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Walt Disney

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2024-04-22

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2024-04-22

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1. “And 35 years into his career, he finally found what he wanted a living, breathing, endless masterpiece. He told one interviewer that Disneyland will never be finished, that it will be a living thing that will need changes. He called Disneyland my baby and said I would prostitute myself for it. He said that working, planning, and developing it gave him endless pleasure. Wal Disney always needed action. I've got to have a project all the time, he said, something to work on. Otherwise he had no place to direct his nervous energy. I want this Disney thing to go on long after I'm gone. Disney was run from the top down, but there were no middlemen, wrote one employee at the time. At the top, alone, like Napoleon, was our leader and captain, El Hefe, Numero Uno, the man, the boss, Walter Elias Disney. All things started with Walt, and Walt had the final”

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2. “And on the opening day, his daughter said that she had never seen him happier, that it was one of the best days of his life. And even on one of the best days of his life, this micromanaging trait, this inherent, it was just part of him. Listen to this. He had never been a man to indulge his pride or rest on his laurels. At the end of the day, the longest and quite possibly the best day of Walt Disney's life, in spite of the numerous calamities, he had dinner on the patio with another one of his employees, of the apartment that he had an apartment and he like lived at Disneyland. That's how obsessed he was with it, right? So he's having dinner with somebody that one of his employees on the patio of the apartment, and he watched the fireworks display over the park. His employee noticed that Walt kept taking notes during the show. What was he doing? A stickler for detail, even amid the pandemonium. He was counting the rockets being shot off to confirm that he was getting the full number.”

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3. “He loved the idea that he had to prove himself right again, waging the same old battles that he once had to wage in making the animated features. He didn't want anyone on the staff who had amusement park experience because he told them Disneyland wouldn't be an amusement park and because we want young, talented people that are willing to learn and make mistakes. And of course he's micromanaging. Another line here. He walked over every inch of Disneyland. Another great line. Walt did not want to cut corners, did not want to compromise his vision when an employee suggested that he used cut glass instead of stained glass in an attraction. Walt objected. Listen to this line. Look, the thing that's going to make Disneyland unique and different is the detail. If we lose the detail, we lose it all. It is the detail. If we lose the detail, we lose it all. He wanted to change everything about amusement parks, including the language that you use to describe it. I did an episode. It sounds funny, but one of the most impressive ones.”

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4. “Disneyland that Walt Disney cared about. The park was his dream now. Television was just a means to that end. Everyone knew that he was only tangentially involved with the other projects. Studios are still doing animated movies. He's completely checked out. The difference was that on weekends and evenings and sitting on the toilet and all that stuff, he wasn't thinking about our pictures. He was thinking about Disneyland. He was always thinking about Disneyland. And he uses the same idea for Disneyland as he did for the studio. He goes out and he visits. He's planning Disneyland. And at the time, amusement parks, you know, they were looked at as like places for suckers. They were dirty. They were terrible. And everybody was telling Disney, Disney's like, why would you do that? They're horrible places. Like, that's the point. Ours won't. While we were planning Disneyland, every amusement park operator, we talked to said it would fail. And what would come out of these meetings even happier than if they'd been optimistic. He loved to fight.”

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5. “Running it through this company called WED, which is his initials. He says, so he's in the bungalow all the time, the very initial planning stages, working hand in hand with the people developing the idea from Disneyland. He had this idea that Disneyland should be an outdoor movie set, by the way. And he says, damn it, I love it here. This is just like the Hyperion Studio. This is way before Disney was successful. It's like the very early days. This is just like the Hyperion Studio used to be in the years when we were always working on something new. It was a small, joyous community. At WED, you no longer had any big departments to deal with. It was just fun to get back into that small scale again, he said. And so he has this idea for the park, but he's got no money again. So he's like, what am I going to do? What do you think he does? He goes to build the prototype and to get the idea, the basic idea going. He goes and borrows another mortgage and he borrows against his life insurance policy. He also talked to a bunch of true believers inside the company and employees started loaning money to them to bridge the gap before he.”

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6. “I don't want to do that. So it actually sets up a bungalow. He starts doing the initial work. He has this old bungalow at the edge of the studio lot. It's a different company entirely. And that excitement of working in a small company with talented people chasing an unlimited opportunity is what he's captured again. And he talks about this. He's happier than he had been in years.”

