Rashad Tobaccowala (25:23)
So I've had the opportunity to be at this Sphere twice. Once at this CES and once within the first three, four weeks that it opened. I have not been for a U2 concert or an Eagles concert. Both times I saw Postcards from the Earth, which is the current show that's going on. And the first time I went is because I heard about it. So I bought tickets for my wife and daughters and we did it. And the second time I went is because I'm on the board of the company that helps create it. And they had some prospects and clients there. They invited me as a board director and I got a behind the scenes look at it. And I obviously believe enough in experiences to be on the board of a company that has created that and a lot of other things. So let me tell you a little bit about experiences. I think we talk about omnichannel. I think the world of marketing is moving from omnichannel to multidimensional. We are starting to move from technology stacks to experience stacks. There are all kinds of experiences of which there are four potential dimensions of experiences. One form of experience is the virtual experience. The other form of experience is a twin experience where you think you're there and feels more real than virtual. A third form of experience is the real world. And a fourth form of experience is an immersive, complete experience, as happens with Unreal Engine and a whole bunch of other things. You put those together and you see some of those happening at the sphere, which is a great physical experience. It's a form of an immersive experience, and it's a real world experience too. But a lot of people have, for instance, used another example and they say these things. I was at a presentation recently and someone said this stuff is for the 100%. It is in some ways and not in other ways. So if you look at this sphere where the cheapest you can get a ticket is $86, right? It's not cheap for one ticket. And if you start doing VIP tickets and add stuff, it goes up to about $200 right next to me. And I use it a lot. So I'm clearly one of the minority. I have a Apple Vision Pro, which everybody basically believes is dead on arrival. It's not dead on arrival. The Apple Vision Pro is amazing because I believe it's where the future of work and the future of television is going to occur. And I use it more like the future of television. And it's a very expensive future of television. It's $3,000 actually, by the time you're done insuring it and paying the taxes, $4,000 we have to insure for $29 a month because it's so expensive. But I use it everywhere in my travels as my form of television. It's incredible. In fact, sometimes at home, and I have the luck of having an amazing 85 inch television, sometimes I want to watch it on that versus that, which is why. But everywhere I travel on planes, it's brilliant. But the other thing that I do is when I'm Again, working and I'm on a plane or I'm outside home. At home I have, as I talk to you, I have an XDR display, these amazing beautiful displays from Apple. But on the road I have also a great display. I have a Mac Pro, the top of the line Mac Pro with the Retina display. But I put out this little thing and what I begin to have is multiple screens in front of me. It allows me to take that screen and make it a huge screen in front of me, right? And I can do a lot of different things. I could also do this thing where I could have the multiple screen in front of me while I have a video running, watching like cnn. So just like I'm doing today, I'm basically doing this, I'm talking to you. I've got the presidency thing, the CNN at the back, I can do the exactly same thing. But that's part of the future of work. But the real future of work and the future of television, especially the future of work, if people don't understand it, I mention it in my book is I tell everybody, hey listen, this is expensive. It sounds very elitist. The price will come down just like it has come down for phones and a bunch of other things. Go to an Apple Store, ask for a 30 minute demo of Vision Pro. Just ask for a 30 minute demo of Vision Pro. And when you have that demo, ask them to show you the Alicia Keys rehearsal in Spatial Video. Once you see that, just remember what I just said, that's the future of work, right? You have absolutely no clue that you're not in the same room as with her. You're in the room with her, right? She's walking around you, she's talking to you, she's talking to her sound people, et cetera. And you think you're right there, that today costs $3,400 a person. Expensive. Okay? Once it's less than $1,000 a person, companies will buy it for everybody. Because my basic belief is it's much cheaper than real estate. Right? And that is what most leaders don't understand. You don't. Most of these people talk about these things like AI. And my stuff is, hey, by the way, if AI really spreads, you're going to require all your employees, but they're going to actually require them to work 75% of the time, not 100% of the time. So have you started thinking about fractionalized employees? When you're basically thinking about a company that starts today to compete in a modern world with modern technology and AI, which Company outside of a dentist's office will make people come down five days a week to the office. Zero. You would never start a company like that. That includes this. Jeff Bezos with Amazon Day Zero. Starting a company would never started that. That's what I told them. And they started clapping. Right. So my basic belief is this return to the office thing is first, the wrong question. That the question should be, how do I maximize the benefits of in person interaction? The second one to a great extent is you should basically be asking a much more important question, which is, how do I reimagine my business? And is it that the reason people are not coming back to the office? There are lots of good reasons for them to come back to the office, but there's also another reason they're not coming back to the office. They are not coming back to the bosses. Because we have entered an age of de bossification. Stop being a boss. Learn to be a leader. If you don't know how to manage and inspire people over a screen, you cannot be a leader. You just cannot be a leader today. And the reality of it is, if you need to be looking over someone's physical body to be a leader, you are so old school, you should go back to basically trying to basically help people in the days of cargo ships. And that's as soon as I show people what's happening with the future of everything, aging population, declining populations, marketplaces, technology, and then I say, what are we doing? The whole focus and emphasis on return to the office is a total lack of. It's got nothing to do with the future of work. Nothing. And that's what Business Insider and all these people are writing about. I said, like, who in the world even understands where this is going? Which is why I hope my book is going to basically either wake people up or they're going to think I'm becoming. Become totally demented and delusional, which is also very likely. But, but, but the way for the, the CEOs who've read my book say, oh, shit, right? Because what happens is I just say, here are different ways of looking at it. You are different frameworks. But I don't say there is a way. I don't say there is one way for the future of work, right? I said, actually, if I were running a company for a certain group of people, I would ask them to come to the office five days a week for the first six months they joined the company. But that means for those people who joined the company for six months, I'd say I needed to come for these reasons after that, this is the flexibility, right? And among those who tell me, hey, I've got some huge personal or health reason I can't do it, I'd make exceptions, but I'd say the standard is this. For these reasons. And once I've got you trained, indoctrinated, built relationships, networks, understood the company, understood our history, understood all the stuff that comes, which is easier to do that way. It's like boot camp. Right now. You're going to be trained as by, you know, mission impossible agents. You've gone through training. Now you go out and do your spying and other work everywhere else. Okay? Then we come back maybe once every quarter or once every month, they figure it out more. You know what all that requires? It requires leaders to actually lead, to work really hard to reimagine their businesses. So you're the same company that says, I want to be agile and I want to keep my costs under control. And then they say, we don't like flexible work and we want to pay a lot of money in real estate. Which one do you want? Now, the good news is, Buzz, because I don't have a job, I can speak like this without fear of being fired, because I don't have a job. Okay? But once I. And I of course, don't speak like, I speak even kinder, if that makes sense. I just say, like, I don't understand why you would do it like this. I would doubt if I had a job today. And the good news, I had a job for a lot of time. And in effect, those are some of the things that I find really, really unusual, which is why one of the things I admire about you is a lot of people say, it's too late, we've grown too old. How can we change? And my whole thing is like, okay, Warren Buffett made 95% of his wealth, 95% of his wealth after his 65th birthday. Okay, so tell me exactly how old you are now. So 99% of your potential has not been used. If you actually can reimagine things, I love it.