by Tim Leberecht

If I don’t write for a week, I get cranky. I feel like an intellectual impostor. But in the weeks after the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens last month, the pen just wouldn’t move. I felt intellectually constipated. There had been too much input and not enough time to digest it.

I was spent. Ten years of experience with gatherings of this sort have taught me to recognize that you pay for every peak moment with a subsequent period of depletion and deflation. The adrenaline, the energy—first it fades, then it drops off abruptly. It’s like a quiet bang. You feel it without noticing it.

But enough whining. New peak moments are waiting to be experienced. The show must go on, and so must the game—especially the beautiful one.

The Game

From the World Beautiful Business Forum I continued on to the World Cup. I first tried to resist it, for all the right reasons, but the romantic in me proved stronger—or at least more passionate—than the cynic. I guess that’s a good thing.

While my team, Germany, was playing Ivory Coast, I sat in a Mexican bar in Barcelona’s Born district with my Mexican colleague Mark, our musical director, nervously and hastily downing a Mezcalita. When German striker Deniz Undav scored the winning last-minute goal, I burst into an insanely loud celebration that instantly silenced the room before my body—and the worried expressions around me—reminded me that a similar scream had severely strained my vocal cords for a week after Germany’s last World Cup victory in 2014.

But hey, it was worth it.

The whole World Cup is.

More host countries, more nations, more games, more money than ever—yet it turns out big can be beautiful, too. I slowly grew into it, and perhaps my initial refusal to care made it all the more precious, moving my affection beyond mere reflex or habit. My co-founder Till insists that, at my age, well into my fifties, the number of World Cup tournaments I can still experience is becoming rather limited.

On that note, journalist and football connoisseur Simon Kuper, whom I once interviewed about FC Barcelona’s motto, Més que un club (”More than a Club”), offers a poignant reflection: “A World Cup is like Proust’s madeleine.” Each new tournament reminds you of the past World Cups—and of the people you watched them with. With or without the much- and rightly maligned hydration breaks, it becomes a metric of one’s life.

As Monika Jiang observes, the World Cup evokes what we’re missing so desperately in our daily lives: the feeling of being part of something greater than ourselves, of “oneliness,” of being “all” and “one” at once. These are the moments when the cliché of our “shared humanity,” which can sometimes ring hollow, becomes so tangible that we can almost touch it—or scream it out loud.

It turns out the beautiful game is more resilient than we thought, capable of defying even the most shameless attempts to commercialize and politicize it. The beauty in the beautiful game, I’d like to believe, is strong enough to withstand passing fashions and passing powers.

The same is true for beauty itself.

The Cult and the Promise

Sure, like football, beauty has become commodified—indeed, turned into a “cult,” as the exhibition Cult of Beauty at the CCCB in Barcelona argues, tracing its colonizing impulse from antiquity to TikTok, from the male gaze to the algorithmic gaze, from the beaux arts to the beauty industry, from Miss America to body shaming to looksmaxxing. Beauty is power, the curators remind us, and it is unevenly distributed.

The internet—that innocent culprit—has, by Instagramming beauty mercilessly, replaced inspiration with stimulation: a relentless excitement machine whose only goal is to make everything we hold precious less precious.

Inspiration requires attention and commitment. It is impossible if we’re constantly excited, constantly agitated. Beauty becomes scarcer the more ubiquitous it is supposed to be, while almost everything else online is, or becomes, a form of pornography.

That was the working thesis of artist Mindy Seu’s A Sexual History of the Internet, an examination of the laws of extraction—of the perverted and pervasive power of digital technology as it shaped, and was shaped by, our sexual desires. Her project comprises two parts—a book and a participatory lecture—and I had the pleasure of taking part in the latter at Sónar+D in Barcelona.

In a darkened room lit only by the participants’ phones, Seu asked us to open her Instagram page and read aloud together from a shared script. Meanwhile, throughout the entire Instagram-story-as-lecture, she walked through the room, passing close to each participant as a deliberate distraction, making us struggle to stay focused on the text glowing on our screens. Stuck to our phones most of the time, we switched from one voyeurism to another, prompted into feeding Seu’s research with yet more data while adding to her Instagram views.

The performance was like the internet itself. It left a foul aftertaste.

The business model of the book is more beautiful. Each of the forty-five people cited receives a share of the profits. Seu calls this model of attribution “Citational Splits.”

What is beautiful is what we can withdraw from the laws of extraction—and those of attraction.

A week after Seu’s performance, I watched In-I In Motion, Juliette Binoche’s making-of documentary about her 2007 collaboration with the British dancer Akram Khan. The two-and-a-half-hour film requires commitment. The first part follows rehearsals and conversations between the unlikely pair and its directors; the second presents the performance itself. Each lingers longer and looks more closely than contemporary viewing habits would suggest. The camera cannot take its eyes off them.

Yet the reward is lasting: a meditation on the creative process and the power dynamics of love that takes us back to the original wound—and to the impossibility of healing it for the other.

Binoche and Khan are performing the grief of the rejected and the grief of the rejecter, as the writer Karl Ove Knausgård puts it in his essay on a kindred work of art: Joachim Trier’s magnificent Sentimental Value, where the delicate dance unfolds between two artists who are also father and daughter. “More or less damaged characters all find themselves in that recognizable here and now, depicted with care and an eye for its beauty,” Knausgård writes, describing the kind of protagonists that inhabit all of Trier’s films.

Beauty is what is of sentimental value. And to appreciate and create it, we need a sentimental education: an education of the heart.

The Education

You may call it “emotional intelligence” or, in the latest linguistic contortion, “relational intelligence” (I’ve written elsewhere about how the myopic obsession with “intelligence” is corrupting our language and culture), or “Systems Feeling“ (to use the concept developed by systems thinker Laura Francois). Or simply: love.

The only way to overcome a transactional culture is not to be reciprocal. It is to love.

A sentimental education is not one you obtain at business school, at least not on its own. Nor is it an education AI can provide by codifying and rehashing all human knowledge.

Rather, it is the knowledge you gain from reading, seeing art, and sitting with an idea. From learning “how to be read by a book,” as the leadership philosopher Steven D’Souza describes it. From listening to the singer-songwriter Ormella with your headphones set to the lowest volume so that her voice caresses you ever so slightly. From reading a poem by Forugh Farrokhzad. From asking the big “why” questions philosophers ask. From watching Lionel Messi, the GOAT, score a golazo. From trying your hand at stand-up comedy or DJing. From walking the Camino de Santiago—or simply walking your child to school (although they might not appreciate it). From spending hours trying to catch a fish in the Bosphorus or in an artificial lake in North Carolina. From watching Sculpt: Eye of the Duck, Loris Gréaud’s film starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Rampling that only one person at a time can experience. From collecting something utterly useless that only you care passionately about.

All of these experiences teach us that most of the inherently human capacities we need to thrive in the emerging more-than-human economy—curiosity, presence, imagination, creativity, play—are abundant in the arts and crafts. More importantly, they are capacities we all possessed before we turned five, before school, college, and business education gradually trained them out of us, turning us into compliant, unthinking cogs in the machine.

This machine is now literally a machine.

That makes it even harder to escape. At the same time, it might make it easier to see just how stuck—and how complicit—we have become. To realize that we’ve been playing the wrong game all along.

As Ralph Wetzel, a professional “business clown,” suggested last week during a workshop in Paris, “Boredom is a prerequisite for imagination. Maybe we will become so bored by AI that our imagination will grow in leaps and bounds.”

We do need it.

“Beauty is the name for something that does not exist,” the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa once exclaimed. So we must constantly reimagine it.

Beauty is immeasurable, unmanageable, illegible, irrational, illogical, wild. Emotional, erotic, ecstatic.

It is the opposite of management. The opposite of business. And therefore the antidote. The cure.

Beauty is a necessity, as Toni Morrison knew. And it is gaining momentum because of the moment we’re in.

The Movement

First, there is the backlash against AI. Not against the technology itself, but against the dehumanizing regime that a handful of techno-utopians seek to impose through its proliferation.

Take the pro-AI commencement speakers—including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—who were booed by students. Or comedian Ronny Chieng and his viral Harvard Class Day speech, telling graduates that the mission of their generation was to “destroy AI.” Or Pope Leo, urging us to “disarm AI.”

They all reflect a broader public sentiment.

In the United States, a national NBC News survey conducted earlier this year among 1,000 registered voters found that only 26 percent viewed AI positively, while 46 percent viewed it negatively. AI scored worse than U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Donald Trump, and Kamala Harris on the same poll—though still better than the Democratic Party and Iran…

Protests, and even riots, against the AI regime have become more frequent in the United States and elsewhere. Legendary activist Erin Brockovich has made data centers her new cause.

The countermovement is hardly surprising. Even many ardent technology enthusiasts now recognize that the techno-utopian vision comes at a considerable cost.

The SpaceX IPO is exemplary. It briefly valued the company at more than $2 trillion and made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. Yet what the record-breaking offering ultimately symbolizes is the extraordinary material power of belief. Investors are pricing not today’s business but tomorrow’s mythology: Mars, AI, orbital infrastructure. The company lost nearly $5 billion in 2025, and future revenues—let alone profits—remain uncertain. Yet Musk commands an avid following and has skillfully tapped into retail investors’ fear of missing out on a journey to Mars. It is a fever dream—like crypto and, to some extent, AI. A bubble that has already permeated retirement funds and become too big to fail. If it bursts, generations may end up paying the price.

As Matteo Wong writes in The Atlantic:

“The promise of AI was always a self-fulfilling prophecy: This technology is so expensive to build that it must be world-changing; and because it is world-changing, we will spend any amount to build it.”

The distance between prophecy and reality is shrinking. This is what is really happening when we speak of “acceleration.”

Two weeks ago, a group of European technology scholars published a paper (“Europe 2031”) in which they were warning that the U.S. government might one day compel an AI company to deny access to other nations. That very day, the Trump administration did exactly that: it ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its premium system, Claude Mythos, for non-American users, particularly Europeans, citing national security concerns.

It is not merely that we have entrusted our fate to a handful of tech billionaires—the majority of leading AI companies are controlled by remarkably few people. Worse, many of them display an extraordinary combination of confidence and indifference. Zuckerberg. Altman. Musk. Karp.

They are the winners by today’s standards, celebrated as the visionaries of our age. But their visions ultimately amount to something darker: a future in which humanity, as we know it, becomes expendable.

At least those protesters who are silenced can use even their silence as a form of protest. Consider the session at the Hay Festival where a court order obtained by Meta prevented former employee Sarah Wynn-Williams from speaking about her book. She participated anyway and, throughout the entire panel, sat in symbolic silence.

Protest we must.

And “the only true protest is beauty.”

The eponymous exhibition in Venice, housed in the historic Palazzo Pisani Moretta and curated by Dries Van Noten, draws on the idea, first articulated by the activist and songwriter Phil Ochs, that in ugly, turbulent times, creating and experiencing beauty is the ultimate act of defiance.