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7. “And so, this is where he gets his new obsession. This is Disneyland. This is the remarkable thing. So shortly before he died, he said the two things he was most proud of was starting and keeping control of a second company and then Disneyland. Disneyland is his greatest creation. And if you look at the arc and the career of most entrepreneurs, like world-class, history-grades entrepreneurs, they do, in almost every case, they do the best work many, many decades into their career. Steve Jobs was what, 25, 30 years into his career when he did the iPhone. Walt Disney is 35 years into his career when he does Disneyland. Surprisingly, there is only one chapter in this book on Disneyland. It is far too important just to dedicate one chapter to it. What I'm going to do is a day after, maybe a day or two after I release this episode, I'm going to re-release this episode I did on that's dedicated. There's an entire book I read called Disney's Land, which is about how he built Disneyland. And so almost as a way of...”

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8. “So knowing Disney, like we know up until this point, you know what his next move is, he needs, he has, it's not that he wants, not that he desires. He needs to do something new, something different, something unusual. He has this maxim that he would remind himself that you can't top pigs with pigs. And he talks a little about this. He says, the thing I resent most is people will try to keep me in well-worn grooves. We have to keep blazing new trails. He kept a slogan pasted inside of his hat. From the time he had been urged to make a sequel to the three little pigs he made the three little pigs movie. He was wildly commercially successful, so they're like, make a three little pigs number two and three little pigs number three. And he didn't because he had this mantra and he repeat it and then he put inside of his hat to remind him. He says you can't top pigs with pigs.”

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9. “Make the final decision. And so he is looking for a new way to micromanage a new thing to pour everything, all of his outlets into because here's the thing. The war lasts. There's like a five-year break between doing all this war work and trying to go back to feature-length animation, try to capture Disney's former glory. And it's over. You can't do that after a five-year break. And you just see that he's completely checked out. He begun to lose his footing and his confidence. His brother Roy was pressuring him to slash budgets and begin another round of layoffs. He had come to a terrible, almost crippling realization. Remember, this is a terrible crippling realization because Disney put excellence above excellence of the product above everything else. Even if he were to move ahead with a few of his feature film ideas, they would never be as good as the films he had made before the war, never as beautifully animated, never as deliberately plotted, never as painstakingly fussed over, never as fully the product of a near religion.”

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10. “He hated. He disliked Disney like a lot of the entrepreneurs in U.S. study. He hated committees. And the level of his micromanagement, it can't be overstated. This is crazy. So he would micromanage every detail down to the point where he even knew the entire inventory he had memorized. He knew the entire inventory of studio equipment, including the number of light bulbs they had in stock. That is when he's making films. He is like that later too. He walks over every single inch of Disneyland. He memorized the exact heights of every single building in Disneyland. This is the only way he knew how to work, and it was also the biggest complaint for the people that worked for him. The most prevalent complaint I recorded about Walt by his producers, writers, directors, and management is that he would not delegate creative authority in Walt's own words. A studio cannot be run by a committee. Somebody, one person has to make.”

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11. “This constant search for something else that he could direct his obsession and his talent to, and pour his entire love and soul into like he did in animation in the earlier in his career. And so Walt is forty years old, just a few years removed from his greatest commercial and artistic triumph. Now he has a studio that he dislikes because of strike. The World War II's full and full flames, and now his student is essentially commandeered by the US government. Again, success is rarely a straight line. He's 20 years into his career. He is 40 years old, and he's in a terrible position. Disney Studio was no longer the Disney Studio. It was now an educational and industrial film facility and an arm of the government, with Walt virtually commuting from Los Angeles to Washington. He was always frustrated that minor bureaucrats would review his storyboards and issue warnings and orders, where previously he had been the ultimate power. That's exactly what he wanted. He wanted ultimate power, ultimate control. He wanted to micromanage anything that got in his way, his ability to micromanage it.”

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12. “He has this ongoing need for challenge. And I think it comes from this inner turmoil. And he was afraid to get into a rut. He said, if we quit growing mentally and artistically, we begin to die. I do not want to be relegated to the cartoon medium. It should not be limited to cartoons. We have worlds to conquer here. That is his line. We have worlds to conquer here. And so at this point, he is right now at the apex of his career. He has never known success as he has at this point in time and one of the worst tragedies that happens in his entire life happens. He buys his mom and dad a house. There's this gas furnace, and it powers a central gas heater and it keeps getting backed up. His mom is going to die in the house that he gave her a year after Snow White, which is his greatest success. Walt is 37 years old when this happens. We better get this furnace fit.”

