Usually when folks go to Walt Disney World, they’re thinking about Mickey Mouse, a rollercoaster, or how exactly the actors playing the Disney characters in the park can appear so happy all the time. Some people, however, are thinking about nuclear energy and how Walt Disney himself could have played a major role in its development.
In the Season 5 premiere of Fissionary, hosts Mary Carpenter and Jordan Houghton sit down with urban planner and author Sam Gennawey to uncover how Walt’s imagination extended far beyond theme parks. From Disneyland to his unrealized vision for Epcot, Walt dreamed of communities built around innovation, clean power, and human connection. Sam shares how those plans included a nuclear-powered city under a climate-controlled dome, what they reveal about Disney’s faith in technology, and why his “yes, if” philosophy still matters today.
Regarding Walt Disney, he's just a geek. I mean, I've had—I've worked with a lot of people who'd worked with Walt Disney, and they would tend to call Walt just kind of a nerdy geek. He was a technology fan. He was—he wanted to be Thomas Edison.
Naturally, that fascination with technology led Walt to get interested in nuclear energy—he even made a TV special called Our Friend the Atom. Walt thought that nuclear energy was the solution to all of our problems.
You could build a lot of nuclear reactors, much the way that France has done with nuclear reactors. He was intrigued by that. He had dealt with a lot of different scientists over the years. You know, everybody wanted to talk to Walt, so he got a lot of information from these scientists, and he just believed that this was the solution for the country's energy problems at the time.
Sam told us that Walt loved nuclear so much he wanted to power Epcot with it. He even had permission to go ahead and build a nuclear power plant without getting any other approval other than working through the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).
Well, he saw this as the solution to his problems on energy. Build a nuclear power plant, I have unlimited energy, I can build an unlimited city because of that sort of thing. So, he really believed in it.
Whether you’re a nuclear energy advocate, a fan of Disney movies, or somewhere in between, Sam and this podcast are for you. We should be ambitious about our movies, theme parks, and how we power this planet.
Sam Gennawey Walt Disney was going to be the storyteller of nuclear energy for a positive future. Walt knew that he needed to communicate, and the best way of communicating was telling stories. It's just the way humans are designed.
Mary Carpenter This is Fissionary, a show exploring how nuclear powers your world. I'm Mary Carpenter.
Jordan Houghton And I'm Jordan Houghton. Let's jump in.
Mary Carpenter Welcome to Season 5 of Fissionary! This season we're asking a simple question with big implications. What powers wonder?
Jordan Houghton Mary, it's so good to be back. I'm so excited for the season. We are exploring the energy behind imagination and the ways big ideas can transform the world around us.
Mary Carpenter And we're starting with someone who quite literally dreamed of building a city powered by the atom, and I'm so pumped this is our first episode. We're talking about Walt Disney today.
Jordan Houghton Incredible interview with Sam Gennawey, who's our guest today. We had so much fun talking to him. Mary, at the end of the interview, we did get Sam to say what his favorite Disney ride is. And I'm not gonna spoil that, but we didn't talk about what yours is and I would love to know.
Mary Carpenter My favorite Disney ride, this is hard, but I'd probably have to say it's Guardians of the Galaxy—
Jordan Houghton Oh!
Mary Carpenter –which is at Epcot, which we will be talking about a lot today on the episode.
Jordan Houghton Okay, wait. So, full disclosure, I have never been to Disney World in Florida. I used to be a season pass holder in California, so I've been there at least a hundred times. I've been to Disney Paris. Guardians of the Galaxy in Florida, is that the same as—what, the Tower of Terror?
Mary Carpenter No! Oh my gosh, Jordan. I cannot believe you haven't been to—you need to go.
Jordan Houghton I know, I need to go ASAP. In Disneyland in California, they turned the Hollywood Tower of Terror ride into a Guardians of the Galaxy ride where you, like, go up and then you drop. I don't know if they also have that in Florida.
Mary Carpenter Yeah, so we have the original tower at—we, I act like it's, like, mine.
Jordan Houghton I know it's yours!
Mary Carpenter My home park! In Florida we have the Tower of Terror ride, it’s just the original Tower of Terror, like the Twilight Zone.
Jordan Houghton Yes.
