Laetitia Vitaud

Nigel Rawlins: Laetitia, welcome back to the Wisepreneurs podcast. The last time you appeared was on Number nine. So welcome back and thank you for accepting my invitation.

Laëtitia Vitaud: Thank you, Nigel, for inviting me a second time. I'm flattered.

Nigel Rawlins: Lovely. Tell me you're still in Bavaria last time you just moved to Bavaria.

Laëtitia Vitaud: Oh yes, that was so that must have been three, almost three years ago, almost three years ago. I'm still in Bavaria, but planning to go back to France next year, next summer. I've been away from my country for nearly a decade now, and strangely enough, Germany is the country that made, that's made me feel... completely French and I want to go back for a number of reasons. The Germans to me are just too annoying I want to go back.

Nigel Rawlins: So what is it about them that's annoying you?

Laëtitia Vitaud: It's a good thing, they're very direct people, but they don't, They don't smile much. It's very bureaucratic. A lot of things are quite old fashioned when it comes to the way you communicate with the administration, like the tax administration.

They still use... Fax machines otherwise you just go to the post office and print everything. And it's little things like that. They're not very digital. It has changed of course, but it's still way behind other countries, especially the UK where I lived before and yeah, it's very conservative in Bavaria .

Lots of women at home or part time and as a feminist, I find that, I find it as a hostile environment. I love how beautiful Bavaria is and I love the mountains, the Alps and lots of great things and I think you can have a wonderful life here, but I just... probably miss my own culture.

I miss France, and I know that as soon as I'm back in France, I will hate my own country again. Because I just love to complain wherever I am. I never accept things that could be different. So I have to just basically complain all the time. So I'm not naive about this. I know my own limits.

Nigel Rawlins: It sounds like an intellectual thing where you're questioning things and maybe it's just the way your brain works is you question the culture of where you are. But tell me one of the reasons I think you mentioned in our last podcast, the reason you visit different countries is to learn new stuff.

Was that the reason you moved to Bavaria the first time?

Laëtitia Vitaud: Yes, for my kids to learn the language. I'm actually half German technically. My mother's German. And so I wanted to explore that side of my past or my family's past, although they're not Bavarian, so I learned that Bavaria is very different from the rest of Germany, which is not necessarily true on all points, but so my children now speak perfect German as well as perfect English, so it's another reason why I allow myself to think we can go back home. We've explored enough. There's another thing, what you said about learning about different cultures is still true. I still want to do that, but I also want to feel anchored somewhere. To have roots, not be one of those nomad people who just need the computer and Wi Fi connection and can be anywhere and are actually nowhere.

They are nowhere because they don't form connections, strong connections with the people they're with. And I have that thing where most of my clients are either in France or in the UK or even Belgium, for example, but not really in Germany. I don't have professional connections there. I don't really have that many connections.

So I'm one of those anywhere's, to use David Goodhart's term, who distinguished between the somewheres and the anywhere's. And for a while, the anywhere's they had it all. They were the winners of globalization. I don't think they are anymore. I think you have to know your neighbors. I think you have to be anchored in a local community.

I think you have to be more local now. And that's the future with climate change and all the things happening, the aging also. I think it's important to have strong roots. And I will still travel as a tourist, at least in Europe. I don't know how much I want to be on a plane, although I would love to visit Australia one day.

Nigel Rawlins: Oh no, it's pretty laid back. We're spring here at the moment. It's a 20 degree day. It's been lovely and sunny. The warmth is just beautiful. You actually speak three languages, don't you? French, English and Germany. And your English is excellent. How does that affect the way you think about things?

Laëtitia Vitaud: The fact that I speak multiple languages ... Yeah, it makes me question a lot of things. And I think it's at some point when you have those multiple cultures, you tend to be a foreigner everywhere you go. But it's it's also a good thing because you see things it's like having hindsight all the time, oh, I've seen this before somewhere else, or I've seen a different version of this, or oh, I see that they take this and this for granted when in fact it could be different, so I think it helps develop other forms of intelligence, that are quite useful.

Nigel Rawlins: One of the things we were talking about before we started on here was the fact that you have learnt Jiu Jitsu and you compete in that as well, and you do yoga, and as I mentioned to you, some of our guests have a background in dance music, and as an actress.

Do you find that your jiu jitsu determines things about how you react with people or do your work?

Laëtitia Vitaud: It's probably, Jiu Jitsu in particular, has probably made me more comfortable with how different other people can be, how different their bodies can be, how more mindful of them, of their... needs, of their limits. When you hear Jiu Jitsu, you think of fighting and aggression. In fact, it's much more it's much more an action reaction thing.

