Minter Dialogue with Leslie Grandy

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

To connect with Leslie Grandy:

• Check out Leslie’s IG account here
• Find/buy Leslie Grandy’s book, “Creative Velocity,” here
• Find/follow Leslie Grandy on LinkedIn

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on Megaphone or in iTunes.
Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial: Leslie Grandy, I loved reading your book and a lot about creativity, but your background is so stimulating and, and somehow in my mind, as I was listening or, you know, thinking about you, there’s sort of parallel universes. My wife worked at Apple. I’ve done a film, and, and I worked in business. And then I got into thought leadership and, and creativity. So, there’s so many things in common. But let’s start with you in your own words, Leslie. Who are you?

Leslie Grandy: Well, I, I, I feel like I have a little bit of Forrest Gump in me because I’ve been very fortunate to build a career that if you’d have told me it would look like this, I wouldn’t have believed you. I think that I’ve been able to sort of capitalize on opportunities that maybe I wouldn’t have expected to appear. But I also have this incredible strategy where I just feel an avoidance of failure ensures my success. And so, in doing that, I’ll just continue to push and push and push till I make things happen that really help me materialize my best self. Just as an example, I started in the film industry because I was a film major undergraduate. And I was a film major undergraduate because I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to be and therefore decide where I wanted to go to college. And so, when I was in high school, I did. My schedule didn’t allow me to attend an English class. And so, they gave me an independent project to make a film. And that film won a Young Filmmakers Award. And all of a sudden I thought, oh, this is the universe telling me I have some talent, so I should go pursue that. And so, I did. I went to Northwestern University and got a film degree. And as soon as I left, I moved to Hollywood. And like everybody else who doesn’t know anybody in Hollywood, I just hit the pavement and started meeting people and taking odd jobs and finding my way forward and happened to find someone who knew someone who got me a job with Gale Ann Hurd, who produced the Terminator and Aliens and the Abyss. And the next thing you know, I’m working with James Cameron on the Abyss. And then Brian De Palma crosses her path, and I start working for Brian De Palma. And so, I didn’t really have, you know, a straight line. I just followed the next opportunity to the next place. And within that garnered a lot of riches. Just found a lot of goodness in it. Got into the Directors Guild through the process. Again, not something I set as a goal, but something that was serendipitous and possible by the path that I had taken. So, I capitalized on that and got work as a member of the Directors Guild as a second assistant director. But after years of being on the film set, I just didn’t find it the career I wanted to spend the next 25 years on. And that the film set really taught me a lot of things, but it wasn’t really a lifestyle I wanted to pursue that I wanted to keep. And so, I went back to school and decided to get an MBA at the University of Washington. But because go Huskies. Yeah, go Huskies. And because I couldn’t afford the tuition as an out of state student, I had to get a job. And the job I got was at the state film office during the era of Sleepless in Seattle and Northern Exposure and Assassins. And again, just the right place at the right time to, you know, to meet people or to leverage my experience in, in a particular way. And that allowed me to go to the state school for free for two courses. So, I managed not only to get a job to help me pay for it, it actually paid for me going to school, but as a state employee going to a state institution. So, it’s really a blessing. And while I was there, the first job I got was actually to do a corporate video for a company that was going public. And so, everything kind of just built on in, like I said, a sort of serendipitous way of opportunity, you know, meeting, timing. And from that point on, the career really took that same path in technology. And I found myself interviewing with Steve Jobs when I, when I was considered for a job at Apple. And again I thought, how am I here? How am I sitting down at Steve Jobs office asking a question? Well, it’s this combination of things that allowed me to put myself into that situation without actually saying, this is who I want to meet and this is what I want to do. And I think there are so many people who are destined to accomplish things because they’re laser focused on it. That is just not me. I am the person who sees what’s in front of me and tries to leverage that into the next thing forward. And then in that it allows me to take paths I hadn’t considered before. And so, I think that’s really how I would sort of describe my journey. Journey is just opportunity, meeting, timing, and capitalizing on what it provides me in that moment to increase my opportunities next time, right? To bring me new problems to solve or new people to meet in the next place that I might move. And so, I think change has been a part of my Life. But I think I’m also really an opportunistic thinker. I think where I see a possibility, I’m not afraid to go there and find out there isn’t one. But sometimes there is in an unexpected way.

Minter Dial: A lovely intro. And I mean, I. One of my mind says, well, opportunistic, there’s a word that could sound very horrible. Serendipitous is kind of a more beautiful word. But at the end of the day, I would argue openness to adventure, openness to whatever comes next, 100%.

Leslie Grandy: I think you. I think you’re absolutely right when I say opportunistic. I think, one, you have to create opportunities. They don’t just show up. So, I understand the negative side of that word, but sometimes we make opportunities because of what we bring to the situation. Right. And that’s a little less serendipitous and a little bit more, you know, skill meets problem kind of opportunity as opposed.

Minter Dial: To saying contrived or something like that.

Leslie Grandy: Right.

Minter Dial: So, let me ask you about the meetings you’ve had with these TO Palmer, Steve Jobs, amazing personalities, seeing them up close, what did you come away with in their abilities, their success? What are the things that you could somehow take away from the. I mean, I’m sure you, as a second ad, you weren’t exactly, you know, top of mind for them every time. However, you got to see, anyway, in the acting and the directing world, some amazing people up close. What did you. What’s sort of.

Leslie Grandy: Well, it’s super. I think I learned more about myself even than about them through the process. I think it’s easy to be intimidated by people like that because they have a skill or a talent that you don’t naturally see in yourself, not to.

Minter Dial: Mention reputation and ego.

