Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en so disneyland does about 3.8 billion dollars a year of revenue every day about 50 000 people come to the park so you know just roughly speaking they make about just over 200 per guest per year and that’s that’s not counting the hotels the flights and the and a bunch of the auxiliary stuff so a ticket into the park is like 120 bucks and then you spend like another 100 bucks on food and merch so what happened so walt disney basically his story is kind of amazing so he he grows up and he he’s actually from your your hometown i don’t know if you know this you probably probably do but he’s from missouri and i didn’t know that apparently there’s a place in missouri called electric park have you ever heard of this no because this is the inspiration for disneyland when he’s eight years old he goes to this place called electric park and electric park was kind of known for two things one it was it was an amusement park and the second is it was really clean and that’s like one of the biggest things about disneyland is disneyland is really clean so imagine having 50 000 guests over to your house but somehow everything stays really really clean um and that was like he’s fanatical about this so he goes to electric park and he wants to be a cartoonist he uh ends up working at an ad agency and then he creates his first business it’s called laphograms and he’s basically doing these like kind of like animated uh cards but you know a bad business deal leads it starts working but then he cuts a bad business deal where uh he’s owed a bunch of money by one client and then they don’t pay him and the business goes under and so he says okay let’s go to hollywood and um and he tells his brother let’s go to hollywood and let’s create another business and so they go and they create disney brothers cartoon studio and this is where they create mickey mouse this is where they create snow white that’s the first big hit so the company goes from like in debt or making no money to making millions of dollars off of snow white that was like the big win and so he’s like okay this is kind of working and the business is doing all right it’s not going gangbusters um but it’s a float and he’s working on his next story he’s working on pinocchio he’s working on a couple other stories and he’s always had this crazy idea about amusement parks ever since electric park and he takes his daughter to the local merry-go-round and he’s like ah this is like so boring like why isn’t there something more grand than just this merry-go-round like my daughter loves this but like this is so boring for the parents and this is just one ride like what if i made a place that was um you know what if i made a place that was fun for both the parents and the kids to go to which is like a similar theme with all pixar movies and disney disney movies which is like the movie is enjoyable toy story is enjoyable to an adult and a kid it has like two layers to it both can enjoy a different piece of it and so he’s like and so what how did they actually come about this how did they actually like figure out the idea so they started by doing research they went to every theme park they could find they went to the world’s fair they went to a whole bunch of places getting inspiration and ideas and mesh and thinking about what is bad about this experience what can be made better so things being dirty blah blah blah and he’s like okay um he starts thinking about the design of the place and electric park had this um train that went around the whole park and so if you go to disneyland that’s still the thing there’s right when you enter there’s a train and the train will take you around the whole circumference of the park and he’s like all right i’m gonna build i used to tell people one of these days i’m gonna build an amusement park and it is gonna be clean and he takes two guys off of pinocchio and he says hey listen um i want you guys to start uh start working on like secret project x and um he’s like you know it’s a shame that when people come to hollywood there’s nothing to see here like people all around the world have heard of hollywood they come here there’s the sign where it says hollywood and the letters on the hill but there’s nowhere to see hollywood so he basically is like uh guys if anybody came to even see our animation studio they just see a bunch of dudes hunched over over drawings it’s not they’re not very impressive let’s build something amazing in hollywood and guys get super excited they start doing research but then reality hits they have to they’re working on pinocchio they ought to ship it they’re working on fantasia they got to ship it then world war ii happens so all of all of world war ii happens and then he comes back because he hires this guy kimball to work in his studio and kimball’s like this junior kind of animator guy kimball invites all the co-workers over to his house for like a barbecue or a birthday party or something like that and in the back in the backyard of his house he’s like oh by the way you guys don’t know this but my hobby is i build these little trains almost like the steamboat style train like it’s like a life-size thing it was very small uh it’s like you know one one uh like whatever one link of a train basically you have you cause this guy’s name is ward kimball if you google him he looks like a cartoon and you can see his his train too so walt goes to this thing he’s blown away he’s seeing the train up close and he’s like dude ward built this thing okay we’re the whole mickey he says he comes back to the office he sends a memo he says mickey mouse park is back on and he tells the shareholders shareholders say don’t do it movie studio is already on on edge this sounds like a big distraction it’s against the charter of the company uh we don’t want you doing this he says okay um no problem i understand i’ll create a new company so he just creates another company to create the park he’s like i’m still going to do this but if you don’t want in i’ll do this myself and um and he calls it like a red law or whatever something like that which is like you know uh walter backwards uh is kind of the name where he names it he starts working on it and so he’s like all right how do i fund this thing he thinks it’s going to take five million dollars to build disneyland and in actuality it ends up taking 17 million dollars to do it and so he’s like all right how do i fund this he uh he takes his uh his life insurance policy and he takes a big loan against that that gives him like you know 100 grand or so to go do this then he sells a house that he had in palm springs so that’s like the next seed money that he goes through that pretty quickly then he goes all right i need some bigger money how do i get millions of dollars for this okay he goes to abc the tv network and he says hey abc you’re struggling right now you don’t have much tv programming i will create this this program called like whatever like the wonderful