Darin Grant - CTO at Animal Logic

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. I'm curious to know how many of you have a leadership pipeline. We know that great leaders grow companies because we talk to them here on the show every day. But what are you doing to create great leaders within yours? If you're a CTO, it is 100% your responsibility to grow and improve your people beyond just their coding abilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) We've built a tool that improves your people in their craft and in leadership. Visit leaderbits.io to learn more. Today, we are talking to Darin Grant, the CTO at Animal Logic, and we discuss what it took to bring The Matrix, Happy Feet, and The Lego Movie to the big screen, the difference between partners and vendors, and we even get a few unexpected tips that will make you a better problem solver. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) This is the Modern CTO podcast. So what's going on in your teams right now? Are you up really early? I know that they're mostly in Australia, but you're in Los Angeles.

(Darin Grant at 00:01:08) Yeah. Yeah. So I get up very early. We have offices in Sydney and Vancouver, and Vancouver gets online around 9:30. The offices in LA get online around 10 in the morning.

(Darin Grant at 00:01:21) And actually, it's kind of this brilliant thing. You know, everybody talks about meeting culture and how your day is completely overrun with meetings, and so you never have time for think time or actually doing any work. That's kind of inherently built in with me being here in Los Angeles. I have some overlap with Vancouver, and I'll do a bunch of meetings with just Vancouver only in the mornings, but that doesn't take up my entire morning. Right now, we have a two-business-hour overlap with Sydney. So all of our meeting rooms are fairly empty until those two hours happen between 4 and 6 p.m. right now, and they get incredibly packed.

(Darin Grant at 00:01:59) So I have the mornings really available to start to take the time to think about strategy, to plan out meetings so that they are very effective because I have a very limited window to have them. And then, yeah, I mean, the only downside is I end up working pretty late in order to do that overlap with Sydney. But it's actually really nice to be able to have that focus think time in the mornings, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:24) That's what I do. I get up like 5:30, so I get my exercise in, get a jog in, and then I work on everything for my, like all the preparing stuff in between like 7:30 and when they get in at 9. And then by the time, and the moment that they get here, it's just like I just help them the whole day.

(Darin Grant at 00:02:42) Yeah. And, you know, I know a little bit about your background right now. So I know that you're not only getting up at 5:30 in the morning right now since you have a newborn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:54) Oh, yeah. Yeah. We are going on six weeks now.

(Darin Grant at 00:02:57) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:58) Yeah. It's a lot, but he's just starting to get feedings like are going from three hours to like every four hours, and so that's good.

(Darin Grant at 00:03:08) Everything's sick. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:10) Yeah. Yeah. Then when they get to every six hours, then the wife starts getting some sleep. And after about three months, they're usually like they sleep through the night.

(Darin Grant at 00:03:20) Yeah. Cool. Well, I hope you luck with your second one sleeping for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:25) I will need it. Yes.

(Darin Grant at 00:03:27) You can't bank on it. You can't bank on it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:30) No.

(Darin Grant at 00:03:30) I'm very fortunate myself. But yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:32) Also, changing the diapers is different with a boy than a girl. So you have to like protect yourself better.

(Darin Grant at 00:03:39) Yep. Yep. They have these, I don't know how effective they are. They're called PeePee TeePees.

(Darin Grant at 00:03:46) Yeah. These little cloth, like they're like little yamacas that you put right on top.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:52) Right now, I'm just doing like the quick diaper move.

(Darin Grant at 00:03:56) Oh, you guys, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:57) Just ninja diaper it. So I think it's super cool what your company does, by the way.

(Darin Grant at 00:04:03) I do too. I do too. Yeah. I'm humbled by the company that I'm keeping and being on this podcast. But yeah, I think we do something very unique and different. Certainly, something that's kept me coming back to this industry and mostly focused on this industry for like 25 years now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:23) So the average person doesn't know Animal Logic—

(Darin Grant at 00:04:26) That's true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:27) Really as a brand, but they do know some of their work. What are some of the most like known projects that you work on?

(Darin Grant at 00:04:32) You know, so I'll start by saying I'm relatively new. So I can say these things without any pride of ownership and also without any kind of humble brag thing. But so Animal Logic has been around for 28 years now. Started in 1991.

(Darin Grant at 00:04:48) But really kind of hit the broader scene. They did work on this movie that a few people saw called The Matrix. And they did a lot of work there. A lot of the work was shot locally in Australia, and so they picked up much of the work as a result of that. Animal Logic started out as a purely Australian company. Lots of pride in that. Kind of the shining star of the Australian visual effects animation market. But yeah, we worked on Matrix back in the day. And then there have been some watershed moments in terms of Animal Logic's history and growth as a company that are all focused around different movies and what we achieved there. So, starting with Matrix, which is a big kind of splash on the scene.

(Darin Grant at 00:05:33) Speaking of splashes on the scene, the next thing that Animal Logic is noted for is doing this movie called Happy Feet, which is a motion capture and enabled movie about dancing penguins, which actually won an Academy Award for best animated feature. It's rare that that award has been given to anybody but Pixar or DreamWorks, former employer. But Animal Logic did that, and that was a source of great pride for the company. From there, they moved on and coproduced the—I mean, our CEO was a producer on Happy Feet, but really moved much more into coproduction and co-development of a movie called, I think we went through various different names in different territories. But it was either called the Legend of the Guardians or the Guardians of Ga'Hoole, which is this movie directed by Zack Snyder, who's really famous for really reinvigorating the DC movie franchises at Warner Brothers, like Justice League, Batman v Superman, all that kind of stuff, and Watchmen and things like that. So Zack Snyder directed his first animated feature, which is about these warrior owls, which I think was visually incredibly ambitious, kind of shocking. And so I was an outsider at the time. I got sent to go watch the movie to report on it back while I was working at my former employer. And I gotta say, even back then, I was like, wow.

(Darin Grant at 00:07:05) I can't believe that this came out of this shop in Sydney that people had only really heard of from Matrix. So that definitely started my intrigue with the company back then. And then the company was fortunate enough—we have a long-standing relationship in history with Warner Brothers. We were able to work on The Lego Movie.