Leslie Grandy: Right. A lot of that. There’s all of that, but there’s also their ability to capitalize on that. Right. Whatever it is, is it, you know, might seem like a weakness to me personally is maybe in their strength. Right. They’re. They’re less personally offended by people or they’re less worried about what people think of them. Right. They do what they do because they hold it true in their heart. And I think that’s. That’s a great thing. But I also learned that the bigger the personality, the more I have to control how I react to it. Right. And for me, what I think it taught me was how to not be whipsawed around by those big personalities, but to operate effectively around them. And typically, those personalities tend to be less thoughtful about how they might Ask a question or request something. And so, it’s very easy to feel hurt or offended or angry. And I’ve seen people who. When I worked for Brian, and I wasn’t just an AD on the set, I worked with Brian on the. As he was developing his script and doing the budgeting for the film. And so, I worked pretty closely with him all along. And I realized I just couldn’t be offended by him. Although people who interacted with him would storm off saying how disrespectful he was to them, and they were right. But for me, what, what it was doing was giving me more than it was taking from me. It wasn’t taking my dignity, it didn’t take away any of my capabilities. And so, as long as what I could do was manage my emotional reaction to it, I got a lot of benefit from it. And that’s also part of the creating opportunity. You shut yourself off from that opportunity when you get offended by someone who is short tempered or condescending, which certainly Brian could be. At the same time, I got a lot of respect from him by not falling prey to those emotions. I. I can. If I can. I’ll tell you a quick story. I. He wrote a script. He. He loved to write a script and he loved to write his own stuff and do his own material. That was his thing. And so, he was very personally attached, obviously to the script, but because he was going to film it, the script had no scene direction in it. It literally was 100 pages of dialogue, literally nothing else in there. And he asked me to create a budget for the film. And I read it and I really didn’t like it. I just didn’t like it. But before we got to that point, I had to get it from him. And he was in Northern California and I was in his house in Hollywood and he wanted to send it to me. This was in the days where you had to have modems, talk to each other, shake hands and then send it. And he was in his. Exactly, exactly. And he was in the. On his computer there. And I was at his computer in his office and it wasn’t working. And he was getting more and more angry, like really hostily angry. And I said to him, you know, I know I can figure this out, but I can’t while you’re screaming at me. So, I’m going to hang up now and I will call you back when I’m done. And I think he was so perplexed that anyone would do that, right? That he never held it against me. In fact, I think the fact that I got it working got a little kind of props from him, you know, and that I was able to figure it out. And then he sent it to me, and it was horrible. And I just have to admit, I didn’t think anyone would ever make it who read it. So, I never bothered to do the budget. I just thought it would find its way to the trash bin. And month or Two goes by. He never talked to me about it after he asked me to do it. And then Two goes by. He picks up the phone in his car, he calls me, and he says, I’m on my way to meet the head of Universal. How much money should I ask for the script? And I hadn’t even done it yet, right? And I couldn’t say, well, I didn’t think anybody was going to do it, or I hadn’t done it, which several people probably would have, in my shoes, acknowledged. I said to him, I think you should ask for $12 million. And the way I came up with that number was really just, he could get that on video rights and foreign, because Brian was huge in Europe, in Asia, he could do really well on foreign distribution rights, and he could do really well on video because he had kind of a cult following. But it probably wasn’t going to do well in the theater because it was bad. And So, I said, $12 million, and a studio can write a check for the amount of money they know they’re going to get back from that distribution without even a heartbeat, right? Like, there’s like, oh, Brian De Palma, $12 million. Perfect. Our lady calls me back. He said, we have $12 million. We start next month. And. And so, the idea that I could still be a part of the process moving him forward, despite the behavioral challenges that working with him presented, I think made it really clear to me that my strength in that scenario was to hold emotional regulation as a key to engaging with that big personality. And then when I met Steve Jobs, and the same thing they told me in my interview with Steve, this is great. I went back for my interview. I met the VP of hr. They said. He said to me, you’re going to meet Steve, and it’s either going to be five minutes or 60 minutes. If it’s five minutes, get out, get your things, get out of that door, go down to the car and go to the airport, because it’s over, and you will know it’s over. So, don’t even try to pretend. Like, just go. But if it goes on, then, you know, he’ll keep you for the full 60 minutes. So, five minutes into my interview, the door opened. His kids came in with the nanny, and I was 100% sure this was it. So, I started gathering my things, and he told them to turn around and go back out and told me to sit down. And we kept talking. And the question he asked me was combative, like it was, what was it like to be the product manager of crappy products? And so, again, the, the idea that that could stir an emotion in me, I think is part of the exercise for him. Right. How do I react to the criticism? How do I handle the criticism? So, to stay open to that opportunity, I had to not react. And I think there’s a lot to be said around how big personalities can teach you emotional regulation in order to get the leverage or value out of that relationship.

Minter Dial: So, I mean, my head’s spinning with lots of these stories.

Leslie Grandy: Sorry.

Minter Dial: No, it’s great. And hopefully it’s doing the same for everyone who’s listening is there’s one thing which I find is missing in society and a lot of the way businesses are run today, which is having a backbone. At the same time, you are needing to emotionally regulate, bend over, if you will, in front of whatever’s hostile words that are coming. And then you also have this ability to bluster. 12, 12 million bucks, top of mind. Then that probably also comes from the fact that you have a good base of knowledge, otherwise, that it didn’t come out of nowhere. But then there’s another thing which I think is really critical and interesting, which is taking things personally. You mentioned how Brian De Palma was personally attached to this dialogue script. And if you listen to one ranting horrible boss, spewing out expletives and talking about you in the most degrading way, you can stand up to that. And then the end, he says, well, don’t take it personally. Well, I think you do need to take things personally. In fact, it’s by taking things personally, you end up with a true backbone.

