Welcome to today's episode where we explore the remarkable journey of Michael Libby ('02). From academic challenges and an unexpected departure from Harvard-Westlake to navigating the jungles of Disneyland as a Jungle Boat cruise guide, Michael's path is anything but conventional. Fast forward to today, Michael has emerged as a trailblazer in the world of creative technology, serving as the CEO of Worldbuildr, a pioneering technology consultancy with a focus on immersive experiences. With over 15 years of expertise in the field, he's established himself as a leading figure, reshaping the landscape of location-based entertainment. Join us as we delve into Michael's inspiring story of resilience, innovation, and transformation. Discover how he turned adversity into opportunity and continues to push the boundaries of what's possible in the realm of creative technology.
Connect with Michael Libby on LinkedIn
Welcome to Uncharted Paths. The podcast that dives deep into the journeys of courageous individuals who listen to their inner wisdom and forge paths of authentic expression. In a world where conventional success often overshadows personal passion, we illuminate those who have dared to venture off the beaten track.
In season one, we're uncovering the untold stories of unique alumni from Harvard-Westlake School. You may recognize names like astronaut Sally Ride, the former mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, and actors Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, but now we're shining a light on the hidden gems. I'm Lindsey, and I'm Kristin.
Join us as we explore the stories of these remarkable individuals, share their triumphs and challenges, and uncover the lessons that can inspire possibility for all, especially today's generation. It's time to follow your heart and chart your own path. Welcome to Uncharted Paths [00:01:00].
Welcome to today's episode where we explore the remarkable journey of Michael Libby. From academic challenges and an unexpected departure from Harvard-Westlake to navigating the jungles of Disneyland as a jungle boat cruise guide, Michael's path is anything but conventional. Fast forward to today, Michael has emerged as a trailblazer in the world of creative technology, serving as the CEO of WorldBuildr, a pioneering technology consultancy with a focus on immersive experiences.
With over 15 years of expertise in the field, he's established himself as a leading figure reshaping the landscape of location-based entertainment. Join us as we delve into Michael's inspiring story of resilience, innovation, and transformation. Discover how he turned adversity into opportunity and continues to push the boundaries of what's possible in the realm of creative technology.
Michael, welcome to the show [00:02:00].
Thank you.
What led you to say 'yes' to being here today?
I think it's really great what you're doing. I think just the fact that this exists will be really great for the students and maybe even greater for the parents.
When you hear ‘uncharted,’ what comes to mind?
When I hear ‘uncharted,’ literally it means that there's no map, no path that somebody set out that you can follow. It's Lewis and Clark.
When you think of your own path, do you feel like you've had an uncharted path? And if so, when did that begin?
It was probably during high school, maybe 10th or 11th grade, when I started to realize my interests and sensibilities were a little bit different. It was being really interested in the creative arts, in playing music and visual artwork, creative writing and video and film and animation and comedy. The things that made me happy.
What compass did you use to choose what you did or were involved with in high school? Middle school? [00:03:00]
It was just the things that I naturally gravitated to. Playing music was a big one. Making videos was a big one. Doing art projects, doing creative projects. When I was in school here and anytime a teacher assigned something that wasn't a typical essay or report or homework, but said you could do some other visual presentation in lieu of a paper, I was all about that. It was fun. It was different. It was creative. And it was challenging, like the good kind of challenge.
Did you start doing things to prepare for college? What was that journey like for you?
I really have an uncharted path in that respect. I think you probably have forgotten that I didn't graduate with you guys. I want to point that out, by the way, nobody even remembers that. What happened was I went to an elementary school called the Mirman School. I was a smart kid, did well at Mirman, got very good grades [00:04:00], and then came to Harvard-Westlake in seventh grade, continued to get very good grades, but then maybe around 9th or 10th grade, even if you're a smart kid, there comes a point where you need to start studying for tests, and you can't just coast on your intelligence. I didn't like that so much. I didn't like doing homework, and I didn't like studying. I struggled with self-discipline and things like that.