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13. “So important to her. More important than I am, and that's kind of heartbreaking. But when you're small, you are the most important person in their life. And Walt really just hits on this beautifully. He said they used to love to go with me in those days, he would reminisce. And that was some of the happiest days of my life. They were in love with their dad.”

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14. “Telling how six year old Diane asked him if he was Walt Disney. You know I am, he answered The Walt Disney, she questioned. When he said that he was, she asked for his autograph. He would chase the girls around the house cackling like the witch from Snow White, or he would twirl them endlessly by their heels for hours and hours and hours. Diane would say he would stand in the swimming pool and let them climb on his shoulders. I thought my father was the strongest man in the world and the most fun she recalled. At night he read to them, and on weekends he would take them to either Griffin Park to ride the merry go round or to the studio, where they would follow him as he snooped about and pedal their bikes around the empty grounds while he worked. This is the part that Willie chooks you up if you have kids because he's saying this, you know, they're not little kids anymore. And I've already gone through this. Like the difference between a four-year-old and a 12-year-old, you know, like you're not, the first five, my daughter, her friends.”

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15. “And so he says, he griped that when he hired veteran animators, he had to put up with their goddamn poor working habits from doing cheap pictures. It was easier, he believed, to start from scratch with young art students and indoctrinate them in the Disney system. And so their education doesn't stop when their graduate art school and come to Disney. Again, he has this, he has Disney University or whatever they call it, these man- What is he doing? He's brainwashing them. The intention was not just education, it was infatuation. As always, Walt wanted the studio employees to be besotted as he was with the notion of excellence he wanted obsession.”

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16. “Binder. He was a spell binder. We were just carried away. And so he sells his entire company on, hey, let's marshal our resources. Let's be focused. No one's ever done this before. But if we can do it, we can make it a massive success. Here's the problem. To make a feature length cartoon, DZIC is going to need a lot of animators. I love weird ways people hire, weird ways people recruit. So what he does, he's like, okay, let's send letters to all the art schools across the country. We're going to list the kinds of skills that we need and encourage people that have those skills to apply. They do this for a long time, not just for Snow White. In the next decade, they're going to get 30,000 new applicants from just sending letters to art school saying, hey, these are the skills we have. Are you interested in being the best of the best? Apply here. His demand for animators far outstrip supply. And so he has to bridge the gap. He's got to hire these like veteran animators. And he's so pissed off about doing this.”

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17. “Is my mantra? And he's like, okay, like there's a lot of energy in his shorts. Like, what if we just did one feature length animated movie? And people were like, just like Pixar? And people, you can't make a computer, the world's first computer animated feature film. They go on to do it. It changes the course of their entire company. This is Disney's version of that is with Snow White. He's just like, how much would a full length, if we're making a little bit of money on these animated shorts, like how much would a full length feature film cartoon make? And everybody's like, you can't do this, never been done again. And again, this goes back to storytelling. This goes back to cult of personality. This goes back to enthusiasm. Walt told us this idea of developing the story Snow White, and honestly, the way that boy can tell us story is nobody's business. I was practically in tears during some of it, and I've read that story many times as a child without being particularly moved by it. If it should turn out one-tenth as good as the way he tells it, it would be incredible. He was a spell.”

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18. “Walt made more money from the rights to Mickey merchandise than from the cartoons. It was a line in George Lucas' autography, something like he made three times as much on Star Wars toys as he did the movies and Star Wars printed money, if I remember correctly, had $11 million budget and made $775 million at the box office. That's just Star Wars One. And yet he's tripling that on toys and merchandise. Disney became the first studio to recognize that one could harvest enormous profits from film related toys, games, clothing, and other products.”

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19. “Better condition in the morning to carry on the work. He seldom traveled and admitted that he would rather spend vacation at home. That changes later in life. Him and Lilyian would travel a bunch, especially after their kids are out of the house. And then let's get into another innovation. This is a business model innovation that Disney came up with. And this is just blew my mind. This is the importance. Again, everybody gets to the top of the profession. They understand that learning. What did Charlie Munger say? Learning from history is a form of leverage. What I'm about to read to you, and this entire thing, this is a huge theme. One of the largest parts of Disney's business is going to be merchandise. For the life of me, this is happening decades before George Lucas is negotiating with 20th century Fox about maintaining the merchandise. George Lucas wanted to make sure he maintained the right to do sequels and the right to own the merchandise for Star Wars. And they just gave it up.”