Mary Carpenter Tower of Terror.
Jordan Houghton Yes.
Mary Carpenter So that's original. The Guardians of the Galaxy ride in Florida is at Epcot, and it's the smoothest ride you'll ever be on.
Jordan Houghton Oh!
Mary Carpenter They blast music, there's five or six songs from Guardians of the Galaxy, you never know which song you're gonna get. It's so much fun. I mean, it's an amazing coaster.
Jordan Houghton Yeah, I gotta get down there.
Mary Carpenter Yeah.
Jordan Houghton I love Disney. You just you feel like you're a kid again whenever you're in there. We talk about this in the episode actually, like, sort of the emotional freedom you have when you're inside of a Disney park thanks to the way that they're set up and just the emotional experience you get in the built environment there.
Mary Carpenter Yeah, I mean, it's the most brilliant storytelling at Disney. And you got—I mean, you have to go to Epcot now after we've talked about it, which is my favorite park.
Jordan Houghton I know, I was like, I don't want to say while we're talking to Sam that I haven't been to Florida, but I—California I know so well. Okay, let's get into this interview!
Mary Carpenter Sam Gennawey is an urban planner, planning historian, and author. Sam has spent years uncovering the story of Disney's relationship to infrastructure, technology, and even nuclear energy. And today he joins us from the road, where he lives full-time exploring the US National Park System. Sam, we're so glad to have you with us to start out our season. Thanks for joining us!
Sam Gennawey Very good. I'm glad to be here as well. Thanks for inviting me.
Jordan Houghton This season we're talking about how far imagination and curiosity can carry us, and there's really no better place to start than with Walt Disney. What do you think is behind that curiosity? And then, follow up to that, what powers wonder for you in your work?
Sam Gennawey So, regarding Walt Disney, he's just a geek. I mean, I've had—I've worked with a lot of people who'd worked with Walt Disney, and they would tend to call Walt just kind of a nerdy geek. He was a technology fan. He was—he wanted to be Thomas Edison, if he could be Thomas Edison, more than almost anybody else, and was always involved in technology. A little bit of a conflict when most people think of him mostly as a storyteller, but storytelling was just an excuse to be able to play with technology. And his curiosity was unbounded. He would get interested in something, dive deep into that pool, and then he would move on to something else. He didn't want to repeat things, he didn't like sequels because he liked the concept of new learning. And I gotta confess, I like Walt. I learned a lot from him because of that kind of curiosity, and curiosity is, well, I think my driving motivation in life as well, too.
Mary Carpenter So Sam, you've had an unexpected career path from record stores, record labels, urban planning, and the author of several books on the history of Disney theme parks. How did you first become fascinated by Walt Disney as a planner?
Sam Gennawey Well, this goes straight to your curiosity question, isn't it? By going through all these different things, you learn a bunch and then you want to move on to the next thing. I grew up in Los Angeles in Whittier, California. I'm of the age where from about 1969 to the early 1970s, my mother would drive us and my two much older brothers down to Disneyland. Now, this was at a time you bought a general admission ticket, which gave you access to the park and you can go do whatever you want to do, except for get on the rides. You had to spend extra money to buy a ticket to go on the ride. We weren't wealthy at all, we were a working class family. What my mom did is she used the park as a babysitter. This was a thing back then that a lot of parents felt that they could just drop their kids off at the front gate, let them run around, and then come pick them up and know that they're going to be safe. So, while growing up there, I was immersed in Disneyland the land, the park part of it, which gave me access to four free rides. I could go shrink down to the size of a water molecule in the Monsanto ride. I could go and watch Mr. Lincoln. I can sit in a theater and watch a theater that had screens all the way around me. Most importantly, though, I got to go to Progress City, I got to go to the Carousel of Progress, which was an attraction at the very last stage. Once you got—the show was over with, everybody was invited to step up on the stage to take an escalator up to the top floor and up there was a 20,000 square foot model of Progress City, which was Walt's City that he was planning on building in Florida. And I would just trail the rest of the crowd and spend a lot of time up there looking at that model. And then somehow or other that really seeped into my brain, and when I decided to leave the music industry, I wanted to help build Progress Cities. I wanted to build these cities that I saw as a kid that Walt Disney showed me at the top of the Carousel of Progress.
