#346 How Walt Disney Built Himself

Walt Disney was a first-abundal television program, feature animation, live-action 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 Disney movie. A hundred million people watched Disney television show. 80 million people read a Disney book.

50 million people listened to Disney records. 80 million people brought Disney merchandise. A hundred and fifty million people read a Disney comic strip and nearly seven 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 a reverence or innocence. He had been a master of order. That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is this giant, comprehensive 800 page.

Bography of Walt Disney. Walt Disney, the triumph of the American imagination and is written by Neil Gabbler. 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, I appreciate your reading, you know, almost 350 of these biographies of history.

Completely changes what I get out of the book, the context, the additional meaning, and I think particularly doing it right now after doing Quentin 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 them. 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.

Simultaneously, it's 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 Ford Copa. 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 nightmares.

Nightmares of 40 years later again, raw ingenuity and sadistic determination. 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 of the dream so the people around him, even if it's their kids, which is crazy. And he's so Francis Ford Copa 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 nine years old. His father's already failed multiple times to try 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 nine years old and yet Walt was already tethered to the route.

I was working all the time he said I never had any play time 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 wakening 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 a liest 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 a liest 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 his 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 this 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 just proves like whatever happened to you in the past like you don't have to keep that trend going so Walt Disney the main he's he's gonna 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 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 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 will 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 shit 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 4 I've never laid a finger on them in this a theme that has reoccurred in these backfades like you can it doesn't matter what happened with passion are you still.

It always 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 is again raw ingenuity statistic 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 and his father building an addition onto their house right and every time what would make a mistake a life 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 Walt'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 falls him down to the basement grabs a hammer to try to strike him but this time while grabbed his father's hand and remove 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 to puberty.

You may not win a fight 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 them 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 by work and now defeated in the family to.

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 know study this is the most obvious because he literally built Disney world there Disney land I guess was the was the one that was completed when he was alive as a fantastic metaphor for what he was trying to do his entire career.

He wanted to escape and then control his environment in 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 this guy's clearly quick weighted he's clearly smart he's clearly driven so why is the teacher saying you're the second dumbest person in 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 says he had never stopped drawing he spent hours decorating the margins of his textbooks with pictures and then entertaining his classrooms are 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 them they said it was sissy it was sissy 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 this textbook years ago I read a biography of Dr. Seuss whose real name is theodore Geisel I think is is how you pronounce.

And one of the things that's in that's in that it's episode 161 one of the things that's in the book is very fast things talks about how he met 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 it 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 what he's doing.

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 with his father wants to do for George Lucas is 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 Disney has this idea is 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

time practicing drawing living in his own world right but it even says there's a great line of the book is like when he wasn't drawing he was thinking about it but he would also seek out additional help so there's these cartoonist in his original idea for his life was not to build you know the world's first multimedia corporation is idea was like oh well there's cartoonist the people get paid to write to like draw pictures who does that oh newspaper cartoonist OK so that's what I'm going to do and so he would find.

So he's got a lot of cartoonists that worked in 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 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 in trance that he would not even take a bathroom break I'm not even kidding this was a shocking to me how many times he gets so

he would 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 land and Walt Disney and so this idea this total encroachment in his work that is very evident when this is a 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 bargurys of Edwin land that I read I want to read you this paragraph it's a 600 page biography I read on this patent lawsuit between Polaroid and Kodak and it says Edwin land had learned early on that total encroachment 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 latent his career land 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 One I mentioned earlier that he had three older brothers they all go off to fight in World War One 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 thought of

the war the thought of it not as a war but as an adventure which I should have very common theme about young young American men and both were one or two 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's station in France to be an ambulance driver for the red cross now there's a line here and he 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 hilarious anecdote that I came across in another book that I read it is Ray Croc's autobiography of reddich white 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 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 autobi 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 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 this 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 Walt 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 mentioned this is line in the George Lucas biography that I was interesting where he would like shoot so much footage as many as much as he can and like you know handful days and he spent 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 realize I might

title this episode Walt Disney how Walt Disney created himself for something 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 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 they say the same thing the same description over again they say that he was determined to be successful that sadistic determination raw ingenuity and sadistic determination right he had absolute faith in himself and this is why I always say that

what's one thing that's obvious when you read a bunch of our fees 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 doing advertisements are like drawing ads for companies they're called commercial art shops is what they were called 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 he never pees his pants but he holds it until the meal breaks and I know I keep pounding on that but it comes up over and over again I just think it's such an interesting like total

grossment into his work and so this trial ends the founder of the company approach some 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 Stephen Spielberg you listen to Stephen Spielberg episode right this is much later in his life

