#347 How Walt Disney Built His Greatest Creation: Disneyland

There's two things that Charlie Munger said one time that I think almost all of history's greatest entrepreneurs understood intuitively, and that's learning from history as a form of leverage. And the second thing he said was that there's ideas worth billions in a $30 history book. If you've been listening to these episodes I've been making about the filmmakers recently, like Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, this idea comes up over and over again, both Tarantino and Spielberg actually studied Walt Disney and learned from him as well. But they would watch and rewatch old movies that they loved, and then decades later, entire scenes

from those movies would actually appear in Steven Spielberg's movies, they'd appear in Quentin Tarantino's movies. It's the exact same idea behind young Steve Jobs studying Edwin Land, and then you see Edwin Land's ideas show up in Steve Jobs' companies and products. Jeff Bezos' famous for passing out Sam Walton's autobiography to the early employees on the top executives at Amazon, you see that Sam Walton's ideas would show up in Jeff Bezos' companies and products. And that is a main theme that reappears over and over again for anybody that gets to the top of

the profession, whether it's in business, in art, in sports, in music, you see it over and over again. Anybody who becomes great at what they do, they are steeped in the history of their industry. They talk about it over and over again, they don't just read a book one time, they don't just watch a movie one time, they don't just have one conversation, they do it over and over and over again. That is why if you have not done so already, I'm going to highly recommend that you subscribe to Founder's Notes. For six years I've been cataloging all of my notes and all of my highlights for every single book that I've done for the podcast.

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dot just like the podcast Founders Notes dot com. I appreciate the sport and I hope you enjoy this episode on Walt Disney's greatest creation Disneyland. One day in the early 1950s Walt Disney stood looking out over 240 acres of farmland in Anaheim, California. And imagine building a park where people could live among Mickey Mouse and Snow White in a world still powered by steam and fire for a day or a week or if the visitor was slightly mad forever.

Despite his fame and success, exactly no one wanted Disney to build such a park. Not his brother Roy who ran the company's finances, not the bankers and not his wife. Amusement parks at the time were a generally despised business. Disney was told that he would only be heading towards financial ruin. But he persevered, initially financing the park against his own life insurance policy. He assembled a talented team of engineers, architects, artists, animators,

landscapers and even a retired admiral to transform his ideas into a wonderland. The catch was that they only had a year and a day in which to build it on July 17, 1955 Disneyland open its gates. And the first day was a disaster. But the curious masses kept coming. 800 million visitors have flocked to the iconic park since then.

In this book, popular historian Richard Snow brilliantly presents the entire spectacular story, a wild ride from vision to realization that reflects the uniqueness of the man determined to build the happiest place on earth with a watchmaker's precision, an artist's conviction, and the desperate, high-hearted recklessness of a riverboat gambler.

That was from the back cover of the book that I reread and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Disney's land. Walt Disney and the invention of the amusement park that changed the world and was written by Richard Snow. So originally, in case you missed last week, I just spent an insane amount of time reading this 800 page biography of Walt Disney.

And on that last episode, I mentioned that one of my favorite books that I've ever read, and I've done a bunch of podcasts and read a bunch of biographies, on Disney is this book because it's just dedicated to what Disney said at the end of his life, that he was most proud of two things. Keeping control of his company because he famously lost control of his first company. So keeping control of his company and then Disneyland.

And the reason I love this book and why I recommend reading it is because I don't know 80, 90% of it is just this relentless resourcefulness that he had to have. He was not a wealthy man when he built Disneyland far from it broke. And so I just think there's a ton of lessons in here. This resourcefulness can be applied to whatever you and I are working on.

And so originally on the episode of it last week, my plan was like, hey, since I already did an episode on this book four years ago, I'll republish it. And so if you listen to both of them, you can figure out the first episode is how well Disney built himself. And then this one is obviously how he built his greatest creation.

But then as I picked this up to skim through and to start reading it again, I was like, oh, no, I'm going to reread it in its entirety because I think I can do a better job than I did four years ago, especially because I just came off, you know, 60 hours, whatever it was, of reading that 800 page biography of Disney.

So I think the great greatest place to start and what I really want to focus on is exactly what the back cover did such a great job of is like even though he's one of the greatest and most celebrated living entrepreneurs at the time he has this idea for Disney. And even though it was obvious if you studied his career up until this point that he didn't rest on those laurels, he didn't just want to repeat past successes.

As he said, I love this idea that he kept in his hat that you can't top pigs with pigs. He kept that maximum in his hat to remind himself as a way I always have to try to top what I did previously, I should be blazing new trails.

Even though that was, you know, in retrospect, if you're analyzing Walt Disney's career, you know, he's a 53 year old man when he's building Disney and it should have been obvious that this approach to his life and work, the external world, other people, even people close to him, still doubted him.

I think that is a fundamental lesson of human nature that you and I should internalize. So I think I need to start at the very, very beginning because it's just great quote about the outside perception, what they thought it was going to be and what it turned out to be when he reached middle aged, it seemed that we were going to witness an all too familiar process, the conversion of the tired artist into the tired business.

And in 1955, we heard that Disney had opened an amusement park under his own name. It appeared certain that we could not look forward to anything new for Mr. Disney. We were quite wrong. He had instead created his masterpiece. And so I just want to pull a few things out of the first chapter because I think the first chapter gives us great overview and really sets the story.

And then I'm going to go into like the prehistoric just Disney where he got the ideas. In many cases, Disney reminded me, I think was Kobe Bryant, if I'm not mistaken, that said you should treat the world, the entire world is a classroom that you can take lessons from everything. And you'll see this in this evolution, this multi year, maybe half decade, maybe decade long evolution of the idea of Disneyland before he actually makes it.

And so the opening chapter is opening day at 4 a.m. when his day starts a few hours before everybody else. It's the biggest day in his life outside of the birth of his daughter, so I would say maybe the day he married his wife. But what was fascinating, I think I need to point this out, it's like, keep in mind like everything about to describe to you. Disney is 30 years into his career. He is already Walt Disney.

And yet you the pressure and the nervousness, I don't think ever ends. He was nervous now in his anxiety sometimes cracked into anger. There were so many things that could have been done better. He was 53 years old, slightly overweight, an incessant smoker, but during the past few months he had amazed his colleagues by how quickly he could move about his future park. I need to stop there too.

This ability to move quickly, like physically move quickly, not only push the pace inside your company, right, but the ability to move quickly and have a lot of energy is actually a very common description in these biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs. And so not only is he about to open for the first time ever an amusement park that's on like anything else that was on the planet at the time, but he's also doing this like live show.

This show that he doesn't partnership with ABC, the opening of Disneyland is watched by I think 54% of the entire American population at the time. So it says not only was Disney inaugurating an amusement park. He also had to be the host of the largest live TV show ever mounted. And it's going to go to the cement, but it's amazing that before ABC. So ABC was Disney's main sponsor.

He says, oh, you want my TV show that's good. You have to make you a deal. I'll give you television programming. If you help pay for my park, he had offered that deal because of this time in history CBS and NBC were well a lot. They were a lot larger. ABC was like a distant third. And so CBS and NBC had turned down the steel, but pointing this out is so important because it couldn't be more contrarian. What Walt Disney was doing could not have been more contrarian.

So CBS and NBC wanted to Disney television show to but not enough to get involved in the amusement park industry, which in 1955 had become widely perceived as both dangerous and disreputable. And so this question that everybody's asking him his brother's asking him it says right here is wife's like why are you building an amusement park. Everybody inside and outside his company is going to ask him this question. There's actually a fun, a phenomenon. He has got a phenomenal response.

