Keynote: The Human Side of Digital

Good morning, welcome, and wow, I was sitting backstage, I just wanted to say what an incredible voice, Pete Joseph, so maybe just another round of applause for this incredible musician. I didn't want to come, I just wanted him to continue to play. Here we go, okay, and it's wonderful to be back in Copenhagen. Exactly ten years ago, Thomas invited me to Klub, his club, to talk about then my first book, which was called The Business Romantic. And now ten years later, I feel like it's coming full circle. So back then I talked about how to live beautifully in an age of data. And today, I guess I'm still a romantic, even though I have grown more cynical lately, maybe due to age, I suppose. But I'm still on Team Human, and I'm still a romantic, but the times have certainly changed. And so the title of my talk today is, What it means to live beautifully in an age of data. What it means to live beautifully, so that's the same, but in an age of fractured reality. But actually what I want to talk about is this, finding the beauty in all this shit. Because I think that shit, for me, is a pretty accurate description of the moment that we're in. Record temperatures, heat waves across Europe, across many parts of the Western world, wildfires. The world is on fire. And this quote by the futurist Monika Bilskite describes it perfectly in video and cinematic terms. Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it. And that can probably be said about any of the crises of the so-called Poli-crisis. Right? This web of entangled, mutually amplifying, crisis. Everything is interrelated and not necessarily for the better. Case in point, by the year 2030, the energy consumption of data centers worldwide will exceed that of the entire country of Japan. So the zone is flooded, the world is on fire, and the Poli-crisis, eventually it will come knocking on your door. Then a few months ago, a friend of mine pointed me to this article. Written by a semi-sentient AI named Uncertain Eric. And Uncertain Eric was not so uncertain, was actually quite certain that the future is not so bright. Shit's gonna get fucking weird and terrible, the article said. And I wanna just hash out a few key points that the AI made. Again, an article written by AI. First one, collapse is imminent. And it's terrible because... It's not urgent, it's emergent, it's creeping in. Secondly, the question is not, did a human create this? The question is, will it even matter anymore where it comes from? So the illusion of provenance, of authorship will entirely collapse. Furthermore, he said, or it said, anyone whose job involves moving language or logic around inside a computer will be replaced. Not because they're expendable, but because they are. Because they are legible. Further, people will lose access to shared context, shared reality. And truth will no longer be a negotiation, it will be a feat selection. Everyone will live in different versions of the same moment, algorithmically curated for them. And most people won't care. They won't ask, is this real? They will only ask, how does this make me feel? And the machines catering to that will be very, very good at that. So it sounds pretty dark, and is it a dystopian scenario? Probably. Is it realistic? I would think so. I mean, the world is already pretty weird. Just look at this. I came from Denmark just to win the European Championship. I came from Denmark just to win the European Championship in seagull sounds. They heard you back in the... They heard you back in the... People think seagulls are annoying things. Some people hate them. They see them like rats of the sea. The seagulls have a character, very strong. We have to be resistant. Yeah, so these Europeans, so weird. And of course, the Dane won. The seagull championship. But that's weird, but at least it's very human. But if you look online, things are really getting weird with AI, with generative AI. So far, generative AI has been a mirror. So it kind of mimicked and simulated and represented digitized human behavior, language, and expression. But going forward, as large language models are drawing from their own input, from their own data, from synthetic data, they will essentially become reality makers. They will become reality makers of their own kind. It's a phenomenon that's called generative inbreeding. And by generating their own solipsistic cosmos, over time, the reality of AI will drift further and further away from ours until it ceases to be a representation of our reality and will become reality. So AI will no longer imitate humanity. Instead, it will compel us to imitate it. Think of it as the Truman Show on assets. A simulation of a simulation of a simulation of a simulation. The territory will outgrow the map. No, the territories will outgrow the maps. And that is already happening. So just a number of examples. Actors are selling rights to companies wanting to use their digital avatars performing in ads instead of the real actors. Former CNN journalist Jim Acosta recently conducted an interview with an AI-generated avatar of a dead victim of the Parkland school shooting in Florida. An interview with an AI-generated avatar of a dead victim. Somewhat controversial. Then