Jordan Houghton This is so cool! What an interesting story and evolution of your career. You mentioned that a lot of people think about Walt Disney as a storyteller. What do you think people misunderstand about who Walt actually was, especially with regard to his role as a designer and a futurist?
Sam Gennawey He—what Walt liked to do is he knew that people communicated through stories. He knew that primarily, he needed to do that. And he wanted to use different kinds of technologies in order to tell that story, to provoke people's emotions, because that was very important to him, was that stories are not about information, stories are about emotions, and that if you can connect with somebody on an emotional level, you can then guide them through what you needed to educate them about. And so, he was really quite big on that sort of thing, so that's why he was into the idea of Audio-Animatronics, dealing with miniatures, architectural design, visiting places and spaces and understanding what we call the timeless way of building, and was able to apply that to his theme parks. He was also a big technology geek in the sense he really believed in corporate America and corporate America's ability to solve all sorts of problems and wanted to be able to do that by using technology. But he knew he couldn't just put the technology up front. Walt knew that he needed to communicate, and the best way of communicating was telling stories. It's just the way humans are designed.
Mary Carpenter So diving into that a little bit more, what do you think drove Walt's desire to shape how people live?
Sam Gennawey I mean, he'd always been creating worlds because animation is as artificial storytelling as you can get. The world the characters live in are animated worlds. And he was unique in the sense that—you had Betty Boop at the beginning of time, who was a cartoon character living in a real world. He created his Alice series, which was a live woman or live girl in a cartoon world. So, he had the control of a model builder where he can control the entire surroundings. And when he created Disneyland, that was exactly what ended up happening, and a lot of urban planners were just awestruck by its ability to function and to inspire, and that's because he based everything on this timeless way of building. He started realizing that maybe he was on to something. Maybe he figured out how to organize the built environment in such a way—these sacred stories that people wanted to share, these universal stories that people wanted to share, could be distributed. And he started thinking maybe I could help solve the problems of cities, because I'm certainly doing that at my park, the place is really efficient, it makes a lot of money, it's very clean, it's very safe. Maybe I could apply some of these lessons to real cities, and that's when he started getting interested in his idea of Epcot, which was the city that he was planning on building in Florida.
Jordan Houghton Interesting. When did the idea of Epcot first emerge and what problem was Walt trying to solve with it?
Sam Gennawey So, this was a huge amount of research that I dived deeply into in my book, Walt Disney and the Promise of Progress City. And the one place where I definitely know that it started was there was an article in a magazine called Out of the Fair. And what it talked about was a concept for the 1964 World's Fair competition. The City of New York applied, and they're the ones who ultimately won. Washington, D.C. also wanted to build a World's Fair. Washington, D.C. hired an architect named Victor Gruen, who is most famous for creating the indoor shopping mall, but he was so much more than that. And what Walt saw was the first World's Fair that was oriented towards the automobile. Therefore, it had a condensed urban center where all the activities placed, and it was surrounded by parking lots. But even more substantial was that when the fair was over, unlike any other World's Fair where you tear down all the buildings and the infrastructure, they wanted to retain this and they wanted to create a city. The problem he was trying to solve was the problem of cities. He recognized that people were—he didn't like, he didn't like American cities. He didn't like everybody having to get into a car. Now this is going to be kind of ironic considering that, you know, Disneyland helped create many of these problems in a way. But he didn't want people to get into cars, to drive long distances, to go see and do things. He wanted people to enjoy the environment, so he wanted to build a city that was all about transportation first, because he first and foremost was a train geek, and he wanted to be able, so that people could get around and not have to be able to walk everywhere—much like what Disneyland can be at its best—and he wanted to solve the problems of the inequity of cities, but he also wanted to solve the problem of American technology companies. You see, at that time, you didn't just do computer studies to figure out whether something was going to work. The ideal thing was to be very experiential. You want to build it, give it to a bunch of people, test it. If it worked, it worked. If it didn't work, why didn't it work? Let's rebuild it—back to that Thomas Edison thing—and he wanted to be able to give American corporations a place and a space where they could build new technology, use 20,000 people that were going to be living in this city to test that technology, and if it worked, great, and if it didn't, you just pull it out and you put something else that was new in it. It would have completely changed the way corporations would have organized to be able to build consumer products.