And then the lesson behind if you read between the lines of what he's saying is a phenomenal lesson to keep in mind is to learn to get there and later on. But right before the park opens, a journalist is asking like why are you doing this? And the way I would describe Walt Disney's view on Disneyland, what he was doing. I heard this interview from Elon Musk a few years ago that that was fascinating.

It's you know they were trying to same thing journalists was interviewing him trying to get behind like why are you doing Tesla why are you doing SpaceX why are you doing all this off and he says this what Elon said I think can be applied to disease mindset as well. Elon must said I think life must be more than just solving problems. You want to do projects that are inspiring projects that make people excited. And that's what Disneyland has done for 800 million people.

But before the 800 million people visited this idea that came from Walt Disney's mind it excited him first. And that is so important. And you see this level commitment he had hawked his life insurance sold his summer home and borrowed every dollar he could to build Disneyland. Not surprisingly this had been a tough concept to sell the park had struck most other people as a foolish extravagance and an expensive one with initial projected cost of a million and a half dollar.

So Walt Disney I don't even know if he could do math because every single time he's like I think this movie will be you know $50,000 or this thing will be a million dollars. No no he thought he could build this in there for a million and a half dollars the final cost was 17 million that's about 160 million in today's dollars.

So at the end of this it says he was broke but he had built Disneyland and the good news is and he certainly doesn't know this opening day but he's not going to stay broke for very long not only did he create a phenomenal product one that is constantly he says his line where says improvement is my mantra.

One that he's constantly like it's a living breathing thing he's constantly improving but I was sitting here thinking about this idea where he's like okay I can't figure out how to make no one wants to give me the money to build Disneyland and he had this brilliant idea he's like okay television networks want me to create you know Disneyland programming and the brilliant idea to tie in I will give you what I what you want if you give me what I want which is obviously funding for my amusement park but so he that's the financing of the park which is brilliant.

But this may be the greatest product launch of all time because before opening day right he had run eight months of his television program he produced a bunch of other programming for ABC as well but one of them let me just read this to you and then I'll explain why I think that this this may be the greatest product launch of all time so he had run eight months of his television program he had named his new show Walt Disney presents or the wonderful world of Walt Disney which you could have it was simply called Disneyland and every weekly episode.

It was an advertisement for the still unborn park. I went on YouTube you can go on you in fact it was funny there's an entire chapter of this book which is essentially just a summary of what these shows were about and so I was like well I can read about them but I also want to watch them so I went and actually watched I watched the opening day one I watched the ones that he was doing a bunch of the ones that he was doing essentially just like watering the ground right and the reason I say it's maybe the greatest product launch of all time because it's eight months of his television program.

It's not just a lot of time because it's eight months of one of the highest rated television shows that functions when you watch them as a giant ad for Disneyland but it is it is just like David Ogabies told us it's like you can't save souls in an empty church you're advertising you're marketing has to first entertain it has to hold people's attention and so of course Disney's not like say hey come to my park you know it's open on this day this is what it costs he's talking about why he's building it what it's going to have what it means what you can expect to experience and the result was that I'm not going to say it's not going to be a big deal.

And the result was that on opening day it the opening of Disneyland creates the largest traffic jam in Orange County California history and from that opening day and almost every day since in the last 70 years people have constantly flocked to this creation and it was his creation this is one of the most inspiring things about obviously reading

biographies studying Walt Disney studying Disneyland in particular this is a great line in the book where it says Disneyland is the extension of the powerful personality of one man one thing that's obvious when you read this book and when you go into detail about how Disney was actually created like all the creation of Disneyland is it's very steep jobs ask very Edwin land as I kept bringing them up on the

past episode Walt Disney's like oh the creation of Disneyland which just Walt Disney's personal taste and physical form and to me it demonstrates how important it is to for even a supremely talented people you know it doesn't matter what list you have of history Sunday center wall Disney has to be on that list and yet even a supremely talented person like that if they're not excited if they're not focused if they're not alive with what they're

working on that talent could go to waste and so I want to go into the prehistory of Disneyland and his daughter writes this biography actually wrote actually ordered a bunch two or three other books now maybe four books that I found in the bibliography of of this book and last week's book but his daughter is describing what's taking place in her her dad's life right before he goes into this because the idea for

Disneyland may come to life for other people to experience and you know 1955 but you can trace it back to the 1945 1948 1949 he is flat out depressed and so his daughter wrote at that time I think it was just after the war when nothing seemed to stimulate him I could just sort of sense it I could tell he wasn't pleased with anything that he was doing and at this time he's completely disengaged from the business that made him well known the one that he

did in over in Oregon Disney Studios and he's spending all this time doing something that seems silly which is building toy trains and this is just a hell of a sentence one small enterprise did please him and it had little to do with the art that he had done so much to invent and of which he was the undisputed master so there is a film critic and your time's film critic that comes and visits Walt Disney in the early 1950s and he comes away from this

meeting depressed because he loved Disney films and so the description of this visit is as follows he was dismayed to find that the man who's work he had long admired seemed totally uninterested in movies and seemed wholly almost weirdly concerned with the building of a miniature railroad engine and a string of cars all of Disney's zest for innovation for creative fantasies

seemed to be going into this play thing and so at this point this idea for a physical project and he goes through a lot of different versions of this is just in his mind he's going to go and travel to this railroad fair and is after this

experience is the first time he puts his ideas actually on paper and he writes this memo called the Mickey Mouse Park which I'll get there so you can really think of this railroad fair that he attends is an early blueprint for Disneyland and so surrounding the railroad fair or

all these external exhibits I got to read this to you because it sounds a lot like Disneyland and they have a great punchline here so it says one can see some of the spores that would blow into Disneyland in the guide books description each exhibit will prove an exciting and entirely different chapter in a stirring melodrama remember this is the guide book and the railroad takes you through all these different worlds or what Disney would later call scenes because he thought of really thought of

Disneyland is like an external like a three dimensional movie set and so at this park that disease at it takes you into through a primitive Indian country it takes you to the playgrounds of Florida it takes you to the romantic old French quarter of the New Orleans

and this is the most important part of this entire section the exhibits added up to a coherent whole the growth of America told in three dimensions it was a history less than that you could walk through although the term still lay in the future

Walt Disney was visiting a theme park and one of Walt Disney's heroes was Henry Ford so on the way back from this railroad fair he also visits you could still go to this thing today in a fact I watch a bunch of videos on this on you two so Henry Ford at this point so richest American

and he was building the thing called greenville green field village and the way Henry Ford built his park is he didn't build things from scratch he literally bought all these old structures so like he went and bought

Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory when I mean by that it's like literally told them to disassemble it put on a trucks bring it to Michigan and reassemble it Ford had this incredible collection like he had the cabin were George Washington Carver was born he had Harvey Firestones childhood farm Henry Ford

was a big Abraham Lincoln fan he bought and moved the courthouse where when Abraham Lincoln was young he practiced law Henry Ford bought the right brothers house and the bicycle shop where they conducted their first experiments Ford's town this is so important to understand disease approach to his entire life really but also for in particular to disband Ford's town was an entirely personal reflection of the man so would

Disney's be the road map of Walt Disney's life and so it is when he gets back from this trip that he does that first project memo that he calls it's time Mickey Mouse Park and it's fascinating because he just lays out a bunch of things that he holds true like they're only going to use the best materials they're going to focus on detail and there's just a surprising number of the ideas in this this memo because this is you know a decade and a half a decade before