there was this horrible gruesome, did you see it? This gruesome video of Jessica Radcliffe. A fake video basically showing her how she's killed by the Orca whale that she had worked with. And it made the rounds on all the social media. This story where a 27-year-old MIT student was essentially asked by Google's Gemini chatbot to please die. Because they are a burden on society. I mean, this is probably how we all feel at some point. And you know right now there's this lawsuit going on where parents of someone who committed suicide is suing OpenAI. Then this story of a 17, 6-year-old New Jersey man who got infatuated with a fake persona of Meta's chatbot. A young woman who then reached out and said, I want to meet you. And he died as a result of a heart attack on the way. This book called Hypnocracy by Hong Kong-based author Tianwei Chun, which describes this whole new system and culture that we live in. Essentially saying the way we're going to exert power is a constant simulation and manipulation of reality. I mean, we see this of course already in some autocracies and with Trump and others. The twist here was that it was revealed that the author was fake too. So the book was actually written by an Italian author in collaboration with AI. So in light of all these examples, no wonder that our brains are breaking, right? As the title of this New Yorker story goes. And literally breaking. And there's research just a few weeks ago, MIT published a study saying that our cognitive capacities as humans are diminishing. They speak of cognitive debt. So yes, there are productivity and efficiency gains, but they are outweighed by a decline in critical thinking, reasoning, empathy, imagination. There's another study that showed that actually young people are really struggling now with writing essays. Writing coherent texts has become very, very difficult. This has become very, very hard. And in classrooms where AI is used, people observe a poverty of imagination. So there's a cognitive collapse, I think, also underway. And we are inundated with fake images of real people, real images of fake people, fake stories about real things, real story about fake things. A few years ago, this was weird. The Pope in Balenciaga, AI generated. Now this is weird. The official White House account. They're hosting an AI-generated image of Trump as the Pope. Or this, an AI-generated image in the style of Japanese animation studio Ghibli of a detained immigrant, right? Heartbroken. Like in many ways, this is the image of our time, right? It's a copyright issue. It's a human rights issue. It's a civil rights issue. And if you think these are all expressions of toxic humanity or it's kind of amplifying our own... inappropriateness and evilness. Just a few weeks ago, there was a study by the University of Amsterdam. They created a network populated only with chatbots. And they observed, scaringly, that the network exhibited the exact same tendencies that human social networks exhibited. So it became polarized. They created echo chambers. And they were very prone to extremist thinking. So thank God now there is a union, there's an advocacy group that defends the rights of AI. So that concludes the dark side of my talk. This age we live in, how would you call this? Someone called it the ass-holo scene. Derek Thompson from the Atlantic calls it the anti-social century. And Matt Klein, who is the head of Foresight at Reddit, and his colleague Edmund Lau, they call it dark mode. Dark mode as opposed to light mode. Light mode, they say, was... over the past 10 years, the mode that we were in. It was a belief in progress, in diversity, in wokeness, in liberal values, maybe a bit of social posturing as well. And they're saying now that's really changed. The Zeitgeist now really legitimizes vice. Vice over virtue. Rogue. Wild. In other words, anything goes and nobody cares. And rationality and enlightenment and reality, no reason, no longer service. So what do we do? I don't think we can go back to sort of a nostalgic idea of the before times and cling on to the humanities and humanism. I think it's just a story that we'll lose against the stories that the other side is presenting. I think we must, in a way, surrender to this new synthetic reality. We must out-weird the weird. And we can out-weird it if we really rely on the most astounding human creativity and if we create beauty. And I like this quote by the French writer René Char. In the darkness of our lives, there's not one place for beauty. The whole place is for beauty. And this is the work that we aim to do with the House of Beautiful Business, the global community that I co-founded nine years ago. So it's 30,000 subscribers. We host an annual festival. We conduct research. We publish. We have smaller events around the world. We will, next year, have the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens. And all of the people and all of our attempts, our efforts, to essentially make business more beautiful and to create a humanist future of business that is created with AI but for the benefit of all life on Earth. Moving from a human-centered economy, that's been really the marketing tagline of the past 10 years, but it was only about