SPECIAL: Walt Disney (Part 1)

yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a go less travel never looking back alright what's happening everyone this is sam par i'm typically the host of my first million but this is kinda special so i'm on a walk right now where i live in austin i'm walking around it's in the evening and i'm listening to my favorite podcast it's called how to take over the world and ben the host talks about historical figures like napoleon steve jobs people like that edison just like people who innovate whether it's business or military and he tells their story but from an angle of like what i can learn about leading and kinda taking over the world they're taking over an industry and it's incredibly fascinating and it's amazing i've listened to every episode and ben i loved it so much i actually asked ben to join my first as our producer and he is and i'm listening to this episode right now on walt disney and it's so good i test texted ben i go ben i'm recording an intro right now and we're gonna put this on the my first million feed because i think our audience is gonna love it so this is part one and then throughout the feed you'll see part two as well but on walt disney and you're gonna learn about everything that walt disney did and i'm at the part now where basically ben talks about walt and how he filed for bankruptcy a couple times and went broke a couple times before the age of thirty and yet he always had this like crazy optimistic outlook and it's motivating it's awesome but he was kind of not a loser because he was doing cool stuff but like he failed a ton when he was getting started and it was inspiring to me or it is inspiring to me so check it out this is a special edition of my first million it's called how to take over the world with walt disney ben wilson is the host and a my personally producer and i just wanted to share it with you check it out i was show you how good i man just one second me i'd like to take this chance to apologize absolutely nobody hello and welcome to how to take over the world this is ben wilson we've got an exciting episode for you today we're talking about walt disney and why walt well there are a number of different angles that you can look at walt from you can look at his success as an entrepreneur as a guy who just founded one of the i think fifty largest companies in the world worth billions and billions of dollars you can look at him as a storyteller as probably the greatest storyteller of the twentieth century you know a lot of the stories that we live with now that are a part of mass culture come from the disney company and come from things that that he started and patterns that he set out so you can look at him as a storyteller you can look at him as a rags to riches story you know he came from literally nowhere grew up in missouri in the united states did not come from wealthy family you know someone who just took nothing and was able to establish one of the most iconic companies of all time you can look at walt as an innovator you can look at him as an artist he really is at the nexus of technology art business and so no matter what you're looking for i think you can see something in walt disney he's he's one of the great americans of the twentieth century and he's got a great story so i'm excited to dive into it but before we do here is a brief word from our sponsors have you ever heard the urban legend that walt disney was cryo frozen it's not true but it was a pretty common urban legend at least back when i was in elementary in middle school they would say that he was frozen with the hope that future advances in medical technology would allow him to be resuscitate and resurrected someday well again this never happened but while walt disney never froze his body you should be freezing yours and that's because cold exposure and cold baths specifically have been shown to have a number of positive health benefits it's good for your hair and skin good for your mood and concentration it keeps you sharp i love taking cold baths and that's why i am proud to partner with cold plunge the cold plunge has cooling technology that gives you ice bath levels of cold without all the hassle with their filtration and sanitation technology it makes the experience far superior to an ice bath or chest freezer you can fill your cold plunge with a hose set your temperature and you're off it couldn't be easier so check them out at the cold plunge dot com and use code ben will to get hundred and fifty dollars off once again that is the cold plunge dot com and use my name as the code b e n w i l s o n for a hundred and fifty dollars off walt elias disney was born in chicago in nineteen o one he had virtually no memories of chicago as a little boy because when he was four years old his father decided that chicago was not particularly safe and the name that they were growing up in was not particularly good in fact the notorious gangster a capo was was sort of a a famous mafia man he would later set up his headquarters in that same neighborhood that walt was growing up in so that became too much for walt's father elias this and so there was an incident that pushed him over the edge two local boys killed a policeman in a robbery gone wrong so while it was four years old and elias disney decides to move his family to marcel missouri small frontier railroad town hundred miles northeast of kansas city a elias bought a small farm there and he worked hard and he worked his sons really hard he had them help with all the the household tasks the disney came from a long line of scheme and failed businessmen it's actually remarkable to see how many failed schemes and and businesses they had over multiple generations elias father ke had tried to drill for oil but failed to find any then he set out for california