#347 How Walt Disney Built His Greatest Creation: Disneyland

23:39And you might be like, David, why are you spending so much time talking about this train? Because this is not about a train. That's not what he's doing. I love this evolution of an idea. I mean, how valuable is Disneyland and theme parks to the Disney empire today? You know, 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 this accident. It falls over. Somebody gets burned. But that's not why he stopped doing it. There's a there's a great line. I just need to read this to you.

24:07And they're like, you know, this guy spent years doing these experiments. Fifty 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 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.

24:40It's a great way to reinforce what's actually taking place here. But really like, think about that. Walt doesn't give up. I'm reading from my notes now. Walt doesn't give up, so he must have something else in mind. And I said, I can't think of a better trait 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 Disney had learned a great deal from building his 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 so important, a narrative of shifting scenes, one blending smoothly into the next.

25:14Here 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's train at his home and what he went on to do with Disneyland. And so there's a couple of fascinating things. The fact is that there was small theme parks, small amusement parks, you know, 60 years before Disneyland. And we're going to get into the actual incentives, the economic incentives, why they were, you know, rather crappy.

25:46It said 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, OK, this, you know, the germination is 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 that 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.

26:20And 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 an amusement park after seeing Coney Island. The whole place is so run down and ugly. This is Walt Disney speaking, direct quote from him. The people who run it are so unpleasant. The whole thing is almost enough to destroy your faith in human nature. So in the early 1900s, there was little miniature versions of Disneyland just done on a much smaller and like worse scale. And they hold a lot of the same traits that Disney's going to use. They all had single entrances.

26:51They charge admission fees just to get on the grounds. And they offered increasingly elaborate attractions in a carefully monitored environment. And this blew my mind. This is an absolute wild reason that there were so many small amusement parks. So there's over 20 ,000, they call them lesser imitators of what Disneyland 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.

27:23This 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 are you talking about, David? What does that have to do with the thing? Why was it called Electric Park? It was called Electric Park because it was a child of the trolley car, which was 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 riding electric trolleys to commute to work, right? So during the weekends, no one's working. Their ridership drops.

27:52That's a big problem because they have to pay power companies for electricity every day, no matter how few fares they 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 and five days of revenue, 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.

28:25They 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 opportunity is 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 that took me, like I was in book 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.

28:53There's nobody in the world that could build an 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 an amusement park? They're 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 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.

29:22And so in 1952, his original idea is 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 the whole time. No one has experience for something that's never been done before.

29:51And it is during this futile search for an architect because he can't find somebody that's ever built it because nothing like this has ever been 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. What 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.

30:18His studio people would have to do it. And so one of the first problems that Walt Disney needs to solve, he got to figure out where now that Burbank won't let him put the park over there where's this thing going to be so he 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 they're 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 and my four -year -old son we've my daughter to this too, but we've watched, I've lost track.

30:55Toy Story is one of my favorite kids movies ever, 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 had Toy Story on the brain the last decade. So anyways, now he's going through, what's fascinating to me is Disney is a superb storyteller, master storyteller, everybody that runs into him from the time he's like an 18 year old kid until he's in his 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 what's shocking, it's very similar. He uses this, he does this on the television show as well.

31:27Right now he's telling the story to recruit and empower the people that are going to help build him, build the park, right? But then he tells the story to get people excited to actually come to, for, for not just employees and builders and planners, but actually customers and guests are as he calls them. And so this is the subscription 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 an amusement park at a time where most parks were planned as a grid with four side and access entrances. So he would go in and part of his planning would he go and talk to other amusement park owners and they're like your single entrance idea is the stupidest thing ever.

32:08People don't like to walk. You need to have multiple entrances close to parking lots. And so again, going back to that note I referenced earlier, the creation of Disneyland was Walt Disney's personal taste in physical form. That's the 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. Rather, once the guests entered, they'd pass through a turn of the century main street, which would end in a circular plaza or town square. The area would then feed off into four thematic activity areas, the World of Tomorrow, Fantasyland, Frontierland, and Adventureland.

32:46More things he did different than his competitors. Most amusement parks wanted 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 Ferris wheel and tunnel of love. Rides would be subordinate to story. But most alarming of all, this entertainment anonymously had to be open in just two years. And so a problem they ran into right away is they looked at a few other locations. As soon as word got out that Disney might be buying, building his amusement park there, all these other realtors and real estate investors would go out and buy up the property.