Disney is actually real and was fasting is his first idea is not okay let me go out by land I'm going to build my own park his first idea is I want to build a scale down train and a railway system that can actually use so he actually you can it's big enough that people can get on it and I don't want to just be directing the design from on high he this is the crazy thing

Disney actually pays one of his employees to teach him he he he learns and trains to be Walt Disney in his 50s right is learning and training to be a machinist and so now he shows up at the shop says they clear off a workbench and the next day began conducting a master class in machining for a single pupil and so the train their building is called number 173 there's a great line in the biography that I read last week on

Walt Disney where it's like his main treats were the combination of raw ingenuity and a sadistic determination this when I read this the what when I read this paragraph the the term sadistic determination sadistic determination and sadistic dedication this is what this looks like so says number 173 was not destined to be a mere ornament it was to power a railway system and Disney needed a place to run it he drove his wife out to see a five acre

undeveloped hilltop it seemed time for a new larger house he told them but what chiefly drew him to it was the varied terrain the terrain and very fine views that would be finer still when seen from a moving train he is explicit about why he's buying this property right his wife and daughters like oh it's time for a new family house he says I want the line to run completely around the house

that's why bought five acres of land so I have plenty of room to run and so now they are designing where the track is actually going to run this is really important because Disney had this this crazy drive he had to be the best memory says he wants to conquer world world he wanted absolute domination he wanted to pick a field in which he could not be one of the best he wanted to be the very best

and to him the definition of being the best is like there is no additional room for improvement and so he is always going to optimize he said the only moat that he believed in was the superior quality of his product right he's like I'm optimizing for quality and excellence above every other consideration I am not optimizing for cost and you see this over and over again when he gets super mad

like we'll start yelling at people when employees are like well I found a you know we can do it the way you do it which is better or we can do it this way that's like slightly less better but a lot cheaper and so they're building this tunnel he actually builds a tunnel where you like you grow you're on and usually he's the one driving the train by the way

you're on the train you know a bunch of other people he'd have a bunch of parties at his house and they would just go riding the train for hours and he's on the front one and he would go through a tunnel and so they're like hey you know these curves are really expensive tunnels are really expensive isn't it it's much more prudent

Walt that let's just make the tunnel straight because you know that's a lot cheaper and Disney's response is hell it's cheaper to not do it at all I don't want you to tell me any of the cost for the tunnel

and you might be like David why you spending so much time talking about the train because this is not about a train he is that's not what he's doing I love this evolution of an idea I mean how valuable is disney land and theme parks to the disney empire today you know but you're talking this is this is the germination of a multi multi billion dollar idea

and it started out with just a train and what's fascinating is like there winds up being sacks and it falls over somebody gets burned but that's not why he stopped doing it there's a great line I just need to read this to you and they're like you know this guy spent years doing these experiments 50 thousand dollars in nineteen fifty dollars building this train buying his house like doing all this crazy stuff and they said how strange that the boss would just drop it

Walt doesn't give up so he must have something else in mind and so the note I left myself here and I'm looking at founders notes if you have a subscription to founders notes already after the listening to this episode I would go and actually read my highlights from this book

because there's all this commentary that I put on top of the highlights it's a great way to reinforce what's actually taking place here but really they think about that Walt doesn't give up I'm reading from from my notes now Walt doesn't give up so you must have something else in mind and I said I can't think of a better trade to have than sadistic determination he's not going to give up and he doesn't let any experience go to waste so what did he learn from doing this well Walt

Walt Disney had learned a great deal from building a train he learned about creating a full operating system so carefully landscaped that it gave his guests an experience a narrative of shifting scenes a narrative that's

important a narrative of shifting scenes one blending smoothly into the next here was a whole little world with him in absolute control and one in which visitors weren't sitting back and watching a screen but rather were full participants he used this railroad as an example of what he wanted to do next there is a definitive line between Walt train at his home and what he went on to do with Disneyland

and so there's a couple of fascinating things is the fact is that there was small theme park small amusement parks you know 60 years before Disneyland and we're going to get get into the actual incentives the economic incentives why they were you know rather crappy it's at something like economics worked against such extravagance but I do want to bring out the main point of what I'm trying to get to

it's fascinating it's like okay this you know the germination of this like very basic version of what Walt's going to do that idea has been around for a long time but they're all suck he's touring all these places and he just cannot get over how bad they are and the main theme the idea behind what he's discovering is like oh their mediocrity is my opportunity it is an opportunity specifically because there is so much room for

improvement and so he's touring all these amusement parks and there's just a hilarious one because he goes to Coney Island and he goes with his wife and he tells her I'm almost ready to give up the idea of a amusement park after seeing Coney Island the whole place is so run down and ugly this is Walt Disney speaking direct with him the people who run it are so unpleasant the whole thing is

just a little bit more of a way to destroy your faith in human nature so in the early 1900s there was little miniature versions of Disney Land just done on a much smaller and like worst scale and they hold a lot of the same traits that Disney's going to use they all had single entrances they charge admission fees just to get on the grounds and they offered increasingly elaborate attractions and it carefully monitored environment and this blew my mind this is an

event that there was so many small amusement parks so there's over 20,000 they call them lesser lesser imitators of what this is going to be there's over 20,000 of these in America alone in fact there was one just 15 blocks away from Walt Disney's childhood home it's called electric park and the reason this is a wild reason that so many small amusement parks were built in the early 1900s remember this is going to blow your mind this is pre invention of the electric meter

okay so electric companies this is before they switched to usage based pricing you're like what the hell you talking about David what is that the thing why was it called electric park it was called electric park because it was a child of the trolley car which is electric right the new traction companies all face the same problem ridership dropped away to next to nothing on the weekends because people were just writing the

thing to work right so during the weekends no one's working their ridership drops that's a big problem because they have to pay power companies for electricity every day no matter how few fairs a collection collected to offset its cost the invention of the electric meter of usage based pricing is in the future so if you're them you have a business right you have seven days of

expenses and only five days of usage five days of revenues seven days of cost five days of revenue that's a problem and so these amusement parks were originally built by trolley companies to give people a reason to travel on Saturday and Sunday they built amusement parks and they weren't called amusement parks back then they were called trolley

parks but they were we would consider them amusement parks and so this following quote by Walt Disney is really when I realized oh the opportunities there because there's so much room for improvement that you can I mean this goes back to what we learned about Steve

jobs one of my favorite things and took me like I was in book like number 10 before somebody smacked me in the face with this was that one of Steve jobs greatest talent was identifying markets full of second rate products that's exactly what Walt Disney's doing he identified a

market full of second rate products there's nobody in the world that could build a amusement park like Walt Disney could based on his experience the characters that he's created the stories that he's created and so he identified their mediocrity is my opportunity why would you want to get involved in a amusement park there's so dirty and not fun why would you want to get involved in a business like that they asked him and he fielded the question the way he would countless times during during

Disneyland's germination that's exactly the point mine isn't going to be that way he said mine's going to be a place that's clean where the whole family can do things together and so in 1952 is original ideas like I'm going to build Disneyland I'm

going to build it by the studio it's going to be in Burbank the interesting thing is the city would not let him build it but this is how he described this is how Walt Disney described Disneyland a few years before it was built he said Disneyland will be something

of a fair an exhibition a playground a community center a museum of living facts and a showplace of beauty and magic and it is in the early planning stages that he runs into a problem that he's going to experience all time no one has experience for something that's never been done before and it is during this feudal search for an architect because he can't find somebody's ever built it because nothing like this is

a room built before that he actually stumbles upon one of the greatest ideas that it is less architecture and more storytelling and filmmaking Disney had come to believe that what he needed couldn't be supplied by architects a friend of his told him no one can design Disneyland for you you have to do it yourself well Walt Disney was seeking had more to do with movies than with architecture Disney's buildings would not be the work of

architects they would be the work of set designers his studio people would have to do it and so one of the first problems that Walt Disney needs to solve you guys figure out where now that Burbank won't let him put the park over there where's this thing going to

be hires the Stanford research institute and they're going to help him find and then plan and then build the park as well now this is hilarious the two dudes from the Stanford research institute the ones that are going to help him build the park their named Woody and buzz hilarious that