and search a gold but gave up before he even got there and then settled for a farm in kansas which turned out to be very difficult to manage and unprofitable until the very end so elias walt's father grew up on the edge of poverty for his entire childhood he himself would undertake a number of ventures during his lifetime just like his father and they would all end in failure just as his father sad and you kind of have two things happening at the same time here elias the determination to not follow his father's pattern of failure made him extremely diligent and hardworking working but the fact that he failed despite all that hard work made him bitter and angry oftentimes he was a very severe man he was very religious was described in one book as quote nearly humor he worked hard he believed in an old school approach to parenting that involved corporal punishment beating his children and he never showed outward affection towards them at all now i should say they can get exaggerated sometimes he would punish his sons by hitting them with a switch or the wooden handle of his hammer or with his bare hands but elias was not sending walt to school with black eyes and broken ribs so sometimes you'll hear you know walt disney's father beat him with a hammer yes with the handle of a hammer it's still not great right hit but but he's not like you could kill someone with hitting him with a hammer with with the end of a hammer with the handle it's more of a like a spanking he was a severe disciplinary but i have not seen any indications that it was to the point of harming his children's health nevertheless it wasn't great and i've seen some say that walt hated his father and i think that's actually true you read some of the things he said and you think okay this does sound like someone who maybe hated his father but you read some of the other things he said and it sounds like he loved and admired his father so which is it and i think the answer is both parental relationships are often complicated and this one was more complicated than most you know you you can't dis instill it down to a single word walt loved hated respected resent admired his dad all at the same time his relationship with his mother was much less complicated walt's mother's name was flo and she came from online of academics and school teachers she came from a sort of upper middle class american family she herself was very bright and her boys would describe having a wonderful sense of humor she was loving and affectionate towards her children and was just an smaller around great mother she would even sometimes stick up to elias for the boys and get him to not hit them when he was mad it was in large part due to the physical and emotional safety that florida provided that walt would remember marcel as an ideal place to grow up almost a utopia a heaven on earth in fact roy disney later did say quote it was just heaven for us city kids and walt himself would say everything connected with marcel was a thrill for us after coming from crowded smokey chicago my favorite quote about marcel actually comes from walt's wife who pointed out that it's kind strange that it meant so much to him she said quote marcel was the most important part of walt's life he didn't live there very long he lived in chicago and kansas city much longer but there was something about that farm that was very important to him so why was it so important to him why was it such a great place to grow up well because the place was well like a disney movie which is not a coincidence first there was the nature there were all sorts of farms gardens and groves that provided fruits and vegetables there were streams and forests the place was teeming with little woodland creatures like foxes rabbit squirrels of possum and raccoons walt loved playing with the farm animals the pigs the cows the chickens he would sometimes ride the pigs when driving them into their pen he also loved fishing for catfish in the creek in the summer and skating on the little creek when it froze over in the winter there was a very strong sense of community in marcel both with the neighbors who would help each other men's fences and when there was time to harvest crops you know for for a week they would all come sleep in the disney's front yard and the women would stay and cook together and the men would go out with elias and the boys and help them harvest their crops but there was also the sense of community with extended family who were always around aunts uncles and cousins some of them lived very nearby and even those who didn't live right in marcel would often come and visit and and lodge with the disney's for a week or two in marcel you can see all these little hints and echoes of things that would come into walt's art later in life so for example as i mentioned there's sort of the id american countryside with all these little woodland creatures that would show up another thing is his love of trains as i mentioned it was a stop on the railroad and walt was fascinated by the train that would come through trains to him represented a chance to travel someplace new and discover the world growing up in a small town also represented technology in the future they represented adventure they represented opportunity you know eventually just like thomas edison he would take a job on the train selling little treats to the passengers and and making a little pocket money for himself and by the way i do find that one of those funny coincidence is that they both had that same job as boys selling treats on the train and you see that show up later in disneyland in disneyland world and many of his films and movies his his love of trains and railroads another thing where you can see some echoes is his love of his uncle ed uncle ed was walt's uncle obviously and he would take him