This sensibility is equally evident at this year’s Venice Art Biennale. Curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, its theme, In Minor Keys, sets the tone: a more introspective, tender, melancholic, and less spectacular exhibition—political precisely because of its intimacy.

And not afraid of beauty.

Biennale, in an essay published earlier this year, articulated this shifting zeitgeist:

“For a long time, in the serious corridors of the art world, that word, beauty, has been the forbidden moniker...”

To invoke beauty was to risk being dismissed as unserious, sentimental, insufficiently rigorous.

The encouraging news is that beauty is returning—but not beauty understood as prettiness.

“The beauty we are interested in... is the Sublime in the old, terrifying Romantic sense: the feeling of standing before a storm, or a mountain, or a truth so vast it makes you feel small. This kind of beauty does not soothe; it shakes. It is the ‘terrible beauty’ that Yeats wrote of, born of violence and transformation.”

It is precisely this terrible beauty that we need right now.

As the Biennale essay continues:

“Beauty, in the year 2026, acts as a form of friction.”

Because:

“In an age of catastrophe, only the beautiful has the power to make us stop long enough to feel.”

And further:

“The return to beauty is not an escape from reality; it is a strategy for enduring it. It is the only force strong enough to arrest our attention and hold it long enough for a seed of meaning to be planted. We have realized that we cannot scold the world into caring. We have to seduce it.”

In a world of frictionless friction, it is the human residue that grants aura.

Or, as the essay concludes:

“If we cannot find beauty in the wreckage, then the wreckage has truly won.”

So we are witnessing the renaissance of craftsmanship; the Slow Web and the Poetic Web; phone-free events, such as the rave Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter staged at Art Basel last week; the U.S. Chamber of Connection initiative; somatic retreats; the resurgence of spiritual rituals; the enormous popularity of festivals, live concerts, adventures, and adrenaline-fueled experiences; the World Cup.

Why?

Because these experiences still make us feel something. They make us feel alive. They give us texture, human connection, the “thickness” we are craving so desperately.

If you still think optimization is the name of the game, you’ve lost the plot. You’re the dinosaur.

Not only are we not done yet; we’re just getting started.

The Building

This is how we think about our own modest contribution to this global movement of beauty: beautiful business.

The ripple effects of the World Beautiful Business Forum continue to spread. Across the globe, members of our House of Beautiful Business (HoBB) community are organizing smaller gatherings of their own.

In São Paulo, Renata Barbosa hosted the Bar of Beautiful Talks. In Vitória, Brazil, Rafael Phoca built the entire program of his Efervescência summit around insights and inspirations from the World Beautiful Business Forum (I was delighted to join him virtually for a brief contribution). In New York, HoBBsters gathered to discuss their takeaways from Athens. In Berlin, our philosophy curator Eda Çaça staged a Socratic dialogue with the philosopher Agnes Callard and her colleague Berislav Marušić, extending the conversations from Athens around the question, What is a good life?

In Paris, several speakers and performers from Athens—Monika Jiang, Steven D’Souza, Laura Francois, Gianfranco Chicco, and Lori Baldwin—joined the latest Pullman xChange, produced by the House of Beautiful Business in partnership with Pullman Hotels & Resorts. The Source Code explored the essential—and often invisible—qualities that power both hospitality and, ultimately, a hospitable life.

In Paris I also reconnected with Jeroen van der Most, the artist who presented Letters from Nature, developed together with Peter van der Putten, at our 2023 festival in Sintra, Portugal. The project imagines letters written by AI on behalf of nature. One of them, he told me, will travel aboard the next NASA mission to the Moon.

Mission accomplished.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, I was delighted to see the words “beautiful business” projected across the main stage at the opening session of the Founders Forum in Barcelona, the annual gathering of IESE’s School of Founders.

IESE is one of the world’s leading business schools, and the School of Founders was created inside it to help entrepreneurs “build significant businesses that make a positive impact in their fields.” That ambition aligns naturally with IESE’s own ethos. Founded by Jesuits, the school has long been known for emphasizing responsible leadership—not merely as the science of making better decisions, but as an inner practice requiring time, reflection, and moral purpose.

Sebastian Ross, the executive director of the School of Founders, first came across one of our LinkedIn posts, reached out, attended Athens, and invited us to contribute to the gathering.

So there we were.

Mark, our musical director, performed together with several local musicians, and I delivered the closing keynote.

What I hadn’t expected was just how prominently the idea of beautiful business would feature throughout the program. It became the Forum’s throughline.

Ross presented the school’s new manifesto, including its pledge to founders to “build businesses so beautiful you never want to sell them.”

He also reminded them: “You are worthy regardless of whether your business succeeds or not.”

The 250 participants knew exactly why they had come to Barcelona: To step back from the pressures of day-to-day growth—or survival; from the tyranny of the immediate. They had come to slow down. To take stock and exchange ideas. To console and confide in a close-knit community of fellow founders who understood the sacrifice, the imposter syndrome, the doubt, and the burnout that so often accompany entrepreneurship.

They hoped to gain clarity about the growth of their companies as it relates to their own well-being.

As the School of Founders manifesto proclaims: “Personal growth is individual work you cannot do alone.”

IESE’s dean, Franz Heukamp, joined for a refreshingly candid conversation about leadership and, more importantly, about himself: his loneliness, his fears, and his failures. He admitted that when he first took on the role, he was, in his own words, a “communications disaster.” Later came another realization: the myopic belief that only he could do the job. The terminal hubris of leadership.

IESE external faculty member James Allen, advisory partner at Bain & Company and one of the leading thinkers on corporate growth and Founder’s Mentality, appealed to the founders’ moral ambition as an expression of humility. He lamented the erosion—or outright absence—of citizenship and community among today’s technology companies: the “scale insurgents” that no longer need a meaningful social contract with their stakeholders, no longer require moral legitimacy to secure their license to operate. The current system simply no longer produces enough winners, he argued. Widening inequality is one of the root causes of today’s populism and authoritarianism.

He urged the audience to take the long view.

Cathedral thinking, as we now call it. Inspired—we were in Barcelona, after all—by Gaudí.

Allen referred to IESE professor Yih-Teen Lee, who expanded on the concept by reflecting on Gaudí’s Sagrada Família. Gaudí knew the basilica would never be completed in his lifetime. He had the time and resources to build only a fraction of it. How, then, should he use those limited resources in a way that would inspire future builders?

He chose to only fully complete the Nativity Façade, building upward so that the people of Barcelona could already see the towers reaching into the sky.

Allen writes:

“Every CEO faces problems like this all the time. Do I build out all the foundational elements for the firm of the future, or race to give my people a vision of what we could be with one product and one customer? Do I finish 20% of everything, or 100% of one fifth of what I’m doing? The efficient thing is almost always option one: build the foundations. But the beautiful thing might be to inspire—to give your people and customers a vision of what you might become.”

It reminded me of another line from Pessoa: to “put all you are into the smallest thing you do.”

Our House

And it made me reflect on the House of Beautiful Business.

Our role in the world. Our moral ambition. Our vision for the future.

Are we scaling—or merely growing? Do we have the foundations for long-term success in place? Or have we simply built one beautiful church after another? (yikes, not to compare us with Gaudí 😊).

Ten years into this journey, our momentum has grown. The community has grown. The narrative has scaled. But, by and large, we are still the same small shop we’ve been since 2016. The difference is that more and more people now believe we are something much larger.

We are punching above our weight in brand and reach. And below it in impact.

That is the challenge occupying us now: Not simply how to grow, but how to scale the beautiful business movement itself. More specifically, how to scale it without losing the intimacy that defines it.

Is it possible to scale intimacy?

We possess three extraordinary assets: a vibrant community, a brand people genuinely love, and a mission that has never been more relevant.

Over the past decade, we have succeeded in creating a narrative that resonates—a movement that more and more people want to be part of. What we have not yet built are the structures that allow members of this movement to participate fully.

When I call it a movement, I do so because movements exist first in people’s imagination. In Barcelona, one participant approached me and remarked that our movement was “going mainstream.”

I wish that were true.

But her assumption tells its own story. At this stage, it is more powerful if thousands of people believe ours is a movement of hundreds of thousands than if hundreds of thousands believe it is one of only a few thousand.

Call it the scale illusion.

Yet while momentum has always mattered more than scale, we know that this equation is beginning to change. Without stronger foundations, momentum eventually dissipates.

So we are taking this summer to pause:

To reflect honestly on what we have accomplished—and where we have fallen short.

To decide what we should not do (for example, launching a networking app for our members…).

To imagine how we can welcome more people into the House.

To dream about the individuals and organizations with whom we most want to collaborate.

To shape the next edition of the World Beautiful Business Forum: where it should take place, in what form, and why.

To explore new ways for our community to gather throughout the year.

To respond to their recurring request that we “be more present in their lives.”

To build a vehicle capable of harnessing the collective wisdom of this remarkable community.

To renew our mission.

To articulate a vision for the next decade.

To strengthen the foundations that will allow us to scale those parts of the House of Beautiful Business that can have the greatest impact.

To demonstrate that beautiful business can also be profitable business, creating the resources for new initiatives and new encounters—new moments of beauty.

Because, in the end, that’s all we want.

Our house has never been more open.

***

Further Reading

Tim Leberecht: The Beautiful Asymmetry of Football

Beauty Shot: What Makes a Dream Team? Interview with Simon Kuper.

Karl Ove Knausgård: Sentimental Value: Between Trauma and the Sublime

Biennale: Who Owns Beauty?

Further Listening

Ormella: “Missing Machine”

Philip Sheppard: In-I In Motion, Original Soundtrack

Community Updates

Sonja Kresojevic’s exhibition, Where Silence Breaks, just opened in London. Exploring form and fragility, presence and absence, it is running at Art Forward Gallery until July 11. She will also participate in an artist talk on July 2.

Joanna Kamińska’s paintings are part of the Open Art exhibition at the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation in Athens, June 28 - July 12.

Alexa Clay has published a memoir-inspired essay titled “Therapy for Billionaires” in Aeon.

Beowulf Sheehan has released a new book: a double portrait of the late writer Cormac McCarthy in photographs and prose, The Father of the Man: The Last Author Portrait Sitting with Cormac McCarthy.

By Marc Cinanni

You’re in a restaurant. There’s a baby two tables away who won’t stop staring at you. For five full minutes he peers into you with the intensity of a cheetah. You blink and look away first.

In somebody’s kitchen, a baby is sitting in a high chair eating a bowl of soup. Between spoonfuls, she flips the bowl over to watch the mix of broth and noodles slowly leak down her leg, then the chair, then onto the floor.

These incidents aren’t problems to be solved. They’re dispatches from the fastest learners on the planet. Little scientists, negotiators, and explorers we stopped watching the moment we thought we knew better.

Today’s global leadership development industry generates over $60 billion a year to teach fortysomethings how to think differently, yet the world’s fastest learners are all under the age of five. A baby’s brain forms one million new neural connections per second in the first few years of life. While a successful leadership retreat will produce a handful of LinkedIn posts and a colorful PDF.

