December 25, 2024 • 36 mins
“We endeavor to make those worlds authentic by doing great research and make them kind of a pushed reality of what it might be to be there. To not have any contradictions. To make it as authentic and real as we can so that it's telling the story you want to tell."
Few people have had a hand in shaping the magic of Disney parks and experiences like Bob Weis, retired President of Walt Disney Imagineering. During our conversation we talk about bringing imaginative worlds to life and his brand-new book, "Dream Chasing: My 4 Decades of Success and Failure with Walt Disney Imagineering." We explore the challenges of creating this immersive narrative, emphasizing storytelling over visuals, and how Bob exceeded his own expectations by penning over 450 pages with the help of Disney Editions.
Writing a book was an endeavor Bob initially hesitated to undertake. With the guidance of Disney Editions, the project transformed into a narrative-driven masterpiece. His story reminds us that even seasoned dreamers face doubts, but persistence leads to extraordinary results.
Collaboration was a central theme in our conversation. Bob shared stories of the various people he spent time working with in Shanghai and Tokyo. He emphasized how diverse talents come together to create unparalleled experiences. Bob also highlighted the parallels between Disney parks and national parks. Both provide meaningful, authentic experiences that enrich lives. He stressed the importance of trust, research, and authenticity in design.
Whether designing Flight of Passage in Pandora or Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge, Bob’s career is a showcase of relentless creativity and excellence. His insights remind us that dream chasing requires collaboration, persistence, and authenticity.
For lessons on leadership, creativity, or achieving your dreams, this conversation with Bob Weis is a must-listen. It’s a treasure trove of wisdom from a true Disney legend.
Connect with Bob Weis
Order the book - Dream Chasing
Connect with Jody
About Jody - https://jodymaberry.com/about-jody-maberry/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sugarjmaberry
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodymaberry/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/sugarjmaberry/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jodymaberry
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:03):
Welcome to the Jody Mayberry Show. This episode,
I am so pleased to introduce to you Bob Weiss, the
retired president of Walt Disney Imagineering.
Bob, it's so wonderful to have you here. Oh, it's my thrill, Jody.
Great to meet you. Great to be on your podcast and great to
talk about the books. So thank you on all fronts. Well, I
(00:26):
it it is my pleasure. And And I actually wanna start with the book itself.
Yes. There's a lot of good stuff in the book. But one, it is a
beautiful book. And I have to say, when I ordered it, I was
surprised at the size. It's just a really nice,
beautiful book to hold. Was did you have
a part in how big the book was, or was that a a
(00:48):
Disney thing? You know, it's a funny thing. I had a conversation
with the executive editor of Disney
Editions, who's Wendy Levcon, And we
chatted about the book. And I said, I don't think I can write a book.
And she said, I think you can write a book. You know, she's trying to
set me at ease. And I said, you know, look, I don't even like to
(01:09):
return emails, let alone, you know, write anything. And she
said, you only have to write 250 pages and you got a
book for us. And Lee knows this. I ended up writing
450 or something. Right. So I definitely got into it. And once
I started working, the flow was much easier. So
we actually cut it down a little bit because I you know, but
(01:32):
it's it's a big book. It's a nice book. When you work with
Disney Editions, you have such amazing professionals working with you from
everything from how many pages to how you should structure
the chapters and things like that. They don't write the book for you by any
means, and I didn't have a ghostwriter or anything like that. But they're tremendous advisors,
and they're tremendous enthusiasts who when you try to do something you've
(01:53):
never done before, it's hard and you don't have
confidence in yourself because you've never done it before. And they give you confidence that
you can do it. And so I couldn't ask for better. So, yes, I'm very
happy with the way the book turned out, the design of the book,
the amount of detail that they allowed me to put in into the
book. It's just it's a wonderful, wonderful experience, a chance to do
(02:15):
this. One of the things I like about the book, the physical
book, we're not even in the contents of it yet, is
you went against what they say sells really well
right now. Soft back about 200 pages
about so big, the certain size. And that's what's catchy
about the book is it's bigger than you expect in
(02:37):
size and in page count, and I think it just turned
out delightful. So good work on that. Thank you. Thank you.
And and, you know, it is a little bit wider than the normal book that
comes out, which I wanted to have. And it's I
think the most important thing is what's the content you have? And as a
person who spent most of their life at Walt Disney most of their
(03:00):
professional life at Walt Disney Imagineering doing visual projects, My first
thought was, well, we'll do a whole bunch of pages about this and a bunch
of pages about this, thinking of it kind of more like a coffee table book.
And then I ended up saying, you know what? You're writing a book. I want
people to read the book. And so I didn't want to put too many
visuals in it because it would be kind of expected for me to put a
(03:20):
lot of visuals in it. And as I and as I started looking at visuals,
it was stuff that I know, Jody, you could go and find on Google.
You can go find pictures of Tokyo Disney season, those kind of things.
So I said, I'm gonna have the reader read this. And so I hope that's
what they're doing. I think that's what they're doing. Well, I will tell you. I
did it both ways. I've done the audiobook, and I've done the physical book.
(03:42):
Thank you. It is a great combination because I listen to the
audiobook, and then I'd say, wait a minute. I wanna read
that again. I wanna go deep. And then so I would open up to the
page and Oh, that's great. Yeah. It turned out to be a really
good way to do the book. So you've created so many
projects or been responsible for so many projects. I don't know how
(04:04):
accurate the number is. I, in researching you, I
saw you've been responsible for 300 projects. So give
or take, let's say 300, 301 with this book. How
does this book rank compared to all the other projects you've created? I
mean, that's got to feel special to hold this in your hands. It's very
special. And I remember when we were trying to get the book
(04:25):
out and, you know, the d 23 fan convention in
Anaheim is when they like to introduce books. And
so you back up from deadlines and you have to figure out how when you
have to have it be done to get it printed and packaged
and out to Anaheim and at least a few copies to Anaheim
in time for d 23. So I remember in the middle of editing
(04:48):
thinking I've designed a whole whole parks and resorts, and
it's been less work than this. It was a lot of work, a
lot of wonderful work. Don't get me wrong. A lot of wonderful work and
gratifying work, but surprisingly, a lot a lot of work
to not just to pick out what you want to talk about. But for me,
what I hope people get from it is I wanted to tell it kind of
(05:11):
an adventure, kind of a page turning. You know, you don't really
know what's going to happen. You know, if you suspend your disbelief, you don't know
whether we're going to get there or what will happen. So I really wanted to
take the reader on a journey. Not I wasn't interested in doing
an autobiography ever. I was interested in doing something that
took them kind of inside these projects and inside the rooms
(05:33):
where where people are talking about them and where they're having successes
and failures, and they have to get back up and they have to try to
do it again. I wanted to bring that to life for people.