Leslie Grandy: Yeah, I, I, I think there’s a way to take things personally when it really is personal. But when you see people like this, treat a lot of people like that, it makes it a lot easier for you to retain backbone. Right. Because it’s, it is evident, like, Brian didn’t just treat me that way. He, you know, he would treat anybody.

Minter Dial: You weren’t special.

Leslie Grandy: I weren’t special enough. I wasn’t special enough. Exactly. And I think that’s where, when you’re realistic about that, you’re recognizing it’s about Them and not about you. And maybe he wants to evoke a reaction for me or maybe he doesn’t even care. Right. But the point is I’m in control of that. And I think by being in control of how I react to it, being aware of how he treats others and not just me, it makes it a little bit easy to operate. And again, very much capitalize on this moment in time where I’m a 25-year-old working in Hollywood with no connections, working for somebody I studied in film school. I’m not going to run out the door because I’m faint apart. I’m going to run out the door because I need to move on for something better, some other opportunity and use this as a launchpad. But while I’m there, I’m going to make sure that I don’t dismiss the opportunity by being personally affected by someone’s performance around everyone, not just me. And so, it could be personal if it was just me and if he treated only women that way or just me that way, but he didn’t. He was antisocial, so he treated everybody equally. In some ways he was very equitable about that. And so, I think when you see that, right, you recognize there’s more to the story than it is about you. And I think that’s where getting emotional regulation to me keeps me open. If I recognize it’s not just about me when it’s something I can control, which is my reaction to it, you know, I could be fed up and walk out and storm out. I can, you know, cry. I could laugh in his face. I could do a bunch of things. I chose to just ignore it. And while it some people would tell me and did that I was giving him permission for bad behavior by doing that, I wasn’t going to be the one that was going to change him at that age, at that level of accomplishment that I had had. But there was benefit for me that I was going to make sure I got and I didn’t limit that by how I reacted, you know, and didn’t control.

Minter Dial: All right, so on the very first point, I would like to say that it shouldn’t. This is not a condoning of shit behavior.

Leslie Grandy: Right.

Minter Dial: But I also hear within what you’re talking about is a sufficient knowledge of self, some stoicism. But you also didn’t fall prey to the #metoo movement.

Leslie Grandy: Oh my gosh, if I did, I wouldn’t have had a career. I mean, honestly, that was the biggest moral conundrum for me during that era.

Minter Dial: I’m sure you’re young, attractive.

Leslie Grandy: And also, Hollywood was running rampant. I mean, it was that era of misbehavior. And so, you’re 100% right. I could stand up. And in some ways, I have to be honest, I look back on that and I see it with 20, 25 eyes and recognize I could have maybe made a difference for women who came behind me. But on the other hand, I also recognized I was still figuring stuff out. So, to make that a platform at that point in my career could have been a good thing, but it could have also been a. A challenging thing for me to deal with. And the way you got work in Hollywood, you didn’t want to seem difficult, you didn’t want to seem petulant, you didn’t want to seem contrary to how things were operating culturally at the time. And so, if the cultural norm was bad behavior, the people who could get stuff done in that context were the ones who were working. And I wanted to be one of those people.

Minter Dial: Yeah. And those are the. I don’t know if you’ve read the book by Angela Duckworth, Grit, it seems that sort of underwrites who you were. And one of the challenges that I have as an old man that I am now, is our inability to look at what happened in its context. I take, for example, the cancellation of Kate Smith, a singer in the 1930s who sang two songs out of 3,000 that in today’s world, are absolutely unforgivably, you know, wrong. However, we should learn to put it back in. In the perspective and the. And the context in which things were happening. And we don’t do that enough. And so, yeah, this idea of Grit seems like a good thing. To what extent would you say then, this whole experience? Because, I mean, I like the way you express the fact that you didn’t have it all sorted out. And I think that is typical of 98% of kids at that age. And. And that, you know, the occasional person who has an idea of, I want to be a firefighter, good for you, whatever. But then for the rest of us, it’s just about sorting this stuff out. Yet it does feel like your experience there was quite structuring for your life. How. How do you define or describe the experience in film that you had in the follow on of your life?

Leslie Grandy: I so love this question because I think it was so formative and so insightful that you noticed that and how I talked about it. I think a couple of things I look back on now and say, if I hadn’t have done those 13 years in the film industry, would I be this? Would I be as good at that? And one of those things is how did I get hired so frequently? People would ask me that all the time while I was doing it. And I don’t know that I knew the answer. I always worked when I left, I left the career that I knew what it was. I didn’t leave because I couldn’t get a job in Hollywood. I left because I knew exactly what it was and I didn’t want to keep doing it. But I wasn’t giving up. I was just proactively choosing to move in an intellectual direction that was more business focused than production focused. But what I learned in retrospect is the way I got work all the time was because I was just damn fine at figuring stuff out. You could give me any kind of problem I’d never seen before, which is usually what happens on a film set, and I would be the person everyone would know. We go come back with an answer, we go figure it out. And who doesn’t want people on, on their team that are that way, right? That, that just don’t see problems as walls, but as, oh, I got this, I’ll go figure it out. I’ve never figured out how to do this. I’ve never figured out how to do that before. But I believe in my capacity to do it. And I don’t think I knew that was a skill to be confident about. I just thought it was brute force. I have no choice, because if I don’t figure it out, they’ll fire me and someone else will get the job. So, I don’t think I knew it at the time that that was really my engine, that was really my superpower. What it has done now is it gives me great confidence in any situation that I haven’t experienced before, trusting in my instincts of how do I research the answer, how do I figure it out? What do I use to make this decision? And I do that at warp speed. Because on a film set, you got 300 people standing by waiting for the camera to roll. And if you can’t figure out how to shut up that leaf blower four blocks away, you know nobody’s going to be filming. So, you have to.

