Dream Chasing and the Magic of Disney Imagineering | Bob Weiss on Building Impossible Dreams

0:00 Oftentimes, you might walk into a meeting with your idea, but by the time you leave the meeting, it's our idea. You know, because somebody's added to it. Somebody else has made a great comment. That's the magic of it. And the magic of it is the collaboration. Well, the silliest thing anyone tells you, Brian, is a project's been canceled and someone will say, well, just don't take it personally. Well, it's you. There's no way not to take it personally. Creative output. is coming from you and your team members. So everybody takes it personally. And then one of the things you wrote is dreams are elusive and always pulling at you. They seem to always be right around the corner, but you never really know what you're chasing until you catch it. It turns out to be real magic. The chase will have been worth it.

0:46 Well, I had planned this. I had the entire WI patio loaded with 750 people ready to see Bob Unger. So he thought I was probably going to go back to the studio and there might be 10, 15 people the way I described it. I said, well, it's just the team's gathering. So I walked out there. I walked out there with him. And he's like, what the heck? It was 750 people. And I'll tell you, Bob got up on the steps with me and Howard Brown, our team, gave an incredibly inspiring address. No preparation. Keep a very, very positive attitude about your own. Maybe that one will come true. Maybe the next one will come true. Maybe it'll be some combination of two things you want to do. But don't give up and just keep a very, very positive and collaborative attitude toward anything you want to do. Welcome to Yes And Land, where we say yes to the reality of yesterday and today. And we say and to the possibility, growth, and imagination of tomorrow. Today, we are very excited to have Bob Weiss on the program with us. Bob has a storied career, over four decades with the Disney company. Started right out of college, basically. Did have a job prior to that during college, but started out in WED Enterprises, which is what Walt Disney Imagineering

2:17 used to be called. And Bob has worked on all of the Disney parks worldwide. and some amazing experiences that he talks about in his wonderful book, Chasing Dreams. And just such a pleasure to have him on today to learn from him, to learn from the successes and failures that he had during his four decades with the Walt Disney Company. So, Bob, welcome to the program. Hey, Ryan, it's great to be here and great to have the conversation. And I feel so privileged that I was able to write this book, Dream Chasing, and I was able to get it out there and been able to meet people, have great conversations about people's dreams and how to chase them, how to fulfill them. So it's great to have a chance to have a conversation with you. And yeah, we're excited to learn about some of those, what your dreams were, what you were chasing, and what life lessons we can pull, we all can pull from the experiences that you had as we all kind of chase our dreams. One of the things that I wanted to kind of start with you about is taking it kind of all the way back to an experience you talked about in your book when you were a young lad, I believe nine years old, as I believe what it was. And you talked about first going to Disneyland and that that kind of gave you your first spark. And so I'm wondering if you can kind of take us back to that. What was it that you were feeling in? that time that you can remember that gave you that spark? What were the emotions you experienced

3:48 that you felt like gave you the spark? Well, interesting in my generation, Disneyland opened in 1955. I was born in 1957. And I probably went to Disneyland by, let's say, 1961, 62, something like that. So I never knew a world without Disneyland. Like you, like you younger folks who never knew a world without Disney World and Disneyland. But I never knew the world without Disneyland. And Disneyland to me was a place that the family went once a year. You know, we didn't have this kind of pass where you could go every weekend or anything like that. It took a lot of energy and money to get passes. But my father was a member of the Magic Kingdom Club at his work.

4:32 And he would sell, you know. accumulate, I guess, value during the year. And then once a year we go, and we kind of decided it was my birthday when we would go. So we always went right around Labor Day weekend. When's your birthday, Bob? My birthday is September 6th, so it was always around there. September 6th, all right. It was just a great, great experience. It was just something that you immediately sense, even as a kid. about Disneyland as being a real place, a place that has kind of high ideals, that makes people aspire to a wonderful, you know, kind of secure life and life is good and people get along together.

5:16 It's just a general feeling of Disneyland of well -being, I think. And so I had that feeling. And even there were times I went, I wrote in the book, even there were times I went. I don't have it as an adult, but as a child, I had asthma periodically. Couldn't run and might have a bad day. And we were at Disneyland. It didn't matter. It was great. It's the greatest thing in the world. So I grew up with Disneyland. I grew up with an affection for Disneyland, as many young people who first go to Disneyland in their lives and then go repeatedly do. And I still feel that way. I still feel that. Sense of security, I guess, when I go through the gates. Now that I'm retired from Imagineering and I don't actively pursue projects anymore, it's even better because I don't have to be looking around saying, is there something wrong? Is there some paints chipping or somebody's doing the wrong thing? I don't have to. I just enjoy it like a guest, and I love that. When you started working for WED Enterprises, What was it you were trying to capture in the projects that you worked on so that others could experience Disney? Well, you know, I didn't know what WED Enterprises was. I had worked a summer at Disneyland, a summer and a fall at Disneyland in outdoor foods, which was popcorn and ice cream.

6:38 And it's a great position to work at at Disneyland because you get to stay inside the park all day and you watch people and you see how it changes throughout the day. go on a shift, they push you someplace else. So you might be in Frontierland today, Tomorrowland tomorrow, the next day. And so it's a really great way to observe how Disneyland works. You know, I had an opportunity to work at Disneyland for a summer and a fall, and I was in outdoor foods, which was popcorn and ice cream. I was out on the street all the time. You learn so much about Disneyland and about the people because you're there all day and you're in different lands on different days. I kind of heard a little bit about this secretive group called WEN Enterprises. And it was because Space Mountain was under construction. And I remember asking, because I was in architecture school, I remember asking, you know, who does this kind of stuff for Disney? And they said, oh, it's a secret group, you know, WEN Enterprises. You know, you can't find out anything about them.

7:37 It really was a secretive group. So it just happened, Ryan, if you can imagine, just like. complete accident that they came to recruit at my college when I was getting ready to graduate. And I had studied a combination of architecture where I got my degree and I studied a lot of theater. And I rushed around and I grabbed my portfolio and I went up and I met the recruiter and they thought it was a great fit. And that was a great opportunity for me. So back to your question now, when I started it at Thwed, I knew a lot about Disneyland. I probably knew a lot. more than many people who started at Wed because I had grown up there and seen it so many times and worked there a little bit. And my first job was building the first Disneyland outside the U .S., which is Tokyo. And it was essentially an adapted version of the Magic Kingdom in Florida, which I had also been to as kind of a teenager.

8:35 Here I was and I was surrounded by people that had worked on Disneyland, you know, Bill Martin and Bob Gurr and people like that who were legends and now are recognized as legends. But at that point, they were kind of the senior people at WED and they were – some of them had come back from retirement even to work on Tokyo. And they treated us like we were their – you know, they're teaching us the ropes. They really were open. They were amazing mentors. And so you really got a great – it was a quick education on Disney and on how you build Disneyland and how they build Disneyland. So I feel privileged to have been there at that time. I kind of think of myself as part of the second generation of WED. The first generation worked for Walt. And then when Epcot started and TDL started, this sort of new generation flooded in because they needed a lot.

9:33 bigger company to do those projects. And we were lucky just to be mentored by those incredible designers. What did you learn from the way they mentored you to then you mentoring other people as you came up? Because obviously you moved all the way up to being president of Walt Disney Imagineering, which is just phenomenal. And so you must have mentored a lot of people along the way. What lessons did you learn from them on how to mentor? I just finished a book, Ryan, my third book. I just finished it. It's just gone out to the publisher. And it's based on Marty Sklar, who is the leader. I was going to ask you about this book, Bob. I'm glad you brought it up. I'll tell you about it later. But I bring up Marty because he was a big proponent of what we called the hallway culture. And we used to use these big four -foot by eight -foot storyboards.