So that was the hard part was figuring out how to make a great story
out of it and try to take, you know, 40 years of doing this and
figure out which projects were the most interesting, not because they
(05:54):
were all perfect or that they were all successful, but because they all
had a message. And, you know, one of the big things that I talk to
people about, Jody, when I have been out on the road
signing books and things is this is about your
dreams and my dreams. And the fact that we don't
really follow them, we chase them. You have to aggressively go
(06:16):
after the dreams you have in your life and try to make them happen. And
in the case of a theme park or a movie or something like that, a
big development project, you've got to get a lot of people to go after it
with you. You can't just do it by yourself. So the idea of dream
chasing really came about as some way to talk about how do you
create the kinds of environments, the kinds of organizations that it
(06:37):
takes to try to get a lot of people on board with an
idea and follow through on it. That's really so much about what the book is
about. And it does it comes across. And
that that was when I first saw the title, I just thought, oh,
that's a, you know, nice Disney esque title. And then you
read the book and you realize, oh, it it's not just a clever
(06:59):
title. It's what the book is really about. Yeah. And I,
I was very lucky. I had met Simon Sinek. You probably know
from, you know, his wonderful books about about
creativity and business and innovation. And and I reached
out to Simon and asked him if he would possibly read the
book, which is a lot to ask and in draft form and do a
(07:22):
blurb for the back. And and he did one, which I'm so happy
about because it captures this idea that that a lot of
us, I'd say all of us, most of us for sure have dreams,
have ideas. The difference about them is, do
you work in a group of people or an organization or wherever you work? Are
you in a place where people can help you follow those and help you get
(07:44):
them done? That's the difference. And I certainly was very, very
lucky to be a part of Disney for so many years
where there's a natural predisposition to want to make things
happen, to want to make things successful and to want to
dream outside the box. And so I want other people to
feel the same way no matter what they're dreaming about, to feel like their dreams
(08:07):
are good. They're probably better than they even think so.
And to not let a few hurdles in the way keep
you from going after them. Yeah. There are a lot of hurdles
in the stories that you share and still some really
incredible results. Yeah. People don't know that. You know, we tend
to in the past, the person I give enormous credit
(08:28):
to for this book, besides the editor Wendy Levkon,
is Leslie Iwerks, who produced the Imagineering story,
the multipart show that premiered on Disney Plus about the
Imagineers. And the reason I give Leslie, my friend, a lot of credit here
is because had she not produced that series, Imagineering
wouldn't be kind of out in the open the way it is today. There was
(08:51):
a lot of truly behind the scenes there. I think prior to
that, most of our behind the scenes work was mostly kind
of talking about the success of projects and things. This
really got into people, personality, passion,
projects. And so it opened the door for others of us who
wanted to talk about projects in an honest and straightforward
(09:14):
way. So I'm definitely excited to have the book out and have it
be kind of have some real detail and
a real life history behind it. Well, I
want to get into some of the items in the book, and
it starts out talking about camping. And what
I was hoping reading that story was, oh, we're
(09:37):
Bob's going to find inspiration for what he did in a
national park, which it doesn't really get into that. But it
does make me wonder, did you ever get an idea from a
national park that you implemented in a Disney project?
Well, I grew up going to I know I write a little bit about it,
just a little bit of about kind of the history of growing up in my
(09:58):
time and in camping with the family and that kind of thing. But yes,
I grew up going to the national parks. And by the time
I was off to college, I had been to so
many of them across the country because we used to make these big drives across
the country. And so I've been to many, many of the national
parks. I've always been inspired by them. And I guess what I would
(10:20):
say is Disney Parks try to inspire you.
They try to make you forget that every day of your life
and what problem you might have at work or at home or whatever. And
just and just realize that you live in a bigger
world where amazing things are going on. And when
you stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon, El
(10:42):
Tovar there and you look out over that canyon or you
stand on the, you know, the edge of Bryce or any of
those, it's impossible not to be inspired. It's impossible not
to think that there's a bigger world out there that you should be
inspired to be a part of. And so in that sense, maybe not
in the direct sense you're asking, but in that broader sense of what
(11:04):
it truly means to think about designing a park of
any kind. The National Parks are the best example there is out
there. And they're real, they're in the real world. And they've been elegantly,
wonderfully preserved by history and by the people who dedicate their lives
to them. It's very relevant. It's very relevant to to what
we do. And I think even the I mean, I'll go off on the deep
(11:26):
end here. I'd say even in the original
days of when they started to bring the trains out west
and, you know, they would bring the trains out and then
go see the sites. And then they would bring the Native Americans out and
show their artwork and their crafts and all that stuff to give
the the, say, the tourists from New York or Chicago on the train a real
(11:48):
sense of where they were going and what they were seeing. So much of that,
I think, is directly relevant to Disney history. When you
say that, it it does make me think of when you are in
a Disney experience, it is very close to
the experience in a national park where you are completely surrounded by
the it's not just you're taking on you're looking at a view. You're
(12:11):
actually surrounded by what's going on. And and
you you do capture that at at Disney, which is
phenomenal. There are a lot of similarities between
natural parks and themed parks. And Oh, I think there
totally are. And and I think that the the first operators
of the parks were were the park rangers, the national parks, the, you
(12:33):
know, the fabulous national park lodges, the
campgrounds. You know, that's what inspired Disney
for years. And I think I think a big part of why Walt
Disney originally, after he did Anaheim,
he wanted to get 26,000 acres in in Central
Florida was he wanted a national park. He wanted a
(12:55):
place where there weren't just like, you know, little
Podunk motels everywhere and food out fast food places.
You know, he wanted what he called the the blessing of size. He
wanted the scope of the vacation. And he didn't want
it to be ruined by advertising or or things like
that. So I think that's that's really been a part of it from the
(13:17):
start. Yeah. That is fascinating. One of the
things you said earlier reminds me of this piece
from your your book in well, they're not really
this is what's interesting about Bob's book is there are chapters, but they're
not called chapters. It's almost broken into little stories that
happen along chronologically. This story is called lunch
(13:40):
out, and Bob is talking about what was going on
when Reagan was shot. And in that, Bob, you
said as dreamers, we enrich people's lives and we
take that very seriously. Now that sentence was part
of a bigger discussion you were having in that chapter. But
that sentence really struck me because
(14:02):
that is true for natural parks, just as it is
for Disney like that. I love the idea
that you're create it's theme park, it's entertainment, but
you take it really seriously because you enrich people's lives. And
I think if you have that feeling of the work you're
doing, it's got to make it just so rewarding to
(14:24):
realize, look, we're not just making attractions, we
are enriching people's lives. Well, you will find in the
Imagineering disciplines, you will find
people that study art history
and architecture history and go out and study
rocks and trees and plants and
(14:46):
environments and how waterfalls work and all
those things. So, yes, we are creating that
reality. We are creating a synthetic world, not
a real world. But we endeavor to
make those worlds authentic by doing great research
and make them a kind of a encapsulation, a
(15:08):
kind of a pushed reality of what it might be to be there
and and not have any contradictions, you know, make it
as authentic and real as we can so that it's telling
the story you want to tell. So sometimes it might not be a
real story. It could be Pandora, you know, that Joe
Rohde did at the Animal Kingdom. But it still is backed up
(15:31):
by research on this earth with this kind of rock work. And
even though those mountains are floating, they still have, you know,
plants and trees and rocks. And, you know, you want the
audience to really believe they are on Pandora or
that we are really in some location, and that
requires a lot of research and a lot of detail to get
(15:53):
there. Yeah. That well, since you you mentioned
Pandora, there was a spot in the
book where you talk about Pandora and say that when
Joe and the team created that, when Joe wrote in the team created Pandora,
that they did in particular flight to passage, they pulled off
something nobody really thought was was possible. Like, no
(16:15):
one had thought of that before. And to me, that is
pretty amazing to think about that. That ride in particular,
so many people say, oh, that's the ride at Disney
that. And James Warner wrote the book, how does Disney do
that, because he was inspired by that ride. And so many people
credit that that ride as being, like, the inspiration.