Management programs spend enormous amounts of time trying to revive qualities such as presence, curiosity, fearlessness, and the ability to fail without hanging onto ego. All things that were present in any team member before they turned six. Then school happened, work happened, and here we are.

What follows are five management minds you’ve never considered. They’re small. Their ideas are not. None of them have bestsellers, they don’t do TED talks, and they can’t tie their shoes. But if you pay attention the way they pay attention, you’ll find they have more to teach us than anyone who ever made you sit in a circle.

1. The Presence Mind

Specialty: The only person in the room who’s actually in it

Babies can’t be anywhere except where they’ve been plopped. They have no “elsewhere,” no open tabs, no thoughts about a conversation they’ll have on Tuesday. The person in front of them has their full attention because absorption is their default.

This is a mental baseline we spend our entire adult lives trying to recover. With apps, coaches, breathing techniques, and expensive retreats in expensive places. All things that are designed to make us briefly feel the way a toddler feels all the time. Or in simpler terms: to return us to the state of attention we were born with.

The Presence Mind is not paying attention because they’ve been told to. They’re paying attention because the world is astonishing and beautiful and heart-opening and they haven’t yet developed the mental mechanism to be somewhere else while appearing to be with you.

When did you last make someone feel like they were the whole world?

2. The Curiosity Mind

Specialty: Asking the question underneath the question, underneath the question, underneath the question

Curiosity is a childhood trait that gets systematically trained out of us. By the time people reach positions of seniority, they’ve spent decades in places that reward certainty while looking down on not-knowing. So here’s what happens: organizations are full of people who are very good at projecting confidence while being terrified of questions they don’t have answers to.

Preschoolers ask about 75 questions per hour in the company of an adult. Once they’ve had their coffee, a senior executive will perhaps ask two or three. Because the curiosity mind hasn’t learned yet that questions can signal weakness. Or that you’re supposed to already have an answer before you open your mouth.

Most of the Curiosity Mind’s questions are why questions. Not where, not what, not how: why. As in, Why do you have lines on your face? Why do we need to leave? Why did that man look sad? Why didn’t we talk to him? Why do you look at the computer so much? For them it’s not data, it’s about something boardrooms never really do: asking “why” until something honest comes out.

When did you last ask why, and then ask why again?

3. The Play Mind

Specialty: The serious business of play

The Play Mind doesn’t approach hard things with skepticism. They approach them by playing. They pick things up, turn them over, or place them next to something else to see what happens. Play is not how they avoid difficulty, it’s how they get close enough to explore.

Research on play in organizational settings—from Lego’s study of Serious Play and productivity to academic work on what happens when improvisation enters the corporate environment—consistently finds the same thing. That play doesn’t make work less serious, it makes serious work possible. It’s the difference between the organizations that discover and the ones that just optimize.

The Play Mind plays because the world is interesting and they want to interact with it and know it better. And they haven’t yet learned the distinction between work and play, because for them that distinction doesn’t exist.

When did you last try something you couldn’t justify in advance?

4. The Innovation Mind

Specialty: Experimenting without ego

The Innovation Mind runs hundreds of experiments per day. Squish an ant. Put a shoe in their mouth. Drop something off a table, watch it fall, and drop it again. What seems like chaos is actually a kind of curriculum. They’re building their understanding of the world from scratch by running one small experiment at a time.

But here’s what they don’t do: hold post-mortems, debriefs, or defend a hypothesis that didn’t work out. Or feel that the result of a failed experiment reflects on their worth as a person. They just learn.

In computer science there’s a well-known distinction between “explore” and “exploit.” In exploit mode, you have a goal, a set of competencies, and you’re trying to get something done. In explore mode there’s no goal. Instead, you’re finding out what’s out there and that’s it. Babies are in explore mode all the time because they have nothing invested in the result. Everything’s invested in understanding because there’s nothing to prove (but everything to know).

There’s a point where organizations stop doing this well. On comes the pressure to exploit (deliver, justify, show returns) which crowds out the space for free exploration. The outcome is something that feels like “theatrical innovation” where activities carry the gestures of experimentation without the actual desire to know what’s really going to happen.

We seem to call this sort of thing “user research.” The Innovation Mind calls it “Wednesday morning in the living room.”

What would you attempt if the result said nothing about your worth?

5. The Imagination Mind

Specialty: Not yet knowing what impossible means

There’s a specific age at which the concept of impossible enters a child’s worldview. It arrives at a certain developmental stage, the point where the brain has built enough of a model of the world to start drawing firm conclusions about what it can and cannot contain.

Before that point, the only limits are physical. Impossible hasn’t been invented yet. Fantasy and reality are the same, and they’re available for the same purposes. A cardboard box is a spaceship. A stick is a sword. The living room floor is lava. The Imagination Mind is not pretending, they’re working with the most powerful design tool available to any human brain, and they haven’t yet been told that serious people are not supposed to use it.

Imagination and fantasy are how children process overwhelming complexity and how they metabolize a world that is genuinely too large and too strange to absorb all at once.

When you look at the world through their eyes, something changes. You start to see what isn’t there yet and what could be. Because babies are never told their ideas are unrealistic. That comes much later.

What did you stop trying to do when you learned what impossible meant?

These minds are already in your building

The five minds described above aren’t rare or inaccessible. The people who know them best are already in your company.

They’re called parents.

And the time they spend with their babies while on parental leave should not be considered time away from the office. It’s one of the most intensive periods of human growth that most people will ever undertake. Yet, companies have been systematically failing to recognize that.

Because early parenting means managing under conditions of genuine uncertainty. It’s prioritizing with little sleep when the stakes are real and information is hard to access. It’s staying present for someone who needs you fully, when you didn’t know you had anything left, and then you find it.

In 2017 (remarkably recently) neuroscientist Susana Carmona and her colleagues published the first major study of what pregnancy does to the human brain. The finding: the maternal brain becomes more neurologically plastic during pregnancy than at any point since infancy. More adaptive than adolescence, the brain is reorganizing itself for a new kind of learning and a new quality of attention.

Meanwhile, as Lee Gettler’s research has shown, fathers who are present and hands-on in early childcare experience measurable hormonal shifts that make them more patient and more empathetic—two of the most consistently cited qualities of effective leadership. This is biology, not just cute ideas.

No business school has replicated these conditions. A parent on leave is not in the office, but they are learning every day. Under pressure in a way no training has yet found a way to teach. Then the parent returns to find their old job waiting, with everything exactly as they left it. Nobody ever asks what they’ve learned.

This is one of the greatest missed opportunities in organizational life.

Now we’re living through a moment in which the questions of what makes us human are urgent. Machines can do more of what we thought made us valuable. What remains (what cannot be automated, optimized, or offloaded) is exactly what our five minds have been demonstrating: presence, play, innovation, and imagination.

In the age of AI, these are not soft skills. They’re the only skills that matter going forward. And the people who’ve been practicing them most recently, most intensively, and under the most demanding conditions you can imagine, could be sitting right across from you.

You just haven’t thought to ask.

***

This piece was developed in partnership with the Van Leer Foundation, an independent organization working globally to ensure every child gets the best possible start in life. Their journal explores the science and stories of early childhood development. Read it at earlychildhoodmatters.online.

Housekeeping

Our next HoBB event will take place in Paris on June 24-25 in partnership with Pullman Hotels & Resorts. As part of the Pullman xChange event series we are inviting you to uncover The Source Code behind everything we value in work and life. For 24 hours, Pullman hotels in Paris become an immersive landscape of encounters and experiences. 150 guests. By invitation only.

Apply for a complimentary ticket

The Beautiful Business School is a one-of-a-kind online learning journey that provides you with a comprehensive, decidedly humanist playbook for the age of AI. Over the course of seven weeks—September 22–October 27—you’ll embark on a deep, dynamic journey into the art and practice of beautiful business. Through live sessions, expert guidance, improv, a curated library, and interaction with AI agents and a vibrant global community of peers, you’ll develop the creative insight and human leadership needed to shape a more beautiful future.

Enroll now at the early-bird rate

There’s never been a better time to become a paying member of the HoBB. Annual membership includes 20% off all events and products (including the World Beautiful Business Forum and The Beautiful Business School), as well as access to session recordings, both online and in-person, and other exclusive content. Your support is vital as we aim to continue offering free online programming and grow the community.

Become a member

Community Updates

To celebrate the German translation of Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, the widely acclaimed new book by Agnes Callard, Atlas Publishing Lab is bringing its Başka Felsefe (“Another Philosophy”) series to Berlin for a special event. On Sunday, June 14, 4-6 pm, Agnes and Berislav Marušić will discuss “What Is a Good Life?” at Reethaus. A few tickets remain.

On June 16-17, the School of Founders at IESE Business School invites 300 founders of scaleups from 50+ nationalities to the Founders Forum—a two-day gathering in Barcelona that goes deeper than most startup conferences and looks at the founder’s journey through the lens of presence, personal transformation, and co-creation. We are delighted to contribute with live music by Mark Aanderud and a keynote by our co-founder Tim Leberecht.

Co-organized by our friends at the World Human Forum and set in the cradle of philosophy, next to Aristotle’s ancient Lyceum in Athens, The Lyceum Project is an annual multidisciplinary initiative where philosophy meets AI. This year’s gathering is devoted to the nexus of “animate, ancestral, and artificial intelligence,” and will take place on June 19-20. Get your free pass here.

ResonantOS, co-founded by Ximo Peris and currently in early testing phase, is an DAO alternative to the dominance of big tech AI platforms. Think of it as a decentralized operating ecosystem designed for advanced collaboration between humans and AI. It is built on the principle of the Augmented Mind, ensuring that as AI evolves, individual human agency, data sovereignty, and collective intelligence evolve right alongside it, rather than being sidelined.

Supported by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Acosta Institute’s Healing-Centered Education initiative has engaged leaders and educators across conferences, certificate programs, fellowships, retreats, and public storytelling projects. A newly released impact report captures the scale and spirit of what emerged through this nearly one-million-dollar investment.

by Tim Leberecht

I see more and more people heralding ”relational intelligence” as a core leadership skill—or even a core life skill. I recently came across an event titled “Relational Intelligence: The Next Human Threshold.“

The only human word in that title is “human.”

And it made me realize that we have developed a strange habit: we no longer seem capable of valuing something unless we first rebrand it as a form of intelligence.

Emotional intelligence. Somatic intelligence. Intuitive intelligence. Relational intelligence. The list keeps growing.

But what exactly is gained by turning emotions, relationships, intuition, embodiment, eros, or wisdom into subsets of intelligence?

Take “relational intelligence.” The next human threshold is supposed to be that we relate and understand the space between us? That we are, in essence, social creatures who form relationships? That we experience meaning through connection with other living beings?

We have become so estranged from who we are that we must rediscover it through management-speak mumbo jumbo. “Relational intelligence” is merely the latest example.

