Brian Collins is what is known as a legend in the design world. He has either personally designed or overseen some of the biggest design projects. He designed the Hershey store in Times Square. His company redid the branding for Spotify, Mattel Levi's American Express, IBM, some of the biggest, most powerful companies. He has had significant influence in how they look and feel and present themselves to the outside world. By sheer dumb luck. I have known Brian for twenty years, and so I have learned so much from him just from getting to interact with him over all these years. And one of the things that I adore about him is his ability to think about the future, how we live, how we interact with the world and with each other. So we sat down together and we talked about designing the future. This is a bit of optimism. Brian Collins one of my favorite people in the world. I want to talk to you about the future. That's my favorite topic because you, more than almost anyone I know, think about the future, live in the future, build the future, plan the future, and have shown me how to do that. Over the course of a very long time that you and I have known each other twenty years or something we've known each other, which makes me just feel old. I met you when I was four. Yeah, I mean I think I met you. I think I was sixty two, so about the time they canceled the Starski and Hutch they'rekay. Just to give a little context, you and I met when I had a I wasn't entry level, but I was low man on the totem pole. We worked in OGLIVI at May There together, you were the head of the design group there. I was a lowly dog's body and there was a huge new business pitch that the company was working on that took a lot of people involved from the agency to participate. And I was assigned to work on this pitch and I was assigned to work with you. And that's how we met. Yeah, he became part of my team. That became part of your team. That day. Flash forward many many years. We met for lunch and you, as a little gift, gave me a copy of doctor James Carson's Finite and Infinite Games. You gave me his book many many years ago, a book that profoundly changed the course of my life but also changed the way I view the world because it is ostensibly about the future. It's looking at the future in a way that is far more poetic, far more generous, far more encompassing as a metaphor. And I thought at the time, since you were looking at the future in a very big, sort of abundant way, it was all mapped ahead of you, you know, it was all potential, It was a cargo of possibilities in front of you. That this was a book that I thought that had a pretty powerful sort of philosophical then, but it also had poetry to it, and I thought it would be something that you would like. Well, I'm super grateful. So growing up, did you live in your imagination? Were you always thinking about the future? Were you a fan of science fiction? Was that your thing? Well, you know, it's interesting. I think when you're a young child, if you're creative, if you're intensely creative, you learned very early on that your mind works like differently from a lot of their kids, and you can do one of two things about You can either resent that and go off and sort of become insulated and singular. But I come from a big Irish family and within a larger Aish family, so we talk with each other all the time. So I was wired to be social. And so what ended up happening is I think there's a split in me and I'm not an extrovert and I'm not an introvert. I'm an ambrovert, which means I like being really really social and I like really being alone. That does like And so I like hanging out with my family, like hanging out with friends. God knows, I love hanging out with my crew and everyone on my team. But then there's time where I have to go away. And I think, growing up, as I did in the nineteen sixties, everything in the nineteen sixties, sign was about the future. You know. John Kennedy's speech in nineteen sixty two puts the United States on a very different trajectory. We choose the moon, We choose them not because it's easy, because it is hard, and we will get there before the end of this decade decade, right, Okay, Yeah, well you know it's Boston, Brahma. What I saw in front of me was the future was always arriving every day, whether it was on television with science fiction, whether it was in Disneyland with tomorrow Land, whether it was the McDonald's that opened up in Boston looked like it had flown in from the year twenty twenty five. And it was funny. It really interesting to me that the future of architecture first appeared in retail, like retail architecture because it was easy to produce coffee shops, car washes, drive throughs that were sort of mablematic of the world of tomorrow. And so every morning you would wake up and like, what what is tomorrow going to bring? Because all of us were going to the moon, the culture had to catch up with Russia. America thought that the Soviet Union was basically in agrarian are barely a post Aguerrian society. And the first three breakthroughs in the frontier of outer space was made by the Soviet Union, you know, from spotany to the first man in space, and the first dog and the first Doglika, and also the first human being to go into space outside of the capsule. Those are all inventions driven by the Soviet Union. They were ahead of us kind of mathematically and scientifically effectively by decades, and so we had to catch up. So the country was driven And what did that do for you as a kid? So did you just sit and watch TV? Did you dream of going to space? Oh? I dreamed about all of this. I had space toys. I read science fiction starting when I was ten. So I live in that world because it was tomorrow was always coming. All the other thing about the nineteen sixties view of tomorrow was our golden era was going to be ahead of us and not behind. This it was not make America great. America will be better than ever. People will be better than ever, the world will be better than ever. In fact, the benchmark was, well, if we're going to the moon, and we were, then we can solve fill in the blank. We can solve the Vietnam War, we can solve racism, we can solve the common Cold. Because mankind collectively could do that, everything else, by comparison, seems solvable. So future orientation was something that for my childhood. A lot of the kids I grew up with didn't care, but my imagination was absolutely capturized. You and I share something in common, which is we're both diehard optimists, and you know, I mean, I have my definition of optimism and I'm very curious what yours is. One of my definitions of optimism comes from someone who I grew up with Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky's quote was, if you assume that there is no hope, you'll guarantee there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct from freedom that there are opportunities to change things, there's a possibility you can contribute to making a better world. So, in other words, optimism, he said, is a strategy for making a better future, because unless you believe that the future can be better, it's unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it. So if you as soon there's no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope. My definition is that optimism is not blind positivity, and it's not naive. You know, you can live in darkness, you can be in darkness, you can go through hard times. But optimism is the undying belief that the future is bright. One definition that I like in design is design is hope made visible. And there is a great quote by Rebecca Solan and An in your book Hope in the dark. Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch feeling lucky. It is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth treasures, and the grinding out of the poor and marginal. To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabit. Oh my goodness, I love that because hope, I think, is to some people this ethereal thing that is a lottery ticket that you hold on to and you go, I hope, I hope it works out. I hope I win the lottery. It is like it is. But I love this idea of hope being an axe. I absolutely do adore that imagery. Sure, that makes the present inhabitable because you can plan a better future and you and you have the right to change things. That's the thing. It's not it's not passively waiting for the world to change around you. But hope an optimism is a battery that drives the energy for for positive change. So you have this amazing company where you have brilliant designers and strategists and thinkers and doers, but you lose employees constantly. Yeah, for all the brilliant design that you do you also, I don't know, on purpose or by accident built a factory because you build these wonderful people up to become really desirable in the marketplace, and they leave, and so you have this wonderful young team, but they're constantly leaving. I'm so interested in how you build such a successful business where it's just people are constantly quitting to go onto to greener pastures. Well, I wouldn't say that necessarily greener pastures because they're different pastors. Fair enough, fair enough, fair enough, and they're going on for big jobs and more responsibility and getting there. Well, yeah, I think I think that's true. I believe grass is not greener. On the other side, I think grass is greener where you water. Yeah, fair enough, you know. So I've been a teacher first, starting with the California College Warts, and so when your teacher, you have a different perspective. The object is to make sure that your students grow and accelerate. And I speak to my students like I speak with my employees, which is you speak to them about who they can become, not who they are. The other thing I try to do is I don't hire people for their potential. I hire people for their inevitability. What does that mean? Everyone I hire, I see them for who they can become and who they is potential. No, it means I know they will become. In other words, I treat them as if it's inevitable, not potential. Potential is potentially yes, potentially no. But if you treat them that it's inevitable, they will do nothing that succeed. That's a different conversation. You tell somebody you will not fail. There's nothing you can do where you will not fail. There's nothing you can do where the outcome of this will not be successful. You'll be in good hands, everything will be okay. That changes a young person's mindset. So you're teaching them to envision the future for themselves always. You're teaching them the confidence of a bright future. The purpose of columns is not to create followers in Brian Collins, that's stupid. The purpose of columns is to create more leaders. Now, by the way, I've had people who worked with me for twenty one years. I've also had people on our team who work here for eight or nine years. We have boomerangers who come back, and that's really interesting. So if you see yourself as a community of where people come and go. As long as there's a core group of people that keep the values in place, then I'm okay that people go off and try new things, you know, as long as they set as postcards. I'm bomb as somebody who lives in the future, designs the future, builds the future, teaches young people to have confidence in the future and themselves. How do you deal with disappointment? Not? Well? I wish I could be like, well, you know, I'm very said about it, but I'm not because I have hopes for them. So when something goes sideways, just walk me through that. Whether a person lets you down, or a project goes sideways, or a meeting goes badly, how does that show up? Well, I don't see it as failure. Yeah, first, I see it as it's the best you could do, and it's the best that we could do at that point. So let's if we made a mistake, let's apologize, but let's not beat ourselves up. Let's learn from this. If we learn from it, we don't make the same mistake again, then I'm okay. If we make the same mistake again, then I'm like, what the hell make new mistakes? So better. Are you like that with yourself? Because I find the way, you know, because now I'm not I beat myself up to death. My worst things is when I know that I didn't deliver, that I didn't step up to the plate or the standards that I set for my staff and I come short, I will go into a shame spiral. I've got to check out, like why did I do that? And then you know, and sometimes when I when I get like that, you know, the twenty two year old Brian who set out to start his own you know his career, doesn't want to talk to me, like, Brian, I'm not talking to you. You just pissed me off. But you know, it gets back to this idea of disappointment, because disappointed it is related to the idea of regret. And the thing about regret is if you look at it and now that I'm you know, you know, now that I'm on the other side of twenty two, regret could be a tool for opening up a smarter future. Walk me through that I'm I'm because and it's face I'm not sure I agree. Years ago, when I was an obelieve, there was a gifted young designer who worked on my team who found out how much somebody else was making and they were both about the same age. This other person I had to get out of a very famous design company, and so I had to pay him. He's probably made about a twenty five percent more at the time than this other young designer did. And he got wind of it, and he came into my office and publicly in front of four or five other people, said I demand the same level or I will quit. And my ego was like, well, you can't say that to me. You can't say that. I said, Now you've give me no option because you have to quit because if I give you a salary now people will now see that's how you get salaries by coming in and doing brinksmanship. I regret having treated that designer in that way. And so recently when someone had made a mistake around it wasn't a salary issue, but someone came in and acted out of like and this is young, this is a very young designer. I was in my thirties at the time. The designer was all full of pisson vinegar, and someone did the same thing. A young designer on my team was all full of pisson, dinner ger and sort of played briingsmanship with me, and I said, I understand, I hear you. I understand why this is difficult. Why don't we go out and have a dinner and maybe have a drink. Let's think about it. You're enormously important to me and I don't want you to make a mistake. So I've been through this and I will not let you make this mistake. I'm going to give you some options that I think will be good for you, and then we'll make these decisions together if you decide to leave good, if you decide to stake good. But I've got to give you these options so you will not make a mistake. Okay. And so what I did because I did not want to go through their heartbreak looking back at what I did. Life is lived in the moment, but it's understood by looking backwards. And so by the way that he ended up, he saw his options calmed down. It took him two days and he goes, yeah, you're right. Had I made that decision last twenty four hours, I would have regretted it. Yeah, I know. My job is to prevent you from making mistake, or you or giving you options. So you're acting so you're choosing a future instead of reacting against one of you to like, So choose the future. Do you choose this? He said, yes, I want to do this, and he's still a key part of our team. I want to say that again because that's such a good point, to choose a future rather than reacting. Again, it's the one you don't like. Correct, So it's running to wards rather than running away. That's right. He was running away and I didn't want him to run away. I said, after two days, if you choose to run away, I'll support you in doing that, but let me outline a future that might be interesting and we can create it together. And we kicked it back and forth and said, does this seem interesting to you? Oh, yeah, that's better. I didn't know that was possible. Well, you didn't know unless we had a conversation, and you wouldn't have been able to do that had you not screwed it up a bunch of years earlier. Yeah. I'm devastated by that choice, and i'd made I let that designer lead. It was one of the dumbest things I've ever done. I've talked about this before, but I so love it, which is there's this Chinese story that's told, and it's told many ways, but this is the way I know it of a young man who's born with a remarkable ability for horse riding, and everyone in the village says, you're so lucky, and the monk says, we'll see, and then he falls off his horse, breaks his like his career is over, and everyone in the village says, you're so unlucky, and the monk says, we'll see. And then war breaks out and all the young men are sent to battle, but he can't go because of his busted legs, and everyone in the village says, you're so lucky, and the monk says, we'll see. And this is sort of regret, like had you not had that experience go sideways all those years ago, and had that what we're calling a regret, then you may not have learned the lesson on how to actually treat someone properly and with empathy and understand the emotional side of these conversations better later. So the question is do you have to go through regret to grow, Yes, you do. You have no choice. Wisdom isn't gained by studying, isn't gained through reading wisdom is gained through years of sometimes pain and regret. Now the thing about that too is it's