(16:37):
I didn't think I didn't feel like I was at Disney. I
felt like I was really somewhere else. And that's pretty cool when you can pull
something like that off. Yeah. And I think that teams have, you know, done
their best to do that. Certainly, we tried to do that with Rise of the
Resistance as part of Star Wars Galaxy's Edge. And
Star Wars Galaxy's Edge is another example of there's
(17:00):
no real Star Wars out there. Right. We all want it to be.
But the important thing is that
the team endeavored, in that case, to fulfill
for people who had grown up with Star Wars
or people who didn't know Star Wars at all, to fulfill
their dream of what it would be like to be there, to be in that
(17:23):
world, to be standing next to the Millennium Falcon and to be
in a world like that. Very similar idea as Pandora,
where you're trying to fulfill an expectation and kind of
overwhelm the expectation. Right. You're trying to go beyond the expectation.
And I've seen people or talk to people who broke into
tears when they entered Star Wars Galaxy's Edge because they
(17:46):
felt like they had been dreaming to see Star Wars
since they were kids. And, you know, all of a sudden here they really are.
And so the responsibility that you have as an
imagineer, I think, is big because we know that the audience
has not only big expectations, but they have trust in
us. They trust that we're gonna do the right thing. They trust that we
(18:08):
have kind of a moral grounding. I don't want to overstate it, but a kind
of moral grounding to to doing good things that are
meaningful and to doing them authentically. And I think that's probably
what we share with you know, all those thousands and thousands of
park rangers out there who maintain our parks is that they believe in
those sites. They believe in the importance of education, of
(18:30):
nature. And so we're all trying to present to the public because the same
public. Right. Just different context. But we all believe in doing the best
job we can possibly do. Yeah. Well, having worked
with Lee Cockrell for so long, I will often meet people who
worked at Disney that will tell me a Lee Cockrell story.
And and one person told me he worked at one of
(18:53):
the resorts and was at this point in his
career where he felt like I just work
at a hotel. You know, I could have I feel like I could have done
more. Maybe I should have done more by now, and I work at a hotel.
And Lee pulled him aside and said, look, you don't
just work at a hotel. Look who comes here. It's
(19:15):
doctors, police officers, teachers. Mhmm.
And they come here and have the best vacation of their life, and
they get recharged, and they get motivated, and they get energized,
and then they go back into the real world and do the
really important work that keeps all of us going. And he said,
that's what you do here. And that person said it
(19:38):
completely changed my viewpoint. And then he went on to have a
very long and successful career at Disney. And that is also
something similar to parks. Like, you could get bogged down
by, alright. We're doing the same thing every day. We're at
welcome stations, and we have visitors that speed
and litter and and you could get bogged down or you could
(20:00):
say, look, we're introducing people to nature and it's going to
change their lives. And I think that's another similarity in park
rangers and and what imagineers do. I do. I do. We're
raising a kind of expectation of
quality and care and stewardship.
No question about that. That makes people care about places. And
(20:23):
one of the things that I'm sure Lee would tell you,
because I know I know I've read about it with, Dick Nunez,
you know, who was the sort of the patriarch of the operations
business, was that if the place was clean,
it would stay clean. That doesn't mean you don't have a 1,000,000 sweepers out there
keeping it clean. But the more you kept it clean, the more
(20:45):
people would hesitate before they would drop something on the floor.
And the dirtier it was, the more they wouldn't kind
of care. Right. So if you go if you're coming out of a state fair
or something and it's kind of out of control and there's stuff everywhere and the
trash cans are full and stuff like that, you don't necessarily have a choice but
to just drop your stuff wherever you are.
(21:07):
But if you're in a place that is constantly maintained, no matter how much, no
matter how busy the day is, no matter how stressed out everybody
is, people believe they're in a place that they should take care of. And that
makes a difference. That makes a difference certainly in the national parks,
but certainly at all the Disneyland parks, too, is that you try to keep
ahead of it, keep the story always consistent,
(21:29):
and people will be a part of it. They'll appreciate it. I feel that
is why Animal Kingdom is such an important
park at Disney World because just like a natural park, it
introduces people to the natural world with the hope
that you go home and you by the time you get there, you care about
what you just experienced and you want to protect it and you want
(21:52):
to conserve the natural world. And that's why when
people ask what's your favorite Disney park, I always say Disney's
Animal Kingdom is tops. And that's that is why the bigger
mission of what that park does. Yeah. That's a good point.
But I think that all the parks are
in some way an aspiration to something
(22:14):
we'd like to do better. Right? So EPCOT gives you this
feeling that the future could be better, that nations
could all be compatible with each other. You know, there's there's ideals
behind the parks. Main Street USA and the Disneyland gives you a sense
of people can all live together and work together and, you know, collaborate
and cooperate. And, you know, your your hometown can be
(22:36):
can be very neighborhood friendly. They all have these kind
of ideals behind them. And I think as imagineers,
you're always looking for stories or places that you can
create that express that, that help kind of
express not just the story you're telling, but the
larger story, which is why are people there? Why do they
(22:59):
come back? They're there because they're with their families or they're with their friends,
and they're having a good time, but it's more than fun.
It's a kind of a aspiration to a better
world. And that's the fundamental underpinning of all of
them. Oh, yeah. That's that's really good. I
hadn't I've always thought that with Animal Kingdom. I hadn't thought that
(23:20):
through so deeply with the other parks. Yeah. I think it's I think it's a
it's perhaps more clear and immediate to see in Animal
Kingdom, but all the parks, I think, endeavor to do that.
They all endeavor to put you in a place
where you almost come away saying, I don't understand why
the world's so difficult if Disney ran it. You know, David
(23:43):
Brinkley said it when he was a famous news
journalist on television. But when Walt Disney World opened, he said,
we've all heard that our cities are going to be
modern and they're going to have great transportation and they're going to be clean and
they're going to be futuristic and all that stuff. And he said, but nobody's done
it but Disney. And, you know, I think we all can do
(24:04):
it. We all should do it. And Disney inspires a lot of people
that that work in the urban design world. But it takes a lot of
work to do that. And it certainly is what we all try to do. Well,
I wanna move to another story called trimming the
bushes. And this one caught my attention, for a couple
of reasons. 1, because it involves Carl Holtz, and
(24:26):
I've met Carl through Lee Lee Great guy. Great
guy. Lee says that Carl Holt was the best hire
he's ever made. And Oh, yeah. And Carl
is a big personality. So your your story about him made me
laugh. So Carl called Bob. Carl
well, Carl calls me out of the blue, and I'm just now
(24:47):
president of Imagineering. So a lot of people call me out of the
blue. But I pick up the phone and this guy just start to yell at
me on the phone. I won't say what he said, but he starts yelling at
me on the phone that he's gonna trim these bushes. I don't know what he's
talking about. I don't know what bushes, what his problem is.