Mary Carpenter So, Walt was a public supporter of nuclear energy and even made a TV special called Our Friend the Atom. What do you think about nuclear excited him?
Sam Gennawey Well, at the time, imagine when—he died in the mid 60s, so, at that time nuclear energy was the solution for all of our problems, wasn't it? Because it didn't take a whole lot to get the uranium and to create these nuclear reactors, you didn't have to burn a bunch of fuel and dig up mountains and things that were like that per se. At that time it would have been considered very, very clean, efficient energy. It could be very compact. You could build a lot of nuclear reactors, much the way that France has done with nuclear reactors. He was intrigued by that. He had dealt with a lot of different scientists over the years. You know, everybody wanted to talk to Walt, so he got a lot of information from these scientists, and he just believed that this was the solution for the country's energy problems at the time.
Jordan Houghton What would that—what it would it have looked like to live there if the whole thing had come together?
Sam Gennawey Oh, it would have been incredible! In fact, Harrison Buzz Price, who was the guy who found where Disneyland should be and the property where Florida—where the Epcot project was going to be, and Tokyo Disneyland, and worked with Walt Disney on hundreds of projects as his business analyst, basically, told me just prior to his death—Buzz's death. So, I'll give you an idea of it. When you drove up to the resort, there was the two freeways crossed each other. Well, you'd park your car, you would not see your car until your trip was done. You didn't need to. You'd hop on a monorail, which was the spine that connected the resort. The first area that the monorails would have passed through would have been an industrial park that was based off of the Stanford Industrial Park concept that he saw at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. There would be showcases for different corporations, meeting areas for the companies to get together and collaborate on projects, tours of factories, the latest and greatest products. Then you'd get back on the monorail and you'd go into this circular city that was 50 acres enclosed underneath an air conditioned structure. Because Walt ultimately may have been born in the Midwest, but he was really a Californian, and he thought that the weather in Florida really sucked. And he did not like humidity and thought, I'm going to get people out of this humidity and I'm going to put them into a structure, so let's think of a wheel, shall we? And this is the way—best way of describing Epcot. So, at the very center of the wheel was the core. The monorail would pass through, this is where the hotel convention center and the tall structure that was going to be the 30-story plus hotel that was the centerpiece of the construction. Now, those who are familiar with the design of Disneyland, this will sound familiar because Disneyland is a hub and spoke park. There is a wheel in the middle, and then you go off onto your different adventures with the spokes. You would go out in the spokes using the People Mover, which was a ride that was built for Disneyland, but that wasn't really actually built for Disneyland, this was Walt's way of testing the technology to see if it could stand up to the demands of it, the same way he did with the monorail. And you—your second level going out from that circle would have been the retail district. And the retail district would have consisted of little pie-shaped lands that would have represented Europe. Spain, Italy, someplace in an exotic place. Sounding familiar? Basically, all the countries that are at the Epcot today would have been in these slices of pie, so everybody would come through and walk through the retail area. And then surrounding the retail areas would have been the entrances to corporate offices, because he was—that's where the mucky-mucks of the companies would work. And then just beyond that would have been a high density of apartments. And that was all within this 50-acre enclosed structure. And then outside of that would have been surrounded by green space, open space. Schools, churches, parks, recreational fields. And then outside of that would have been single-family homes.
Mary Carpenter I love that. I love that concept. I wish that that would have caught on in other places around the country. Living in D.C., I walk a lot, I hardly ever drive. And I do love the People Mover ride at Magic Kingdom. And that would be amazing if we had those around just to hop on and take you where you need to go.
Sam Gennawey And you've gotten exactly to why Walt wanted to build Epcot, because he didn't believe—he thought that people's imaginations would get stilted and they would always want to live into what they already know. And he knew that he could shake that up and he can transform people's minds by showing them, this is the best way to do it. It was brilliant. It was a brilliant concept.
Jordan Houghton I mean you had me at no humidity.
Mary Carpenter Yeah, that too! Which is wild he built everything in Florida. How serious was Walt about powering Epcot with nuclear? Was this aspirational or was he pretty serious about it?