not something you do, it's something sometimes is done to you. I'm going to go back to that Hope analogy, which is, I think potential for some people is a lottery ticket they're holding onto, right, which is somebody once told them you have potential, and now they walk around holding onto it. Well, if you're always loaded with potential, then you don't have to choose, because you're always the person on their way to somewhere in great right where inevitability to me, you know, is that acts, which is which is strangely enough, it's not inevitable unless unless you're unless you're plowing forwards. From very early in my career, I always chose who I was going to work for rather than what or where I was going to work for. And I took lower paying job offers because I really liked who my boss was going to be versus the higher paying job and the fancier account who They were fine like, the team was fine, but I wasn't inspired or enamored by them. And I remember that traditional hr question, So, simon, what are you looking for? When I'm being interviewed, and I would always say the same thing. I said, the thing that I'm looking for is a lot like looking for love, I'd say, which I'm looking for a mentor. And I literally went from job to these jobs looking for somebody who would teach me. And this goes back to what you were saying before, which is one of the greatest assets you have as a leader is your also a teacher? And it raises the question should all people in leadership positions and senior leadership positions, should they also teach? Will that make somebody a better leader? Well, I think there are people who are natural leaders, and I'm certainly not one. When I started columns, it was very clear to me in the process of doing it that I became more excited about seeing other people create things that they had no understanding that they could create that level of work, and see young people manifest work or ideas or writing or potentials that they didn't know they could. It is far more interesting to me than anything that I could create. One of my favorite things about our friendship is because we've known each other for so long and because we've actually because I met you professionally, Yeah, is I can actually remember who you were as a leader twenty years ago. I know exactly and who you are as a leader now. And it's fun, I think because I think we can say this about each other, which is because we've been friends for twenty years. It's not like we took a break. And You've always been a genius and you've always had a perspective on the world that is is unique and illuminating. You've always had that. That has always been something that has astounded me about being in a room with you. But I remember back in the day, back in the day, no, no no, no, you're always the smartest guy in the room. But back in the day, it became abundantly clear that you it's not that you wanted to tell us, it's that you just had all these ideas that you did tell us. And you you dominated rooms, oh yeah, and you and you were polarizing. People loved you and hated you back in the day, even you know you you were the genius that you know, and some people had issues with it and some people didn't. What sitting in meetings with you now, it's a totally different experience, really, that's interesting, totally different experience. You're still the smartest guy in the room. But it's amazing how much you defer, and it's amazing how much when somebody asks you your opinion, you go, well, let's ask Stacy her opinion first. It's an amazing thing to see. Was this organic? Was this an evolution or was there another regret? Is there something that happened that pushed you in this direction as an evolving and growing leader. Well, the thing about the thing is about hiring young people. I have a nose for talent. I think I like, and I think you do. We can, you don't have to. We don't need to temper that statement. You have remarkably talented people who work with you. Yeah, But the thing about them is we're kind of I think, if I know, it's for talented misfits, you know, for people who we seen the colins. We all seem to get along with, We all seem to belong with each other because we don't seem to belong at the moment anywhere else. And I've been very, very lucky about that. And I think what starts to happen, right the two kinds of people, the kind of people who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't, right. But they're two kinds of leaders. I think there are those who kind of like uh an architecture, like Frank the Lord right, and there's the grand master in the Guru. And you learn how to design like Frank Floyd Wright. Incredibly, you gain changing philosophy about nature, about about the importance of design, how the world and the world you lived in and in the materials and the habitat you were surrounded by about you informed it and how it informed you and led to some of the most remarkable pieces of architecture in the world, including Falling Water and the googa Im Museum in New York. They feel inevitable, and that's one way of being a design leader. There's another way of being a design meter, which is which is how Jim Henson did it. Because we work in the design of the Jim Henson Exhibit, who created the Muppets and was one of the co creators of Sesame s treat Is. Henson realized his own talent was amplified, accelerated, complimented, dimensionalized color was added to it, musicality is added to it. When he brought in collaborators who are very different than him and the Muppets exist because of that collision of forces that he that he didn't know about. And so the Muppets, even though it said Jim Henson associates the Muppets is a manifestation of thirty forty fifty kinds of musicians and writers and composers and illustrators, clowns, performers, actors, cinematographers, and and he went out to find people who are infinitely better than he was, and as a result, what they did together they never could have done anyone under Frank Lloyd Wright. Franklinker had a nose for talent, but he was also looking for people who were obsequious, you know, who would follow his league, who were gifted but were willing to you know, to go okay, you want it to be their way. And I always found it much more interesting as I progressed in my career Ogilvy, is that I found there were people who are enormously more talented than I was in design, in writing, and like, oh my god, we can actually do more stuff if we hire people who are different than I am, who are not like me. This is important. This is important because we started talking about the future right and the building of the future. And when you're a Frank Lloyd Wright, as genius as you are, you die, and for the rest of time we are forced to repair and put your work in formaldehyde so that we can look back on it. Where you have your Jim Henson's and your Walt Disney's who surrounded themselves with people who are far but and those companies, with their leaders long gone, with their founders long gone, continue to innovate and pave the way in their industries. But because of the people he built around them. And so the inevitability of hope, of hope as an axe, yes requires us the humility. This is very interesting that it requires the humility to surround ourselves with people who are a lot better than we are, and different and different and different. There are people in my team who are not particular, not particularly good writers. They might not be as fluent in conversations about strategy, but if you give them the brief, and the brief is inspiring and opened it enough, they will absorb their brief and they will create things that you will blow or mine. And so you have to have you have to recognize there are going to be different kinds of intelligences, different kinds of energies you have to create people who You have to create room for people who are insanely introverted, who may even be by every definition, somewhere on the spectrum whatever that means, as well as people who are alphas who are going to go out and help you, you know, win the day in a massive project. The culture has to accommodate all sorts of different energies. We do not. I despise, despise the term cultural fit. What a pernicious work. You don't fit, Get out, really, you don't fit. Leave. It is such a cover, It is such a tiny fig leaf for people to hide behind any kind of remans that I don't like. You can hide all sorts of things, racism, homophobia, you know, all sorts of all sorts of fears. Where we hire for what we would say is cultural contribution. What do you bring? How are you different? How can you add to our tapestry with something that we don't have? How can you do how can you bring something to us that's different? So we try hard for people