But what you find out is people have passion
(25:10):
in this business. Right? And Carl certainly
what, you know, what we love about him is he has passion, and so do
I. But there were apparently some bushes that
were some sort of a special bush, and they blocked the ocean
view from the Alani lobby. And
Carl had gotten frustrated about them getting too tall. And
(25:31):
I guess somebody at Imagineering had said, well, you know, you can't trim those. You
got to ask an Imagineering. You got to ask Joe Rode or whatever. And this
is a meaningful story to me because one of the things I
had a challenge with when I first came president of
Imagineering was it's easy to point the finger at
Imagineers and say they're too difficult. They spend
(25:53):
too much money. They have too many rules. There's
a lot of things. But Imagineering has a history of
being the only R and D creative place founded
by Walt Disney himself. And the purpose was
to create the impossible, to do what we're talking about, Jody,
to create people's, you know, vacations, to create
(26:15):
important milestones for them, all those things. So
even a bush in the lobby of the Aulani Hotel in Hawaii
is important to us. And so, yes, we can go overboard
sometimes. And, you know, probably somebody should have called Carl and
said Carl will come over and turn the bushes. Right. But it's
never usually a lack of stewardship. It's
(26:37):
usually air on the side of stewardship. You air on the side of what's
important aesthetically, all those things. And that's what I was trying to capture there
is because, you know, Imagineering has a 100
plus individual disciplines from landscape architecture to
ornamental horticulture to stained glass to to ride
engineering and show engineering and music and writing
(26:59):
and filmmaking and just so many different things, color
specialists. And so it goes back to this idea of trying to be
authentic, trying to be careful. And when you
leave, when you finish a project and you go home, making sure that the
project stays that way. Right. You don't want somebody to go 6
months later and say, well, it looked really pretty on opening day, but doesn't look
(27:20):
good now. So a lot of effort on Imagineers goes into
the initial authenticity, the beauty of it, but also the
fact that you should keep it that way. And that goes back to Walt too.
One of the things I liked about that story, and then you followed it
up mentioning all the urban legends and about
how impractical imagining was. And that that
(27:43):
just followed you around. And that, you know, that's kinda true in
operations that they have to operate what
you've now designed. And there's sometimes stories on
you can't as Carl said, you can't trim the bushes if you don't call
Bob Wise. And that's an interesting tension between
them operating what you designed and the
(28:05):
conversations that happened there. But as Bob said,
every side is passionate about it. And it reminds me of
a story Ron Logan told me about
entertainment. This is how him and Lee Cockrell ended up so close.
They used to butt heads because Ron Logan would design entertainment
for Walt Disney World, but it would spend Lee Cockrell's
(28:27):
operation money to put it on, and then they would butt heads. And they
finally sat down together and said, look, we're both trying to make sure our guests
have the best vacation of their life. So instead of butting heads about it,
let's put our heads together and figure out how to do this right. And I
know even though there are stories, there are urban
legends about Imagineering. Really, that's what you guys do is
(28:49):
help operations create these fabulous
experiences for people. The best thing is always
the communication collaboration. You know, I have
some of the most wonderful relationships, professional
relationships I have are with the people who've operated the parks. And
usually we planned it together. We evolved it over years
(29:12):
to come. You know, I have a close relationship with Andrew Ballstein, who's in
Shanghai, making that park work every day. And we worked on building it
together with George Gross in Tokyo with Bruce
Laval, who's now retired. But but he and I built the studio, the Disney
MGM, now Disney Hollywood Studios together. The more you
understand each other, the more you understand the meeting point of
(29:34):
the creative design and the daily operation,
the more you can do great things. You know, we set out to
renovate Disney California Adventure to expand it,
to make it more relevant for the guests in Anaheim. And I couldn't have done
it without George Callegrides, without Mary Niven, without the people who
were operating it every day. And the truth is, it comes down to
(29:57):
in the end, we're all doing the same exact thing. We're just trying to make
it better for the guests. We have a different way of looking at it. Some
of us look at it from an experience point of view. Some people look at
it from dining and service, and some people look
at it from daily operating. You know, everybody looks at it from a
different lens, but it's all the same thing. It's all what is the
(30:17):
quality that you're trying to create? What is the experience you're trying to
create? And I think you'll find them that,
imagineers have a huge admiration for the
cast and for the people who were on the cast. I recently
was at the 35th anniversary of Disney MGM
Studios in Florida and, had a nice meeting with a bunch
(30:39):
of cast members who had been there from the beginning. So these are people who
have worked in the park for 35 years. I worked on it, you know,
for 6 or 7 years. And to just hear their stories and hear how
dedicated they are to that park and how dedicated they are to the guests is
incredible. So it takes everybody. It takes everybody to make it
happen. And, yes, we have arguments. Sometimes we
(31:01):
see the world differently. But in the end, we only have one purpose,
which is the happiness of the guest. Yes. That is wonderful.
And this the story with Carl, it keeps
getting better because Bob and Carl end up working together for
Disney Cruise Line. So Carl is the president of Disney
Cruise Line, and Bob is behind designing the
(31:24):
ships, which I know there's a big story there. But the
one piece that got me when you're talking about that
is you're talking about Laura Cabo. And I don't know her,
but I love what you said when you were talking about her. You said on
every level of every organization, there's
underutilized talent. And I thought, wow. That is a
(31:45):
good one. Can you talk a little bit about that and how
leaders can find that talent? Yeah. I think there's an
openness you have to have. And sometimes
people think they're doing the job they were asked to do
and they're doing what they were what they were asked to do and they're doing
it every day. Some people jump out and try
(32:07):
to, you know, push forward and do something different. Some people are trying to figure
it out. Laura Cabo was one of these folks who who
was incredibly talented before she came to Disney. I
wasn't aware of her portfolio before she came to Disney. I saw what
she was doing. I thought she was doing a great job. But someone outside
Disney said, well, do you have any idea what she did before?
(32:29):
And I was looking for somebody to to design the next generation
cruise ships. And I had no idea she had so much experience in resorts and
cruise and all that. So I went to her and within a with literally within
a few weeks, she was suddenly, you know, designing the next generation of the
Wish and all of that. So you never know if
inside your organization, you're overlooking somebody. I wouldn't
(32:52):
say that Laura was being overlooked. I would just say, you never know if there's
somebody there who can do more than you think they can do
or even that they think they can do. So especially
in a creative or technological organization, you
always have to keep your eye out. You've always gotta be looking out for
somebody who may be doing that, but you didn't know
(33:13):
that when they're at home, they paint or they build model trains
or a lot of the people who work for Walt Disney, Exotencio,
who was an animator, who ended up writing music. He ended up writing
Yo ho, Yo ho, A Pirate's Life for Me. Blaine Gibson, who also
was an animator, but he ended up to be the lead sculptor for Walt. He
sculpted all the pirates, sculpted all the figures for years, the presidents.
(33:36):
You have to understand people are multidimensional
and look for those talents and let people have as
many chances as they can to try them out for you.
Well, Bob, this has been such a good conversation. And I I
showed up with 3 pages of notes, and we got through
about 1 fourth of it. But there's just so much
(33:59):
to come back. We'll have to come do the other the rest. Yes. I hope
so. Because this this is fun. It's it's such a blast talking to you.
We'll have to do more. And we've got it. You know, we've got the we
just had the audiobook come out, which I'm glad you talked
about. I gotta put a brief plug in for ghost dog,
which is my fiction book, which is a book about the haunted mansion,
(34:22):
about what would happen to a family if a ghost dog followed them home
instead of a ghost followed them home. That's out. That's doing well. The
audiobook for that comes out in January. I'm just so happy to
have a chance to talk about these books, to talk about, you know, your work
in the parks. I have to before I let you go, I have to talk
about the parks again for a second because I just think that the
(34:43):
dedication of our people who make our national
parks work every day is just so incredible. And, you
know, it's it's just like what I said about CAST. Right? It it's the people
who care about the people who come there and make their lives
better, and that's what they're about. And in the case of the park rangers, they're
not only helping to make it work, but they're also experts in
(35:05):
the geology and the the flora and the fauna and the history and
everything else. They're incredible people. So I thank you for that too.
