Rishad Tobaccowala
How does your company fit into your story?
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 355: Rishad Tobaccowala
Here’s a question. How does your company fit into your story?
I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach their leaders to help them succeed where leadership has its greatest impact. The intersection of strategy and humanity.
This week’s guest is Rishad Tobaccowala. He is a thought leader, author and one of the great provocative thinkers. His insights are drawn from his many years spent as the Global Strategist and Chief Growth Officer of Publicis Groupe and now from his work as an independent advisor to businesses across the world.
“For many, many years earlier in our career, I think it would be fair to say that we try to figure out how we fit into the story of our companies. But increasingly, people are asking, how do the companies fit into the story of their life?”
We all have a story we want to tell about our lives. Our answer to who we are and why we’re here.
For too many years we have tried to mould that story to fit the needs of the companies we wanted to work for.
If we were accepted, the shape that we had carved ourselves into became a lasting edit. One that we carried with us to the next job. And the one beyond.
And what we too often left behind was the story of who we wanted to be.
That has changed now. The individuals stand firm and watch potential employers twist themselves into pretzels to convince the candidate of the company's rightness, its worthiness, its fit.
Which, from a leadership perspective, strikes me as a mistake.
The tsunami of change brought about by a global pandemic will slowly recede, and the companies left standing will be those who stayed true to their stories and know the kind of people that can help write the next chapter.
Here’s Rishad Tobaccowala.
Charles: (02:01)
Rishad, welcome to Fearless, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Rishad Tobaccowala: (02:04)
Thank you for having me.
Charles: (02:06)
How do you think the world has changed in the last two years, through a business lens?
Rishad Tobaccowala: (02:12)
I believe that it has accelerated the impact of three trends that were occurring prior to COVID. One of which was the increased use and shift in the way technology is being leveraged. The second is that we are in the midst of significant demographic shifts, which include not just multi-ethnicity, but both in aging and a declining population. And three that we are living in a global world, whether we like it or not. And what has occurred over the last two years is we're seeing this in three frontiers. One is people are being somewhat surprised that the office is now a container of the past, and if you want in-person interaction, which is extremely valuable and important, you can do it, but people don't have to spend five days to do that.
And then with regard to technology, we are entering this third connected age, which is occurring over the last two years. In the first couple of ages we focused on the following. First age, was 1993 to 2007 whereas human beings were connected to transact and connected to discover. We call that search and ecommerce in our business.
In 2007, we entered second connected age, building on the first, whereas human beings, we were connected all the time and connected to everybody, which is social and mobile.
And part of what we are now entering is what I call the third connected age, where because of a combination of things, like much faster connections, like 5G, voice, AR and VR, which are new ways to connect, data connecting to data, which is machine learning, and new trust connections like blockchain. We're gonna be in a revolutionary moment, both in the way business is operated, and what a firm is, what an employee is. But to a great extent, what I believe is one of the greatest renaissances of creativity that you're ever gonna see. Because one of the things that people are missing is, over the last few years, bit by bit by bit, power has moved to the individual.
The people we were not paying a lot of attention to was the talent, and now the talent has the power, like never before. And that is specifically every industry and our industries will change things. So it's a long way of showing how things have changed over the last two years, but have accelerated changes over the last 40.
Charles: (04:57)
And in fact, not only is it 40 years of habit, but we could make the argument that in fact, we are still operating under practices that were established at the beginning of the Industrial Age, aren't we? We could go back a 150 years, in terms of people coming into an office five days a week, and living up to, or living to the expectations and requirements of the person who owned the building, essentially. So given the dramatic change that you've just described and that we've lived through, how do you think people go about reimagining the office? What does the office become other than, as I think I heard you say at one point, essentially a museum to the way things used to be done? What do people do with an office now?
Rishad Tobaccowala: (05:37)
So I believe what people do with an office now is four different things. The first is it serves as a museum, and museums tend to be important to any society, civilization, and business, and in the case of advertising and marketing, because we have awards, we can show those. Many of the companies have founders or co-founders, so we can garland their pictures, right, there. We can display our work, you know, on screens or statically in terms of advertising, and it's a place where we can indoctrinate people into the culture, which is what museums do. As well as to a great extent, we can have events, you know, like cocktail parties for clients and things like that. So that's one reason why they will continue to be important, but we don't need too many of them, and you need great looking museums versus smaller museums.