It's like you use the other person's strength to, for example, make them fall. But to do that, you have to understand how they work, what they plan to do, et cetera. So it's very, relational. It's about the relation between two bodies and the minds that control them. So that's probably the one thing that I find the most interesting.

The other is that it's made me confident, more self confident, because I was extremely unsure of myself. I didn't like my body. I was very ill at ease all the time. And when you do a lot of sports, you have this chemical thing, you have all these nice hormones and endorphins, etc.

And then you build strength, and the two go together, hormones and muscles. And you build confidence, because also you have, you develop skills you learn to understand right and left a little bit better, to coordinate things a little bit better. And it's it's an extremely interesting activity to do.

But I think you can have that with other things. It's probably... If you're a dancer, you will have some of the same advantages. Jiu jitsu and martial arts are a little bit dances.

Like Capoeira, the Brazilian martial art, it's a mix between fight, fighting and dancing.

Nigel Rawlins: yeah, now I've seen that, it looks amazing. By doing other things with our lives and we bring it into our work and our relations with people, I think it helps us see things better. But the physical, I think, with the people I've been talking to on the podcast, it's very evident to me that it helps them with their thinking and helps them with their work, especially if they're a coach or a life coach.

They have an insight which is quite incredible. And I don't know whether it's because when you're dancing in a group professional dancer, or an actress, or a musician, and you're performing in a group that you're situationally aware, you're aware of the other person, and you somehow flow.

Laëtitia Vitaud: Yes, that situational awareness is also something that we don't have enough of. We tend to forget our bodies, especially with our digital activities. We're all immersed in our screens and our interactions with others online. And we forget we have a body, we forget where we are, and we forget to be aware of our environment and perhaps we need more of these activities than we did a few generations ago.

Because of our digital usage and the way we forget our bodies all the time.

Nigel Rawlins: I think the main thing is, where does the body end? And I think that's a big issue at the moment, especially in a digital age, because our screens really, are they a part of us? And our keyboards, and our phones, and our iPads?

Laëtitia Vitaud: I think they are an extension of ourselves.

Nigel Rawlins: The other thing I want to talk to you about is, I hadn't realised you've written four books now. You've just published your fourth book.

Laëtitia Vitaud: I can officially call myself a writer.

Nigel Rawlins: Yes, but they're all in French though, aren't they?

Laëtitia Vitaud: Yeah, sadly I would have liked to have the, especially the last one translated and the one before that, because I think it would match a lot of other cultures. It's not... too anchored in the French culture. But it's not that easy to find publishers that are interested in translating essays.

Very few essays get translated because novels usually are they sell a lot more than essays. No I didn't get a publisher to translate it for me and publish it.

Nigel Rawlins: So what was the topic of the last one?

Laëtitia Vitaud: The last one was about productivity and how much of a fallacy it is how flawed it is as a way to measure the efficiency of work the wealth of a nation and basically how we should change it, not use it as an indicator to to make decisions about economic policy, for example, so just very concretely if you look at industrial work here, the idea was that one hour of work, you can measure the output.

You have that output input ratio, and it's easy to measure and apparently cannot be negotiated. It's the way it is. But it's not, because there's a lot of hidden work, there is a lot of invisible work, and there's a lot of unpaid work that's necessary to sustain the paid work that gets to be measured.

And so when you look at it more globally the productivity ignores a lot of things that matter. Ignore gender inequalities, they ignore externalities, in particular environmental externalities. If you pollute the river a lot, your productivity will increase, but that's not a good thing.

The true cost of that production is not measured and the true cost should include the damage that it does on the planet, the environment, the community, your family even. So it's a criticism of that indicator and basically all the economists that are so focused on just measuring productivity and the way we, also get obsessed with our own productivity and want to click on articles that promise to give us the best morning routine to be more productive during the day, and how we use productivity in all kinds of moments of our lives that have nothing to do with production whatsoever.

When did we get to think of sleep as something you need to be productive about? Or how did we get to think of eating better to be more productive, sleep better to be more productive? It should be the other way around. We are productive to sleep better, or to eat better. Fundamentally we need to we need to reverse our priorities.

Productivity is not a goal in itself, it's a means to an end. The end is to have a good life, not the other way around..