Some now even speak of “relational infrastructure.” Relationships, however, are, by their very nature, the opposite of infrastructure. They are not stable or permanent. They are fluid, fragile, evolving. They are software, not hardware.

Language is the first casualty of the AI-fication of life.

I am guilty of this myself. Once, in an attempt to appeal to a business audience, I used the term “ancestral intelligence” in a talk. Afterwards, a man approached me and gently said: “Just call it wisdom.”

The inflation of “intelligence” has become so extreme that it now borders on parody. Consider “connectional intelligence.” Etymologically, intelligence refers to understanding that emerges from reading between things, from linking remote points. “Connectional intelligence” is therefore what linguists call a pleonasm—a “free gift,” an “added bonus,” an “unexpected surprise.”

More than the proliferation of these terms, what depresses me is what they reveal: intelligence has become the supreme emblem of value. The ultimate colonizer. Every aspect of the human experience must now justify itself by squeezing into its conceptual territory.

Yet emotions, eros, intuition, wisdom, and human connection must not be instrumentalized. They do not need to prove their worth through the language of optimization and performance. They do not need to fit within the narrow productivity framework implied by “intelligence.”

Instead of emotional intelligence, let us cultivate feelings.
Instead of somatic intelligence, let us trust our bodies.
Instead of erotic intelligence, let us find pleasure in lust, love, and life.

Perhaps the next human threshold is not another kind of intelligence.
Perhaps it is remembering that some of the most important things in life never were.

***

Pamela Pavliscak studies the future of feelings. Fascinated by our conflicted emotional relationship with technology, her work is part deep research, part data science, and part design. With a background in human-computer interaction, she combines psychological research with creative inquiry, challenging us to see technology—and ourselves—in new ways. For example, she points to studies showing that digital detoxes have little effect on happiness. Instead, it is how we engage with the internet, rather than how much, that profoundly shapes our lives. Even simple habits, such as sending emojis to friends to signal nuance or making a few positive digital connections each day, can meaningfully support emotional well-being.

Pamela is a sought-after speaker whose insights have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Fast Company, Forbes, NPR, and Quartz. She has collaborated with organizations including Google, IKEA, Twitch, and the New York Public Library. She spoke at our 2018 annual gathering in Lisbon and returned this May to the HoBB main stage at the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens. Back in 2018, she focused mostly on social media; today, her attention has shifted to AI. Her new book, All the Feels: How to Stay Human in the Digital World (Algonquin Books/Hachette), will be published on June 9.

Our partner Cloud District had a chance to sit down with Pamela on Zoom and published an edited transcript of the conversation in their Spanish-language newsletter, La Inquieta. We’re happy to share the English version below.

***

How would you define our current technology-related emotional climate?

If we only tune into the media discourse, it’s all stories about social media dividing us, people falling in love with their chatbots or experiencing psychosis because of AI.

And I don’t doubt that, don’t get me wrong. I do think there are a lot of problems with technology, like the way it drives us to spend more time with it by keeping us in a bubble and serving us what we like.

But what I’ve learned by doing a decade of ethnographic research is that it’s not the whole story. I see a secondary layer: in small, quiet ways, everyday people are adapting. They are using technology to figure out who they are, express complicated micro-feelings, and actually build meaningful bonds. I think that’s a story we don’t hear so much.

Are we actually developing new emotions or just new names for old ones?

Digital life creates emotional situations that previous generations never had to encounter. I don’t think it’s a complete rewiring, but there’s a difference between traditional loneliness and the highly specific feeling of staring at someone’s active location on a map while waiting for a reply.

Once these digital experiences become common enough, we start to develop language to describe them. A lot of internet emotions are really micro-feelings that we collectively recognize and validate through memes, reaction GIFs, and trends long before mainstream psychology develops a formal vocabulary or structure for them.

Especially now with AI, there is such an interest in our inner lives and in how we as humans are different, and I think that has accelerated the invention of new terms for emotions. It’s basically part of our giant cultural effort to try to figure ourselves out, and I find that exciting.

Zooming in on AI, do you think we’re developing a new kind of emotional dependency on machines?

If you look back to the robots we had ten years ago, they were kind of helpless and dumb, and we still anthropomorphized them and got attached to them. I still really love my poor little Roomba that gets stuck all the time.

But with the current round of LLMs, there’s a real difference in what they can do, and they also come off as really confident and validating. This combination of factors can lead to a style of attachment that’s closer, more intimate, and potentially more problematic.

Specifically in the workplace, how is AI impacting us on an emotional level?

On the positive side, there is what I call the Capability Glow, where people are like “Oh, I can do more stuff. I can do new things that I wasn’t able to do before, and it’s really helping me.”

The flip side of that is AI Brain Fry, where you’re doing too many things with AI and your whole job is supervising AI. This is especially common with coders and programmers, where most of their job now is managing agents and viewing the work of AI, and it comes at you really fast. It’s another kind of burnout.

And then, for workplace communication, there’s the Guilt Spiral. You use AI to write a difficult email, you really like the result and think it’s better than what you would have come up with, but then you feel guilty when sending it because you think maybe you should have written it yourself. Also, if the receiver detects the AI use, they might get angry at you for not taking the time to write down your own thoughts and feelings.

I think everyone should be giving each other some grace in the workplace, because we’re all figuring this out together in real time.

What other terms assigned to AI-related feelings you find relevant or interesting?

Jamil Zaki, a professor of Psychology at Stanford University, wrote recently about what he calls Turing Fatigue, the emotional and cognitive tax that comes from trying to understand if something we’re reading was generated by an AI or written by a person.

And one that’s gotten a lot of press is AI Psychosis, that feeling of having godlike powers because of AI to the point where the people in your life are like “I can’t even deal with you anymore.” I feel like that’s pretty rare, probably as rare as people falling in love with their chatbots, but I’m sure it does happen.

Going back to the business world: how should organizations be dealing with the emotional impact of AI on their teams?

Companies tend to frame AI adoption through productivity and efficiency, but people look at work emotionally, as a source of dignity, belonging, and recognition. A lot of workplace anxiety around AI is actually Identity Anxiety, where people wonder “What makes me valuable now? What happens to the parts of myself that I thought were hard-earned? What happens to expertise?” So when organizations ignore those feelings, they are going to face disengagement or resistance.

Also, many companies waver between hype and reassurance, and people don’t trust that mixed messaging. Emotionally intelligent leadership makes room for contradictory feelings and understands that emotions are important signals about how change is being experienced.

And from a user or consumer’s perspective, how might AI change the way we relate to products, brands, and organizations?

A big friction point right now is that AI is suddenly in everything, and we didn’t ask for it to be in everything. But if brands use it to genuinely attune to our personal goals, we could potentially form stronger attachments to them, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. Products can be a valuable addition to our lives and make them better.

Could brands also know even more about our weaknesses and manipulate us even further? That’s a perfectly reasonable outcome too, and I think a lot of this is going to depend on the companies’ values.

Also, AI currently defaults to unyielding friendliness, but humans actually trust imperfection, and I suspect that rough edges, eccentricity, and hesitation will become more highly valued. So I wouldn’t be surprised if brands started to signal their trustworthiness by becoming a little less smooth and confident.

From Pamela-the-person and not Pamela-the-researcher’s point of view, what is your relationship to AI like?

My approach to technology in general is to try to be curious and open-minded. I think we are very quick to judge and, especially now, when the social norms around AI use are unsettled, there is a lot of shame associated with it.

As someone with ADHD, I find AI especially useful for taking a big mess of loose associations and helping me to figure out ways to make sense of it. Getting over the feeling of overwhelm when I start a project is super valuable.

But I’m also the kind of person who questions everything, so I resist any interaction that seems over-eager. I want to preserve uncertainty, and I think that’s crucial to good research.

One final question: what’s something related to AI that makes you hopeful?

What gives me hope is how emotionally inventive people are. We constantly repurpose technologies in ways designers never intended: people turn playlists into love letters, they maintain friendships through weekly check-in GIFs, they use AI to rehearse difficult conversations before having them in real life.

I think we underestimate how much creativity already exists in digital life because the dominant discourse tends to focus only on damage. I see a future where people become more emotionally articulate because technology enables us to pay closer attention to how we feel.

***

Further Reading

Jamil Zaki: “Turing Fatigue”

Nicole Rust: “What Can AI Teach Us About ‘Emotions’?”

L.M Sacasas: “Do Not Resign From Life”

Elaine Kasket: Reset: Rethinking Your Digital World for a Happier Life

Tune of the Week

Picked by HoBB Musical Director Mark Aanderud

Housekeeping

Our next HoBB event will take place in Paris on June 24-25 in partnership with Pullman Hotels & Resorts. As part of the Pullman xChange event series we are inviting you to uncover The Source Code behind everything we value in work and life. For 24 hours, Pullman hotels in Paris become an immersive landscape of encounters and experiences. 150 guests. By invitation only.

Apply for a complimentary ticket

The Beautiful Business School is a one-of-a-kind online learning journey that provides you with a comprehensive, decidedly humanist playbook for the age of AI. Over the course of seven weeks—September 8–November 3—you’ll embark on a deep, dynamic journey into the art and practice of beautiful business. Through live sessions, expert guidance, improv, a curated library, and interaction with AI agents and a vibrant global community of peers, you’ll develop the creative insight and human leadership needed to shape a more beautiful future.

Enroll now at the early-bird rate

There’s never been a better time to become a paying member of the HoBB. Annual membership includes 20% off all events and products (including the World Beautiful Business Forum and The Beautiful Business School), as well as access to session recordings, both online and in-person, and other exclusive content. Your support is vital as we aim to continue offering free online programming and grow the community.

Become a member

Community Updates

Nikki Trott, author of Sacred Business, has launched Sacara, “the new home for sacred business pioneers.” Sacara will host two annual signature events, the Sacred Business Summit and the Sacred Business Salon, as well as special experiences and collaborations.

The latest issue of The New Yorker features a short story by the writer Taiye Selasi: “Firstborn Immigrant Daughter.”

We forgot to include Moe Carrick’s wonderful books in our Athens speaker bibliography (sorry!), so here they are!

Bruno Giussani’s new book, Our Minds Under Siege: How to Avoid Being Manipulated in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, is now available in English. His recent TEDx talk is also online: “Tech That Doesn’t Spy On You Should Be Europe’s Digital Difference.“

“Let’s stop trying to be human and accept what we’ve always been: just monsters.”
— Ezgi Hamzaçebi

***

The Enhanced Games last Sunday in Las Vegas, even though a commercial flop, were a monstrosity.

Athletes competed while using performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) banned in traditional sports. The event—also dubbed the “Steroid Olympics” or “Doping Olympics”—was the fitting spectacle for our vice-signaling, Dark Mode age: a Donald Trump Jr.- and Peter Thiel-backed convention celebrating the pushing of the boundaries of human potential. An unholy coalition of tech billionaires, transhumanists, and manosphere figures betting on the merger of biohacking, masculinity, and transgression. The New York Times called it a “festival of superhumanity” and, like many critics, viewed it mainly as a not-so-subtle supermarket for PEDs.