Oh, man. That is great to hear. And the book again is
Dream Chasing My 4 Decades of Success and Failure with Walt
Disney Imagineering. And I have not read the
fiction book yet. What's the name of that one again, Bob? The book is
(35:26):
called Ghost Dog. Ghost Dog. Truth and Lending. It's about a dog who's a
ghost or a ghost who is a dog. And, if you go
to your bookstore or Amazon, you find Dream
Chasing and look under my author name, you'll find Ghost Dog right there.
Alright. And if you wanna keep up with what Bob is doing, you can go
to bobweiss.com. That's where you can find the
(35:48):
books. Bob, I'm I'm so happy you were here. Thank you so much for
talking with us. Thank you so much for the opportunity. And thank
you for listening to the Jodie Mayberry Show.
He chalks a Seki every Monday at Sugar Jay.
Welcome to the Jody Mayberry Show. This episode,
I am so pleased to introduce to you Bob Weiss, the
retired president of Walt Disney Imagineering.
Bob, it's so wonderful to have you here. Oh, it's my thrill, Jody.
Great to meet you. Great to be on your podcast and great to
talk about the books. So thank you on all fronts. Well, I
(00:26):
it it is my pleasure. And And I actually wanna start with the book itself.
Yes. There's a lot of good stuff in the book. But one, it is a
beautiful book. And I have to say, when I ordered it, I was
surprised at the size. It's just a really nice,
beautiful book to hold. Was did you have
a part in how big the book was, or was that a a
(00:48):
Disney thing? You know, it's a funny thing. I had a conversation
with the executive editor of Disney
Editions, who's Wendy Levcon, And we
chatted about the book. And I said, I don't think I can write a book.
And she said, I think you can write a book. You know, she's trying to
set me at ease. And I said, you know, look, I don't even like to
(01:09):
return emails, let alone, you know, write anything. And she
said, you only have to write 250 pages and you got a
book for us. And Lee knows this. I ended up writing
450 or something. Right. So I definitely got into it. And once
I started working, the flow was much easier. So
we actually cut it down a little bit because I you know, but
(01:32):
it's it's a big book. It's a nice book. When you work with
Disney Editions, you have such amazing professionals working with you from
everything from how many pages to how you should structure
the chapters and things like that. They don't write the book for you by any
means, and I didn't have a ghostwriter or anything like that. But they're tremendous advisors,
and they're tremendous enthusiasts who when you try to do something you've
(01:53):
never done before, it's hard and you don't have
confidence in yourself because you've never done it before. And they give you confidence that
you can do it. And so I couldn't ask for better. So, yes, I'm very
happy with the way the book turned out, the design of the book,
the amount of detail that they allowed me to put in into the
book. It's just it's a wonderful, wonderful experience, a chance to do
(02:15):
this. One of the things I like about the book, the physical
book, we're not even in the contents of it yet, is
you went against what they say sells really well
right now. Soft back about 200 pages
about so big, the certain size. And that's what's catchy
about the book is it's bigger than you expect in
(02:37):
size and in page count, and I think it just turned
out delightful. So good work on that. Thank you. Thank you.
And and, you know, it is a little bit wider than the normal book that
comes out, which I wanted to have. And it's I
think the most important thing is what's the content you have? And as a
person who spent most of their life at Walt Disney most of their
(03:00):
professional life at Walt Disney Imagineering doing visual projects, My first
thought was, well, we'll do a whole bunch of pages about this and a bunch
of pages about this, thinking of it kind of more like a coffee table book.
And then I ended up saying, you know what? You're writing a book. I want
people to read the book. And so I didn't want to put too many
visuals in it because it would be kind of expected for me to put a
(03:20):
lot of visuals in it. And as I and as I started looking at visuals,
it was stuff that I know, Jody, you could go and find on Google.
You can go find pictures of Tokyo Disney season, those kind of things.
So I said, I'm gonna have the reader read this. And so I hope that's
what they're doing. I think that's what they're doing. Well, I will tell you. I
did it both ways. I've done the audiobook, and I've done the physical book.
(03:42):
Thank you. It is a great combination because I listen to the
audiobook, and then I'd say, wait a minute. I wanna read
that again. I wanna go deep. And then so I would open up to the
page and Oh, that's great. Yeah. It turned out to be a really
good way to do the book. So you've created so many
projects or been responsible for so many projects. I don't know how
(04:04):
accurate the number is. I, in researching you, I
saw you've been responsible for 300 projects. So give
or take, let's say 300, 301 with this book. How
does this book rank compared to all the other projects you've created? I
mean, that's got to feel special to hold this in your hands. It's very
special. And I remember when we were trying to get the book
(04:25):
out and, you know, the d 23 fan convention in
Anaheim is when they like to introduce books. And
so you back up from deadlines and you have to figure out how when you
have to have it be done to get it printed and packaged
and out to Anaheim and at least a few copies to Anaheim
in time for d 23. So I remember in the middle of editing
(04:48):
thinking I've designed a whole whole parks and resorts, and
it's been less work than this. It was a lot of work, a
lot of wonderful work. Don't get me wrong. A lot of wonderful work and
gratifying work, but surprisingly, a lot a lot of work
to not just to pick out what you want to talk about. But for me,
what I hope people get from it is I wanted to tell it kind of
(05:11):
an adventure, kind of a page turning. You know, you don't really
know what's going to happen. You know, if you suspend your disbelief, you don't know
whether we're going to get there or what will happen. So I really wanted to
take the reader on a journey. Not I wasn't interested in doing
an autobiography ever. I was interested in doing something that
took them kind of inside these projects and inside the rooms
(05:33):
where where people are talking about them and where they're having successes
and failures, and they have to get back up and they have to try to
do it again. I wanted to bring that to life for people.
So that was the hard part was figuring out how to make a great story
out of it and try to take, you know, 40 years of doing this and
figure out which projects were the most interesting, not because they
(05:54):
were all perfect or that they were all successful, but because they all
had a message. And, you know, one of the big things that I talk to
people about, Jody, when I have been out on the road
signing books and things is this is about your
dreams and my dreams. And the fact that we don't
really follow them, we chase them. You have to aggressively go
(06:16):
after the dreams you have in your life and try to make them happen. And
in the case of a theme park or a movie or something like that, a
big development project, you've got to get a lot of people to go after it
with you. You can't just do it by yourself. So the idea of dream
chasing really came about as some way to talk about how do you
create the kinds of environments, the kinds of organizations that it
(06:37):
takes to try to get a lot of people on board with an
idea and follow through on it. That's really so much about what the book is
about. And it does it comes across. And
that that was when I first saw the title, I just thought, oh,
that's a, you know, nice Disney esque title. And then you
read the book and you realize, oh, it it's not just a clever
(06:59):
title. It's what the book is really about. Yeah. And I,
I was very lucky. I had met Simon Sinek. You probably know
from, you know, his wonderful books about about
creativity and business and innovation. And and I reached
out to Simon and asked him if he would possibly read the
book, which is a lot to ask and in draft form and do a
(07:22):
blurb for the back. And and he did one, which I'm so happy
about because it captures this idea that that a lot of
us, I'd say all of us, most of us for sure have dreams,
have ideas. The difference about them is, do
you work in a group of people or an organization or wherever you work? Are
you in a place where people can help you follow those and help you get
(07:44):
them done? That's the difference. And I certainly was very, very
lucky to be a part of Disney for so many years
where there's a natural predisposition to want to make things
happen, to want to make things successful and to want to
dream outside the box. And so I want other people to
feel the same way no matter what they're dreaming about, to feel like their dreams
(08:07):
are good. They're probably better than they even think so.