Minter Dial: Money is running, right?

Leslie Grandy: And so, you have to be able to figure it out, but you have to be able to figure it out quickly. You have to be able to know what the framework is for figuring out. What do you do? What, what are you? Are you an analyzer before you act? Are you able to act and analyze simultaneously. And for me, that became my stock and trade. And I, I would say without question, it’s why I get hired, why I got hired in film and why have gotten hired at the companies I’ve gotten hired for is because that comes through. You can throw me a problem and I’ll tell you how I would go about solving it. Even if I don’t know the answer. I can tell you my approach to it, what I would think about and how I would, how I, what I would consider and what I would value in my process. And I think that creative problem solving, that ability to tackle a problem that I hadn’t seen before, is my superpower. But I don’t think I knew it until I got into corporate America and looks back on what those years taught me.

Minter Dial: All right, so I need to mix in a couple of things here. So, first of all, I went to university in America and I studied women’s studies in the 1980s. And one of the things that I observed was that a lot of my male friends had a lot more bluster than my women friends. And bluster equal bravado. The ability to say, I can do it. I’ve never done it before, I can do this. And so, I tend to characterize it as a masculine trait because another way of saying it is a bullshit artist.

Leslie Grandy: Right?

Minter Dial: Never done it before, but I know how to do it. So, you found this skill. Is it something that you can teach? Is it.

Leslie Grandy: How do you totally.

Minter Dial: How do you craft that skill in young people who are missing in confidence, don’t know, haven’t done shit, you know, because they’re 20 years old and maybe don’t have the confidence to talk like you did.

Leslie Grandy: It’s the reason I wrote the book. I mean, jumping right to it. I think that people think it’s a talent or a trait. And I’ll tell you, it’s a skill that can be practiced, developed and nurtured. And I think it starts with what you said early on about me. As I’m pretty self-aware, I’m reflective of what I’m good at and what I’m not good at. And I’m constantly, constantly reassessing what I’m capable of in that situation. I think that’s the first thing. But I think the way you teach people is you start with basic. There are creative thinking frameworks, there are actual frameworks that people can use so that when they lack the confidence, they can lean into a methodology or a technology or a technique or a tool that can help them ideate invent problem solve. And I found over the years in corporate jobs, I’ve had people abdicating that to other people. I’m not the creative person. The designer’s the creative person, or I’m not as creative as that engineer is who can build stuff. I’m just the doer or the operational person or the operator of the business. And so, I’m not that good at it. And I just get so frustrated when I see that, because it’s a choice to abdicate that responsibility, to nurture your own creative capacity. And that’s what I’ve told people I’ve coached throughout my career. You can think big. If you’re being criticized for not being a big thinker, it’s because you’re not trying new methodologies to come across an idea that you might not have in your normal course of the day. Right? There are techniques and things you could do that could allow you to unveil things in your subconscious or to learn things in other domains that you could apply to your problem here. But you got to take the action. You got to have the motivation, right, to want to be creative. Not because you weren’t. You were born with the talent or you weren’t.

Minter Dial: The framework idea is really useful. I have a little image of I was on a few boards and I was typically regarded, despite my sort of look, as a creative. And, you know, I did marketing as that sort of. That was my big route to success, quote, unquote. And then I have, as a general principle, the idea of every committee should operate as a board of governors where everybody has the opportunity to speak. Yet one of the things that I’m thinking of is sometimes everybody has an opinion. I don’t like that blue.

Leslie Grandy: Really?

Minter Dial: What don’t you like about it? And so, everybody likes to sometimes roll into the creative thing because it’s exciting. Look at me. I got the marketing thing going on. I like this blue, and I don’t like that BL yet. It’s really far from a strategic or smart thinking. Anyway, that’s sort of one of the areas I wanted to go into. But at the same time, I wanted to because, I mean, obviously your book is really about creativity. One of the sentences that really struck out, I think it was in the epilogue. But you quoted Ray Dalio, and of course, Ray Dalio is an interesting chap because he’s in finance, right? And he talks about the soul. Where I don’t remember if he talks about it or you talk about it because the current president of the United States talked about the soul of America coming back and equating it with finance. And so, I think of Ray Dalio as a financial dude. But he talks about three Cs, right? Or at least you talk about his three Cs. And I would say par for the course, you focus on the creativity side. The competence side is a boring old skills. And you can, anyone can learn skills. The thing that I feel is far more interesting is actually character, right. Because that is. And I was talking with my friend Mark Carlton Smith, who was the head of the British army, and he says the most important thing in his life is and how he recruits is he recruits for character. I would have to argue, Leslie, that you are a character, not a character in a film or a book, because you talk surely a lot about that, but a character. How do you define character?

Leslie Grandy: To me, I feel that character actually powers creativity because it’s a sense of valuable values, meaning. And I don’t think creativity can exist without meaning and values. So, to me, I think of them as not being separated. I really do think of them and being intertwined because anybody can spew ideas all day long, but the really creative ones are the ones that, that have meaning, purpose and value for, for people, right. Whether it’s customers or colleagues or family members. It’s when the ideas actually enhance the experience that person has. And the way that this matters even more to me to say it’s intertwined with creativity is in the world of AI. You might think your AI partner is creative because it can spawn 400 ideas in two minutes, but how many of them are meaningful, purposeful and valuable? And only a human can decide that. Only a human can figure that out. You really have to know contextually what’s valuable to the group you’re servicing. You have to understand the societal norms of what it’s considered normatively valuable for people. And so, when I, I think about creative, creative velocity and creativity and creative thinking, it. It assumes character is part of that mix. And even more depends upon it when you’re partnering with AI to ideate and innovate. So, I, I see Ray separating them out and I understand you can interview for character and that person may not be creative, but to me, creative depends on character because character really gives imbues the meaning and relevance in any idea.