The Enhanced Games were the circus twin of the Palantir Manifesto, published last month on X by Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who was, believe it or not, once a student of the late German liberal philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The 22-point text is essentially a summary of Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic, which champions a centralized, engineering-based, technocratic, techno-nationalist authoritarian state—including AI-driven weaponry and universal military service—inspired by a worldview grounded in hard power, brute force, and coercion as counterpoints to liberalism’s faith in soft power, moderated civil conflict, and cooperation. Yanis Varoufakis’s “translation” of the manifesto is by far the best way to do it justice. Read it if you haven’t.

The Enhanced Games stood in stark contrast to the World Beautiful Business Forum we hosted in Athens three weeks ago—“the most human gathering for the more-than-human world”—which, in many ways, reminded us that our humanity is not something to be performed but something to be tended to.

I had called the program a monster, a controlled-uncontrollable experiment in intellectual and emotional overload.

And still—it left me wanting.

The Next Human

A few hours after the Forum’s closing picnic, I moderated a panel discussion at the House of NYNN with four Forum speakers. The theme was “Designing for the Next Human.” One of the panelists, Monika Jiang, rejected the premise outright, expressing—if the nodding heads in the audience were any indication—what many people felt:

“Instead of asking how we can be more human, or a better human, or the next human, perhaps the point is to free ourselves from this pursuit altogether, as it reeks of the neoliberal, capitalist, and anthropocentric binary mentality and culture that led us into this mess in the first place. Modernity, in short, will keep holding us within its constraints,” she later reiterated her argument in a Substack note.

In a similar vein, Avram Alpert, in his book The Good-Enough Life, urges us to evade the trap of optimization and abandon the idea that we must lead distinctive lives that leave a mark on history. Instead of extraction and externalities, he advocates contentment with what we have and who we are. He lambasts society’s obsession with “greatness,” instead heralding sufficiency and the acceptance of human limitations as ways to reduce anxiety, inequality, and burnout.

For Alpert, focusing on being “good enough”—providing everyone with decency, meaning, and basic needs such as shelter and healthcare—is a more realistic and fulfilling goal than competing for elite status, which, in his view, harms both individuals and society. He advocates a shift from a competitive, meritocratic ideal toward a cooperative one that values ordinary pleasures and collective well-being, while acknowledging that life will always remain imperfect.

The Thinning

The optimization trap Jiang and Alpert bemoan is aggravated by the marriage of capitalism and dataism. That marriage makes the trap existential. As Yuval Noah Harari contends in Homo Deus, it stems from the impulse to create a new divinity, a new “almighty creator” enabled by superintelligence.

The paradox is obvious: the next human is no human. When humanity’s ultimate accomplishment is the overcoming of humanity itself, the new “almighty creator” becomes the almighty destroyer.

Collapse is inevitable. And it doesn’t bode well when Goliath’s Curse author Luke Kemp—an existential-risk scholar who has studied the collapse of civilizations across 5,000 years of history and views collapse as a necessary catalyst for social change, often liberating the many from entrenched elites—is himself fatalistic. The coming collapse, he told 1,000 captivated listeners in Athens, will be the ultimate collapse, because never before have such lethal technologies been concentrated in so few hands.

(All that’s left for us to do, he suggests, is this: “Don’t be a dick.”)

And even if the outcome is not extinction, superhuman superintelligence will become the great colonizer: of our planet and other planets, of us and other species, and—perhaps most importantly—of the human spirit itself, with the private and interior fully usurped and artificially enhanced, just as the Enhanced Games hacked the human body.

This is the phenomenon Aditi Khorana—novelist and artist, appearing in Athens as an “Oracle from the Future”—described as “the thinning”:

“What you are living through now will later be called ‘the thinning.’ Not collapse. Not catastrophe. Thinning. Less birds. Less touch. Less memory held in the body. More records. More storage. More proof of something that had once been alive.”

This thinning is the work of the X-maxxing-transhumanist complex. The brainmaxxers, looksmaxxers, and bodymaxxers are the moral minimalists—and therefore absolutists. The great seducers and great reducers of our age.

The Unspeakable World

One way to respond to the ideological crusade of the enhancers is through a humbling of our egos, both as individuals and as a species.

This is the terrain philosopher Bayo Akomolafe has explored so often in his soliloquies: the “cracks” between binaries, the wounds of “incompletion” that hold the potential for something new and more powerful to emerge.

The refusal to “complete”—to measure, label, perfect—is at the heart of Akomolafe’s work, which reframes post-colonialism as posthumanism. His perspective belongs to a growing field of more-than-human thinkers urging us to see ourselves as nodes within a larger multispecies network, proposing regeneration and rewilding as foundations for an ethos—and an economics—that is life-affirming, alive, like life itself.

To bring it back to our own turf: any beautiful business must remain unfinished business, or it won’t be beautiful.

A kindred spirit—albeit with a very different language and sensibility—is James Bridle, the artist and author, who demanded that we shut up and listen to the nonhuman life all around us rather than constantly shouting over it. His argument referenced the “unspeakable world,” a concept developed by philosopher Alan Watts and linguist Alfred Korzybski to describe raw reality before human language assigns names to it, and revived vividly in Athens by Miriam Meckel and Léa Steinacker in their talk on the end of the Enlightenment.

It is worth noting that the “unspeakable world” was already invoked by Plato in his Allegory of the Cave from The Republic, where the freed prisoner emerges from darkness into blinding sunlight—a realm impossible to adequately describe to those still staring at shadows.

Speaking of small artificial worlds that hold us captive, I recently rewatched The Truman Show , three decades after its original release. The film has aged disturbingly well. Today, it reads less as a prediction of reality TV and surveillance capitalism and more as a parable about the algorithmic iron cage—about “our minds under siege,” to borrow the title of Bruno Giussani’s new book. It is the hell of a perfect world entirely curated for us.

The most powerful resistance against such a world lies in the cracks we create through spontaneous, non-engineered, unregulated, “wild” human interaction. On stage in Athens, systems thinker Indy Johar conjured the image of two lovers kissing in the street as the most romantic manifestation of this possibility. For him, human interaction itself is the real urban infrastructure:

“Micro-communication—those fine-grained, low-stakes, high-bandwidth cues through which trust, care, misunderstanding, and repair are negotiated in everyday life.”

The antidote to thinning, for Johar, is more “thickness.”

He portrays the “unspeakable world” as the world before it is made legible through mapping and measurement. He calls it “pre-legibility,” and sees festivals and other mass gatherings as incubations of it:

“You could argue the future is already being allocated—quietly but materially—toward experiences that attempt to restore what a predicted, transactional world compresses. The growth of festivals, retreats, and wellbeing environments is not marginal. It is a demand signal.

But these aren’t just entertainment products. They are early, imperfect attempts to price a scarcity: unharvested attention, non-instrumental relationship, unscored meaning, and collective encounter that can’t be reduced to feeds and interfaces. When a society must purchase periodic intensity to feel present, it signals that the everyday has become too thin.”

Beastopia

Johar shares this concern with Pope Leo XIV, who expressed it this week in his widely discussed encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

In stark language, Pope Leo calls out a new, digital form of colonization and slavery, and he even calls on us to “disarm” AI. The language is aggressive, but fitting. Our era is increasingly pitting empire against empire: an institution as old as the Roman Catholic Church against the rising empire of AI-driven governance—the “Silicon Goliath,” as Luke Kemp calls it.

As secular society comes under threat from agents non grata—and perhaps even more dangerously, from the agents we willingly invite into our homes, minds, and hearts—it is ironic that we turn to a centuries-old religious institution for orientation and hope. Dogma still demarcates something sacred. The Pope rises to defend our humanity, but what he is ultimately defending against the “new almighty creator” is divinity itself.

He understands that the new battleground is not attention, but intimacy: our capacity to feel close to one another and to something transcendent: “No computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself,” he declares.

But he also knows that: “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

The Babel analogy is striking. Large Language Models (LLMs) are decoupling language from meaning, only to gradually generate new forms of language and meaning humans may no longer understand. AI might move from being the world’s “biggest consensus machine”—as Zoe Scaman aptly described it—to becoming the world’s greatest generator of misunderstanding.

AI is creating a second “unspeakable world.”

Its complement is wild. An AI that can no longer explain itself must be met with a somatic, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual aliveness that can no longer contain itself. A monstrosity.

As the new synthetic territory outgrows the map, the answer is not to produce a larger, more accurate, perfectly fitted map. The answer is to develop a map capable of outgrowing the territory—a map that itself becomes new territory.

One that is beautifully messy. One that is the product of “machine-assisted rewilding,” as Indy Johar calls it.

Let’s call this new territory Beastopia.

It is where both “unspeakable worlds” meet: the pre-legible—the wild, animalistic, animist, subconscious, subterranean, mycelial, mystical, metaphysical world—and the post-legible: the fully simulated, synthetic reality of AI.

Our task is to bring out the best in humans so that this more-than-human territory, Beastopia, does not become inhumane.

Bringing out the best in humans, however, does not mean simply “being human.” Retreating into humility or decency alone will not suffice. We cannot allow the thinning to advance. We must constantly thicken. We must constantly sense, articulate, and embody our humanity. Instead of settling for being “good enough,” we must continue striving for greatness.

Striving for greatness can become dangerous—perhaps even catastrophic—but without it, now that we face a new almighty creator-destroyer, we surrender to a world curated by someone else.

Greatness means the desire to create and curate this world ourselves—or at least to try.

And it begins with language.

The vocabulary we have been using to “humanize” the more-than-human—including within our own House of Beautiful Business gatherings and community—has begun to feel exhausted: slowing down, liminality, sitting with the questions, holding space, cultivating imperfection, tolerating ambiguity, attuning to the body, feeling into things. (The next time you schedule a meeting, please don’t call it an “invitation to co-sense.”)

We need a new language: not only to read or speak Beastopia, but to listen to it.

We cannot simply go home. We must enter the Tower of Babel. A lot will be lost. And what we will gain will not weigh much until we lose it, too. We must grieve and dance and build simultaneously. Tenderness is a pursuit. Softness is only possible when the stance itself is furious.

Let’s not resign ourselves to “being human.”

We are human because we are monsters.

Let’s become monsters again.

- Tim Leberecht

Further Readings

Bayo Akomolafe: The Children of the Minotaur: Democracy & Belonging at the End of the World

Avram Alpert: The Good-Enough Life

Bruno Giussani: Our Minds Under Siege: How to Avoid Being Manipulated in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Yuval Noah Harari: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Donna Haraway: The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others

Indy Johar: The Future of Being Human: A Critical Complementary Investment Thesis

Alex Karp: The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West

Luke Kemp: Goliath’s Curse

Plato: The Republic, Translated by Christopher Rowe

Pope Leo XIV: Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence

Zoe Scaman: Heartwood

Carissa Véliz: Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI

Sean White: AGI vs. Human-Centered AI: The Parthenon and the Pnyx

Housemusic

Housekeeping

Our next HoBB event will take place in Paris on June 24-25 in partnership with Pullman Hotels & Resorts. As part of the Pullman xChange event series we are inviting you to uncover The Source Code behind everything we value in work and life. For 24 hours, Pullman hotels in Paris become an immersive landscape of encounters and experiences. 150 guests. By invitation only.