So every company should probably be thinking, in any particular city or country, what will be their museum or museum offices, and what to do with the rest. So that happens to be one. The second is I'm a big believer in in-person interaction. And what we do know is that we... for many people, in-person interaction is important for three reasons. It obviously varies based on industry, it varies based on age, and a few other things, but the three key things that you get from in-person interaction, which is is hard to get from completely virtual. So you can get from virtual, but my basic belief is virtual plus in-person is better than all virtual. And I also basically believe that virtual plus in-person is better than all in-person, right?
So the debate that people are having is like A versus B, I said, "No, it's both." How do you combine both to be better than what was one before? So in-person has the following three advantages usually, but again, not always, versus virtual. Number one is it's a great way to basically learn that there are certain types of learning that can be done with your head down or your head up, but there are certain types of learning where your heads has to be together. And that head together sometimes is by watching and seeing the unsaid. You know, you and I have been in many meetings, by being in the meeting and seeing both how people comported themselves, as well as the body language, and the tension or the lack of tension, we learned a lot. Those are hard without being there in-person.
The second big benefit is basically relationship building and networking. And what I've sort of discovered is when you have met someone, either before or after you've met them virtually, it enhances the relationship obviously, ideally, if you like each other. But as I remind people, you can't be dating completely virtually, at some stage you’ve got to meet, right? So what tends to basically happen is the ability to build on this relationship and networking that can be better done in-person.
And the third one is very simply problem-solving and idea generation, which I call “heads together”. That's another thing where with heads together can probably do a better job than separately. Now, again, the reason I say it's A plus B, can you learn, can you build relationships, and can you solve problems virtually? Yes, we did that for two years. So it's not that you can't do it, but buttressed with a little bit of in-person interaction in a bar, at an event, in a restaurant, or at the museum, that's probably good.
So for certain employees, they would like to be away from home. So it's a place like a getaway place that someone can getaway to. And so there it's like, "Hey, we have something that allows you to plug in, check in, do what you need to do, meet your colleagues." So it's almost like every office, even though the company may own the real estate, becomes a WeWork, but the WeWork, maybe just for the employees.
So the idea really is to get back to in-person interaction, but make sure, and if you recognize it, it doesn't have to be done five days a week. It may be done a few days a month for all you know? And it obviously has to be flexible. But that is where really, you can think about space. Now, based on this, my belief is that almost every company in America has maybe 50 to 70% too much real estate.
And I sense that eventually people will come back maybe one day or two days, but why do you have tens of thousands of square feet for that? And that will eventually come back to this entire thing, which is, yes, you need these physical locations to do these kinds of things. But if you think about that, you don't do that all day long, that you should program these things, and you don't need to do those more than certain days a week. All of a sudden, one of the biggest things, at least, is gonna be that the future of work is gonna be completely unbundled and distributed. And the reason I use unbundled and distributed and not remote and hybrid is, unbundled means it'll be at the museum, it'll be at home, it'll be at the restaurant, it'll be at CES, it'll be whatever. But distributed is primarily because what is happening, you know, to a great extent, is we now are working from all over. And that also is not new, to your point, where this was not necessarily true a 150 years ago. But 20 to 25 years ago, many of America's biggest companies, largest number of employees no longer work near their headquarters. Like IBM and Accenture today have more employees in India than we have in the United States.
So it's these very interesting things. Once you sort think about it, you begin to realize that returning to the office is not a business problem, it's not a creative problem, it's not a talent problem, it's a managerial problem. Because managers are wondering, what in the world do we do now?
Charles: (12:16)
I mean, I think what you're seeing is, and what you're describing so beautifully is a difference between the question of when do people go in the office compared to—
Rishad Tobaccowala: (12:24)
Yes.
Charles: (12:25)
... answering the question, why should people go in the office? And I think it's interesting to see how many leaders are still fixated on the former. They're still worrying about how many people came in today, which days of the week are we having people come in, and they're not getting to that second level or third level of thinking, which is, why would these people want to come into the office? What's the reason we can give them?
Rishad Tobaccowala: (12:44)
Yes. And one of the reasons that I was asked to speak to these 20 different companies is, over the last couple of years, as sort of a free moving agent, while it has been limited to the United States, I have worked across or touched over a hundred companies, and I've visited about 15 or 20. And I'll tell you something very common. Once people return to work or to the office, it takes approximately two weeks for them to question why they came back. So what I'm basically seeing is people come back, and after two weeks, people stop coming, and there are three reasons they stop coming. One is because people haven't asked why we are coming back, just like we're coming back. It's number one. The second is there was a nostalgia of December 2019. And very much like in nostalgia, when you go back to the place that you were nostalgic about, it seems smaller and shrunken relative to your dreams. So like, "What is this?" Right? So there's that shock.
