Former Global Futurist and Long Term Strategy Director at HP (Hewlett-Packard) Jonathan Brill helps business and Hollywood leaders envision and profit from radical change. Jonathan shares insights on testing your future strategies, the power of Jack of all Trades rather than master of one, and what it means to successfully ride the waves of change.
Larry Olsen: Welcome. I'm Larry Olsen, and what's on your mind? Once set, it delivers your life. To change the outcomes we want, we must change the plays we’re running. Join us at Mindset Playbook with Real people - Real talk for Real insight.
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Larry Olsen I want to welcome you to Mindset Playbook, where today's guest is the highly sought after Jonathan Brill. Jonathan is a former global futurist at HP. He's an expert on resilient growth and innovation under uncertainty, and he helps Hollywood and corporate leaders and vision and profit from radical change. His new book, Rogue Waves, shares decision making and innovation tools that have helped companies’ growth through crises and generate over $27 billion in new revenue across a range of industries. He is an in-demand thought leader, speaker and contributor to TED, Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today. Welcome, Jonathan, and thank you for investing your time with us today.
Jonathan Brill [00:03:23] Thank you so much. I am excited to be here.
Larry Olsen [00:03:26] Yeah, it's a pleasure. You know, Jonathan, you've experienced great success by assisting other organizations in envisioning and acting upon what most can only imagine. And that's the future. Regarding your own growth, what do you believe has been the foundation to your success?
Jonathan Brill [00:03:47] So I would say two things. The first is a piece of advice I got very early in my career from a mentor, and he said there are there are two paths forward. You can go deep in one thing, or you can understand many things. It early in your career. Like the payoff for going deep are great. But later in your career, the pay asked for going abroad are profound. And I think it's easy to dilettante your way through, you know, and not actually master anything you touch. Mm-Hmm. But his advice to go abroad and really spend a couple of years in a range of different areas fields, industries. I think that's what's brought me some success over time because I've seen more. I've seen more challenges and I know more ways in and out of them than the people who have just been on one or two places.
Larry Olsen [00:04:52] But it seems to that you're probably not as locked on. You haven't created these strong parameters around you because you're a quoted expert in that field. And sometimes our own expertise can blind us to other opportunities. Mm-Hmm. So, that may have been some of what he was referencing to.
Jonathan Brill [00:05:13] I think I think it was in martial arts, they talk about having soft ties or soft, say, paying attention to the periphery. (Olsen: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.) Yeah. Instead of what's going on right in front of you and in the moment, it's so easy to focus on what's right there. (Olsen:Absolutely.) And ignore the what was going on around, so Marsh McLennan, the risk management firm and they the insurance adviser. You know, they're the people that everyone goes to and asks what they should put in their risk profiles and they're their assessing taking case. You know, it's so fascinating when you take a look at what they were advising in 2019 and their annual risk report and what they're advising today and their annual risk report. And guess what? It's whatever is in the headlines and is scaring the pants off of boards of directors today.
Larry Olsen [00:06:09] Oh, for heaven's sakes. Very reactionary, huh?
Jonathan Brill [00:06:12] Very, very reactionary, and very based on the history of your industry during your career. When you take a look at, what was going on with something like Covid? Right. Or Respiratoria is of another pandemic, we were tracking that at HP because we were looking at technology issues, technologies that might be really useful if something like this happened. And it turned out that, you know, most people were looking at this as a one in 100 chance, right? Like, it's happened in 1918 and 1917. We had a pandemic hasn't really happened again. We have the Hong Kong flu. We have a couple of other things. But what actually was happening was that these were occurring more frequently, so knowing pandemics were occurring more frequently. We were just getting better at containing the. Mm-Hmm. And so, we were looking at this thing where the risk was incredibly dynamic. Our experience of it was that it was static. And my point about, you know, hard side versus soft side is if you're looking at the moment, you aren't looking at the underlying characteristics that are changing the shape of your future. You're looking at what you know, what's in front of you, how to hit the corner. The reality of how things change right, is typically they're not linear. It's not like you get, you know, we do business planning where you can see kids and business school and they're like, oh yeah, I'll do six percent better or worse next year. But that's not how it works, right? You have AMC moments where you do 100 percent worse and all the movie theaters close or you have Zoom moments where you have 26 times growth, right? And those are actually, in many cases, more reliable growth trajectories than we're going to do six percent better or worse because of what they call a rogue wave. So, the way that the future typically works is that you have your own way of disruption and some other ways of disruption, and we look at them individually, but we don't actually look at what happens when they collide, when they overlap. And that's how the future actually occurs, right? There are 10 major social, economic and technology shifts disruptions that are occurring right now and independent of what the instigating event is, whether it's COVID or US-China relations or something comes, you know, meteor hits the Earth. The question isn't really about that. It's about what's the impact of that instigating event on all of these other things. Does it cause them to collide? Because that's when you have massive change, when you take a look at billionaires, newly minted billionaires? They doubled. Or are they increased by 13 percent? And in 2020, over is the beginning of COVID. Why? Because they were prepared to take advantage of leverage to take advantage of that moment and monetize it. The wealth of the top, I forget it just appeared the other day and the newspaper, the top 10 or so wealthiest people in the world. It's doubled, doubled over COVID. Why? Because they were prepared to leverage that moment. They were thinking a little bit longer term about what has to happen to get out of a disruption like this and how do I position myself to take advantage of it?