I think he's probably 50 years old this time for 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 guess his first job he's like I should start my own company one of my favorite facts about Walt Disney's by time he was 20 his first company by time he's 20s already gone bankrupt with his first company and then you just immediately start over again and just does it better the next time

so it says for someone virtually without training our experience for someone who had just lost his job he was cocky I felt well qualified he would say he was already thinking of opening his own art shop so he lost his job because that work was seasonal it was just around the holidays the Christmas holidays

Walt had met another animator this getting you year works I think it's how you pronounce his name it's very weird and he's like oh this guy's talented and then and possibly 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 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 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 Steven Spielberg Steven Spielberg when he was a kid he would practice accepting his his he would he would visualize himself winning an Oscar and then he would practice his acceptance speech in front of the academy Steven Spielberg and he was doing this was like 12 years old and so then this is the first time they were going to see something that Walt 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 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 can't animation is just making cartoons move it brings life to my cartoons and then this part describes why that was so important it's five sentences to progress 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 Land

so why is he going to do this one number one it was a way to make his mark 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 appeal to him that's number one that reminds me of Edwin Land his personal motto he said his personal motto was don't do anything that someone else can do and we'll see an animation there was nobody in the world that could do animation in the way Walt Disney's going to wind up doing it and he knew it too there's a line that George Lucas says that somebody was describing a young George Lucas says it he knew how to do it he was going to make sure everyone knew that he knew

Walt Disney would hold his entire team to what many people consider like an unreasonably high expectation of excellence and one of the lines he has about this is 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 interpretation 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 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 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

double everyone who knew him remarked on his intensity when something intrigued him he focused himself entirely on it as if we're with 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 again he jumps into something and he builds his own curriculum so that is number two at when 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 Edwin Lansch know because he drops out of Harvard twice number three that idea that hey they're we're not dabbling here we're not dilly dally we're not dabbling you know 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 is him

Edwin Lansch 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 Lansch only focused on Polaroid we see now that Walt Disney is doing the same thing yeah 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 you want to you want to Walt Disney's first studio it was a garage in the yard that was 15 square feet and this is a 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 and was in bed

Walt was out there putting 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 Walt Disney has a lot of things to do with the game

and to 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 in animate and making it animate it was a he

he had a he had a giant giant ego it was a he he he process in which the animator assumed an exercise god like control over his material in the case of Walt Disney the Sir this surge of empowerment was so great one might even have concluded that animation took the place of religion for him for a young man who had shaved 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 exact same thing here determined to master ambition he immersed himself and completely he had take there's only this is how you know you know your early to a field so he's reading everything you can get he's taking classes he's practicing and it says he took out the one book from the Kansas City library that there was on animation

and so before his company's doing like this this this freelance jobs is advertising 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 start out what's the first thing you can do the most rudimentary almost like simple thing you can do I can make a you know one minute animated cartoon is going to be black and white it's not going to have sound and then eventually I'm going to add sound and then

that 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 church the entire trajectory of his company and he's like I'm going to build the world's first full feature length animated cartoon but is fast and you think that's the power of biography one of the

other things like you just see it's like oh it starts here okay now you seem learning oh wait he's figuring out and then he keeps doing that unimpeded and let's eat compounds for four decades and then by that time he's got movies theme parks television shows radio books merchandise

everything and so he calls his first product laugh or grams and his dad is like your crazy 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 is not like a strong demand for these cartoons it's not why people are going to the movies you know so if a movie if you're a movie theater