world of disney or something like that i’ll create a tv show for you that’ll air every sunday if you invest in my park idea so disney basically puts down half a million dollars plus another about six and a half of loans and bonds and they owned 34 of disneyland and so that’s how he got the next seven million bucks and then he did the same thing with two other companies and then he sold some sponsorships he he like accumulates together the 17 million dollars hustled his way he hustled his way to doing it the other thing that he did was he was like all right um you know this this thing works because um he’s like i gotta hi i gotta have like the uh the rides work automatically and so he created this thing where if you go to disneyland now you sit in a ride and you go and it’s sort of like a it’s like a stage play that plays out but it’s all synchronized when your little like roller coaster cart enters this room the lights go on the character makes a sound and then when you leave the room it all folds back into its thing and that’s called animatronics and so basically audio animatronics was like the thing he wanted to do which was like he wanted live animals but it’s too much work so instead of live animals he created these robotic animals and he said i’m going to synchronize the movements to music on a loop and there’s this one guy who was just working on only this and he was kind of in front of a green screen trying to make this like puppet do this thing synchronized to music and eventually they finally figured it out and that was like the big breakthrough so okay let me fast forward a little bit they open the park they build the whole thing in less than one year they open the park and he only invited like 1500 people to it or something like that uh like invite only launch but somebody counterfeited the tickets and so double the number of people showed up with counterfeit tickets on day one because double the number of people showed up uh everything breaks the plumbing breaks because there’s too many people using water in the park more than the load was able to handle so he they come to him they want we got a problem the plumbing is broken you have to make a choice toilets are water fountains he’s like toilets for sure and so he there’s no water there’s no drinking water that day the asphalt was still so freshly poured that like women’s high heels was getting stuck in the cement oh no because it was like caving in it was basically a giant disaster and he does some pr he basically says look um we have you know we had to work out the kinks give me a month and basically give me give me some time and this thing will be smooth and sure enough within a month the the baby is you know humming and in seven weeks he does a million visitors so it was kind of an immediate hit once he did it because it was such a famous idea it was disney right off the bat or at this air at this point how famous were they they were like i mean they were a big deal they weren’t like semi-famous they hadn’t had like i mean nowhere near what they are now but like they were semi-famous really the abc show which he was doing while he was building the park was almost like the hype video for the for the park launch was he just grinding the whole time yeah a crazy amount of work and so he he creates this thing and you know it’s basically the sixth or seventh most visited tourist destination in the world now and um you know it’s kind of this crazy place i think which is kind of shocking i think disney or the theme park division prior to covid was the most profitable part of the company wasn’t it except for well not profitable because it had a lot of expenses but in terms of gross profit yes because they had a lot of revenue and a lot of expenses um but now disney plus is like the bigger thing because disney plus is like pure profit business basically took all that ip that people loved and created a streaming service but before that before covey before plus i like disneyland it wasn’t it wasn’t a project it was a like a major a value creation a lot of value was created there i wanted to know is this a is this a loss leader or is this a um a cash cow and it’s it’s more like a cash out it’s hard to tell because every company’s like accounting makes everything look like it’s like losing money you know what i mean like accounting can make something look amazing or terrible regardless of it but you know the parks division parks and resorts was doing you know billions like 30 billion dollars a year or something crazy like that so it was you know obviously became a smash success when he wanted to do disney world in florida he creates five stealth companies because he’s like disneyland was a hit he’s like i’m looking for the second location if anybody finds out where i’m looking the price will go up so he creates five shell companies he starts buying up land in florida sure enough it leaks out the day after it leaks the price per i think acre went from like a hundred and eighty dollars an acre to eighteen thousand dollars an acre basically he couldn’t buy any more once the news leaked and uh and you know he had this like kind of like inspiring vision so he’s like disneyland i want this to be the happiest place on earth and he’s like i want people to have no problem no problems with here i want this to be an escape from your problems you know you know um in real life and disney world he’s like he created this thing called epcot which uh i don’t know if you’ve ever heard of epcot but epcot is basically a standard government agency no it does sound like it though epcot is like right next to disney world it’s this huge dome looking thing and it stands for it’s an experimental what is it it’s experimental prototype community of the future uh something like that of tomorrow and that’s what it stands for um and so what he did was epcot is basically like it takes the cutting edge of what the future looks like and it creates like a mini simulation of the future so you can go and see the latest what the what the future is going to look like in terms of technology i’ve been once when i was a kid yeah that’s kind of amazing and so um and he’s like you know but all of these projects i’ll read you some of the quotes that i thought was pretty great for him as like an entrepreneur he goes um i want this to be the happiest place on earth i want compared to kids have fun together he goes um when it came to epcot he’s saying uh where is it he goes i want this to be a living blueprint of tomorrow i want this to be an always evolving thing epcot is never going to finish because tomorrow will always be different than today uh disneyland itself will never be completed it will go it will go on as long as there is imagination left in the world and so since then you know they built the park for 17 million but obviously they pour in like hundreds of millions of dollars every year to upgrading the parks changing the the rides and the themes and all that stuff um in order to kind of continuously evolving