And to not let a few hurdles in the way keep
you from going after them. Yeah. There are a lot of hurdles
in the stories that you share and still some really
incredible results. Yeah. People don't know that. You know, we tend
to in the past, the person I give enormous credit
(08:28):
to for this book, besides the editor Wendy Levkon,
is Leslie Iwerks, who produced the Imagineering story,
the multipart show that premiered on Disney Plus about the
Imagineers. And the reason I give Leslie, my friend, a lot of credit here
is because had she not produced that series, Imagineering
wouldn't be kind of out in the open the way it is today. There was
(08:51):
a lot of truly behind the scenes there. I think prior to
that, most of our behind the scenes work was mostly kind
of talking about the success of projects and things. This
really got into people, personality, passion,
projects. And so it opened the door for others of us who
wanted to talk about projects in an honest and straightforward
(09:14):
way. So I'm definitely excited to have the book out and have it
be kind of have some real detail and
a real life history behind it. Well, I
want to get into some of the items in the book, and
it starts out talking about camping. And what
I was hoping reading that story was, oh, we're
(09:37):
Bob's going to find inspiration for what he did in a
national park, which it doesn't really get into that. But it
does make me wonder, did you ever get an idea from a
national park that you implemented in a Disney project?
Well, I grew up going to I know I write a little bit about it,
just a little bit of about kind of the history of growing up in my
(09:58):
time and in camping with the family and that kind of thing. But yes,
I grew up going to the national parks. And by the time
I was off to college, I had been to so
many of them across the country because we used to make these big drives across
the country. And so I've been to many, many of the national
parks. I've always been inspired by them. And I guess what I would
(10:20):
say is Disney Parks try to inspire you.
They try to make you forget that every day of your life
and what problem you might have at work or at home or whatever. And
just and just realize that you live in a bigger
world where amazing things are going on. And when
you stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon, El
(10:42):
Tovar there and you look out over that canyon or you
stand on the, you know, the edge of Bryce or any of
those, it's impossible not to be inspired. It's impossible not
to think that there's a bigger world out there that you should be
inspired to be a part of. And so in that sense, maybe not
in the direct sense you're asking, but in that broader sense of what
(11:04):
it truly means to think about designing a park of
any kind. The National Parks are the best example there is out
there. And they're real, they're in the real world. And they've been elegantly,
wonderfully preserved by history and by the people who dedicate their lives
to them. It's very relevant. It's very relevant to to what
we do. And I think even the I mean, I'll go off on the deep
(11:26):
end here. I'd say even in the original
days of when they started to bring the trains out west
and, you know, they would bring the trains out and then
go see the sites. And then they would bring the Native Americans out and
show their artwork and their crafts and all that stuff to give
the the, say, the tourists from New York or Chicago on the train a real
(11:48):
sense of where they were going and what they were seeing. So much of that,
I think, is directly relevant to Disney history. When you
say that, it it does make me think of when you are in
a Disney experience, it is very close to
the experience in a national park where you are completely surrounded by
the it's not just you're taking on you're looking at a view. You're
(12:11):
actually surrounded by what's going on. And and
you you do capture that at at Disney, which is
phenomenal. There are a lot of similarities between
natural parks and themed parks. And Oh, I think there
totally are. And and I think that the the first operators
of the parks were were the park rangers, the national parks, the, you
(12:33):
know, the fabulous national park lodges, the
campgrounds. You know, that's what inspired Disney
for years. And I think I think a big part of why Walt
Disney originally, after he did Anaheim,
he wanted to get 26,000 acres in in Central
Florida was he wanted a national park. He wanted a
(12:55):
place where there weren't just like, you know, little
Podunk motels everywhere and food out fast food places.
You know, he wanted what he called the the blessing of size. He
wanted the scope of the vacation. And he didn't want
it to be ruined by advertising or or things like
that. So I think that's that's really been a part of it from the
(13:17):
start. Yeah. That is fascinating. One of the
things you said earlier reminds me of this piece
from your your book in well, they're not really
this is what's interesting about Bob's book is there are chapters, but they're
not called chapters. It's almost broken into little stories that
happen along chronologically. This story is called lunch
(13:40):
out, and Bob is talking about what was going on
when Reagan was shot. And in that, Bob, you
said as dreamers, we enrich people's lives and we
take that very seriously. Now that sentence was part
of a bigger discussion you were having in that chapter. But
that sentence really struck me because
(14:02):
that is true for natural parks, just as it is
for Disney like that. I love the idea
that you're create it's theme park, it's entertainment, but
you take it really seriously because you enrich people's lives. And
I think if you have that feeling of the work you're
doing, it's got to make it just so rewarding to
(14:24):
realize, look, we're not just making attractions, we
are enriching people's lives. Well, you will find in the
Imagineering disciplines, you will find
people that study art history
and architecture history and go out and study
rocks and trees and plants and
(14:46):
environments and how waterfalls work and all
those things. So, yes, we are creating that
reality. We are creating a synthetic world, not
a real world. But we endeavor to
make those worlds authentic by doing great research
and make them a kind of a encapsulation, a
(15:08):
kind of a pushed reality of what it might be to be there
and and not have any contradictions, you know, make it
as authentic and real as we can so that it's telling
the story you want to tell. So sometimes it might not be a
real story. It could be Pandora, you know, that Joe
Rohde did at the Animal Kingdom. But it still is backed up
(15:31):
by research on this earth with this kind of rock work. And
even though those mountains are floating, they still have, you know,
plants and trees and rocks. And, you know, you want the
audience to really believe they are on Pandora or
that we are really in some location, and that
requires a lot of research and a lot of detail to get
(15:53):
there. Yeah. That well, since you you mentioned
Pandora, there was a spot in the
book where you talk about Pandora and say that when
Joe and the team created that, when Joe wrote in the team created Pandora,
that they did in particular flight to passage, they pulled off
something nobody really thought was was possible. Like, no
(16:15):
one had thought of that before. And to me, that is
pretty amazing to think about that. That ride in particular,
so many people say, oh, that's the ride at Disney
that. And James Warner wrote the book, how does Disney do
that, because he was inspired by that ride. And so many people
credit that that ride as being, like, the inspiration.
(16:37):
I didn't think I didn't feel like I was at Disney. I
felt like I was really somewhere else. And that's pretty cool when you can pull
something like that off. Yeah. And I think that teams have, you know, done
their best to do that. Certainly, we tried to do that with Rise of the
Resistance as part of Star Wars Galaxy's Edge. And
Star Wars Galaxy's Edge is another example of there's
(17:00):
no real Star Wars out there. Right. We all want it to be.
But the important thing is that
the team endeavored, in that case, to fulfill
for people who had grown up with Star Wars
or people who didn't know Star Wars at all, to fulfill
their dream of what it would be like to be there, to be in that
(17:23):
world, to be standing next to the Millennium Falcon and to be
in a world like that. Very similar idea as Pandora,
where you're trying to fulfill an expectation and kind of
overwhelm the expectation. Right. You're trying to go beyond the expectation.
And I've seen people or talk to people who broke into
tears when they entered Star Wars Galaxy's Edge because they
(17:46):
felt like they had been dreaming to see Star Wars
since they were kids. And, you know, all of a sudden here they really are.
