[on-hold music] The only people who wanna go back to the office are the zookeepers. The office are zoos. [laughs] All the things you claim that you were doing at the office, we never did at the office, fools.
The animals are not going back into the goddamn cage. [laughs] The question isn't how we go back to the office, but what does the future of work look like? Wait, did you say that? 'Cause I refer to that all the time.
Right. Three companies- Yeah... can get twenty percent of Brian Morrissey, and Brian can basically sell that twenty percent for forty percent because they're getting Brian at a sixty percent discount.
[laughs] Why are Brian and Rashad paid so much to do this bullshit talk? All right, I don't like me being included in this, Rashad. [laughs] Right. A- a- a- These, people need this podcast.
[on-hold music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey. This is our last episode of the year, believe it or not. Um, we're actually seven episodes in, I believe this will be.
Uh, big thanks to my friends at Mediaocean for supporting this, uh, little year-end mini season that, uh, we're doing.
It has been nice to see the reviews and ratings on Apple, as that does, as far as I can tell, help people find the podcast. And let's be honest, it's nice to have feedback when you're making stuff.
I wanna thank Podcast Fan225, who I don't think is a relative, who left this nice review. "Great conversation, smart questions, helpful perspective.
Loved Brian on his previous podcast, and glad he is back with the Rebooting." So if you do have a chance, please leave, um, a rating, a review, and tell anyone else about the show that you think would find it valuable.
So for this final episode, I wanted to take big picture conversations. And last week I, I did that with The Slowdown's Spencer Bailey and Andrew Zuckerman, and we talked a lot about what comes out of, of COVID.
And this week to co- to cap off the year, I asked Rashad Tobaccowala to come on. Um, Rashad and I have known each other for m- many years. He once gave me tremendous life advice, actually, leaving Las Vegas.
I don't know if you remember this, Rashad, but we'll talk about it later. Rashad's had a long career, um, in advertising. He served in a variety of top roles at, uh, Publicis Group.
He's now writing a, a great newsletter, and I actually do truly mean that. It is called The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past. You can find that at rashad.substack.com.
[on-hold music] This week's episode is brought to you by Mediaocean. Next week, many of you are heading out to Vegas for CES, the annual confab of the tech, media, and advertising worlds.
Some of you will probably be skipping this year, but that doesn't mean you have to miss out.
Mediaocean has set up a live stream of its programming from the Mediaocean Retreat, so you can still enjoy the thought leadership that the retreat will feature from an array of top executives, including Twitter Chief Customer Officer Sara Persnett, Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady, and S4 Capital CEO Martin Sorrell.
Not to mention my upcoming podcast guest, Rashad Tobaccowala. The Mediaocean Retreat programming will run on January fifth and January sixth from noon Pacific Time to four PM Pacific Time.
Check out the agenda and register now at mediaocean.com/retreat. Be sure to tick the box for virtual, and you'll receive links from the GoToWebinar to tune in live. If you can't make it live, don't worry.
There will be recordings available on demand following the event. Again, go to mediaocean.com/retreat and register now. [on-hold music] Rashad. Thank you very much for having me, Brian. Okay.
So explain the origins, actually, of the newsletter, because you've been doing a lot of...
I've always thought you've been, and I, I mean this, been very thoughtful and, and brought a lot of great perspective in, in the times that we've spoken, but also in your public speaking and writing and stuff like this.
But you joined the newsletter bandwagon. What was the goal? There were three goals, really, of the newsletter. The first was, I speak about how I try to remain relevant and keep learning new things.
And I was, eighteen, twenty-four months ago, seeing a lot of people that I admired as writers, whether they were at The New York Times, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, wherever they were.
A significant number of them, which means ten to fifteen percent of them, were leaving their institution and deciding to start what they called a Substack.
So I basically said, "What the hell is a Substack that these people are going to?" And I looked at it, and I thought that was intriguing.
And so that was number one, was as part of my learning, I thought, "Maybe I should learn how the Substack works," just like I've learned a few things.
But the second, as I constantly think about how media and marketing changes.
And it became clear to me that whether people could make money or not on Substack, what it did do is it allowed a individual to separate themselves from a media company.
And right now what had happened is media had separated itself from a physical platform, so the song no longer was on the CD or in iTunes. But the musician or the author still stayed connected to the man or the woman.
And I thought this was sort of intriguing that you could actually separate yourself and monetize your own craft without having to monetize the monetization institution. So I said, "Let me...
Y- you know, could that mean that the world of media and marketing will change?" So I wanted to do that.
And the third is, as I myself became an author, and so I thought, "Hey, uh, maybe this is another way of thinking about the future of writing, in addition to books and stuff like that."
And so I, I decided to start one in August of twenty-twenty, and it was initially going to be an experiment. So my first one basically says, "I'm trying to learn Substack.
If you'd like to sign up to see what I'm learning, and I'm gonna share some stuff, it'll be like a gift. I don't know how often I'll do it. It'll be bohemian, and off we go."
