Behind The Worlds

Kenneth Nakada has spent his career building the worlds you thought were real. He painted environments for The Matrix. He designed worlds for Avatar. He helped make the ocean, the tiger and the sky in Life of Pi look so real that the film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. He built one of the largest LED volume stages in North America. And he showed up to every job knowing something mo...

Andrew Green has spent his career inside the rooms most people never get access to. He negotiated the Harry Potter mobile license when no one had ever extended J.K. Rowling's universe without her writing it herself. He worked with Matt Groening and the original Futurama cast to create brand new content for a mobile game. He voice directed Arnold Schwarzenegger in his guest house, Benedict Cumberba...

Ron Millar (also known at Ron the Alien) is one of the most influential people in the history of gaming. He was among the first 5 employees at a small company called Silicon & Synapse, which you know today as Blizzard Entertainment. He helped turn Warcraft from a military strategy game into orcs and humans. He was the original lead designer of StarCraft. Then he left, started his own company,...

Willem Helmet Pickleman is a creative technologist who has spent his career living at the intersection of art and technology. He taught himself to code on YouTube, pushed augmented reality into advertising agencies that had no idea what it was, and ended up at Snapchat building AR tools used by millions, selling watches on wrists that weren't really there, and solving problems nobody had solve...

Shubha Jagannatha is a builder who has always lived between two worlds: engineering and art. She spent three years at Pixar as a technical director, working on Turning Red, Lightyear, and Elemental, fixing individual pixels in films watched by tens of millions, watching orchestras score movies live, and seeing firsthand what happens when a film gets quietly shut down after years of work. Then she...

Rylan Pozniak Daniels is a world builder in the truest sense. He's designing augmented reality interfaces for NASA astronauts returning to the Moon, creating apps for Apple Vision Pro, and reimagining the future of immersive storytelling. In this episode, we explore what immersive media lets us express that flat screens never will. Rylan shares the moment he met Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Super...

Nuno Leiria spent 15 years building games for 100M+ players such as Fortnite and Fable . Now he's built something that's flipping the gaming industry upside down. In this episode, we dive into: • Why game development took 15 years to learn (and 15 seconds now) • The surprising moment parents BEGGED their kids to keep playing • How AI is enabling teenagers to build at "the speed of cul...