And so the responsibility that you have as an
imagineer, I think, is big because we know that the audience
has not only big expectations, but they have trust in
us. They trust that we're gonna do the right thing. They trust that we
(18:08):
have kind of a moral grounding. I don't want to overstate it, but a kind
of moral grounding to to doing good things that are
meaningful and to doing them authentically. And I think that's probably
what we share with you know, all those thousands and thousands of
park rangers out there who maintain our parks is that they believe in
those sites. They believe in the importance of education, of
(18:30):
nature. And so we're all trying to present to the public because the same
public. Right. Just different context. But we all believe in doing the best
job we can possibly do. Yeah. Well, having worked
with Lee Cockrell for so long, I will often meet people who
worked at Disney that will tell me a Lee Cockrell story.
And and one person told me he worked at one of
(18:53):
the resorts and was at this point in his
career where he felt like I just work
at a hotel. You know, I could have I feel like I could have done
more. Maybe I should have done more by now, and I work at a hotel.
And Lee pulled him aside and said, look, you don't
just work at a hotel. Look who comes here. It's
(19:15):
doctors, police officers, teachers. Mhmm.
And they come here and have the best vacation of their life, and
they get recharged, and they get motivated, and they get energized,
and then they go back into the real world and do the
really important work that keeps all of us going. And he said,
that's what you do here. And that person said it
(19:38):
completely changed my viewpoint. And then he went on to have a
very long and successful career at Disney. And that is also
something similar to parks. Like, you could get bogged down
by, alright. We're doing the same thing every day. We're at
welcome stations, and we have visitors that speed
and litter and and you could get bogged down or you could
(20:00):
say, look, we're introducing people to nature and it's going to
change their lives. And I think that's another similarity in park
rangers and and what imagineers do. I do. I do. We're
raising a kind of expectation of
quality and care and stewardship.
No question about that. That makes people care about places. And
(20:23):
one of the things that I'm sure Lee would tell you,
because I know I know I've read about it with, Dick Nunez,
you know, who was the sort of the patriarch of the operations
business, was that if the place was clean,
it would stay clean. That doesn't mean you don't have a 1,000,000 sweepers out there
keeping it clean. But the more you kept it clean, the more
(20:45):
people would hesitate before they would drop something on the floor.
And the dirtier it was, the more they wouldn't kind
of care. Right. So if you go if you're coming out of a state fair
or something and it's kind of out of control and there's stuff everywhere and the
trash cans are full and stuff like that, you don't necessarily have a choice but
to just drop your stuff wherever you are.
(21:07):
But if you're in a place that is constantly maintained, no matter how much, no
matter how busy the day is, no matter how stressed out everybody
is, people believe they're in a place that they should take care of. And that
makes a difference. That makes a difference certainly in the national parks,
but certainly at all the Disneyland parks, too, is that you try to keep
ahead of it, keep the story always consistent,
(21:29):
and people will be a part of it. They'll appreciate it. I feel that
is why Animal Kingdom is such an important
park at Disney World because just like a natural park, it
introduces people to the natural world with the hope
that you go home and you by the time you get there, you care about
what you just experienced and you want to protect it and you want
(21:52):
to conserve the natural world. And that's why when
people ask what's your favorite Disney park, I always say Disney's
Animal Kingdom is tops. And that's that is why the bigger
mission of what that park does. Yeah. That's a good point.
But I think that all the parks are
in some way an aspiration to something
(22:14):
we'd like to do better. Right? So EPCOT gives you this
feeling that the future could be better, that nations
could all be compatible with each other. You know, there's there's ideals
behind the parks. Main Street USA and the Disneyland gives you a sense
of people can all live together and work together and, you know, collaborate
and cooperate. And, you know, your your hometown can be
(22:36):
can be very neighborhood friendly. They all have these kind
of ideals behind them. And I think as imagineers,
you're always looking for stories or places that you can
create that express that, that help kind of
express not just the story you're telling, but the
larger story, which is why are people there? Why do they
(22:59):
come back? They're there because they're with their families or they're with their friends,
and they're having a good time, but it's more than fun.
It's a kind of a aspiration to a better
world. And that's the fundamental underpinning of all of
them. Oh, yeah. That's that's really good. I
hadn't I've always thought that with Animal Kingdom. I hadn't thought that
(23:20):
through so deeply with the other parks. Yeah. I think it's I think it's a
it's perhaps more clear and immediate to see in Animal
Kingdom, but all the parks, I think, endeavor to do that.
They all endeavor to put you in a place
where you almost come away saying, I don't understand why
the world's so difficult if Disney ran it. You know, David
(23:43):
Brinkley said it when he was a famous news
journalist on television. But when Walt Disney World opened, he said,
we've all heard that our cities are going to be
modern and they're going to have great transportation and they're going to be clean and
they're going to be futuristic and all that stuff. And he said, but nobody's done
it but Disney. And, you know, I think we all can do
(24:04):
it. We all should do it. And Disney inspires a lot of people
that that work in the urban design world. But it takes a lot of
work to do that. And it certainly is what we all try to do. Well,
I wanna move to another story called trimming the
bushes. And this one caught my attention, for a couple
of reasons. 1, because it involves Carl Holtz, and
(24:26):
I've met Carl through Lee Lee Great guy. Great
guy. Lee says that Carl Holt was the best hire
he's ever made. And Oh, yeah. And Carl
is a big personality. So your your story about him made me
laugh. So Carl called Bob. Carl
well, Carl calls me out of the blue, and I'm just now
(24:47):
president of Imagineering. So a lot of people call me out of the
blue. But I pick up the phone and this guy just start to yell at
me on the phone. I won't say what he said, but he starts yelling at
me on the phone that he's gonna trim these bushes. I don't know what he's
talking about. I don't know what bushes, what his problem is.
But what you find out is people have passion
(25:10):
in this business. Right? And Carl certainly
what, you know, what we love about him is he has passion, and so do
I. But there were apparently some bushes that
were some sort of a special bush, and they blocked the ocean
view from the Alani lobby. And
Carl had gotten frustrated about them getting too tall. And
(25:31):
I guess somebody at Imagineering had said, well, you know, you can't trim those. You
got to ask an Imagineering. You got to ask Joe Rode or whatever. And this
is a meaningful story to me because one of the things I
had a challenge with when I first came president of
Imagineering was it's easy to point the finger at
Imagineers and say they're too difficult. They spend
(25:53):
too much money. They have too many rules. There's
a lot of things. But Imagineering has a history of
being the only R and D creative place founded
by Walt Disney himself. And the purpose was
to create the impossible, to do what we're talking about, Jody,
to create people's, you know, vacations, to create
(26:15):
important milestones for them, all those things. So
even a bush in the lobby of the Aulani Hotel in Hawaii
is important to us. And so, yes, we can go overboard
sometimes. And, you know, probably somebody should have called Carl and
said Carl will come over and turn the bushes. Right. But it's
never usually a lack of stewardship. It's
(26:37):
usually air on the side of stewardship. You air on the side of what's
important aesthetically, all those things. And that's what I was trying to capture there
is because, you know, Imagineering has a 100
plus individual disciplines from landscape architecture to
ornamental horticulture to stained glass to to ride
engineering and show engineering and music and writing
(26:59):
and filmmaking and just so many different things, color
specialists. And so it goes back to this idea of trying to be
authentic, trying to be careful. And when you
leave, when you finish a project and you go home, making sure that the
project stays that way. Right. You don't want somebody to go 6
months later and say, well, it looked really pretty on opening day, but doesn't look
(27:20):
good now. So a lot of effort on Imagineers goes into
the initial authenticity, the beauty of it, but also the
fact that you should keep it that way. And that goes back to Walt too.