Minter Dial: I love the way you describe that. Right. So, I need to push back just a tad. Okay. So, in, in the film industry, which I’ve had a small eek, you know, inkling of through the film that I did and I, I talked to a Chap called Weinstein. And so, I’ve, you know, let’s say Anne Hanks and a few others. I’ve had my little experiences, but on balance I’ve had a very negative experience. And you talk about values. I can’t say that it’s an industry that is overflowing in good values. And so, I’m wondering to what extent that was part of why you.

Leslie Grandy: That was part of my decision to leave. And I’ll give you the very specific story that was the value-based reason I stopped. I was on location with Gale Anne Hurd and Brian DePalma on a movie that, that I told you about that Brian had written called Raising Cane, starring John Lithgow. And I was working for both of them. And my husband, who is a finance guy, was actually managing a lot of Brian’s financial relationships with his accountant and his lawyers and so forth, because my husband was the CFO and they were doing a deal with Universal. And Gail had been building this production company and had maybe 15, 20 employees in it. And Brian was literally a lone gun with like my husband on, you know, contract, a lawyer on contract and maybe a housekeeper. Like, like literally nobody. No, because he wasn’t a people person. So, why do you want to have a whole team of people around you if you’re not a people person? And so, I would. I was on the set and my. It was in Northern California and my husband had flown up to talk to Brian about the fact that Gail had told the studio head that she needed the lion’s share of the deal that they were doing because she had so many people in his employ. But clearly the studio head and the lawyers had told my husband that Brian was the reason she was getting the deal. And so, she had heard that he was coming to the set to convey that message to Brian. And so, when she saw him show up at a lunch break on a day of shooting on location where everybody, the cameraman’s kids, the stylist kids, the spouse of the grip, whatever, was all on set eating lunch with them. He showed up and she made a scene and threw him off the set saying it’s a closed set and family wasn’t allowed. She literally threw him out of the set in this grandiose way.

Minter Dial: Drama.

Leslie Grandy: And so, much drama. And my husband is Canadian, so he steers from drama. So, he immediately hunt 180, went back to the car, didn’t even, like, react. Just literally, that was his reaction, was turn his back on him and he would go. I was so appalled that she would hold him to a standard that was obviously not happening anywhere else at the table she was eating at or anywhere else on the set. And that she was behaving so poorly that I literally told her to F off. And then I turned around and my husband was gone. He had already driven off. I had literally no cell phone because this was before there were cell phones. And we had a plan that he was going to meet me at 8 o’clock back at the production office. So, I said, oh, my God, I’m stuck here. After I just told her to go off, and I couldn’t imagine what to do. So, I walked over to a teamster and I said, can you take me back to the production office? I’m just going to sit there for the next 10 hours. So, my husband comes back. He came back to pick me up. I got in the car and I said, look, I’m quitting. I can’t take it. This is unacceptable. He said, I’m so glad you started this conversation because I was going to tell you I had to quit. And so, the two of us were like, okay, well, this is so much easier. That night, we went back, we wrote our letter of resignation. We dropped it off at their house, but we gave them two weeks’ notice because we knew the keys to everything. We knew the keys to the safe deposit box or to their stock accounts. We knew everything about them, and they couldn’t afford to have us just walk away. And we didn’t think that was very professional. Anyway, so we said, we’re here for two weeks. So, we showed up the next day for work, and she said, what are you doing here? You quit? And I was like, but did you read the letter? It’s two weeks’ notice. I’m going to make it easy for other people to do the job because that’s my value. Even though I don’t stand up for you, I’m standing up for the people who are going to get stuck doing this work, work. So, that’s who I’m coming back for. And they were just so dumbfounded that I would do that or that my husband would do that, that those next two weeks were so entertaining because they didn’t know how to behave. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to talk to us. They didn’t know how to react to us. Because this blowout was followed by this incredibly irrational behavior on our part that they. That just really put them off, really threw them off. But that moment, right of, you can’t talk to my husband, that way and you can’t run your, your business in a way that puts me in a situation in my marriage that’s just not. We’re. You’re not worth it to us. Right? Like this is not worth it. So, for me, that moment of really that was the. Maybe there were 10 straws before that, but that was the straw that broke the back. That was the moral value, moral compass moment of. I can’t keep doing this. This is not, this is not who I am.

Minter Dial: Of course Creative Velocity is dedicated or in part to your lovely husband. And I lived in Canada for four years, so I know. Oh, Canada. And, and the values of hockey. I think that’s, that’s my feeling about that. At the same time, I want to make one small comment we’re not going to talk about, but I’m just going to leave you frustrated on this one. There are two other topics I want to get into before we close. One. One is I. So, I’ve written a number of scripts and, and it just became very obvious in the scripts because I, I tend. I studied literature in women’s studies university. I, I thought character development is interesting, but systematically people would say no, no, no, that’s too boring, you know, you know, just give me dialogue and like, oh my God, fathers. Anyway, that was the, that’s the, the thing we’re not going to talk about, but hopefully that going to stimulate some thoughts. Let’s get into two other areas. And one is the ethics of AI co creation. Ethics in general in the film industry. As I was mentioning before, I think that there’s some disregard of ethics now when it comes to creativity and AI. I love the way you expound on the opportunities within that. And yet, and as Dalio said, it’s all about radical transparency. AI doesn’t seem to me a very transparent property. And yet there’s lots of opportunities. And I was just wondering, how do you look at the idea of creating with AI and the ethical construct or the transparency about the utilization? It’s a complicated topic because absolutely you might have written a text and you put it through at say perplexity or whatever to make it better English. So, if you’re going to credit perplexity for your editing, you might have used ChatGPT to provide you some references here and there or Deep Seek or whatever to help you to find the right source. Because so many of the citations on Internet are just full of shit and it’s not the right person who actually said that. All right, so then all of a sudden you’re annotating how often you’re using AI. How do you look at the. This ethical conundrum?