And because I wanted this to be completely opt-in, I simply said, "Hey, if you'd sign up," and I posted it on LinkedIn and Facebook and TwitterAnd between August one, when I posted it, and August 16th, when I first wrote one, I had 500 sign-ups.
So I said, "Okay, I better write something." So I did. [laughs] And the reaction to the first one was good, and it just appeared on a Sunday, and people thought Sunday was a great day to do it.
And I then did it the next Sunday. And so now it's 70 Sundays later, I'm still at it. And the thing that ended up was it became, for me, something much more than Substack and technology.
It became three very important things. One is a, it's a discipline that forces me to write every week, right? Yeah. Because my stuff is I've gotta write every week, so I gotta think about it. So that's number one.
That helps me in my speaking and advisory business because I'm thinking about things. That's, that's number one. I mean, as you know, as a writer, when you write it down, you think about it in a bit more detail.
But the second- Yeah... is it became a amazing marketing vehicle. So it... Now I have about 11,700 subscribers. It's free, but I have about 11,700 of them.
But on an average week, I have about 25,000 readers, and my open rate's about 45%.
But because of massive, both social media, but people forwarding it across their organization, I've actually become some sort of little baby media company with these 25,000 people. But interestingly, every Sunday
when I post, it increases my sales of books. And at the end of every week, I get one or two speaking assignments, specifically because someone read a Substack- Yeah...
and said, "Hey, I want you to talk about this topic." So that's how it came to be. Yeah. What started off as an experiment now has become a business. Yeah.
And just on Substack, I, I think you hit on a lot of, like, big trends that really have enabled Substack, and I think sometimes it goes underappreciated. And one is the shift from institutions to individuals.
I've talked about it a lot, but I think it's a profound shift that's taken place over the last few years, and it's putting, like, real meat on the bones of all the stuff we've been talking about since the, the dawn of the internet, right?
I think that's amazing. I think the other thing is that it has enabled the expertise that people like you have to, to, to be spread, and I think that's amazing.
'Cause I think the future is, while it does not fit in the containers of the past, as we know, Rashad, it, it is going to be more expertise driven. Yes. And I think it's tremendous.
A lot of journalists try to circle the wagons and view this kind of stuff as threat. I view it as amazing.
Like, the stuff that like, it, whether it's Andreessen Horowitz or what you're doing or, or even Troy Young's got an amazing- Yep... podcast, People Vs Algorithms. For me personally, as a student myself, I love it.
It is. And, and, and, and you learn a lot. And what is also turning to happen is it's almost reversing the model. So what happens is now I write on Substack, and then some traditional media companies republish it.
So Media Village- Oh, yeah... does it, Adweek does it. Often people in India, the four or five people who say, "Can we republish?"
I said, "Yes, you can republish, but you have to strip away the pictures unless they buy photographs." Because my stuff is free. Okay. And so I use...
You know, if, if you notice, each issue I feature a different artist, and I send people- Yes... to the artist's site, so I'm like a free ad for them, and I don't monetize their work because nothing of mine is monetized.
I mean, directly from that way. And so pe- Well, it's indirectly monetized with your workshops, your books, your speaking. Yeah, a- absolutely. So it's all of those things.
But what tends to happen is the l- the news, the thing is itself free, and so it's turned out to be really cool.
And it's come to a point where I actually have curators and, of museums who send me artwork they'd like to feature. Wow. Very cool. Very cool.
So w- you know, you started this, obviously we're coming into the end of the year, but we're also coming up on two years of, of the pandemic era.
When did you, when you're looking back on it, when did it hit you that this was gonna be pretty profound? It hit me sometime at the end of April 2020.
So the way I look at it is the first time I began to pay attention to COVID, I mean really pay attention to COVID, was a day
I remember I was in a car leaving PayPal's campus, where I had gone and taken books as a promotion.
And as I was sitting in the car, on my phone it basically said that the doctor who had first discovered COVID-19 had died. There was a doctor who- Oh, yeah... basically said, "Hey, there's a- Yeah...
there's an issue here." And, and- He was a whistleblower. He should've been Time's Person of the Year for 2020. Right. And, and so he was the whistleblower, and he basically, it was sometime in
late January, early February, and I said, "This is weird. This is basically happening." Yeah. And then by mid-February I said, "This is... I gotta pay attention to this."
But obviously, when the lockdown happened, the stock market started falling. Then I started doing a lot of studying and research about what happened when plagues happened and things like that.
And in April I was asked by publicists to, as people were going into lockdown, they basically said, "We're gonna start a s- webinar series for our clients to stay connected, and we'd like you to be the first guest, and we'd like you to talk about what people should think about
COVID." So I said, "All right."
So then I did it, obviously because I'm gonna speak to a whole bunch of people, I spent two weeks learning and I wrote something, and that particular piece, which I then published in May of 2020, was called The Great Reinvention.
And so three weeks ago, as the Omicron virus began to spread, I took what I wrote two years ago and I put it on Substack, and I said, "Here is The Great Reinvention." And what is remarkable is- It held up.