45 years later the first movie that Disney and Pixar make together toy story the main characters are Woody and buzz and me my four year old son we've my daughter to this to we've watched I've lost track out toy stories one of my favorite you know kids movies I work but I've watched all four of

them and I can't I've lost track how much this jumped out to me because I'm just I've have to restore on the brain last decade so anyways now they he's going through what's fascinating to me is Disney is a superb storyteller master storyteller everybody that runs into him from the

kid until he's in the 60s says the same thing about him and so he has to tell the story to Woody and buzz and he's describing what he wants to build and with shocking it's very similar he uses this he does this on the television show as well and right now he's telling the story

to recruit and empower the people are going to help build a build the park right but then he tells the story to get people excited to actually come to for not just employees and builders and planners but actually customers and guests or as he calls them and so this is

the description where it's just very odd because it's unlike any other amusement park in existence at this point it sounded strange unlike anything you would expect in a amusement park at a time where most parts were planned as a grid with four side and access

entrances so he would go and and part of his planning would he go and talk to other amusement park owners and you're like your single entrance ideas stupid thing ever people don't like to walk you need to have multiple entrances close to parking lots and so again going back to that note I

reference earlier the creation of Disneyland was Walt Disney's personal taste and physical form this way I think about it. So it says most of them had these you know four side access Disney outlined a design concept of a single park a single entrance into the park

once the guests entered they passed a return of the century main street which would end in a circular plaza or town square the area then feed off into four thematic activity areas the world of tomorrow fantasy land frontier land and adventure land more things he did different than his

competitors most amusement amusement parks one in all the street visibility they could get Walt's entire park would be hidden from the outside world by landscaping Walt was talking about customized rides exhibits and attractions instead of the standard off the shelf fairs wheel and tunnel of love rides would be subordinate to story but most alarming of all this entertainment anonymally had to be open in just two years and so problem they run into right away is like they looked at a few other

locations as soon as word got out that Disney might be buying building is amusement park there all these other realtors and real estate investors will go out and buy up the property so he's like okay how do we solve this problem problem actually do really smart they use a bit of misdirection here and so not only does he use people secretly working for him to slowly buy up all the property but then they actually launch a very effective disinformation

campaign they leak to the local papers that Disney is planning an amusement park in the San Fernando Valley Valley 50 miles away and that misdirection causes people to go try to figure out where he's building in the San Fernando Valley even though he's not and buy a property around it and so once Disney has his land he actually drives the remember these are just orange grows right and he drives his friend out there to tell him the story

of like what he's going to build this guy named art link letter who's one of the most famous TV hosts in the country and I just think his response is hilarious and so says Disney pulled the car over we got out and

Walt began vividly describing Disneyland the acres of colorful buildings in places and all the names of the places like tomorrow and fantasy and all that the thousands of people and what they would be doing and while he talked he became more and more enthusiastic by the minute I began to

grow more and more concerned I hardly knew how to tell him that for once he was making what would probably be the biggest and most ruinous mistake of his life what could I say I knew he was wrong and so up until this point he's been financing everything himself this is where he winds up selling his

vacation home in pub springs he borrows against his life insurance his wife is like in tears she's very worried like what if he dies what's going to happen to her and so Walt knows that he has to get his brother and his partner Roy his brother Roy Disney involved and up until this point you know it's just been Walt's little side project you know he's clearly been depressed with the studio so he's just

working on this to to be distraction and then world realizes all this isn't going away I have to get involved I have to like save my little brother and they have this you know this interesting relationship these ups and downs like any brothers can have especially brothers that work together

so closely there was a time when they were fighting over business they didn't speak to each other for two years which is wild and so Roy Walt's always saying you know Roy trying to home me back and really Roy's savings asked financially because by Walt Disney's own admission like he was

terrible with money terrible with he just never paid attention to that at all and I'm going to get into what the role that Roy was playing and why you know there would be no Walt Disney if it wasn't for Roy Disney as well but I just I was funny where um you know Walt's talking about this adversarial

relationship that his older brother always has with them he's holding them back and it says Roy saw their relationship just differently when Walt and I were little we lived on a farm and we had to sleep in the same bed now Walt was just a little guy and he was always wetting the bed and he's been

peeing on me ever since and so it's just like port again I love the role that Roy plays but I just couldn't imagine in fact this is great sentence where you know I got to be clear here Walt's older brother Roy was the perfect partner for Walt to have you know they had

everything you wanted they had different complimentary talents and Roy was fine in being in being in Walt's shadow you know there was a hundred times the amount of people that knew Walt Disney then new Roy Disney and this is great description of their relationship in the book and

it's talking about Roy's perception of this unique understanding that no my brother is supremely talented he's like one and a 10 million kind of talent Roy never lost his calm understanding that the company's prosperity rested not on the rock of conventional business practices but

on the churning extravagant perfectionist imagination of his younger brother that is an incredible paragraph but it's also it's not meant to diminish Roy was a was a talent of his own was a genius of his own this is how somebody worked it with both of them for a long time says Walt

was the front man and Roy was in the background in a way Roy was as much of a genius as Walt was they shove their chips in the pot they go all in multiple times they win an all in on snow white they're going all in on Disneyland Roy always save the day if it hadn't been

for my big brother Walt said I'd swear I'd be in in jail several times for checks bouncing I never knew how much money we had in the bank and so Roy is now going to want to be the one that goes and pitches these TV studios because he's got this idea Walt has this idea of how he's

going to finance the park is the banks are not going to give you money is just not going to happen to his studio is not doing well financially and what was fascinating is Roy understood that like once Walt was focused on something there's just nothing you can do he said that

a determined junior because he would call Walt Jr. He says a determined junior was impossible to dissuade and so his whole point is like well if it's futile to try to stop my brother I need to then help my brother and so we are now in September of 1953 now keep in mind

Disney opens in July 1955 they have no money they have no financing so far right they just have a couple hundred acres of orange grows at this point it is remarkable how fast they did this so really I want to talk to you about how Walt Disney makes his pitch deck and this pitch deck is going to be unbelievable be successful this pitch deck doesn't work on CBS or NBC but it works on ABC remember what Walt Disney said last week he said the ABC needed to tell my television so so damn

bad they bought an amusement park that made me laugh I laughed at loud when I read that so I'm going to give you the summary of how he builds his pitch deck okay and it's remarkable how fast he moves as well so he calls up a former employee on a Saturday morning he says hey come down

to the studio I want to tell you something he tells him about Disneyland this guy's name is herb rhyming her rhyming is like that sounds fantastic and this is like great he asked her to draw a rendering by Monday Roy is leaving for New York on Monday it is Saturday morning on Monday

so he can take this drawing that has not been completed yet so he can pitch the TV networks we talked about last week and we talked about a bunch of times so many cases a lot of the great leaders and entrepreneurs in history they they they resemble cult leaders and so much so that there's like

a hundred page chapter and they 800 page biography called the cult and we see how spookily charismatic that Walt Disney was because this guy's like hell no there's no way I'm doing it Disney offers you says hey I will stay with you the entire time and so they're eating like son it gross to me

tuna sat tuna sandwiches and milkshakes the whole weekend right but they work 40 hours straight and the end result is this beautiful aerial drawing of what is what was in Walt Disney's mind now read now listen to this I'm going to read this paragraph to you this blew my mind what they had conjured up from Disney's vision and Ryan's patient skill was remarkably close to what two years and many millions of dollars later

would rise from the vanished orange groves of anima high California to tease the imagination of the entire world so this is 1953 okay and television is literally going to save Disney now what is remarkable is one of other Disney heroes in addition to Henry Ford was his getting Charlie Chaplin Charlie Chaplin founded this company called United artists right and Disney was like oh my god I can't believe I got

signed to my heroes company they were being his distributor at the time this is back in 1936 they want to have a falling out him and United artists because they United artists was pushing them like hey we want future rights to broadcast your Disney movies on TV Disney broke with that he's like absolutely not and the crazy thing I said last week it's 4,000 there was 4,000 TVs in the entire world when he made this decision no no

