#158 Walt Disney (Disneyland)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. Hey there. Real quick before we get into this episode on Walt Disney, a few people reached out to me this week asking how to buy gift subscriptions, so I'm just gonna leave a link in the show notes if you're interested in doing that, and thanks as always for helping spread the word about Founders.
One day in the early 1950s, Walt Disney stood looking out over 240 acres of farmland in Anaheim, California, and imagined building a park where people could live among Mickey Mouse and Snow White in a world still powered by steam and fire for a day or a week, or if the visitor is slightly mad, forever.
Despite his fame and success, exactly no one wanted Disney to build such a park. Not his brother Roy, who ran the company's finances, not the bankers, and not his wife Lillian. Amusement parks at that time were a generally despised business.
Disney was told that he would be headed towards financial ruin. But Walt persevered, initially financing the park against his own life insurance policy. He assembled a talented team of engineers, architects, artists, animators, landscapers, and even a retired admiral to transform his ideas into a soaring yet soothing wonderland. The catch was that they only had a year and a day in which to build it.
On July 17th, 1955, Disneyland opened its gates, and the first day was a disaster. Disney was nearly suicidal with grief that he had failed on a grand scale.
But the curious masses kept coming, and the rest is entertainment history. 800 million visitors have flocked to the iconic park since then. In Disneyland, popular historian Richard Snow brilliantly presents the entire spectacular story, a wild ride from vision to realization that reflects the uniqueness of the man determined to build the happiest place on earth, with a watchmaker's precision, an artist's conviction, and the desperate, high-hearted recklessness of a riverboat gambler.
That was from the back cover of the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is Disney's Land, Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World, and is written by Richard Snow. So I actually found this book. I wasn't expecting to do this book this week. I was in a bookstore, just randomly looking through the biography in the business section, and I saw this book. I picked it up, read that back cover. I was like, oh, I'm gonna buy this right now. And I started reading it, and I couldn't put it down. So that's a great indicator that that's the book that I should be talking about this week. And what I didn't realize until after I had already started reading the book was that I had read another one of Richard Snow's books. So I think all the way back on Founders number eight, maybe, I read his book called I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise of Henry Ford. And there's a paragraph in that book that I thought was just hilarious. It's how he came up with the name of that book. I'm just gonna read it to you real quick. One day towards the end of his life, Ford was talking with a local high school boy named John Dallinger, and they got onto the subject of education. Ford spoke of the virtues of the McGruffys Reader era. That's how he educated himself when he was younger. And that sounded pretty futsy to Dallinger. But sir, he protested, these are different times. This is the modern age and young man, Ford snapped, I invented the modern age. The claim is as preposterous as it is megalomaniacal. It is also largely true. That's one of my favorite paragraphs that Richard Snow ever wrote. I thought it was fantastic the way he summed that up. So back to Disney, this is the third book I read on him. I was actually shocked. I went back. So I've done Founders No. 2 and Founders No. 39 on Disney. And I cannot believe I let this much time pass before reading another book on him. He's one of the most influential entrepreneurs and inspiring entrepreneurs to ever live. I wanna read this quote, that's at the very beginning of the book, which I found remarkable. Because when I read, Triumph of the American Imagination by Neil Gabler, that was the book I covered on its most comprehensive biography of Walt Disney, I think, ever written. It was on Founders No. 2 I was really shocked, because going into that book, I knew of Disney through animation, through cartoons. I didn't know his favorite project he ever worked on was Disneyland. And so I wanna read this quote, that's right at the beginning of the book. He says, when he reached middle age, it seemed that we were gonna witness an all too familiar process, the conversion of the tired artist into the tired businessman. When in 1955, we heard that Disney had opened an amusement park under his own name, it appeared certain that we would not look forward to anything new from Mr. Disney. We were quite wrong. He had instead created his masterpiece. So I wanna start with a good way to think about the importance of Disneyland, and then getting into Walt's early life. So it says, Disneyland is the extension of the powerful personality of one man. It is not, like many perfectly good modern theme parks, a consensus on what might make a nice place. So if this is the first time you're studying and learning about Walt Disney, he's an obsessive with soul in the game. I put him up there with people, the fanatical people that were very concerned about the quality of their products, like Steve Jobs, Enzo Ferrari, Henry Royce, of Royce Royce fame. He's the same exact breed of person. And so the idea that he's going to design from consensus is just not going to happen. At the age of nine, Walt was climbing out of bed every morning at 3.3 in the morning to go to work. He was delivering newspapers in the snow. Disney's father didn't believe children should have toys, but on nice mornings, I used to come to houses with those big old porches, and the kids would have left some of their toys out. I would find them and play with them there on the porch at 4 in the morning when it was just barely getting light. Then I'd have to tear back and go back to my paper route again. More about his father, his joyless father. His father incubated a peculiar, joyless blend of grim Protestant work ethic and socialism. His mother did her best to soften things for the boys, sometimes handing them slices of bread buttered on the bottom so their father wouldn't see them being spoiled with such a luxury. So his father is a very hard man, just like Disney winds up being very stingy with praise. And as soon as all of his sons got to the age, they tried to go as far away from him as possible. So it gives you an idea of his early life. Does not sound like a very nice person to be around. Their farm, this is before they moved to the city, they're working at the farm, Disney is really young. Their farm, like every farm, demanded hard work, which in this case was thankless. Elias Disney, that's his father's name, believed that using fertilizer on a crop was like giving whiskey to an alcoholic. He refused to do it with the predictable results.