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20. “He's like, no, no, we're telling a story here, and actions express priority. Walt demonstrated that story was king, and he did so through his actions because he had appointed for the very first time in the industry a head of a new department called the Story Department. There was no such thing as the story department in any other. It was something unheard of in any other animation studio at the time. And this is not all upside. This relentless pressure, it's changing him just like his work's changing. It's changing him too. When he was young, he was like outgoing. It says he was gregarious and outgrowing. Now all of his enthusiasm, all of his time is eventually going to be split with his kids. But at this point, all of it is going into the studio. And now he's personality's changed. He is withdrawn outside of the studio. He essentially has two modes of his entire life, work and family, family and work, work.”

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21. “Endlessly analyzed to make sure it worked, to make sure it was up to standards, to make sure that it could not be improved upon. Everything was drawn and redrawn until we could say this is the best that we can do. And so there's obviously both negative and positive externalities to this. Positive externality is if you have to keep pushing the pace of your entire industry, you're going to wind up inventing new technology, a bunch of the tools, right? Other animators are in this book saying every tool that we use was originated at the Disney studio. That emphasis on analysis would lead to the development of new techniques that would facilitate higher standards in animation and then soon become the standard operating procedure for the entire industry. He did not just innovate in technology. He innovated in company organization too. Before him, animators looked at some silly thing not to be taken seriously. It's all about gag. It's about like one-off.”

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22. “Now, and to say that's all you need to succeed, the truth is that it demoralized me terribly. I would crawl into the house every night covered in dust after a long day, a long day of failure, by the way, exhausted and depressed because that day's work had not worked. There were times when I thought it would never work that would just keep on making, he's trying to make a cyclone vacuum, making cyclone after cyclone, never going forward, never going backwards until I died. The source of his excellence is also the source of this divine discontent, this dissatisfaction, this relentless pressure that he puts on himself over and over again, and he's going to have many, many times where he breaks and gets completely disengaged. This is important to note because it is repeated over and over and over again in every chapter, in every decade of his work. Walt would not repeat, would not okay any animation that did not meet with his very high standards of acceptance. This meant that everything one did had to be analyzed.”

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23. “Against oppressive, unrelenting financial constraints that barely allowed them to survive, and that even now had not loosened, and then the setback in starting his own families talking about he's got all his precious at work. He desperately wanted to be a dad, but unfortunately had a few miscarriages. But when all this built up and instead, all this had accumulated until Walt, who you was usually so self-confident, cracked, and he suffered a breakdown. This is such an important point. It's why I said out of every single book that I've ever read my number one recommendation is still James Dyson's first autobiography against the odds by James Dyson's episode 25. It's episode 200. It's episode 300. It'll be episode 400 and 500 as well. I'm going to read that book every 100 episodes. It's so important because we can celebrate Disney as accomplishments after the fact. But going through this, it's so difficult that any logical person would quit. I'm going to read one paragraph from James License Autobiography. While it is easy, of course, for me to celebrate my dog.”

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24. “Every single award. They made a ton of money. Disney says, I can't even watch them. A decade later, because all I see is the mistakes. All I see is what I could do better today. And yes, this habit, practice over a long period of time by supremely talented individual like Walt Disney is going to build a great product, but it can also break you down. Because just like he drove his staff mercilessly, he drove himself like this. He has multiple nervous breakdowns and health problems throughout his entire life because of this. He's around 29 years old when this is happening. When he talked on the phone, he would suddenly and unaccountably find himself weeping. At night he couldn't sleep. At the studio, he became physically ill looking at his lace cartoon and unable to see anything but its flaws. The years of fighting and losing and then having to fight back, the years of having to maintain a brave front in the face of loss and betrayal and the years of feeling compelled to produce cartoons so good that Disney would be unassailable in the industry while struggling.”

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25. “Very good. It's by David Ogrovy and the team at Ogrevie and Mather. And it is based, it's a very short book. It's very hard to find. I think it sold out really fast after that episode came out. But it's based on Olgovi's idea of divine discontentment. And Olgovi describes this. He says, we have a habit of divine discontent with our performance. It's an anecdote to smugness. Ogovi had that and Walt Disney had it too. Never content with the quality of what the studio produced, no matter how good a picture we turn out, he said. I can always see ways to improve it when I see the finished product. His entire life. He wanted something that was living, that was ongoing, a product he could always improve. He didn't find that until he was fifty-five, I think. 55 or 56 when he made Disneyland, so much so that he could make the world, you know, some of his, many of his animated cartoons, his animated feature films.”