(Darin Grant at 00:07:28) And really, that's another kind of watershed moment. It should've won the Academy Award. Here's an animated feature that had a very different look and style and told animation in a very different way. So you can see first, we had Happy Feet, which was this mocap animation feature that told a great story and actually was well received. We did Guardians of Ga'Hoole, which I think from a visual perspective was really stunning and amazing. Kind of what happens when you put high-end visual effects in an animated feature. And then we moved on to Lego Movie, which was a very different unique style. We did some things there that I think were groundbreaking and innovative in terms of this look and feel to the environment. Nobody had been building environment out of Legos for sure up until that point.

(Darin Grant at 00:08:22) And then that started that franchise off. And then most recently, kind of a big watershed moment for us was the development and production of Peter Rabbit, which came out last year. Peter Rabbit was an actual coproduction by Animal Logic. We sourced the script. We built the project, built the package, sold it to our partners at Sony Columbia Pictures, and then coproduced the entire movie with them while we did all the visual effects work for that.

(Darin Grant at 00:08:50) So that was another great moment for us. Really kind of hearkens what we're trying to do as a company, which is switching more into coproduction and then eventually co-financing animated films rather than just being a vendor or somebody who's doing animation services work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:11) Now when you were like 10 years old, did you know that you wanted to go into this movie world, let alone animated movies?

(Darin Grant at 00:09:21) No. So first, I grew up in Cupertino, California, which many people would not know where that is, except they wonder why everybody knows what the weather is there because it's the default weather on the weather app for Apple or for any Apple device because it's Apple's born and bred in Cupertino. So I grew up around computers my entire life. Started programming when I was five. Just like I think you did too, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:46) Like eight.

(Darin Grant at 00:09:47) Eight? Okay. Yeah. Okay. Late starter. Whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:49) Late starter. Late bloomer. It's okay.

(Darin Grant at 00:09:53) Well, I had the advantage of being in that environment. So always was around computers, was really thinking that I would do something along the lines of computers, right? But what I was inspired by was I really wanted to be a combination of two things. I wanted to be a Disney animator, and I wanted to be Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties. Like, somebody—I don't know why, I'm not a Republican, but this idea of focusing on business and growth and all that kind of stuff was really interesting to me. And so, it turns out I couldn't draw worth a damn, so animator was out. But I did want to find something that was this combination of technology based on my upbringing, art from that Disney inspiration early on, and then business, right, from watching Family Ties. And so, not knowing how to merge all that stuff together, I just went along my career, kind of building up and going into computer science.

(Darin Grant at 00:10:54) And then I was fortunate enough as a junior, I think, in college to have a friend say, "Hey. You kind of like computer graphics, right? I have a friend that does that stuff, and he works on visual effects movies." And I'm like, I think people called it misnamed it special effects at the time. Special effects movies. I'm like, "Oh, Industrial Light & Magic," because that's the only thing anybody knew about at that time. "No. It's this company out in Venice Beach, California called Digital Domain." And this was in 1994, I think. Digital Domain was founded in 1993, so it's very early on. So I got a tour. I got a tour of this place, and they were working on this film called Apollo 13 at the time, Ron Howard directed this amazing masterpiece. And Apollo 13, I got a tour. The guy that I was getting a tour from worked in the R&D department as a software engineer.

(Darin Grant at 00:11:46) But what he did was he took us on a tour, and first, he showed us—we had a model shop. We used to build models. Like, if you remember the lunar capsules that land in Apollo, it's about yay big, right? And Digital Domain still has the model in their lobby if you're able to go visit. And so they had people actually physically building models, which is like, "Hey, that's pretty cool for a tech company, right?" Having somebody—I think, you know, you could go use a lathe if you wanted, if you were licensed or qualified, on your free time. But so we had people doing that. They had that out on a sound stage or not a sound stage, on a stage for shooting. Couldn't record sound out there. And they were shooting motion control movements on that. Basically, like a computer programmed camera that could do the same move over and over and over again so that you could add different layers than something that was created on the original Star Wars films by a gentleman named John Dykstra. But so motion control is this idea of using computers in order to drive a camera.

(Darin Grant at 00:12:48) And they use those computers to drive a camera in order to film this footage of this model that they made there on set. And they were shooting it or they made on premise, and they're shooting it on their premise too. And then magically, at the time, they were able to make that filmed footage and bring it into the computer and then have people do a bunch of artwork on top of it and then push it out back to film, right? And so I saw people looking at footage that had just been shot on their stages with models that they built.

(Darin Grant at 00:13:18) And then we finally ended up—we ended the tour back at his desk. And this guy was a software engineer, right? He didn't know art from anything. And he was writing code to—back in the day, Digital Domain was doing a test for that original Godzilla movie that came out in the early 2000s, late '90s, right? Somebody else got the work, but he was running this code in order to do a water simulation. At the beginning of the movie, this gigantic space egg comes in and drops into the ocean. There's this gigantic ripple that happens. And he's running code using sinusoidal functions in order to make this computer-generated ripple. I'm like, "Wait a second. You're combining all this cool stuff and all these artists and all this stuff that I love, and you're writing code in order to make art. That is the coolest thing ever. This is what I want to do with my life." And so that's kind of my superhero origin story. I did everything I could in order to get hired by that company, got hired by them 6/3/1996 straight out of school, and the rest is history.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:16) Oh, it's amazing. That's, I love that backstory.

(Darin Grant at 00:14:20) Yeah. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:21) So then you get there, right? Did you end up writing like CGI-type code?

(Darin Grant at 00:14:28) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I did. I did everything. I did, you know, a good lesson in life is to find a hole and fill it and make yourself of use, right? I think it's, my son watches Thomas the Tank Engine a lot, and that's really a key point of that, as being a really useful engine. And so I think it's actually true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:48) I love it.

(Darin Grant at 00:14:49) Yeah. It's true. So I did whatever I could, whatever was filling a hole, filling a gap, right? And so that, well, there was stuff that I really wanted to do. Like, one of the first pieces of kind of CG code I wrote—well, first, I started out in the games division that they had there. Digital Domain, even though they're known for all this other stuff, it's co-founded by James Cameron, director who's directed a couple of big movies here and there, like Titanic and Avatar. It was known for that side. They also had an interactive division, and I ended up initially getting hired in that division. They said, "Oh, well, you have a guaranteed job here. If you turn this job down, then you can, like, you know, roll the dice and see if you'll get a job within the R&D department. But this is a job at the company." I said, "Great. I'll take it."