Larry Olsen [00:09:44] Gotcha. Yeah. Outstanding.
Jonathan Brill [00:09:48] And so we've got to look bigger. We got to look, keep those softer eyes, you know, and look at the range of possible futures, not just the ones we've experienced personally before.
Larry Olsen [00:09:58] So where are you finding that? You are most relevant now.
Jonathan Brill [00:10:08] I am having a really interesting experience with the book. I'm talking to a bunch of start up, you know, kids in their 20s who are saying, hey, I want to. I understand that most of the things they teach in business school assume that the world will get less volatile. They assume that things will get easier, and the world will, technology will get more integrated. You take a look at what's happening right now. I don't think those things are true. You know, and in fact, when you take a look at that, say Marsh McLennan report, I was talking about like about 10 percent of the surveyed. The people surveyed thought that there was a really good positive outcome over the next three or five years. Mm hmm. So, you know, we're moving into this very different world. And what I think about what the book talks about is, how do you plan for that? How do you take advantage of that? So, startup kids are looking at this and saying, hey, you know, the way that we were taught to do this doesn't work. We've got to figure out how to do something different. And the other side, you know, is really Fortune 500 more Fortune 100 organizations who are realizing that we've got this. We've built an inventory, right? We know how to just move forward in lockstep. But that's not how we got out of the last two years. And that's probably not how we're going to get out of the next 10. So, we've got to change the way we think about our organization so that we're using uncertainty. We're leaning into it and taking advantage of it instead of trying to mitigate and avoid it.
Larry Olsen [00:11:57] Gotcha, gotcha. You know, when any time you just look at the human species, we're we typically are adverse to change. Mm-Hmm. You know, a basic amygdala is as is predictable and it wants some certainty so it can stay alive. Mm hmm. And so, you build all of these experiences through your life so that you're basically protecting yourself. Sure. And when there is a change, if they say the only change an individual likes is the one they came up with for themselves. And typically, it's not very it's not a very big one. You know, it's risk avoidance it at all costs. Now here you are in a field where how do you hear it was the question How do you prepare people not to resist change as you are now helping them see more clearly into the future? Mm-Hmm.
Jonathan Brill [00:12:52] So I will think about that slightly different. OK. It's, you know, it's not that people are terrified of change. It's that people are terrified of unknowns. (Olsen: OK, OK. Fair enough.) Right. I'm terrified of known unknowns and that that's fair. And I would argue that a lot of it is because we have what we call future blindness. If you want to see the range of possible futures, you need a full set of skills to do that. And you know, we all if we if you get a four-year degree in English, right, you learn how to look at the range of possible futures, how to invent futures or write fiction. If you're go to law school, you learn how to do deductive work, right? We know what the facts are. This is the universe of facts. Therefore. X must be true. If you're a scientist, we say, hey, we don't know all of the facts, but here's the information that we have here is the most likely outcome. You're an economist, you do what's called Bayesian reasoning, which is looking at all of this information, building a model of it and saying, OK, well, if we put, you know, so much input here, you know what? How much? How does that accelerate decelerate, you know, break the output supply chain types of problems? My point is we have these different ways of looking at the future there in philosophy there or what epistemology? It's called inductive deductive abducted and in Bayesian reasoning. And we only train our people as we've gotten more specialized and wonderful.
Larry Olsen [00:14:40] Hmm.