Nigel Rawlins: You wrote an article about Adam Smith's mum, or mother, Tell us a bit more about that, because I think that's what you're talking about with economics,

Laëtitia Vitaud: Yeah, so Adam Smith is this Scottish thinker, a fantastic thinker who is said to be the father of economics. And he came up with lots of interesting ideas about the market, about the the invisible hand of the market, about lots of things. How magically on the market you have people pursuing their own interests.

And it leads to fantastic things like the dinner that you have on your table. So the dinner that you have on the table it's an addition of the work of the brewer with your beer, the work of the baker with your bread, the work of the butcher with your meat, et cetera. And he says, Oh how incredible, how marvelous how magical.

And that's all very interesting. But blind spot, this complete omission of something invisible, which is that Adam Smith's dinner didn't come on the table already made. Somebody did the groceries, somebody prepared that food if it had to be prepared, somebody did the dishes, somebody did all that work and the dinner was not, you know, the kind of miracle that happens on the market with brewers, bakers, and butchers pursuing their own interests.

It was made possible by the invisible work of his mother. And Adam Smith was single. He was looked after by his mother for a very long time. I'm not sure when it is that she died, but and how he survived without her. But but it's interesting how that terrible omission, that terrible blind spot was something, is something that is seen throughout the history of economics as a discipline, as a science, that it's as if there was no economy in the home, as if there was no value created in the home and all that, all those activities that are not on the market that are not paid for, that for which there is no visible transaction, because there are transactions in the home too It's something for a very long time did not, was of no interest to economists. Today it is, and today there are also more women economists and today it's something that is studied but it's still not seen in GDP figures, it's still not seen in productivity figures, it's something that's not measured so it doesn't really count, it's not something that is seen as something that matters by politicians and so we still have that legacy of Adam Smith's terrible blind spot. His mother.

Nigel Rawlins: He omitted his mother. And it's incredible, isn't it, that, He never even thought about that part of it. He was incredibly blind to it. By you bringing it up, it made me aware of it. But I guess I've always been a bit aware of it anyway. Okay. We're talking about productivity.

One of the big issues I think I mentioned Rahaf Hafoosh wrote a book called Hustle and Float, and she was talking about knowledge workers trying to do knowledge work, which is thinking, designing, solving problems, maybe writing things, designing things But their productivity was being measured by the industrial paradigm.

So what are your thoughts on that? And you mentioned did you say you knew Rahaf or you've met

Laëtitia Vitaud: Yes, I've actually met her. She lives in she lives in France. She lived in Paris, at least when I was there, so I've met her perhaps a couple of times, and her book is amazing, and she's been doing that work about cognition and attention, and also more generally, an anthropological work about the way we view productivity.

So it's a very interesting, very close to the things that I write about. And she does it very well. She also does it very well in English. She's published in English, whereas I'm published in French. And so she has a wider global audience than I do. But I, I. I completely share her view of how cognition and attention are really at the heart of everything we need to be worried about today and everything that's wrong today.

I'm personally quite worried about how artificial intelligence is generating this tsunami of content. And it's really, there's this exponential growth of articles and pictures and things. It's, there's so much of it, I feel overwhelmed all the time and I feel it's very hard to pay attention to something.

So I have to I have to exert my will and just really focus and try to not think of all those distractions. But I find that it's increasingly hard to pay attention. To have this focused attention on one thing to be mindful. And it makes it increasingly hard also for creative people to to focus and produce their own thing, but also to be seen as producing something of value because there's increased competition of content produced by machines. So it's it's a world where attention is going to be scarce, increasingly scarce. It's a paradox because our economy could be called the attention economy, it's our attention that's bought and sold.

But there is less and less of it, a little bit like all planetary resources clean water and air, attention is becoming this thing that's increasingly rare and increasingly valuable and that needs to be protected because it's in danger.

Nigel Rawlins: You mentioned Adam Gazzaley in some of your writing. He wrote the book, The Distracted Mind, which I found quite fascinating. As humans there's only so much attention that we can actually give. Our brains weren't designed for lots and lots of thinking because our brains are quite lazy in many ways, but they use so much of our energy.

They take about 20 percent of the energy that we ingest to run the thing. So let's talk a little bit about trying to do knowledge work. If you're employed in a job and you're a knowledge worker, you've got to solve problems. How's that productivity being measured?

Laëtitia Vitaud: Yeah. So perhaps to go back on Gazzaley, because I love his work there's this very simple idea that we have ancient brains, that our brains haven't. Changed as much as we think it did, because a thousand years ago or two thousand years ago, we were the same, biologically people.