(Darren Grant at 00:15:34) And I did that for six months, and I worked my butt off there. And then I got the opportunity to shut down that division. I got the opportunity to move into the division I wanted to be in in the first place. So I found a hole, filled it, allowed me to have an opportunity to move forward. And then, yeah, I just continued that model when I was working in R&D.

(Darren Grant at 00:15:53) I really wanted to work on the cool graphic stuff. And so one of the things I got to write was a temporal median filter for Titanic. Temporal meaning time, median meaning an average. And so what would happen is on Titanic, they shot this footage. It was in a big dump tank, right? So very dark. If you actually shoot underwater footage, there's stuff, silt in the water, so that if you go out at a distance, all of a sudden it becomes dark and murky and really noisy from a perspective. And so one of the things you can do is you can take and clean up noise in the image by taking over time—what does this pixel look like over time?—and averaging it together so you're not getting all this popping kind of noise. It's a simple thing to write, but it was cool, and it was the first thing that I ever got to write to help out an artist who was trying to process the shot. If you remember, lots of people remember every aspect of that film, but there's this one scene of this woman floating underwater with her dress flowing, everything like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:53) Yeah.

(Darren Grant at 00:16:53) It was dark and noisy as hell and couldn't be used the way it was. And so we used this in order to clean up the image so it could then be properly composited to the rest of the film.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:02) That's amazing.

(Darren Grant at 00:17:04) Yeah, it was for me at the time. And then, but at the same time, I also wrote our timecard system. Timecard system. And I could do it. And I just said, "Hey, look. Okay, I'll do this after hours. Let me do the cool stuff I want to do at my day job, but I'll happily do this stuff on the weekends, right? Whatever it takes." And that balance of doing the cool stuff with doing some of the stuff that just needed to be done in order to move the business forward is really what kind of drove me throughout my career.

(Darren Grant at 00:17:29) Good friends who are all about the cool stuff—actually, a person I've worked with and been a close friend to my entire career just gave a TED talk this week. Yeah, well, TED. Not TEDx, like TED. Yeah. For all the work that he's done on computer graphics over the years. Super excited, super proud of him for what he's accomplished, but that's not me. I was never a PhD in computer graphics. I'm a hole filler.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:54) But you're a really useful engine.

(Darren Grant at 00:17:57) I'm a really useful engine. Yes. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:00) And you do some really cool stuff too. You sit on a board or a panel for the award? What award?

(Darren Grant at 00:18:08) Yeah. So the Academy Awards that you see on TV every year. If you watch it in the past, they've said at an event prior, there's two events that happen outside of the Academy Awards. There's the Governors Ball, which is kind of the lifetime achievement awards, and then there's the Scientific and Technical Academy Awards. Basically, you know, the Academy is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And from the early days of the Academy, they appreciated that the art and technology needed to co-develop together. There was no art without technology. Technology that wasn't driven by art wasn't really what the Academy was about. So there's always this idea of merger. And while there's best picture and there's best actor and things like that, there's no award for technology outside of these Scientific and Technical Achievement Awards.

(Darren Grant at 00:18:59) And so I've been fortunate enough to participate in doing the investigations. The other nice thing about the Scitech Awards is that people apply for them. It's not like there's a limit. There's not one best technology per year where I get up on stage and everybody else is a loser.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:16) Yeah.

(Darren Grant at 00:19:16) But the opposite. We investigate. People apply. We investigate their applications. It's a pretty in-depth thing. I think I spend over a hundred hours a year over the course of a three-year investigation period focused on interviewing people, writing reports, documenting, "This is actually the real innovation that's happened here. Here's the impact of the industry, and here's how this has changed motion picture making from here on out." So we do those reports, and then we get to make recommendations, say, "Yes, we believe this should get the kind of award or not." And I've been fortunate enough to do that for the last fourteen years. And I do co-chair the subsection of it that really focuses on anything software related.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:00) That's pretty neat. What was just one from, like, the past year?

(Darren Grant at 00:20:03) There's one that everybody—you know, this is a broad podcast—there's one that everybody will find approachable and relatable to. So back in the day, there are these two brothers, Thomas Knoll and John Knoll. Maybe some people in your audience already know who I'm talking about. They invented this product called Photoshop, and they invented this actually for our industry. John Knoll was working at Industrial Light & Magic at the time. His brother Thomas was a PhD student writing some image editing software because he loved cameras and loved manipulating footage, camera footage. And so the two of them got together—John with his artistic side but also very creative technically, and his brother. John convinced his brother, "Drop out of your PhD program, come here and make this software with me that I'll use at ILM, and then we'll sell outside of that." And, you know, Photoshop never would have been what it is today had it not been for John working in the visual effects industry, had it not been for him convincing his brother, "Drop out of your PhD program, come here and make this product." And I think partially all of that happening within Silicon Valley back in the early days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:18) That's super cool. I did not know that.

(Darren Grant at 00:21:20) Yeah, right. And a lot of people didn't know that. But I mean, what it was was John was using—John wanted an interactive way in order to manipulate imagery, right? And so I think some of the first uses of Photoshop that you've ever seen anywhere were actually on The Abyss. So if you remember, okay, another—yeah—James Cameron movie, right? There's this pseudopod, this water-based pseudopod. And there are these scenes where what was super cool about that pseudopod was you could see all the reflections of the surrounding environment in the pseudopod. And so what he did was he took a bunch of photos and stitched them together in Photoshop to make basically a reflection dome to be reflected in that pseudopod of the stage, right? So that was one of the first uses of Photoshop within anywhere, certainly. But it was developed specifically for the motion picture industry, and then the rest is history, and it kind of got much bigger than us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:19) I just looked him up. He's 56, John Knoll.

(Darren Grant at 00:22:23) Yeah. And he was very young at the time. I mean, his older brother was in a PhD program, so...

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:29) And now he does visual effects supervisor for, like, for you?

