Host E.B. Moss shares a personal scoop, and a re-scoop: a favorite episode with Rishad Tobaccowala, futurist and author of Rethinking Work, whose ideas just got a fresh round of buzz via a new Fortune Magazine interview.

Rishad does everything big; he starts with two doppios (four espresso shots!) He also goes big in challenging the premise of everything we think we know about work. He's a voice of authority. named a top business leader by Business Week a top five marketing innovator by Time, and he's in the Advertising Hall of Fame. In "Rethinking Work" he's candid that companies are fixated on the wrong question ("How many days a week should people be in the office?") instead of the right one ("How do we rethink our strategy, our org design, and the difference between managing and leading?").

And that Bossing is bad. Influencing is good. Rishad breaks down how "bossing" needs to morph into mentoring, predicts the plus side of fractional employment, the rise of the "company of one," and why AI means more work but fewer traditional jobs. Yes, as he puts it, "Change sucks. But irrelevance is worse."

Also in this episode: why storytelling is the whole point of the data age (not a casualty of it) And E.B. shares her own scoop about her new role telling stories for Nielsen's Global Brand Marketing team.

Also mentioned in this episode: Rishad's Rethinking Work podcast, and his conversation with fellow Insider Interviews alum Lou Paskalis.

Insider Interviews delivers the insider's scoop on the business of media, marketing, and advertising.

Key Moments include:
10:30 – Why "return to office" is asking the wrong question entirely
11:40 – "Keyword bingo": future, agile, personalized, talent
14:00 – "Change sucks. But irrelevance is worse."
19:50 – Bossing bad, influencing good: the fractional employee model
28:00 – Boss vs. leader (and the musical interlude begins)
44:20 – AI + HI: why storytelling is "data with a soul"
47:50 – The playlist metaphor: the future of work, music, and marketing in one image

Support this show at: buymeacoffee.com/mossappeal or find out more at mossappeal.com/podcasts.

Theme music by John Clayton.

Host E.B. Moss brought on the new GM of Alembic, Hitesh Wadhwani, during the POSSIBLE Conference in Miami, as part of a mini-series for "Insider Interviews" called “POV: Possible.” Because, as Wadhwani explains, with causal AI it's now possible for marketers to prove what actually drove business results.

Wadhwani arrived at Alembic from 12 years at Google, where he helped build measurement products including Google Meridian. He explains why having more marketing data does not necessarily create more confidence — and why traditional approaches still leave CMOs and CFOs asking the same question: what actually caused the outcome?
Wadhwani makes the case that LLMs were designed to predict language, not deliver the kind of precision needed for multimillion-dollar budgeting and pricing decisions. Alembic's answer is causal AI: a real-time model of the business that connects marketing channels, pricing, promotions, inventory, and more to identify not just what happened, but what caused it.

He shares a standout case study involving a major airline's Olympic campaign spend. Alembic's model identified, at moment-level granularity, that the placement of the brand's logo during the medal ceremony drove more flights to Paris than any other single moment in the campaign — the kind of insight that makes causal AI feel a lot less like a buzzword and a lot more like a business tool.

One of the biggest ideas in the episode is how causal AI can help close the gap between marketing and finance. Instead of separate teams using separate metrics, Alembic puts brand, performance, and measurement into one framework that gives CMOs and CFOs a shared language for decision-making. That includes getting better vision in to how to exactly measure creator and influencer marketing.

Learn how Alembic's model works, and what's next for the company with NVIDIA as a compute partner.
Subscribe for more Insider Interviews and share this one with the measurement skeptic on your team.