Sam Gennawey Oh no, no, he made sure that when they came up with the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which was the ordinance that basically took all the planning powers away from the state of Florida and the two counties that he—his properties were in and gave him exclusive rights to it, he really wanted to build this. He had permission to go ahead and build a nuclear power plant without getting any other approval other than working through the AEC, the Atomic Energy Commission. That was the only thing he had to coordinate with them because that made sense.
Jordan Houghton So, in the midst of Cold War, nuclear power got sort of mixed in with the fear around weapons. But there were efforts like Atoms for Peace to reframe it as a force for progress and possibility. And I think you see a lot of that in Our Friend The Atom, which has a very hopeful tone. For listeners who haven't seen it, go out, you can find it on the internet. There's actually a book as well that's very cool. So, Sam, how did Walt fit into that moment?
Sam Gennawey Well, he saw this as the solution to his problems on energy. Build a nuclear power plant, I have unlimited energy, I can build an unlimited city because of that sort of thing. So, he really believed in it. And it was going back to what we started with, with the idea that he was a technology geek who told stories. And so, his ability to convey to people what was going on—he believed he could persuade people to take advantage of this technology itself. I mean, I've been really, really lucky. I've been inside the B reactor at Hanford twice. It's managed by the Department of Energy and in conjunction with the National Park Service. I've been inside that structure. It's just—it's awesome. If anybody, if you can do it, go get your ticket for the B reactor at Hanford, Washington, and you will completely change your mind as to what's going on. Walt believed he was the guy who could sell the idea of the atom to people as a positive force as opposed to a negative force, to basically turn the lemons into lemonade, to take it away from being a weapon into a perpetual force of energy that would enlighten everybody and to power that air conditioner that was going to be in his 50-acre building so that you don't have to stand out in the swamps of Florida. If you've gone to the Nuclear Museum that's in Albuquerque, New Mexico, they actually have a whole display about Walt Disney World. It has a picture of Tomorrowland, it has the different movies that he had done, and they actually have a whole little section set aside that is dedicated to the idea that Walt Disney was going to be the storyteller of nuclear energy for a positive future.
Mary Carpenter They should have at Epcot somewhere.
Sam Gennawey Wel,l the downside to it in this day and age is it's not in a Disney movie that they're trying to promote. And of course, attitudes towards nuclear energy have firmed up in such a way where people don't tend to have an open mind. I mean, here's what the bottom line is for Walt. This is something I learned from Buzz Price. It's in the design guidelines for the Walt Disney Parks, and that is the “yes if”, not the “no, because”. You see, Buzz realized that if you want to talk to creative people about numbers and all this kind of nasty stuff, your best approach was the yes, we—we live in a world which is the “no, because”. No, you can't do that because of this. No, you can't do that because you don't have a solution for the waste. No, you can't do that because you've not figured out how the structure of the building looks like or whatever it is. Walt lived in the world of the “yes, if”. We don't live in that world anymore, which is really tragic. We don't think that way anymore. And that's tragic. That's really quite tragic. So, it's the “yes, if” versus the “no, because”, and that's how Walt always operated, was the “yes, if”.
Jordan Houghton I feel like that statement embodies our theme this season, this idea of “what if”, “yes, if”, not “no, but” or “no, because”. It's about looking at what something can do and what it can unlock and how it can make our lives better.
Mary Carpenter So, if Epcot had become a living experiment, what do you think it could have unlocked for how we live and how we imagine the future?
Sam Gennawey Oh, well, we'd have all sorts of really cool gadgets because it would have been tested and you'd be able to go, ooh, I want to get that microwave, it's been in 20,000 houses in Epcot, and look how cool that thing worked. I think that the attitude towards public transportation as transportation for all versus transportation for the poor or for the disadvantaged or for, in some many ways, the enlightened. I think that we would have seen that beauty and the aesthetic and outdoors, and having nature nearby, nature redeems everything, is my attitude. Living in a 50-acre city and then being able to hop on a swamp bus that's going to be a 20-minute ride away from where I'm living and being able to go into natural areas as a matter of course would have happened. The idea of living in more compact urban areas instead of suburban sprawl because he didn't really like suburban sprawl. That would have been changed as well, too. Walt wanted to remedy that. He wanted everybody to live, work, and play in the same place, to be able to walk and not to be able to do it and to have access to nature. So, we would have had a different attitude towards our connector towards nature and our attitudes towards the density of cities as well, too.
