Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 84: Special Guest Tony Van Eerd!

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

In this episode, Bryce and Conor interview special guest Tony Van Eerd!TwitterADSP: The PodcastConor HoekstraBryce Adelstein LelbachAbout the Guest:Tony Van Eerd has been coding for well over 25 years, and hopefully coding well for most of that. Previously at Inscriber, Adobe, and BlackBerry, he now enables painting with light at Christie Digital. He is on the C++ Committee. He is a Ninja and a Jedi.Show NotesDate Recorded: 2022-06-24Date Released: 2022-07-01CppNorth ConferenceInscriberBlackBerryAdobeCHRISTIEChristie Eclipse 4K RGB Pure Laser ProjectorGary KlassenBlackBerry QNXGeneral MagicCP24Inscriber offers Adobe After Effects plug-in to streamline productionBlackBerry Liquid GraphicsGoogle LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.Intro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

Loony, you want to say hi? Now, if I wanted to say hi, I would need to knock on something. There we go! See, I know how to make this dog work. You want him to bark, you just knock on something. Welcome to ADSP, the podcast episode 84 recorded on June 24, 2022. My name is Connor and today with my co-host Bryce, we interview special guest Tony Van Eerd. So I've got the same thing. My mom's side is like Irishottish and a few other things

like some spanish or whatever you know that kind of mix and my dad's side is dutch straight up straight up dutch as far back as you go yeah i was looking it up because i was wondering what the van means and i guess it means like from yeah it's like he's from Erd. I'm just going to call you that for now. No, no, no, no. I was traveling, right? As we do. And went through the customs at Toronto Airport or whatever. Went through something.

And the guy looks at my passport and all this stuff. He says, oh, of the earth. Worldly. He's like, worldly. Of the earth. I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, your last name. Van Eerd. Of the earth. And I'm like what are you talking about he's like your last name van eard of the earth and i'm like oh right it's of van is of yeah okay so he's just tony of the earth yeah and he's like he's like it means worldly i'm like it probably means farmer

you know like it doesn't mean worldly no no it just look it just means that your family were actually yeah intergalactic explorers. You were the Tony from Earth. We're the subset of the family from Earth. But then you go through all that and you get to the gate. And then you meet up with all your other buddies you're traveling with, right? And the other guy I'm traveling with, he goes like, hey, my last name means blah, blah, blah. I'm like, did you go through the same guy?

And I guess we figured like a bunch did you go through the same guy and i guess we we figured like a bunch of us went through the same person and he just tells everyone what their last name means and it doesn't matter what language you are and stuff and you can imagine someone who works at the airport like that and goes through staring at passports all day needs a hobby and his hobby was like knowing languages found a way to keep it interesting. Do you know what your first name means, Tony? I'm named after a mafia guy. Really? Tony.

Yeah. I'm like named after an Italian mafia friend of the family. Oh, I thought you meant like a fictional character. No. No, you mean. Yeah. Yep. Born in Windsor,

you know, there's some mafia in Windsor. That's the Canadian mafia? Yeah. I mean, there's mafia everywhere, so yeah. It's like they extort you, but they're really nice about it.

They say sorry when they're robbing. Sorry about that. Well, or maybe they're the French Canadian mafia because I'm about to offend some some number of my friends some of my audiences but all those all those stereotypes about canadians being nice that's not the french canadians it all depends whether we're holding a hockey stick or not holding a hockey stick that's and i mean that in the best i mean that in the best possible way also uh ol Olivier one day mentioned that we take all our anger and through some secret ritual, we take all the anger out of us and put it into Canadian geese.

And that's why they are the way they are. And then we send them south. It's a long-term plan. Well, we have a lot of topics probably to talk about tonight. We're all going to be in... T-minus from when we're recording, T-minus 24 days, we're all going to be in Toronto,

CPP North. I think technically when this gets released, it'll be 24 minus 7 is 17 17 days um it depends actually when are you getting into because the conference is monday to wednesday which starts on the 18th i believe i get in on the 17th um i'm flying from japan because i'm going this next saturday i go to london for cpp on c and then i go to from l CPP on C. And then I go from London to Tokyo for this quantum computing conference, which is like a whole podcast episode we should do about that. And then I go from the quantum computing conference in Tokyo to Toronto.