Jonathan Brill [00:14:41] If you want to manage unknowns. Figure out how to work around them. You want to have that bigger picture of what's going on, make sure that even if you aren't a master of these things, you have those ways of thinking on your team, think like a lawyer, think like an economist. Think like an artist, right? And think like a scientist on your team so that you can really look more broadly at what's going on. And then you want to have some technical skills that you see in a more advanced project management. How do you uncouple threats from opportunities, so you get the upside without the downside, right? That's why people become billionaires, right? As they figured out how to make one of those go exponential in the situation where everyone else is taking the downside. And then how do you experiment? And most of us are taught, you know that you go from A to B to C to D e. Yeah, it's like a, you know, it's a process, right? Right. So, it's a serial process. There is another way to innovate, right? And it's looking at things in parallel. So, when you think about that linear process, it's like General Motors does this. We made a better car, made a better carpet, made a better car, made it a better car. All of a sudden, we've got this electric vehicle that goes one hundred and fifty thousand miles without a tune up, which is amazing, right? Only one problem, which is our business models. We tell the dealers who make their free cash flow by maintaining this thing for three years and then selling another one to the same damn people. Right? So, so because they took this the serial approach to innovation of trialing a single experiment repeatedly, they've got themselves in a predicament, and I'm not sure that they're going to get themselves out of it. You know, you take a look at how pharma companies work. They think about experiments in portfolios like you would a stock market investment, right? You have some high risk, high payoff investments. You have some medium risk medium term payoff investments and then you have some kind of insurance investments that will make sure you don't lose everything if it all goes bad. And this is called like a barbell investing strategy. Okay. They do the same thing in pharma. Yeah, you put a hundred molecules that you're looking at and you run a horse race with them. If you manage this really well, no matter which opportunities drop out, you get the rate payoffs on the rate timelines. And so, the question that I would ask is, are you doing that? Are you looking at uncoupling threats and opportunities and then looking at how do you experiment more effectively in your organization? And almost always wanted to do these sorts of audits in organizations. What I see is that there are over rotated toward one of those directions or the other that aren't appropriate for the investment thesis of the company.
Larry Olsen [00:17:41] Mm hmm. So, is that the parallel thinking that you're talking about?
Jonathan Brill [00:17:47] The in terms of parallel thinking exactly and what you get at often is, you know, people like to protect themselves from the boogeyman right and dividend and driven companies, for instance, right? Because they've got that amygdala response you were talking about like, we can never be off by one percent. You know, we're off by a tenth of a percent. We lose a 10 percent, 10 percent of our stock share, right? (Olsen:Yeah, our stock price,) yeah, so you end up protecting yourself against a lot of known unknowns or unknown unknowns, right? These things that you can't really control for. Instead of like the blindingly obvious problem in front of you. Hmm. And so, you know, for those companies, you tend to get that and then, you know, if you've got an early-stage super high-risk thing, right? They're all about super high stage, super high risk, but they're not looking at, OK, well, if we're successful about that, whatever the thing is, does it kill us? Hmm. Yeah. Like, can we survive success? And so, they're not doing those, those other pieces of innovation, the medium and low risk innovation or de-risking innovation in the companies. So, you want to be looking at all of those, you want to be thinking about what you do as a portfolio.
Larry Olsen [00:19:13] So it sounds like a lot of companies that spend a lot of time developing well thought out obsolescence.
Jonathan Brill [00:19:23] Yeah, the best way to beat it is to become really good at something that no one cares about anymore. You know, I take a look. (Olsen: Except yourself,) except yourself. But I take a look at companies like your meds. They be the fashion brand that makes the, you know, silk kerchiefs and the okay, you know. Multi-billion dollar colognes and multi multi-billion dollar company. Well, they started off as a buggy maker. They've made high end leather saddles, and when you take a look at their logo, that's why there's a horse there. You know, they made leather with leather coach work for, you know, the nobility of Europe. And so, cars come along and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's it going to do? And they actually take the license, they get the license for the zipper. Right, so they've got their leather business that's going to degrade over time. But they have this thing for the zipper, and they make the first windbreaker. So, they build the business clothing business that's adjacent, right, leather goods into clothing and bags and all these things. So, they get this adjacency and then they go into to housewares, and they start getting into hard goods. And so, they become one of the first lifestyle brands and they get into watches right after the Second World War. This overproduction of watches in Switzerland. So, they get into watches, and they make that a luxury item and so on and so forth. And so, they grow themselves, you know, over time into this highly diversified business that has one value proposition, you know, ultra-luxury with natural materials and high-quality craftsmanship and all that stuff. Mm-Hmm. But they figured out how to do a whole series of experiments so that no one thing was going to kill them.