Jordan Houghton How do you think the invisible systems like energy that power these places shape how a place feels?
Sam Gennawey Well, what we've done in the United States for the most part is because we just put all the power plants in where the poor people live. There is an environmental justice issue where anything that we think is messy and dirty, we're just going to hide it. And going back to the Progress City model, everybody who lived in the city was looking at the power plant. The power plant was located fairly close to—it was just right on the outskirts of the of the city itself. Everybody would have seen what the city was being powered by because he believed you needed to know the power source in order to be able to appreciate the power source. You needed to have that right there. So, we would have been looking at the technology a lot differently. He would have screened it behind beautiful plants and trees and stuff like that to a certain extent, but it would have been proudly, the big GE logo would have been right there. And you would have seen who was powering that city. And we tend to shove that away these days.
Jordan Houghton Are there any real places, past or present, that you think come anywhere close to the kind of experience Walt was trying to create with Epcot?
Sam Gennawey There's been a few stabs at it. There's a place called City Center, which is a development that's in Las Vegas on the strip. It's where the Aria Hotel and stuff is, you might be familiar with that. That's about the same size as Epcot. Basically, it's all indoors. It had both living areas, retail areas, resort areas, all blended together within walking distance. You planted your car once and you took their little train, it went back and forth. And I think that that had some resemblance to it. We sort of moved away and we started moving, at least for those who are trying to build more compact urban areas, we try to move more towards a traditional way of building. That would be places like Celebration or see—or developments that the Duany and Plater, the new urbanist people, have come up with.
Jordan Houghton You got me excited, Sam, because I have to thank you for the shout out to City Center. I spent five years of my life on that project bringing it for—I worked for one of the architects and so was involved in the planning from the beginning to when the fireworks lit up the sky over at opening, and it was so cool to see the creative process where they brought all the different designers and planners in together to make it what it is, so thank you for that!
Sam Gennawey Oh, you're welcome! Yeah, no, it's the closest thing that I can think to it. I mean, if you just would have put the nuclear power plant where, I guess, the Bellagio is, or where, you know, that kind of thing, you would you would have had the same thing. But it is true. City center, you park once and you'd be stupid to get out of your car. Just go walk around the whole thing and go experience it all, everything's all connected with each other. Except for Epcot would have been cooler! And just because Walt had great designers as well too.
Jordan Houghton Well also it would have been cooler because he would have had a way that you didn't even have to go outside and feel the heat.
Sam Gennawey Yes, that's right.
Mary Carpenter So, what do you think Walt would say if he could see how we build and power our cities today?
Sam Gennawey I can't speak for the man because I never met the man. I think that he would kind of ask, what happened to imagination? Could you guys just sort of figure this out?
Mary Carpenter Yeah.
Sam Gennawey Why, what did you—why are you just doing what's in front of you?
Mary Carpenter Yeah.
Sam Gennawey Why don't you think through that and come up with, what is the next idea? He always wanted to push through to the next level, to the next idea. And I think he had been very disappointed about how not bold people are today, and how timid we are about trying to create that next new thing and just relying on what we know we can get away with.
Jordan Houghton So, before we wrap up with a final question, I would love if you tell us a little bit about your latest book, Sacred Landscapes.