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26. “His hobby is his work every moment of his time is given over to it. There wasn't a night we didn't end up at the studio his wife recalled. She would curl up on the couch in his office and sleep while Walt worked. She would wake up at different intervals to ask how late it was, to which regardless of the time Walt would answer, oh, it's not that late, honey. Walt admitted years later, listen to this. This is insane. Walt admitted years later that he would turn back his office clock while Lily slept so that she never knew how late he had worked. And if you know that improvement is his mantra, that excellence is his business strategy. Of course he's going to dedicate all this time to it. A couple weeks ago, I did this book. It's episode 343. It is the eternal pursuit of unhappiness. People love that episode. If you haven't listened to it, you should listen to it after this. Episode 343, Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness being very good is no good. You have to be very, very, very, very...”

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27. “Strategy. If you want to know the real secret of Walt's success longtime animator Ward Kimball would say, it's that he never tried to make money. He was always trying to make something that he could be proud of.”

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28. “Still, it's like ever present, and that belief that he had about himself and what he could do was transferable to his employees. Walt struck me as being absolutely sure of himself. He was positive about what he was going to do. He was positive about what we could do. And so Walt's modus operandi is, let's make a bunch of money, and then we're going to reinvest every single dollar and more so that they lose a bunch of money too into the quality of the product. And there's many times, and he does this in animation, he does this in movies, he does this in Disneyland where people are like, oh, we're going to, you know, there's a great way to do it and there's a cheap way to do it. He flips out. His animations could not be compromised. They had to be better than anyone else's, or he would not survive in this business. Again, excellence was Walt Disney's business strategy. His animations could not be compromised. They had to be better than anyone else's, or he would not survive in this business. Excellence was Walt's business.”

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29. “Animated figure, right? Mickey Mouse is about to wax this guy. Was Felix the Cat? He was determined that Mickey Mouse would supplant Felix the Cat. This was inevitable because it says Felix's creator, this guy named Pat Sullivan, had none of Walt Disney's drive or foresight. And so this is when we get into Disney building his cult. That is exactly how it is described in the book. And one way he did this, and I think this is a really good idea, is like he made you believe that by working with him and at Walt Disney Studios, you were part of an elite team that you were not just an animator, you were part of the best animation team in the world. There's a line in the book where one of his employees said, we felt like we were the elite class, like you would be at West Point. And this is where he tells them that the quality of not just what we're making rests on us, right? The quality of the entire animation industry rests on us. That self-belief that everybody notices from the time he's a young man, now he's around in his 30s.”

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30. “Like movies, he uses this at Disneyland. He would hire for enthusiasm and youthful enthusiasm over experience. And he's just like, I'm going to make my own people. And so he winds up starting his own school. And so they'd work all day. And then at night, he would preside over animation classes. I did an episode on Walt Disney and compared and contrasting with Pablo Picasso in episode 310. There's a line in that book says Disney himself trained over a thousand artists. And just like he held his staff to high standards, he held himself to high standards too. You have to understand. Unbelievably talented, unbelievably obsessed, unbelievably dedicated. He was also ruthlessly, ruthlessly competitive. Walt Disney wanted domination, domination that would make his position unassailable. His larger quest was to become the animation overlord, so at the time the most popular”

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31. “Drawing. The biggest difference between the Disney The difference was an expectation Walt Disney had to be the best. He insisted upon excellence. And he would give you the advice train your own train and educate your own team. He was so sick of these people coming from second class. If you hire from experience, the problem is their experience may be several levels below your expectation. He says this. It could be a struggle convincing men who have spent their careers thinking of animation as a throwaway, that they could and must accomplish something better. I have encountered plenty of trouble getting my new man adjusted to our method of working while complain. Part of Walt's secret was that in insisting on quality from individuals of whom it had never been required, he inspired commitment. This is one of his employees describing the environment. We hated to go home at night, and we couldn't wait to get to the office in the morning. We had lots of vitality and we had to work it off. And so how did he train and educate his own team? He uses this for animation. He uses this for fun.”