and you want to cut back on some expenses so people are coming to see the main feature they're not coming to see these like one minute cartoon 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's such a great line he's one of the most unusual 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's struggling he's about to go bankrupt he's going to starve he's going to live in his office that is it's insane that he he persevered to 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 relentless to 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 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

so there 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 well remembers I would remember 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 shower once a week and he goes down to like the you know the local YMCA

he pays like a Nicola 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 stave 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 he's one of his greatest traits is revealed he's got this bullet proof optimism listen to this

throughout the failures throughout the days without meals and nights with rest of 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 in 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 an 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 think about what his decision making here he's like okay Kansas City is clearly not the right place

I'm going to scrounge have a glass dollar you want to do a bunch of freelance work again then what's up selling his camera just so he can make enough money and buy a train ticket and get from Kansas City to Hollywood

this was one of the most important decisions he ever makes think about how crazy this is because we you and I know from our vantage point the run that he's about to go on right is going to have tons of ups and downs but he gets to Hollywood 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 self confidence a borrowed suit and peculiar self confidence

and so he takes the same idea he had this idea called Alice's Wonderland which is you combine live action with some you shoot like a live action like little girl right and then you draw 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 got sake

but he had that idea is 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 in there and he winds up immediately selling it 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 Alice's Wonderland

and she'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

Walt Disney World Famous by the time he's in his 30s right but you look at him when he's in his mid 40s and he's just going to struggle after struggle 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 disengling and then since he doesn't worry about money 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 find this book takes an unbelievable amount of time to read into digest but I do think the end result is you feel incredibly inspired.

You know throughout any normal week you can feel you're going to have this entrepreneurial emotional rollercoaster 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 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 mince Charles mince starts running the business because Margaret gets pregnant and Charles mince is the reason that Mickey Mouse is going to be a little bit more difficult to do.

Mickey Mouse exists because Charles mince steals Disney's company from him this is so important and to understand why this happened there's a lot was important to Walt Disney he was not he's like a reluctant entrepreneur.

And I think these two sentences give you an idea 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 one difference between Walt Disney and Steve Jobs Steve Jobs said that those exact same desires and need it's like I have to make literally he's never chased market share think about the decade people made fun of him because Microsoft had all this market share.

Steve's like I have to be the best I have to make the best products that means I don't have the most market share I don't give a shit 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 a foundation on which would allow him to continue to make great products.

Disney struggle with that for his entire career nearly his entire career maybe the last like 10% he finally figured that out.

And so one of the mistakes Disney makes here and I don't think get a choice so I think he had to make this thing I think this is inevitable and I think this one of being one of the best undoubtedly what had to be one of the best things that ever happened to Disney because without their 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 is this this theft by Charles mints of his characters of not only Alice in Wonderland or Alice

Wonderland but also this rabbit Oswald the rabbit that Disney events and then mince is also going to lead a coup and overthrow Disney out of his own company and so Disney has to start over again but again this had this terrible thing had to happen for Disney to create his greatest invention and one of the

states 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 just going to cut out you know the middleman I go direct.

And that's important because the middleman has the contract with the distributor distributor controls all the money and so the middleman can just say hey it's actually 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 is 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 a better and smart it made a better

businessman smarter person and help develop skills that he needed to continue to build his company because he's just going to start over again after this and so Charles mints starts doing these back channels to a bunch of the key employees that are working for

Disney Disney is 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 are excellence that he's going to hold you accountable to and he also is rather naive by his own emission he says he was never 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 member 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 is like okay this is information I will improve next time he had this invention called the ball barrel which is a wheelbarrow with a ball that doesn't get stuck in like dirt right I can't understand why for hundreds of years people using wheelbarrow it gets stuck I can improve this he wind up

this 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

much of the position here he had signed a deal where the company that he no longer controls all the ownership of the characters that Disney invented relied resided rather with Charles mince's company not his own and so it says Walt had no rights to the character that