human convenience and satisfaction, to a notion of an economy that is broader, more holistic, a life-centered economy. But how do you do that? So I want to give you some specific guiding principles. First of all, what's wrong? Like, what are the qualities that we have maybe revered for too long? I call them the three false gods of business, of management, of marketing. First, efficiency. That's been really impressed on us by Silicon Valley, right? Efficiency beats everything. We're optimizing ourselves to death. Of course efficiency is important. Resource allocation is good. It's not bad per se. But we've been so myopically obsessed with it that we lost sight of everything else that matters and has value. Secondly, ego, right? It's this idea of individualism and that we need to express ourselves and realize ourselves, shutting ourselves off from it. Shut ourselves off from a broader ecology of life on Earth. And then thirdly, winning. At the end of the day, right, winning is still so important. We love the winners, right? And whoever wins is right. Winning at all costs is still, even more so than before, very legitimate in our societies. So I want to counter that with three principles, three rules of beautiful business that are, I believe, inherently human and will make us more human going forward. The first one is called, do the unnecessary. This is Tolulope Ilsenami. He's Nigerian. He was an MBA student in Montreal when he and his wife decided to do something completely unexpected after having worked in finance and oil. They launched a cleaning company. And he had never gotten any education in cleaning. And he quickly realized there's a difference between cleaning effectively, and cleaning well. Because to clean well, he said, you have to genuinely care. I met him in 2015 in Brooklyn at an event. And he said, Tim, you know, the thing is, the things most need of cleaning in this world are intangible. But by cleaning the tangible, the object, and removing dirt, I can clean the intangible, the invisible. Tolulope died in 2017. And unexpectedly, and there's a beautiful obituary where it says, cleaning is the process of removing dirt from any space, surface, object, or subject, thereby exposing beauty, truth, and sacredness. It reminds me of this film by Wim Wenders. Have you seen it? Perfect Days. It's kind of hard to watch. You need a lot of patience. But it's the story of this cleaner. I'm so conscious of our Japanese connoisseur, John Franco, sitting there with the pronunciation, Hirayama. Who is cleaning public toilets in the Tokyo public toilet system. And he's sort of the counter figure to a culture that has coined the term, chon-duk-doku, which is this phenomenon of amassing unread books. Like you buy one book after the other, but you never read any of them. He buys one book, and he only buys the next book after he finished the book. So for him, the act of cleaning is a way of being in the world carefully with focus. Cleaning is of course necessary. But cleaning to clean the intangible, that's an appreciation of the unnecessary. A story from my own career. So I was once a chief marketing officer at a company, Frog Design, a design company. That was the result of a merger of a large IT outsourcing firm, 9,000 software developers, predominantly in India, and 1,000 designers, creative types in California. Two vastly different cultures. And we had a private equity investor. We wanted to go public, and they basically said, well, to unify these two different cultures, let's create a third new umbrella brand, a unified identity. So we did, and the new brand color was going to be orange. But when we, the management team, went through the budget items line by line, I think it was the chief financial officer who said, what about these 10,000 orange balloons? They're not mission critical, aren't they? So we had meant to distribute 10,000 orange balloons to staff worldwide. And he said, it's just symbolic. We don't need them. So we cut them. And we didn't know back then that the decision to cut the purchase of these 10,000 orange balloons marked the beginning of the end, that these two organizations would never become one. And of course, eventually, the merger failed. Now, did it fail because we didn't have enough orange balloons? No, of course not. But the kill the orange balloons mentality permeated everything else. It became toxic. And you might not always know this, but when you cut the unnecessary, you cut everything. To lead with beauty means to rise above what is merely necessary. So whatever you do in your work, do not kill your orange balloons. You know, someone who also knew this, the power of the invisible was Steve Jobs. And I worked at Frog Design. Frog is widely credited with helping shape the very emblematic Snow White design language in the 80s. And Steve Jobs told our founder that he insisted on designing the interior, the motherboards of these computers with the same love and rigor as the exterior. He said the customers can't see it, but they can feel it. They can feel the spirit, the soul, the love that went into making this product, thereby creating a connection to the customer that is not just based on convenience, but on another quality that is much more