I was wrong there was only 2,000 TV sets in the entire world where Disney was so adamant about not relinquishing these rights that he broke with the company of his hero this may be one of the most important lessons for you and I to internalize the thing about this this decision right this holding

to this car absolute control and he always was a technologist like yeah he built a media company but he always utilized technology was a fan of technology he understood way this is going to something that's going to come up in the story of an ever game Disney understand that this new

technology TV it was an ally not an adversary and Disney understood this years before other movie studio moguls did there's a line in the book where it says that the other studios regarded television as a homeowner does termites and he's like a meeting I think I cover this later on

where he's at a meeting and they're like yelling at him they're calling the traitor it's like you don't understand this is an idea I'm going to get into that but I really need to like I want to spend some time here so you and I

don't ever forget this again this he may say this is a 936 1953 it's going to give him the funding of the park and then be the greatest promotional tool for his businesses ever existed and so this idea that I wrote myself and these are the notes that you can find a founders notes too this

decision paid dividends 20 years later hold on technology developed by other people constantly benefited Disney's businesses many there are many such cases in the history of entrepreneurship just like this go back to the book Disney clearly explains this is before he assigned to deal right this

is excellent every time I got to thinking of television I would think of this park and I knew that if I did the park I would have to have some kind of medium like television to let people know about it so I said well here's the way that I'll get my park going it is natural for me to tie it in with

my television so I just sort of insisted that my Disneyland park be part of my television show the network that sign for a Disney program would have to help pay for the park and this is why it's so important that I really do feel Walt did not really look around he looked in he looked into his

personal taste he built a business of his authentic to himself and the most authentic business that the business of most of the truth itself which is many such cases in the history of the entrepreneurship this is why I say like the myth of this you know young entrepreneurial genius in

almost every case of these stories that you wouldn't we've now done what 350 of them together the greatest work that somebody does is not come in the first decade of their career it is many many many decades into the career Disney's greatest creation came 35 years 35 years into his

career same thing with Steve Jobs and it is because he had this ability to be a contrarian not contrarian for Cotrian's sake but because he really believed he was not looking around he was looking in so he goes to this meeting with a bunch of all these other studio heads and the head of MGM said you're being a traitor to the motion picture industry listen to this is clarity of thought here that is silly if I was able to put a trailer of your next movie picture into every home in the United

States how much would you give me a million dollars at least I rest my case they didn't understand the show was a trailer for in his case the show was a trailer for Disneyland it's also a trailer for every single other thing where he does this I talked about Soswee he does documentary about the creation of the movie 20,000 leagues under C it people find entertaining has to be a stand on you know interesting piece of

content on its own but if you're able to produce something like that then what's the result it our movie sales going to go up or down you get to the end of an hour long documentary about how this movies built you go watch that documentary and so this is the deal they sign with ABC after NBC and CBS said no ABC would invest a half a million dollars outright in the park then they have to purchase a weekly hour long television program and for that

think about Disney got paid to advertise his park that's what you think about it they're paying him $50,000 a show during the first year 60 thousand dollars a show in the second and $70,000 a show in the third year the network would also guarantee $4.5 million in construction loans at $40 million is the biggest programming package in history and so now in addition to building the

park he's got a build out all this content for TV they've never done it before and this is one of the things I most admired he just wasn't scared to go into areas we had no experience he just trusted if I can assemble a group of talented people to figure it out along the way this is hilarious I love the story bill was

remembered that he was going through a period of frequently running into his boss in hallways and parking lots when one day wall stopped him and said hey you you be the producer of my TV show wall was dumbfounded huh I don't have any experiences a television producer who does Walt said and that was that and we see the approach that he had for animation is the same that he has for

the music park he says I do not want anyone hired who has anything to do with a music park he optimized for town he wanted to train his own people he said over and over again I think he got like he's are cursing about it to where he people like when he would recruit from other like animation studios he said he had to put up with their God damn poor working habits from doing cheap pictures he believed

is easier to start from scratch with young art students and indoctrinate them into the Disney system something he did throughout his entire career over every single decade is he'd have these these mandatory you can such he create his own training and curriculum regardless of what they were working on and he would make the classes mandatory over and over again now sometimes they could like stop the classes but anything they were doing something new like an amusement park they were

mandatory training in fact his entire chapter in this book about the school for like training the actual cast of the employees that are going to work in the amusement park another thing I love about Walt is when you tell him it's not going to work and he believes in his thinking he gets excited and so they go and meet with a bunch of other

amusement park owners and this is what they say after a presentation on Disney land the reaction was unanimous Disney land would not work all the proven money makers are conspicuously missing there's no roller coasters there's no Ferris wheel there's no carny games you don't have barkers like the guys that stand along the midway to sell side shows so they say without barkers the marks won't go in now think about that they didn't call customers didn't call

them guess they call them marks custom rides will never work and besides the public doesn't know the difference or care many of Disney's favorite projects made no sense at all things like the castle and the pirate ship are cute but they are right so there's no economic reason to build them there's too many things here that

do not produce revenue Walt screwy ideas about cleanliness and grant great landscape maintenance or economic suicide he will lose his shirt by overspending on things that customers never really noticed tell your boss to save his money tell him to stick to what he knows and leave a

amusement business to people who know it this did not frighten Walt Disney those guys who call a paying customer a mark couldn't grasp what he had in mind and again he trusted his own judgment he trusted his own taste he's not that what he's really trying to build he said this over it's much closer to emotion picture than it is a museum park and so he realizes well there's a good place for me to recruit talent and that is my studio

this hilarious because he set up a separate company this is a it's W. E. D. separate from Walt Disney studios and so in designing Disney land we thought of the park as if it were a three dimensional film we wanted everything that guests experience not only shows and rides to be an entertaining part of the story this was a new idea we took the most basic needs of guests and turn them into attractions Disney can this is hilarious Disney continued to prow

through the studio tapping people for his park some of them would only be gone for a few weeks or months and in some I just turned out for years the staff members left behind began referring to the new project as cannibal island that is

they'd eaten into their work for so much that now the new project is called cannibal island one thing I think Walt Disney would agree with it says in multiple books that he's just not a snob he has a like high levels like high standards and he demands excellence but he's very informal and so there's just a ton of unique ways that Disney would recruit talent to work on Disneyland and so one of the biggest things that he didn't know how to build was

he had these giant ships and yet to build your own entire river and so he's going to recruit this admiral this former admiral from the US Navy is getting Joe Fowler who's going to work not only does he help build Disneyland but he wants a board building Disney world as well and listen to this exchange goes to meet him he says there was no discussion of any specific job but as the visitors made their

goals Walt said to him Joe I'd like you to have come down I'd like you to come down next week and have a look at Disneyland will send you a ticket the ticket arrived quickly the next Monday the admiral having packed a single change of clothes set off for Los Angeles telling his wife I don't know anything about the motion picture business I'll be back tomorrow night Mrs. Fowler would not see her husband again for three weeks

he arrives to Burbank at the studio office and Walt talked to him about Disneyland for half an hour then he excuse himself he said he had to go see rushes from the previous days filming all be gone from maybe an hour Walt said