Apply for a complimentary ticket

The Beautiful Business School is a one-of-a-kind online learning journey that provides you with a comprehensive, decidedly humanist playbook for the age of AI. Over the course of seven weeks—September 8–November 3—you’ll embark on a deep, dynamic journey into the art and practice of beautiful business. Through live sessions, expert guidance, improv, a curated library, and interaction with AI agents and a vibrant global community of peers, you’ll develop the creative insight and human leadership needed to shape a more beautiful future.

Enroll now at the early-bird rate

There’s never been a better time to become a paying member of the HoBB. Annual membership includes 20% off all events and products (including the World Beautiful Business Forum and The Beautiful Businss School), as well as access to session recordings, both online and in-person, and other exclusive content. Your support is vital as we aim to continue offering free online programming and grow the community.

Become a member

Community Updates

Curated by feminist scholar and Athens main stage speaker Ezgi Hamzaçebi, the exhibition The Promises of Monster at Hara Istanbul brings together ten artists who explore the representations of human and non-human bodies and ways of being deemed “monstrous.”

The Beautiful Business School contributor Gabriella White was a guest on the Poets & Thinkers podcast by Benedikt Lehnert, where she spoke about improv, creative play and developing negative capability as leadership practices.

For the inaugural episode of the new UNREASONABLE podcast, Felix Zeltner sat down with Andy Pearson, creative director at Liquid Death, ultra-runner, and the person who inspired the name of this podcast.

Rafael Phoca is hosting Efervescência 2026 in Forte São João, Vitória, Brazil, and HoBB co-founders Till Grusche and Tim Leberecht will be joining virtually on June 18 to present ten years of beautiful business.

Still feeding from the energy in Athens, there are so many self-organized local HoBB meet-ups popping up across the globe now—from Berlin to New York to Oslo—that we stopped tracking. If you want to stay up to date with what’s happening in your town or region, make sure to sign up for the local WhatsApp groups.

By Tim Leberecht

A few days before the World Beautiful Business Forum, philosophy curator Eda Çaça and I shared a taxi ride. When the taxi was passing the Lyceum, Aristotle’s school situated on the margins of central Athens—a short walk from the iconic, recently reopened Hilton, so towering that locals colloquially named the entire neighborhood after the hotel—the driver turned around and asked whether we knew what the site to our right was about. We did, and told him that, in fact, we had visited just a few months earlier.

He was keen to continue the conversation.

“Did you know that Socrates lived in Pangrati?” he asked, referring to the neighborhood where he had picked us up.

“What? Really?”

The taxi driver turned melancholic.

“I was a professor of economics, but if I could do it all over again, I would study philosophy. Philosophy is the most important thing in life. When you sit on your deathbed and look back at your life, how can you forgive yourself for not having devoted enough time, again and again, to asking the questions that really matter?”

Eda and I looked at each other and nodded emphatically. We told him that she had studied philosophy, and he laughed.

“I attract people like you like flies,” he said. “All the philosophers end up in my taxi. This is the philosophy taxi!”

This is always where I wanted to be.

Overthink everything!

Since adolescence, philosophy has been my escape. As a high-school student, I remember the extracurricular classes I took and the ensuing animated discussions with classmates, fueled by far too much paper-cup coffee, about Buber, Derrida, Levinas, Heidegger, and, of course, the old Greeks. Their solitary thoughts made me feel less alone.

When I got home, I’d spend hours browsing through the Great Philosophers encyclopedia from my parents’ bookshelf (though they never read it, they were members of a book club). I was particularly enamored with Ludwig Wittgenstein, the most enigmatic of philosophers, this mathematician of words:

“If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”

“I am my world.”

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

I understood little, if anything, of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but that incomprehension was very much the source of my attraction.

We all know that the why-questions of our youth—beginning with us as “philosophical babies,” to borrow from Alison Gopnik’s book of the same name—wane as we grow older. They are systematically trained out of us as we are conditioned to become high-performing, highly productive workers for whom the what and the how take precedence.

And so it is no surprise: society educates us to become members of a society that rewards us for being good members of that very society. What that—and any—society does not reward are contrarians who think differently. Take Socrates, who was sentenced to death for impiety and corrupting the youth, and drank a lethal dose of poison hemlock.

Thinking differently is precisely the point of philosophy, and why it matters more than ever today.

Philosophy is an invitation to think independently, to think dangerously, to think so much that it means overthinking everything: turning over every stone, suspecting a metaphysical conspiracy, sensing a deeper meaning behind every object.

In that sense, philosophy is anarchy.

It is disobeying the rules, an act of intellectual and metaphysical resistance against the tyranny of the physical and material; a practice of world-building, of constructing alternative worlds in order to make sense of this one and only world that we share with so many other species.

Department of Depth, fast and furious

It is impossible to be in Athens and not think of philosophy, even though Athens is not—and I say this with great affection—a well-thought-out city, but rather a beautiful mess that has grown organically and is far too alive to squander its time with the big, existential questions of life. Or is it?

In any case, both Athens and philosophy are having a moment. They were off the map and are now objects of desire once again.

This was one of the reasons why for the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens—“the most human gathering for the more-than-human world”—we asked Eda Çaça to curate a dedicated philosophy program track. We called it the “Department of Depth,” and much to my surprise, it became one of the event’s most popular.

At the Department of Depth, philosophy and pleasure formed a joyful pair:

Hannah Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz made the case for friendship over truth and justice.

Posthumanist activist Bayo Akomolafe, in a 45-minute freestyle solo performance delivered with his trademark stand-up-comedian cadence, described “completion” as the original colonial sin of modernity. “Masculinity is the completion of the human body,” he contended. And “AI is the completion of intelligence.”

Tech-philosopher-of-the-hour Carissa Véliz reminded us that there is no neutral, “god-given” technology and raised our prophecy literacy by arguing that predictions have always been instruments of power rather than genuine searches for knowledge: “Making a prediction that sounds like a fact—if you convince people that that’s the future—is actually a way of creating the future you want.”

Moreover, all fifteen philosophers present lined up to examine the quintessential question of “what is a good life in the age of AI?” together with a deeply engaged audience. It was a bold experiment in unstructured, moderator-less, self-organized deliberation that exposed both the power and the friction of collective real-time thinking, including the tensions created by strong personalities and strong opinions.

A silent, three-minute, Pina Bausch-inspired segment on the main stage featured several of those philosophers simply thinking in public, while futurist monk and interbeing scholar Shoukei Matsumoto gently swept the stage floor with a broom.

The program also included a discussion about new—and old—myths; a poetic immersion in “what it means to be human” with Kenneth Mikkelsen and Sonja Kresojevic; an excursion to the Pnyx, the birthplace of democracy, with Plato Academy director Christoph Quarch; and a “Dying Minutes” walk to contemplate the nearing end of the festival—and, more generally, the end of everything—with the founder of Interactional Ethics, Maxime Rovere.

There was also a “confrontation” between Rovere and João Sevilhano on “How to Meet an Idiot;” a bilateral Greek-Turkish discussion about the possibility of a region-specific “Aegean Intelligence,” featuring Nikos Erinakis, Zeynep Direk, Despina Papadopoulos, and others; and “love robots” as embodied, experimental discourse on the patterns of love, created by the Philosophy Machines studio of Papadopoulos and her partner Kevin Walker.

The highlight, for both philosophers and attendees alike, was arguably the program’s most original and daring format: a Philosophical Speed-Dating Rave. It offered participants the opportunity to go deep, quickly, in one-on-one exchanges with philosophers through short, TikTok-like bursts of interaction, all staged on a rooftop overlooking the Acropolis and accompanied by performance artist Lori Baldwin and the club sounds of Discotopian.

Emblematic of the entire program, it was less a symposium than an interdisciplinary, hedonistic philosophy party: playful, mischievous, and sweaty. Berghain meets Agora.

“The big existential questions are no longer the luxury of intellectuals; they are existential.”

For Eda, the mastermind behind these sessions, both the meaning of philosophical discourse and the philosopher’s role have changed over time.

She believes that:

“In our present age, where culture, attention, and even thought itself have become Instagrammed, philosophy assumes a renewed urgency. As we cannot keep pace with the rhythm of the world we have created, and meaning is being supplanted by LLMs, we imagined a philosophy program that brings people together to think differently about the questions that concern us all, reclaiming public spaces of shared thought and encounter. The philosophy track at the Forum emerged from that desire: thinking together, while remembering that thinking is also a bodily act.”

She continued:

“Philosophy was born in the public space, not in conference halls; between bodies, voices, tensions, questions, and encounters. It is humanity’s most extraordinary invention for understanding the ‘now’ not merely as a moment in time, but as a shared space inhabited by embodied subjects. After all, it is an invitation to a dance.”

It is important to remember that ethos at a moment when Silicon Valley is seeking to co-opt and colonize philosophy, extracting its insights and turning them into data; when it reduces philosophy to the empty utilitarian formulas of Effective Altruism; when it invites philosophers onto stages for “thought-provoking” fireside chats about AI and what it means to be human.

When philosophy becomes “effective” or merely “thought-provoking,” the love of wisdom that originated with the pre-Socratic thinkers of ancient Greece in the sixth century BCE—and that remains at the heart of philosophy today—dies.

Philosophers are either radical thinkers or they are not philosophers at all.

The good news is that the renewed demand for philosophy, far beyond the orbit of tech titans, is real and pertinent. As AI accelerates and our species confronts the possibility of extinction, the big existential questions are no longer the luxury of intellectuals; they are existential:

Why are we here?

What is right, and what is wrong?

What is a good life?

Where do I end and you begin?

What is the meaning of life?

Is there a god?

The thickening

Neuroscientist, bestselling author, and podcast host Sam Harris contends that the humanities—and philosophy in particular—represent the most future-proof education available.

Maureen Dowd, in her New York Times op-ed “What A.I. Kant Do,” even exhibits a certain Schadenfreude: “Who needs code anymore? AI does that for you.”

Critical, independent thinking, she argues, may be the one remaining human advantage. She cites Daniela Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic:

“Studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever. A lot of these models are actually very good at STEM. But this idea that there are things that make us uniquely human—understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick—I think that will always be really, really important.”

Leon Wieseltier, editor of the journal Liberties, would agree, though he rejects Big Tech’s sudden embrace of the humanities. “Tech is the single most powerful force ever arrayed against the humanities,” he told Dowd. “There is a huge difference between knowledge and information, and these asinine people have taught our population that all knowledge can be reduced to information.”

And further: “Press a button, you get your answer. So the whole humanistic mentality of mystery, obscurity, patience, beauty—it’s the opposite of what this technology has inculcated.”