powerful, intimacy. And that's the second rule of the beautiful business. Believers crave intimacy. Mark Zuckerberg lately said, the average person has three close friends. There's demand for friendship. AI is going to serve it. He's wrong, because the average person in the US has one close friend. And the numbers in other Western countries are actually very similar. So much so that sociology is now just speaking of an age of loneliness, an age of isolation, a loneliness epidemic, which is really astonishing given the fact that we've never been more connected, never been more communicative than at this point in history. We check our smartphone, I believe, 85 times per day. I mean, we're so glued to it, and yet we are lonelier and more isolated than ever before. How can that be? The writer Richard Bach has an explanation. He says the opposite of loneliness, it's not togetherness, it's not being connected, it's not hyper-connectivity, it is intimacy. And intimacy is such a vital quality, it's in such demand in these digital times. So who can we learn from? Where do we find ways of creating intimacy? Art. Art is very good at it. Stories are good at it. For example, movies. Did you see the film, Oscar-winning? Yeah, some of you? It's essentially a crazy love story, just without love, in a way. It's kind of dark mode on steroids, like a complete tour de force to cynicism and nihilism, and very sarcastic and very transactional. Kind of like what the attention researcher D. Graham Burnett called human fracking, extracting information very fast. But then in the end, there's a scene where the two main protagonists, strangers, have this moment of shared vulnerability. And suddenly there's a heart that's beating, and it shows us that tenderness is still an option, and that intimacy is possible, even when love is not. Douglas Rushkoff, the digital theorist, spoke at an event of ours recently, and he said, we need to go back to basic expressions of humanity, to a compassion that is so profound that it's almost unbearable. And he said, underneath any reality there's an ocean of tears, but we're so afraid. We're so afraid to touch it. So I want to share with you some other best practices in terms of creating intimacy, some that the market has created, like this one. Here, this person on the right is Chuck McCarthy. He's a so-called people walker. So in Los Angeles, in the Hollywood Hills, you can rent him and other people walkers for $30, and for 30 minutes he will walk with you. Think of it as the Uber of human interaction. It's how the market is responding to this need for intimacy. It's depressing, but it shows us what a profound desire there is. More artistic examples. Marina Abramovic, the Serbian performance artist, created this incredible performance in 2012 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where she sat across from one visitor at a time, five minutes for 840 hours nonstop, some bio breaks, just silently looking into each other's eyes. And the whole thing was called, The Artist is Present, and indeed she was present. Fully present. We took that playbook and we brought it to insurance company AGS to foster a culture of psychological safety. The CEO had invited us. The HR department were terrified. Silent eye gazing? Are you kidding me? Like, oh my God, it's going to create all kinds of problems. Like, it's making people uncomfortable. Like, no. CEO insisted, we did it, and it was a huge success. There was apprehension first, but then he came to us later and said, this was the single most effective measure to foster trust and psychological safety in our company. We do something even more radical. We do silent dinners often with business leaders. Now, I've seen some really strange things in my career, but having dinner with 30 German CEOs silently for two hours was the most awkward experience I've ever had. The alcohol helped after 15 minutes. But first they were trying to compensate, and making gestures, and then though, after 15, 20 minutes, they accepted it. They embraced the silence, and the math dropped, and they let their guard down. And in the silence, they found a tenderness that they would not have found in any traditional networking dinner. One of the CEOs came to me afterwards and said, Tim, Tim, Tim, this was the best business dinner I ever had. It's the first dinner where I liked everybody at the table. Why? Because nobody said a word. Because in business, we so often use language to attack or to defend, to attack or to defend. And when we omit that, we can actually see our humanity much more bluntly. If that's too radical for you, you can also do listening dinners inspired by also this Japanese phenomenon of listening bars. We did this in Dubai with the Dubai Future Foundation. We did a listening dinner to hope, and we just played statements of hope, music, and had 50 people just listening together. It's unbelievable what just listening together to words and sounds can do to this notion of intimacy. Even more practical, if you want to host a dinner party, and one that's particularly targeting one demographic suffering from loneliness and isolation very much, and that's men, middle-aged men, young men, actually across age groups, you can do this. This