33:25So he's like, okay, how do we solve this problem? They actually do it 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 leaked to the local papers that Disney is planning an amusement park in the San Fernando 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 up property around it. And so once Disney has his land, he actually drives, remember, these are just orange groves, right?

33:59And he drives his friend out there to tell him the story of what he's going to build. this guy named Art Linkletter, who's one of the most famous TV hosts in the country. And I just think his response is hilarious. And so it says, Disney pulled the car over. We got out and Walt began vividly describing Disneyland, the acres of colorful buildings and places and all the names of the places like Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, 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.

34:27I 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 Palm 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 a distraction and then roy realizes oh this isn't going away i 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 where they were fighting over business they didn't speak to each other for two years which is wild and so So Roy, Walt's always saying, you know, Roy's trying to hold me back.

35:26And really Roy's saving his ass 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 thought it was funny where, you know, Walt's talking about this adversarial relationship that his older brother always has with him. He's holding him back. And it says, Roy saw their relationship differently. When Walt and I were little, we lived on a farm and we had to sleep in the same bed.

35:59Now, 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, again, I love the role that Roy plays, but I just couldn't imagine. In fact, there's this 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 complementary talents. And Roy was fine in being in Walt's shadow. You know, there was a hundred times the amount of people that knew Walt Disney than knew Roy Disney. And there's this great description of their relationship in the book.

36:39And it's talking about Roy's perception of this unique understanding that, no, my brother is supremely talented. He's a one in 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 talent of his own, was a genius of his own. This is how somebody worked with both of them for a long time. It says, Walt was the front man and Roy was in the background.

37:16In 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 went in all in on Snow White. They're going all in on Disneyland. Roy always saved the day. If it hadn't been for my big brother, Walt said, I'd swear I'd be 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 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 because the banks are not going to give you money. It's just not going to happen.

37:47Disney Studios 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 groves at this point.

38:21It 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 unbelievably 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 that ABC needed my television show so damn bad, they bought an amusement park. That made me laugh. I laughed out loud when I read that. So I'm going to give you a summary of how he builds his pitch deck. OK, and it's remarkable how fast he moves as well. So he calls up a former employee on a Saturday morning.

38:52He says, hey, come down to the studio. I want to tell you about something. He tells him about Disneyland. This guy's name is Herb Ryman. Herb Ryman is like, that sounds fantastic. And he's like, great. He asked Herb 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. In many cases, a lot of the great leaders and entrepreneurs in history, they resemble cult leaders. And so much so that there's like a hundred page chapter in that 800 page biography called The Cult.

39:29And 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, he says, hey, I will stay with you the entire time. And so they're eating like, it sounded gross to me. They're eating 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 was in Walt Disney's mind. 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 Ryman's patient skill was remarkably close to what two years and many millions of dollars later would rise from the vanished orange groves of Anaheim, California to tease the imagination of the entire world.

40:13So this is 1953. Okay. And television is literally going to save Disney. Now, what is remarkable is one of other Disney's heroes, in addition to Henry Ford, was this guy named 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 hero's company. They were being his distributor at the time. This is back in 1936. They wound up having falling out, him and United Artists, because the United Artists was pushing him. They're like, hey, we want future rights to broadcast your Disney movies on TV. Disney broke with that.

40:47He's like, absolutely not. And the crazy thing I said last week, it's fourth out. There was 4000 TVs in the entire world when he made this decision. No, 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. Think about this. This decision, right, this holding to this absolute control, and he always was a technologist. Like, yeah, he built a media company, but he always utilized technology and was a fan of technology.

41:19He understood way, this is something that's going to come up in the story over again. 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 had like a meeting, I think I covered this later on, where he's at a meeting and they're like yelling at him. They're calling him a traitor. He's like, you don't understand, this is an ally. I'm gonna get into that. But I really need to like, I wanna spend some time here so you and I don't ever forget this.

41:51Again, he makes this decision in 1936. 1953, it's going to give him the funding of the park and then be the greatest promotional tool for his business that has ever existed. And so this idea that I wrote myself, and these are the notes that you can find in Founders Notes too, this decision paid dividends 20 years later. Hold on. Technology developed by other people constantly benefited Disney's businesses. 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 a deal, right? This is excellent. Every time I got to thinking of television, I would think of this park.