10:22 Whenever you were going to present something, you pinned them on those. And those were actually moved over from the animation department at the studio. where you had to do frame -by -frame storyboards. So you had these big boards in your office, and you're pinning up whatever you're working on. And the offices were pretty small. So eventually, you had to put them in the hallway. And you put them so people walking by could see what you were working on. And people would stop. Anybody would stop and say, oh, what's this? And it made it a very open culture. It wasn't secretive. People would meet in the hallways, look at somebody's boards and say, oh, I think you should do this scene a little bit differently. Nobody had a problem either with advising somebody or taking advice. It was that kind of camaraderie, very casual camaraderie. And I'll tell you, Ryan, I had an office at one point at WED. And on one side of me was a complete legend, Sam McKim.

11:21 who worked for the company for many, many years, was a child actor, did tons and tons of work and illustrations for the company. And on the other side was Exitensio. There's a new book out about Ex, but he's the guy that wrote, you know, Yo -Ho, Yo -Ho, A Pirate's Life for Me, did so much directing of voice and design. But they never acted like they were on a higher plane or anything. They were just guys. You know, now we think of them as Disney legends, but at that point they were just colleagues. Harriet Burns, who now is a Disney legend, was in the model shop, you know, building. Joyce Carlson is a legend. I worked with her because she came to Tokyo and helped us complete Small World. She worked on all the Small Worlds. So these are people who now are recognized for their incredible contribution but were so matter -of -fact and nice and helpful. So I took that on as my— as my mantle. You know, if people want to come see me or if they want to talk about their careers or, you know, where they want to go, so many people helped me that I try to help as many as possible. And, you know, you get, of course, it gets harder as you go up because you have more responsibilities, you have more people to talk to. But the best thing in the world for Marty, for me, for John Hinch, for anybody, I think, was walking the halls, walking around, seeing people and just having casual conversations.

12:46 It's the best thing in the world. Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, one of the things that you must have had with everybody there was there had to be a lack of probably ego and some kind of feeling of safety because to be able to put your work out there and be able to take the feedback that somebody gives, you've got to really remove your ego from that equation so that you can be receptive for it and feel like an environment that you can be vulnerable, that it is safe for you to do. So that's a very good description of it. And I think. I would tell you that it's still that way. I think it's still a very group -oriented process. It's collaborative. There are no superstars. People work together. There are the people who come up with ideas. There are people who are focused on making them a reality.

13:30 They work together seamlessly. But back then, I think it was different because we had these folks who had been a part of the invention of things like the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean and those kind of things. But there was absolutely no ego associated with them. It was just like, oh, yeah, we do this. That's what we do. Claude Coates was the most humble guy in the world. They were incredible. And, you know, there wasn't a culture of these folks are legends or things. I'm so happy today that people are recognized as that because they did really great things in their creative careers. But it's interesting how I think back then the organization was very humble, just very collaborative. And I feel like even when I go back there, which I do quite a bit now, it's the same way. It's very humble. And, you know, you have a team and you have somebody that's been there for 30 years on the same team as somebody who just got here from college. And you will find, I think, in that kind of environment, and this probably applies to your audience whether they're in some other kind of business or not, The senior people of your company are really interested in what the younger people have to say because they're coming out of college. They have different skills. They have fresh ideas. And the young people are very interested in being mentored. So as long as you approach it right, it's a really collaborative, great mentorship possibility. Yeah, and I think the organizations that can find a way to do that

15:01 are ones that can have a much better culture inside the organization. I think one of the things, just from my perspective in the legal world and law firms, is sometimes, unfortunately, that's not the case. Sometimes you'll get lawyers who have experience who do get those egos, and they aren't willing to mentor. And I think it's really short -sighted. I think if we want to do something or build something that's more enduring, where people want to be and they want to stay, you've got to have that positive culture where it is more about collaboration and mentorship and working together to build something better. There's a few quotes I want to ask you about. One that came up, and I want to kind of get your take on this. And it's a quote you'll recognize. It's from Walt, of course. And he said, all our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them. And so when I hear something like that, it talks, you know, he's talking about courage.

15:53 I mean, courage to pursue them, which means to some degree, if we're going to be courageous, it means that there must be some fear that's there because otherwise it's not courageous to pursue it if there's not fear. In your career, when you were taking on new challenges, what fears did you have or did you face as you were approaching things that were sometimes these huge things that you were doing like Shanghai Disney or Tokyo DisneySea, those types of things? Well, that's a great thing for us to talk about, Ryan. And as you know, my book is titled Dream Chasing. And we were actually about – I was about halfway through the book. I say we because I had a wonderful editor at Disney who didn't write anything for me, but she guided me through the process. I had never written anything like this before. And about halfway through, she said, you know what this is about? You're writing about – chasing dreams. You're writing about how hard it is to come up with an idea, but then how do you go all through the gauntlet to actually get it done, right? And so I picked up on that theme and the book really became case studies about having great dreams and what it takes to chase them along. I don't think you follow them. I think you kind of have to chase them. You have to be aggressive. You have to really want them to happen. And I think... That what I learned in my career and what I now seem to hear from people when I go on the road and talk about the book is how do I have an idea, a germ of an idea?

17:27 And if I believe what Walt said, which is, you know, if you're willing to pursue them, you can make them happen. How do I make that happen? And I tell people it's a long road. It's a tough road. And it's a road that you have to get others to share that dream with you. It's not just something you're doing, but you have to get others to be a part of it. And to do that, you've got to have them invest themselves. And sometimes that means modifying an idea so that you have a variety of opinions and ideas. Oftentimes, you might walk into a meeting with your idea, but by the time you leave the meeting, it's our idea. Because somebody's added to it. Somebody else has made a great comment. Somebody else has said, well, we could do this. That's the magic of it. And the magic of it is the collaboration. And so when people say to me, I've got a dream and I want to pursue it, the first thing I suggest to them is try to get collaborators who believe it like you do. Not very many. Many of us are soul artists or soul entrepreneurs. Some of us are. But most of us are in a position where we benefit from collaboration, even in a small company.

18:36 And so that's probably the biggest advice I've given in the book is don't give up on your dreams. Push them hard. But also be willing to modulate them through a great collaborative effort is what it takes when you're going to do, especially the field I've been in, these big, huge, you know. projects around the world, you're going to have a big team and you're going to have to be a leader of many people. Yeah. I, you know, one of the, one of the things too, that when I was thinking about this and I, and I found another quote, I want to ask you about, uh, about this very thing. Tony Robbins said, it's, it's not about the goal. It's about growing to become the person that can accomplish the goal. So in your experiences with this, when you had the courage to do those things and you were finding people to mentor you and collaborate with you on these things, As you look back at that career, what was it that you felt like you needed to become in order to be the leader that you ended up becoming with WDI? That's a great note. And I think that I've always seen leadership, and maybe it's particular to Disney and particular to WDI, is leadership is a very soft kind of collaborative leadership. It's not a hard. top -down kind of, you know, you guys go do that.

