TwentyThree Summit Interviews - Tim Leberecht, author and co-founder House of Beautiful Business

Tim, thank you so much for being here today. I had the chance to watch part of your speech. I think it's so comforting to hear from you, not because you say that the world is great the way it is, not quite, but you give some hope in the way that we can change it and possibilities for us to take action. So, yeah, thank you for the work you have been doing. Thank you. Really wonderful to be here and I really enjoyed the talk and also the resonance. I felt like people need hope and they need positive messages these days. Yeah. You describe yourself as someone who started business as a business romantic and has evolved to something to be more nuanced or perhaps even skeptical. Can you share a little bit about your journey so far? Yeah. So I have a background in the humanities and the arts. So first I really want to become an artist and make music. And then I ended up in marketing. But I grew up in Europe, so I'm like deeply attached to the European values of humanism and that whole background. But then I went to Silicon Valley, worked there in a creative industry and kind of inhaled all of the Silicon Valley spirit for many years, like seven or eight years, but became a little bit homesick for European values and the European sensibility. And then I wrote a book about meaning, really. I worked in marketing. I was a chief marketing officer for a design company. And I was interested in the process of meaning making, like what are the principles of meaning making? And I realized at some point that they're all romantic principles, like I could all draw them from the arts, literature, philosophy movement, romanticism, mystery, intimacy, passion. So this was a real epiphany for me. And I realized, oh, this is great. Actually, this movement has still to teach us a lot, especially in an age where we're so obsessed with data and measuring everything. So I wrote a book, The Business Romantic, and I've been basically even preaching the gospel of romanticism to businesses who are usually much more inclined to follow efficiency and all of these trends. But I've been kind of like a Trojan horse. Yeah. And hopefully have had some impact. The digital space has become more and more dominated by bots, like farms spreading love throughout social media. How did the internet become so human? And what is the path for putting humans back to center? So the internet was really like a beautiful vision for showcasing the best of our humanity, right? Diversity, surfacing, discovering things that had not been mainstream. It promised so many things, democratizing, leading the states to voices that had not been heard, an amplifier for creativity and whatnot, right? It was a beautiful vision. And it was like that for a while. What happened? Well, I think the big Silicon Valley platforms began to create walled gardens, to extract attention, to monetize them pretty ruthlessly. And that led to this essentially like becoming an attention economy with like, yeah, ruthless extraction of attention that's now tightly controlled. And that's very manipulative and very persuasive. So what can we do to get us to restore that original vision for the internet? It's probably we need to infuse it with different values. I mean, there are like the poetic web. Christopher was actually here at TwentyThree Summit as well, trying to hack it a bit, right? Take it away from the big platforms, undermine it with poetry, with beauty. Of course, we have alternative browsers. We have now blockchain and decentralized autonomous organizations. We have attempts to use AI in a different way, right? In a more creative way. So at the end of the day, it's a power game, of course. And the power also comes from what people want. They're not going to get enough people just voice what they want and what they dislike. And we have also politics that help us institutionalize that power by implementing regulation that makes sure that these platforms are not too invasive in terms of our privacy. I think maybe we have a chance. But we've gotten so far into this game that it's very hard to see. There's so entrenched in our lives, these platforms, that it's very hard to see how we could reverse it. So there is a way, but we need to go together. In a nutshell. Yeah. So here at TwentyThree, we believe that video is an essential medium for companies. I'm moving the subject a little bit. And having a video strategy is essential. What advice would you give to those that are looking forward to successfully develop and implement a video strategy, but still being human and being natural? So considering data, but remembering who we are. So there's a school in Austin in Texas that is entirely focused on AI. So it's basically teaching, I believe it's high school kids, how to become better at AI. They don't have any curriculum anymore. They don't read books. They don't have mathematics even. They are just thinking about AI. And they discovered something really interesting. Something they call spikiness. So any behavior that is improbable, that is unpredictable, that is very strained, that is very emotional, it's very hard for the algorithms to predict and to kind of shoehorn into this AI consensus and homogeneity. And that's what makes us human, right? It's the spikiness of it. It's personality. And you see this if you look at the media landscape right now. We clearly see the shift, whether it's on sub-sac or video, from the more canned, standardized formats that are polished and perfect to off-the-cuff, long conversations, casual conversations, opinions, flamboyance, like strong personality. So anything that makes us unpredictable, that makes us spiky, to use that term, is something that makes us human. And that is always content that will cut through. I think it's a mix of that, but I would err on the side and over -index on the side of creating spiky, very, very, very human format. Because people will relate to human content, and they can still tell whether something is fake or inauthentic or something is authentic and engaging. Yeah. Instead of being being weird. All of that. Yes. Out of the box. Yeah. I love it. So this year's theme of the TwentyThree Summit is the human side of digital. What does that mean to you, being human and digital? I think what it means to me is to be a person. And it's very hard to be a person in these times, to become a person. Well, first of all, we are so exposed to so much competition, why we're constantly comparing ourselves. We know that teenagers are now almost like poisoned with this constant pressure to compare themselves with other lifestyles. So I think it's really taking a step back. And I mean, three things that I also shared in my talk. One is contemplation. So it's really allowing yourself not to be part of that wreck race, but taking time for yourself. Be actually okay with solitude, with the source of thinking, of deep thinking, understanding and becoming aware of who you really are and what you want and what you need and who can give it to you, rather than just following the next trend. Second is creativity. Right? It's like this notion of like, find a vehicle that allows you to express yourself, that allows you to create something. It might be writing a song, singing. It might be gaming in a different realm. But creating is something that I think makes us human, which is why the creator economy and people really and the internet or the digital economy allowing us to be creators and reaching more people or reaching niche, passionate niche audiences is something that can be very liberating and can be human. And the third is curation. Like I'm writing a book about this now, but it's this ability to really discern and to distinguish content that matters and distract meaning from this abundance of information and data that we're inundated with digitally, but really developing a taste, a style, like kind of looking at things, looking at videos, reading and reading, but not just falling prey to like the feed that TikTok and others are serving here, but really developing your own aesthetics, your own taste, and then collecting content that suits your needs. So contemplation, creativity and curation, in my view, are the pillars of what makes you a person, which then in effect, I think, makes you human. And we need more of that. Thank you. It has been a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks so much.