42:31And 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 signed 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 that was authentic to himself. And the most authentic business, the business that was most authentic to himself, which is many such cases in the history of entrepreneurship.

43:13This is why I say like the myth of this, you know, young entrepreneurial genius. In almost every case of these stories that you and we've now done what, 350 of them together. The greatest work that somebody does does not come in the first decade of their career. It is many, many, many decades into their 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 Katrini'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 these other studio heads and the head of MGM said, you're being a traitor to the motion picture industry.

43:52Listen 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. 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 this last week, he does this documentary about the creation of the movie 20 ,000 Leagues Under the Sea. People find it entertaining. It has to be a standalone, interesting piece of content on its own.

44:26But if you're able to produce something like that, then what's the result? Are movie sales going to go up or down? You get to the end of an hour -long documentary about how this movie was built, you go watch that documentary. And so this is the deal they signed 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 it, Disney got paid to advertise his park. That's the way you think about it. They're paying him $50 ,000 a show during the first year, $60 ,000 a show in the second, and $70 ,000 a show in the third year.

45:02The 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 to 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 where he had no experience. He just trusted if I can assemble a group of talented people, they'll figure it out along the way. This is hilarious. I love this story. Bill Walsh remembered that he was going through a period of frequently running into his boss in hallways and parking lots.

45:31When one day Walt stopped him and said, hey, you, you be the producer of my TV show. Walsh was dumbfounded. Huh? I don't have any experience as 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 amusement park. He says, I do not want anyone hired who has anything to do with an amusement park. He optimized for talent. He wanted to train his own people. He said over and over again, I think he got like he started cursing about it, too, where he people like when he would recruit from other like animation studios.

46:07He said he had to put up with their goddamn poor working habits from doing cheap pictures. He believed it was 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. he essentially created 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 anytime they were doing something new like an amusement park there was mandatory training in fact there's an 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 Disneyland, the reaction was unanimous.

46:56Disneyland would not work. All the proven moneymakers 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 sideshows. So they say without barkers, the marks won't go in. Now think about that. They didn't call them customers. They didn't call them guests. They called 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 aren't rides, so there's no economic reason to build them.

47:28There's too many things here that do not produce revenue. Walt's screwy ideas about cleanliness and great landscape maintenance are 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 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 what he's really trying to build. And he said this over and over again.

48:03It's much closer to a motion picture than it is amusement park. And so he realizes, well, there's a good place for me to recruit talent. And that is my studio. That's Hilarious because he set up a separate company. This is W .E .D. It's separate from Walt Disney Studios. And so in designing Disneyland, we thought of the park as if it were a three -dimensional film. We wanted everything that guests experience, not only the 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 turned them into attractions. Disney, this is hilarious, Disney continued to prowl through the studio, tapping people for his park.

48:38Some of them would only be gone for a few weeks or months, and in some, as it turned out for years. The staff members left behind began referring to the new project as Cannibal Island. That is hilarious. They had eaten into their workforce 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 high levels, 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 like he had these giant ships and you have to build your own entire river.

49:17And so he's going to recruit this admiral, this former admiral from the U .S. Navy, this guy named Joe Fowler, who's going to work. Not only does he help build Disneyland, but he winds up building Disney World as well. And listen to this exchange. He goes to meet him. He says, there was no discussion of any specific job, but as the visitors made their farewells, Walt said to him, Joe, I'd like you to come down next week and have a look at Disneyland. we'll 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.

49:49I'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 excused himself. He said he had to go see Rush's from the previous day's filming. I'll be gone for 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.

50:22That 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 this 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's like, okay, I need all these mature trees. The problem with buying mature trees are they're really, really expensive.

50:58You'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 $500 each. They don't have enough money to buy the amount of trees they need if they're $500 each. This is how they figure out a way to buy them for $20 each. Bill was friends with the head of landscape architecture for the California Department of Transportation, and he got advance 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 Ana Freeways all yielded trees for Disneyland.

51:31then. We paid $25 for 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, a 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.

52:06That 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 more founders should do this. They're in the best position to tell the customers why. Why does the product exist? Why is it so important to you? In fact, one of the best descriptions 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.

52:40I think I talked about this 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 foist 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 talking about his thinking of why he did this. He says, I don't consider myself an actor or anything.