19:55 You know, you don't order people around. And I learned a lot. I learned so much of this from Marty Sklar. Again, the new book that I have is somebody who got to know people almost like chess players. And he would say, I know what that person does. And I know what they do really well. And I know this other person, what they do really well. And I think I'll put those two together and say, why don't you two get together and work on this project for a little while. Or you four get together and work on a project like that. So the biggest benefit you have is being collaborative, being positive, and really knowing your people. Know who the talent is.

20:37 and know how to combine them, know how to sort of mix it up. You don't want really a room full of people who do the same thing or think the same way. You want kind of a crazy room where people argue and one person's an artist and one person's a writer and somebody else is a musician, whatever, an anthropologist, so that it's lively and that you can learn from each other. And I think being a senior leader has to do with recognizing that you're not doing it for them and they're not doing it for you. You're guiding them to create something, but you're guiding them. When you do it yourself, you might be the boss, you might be the leader. But when you're a senior leader, you're really guiding. And you have to say, I think this chemistry is not working. Maybe I'll add another person or maybe I'll exchange a person out. But you do it kind of. softly and carefully. You know, you don't just come in and order people around. It just wouldn't work in this environment. It's very, very collaborative, very collegiate. And you have to know the people and what they're good at so that you can successfully build teams together. I think that's really insightful.

21:49 I mean, I think if a leader really knows their people, then they can find those skills and those abilities. Because, you know, certain businesses and certain industries you might not have as many opportunities for creativity uh but i still think that there's plenty of opportunities for collaboration we i've talked about it with my firm lately of of this idea that i heard of of a plumber and a poet that you have certain plumbing that needs to get done and those are certain procedures that have to get followed and things that have to get done a certain way because otherwise it Palming doesn't work. Then you have the poet side of things. And that's where you have the creativity. That's where you have the autonomy. And I think in every job, every industry, there's plenty of poetry that's done. I agree with you 100%. Yeah, it can be made so much better through that collaboration that's there. I was just going to add to that, Ryan, that I think what I find is even organizations that you might not on the surface think. have a strong creative bent of any sort. You find that there are creative people in every group, every organization. And what may not be happening is they may not be stimulated or may not feel free to get together. So I even tell people, well, you're not going to start a creative division in this company, but you could give three or four or five or six of your most interesting people who think outside the box and say, look, We're going to buy lunch for

23:20 you guys once a week for the next two months, and we're going to give you a room, and we want you to come up with a bunch of ideas and see what comes out of it, right? Just find ways to leverage the creativity you have in an organization. And sometimes it might mean you bring in one consultant who helps to do it for you, helps stimulate creativity. But it seems to me every organization benefits from having a creative enclave that's thinking about the future, thinking about outside the box. Yeah, actually, I love that. You know, and at the end of this episode, when we circle back to our three actionable takeaways, to me, that's one of the perfect ones that we could give as a takeaway. I love this idea of putting people together and saying, hey, you know, go do lunch once a week and come up with an idea. I think it's a great recommendation.

24:06 I'm already thinking about people on my team I can do that with, to be honest. Yeah, yeah. But people want to. People who want to do it want to do it. So if you kind of give them a little bit of license, they will. Yeah, I think that's right. So another quote I want to ask you about, and of course it's going to be from Marty Sklar. And he was paraphrasing Einstein. And what I've got here is he said, if you aren't failing from time to time, you aren't trying anything new. So one of the questions I have for you is obviously, you know, the book, I believe you had said at one point in time was going to originally be called successes and failures before you land on the title you did. And so you, you document some of the failures that were there. My question is this, when you had, one of those big projects that you were working on that completely got shut down. What was it that you were experiencing emotionally when that first happened before you were able to kind of move forward and move to the next project? What did that feel like? And then once you kind of described that, how did you find a way to move forward? Well, the silliest thing anyone tells you, Brian, is a project's been canceled or hasn't gone well or something like that. And someone will say, well, Just don't take it personally. Well, it's you. There's no way not to take it personally because creative output is coming from you and your team members, so everybody takes it personally. So the reminder you have to have, which is great in Marty's quote, is if you weren't pushing really hard, you have

25:37 to fail once in a while. You have to be pushing outside the box. You have to be trying things that aren't possible. And Marty's experience, you know, goes through many different iterations of Epcot. It goes through things that never happened, like the Mineral King ski resort and, you know, things like that, that they tried and it didn't work. And I think the first thing you feel is a sense of a kind of loss, right? You worked on this thing for months or, you know, in the case of Disney's America, you might have worked on it for a couple of years. You believed in it. And all of a sudden it's shut off and it's gone, right? So I think I always go. I used to hit the ball. I hit tennis ball a lot once a week when I was at WDI. And if things went south, went bad, I would double my tennis dates. I love that. And I would just go out and I just. hit the ball more, you know. And I think a combination of exercise, getting some sleep, getting some fresh perspective, maybe take a few days off, go do something, it works, you know. And you realize, okay, life's going to go on. And sometime later, the learnings you have in that project, Disney's America, you know, many projects like that, the learnings you have end up helping you in something else. They may not come back exactly the same, but the learnings you have, the contacts you made, the things that you put together, they become a part of you. They become a part of who

27:09 you are. They may not become Disney projects, but they do become a part of who you are and the chemistry of things you know that you can bring to the application of the next project. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Now, so you, when you would have those things happen and you were able to move past those, how did you help? the people that worked for you when you were a leader find that same thing, to dig deep and to realize like, oh, actually, this is a lesson that I can take forward. And I do, I can experience it, right? I can accept the fact like this was personal and I can have those emotions. How do you help them then dig themselves out if they struggle with it? Because not obviously everybody's going to do that perfectly every time. Yeah, I did have a habit of trying to find a point in time. that thought it was sort of like, okay, we're at the end of the blue sky process or the concept process or design development. It looks like we're going to go on hold for a while or it looks like we may not go forward, is complete something that can be packaged up and given to the archives or given to the library or people can hold on to that kind of captures. the learnings of that project. You don't want to lose that because people learned a lot. They had a lot of great ideas. So you find a way to preserve that for your future. And frankly, I always looked for a way to celebrate the team, celebrate the teams, even if they're at the end point. Okay, we're all going to go, when we get this done,

28:39 we're all going to go have a great lunch and congratulate each other for a job well done. Even if it didn't get built, I think you can celebrate a team's work. And teams, I think, really appreciate having a sense of closure. Okay, we closed it out. We put everything away. We had a really nice event, you know, where they congratulated us. And now we're getting reassigned onto new things and we start fresh. You know, I think every stage of a project should be celebrated by the teams because there's hard work goes into it. And if you only celebrate the ones that get finished, it's kind of losing the opportunity to celebrate everything along the way if you can. Yeah, I think that's a great point. I love this idea of still celebrating it, even if it didn't work out exactly like you were hoping, because the team still needs to feel that. They still need to feel like, hey, look, I made these contributions. My contributions are valued, even if we didn't use it the way that I was hoping.

29:37 It also makes me think of after action reports, right? I think in my industry, very few law firms do something like that. But in different businesses, I think an after -action report can be very helpful to help our teammates, to help our people process through, okay, so we had this thing. What went well? What didn't go well? Could we have even done anything differently? Maybe it was just the fates just weren't ready for this project, whatever. But you're right. It's incredibly valuable information. And I've had people call me. I keep mentioning Disney's America because it's one of the big ones that I had that got canceled.