Technically I stop in New York for like three hours, but to Toronto. And that'll be my July, basically. I'll be on the road for three weeks. So you land on Sunday. Tony, when do you... And Tony, tell... Actually, we have any... We do a terrible job of introducing our...

We just start chatting. Yeah, we do. I'm sure there's a number of folks. We always mention... We were chatting on Discord yesterday, and Tony mentioned that he's probably either the number one or at least top two tied with Sean mentioned individual. individual said his name already.

How am I going to stay ahead? I was like going to go through this whole thing. Tony, Tony, Tony. Yeah. I was going to go through this whole, this whole episode.

I only go by episodes, not how many times you say my name, but you just, how many episodes I get brought up. And I think I'm on, I think I'm on the top of your list. Maybe we should add a tag because the website, we tag topics. And whenever we say your name, you know, Tony tag.

Not as a guest, just as mentioned. No, we need a Tony counter. We need one of our audience members to go and count all the number of times that we've mentioned Tony. I think that audience member is me. I'm that pathetic that I keep track. If we had transcripts, it'd be a lot easier. It's probably a one-line or two-line Perl script to get that. But anyways, Tony, tell the people about yourself,

where you're from, what you do, your history. You used to work at a famous company, and now a famous company too. Yeah, I wonder. He's worked at two or three famous companies. I was going to say, yeah. I just mean as far as Canadian companies go go it's pretty famous right that's what you're talking about no not that one okay which famous company are you talking about connor he's talking about blackberry i think that's what i'm talking about but i thought he meant adobe

the other famous company but that's not that's not canadian company i said famous canadian company yeah but who cares about Canadian company? I mean, Canadians do. Yeah. Um, no, you're outnumbered,

right? Grace, like this whole thing, even though, even though Connor is fine for me to be outnumbered because you're Canadian. Bagels are coming up at some point, but first let's let Tony introduce himself. Oh,

at the same time, I've been waiting. Does that look like a blackberry flavor you got there? The best one? Of course it is. What were we just going to talk about? Is that the Canadian about? I don't know. People sometimes say

I say the Canadian about. You don't really do the Canadian about, Connor. Sometimes I do. you would be connor you could definitely pass for an american you have almost no discernible accent have you how do you put up with those kind of insults i mean tony has like a tony has like a slightly more of an accent than you and it and when it comes out more like a little bit more but But you have an almost imperceptible accent. It's funny that Bryce says that because sometimes when I'm abroad, people actually think I'm from New York. And they're like, oh, you have a New York accent.

I was like, I don't know what that is, but I'm not. And I'm not really certain why you have that accent, Connor. I did act in a play when I was younger called Lost in Yonkers. And you just never dropped it again. I wasn't planning on doing an accent, but apparently I'm really a method actor. I do consider myself the Christian Bale of the C++

community. I don't even know what to do with that. You were talking about me. Come on. We'll be quiet for you. So it starts with, yeah, I will be flying into Toronto down the 401 from KW area on Sunday. So, yes, I'm in Canada. I'm in, well, I live in Guelph, if anyone knows where that is, and work in Waterloo.

I work at Christie, who makes projectors, which I will say- Christie doesn't make projectors. He makes amazingly mind-blowingly cool projectors. Did you go to, you went with Hannah to the planetarium? I go to that planetarium all the time because my grandfather volunteered at the natural history museum for like 20 years and his buddies with neil degrasse tyson but yeah i did not know it was christian projectors i'm not surprised yeah so those are the best projectors in the world like there's no no doubt those are they're like

i think i think we can only say a million to one contrast ratio. Only. Only a million to one, but it's actually higher than that. This is the Hayden Planetarium at the American Natural History Museum in New York, the best museum in the world. People had trouble measuring the contrast ratio because it's so high. We project, because it uses DMDs, the little chips that are mirrors. And normally you project light on the mirrors and then you project it out the projector. And we said, no, no, no. We're going to project light onto the mirror and then that goes to another mirror and then that goes out the projector.