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32. “And so, this commitment to excellence is something that Walt will repeat decade after decade after decade. Walt had passionately expressed his longstanding conviction that his salvation was in making a product that so excelled that the public would recognize it and enjoy it as the best entertainment and that they would demand to see Disney pictures. That is a direct quote from Walt Disney that the salvation, our salvation is in making a product that's so excelled that the public would recognize it and enjoy it as the best entertainment and that they would demand to see Disney pictures. Now, Walt Disney is expressing an idea that Warren Buffett picked up on and analyzed, and it turns out Warren Buffett thought Walt Disney was obviously successful in what he was trying to do because he talked about later on Warren Buffett would talk about the importance of building a brand that is special in the mind of your customers. And he uses Disney as an example to...”

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33. “Remember correctly, and he had to sell it so they could get parts to build their first product. And so the distributor is able to put Steamboat Willie in theaters all over the country. The reaction from the audience is unbelievable, and so much so that they try to aqua hire Walt Disney. This is very fascinating. And this one paragraph tells you a lot about Disney, one, that he's going to refuse to sell his company. He's not doing it for the money. He's doing it for like he wants to make great products. So why would he sell his company? And then he just believes that quality is his only advantage. The problem was that the distributors, all of them, wanted to buy Walt's studio, not just his cartoons. But Walt was adamant about not selling, about not surrendering control, no matter how badly he needed revenue. Why? Because he didn't want to just be another animation producer. He wanted to be the king of animation. Walt believed that quality was his only real advantage.”

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34. “They said it was unnatural, peculiar, and off putting. You know what he did? You know what Disney did? He previewed it. He put it in front of customers, in front of an audience. And how are they going to react to it? I like this. Why wouldn't they like it? And this was the result. I never saw such a reaction in an audience in my life. The sound itself gave the illusion of something emanating directly from the screen. Walt was ecstatic. He kept saying, this is it, this is it. We've got it. And so this is going to allow him to sign a distribution deal, the distribution deal is going to bring money into the studio. But how did he finance Mickey? He borrowed every single thing he had bought a house earlier, him and his brother, who's his business partner, Roy, they put mortgages and second mortgages on their house in addition to them taking out second mortgages on their house while Disney sold his car to finance his company. Steve Jobs did this in the early day of Apple. He was driving like a Volkswagen bus if I remember.”

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35. “Mickey. And I said it sounded better than Mortimer. And that is how Mickey was born. So let's go back to this opportunity as a strange beast. It frequently appears after a loss. This causes him to invent the sound cartoon. Okay, so he starts drawing Mickey Mouse. I think, so everybody, well, maybe everybody doesn't know this, but probably his biggest hit that he needed when he was younger, he's around 27, 28 years old at this point in his life. He makes the world's first sound cartoon. It is Steamboat Willie. It is actually the third Mickey Mouse cartoon, but the first two didn't get distributed because it was missing something. And Disney believed that it was perfectly logical that, you know, you're watching other things. They're like, if sound is coming out of live action, sound's how we communicate with one another. Why isn't sound coming out of cartoons? At the time, people would criticize this. They said drawings are not vocal. Why should a voice come out of a cartoon character? That criticism is coming from within his field. That is other animators talking to Disney.”

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36. “that you seek is found in the work the only thing you can do is get back to work that is the only proper response so on the way home on the train he's got nothing his entire business has been taken from him and what is he doing he's spending the entire time on the train drawing and sketching and trying to create new characters and then using those characters as a basis to make more animated cartoons so he can sell the cartoons and get back on track and so it is on this train ride across the country that he starts drawing a mouse. And thankfully, his wife was with him because he draws the mouse. She thinks the character looks great, but she's like, that is a great character and a terrible name. Why? Because Walt Disney wanted to call Mickey Mouse Mortimer Mouse. And his wife said that was a horrible name and I made quite a scene about it. So they go back and forth after a while and Walt asked her, what do you think about the name?”

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37. “With Charles Mintz's company, not his own. And so it says Walt had no rights to the character that Walt had created, thus leaving Walt no recourse. This is so important. Why? He says Walt had nothing, no character, no contract, no staff, save for the very few who remain loyal, no plan. He would talk often of this episode as a betrayal saying that he had to control what you had or could be taken from you, and now he had seen how duplicitous the business world could be. And so now he's on the train back home to Los Angeles. His wife is terrified. They have no money. He's got no characters. It looks like he doesn't have a business. She is crying. And what happens? There's a line in one of this interviews I heard. I was watching on Kobe Bryant one day, and he talked about this. You know, he went to a ton of adversity. And he says, well, when you're going through something, what other choice do you have but to go through it? And Kobe's perspective, in other words, was that the solution.”