Shit, I read it too. I just read it this morning again- Yes... and I was like, "I know this is-" And I, and it, uh, uh, that was so prescient in everything that's happenedRight? So, so people said, "What did you see?"
And I said, "I didn't. I just went backwards to look forwards," which we sometimes don't look at. So I just looked back at what happened when you have impacts like this. And then it almost- Yeah...
it, it talked about the society issues we were gonna have. This was even prior to George Floyd and a whole bunch of other things.
And that was something that, to a great extent, also provided a bunch of credibility, which was, "Wait, this guy actually can be quite right." Yeah. "He's not as foolish as he looks."
So let's go to the scorecard a little bit. Sure. I don't wanna, like, get into the, the predictions specifically, but I, I look at this as, I don't know if...
Do you remember the Dateline NBC era where all those shows, like, they were all very similar? And I remember one trope that they always went to was, "We took a blacklight to, like, hotel rooms.
You won't believe what we found." Yes. And of course it was not good. I view COVID as, like, the giant blacklight that was taken to our respective hotel rooms. Yes.
It's not gonna be good what you find on the, uh, the bedsheets in a motel room.
And similarly, in our societies, I feel like the blacklight exposed the things that we all knew were there, whether it's inequality, um, whether it's rickety health systems, poor leadership, et cetera, and just made it incredibly disgustingly clear.
[chuckles] Yes. You're absolutely right. I had talked about three things: fragility, resilience, and resurrection.
And in that fragility, to the point you're making about blacklight, it basically said, okay, we are fragile as human beings. Obviously, we were scared about our health, among other things, and health of other people.
But what was very clear was the fragility of business and the fragility of society. Mm-hmm. And what most business people don't know, and this is what I try to remind them, that they lost so much credibility
that they don't realize how much credibility they lost. Because I said, at one particular stage, you basically said you're to close everything down. You had money and you paid it to yourself as dividends.
Then you had to go raise money because you... Like, look, you're in the airline business, right? Which is an up-and-down business- Yeah... but you don't plan for an up-and-down business. You're Boeing- Yeah, well-...
and you don't plan for up and- You, you don't plan that when you can go to the government and be like- Yeah... "Oh, wow, this thing happened," and it's like, well- Exactly. Exactly.
Professor Galloway, he says basically we're capitalists on the way up and socialists on the way down. Yeah.
[chuckles] I get the sense from reading a- and listening to what you've been saying that you come down on the side that this is a big change in our societies and how we organize ourselves.
From the very beginning, there were the V-shaped recovery people who were like, "We're just gonna get right back to it because this is gonna be a blip. Look at the Spanish flu.
If you look back, it wasn't that big of a deal, e- et cetera, even though it was devastating."
But e- explain to me why you really do believe that we're going to have a reinvention out of this, 'cause I think it's really difficult to see that when you're in the midst of it for a lot of people.
So the piece I wrote was called "The Great Reinvention," and it was based on the following, and the reason why I think it's gonna be dramatically different.
What I did when I was writing my book is I figured out that when it's very hard for things to change, just like and it's very hard for us to change our diets or learn how to exercise or whatever, because you have to repeat something almost daily for three months.
And when you do something for three months again and again, it actually changes you. So- Yeah... that's one.
Second is every crisis that I had seen before in my 40 years, and obviously I have not lived through World War II or the Great Depression, right? In my 40 years was tended to be limited.
It tended to be limited either in geography- Yeah... or limited in who it touched. The Great Recession did not hit everybody, including it did not hit a lot of rich people, and it did not hit 36 countries.
Or it was something else, like SARS and MERS. But w- what I began to realize here was we had not just a financial crisis, not just a social crisis, not just a health crisis, but all of the three
occurring not to some people, but to all people, and not for a short period of time. I thought it would be at least six to nine months, and it's turned out to be two years.
And so my belief is if you basically take the entire world, put them through a financial health and social crisis for two years, and expect the thing to be the same, you should not be in business.
You should resign immediately. Yeah. At, at March, I think it was like March 14th or 15th i- in 2020, I was still at Digiday and, and we had our final happy hour. And looking back, it was kinda crazy.
There was like, there was open, like, Cheez-Its and stuff like this.
But we, a few of us took, uh, we were leaving the office at that point, and we took straw bats about, like, when we would come back, and people said two weeks. Yes. A couple of people said three weeks.
And I've watched enough Price Is Right. I know you gotta go big or go home, right? So I said, "How long was martial law in Poland?" And we like Googled it, and so I said, "Okay, it's gonna be six months."
People said I was crazy. Well- I wrote it was, was gonna be many months. I didn't realize it was gonna be two years. But what- Yeah... is tended to happen, and this gives you sort of a, a, a feeling, which is
people have rerouted their lives over the last two years. They've... Right? And the, the reason why it's changed is, here's the following.
There have been physical things that people have gone through, and those physical things could not just be health crisis, but they may have moved, right?
Or people may have moved in with them, so there are these physical things.
Then there are the emotional things, and one of the interesting things in the emotional thing is I don't know of anybody who doesn't know somebody
relatively close to them who has either died or been very sick because of COVID. Okay? Yeah.