who are not a fit, but who who contribute to something, and then the culture has to then accommodate them. I like this because the culture absolutely is a set of values. Right. There is such thing as fitting the culture. But what I love is this terminology of seeing someone as a fit absolutely has a pernicious side to it. But what I like is fit is passive, right, Like you're you're a square. We have a place for a square over here, square peg, square hole, ta da right Versus contribution, which is a growth mindset with its contribution, which is we're growing, we're expanding, we're amplifying, and we need whatever it is you have to help us amplify. It goes back to Frank Lloyd Wright. Do you fit? Are you you know? Will you be the square peg that I need in the square hole at this moment to serve to serve me? Or are you going to do something that's going to challenge me and make me uncomfortable? Jim Henson, Walt Disney. Uh, And look what we can build together that I couldn't do without you. That's that's cultural contribution. I really really like that for us to think of someone as a potential cultural contributor rather than a fit. What you bring that we don't have? How do your voice different? How is your personality different? How can you and I'm going to even tweak my language in not as a potential cultural contributor, an inevitable cultural inevitable part great, yes, once again a prisoner of language. Thank you you spot my achilles he and I'm with you. I mean like that. But I think changing words, I mean you and I both know this. Changing the words we use actually matters. It sure does. Is a proverb, I think, of course statement. I think it comes from the Igory coast. I might be wrong, but it says, if you want to go somewhere fast, go alone, if you want to go somewhere far and go together, right. But that means there's there are going to be certain kinds of things that you do with the people a bunch of people who are going to go together. It's going to be arguments. There's going to be difficulties because you have to accommodate, particularly if you want to accommodate enormously talented and commonly gifted people like we have at our company, and they tend to be ambitious, They tend to want to run fast and get things done, make stuff. Talented people love to get stuff out the door. One of the things that we've had to do this is sometimes. Good thing I've learned is that there are people who are love to talk, and there are people who love to do, and then there are people who love to do both. I think there's a huge mistake in the business press, in the writing about business and the studying of leadership. Sure, and it's and it's this, which is we spend too much time studying the companies who are quote unquote big, successful, fast growing, where the leaders have outsized egos, you know, for all for all the reasons. And I think we're missing an opportunity to study the creative companies. You know, Yes, there's been books written by you know, about Disney and about Henson, but they tend to be read by people from those industries, from creative people like the like everybody in the world isn't reading about Jim Henson like they read about you know, General Electric. You know, they're writing books about Google and Twitter and Amazon. But but I think studying cre creative companies, theater companies, dance companies, yours a design company, where where the idea of hiring misfits and hiring for contribution and hire and by the way, hiring introverts and how you create space for an introvert who is insanely talented. But it's really important if you're building a creative company where you want to be on the frontier of things all the time, and we always want to be on the frontier, So I have to make space. And I sense this person might have something. It gets back to this puzzle, I think, and I've seen this an awful lot and I've seen and I've been falling victim to this because I like people who are intelligent, hyper articulate and charismatic, and I fall for it more often than not. Is if you're not careful. And I don't do this anymore. I used to do it a lot, and we started Collins is a hire. I would hire articulate incompetence, and the market and the marketing industries shock a block with them. People who can talk the blue streak, don't know how to write a deck, don't know how to design it, don't know how to design a damn thing. I can't write it. I've hired. I've hired some of those companies. Oh and they they go, yeah, more of this, more of that advertising marketing is filled with them. Yeah, and they can they don't have ideas, but man, can they talk a blue streak man? Can they sell you? You You know, they can sell ice in Minnesota in January when it there's thirty degrees, blows zero and snow drifts ten. And they're like, and I and I fallen victims of these. Yeah, it's true. And I have to articulate incompetence. I think, yeah, that is that sums up the industry. Articulate competency is rife. And and you see them and and they're and and they get and the other flip side is they get fame and mastery confused or conflated. And so what we try to do is is I and I see this with with the young creative people of them, is they get they get fame, you know, because of Instagram, Godness, TikTok, Pinterest, all the places that they're posting. They can become very very famous. But but you don't have to be very very good. There are less great masterful creative people, but not all of them are famous. And so what I try to do is not complaint to and I'm very interested in mastery. Mastery is a long game. This is so interesting to me. I've learned so much about what it takes to build the future, and the idea of hiring for cultural contribution, the idea of looking for misfits and offering them the inevitability of their own future. And it's really a confidence grain, right, helping them build the confidence and putting them in uncomfortable positions and letting them know that they can't fail because they're full of They're surrounded by people who want to see them succeed and feel supported, who will not let them, will not let them fail. And if they have a setback, then it's simply a lesson and we'll get through this together, you know, because not everything goes according to plan No, and you know, God, that's we've made mistakes and people, you know, we'd like for whatever reason. There is no greater statement of optimism then to think about the future as an inevitable positive place use the word the future. I use the word the futures because there's no such thing as the future. All futures are in competition with each other all the time. The future, I thought it was going to be inevitable. In the year twenty sixteen, I sat with fifteen members of my team. I saw that future collapse. In November twenty sixteen. I'm like, what that future was not inevitable? And I thought it was. All futures are in competition with other futures all the time. You have to choose which future are you going to invest in? But then it's not inevitable, is it? No? No No, no, no no no no no. What I'm saying is their trajectory to be self actualized, in my mind, is inevitable. I love this. I love There's no such thing as I'm going to say again because I love it. There's no such thing as the future. Now. There are futures, and all of these ideas of what the future could be are in competition. And this is and shapeable, which is why we have to show up in life with an AX and not a lottery ticket, because the future that we get to live in is the one that we that we will have to build and bash down doors to see happen, and the one that you believe is worth fighting for, and the one that you believe is worth fighting for. Amen to that, Brian. I could talk to you for hours. Thank you so much for doing this with me. This is so good. Every time I talk to you, I learned something new. I really do. I love it well, sign of the same thing back. It was great. How do I say? This week we talked about regret, right, I've learned two things, if I've learned anything at all, is the power of regret to be a sort of a tiller to help you avoid the same mistakes. And I use it in some ways as a bit of a sale to to find to help me make better decisions. And the second thing I've learned about regret, probably more than anything else, the secret of long term, greative relationships is the secret of long term romantic relationships. And it's not respect, it's not delight, it's not confidence, it's not it's endless, endless, endless forgiveness and saying Okay, we'll try it next time, and let's get up and do it again tomorrow. Yeah, that's true. I love you, Brian, I really do. I'll talk to you soon. If you enjoyed this podcast and you'd like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.