And third is, it's a very low energy environment because there are very few people. So even the companies that dictated, "You must return," like the famous JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are shocked and surprised by even now, with all their dictates, that only 60, 70% are coming back, and then they're spread out.
And so a lot of these people have basically, unfortunately, you know, surrounded themselves with people like them. And, you know, one of the things I always warned senior management, which I used to be part of, across all companies, is we eventually to a great extent become somewhat incestuous. We hang out with each other or people like ourselves, and we begin to think that the rest of the world is like us. And then obviously the way we utilize media, and if we utilize the web, all of it is customized and algorithmized to make us feel good. And as a result, we start to begin to believe that our flatulence smells like Chanel 5. And then we start making strategy which stinks, but we think it smells great, right? And then the reality of the world comes and shocks us.
And then our first thing is, where are these people, you know, they won't learn, they won't do this, they won't do that. And my whole stuff is like, hey, who's caught in a time warp? Us in management or the future?
Charles: (15:16)
Well, and if to your point, this is being driven by leaders who only understand their value within the proposition of an office with people within it, or largely only understand their value through that lens, what's the value proposition that they have to bring to the table now, in your view? How do leaders have to evolve in order to be meaningful and valuable and effective?
Rishad Tobaccowala: (15:38)
So, you know, fundamentally, I basically asked, why do people go to work? So my whole basic belief is, okay, if you're a leader, you want to eventually find people who will create value you for your clients, value for themselves, and enough value leftover for the firm. So why does somebody who is a talented individual decide to go to work, okay? Why do they decide to work? And the first three are very simple. They go for money, fame, and power, and you need money and you need fame and you need power.
You might have all the money, but you want some... If it's not fame, it might be recognition. If it's not power, it's autonomy. It's human being to want money, autonomy and recognition, so that's one. The second is purpose, values and connections. So while you join for money, fame, and power, you stay for purpose, values and connections. And what has started to basically happen is those three reasons to stay have been highly tested over the last two years. You feel less connected with people because you don't see them. Many of your colleagues, you never knew before they joined the company. You are now thinking about the purpose of work in different ways, after two years of fragility, two years of all kinds of challenges, both the societal and company. People are basically asking, "What am I working for?" And people's values have deferred because they've lived a different life, so to an extent they've gone off remote control. And I'll say, "You know, I like being with my kid, I like looking after my older mother. I like doing something of sort."
And so the purpose, values and connections are still important but what has happened is people's purpose, values and what they feel connected to have changed. And the first thing management has to basically do is understand what the new purpose, values and connections are, as well as, by the way, companies are now expected to have purpose, values and connection, whether it's because of DEI, ESG or whatever it is.
The three things that people stay, because while we talk about The Great Resignation, we have to remember that less than 20% of people have resigned and most people are not resigning from work, they're resigning from that particular place.
So I looked at the millions of people who weren't going anywhere, right? So assuming that most of them are not on autopilot or dead, why do they still stay? So they have money, fame and power. They have purpose and connections. What they're really looking for is freedom, story and growth. And freedom is, “Give me freedom and flexibility to be who I am, and work the way I want to.” So that has become more important and that's exactly what we're starting to say, "We've taken away from you." So recognize that.
Second is story. This has been changing for a long time, but for many, many years earlier in our career, I think it would be fair to say that we try to figure out how we fit into the story of our companies. But increasingly, people are asking, how do the companies fit into the story of their life? Which basically means the center of gravity of my life is not the office or the company, the center of gravity of my life is me, and the office and the company happens to be a part of it but it's not all of it. Which again, basically means we have to think about it in a slightly different way, which a lot of people are not. But the single most important thing is growth.
So the average company today stays in the S&P 500 for approximately 12 years. Doesn't mean it goes out of business, but stays in the S&P 500 12 years. You and I will have careers that will last for about 50 years. Which means my individual career is four times longer than the companies lasting in the S&P 500. So when you think about S&P 500 companies disappearing, technology shifts coming significantly, what a person really wants is, how do they grow themselves and their skills to remain relevant? And every industry, and unfortunately particularly, until recently, most people in the marketing and advertising space, where have they gone to find their cost savings? They've gone to find their cost savings in investments and training.