Like at this particular stage, it's very hard to find someone who can't name a close relation or a close friend who hasn't gone through death or a near-death experience.So what that basically does is it tells you we are going to run out of time,
and it makes you stop thinking, right, emotionally in completely different ways, which we- Mm-hmm... hadn't thought about.
And the other one that you basically begin to think about is because you're not doing the same thing, you stop thinking about stuff, and you start resetting your mind. And so spiritually, you end up being different.
Emotionally, you end up being different. Physically, you end up being different. Because whether you are in a meme stock, whether you are in crypto, or whether you lost your job, financially you're different.
And as, and coming out of it, it surprises people that people are asking a very simple question, "How do we get back to the office?" That's a wrong question for two reasons. One is no one's going back, okay? Mm.
The only people who wanna go back to the office are the zookeepers. The office are zoos.
[laughs] If you're a manager and a zookeeper, you want it to go back because the zookeeping is what justified your job at your- Yeah... corner office. The animals are not going back into the goddamn cage, okay?
So forget about it. It's not gonna happen. That's number one. That's a travesty if you even think about it. That's A. B, the question isn't how we go back to the office, but what does the future of work look like? Yeah.
20% of the people who are working from home on a full-time job have now a side hustle going on. I know. And it's just one of the reasons people don't wanna go back to the office.
Besides all the flexibility- Well, see-... besides everything else- Yeah... it's what the hell? [laughs] I mean, I feel like as a former zookeeper, a recovering zookeeper- Right... I can say [laughs]
that the offices were very good for a few things, one of which is control. There's a reason zoos exist. Like, it's good for control. You can keep tabs on things- Yes... and stuff like this.
And it's also very good for the managerial class to peacock, to stick out. Yeah. Yeah. You have meetings, and you sit at the head of the table, and people present to you, and stuff like this.
There's a lot of pantomiming that goes on in the office. It- There, there's a lot of pantomime. Here's what basically happens. Think about it.
If you're a manager, the way you mark yourself, or as you say, peacock, as a manager, you would have a larger office, number one. Yeah. You would have an assistant.
You could show up early or late, and people would wait for you. And you could go in checking in on people, which you call quality control or control, okay? Yeah.
Now, you are a Zoom box equivalent to all other Zoom boxes. If you schedule a time, no one's hanging around. If you don't show up, they disconnect from Zoom. There is no assistant to basically keep people waiting,
and people are now asking, "What exactly do you do for your living?" Um, that's true. Although, living in Miami, I recognize that it's really refreshing compared to New York because people rarely ask that question first.
You know what I mean? [laughs] Like, it's like a just totally different place 'cause people here generally didn't move here for- Yeah... for work, unless they're in the real estate or club promotion business. Exactly.
And so there are all these new excuses that are being made, so the excuses are the following: It allows for creativity, for collaboration, for learning, and for networking. So I say, okay, let's be clear.
Before I became this starving author, I actually ran things once upon a time, okay? [laughs] So with that being said, when we wanted to do creative brainstorming, we would go to off-sites.
When I wanted to network- Yeah... I'd go to bars and restaurants. When I wanted to learn, I'd go to events like CES and Cannes and other places.
So all the things you claim that you were doing at the office, we never did at the office, fools. We never did at the office. Yeah.
I mean, 80% of the stuff that I've ever come up with has been, like, either running or now going to the beach and stuff like this. So I put that as ideation time on my calendar. Yeah.
But I'm also, like, very cognizant of living through this, of the incredible privilege that a lot of these changes have afforded to those of us on the other side of the inequality divide, right?
A lot of people didn't have the opportunity to pick up and move to Miami or Austin or whatever. They didn't have the oppor- They can't just log in to, to Zoom. Some- someone just delivered groceries- Yeah...
for me from Instacart and stuff like this. That person doesn't have the same privileges I have to just podcast with you.
[laughs] So there's part of it that, like, I feel like maybe it's the self-awareness that I don't sort of like is, is that it's almost like a luxury good, this kind of new flexibility- It-...
and stuff like this, and I just... I want... I, I, I wonder if we're just exacerbating inequality or just moving it into a new realm.
So, so, yeah, to, to, to, to a point, I basically believe, and that's why almost everything I write say there are two worlds.
There are people who are white-collar workers who can do what they want, and then there are people who have to be either on the front lines. If you're working in a dentist's office, you can't do it like this, right?
Uh- Yeah... so there's lots of stuff you have to do. But I think the reason this is gonna end up being good for everybody
is the frontline workers have now begun to realize, after we called them essential, that they actually are essential, and we're less essential, okay?
[laughs] As a result is one of the reasons why you're basically seeing them get paid more. The other is- Yeah... they're also realizing, "Do I want to take this particular job, or is there something else I want to do?"
Right? Yeah. And so one of the things you're beginning to see is wage increases and people saying, "Look, we ain't gonna take this shit." That's... So there's a benefit there. Yeah.