on adventures they would play games explore the natural world flag down trains and even catch rides to neighboring towns uncle ed was considered by most people to be dim wit and perhaps even mentally handicapped not so much so that he couldn't watch over walt when he was a a boy they would go off just the two of them and go on these adventures to walt though he viewed him as just a kid that never grew up because he had this great enthusiasm uncle ed this this love of adventure and so you can see that echo in peter pan walt viewed him as this peter pan like figure this person who would never grow up and maintained the sense of love of adventure and enjoy and and and boy enthusiasm now the disney farm in marcel might have been id but it was not profitable farm was already struggling when elias came down with either ty or dip f but he was unable to work in nineteen eleven so in nineteen eleven when walt was nine years old the disney family left marcel for kansas city after moving to kansas city elias made a living by purchasing a newspaper delivery route at this point elias two oldest boys herbert and raymond were already adults and had left home but walt and his older brother roy were still around and elias made them work the paper route for him the paper route would loom heavy and walt's memory of his boy years in kansas city and you can understand why he would have to wake up at four thirty in the morning every single morning for six years to go deliver papers even in the freezing winter there are stories that what would tell about having to t through five foot tall snow drifts in order to deliver some of these papers and elias was meticulous about that paper route and placed a heavy emphasis on making sure it was done right he would make walt and his brother roy placed the papers inside the storm door of people's houses even when they had to t through feet of fresh fallen and snow so other people were not doing this people were just throwing the paper to the front porch but the disney boys had to do it it right they had to go place the papers exactly so exactly perfectly on people's doors at school walt was an indifferent student not very good as you can imagine for someone who was waking up at four thirty in the morning as a boy he often slept through class but even when he was awake he was not much of a student he didn't really care about school he was always drawing and doo rather than actually listening or studying when he was a school the other thing he was doing was performing walt discovered a partner in crime in kansas city at benton grammar school a best friend named walt f the two who dug themselves two bad walters were always creating shows and stunt and jokes they had like a little va show that they did so walt had an early streak as a performer he also had an early interest in entrepreneurship at one point he put up a tent and set up his own circus for the neighborhood children charging a dime for admission but when his mother found out that he was charging these kids she made him refund everyone their money he was always trying to sell newspapers on the side and coming up with little schemes to make a little bit of money but whenever his father elias found out about these little side hustle he would con all of walt's pocket money as he was getting older walt grew increasingly agitated with his dad's severe ways harsh discipline and this is especially true once roy left and walt was the only boy at home one day when he was fourteen years old walt was helping his father work on the roof of their home and walt failed to execute one of elias commands quickly enough at least in his eyes and so this resulted in a tie raid elias yells at wall and says go to the basement and i'm gonna come downstairs soon to to punish you to hit you and roy who happened to be home visiting pull wall aside on his way to the basement and said don't take this anymore you're bigger than him don't let him do that to you and so when elias came down to the basement he grabbed the head of the hammer as usual and raised it to hit walt with the shaft of his hammer and walt grabbed his hand and so then elias raises his other hand to hit walt and walt grabs that hand too and so he's holding both his hands and they struggle for a little bit and that's when elias realizes wow my son is bigger than me i i can't do this anymore i can't hit him anymore and elias breaks down bo in front of wall and after that elias never tried to hit him again in contrast to elias walt's mother flo really shines at this point in walt's childhood all of these great people seem to have extraordinary mothers edison mother not only believed in him but gave him the better part of his education as a boy napoleon always considered his father something of a failure and believe that he got his intelligence and his drive from his mother i'd like to read a paragraph about flo from a biography of walt disney by guy named neil gall very if you can read one that's someone i recommend he says about flu quote it was she who managed the money for elias made most of the children's clothes and sew their quilt cook their meals and encourage their reading conceived with the children and always exercise restraint and an even temper and it was flo alone who could tease her husband and calm his raging storms though she did so carefully without confronting or counter him besides his mother the other pillar of walt's early life was his brother roy who i've mentioned already walt wasn't close with his two oldest brothers who were much older than him but roy who was still eight years older than him was always his protector and friend walt regarded him as something of a surrogate father since he had such a troubled relationship with his actual father interestingly you know walt was the only dream in the family everyone