(Darren Grant at 00:22:33) John Knoll is, like, chief creative officer for Lucasfilm. So anything, any—he's basically the grand poobah of all visual effects supervisors there. He's, yeah, he's super accomplished, super dedicated to the art and the craft. He's on the board of governors of the Academy. He's, you know, pretty impressive guy, and really exhibits this passion that I think is really drives people to success in any industry. John, you know, he could do anything on the weekends. He goes back and he's built, like, scale models of some of those models from the original Star Wars and films them and does everything with them again in his home just because that's his passion and his hobby. His work, his passion, it's all combined. And so, you know, if he wasn't doing it for money, he'd be doing it for fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:20) Oh, I love it. I'm taking notes. So a lot of the people in the software world or CTOs in technology world, they have different organization structures, right? Some have tribes, some have just teams, some people get fancy with it, some people don't. But what I'm curious is, what's the structure for your company? Because you guys animate these movies, and that's really interesting to me.

(Darren Grant at 00:23:47) Yeah. So we flex a lot in terms of our head tone. We have typically this kind of separation, which always causes some strife between production and technology. And sometimes you have people in the middle called production technology who are really trying to bridge that gap. And production is really the idea of here are people that are working specifically on a particular work product. So, for instance, I mentioned Peter Rabbit. I think they just wrapped shooting in London on Peter Rabbit 2. Peter Rabbit 2 will be coming to the theater next year. And so there's a bunch of people that are dedicated to just delivering that product. It's almost like a product team. And then technology provides a kind of central core service in support of all that stuff. I mean, ultimately, we're not a technology company, even though we produce great technical IP. We're a creative company. And our creative IP, ultimately, especially as we co-produce and co-finance films, our creative IP should be worth more than technology that we're developing. And we're there in service to them, right? Animal Logic, funny enough, has released products out in the market in the past, specifically garnered towards our small market of entertainment. But really, that's not our focus right now. Our focus is developing tool sets and workflows that make the production of our actual content, these films, as efficient as possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:14) Right. Because the moment you get into monetizing internal tools or concepts of divestitures or whatever it may be, then your management layer, your focus, is completely void of just being solely focused on supporting the creative.

(Darren Grant at 00:25:27) That's exactly right. And I've been on both sides of the fence. I've worked for a number of different software companies that provide services to this industry. I was a part of doing that monetization. There's this product called Nuke, which most of your clients probably never heard, or most of your viewers have probably never heard of. But it really is a tool for compositing. So people may have heard of After Effects or things like that, where you're taking multiple images and putting them together into a final image. Nuke is what is the industry standard for doing that work at the high end of the film and commercial market and animation market. And that was developed at Digital Domain, and I was a part—I was the software manager of that product when we took it from an internal product and then pushed it out to the market, right? And it did change things around a lot. On one level, it was like, "Oh, look. We can finally have documentation because we have to provide that for external people." Internal people, you pick up the phone and you call up Bill, who's the main developer of it, and he'll just tell you rather than writing it down, right? So there are lots of advantages to that, but lots of disadvantages in terms of bifurcated focus. Our internal clients are asking for this. That really doesn't matter to us, but we're taking our internal resources in order to do that. Lots of challenges there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:45) So I've got an interesting question for you. I was asked the other day, what are my thoughts on, like, the subject of diversity and inclusion? Because, apparently, this is getting popular. And I've kind of seen the headlines. I've seen the headlines, but I haven't ever, like, dove into the subject. I had a familiarity with the concept of diversity of thought because you really need that on teams, period. But what are your ideas? Or what are your thoughts? What do you know about diversity and inclusion?

(Darren Grant at 00:27:16) I know that having a bunch of people that all think and act the same way is not the way to develop something that is useful for everybody, right? And we do focus on diversity and inclusion quite a lot at Animal Logic. You know, we actually talk about the executive team. We have a very small executive team of four people. One is kind of standard Anglo-Saxon. One is—our CEO is Armenian. I'm half Japanese, and our COO is a woman. And I think, I mean, on one level, just from a selfish perspective, on one level, focusing on diversity and inclusion is fantastic because it's an untapped market of resource, right? So if all we do is hire a bunch of middle-aged white engineers, then we're leaving out a huge part of the market, or young white engineers, right? Because even there's the diversity inclusion of the generation that's, like, 40-plus, 50-plus, right? They're still incredibly valuable. And if some markets are ignoring them, I'm happy to get those people because they have a wealth of experience and knowledge. And the same is true of anybody in the diversity or inclusion area. They have a wealth of experience and knowledge that is different and an asset outside of anything that's kind of your standard, right? So, yeah, I mean, all that stuff is very important to me. It's very important to our organization. Since I've taken over as CTO—we didn't have a CTO before—but since I've taken over, I have a team of seven in my technology leadership team. Two of which are women. Zero of which were women before I started. So I do take it very seriously. My wife, super accomplished technologist as well. And so that certainly helped to inspire me to do this. But yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:23) That's what I thought too. I was like, "Yeah, you need a bunch of great people." And to me, we definitely need to make sure that we're not one-sided, right, for any period. And then we just need a lot of good people that think differently. And I mean, I'm a big fan of looking at people like a computer processor. I really care about how they think and how they make decisions.

(Darren Grant at 00:29:45) Yeah. And I mean, I think the main thing where there's such an emphasis right now is it takes a while. It takes generations to build that up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:54) Oh, yeah, right?

(Darren Grant at 00:29:55) And just from a workplace and culture environment, which is something we can change immediately. But then also, how do you have people that are inspiring and encouraging? I've had many mentors in my life, and I can look at them and actually more strong female mentors than I've had male mentors, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:15) Me too, by the way. Just random.

(Darren Grant at 00:30:18) And I can look at that, but it's all about, you know, you don't get to where you are unless somebody else is looking down from where they are and helping mentor and bring somebody up, right, and choosing you. And so, people want mentors that, honestly, a lot of times look and feel and think about things the same way. Like, "Okay, if you're like me and you're there, this is how—then I have faith that I can get there as well." Some people don't need that. Some people are glass ceiling breakers or innovators, change makers.

(Darren Grant at 00:30:49) Right? But a lot of people who are rank and file need inspiration from people that look and act and think like they do. Right? And so this becomes a multigenerational issue. And so the main thing is, how do you encourage, how do you put people in those positions of authority and power?