So what had basically happened is companies started trying to buy the cheapest people they could, provide them with the minimum training that they could. And as a result, people basically said, "How am I going to grow?" And also what people are basically saying is, "I would rather grow, when my company is basically working in the world of word processing versus in the world of typewriters." And that, again, becomes a very big struggle, which is, it's hard to believe, but most people who used to work with us may not want to be like us anymore, okay? Which is a bit of an affront.
So the whole idea is, I would turn around and say, "How do I make sure that I keep you as a talent, world class in your skills, that allow you to grow both as a person and as a skilled talent? How do I do that in a way that gives you maximum freedom, but within a firm framework? I'm paying you, there are clients, there are meetings you have to have. I can't give you freedom where you can come in a bathrobe and decide not to come to work. I want to give you more freedom, and I also recognize that the center of gravity of your life is no longer work, but work is important to you as a person." So it's not like work isn't important and you shouldn't be following certain rules, but if you look at it as like, "I'm gonna give you as much freedom as I can. I'm going to basically recognize that the story of your life includes work, but it's not all about work, but more importantly, I'm going to help you grow as a person and your skill so you can remain a talented and economic viable entity." That's what we should focus on.
And if you noticed, none of those three are what we talk about, right? They talk about, to your point, "How many days back in the office? What do you do this? How do you do that?" Who cares? I want freedom, I want story and growth. And if you don't give me freedom, story and growth, and your purpose, values and connections are weak, then I'll focus on money, fame, and power, which basically means I won't be loyal. I'll go to whoever pays me more money, because if that's the only thing that matters, I'll just go and do that. And so that I find pretty shattering, which is, people say people are not loyal. I said, "Whoever said they have to be loyal to you?"
I think people need to be loyal to themselves and their families. The whole idea of people being loyal to companies, I'm loyal to a company, but I was loyal to a company because I recognized that I got benefits from it and they got benefits from me, but I can pretty much assure you that when I die, I don't think my company will be at my graveside. Other people will. So my whole stuff is, "You're a goddamn company. What the hell are you talking about?" You know, when, when there's a downturn, you cut people. Like, you don't basically say, "You're no longer my daughter or son, because I've lost my job." But you're no longer my employee because there's an economic issue. These simple things like talking about humans, talking about English and thinking that other people are actually around you are very intelligent, are sometimes things we forget.
Charles: (23:11)
I'm so struck by this because what you're pointing out is that the entire structure of business, I mean, you and I specialize in companies for whom creative thinking and innovation are fundamental, so let's focus on those kinds of businesses. Those kinds of businesses are built around restraint. They're built around five days a week, give or take, they're built around 40 to 50 to 60 hours a week, give or take, they're built around the talent pool is available to us from their early twenties until, what, their early mid fifties, something like that. And they are full focused on, “How do we maximize the value to us as a business from all of those closed groups or possibilities?” And Faith Popcorn made the point about a month ago, she said, "Life expectancy has tripled in the last 200 years. Who's to say, that's not gonna happen again?"
Right now, I think if you look at life expectancy in the Western world, I think, I think I'm right in saying that a child born today into the Western world has a life expectancy of close to a hundred already.
Rishad Tobaccowala: (24:15)
Yes.
Charles: (24:17)
So the notion that we are worrying about how do we extract the maximum value of people who are going be finished with when they are 55 or 60 is becoming increasingly absurd, because we're looking at decades of life beyond that, decades of valuable contribution beyond that. And to your point, the relationship is backwards. We need to look at and understand the people as individuals—
Rishad Tobaccowala: (24:37)
Yes.
Charles: (24:38)
—and the journey that they want to be on, and the moment from a business standpoint that we are going to play in that, however long that is.
Rishad Tobaccowala: (24:45)
That is absolutely right. I wrote a piece about 2, 3 months ago called The Age of the Seasoned. So I decided not to call you and me “aged,” right? I just thought—
Charles: (24:56)
(laughs) I appreciate that.
Rishad Tobaccowala: (24:56)
—it will more elegant to say... I thought you and me, we could be called “the seasoned,” okay? And people are a decade or two older than us, even more seasoned, but they're seasoned? And there are three factors that we seem to be forgetting. One is, to your point, people are gonna live much longer. In addition to living longer, they're living healthier, and they're also living in a system where a lot of things that might have allowed them to be financially less burdened, everything from pensions, to social security, to healthcare, all are not as strong as they used to be. So, to a great extent, whether you like it or not, you're going to possibly have to work. A lot of people, they like to continue to work. For other people, whether they like it or not, they're going to have to continue to work.