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38. “In the process, Disney realized he had signed a bad deal because in the agreement, Disney had no rights to the character that he created. Remember James Dyson, episode 300? This happened to him well before. And again, this had to happen to him because he took it as a lesson. He's like, oh, okay, this is information. I will improve next time. He had this invention called the ballbarrow, which is a wheelbarrow with a ball that doesn't get stuck in like dirt, right? He's like, I can't understand why for hundreds of years people are using wheelbarrow. It gets stuck. I can improve this. He wind up Dyson's mistake, which he never made a game, was he signed over the patent that was in his name to the company. Then he gets kicked out of the company. So then he loses the rights to his invention because he doesn't have access to the company. The company owns the patent. Very similar situation here. He had signed a deal where the company that he no longer controls all the ownership of the characters at Disney invented relied resided rather.”

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39. “Person and help develop skills that he needed to continue to build his company because he's just going to start over again after this. And so Charles Mintz starts doing these back channels to a bunch of the key employees that are working for Disney. Disney is also like a taskmaster, you know, very difficult person to deal with, very difficult person to work under. He has these unrelenting standards for excellence that he's going to hold you accountable to. And he also is rather naive by his own admission. He says he was never a good judge of people. And so he didn't believe.”

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40. “Give a shit. I'm going to make the best products. Walt Disney was the exact same way. The difference was Steve understood that he had to build a great product or a great company because a great company was the foundation on which would allow him to continue to make great products. Disney struggled with that for his entire career, nearly his entire career, maybe the last like 10% if I had finally figured that out. And so one of the mistakes Disney makes here, and I don't think he had a choice. So I think he had to make mistakes. I think this is inevitable. And I think this wind up being one of the best undoubtedly had to be one of the best things that ever happened to Disney because without this, it's not at all clear that he would have invented Mickey Mouse and later in his life, Walt Disney said, I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing, that this was all started by a mouse. And it's this theft by Charles Mintz of his characters, of not only Alice in Wonderland, or Alice's Wonderland, but also this Rabbit Oswald the Rabbit that”

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41. “Margaret gets pregnant and Charles Mintz is the reason that Mickey Mouse exists because Charles Mintz steals Disney's company from him. This is so important. And to understand why this happened, you understand what was important to Walt Disney. He was not, he's like a reluctant entrepreneur. And I think these two sentences give you an idea of that. Walt was never interested in building an operation or running a business. He was interested in improving product as a matter of personal pride and psychological need. What does that mean? He sincerely wanted to make good animations and sincerely wanted to be counted among the best at his craft. The one difference between Walt Disney and C. Jobso, Steve Jobs said that those exact same desires and need. It's like, I have to make literally, you never chase the market share. Think about the decades people made fun of him because Microsoft had all this market share. Steve's like, I have to be the best. I have to make the best products. And that means I don't have the most market share.”

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42. “Important decisions he ever makes. Think about how crazy this is because we and I know from our vantage point the run that he's about to go on, right? It's going to have tons of ups and downs, but he gets to Hollywood in 1923. He's going to die in 1966. And if you think about what he builds in Hollywood over the next four decades, he arrives in Hollywood with nothing but a borrowed suit. And it says a peculiar self-confidence, a borrowed suit and peculiar self-confidence.”

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43. “He ate from a can, since he's living in the office, he doesn't have any money, he only takes a bath or a shower once a week, and he goes downtown to like the local YMCA. And I think pays like a nickel or a dime so he can shower there. And he's losing so much weight and he looks so bad that everybody around him, the older people in the community, think he has tuberculosis. And eventually he can't stave this off any longer. So this is when he declares bankruptcy. And it is during this time, probably the darkest time in his young adult life that one of his greatest traits is revealed. He's got this bulletproof optimism. Listen to this. Throughout the failures, throughout the days without meals and nights with restless sleep, throughout the constant begging for funds, throughout it all, Walt Disney seemed never to lose his faith. I never once heard Walt say anything that would sound like defeat. He was always optimistic about his ability and the value of his ideas and about the possibilities of cartoons and the entertainment.”

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44. “Educational films on dental hygiene for a dentist. This is the state of affairs before he has a big hit. He's going to do this live action cartoon called Alice's Wonderland, not Alice in Wonderland. It's called Alice's Wonderland. And so he can't pay rent. So he's sleeping in his office. He has to get his meals on credit when that credit runs out.”