(Darren Grant at 00:31:06) And then, a second piece of that, you must encourage them to do much more mentorship and leadership development of the next generation in order to help make that next generation a larger percentage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:20) Yes. I look at it like a directional pad. Right? You have to have people above you, you have to have your peers, and you have to be teaching below you. Programmers would say to me, "Why am I supposed to mentor somebody? I've only been programming for two or three years." I was like, "You can do Hello World. There are people who can't even install the packages on their computer."

(Darren Grant at 00:31:40) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:40) I was like, "You know enough to start teaching entry-level programming if you have two or three years experience in programming." And the benefits that you get from doing that are tremendous.

(Darren Grant at 00:31:51) Yeah. You look at things from a different perspective versus your own. The long-term benefit—I mean, when I started out, I did some public presenting and things like that. And I've had people that have come up to me and said, "Hey, I saw that presentation you did in 1999," which I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Right? And, "I was there, and I remember you from that, and a lot of what you said inspired me to continue forward in my career." Now look at them. I mean, from that aspect, the people that actually directly worked for me—since I moved into management very early in my career and I filled holes rather than focusing on a specific area, it's doubtful that I'll ever get a Scientific and Technical Achievement Award of my own. But what I find great value in is having mentored and having given the opportunities to people that work for me in order to do that, in order to innovate. Right? So I count my awards and thank-yous that I get on stage more so than anything that I actually physically get.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:49) I got goosebumps just now. It's rewarding. I know what you're talking about too.

(Darren Grant at 00:32:54) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:55) You have this vision, this idea, this picture in your head of what it would be like to get one of those awards. Then you get drawn to that, you get near it, and then you realize you could actually contribute in a greater way. There's something better over here, and then you just fit into that place. I mean, look, you've been doing it for fourteen years now. Right?

(Darren Grant at 00:33:12) Yep. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:13) Yeah. And you've been a part. It's like, would you rather get one or be a part of giving a hundred?

(Darren Grant at 00:33:19) Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, yes, I would love to get one myself, but that's just not in the cards for me. And when you figure that out, you really figure out where your place is in life and what you can actually do to bring the most benefit to the world, or in this case, the industry that I'm in. That's—yeah. It's about understanding how to fill that hole.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:38) You might get one, man. I wouldn't say no. From the great shaman Justin Bieber, "Never say never."

(Darren Grant at 00:33:47) Okay. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:49) There you go.

(Darren Grant at 00:33:52) There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:52) That is why we are friends, Darren.

(Darren Grant at 00:33:54) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:56) So one of the reasons why—like, first of all, for everybody that is listening, I got to go out and see their offices. It's amazing. But one of the coolest things about you, Darren, is that we have 1,700 people on LeaderBits now.

(Darren Grant at 00:34:13) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:14) And you, as a leader with your upper management team on LeaderBits, one of the most active, interesting groups on the entire platform. And that says a lot to me about you as a leader because you really care. You're in there coaching them, growing them. It's just—I mean, kudos to you.

(Darren Grant at 00:34:37) Well, thank you. Thank you. I mean, that's what the platform is—actually, the thing that I found is that it feels like that's what the platform is meant to encourage. Right? It makes it very easy for me to go in and see what their progress is. Things that we don't even talk about in our one-on-ones, just activities that they're doing. And see that and be able to get—you know, part of this is just encouragement. Right? Leadership and management skills, they're all obvious. They're all obvious, and what you really need is just a consistent reminder of these things. And just re-putting that bit of leadership knowledge back in your head on a regular basis is what reminds you and helps you continue to drive forward to be a better leader. Right? Making it almost habit. Right? You have that boomerang function where you can say, "Hey, make me do this. That was really good. Make me do this again in another two weeks." Forming habits—you don't have to be focused like, "I'm gonna sit here for eight hours and make sure that I focus on this habit, and I will have it for the rest of my life." It's not how it works. Remind yourself to brush your teeth every night, and lo and behold, after time, you just do it as a matter of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:45) And I'm really grateful for you getting on a call and talking with SurePrep, and that was just unbelievably fantastic. I told my investors that, and they were like, "Well, then you'll really love business because this is what it is. Clients aren't mysterious people. They're people you have relationships with. They'll act as sounding boards for you. They'll give you raw, direct feedback and advice." And so I was super grateful for that.

(Darren Grant at 00:36:11) Well, and that's an interesting thing. Right? That's the approach that I take. So we are—again, we build a lot of amazing technology here, but we're not necessarily a technology company. So my goal is to, with the resources that we have, make sure that we're focusing them on the things where we really wanna move the needle and change the industry as a whole or certainly change Animal Logic, if not the industry as a whole. Right? And everywhere else, you know, there's a lot of other great technology companies that are focused on making products to do things—like, we're using Zoom. We've talked about Zoom and Eric a lot. They're going public pretty soon here. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:50) I saw a couple things about that.

(Darren Grant at 00:36:52) Yeah. $9 billion evaluation put on them. Right? We're not making a video conferencing—like, we depend and rely heavily—I'm remote. I work in LA. Most of my team is in Sydney and Vancouver. I depend on video conferencing inherently as a part of business. Right? That doesn't mean that I wanna build a video conferencing system or that's the right thing for us to build just because we're dependent on it. We can find—and basically my strategy is focus and build and innovate on key areas, and everywhere else, buy your way into matching the state of the art. Right? And when you're buying your way into something that you're incredibly focused on and is a key part of your technology modernization, that's not a vendor. And actually, we've talked internally—when visual effects companies started being called vendors instead of partners, it's kind of the beginning of the end in terms of commoditization. I don't treat key vendors as vendors. I treat them as partners. They're partners. They're people that I know. You know, I know about your background. There's people that I know. There's people that I—because I'm inherently reliant on your business succeeding for my business to succeed. Right? Because I do believe that LeaderBits is providing value to our leadership team that I think pays off in spades. So I'm incredibly—it's incredibly important for me for you guys to be successful because that actually just benefits me. I'm ultimately pretty selfish. So, but finding ways to treat your vendors as partners rather than as vendors in key areas is just as important to building out your technology portfolio as doing the technology yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:41) And I like how you say it too because one of my favorite things to say is we need more good selfish people. Because, in our language, in our vocabulary, selfish has gotten a bad rap because we somehow use that word so much for negative. But when you have a good person who's selfish, they desire to do as many things as possible to help others because that's what makes them feel good. Right?

