Hello everyone and welcome to a very special episode of the Diz Unpluged Celebrating

Our 25th anniversary of the Diz coming to you live from the Bob Varley studio in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Pete Werner joined at the table this week by my good friends John Maygai. Hi everybody. Kevin Close. Hi everyone. Rhino Klaven.

Corey Martin. I'm just happy to be here and our producer back in the noop Mr. Craig Williams. And hope everybody's week is going well before we get started just a reminder this show along with all the content we produce brought to you by Dreams Unlimited Travel dot com of which John and I are owners. If you like our content if you like the stuff that we've been producing for the last 25 years a great way to show your support.

And I'm going to be here today is to book your next Disney World Disney Land Disney Cruise Line adventures by Disney Royal Caribbean. Blah blah blah vacation through Dreams Unlimited Travel dot com.

So yeah 25 years now I need to clarify something for folks. I posted on my Facebook one of my Facebook pages. The one with the blue track mark next to it, which is at Disney Pete. If you're looking for me there, that's my other page, not my personal page, my professional page.

I posted this morning that you know my oldest child turned 25 today and a lot of comments come in saying how much they love the show, which I certainly appreciate.

But I need people to understand the show is not what turns 25 today. The Diz turns 25 WDW info dot com Disney info dot com, which is how it started life as Disney info dot com. I'll get into that story in a second.

That is what I created 25 years ago that spawned this show Dreams Unlimited Travel. The boards the Diz boards dot com DC L fan dot com DVC fan dot com moving to Orlando dot com. All of those things respond from that one website WDW info dot com.

So that is what is celebrating its 25th anniversary today. The show will turn 16 in July. Right? Yeah, 16. Yeah, seniors. God really 16. I know. I know. I know. But drive soon. Yes. You can get it. The show will be able to get its learners.

Sure. Somebody commented on my Facebook post that the Diz was old enough to rent a car. But you know, obviously days like this are full of a lot of reflection.

It's been a wild ride over 25 years. And at no point in time, I get asked this question all the time. At no point in time, did I think when I was starting when I was, you know, in those early days working on the Diz that it was going to turn into something anything let alone this.

I was doing it for fun. I was doing it to learn how to make websites for a job I was doing. I worked at UPS at the time and it got put on a project to develop an intranet website. And I had no idea what I was doing. So I created my own website to kind of learn before I started on this project for UPS.

And what I created was the Diz. And so there was no intention that this was going to be a business let alone a business that turned into what it's turned into.

As a matter of fact, in the very beginning, I think you remember John, I was insistent I didn't want ads on the site. I didn't want.

Yeah, it was, it was, we worked in a triangle. It was plan book discuss. You came in that triangle of three websites and you couldn't really get out.

You know, the boards, you know, plan book discuss. That's what we were. It wasn't until Google ads that we were like, uh oh, we're putting other ads on the site. Uh oh.

Yeah, it, I didn't, I didn't want to, but you know, reality of, and where I had to change my mind is after we launched the boards.

And again, I, I, the Diz actually started in late May of 1997. I never remembered the exact date because I wasn't paying attention. I mean, it wasn't like I thought anything was happening.

We didn't have a plaque made or something. Yeah. You know, and so I always just said June 1st. June 1st was the official birthday of the Diz.

And it wasn't until I launched the boards, which was a couple of months later, I want to say it was August of 1997.

And they became popular very quickly. And it kept crashing. We were on a shared hosting server at that point.

And I think maybe we were paying $50 a month. If it was ever a time that we paid $50 a month.

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