So you're going to have all these older people or seasoned people. The second is that more than 50 percent of America’s wealth is held by people over 60 years old, who are gonna live for another 20 to 30 years. And if you open AdAge and Adweek, it appears that after you're 35 years old, you're dead to the world. What's that about? So fundamentally a business that is supposed to navigate clients into the future, a business that is supposed to keep up with trends and culture, a business that is supposed to sell things to people that has money, basically is looking completely at the wrong end of the telescope.
Charles: (26:22)
And you and I both know that the reason for that is because the business model is predicated on hiring young people, paying them as little as possible for as long as possible, and then replacing them when they start to become too expensive. I mean, the business model itself is flawed, right? Which goes back to the foundation of the businesses, "Let's pay people by the hour. Let's compensate agencies and creative company by the hour," which is also absurd. And so the entire—
Rishad Tobaccowala: (26:43,)
It is, it is, yes. Yeah, it is, it's absolutely absurd. And to me... So here's what's beginning to happen is now oddly, one of the reasons the business model is under... is problematic, is today, some of the most wanted skills happen to be the ones that the less seasoned happen to have. And so the market is willing to pay them much more, and the industry, because of its, what I call digital leakage, right? So we compete, we rarely would compete 25, 30 years ago for the same talent as who was going to Microsoft or IBM. Today, the very same talent could be going to Google, trade desk, a crypto startup, you know, something of that sort—
Charles: (27:32)
Netflix, Amazon, and all those places, yeah.
Rishad Tobaccowala: (27:33)
Yeah, right, or whatever it is.
Charles: (27:35)
Yep.
Rishad Tobaccowala: (27:35)
And what is interesting happen is the people who we most value sometimes, you know, and we need in our business are basically saying, "Hey, wait, a second. I can get paid better in other places." Second is, "I do not want to be managed where you think where the client is right." So one of the key things that I truly believe is obviously our business doesn't live without clients, but our business dies when we focus only on clients, right? Our business has, to a certain extent, become so decided by clients, that we are doing clients a disservice. I believe we are external to the client, and we should be going to the client and saying, "Listen, you are wrong."
One of the things that you're also wrong about is, if you basically want world class thoughts, now we have to differentiate ourselves to be able to show that. I've basically always said, "It doesn't matter how cheaply you buy the arrows, what you want are world class archers." We are fixated on buying the arrows cheaply versus focusing on the archers.
The simple reality is there's a leadership crisis, because what tends to happen as part of leadership, is recognizing when the world is changing, and taking principled stands including, you know, going to a client or a brand and saying, "This will not stand." Now, interestingly, the reason why I think this is very good for our industry is three shifts are helping us.
The first shift that's helping us is our supposed competitors have turned out to basically be people who our clients are increasingly trusting even less than us, which is the Facebook and Googles, et cetera.
But the second and third have particularly helped us, because almost every company has become more advanced both digitally and in other kinds of things. Those skill sets are in such great demand that we have too much demand coming in. Almost, if you look at almost any agency, the problem is no longer demand, the problem is supply. Most holding companies in the United States at this current time have between five and 10,000 open jobs, just the holding companies, each one has between five and 10,000 open jobs. So now we can go to our client and say, "Sorry, this is how much it's going to cost if you want the work to be done." And the client can't go anywhere else, right? Including they can't go in-housing, which is like a BS thing anyway, okay. The problem with in-housing always was the skill sets are churning very fast and you can't ever fire yourself. And what is in-housing when everybody's working externally? Everybody's either out of house or everybody's in-house.
These things are inability to see how trends change. The inability to actually be flexible in mind is shocking, and as a result, people who know how to do that are in absolute demand. And so one of the things I'm spending a lot of time with people all over, both management, as well as a young people, is training them on how to basically become absolutely amazing companies of one. But I'm not saying you're a company of one just by yourself, you work with hundreds of other people, but you want to basically build skill sets, build networks, build reputation, and build learning, so you never have to basically be forced to fit into someone's Excel spreadsheet.
Charles: (30:45)
Yeah, that's really well said. and it certainly lives up to my experience of what the last five years have been like, and expanded and accelerated dramatically actually over the last two and a half. Underpinning all of this is a subject that I've become increasingly interested in over the last few months, I think, which is that of emotional safety, and the role of emotional safety in the workplace. That started, I guess, essentially through the advent and framing of DEI work, but it goes much beyond that. I'm curious, from your standpoint, as you see the world evolving and needing to evolve faster, what do you think is the role of emotional safety and how do you think companies go about creating it?