So the projector costs twice as much as it should cost because we doubled everything internally. But it gets rid of secondary light that you would get. So there's no, like there's this problem of black level light that you can get in the projector and it just disappears. How many projectors is it? Because it's planetarium, so it protects the 180. Yeah, I don't know for sure,

but it's like six, I think, or something like that. Six or eight or something. And the people there, the people at Hayden are very picky. One of our most picky uh customers ever like they they did not settle for anything less right we basically made a projector we designed a projector for them right wow is there like a youtube video that uh won't capture i'm sure uh the contrast yeah if i google this will i be able to find some i don't know i don't know if i'm telling you stuff I'm not supposed to tell you,

but, you know, anyone could figure it out by, like, the projector's there or someone could take it. Were you there for, have you ever been there? I haven't been there. I didn't get to go to that. I get to go to places. It's really weird when you work for Christie because if you do go on site, you go somewhere and you work on site at, like, midnight to 6 a.m.

because you have to go there when it's closed. So I've been to all these big places only when it's closed, but I haven't been to Hayden. And to avoid getting into Tony into trouble, I'll just say big places such as, you know, theme parks, things like that.

You know, I like to say, you may have gone to his children. I like to say universal studios because that's one of the ones that I can say and other large theme parks and places yeah um anyhow before christy i worked at this other place called blackberry let me just take another drink of this blackberry liquid oh it's so i didn't even i'm not sure if that was intentional but wow so my my favorite part of i knew tony part of the time when he was at blackberry

sort of towards the end and my favorite part of tony at blackberry was the period towards your end of the end of your time at blackberry where it seemed like your job function was just to file patents yeah i went through a stage if i if I recall, the benefit system for, like, the reward system that they gave you for filing was like. Well, there's two parts. There's two parts. I mean, the reward system is not much different than anywhere else, I don't think. But they did have a thing where anybody who was a director or something had people under them, had a quota. They just said, well, you know, you've got, not that I did.

I don't like having people under me. But my manager or something had like 50 people or 100 people under him. So they said, we would expect, you know, this many patents every year or every quarter. I expect 10 patents out of 100 people or some number. And my manager was telling me this one day and I said, all right'll we'll do that this afternoon for you he's like what i said i'll just sit down with a couple other guys and we'll just we'll just make up patents for you this afternoon and then we did every whenever we needed more patents we're just like i can think of whatever some of them are dumb some of them are actually good i got patents on predicting the future i got the awesomeness patents How many patents do you have?

I might have like 10 or something Not that many I used to work with a guy Gary Klassen I worked with him at Christie And at Blackberry He's the guy who wrote BBM The good old Blackberry Messenger

He's got like 200 patents And he didn't even know it The lawyer one day told him That he's like 200 patents he's just like and he didn't even know it the lawyer one day told him like that he's on 200 patents he's like why but it's because like every blackberry every bbm patent had had his name on it kind of thing yeah um he's a great guy by the way um i also seem to recall you towards the end of your time at blackberry describing like your your station and situation at BlackBerry as like you knew where the escape hatch was if you needed to exit the building at BlackBerry.

It's kind of sad that I... Should I be even saying these things? But I went to my manager and said, like a round of layoffs were coming. I knew they were coming. And I said, put me on the list. I said, I'm fine. I can get they you know there's other people on my team they can all get other jobs but i'm like i feel the most confident of everyone here that i'll land on my feet so i said put me on the list and he's like i can't do that and he said he said i asked my

manager to put myself on the list like my manager was going up on their chains put me on the list you know yeah it's kind of bad when when once you start seeing rounds of rounds of layoffs um but blackberry still exists right they are still out there and it's in your car blackberry is in your car right yeah qnx yeah yeah that's what we uh you know nvidia does a lot of car stuff and uh and q and x it's it's real big 225 million cars yeah um but anyhow but let's but we should talk about the good times blackberry because you used to be very excited about should we just give like a little little couple minute um description because i'm i'm sure there's at least one or two people that are below the age

of like i don't know 25 or 20 that actually don't know what blackberry is um have no idea what bbm is um uh where where do we start um blackberry was was one of the first i mean there was even before black there there was like palm and stuff blackberry was really on the on the bleeding edge of of phones before the iphone right um blackberry was the first thing to really have a really good email and stuff in your pocket and and corporate the corporate world lived and died off blackberries uh all all business was done on a blackberry because you could quickly connect and do your email and get everything. And,

and just, it was the businessman's, you know, pocket device. And it was the, it was the number one phone before the iPhone came out. And then the iPhone came out and I didn't work at BlackBerry when the iPhone came out.