30:18 But who have called me and they have done PhD dissertations about Disney's America. No kidding. They sent them to me. Not kidding at all. I've also had people with PhD dissertations about Tokyo DisneySeas and other things too. People love to learn about Disney and write about Disney. But everything's a journey and it's great to – I don't look back with regret on – I feel like all the successes and the failures are an accumulation of hard work that, you know, I'm so glad to have work done all around the world, you know, to feel privileged to have completed every project we did start. Yeah, for sure. One of the things that I believe a lot in and have. kind of been a passion to me for the last several years is some work by Simon Sinek where he talks about having a why or a purpose. And one of the things that he said is working hard for something we don't care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion. When you were experiencing, and you're still in the middle of a project, and things get really hard and they're very difficult, you're coming up against things that seem impossible to overcome, where did you dig down to to find the ability to keep going and pushing towards the dreams that you had and the things that might have seemed impossible? Well, that is the magic to it. That is the challenge for a leader or a team member

31:51 is to keep that. keep that passion fueled even in the roughest of times in the middle of the night when people are working long weeks and in a foreign country, living away from their families or whatever it might be. I think Simon Sinek is very on point there. He's very, very clear about that point, as you said. And I met Simon a few times and I actually called him when I was finishing Dream Chasing. And asked him if he would take a look at the book. And he did. And he wrote a blurb for the back cover, which I really cherish, where he talks about everybody has dreams. Everybody has dreams. And I know Simon believes that, like I do. And the difference is whether you can create an environment where those dreams can be fostered as opposed to just kind of fall away. So I think in this case, I can remember in the depths of Shanghai Disneyland.

32:46 Where we would, my fellow leaders and I would walk through the building and just hand out bagels, you know, at 10 o 'clock in the morning or hand out cookies or have little beer events after work. Or, you know, we were in the middle of Shanghai and we managed to find a company that would do. a bunch of Thanksgiving turkeys for us. It wasn't a normal thing to have in China, but we got them to do turkeys that we could take to each department one morning. You go around, you shake hands with people, you listen to people bitch or complain, you know, and then sometimes they're happy just to get it off their chest, right? They just want to tell you how screwed up this is. And you can say, you know, I agree with you. This is screwed up, but let's figure out how to get it done. And when you're on site, and Craig Russell is an expert of this, and there's other people who are an expert of this, when you're walking around on the site, you can give people a lot of encouragement. You can have them realize that even though they're stuck in the day -to -day, if they kind of squint their eyes and look at this, it's going to be incredible.

33:57 And they just have to realize that there's going to be a lot of hard work along the way. These are hard projects, especially the end. And by the end, I don't mean the last week. I mean the last year that you might be working overtime. And it's very difficult to have a work -life balance when you're doing that and you're away from home. But I think people eventually, and sometimes it's, you know, at the end of Star Wars, Galaxy's Edge, and at the end of Shanghai, very similar, I had a whole bunch of people. who were so upset, angry, mad. I'll never do another project again. This is too much work. It's too much stress, you know. And then the one -year anniversary gets together and everybody has a little party and gets together and everybody says, wasn't that the greatest project we ever did? Often when people ask me what my favorite projects are, I often end up answering the most difficult ones, you know. Because those are the ones that you feel like you really earned your passion for because it was tough. And that's okay. You just have to find out a way to keep your own energy going. But the thing that really sustains people's energy is their fellow team members. And I've seen amazing things. I've seen team members take care of each other, go out.

35:16 as a group and have bike rides or play badminton together, you know, do team building stuff offsite where they can get to know each other better. I've seen somebody get sick and a group of team members got together and went to HR and offered some of their sick leave time if they could give it to that person because they needed more time or they can cover their job. Teams are amazing. And teams are where most of your time is spent. And they can be incredible supporters for everybody. Yeah, it's, to me, when people are willing to do that, it comes from somewhere, right? And it comes from who they are, comes from the team you're assembling, but also comes from the leaders, right? The leaders have to be showing that in order for people to follow it. In reference to Simon's work, I'm curious, and if the answer is you don't have one or you're not sure, that's okay as well, but I'm just curious. Do you have a personal why statement? You know, Simon in his book, start with why and then finding your why kind of talks about a very specific like, what is the why that somebody has, both a business and also individual? I'm wondering if you have one. Well, I'd probably steal one from Robert F. Kennedy, the original Robert F. Kennedy from 1968, which is why not? You know, you have to.

36:38 You have to go into a meeting or go into a conversation with something and somebody's got a crazy idea and not say how difficult it is, but say, you know, how could we do it? What's the possibility here? You know, why wouldn't we try this? You know, why wouldn't we try it a different way? My advice to brainstormings when they start is don't say no. Don't ask questions about how difficult it's going to be. Just explore the possibilities. The worst thing is somebody comes up with an idea and somebody says, oh, you know, we tried that 30 years ago and it didn't work. Well, you know, today's today. Let's try it. You know, we might want to try it again. You don't want to clamp down on things just as they're kind of being, you know, they're seedlings. So I think it's important that you let creative people run a little bit, run way out there, you know, and you can always haul them back in when it's time to put some business parameters around it. Free thinking is a great thing for anybody. You know, thinking outside the box is great. It can be scary for some people, but that's really what we all need to do. Well, I love what you're doing there, which is when you're saying why not and you're opening up that free thinking, you're empowering those people to be able to think and know this is a safe place for us to explore these ideas. This is a safe place for us to be able to figure out what's there. And so to me, it's very much what Simon talks about, about it being outward facing so that somebody else can be empowered

38:10 to do something better or beyond themselves or do something great. I love that. And projects are really an important social culture. There's a group of people who, you know, in a Disney project sense, they could work together for the next five years. So, you know, it's a long road. And so their ability to create strength amongst themselves and to create a team identity and, you know, a team support structure and keep their own passion burning all the time, that is such an important thing. Now, in your book, I believe, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you describe yourself as an introvert, I think, if I remember correctly. And here's what I want to get your take on, because I came across some materials from Adam Grant, who he himself is a self -described introvert. And he said that there is such a thing as an introverted leadership advantage. And then he went on to say in a post, Introverted leaders were very open. They were willing to listen. They took better suggestions and they left their people feeling more valued.

39:16 So as an introvert, if you in fact are leading some of the most creative teams in the world, how do you think that being an introvert served you well in those leadership positions that you had? Who was that quote from, Brian? Sorry. Adam Grant. Adam Grant. That's a great quote, by the way. Send me that. But I think it's very true that there are – first of all, there are different leadership styles and we all can be successful with who we are. But I think in my history at least, listening is really important and not necessarily walking in and snap judgment on something.

39:58 Kind of walk in and say, OK, tell me about this and explain it to me and listen carefully. And be willing to absorb quite a bit of that knowledge before speaking up. You know, I think that's – whether I'm an introvert or an extrovert, I think I am an introvert. My style was to try to understand problems, understand issues before making judgment on them. And the great thing about being at a place like Imagineering is – You have engineers and technical people and software people and artists and writers, and you can get a pretty good group together and say, what's happening on this project and where is it bogged down? And if you've got the right people in the room, you can really find out if you listen carefully and be willing to, as I said, take somebody's call if they're just mad about something and listen, try to understand it. So I think that's a strength. I try to absorb things before necessarily jumping in. And I don't like to hear myself talk so much. I like to give direction when I sort of understand what I'm doing. I'll tell you what, though, Ryan. I've been writing now for four years. It's been about four years since I started dream chasing. I wrote a little novel called Ghost Dog based on Haunted Mansion. I'm just finishing this Marty Sklar book, and I've got another book I'm starting for Disney. I'm at home. with my computer. That's the best thing in the world. You're loving it. My wife, my family.