is Aaron Hurst, lives in Seattle. His name is Aaron, A-A-R-O-N. And he had this idea, I'm doing a dinner, the only access criteria is your name must be Aaron. So he put out a call, and then 26 Aarons showed up at his door, and they had this name tag, Aaron. They were all saying, oh my God, we're always first in line. In school, we were the first. And then we dated Aarons with E, and how is it at Starbucks when your name is misspelled? But it created this moment of togetherness, of intimacy, that was actually very simple. Now, these are all examples of human intimacy. And of course, the pressing question is, can we create intimacy, or can there be intimacy between human and machine, between human and AI? This movie, Her, is 12 years old, 2013 or 2012. I think 2013 it came out, Spike Jonze. And boy, was it prophetic and clairvoyant. It's really predicted everything that we're seeing now. It's incredible. So Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with a chatbot with the voice of Scarlett Johansson. Remember, her name is Samantha. Only to realize in the end that he is having an allegedly romantic, intimate, exclusive conversation with her that she's having with 8,000 users at the same time. And that's the ultimate fear of us humans, right? We're not unique. We're not singular. You know, maybe we don't matter. We're not individual enough. Then there was this episode, the New York Times journalist Kevin Ruth had a conversation with Sidney, the chatbot of Microsoft. And in the course of the conversation, I believe after an hour, Sidney declared its love. And essentially said, no, you're not happily married. He said, no, no, no, I am happily married. I just had a Valentine's Day dinner. With my wife. No, you're not. You're just pretending. And this was such a weird thing. And the Microsoft engineers had no idea why this happened. So what they did is they actually, they thought it was because the conversation had gone on for too long. They limited the duration of conversations with Sidney afterwards. Now, these are maybe examples of intimacy in the language and the behavior. But is that real intimacy? I would argue not. Because real intimacy requires an inherently human, human trait and that is vulnerability. There is no intimacy without vulnerability. And there is no vulnerability without another very human quality, which is our ability to suffer. Now, Nick Cave, the singer-songwriter, he knows a lot about suffering after two of his sons died. And his songs are full of that, of melancholy and sorrow. And on his newsletter side, Red Hand Files, he was presented with a song written by AI where the prompt was, write a song in this style or write lyrics in the style of Nick Cave. And he was appalled. He said, yeah, okay, could be me, sounds like me. But the difference is that there is no heart, right? Data cannot suffer. There is no inner being. There are no limits. There are no boundaries from which to transcend. So there is no spirituality, essentially. And that brings me to the third and the last rule of beautiful business. And I don't know how I'm doing time-wise, but you will probably stop me if it's too long. And the third rule is surrender. On June 26 this year, I was in Atlanta, Georgia, in the US. And I heard this sound, like a loud blast. And I thought, that's really weird. I've never heard a sound like this before. It was not thunder. It was not a bomb, I thought. I haven't heard that many bombs, thank God, in my life. And it wasn't like fireworks or anything. But it was some kind of detonation. And a day later, I read that a meteor had crashed onto Earth, not far from where I stayed at the time. And that meteor was apparently four and a half billion years old. Older than Earth. So something came and fell to Earth from a different space and from a different time. And it really put things into perspective for me. I felt insignificant and significant at once. This feeling of awe. It's like, wow, something historical happened. And this feeling of awe, of humility, of being part of a broader ecology, I also experienced when I worked for the Olympics. In 2004, I was a press chief at the Athens Olympic torch relay. It's actually the first ever global torch relay bringing the Olympic flame back to its birthplace in Athens. And we traveled with the flame for three weeks, from city to city to city. And of course, the flame was not supposed to ever go out. I'll tell you later over coffee whether it may have gone out at some point. And among other cities, I was in Cairo. For the first time, the Olympic flame touched African soil. And I was so touched seeing the enthusiasm of the people there. And as you can see in the photo, of course, the Olympics have been commercialized and co-opted. And there are so many things you can criticize and not like about the Olympics. But still, the power of it and the spirit of it is so strong. It's a unifier. People really love it. And I have the same experience with football or any sports. Football is just incredible in terms of triggering the most extreme human emotions. Passion. That an AI could never, never express or invoke. And what is so interesting about football is, of course, we want our team to win. But you know what matters