(Darren Grant at 00:39:03) Right. Right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:05) Yeah. I like that. The vendors versus partners.

(Darren Grant at 00:39:10) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:11) You can get a lot of trouble trying to build every single thing yourself. So I like how you brought in that concept of buy your way in wherever you're not extraordinarily focused.

(Darren Grant at 00:39:19) We are not a web technology company. We are not—we do have our own time-crunch system. We're not innovating on that right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:26) Is it yours?

(Darren Grant at 00:39:27) No. No. No. It's somebody who's been here for twenty—twenty-three, maybe twenty-four of our twenty-eight-year history—built it very early on. And so it's like, okay, we can leave this until we wanna look at this. But if we're not doing additional development here, if we were, we would really reexamine this and say, "Is this the right thing for us to be spending our time on?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:48) Yeah. No. I like it. I like it. And then I've told the story—one last little thing. So I told that story of when you shared with me about the behavior change of writing the shorter email about a hundred times now because—well, I get emails and thank-you notes and stuff from our users, and I get some video testimonials, when people get promoted because they do what's in it and they're just on an individual account. But when, meeting you in person first time and hearing that you've actually seen changes on your team, that was the most energizing thing in the world.

(Darren Grant at 00:40:26) Great. Great. Yeah. I mean, it's super cool to be able to have this easy interface for being able to focus on—when you're in your one-on-one, as much as you wanna focus on developing that person as an individual, ultimately, the long run, your list of stuff that you have to talk about that's work-related comes up and takes over. Right? So this provides a separate asynchronous way to be able to still focus on those things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:56) Well, that's what I'm really interested on the human side of things. Right? Because I talk to a lot of CTOs. Right? And some of them will say, "Oh, our leadership, we don't need to do that. We do one-on-ones." And I was like, "Well, I don't know how to—I'm still working on articulating it. Right? The way to say it. I'm still gathering data as my machine learning algorithm brain thing." But, yeah. It's just like, it's different. It's like one-on-ones, you can check in, see how people are doing, but it's not the same as intentionally practicing a leadership exercise.

(Darren Grant at 00:41:35) Yeah. Exactly right. Exactly right. And you can check in and you can try and fit some of those ideas and concepts into that. But, ultimately, everybody has—I have seven direct reports, which is a nice number compared to 20 or 50 that some poor people have. Right? If you add that up, you are just doing the bare minimum in terms of status check and keep everything, keep the wheels on the track going forward and not taking this—like, again, it's selfish. Again, it's the selfish time to focus on developing yourself as an individual and having your mentor or your HR business partner, whomever, participating in that with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:16) So if you could go back to the beginning of your career, right, when you're writing that median algorithm. Right?

(Darren Grant at 00:42:24) Median temporal median filter. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:27) The temporal median filter. You go back—

(Darren Grant at 00:42:30) It sounds really impressive. It's actually just a few lines of code.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:33) No. It's super impressive. You iterate pixels over time and space and average them out. I think that's super geeky and neat. But if you go back to that version of Darren and you could give him one piece of advice to last him his entire career, what would it be?

(Darren Grant at 00:42:56) God, it's really hard to narrow it down to one. I think, you know, if I look at it, it's kind of—everybody has the same thing on your deathbed. Do you ever look up at your loved ones and say, "I wish I worked more"? Right? And that never happens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:18) Until I die.

(Darren Grant at 00:43:20) No. Just kidding. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe Elon Musk feels that way. There's this concept of workism within American culture, Chinese culture as well, the 996. Right? But, for me, I did work constantly and focus on the job, and that helped me accelerate and grow my career. But then, I've also seen other people who are peers with me, who didn't do that in their twenties. Right? Like, I know people that are CTOs that were in rock bands touring the country, or making music videos, or traveling. Right? Experiencing life. And the thing to remember that I would tell my old self then, is that wealth of experience doesn't have to be focused on your particular job. Right? Wealth of experience can come from all your experiences. You're the sum of all your experiences in life. And so, even learning how to windsurf or something like that, can teach you a lot about self-perseverance, can make you relatable to people rather than, "Well, this person only works twenty-four seven." Right? And I don't want to be that person. Right? "Oh, but I enjoy windsurfing." "Okay. I can relate to this person on a human level." I probably should have done more of that early on. Yeah. Definitely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:54) You run out to San Clemente right now.

(Darren Grant at 00:44:57) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's hard to learn to windsurf when you're in your mid-forties. Yeah. I'll tell you that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:02) I believe you could do it. I believe you could windsurf while winning your scientific award.

(Darren Grant at 00:45:08) Okay. Alright. Alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:10) No. I like that though because I've found that—alright. So, last week, I was in Colorado speaking, and I saw the mountains, and I hadn't been to Colorado before. And I was like, "This is beautiful." And so I took a couple days off, extended my weekend.

(Darren Grant at 00:45:28) Which part of Colorado?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:29) Boulder.

(Darren Grant at 00:45:31) Boulder? Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:31) I was bouncing between Boulder and Denver, so I kept seeing the mountain line. And so I said, "Alright. I'm gonna take Friday and Monday off. I'm gonna get an Airbnb and then just adjust my return flight because I haven't had a day off in, like, sixteen months or something like that."

(Darren Grant at 00:45:45) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:46) And so I did, and I went on mountain climbs in the morning, like every morning. And I learned so much from a mountain climb. Yeah, it was like a way for my brain to decompress in a different avenue for it to tie things together. And I ended up writing some interesting content and having some interesting observations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:08) And I was like, as much as I love what I do, and I don't feel like it's work in a weird way, the diversity of experience is super important.

(Darren Grant at 00:46:21) Well, and that's so—I guess, yeah, going back to our earlier conversation, as much as that's important to have that external diversity influencing you and your decisions, having what you're including yourself is equally as important. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:36) I think you just made a LeaderBit, man.

(Darren Grant at 00:46:39) Okay, here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:41) I love it.

(Darren Grant at 00:46:43) Do as I say, not as I do on that one, for sure. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:47) Well, it's the first step to working on anything is to start the conversation. Like, I started saying I get up at 5:30 in the morning for runs, like the first time I ever tried.