else was practical minded and kinda of sober and that included roy he didn't have an imagination like walt either but he respected walt's creative streak and would help and encourage him all their lives while also kind of grounding him and bringing some practical sense to the relationship walt had a fascination with cartoon from his very earliest childhood something that his father did not find practical in kansas city to and turned into an obsession though he was simply always drawing who took saturday courses at the kansas city art institute and also signed up for correspondence courses and those were like the original online courses they were distance education courses that came in the mail despite this effort walt was never an exceptional cartoon he wasn't a naturally gifted drawer but through extensive practice and sheer determination he did make himself a decent cartoon he wasn't bad in nineteen seventeen elias moved his family back to chicago where walt attended high school he was the cartoon for the school paper mostly drawing patriotic cartoons about world war one he continued to be obsessed withdrawing and continued to be a poor student he even occasionally skipped school to go to the chicago art institute or hang around the offices of a chicago tribune they had moved to chicago because elias was interested in a business called the oz factory which produced jelly the business was doing poorly so elias decided to become personally involved walt worked at the factory one summer though he did eventually grow tired of it and quit to work as a substitute male carrier one side note about that is that we almost never got walt disney because he was almost killed in a terrorist attack mail bomb injured thirty and killed for in his post office including a man who worked just two desks away from walt and walt was very nearly blown up he had debris on him it's not certain who carried out the attack though most likely it was done by an organized crying gang or perhaps some radical ana or radical socialists for his senior year walt decided not to return to high school he tried forging his birth certificate to join the army to fight in world war one but he was caught and rejected eventually he was able to forge some papers and join the red cross to be an ambulance months driver but by the time he got to france with the red cross the war had already ended he spent his time in france doing men labor and in just about every spare moment when he was not working he was doo and drawing he even got his work published in the army newspaper in one of those funny coincidence of history what happened to be stationed in the same ambulance score as ray cro ray would end up being the famous as ceo of mcdonald's who led the fast food chain to become one of the largest companies in the world and according to one book i read although i didn't see this repeated anywhere so take this with the green of salt but apparently ray remembered that he and the fellows in the core thought what was a little bit strange because when they had a an open opportunity when they had a spare moment they would go into french towns and try and pick up french girls what would never come he would stay behind and just draw and draw and draw and so they all thought what was kinda of funny because he was drawing all the time while he's in france and that is you know i i don't know whether that particular story is true but it is true that walt was almost compulsive in how much he was drawing at this point in his life in nineteen nineteen walt returned to the united states his father had secured a job for him paying twenty five dollars a week at the oz factory which was pretty good right and elias was fl acid when walt told him that he was instead holding out for a job as an artist walt later said quote he never understood me he thought i was a black sheep this nonsense of drawing picture he said walter gonna make a career of that are you but walt did eventually get a job as an artist his brother roy recommended him to acquaintances for an opportunity to apprentice us with an illustration advertising company called pe rubin commercial art company walt was just thrilled to gain full time employment as an artist at the age of only seventeen but unfortunately he's laid off a short time later when the art studio went through a financial rough patch but it wasn't for poor performance his associate from those days remembered walt as pretty good artist and an extremely hard worker who did things quickly and did them well the most important thing to come out of the job for walt is that he made a notable good friend a very gifted cartoon by the name of hub i works after being laid off walt decided to start their own company and they had some initial success they were selling basic illustrations to kansas city based companies and they were a very good partnership up was an incredibly gifted artist possessing the kind of artistic talent that walt could only dream of but he was shy and socially awkward whereas well on the other hand was a decent artist but charming extroverted and a natural salesman so between the two of them they had exceptional art skills and exceptional sales skills and so they would had some success but they were kids you know these they were seventeen years old so when they saw a job ad for a position as a cartoon with a kansas city slide company ups suggested that walt should go take the job to provide some steady financial footing for them and up would try to keep a company a afloat by him self well as i said up was not much of a businessman although he was a great cartoon so he wasn't able to hold down the company on his own and so after not very long they shutter the company and up joined walt at the kansas city slide company this was their first foray into moving pictures and walt was