And our ancient brains are just not wired for the tech usage of today, where we have so many, stimuli? There's so much stimulation that it's not something we can... digest. The brain just cannot cope with it. We we think we can work on multiple projects and receive hundreds of emails and have how many tabs I have open on my screen, but generally every day, it's dozens of tabs that are open at the same time, and we feel less and less productive as a result, because our ancient brains just just can't handle all this multitasking, all this stimulation. It's taking big toll mental health.

There's more anxiety. I feel anxious when I have a lot of emails and a lot of open tabs. Stress addiction, because there's this dopamine addiction of like many rewards when you get a a new notification. But it's... too much, and this cycle of addiction gets to a point where we're actually sick.

Burnout. All those things are epidemics today. There are multiple figures about how many times we check our phones, some studies say 350 times, others say it's 15 times an hour in your waking time. It's you check your phone on average once every four minutes.

But of course the figures can be debated. I'm not sure it's it's representative of the entire population, but it says something about about the way... our cognition has been affected by all this tech, by all those devices. But when it comes to cognitive work, the way we think and create and make decisions and all that coming up with new ideas, with fresh ideas, or combining different ideas, like bricks of text and code.

Even made by AI. It's all about how much attention you can pay. It's all about how focused you can be. You need this focus to improve cognitively. The environment you're in makes it nearly impossible because of this tsunami of text and code and images and produced by humans, by AI, by humans and in, in AI together.

And it, this production of content exceeds the amount of, the entire amount of human attention available on earth. There's more content produced than our human, our added human attention can consume.

And all this takes a lot of energy and all this adds up to CO2 emissions and global warming what a waste, right? I I find it's really threat. You mentioned Rahaf Rahaf's book, Hustle and Float. I think she also speaks about the theater of productivity, being busy for the sake of being busy.

It's hard to actually have an idea of how productive we really are when we have an interest in seeming as productive as we can possibly appear to be. So there's a theater of productivity. A lot of it is fake, a lot of it is useless, a lot of it is bullshit, but we depend on that appearance of productivity because it's a way to signal our worth.

If you say Oh, I'm being lazy or I have nothing to do. It's another way of saying you're useless, worthless. It's , busyness for the sake of busyness because it's a way of signaling our worth. Let's have a little talk about AI. Obviously, there's a lot of people churning out AI articles for example, on a website or online. I use a lot of chat programs. I use it to help me summarize things. Because I read a lot, and I take a lot of notes, I often feed my notes in to prime what I'm after to help me do an outline, and then I might. ask it to use some of my notes to fill it in, but if I don't edit it, it just comes across as just unreadable.

Nigel Rawlins: It would concern me if people were writing articles with AI and just churning it out, and not really... putting any effort into it and. That's just going to overload us all, because most of us are gonna have to start churning through stuff to see if it's worth reading. Are you using AI for anything yourself ?

Laëtitia Vitaud: A bit I have a use that's quite similar to yours. So for example, I use it sometimes to summarize a long text. Let's say I will copy paste my own text into GPT and ask GPT to make a shorter version of it. And that works quite well. The other way around doesn't work well because it will just repeat things over and get completely unreadable and with expressions like. "It is to be noted that,..." very rigid, boring phrases that nobody would use and that makes the whole text unreadable. I agree with you, it's a very powerful tool when you edit it, and especially when you feed the machine with the stuff that you want to use. Because otherwise, if you ask...

Random questions will fill in the blanks with either faulty information or basically stupid stuff sometimes. I think it works quite well when you ask questions about facts that are very well documented or things like that, because then all the information that was fed into the machine will make the answers quite reliable. It also works quite well for proofreading. Proofreading is another thing that I use it for. Can you get rid of all the typos? Or correct my grammar? Or make sure there's, there are no spelling mistakes? So yes I use it.

Nigel Rawlins: I think we should, but I think if we're using it for a purpose with good intent to put out good content. It still takes several hours to put an essay or an article together. I know it can take me probably two days a week to write two articles. Now mind you, I've done all the reading.

I have all my notes in digital format. So my main thing is working out a series of articles I want to write and then finding my articles cause I use a relational database. So if I've read 15 books on strategy, I've probably got 15 good pieces of information in there that I can pull in. It gets beyond me to think to try and pull those 15 books together.

I don't know how people wrote books in the past.

But it may be that in the past they were less distracted than we are today. And if we think back, what we were talking about too, about our attention, if we go back or think, I imagine the hunter gatherers their day would have been fairly quiet compared to today.