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45. “One minute cartoon. So he's launching into a market with rather weak demand. And I think there's two things that serve him really well. It's just like intense drive and self-belief. It says there's such a great line. He's one of the most unusual people you could possibly study with a podcast full of unusual people. It says he had the drive and ambition of 10 million men and he had the self-confidence to match. He says, listen, he's struggling. He's about to go bankrupt. He's going to starve. He's going to have to live in his office. That is, it's insane that he persevered through all this, but he says, I'm going to sit tight. I have the greatest opportunity I've ever had, and I'm in it for everything. And he's relentlessly resourceful. If he can't sell cartoons, he starts doing more freelance work. He'll go to companies and say, hey, I can build cartoons for you. He winds up doing to payroll and to feed himself. He winds up even doing edge.”

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46. “Figuring out, and then he keeps doing that unimpeded, and he lets he compounds for four decades. And then by that time, he's got movies, theme parks, television shows, radio, books, merchandise, everything. And so he calls his first product laughograms, and his dad is like, you're crazy, you shouldn't do this. Says his father, who had suffered so many economic setbacks of his own, advised him not to do this, warning that he could go broke. But remember, he's the antithesis of his father, while Disney was too independent-minded, even at the age of twenty, to think of himself as someone else's employee, and that confidence, that unusual self-belief is actually going to power him through because it's not like there's a giant market. He's in a brand new industry. There's not like a strong demand for these cartoons. It's not why people are going to the movies. If you're a movie theater and you want to cut back on some expenses, it's not people are coming to see the main feature. They're not coming to see these.”

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47. “He's practicing, and it says he took out the one book from the Kansas City Library that there was on animation. And so before his company's doing these freelance jobs, these advertisements, but his first product is going to be selling one minute animated shorts, and he sells them to movie theaters, right? These are little one-minute cartoons that are shown before movies. You know, you start out, okay, well, what's the first thing you can do? The most rudimentary, almost like simple thing you could do. I can make a one minute animated cartoon. It's going to be black and white. It's not going to have sound. And then eventually I'm going to add sound and then I'm going to add color. And then instead of being one minute, it's going to be, you know, six or seven minutes. And then he has this idea, which changes the entire trajectory of his company. And he's like, I'm going to build the world's first full feature length animated cartoon. But it's fascinating. I think that's the power of biography. One of the powers of biography is like you just see. It's like, oh, it starts here. Okay. Now you see him learning. Oh, wait.”

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48. “Not seem to notice was that Walt Disney, who for years had been determined to become a newspaper cartoonist, was now suddenly just as determined to become something that to most outsiders was even more impractical, something for which he had no real training and something for which a job did not even seem to exist. He wanted to become an animator. When he began puttering in his garage, animation was scarcely two decades old. What is going on here why is he obsessed with this? Remember the animator creates his own world, a world which he has completely under his control. What did it say? I don't think you know this, but the intro to this podcast came from the introduction and the epilogue, and it ends with saying that he was a master of order. A master of control. Why? Why was that so important to him? Walt Disney had a psychological connection to animation, a connection forged by his childhood experiences.”

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49. “And so again, don't do anything that someone else can do, right? I want to jump into a new industry because I have a chance of being the best in the world at that industry. Number two, Walt Disney, this is probably my favorite quote in the entire book. Walt Disney seldom dabbled. Everyone who knew him remarked on his intensity when something intrigued him. He focused himself entirely on it, as if it were the only thing that mattered. Now animation mattered. That is when he began an immersive self-education in the medium. How many times is he going to use the same playbook over and over again? He jumps into something and he built his own curriculum. So that is number two. Edwin Land. There's a rule that they don't teach you at Harvard Business School. It is. If anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess. And Edwin Lange should know because he drops out of Harvard twice. Number three, that idea that, hey, we're not dabbling here. We're not dilly dabbling. We're not dabbling. You know, everyone who knew him remarked on his intensity when something intrigued him. He focused himself into.”

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50. “We go to business, right? Because he thought quality was the only moat. That's not the word he uses, but that's the way I would describe his interpretation of that. That the only thing, like he's betting his entire company on excellence and quality of the product. If we let that go, then our entire company goes out of business. And if our company goes out of business, the quality of the entire animation industry would fall. That is a wild, wild statement. Wild that he said it and wild because it's probably true.”

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