thrilled about it he would say years later quote the trick of making things move on film is what got me another quote from ga the biographer he said quote walt disney seldom dabble everyone who knew him remarked on his intensity when something intrigued him he focused himself entirely as if it were the only thing that mattered and that thing now that he was focused on was animation and so he was thrilled with to be with the slide company getting an education in animation not only was he getting an education from the slide company but when he couldn't learn there he was educating himself walt set up a studio in his parents garage they had recently returned from chicago after the oz company failed and so he went to their garage and set up some cameras and some animation equipment and was able to the experiment there with different animation techniques and he was like i said obsessed roy said quote when he'd come home and long after everybody else is in bed what was out there still putter working way experimenting trying this in that drawing and so on so he was spending real late nights just figuring out this new technology of animation you have to remember that animated cartoons know motion picture cartoons are very very new at this point this is an industry that isn't even twenty years old and so it was the wild west you know there was no college degree that you can get for animation you just had to experiment and talk to the people who were doing it and figure it out at the slide company they were using a technique using cut out cartoons which was the standard animation method but walt it starts to become interested in a new technology g called cell animation it used overlapping layers of illustrations on cell sheets to quickly create elaborate hand cartoons so that you know you didn't have to draw the same thing over and over again you'd keep some layers the same for the background or static characters that didn't move while repeatedly red drawing only those portions of the scene that moved and over time walt it became not only interested in cell animation but in usual way obsessed was determined that this was the future and he needed to learn how to do it he's experimenting with it in his garage talking to more experienced animators attending classes at the art institute and taking out books from the library to read about this new technique he began using cell technique to produce cartoons to run in the biggest theater in kansas city called the newman theater in a pattern that would be a recurring theme throughout disney's career their cartoon stories often found new life from old fable and fairy tales and they also tended to give life to ina objects so one of his first cartoons that he does on his very own is this plant that sort of comes to life and just jumps around a little bit it's actually interesting to me that so reminiscent and of pixar when they start the first thing they do is animate this little lamp and this little little plant this little flower that wall animate is kinda similar to the pixar lamp all of these animations that he's doing are very simple one to two minute short animations that ran in front of feature length films at movie theaters they became known as neumann laugh and the company was later named laugh graham studios by walt the cartoons were a commercial failure but they were creative success they made walt a mini celebrity in kansas city and he soon discovered that he loved the attention he loved you know he was a natural show he was a natural performer he lived for the response of the crowd and people were responding to his cartoons they were popular they made people laugh walt soon started dreaming of making longer cartoons seven minutes rather than two minute clips that he had been making and at this point walt is really hustling he's renting a little shack just up the hill from his day job which had changed its name to the kansas city film ad company and they weren't interested in trying or funding walt's curiosity in cell animation technology so what was able to work there at the kansas city film ad company during the day and then just walk eighteen steps up to his own little studio and after hours he would try his selling animation stuff and and they didn't care that he was experimenting with his stuff and taking side projects he was also able to persuade up and coming animators to come draw for him for free he didn't have any money to give them so he wasn't paying them but they could learn sell animation he was always gifted at getting people to buy in to a larger vision and that was certainly working in his favor here so he's got this this free labor eventually walt decided to go all in on his new venture persuaded up to join him once more and built out and built it out into a full fledged studio walt's brothers had recently moved out of kansas city and so walt turned laugh graham studios into a sort of surrogate family most of them were young and unmarried they spent long hours working together the schedule that most of them worked was from nine am until about midnight and they were experimenting playing prank working just having fun a friend visited and asked walt about his new studio and he asked if they were making good money and walt responded frankly no but we're having fun and that was maybe under selling it they were having a really great time and walt was very bad with money laugh grand studios soon ended up in financial trouble and on on the very urge of bankruptcy in these dire straits disney tried throwing a hail mary he wanted to produce a longer film rather than the one to two minute clips that they had been making he wanted to try a seven minute film that would combine live action film pornography with animation it was called alice wonderland and was of course inspired by lewis carroll famous