And fairly simple. They could have been a lot more intelligent than us because of that. Much more socially aware as well and environmentally aware and situationally aware compared to today where we're, so distracted. I've been thinking about older professional women. And I think somewhere you wrote that from the age of about 40, some women are saying that they don't want to keep working in organisations anymore and they want to go out and work for themselves. Is that something you're seeing in Europe?

Laëtitia Vitaud: It's something that we're seeing in Europe. There are more women entrepreneurs now than 20 years ago. It's close to one third of all the companies created in France that are created by women now, which is more than it used to be. Although, among them, quite a lot of them have a male co founder, so it's still a small minority, and but among them there are a lot of very small companies composed of just one individual so freelancers many more of them.

It's it's hard to see it as entirely good news, because as far as France is concerned, two thirds of those female entrepreneurs make less than minimum wage or make exactly minimum wage. So it's when you think of founding a company, creating a company, you think of something big, something that will not necessarily make you rich, where you can hire people and develop a business, et cetera.

A lot of those women who found businesses, they stay very small they are paid less, they are negotiated less, and in fact, strangely enough, the gap, the pay gap, among freelancers and entrepreneurs, the gender pay gap is bigger than it is in salaried work and employed among employees, which is strange because it's your own business.

You charge what you want in theory. You are, have full autonomy of how, over how you develop your business. It's not like you have a manager preventing you from getting a promotion or imposing less pay than the pay that your male counterparts have. So in theory, it should be entirely emancipated from all this bias.

In reality, there is more bias and there's more inequality there. So I'm not sure I want to see it as entirely a positive thing. It's also something that's a choice that's imposed on women who get harassed, either after they come back maternal leave and they get harassed terribly or during menopause where they are treated very badly or the combination of sexism and ageism.

At work takes a huge toll on them and sometimes either they're fired or they just give up and try to do something on their own. And it's not something that is driven with the decision to found a company is not necessarily driven by the will to create something on their own. It's just more like a default, mode than something that's entirely chosen.

Nigel Rawlins: I must admit it, it's much easier to have a job, provided you get treated well and you're happy in the job and you've got good friends. The difficulty I think in setting up your own business is having some specialised knowledge that you can actually charge a higher fee for so you don't have to do as much work,

Laëtitia Vitaud: It's just specialized knowledge, you're right about that, but it's also, perhaps even mostly, the network. If as a salaried executive, if you were an executive or a salaried employee, you have a strong network of people who trust you, They will trust that knowledge of yours is worth paying for. And it's all boils down to how strong those ties are, those professional ties are that you develop throughout your career.

And that's how you can build a business that's stronger and more powerful. And the problem is that a lot of women Who were unhappy at work as a salaried employee and decide, okay, I give up. I want to create my own company. They don't have that powerful a network to build a business on. And that's the women who find it hardest to make money.

Nigel Rawlins: And the difficulty from the sounds of it is they don't always know what to charge or how to set their fees, that can be abused as well. I've been notorious for undercharging, so when you hear what some people charge and probably when they hear what some men are charging, they're probably going to be quite shocked for the same sort of thing that they're doing.

Laëtitia Vitaud: Which is why to know more about that, you need to talk to people, to other people, about how much they charge. I have my own little clubs of freelancers and people I work with and I try to create that environment, if I can call it an environment, I try to create those relationships where we can talk freely about money.

Oh, how much did you charge for this? Oh, and how much did he charge for this? And etc. So just... So that they're all, there are all those discussions about money, open discussions about money. And then we coach each other. Oh, you shouldn't accept this job for less than this much. And it helps to think of it together to talk about it more openly.

Really crucial to talk about money.

Nigel Rawlins: I totally agree. So let's just talk a little bit about that. So if not just so much about money. If, for example, you are 30 or 40 years old, working in a job, but at some point in the future they may say, when I turn 50 or when I turn 60, I want to run my own business.

What do you think we should be encouraging them to do between now and then that would help them?

Laëtitia Vitaud: Different things. The first one would be to, even as a salaried employee, start working on developing your own skills. Thinking of yourself as a craftsman or craftswoman who will always add new bricks to what they do and work on that. Work on that also professional identity on the story you tell about who you are professionally.

This is, so this is a continuous work that you need to do and start doing even when you're very comfortable with a job with nothing else to do but your work. Always think of your career and your skills. The second is the network. And the network build strong relationships, keep in touch with the people you work with develop this network continuously, meet new people who may give you ideas about future activities, about future professional transitions, try to have as heterogenous network as possible, right? Network composed of people who do different things, not just the not just your peers, not just your professional peers. People who are a bit older, people who are a bit younger, right? A network that is stronger is a network that has a lot of variety and built into it even why not a few people in other places, we live in other places, who might also give you ideas and options, new options, if you need to do something else, if you need to switch to find it very useful to have connections with people who are already where you want to be.

