't hire we cast this is not a park it is a set you can't go on stage unless you're ready to give a pleasant happy performance that's how he would train the early employees at Disneyland he had an obsession with cleanliness it was calculated that a discarded cigarette butt will lie dormant for no longer than 25 seconds before one of the cast members pick it up and the opening day of Disneyland caused the largest traffic jam in ore County History you have you know 50 million people whatever the number was watching the TV show of course you know that's going to translate people are gonna they've been watching a show about the creation of this thing when the things ready they're going to come and on the opening day his daughter said that she had never seen him happier that it was the one of the best days of his life and even on one of the best days of his life this micromanaging managing trait this inherent this it was just part of him listen to this he had never been a man to indulge his pride or rest on his Laurels at the end of the day the longest and quite possibly the best day of Walt Disney's life in spite of the numerous calamities he had dinner on the patio with another one of his employ of the apartment that he he had an apartment he like lived at Disneyland that's how obsessed he was with it right so he's having dinner with somebody that one of his employees on the patio of the apartment and he watched the fireworks display display over the park his employee noticed that Walt kept taking notes during the show what was he doing a stickler for detail even amid the pandemonium he was counting the Rockets being shot off to confirmed that he was getting the full number and 35 years into his career he finally found what he wanted a living breathing endless Masterpiece he told one interviewer that Disneyland will never be finished that it will be a living thing that will need changes he called Disneyland my baby and said I would prostitute myself for it he said that working planning and developing it gave him endless pleasure Walt Disney always needed action I've got to have a project all the time he said something to work on otherwise he had no place to direct his nervous energy I want this Disney thing to go on long after I'm gone Disney was run from the top down but there were no middlemen wrote One employee at the time at the top alone like Napoleon was our leader and Captain El Hefe Numero Uno the man the boss Walter Elias Disney all things started with Walt and Walt had the final word always and that is where I'll leave it as you can imagine 800 Pages there's a lot more for the full story buy the book if you buy the book using the link in the show notes you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time another way to support the podcast is if you want to buy merch I do not have an advanced Disney level merch yet for the podcast but I do have super comfortable sweaters actually sweatshirts every time I'm on Zoom or some people see me in person I'm wearing this thing it's super comfortable and they're like how do I get one I was like how do people not know that you can buy one well they don't know because I do a terrible job of letting you know that it exists if you want to get yourself some Founders merch there's a link down below Below in the show notes and you can go to Founders podcast.com that is a great way to support the podcast also if you're interested in going to a live event the first live event I did the first conference I did Founders only that was like four weeks ago six weeks ago uh it sold out it was well regarded I'm in the middle of planning two to three more that will take place this year if you want to be notified about any future Founders conference including the ones that are taking place this year go to Founders only.com make sure you put in your email you can also join my personal email list where I email you my top 10 highlights for every book that I read I'll leave that down below as well I would join both of those lists to make sure that you don't miss and as soon as tickets are available which should happen I would say in the next week to two weeks at the very latest I will announce it on the podcast but also send you an email and that makes 346 books down 1,000 to go and I'll talk to you again soon I just finished Rel listening to the entire episode and as I was listening to it I was jotting down some notes to myself and what was remarkable one of the most remarkable things that jumped out to me is this idea of like all these other entrepreneurs that are mentioned in the episode in addition to Walt Disney all share this same trait so I'm thinking Dr Seuss Francis for Copa Steven Spielberg George Lucas Edwin Lance Steve Jobs James Dyson the founder of Red Bull Red Bull uh diatric Metts uh Charlie Munger and it's this idea I actually got from Charlie merer about the importance that of learning from history is a form of Leverage there's a line in Port Charlie nom I think about all the time I should actually I don't wear hats normally but I should start putting messages like uh there's a uh there's a there's ideas worth billions in a $30 history book I love the idea that Disney would put a maximum in his hat so he would take off his hat and remind himself that you can't top pigs with pics maybe I'll put it on the inside of my shirts or something but the value of studying both the Great and the terrible work that came before you think about the terrible you know Disney created his own curriculum right he's studying all these amusement parks like these are terrible they're not living up to their expectations at all I can make a superior product of this and therefore greatly greatly expand the market which is exactly what he did but it was also obvious listening to that episode how devastating you know I was IND I was kind of induced into a state of Rage thinking about the guy at 20 Century Fox not using not learning from he from history that was a multibillion dollar mistake and it's a mistake that if it happened today and if that executive 20th Century Fox had access to Founders notes it wouldn't have been made because he could have simply search every single one of my notes every single one of my highlights every single one of my transcripts and found multiple examples of these phenomenal merchandise businesses that were built in the past by Walt Disney by George Lucas by Dr Seuss and if that executive didn't want to read or search through the highlights notes and transcripts himself he could have just asked the founders notes AI assistant named sage and sage could have done all the work for him the higher you go in your career the value of your judgment the value of your decisions drastically increases that is why it just just just main thing that reappears over and over and over again has reappeared since this project started 8 years ago anybody who gets to the top of their profession anybody who comes great at what they do when you speak to them when you read their writing it is obvious that they study and restudy and study again the great work that came before them in the history of their industry Spielberg would watch and rewatch movies that he loved decades later entire scenes from those movies would appear in Spielberg's own movies just like Steve Jobs intently studying Ed L there's a ton of Edwin L's ideas that show up in Steve Jobs companies and products there's a ton of Sam Walton's ideas that show up in Jeff bezos's companies and products Henry Singleton's ideas show up in how Warren Buffett built birkshire in fact there's a great quote again I know I love quoting Charlie Monger in fact uh Charlie