novel it was about a real little girl who enters a magical fantasy world of animation and this little cartoon actually bears no resemblance to alice in wonderland the famous movie that disney would later produce this is a a different thing and it only used the lewis carroll story as inspiration but was a different thing however the company was falling apart around him as walt tried to finish this project of alice wonderland animators were leaving left and right they were evicted from their offices and even up quit in the end so the film was finished eventually but only because walt did the vast majority of the animation himself even so this combination of live action and animation it was something that people had done before but this was a little different mostly what people had done was mostly live action with a little cartoon in that live action instead what this was was mostly cartoon with one live action character playing in that cartoon if that makes sense so this was very leading edge and very cool walt was more than anything a forward thinker he was almost edison sony or steve jobs in his love of showing the world something groundbreaking something new but he's still working out how to make it profitable or even cost efficient and alice wonderland is not finishing time to save the company which goes completely belly up and you know i said walt was bad with money but at this point it's not because he's an extravagant spend at the time he really wants to finish this film so he's rail thin he's eating nothing but canned beans he had been evicted from his home was sleeping in studio he was showering once a week at the train station i mean walt is really just trying to slum it just trying to scrape by in order to finish this animation his problem was at this point not that he a profit spend it was the he wasn't making enough money kansas city just wasn't a big enough market to support the cost that went into making an animation of this length and complexity and at this point he didn't have the connections to get distribution outside of kansas city despite this company failing walt is in pretty good spirits he had a cheer and optimistic disposition in general and was rarely thrown into a bad mood by setbacks walt would later say quote i had no recollection of he ever being unhappy in my life i was happy all the time i was excited i was doing things and love i mean that's that's kind of exaggeration to be honest he also said another time that quote he was crushed and heartbroken at this first bank pepsi which is understandable for someone who you know he's twenty one years old and he just declared bunk bankruptcy his his company just failed but it is true that he did have this this remarkably buoyant personality things might get him down for a little bit but after like a day he tended to pop right back up and be his normal cheer optimistic self walt soon decided that what he needed was a change of scenery and so he was debating between new york and los angeles and he eventually decided on the ladder mostly because his brother roy had moved to los angeles to recover from tuberculosis the problem was walt was so flat broke he didn't even have the money for a a train ticket out to los angeles to start over again so he bought camera on loan and went door to door to the wealthiest neighborhoods in kansas city offering to make films of people's children so it's just like kind of the most down and dirty side hustle that he could think of and doing this it was it was a smart approach and just a a matter of a week or two he was able to scrape together enough money to pay for the camera that he had bought and then buy a train ticket out to la when walt bought that train ticket out of kansas city the bitterness of his failures was far from his mind he said quote he felt free and happy as if he were lit up inside by incandescent lights you know i think many of us have had that feeling of starting over and of opportunity in front of us and that's what he was feeling as he took the train to la and and that's you know one of my main takeaways from his life is just that uncomfortable optimism it really was i mean it could be illogical at times anyone else would think you know you have no reason to be optimistic right now but it was his superpower his belief that everything would work out no matter what having been recently burned by the animation industry won't considered going into the live action film industry these were the days before hollywood's golden age but los angeles was quickly becoming a center of film production and the center for animation on the other hand was all the way out in new york so wasn't necessarily a natural fit to go out to la in order to start an animation studio but fate sort of intervened at this point because while he was in los angeles while was able to come up with a distribution deal it for alice wonderland with a new york based distributor named margaret wink and with that walt teamed up with his brother roy to form the disney brothers cartoon studio which should go on to become the walt disney company and this was formed in nineteen twenty three the company initially started out by completing more episodes of alice adventure in wonderland which experienced some popular success so he hires his old friend up to come work for him as well and at the time he also hires multiple other ink artists including an e artist named lillian bounds over time walt takes a liking to lillian and finds that she likes him back and they end up getting married in nineteen twenty five it's marriage was was a happy one lillian was a a very steady and constant companion for walt and they raised three children together so you would think that we're set from here right walt has his main team he has himself his brother roy way his buddy up who is this sa brilliant