Quint Boa on Adapting to AI, Getting Sober, and What Success Really Costs
Quint Boa has spent more than 25 years building a company that refused to die. Synima, the video and animation production company he co-founded in 2000, has survived the shift from VHS tapes to DVDs, the 2008 financial crash, Brexit, COVID, and now the arrival of generative AI. By almost any statistical measure, Quint says, it should have folded years ago. Instead it employs 50 people across London, New York, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam, and ranks among the top AI video production companies in the world.
But the throughline of Quint’s story isn’t the technology. It’s what he learned about himself while keeping up with it, including a decision 12 years ago that changed everything.
Reinvention driven by anxiety, not ambition
When Emily asked how he always seemed to land on the cutting edge, Quint didn’t reach for a triumphant answer. “It was driven by major anxiety,” he said. Not a love of the new tools, but the fear of being left behind: buy this piece of kit, get across that piece of software, because if you don’t, someone else will and then you’re behind the curve. He watched the cadence of change accelerate from years to months to weeks, from VHS to CD-ROM to DVD, from animated text in 2013 to full generative AI in 2022. When Sora first appeared, the industry breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t good enough yet. Then the client calls started coming, and everything changed again.
Where a psychotherapist meets a production company
Quint’s path into psychology came through his family. His father was the Canadian actor Bruce Boa, familiar to Fawlty Towers fans as the American guest demanding a Waldorf salad. His aunt was the Jungian analyst Marion Woodman, a founder of mind-body work. Quint earned an MA in psychotherapy and started a PhD before the production company pulled him away, then returned to the ideas after COVID. His argument is simple: our sense of self runs on stories, and much of that story is visual. Animation, he says, is how you communicate something too big, too small, or too complex to film, whether that’s two planets colliding, a macrophage swallowing a pathogen, or a dopamine pathway lighting up inside a brain you can’t cut open.
Adopting AI without treating people as replaceable
The hardest part of the AI shift wasn’t technical. It was human. Quint had built a team of trained animators, people who studied color theory and craft, and the technology meant asking them to reskill. “I have a duty of care to my staff,” he said, describing a hybrid approach that still pairs traditional character animation with AI-built environments, and buys his animators time to evolve. He’s blunt about the cost to the craft, and just as blunt about the alternative: refuse to move, and the company withers on the vine. What he won’t do is treat people as inventory. “I never managed to look at staff as chess pieces,” he said. It’s a distinction Emily, laid off after 11 years once there was enough of her past work to repurpose, felt in the room. The divide is between leaders asking how their people can evolve with the technology and leaders asking who they can replace with it.
Twelve years sober, and out loud about it
Then the conversation turns personal. For 10 to 15 years, Quint drank heavily, a couple of bottles of wine a night, then lunchtime client drinks, then miniatures first thing in the morning on a job in Amsterdam just to get through the day. He tried bargaining his way around it, no drinking Monday to Thursday, only gin, before he ran the AA checklist and admitted the obvious. He tapered off over about a week, with a clear caution that stopping abruptly can be dangerous, and he hasn’t had that first drink back since. That was 12 years ago. Quint is, in his words, out and proud about being an alcoholic, in gentle transgression of AA’s own traditions, because he believes it’s one of the last real taboos. He’s an ambassador for NACOA, the National Association for Children of Alcoholics, whose helpline takes calls from kids, some of whom ring just to have a bedtime story read to them.
What you actually get when you stop
His reframe upends the cliche. “When you stop drinking, that’s when you’ve got options,” he says. It’s the person who’s still drinking who’s on the straight and narrow, whose evenings are accounted for by the bottle. The sober friend might be at the gym, on a date, driving somewhere on a whim, living a fuller life without the low hum of dread about tomorrow morning. His advice to anyone quietly wondering about their own drinking is disarmingly small: “If you wanna find out why you drink, stop drinking.” Try it a day at a time and see what comes up. The pub will still be there in three weeks.
The stigma we still haven’t dropped
Quint and Emily, who lives with bipolar disorder and wasn’t diagnosed until her late 20s, land on the same worry from different angles. We are more psychologically literate than ever, and yet young people are in the middle of a second epidemic of anxiety, resources are being cut, and unregulated chatbots are handing out therapy that was never peer-reviewed. Quint points to a figure that stays with you: as many as one in five incarcerated people may have undiagnosed ADHD, self-medicating their way into trouble. His summary of the moment is hard to argue with. “Either the world is nuts or we’re nuts,” he says. “The world is nuts.”
Rewriting success
By the end, Quint’s definition of success has almost nothing to do with the curve he once chased. The empathy he leads with now, the duty of care, the willingness to walk the walk in a room full of strangers, all of it was earned on the other side of something hard. “Your health is your wealth,” he says. “Sit down for a while and think about what really matters to you. And enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.” That’s the quiet center of this one: you can keep evolving through every disruption the world throws at you, as long as you don’t lose yourself along the way.