You know there's, like, a viral trend of, it might be TikToks, of quitting? Yeah, yeah. The, the- Of like Tyler quitting...
the whole idea is once you told me I was essential and I was out there on the front lines, and by the way, the whole society shuts down without me, but it's going to go- Yeah...
perfectly fine without Brian and Rishad, but it shuts down without me. [laughs] Why are Brian and Rishad paid so much to do this bullshit talk? All right, I don't like me being included in this, Rishad. [laughs] Right?
A- a- a- and- These people need this podcast. Right.The old stuff is, look, they can podcast, but by the way, they won't get any food, they won't get anything without us. So let's get, make sure we get paid.
That's number one, right? And so I've always, in this p- thing I talked about, the increased emphasis of both unions, which had the idea of collective bargaining, people saying, "No, we won't take it anymore."
So that happens to be one key thing.
But there's something else which is also a benefit, and the benefit is this, and this is the crazy shit that people talk about when they want to go back to the office, why this doesn't make sense.
At the very same stage we're talking about the importance of DEI, right? Diversity, you know- Yeah... equity, and inclusion. Now, think about the following.
Because you now don't have to work in the middle of an expensive city like New York or San Francisco- Mm-hmm... or Boston, or because you have to either look after a parent or look after a child,
you, who are a man or a woman, have now the ability to work from where you want, and you now begin to have a world of opportunities that you could not have had before. Yeah. Okay?
And that is, people are underestimating that. The other thing they're underestimating in our industry, which is the advertising and marketing industry, is we happen to have lots of equality problems.
We have fixed, to a certain extent, the women issue, but not at the senior management level, but we've sort of got the women thing done, but not at the senior level. We still have a- Okay...
big problem with African Americans. We still have a big problem with Hispanic. But here's the other big problem we have. Older people, okay? Oh, no one likes to talk about- Okay?... the older people. The older people.
I become more interested in this topic- Yeah. Look... um, each passing day. And, and, and, and, and, and my old stuff is, hey, let me give you three key p- things on older people.
Number one is- Let me tell you, Rishad, just, let me just- Sure... jump in here. Let me tell you, having managed a, a large group of young reporters, they never pitch stories about this.
They'll pitch stories about every single ism possible in the office, and I, I'm like, "What about this ism?" Because it's the... it's very obvious. It, it, it, it- I mean, walk into an ad agency, walk into a publishing.
Yes. So we have a big ageism problem. [laughs] It's all across the problem. We have it in our industry, and there are three reasons for it.
First of all, why should we pay attention to it, besides it being wrong, is 10,000 people are turning 65 every day, right? 70% of America's wealth is held by 55-year-olds and above.
Number two, if you're a marketer, you may want to think about the fact that 10,000 people turn 65 and all the money is with 55 and above. That's number two. But here's the key. We are now desperately looking for talent,
and usually the, the whole thing against older people were the following. One, and these were in this order, but I'll tell you the real order it was. The claimed order is this, and I'll tell you what the real order is.
The claimed order- [laughs]... is they don't get modern technology, okay? So that, that was- For sure... number one. Number two, they don't know how to manage millennials and Gen Z, right? Okay. Number three
is they are expensive. That was the order. The real order is, number one, they're expensive. Three over three. Number three. It's all number three. [laughs] Because post-COVID, you tell me who doesn't get what, right?
Et cetera. Yeah. So that's, it's, it's number three. But guess what? You can solve for number three because of unbundled distributed work. You can now get 20% of Brian Morrissey, and three companies can- Yeah...
get 20% of Brian Morrissey, and Brian can basically sell that 20% for 40% because they're getting Brian at a 60% discount, right?
And all of a sudden, you now begin to have the ability, as long as Brian Morrissey has one thing, which is healthcare, okay?
Brian Morrissey can actually earn more money and have greater flexibility in life, and companies can get the experience and wit of Brian Morrissey, the older one. Thank you.
Rishad, I, I thank you for, for productizing me. I want everyone to know that you don't get a discount, though. Right. [laughs] No, I'm just kidding. No, actually, I'm not kidding.
Anyway, so that is, I think that's a great way to, to frame it. So let me ask you this, though. What, why are you optimistic at this point, two years in coming out of this?
'Cause I think it's very easy, particularly as Omicron comes on, it's... And I was always canceling this before I left Digido. I'm like, "This is gonna be a long deal." I've run ultramarathons, and it's long.
Like, it's just long. There's no way around it, and don't fool yourself to think that this thing's just gonna snap out of it. It's gonna be messy. And I think it's pretty easy for people to sort of lose hope.
And again, I recognize that I have a lot of privileges in dealing with this. It's, I, I have my own challenges, but I have a lot of privileges that other people don't have.
But why are you optimistic overall that we're gonna come out on the other side, wherever the other side is, in a better place than when this thing started? So I'm optimistic for four reasons.
One is just the broad sweep of history reason, and the broad sweep of history reason is if you look at any time and you look back 20 years from that time,
you're in a better position than you were 20 years ago, and you can say that in almost any 20-year period. And what people... So the f- the first is life gets better, but the headlines say it's getting worse.
So that's one thing to keep in mind. Yeah. Right?