animator they founded the walt disney company and the stuff that they're producing is doing fairly well they've moved beyond the original alice wonderland films and are producing other original works as well k but it's not quite smooth sailing from there trouble would arise when margaret wink their distributor got married and turned over most of her work to her husband charles mint and min and disney did not get along they butted heads over a lot of different issues including the future of the company and what type of animations they should make and most of all over money and how much walt and his company were entitled to at a time when walt animations were doing better than ever walt wanted to get paid more and get paid faster and in fact there was more money coming in and he and mint were able to come to an agreement over the money but the real sticking point was that minsk kept cri walt's work and making more and more suggestions walt thought that he was the true creative genius behind the animations and min thought that the work was kinda s and that he knew more about how to produce great animations even though he wasn't himself an animator and that might seem ridiculous to us in insight but you know it is true that mint thought that it was his his show business savvy and his notes on walt's animations that were the keys to their success they were eventually able to come to a deal both in terms of how they would handle their business going for you know who would get more creative freedom but also in terms of of money but this new deal did put even more financial stress on walt who was trying to expand his studio and bringing more animators to make the animation even better but now instead of having more money to produce his animations he would have just a little bit less he started to push his staff harder and harder and the air of fun and adventure that had started with the disney company was replaced with stress kinda of labor boring hard work and tension due to this tension three animators decided to leave and start their own studio and for a little bit things seem shaky you know okay animators are leaving we have a little bit less money is this thing even gonna make it but this all seems to blow over when walt comes up with a new series a completely animated cartoon about a character named oswald the lucky rabbit oswald was immediately a hit and other animators regarded him as the gold standard other cartoon characters at the time tended to just be excuses for gag you know they a lot of them were cartoon animals but they didn't have a a person necessarily that continued from from cartoon to cartoon whereas oswald did have a real personality that carried from animation to animation and had different attributes that you could point to and he's a character that you can kinda get to know the animations are solid successful that he's able to strong arguments into paying him more the staff at disney studios increases to twenty two employees walt builds a new home and things are generally going really well for him in his life but just as things are finally going great for walt in nineteen twenty eight he faces the greatest catastrophe that he's faced yet disney went out to new york to negotiate another new deal with mint with oswald doing so well he thought he had great leverage to negotiate more money in mint saw it completely differently it was mint who had negotiated the national distribution deal with universal studios so he was the reason that people were seeing oswald it was mint who actually owned oswald because of some smart drawing up of contracts so he owned the intellectual property it was disney's animators who were actually drawing oswald disney himself had stopped being an active animators a short time previously so in mince eyes he's looking at this and saying okay i'm doing the distribution walt's cartoon are doing the actual drawing walt himself is just a middleman man he's a sub contractor and so mint went around disney and negotiated employment deals directly with some of disney's animators and disney couldn't believe that you know when he hears this he says no way and he he calls to see if it's true and it's true they had negotiated contracts with mint himself essentially cutting disney out of his own animation he was mint was stealing oswald essentially from disney is the way that walt saw it and so walt you know he goes out to new york to renewed negotiate a new deal with mint to get more money because oswald the lucky rabbit is doing so well instead what he finds is that there's a trap for him he essentially gets ambushed and not only does he not get a new deal but he essentially gets his character and his company and his employees stolen out from under him and vince is kind of a jerk to him just treats him rude and and basically treats him like he's a nobody and so by the time that walt took the train back to new york he was essentially at ground zero again no cartoon character no deal no employees essentially no company and like i said he had a buoyant personality but that can only go so far and the failure really did get to him mh his wife lillian said that he was quote like a roaring lion when he first got on that train he fu about his treacherous crew these these un unhelpful animators and also about mint and how he'd betrayed him and ambushed him but he also let it motivate him he wasn't just going on ti aids he starts sketching and and immediately he he's thinking okay i need to come up with a new character to replace oswald so that mint can't have the last laugh i can show that it was actually my creative genius i might not have been the one who always drew oswald but i thought up oswald and he was my character so disney's got nothing but he does have this sketch pad and he's sketching out all these new characters