#346 How Walt Disney Built Himself

**David Senra** (0:00)
Walt Disney was the first to bundle television programs, feature animation, live action films, documentaries, theme parks, music, books, comics, character merchandise, and educational films under one corporate umbrella. He created the first modern multimedia corporation. In the year of his death, 240 million people saw a Disney movie, 100 million people watched a Disney television show, 80 million people read a Disney book, 50 million people listened to Disney records, 80 million people brought Disney merchandise, 150 million people read a Disney comic strip, and nearly 7 million people visited Disneyland. Walt Disney had changed the world. He had created a new art form and then produced several indisputable classics within it. 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 long survive him. Yet all of these accumulated contributions paled before a larger one. He demonstrated how one could assert one's will on the world. Walt Disney had been not so much a master of fun, or irreverence, or innocence.
He had been a master of order.
That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is this giant, comprehensive, 800-page biography of Walt Disney. It is called Walt Disney, The Triumph of the American Imagination, and it was written by Neal Gabler. I read this book for the first time nearly eight years ago. In fact, it was episode two of Founders. But the second reading, after reading almost 350 of these biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, completely changes what I get out of the book, the context, the additional meaning. And I think particularly doing it right now after doing Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Tarantino, Spielberg and Lucas all idolized Walt Disney. They studied him intently. He had a huge influence on their work. And so over the last week, I've spent well over 50 hours reading, highlighting, rereading. The last few days, just really trying to figure out what is the most important lesson that I'm trying to take away from this book. And in 800 pages, it's absurd to think that you can distill it down to just one sentence. But later in the book, there's this line that has really stuck with me as I go and read and reread all these highlights and notes.
And it said that Walt Disney's key traits were raw ingenuity and a sadistic determination.
And I sat and thought about that, raw ingenuity and a sadistic determination. I think that is a very accurate description of him. Why was he like that? And what you realize is like he had to be, he had to have this sadistic determination, in large part because his dad, the relationship they had with his father, his father, Elias Disney, was excessively controlling and simultaneously unsuccessful. A man that was beaten down by life that failed at nearly every single thing that he tried. There is another filmmaker that I did a podcast on, Francis Ford Coppola, this is all the way back on episode 242 I'm going to put this book down and I'm going to pick up that biography because there's such a parallel before I get into this first story about this experience that Walt Disney is going to have with his father, that he's having nightmares, nightmares of 40 years later. Again, raw ingenuity and sadistic determination. And so let's go to what Francis Ford Coppola said about, he had this drive as well. And so he says, this is Francis Ford Coppola describing his childhood and his relationship with his father. I had spent a lifetime with a frustrated and often unemployed man who hated anybody who was successful. And that kind of person usually tries to belittle the aspirations or the dreams of the people around him, even if it's their kids, which is crazy. And he's so Francis Ford Coppola is telling us what his dad said. And he said, there can only be one genius in the family. And since I'm already that, what chance do you have? And so I want to pick up the story of Walt Disney. He's nine years old. His father's already failed multiple times. They're trying to provide a living for his family. They are now, his father has a newspaper route delivering newspapers. And he insists that all of his sons help him. And this is how Walt Disney remembered this. The route was not just a means of earning a living. It became a way of life for Disney's. Everything had to be subordinated to the delivery of newspapers. He was only nine years old, and yet Walt was already tethered to the route. I was working all the time, he said. I never had any playtime. The route and its demands, the unyielding routine, the snow, the fatigue, the lost papers, it traumatized and haunted him. 40 years later, he was still awakening in a sweat with nightmares about the route, that he had missed some customers, and he remembered how much of his life he surrendered to this route and how hard he had to work for so little reward. And so that line there about he had to work so hard for so little reward, Elias Disney had a very bad habit of taking the money that his sons made and just keeping it. Walt had three older brothers. Two of them ran away because Elias kept taking their money.