Larry Olsen [00:21:32] Touching. So, what about. We spent a lot of time. Our life is basically directed by our habits, attitudes, beliefs, and expectations. And they say that ninety five percent of most people's day is subconscious. They're just reacting to the situations in front of them. And then you pop into the environment. Mm hmm. And there's probably a lot of people that are listening to this right now and wondering if how diverse their company really is. Are they in one of those companies, which I would say is probably a larger majority of how companies are operating then than what you are bringing to the party? Would you agree?
Jonathan Brill [00:22:24] I would say that companies that succeed over time is environments change or operate like I am suggesting, companies that don't tend to be more specialized and not, not shift, not be thinking about what happens when everything goes bad. Just trying to make everything there, assuming that their kayak won't flip like if they just paddle, well, hard enough. And that's not how things work. The questions what happened that you should be asking is what happens when your kayak flips? Yeah. Am I prepared? How do you flip it faster? Because at the end of the day, you know, in the volatile environment? Right. If everyone else is trying to bail out their boat. And you're back up, right? I mean, that's blue ocean, yeah, right, that's free money. That's free operations. And when you take a look at it, a company like Amazon, you know, it's really easy to look at them and say that they've got so much money and they've got investors who will let them put do nonsense for years. And you know, they've got smart people and they've got the infrastructure. And so, my question is, if I gave you that magic wand that said, you've got all of that, you know, and you saw the opportunity, could you hire a workforce the size of the Ford Motor Company in 90 days? Yeah. Right. Is that a standard? It's not a resources issue. It's a mindset issue. And that mindset enables the processes that enable that to happen. You can't you don't want to like take up big wave surfing after the big wave hits like This is a thing you practice. It's a way of be it in. And by what? By the way, it's a way of being that starts before you're successful. It's a process, not an effect.
Larry Olsen [00:24:26] OK. OK. Yes, yes, I like that. So how does that I've kind of like to equate these things to our own lives? Mm-Hmm. Can you predict the future of a marriage? Not you specifically, but do you think that's possible and then be able to see the signs that you can now correct intelligently?
Jonathan Brill [00:24:57] Yes. So let me start off with your macro versus micro. OK.
Larry Olsen [00:25:03] OK.
Jonathan Brill [00:25:05] You can be predictive about a lot of different types of micro events. It's very difficult to be predictive in the range that people will want about macro.
Larry Olsen [00:25:12] It's OK.
Jonathan Brill [00:25:13] OK. Still looking at marriage, I think you're teaching. You're setting me up for how to answer because there is actually data about this that they're okay by watching the body language of couples over a short period of time. You can actually a college students can reliably predict the whether that marriage will succeed. (Olsen: OK.) Yeah, sure. And so and so there are, in that case, apparently reliable predictors. Now, I'm not a psychologist. I don't do that kind of research. (Olsen: Gotcha.) But that's what I know about that, that question. And so, the question is like, OK, well, how did we know that right? What are the indicators? What are the things that as humans, we cued into in the environment that allow us to do that? And how can we apply that way that we learned how to do that to other things? Right. And that's what I was talking about. These processes, these ways of knowing earlier. You know, how can you take that whole skillset and apply it to a broad range of things? And by the way, that's what yeah, that's what my book about is called the rogue method. So how do you react? Yes. How do you figure out what's the baseline? Because if you want to predict any future rate like you know what a good marriage looks like, you know what a pissed off way looks like. If you ever had a mom or a dad, you got a pretty good clue about that.
Larry Olsen [00:26:45] Well, let me let me ask you this question because you know, the way I would look at that marriage element is, is what's the vision first, it's got to be more than just getting married. Like, you know, how do you want to raise children? How do you want to entertain each other? What types of things do you want to grow into as a couple? And what are some of the signs that we need to be more transparent as we're getting these college kids predict in the body language? So, the vision is so important and yet it's imagined. And then the reality becomes negotiating through things so that you can ultimately manifest it, but if not, you're at least enjoying the ride along the way, right smelling the roses along the way. Equate that to the business element because I don't know if you used the word vision or uses the word goal or whatever terminology you have for what is that we're going after? Or do you even do that? With organizations,
Jonathan Brill [00:27:50] so there are two
Larry Olsen [00:27:53] and helping them grow.