41:30 I write for a few hours. I go out. I grow cactus. I go out and work in the cactus garden. I come back. I write for a few more hours. So I think fundamentally I've realized myself as an introvert. But I do love going out and doing the book chores, book speeches, things like that. So I do like the outgoing part of it. But I do enjoy the quiet life of writing and authoring. Being a president of Imagineering, you rarely are in a meeting that has less than 40 people in it. So there are big conference rooms, big issues, lots of people with opinions, lots of people to manage.

42:11 1 ,000, 1 ,500 people, 720 people on the concept team for Shanghai. You were dealing with a lot of people all the time. The best thing in the world about Imagineering was name tags, right? You could always remember people's name. But it's very hard to do that truly as an introvert. I say I had to play an extrovert on TV. I had to be very outgoing. I had to go out, shake hands with strangers, thank people. If you took me to a dinner party right now, I'd be very happy to sit in a corner and not talk to anybody. But I do it because it's important. It's important to meet people and things like that. But I do think introverts are often overlooked because they're not the loudest person. They're not the loudest person in the room. I think that's one of the things that in Adam Grant, when I heard him talk about this very point, that's one of the key things he's pointed to, which you just, which you just discovered, which is they do get overlooked. So many times introverts can actually be great leaders, but because they're not the ones who are the loudest in the room or out there, they're not jumping on the table. They're not jumping up on the table, stuff like that. But they're often the most thought, they're very thoughtful. And I did a few things. I, in brainstorming sessions, I would often stop and I would, realize there's three people in this room talking and there's 12 people in this room, right? So I would ask people, I'd say, you know, Mark, what are you thinking about this? And then they felt the freedom to say something very insightful, but

43:44 they wouldn't necessarily interrupt the room to say it. And one of my favorite things to do at the end of a couple of days brainstorming or a couple weeks brainstorming, it doesn't matter what it is, is to stop the meeting. half an hour before it's supposed to stop and go around the table and have everybody make a comment. So everybody gets a moment to say what they thought. Incredible insights come out of that because the people who've been maybe talking the loudest, you kind of know where they're coming from, but there's a lot of talent in that room and you want to hear where everybody's coming from. I think that's a great suggestion too. You are also, Brian, in an environment, a place like Imagineering, a lot of artists. and engineers, and you find that it is a very high introvert percentage environment, I think. And so you have a small group of super outgoing folks, and you have a lot, maybe not as much as animation. Animation is super introverted, but imagining is quite introverted as a field.

44:44 So you have to really dig to, that's another reason why the better you know your people. The better you get to know them, then you know where to cast them, who to cast them with, what kind of projects to give them. That's the best tool in the world is knowing the people. Yeah, I love it. So another thing I want to ask you about was in your book, you talk a little bit about Stephen Covey. You make reference to some stuff you guys have looked at with Stephen Covey. And I want to get your take on what I think is a beautiful paradox. So it's this. Stephen Covey wrote in his book. that you should begin with the end in mind, okay? And then one of the things you wrote is, dreams are elusive and always pulling at you. They seem to always be right around the corner, but you never really know what you're chasing until you catch it. If it turns out to be real magic, the chase will have been worth it, which is just beautifully written, first off. But to me, I think there's a bit of a really cool paradox that's there, and I kind of want to get your take on it, of that you're chasing these dreams, but you don't really know it until you get there. With Stephen Covey also saying you've got to begin with the end in mind. Yeah.

45:51 Yeah. I think Covey was a nice match when he came to Imagineering. He came probably over the course of a year. We did lots of sessions with Covey and his people. And I think he has a particular style of what I'm talking about, which is sort of a soft leadership style, which is. Definitely strategic. It's definitely leadership. But it's not didactic. It's not going and telling people they have to go do that because I'm your boss, right? It's having relationships. I think Stephen was very insightful about his – the thing I remember most, Ryan, is him talking about relationships like a bank deposit. Are you overdrawn with this person or do you have a pretty good account with this person? And if you're starting to feel overdrawn with this person, you better go – have lunch with them or talk about their project or chat a little bit and hear their point of view. But I think a lot of people figured out from that that people think differently, people work differently, and the more you can build those relationships, the better you can do it. You know, it's all about people and how they get along. We also did... quite a bit of work as many organizations have done with Myers -Briggs and having people understand kind of their Myers -Briggs four -letter code thing. But it was interesting to be in a room with somebody who's quite introverted and

47:24 thinks by feeling versus very extroverted. And you learn a little bit more insight about the people you work with. And it's tremendous when you can do that. So Simon Sinek coming in, Stephen Covey coming in, they were fantastic. Once in a while, organization has to look inward and say what's working and what's not working and stop for a second. And it's very hard when you're overcommitted and projects are happening. It's very hard to do that. The best time to do organizational development really is... In the early stages of projects, a project is just getting going, teams assigned, and we've got challenges ahead.

48:09 I used to always try to do an off -site at that moment, take the new team off, doesn't matter where you go, someplace, but get out of the office and have a day where everybody, and I would say, how are we going to work? How are we all going to work together? Once you're going, it's kind of too late to ask the question, right? You kind of want to ask it at the beginning and set some ground rules because each team approaches projects differently because no two projects are the same. Yeah, getting that team formed at the beginning, getting them to build those bonds and those bonds together at the beginning, I can see how that would set it up for greater success if you do that early. Yeah, if you look at it, there's another guy you might look at, another business philosophy you might benefit from looking at.

48:56 He was a great friend. He's passed now, but he was a great friend. He was a great organizational development person. His name is Ravi Rao, R -A -V -I -R -A -U. And he wrote a great book, and he spent a lot of time with us, and he had tremendous insight. He was a neurologist, actually, by training, with tremendous insight into people's behavior and a great sense of humor, very soft style. But people walked away from a session with Robbie with a tremendous insight into how the team was going to work. Yeah, I'm definitely going to have to pick that up. I'll definitely find his material and definitely read that book. So one of the things I thought was also interesting in kind of reading through your experience is that you took a bit of a detour for a little while outside of the Walt Disney Company. And you had your own company as an entrepreneur.

49:49 I'm interested in what were the... What was the best lesson that you took from your time running your own business that then helped you overall as you came back into Disney and as you ran Walt Disney Imagineering? Well, I really enjoyed my time at Imagineering and I enjoyed my time away from Imagineering. You know, I enjoyed both ends of that spectrum. Being away from Imagineering was fun and challenging because When you're in a corporate world, you just go up to the Xerox machine, you know, back when we had paper, go up to the Xerox machine and make a copy. In the private entrepreneurial world, you have to figure out how much a Xerox machine costs and where do you go buy one and who's going to take care of it once it breaks. You know, you suddenly have the responsibility for everything, for people, for health insurance, for, you know. Accounting, making sure you have enough money every Thursday or every other Thursday when you're going to pay people. So as much of a struggle as that was for me, not being a business person, but surrounding myself with good business people and the ups and downs of all that, ups and downs of interesting clients, I did have a great experience from that. And I think when I got back to Imagineering, the management people who invited me back, I think they saw that that was a benefit to me, that I knew more about. not just creative from having different kinds of creative problems from

51:22 NASA and museums and other types of organizations, but also knowing a lot more about how a business runs. And I think that was a great experience for me. I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed being an entrepreneur. And I built great relationships. You're in D .C. right now. If you know the National Harbor Project, which is on the river just south of you, across from Old Town Alexandria, I did the master plan for that for an incredible client. I didn't know that. Milt Peterson, the Peterson Company, the patriarch of that company has since passed. But I had easily a 10 -year relationship with Milt. It's an incredible project. I worked on some things with the Smithsonian. I really, you know, I worked with NASA down at Kennedy Space Center. on the public programs, things like that. Those were incredible experiences.