Leslie Grandy: Great question. I do. I did put in two illustrations in the book and credited AI with their A generation. Because I’m a terrible artist and I didn’t find anything in stock footage that really communicated what I was looking for. So, I had no problem crediting that. But they couldn’t come up. You know, it can’t caption it. It couldn’t do what I needed it to do. But it got me started. And I have no problem acknowledging that. And I do think that where you are limited in knowledge or reach, it’s great to have things brought back to you. But I think the point you’re making, or at least that’s how it sounds to me, the point you’re making is how do you have the healthy dose of skepticism around what you get brought back so that you’re not enamored with the output as fact? You’ll see in the book. Throughout the book, I always talk about challenge the result. You need to challenge the result. And unless you take that proactive approach and you’re likely to get not only a hallucination, but a bias in the answer, right? A bias from the data, a bias from the source material that was quoted. And so, unless you’re an active participant, I question the value of just pure output. And throughout the book, because it was such a thread in the book, I was actively testing my theories around things and experiencing enough. I don’t want to say hallucinations, but enough, just genuine mistakes. I. I created a logic puzzle, and also I knew the answer, and it had like, 15 facts. And then the question at the end is, who lives in, like, the red house? Or something like that, Right? Was the question. And I thought, oh, I’m going to see what AI does. Because maybe a reader would take all this and put it into AI to get the answer. And would they learn anything if they did that? So, I thought I should do that because I should know. And I put it in and it randomly, just randomly decided to ignore them and came up with the wrong answer as a result. So, I said, why did you ignore these three facts? And they said, oh, you’re absolutely right. Let me do it again. I’m sorry that it was going to pick up those facts and rerun the answer. It just did it again and randomly ignored two different facts the second time. The third time, I gave it the actual answer, and it’s, oh, you’re absolutely right. Here’s how that works. And then that level of skepticism is so critical. And. And when I talk, when you think about it as ethics, it’s not even about, you know, to me, plagiarism or not plagiarism, it’s how much are you imbuing your own meaning and purpose and value and insights into that conversation. Because you are a new input for AI. You are an input in how you interact with it. So, ethically, if you want this to get better, you have to engage, you have to actually iterate. You have to give it that feedback. You have to tell it it’s making mistakes in that way. And then you also have to know its limitations. Like, it can’t put letters on an image and have them make sense. Like, literally, I said, put creative velocity in this image and it’s doesn’t know how to spell the word. Or you ask it how many M’s are in Canada? And it’ll tell you. Three. Okay, they’re none. But why did you think there were three? So, you know, there are these flaws, these gaps. And so, it’s, I think, the ethical responsibilities on the person in how they interpret the result, how they challenge the result, how they leverage that result, and how they iterate on it. How do they move it towards something that’s more meaning, meaningful and valuable and. And even true, truthful. Right? So, I think that it’s an important partnership, and I. My biggest fear that I hope to dispel in writing the book is that people outsource their creativity to AI just like they did it to a designer. I don’t think it’s any better result when you do that.

Minter Dial: So, first of all, I wanted to highlight this idea of critical thinking and how that’s actually what this is about, or at least what I interpreted what you say. And within critical thinking, you have to go on your experiences, maybe some facts, and be able to sort of say, what I read is not always the truth. That has always been a problem in our humanity and the laziness of us. My point was more about the. The ethical quandary of how much do we say is being used by or helped by AI. To give an example, I might use some thoughts you said, and I might inspire me to write. I’m writing a new book, the Avatar Trap, and. And I might use some of the thoughts you’ve had. They’ve inspired me. Should I. Should I quote those inspirations from the podcast that I had with Leslie Grandy? You know, just to take an example or a conversation at a dinner party? Oh, that. That sparked me and Natalie said something. Oh, that really got me an idea. Well, I’m not the progenitor of that actual idea. It’s sparked by her. Should I credit her now? Add in all the research and the help that AI with creativity, with critical thinking can do to help us. How much of it should we be also citing as in, you know, this came from. This editing was by. This idea came from. I mean, I feel like this is the, the wormhole that.

Leslie Grandy: Well, there’s two pieces to what you’re saying that I want to separate out in my mind when I, When I hear it. One is I’m going to go down one rabbit hole here, which is I was teaching a. An online course asynchronously for university, and they told us to be aware, obviously, of AI generated homework assignments. Right. And. And so, they gave us a bunch of tools that we could use to assess the probability that was AI generated. What I. I wanted to see how those tools worked. And I took a document that I knew I had created, but I had run through Grammarly. I had run through Grammarly to make sure that I wasn’t missing something that was poorly constructed or that I had this run on sentence somewhere in the middle of it. My mother was an English professor. I. I feel like Grammarly is her sitting on my computer, so.

Minter Dial: My mom, too, by the way.