I worked at Adobe and I saw it and I was like, man, my friends at BlackBerry, I got to tell them that they're in trouble. And no one at BlackBerry believed that the iPhone was going to cause a problem. I was like, man, my friends at BlackBerry, I got to tell them that they're in trouble. And no one at BlackBerry believed that the iPhone was going to cause a problem. They're like, it doesn't even have copy and paste. It's, you know, that iPhone sucks.

It's like, guys. I just read a Twitter thread about the iPhone not having copy and paste. And like, apparently they just didn't have time to get around to implementing it. But yeah, like I was reading the said, and I like, I didn't even know that the first iPhone didn't have copy and paste. But it was from one of the original like iPhone devs. And he was like, yeah, you know, we just really, we just ran out of time. We just didn't have time for copy and paste. The original, a friend of mine jumped on the iPhone early, right? The iPhone also didn't have apps.

Like you couldn't write an iPhone app. And the first iPhone app was the camera, or not the camera, the light. And it wasn't even the camera light. It wasn't the flash. It was, it turned your screen white. And that was a 99 cent app. And my friend at the time said we should start writing iphone apps i was like the first app was 99 cents it made the screen white and i was like yeah yeah that'd be

kind of cool but you know i don't got time for that man being like early days you could have made a killing right yeah when a white screen made money anyhow um i worked at Blackberry. Before Blackberry, I worked at Adobe for almost 10 years. Mostly worked on Adobe Premiere. Also worked on some internal, what we called internal open source, which is like shared code within Adobe. So my code is in all the products. I can always point to an Adobe product and say I got some code in there. Before Adobe, I worked at a place called Inscriber.

And Inscriber's got like a huge amount of strangely large number of people from this tiny company work in interesting places now because it was just this like little hotbed of smart people. And you should explain what Inscriber does because that's actually one of my favorite of the Tony jobs. Is this like the general magic of Canada or something? Sounds kind of like it.

Inscriber, well, for you, Connor, and our Canadian listeners, CP24, you know, that TV station? All that text and everything that's going on, that's Inscriber. So Inscriber is known for doing text for television. We do graphics for Wii. I worked at Inscriber when it was like,

I started there when there was like 10 people. I was there for 10 years. I still consider, I say Wii. I still say Wii even though I haven't worked there for 20 years. It's one of the first places I worked. It was known for texts for television. And it just was better looking text than everyone else was doing. And also...

And you should explain what time period this was in. Yeah. Because some of our younger audience members... Didn't live. Weren't alive. When did I... About 1990 or so is when I started there. And at the time, if you wanted to put text on TV,

like in the TV studio, like you're in the newsroom and you want to put up so-and-so reporting from Baghdad, that was a $100,000 machine. And it was, you know, a box that only did text for television. And if you wanted to change the font size or something, you know, you had to get down, you know, download. You had to, like, from the company get new fonts at different point size. Like, it was, nothing was dynamic, right? So, my boss, a guy named Dan Mance, really great guy, he wrote a thing called Inscriber.

Basically wrote it on his own under DOS. This was a DOS program that would do text and would put it out on a Targa card before NVIDIA or people like that really existed. And you could buy a computer and this card and this software and $10,000, you would have a better text output on top of, you know,

overlaid onto video. Um, and it costs 10,000 bucks and you could change the font size on the fly and change the colors and do all this stuff. And people are like, Oh my God, that's so much better. Um,

so inscriber did that as their, as their main thing. Um, they, the reason I ended up at Adobe is because inscriber and Adobe made a deal together to do like a joint venture because, uh, thing um they the reason i ended up at adobe is because inscriber and adobe made a deal together to do like a joint venture because adobe premiere had a really bad text engine even though adobe as a company had a good text engine premiere had a bad video text engine so they instead of using

their own they bought inscribers um and i i got bought i got bought bought by Adobe. Which is actually funny because I worked, I was at, after about five years at Adobe, someone from HR came to me and said, oh, you actually have been at Adobe for 15 years because you're technically a merger, right? You were a merger from Inscriber to Adobe. So your five years is actually 15 years. And we owe you like this much vacation time.