52:15 I just loved them. I made some documentaries. So I love the business world of Disney, but it's all absorbing. You can't do anything else. It's very hard to do anything else. You know, it's really hard for me even to start my book when I was starting to think about retiring from Disney. These projects are just, they drive your life, right? So I enjoyed being away and having some different kinds of. clients. I got to meet astronauts. I got to meet, you know, incredible architects and designers and philosophers. It was great. And I brought those concepts back. I often would bring people that I met outside back to advise me on Disney projects when I was back or to do workshops with them because I found it was a great talent base that had never been tapped at Disney. So it was a great process. It was a great, you know, several years away. Love being there. Love being at Disney at the same time.

53:11 Yeah. So one of the things I'm kind of hearing too is that, you know, when you do have these big projects and either when you're at Disney and they take up a lot of your time and energy or when you're an entrepreneur and it's all the time, right? It's 24 -7 when you're an entrepreneur. Yeah, absolutely. It sometimes will come at a personal cost. And I'm curious about that because it's something that I experienced early on in my career as a divorce attorney. I unfortunately got divorced. And I kind of experienced a little bit of that. You know, for you, what were the lessons that you took from that about how that affected your personal relationships? And how did you use that to kind of shape and change and improve your future relationship? Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think we all, many of us have struggled with that, struggled with being away from home for a long time, you know, or getting on a plane, you know. Getting home on a Friday night and realizing you have a flight out on Sunday evening, you're going to be gone again. It's tough on family life.

54:12 It's tough on partners. I also got divorced, so I feel for you on that. And I think there's an absorption into the project. The project will fill every bit of you if you let it. And you have to just figure out your own balance because the company won't necessarily give you that balance. You're going to have to find it yourself. You're going to have to set limits. And I feel better now. I'm in a relationship with my wife and I have a daughter. I have an adult son. And I feel like I have much more balance now than I did. My son will tell you. My son is now 30 years old. He'll tell you I was just. gone all the time flying somewhere and it was part of it was because i ran the company when my son was young and then i went to disney when he was a little bit older and you know i was off at shanghai or off somewhere all the time so um i could have done it better but you learn along the way right and um you know i think you have to you have to set certain you know things life happens right and you got to figure out how you can make those things i i I spent a lot of time on this Marty Sklar book, and Marty was somebody who I know work was his life. But I learned a lot more about his family life, his respect for holidays. I went through his calendars, and you'd find his daughter's graduation or his son's dissertation.

55:39 He was very careful about making sure. But his wife told me, Leah Sklar, told me that— And they recognized that Disney was a part of their life. It had to be because he was such a leader and pulled in every direction. So I don't know, Ryan. That's a tough balance. Let's work to find it. But it is a tough – there's no question. I'm more balanced now, but that's because I'm not in that – I'm not in the world anymore like that. So it's tough. I feel for everybody that's in that world. I think one of the takeaways for me with that is that we do need to work to look to find the balance that's right for us. And if we are married, that's right for our spouse and our families as well. And making sure that we have time that's dedicated to those things so we are showing up to those important events.

56:32 making time for the things that are most important. So our family knows that we care and knows that we love them and appreciate them as well. Yeah, we had, I don't like this term at all. It's an HR term. It's a terrible term. It's a relocation term that they call a trailing spouse. And that means we employ the one person in the family and they're going to bring to Shanghai with them a trailing spouse. And what you learn is trailing spouse is a whole lot of wives, partners, husbands, you know, it's, It's a bunch of people who are incredibly brave to pick up their life, have it all up, some quitting jobs, to move with their spouse or their partner to Shanghai, knowing that they're going to be working 18 hours a day for a very long period of time. And so we did try to reach out. We tried to reach out. We did bus tours of the site. you know, lunches where we would invite spouses and partners out to get a briefing on how the project was going. And a lot of times people would come up to me and say, you know, I'm so glad you did this because, you know, she's working 18 hours a day. We rarely see her. She can't talk about anything because you have such confidentiality, you know, restrictions.

57:48 But we came here and we got a better idea of what's going on. And we have a little bit more. sympathetic attitude toward what they're going through. You have to really say it's a family or partners or a team. We employed as many spouses and partners as we could if we found legitimate jobs for them and they had talent and we could bring them into the project. So it's a tremendous sensitivity. You have to constantly be reminding yourself that people have lives, they have kids, they have dogs, cats. I mean, it's just, you know, and they're important, right? Just, you know, forget about it. Birthdays, you know, holidays, you know, just really do anything you can to remember your people are people and they have lives too. Yeah, I think that's great. One of the things I also want to ask you about was, I mean, obviously you must have had a close relationship with Bob Iger because he wrote the foreword of your book. I'm wondering, what's the most important lesson that you learned from him as a leader?

58:49 Bob was always, always in my experience, and I think most of the people that I know will say the same thing. Bob was always positive, generous, interested, inquisitive. What are you doing? How's it working? He just had a way of stimulating positive energy. He never came into a room and left people on a down. He always, you know, even if he gave a lot of notes or had, you know, he always left on a high note. Because of his attitude and because of his generosity. Incredibly excited. He shared excitement. He pushed people in a very positive way to try new things. Why not try it?

59:34 Why not try that? He had a very definitely a why not kind of attitude and gave great notes, gave great opinions. There's no way it could work for Bob Iger without feeling like you wanted to absolutely do the best thing you'd ever done in your life because he encouraged us to feel that way. And then, you know, you know, to have somebody be that positive and then to be able to reach out, you know, I reached out to him and said, you know. Could I get on Good Morning America with the book? And, you know, he makes things like that happen for you to write the foreword for the book, to do so many things for so many people. Just a great experience. Tough, tough job, you know, running a whole company.

1:00:21 But, you know, an amazing ability to remember people, to remember where we were the last time we showed him this, you know. And I'll tell you one story about Bob that I think is really telling about this. There's two stories, actually, if you want to hear them. One was over a course of about six months, I reviewed all of Shanghai with him. He would come over for maybe three hours, and each day we would do Fantasyland or tomorrow we'll do Adventureland. Then we'll do Mickey Avenue. And we usually had about three hours of his time each day. And he gave notes. We had great sessions. And then I asked him, I said, you know, at the end, what if we do the whole park? We'll reprise the whole park. So you can see, we'll do a walk in the park, and we'll take eight hours. We'll take eight hours of your day, the entire day, and we'll start at the parking lot, and we'll just recap everything.

1:01:16 All the notes we've taken, everything you've told us, plus walk through it. And he agreed to do it, and we did eight solid hours of meetings. And I never did this again, but at the end of that meeting, I said, Bob, we've got about 10 minutes left. Would you be willing to address the team? You know, everybody just saw their work. Could you give a quick address? So I made it sound like I just, oh, hey, by the way, why don't we just do this? Well, I had planned this. I had the entire WI patio loaded with 750 people ready to see Bob Iger. So he thought I was probably going to go back to the studio and there might be 10, 15 people the way I described it. I said, well, it's just the team's gathering. So I walked out there. I walked out there with him. And he's like, what the heck? 750 people? And I'll tell you, Bob got up on the steps with me and Howard Brown, our team, gave an incredibly inspiring address. No preparation, but he had seen the park. So he could earnestly speak about his.