I would always come home from school and get really active into my hobbies, which were creative hobbies, and my parents are just the most wonderful people who always want the best for me and always acted in what they thought was in my best interest.
And I think they too have more traditional views, or at the time, they had more traditional views of what success might look like. When my grades started to slip, my parents started to be more strict and more disciplinary.
Separately, there was a fundamental issue at home about technology. [00:05:00] And I have gone into a career in advanced technology, and my parents, bless their hearts, are the most technophobic people I've met in my entire life. And there was this cold war at home about, maybe you'll find this funny, about upgrading from dial-up internet to high speed internet.
They wouldn't do it until my grades got better. I told them I needed it for my work, and it really escalated. And I realized, at that age, that really the only power I had was over my grades and my academics. As a minor, that was really the only power I had. So, almost in an act of defiance, I started to intentionally tank my own grades.
Obviously, very short sighted, but it was the only thing I thought to do. In hindsight, it really was this clash [00:06:00] between, I think, a traditional vision of what success looks like and the unknown, so I ended up leaving Harvard-Westlake after junior year.
I was popular at Harvard-Westlake, the teachers liked me, my friends. I was on the student council in 11th grade, and I left and I went to boarding school to finish high school in snowy, cold Massachusetts.
I came back to LA. I went to USC for college, and I was a creative writing major and really enjoyed it. I actually entered USC as a journalism major, because I worked on the school paper here at Harvard-Westlake. I realized, in journalism they were teaching me how to write objectively and how to take my opinion out of the story.
I realized, 'Oh, that's not me at all. I want to put my opinion into the story and express myself creatively.' I had this amazing teacher at USC who was supposed to be teaching me about fiction writing, but he was showing us [00:07:00] Wes Anderson movies and Kubrick movies as well. It helped me understand what being a professional creative person is about, honestly,
in terms of creative analysis, understanding creative intent, and what makes good creative content versus bad creative content. I loved it, so I changed my major to creative writing, which I'm sure for a lot of parents that it would be scary. But no, I loved it, and I need to tell you, the biggest thing that I learned there is how to tell a story. It's one of the most valuable skills that I've had for my entire life is how to tell a story. Storytelling is such an important part of everything. It's an important part of business.
If you're pitching something to an executive, the way that you make them care is with a story, getting them emotionally invested into what you're talking about. Now, at the same time, I was really into going to Disneyland. I just loved it. This idea of a narrative, [00:08:00] immersive world, a story being told through physical space, through architecture, spatial storytelling.
I was so enamored by it. So, while I was in college, I got a part-time job at Disneyland working on the Jungle Cruise ride. Other Harvard-Westlake friends, they were doing internships, like a coffee mail person at CAA or something like that.
I was literally driving a boat on a Jungle Cruise and telling jokes about robotic animals. I was having the time of my life. I joke that it was like my second major, because being there, taking passengers around, 45 people at a time, every eight to ten minutes, that really enhanced my storytelling abilities.
I had tremendous stage fright before that. I was never involved in theater here or anything that put me in the spotlight on the stage, but that really is a sink or swim environment where you have to be funny, but you also need to read the guests as they're loading onto the boat.
Are there families on board? Are [00:09:00] there teenagers on board? Like, what are the jokes? How am I gonna tailor this experience to them? So, I was formally learning how to tell stories in school but boots on the ground learning how to tell stories to real audiences at Disneyland.
It was also there that I really came into myself as a leader. I started becoming a trainer on the Jungle Cruise where I would train new skippers on how to operate the ride safely and be funny. And then I became a shift lead there where I was in charge of the Jungle Cruise and the Tiki Room and Tarzan's Tree House. It was a wonderful experience that led me to my first break, which was an internship as a creative writer at Walt Disney Imagineering, which is the design wing of the Walt Disney Company that dreams up and designs and builds all of the new attractions.