Disney never returned after a while a secretary appeared in the doorway are you Joe Fowler yes will you come with me this is your office there's some contractors in the office opposite of you that want to talk to you and then he handed him an envelope here's the keys to a car that was my introduction said Fowler nothing was mentioned about salary for a week he was to be the construction boss for the park which had to be open in a year

and then another thing I love about the story is there's just a ton of these relentlessly resourceful ways that they get this done on a smaller budget and in record time so Disneyland or Walt Disney had this landscaping was incredibly important to the look of the park the story of the park and so he wanted he hired this landscape firm

and he said okay I need all these mature trees matured the problem with buying mature trees are they were really really expensive you're literally buying time and they only have a couple hundred thousand dollar budget and they have to landscape you know hundreds of acres

and so the trees that Walt Disney wants are like five hundred dollars each they don't have enough money to buy the amount of trees they need if they're five hundred dollars each this is how they figure out a way to buy them for twenty dollars each

bill was friends with the head of landscape architecture for the California Department of Transportation and he got advanced notice when a new road was about to be cut down and there's trees that stood in its path the Santa Monica freeway the Pomona and the Santa Anna freeways all yielded trees for Disneyland we paid twenty five dollars for each tree to the car

each tree to the contractor who was just going to bulldoze them and take them to the dump that's not all they did at night they would drive around prosperous neighborhoods knocking on the doors of houses whose yards contained promising specimens and offering them to buy them outright

sometimes they got lucky in Beverly Hills they came upon a magnificent banyan tree that tree that was easily worth several thousand dollars they rang the doorbell and when the owner answered they asked if they might consider they asked him if he might consider parting with his tree the man laughed that big old son of a bitch there I'm so tired of that thing they got that tree for the cost of installing a small tree in its place

and so when it came to picking a host for the show that's going to be on ABC called Disneyland it was very obvious that there's only one possible person and that was the actual founder and I think more founder should do this they're in the best position to tell the customers why

why is the product exists why is this so important to you in fact one of the best description I heard of this is when I many years ago the first time I read James Dyson's autobiography against the odds he talked about this I think I talked about this in the last time on episode 300

and he says I set off around the world to start selling it properly it was time spent away from designing but it was to teach me above all else that this experience that is this is what the experience is teaching him that above all else that only the man who's brought the thing into the world can presume to

be forced it on others and demand a heavy price with all of his heart and Walt did not have a public facing TV show before this and so he's he's talking about thinking of why he did this says I don't consider myself an actor anything that's the greatest things like trying to be authentic right

but in trying to get a whole these things I can introduce them I can get them going I myself and that's good or bad I'm still myself it's my business and I can talk about it it's what we do here at the studio so when

I was a new project that's exactly what he did internally you know if he had a martial resources to try to do something new like when he wanted to make the world's first full length animated movie and snow white he just martial team together he told his stories like I'm just going to be doing that now except instead of just telling my employees I'm telling the entire world

and make no mistake he was nervous and anxious about this and so you know Walt Disney had this like very clean cut image and in many cases he thought of somewhat of a contradiction because you know he he cursed he smoked a chain smoke cigarettes and he drank and so his fast things before the show they made this like potion they call it a potion that would smooth his throat and lessen his anxiety it was eggs beaten in wine so he would drink a little bit of eggs mix mixed with wine

mixed with alcohol and it would take the edge off and make him less nervous before he went on the air and so this goes back to this idea that the creation of Disney land which just Walt Disney's personal taste and physical form because Disney did not want any formal organizational chart he actually says multiple times I don't ever want to see an organizational chart

and so we have one of the guys that worked with them was being interviewed and he says in the very early months at the very beginning of Disney and he says you asked the question what was our process like I kind of laugh because processes an organized way of doing things I have to remind you during the Walt the Walt period of designing Disneyland we didn't have processes we just did the work process came later all of the things had never been done before

Walt had gathered up all these people who had never designed a theme park they had never designed a Disneyland so we were all in the same boat at one time and we and we had to figure out what to do and how to do it on the fly as we go along with it and not even discuss plans timing or anything we just worked and Walt just walked around and made suggestions

and let's go back to this informal way of recruiting and I really think it speaks to what James is saying it's like you know the founder company your enthusiasm is infectious if just the way you recruit and you inspire employees you can do it to the outside world that's why how he was doing it for internal employees why he was the host of the TV station but you also see how recruiting people so he's like listen you know you can dream create design and build the most wonderful place in the world but it still takes people to operate and so this is where he starts he's recruiting this guy named

Van R'sdale Van R'sdale France actually and he's going to run this school this this essentially training school for all the cast members are going to work at this at the theme works and it is amazing to me how many people that were really important and building Disney Disneyland we're actually they develop skills during the war during

the war were to that they were directly transferable to the work they'd wind up doing for wall so during the war van worked for consolidated aircraft corporation he was in charge of their training and so keep that a mind for about 60 seconds from now so this is what meeting and being recruited by Walt Disney was like he shows up at the studio and he says a

looking fellow in a sports shirt enter the office and flop down into the chair without any introduction I knew I was sitting next to Walt Disney they shook hands I'll always remember that handshake somehow I'd imagine that Walt Disney would have the soft delicate hands of an artists drawing Mickey Mouse but my hand met the firm grip of a man who had grown up doing hard farm labor and working for his father and construction Disney took out a cigarette and he began to speak

he this is his recruiting, right? As I listen to him, and this enthusiasm conversation, I was struck by the sense of excitement that Disney felt for this project. Enthusiasm is contagious. It is infectious. You can literally transfer your enthusiasm for your project to other people. He even turned to me and outsider to present his thoughts. He spoke for two hours. And this is Van describing why he feels he was

recruited to this job. I guess they felt if I could convert 65,000 cowboys, farmers and homemakers into dedicated aircraft workers, then I could mold a group of diverse Californians with no business experience into producers of the Disneyland Dream. People have to be trained to operate this place, and I know you can handle the job. That began his working schedule for the next two years of 14 hours a day, seven days a week.

And one of the smartest thing that Van does is he imbibes their work with a sense of meaning. This is why they this is what stories do. This is why the storytellers most powerful person in the world, which Steve Jobs said. The theme of our joint effort would be we will create happiness. How do we manufacture that elusive intimate commodity? At Disneyland, I wanted people to feel they were involved in something more than parking cars, serving food or sweeping up popcorn. He told a

parable, two men are laying bricks. Somebody asked one of them what they are doing, what he's doing, and his response is I'm laying bricks. To the same question, the other man answers, I'm building a cathedral. I don't want to go through my life thinking I'm just laying bricks. I'd much rather go through life believing, believing. And only works if you truly believe it than I'm building a cathedral. And part of that is really important that companies should have their, they should create

their own language. This idea of them creating their own language appears over and over again. I'm going to read you two separate sections that are separated by like 200 pages in the book. Says we don't, this is part of the training. We don't have customers. We have guests. We're not employees. We're host and hostesses. We don't have crowds. We have an audience 200 pages later. They're talking about, they're still continuing this in modern day with one of the head of PR at

Disney. I was the last word on copy issues for publicity and marketing and my red pen eliminated the word ride whenever I found it. This is in 2008. When we only describe our attractions as rides, we fall into the category of six flags or universal studios. We should rise above them and describe what we do as attractions, adventures, immersive experiences and of course stories. When you are creating Disney magic, the words describe it should support the magical experiences. It's excellent.