Brian Collins is what is known as a legend in the design world. He has either personally designed or overseen some of the biggest design projects. He designed the Hershey store in Times Square. His company redid the branding for Spotify, Mattel Levi's American Express, IBM, some of the biggest, most powerful companies. He has had significant influence in how they look and feel and present themselves to the outside world. By sheer dumb luck. I have known Brian for twenty years, and so I have learned so much from him just from getting to interact with him over all these years. And one of the things that I adore about him is his ability to think about the future, how we live, how we interact with the world and with each other. So we sat down together and we talked about designing the future. This is a bit of optimism. Brian Collins one of my favorite people in the world. I want to talk to you about the future. That's my favorite topic because you, more than almost anyone I know, think about the future, live in the future, build the future, plan the future, and have shown me how to do that. Over the course of a very long time that you and I have known each other twenty years or something we've known each other, which makes me just feel old. I met you when I was four. Yeah, I mean I think I met you. I think I was sixty two, so about the time they canceled the Starski and Hutch they'rekay. Just to give a little context, you and I met when I had a I wasn't entry level, but I was low man on the totem pole. We worked in OGLIVI at May There together, you were the head of the design group there. I was a lowly dog's body and there was a huge new business pitch that the company was working on that took a lot of people involved from the agency to participate. And I was assigned to work on this pitch and I was assigned to work with you. And that's how we met. Yeah, he became part of my team. That became part of your team. That day. Flash forward many many years. We met for lunch and you, as a little gift, gave me a copy of doctor James Carson's Finite and Infinite Games. You gave me his book many many years ago, a book that profoundly changed the course of my life but also changed the way I view the world because it is ostensibly about the future. It's looking at the future in a way that is far more poetic, far more generous, far more encompassing as a metaphor. And I thought at the time, since you were looking at the future in a very big, sort of abundant way, it was all mapped ahead of you, you know, it was all potential, It was a cargo of possibilities in front of you. That this was a book that I thought that had a pretty powerful sort of philosophical then, but it also had poetry to it, and I thought it would be something that you would like. Well, I'm super grateful. So growing up, did you live in your imagination? Were you always thinking about the future? Were you a fan of science fiction? Was that your thing? Well, you know, it's interesting. I think when you're a young child, if you're creative, if you're intensely creative, you learned very early on that your mind works like differently from a lot of their kids, and you can do one of two things about You can either resent that and go off and sort of become insulated and singular. But I come from a big Irish family and within a larger Aish family, so we talk with each other all the time. So I was wired to be social. And so what ended up happening is I think there's a split in me and I'm not an extrovert and I'm not an introvert. I'm an ambrovert, which means I like being really really social and I like really being alone. That does like And so I like hanging out with my family, like hanging out with friends. God knows, I love hanging out with my crew and everyone on my team. But then there's time where I have to go away. And I think, growing up, as I did in the nineteen sixties, everything in the nineteen sixties, sign was about the future. You know. John Kennedy's speech in nineteen sixty two puts the United States on a very different trajectory. We choose the moon, We choose them not because it's easy, because it is hard, and we will get there before the end of this decade decade, right, Okay, Yeah, well you know it's Boston, Brahma. What I saw in front of me was the future was always arriving every day, whether it was on television with science fiction, whether it was in Disneyland with tomorrow Land, whether it was the McDonald's that opened up in Boston looked like it had flown in from the year twenty twenty five. And it was funny. It really interesting to me that the future of architecture first appeared in retail, like retail architecture because it was easy to produce coffee shops, car washes, drive throughs that were sort of mablematic of the world of tomorrow. And so every morning you would wake up and like, what what is tomorrow going to bring? Because all of us were going to the moon, the culture had to catch up with Russia. America thought that the Soviet Union was basically in agrarian are barely a post Aguerrian society. And the first three breakthroughs in the frontier of outer space was made by the Soviet Union, you know, from spotany to the first man in space, and the first dog and the first Doglika, and also the first human being to go into space outside of the capsule. Those are all inventions driven by the Soviet Union. They were ahead of us kind of mathematically and scientifically effectively by decades, and so we had to catch up. So the country was driven And what did that do for you as a kid? So did you just sit and watch TV? Did you dream of going to space? Oh? I dreamed about all of this. I had space toys. I read science fiction starting when I was ten. So I live in that world because it was tomorrow was always coming. All the other thing about the nineteen sixties view of tomorrow was our golden era was going to be ahead of us and not behind. This it was not make America great. America will be better than ever. People will be better than ever, the world will be better than ever. In fact, the benchmark was, well, if we're going to the moon, and we were, then we can solve fill in the blank. We can solve the Vietnam War, we can solve racism, we can solve the common Cold. Because mankind collectively could do that, everything else, by comparison, seems solvable. So future orientation was something that for my childhood. A lot of the kids I grew up with didn't care, but my imagination was absolutely capturized. You and I share something in common, which is we're both diehard optimists, and you know, I mean, I have my definition of optimism and I'm very curious what yours is. One of my definitions of optimism comes from someone who I grew up with Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky's quote was, if you assume that there is no hope, you'll guarantee there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct from freedom that there are opportunities to change things, there's a possibility you can contribute to making a better world. So, in other words, optimism, he said, is a strategy for making a better future, because unless you believe that the future can be better, it's unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it. So if you as soon there's no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope. My definition is that optimism is not blind positivity, and it's not naive. You know, you can live in darkness, you can be in darkness, you can go through hard times. But optimism is the undying belief that the future is bright. One definition that I like in design is design is hope made visible. And there is a great quote by Rebecca Solan and An in your book Hope in the dark. Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch feeling lucky. It is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth treasures, and the grinding out of the poor and marginal. To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabit. Oh my goodness, I love that because hope, I think, is to some people this ethereal thing that is a lottery ticket that you hold on to and you go, I hope, I hope it works out. I hope I win the lottery. It is like it is. But I love this idea of hope being an axe. I absolutely do adore that imagery. Sure, that makes the present inhabitable because you can plan a better future and you and you have the right to change things. That's the thing. It's not it's not passively waiting for the world to change around you. But hope an optimism is a battery that drives the energy for for positive change. So you have this amazing company where you have brilliant designers and strategists and thinkers and doers, but you lose employees constantly. Yeah, for all the brilliant design that you do you also, I don't know, on purpose or by accident built a factory because you build these wonderful people up to become really desirable in the marketplace, and they leave, and so you have this wonderful young team, but they're constantly leaving. I'm so interested in how you build such a successful business where it's just people are constantly quitting to go onto to greener pastures. Well, I wouldn't say that necessarily greener pastures because they're different pastors. Fair enough, fair enough, fair enough, and they're going on for big jobs and more responsibility and getting there. Well, yeah, I think I think that's true. I believe grass is not greener. On the other side, I think grass is greener where you water. Yeah, fair enough, you know. So I've been a teacher first, starting with the California College Warts, and so when your teacher, you have a different perspective. The object is to make sure that your students grow and accelerate. And I speak to my students like I speak with my employees, which is you speak to them about who they can become, not who they are. The other thing I try to do is I don't hire people for their potential. I hire people for their inevitability. What does that mean? Everyone I hire, I see them for who they can become and who they is potential. No, it means I know they will become. In other words, I treat them as if it's inevitable, not potential. Potential is potentially yes, potentially no. But if you treat them that it's inevitable, they will do nothing that succeed. That's a different conversation. You tell somebody you will not fail. There's nothing you can do where you will not fail. There's nothing you can do where the outcome of this will not be successful. You'll be in good hands, everything will be okay. That changes a young person's mindset. So you're teaching them to envision the future for themselves always. You're teaching them the confidence of a bright future. The purpose of columns is not to create followers in Brian Collins, that's stupid. The purpose of columns is to create more leaders. Now, by the way, I've had people who worked with me for twenty one years. I've also had people on our team who work here for eight or nine years. We have boomerangers who come back, and that's really interesting. So if you see yourself as a community of where people come and go. As long as there's a core group of people that keep the values in place, then I'm okay that people go off and try new things, you know, as long as they set as postcards. I'm bomb as somebody who lives in the future, designs the future, builds the future, teaches young people to have confidence in the future and themselves. How do you deal with disappointment? Not? Well? I wish I could be like, well, you know, I'm very said about it, but I'm not because I have hopes for them. So when something goes sideways, just walk me through that. Whether a person lets you down, or a project goes sideways, or a meeting goes badly, how does that show up? Well, I don't see it as failure. Yeah, first, I see it as it's the best you could do, and it's the best that we could do at that point. So let's if we made a mistake, let's apologize, but let's not beat ourselves up. Let's learn from this. If we learn from it, we don't make the same mistake again, then I'm okay. If we make the same mistake again, then I'm like, what the hell make new mistakes? So better. Are you like that with yourself? Because I find the way, you know, because now I'm not I beat myself up to death. My worst things is when I know that I didn't deliver, that I didn't step up to the plate or the standards that I set for my staff and I come short, I will go into a shame spiral. I've got to check out, like why did I do that? And then you know, and sometimes when I when I get like that, you know, the twenty two year old Brian who set out to start his own you know his career, doesn't want to talk to me, like, Brian, I'm not talking to you. You just pissed me off. But you know, it gets back to this idea of disappointment, because disappointed it is related to the idea of regret. And the thing about regret is if you look at it and now that I'm you know, you know, now that I'm on the other side of twenty two, regret could be a tool for opening up a smarter future. Walk me through that I'm I'm because and it's face I'm not sure I agree. Years ago, when I was an obelieve, there was a gifted young designer who worked on my team who found out how much somebody else was making and they were both about the same age. This other person I had to get out of a very famous design company, and so I had to pay him. He's probably made about a twenty five percent more at the time than this other young designer did. And he got wind of it, and he came into my office and publicly in front of four or five other people, said I demand the same level or I will quit. And my ego was like, well, you can't say that to me. You can't say that. I said, Now you've give me no option because you have to quit because if I give you a salary now people will now see that's how you get salaries by coming in and doing brinksmanship. I regret having treated that designer in that way. And so recently when someone had made a mistake around it wasn't a salary issue, but someone came in and acted out of like and this is young, this is a very young designer. I was in my thirties at the time. The designer was all full of pisson vinegar, and someone did the same thing. A young designer on my team was all full of pisson, dinner ger and sort of played briingsmanship with me, and I said, I understand, I hear you. I understand why this is difficult. Why don't we go out and have a dinner and maybe have a drink. Let's think about it. You're enormously important to me and I don't want you to make a mistake. So I've been through this and I will not let you make this mistake. I'm going to give you some options that I think will be good for you, and then we'll make these decisions together if you decide to leave good, if you decide to stake good. But I've got to give you these options so you will not make a mistake. Okay. And so what I did because I did not want to go through their heartbreak looking back at what I did. Life is lived in the moment, but it's understood by looking backwards. And so by the way that he ended up, he saw his options calmed down. It took him two days and he goes, yeah, you're right. Had I made that decision last twenty four hours, I would have regretted it. Yeah, I know. My job is to prevent you from making mistake, or you or giving you options. So you're acting so you're choosing a future instead of reacting against one of you to like, So choose the future. Do you choose this? He said, yes, I want to do this, and he's still a key part of our team. I want to say that again because that's such a good point, to choose a future rather than reacting. Again, it's the one you don't like. Correct, So it's running to wards rather than running away. That's right. He was running away and I didn't want him to run away. I said, after two days, if you choose to run away, I'll support you in doing that, but let me outline a future that might be interesting and we can create it together. And we kicked it back and forth and said, does this seem interesting to you? Oh, yeah, that's better. I didn't know that was possible. Well, you didn't know unless we had a conversation, and you wouldn't have been able to do that had you not screwed it up a bunch of years earlier. Yeah. I'm devastated by that choice, and i'd made I let that designer lead. It was one of the dumbest things I've ever done. I've talked about this before, but I so love it, which is there's this Chinese story that's told, and it's told many ways, but this is the way I know it of a young man who's born with a remarkable ability for horse riding, and everyone in the village says, you're so lucky, and the monk says, we'll see, and then he falls off his horse, breaks his like his career is over, and everyone in the village says, you're so unlucky, and the monk says, we'll see. And then war breaks out and all the young men are sent to battle, but he can't go because of his busted legs, and everyone in the village says, you're so lucky, and the monk says, we'll see. And this is sort of regret, like had you not had that experience go sideways all those years ago, and had that what we're calling a regret, then you may not have learned the lesson on how to actually treat someone properly and with empathy and understand the emotional side of these conversations better later. So the question is do you have to go through regret to grow, Yes, you do. You have no choice. Wisdom isn't gained by studying, isn't gained through reading wisdom is gained through years of sometimes pain and regret. Now the thing about that too is it's