So it's, I, I, I often basically, I read this line, and it isn't mine, which is, "I get terrorized every day by looking at television or doom scrolling," but that doesn't mean anything, okay? So that's number one.
So that's broad context.
The second reason is I believe because we're at the cusp of some of the most dramatic breakthroughs in technology, and not just technology like Web 3.0 and internet kind of stuff, but everything from biotechnology- Yeah...
gene technology. Like in the real world. In, in, in the- Like the real-... in the real world... real world.I saw it described as the Earthverse- Right... the other day. I'm like, I need that term. The real world.
I like that. So that's the second one.
The third is, yes, there are downsides to the connected world, including people going crazy sometimes, but the connected world has now given opportunities to billions of people that could not have opportunities before.
Yeah.
And that includes, like when I'm, when I go to India, which I haven't been for the last 18 months, but the fact that now 450 million Indians watch video on their mobile phones and do banking and do a whole bunch of other things that they couldn't do before.
So what happens is now you've got billions of people, talented people, who are coming on in a world where there's massive new modern technology, in a world which gets better every time.
And then here is why I think COVID actually helped. COVID itself is clearly a tragedy. Just in the US alone, 800,000 people have died, and I think worldwide about five million, and that's an underestimated number.
But what it did do, as we began this conversation, it shone a light on everything, right? And it basically made people say what's important and what isn't important. Yes, some people ran away into a world of imagination.
Okay. But a lot of people said, "What is important?" And so now we're beginning to address those important issues, and people are speaking up, and there is, I think, that which I believe is big, which is we are now
paying attention to what's important and what's not important
in a world where more and more people have a voice, in a world where we're having significant technology breakthroughs, and in a world that has always improved over time, and that's the reason I'm optimistic. Yeah.
So final thing I wanna talk to you about is I wanna talk a little bit about crypto and Web3. You, you, you're crypto and Web3 curious. I can tell. Yes.
And I suspect that you're not reflexively dismissive of it because you're thoughtful, and people who are thoughtful generally are not reflexively dismissive of things. But I could be wrong.
So here, here, here is why I've paid attention. So I first began to understand about blockchain when I had a lunch with somebody in 2015, right? And at that particular stage, I actually...
And I went to Davos, and I listened to people, and people were laughing. So whenever I get senior people laughing at something, just by my natural behavior, I think I gotta pay attention. Get that vibe.
And so at Davos they were laughing, so I went away and I actually went, and I bought a Bitcoin. I started a Coinbase account, and I bought a Bitcoin at $250. And it was the only recommendation- Oh, shit, Rishad.
You made a Bitcoin. That I made. And there's a piece you'll see where I tell everybody, "If you're willing to lose $250, which I'm willing to lose, go buy one of these things and hold on for dear life.
It's likely to go to zero, but who the hell knows what's gonna go on," right? And, and basically happened.
And then I began to realize that the same people who were laughing at it three, four years later were basically saying, "What? Wait, what happened?" So, so that's, I, that's how I started paying attention.
What I- Yeah... was a little later on was this whole NFT thing, right, which to me felt like a Ponzi scheme to a certain extent, and, and my whole stuff is how does this work?
Having studied it in some detail, I actually believe that the real part of Web 3.0, which is very important, and blockchain, both of which are very important, have got a underlying plumbing that's very real.
And as someone who went through the dot-com crash, right, but ran a company that did not crash when the dot-com crash happened, I reminded people about something. I said, "Don't look at the NASDAQ pricing.
Look at the increased penetration of-" Wait, did you say that? 'Cause I refer to that all the time. I've been, like, stealing that, like, in my wondering.
So I actually would have a chart which says, "Here's NASDAQ pricing," which was, you know, this crash from 5,000 down. Yeah, yeah. People looked at the wrong number.
They looked at the NASDAQ, not the broadband penetration. Shit, I've been stealing this from you for years, Rishad. So I just had this little chart, and I said, "This is what we wanna pay attention to." Yeah.
So I, I tell people, "Don't pay attention necessarily to what, you know, Dogecoin is doing or what a- Yeah... Bored Ape Yacht Club is worth.
Think about the underlying technologies," and here's what the underlying technologies are, and that's what I'm excited about. So I don't know exactly what'll shape up. To me,
I think the way I describe it to people is C-O-D. I call it COD. Okay? So C-O-D. So I'll start off with D is decentralized and democratized, and I'll explain that. Mm-hmm. O is open, and C is composable.
And what that means is you and I will now have the ability to do our own creative stuff, uh, everything else with Lego pieces.
And as long as a Lego pieces fit with other Lego pieces, and it's very easy for us to learn Lego. We don't have to learn code. We don't have to learn a whole bunch of things. That's C.
It's much more open, and what people don't realize is 95% of modern software is written on open systems like Linux. It's already beginning to happen. The company that's better prepared for the metaverse than Meta
is Microsoft, okay, which is leading in AR, has GitHub, has thought about plug-and-play and APIs in open, in, in, in, in, in, in a great way, right? Was trying to buy Discord. I've asked people to pay attention- Yeah...
to Discord server, you know, among other things. So I've been playing around and learning a lot, and I'm beginning to feel that this is very much like 1999. That there's maybe a- Right...
boom, but then after that we're gonna, we may have a little bit of a crash, but then when we come back, we're gonna have a completely new world.