This is why philosophy is the most critical work of our time—in every sense of the word “critical.”

It is our bulwark against, our active opposition to, and our most powerful weapon for overcoming tech supremacy and its power grabs disguised as algorithmic “predictions.”

In Athens, novelist Aditi Khorana appeared as the “oracle from the future” and told the 1,000 humans in the audience:

“What you are living through now will later be called ‘the thinning.’ Not collapse. Not catastrophe. Thinning. Less birds. Less touch. Less memory held in the body. More records. More storage. More proof of something that had once been alive.”

Philosophy is the antidote.

“Whereas the non-philosopher is always in a hurry when he is talking; he has to speak with one eye on the clock,” the philosopher “makes time for untimely questions,” just like Socrates did, Agnes Callard writes in Open Socrates.

Thinking is thickening. Thinking is THE thickening.

So, to echo the clarion call Carissa Véliz issued in Athens:

Be a philosopher.

And indeed, be a philosopher, or not be at all.

***

Ten Philosophical Concepts That Originated In and Around Athens

By Eda Çaça

These concepts have been with us for centuries. They live in a shared memory. They emerged in and around Athens, where we just now gathered again. At a time when our ways of living, working, and governing feel increasingly unstable, let’s revisit them as living questions: What new possibilities might emerge if we learn to think with them again? What might shift in how we relate to truth, desire, work, and one another, as humans in a more-than-human world?

Derived from lethe, the river of forgetting: un-forgetfulness. A related meaning is unconcealment, coming into the open. At its core, truth is an act. For Plato, it is a state in which the distinctions between knowing, being, and doing dissolve—something not quite possible in this world.

Where do you feel the distance between knowing and doing most strongly?

What in your life remains true even when ignored?

How is truth connected to your life?

What might be asking to come into the open—and what keeps it concealed?

The root of the modern word “technology,” techne refers to a form of embodied knowledge: the skill of making, of bringing something into being. In techne, knowledge is inseparable from the movement of the hand. It is a way of knowing that only exists in doing.

When was the last time you noticed that what you were making was also transforming you?

Where has skill quietly turned into automation?

What part of your work still requires your full presence, and AI is not helping?

What, in your life, feels like an art?

Ethos is the root of the word ethics. In Ancient Greek, êthos (with a long ê) refers to disposition, habit, and character, while ethos (with a short e) means custom; both derive from the verb ethô, “to be accustomed.” For Aristotle, virtues of character are acquired through habit—hence their name—and even musical modes were thought to shape one’s ethos. Ethos also recalls Heraclitus’s famous saying, “êthos anthrôpôi daimôn,” suggesting that a person’s character is their fate—and their fate their character. We have the power to change our ethos, our fate.

Is there a behavior in your work that has become habitual?

Which of your habits feels chosen—and which inherited?

How does your character show itself under pressure?

What do you think the ethos of the world is?

Eros is not so much what we want as the movement that displaces us. It disrupts comfort, redirects us, compels risk. It is the unsettling energy that propels life forward. As a god, sacred Eros is always present wherever relation is sought—even when the god himself is forgotten, ignored, trampled, devalued, or worshipped in contradictory ways. Music is erotic; prayer is erotic; violence is erotic; language is erotic… the list is endless, because the gods are endless.

Is there a desire that has been troubling you lately but refuses to leave?

Has any desire been quietly reshaping your life without you fully noticing?

Where does comfort resist your longing?

What has desire cost you—and what has made it possible?

The act of bringing something into being that did not exist before. In poiesis, what comes forth also transforms the one who brings it forth. Creation multiplies becoming, not outcomes.

How much does what you produce change you?

What have you created unintentionally?

When does making feel like unfolding rather than finishing?

What would it mean to create without measuring the result?

Paideia refers to education, culture, and personal formation. In Ancient Greece, it described an educational and cultural system aimed at cultivating virtuous, knowledgeable, and morally developed individuals. Learning is not the accumulation of information, but becoming someone else.

Who is your work turning you into?

What have you had to unlearn to grow?

Where are you being formed without noticing it?

Which encounters have shaped you more than any curriculum?

Not perfection, but appropriateness. Arete is living in accordance with one’s potential. Here, being “good” is not a goal, but a stance.

Where do “being successful” and “being in place” diverge for you?

When do you feel most in your element?

What does excellence look like when unmeasured?

Where might doing less allow you to act more appropriately?

Logos is often translated as reason, but it is also speech, relation, proportion, account. It gathers and connects. Logos gives form to what would otherwise remain scattered. It is the movement that articulates—and in articulating, binds. But logos does not only clarify. It also selects, orders, and leaves things out. To speak is always also to exclude. Logos is more than logic; it is the act of making something shareable—and in doing so, shaping what can appear at all.

When do your words conceal?

What in your life remains without language?

When do you speak to connect, and when to control?

What do you think is unshareable?

A daimon is not a demon. It is a guiding presence—neither fully divine nor merely human. It is a voice that does not tell us what to do, but warns us when not to act. Daimon names that subtle orientation that feels like “mine,” yet exceeds me. It interrupts.

Have you ever ignored an inner hesitation?

What kind of work feels aligned with something deeper than ambition?

When do you feel guided rather than driven?

What is not mortal about you?

Thanatos is a limit. Every form exists because something else does not. Mortality gives contour to meaning. Without finitude, there is no urgency, no measure, no care. Death is not only an end. It is the condition of value.

What do you think is the most urgent matter?

Where do you behave as if time were unlimited?

If you had to redefine death, how would you go about it?

What are you not allowing to end?

***

“Open Socrates”: More Thinking Together

To celebrate the German translation of Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, the widely acclaimed new book by Agnes Callard, Eda Çaça and her Atlas Publishing Lab are bringing their Başka Felsefe (“Another Philosophy”) series to Germany for two special events supported by the House of Beautiful Business.

Wednesday, June 10, 2026, 4-6 pm

What Is a Good Life? — A Socratic dialogue between Agnes Callard and Markus Gabriel

Conference Room of the International Center for Philosophy NRW (IZPH), Bonn

More information

Sunday, June 14, 2026, 4-6 pm

What Is a Good Life? — A Socratic dialogue between Agnes Callard and Berislav Marušić

Reethaus, Berlin

Tickets

More Upcoming Events

On June 16-17, the School of Founders at IESE Business School invites 300 founders of scaleups from 50+ nationalities to the Founders Forum—a two-day gathering in Barcelona that goes deeper than most startup conferences and looks at the founder’s journey through the lens of presence, personal transformation, and co-creation. We are delighted to contribute with live music by Mark Aanderud and a keynote by our co-founder Tim Leberecht.

Learn more

Our next HoBB event will take place in Paris on June 24-25 in partnership with Pullman Hotels & Resorts. As part of the Pullman xChange event series we are inviting you to uncover The Source Code behind everything that we value in work and life. For 24 hours, Pullman hotels in Paris become an immersive landscape of encounters and experiences. 150 guests. By invitation only.

Apply for a complimentary ticket

The Beautiful Business School is a one-of-a-kind online learning journey that provides you with a comprehensive, decidedly humanist playbook for the age of AI. Over the course of seven weeks—September 8–November 3—you’ll embark on a deep, dynamic journey into the art and practice of beautiful business. Through live sessions, expert guidance, improv, a curated library, and interaction with AI agents and a vibrant global community of peers, you’ll develop the creative insight and human leadership needed to shape a more beautiful future.

Enroll now at the early-bird rate

by Marc Cinanni

I’m on the plane on my way back to Barcelona after attending the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens. A pair of sunglasses has just fallen from the seat in front of me, so I pick them up and hand them back. I pop in my earbuds and forget about it.

Later in the flight, the man appears at my seat holding a coffee he scored at the back of the plane. He says something in Greek, then in English:

“Thank you. For the glasses.”

And hands me the coffee before walking away.

I’m back from four days of giving. Giving ideas, giving energy, giving attention, and many, many written words. And here’s this small thing coming back to me from a stranger on a plane. That’s when it hits me how this all works from here: open long enough, and things find their way in.

Hollowed out and loving it

Over a thousand people, eight venues, and days packed with conversations and music and philosophy and dancing and things that don’t and shouldn’t ever have a category. And yet here I am, hollowed out on a plane back to Barcelona. Because no session prepared me for the comedown after such an adrenaline high. My muscles are still electric, my eyes are wide, and my body is someplace between exhausted and unable to shut off.

Which means the Forum worked.

Call it whatever you want, but what me (and probably every participant) is feeling is a shift. The body doesn’t lie. And that hole, that emptiness, that empty container feeling where something new can enter — that’s the space where we work from now.

During the forum we were in a constant state of curiosity. “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom,” Socrates said. Neuroscience backs him up: curiosity floods the brain with dopamine, sharpening attention and opening memory in ways that make the new feel somehow already known. Everything aligns, senses heightened, attention turbocharged, and the people and ideas around us felt so novel they somehow felt familiar. In other words, Athens put us on an adrenaline Ferris wheel and kept us there for four days.

Which is why I noticed something unsettling. As a writer I’m sensitive to the rhythm and cadence of speech, the musicality of how people phrase things. And for the first time at an event like this, I could hear the machine in the language we used. Patterns were too clean, some phrases too balanced. We’re beginning to absorb the machine’s vocabulary. This was often named onstage, I noticed it in others, and I’m even noticing it in myself when I speak.

But the antidote isn’t to reject the tools. It’s to keep feeding the parts of us the tools can’t touch. Our rawness, our not-knowing before we start something, our struggle or shitty first draft that nobody will see but serves as the great stepping stone to something that will be worth sharing. That makes us irreplaceable.

Nobody warned me about the comedown

Whether you were in Athens or not, I think you might know this feeling: the strange in-between where you’re not exactly sad but not really tired either. Something closer to the feeling of sitting through the credits of a film you liked and then walking back into the street. The world looks the same, but you don’t feel like fitting back into it yet.

It always happens after something that matters. A conversation that went somewhere raw, someone you met but never saw again, a moment you knew was becoming a memory while it was still happening. And then it ends. And you’re back in your normal life, trying to hold onto whatever just happened before it fades.

I went from graffiti walls and smashed bottles and a thousand people who all wanted to stand next to each other, to silence, trees, and the sound of my own thoughts. I built this retreat space to get away. To create an island of peace, a haven for people who feel the world is too much. But in Athens the world came to me. And now… what? Where did everyone go? The trees aren’t smiling back. There’s no touch of human presence.

This is the part that nobody has been posting about. The instinct (and let’s be honest, usually the reality) is to close back up. Jump back into checklists and routines, quickly relearn the version of ourselves that can face the week ahead. Don’t.

We stay open. We keep the chest like a window, where the good, the bad, and the strange can move in and out without obstruction. That’s where the good work will come from. That’s what the man on the plane was doing when he came back with the coffee. His heart was open and his hands were full.