(Darren Grant at 00:47:01) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:01) And it took about three months before it became a thing that I do. And that was about a year ago. But yeah, I kept saying it over and over. And then what happened was I felt this need to be accountable to myself. I'm like, I can't go around and say that publicly if I'm not actually doing it. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:20) And so then I became that person. So it's always about finding little tricks, little edges, little ways to get an up, and then consistency over intensity.

(Darren Grant at 00:47:30) Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Making habits, making positive habits is a good lesson for life, not just in work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:39) Yeah. Darren, this is fantastic, man. We made a podcast.

(Darren Grant at 00:47:43) Cool, all right. Yeah, all right. That's awesome.

(Darren Grant at 00:47:45) There is one thing—like, I was going through some of the list of example questions from Chloe, and one thing that I thought would be might be valuable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:52) Mhmm.

(Darren Grant at 00:47:52) If you have a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:54) Please.

(Darren Grant at 00:47:54) Yeah, yeah. So it was about advice on technology leadership. And one that I was thinking about—kind of there are two things that are two quotes, one of which I don't know the attribution, one of which is attributed to Albert Einstein.

(Darren Grant at 00:48:09) So, you know, there's somebody to learn from. Albert Einstein once said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." Right? And then the thing that I've been focused on quite a lot recently is this idea: If you're not the problem, then there is no solution. Which sounds very kind of ridiculous and harsh.

(Darren Grant at 00:48:34) But if you think about it, really, and you take a step back, that quote is really saying, look, the only way that we can solve problems or affect solutions to problems is things that we can change ourselves. Right? And so oftentimes, whether—so saying we're the problem isn't necessarily saying I'm the problem child, although a lot of time I am, ask my team. It's much more about, if I'm focused on how to solve this, the only thing that I can really change or adjust or affect are things that I can do. Right?

(Darren Grant at 00:49:11) So whether it's myself, or whether it's saying changing my approach, changing the context that I'm giving the team or anything like that—it's really, if you're not the problem, then there is no solution. And so changing that mindset to say, I've got to change things. It's not like this person's not doing what I want, got to fix them. Like, no, no, you've got to fix yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:31) Yeah. And then it gives you control. Like, the moment—as long as the problem is not you, then it's outside of your control.

(Darren Grant at 00:49:39) Right. Right, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:40) And if you could take ownership of it, now you can start to strategize about how you have control and you can adjust the variables in your environment in order to achieve a different outcome.

(Darren Grant at 00:49:52) And if you look at it and there's nothing that you can do in order to affect the solution, then that's not a problem that you can solve. And you should, you know—but if there is something, do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:04) And that's the hard part.

(Darren Grant at 00:50:06) Both of those things are the hard part.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:07) The hard part is first realizing, like, coming to the conclusion that you can't change it.

(Darren Grant at 00:50:13) And—

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:14) And the second part is in redirecting your attention to figure out what you can then do.

(Darren Grant at 00:50:19) Right, exactly, right. It's the serenity prayer. Twelve times, actually, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:25) It's like, I love it because the first time I heard the sentence, I was like, this is just good information. Like—

(Darren Grant at 00:50:32) Exactly. This is—

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:33) This is just good knowledge to pass around.

(Darren Grant at 00:50:35) Yeah, exactly right. But it is good knowledge, and so I thought that was something—I haven't watched every podcast, but I wasn't sure if that was covered. But it was a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:44) No. Were there anything else in the notes from Chloe that you wanted to share, experience? Anything you think would be good LeaderBits or advice for the audience or anyone?

(Darren Grant at 00:50:57) I guess, no. That one—actually, I was just looking at one and, like, what are some of the struggles you faced as a CTO and the lessons you learned from them? And I realized if I just applied what I just said, I wouldn't have had the problem. I'm in my bed.

(Darren Grant at 00:51:11) I was like, why didn't I do this podcast earlier? Ten years ago. Well, yeah. Okay, one thing—and this kind of ties into this—is a good one because it ties into what we do as a business as well.

(Darren Grant at 00:51:24) It's another thing that I believe is undervalued in terms of technology leadership. One thing that's incredibly undervalued is storytelling. And maybe I'm influenced, impacted by that because our very business is about storytelling. Right? Whether it started out with storytelling just in making amazing visuals, when we were working on visual effects movies to help a creator tell their story, are now moving into actually developing the content for animated and hybrid films ourselves in order to tell better stories overall. And the idea of storytelling actually bleeds through to everything.

(Darren Grant at 00:51:57) I'll start out with just pure communication. I went to an extremely technical, a small engineering school in Southern California called Harvey Mudd. There were 680 undergraduates when I was there. And it's part of the Claremont Colleges. There's five different colleges there.

(Darren Grant at 00:52:13) If you're a fan of Revenge of the Nerds, it felt much like the different fraternities, like we are the Lambda Lambda Lambdas. There is the Alpha Betas, which is the Claremont McKenna College right next door, which is all business economics majors rather than engineering. And I had an economics professor my freshman year, scared the crap out of me with this scared straight speech about saying, look, you're all smart. You're all smarter than those people at that college next door, but you're all going to be working for them while they're out golfing in the middle of the week and earning twice as much as you, because none of you know how to talk. None of you know how to present.

(Darren Grant at 00:52:55) None of you know how to communicate. And communication is the most important thing in leadership and growth. And I really do think it is. And I've heard some other people on your podcast talk about that. But it's not just about communication.

(Darren Grant at 00:53:08) It's about really taking a step back and understanding how to tell the story of what you're doing, right, and why you're doing it and how that impacts the people, why the people that are listening should care. And I do feel like oftentimes, when people are—it's like, oh, well, we handle this within one-on-one and stuff like that. That's really only half of the communication balance, right? The other piece, a large piece of communication, is broad public communications, right?

(Darren Grant at 00:53:36) Not just telling an individual, not just telling the team, but telling everybody in the company, telling the world, this is what matters to us. This is why we're doing this. This is how it impacts or benefits you. Get on board with us. Try and get everybody to be on that same page. And, you know, maybe it's influenced by the fact that I work with storytellers all the time. Like, we actually have artists that are making stories and all that stuff every day here. But it's—I can't state how undervalued that can be in an organization of clearly communicating a message. And whatever you need to do in order to make sure that people can hear that message, and they understand that message, and then embrace that message. That's what storytelling is really about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:19) I love that. That's, like, by far my most favorite LeaderBit now, because we don't—it's like, how do I not have one on storytelling? Now I do.