And like, you know, we owe you a sabbatical. And we owe you all this stuff because we screwed it all up. And I'm like, all right, I'm taking Fridays off the rest of my life. Like I had so much vacation time, I would never catch up on my vacation time. And I'm just bad at using vacation time. So they probably still owe me vacation time and i'm just bad at using vacation time so they probably still owe me vacation time 10 years later uh anyhow i've been doing pixel plus plus my whole life that's that's that's the summary of that because i was at an inscriber doing pixel processing

i was at blackberry making making the scrolling and everything smooth it was a thing called liquid graphics to make the blackberry 60 frames per second and a sad story there was that the people that were we were in the team that was doing the graphics you know library that you would call we were doing the c++ graphics library that you would call you would call it from your java application right and then it would call down into our c++ eventually and we're like this there's no way we can do 60 frames per second because the chip that they were buying for the next the next piece of hardware and and they're like you know it's got to be 60 and we're like do the math it literally you can't push that many pixels across the bus like there's just just it's not hard to figure out the bus bandwidth is this the screen size is this you can't get this many pixels at 60 frames per second and they're

like huh the only thing that got me was like we're the software guys you are the hardware guys you should have already figured this out so we had to convince them to like switch what chip they're going to buy because of course they wanted to buy the cheaper one like it's just not going to work anyhow here we are now so did you end up going back to so it was inscriber adobe blackberry and then back to adobe and then christy no christy or blackberry to christy so the iphone came out before you joined blackberry yes i i went to blackberry with a with an iphone in my pocket and whenever anyone um started talking about how should this work how should i'm just like let me just pull out this phone in my pocket how about you make swiping work like this it was like they had really weird ideas on how things should work and then and then the worst the worst part

too is that they didn't they got in this state of being worried about, like, there was features of the BlackBerry that worked better than, well, even just a simple thing I noticed recently. If you plug in a phone, if your phone dies, battery dies, right? You get home, you plug it in. Your phone doesn't turn back on. It just charges. But then you still have to press the button to, like, boot it back up, right? A BlackBerry phone, if it dies, you plug it in, it just turns itself back on it just charges but then you still have to press the button to like boot it back up right a blackberry phone if it dies you plug it in it just turns itself back on because of course like you're going to want to turn it back on why why do why do i have to tell it that right and there was an argument about that at blackberry about like the next phone is not going to turn

itself on it's like why not they're like well iphone doesn't do that it's like well maybe it's a good feature that they haven't got to like iphone didn't do cut and paste either you know like and you just get that every now and then of like oh we shouldn't do that the um this on-screen keyboard should it show um uppercase all the time or uppercase and lowercase um ip used to, I don't know what it does now, but it used to always show only uppercase letters on the keyboard, right? Even if you're in lowercase,

it would only show uppercase because the keyboard was like, as if it was a physical keyboard that doesn't change, right? And then Android, it shows uppercase and lowercase. It's a better, it's more feedback on the UI. And BlackBerry had uppercase, lowercase, and then they switched it to uppercase only.

And I'm like, that's stupid. That's bad UI. They're like, well, that's what iPhone does. Okay, well, can't win any arguments if you just, you know, why just be a duplicate when there's good features that you had that you, I don't know. So we have to talk about the most iconic

feature, part of the black barrier keyboard which of course is the keyboard yeah i was hoping you were going to say the the different lights in the top left hand corner for the types of mess that that is something that even to the flashing i know so many people will say that's what they miss the most is the flashing light. Yeah. So why, so why, why did the physical keyboard die? You know what? I think, well, there's two reasons,

right? Cause, cause it uses up too much screen real estate, right? People just want the bigger screen. And a lot of people, so there's a gap, right?

When, when the iPhone came out and integrated, like basically the, the demo about it, I went to, you know, I was working for Adobe. I went down to San Jose to visit the team because I was working for Adobe. I was still up in Canada, right? We had a small office up here. I ran an office for Adobe. This is why I'm not a manager. It's not a good idea to have me run an office.

But we went down and the iPhone had just come out. And of course, everyone in Silicon Valley just bought one the next day, right? So everyone on the Adobe team that I was working with had one. And they just said, look at this. And then they went to Maps. They found a nearby restaurant. They pressed the button. They called the phone. They they made a reservation we went to the restaurant right which is something we all just do now that was a killer demo and they didn't even mean it to be a killer demo they just did it yeah and you couldn't do that on any other phone because it just wasn't all there just wasn't all put together right um and the iphone had that and so now everyone switches the iphone because it's just got killer features and then they well wait did the first iphone have maps yeah i think was it google maps yeah it was

google maps right from the start it was just everything was smooth and integrated right um and then people loved the keyboard because you actually can type faster and everything's faster but then you get you learn to live without it because of all these other features that are killer features, and then you don't feel the need to go back to the keyboard. But I still miss it. I know I'm better with the physical keyboard. It's just nicer.