One of the things I liked about that story, and then you followed it
up mentioning all the urban legends and about
how impractical imagining was. And that that
(27:43):
just followed you around. And that, you know, that's kinda true in
operations that they have to operate what
you've now designed. And there's sometimes stories on
you can't as Carl said, you can't trim the bushes if you don't call
Bob Wise. And that's an interesting tension between
them operating what you designed and the
(28:05):
conversations that happened there. But as Bob said,
every side is passionate about it. And it reminds me of
a story Ron Logan told me about
entertainment. This is how him and Lee Cockrell ended up so close.
They used to butt heads because Ron Logan would design entertainment
for Walt Disney World, but it would spend Lee Cockrell's
(28:27):
operation money to put it on, and then they would butt heads. And they
finally sat down together and said, look, we're both trying to make sure our guests
have the best vacation of their life. So instead of butting heads about it,
let's put our heads together and figure out how to do this right. And I
know even though there are stories, there are urban
legends about Imagineering. Really, that's what you guys do is
(28:49):
help operations create these fabulous
experiences for people. The best thing is always
the communication collaboration. You know, I have
some of the most wonderful relationships, professional
relationships I have are with the people who've operated the parks. And
usually we planned it together. We evolved it over years
(29:12):
to come. You know, I have a close relationship with Andrew Ballstein, who's in
Shanghai, making that park work every day. And we worked on building it
together with George Gross in Tokyo with Bruce
Laval, who's now retired. But but he and I built the studio, the Disney
MGM, now Disney Hollywood Studios together. The more you
understand each other, the more you understand the meeting point of
(29:34):
the creative design and the daily operation,
the more you can do great things. You know, we set out to
renovate Disney California Adventure to expand it,
to make it more relevant for the guests in Anaheim. And I couldn't have done
it without George Callegrides, without Mary Niven, without the people who
were operating it every day. And the truth is, it comes down to
(29:57):
in the end, we're all doing the same exact thing. We're just trying to make
it better for the guests. We have a different way of looking at it. Some
of us look at it from an experience point of view. Some people look at
it from dining and service, and some people look
at it from daily operating. You know, everybody looks at it from a
different lens, but it's all the same thing. It's all what is the
(30:17):
quality that you're trying to create? What is the experience you're trying to
create? And I think you'll find them that,
imagineers have a huge admiration for the
cast and for the people who were on the cast. I recently
was at the 35th anniversary of Disney MGM
Studios in Florida and, had a nice meeting with a bunch
(30:39):
of cast members who had been there from the beginning. So these are people who
have worked in the park for 35 years. I worked on it, you know,
for 6 or 7 years. And to just hear their stories and hear how
dedicated they are to that park and how dedicated they are to the guests is
incredible. So it takes everybody. It takes everybody to make it
happen. And, yes, we have arguments. Sometimes we
(31:01):
see the world differently. But in the end, we only have one purpose,
which is the happiness of the guest. Yes. That is wonderful.
And this the story with Carl, it keeps
getting better because Bob and Carl end up working together for
Disney Cruise Line. So Carl is the president of Disney
Cruise Line, and Bob is behind designing the
(31:24):
ships, which I know there's a big story there. But the
one piece that got me when you're talking about that
is you're talking about Laura Cabo. And I don't know her,
but I love what you said when you were talking about her. You said on
every level of every organization, there's
underutilized talent. And I thought, wow. That is a
(31:45):
good one. Can you talk a little bit about that and how
leaders can find that talent? Yeah. I think there's an
openness you have to have. And sometimes
people think they're doing the job they were asked to do
and they're doing what they were what they were asked to do and they're doing
it every day. Some people jump out and try
(32:07):
to, you know, push forward and do something different. Some people are trying to figure
it out. Laura Cabo was one of these folks who who
was incredibly talented before she came to Disney. I
wasn't aware of her portfolio before she came to Disney. I saw what
she was doing. I thought she was doing a great job. But someone outside
Disney said, well, do you have any idea what she did before?
(32:29):
And I was looking for somebody to to design the next generation
cruise ships. And I had no idea she had so much experience in resorts and
cruise and all that. So I went to her and within a with literally within
a few weeks, she was suddenly, you know, designing the next generation of the
Wish and all of that. So you never know if
inside your organization, you're overlooking somebody. I wouldn't
(32:52):
say that Laura was being overlooked. I would just say, you never know if there's
somebody there who can do more than you think they can do
or even that they think they can do. So especially
in a creative or technological organization, you
always have to keep your eye out. You've always gotta be looking out for
somebody who may be doing that, but you didn't know
(33:13):
that when they're at home, they paint or they build model trains
or a lot of the people who work for Walt Disney, Exotencio,
who was an animator, who ended up writing music. He ended up writing
Yo ho, Yo ho, A Pirate's Life for Me. Blaine Gibson, who also
was an animator, but he ended up to be the lead sculptor for Walt. He
sculpted all the pirates, sculpted all the figures for years, the presidents.
(33:36):
You have to understand people are multidimensional
and look for those talents and let people have as
many chances as they can to try them out for you.
Well, Bob, this has been such a good conversation. And I I
showed up with 3 pages of notes, and we got through
about 1 fourth of it. But there's just so much
(33:59):
to come back. We'll have to come do the other the rest. Yes. I hope
so. Because this this is fun. It's it's such a blast talking to you.
We'll have to do more. And we've got it. You know, we've got the we
just had the audiobook come out, which I'm glad you talked
about. I gotta put a brief plug in for ghost dog,
which is my fiction book, which is a book about the haunted mansion,
(34:22):
about what would happen to a family if a ghost dog followed them home
instead of a ghost followed them home. That's out. That's doing well. The
audiobook for that comes out in January. I'm just so happy to
have a chance to talk about these books, to talk about, you know, your work
in the parks. I have to before I let you go, I have to talk
about the parks again for a second because I just think that the
(34:43):
dedication of our people who make our national
parks work every day is just so incredible. And, you
know, it's it's just like what I said about CAST. Right? It it's the people
who care about the people who come there and make their lives
better, and that's what they're about. And in the case of the park rangers, they're
not only helping to make it work, but they're also experts in
(35:05):
the geology and the the flora and the fauna and the history and
everything else. They're incredible people. So I thank you for that too.
Oh, man. That is great to hear. And the book again is
Dream Chasing My 4 Decades of Success and Failure with Walt
Disney Imagineering. And I have not read the
fiction book yet. What's the name of that one again, Bob? The book is
(35:26):
called Ghost Dog. Ghost Dog. Truth and Lending. It's about a dog who's a
ghost or a ghost who is a dog. And, if you go
to your bookstore or Amazon, you find Dream
Chasing and look under my author name, you'll find Ghost Dog right there.
Alright. And if you wanna keep up with what Bob is doing, you can go
to bobweiss.com. That's where you can find the
(35:48):
books. Bob, I'm I'm so happy you were here. Thank you so much for
talking with us. Thank you so much for the opportunity. And thank
you for listening to the Jodie Mayberry Show.
He chalks a Seki every Monday at Sugar Jay.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.