And I think this has the same impact over the next 10 years as the web did.Yeah. I couldn't agree more. Like people always, with good reason, they focus on the freak show.
Freak shows always get a lot of it's like freak shows- And, and that's the reason, like two weeks ago when I wrote this page, The Age of Creativity,
a lot of senior people wrote to me and said, "Obviously you're paying attention, and because you've had a pretty good track record, we pay attention when you pay attention," right?
And even though twice I say, "I'm not suggesting you buy stuff. There's a Ponzi feeling like this, forget that."
So I'm not making any recommendations, but the way I got their attention is I connected three things that they found very unusual. One is I said, "Here is the future of creativity."
And I reminded people that the most valuable companies are actually creative companies and not data-driven companies. LMVH, Apple, et cetera. Okay, that's number one. Second,
I showed that we were going to a world of makers versus creators, and that's where I paid a, you know, homage to Virgil Abloh and his work and his videos. Right.
But third is I said, now you're thinking about makers, you're thinking about creatives. I'm already on this substack talking to you all without going through a middle person, right?
Now basically think about what that does to makers and creators with non-fungible tokens. But instead of listening to some bullshit, here's a twenty-minute Financial Times video. Right?
With the Financial Times talking to both naysayers, Sotheby's- Yeah... Christie's, artists, the whole bunch and play.
And then by the way, if you wanna see what the first Web 3.0 real brand is, it's Bored Ape Yacht Club, so Google this or look at this article. Yeah, great.
And people spent forty-five minutes and they said, "This has made more sense in what we need to do than all the things we talk about." Right? And I said, "Yes, and by the way, I gave it all away to you for free."
So I said, "Be wary of people who are charging you a whole bunch of stuff to educate you on this shit." [laughs] Oh, God.
So I wanna circle it back to what I mentioned earlier, which is career advice, 'cause I've always thought you've given good career advice, and you probably don't remember this, but we were in Las Vegas one time and we were both at this, I think it was Revenue Science- Yes...
at the time, before their Audience Science Summit. I did a little s- talk, but you were probably the main draw. And we-- I glommed on...
It was probably pre-Uber, so I glommed on your like car service, 'cause you were like agency exec guy. You guys have car service and stuff like this. I'm just like a reporter. I-- We take cabs, right?
So leaving Las Vegas is always fraught, but you were like, you asked me like the career question, and I was like, "Oh, shit, man. I don't have a good answer."
[laughs] I was talking to you about like, "Oh, I kinda wanna do something solo," and stuff like this. You could tell I had- Right... no idea.
But you said to me something really smart that I would always refer to when we were early on in just Digiday in a little room in a WeWork, was that big organizations cover up for our inefficiencies. We can have bad days.
[laughs] And I wonder about that when we go into this decentralized world and people are really drawn to this independent path and it's very, it's very attractive in theory, but at the same time, it requires learning a new skill set, what I've learned.
It, it, it does require learning new s-skill sets, and I remember that conversation because I took the same advice I gave you, and I stayed put in a company- [laughs]... for many years.
So I'll give you three thoughts here. One is past, and one is pr- and one is present, and one is future, okay?
So on past, I wrote something five years ago and then updated it this October for Substack, which is called "Twelve Career Lessons."
And for those, you maybe in show notes put a link to it, but it's October twenty twenty is the post, and it's, uh, on Substack, and it's "Twelve Career Lessons."
And I recommend to everybody, regardless of whether you are new or whether you are a senior executive who's about to retire, to read those, because it's the most popular thing I've basically written, and it still makes sense.
And I updated it from ten to twelve career lessons after five years. So I'd with that. Now, specifically to your question, which is on the present. I now am doing what I told you not to do. [laughs] Okay?
So I'm now a company of one. And I...
But I'm a little bit different than a company of one, which is, A, I'm in a place where I can take a little bit more risks, and that's the reason I was telling you, "Hey, be careful." That was sort of one. Right.
The second is I've managed to build a brand so people somewhat take me seriously even if I don't know anything, which is good. And third is I still do work for the place I used to work at, right?
You may have seen a picture yesterday of me with Maurice Leese-- Levy. We spent an hour together. Yes, I did. Right? Yeah. And so I-my key card still works, right? My email still works. [laughs] Okay.
I'm not an employee. I'm not on, you know, a, a W2, but I'm still connected. So what basically happens is I still have a bunch of safety things, and I can do a lot of other things, too. Write my book. I write. I speak.
I can do that. So this, for the present, I ask people, regardless of what company you're working in, start thinking about yourself as a company of one, and I began to think of myself as a company of one ten years ago
while working inside my company, right? That didn't mean it was I, me, mine, but it was like, how do I make sure that I build skill sets, I build reputations, I build networks, I build different things? Because one day
they will kick me out. Now, they did not kick me out, that's good. But you know- [laughs]... one day, like- But it could've happened. It could've happened. It could've happened. Right? But they didn't, okay?