Rishad Tobaccowala: (31:27)
So I believe it is extremely important that companies basically recognize that their success is built on diversity of thinking, diversity of backgrounds, and those often come from diversity of ethnicity, diversity of gender, diversity of a whole bunch of other things. And that, by its very nature, innovation come when you have these differences that interact with each other, and therefore you want to have two things. You want to make sure that you have somewhat representative of the market that you are working in, and the market that your clients are selling to. Not necessarily a quota system, but somewhat representative of what the reality basically is. The second is you want to make absolutely certain that everybody is given equal opportunity, and that certain things that are clearly seen as racist or sexist or harassment are not allowed.
But then there are two other things that we have to remember, which sometimes we forget. So those are given. You want to have people from all over, you want to have an environment where people are free to speak up. You wanna have an environment where there is no harassment, et cetera, et cetera. And there are two other things that we have to, at the same time, make sure we have, in order for the benefits of what we just did to actually scale. And the first one is to remember that diversity of faces is not the same as diversity of voices. And what I mean by that is, by its very nature, people are going to disagree with each other. And as long as the disagreement has got nothing to do with demeaning a person's heritage or ethnicity, disagreeing is fine, right?
What is starting to happen is often what we are forgetting is we are now sometimes got into a place where people have become so sensitive to everything that nobody actually speaks up.
And so what we now have is diversity of faces without diversity of voices, because someone may think you're harassing them.
So the idea basically is that now, to a great extent, people sometimes in many organizations do not give feedback. So I wrote this piece on feedback. Many people are not getting any feedback. And can you imagine growing without any feedback? Now, we would sometimes get feedback, feedback that was lunatic, that we could do without, that we would grow without, right? (laughs)
But if you had no feedback... So in effect, what is starting to happen is I believe we definitely need to have, and we need to double down on everything to do with diversity and ethnicity and fairness and no harassment and everything else. But at the same stage, we've got to basically recognize that once we have done that, we've got to make sure that people can speak up. Because we are in a business of ideas. We are basically in the business of people challenging the status quo. And my whole stuff is, if you challenge the idea and if you challenge the result, that is fine. You're not challenging the person's background, right? Or anything of the sort. But it's become, because of sometimes the lack of training, we've become sensitive to it. And so sometimes, I suddenly begin to realize that we have environments where everything is beautiful, but nothing gets actually said.
Charles: (34:02)
Yeah, I think that 72andSunny did a very good job of this, I think, where, when you were in a room discussing an idea, they had a strict policy that for the duration of that conversation, the idea belonged to the room, did not belong to anybody. And it created a safe space by which to actually evaluate, discuss, expand, criticize the idea without it being personal, and I always found that to be a healthy practice. And I think, to your point, we need to instill more practices that encourage this kind of thinking and this kind of behavior and formalize those. Last question for you. What are you afraid of?
Rishad Tobaccowala: (35:38)
So there are two or three things that I'm afraid of. One are things that unfortunately I cannot control, and that will happen, which is, you know, at some particular stage somebody, that I love or something else, will pass away. So the loss of people you love, right? But just to nature. And at some particular stage, you know, you and I will probably kick the bucket as they say. So I'm not afraid of death, but sometimes, you know, I like life, so the whole idea is, loss is integrated into living and you have to deal with it, so that's sort of one. The two that I probably… and there's not much you can do, eat a little well, exercise and sleep, but after that it's sort of luck and chance.
The second one that I... the one that I sort of worry about, mostly, is that at some particular stage, I may not be able to see, learn straight, see straight, or get the right feedback and find myself basically back, you know, completely. I'm already doing this on this podcast, which is, "The guy is crazy, he's talking about things that got nothing to do with reality." So one of the key things that, at some particular stage, I could trip myself into the light fantastic. And that's okay, even if you like smoke some weed, but if you do it every day, you kind of like lose the plot, and so I hope I don't lose the plot. And this is not losing the plot because of mental incapacitation, it's just because I'm not listening to people who say, "Listen, you have lost the plot. You better do something about it."
And that is always a problem when you get very passionate about what you do and when you get a little bit well regarded and well known, people think you're very cool, but you know that you probably are not.
Charles: (37:27)
I so value your perspective, your lens on the world. And I am extremely confident that you are a long, long way from having lost the plot. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and your observations and your expertise today. I think this is an invaluable conversation and I thank you for joining me.
Rishad Tobaccowala: (37:43)
Thank you for having me, Charles.
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