the wall had created thus leaving Walt no recourse this is so important why says Walt had nothing no character no contract no staff say for the very few who remain loyal no plan he would talk often of this episode as a betrayal saying that you had to control what you had or could be taken from you and now he had seen how duplicitous the business world could be

and so now he's on the train back home to Los Angeles his wife is terrified they have no money he's got no characters looks like he doesn't have a business she is crying and what happens there's a line in one of the interviews I heard I was watching on Kobe Bryant one day and he talked about this you know into 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 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 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 Mortimer 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 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 is a strange beast if he can appear after loss this causes him to invent the sound cartoon okay so he starts drawing Mickey Mouse I think so everybody maybe everybody is another but one of the probably his biggest hit that he needed when he was younger

but he's around 27 28 years old at this point in his life he makes the world's first sound cartoon it is steamboat willy it is actually the third Mickey Mouse cartoon but the first two didn't get distributed because it was missing something and Disney believed 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 other why isn't sound coming out of cartoons at the time people would would criticize this

it's a 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 off putting you know what he did you know what is he 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 when they like it and this was 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 what was a static 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 deals going to bring money into the studio but how did he finance Mickey he borrowed every single thing he bought a house earlier him and his brother who's his business partner Roy they put mortgages and second mortgages is on their house in addition to them taking out second mortgages on their house well Disney sold his car to find a new house

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 a sell it so they get parts to build their first product and so the distributor is able to put steamboat willy in theaters all over the country the reaction from the audience is it it's unbelievable and so much so that they try to they try to aqua higher Walt Disney this is very fast saying 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 is doing it for like he wants to make a

great product so why would he sells 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 studio not just his cartoons but Walt was adamant about not selling about not surrounding 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 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 much more than that

and then 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 it 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 we talked 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 as a mother going to walk in and pick out a universal pictures video in preference to Disney that's 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 this

Steve Jobs quote Steve Jobs said be a yardstick 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 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 have spent their careers thinking of animation as a throw away that they could and must accomplish something better I have encountered plenty of trouble getting my new men adjusted to our method of working Walt complaint part of Walt's secret was that an insisting on quality from individuals of whom it had never been required he inspired commitment this is one of his employees describing the environment we hated to go home in 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 like movies he uses this at Disneyland he would hire for enthusiasm and and and 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 in 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 to you have to understand unbelievably talented unbelievable assess 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 about to wax this guy was Felix the cat he was determined that Mickey Mouse was supplant Felix the cat

and this was a never because it says Felix's creator is getting 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 to subscribe in the book and one way to did this 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 animated

you were part of the best animation team in the world there's a line in the book or 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

rest on us right the quality of the entire animation industry rest on us that self belief that everybody knows this from time is a young man you know now it's around a start in his 30s it's still it's like ever present 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 to into the quality of the product and there's many times and he does this in animation he does this in movies he does this in Disneyland people are like oh we're going to you know there's a great way to do it 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 are he wouldn't

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 long time animator ward

Kimball 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 a night 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's a couple of weeks ago I did this book it's episode 343 it is the eternal pursuit of unhappiness people love that episode if you haven't listen 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 Ogrivi and the team at Ogrivi and

mother 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 Ogrivi's idea of divine discontentment and Ogrivi describes this he says we have a habit of divine discontent with our performance is an anecdote to smugness Ogrivi 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 his 55 I think 55 or 56 when he made Disney land so much show that he could make the world you know some of his many of his animated cartoons is animated feature films they want every single award they made a ton of money and it is he 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 practice 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 night he couldn't sleep

at the studio became physically ill looking at his ladies cartoon and unable to see anything but its flaws the years of fighting and losing and then having the fight back the years of having to maintain a brave front in the face of loss and betrayal in the years of feeling compelled to produce cartoons so good that Disney would be unassailable in the industry while struggling against oppressive unrelenting financial constraints that barely allowed him survive and that even now had not loosened and then the setback in starting his own families talking about

he's got all his pressures of 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 is 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's episode 25 it's episode 200 it's episode 300 it will be episode 400 and 500 as long 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 quit I'm going to read one paragraph from James Dyson's autobiography