not something you do, it's something sometimes is done to you. I'm going to go back to that Hope analogy, which is, I think potential for some people is a lottery ticket they're holding onto, right, which is somebody once told them you have potential, and now they walk around holding onto it. Well, if you're always loaded with potential, then you don't have to choose, because you're always the person on their way to somewhere in great right where inevitability to me, you know, is that acts, which is which is strangely enough, it's not inevitable unless unless you're unless you're plowing forwards. From very early in my career, I always chose who I was going to work for rather than what or where I was going to work for. And I took lower paying job offers because I really liked who my boss was going to be versus the higher paying job and the fancier account who They were fine like, the team was fine, but I wasn't inspired or enamored by them. And I remember that traditional hr question, So, simon, what are you looking for? When I'm being interviewed, and I would always say the same thing. I said, the thing that I'm looking for is a lot like looking for love, I'd say, which I'm looking for a mentor. And I literally went from job to these jobs looking for somebody who would teach me. And this goes back to what you were saying before, which is one of the greatest assets you have as a leader is your also a teacher? And it raises the question should all people in leadership positions and senior leadership positions, should they also teach? Will that make somebody a better leader? Well, I think there are people who are natural leaders, and I'm certainly not one. When I started columns, it was very clear to me in the process of doing it that I became more excited about seeing other people create things that they had no understanding that they could create that level of work, and see young people manifest work or ideas or writing or potentials that they didn't know they could. It is far more interesting to me than anything that I could create. One of my favorite things about our friendship is because we've known each other for so long and because we've actually because I met you professionally, Yeah, is I can actually remember who you were as a leader twenty years ago. I know exactly and who you are as a leader now. And it's fun, I think because I think we can say this about each other, which is because we've been friends for twenty years. It's not like we took a break. And You've always been a genius and you've always had a perspective on the world that is is unique and illuminating. You've always had that. That has always been something that has astounded me about being in a room with you. But I remember back in the day, back in the day, no, no no, no, you're always the smartest guy in the room. But back in the day, it became abundantly clear that you it's not that you wanted to tell us, it's that you just had all these ideas that you did tell us. And you you dominated rooms, oh yeah, and you and you were polarizing. People loved you and hated you back in the day, even you know you you were the genius that you know, and some people had issues with it and some people didn't. What sitting in meetings with you now, it's a totally different experience, really, that's interesting, totally different experience. You're still the smartest guy in the room. But it's amazing how much you defer, and it's amazing how much when somebody asks you your opinion, you go, well, let's ask Stacy her opinion first. It's an amazing thing to see. Was this organic? Was this an evolution or was there another regret? Is there something that happened that pushed you in this direction as an evolving and growing leader. Well, the thing about the thing is about hiring young people. I have a nose for talent. I think I like, and I think you do. We can, you don't have to. We don't need to temper that statement. You have remarkably talented people who work with you. Yeah, But the thing about them is we're kind of I think, if I know, it's for talented misfits, you know, for people who we seen the colins. We all seem to get along with, We all seem to belong with each other because we don't seem to belong at the moment anywhere else. And I've been very, very lucky about that. And I think what starts to happen, right the two kinds of people, the kind of people who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't, right. But they're two kinds of leaders. I think there are those who kind of like uh an architecture, like Frank the Lord right, and there's the grand master in the Guru. And you learn how to design like Frank Floyd Wright. Incredibly, you gain changing philosophy about nature, about about the importance of design, how the world and the world you lived in and in the materials and the habitat you were surrounded by about you informed it and how it informed you and led to some of the most remarkable pieces of architecture in the world, including Falling Water and the googa Im Museum in New York. They feel inevitable, and that's one way of being a design leader. There's another way of being a design meter, which is which is how Jim Henson did it. Because we work in the design of the Jim Henson Exhibit, who created the Muppets and was one of the co creators of Sesame s treat Is. Henson realized his own talent was amplified, accelerated, complimented, dimensionalized color was added to it, musicality is added to it. When he brought in collaborators who are very different than him and the Muppets exist because of that collision of forces that he that he didn't know about. And so the Muppets, even though it said Jim Henson associates the Muppets is a manifestation of thirty forty fifty kinds of musicians and writers and composers and illustrators, clowns, performers, actors, cinematographers, and and he went out to find people who are infinitely better than he was, and as a result, what they did together they never could have done anyone under Frank Lloyd Wright. Franklinker had a nose for talent, but he was also looking for people who were obsequious, you know, who would follow his league, who were gifted but were willing to you know, to go okay, you want it to be their way. And I always found it much more interesting as I progressed in my career Ogilvy, is that I found there were people who are enormously more talented than I was in design, in writing, and like, oh my god, we can actually do more stuff if we hire people who are different than I am, who are not like me. This is important. This is important because we started talking about the future right and the building of the future. And when you're a Frank Lloyd Wright, as genius as you are, you die, and for the rest of time we are forced to repair and put your work in formaldehyde so that we can look back on it. Where you have your Jim Henson's and your Walt Disney's who surrounded themselves with people who are far but and those companies, with their leaders long gone, with their founders long gone, continue to innovate and pave the way in their industries. But because of the people he built around them. And so the inevitability of hope, of hope as an axe, yes requires us the humility. This is very interesting that it requires the humility to surround ourselves with people who are a lot better than we are, and different and different and different. There are people in my team who are not particular, not particularly good writers. They might not be as fluent in conversations about strategy, but if you give them the brief, and the brief is inspiring and opened it enough, they will absorb their brief and they will create things that you will blow or mine. And so you have to have you have to recognize there are going to be different kinds of intelligences, different kinds of energies you have to create people who You have to create room for people who are insanely introverted, who may even be by every definition, somewhere on the spectrum whatever that means, as well as people who are alphas who are going to go out and help you, you know, win the day in a massive project. The culture has to accommodate all sorts of different energies. We do not. I despise, despise the term cultural fit. What a pernicious work. You don't fit, Get out, really, you don't fit. Leave. It is such a cover, It is such a tiny fig leaf for people to hide behind any kind of remans that I don't like. You can hide all sorts of things, racism, homophobia, you know, all sorts of all sorts of fears. Where we hire for what we would say is cultural contribution. What do you bring? How are you different? How can you add to our tapestry with something that we don't have? How can you do how can you bring something to us that's different? So we try hard for people