Learning about Imagineering and understanding what they do there, that's when I started to see a path. 'Oh, there are people that actually do this.' It's [00:10:00] not just architecture; it's not just filmmaking; it's not just engineering; it's everything combined, integrated, and it's almost like this new medium of storytelling, of immersive storytelling. And that really excited me.
The second half to that story is that I worked as a creative writer for a few years, and then I went back to school and got a master's degree at the USC Film School in their New Media division in Interactive Media & Game Design.
And I've gone deep into advanced technology. And now I work with things like generative AI and augmented reality and game engines. I've gone deep into the tech side of things.
I was going to ask that jump from job to starting your company, what was that pivotal moment that you knew something's got to change?
The pivotal moment was I went to grad school and I was learning about game engines and virtual reality, a lot of this new media technology that [00:11:00] now is really coming to the forefront.
I had a different perspective than the other students. The other students all went to that program to learn how to make video games. It's a very well regarded video game design program, and they went to learn how to go work for Activision or EA or these big companies.
I went just to sort of learn the stuff, and I realized that these new tools can be used for things far beyond video games. I realized, again, because of my unique background and perspective, that these tools can be used to pre-visualize some of these experiences.
New rides at theme parks or new museum exhibits or new visitor centers and attractions or brand experiences. You know, if you pre-visualize them in virtual reality, you can actually find your mistakes before you pour concrete.
But it took me being in a video game program, having been a theme park ride [00:12:00] operator to understand the connection there. 'Oh, we can actually simulate what this thing is going to be like and optimize the throughput and the return on investment and figure out how much these things are going to cost and how we sequence the construction, and do it all in advance.'
I was blessed to have this awareness in the moment of, 'You know what, I think I am in the right place at the right time.'
When I was in grad school, this emerging technology, I had a different perspective on one of its use cases and its applications, and that knowledge hadn't really hit the industry yet.
One of the things you find out in grad school, especially when it comes to technology, is you learn all this cool, awesome stuff and have these amazing skills of creating this cool tech, and then you graduate and go into industry, and they're ten years behind everything. Because they're so risk averse, and they don't want to change their processes. They've been doing things the same [00:13:00] way. All they see is risk.
So, then you have an uphill battle of having to convince an industry there's a better way of doing things. I'm still fighting that battle.
Actually, one of the areas we're getting into is wedding pre-visualization. You can have your venue and your flowers and the colors you picked out and your run of events. You can have a timeline of here's when this happens and when this happens.
So you know what the run of show is going to be before the actual event.
What we're really simulating is what the guest experience is actually going to be like. Is this thing that we're going to build going to be fun?
I keep hearing this idea of, rebellious. Rebelling against your parents. Rebelling against the system. Even now, disruptive technology. How do you balance the disruption and internal integrity?
I think you can disrupt with integrity. I spent a year working at Microsoft with OpenAI [00:14:00] during the lead up to the release of ChatGPT and did a deep dive into AI and learned quite a bit about it. The hype is warranted, and it really is going to be disruptive to virtually every industry.
But that's exciting to me. It's very controversial, and I talk about this a lot. A lot of people are afraid of it. A lot of people are repulsed by it. But I believe that technology is not inherently good or evil. I think there are many ways to use it for good.
Ten years ago, I was starting to work in virtual reality. And the movie studios were just scoffing. Look at today, just the whole entertainment industry is being reshaped by some of these technologies. I ended up starting a company about five years ago with the sole intent of disrupting my industry with some of this technology.
Something that I've learned professionally is that If you want to be a disrupter, the place to do it is not at a big [00:15:00] corporation. You do need to go off and do your own thing. So, there's a recurring theme here. Just following your gut and knowing something that nobody else knows. Even if everybody says it's not right, if you know it's right, you just have to stick to your gut. And that's not easy.