And the third thing is money. How do you make it safe to not have revenues for a certain amount of months? Perhaps it means you need to have your house or apartment already paid for, or you need to have a lot of savings, or you need to invest your money a bit better and think of having that special fund for your future professional transitions.

Whether that means changing jobs and paying for training in between, or whether that means creating a company and not having as much money at the beginning... But have that special fund for future transitions. And that takes also a lot of knowledge because we don't we don't invest enough. We're not wise enough about, the way we spend our money.

A lot of us waste it. I waste it a bit too much. So this is definitely something also that needs practice and training talking to others about it. By the way, though, I don't know if it's the case in Australia, but in Europe, there were a lot more, training sessions and programs designed for women to be more empowered about money, are there such things in Australia as well?

Nigel Rawlins: I'm probably not really well connected with what's going on in Australia. I find it difficult to find out what's going on. I do want to talk to somebody about finances or getting your finances straight, but I'm not too sure who to talk to. I don't know how to find them in Australia. I find it easier to find people in the world that I want to talk to.

Laëtitia Vitaud: There's that, that, that French girl, French woman, sorry, in, in the UK who her name is Emilie Boulet and she has this newsletter called Vestpod V E S T P O D. That's really amazing. She also works for the Financial Times and writes for the Financial Times. It's really a lot about women and financial empowerment.

It's a really an amazing company that she created

Nigel Rawlins: Oh, I'll chase her up. You wouldn't believe how many people I speak to in England now, quite regularly on the podcast. They're doing some very interesting things, but that's why I like to look to Europe living in Australia, it's just everything seems to be American. So I do talk to some Americans who are fabulous. As I said, it's difficult finding Australians I can talk to, so if they are listening to this, maybe they can contact me. I generally like to reach out to people who've, who have written a book, who have thought deeply about it.

So in the knowledge area, I've connected with a couple of people who've written the textbooks on knowledge work. I will eventually talk to them as well. But yes, she sounds really good. So Letitia, is there something else that we haven't spoken about that you'd like to talk about ?

or?

Laëtitia Vitaud: Something else that comes with cognition and attention and all that and it's the care work, right? But perhaps we haven't talked enough about that. I'm convinced that care is at the heart of the future of work. Because... we're getting older, we'll need more of it, because also a lot of the cognitive work will be produced by machines, and what's left is the relational work of paying attention to each other, of looking after each other, whether that's children or older people or just each other in general.

That's the main work of tomorrow is basically care and we forget it. Same as Adam Smith's mother's, as Adam Smith's mother, we forget the care dimension that is in all the work that we do. Even when you're an accountant, there's care involved in looking after your clients and strengthening the relationship, listening to them, listening to their problems understanding there's care in numbers in Excel spreadsheets.

Yes, there is care in there too. There's creativity and there's care. So whatever you do, there's this care element is more important and it's caring for others but it's also caring for yourself. And there again with the combined effect of global warming and aging, and population aging, and your own aging, care is going to be even more critical.

Nigel Rawlins: Yes, I agree. And I guess we won't want to work with somebody who doesn't care for us or we don't relate to, so it's a soft skill that's going to be critical. We should talk about how would you like people to find you?

Laëtitia Vitaud: My newsletter, Laetitia at work, so L A E T I A at work, on Substack. I think that's the main that's the main media that I have in English. The, a lot of the rest the other things I do are mostly in French. So this is the one thing that's in English. I had a podcast. I should say I have a podcast because I haven't given up on making new episodes in English.

I'm sure I will one day, but the last one was, I think a year and a half ago or two years ago, maybe a year and a half ago. So it's been it's been a while, but I will do it again. It is called Building Bridges. So there are some nice podcasts there if you want to listen to them.

There's some, most of them are still relevant today.

Nigel Rawlins: And are you using LinkedIn as well?

Laëtitia Vitaud: Oh yes. Yeah, you can easily find me on LinkedIn

Nigel Rawlins: I'll put all of these in the show notes so people can find you. Letitia, it's been fantastic talking to you again. It's almost like it was yesterday. We've just grown a little bit older.

Laëtitia Vitaud: And wiser, hopefully.

So, thank you very

Nigel Rawlins: much.

Laëtitia Vitaud: Thank you Nigel.