while this easy of course for me to celebrate my dog in this 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 wall 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 worked to make sure that 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 actionality 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 every

way 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 and 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 to before him animators animation was looking at is like some silly thing not to be taken seriously it's all about gag it's about like one off he's like no no we're telling a story here and actions express priority wall demonstrated that story was king

and he did so to his actions because he pointed for the very first time in the industry ahead 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 works changing it's changing him to when he was young he was like outgoing he says he was gregarious and outgoing now all of his enthusiasm all of his time

eventually going to be split with his kids but at this point all of it is going into the studio and now he's changed his personality change he is with drawn 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 ever did it's episode number three thirty three red bulls billionaire maniac founder I'm going to read from that book because it sounds a lot like what I'm about to you 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 deetric master sits I'm probably still miss pronouncing his name name that 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 good 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 Lily and 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 to the top of the profession they understand that learning what did Charlie monger say learning from history as a form of leverage when I'm about to read you

and this entire thing is a huge theme one of the largest parts of jizz disease business is going to be merchandise for the life of me this is happening decades before George Lucas is negotiating with 20th 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 come to collapse here take me it's like a billion dollar multiple billion dollar

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 and television was a known thing when that was happening because as soon as Disney finds the right person to run his merchandise

is vision it is an immediate and sustained 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 long time successful partnerships except with this guy name herman came and herman came 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 is like you get 50% of everything you bring it over time that that split would change you know 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 fasting he says in war men are nothing one man is everything in war

man are nothing one man is everything herman came in 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 shit okay he walks in he goes I don't know how much business you're doing but I guarantee you that much business to match what you're doing and I'll give you 50% of everything I do over and so came and pitch is like I'm going to innovate and merchandise is like you guys are

innovating animation this is a great pitch came in 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 filmmaking arm he was going to reinvent it transformed into a sleek quality controlled revenue producing operation that would in time have the added effect of making micky mouse even more popular as a brand then he was as a movie star came in was a whirlwind within a year there were 40

licenses a licensees for Mickey Mouse products within the first year came and brought in 35 million dollars of sales and Disney merchandise in the United States alone and an equal amount overseas that's 70 million dollars in 1934 dollars and just like George Lucas is inexcusable to not study history to not use learning from his

former leverage this is just like George Lucas this is a known thing Walt made more money from the rights to Mickey merchandise than from the cartoons there's a line in George Lucas's out of the biography to 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 dollar budget and made $775 million at the box office that's the Star Wars one 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 a few ways that Disney built his cult remember like there's a these chapters in the spoke or huge someone like a hundred pages long and one of them you I could do

individual episodes just on each chapters how dance and 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 to do they said there's a whole hilarious line in the book where one of his employees I think said something like figuring something out what Walt Disney wanted was a matter of osmosis that in many ways is the anti Steve Jobs I always say Steve Jobs is a clear

stinker that I've ever come across this is book called creative selection I talk about over and over again because I read it a much times it's episode two eating one if you haven't listened to it but listen to this description of Steve which is kind of like the opposite of Walt I am 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 propositions from my standpoint as an individual programmer demoing to Steve was like visiting the oracle del fi 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 you 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 need to decipher what you want to osmosis something you don't want to happen

and then one area where Steve and Walt Disney were of like minds and saw completely eye to eye is Steve jobs once said the storytellers the most powerful person in the world Walt used this in his own products and in running his own company he was a superb storyteller walled himself seem 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 believes so devalue in his studio and its cartoons that he could convince anyone even the stodgis banker who he'd fight with all the time of their value Don Valentine founder of Sequoia capitals 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 of 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 nose into everything he actually has a really beautiful metaphor about the role of a founder

his way to do this is by you know 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 man the animators the composers the musicians the voice artist 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 profit that is how one of his employees described him a voice of the profit another employee was at home talking about Walt and how amazing he is and his wife gets snippy with him and he'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 devoted frenzied accolades they were disciples on a mission and so at this time they're doing a bunch of short animated films they're making decent amount of money but 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 plussing which is basically improvement is my mantra and he's like okay like there's a lot of energy in his shorts like what if we just did one feature length animated movie and people are like this just like Pixar and people you can't make a computer the world's first computer animated feature film

they're gonna do it it changes the course of their entire company this is Disney's version of that is 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 full length feature film cartoon make and everybody's like you can't do it's never been done again and again this goes back to storytelling this goes about to call to personality this goes back to

enthusiasm Walt totus 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 one tenth 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 martial arts 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 cartoon