all these ideas for new characters and he comes up with a story a story of a little mouse who inspired by charles lin builds himself a plane in order to impress a lady mouse walt's wife loved the story but she hated the name he had named him moe mouse well while after what do you think about the name mickey i'm gonna leave the story off there obviously this is a a pivotal turning point in walt disney's career but i'll save that for part two but for now let's take a look at a few of the things that made walt successful the first was his un unfavorable optimism it's true that walt could get down and depressed when bad things happened as anyone would and he could also have a temper not just down and depressed but he could fire off and he could yell and he could get mad but in either case he always bounced back extremely quickly and generally kept an extremely optimistic attitude and believe that things would work out no matter what this was important because if you've been keeping track he basically hit rock bottom and had to start over three different times he was also extremely charming and a great salesman charm is one of those things that is very difficult to define it's difficult to express how one develops charm but i found one note on how he was charming and i found it really interesting he gave the impression that he took a deep personal interest in whoever he was speaking with people said that when they spoke to walt it felt like he turned his entire attention toward them and was really intensely focused on them as a person and i found it interesting because charming people are always described that way that they lock their entire focus on you when they talk to you i've heard people describe that same phenomenon when talk about steve jobs napoleon donald trump bill clinton and even saddam hussein it's very mixed company but every single one of them was a very charming person and walt had that same superpower of turning his focus you like a laser and thereby charming you some part of that is an innate but it seems that walt also worked at it he developed it and i know you know it's funny steve jobs had this thing that he would do that he stared at people and people talk about this it was like kinda creepy but always got your attention that steve jobs would would stare at you and like not blink and walt had the same habit of locking onto to people and when he was like focused on them he would stare directly at them and so again there's not many too many hacks that you can get out of how to take over the world most of these things are sort of general life strategies but i do think that's one little hack you can take away that you can try if you are trying to influence someone charm them focus on them try just doing the steve jobs stare just really intently stare and it does tend to at the very least break up the normal flow of conversation and get them to really focus on what you're saying and become interested in the conversation and and where you're trying to take them speaking of focus walt have this incredible ability to concentrate all of his energy on one task or one scale at a time whether he was learning the basics of cartoon or learning the ins and outs of cell animation walt's ability to ob obsessed was one of his greatest strengths one last thing i wanted to mention is i was talking with someone the other day someone successful in the world of finance and this guy mentioned that he was interested in starting his own thing but i talked to him a second time a couple weeks later and he had decided against it he didn't want to to start his own company his speaking was that he's already comfortable he's made good money and he wants to keep making more good money and there's definitely some luck that goes into being really really successful at the top level and starting your own venture and he's talking about some of the other people who'd been successful starting their own funds and he basically said that you know these people they put it all on black a few times so to speak and they happened to to get lucky and they got lucky a few times and they were able to build off of that and he was afraid that if he didn't have that same luck a few times he could potentially lose a lot of what he had already built so kind of a a classic risk reward and this desire to not lose everything that you've you feel which i understand but when i was reading walt disney story and hearing about how he bottomed out multiple times it just made me realize that if you wanna reach the top you have to be become through with the fact that not only could you hit rock bottom but you probably will at some point you're probably gonna have to go through that before you get to the top steve jobs got fired from apple and napoleon got exiled to alba edison had to watch his entire company literally burned down in front of him even putin you know his his mayor that he he's working for sub check lost reelection and and he lost up his political career was destroyed he hit rock bottom so it's a very common thing so keep that in mind that you can't necessarily count on never going through that but what you have to keep in mind is that it's okay if you fall flat on your face if you lose everything if you've got to start over you're in the company of the great ones they all have gone through that and you can always start over and at least you're in the arena you are competing with the chance to become the greatest and if you wanna play it safe all the time if you don't wanna risk at all fine a lot of people should make that decision but you're probably not going to have a chance to be the greatest of all time alright that's it for this week's episode tune in next week to hear how walt takes over the world of not only animation but media and imagination until then thanks for listening