The Walt Disney Company

The Walt Disney Company is the most successful enterprise ever created for monetizing human nostalgia. In this episode, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal explore Walt's era, tracing how a moonshot factory that repeatedly bet everything on crazy projects—from the first feature-length animated film to a theme park—accidentally invented the modern flywheel business model. The result was a marriage of art, commerce, and engineering that produced Snow White, Fantasia, and Disney Imagineering, and established the foundation for the global entertainment giant we know today.