Interview with Disney Legend Joe Rohde on Imagining the Impossible

Joe Rohde (0:00)

If something is in the land, the cause for it to exist must also be in the land. Like the marquee for Kilimanjaro Safaris is a billboard for Kilimanjaro Safaris, with like phone numbers and address it, you know.

Tom (0:17)

Like an actual safari, yeah.

Joe Rohde (0:20)

Like if there's a marquee, someone inside that land, some imaginary inhabitant of the land made that thing and put it there. Not us, Walt Disney Imagineering, to tell you that something is there.

Tom (0:43)

Thank you for joining us on Welcome Home Podcast today. Today, we are joined by a literal Disney legend. As a longtime creative executive for Walt Disney Imagineering, he was the lead creative force behind Disney's Animal Kingdom, Expedition Everest, Pandora, The World of Avatar, The Adventurer's Club, Guardians of the Galaxy, Mission Breakout, and Aulani, just to name a few.

He's here to talk about his new book, Floating Mountains, The Art of Imagining, The Impossible, available now. We are so thrilled and honored to welcome Joe Rohde to the show. Joe, thank you so much for joining us.

Joe Rohde (1:16)

Oh, you bet. Thanks for having me. It's exciting.

Tom (1:19)

We both read your book and we really loved it. Honestly, it was such an interesting book. Before we started recording here, you're saying it's for Disney fans. There's a lot of Disney mixed into it, but it's also just a lot about your creative philosophy.

I'm not an artist, but even just talking about how to work on teams, and team building, and collaboration, so much of that is stuff that I felt like I could apply to my regular life.

Joe Rohde (1:51)

I do hope that it can be used by people, anybody really, who wants to work together in a group, especially on something that has not been done before. It's really that's the point of the book, is not only how do we work together, but how do we work together on something that has not been done before.

Tom (2:13)

I definitely got that from the book a lot. I know in the book you talk about the creative process and being a map. I feel like the book itself was a map for the creative process. It very much had that intent behind it, that you were giving guiding points for.

Like I say, neither Tom nor myself are Imagineers, but it's definitely inspiring that we, I feel like I can take a lot of that and apply it to just things that I do in my day-to-day, which is just wonderful.

Joe Rohde (2:42)

Yeah. No, that is my hope. When we first were discussing with the folks at National Geographic, what kind of book to make, they told me that we want a book that's like your Instagram.

It is like a giant long Instagram post made of paper.

But my thought was my actual Instagram could be about anything. I mean, sometimes it's like 37 chapters on the history of immersive design and sometimes it's, look, I found a frog in the backyard. So, the arc of the book is actually what you referred to. It's not a linear narrative of my career. It's a linear arc of an idea about what is creativity, where does it come from, what happens to it when we nurture it, and then what happens to it when we put it together with other people. How do we manage all that interface? In the end, what does it all mean and why are we doing this in the first place?

Tom (3:49)

You definitely did that really effectively. I couldn't put it down, honestly. I mean, I was reading on an e-book, but I couldn't put my phone down. I kept going back to it to read it more. I really love how you presented a lot of some of the things that have happened in your life with that Hamilton people where you wrote it like a play, which was really, really, really neat.

Which, to that end, I listened to the audiobook, which I very appreciated you getting all those people involved to do their parts in the play. It was as much fun as it was to read. It was also a lot of fun to listen to as well.

Joe Rohde (4:20)

Sometimes it just gets hard to track when you have a group of people in a text talking.

He said, then he said, then he replied, she answered. So I thought for some of these, we're just going to do it like a play, right? And the people, it's narrated by my son, Brandt. We have some of the original people who were really there doing their parts, and then playing the parts of other people. But it is like little mini plays inside the book. Also because I want the book to be like what it is talking about, right? It is talking about creativity, it's talking about collaboration. It should be like that, right?