Leslie Grandy: Perfect. That’s why we. That’s why we feel like we have so much in common. I literally feel like it’s my mom. But when I took that document that had been improved grammatically by Grammarly, it said 100 of that document was AI written. And I question whether that’s fair. Okay. Because my mother could have done it with a red pen. Right? My mother could have sat there because she used to send my letters from overnight cap camp back to me, corrected with red pen, spelling comma, definitive 100. Like, I have PTSD from it. So, I literally believe that Grammarly is doing the job my mother would be doing. And in that scenario, it was all my content, all my ideas. But the word choices, I didn’t accept all of them. I don’t like some of the construction of sentences that it creates, but I understand also, I want to have my own voice in my work, and I don’t want to sound machine generated. But the question is, that was my content. That was really my content improved grammatically. And I don’t see an ethical challenge in that. Maybe you disagree, but I don’t. Even though the AI tool said it was 100% generated by AI, so it wasn’t but I, I get it. The other side of the equation that I, that I, I feel is important though is that to answer your question about original and ethics around did you create it if you were inspired by someone? When I was writing the book, I found I came across the stat, which I thought was super fascinating. And it supports this notion that to be creative you have to be original. And the fact is that from 1790 to 2010, 77% of US patents issued were the combination of two existing technology codes. The idea that originality is the equivalent of creativity is not, is false. It’s not something I subscribe to. And I feel like the people who look at something like Uber for dogs to get Rover were very creative because they had a different set of problems than cars, but they were looking at a model to spawn something that might serve us in a completely different domain. And so, I, I, I also push back a little on the sense that being inspired by a thought you got at a cocktail party is, is, is bad and, and requires, oh, Nina told me X. No, you, you took it and ran with it in some way is the same as saying, I’m doing, you know, Uber for dogs. There, there’s value in building upon someone else’s creativity. There’s value not so much in citing it, but in taking it to a new place, into a new situation, into a new result. And the originality myth, I think, is one of the biggest risks people have around believing that they’re creative because they can’t think of something original. And you just again, in the book, look at, I have like 10 pages of endnotes because those people sparked me. Now I cited them because they are research reports and they were obvious, but I’m sure there was 100 people I didn’t cite over the 30 years of my career that gave me some kernel of something I built my career on.

Minter Dial: I love it. I mean, in the end of the day, the creativity of being stuck in a box and finding your way through that within the perimeters of law or whatever the constructs are, that is total creativity. I, I, the little story I have is as a 19 year old I wrote a story and I was very proud of myself about how I was an ant. And so, I described the whole story of me as an ant and looking at society through this prism of how we’re just all, you know, on the same old trail. And then I discovered that not only was there a film about that, there was stories written decades ago. So, on the shoulders of giants are we, are we living Our lives. So, want to finish on one area which is really important to me. And I loved the fact chapter nine was all about play. I think Jordan Peterson speaks about this a fair amount. And there are some sort of serious play elements, like you mentioned, Lego and all that. This is the idea of meeting each other in a playful way. And I would almost argue naughty elements to it because play is about as childlike as it gets. Knowing about how to figure out how to tussle with somebody physically means about learning your physicality, but also knowing, as you know, you’re rough and tumbling with a boy or girl. There are things which happen in that play which are always a little bit sort of, huh, where’s this all going? And so, it’s a little bit wonky play and it’s been written written out of us as adults. And so, I just wanted you to just, let’s say, riff on the value of play in our lives and why we need to be integrating it far more in our lives and at work.

Leslie Grandy: Yeah, I think as you get to an adult level in corporations, you have a lot of forced play. Oh, let’s go do this team event at this bar where they do billiards or where there’s a bar. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Whatever. Let’s go all do that. And I, I fell prey to that once because I felt like there wasn’t the human connection happening naturally in the office. And so, I hired an arcade truck to come to the office and whatever the behavior was in the office, it just moved to the arcade truck. It just wasn’t like playful in there, even though it was a play environment. So, what I learned from that and what I, what I really appreciate is what’s difficult for people as they age is free form play. Yeah. There’s a lot of games, families and people love to do games. And that’s great. That is a good form of play, but that’s still structured play. Right. And it’s. And it’s not necessarily fully embracing your ability to break the rules, which is another form of play. Right. When we create a new game with new rules, let’s all do this, let’s play this way or do that. Make believe we run out of those opportunities as an adult, whereas a kid you have recess and there’s no definition of play. Just go play. Right. And so, I think finding as an adult those things that unlock that side of you. Right. That isn’t necessarily tied to the rules or tied to the status quo of how you operate with people and allows you to sort of let your hair down and do something that maybe isn’t necessarily considered adult behavior is, I think, really hard for people and does take conscious intention. Like, I want to do this in a way that’s going to make me uncomfortable in the beginning, but then I’m going to recognize the release that it provides me, right? The idea that I’ve let go of my, my self identity as this super professional or that I’ve done something that looks less disciplined and I need to seem, as an adult, more disciplined. Those are all words that I think start to erode our creative self-efficacy, our ability to see ourselves as being creative under any circumstance. And so, to me, it’s super important. And for some people, play is just a hobby, right? Where you go into a flow state because you’re, you know, you’re crocheting or you’re doodling or whatever. It’s just that it’s a state of mind more than the activity. It’s the idea that you’re releasing yourself from the constraints or the boundaries of your thoughts because you’re doing something that allows you that free form approach, that openness to creating new rules, new policies, new ways of doing things. And so, sometimes as an adult, the easiest way to get into play is to find one of those doors and open it. It what, what gets you a state of flow? It’s why it’s actually, you know, it goes flow and then play and then storytelling. Because those three things to me unlock so much creativity as an adult. Find, find your triggers that get you to the flow state. Within the flow state, let your mind play with an idea. Let your mind and body play with where you are at the time you think and ideate. You don’t have to be at your desk in an office. And then when you get to storytelling, imagine the world where people aren’t driving cars, there’s driverless cars. Or imagine a world where drones are delivering Amazon packages. You know, like it allows you more freedom to ideate and imagine if you go from flow to play, right, to storytelling, that’s a natural progression in terms of how adults can recover what they had as a child.