The other thing I'll say about that is if you want to take an uncharted path and do something that isn't that traditional picture of success, you better go for it. I guess that would be my other piece of advice is if you're gonna take an uncharted path, you gotta go for it. That's the other half of it is that you can't half-ass it. You need to go for it. And you need to go all in. Take that work ethic that you've learned and apply it to the thing that you really want to do. And that may mean financial sacrifices. It may mean longer work hours. It may mean working on weekends when all your friends are out partying, but that's what it [00:16:00] takes.
What would you tell younger you about your lessons learned through triumph and failure?
I would tell my younger self, the only freedom that you have that nobody can take away from you, is the ability to think for yourself and make your own decisions.
There'll be a lot of pressures, a lot of people telling you what you should do, and what they think is right for you, but you need to feel it. You need to follow your gut. Follow your passion.
Most of my closest friends, actually, are from Harvard-Westlake. And I have 30 year friendships with these guys. And not all of them had passions. They have great jobs, families, children, wonderful lives, but they didn't have that fire inside for a specific thing that I did and that I still do.
And so, if you have that, you have to follow it. You don't have to, but you [00:17:00] should.
The other thing I'll say is part of having gone to Harvard-Westlake is reconciling the privilege that you've grown up with. I went to private school for elementary school and high school. My parents sacrificed a lot for me to do that. I felt a responsibility to follow my passion. They created this environment for me where I could follow my passion, and that's a privilege, and not everybody is able to do that for very real life reasons.
And I could. I had the option to do that, and so I felt like I had a responsibility to do it. This was the environment that they worked so hard to build for me so that I could do whatever I wanted. So, I'm going to do what I want to do. And that should be the goal in life is to be happy.
What does happiness look like in your life?
Waking up every day excited about my work, excited about the meetings that I have, excited about taking on a creative [00:18:00] challenge or a design puzzle that needs to be solved.
Getting to work with just tremendously talented people and collaborate with them. And then for me, the thing that really drives me is when you finish a project, whether it's shipping a new virtual reality experience or opening a new theme park ride, seeing people come off of that ride. You've spent years on it, and then on opening day, when you stand off to the corner by the exit and watch people come out, and they're talking about it, and the kids are in awe, just speechless. That's priceless. It's everything.
And, you know, it brings me back to going to Disneyland the first time as a kid. I was probably three years old. Just this sense of wonder of like, 'How did they do that? What am I seeing with my own eyes?' Now, I know how they do it. I know how everything is done. But it's about creating [00:19:00] that feeling for younger people, for the next generation. Yeah, part of creating core memories. Yeah, Exactly.
And then, just having meaningful relationships. I'm still very close with my parents and my sister who also went to school here. And like I said, I have some wonderful friendships that started here, and they're still my best friends. It's a testament to the school that I have these lasting friendships. All of my classmates were smart, good people that I got along with and challenged me, and had the same sense of humor as I did, and we could joke about stuff. That's not a coincidence that my best friends are from here.
I consider myself very successful in terms of happiness and accomplishing goals that I set out for myself.
That gets into a discussion about how do you define success. I would argue that the most non-creative way to define success is financial [00:20:00] success.
That's the most traditional way, I guess. But I can tell you, making money does not really correlate to happiness. As long as you don't have financial anxiety and you can live a comfortable life, you get diminishing returns of happiness when you make more and more money.
People tell you that growing up, but it really is true. And that should be the goal in life, is to be happy.
During your journey, did the next step always seem to be clear and appear for you or were there periods where you were in the unknown?
Even today, now, there's still some uncertainty. Not about whether or not this was the right path, but about whether or not all of this sort of, you know, I've invested all of my knowledge and my perspective into my company.
But, we're still, to all you alumni, we're looking for investors.
We'll put the word out here.
Every day it's a challenge. Starting a company is not for the faint of heart. Making payroll, going [00:21:00] out there and being the lead business development and sales guy, because nobody else can do it.