[laughs] So, and that's because I followed my own advice, or not my advice. Someone gave me a piece of advice, which is every career has a midnight hour, and the smart people leave at five to twelve. [laughs] Yeah. Okay?
And so I followed that advice, and the big fight was whether I was leaving at quarter to twelve or five to twelve, okay? But that was a different thing. Got it.
But one of the, one of the key things that's ex-extremely important is in the present is start thinking about it.
And for the future, and this is the, specifically to your question, it's really difficult, which is why I think companies will exist, right? Mm-hmm. Because in effect,
y-when you're by yourself, you have three big challenges. The first is you have no limits on how the work-You work all the time.
And most people who are working by themselves who are working all the time, especially because you don't know where the next paycheck is coming from, so you accept anything you can basically get.
You can't afford to say no early on. So that's number one. Therefore, that's the reason I think firms will exist because it's not only... It, it, it is one. Second is most people are not self-learners.
I've learned to become a self-learner, right? But the nice thing with organizations is you learn from other people, and there's some training, and there's teaching- Yeah... and things like that.
And I'm doing a lot of it because organizations aren't doing enough of it, so I'm being hired by organizations. Those are my, like, workshops that I do, like, literally three a week.
I'm doing one today for Juniper Networks in India, right?
Yesterday, I did something for a company in Sing- And so what basically happens is companies have begun to realize that they exist for training, but they aren't providing any training. Yeah. So the, they're...
So, so what happens is, as we move into the future,
what I would basically say is try to spend as much time as you can to keep learning because w- I have absolutely no doubt that the boards of companies are sooner or later going to make everybody a gig worker.
Make no mistake. Yeah. They have figured out something.
While they're talking about this office bullshit, they've understood something called variable cost, and they've begun to realize the difference between Hertz and Uber is Hertz owns the cars and the employees, and Uber doesn't.
Yeah. And what is basically beginning to happen is there are models where you can actually be very well off as a gig employee. Think about, for instance, the movie business
and, right, where you go from you work for a movie, you work at a Broadway thing. Yeah. Uh, or think about consulting. I mean, that's where the crypto, that's where the, that's where the crypto Web3 stuff to me comes in.
It's if you think about DAOs, it's not that different from movie models about how people gather together- Yes, yes... for specific projects even though they're really independent businesses.
Yes, and that is why I basically said y- you obviously were a journalist, and I was not, but let's say I pretend I'm a creative, like I'm a creator or a maker, okay? I believe all of us are creators- We are...
and makers, and this combination of Web 3.0 distributed autonomous organizations or democratized o- o- autonomous organizations, learning to work where people say, like, "Where is the next San Francisco?"
Or, "Where is the next Tel Aviv?" It's in your home. It's called the cloud, right? Yeah, exactly. And my whole stuff is you are in the next Tel Aviv or the next Shanghai or the next Bangalore. Stop looking.
Look inside and start learning. Yeah. The democratization of that is profound, and that's why the return to the office is just not going to happen. It's not gonna happen.
And, and what happens is the more people talk about it, the more stupid they look.
[laughs] But it's also, like, unbelievably un- Like, we hired people only in New York and stuff like this, and a lot of entry-level jobs, we didn't pay cut rate like a lot of publishers.
But, like, people were not making... To be honest with you, most of the people who were early career were still on their parents' health insurance. They were often still on their, their parents' cell phone plans.
I was, like, amazed by this. They didn't even have credit cards. It leads you to have a very unfair and unequal situation in a lot of these professions. A- advertising is one of them.
And that's why I think we're seeing a lot of labor unrest because the pendulum has been stacked against them. But beyond that, they're the lucky ones because they're being subsidized.
If you come from an underprivileged background, you don't have someone paying your cell phone bill. You don't have someone providing you better health insurance.
You're gonna have to pay the j- you know, massive out-of-pocket that we would have as a small company. So that really narrowed our pool.
Whether we wanted to talk about how important it was to have diverse, um, teams and stuff like this, just the structure of the business really worked against that, in my view.
It, it is, and, and, and that's the biggest reason I'm really bullish in this new world because, in effect, this is giving voice and opportunity to lots of people that did not have voice and opportunity.
And it's the same people who have basically determined voice and opportunity by place and privilege are the ones rebelling against this new move.
And my whole stuff is take the current when it serves or prepare to lose thy endeavors. This is unstoppable. Get used to it. Yeah. I live across the street from the beach. I know how to navigate waves.
If they're really big, I'm just kinda gonna go u- under. I'm not gonna try to fight it. [laughs] Nothing. Thank you. All right, Rishad, I'm gonna leave it there. This has been wonderful.
I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you, and have a, have, have a happy holiday, and I'm gonna try to get away from the Chicago cold, though today it's warm, and try to pretend- Yeah...
I'm in a warm place like you. Do that. And thank you all for joining us. We'll be back next year, I guess it is, with a new episode.
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