53:10That's the greatest thing. It's like trying to be authentic, right? But in trying to get ahold of these things, I can introduce them. I can get them going. I'm 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 anything was a new project, that's exactly what he did internally. You know, if he had to marshal resources to try to do something new, like when he wanted to make the world's first full length animated movie in Snow White, he just marshaled his team together and he told a story. He's like, I'm just going to be doing that now, except instead of just telling my employees, I'm telling the entire world.

53:40And 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 it was somewhat of a contradiction because, you know, he cursed, he smoked, he chain smoked cigarettes and he drank. And so what's fascinating is before the show, they made this like potion, they called 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 mixed with wine, mixed with alcohol, and it would take the edge off and make him less nervous before he went on the air.

54:15And so this goes back to this idea that the creation of Disneyland was just Walt Disney's personal taste in 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 him was being interviewed. And he says in the very early months, like the very beginning of Disney, he says, you asked the question, what was our process like? I kind of laugh because process is an organized way of doing things. I have to remind you during the Walt, the Walt period of designing Disneyland.

54:45We 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 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 then let's go back to this informal way of recruiting. And I really think it speaks to what James Dyson was just saying. It's like, you know, the founder of the company, your enthusiasm is infectious.

55:23If 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 he recruited 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 in. So this is where he starts. He's recruiting this guy named Van Arsdale. Van Arsdale, France, actually. And he's going to run this school, this essentially training school for all the cast members that are going to work at the theme parks.

55:53And it is amazing to me how many people that were really important in building Disneyland were actually, they developed skills during the war, during World War II, that were directly transferable to the work they wound up doing for Walt. So during the war, Van worked for Consolidated Aircraft Corporation. He was in charge of their training. And so keep that in 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 dapper looking fellow in a sports shirt entered the office and plopped down into the chair.

56:25Without 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 artist 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 in construction. Disney took out a cigarette and he began to speak. This is his recruiting, right? As I listened 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.

57:01You can literally transfer your enthusiasm for your project to other people. He even returned. He even turned to me, an 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.

57:39And one of the smartest thing that Van does is he imbibes their work with a sense of meaning. This is what stories do. This is why the storyteller is the 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 he's doing, and his response is, I'm laying bricks. To the same question, the other man answers, I'm building a cathedral.

58:16I don't want to go through my life thinking I'm just laying bricks. I'd much rather go through life believing, believing. It only works if you truly believe it, then I'm building a cathedral. And part of that is really important that companies should have their own, 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 hosts and hostesses.

58:42We 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 to describe it should support the magical experiences.

59:16It's excellent. Customers are to be called guests. Those who sell the customer's ice cream are called hosts 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 escaped the audience for a break, they do so offstage, 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 a parking lot. They call the outer lobby. Another theme that reoccurs over and over again, especially as they get closer to, they have a deadline.

59:55Like 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 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. 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 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's going to be, you know, I think around 80 % actually complete.

1:00:25But 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, what I'm about to describe to you is 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.

1:00:58It's the time invested. And so they wind up finishing. What are these going to be? These like horse drawn like stagecoaches. And so every single time one of his employees is like, let's just cut this corner. Let's, you know, go 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.

1:01:31They will appreciate it. His employee didn't argue and he said, we put the best damn leather straps on that stagecoach you've ever seen. And that's just a reoccurring theme. And it's detail 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.

1:02:02Collectively, 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 of 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 Walt Disney, 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 wrought iron.

1:02:39They're 40 feet in the air. Nobody could tell the difference. It's that relentless adherence to this principle. And, you know, that's what he said. He's like, look, 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 like this beautifully simple and very powerful idea that he had. And one thing that's obvious that is 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 like this attention to details, not just superficial things. Like attention to detail saved him multiple times.

1:03:12And 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 him 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 engineer is 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.

1:03:47They 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 had seen how they managed it. He knew that the surveyor's 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 not adhere to the deadline. And the reason the deadline can't move is because it 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.

1:04:35All 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, it's 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 and this story kind of humanizes him so he does say 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 what really speaks to the love that he had for the work that he was doing at this point in his year 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.

1:05:27I want a 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, in a 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.

1:05:58He just climbed in the backseat of my car and he's smashed. He's just absolutely smashed at this point. He climbed in the backseat of my car. He had a map of Disneyland and he rolled it up and tooted 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.

1:06:35So it looked like the 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. They're literally working on the park right before the show goes live. And really the main point behind all this is you 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 at Disney, but there's just always things. You never get to the point where it's like, oh, everything's working, functioning properly.