1:02:25 Complete enthusiasm. That is tremendous leadership to me. I never sprung that on him again. I don't think I would try that again. But I'll tell you, one other thing with Bob Iger is we were late on Rise of the Resistance, Rise of the Resistance for Star Wars Galaxy's Edge. And it was just lots of programming time, lots of making sure it was reliable and all those things. And the date was coming up and we knew we weren't going to meet it. And there was a lot of pressure on me to just say, well, you're going to open. Just say you're going to open. And I had to say, it's not going to be ready. It's not going to be artistically ready. It's not going to be functionally ready. We don't want to open something and then be trying to fix it while guests are in line, right? So after a lot of back and forth, everybody's afraid to tell Bob Iger this. So I got the chief engineers and the chief software people and the chief creative people. It was a group of about... I don't know, six people is all it was of seniors in the team.

1:03:25 And one morning we went to Bob's office and we sat down and each person talked about where the project was. And I told Bob, for these reasons, I brought the people here so he could hear directly. For these reasons, I'm recommending that we not open Rise of Resistance yet. Imagine telling Bob Iger, the most important attraction, not going to open on time. And Bob answered instantly. He said, okay, I understand it. Don't apologize for it. We'll open it when it's ready. You guys are doing the right thing. And that's why we went and did it. So that's tough. That's tough love, but that's real support. That's true support on both counts. Yeah, you guys had the courage to go to him, and then he had the courage and faith to trust you guys, that you would not come to him and say it's not ready unless it truly wasn't going to be. Yeah, if you're going to walk in there and tell him that, he's going to.

1:04:18 Believe that you brought the experts in there for a reason. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What about with Josh tomorrow? You obviously would have had to have worked closely with him during your tenure there. He was over at Parks Entertainment. Now he's taken over as a CEO. What's the most important lesson you learned from him and his leadership? I have tremendous, tremendous admiration for Josh. And I'm so glad he's in this role. I worked. for Josh in the role of being over all parks. I think I first worked closely with him at Disneyland when he was first there, and then he took over all the parks. And he is also an incredibly collaborative leader, loves to talk creative ideas, loves to try to figure out the whole why not question, how can we figure out how to do this, tough decisions. about, you know, projects where there's lots of R &D still has to happen. And we don't know if we can, you know, do this, but we're going to embark on it.

1:05:22 You know, he's been great. And he loves Imagineers. So you get a lot of positive vibe from him when he's at Imagineering. Great direction, great definitive, you know, creative direction and ideas. And at the same time, he's so great with guests in the park, you know, with park management. He understands the complexity of the business, you know, getting Imagineers and operators together, you know, to support big projects. He's really great. He's a great strategic mind, great collaborative mind. So I'm so happy to see the combination of Josh, who comes from that background, and Dana Walden, who comes from the media background.

1:06:04 I think the leadership of the company is in really great hands, I think. I think, you know, tremendously. Yeah, I think it was a smart decision to have them do that the way they did with both of them. I think that's going to bring a lot to the future of the company. I'm excited to see where it goes and see where they take it and to see how they put their stamp on it. Yeah, absolutely. And it's not, you know, I worked for Michael Eisner and he, you know, I owe Michael Eisner a lot of my own career. background and advancement and then i worked you know for for bob for bob eiger and and had a great experience and i've worked for josh so i've had a tremendous uh you couldn't ask for better mentors really all three of them yeah i love it so okay so bob where i want to kind of take us from here real quick is just uh Real quick, kind of finishing up a couple of things. We do a this or that segment.

1:06:57 So I have a few questions for you on a this or that. Meant to be fun. Nothing taken too seriously. Let's see if my synapses still work. And we'll do a quick rapid fire after that. And then at the end, what we'll do is we'll talk about those three actionable takeaways. So here's our this or that, okay? And these are gonna be some hard ones. I'm pretty sure, okay? Magic Kingdom or Epcot? Magic Kingdom. Love it. Disneyland or Disney World? Disneyland. Oh, same. It's so nostalgic for me. That's just heart. All that is is heart. I didn't mention this earlier. You asked me which one you should go get on a plane and go visit. I'd say Disney World. But you asked me for my heart. Where's my heart lie? It's coming through the tunnels at Disneyland. For sure. Okay. How about this one? Disneyland Churro or the crepes at Epcot just outside Ratatouille? I reject both options. Oh, no, you don't like either. I don't like either one of them. The only junk food choice I have at Disneyland is a hot dog from the Coke Corner on the way out. That's my favorite. Okay, that's the only thing you really like there.

1:08:07 I see I'm a huge churro fan. I could eat churro forever. Okay, how about this one? Front row or back row on the Incredicoaster? Back row. I like the back row. You get a little more whipping. You get more whipping. Most fast rides, you get more whipping in the back row. Yeah. Star Wars or Marvel? Star Wars. Paris or Tokyo? That's hard. You know, this is tough. Oh, for sure. You're right. These are hard. But Star Wars is something I grew up with. Yeah. Star Wars is amazing. From the beginning, you know. Paris or Tokyo? Tokyo. That's easy. I built Tokyo. I built Tokyo. For sure. Um, book or a movie just in general, reading books or watching movies?

1:08:49 Boy, that's a, that's really hard because I love movies, but I read more now than I've ever read in my life. Uh, I've never read the way I read now. So at the moment, at this point in my life, it's books. Okay. Give me what's a, what book are you reading right now that, that we should read besides of course you are. Yeah, I read a lot of books and I read a whole variety of stuff. I read contemporary stuff. I read fiction. I read nonfiction. But I also read obscure stuff that's from the 30s. And I'm reading a book called Spy right now. Okay. And it was a huge hit in 1932. And when I read about these things, I go...

1:09:30 I read a lot of World War II history stuff, which this is, by Bernard Cohen. But a lot of times I go to eBay and I try to find original editions. I read Mysterious Island, the great Jules Verne book, and I read it in an old edition with illustrations. There's something cool to me about reading an old, old book. That is old. For sure. I love it. I love it a lot. But I also watch movies. I watch movies constantly too. I watch new movies and I watch a lot of classics also. Yeah, I'm a huge movie guy. I mean, I do love reading books, though. I'm more of an audiobook, though. That was one of the things I actually loved about your book. Thank God. Thank God you are. We're all getting to make audiobooks. I love that you read yours because I'm actually always a little disappointed when somebody writes a book that's either a memoir or autobiography or something like that and they don't read it themselves.

1:10:28 I'm always like, no, I wanted to hear you read it. It's a big commitment in time. I read both Ghost Dog and... Dream Chasing. And Dream Chasing took me 26 recording sessions. Wow. So it is a big commitment of time. And how long each recording session? Well, I think we got to a chemistry where we realized I really only was productive for about three hours. Or I'd lose my voice, focus. So we had three hours at a time. And to do an unabridged nonfiction book of almost 700 pages, that's a lot. But I stuck it through. They dragged me into it, really, Ryan. And now I absolutely love it. I can't wait to do the Marty book. I can't wait to do this other book I'm doing. I will always do it if I have the opportunity now. And I'll do a better job the next time. Oh, yours was great. Honestly, it was so great to hear you read that. I absolutely loved it. Thank you so much. But I think the reason that I said books in that pairing of books and movies is because... Trying to be a writer now, I really need to read other great writers.