Customers are to be called guests. Those who sell the customer's ice cream are called host and hostesses. Many of our labels are drawn from the theater. Guests do not form a crowd, but they form an audience. Ticket takers do not have jobs, but they have roles. They were cast members. And when they escape the audience for a break, they do so off stage, usually in a backstage area. The park as a whole was the show, which the audience first entered through the outer lobby,

which is the part which we call parking lot. They call the outer lobby. Another thing that reoccurs over and over again, especially as they get closer to, they have a deadline. Like the park has to open. Really, I think one of the biggest lessons I took from this book is like, what if I had a, you know, a self-imposed deadline? I know I want to make a podcast every week, right? But my entire life, like I don't really have any other deadlines out of

that. Like it's almost like deadlines force this sense of urgency that is very obvious when you read this book and something that's, I got to figure out another other ways to add that to my life and work. But what is fascinating is even as they're getting closer to the deadline, right? You know, it's very obvious that when they open, this park is going to be, you know, I think around 80% actually complete. But even though they knew there wasn't going to be all the way complete,

Disney would not relax his standards of excellence. And particularly his obsession with detail, he said in the other book last week that it's the detail. If we lose the detail, we lose everything. That was a quote from Walt Disney. And really, when it arrived at the described to you, it's like, this is soul in the game. He had soul in the game. These are the people that I want to buy products from. These are people I want to support. Because detail is the most expensive of any

other feature because what it costs, it costs time. It's not just the materials. It's the time invested. And so they wind up finishing what are these going to be these like horse drawn, like stage coaches. And so every single time what if his employees is like, let's just cut this corner. Let's, you know, go to the cheaper route. Let's go the faster route. You have the same response from Walt Disney. He says, why don't we just leave the leather straps off Walt? The people

are never going to appreciate all this close up detail anyways. Disney treated him to a tart little lecture. You're being a poor communicator. People are okay. Don't you ever forget that. They will respond to it. They will appreciate it. His employee didn't argue and he said, we put the best damn leather straps on that stage coach you've ever seen. And that's just a reoccurring

thing. And it's detailed that you can't even see up close. If you look at the top of the castle, in Disneyland, it says, look at the top of the castle at the base of the highest towers are a series of tremendously detailed gargoyles, which you can barely see from the ground. And yet they are part of our magic formula. They are part of a thousand little tiny details. We are looking at right now, but don't consciously perceive individually. They are nothing collectively. They add up to a visual

experience that the guests cannot find anywhere else. Multiple pages later. In fact, there's a great sometimes I really love titles or chapters. And this is one of the perfect, the title of this chapter that I've just fast-forwarded to is a perfect explanation of what I'm trying to get across to you. It's called the perfectionist at work. And so we have another example of this. Another example of what does the not appreciating people trying to get him to cut corners.

Walt would not cut corners and spotted and hated any attempt to do so. I wanted to put plastic railings up on the top of the houses of Main Street, said Wood, and Walt wanted real rot iron. They're 40 feet in the air. Nobody could tell the difference. It's that relentless adherence to this principle. That's where he said he's like, the thing that's going to make Disneyland unique and different is the detail. So if you lose the detail, you lose it all. It's beautifully

simple and very powerful idea they had. And one thing that's obvious that has jotted down to myself. It's like, if Walt Disney is looking at something, he is thinking about ways to improve it. And I need to make the point. This attention to detail is not just superficial things. Like attention to detail saved him multiple times. And so at the time, they need a ton of, they have to build their own river for God's sake. And they're running out of time and money.

And so Disney's engineers come to them and they're like, hey, we need a big, very expensive pump that will deliver all the water that we need from the wells. And Disney said, no, just cut a flume to the river and turn the water on. And the engineers like, you can't do that. So they open up these maps and they explain that the water needed to flow uphill and it wouldn't do that. Try it anyway. Disney insisted. So again, this is attention to detail saving him, not just for cosmetic

or even superficial reasons. They did this and it worked. Disney had carefully gone over his acreage months earlier. This is a form of attention to detail, right? He had carefully gone over his acreage months earlier when it was just orange trees, orange trees. He had talked with the farmers about irrigation and he'd seen how they manage it. He knew that the surveyors maps were wrong. That is a form of detail paying attention to detail saved him. And so there's a bunch of people

around Walt trying to get him to push back to like nodded here to the deadline. And that just, the reason the deadline can't move is because they had to come live on July 17th and not a day later because the partnership agreement that he had with ABC was that the park's opening would also be in conjunction with the most ambitious live television broadcast yet ever attempted. All of it was live. It was the largest collection of live television equipment. They had spent one of the largest

budgets like advertising in newspapers all over the country, no matter what happened. Even if the park was 50% of the way done, it had to go live on July 17th. So a few days before the park opens, he, it's his, him and his wife's 30th wedding anniversary and they decided to have a party at Disneyland. And this was just hilarious. It's one of my favorite stories because it really builds like, to some degree, like when you study Disney, Walt Disney seems kind of like superhuman in this story,

kind of humanizes him. So he does say it's something's fascinating at the very beginning. Now, at the very beginning of Disneyland, he would refuse to allow them to sell any kind of alcohol. And his reasoning for that really speaks to the love that he had for the work that he was doing at this point is here and in his life rather. He says, I feel when I go down to the park, I don't need a drink. I work around that place all day and I don't have one. After I come out of a heavy

day at the studio, I want to drink to relax. So he talked about the difference, right? He was drinking a ton at the end of night when he was, you know, much worse place. But this one night in Disneyland a few days before it opens in celebration of his 30th wedding anniversary, there's a ton of alcohol. And his daughter just tells a great story. It just brings a smile to my face, says he was loving every minute of it and just grinning at people. Later, everyone was worried

about dad driving home. They were trying to steal his car keys and everything. And I just said, Daddy, can I drive you home? He said, well, sure, honey, he just climbed in the back seat of my car and he's smashed. He's, he's just absolutely smashed at this point. He climbed in the back seat of my car. He had a map of Disneyland and he rolled it up and tutored it in my ear as if it was a trumpet. And before I knew it, all was silent. There he was with his arms folded around the map,

like a boy with a boy trumpet sound asleep. And even though they have to open in two days from now, you know, there's just, there's a ton of stuff that's either broken or not finished. The landscaping budget had run out. So again, a form of resourcefulness. They had, they started spraying dead grass with green paint. So it looked like grass was alive and healthy.

There's just a ton of things that are just not going to be done, some of which they're trying to do up until the very last minute day, literally working on the park right before the show goes live. And really the main point behind all this is he said Disney was well aware of the shortcomings. And I think anybody that's been inside of a company, you just realize it's maybe not as drastically unfinished as what's happening to Disney. But there's just always things. This is never

get to the point where I was like, oh, everything's working functioning properly. This is perfect. There's nothing else we need to improve that just that state of affairs never exists. And I think reading this book and especially this chapter is just that that constant reminder. And even a legend like Disney, like he goes to bed the night before they're opening. And he's just sure that he's going to be at the center of the most public humiliation in show business history. He had become

so anxious leading up to that point. He told his wife and daughters to stay home because it's like, oh, there's no point in coming. You're just going to see a gigantic failure. I'm ruined. He was having trouble sleeping. He just wasn't feeling good. But was fastening is the day that it came. The opening day, he put on a good front. Even if he wasn't feeling good, says the dark premonitions had lifted. And now he seemed to be completely at ease and enjoying this huge moment.