Sam Gennawey Yes, well, I've written five books now. So, I'm really pleased with those. The first is Walt Disney and the Promise of Progress City, which is all about these projects that Walt was working on prior to his death and talked about his design DNA. Then The Disneyland Story is a biography of Disneyland that was inspired by Diane Disney Miller during a discussion I had with her at her at their family museum, and that became a biography of what happens when dad dies and does the kid keep going, and in this case, he taught them good values and when they stick to them, it works. Two books about Universal Studios. Sacred Landscapes was the book I wasn't initially planning on writing. I retired, I bought a van, I decided what I was going to go do is travel the country and enjoy my retirement that way. I got hooked into visiting National Parks and trying to visit every National Park that I could drive my van to—so, it's almost 390 of those sites so far—and I really started looking and observing. And I started noticing that the National Park Service design ethic is very similar to the Disney architecture of reassurance design ethic. There's a lot of things that they share, which makes sense because the National Park Service was founded by Stephen Mather. And he tried to create areas where you provoke people not by loading them with facts, but by provoking their emotions—this is what they would call National Park interpretation—and then once you provoke their emotions, you can move them towards understanding the resources and having them care about the resources as much as the park rangers do. So, I started to see my worlds cross over each other. And that's what the book really outlines is when you go to the park, it's not just what you're going to see, but it's what is the interpretive story of that park and how that park takes you through a sequence of spaces in order to teach you about what that park is all about. So, that's Sacred Landscapes, is my latest book. And it's going to lead me to doing a couple of talks for the Smithsonian Institution about the architecture of National Parks.
Jordan Houghton Do you have a favorite National Park?
Sam Gennawey Oh, I hate when people ask that question!
Jordan Houghton I know.
Sam Gennawey It's the next one that I'm going to! That's my stock answer. Honestly, the parks that I most enjoy are those that are on the Colorado Plateau, which was a 150,000 square mile piece of land that about 30 million years ago got lifted straight up two miles and have been eroding ever since. There's just something rather magical about the Colorado Plateau, and there's enough parks to cover everything from nature to humanity that come together that I just absolutely adore. But I love them all. There's only a few parks that I really detest, and then they're not very many.
Mary Carpenter I wanna ask—
Sam Gennawey You're gonna ask me what those are.
Mary Carpenter I was just about to, but instead I think I'm gonna ask you what's your favorite ride?
Sam Gennawey My favorite ride of the Disney theme parks would be Pirates of the Caribbean. Created a lot of things that ultimately got implemented in a lot of other parks.
Jordan Houghton That's my favorite, too. Full disclosure though—this is now a theme of this episode—I like it because it's a place to cool off. So good. Okay, last question for you. Is there a person, place, or thing that has left you in awe recently?
Sam Gennawey For me, it's kind of an unusual answer. It has been the collective effect of visiting so many of these sacred landscapes, the places that we as a country have set aside theoretically in perpetuity to celebrate something or to honor something or to remind us of something that was very important to us as a nation, the “we the people”. And visiting so many of these places, working at over a dozen parks as a volunteer now, and then seeing these stories told as an entire story, that's what's really impactful to me. I believe I've learned a lot about this country by doing this visitation. So, it's not any just one part, but it's how they all start to connect. And that has changed my life, it quite frankly has changed my life. It's got me addicted to maintaining this lifestyle and visiting these places.
Mary Carpenter You really are such a great guest to have on as we kick off this season talking about wonder.
Sam Gennawey I really appreciate you having me on board here.
Jordan Houghton Thank you.
Mary Carpenter Yeah, thanks so much for joining us, this has been so interesting. Disney and nuclear, what else could you need?
Sam Gennawey Exactly!
Mary Carpenter I loved that conversation and I so wish that we had communities like Walt envisioned. And it's pretty cool that you worked on the thing that was closest to it!
Jordan Houghton Yeah, that was that was a really fun mention for me, that was a great project. I led communications for one of the architects on the CityCenter project, so I really I got to see it from the beginning when it was literally sketches on napkins to it actually opening up and it's cool that all these years later he still has that impression of it. That was a really cool shout out. I was happy to hear him say that.
Mary Carpenter Yeah, that's awesome. And I hope one day that we can focus more on connecting people in the way that Walt wanted to.
Jordan Houghton Yeah, those ideas for—or his ideas for how cities could be I mean that's the dream as far as I'm concerned. I would love to not have to drive!
Mary Carpenter I know, me too.
Jordan Houghton Well, Sam, thank you so much for taking us inside Walt's mind and inside a vision of the future powered by imagination.
Mary Carpenter If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to follow Fissionary wherever you listen. This season we're traveling through the systems and stories that make the extraordinary possible, from cities to medicine to the things we can't always see but always feel.
Jordan Houghton And we'll see you next episode as we keep exploring what powers wonder.
Mary Carpenter Bye, Fissionaries!
The next episode airs on Thursday, January 22—make sure you tune in, Fissionaries!