Jonathan Brill [00:27:55] Yeah, there are two different schools of thought. One is that, yeah, we build our strategy, and we execute against the strategy and then we get we get from point A to point B. It turns out that is not necessarily a good way to deliver results, you get yourself locked in to we're going to do this and then we're going to do this and we're going to do this and then, yeah, things go bad.So, example, not a business example, but a fun one in after World War One. You know, the French decided that they didn't really like the Germans invading, so they were going to put this giant berm. They were going to build what they call the marginal line across the entirety of the border with Germany. And like this, there was a massive fortification. It was a two hundred and eighty some odd miles. They think a fortress with trains underneath, and I think it was it was amazing. What they failed to recognize was for the same price, you could put a tank every 500 feet across the entire length of that perimeter, too. And then when the Germans decided they want to go through Belgium instead because they invented new technology, they could move. And so, the question really isn't like how do we get from A to B? It's how do we create this? The building blocks of optionality and potential moving forward? How do we make sure that we're building that over time? Right. That's what Hermanus did right there. They increased their optionality and their potential over time, and they did it fast enough that they kept ahead of the change. The point here is that these are just two different ways of looking at the world and in a volatile world, right? What you want is the latter because you don't want to be the French.
Larry Olsen [00:30:03] Right. Yeah. That's kind of fallen in love with your plan and you build a scattered or blind spot. Everything else is going on around you because you you're going to build this damn thing. And like you said, what if we had a tank every 500 yards? I mean, the flexibility and optionality that you talk ….
Jonathan Brill [00:30:26] It wasn’t every 500 yards, it was every 500 feet,
Larry Olsen [00:30:28] 500 feet. Oh okay. Yeah, way more, even more amazing.
Jonathan Brill [00:30:33] It's two hundred city block. Yeah, I mean, it was madness.
Larry Olsen [00:30:37] Oh, and in how many times I mean, this is what I find so interesting about the human species. I'd rather be right and successful. And it does all this planning and thinking and then it goes to work. And it just kind of like gets tunnel vision for any other realities. And you, you the work that you do is to assist organizations in and not getting caught up in that. Is that true?
Jonathan Brill [00:31:08] I think that's a good assessment. You know, and it's you probably don't want, you know, a hundred of me in your organization that would be super destructive. But I think it's important that every organization have this competency and be building it with them within the company.
Larry Olsen [00:31:27] Yeah. Now do you set some premises up? Do you have rules of engagement? Like I know when I division building with a company, I go all ideas are valid, but never will it be one idea. You know that we're all collaborating, contributing. And so, we talk a little bit about how do you keep from falling in love with that idea? And I think in romance, they call that the not the what is the phase when someone is just all the songs are positive and every color is bright. And you know, we're not in love yet. We're what is it? It's not enamored, but, you know, it's the honeymoon stage. OK. (Brill:Yeah.) And then we begin to get into reality. Yeah. And sometimes it's shock. What was I thinking? And other times it's like, wow, this is one of the best decisions I've made in a lifetime. Right. And so, there's a broad spectrum of realities that are now about to occur, and we don't have Jonathan to come in and help me navigate that right? So, I can see you're absolutely invaluable in what you bring to the party. Kudos to you.
Jonathan Brill [00:32:51] And so the thank you, and so I do have an answer to the question. (Olsen: Please,) I work with the inventor, and I've worked with them for 20 years, named Ted Selker. He is one of the most inventive people, certainly in the Bay Area where I live and we do what we call the chess tournament and what we do as well, we'll say, OK, you know, we know what the challenge area is. We're going to come up with four different ways. To look at this challenge. I'll be the good guy, be the bad guy, right? You be the devil's advocate and we look at one for 15 minutes, then we look at the next one, then we look at the next one and we look at the next one. Then we flip the chess table. And now I was the good guy before, I'm the bad guy, and we go through those things every time we kill one of these things. We had a new one, and the purpose of this, the function is, you know, it overcomes a whole number of biases that have been stoked by psychologists because, you know, we are we don't have availability bias because there's too many options and so on and so forth. You don't get emotionally tied into something because like, you're going to have to take the other side. You have an adversarial relationship, which means that you end up with, you know, generally better truth finding. And there's just a little bit too much for any of us, for either of us to keep track of the whole thing. And so we keep forgetting things and having to come back and build in the details again. And so that technique is a really powerful one for for looking at these types of of issues. Another thing that I like in group meetings that's very powerful is to ask people to, you know, you go you, you do this, do something like this. We're going to look at three futures or 10 futures or 10 decisions or whatever. And I ask, OK, well, how likely do you think this is, you know, and write it down on a piece of paper. I want to be anonymous. Know, 13 percent, 70 percent, whatever. Yeah. And then you go around if the group's comfortable and you say why? Why is that the right number for you? You keep that paper. Because then in your next meeting. You can go around the room at the end of the meeting and say, OK, last time we looked at these futures, we're looking at them again. How likely do you think future one is? Bob? No, 73 percent, why is that the right number for, you know? Hmm, interesting. What's changed from the last time it's called is that so? So, you're moving from opinion. You know, to believe, to foundation, to disconnect, so, right, so you're going through that whole cycle of asking people, really, why? What's the nut you're getting at here? What's the thing we didn't observe? Mm-Hmm. And it gets down to that the core. And because once again, you're tracking it over time, people have forgotten a little bit what they did before, so on and so forth. You really get into having to do type, you know, type two thinking this type one and type two thinking type 1s like kind of instinctual and type twos, you know, very rational. And so, this moving towards that rational mindset and I find that really helps.