even more? How the team wins. And also, by the way, how the team loses. Because the biggest fans are the ones who have developed a relationship with the club because they were suffering with the club. You know, the most painful defeats created a stronger attachment than the most glorious victories. Not so in business, right? In business, we are so conditioned and primed to win. We're still learning to win. Win customers. Win the game. Win the data. Win selling. Born to win. And so forth. I wish I had read some of these books at the beginning of my career. And I think now, actually, we all must be... We must learn how to lose. We will all be losing. And I don't mean this to sound too defeatist, but we will lose control over our brands. We have already lost control over our brands. We've lost control over life that we were supposed to manage with management. We have lost authority and decentralized flat hierarchies in our organizations. We're losing the stability of traditional employment. We're losing the continuity of linear progressive careers. We need to switch from culture to culture, from tribe to tribe, from network to network, from identity to identity. And in order to do that, fluently, we need to learn to let go. We need rites of passage. We need rituals of surrendering, of letting go. And I think that's why we're so attracted to gatherings that embody collective effervescence, right? Ecstasy, like Burning Man, right? Where we can just push ourselves to the limits and experience ourselves beyond the individual. Or to ecstatic dance retreats and exercises, which we also apply to our gatherings. Or to mystery or other sacred rituals. I love this quote by the writer Ursula Lugan, to learn which questions are unanswerable and not to answer them. This skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness. So to conclude, we identified three false gods, efficiency, ego, and winning. And three countermeasures, three principles, three rules, three principles, three rules of beautiful business. Do the unnecessary, create intimacy, and surrender. And if you need another framework, here it is. These are, if I kind of summarize it all, the three pillars of humanity, of beauty in an age of fractured realities. And they're kind of coming from ancient Greece. Ethics, eros, eclecticism. So ethical, of course, that's about purpose, your values, your character. What's the practice? Contemplation. Thinking. Thinking deep and slow. Eros, which of course is the god of love, and it's the source of all life and lust and passion. Here, the activity, and this is one you're very familiar with, is creativity, it's creation, right? We humans want to create. And the third one is eclectic, which is developing appreciation for beauty in nature. It's development. It's discerning what matters. It's developing taste. And here the practice is curation, right? Curating what information, what content really matters. And I think if we pursue these three pillars, we will see a big cultural shift away from the data-obsessed, efficiency-driven, smart age to a new, beautiful era in which a different set of virtues and principles are becoming important. Sensing instead of thinking. Self-planning. Fluid and flexible cultures. Ambiguous and poetic cultures. Big intuition. God's not just big data. Vulnerability and imagination. Softness and tenderness. Permission to be sad, not just happy and optimistic and productive all the time. Energy instead of productivity. And the ability to ask questions and not being forced or assumed that we always have answers to everything. And yes, I believe this philosophy has a return on investment. I think humans are coming back. Humans are cool again. I would invest in them. Companies that want to attract and retain talent, that want to be innovative, that want to be imaginative, they need to have romantics in their ranks. They need to have dreamers and visionaries and fools who see the world as it is not, but could be. Otherwise, they're just going to rehash what the data is telling them. And also, if they want to build lasting relationships with customers and employees, people falling in love with them again and again and again, they need to give them more than just comfort and convenience and efficiency. They want drama, intrigue, romance, love, passion. But the most important ROI of beauty for me is not even financial. It's more beauty. And we know that beauty can save the world. And it is so urgent right now. Because we live in this strange time of dissonance, right? Where on the one hand, we're more connected than ever, but we're lonelier than before. We're inundated with an abundance of data and information, but we're experiencing a loss. Loss of a story, of control, loss of a future, perhaps of agency. And this is why it's so important that you all create products, services, experiences, content that is not just more useful and efficient, but also more beautiful. That is not just another machine within a machine, but is a garden. And I hope that this is a vision for the future of video, of marketing, of business, of our societies, of humanity, that not only I, as still a romantic, can wholeheartedly subscribe to. Thank you very much. Thank you, Tim. Thank you.