(Darren Grant at 00:54:27) Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, it's really interesting. There's a guy that used to work in layout, which is basically early—when you're making animated film, like, it's almost like blocking, if you're not even blocking. Like, I'm sitting here and then Shrek comes up and says, "Donkey, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." It's very, very basic. It's just to get the framework of the story. And he was working there, and amazing guy, really smart. Like, you know, he's a Whitney Biennial artist, right? Done all these great things, but like, was kind of stuck in this small hole, in this small position there.

(Darren Grant at 00:55:03) He had big ideas and the ability to act on that. Right now, I can look up his title. He is the founder of the Sequoia Design Lab. So Sequoia—

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:14) Like Sequoia?

(Darren Grant at 00:55:15) Oh, wow. Sequoia Capital. Works for them, built a design lab where really, one of his one of the primary goals is when they bring somebody into Sequoia Capital, he's helping them tell their story, not just to pitch to investors, but to pitch to the world, right? And he comes from our industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:34) That's brilliant. What's his name?

(Darren Grant at 00:55:37) His name is James Buckhouse.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:39) Brilliant on Sequoia's part for having resources for their founders.

(Darren Grant at 00:55:44) Yeah. He's super cool. Oh my god, look—in my LinkedIn, my friend—my friend's on stage. There's a picture of him on stage with a TED Talk—

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:52) Oh, yeah?

(Darren Grant at 00:55:52) Right now. Yeah, super cool. Check it out. That's pretty cool, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:58) Woah. That's like the—that's like the TED event. That's like the main TED event.

(Darren Grant at 00:56:02) TED. And that's Doug Roble, who's, you know, just not only is an innovator, but he's a brilliant dude and one of the nicest, most human people that you'll ever meet. And what's crazy here, I can tell what's going on just because I know his work. See how he's got like a helmet on there?

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:19) Yeah.

(Darren Grant at 00:56:20) It's a head-mounted camera, and he's speaking in the microphone, and then he's in a mocap suit. This is a completely digital version of him being done in real time. You can see it's the exact same pose, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:30) Woah.

(Darren Grant at 00:56:32) So that is digital Doug when he's presenting as actual Doug, all done in real time. So you can think about what kind of impact that could have on virtual reality of the future, on celebrity. Right? Like, hey, I can act and I'm still in my—you know, I'm still in my pajamas. I can, you know—this stuff has come up with Instagram influencers like Shudu and Lil Miquela and all this kind of stuff.

(Darren Grant at 00:56:58) But here, you can do this all in real time so that they could do that deeper connection between that CG version of somebody and the audience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:07) Yeah. So, like, around Christmas time, when things were slow in business world, I was thinking about—I was watching the rendering, how they're doing that now. And I started thinking about the authenticity issues. And so I started researching, you know, who's the service? What's the method of authentication?

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:27) Like, how could I verify that it's me digitally when things become a thing? And there's actually, like, grants out for it. Like, the government has some grants out for developing technologies, and they're trying.

(Darren Grant at 00:57:41) Grants? I have a good friend that works at Facebook Research who goes and speaks on the specific topic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:46) Really?

(Darren Grant at 00:57:47) Yeah, yeah. It's a big deal. Yeah, because what this is showing is you can start to make things more cost affordable. Like, you can look at it today and go, well, in order to reproduce something that is convincing to not just the casual user flipping through a Facebook video feed or something like that, but it's convincing on a, you know, full HD scale, still expensive. Still very expensive. And so, but that cost—come, like, it's, you know, an order of magnitude less than it was, like, ten years ago. And I could get to the main—and other places we've been approached by various people in the defense industry asking about how much, like, year to year, how much would it cost you to do this? So that they're monitoring, like, wait, when the cost becomes really actually reasonable and this starts to become more and more—this could become more and more popular—that's when we have to trigger this and watch out and have this ability to actually verify our broadcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:41) Yeah. That's an interesting technology. I was thinking about what technologies would be, like, super, super in high demand, and figuring out how to authenticate those streams as you—I mean, it's a real tough challenge if you think about it.

(Darren Grant at 00:58:55) Yeah. It's super tough. And especially, like—so there's Doug in real time, and happens to have an advantage of it because he's Doug reproducing Doug. Yeah. But if he was Doug reproducing somebody else in real time, like, how do you—yeah, how do you tell?

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:07) How do you tell? Where's the authentication? And, like, how does—how does the viewer tell? Like, when I'm watching a video like, you know, Amazon's got the X-Ray.

(Darren Grant at 00:59:15) Version of me. This is actually digital.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:18) Am I talking to your assistant right now?

(Darren Grant at 00:59:20) I'm sitting in a—I'm sitting in VR. I got a headjack in just like in Matrix. It's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:24) Oh, but isn't it—isn't it weird how, like, we are headed in that direction?

(Darren Grant at 00:59:30) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:30) On a macro? Like—

(Darren Grant at 00:59:32) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:33) It's pretty interesting.

(Darren Grant at 00:59:34) Well, that—yeah. That Google example of Lingo or Duolingo, whatever—the when you saw that, like, this Google Assistant was basically scheduling a haircut—

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:46) Yeah, yeah.

(Darren Grant at 00:59:48) Yeah. Voice is a lot easier to do. Audio is a lot easier to do than video. That's far less dimensions to deal with, far less data to deal with. And that's the first step.

(Darren Grant at 00:59:59) But video comes shortly after. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:01) Darren, this is fantastic, man. I'm so pumped, and thank you so much. You brought me a ton of value personally with the LeaderBits and—

(Darren Grant at 01:00:09) Yeah, no. This is—I mean, LeaderBits has been great. I—the only thing I'm annoyed at is I got a challenge yesterday when I was—I was at LEGOLAND with my son. And so I was like, oh, I got a new LeaderBits challenge, but I can't watch it. So I'll do it today. No.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:21) No worries. Thank you so much, Darren. You have a fantastic day.

(Darren Grant at 01:00:24) All right. You too.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:25) Bye-bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then CC me, [email protected]. If you CC me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout-out on the podcast, whichever you prefer.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:54) We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.