1:11:32 So as much of my focus as possible is not surfing the internet or reading the news. It's reading great writers because that's what I'm trying to learn. Yeah, that makes sense. It's probably part of why, as I started this podcast in January, I listen to and watch so many podcasts now because I'm just trying to learn and understand what does it look like? What are people doing? um how can we make improvements and make it better for sure um okay let me let me hit you hit you with some quick rapid fire ones so this is kind of this first thing to come to your mind we'll only do a few um oh boy this is more synapse stuff i gotta sharpen this one's more um favorite disney movie man you're so tough on me In your book, you had said that you, as far as animated features at the time, you really liked Sword in the Stone. I didn't know if that had changed over the years. That's when I grew up. I think my favorite animated feature today is Coco. Oh, Coco's so good. Yeah, I love Coco. There's so much heart to that. Great music in it. It's a wonderful show. I also grew up with the black and white. Fred McMurray movies, like Flubber, the original one. Flubber was great. The original was amazing. I love those movies. I love those movies. They're fantastic, yeah. Yeah, they were so fun. Favorite Disney song? You have to help me with the title. It's the Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes. Is that? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. From Cinderella? It's from Cinderella, yeah. Yeah,

1:13:03 yeah. What a wonderful song. You will have to help me with the song title. I think that's what it is. A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes. I think that's what it's called. Is that what it's called? I think it has another name. But anyway, that's my favorite. And we used it for the opening of Shanghai Disneyland. We did kind of a rock version of it. Fun. That we did. And then I used that quote as the opening of my book because it's so meaningful to me. Yeah. Yeah, it's a wonderful song. Okay, first ride you go on when you go to Disneyland. I have to give you two. It's either Haunted Mansion or Big Thunder. Both are so great. Big Thunder Mountain for me when I was a kid, I just loved it so much. I don't know what it is about. The whole start, too, when they have the fun voice and it's the wildest ride in the wilderness. There's just something about that that I love. There's something about that that has never, you know, with great kudos to Tony Baxter and with tremendous kudos to Exit Tencio and everybody that did Haunted Mansion.

1:14:04 I love Haunted Mansion, too, which is why I wrote the book Ghost Dog, which is inspired by the Haunted Mansion. Yeah. Do you like the version that they do, Nightmare Before Christmas, during the Halloween and Christmas time? Do you like that change? I do. I think it's fun that they do that. I think it's fun that they do that. But I think that there's something about the original Haunted Mansion that just works incredibly well. I loved it so much and I was thinking, I'll never do anything this good. This is just impossible, right? And so I said, well, the one thing you could probably do, because nobody's around who did it the first time, is I said, well, I could write a book about it. So I picked out the dog in the graveyard scene that's howling.

1:14:46 And I said, well, I'll write a movie that this dog follows a kid home. And so that's my contribution to the Haunted Mansion canon. That's an excellent one. And speaking of attractions that you have worked on, though, what's the attraction you're most proud of that you had the opportunity to work on? Yeah, see, that's the tough one, too. Because then I start to think about the things that we did that were groundbreaking and difficult. And I tend to come up with three or four. I know you're asking for one. Three or four is great. It's certainly Tower of Terror. the original in Florida. It's the new pirates that we did in Shanghai. It's Tron. And it's less of my personal effort, but tremendous management effort, which I explained to you already about Rise of the Resistance. Those things are all really, really important to me personally. Yeah. I can remember the first time I went on Rise. when you first walk out to where all the stormtroopers are.

1:15:50 Yeah. It was the most like awe I've ever had at any park, at any attraction ever. And I just thought after going on it, this is the greatest attraction ever made. It was so impressive. Everything about the technology, but it didn't feel like it was technology. It just felt like you were there and part of it, which is what I think you guys do so well with Imagineering is that you utilize technology, but it feels like an experience, not like it's just technology, which was so amazing. I love Cosmic Rewind because the team worked so hard on it. It was a tough job to do. Kevin Fahey is an incredible creative partner. I can't control it, but I love it best when it's fun.

1:16:35 Earth, Wind, Fire, September. So I write it whatever it is. But when that comes on, it's extra special. I just love it. Yeah, for sure. It was one of my selections when we were selecting. Oh, it's perfect. Yeah, it's a great song for it. When we were last there at Disney World in, I think it was November, I was raining terribly that day. Just a torrential downpour. I was there with my wife and two little girls. And it was the very end of the day. And the ride, unfortunately, had broken down a couple of times and we couldn't go. But we could at the end of the day. So the park was closed. And they still let my 10 -year -old and I go on that ride. And she was so over the moon about it. She was so excited that she and I got to go when the park was closed. They still let us on. It was such a fun, magical experience.

1:17:22 I loved going with my kids. Well, my birthday is in September. So whenever it's September, I feel like it's just me. It's just they're doing it for me. They are. They are doing it for you. And I'll always think about that now. If I go on that ride and that song comes on, there's no question. If you get September, thank you, man. I'll be like, it's Bob. It's Bob. Well, thank you. It's been such a pleasure to have you on, Bob. What I want to do, if we can, is provide to our listeners three actionable takeaways or three things that, as somebody's thinking about this topic overall, about dream chasing and working towards things that are great, that stretching their imagination. What are three specific things that somebody could, put into effect in their lives today or this week and take action on that we could recommend to them?

1:18:05 Yeah, I think that my philosophy is that everybody has interesting dreams, has interesting things they want to do. And the number one thing you can do is seek out allies. Seek out allies that can help you with that, that can help you move it forward. Be passionate yet flexible. Be passionate about what you want to do. Be flexible about how you do it, how it gets done, who can help you do it. And the best thing is keep a very, very positive attitude about your own dreams. And maybe that one will come true. Maybe the next one will come true. Maybe it will be some combination of two things you want to do. But don't give up and just keep a very, very positive and collaborative attitude toward anything you want to do. Those are absolutely fantastic. I think those are three great things that I'm personally going to make sure I've got written down and I'm going to go do as well this week to start helping to accomplish the dreams that I have in the things. Absolutely excellent. It's been such a pleasure having the opportunity to visit with you, Bob. You've been such a joy to have on here and such a positive energy and what you're bringing out and putting out to the world. So great to have you on. Well, thank you so much, Ryan. And it's been a great conversation. And I'll just, I'll do my commercial at the end.

1:19:26 I hope people will seek out Dream Chasing as a kind of a manifesto about dreaming. I hope if you're a Disney fan, you like the Haunted Mansion, you'll seek out Ghost Dog. And in about nine months, let's get together again, Ryan, because this huge book on Marty Sklar, the 50 -year patriarch of Imagineering that I've just finished writing, it's just going to the publisher now. will be coming out. So let's talk about that in nine months. Let's put it on the calendar. Yeah, absolutely. My, my recommended takeaways from my perspective, we're going to be first for everybody that you've got to go get a dream chasing. It's just, it's just absolutely phenomenal. Get it and read it, get ghost dog, and then can't wait for this book on, on Marty. I'm very, very excited for it. Awesome. Well, thank you so much.

1:20:12 It's been great. And thank your whole team, everybody. As you leave this conversation, remember that yes, the past can hurt. And you can either run from it or you can learn from it. So here's to learning and finding joy in the journey. See you real soon.