And that huge moment is the opening the the simulcast live broadcast of the Disneyland show and the opening of Disneyland Park. This is crazy. The United States contained 169 million citizens on July 17, 1955 and 90 million of them watched the show 54.2% of the population. And so Disney's going to host it. He's got a bunch of other people there like Ronald Reagan, the future governor of

California. But what was fascinating is the guy, his friend, Art Link Letter, which one of the most famous talk show hosts that he took out when it was just orange grows and trying to tell him the story of the guy's like, I hate to tell my friend that he's just lost it. But he asked, he's like, hey, I need help. Like, you know, a series of, you know, people that can add lip good hosts, but I don't have any money to pay you. And Link Letter is like, that's fine. I will do it for

the Union minimum, which is like, you know, 500 bucks. And Disney could not believe that his friend would, you know, it's like hiring an a list actor for minimum wage. But Link Letter was a very sophisticated entrepreneur or two. And he's like, listen, I will do it. And it's in an lieu of payment of my normal rate. Just give me the photo concession at Disneyland, the rights to the photo concession at Disneyland

for the next 10 years. This is an interesting fact of history. 40 years later, Link Letter wrote surprisingly, the net returns from this valuable concession made me the highest paid broadcaster for one show in the history of television. And interesting enough, because you never know when a friend of yours is offering you like the deal of lifetime, he tried to convince friends of his. Like, hey, buy up all the land that I'm not using on Disneyland. Please build a hotel. I don't

have the money for it. Please do this. You're going to be so rich. And nobody did it. They just didn't believe in it. And so really, you know, Disney is obviously obsessed with control. And now, that, you know, they could try to control that as much as possible if you're in a Disney world. They want to own the hotels, but they didn't have that option at this point. So this is, you know, right around the opening of Disneyland. And this is just a reminder that you have to do what you can

where you're what you have in Anaheim at the opening of Disney, right? Before before Disney opened, rather, they had a total of 87 hotel rooms. And so because they can't have the money to develop the hotel hotels themselves, they actually sign agreement with outsiders, which is very undisneyed like at this point. But they just do the best deal possible. So they do the license agreement. You have the right to build a hotel associated with Disneyland. It's going to cost them

$1,000 per month. Plus, you have to pay 2% of the gross revenue to Walt Disney. Plus $25,000 a year to use the word Disneyland. But this is him just doing what he can where he is with what he has. This was unusual. Disney always kept a tight hold on his name, but the fact that he would allow access to it reflects how much he wanted his park served by a good hotel that was currently beyond his means. And so as you can imagine, the day of the opening, a ton goes wrong that the show

goes off really well. But considering how fast it is in one year and one day, you know, he says that Disney knew better than anybody else at the park and opened less than 80% finish and that there was a lot of hard work ahead, but the hard work did not frighten him because hard work never had frightened him. And so there's a lot more detail in the book. Well, I'll just give you an example of some of the stuff that went wrong. They ran out of food and water. There were not enough

bathrooms so people had to pee in the bushes. The boat got stranded and ran off the track. So the guests had to swim to shore. The asphalt was still soft because it was so hot and they just poured it that women's high heels were getting stuck in there. There was record high temperatures of over 100 degrees. There was a gas leak that closed down part of the park and luckily didn't

cause an explosion. The car ride where like little kids drive cars, which at this time are called auto topia, let there was several car crashes and one kid lost all of his teeth in his mouth. Walt had to resupply the bathrooms himself with toilet paper. So he's carrying loads of toilet paper to the bathrooms and they caused the worst traffic jam in Orange County history. But here's the most important part. It was total confusion both on camera and behind the scenes, but it was a

celebration of the birth of a dream. We had a park. It was a start. And then there was a fascinating contrast. I still think takes place today where the media, the actual newspaper writers and everybody else there like Walt's dream is a nightmare. This is a $17 million piece of crap. It is a people trap. I can't believe how bad this is. And yet the true believers that actually go and then they write these reviews. And again, I think this is what was helpful where you had eight months

of Walt describing like, this is my dream. This is the goal. This is what I'm working towards. They understand that hey, the the the way that Disneyland was on day one is not how it's going to be. It's going to be constantly evolving, living, breathing thing. I know that I left myself earlier in the book, which I don't know if I read to you was that Disneyland, his goal for Disney was an outdoor living, breathing, constantly evolving story, a movie that he could update and improve upon for the

rest of his life. And so the initial like negative headlines from the press, they start to abate as you have more of the people that are buying into his dream and the story and there are fans of his work and trust that he's going to deliver on what he promised he would. And one excerpt from this review is here we first noted the thing which impressed us ever more deeply as the day went on the care and the quality of materials, which had gone into everything Disneyland is not shoddy.

It is not a corner of all. It is not false fronts and makeshift rears. It is carefully built by experienced workmen details are not forgotten and materials are of the highest obtainable quality. And some of the criticism that he got from the media was accurate. He even said that there's going to be changes made year in and year out forever in a project and a business in this idea that

hey, we can make changes year in and year out forever is exactly why he built Disneyland. Disney was determined to keep it growing by what he called plusing his term for improving what was already there in making constant additions. Disney said it has been said that Disneyland will never be complete. In fact, I said it. The way I see it Disneyland will never be finished. It's something we can keep developing and adding to a motion picture is different. Once it's wrapped up and sent out for

processing we're through with it. If there are things that could be improved we can't do anything about it anymore. I've always wanted to work on something alive. Something that keeps growing and now we've got that in Disneyland. And that is where I'll leave it for the full story. How they recommend reading the book. It is a quick read. It gives you a brief overview of his life and then goes into great detail about how he built Disneyland. If you buy the book using the link you'll be

supporting the podcast at the same time. Another way to support the podcast if you want is to buy Founders merch that is available at FoundersPodcast.com. That is 300 and 47 books down, 1000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon. When you read about or you listen to the this history of Disneyland, the creation of Disneyland, this ever-evolving idea. What it becomes obvious is that this idea in many ways was pulled out of Walt Disney. And this just happened to my friend Ben.

My friend Ben is the founder of Vesto. So I'm building this trusted partner network. And so anybody any company that advertises on Founders, one, I have to know the founder. I have to build a relationship with them. Relationships run the world. That is a main theme from history of entrepreneurship. It's really important to build relationships with other founders. And because these trusted partners are able to gain exposure to an incredibly high value and intelligent community of founders.

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see all of their company's financial accounts in one view. And so Ben goes out and builds this. And then other founders that listen to founders are now using this product. So if you go to Vesto.com, you can see what I'm talking about. It's all of your company's financial accounts in one view. You can connect and control all of your global business accounts from one dashboard. And then once you can see everything live, if you have a bunch of idol cash, you can then ask Vesto to uncover your

idol cash and then securely put it to work on autopilot. And so if that sounds useful to your business, make sure you go to Vesto.com, you schedule demo, you're talk to Ben, tell him Dave founder sent you and he'll give you $500 off in the coming weeks. I'll talk more about the trusted partner network that I've been building. All of these products and services are built by founders that I know that I have a direct relationship with that I can call or text anytime I want.

All of them are building great products and all of them are going to be offering exclusive discounts available nowhere else to you. The first one in that trusted partner network is Vesto. So go to Vesto.com, tell him Dave from founder sent you and you get $500 off. Thank you very much for listening, thank you very much for the support and I'll talk to you again soon.