Minter Dial: You write a fair amount about paradoxes of life and everything. I do feel like one of the biggest paradoxes is our society is very keen to ask for total or radical transparency. You need to be authentic and yet you can’t play because we need to be efficient and productive.

Leslie Grandy: Yep. And disciplined. I think that people who seem undisciplined as adults seem wild and unmanageable in a work environment and so it by definition, going into a corporate world where there are corporate norms and values and ways of meetings being run and the way that work gets done, it becomes limiting. Right. It becomes really constraining for people who need some time to free flow of ideas, connect the dots between their subconscious and their conscious mind. And you can’t do that in that environment. And so, finding those places where your mind can be playful. Even for me, it’s a hot shower, but I get some of the best work done in the shower. Like in my head I’m like, how come I didn’t think of that before? You know, and for other people it’s, you know, a 10-mile run, you know, whatever it is that allows you to start to let go of that sense of boundary, like you say, or where the boxes and your mind then has that capacity to flow freely from thought to thought. That’s the beginning of a playful spirit. In my mind. That is how you get to encouraging yourself to be more playful because you start to see things happen when you do that that you hadn’t envisioned when you were really lockstep with the tasks you have on the list.

Minter Dial: Yeah. I somehow equate some element of playfulness with humility and certainly the ability to fail.

Leslie Grandy: Yeah.

Minter Dial: Because if, if you’re not seeking to push the boundaries somehow it’s all sort of too safe. Anywho. Oh, yeah. And I was thinking another thing. I have a dinner theme, which is come to a dinner, my dinner party, and tell us about something that you discovered recently that you’re almost ashamed not to have known before.

Leslie Grandy: Oh my gosh, that is such a good. First of all, I, I got to figure out how to get an invitation to these dinner parties because, my gosh, I can’t. I don’t even know if I would eat. I would be so enamored with the con. It just sounds so amazing. And I love that question because you, you know, it. The one for me is I didn’t realize how much it costs to make a penny.

Minter Dial: Oh, wow. Right?

Leslie Grandy: We have freaking pennies. Like, that was like one of those things that. How did I get into my 60s and not know that? You know, like that one was like, oh my God, there’s something that is ripe for innovation there. Right? Like, that is crazy. I think that’s such a great dinner party conversation starter. I love it.

Minter Dial: Well, and typically what I do is I. Well, we have a whole process, but we spin it out. We start off with some sort of light hors d’oeuvres and aperitif with regard to the question, then we inevitably get deeper. But you know, the thing is this, Leslie, I feel like we could go on for a boatload more. I didn’t even. I had actually tried to prepare nicely 15 different, hugely different topics like tacit knowledge transfer, cultural blind spots, post humanity, creativity. I had just a bunch of things. But time, apparently velocity. And time is not always easy to manage. That’s the way things go, Leslie. So, how can people find more about you obviously order your book Creative Velocity and It’s creative.

Leslie Grandy: Yeah. Creative-velocity.com and. And you’ll be able to learn more about the book. Learn more about the people I interviewed for the book. One of the things we didn’t talk about, which I think is just a little part of the journey story that we were covering, was I. I added an interview at the end of every chapter and I. Every one of those people was somebody that had an influence on me personally. Every one of those people was somebody who really influenced my understanding of my own creative self efficacy and how creativity can manifest in a normal corporate environment. Every one of those people taught me about failure and empathy and all of the things. And in really looking at why I wrote this book, if nothing else, just read the interviews, right? Because that’ll tell you why I wrote the book. Those people’s view on creativity really mattered. And if you order the book early as a pre order, you actually get bonus content which is the complete interview because for length I wasn’t able to include it in the book. And the first chapter is an interview with the people who wrote MacGyver and who were responsible for the MacGyverisms. And if that wasn’t the most entertaining way for me to start writing the book was to talk to them and recognize creativity from a MacGyver mindset, it just spurred all the rest of the thinking for me in the book. So, I hope everyone finds value in the exercises and the content. But the interviews are really some of the most insightful things in the book.

Minter Dial: Repurposing and a lot more that you provided, not just the interviews. It was a great read. It is a great read.

Leslie Grandy: Thank you for reading it. I so appreciate it. It was such a great conversation. As a result, it was fun.

Minter Dial: Leslie, many, many thanks. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to share gin and tonic together sometime.

Leslie Grandy: Oh, I am so. I, I’m, I’m a. I, I would be an Anglophile if my mom was still alive because we spent. She went to the University of London and we spent our summers there and I my. My creative attempt at drama school. It’s in Sussex. Surrey. I’m sorry, In Surrey was that I ended up wearing a black leotard and being a tree in the entire thing because I hated my American accent. So, was it.

Minter Dial: Was it in Waiting for Godot?

Leslie Grandy: No. I don’t even remember what the play was, but I was. I was in the background as a tree for pretty much two hours, standing there like. Like in a black leotard, not moving. I love England. I definitely want to come back. And I would totally take you up on a gin and tonic. It’s. It was my pleasure. I have to say, Minter, everything I heard in the other podcast I listened to came true for. For this discussion. And I. You’re just such an easy conversationalist. And those dinner parties sound like they’re classic. Like, they’re really classic. I. I would love to be a fly on the wall on some of them.

Minter Dial: Epic, Leslie. Let. Let us make that. Make that happen. Super fun to have you. Thank you so much.

Leslie Grandy: Thanks so much, Minter. Your pleasure.