Disney is going to lead 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 gonna 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 gonna get 30 thousand new applicants from just sending letters to art 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 outstrips

supply and so he has 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 god damn 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 their 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 besotted 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 while 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 he's like oh we can do it

for $250 no go they run through the $250,000 budget then he got he gets another his main banker with 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 then this is what Walt said to a reporter at a 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 themes of the book where he's fighting with financiers over and over again this is why George Lucas said that he was intent he was hell bent on controlling the money I think he learned

that in part by his own personal experience but studying the struggles that Walt Disney had with all the bankers but one thing that was so fascinating it 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

finished 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 gonna go up and smoke and so the 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 on the window says goodbye and then just slowly says hey that thing is gonna make you a handful of money and he was right snow white made a ton of money this is what we're 1939 the end

of the Great Depression there's a there's a line here that maybe maybe 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 three 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 theme 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 this idea I don't it's in George Lucas book and I'm thinking put in the George Lucas podcast but he kept making a hundreds of millions of dollars because you just hold on enough and then eventually

there'll be a technology invented that can benefit your business that you need to have to develop so VHS 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 stores on VHS now you can get it on HD DVD and now you know 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 when I'm about to read to you comes Steve Jobs said

this in 1997 1998 he says Pixar is putting something into culture that we were new itself with each generation of children snow white was released on video two years ago and sold over 20 million copies it's 60 years old I think people were 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 too that that he's talking about putting it on I think VHS or DVD at that point that that that 20 million copies 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 it might be the best in his life because he's also going to be tragedy so he makes so much money their parents never you know they struggle 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 can 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 parent 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 doding 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 doding 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 cackling like the witch was no white or he would troll 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 merry go round or to the studio where they would follow him as he snooped about and peddle their bikes around the empty grounds why he worked this is the part

they really took you up if you have kids because 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 you're my daughter her friends are so important to

to her more important than I am you know and that that's kind of heartbreaking but when you're small you are the most important person in their life and while 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 oh that gets you right in the heart okay he did say something was fascinating and again he's not he never rests on his laurels if he's gonna go out and do something great he's gonna try to top it with something else he's not gonna

just sit here he's a saying that he actually keeps in his hat they remind him but I'll get there in one minute so he talks about you know it's no white successful Donald Duck is a fantastic cartoon at this time Donald Duck is 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 gonna 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

the apex of his career he has never known success as he has at this point at 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 while it's 37 years old when this happens we better get this furnace fixed or else some morning we'll wake up and find ourselves dead florist told her housekeeper Alma Smith

florist his mom obviously on the morning of November 26 1938 florist 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 down to the hallway and fainted luckily downstairs the

housekeeper was there she in an neighbor dragged flor and Elias down the stairs and outside Elias revived flor 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 while never spoke of her death to anyone there after when years later Sharon asked him where her grandparents were buried while it snapped I don't want to talk about it and so after the success of snow 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'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 his

conversation and owned 100% of his company so saying if you sell any of your companies so all of it that 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 gonna have three battles and this is where he gets him one of the most depressed states of his life so some of these are outside of his control he's gonna have battles battles with the bankers he's gonna have battles with unions and then

the United States government during World War II such that he could just take 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 is quoted as saying is

after one of these battles that he has with the bankers made me think of a line that I read and will derence the lessons of history and so he's fighting with Bank of America because now he owes a millions of millions of dollars and when he gets back to the studio they ask him it's 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 recurring theme that's really important to control the money as much as possible not to rely on people for outside financing because if they they can control you there's

a line in the lessons of history from Will and Aaron 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