Larry Olsen [00:36:46] Yeah, because you allowed people to see their own growth and in the change of the mindset.
Jonathan Brill [00:36:52] And it's all about like, we're all going to be wrong, like we're all going to experience the same thing. What I want to know is what? What changed?
Larry Olsen [00:37:05] Yeah. That's beautiful.
Jonathan Brill [00:37:07] like no one's like 75 and 75, three weeks later. It never works like that.
Larry Olsen [00:37:14] Oh, that's just what's so fascinating about being able to see things differently to get new information and to be able to be open enough to it. Because I think your argument of the future is compelling enough. Mm-Hmm. You know, just based on how are things going for you right now? So unfortunately, the time has flown as it has a tendency to do and when you're actually into it, we've got a lot of listeners that, you know, are starting their own businesses. They're in relationships, they're keeping their fingers crossed that pandemic now becomes the endemic and we can start, stop hallucinating and getting freaked out over nothing. And I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, but I mean, let's manage it anyway. And. But they're looking at, you know, that whole element of looking for a little certainty with a lot around a lot of uncertainty. And what would you share with them so that they've got a handle, a little bit of a tool, if you will, to not be so reactionary? Because that's a lot of up and down how much the emotional roller coaster and that that causes a lot of cortisol pumped into the system, which isn't healthy for anyone. What would you share with them on dealing with these uncertain times?
Jonathan Brill [00:38:48] So I guess, you know. Two things, you know. The first is, and I should really look this up and make sure that Helen Keller actually said it OK, but just to realize that security is primarily an illusion. (Olsen: OK.) Right. (Olsen: Yeah.) There's no evidence that that it's, that it actually works. Very little evidence that it actually works overtime. Sure. You know, the dam, the dam. Yeah, New Orleans has proven this to us that that the dam always fails. The question is just when they're sitting down. So, I guess I guess that's kind of the first thing is kind of still a philosophy right now. The, you know, it might be good. It might be bad. It'll be different. It'll be the other tomorrow. The other in this is a thing I've come to over time, which is, you know, what's after, what's next, how whatever decision you make in your life, I want to get married that I want to take a new job. I want to do this thing. I want to buy a super car, like whatever it is. Even if that fails. Are you making a decision that increases your potential in your optionality? Afterward. If you just start thinking about that. You'll live a great life.
Larry Olsen [00:40:30] That's beautiful. That's beautiful. How many times have we had just one thing out there and once we got it, so much time had gone by were like, this isn't doing it for me. All these old people are driving these cool cars, you know, instead of when you were young, if I only had that, you know that that is outstanding. The illusion of certainty. And you know, what's after that. What's next is wonderful, and I very much appreciate you taking your time and, and maybe shifting a little bit from helping us break through to being a greater company to finding a little more value in all of the diversity and change that is going on around us. And not clinging to and hoping it gets back to normal, if you will, which probably is the Achilles heel of you. Is something like that.
Jonathan Brill [00:41:30] There's more potential, there's more opportunity than there ever has been and it's because of the volatility, it's because of the change. And so, you can look at this with fear or you can say, Man, this is amazing. I'm glad I am here in the most fantastic time in the history of our species.
Larry Olsen [00:41:55] Oh, I don't. I don't think we could end it any better than that. Thank you, Jonathan. And thank all of you out there. There is so many choices that you have, and you chose us and thank you for investing that time and listen and act upon what you just heard. And also remember, wherever you are right now is exactly where you need to be, and it's all about the vision and the choices. And we all get to make those on a moment-by-moment basis, and it was a good choice to have you on as a guest. So, thank you again. And all the best to you, Jonathan.
Jonathan Brill [00:42:35] Thank you, Larry. This is fantastic. Appreciate your having me.
Larry Olsen [00:42:38] You're sure welcome.
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