1:07:02This is perfect. There's nothing else we need to improve. That state of affairs never exists. And I think reading this book and especially this chapter is just that constant reminder. And even a legend like Disney, he goes to bed the night before their 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.

1:07:32He just wasn't feeling good. But what's fascinating is the day that it came, the opening day, he put on a good front, even if he wasn't feeling good. He 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 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 17th, 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.

1:08:10But what was fascinating is the The guy, his friend, Art Linkletter, which one of the most famous talk show hosts that he took out when it was just Orange Groves and trying to tell him the story. 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 ad lib, good hosts, but I don't have any money to pay you. And Linkletter 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.

1:08:44But Linkletter was a very sophisticated entrepreneur too. And he's like, listen, I will do it. And in 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, Linkletter 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 a lifetime, he tried to convince friends of his like, hey, buy up all the land that I'm now using on Disneyland.

1:09:19Please 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, you know, they can try to control that as much as possible. If you've ever been to Disney World, they want to own the hotel. 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 are with what you have. In Anaheim, at the opening of Disney, right? Before Disney opened, rather, they had a total of 87 hotel rooms.

1:09:52And so because they can't have the money to develop the hotels themselves, they actually signed an agreement with Outsiders, which is very un -Disney -like at this point. but they just do the best deal possible. So they do a 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.

1:10:34And so as you can imagine, the day of the opening, a ton goes wrong. The show goes off really well. But considering how fast they did this in one year and one day, you know, it says that Disney knew better than anybody else that the park had 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, but 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.

1:11:02The boat got stranded. It ran off the track. So the guests had to swim to shore. The asphalt was still soft because it was so hot and they had 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 were called Autotopia, 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.

1:11:38And 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, they're 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.

1:12:19This is the goal. This is what I'm working towards. They understand that, hey, the way that Disneyland was on day one is not how it's going to be. It's going to be constantly this evolving, living, breathing thing. A note I left myself earlier in the book, which I don't know if I read to you, was that Disneyland, his goal for Disneyland 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 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.

1:12:54And one excerpt from this review is,

1:13:15And 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, in 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 plussing, his term for improving what was already there and 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.

1:13:53A 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. Highly 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.

1:14:24Another way to support the podcast if you want is to buy Founders merch. That is available at founderspodcast .com. That is 347 books down, 1 ,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon. When you read about or you listen to this history of Disneyland, the creation of Disneyland, this ever -evolving idea, what 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.

1:15:02Relationships run the world. That is a main theme from the issue 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, in return, I ask them to give you the best possible deal. That is very straightforward, very easy to understand. What I did not understand going into this is how valuable it is for both people. So let me give you an example. I was talking about Vesto for a long time. Way before I talked about Vesto, that's V. People say I slur my words.

1:15:33So it's Vesto. V as in Victor. E as in Egg. S as in Senra. T as in Tom, O as in Oprah .com. Vesto. I'll try to say it clearly. Well, before I ever talked about the podcast, I got to know Ben every time he comes through Miami. We either have dinner together or we go for long walks. We have a bunch of mutual founder friends. And the reason I found out about his company is because I had two separate founder friends on two opposite ends of the founder spectrum, if you will. One was a bootstrapped giant company. The other one was a venture -backed And yet both of them were using Vesto to get a higher rate on their business's idle cash.

1:16:09And so that is the feature I discussed on previous podcasts. But what was fascinating is, one, if you go to Vesto .com and you scheduled a demo, right, you talk to the actual founder, Ben. So if you wind up doing this, please, when you talk to Ben, tell them that David from Founders sent you. But what was fascinating is what happened is Ben had called me and he said a new product was being pulled out of him by the founder's audience. And so as he was doing these founder calls with these businesses that hide idle cash that they wanted higher returns from, they're like, hey, I have another problem.

1:16:39Is there a way you can solve this as well? And the problem was that in many cases, they owned more than one business or they owned different subsidiaries in different countries. They had accounts at different banks. They essentially wanted a way to reconcile and to 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.

1:17:11And then once you can see everything live, if you have a bunch of idle cash, you can then ask Vesto to uncover your idle 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 a demo. You talk to Ben. Tell him Dave from Founders sent you, and he'll give you $500 off. In the coming weeks, I'll talk more about this 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.

1:17:38All 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 them Dave from Founders 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.