is the icon for sage because when I think of a sage when I think of an infinitely wise older person that I go to for advice it's exactly the role that Charlie Monger has played in my life through books and then obviously getting to speak to him but uh he said that all birkshire did was the right people and I do really believe that one of the most important ideas that Charlie Monger ever distilled from us was this idea that learning from histories of formal leverage that is why if you have not done so already I'm going to highly recommend that you subscribe to Founders notes I built this product in partnership with rewise Reed I've been going on podcasts for years I've been talking about on this podcast for years well before I knew I was going to work with them that Reed wives was the best app I paid for because for six years I found it in 2018 cuz the the founder one of the founders of Reed wise Tristan uh emailed me realizing hey you you read a lot you want a way you want a way to catalog all your notes all your highlights into this giant searchable database so that you can recall anytime you want and so since then we've collaborated on this product called Founders notes it's available at Founders notes.com that's founders with an N just like the podcast and we've added a bunch of features originally it was just a c like you could see exactly you get a exact mirror image of my readwise you can see exactly what I see you can search just like I do and then I've started adding a bunch of other features that I need to make the podcast so I don't forget all you know I've read how many 100,000 Pages for this podcast so far I love reading but I also want to remember and retain and actually use what I'm reading and so that is what I'm building and so Founders notes now has every single note every single highlight every single transcript so that means it has you can search every single word I've ever uttered on the podcast which means now you can do a keyword search by person by subject it's just this giant database of the collective knowledge of History graad entrepreneurs if you don't have anything to search you can go and read my highlights and notes by book if you go to the highlights feed the highlights feed will present all my notes and highlights in a random order and I've been doing this for years I've been searching by keyword I've been rereading highlights uh by book I've been rereading highlights in random order on the highlights feed but the last few months this thing has blown my mind I have never got more DMS emails text messages about any feature ever and what's hilarious is I didn't even come up with the name I'm talking about Sage I was calling it you can go back to past episodes I was like it's like the founders GPT or had all these names like these names are terrible and so I actually got an email from an early beta tester and he said none of those names actually they're not good and he said you should call it Sage because Sage is a profoundly wise person that is often looked to for guidance and advice Sage is like search on steroids because when you ask it a question it searches every single note every single highlight every single transcript and it starts making these connections so I've been using it to make every single episode I also use it if I'm when I'm doing research like before this I one of the most common questions I like hey tell me the most important ideas from X meaning any founder you know Steven Spielberg Walt Disney any anybody that you're interested in anybody I've covered on the podcast and I did it for the Walt Disney episode and it gives me this list this bullet point list in the summary of the 14 ideas that feels are the most important ideas uh of Walt Disney and so you can either read the summary you know in a minute or two or you can actually click on expand and you can see every single highlight and note that it fetched that's what it's called and it shows you what book that highlight or note is from or what episode that highlight or note is from and usually within those 40 different highlights and notes that it fetches that it uses that it reads for you to make that summary for you you'll usually find half a dozen eight different books and it's starting to get really interesting because I get a ton of emails about prompts about questions that what I would like to do eventually is like one I'm going to make it an an app on your phone right I I want it on my phone I'm using it in the browser now it works excellent It's on it stays up in my browser all the time but I want it on my phone in addition to that and I want to be able to ask questions just like I can now but everybody's emailing me a ton of people are emailing me questions that they love the responses for so now we can use this entire community of Founders listeners and this is going to take me a little while to build but eventually not only can you ask any question you want but it's going to have like a database of say like the top 50 or top 100 or top 200 questions that other people listen to Founders and other people that subscribe to Founders notes have asked that's going to get real wild and obviously any feature that I add in the future is automatically included with your subscription and that's another important point it does require subscription you can either do an annual basis a ton of people when I it was just annual at one point a ton of people were asking me hey is there like a onetime lifetime option and so I tested that I thought I was going to do it for a limited time A lot of people are doing that I almost positive it's not going to be for a limited time but I'm not entirely sure because the demand was so high but I just want to make sure that I'm building something sustainable something that is the platform that I can use that ensures that I'm able to distribute this podcast for free forever but the important part is there's no free trial available for Founders notes the free trial is the podcast and so it is made for people already running successful companies or people already well established in their career because that's who's going to get the most value out of it because Sage can help enhance the decisions that you're already making in your company and because I made this tool for myself and because I use it myself every day I really do believe a subscription to Founders notes is the perfect companion if you're going to invest how much time are you investing in in listening to this podcast I had a friend of mine text me there he's like hey I need another episode of Founders when's the next episode coming out and I was like well this Walt Disney episode's killing me it's taking me you know 10 I don't even know how long it's taking me 10 days 11 days 60 hours whatever the crazy amount of time I put into more than that uh to make this episode and I was like there's like 345 in the back catalog he's like yeah I've listened to them already to all of them already and so my idea is is like well if you're investing tens of hours dozens of hours hundreds of hours listening to this podcast why wouldn't you subscribe to a tool that's going to help you condense and clarify the collective knowledge of History greatest Founders so then you can actually remember everything on demand of what you've been listening to so if that sounds like you if that fits a description of you highly recommend getting a subscription going to and you can do that by going to Founders notes that's Founders notes.com founders with an S just like the podcast Founders notes.com I really appreciate the support I hope you enjoyed this episode and I'll talk to you again soon