Also, the BlackBerry had a... I don't know, but because with the physical keyboard, you can't do all the sorts of tricks that they do with the virtual keyboard. Like with the virtual keyboard, they can do all this, you know, Oh, you pressed here, but you really meant to press here. Oh yeah. You know, cause, cause, cause where you think you press with your finger versus where you do press are like different locations. Yeah. Blackberry was cause Blackberry had a really, actually Blackberry had, um, still I have an, I have an Android now, and I still think my BlackBerry, last BlackBerry I had with a virtual keyboard was a better virtual keyboard than this Android I have right now. Because it was better at that, figuring out where you meant to click, where you thought you were typing.

And it had better prediction. And also BlackBerry was the only phone that had prediction that didn't send your text home to do the prediction. It was all on phone because BlackBerry is like totally paranoid about security. Well, that's been BlackBerry's market. That's why BlackBerry still makes phones. Like if you work for certain government agencies you probably have blackberry well and you know not only did you have a blackberry you had a blackberry made in canada like we would sell blackberries to everyone else that might be made in wherever but the ones you sold to the government were built in canada like everything about it was built again Canada. Now I still wonder.

Were the chips fabbed in Canada? Yeah, that's the weird part. The chips was still Qualcomm. So like, you know, wherever. But everything that could be was in Canada. So, and people like the US were very happy that we were friendly partners. Anyhow, yep.

Do you think there's a parallel universe where blackberry um managed to compete and still is you know is there up with android or was it inevitable that if they stuck with the keyboard and uh well you know what they they should have gone to android sooner for sure um blackberry could have been the the like one of the top android phones um blackberry was going to go to android early days of android before before it was like just kind of decided like before samsung took over you know and things like that um but the um google versus Google versus Oracle, Java lawsuit was going on, right? Like Google was getting sued by Java, right? And so BlackBerry was like,

let's not get involved with that. We were on good relationship with Oracle and Sun and all the business side. We don't want to mess up with that. We can't go to Android right now because there's big question marks whether Android will even survive the lawsuit. So instead, they went to QNX and made their own OS, which was cool.

Like BlackBerry 10 was... And the funny part is, this is actually how I started on the C++ committee. BlackBerry 10 was the only phone OS where the, you know, premier language for writing applications was C++, right? If you're on iPhone, it used to be Objective-C and now it's Swift. If you're on Android, it was Java. Now Java Kotlin. Windows had a phone, but they wanted you to use C Sharp.

And they all kind of like, maybe you could use C++ if you tried really hard. But if you wanted to write an app for BlackBerry, you could use some other languages. But the number one choice of language, the one we pushed, was C++. It was the C++ phone, right? And everything was like native C++. And that's one of the reasons I joined the committee, because I actually said, I mean, I was already involved. I was already going to Boost conferences and C++ Now, and people like Beeman Dawes wanted me.

I met him at Boost Boost and he's like, hey, come on to the committee. He's one of the reasons, he's an awesome guy. He's one of the reasons I got on to the committee. But I also, I was at BlackBerry and I said, hey, you're the only phone that is relying on C++ and you know who's in the committee? Microsoft, Apple, and Google, right? They are

in control of the language you chose for your phone. Your three top competitors are in charge of the language you're using. So you should have somebody on the committee to speak for BlackBerry. And it's actually funny because I wrote this long email saying like all these that and a bunch of other reasons why blackberry should have someone on the committee and then at the very end it's like by the way that person should be me like if it wasn't clear and this email went to my manager and up and went all the way up to the ceo and i ended up getting an email back that the ceo's response was just like well who should it be and it's like well did you read the whole thing or not right and and my manager sent back to the CEO's response was just like, well, who should it be? And it's like, well, did you read the whole thing or not? Right. And, and my manager sent back to the CEO, it should be Tony, like no question. And so I got, I was on the committee. And then of course,

it was the CEO of, I want to say Mike Lombardi, but that Lazarus or Lazarus, Mike L it's right. Anyhow, because it's Mike L internally he was called Mike L here's another story I just told the other day at work tune in next week to hear Tony's story this is part one of a four part interview series with Tony Van Eerd thanks for listening we hope you enjoyed and have a great day