who are not a fit, but who who contribute to something, and then the culture has to then accommodate them. I like this because the culture absolutely is a set of values. Right. There is such thing as fitting the culture. But what I love is this terminology of seeing someone as a fit absolutely has a pernicious side to it. But what I like is fit is passive, right, Like you're you're a square. We have a place for a square over here, square peg, square hole, ta da right Versus contribution, which is a growth mindset with its contribution, which is we're growing, we're expanding, we're amplifying, and we need whatever it is you have to help us amplify. It goes back to Frank Lloyd Wright. Do you fit? Are you you know? Will you be the square peg that I need in the square hole at this moment to serve to serve me? Or are you going to do something that's going to challenge me and make me uncomfortable? Jim Henson, Walt Disney. Uh, And look what we can build together that I couldn't do without you. That's that's cultural contribution. I really really like that for us to think of someone as a potential cultural contributor rather than a fit. What you bring that we don't have? How do your voice different? How is your personality different? How can you and I'm going to even tweak my language in not as a potential cultural contributor, an inevitable cultural inevitable part great, yes, once again a prisoner of language. Thank you you spot my achilles he and I'm with you. I mean like that. But I think changing words, I mean you and I both know this. Changing the words we use actually matters. It sure does. Is a proverb, I think, of course statement. I think it comes from the Igory coast. I might be wrong, but it says, if you want to go somewhere fast, go alone, if you want to go somewhere far and go together, right. But that means there's there are going to be certain kinds of things that you do with the people a bunch of people who are going to go together. It's going to be arguments. There's going to be difficulties because you have to accommodate, particularly if you want to accommodate enormously talented and commonly gifted people like we have at our company, and they tend to be ambitious, They tend to want to run fast and get things done, make stuff. Talented people love to get stuff out the door. One of the things that we've had to do this is sometimes. Good thing I've learned is that there are people who are love to talk, and there are people who love to do, and then there are people who love to do both. I think there's a huge mistake in the business press, in the writing about business and the studying of leadership. Sure, and it's and it's this, which is we spend too much time studying the companies who are quote unquote big, successful, fast growing, where the leaders have outsized egos, you know, for all for all the reasons. And I think we're missing an opportunity to study the creative companies. You know, Yes, there's been books written by you know, about Disney and about Henson, but they tend to be read by people from those industries, from creative people like the like everybody in the world isn't reading about Jim Henson like they read about you know, General Electric. You know, they're writing books about Google and Twitter and Amazon. But but I think studying cre creative companies, theater companies, dance companies, yours a design company, where where the idea of hiring misfits and hiring for contribution and hire and by the way, hiring introverts and how you create space for an introvert who is insanely talented. But it's really important if you're building a creative company where you want to be on the frontier of things all the time, and we always want to be on the frontier, So I have to make space. And I sense this person might have something. It gets back to this puzzle, I think, and I've seen this an awful lot and I've seen and I've been falling victim to this because I like people who are intelligent, hyper articulate and charismatic, and I fall for it more often than not. Is if you're not careful. And I don't do this anymore. I used to do it a lot, and we started Collins is a hire. I would hire articulate incompetence, and the market and the marketing industries shock a block with them. People who can talk the blue streak, don't know how to write a deck, don't know how to design it, don't know how to design a damn thing. I can't write it. I've hired. I've hired some of those companies. Oh and they they go, yeah, more of this, more of that advertising marketing is filled with them. Yeah, and they can they don't have ideas, but man, can they talk a blue streak man? Can they sell you? You You know, they can sell ice in Minnesota in January when it there's thirty degrees, blows zero and snow drifts ten. And they're like, and I and I fallen victims of these. Yeah, it's true. And I have to articulate incompetence. I think, yeah, that is that sums up the industry. Articulate competency is rife. And and you see them and and they're and and they get and the other flip side is they get fame and mastery confused or conflated. And so what we try to do is is I and I see this with with the young creative people of them, is they get they get fame, you know, because of Instagram, Godness, TikTok, Pinterest, all the places that they're posting. They can become very very famous. But but you don't have to be very very good. There are less great masterful creative people, but not all of them are famous. And so what I try to do is not complaint to and I'm very interested in mastery. Mastery is a long game. This is so interesting to me. I've learned so much about what it takes to build the future, and the idea of hiring for cultural contribution, the idea of looking for misfits and offering them the inevitability of their own future. And it's really a confidence grain, right, helping them build the confidence and putting them in uncomfortable positions and letting them know that they can't fail because they're full of They're surrounded by people who want to see them succeed and feel supported, who will not let them, will not let them fail. And if they have a setback, then it's simply a lesson and we'll get through this together, you know, because not everything goes according to plan No, and you know, God, that's we've made mistakes and people, you know, we'd like for whatever reason. There is no greater statement of optimism then to think about the future as an inevitable positive place use the word the future. I use the word the futures because there's no such thing as the future. All futures are in competition with each other all the time. The future, I thought it was going to be inevitable. In the year twenty sixteen, I sat with fifteen members of my team. I saw that future collapse. In November twenty sixteen. I'm like, what that future was not inevitable? And I thought it was. All futures are in competition with other futures all the time. You have to choose which future are you going to invest in? But then it's not inevitable, is it? No? No No, no, no no no no no. What I'm saying is their trajectory to be self actualized, in my mind, is inevitable. I love this. I love There's no such thing as I'm going to say again because I love it. There's no such thing as the future. Now. There are futures, and all of these ideas of what the future could be are in competition. And this is and shapeable, which is why we have to show up in life with an AX and not a lottery ticket, because the future that we get to live in is the one that we that we will have to build and bash down doors to see happen, and the one that you believe is worth fighting for, and the one that you believe is worth fighting for. Amen to that, Brian. I could talk to you for hours. Thank you so much for doing this with me. This is so good. Every time I talk to you, I learned something new. I really do. I love it well, sign of the same thing back. It was great. How do I say? This week we talked about regret, right, I've learned two things, if I've learned anything at all, is the power of regret to be a sort of a tiller to help you avoid the same mistakes. And I use it in some ways as a bit of a sale to to find to help me make better decisions. And the second thing I've learned about regret, probably more than anything else, the secret of long term, greative relationships is the secret of long term romantic relationships. And it's not respect, it's not delight, it's not confidence, it's not it's endless, endless, endless forgiveness and saying Okay, we'll try it next time, and let's get up and do it again tomorrow. Yeah, that's true. I love you, Brian, I really do. I'll talk to you soon. If you enjoyed this podcast and you'd like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.