a cut back on salaries is having to lay people off they wind up a bunch of his animators and much people inside the company which Walt Disney later on calls Communists winds up organizing and they form into unions and they eventually go on strike and Walt Disney animation never

never recover 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 an animation in the early on 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 strike the World War II's full and full

flames and now his studio is essentially you know common deared 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 is exactly what he wanted he

went an ultimate power ultimate control he wanted to micro manage anything that got in his way his ability to micromanaging he hated he disliked Disney like a lot of the entrepreneurs in United study he hated committees and the level of his micromanagement 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 bit building in Disneyland this is the only way he knew how to work and is also the biggest complaint for the people at work for him the most prevalent complaint I recorded about Walt by his producer's

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 working and trying to go back to you know feature length animation try to capture Disney's former glory and it's it's over is you can't do that after a five year break break and you just see

that he's completely checked out he began 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 a terrible crippling realization because

Disney put excellence above excellence of the product above everything else even if you were to move ahead with a few of his feature film ideas they would never be as good as the films he had made before the war never as beautifully animated never as deliberately plotted never as pain

stakingly 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 forever 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 match 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 it is it's not that he wants not that he desires he needs to do something new something different something unusual he has this maximum that he would remind himself they can't top pigs with pigs and he talks a little about this he says the thing I resent most

his people 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 up three little pigs number two and three little pigs number three and he didn't because he had this mantra and he repeated and then he put inside of his hat to remind him he says he 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 keeping 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 you did the iPhone well Disney is 35 years into his career when he does Disneyland surprisingly there is only one

chapter in this book on Disney and 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 this dedicated is 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 world that other people that don't work at his company can actually partake in 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 hit an iron will behind a facade of affectability 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 think it was an orange growth before he developed it and he has no inclination on doing this inside this old because 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 a 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 through 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 with the people developing that I different disland he had this idea that

disland should be an outdoor movie set by the way and he says dammit 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 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 joys 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 gonna 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

need us something that's absolutely genius so I didn't even cover this part in the book one of the most fascinating things is Charlie Chaplin was one of Walt Disney's heroes and Charlie Chaplin starts this company with a bunch of other artists called united artists and eventually they

started distributing some of Disney's films they wanted to have a falling out Disney and united artists has falling out because they wanted him to relinquish rights for his intellectual property for this new medium called television and he's willing to disrupt and break up with his distributor

at a time 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 four thousand TVs in existence and so many years later now TVs are 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 do Disney and I go in a way more detail in

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 moguls which you could describe Walt Disney S at this point are telling him that television is a threat he's like bullshit

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 gonna there's a much more detail but like the

movie's ample 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 gonna do this deal with ABC this is how he gets his funding from Disney but they start producing a bunch of content together and so what he does is

like oh let's make a documentary interesting documentary stand-alone interesting documentary about how we made the movie and he winds up just drastically increasing because if you sit through an hour long documentary on how this movie is made you find it interesting what do you

think you're gonna do you're gonna go buy a ticket he's like no this isn't a threat it's gonna actually help advertise everything else that we're doing it's gonna have advertising his movies it's going to help advertise Disneyland he does he did this a bunch of times he would re-released

members David Ogrivi gave you and I advice that you're not advertising to standing army or advertising to moving parade and so he'd run the same ad in the same magazine for like 20 years Disney would do that is 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 and 15 years later so he starts taking all the movies that were successful and replaying them on television reselling them remember the movie's done there's no other outline he's not spending anymore money so then all that money just like

Steve jobs realized when they resold snow white on DVDs like oh shit he just dropped a quarter billion to their bottom line he's now selling snow white which he does not the pay for anything else to TV to the television stations to ABC and then they rebroadcast it the point of these making to

the movie moogles 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 Gallup 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 ghost ABC 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 to 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

hey when he does is do ABC there's NBC and CBS right there's so far ABC's like an afterton and the content that Walt Disney makes for ABC makes them we can make some 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 Walt would 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 in a larger theme here if you're

just reading between 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's completely checked out 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 and 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 they were terrible and this everybody was telling Disney's like 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 and every amusement park operator we talked to

said it would fail and Walt would come out of these meetings even happier than if they'd been optimistic he loved to fight he loved the idea they 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 in a amusement park and because we want young talented people are 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 and an attraction Walt objected listen to this line look the thing that's going to make Disneyland 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's I did an episode it sounds funny but one of the most impressive entrepreneurs of our studies

is Balenciaga which is episode three fifteen 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 Coco Chanel said Balenciaga was the best Christian Dior said he was