It's terrifying, and it's challenging. But I don't know, I just feel like I have to do it. But I feel like that's what a lot of entrepreneurs would tell you is they just felt like, 'I can't not do this. I have to do this.'
Yeah, it's a terrible feeling. It's a, it's a curse.
Exactly. There's no other option. There is no other option. You have to stay in integrity. You have to do what's calling.
The story is, not everything is going to be easy. You're not always going to be happy. There are going to be some tough times. There are going to be moments where things aren't clear, and you're not sure what to do, and you're not sure if you made the right decision. You just got to push forward. It's just how I'm wired. I've tried working jobs that I don't like or that don't fulfill me creatively. And you know what? It's the same thing when I was in school here. The subjects that I was really [00:22:00] into, I would crush. The video classes, the art classes, the orchestra, the jazz band. I love that stuff. But if it was a subject I was not interested in, it was really hard for me. And that's probably still true about me.
Harvard-Westlake has just these amazing facilities for the arts. The visual arts building up on the hill, the journalism program, the orchestra program, jazz band, theater program, dance, but again, there was always this implicit kind of cloud hovering over us saying, 'These are good extracurriculars to pad your college applications.' And, no one was really telling us these are viable career paths. It was more like, 'Oh yeah, this will make you stand out in the application pool.'
I wish there was more encouragement. There are people who do this, and they're successful. There are success stories in all of these industries. You can make a lot of money doing any of these things, or you [00:23:00] can reach the pinnacle of your craft.
And I wish there was more encouragement for that, because I'll tell you what, when I hire people, I'm looking at their portfolios. I'm not looking at where they went to school. I'm looking at how good is this person at what they do. I just wish I had been told, 'It's gonna be okay.'
These paths, maybe they're somewhat uncharted here, but they're very charted elsewhere in the world. I found a community of creators and writers and animators and designers who all have the same passion and have always had the same passion.
So, it's not this like crazy life choice that they made. It's just what they always wanted to do. That's the normal for them. When you do it professionally, you're surrounded by people like that. And so, it just feels normal. These paths are definitely charted by many people who have had success doing them.
And you can also get straight A's, and get into the best [00:24:00] school, and then not have a happy life. That's possible too. There are a lot of external forces, and it really comes down to being honest with yourself and your inner voice and your gut and following your instinct and doing what you think is right.
People understand now that the student body is neurodiverse and maybe standardized tests aren't the best way to evaluate intelligence or ability. Generative AI is about to reshape the entire landscape of academia as well. So, things are changing. I think parents today would be doing a disservice to their children by teaching them that there are only these certain paths that you can take. Cause it's just, it's not the case.
What are you curious about today?
I'm very curious about AI. That really excites me. I'm also curious about the next adventure, which is what it's like to have a family and maybe balance out my life a little [00:25:00] bit more from a work-life balance standpoint. That's something I haven't figured out yet.
If you were to grab a couple gold nuggets from our conversation today for people to put in their pocket and take with them.
It's really hard for this stuff to not sound cliche, but number one is it really is going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay. The things that you think are a big deal now are really not. And happiness really is the most important thing. That you will be devastated by a rejection letter from a college, and 20 years later, you'll laugh about it, because priorities change. The things that are important to you when you get older are very different than the things that you think will be important when you're younger.
It's really hard to think differently. And you need to always be asking, 'Why? Why am I doing this? Why are things this way?' And one of my biggest [00:26:00] pet peeves is when somebody says, 'Because that's the way we've always done it.' That drives me crazy. That doesn't mean there's not a better way.
Awesome. Thank you so much.
My pleasure.
Thank you for tuning in to today's episode of Uncharted Paths. We hope you feel inspired to carve out your own unique journey and embrace the courage to follow your passions. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to Like, Subscribe, and Share. Stay connected with us on social media for updates and behind the scenes content.
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Until next time, keep exploring, dreaming, and charting your own uncharted path.