#2 Walt Disney

**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.
He had changed the world. He had created a new art form and then produced several indisputable classics within it. He had provided an escape from the Depression, strength during war, and reassurance afterward. And he had shown generations of children how to accept responsibility while at the same time, allowing them to vent vicariously their antagonisms toward the adult world they would soon enter. He had refined traditional values and sharpened American myths and archetypes. Even if, as his detractors said, he may have also gutted them. He had advanced color films and then color television. He had reimagined the amusement park. He had encouraged and popularized conservation, space exploration, atomic energy, urban planning, and a deeper historical awareness. He had built one of the most powerful empires in the entertainment world, one that would, despite his fears, long survive him. He had founded a school of the arts. In nearly 40 years after his death, his name would adorn a concert hall in downtown Los Angeles, financed largely with Disney family money.
Yet all of these accumulated contributions paled before a larger one. He demonstrated how one could assert one's will on the world at the very time when everything seemed to be growing beyond control and beyond comprehension.
In sum, Walt Disney had been not so much a master of fun or reverence or innocence or even wholesomeness but he had been a master of order.
So the book that we're going to be talking about today is called Walt Disney, The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler. I'm going to try to go in chronological order of his life. Obviously an 800 page book, we're not going to be able to cover everything, but I have five to six different events in his life that kind of show you who he was as a person and how past experiences may have influenced decisions he makes later in life or what becomes important.
So we're going to jump to when he's in his 20s. He's already found a love for drawing. He wanted to be a cartoonist and he started his first business really, really young. Something a lot of people don't know about Walt Disney is he never even graduated high school. He has a ninth grade education. Yet he is one of the most arguably successful, most famous people in history. I think even now in 2016, if you ask who, everybody knows the name Disney. Even if you're not, you've never been to a theme parks, you know who Mickey Mouse is. You've been touched by one aspect of the company that he started. So what a lot of people don't know is he started his first business when he was 19
It was in Missouri. He was basically trying to produce, to do advertisements, to do cartoons, to do short little, they're not really movies, I guess you would call them shorts. That business goes under. He realizes that he's lived up to his full potential where he's at, so he heads west. He heads to Los Angeles, which he thinks would be a good way to be a cartoonist full time and to basically open another studio. That's going well. He's already producing successful drawings and art, and we're gonna go to the part where he's betrayed. So he's a young man, doesn't know much about business, other than just trying to go through trial and error. And let's go right to the book.