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 took away from setting 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 bequeath it you bequeath your dress to your daughter and you see an echo of that idea and 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 but will lie dormant for no longer than 25 seconds before one of the cast

members pick it up and the opening day of Disney then caused the largest traffic jam in Orange County history you have you know 50 million people were the number was watching the TV show of course you know that that's going to translate people are gonna they were watching a show about the creation

of this thing when the things are ready they're gonna 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 micro managing managing trait this inherent this dude is 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 employees of the apartment

that he had an apartment and he like lived at Disneyland that's how 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 confirm 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 Numor 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 by the book you'll be by the book using the link in the

show notes you'll be supporting the podcast 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 the zone 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 exists if you want to get yourself some founders merch there's a link down 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 it sold out it was well regarded I'm in

the middle of planning two to three more that'll 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 highly survey book that I read I'll leave that down below as well I would join both of those lists to make sure that you're missed and as soon as tickets are available it 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 three hundred and forty six books down one thousand ago and I'll talk to you again soon I just finished relisting to the entire episode 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 Coppola Steven Spielberg George Lucas Edwin Lann Steve Jobs James Dyson the founder Red Bull

Red Bull Dietrich Mashishitz Charlie Munger and it's this idea I actually got from Charlie Munger about the importance that of learning from history is a form of leverage there's a line in poor Charlie's nominate I think about all the time I should actually I don't wear hats normally

I should start putting messages like there's a there's a there's ideas worth billions in a thirty dollar 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 pigs 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 in do I was kind of a doose into a state of rage thinking about the guy 20th century

Fox not using not learning from have from history that was a multi billion 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 searched 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 eight 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 re study 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 Edwin Land there's a ton of Edwin Land'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 Berkshire in fact there's a great quote again I know I love quote him Charlie Munger in fact 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 Munger has played in my life through books and then obviously getting to speak to him but he said that all Berkshire did was copy the right people and I do really believe that one of the most important ideas that Charlie Munger ever distilled

from us was this idea that learning from history is a former leverage that is why if you have not done so already I'm going to highly recommend that you subscribe to Founder's Notes I built this product in partnership with Reed Weiss 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 Weiss was the best app I paid for because for six years I found in 2018 because the the founder one of the founders Reed Weiss Tristan emailed me realizing hey you read a lot you want to wait you want to

wait a 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 Founder's Notes it's available at Founder's Notes dot com it's Founder's with a nest just like the podcast

and we've added a bunch of features originally it was just a cut like you could see exactly you get a exact mirror image of my read wise 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 you know I read how many hundred thousand 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 Founder's 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 is greatest entrepreneurs if you don't have anything to search you can go and

read my highlights 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 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 Founder's GPT or I've had all these names like these these 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 serets 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'd like hey tell me the most important ideas from x meaning any founder you know Stephens Wilbert Walt Disney any any major interested in

anybody that 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 it feels are the most important ideas 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 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 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 to know my phone in addition to that and I want to be able to ask questions just like I can now but everybody's emailing a ton of

people are emailing many 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 now they 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 need to 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 one-time 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 you're investing in listening to this podcast I had a friend of mine text me and I was like hey I need another episode of founders when's the next episode coming out and I was like well this

Walt Disney episode is 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 to make this episode and I was like there's like 345 in the back catalogs like yeah listen to them already

all of them already and so my idea is it's 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's greatest founders

so that you can actually remember everything on demand of what you've been listening to so if that sounds like you if that fits the description of you I 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 this port I hope you enjoyed this episode and I'll talk to you again soon.