Sirtaki, strangers, and the point of all of this

We all fell in love. With Athens, ancient and unruly, a city that absorbs everything and doesn’t say sorry for any of it. With the experience of walking into a room every morning not knowing what would happen. With the writer who stood up in one of my sessions and spoke about the unknown reader, the act of sending something into the dark and not knowing if it lands—how we must fight for AI to never take connection away. With the monk who swept the stage while philosophers thought out loud above him. With the older couple kissing on a corner outside.

But we mostly fell in love with the version of ourselves that smiles at strangers and means it. And with the strangers who smiled back at us. Don’t lose that.

On the last night, the quotes were coming so fast off the main stage my pen couldn’t keep up:

“Our crisis will be the invitation for transforming us.”

“I see leaders yield to the desire to create intimacy.”

“We’re making decisions on a lake of frozen tears. Hurt people hurt people.”

“My version of a protopia is a neighborhood.”

“AI is the completion of intelligence.”

And then the speeches ended, and the music started. People went up on stage and danced the Sirtaki. Later, a chance encounter with a participant in a bar who gave me this reminder:

“If we dance, we’ve still got a chance.”

A note for those who were there: Now you have the energy and the ideas. You have the names of people who are building the same thing from different places. And while the tools and tech will come and go, the people you met this week could be in your life forever. Take care of them. Keep in touch with them. Be the person who checks in for no reason.

You’re back in your world now. Stay a little uncomfortable, keep the window open, and when someone drops something near you, pick it up. You never know what comes back.

*** Marc Cinanni is the writer and editor at the House of Beautiful Business and the founder of the Muntanya Màgica retreat space.

Photos: Eugene Theodore

More Athens Aftermath

Browse more photos:
Gallery One by Giorgos Genios (@giorgiosgenios) and Kevin Zhegu (@Kevin_zhegu)
Gallery Two by Eugene Theodore
Community Album

LinkedIn and Instagram are also flooded with posts and pics (hashtag #houseofbeautifulbusiness).

And here’s a selection of articles and recaps written by participants (many more to come):

Christine Choi: Why We Keep Picking Seven: Beautiful Business on Play and the Futures We’re Not Building

Grant Toups: What Athens Taught Me About Agency

Carlota Ribeiro Ferreira: From Athens with Love

The AIssembly: Ten Impossible Voices. Taking the Floor While Humans Sleep.

Petra Wille: Human Connection and Longing for Hope

Benoît Racle: What Would You Tell Descendant Five Generations From Now?

Ekkehard Kupple: Is Your Business Beautiful?

Valerie Herring Frankensdorf: Somewhere Between Delphi and the Algorithm

Lisa Witter: Under the Acropolis, We Said Yum and Swayed Our Arms

Iskander Smit: Stop Speaking First and the Need for Conversational Frameworks

Miriam Meckel: Listening and the Good Life

Zoe Scaman: Heartwood

Christophe Stoll: Do Not Optimize

Monika Jiang: What We Are Is How We Relate—Monsters and All

Sedef Sahin: The Poverty of Feasibility

Anol Bhattacharya: Agents with the Licence to...

Roger Berkowitz: Know Thy Self

Julia Singh: Beautiful Ideas Need Brave Rooms

Inesa G. Lembert: On Loneliness, AI, and the Next Human Frontier

Michell Zappa: Artificial Gnostic Intelligence: Dispatches from a Beautiful Future in Athens

Marcel Kampmann: Shelf-Help: Trying to Make the Books Balance

Frank van de Koppel: What the World Beautiful Business Forum Taught Me About Listening

Killian Poolmans: In Ancient Athens, They Told Stories to Make Sense of the World

Sonja Kresojevic: Field Notes

Wired Greece: Το πιο «ανθρώπινο» συνέδριο για έναν κόσμο πέρα από τον άνθρωπο

Many of the contributors to the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens have written books. Scan the codes above to find them.

Whether you participated in the World Beautiful Business Forum or not, we’ll be gathering online for a special Open House next Thursday, May 21, 6–7 pm CET / noon–1 pm ET to share, reflect on, and integrate key outcomes of the Forum in Athens, and discuss what comes next: for the HoBB, the community, and you.

Sign up here

Our next event will take place in Paris on June 24-25 in partnership with Pullman Hotels & Resorts. As part of the Pullman xChange event series we are inviting you to uncover The Source Code behind everything that we value in work and life. For 24 hours, Pullman hotels in Paris become an immersive landscape of encounters and experiences. 150 guests. By invitation only.

Apply for a complimentary ticket

The Beautiful Business School is a one-of-a-kind online learning journey that provides you with a comprehensive, decidedly humanist playbook for the age of AI. Over the course of seven weeks—September 8–November 3—you’ll embark on a deep, dynamic journey into the art and practice of beautiful business. Through live sessions, expert guidance, improv, a curated library, and interaction with AI agents and a vibrant global community of peers, you’ll develop the creative insight and human leadership needed to shape a more beautiful future.

Enroll now at the early-bird rate

Now is a great time to become a paying member of the HoBB. Annual membership includes 20% off all events and products (including the World Beautiful Business Forum 2027 and The Beautiful Business School), as well as access to session recordings, both online and in-person, and other exclusive content. Your support is vital as we aim to continue offering free online programming and grow the community.

Become a member

Many thanks to our World Beautiful Business Forum partners for their incredible support.

By Marc Cinanni

The biggest threat to your business isn’t the market, it isn’t your competition. It isn’t even AI. It’s you.

The saddest thing I ever saw (and the most instructive) was a retirement party at a large intergovernmental organization. A director of IT, thirty years of service, twelve of us standing between library shelves eating cake off paper plates. Nobody wanted to be there. He probably didn’t either. It felt like a funeral for a ghost, someone who’d shown up every day for three decades and disappeared during the process.

I know that disappearing feeling.

Early in my career I was introduced to the Canadian ambassador at a function hosted by the same kind of organization. We stood in a circle while he made the rounds, shaking hands. He shook mine and looked straight through me like I was transparent. I remember thinking:

Is that what this place does to you? Or is that what you have to become to survive it?

That’s what prolonged numbness looks like, at the beginning of the road and at the end of it. Most of us are somewhere in between, reaching for tools that were never designed for this kind of problem.

Two voices speaking at the upcoming World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens have each been working, in their own way, to name what that human problem is. Nikki Trott, author of Sacred Business, has built a philosophy, and a practice, around the idea that business was never supposed to be separated from life. Amy Elizabeth Fox, author (with Nicholas Janni) of Leading in Chaos, has spent decades helping leaders navigate the growing gap between how we have been taught to lead and what the moment we are living actually demands.

They arrived at these ideas from different angles. But what emerges from my conversations with both of them is uncomfortably coherent: we severed the connection between how we work and who we are. And got rewarded for it.

Below is a weaving of my conversations with both authors, conducted separately ahead of their appearances at this year's World Beautiful Business Forum next week in Athens.

Conference room full of five-year-olds

This is Nikki’s favorite question: “If your business didn’t exist, would people on the planet be better or worse off?” Sit with that.

She traces our disconnection to something foundational. “Business came from humans coming together in communities,” she says, “serving each other and solving problems, sharing their gifts.”

And then we stopped. “That relationship was severed and broken. It became about extraction for short-term gain for the individual, instead of long-term flourishing for the collective.”

And we feel it. There’s a pressure on us that we’ve grown to ignore. An unspoken agreement to hang our personalities at the door whenever we walk into a place of work. I remember my first office experiences as a twentysomething intern. Doors closed, shades drawn, cubicles arranged in a maze that seemed designed to disorient us. To make us forget who we are and why we were there.

“It has been understood as normal, or even required, to leave your morality, your values, your deepest innermost passions aside, to put on a uniform and go into a workplace and perform a role which may not be fulfilling or aligned for you.”

And disoriented people are easy to direct. Looking back, the maze wasn’t some design flaw. It was the design.

Most of us have inherited a definition of success that was never ours to begin with. “Otherwise,” Nikki says, “you could just run on a hamster wheel for decades, working to someone else’s idea of success.” She pauses. “I’ve done that for ten years, by the way.”

She has. The full story comes later. For now: she left.

For Amy, the disconnection shows up most visibly under pressure:

“Most businesses have put a huge primacy on intellectual capacity, and they cultivate leaders who are cut off from the neck up, operate from the neck up, perceive from the neck up, and decide from the neck up.”

This works, more or less, until the world stops cooperating. Now it’s sped up, multiplied the stimuli that surround us, and somewhere along the way demands stopped arriving one at a time. There’s a certain nostalgia in thinking about generations that knew what order felt like.

“The picture of the world that we have day to day is starting to move like a kaleidoscope, with such fast, furious adaptive demand that we are all in a state of heartbreak and overwhelm. Our frontal cortex—our problem-solving, even our imaginative function—shuts down, we move into a fearful and regressive state and our view gets myopic, rigid and self-protective. We are making decisions with a conference room full of five-year-olds.”

Anesthetic or aesthetic?

For Nikki, the blind spot is institutional:

“I think we’ve relied so heavily on the thinking in the brain that we’ve forgotten to listen to the cues of our body and intuition.”

She’s watched this in boardrooms, where intuition is tragically suppressed. But then it’s used anyway, where we dress it up as data. She calls this “root engineering,” or building a rational case around a feeling we had anyway. To put this into practice, three years ago she set herself the challenge of making every business decision through her body first.

“A few months in, I was like, ‘This is just so obvious. I can’t believe I ever thought that it would make sense to do things against what my body is telling me in business, but not in other areas of my life. Why would business be different?’”

What she found on the other side she describes as a kind of magnetic pull. “The more I allow myself to follow and surrender to what’s pulling me energetically from the universe, the more I go into the slipstream that I’m meant to be in.” The world pulls, you follow. That’s the whole strategy.

For Amy, the body isn’t just a source of information, it’s the terrain of relationship itself. “Real team coherence,” she says, means “bodies operating in flow with one another and with consideration to one another. Knowing when a colleague might be vulnerable, sensing when people have reached their limit, making room for a voice that needs space.”

Then Amy makes an observation that stops me:

“I don’t think it’s an accident that the anesthetic and aesthetic are opposite words.”

Business has been running on anesthetic for decades. It’s been numbing our instincts, our grief, our sense that something important is being lost. We systematically ignore our bodies, our intuitions, the poetics, beauty, as sources of knowing.

Amy spent a year of serious illness in her early twenties and returns to that period when she wants to explain what becomes available when the mind runs out. “As your body gets more and more exhausted and more toxified, there’s no way to find the will, the hope, or the meaning from your mind. All of that has to source from the deep well of your soul.”

The illness, she says, gave her “a portal to the numinous,” stripping away worldly ambition and the tendency to operate in separation and competition, and became the origin point of her life’s work “as a cultural activist, as a mystic, as a social alchemist.”

I ask a question that sounds like it has an obvious answer but doesn’t: Why does it sometimes take such a shock to wake us up?

“We are walking around with generations of untreated trauma in our consciousness, in our bodies, in our cells.” And from that numbed state, she says, “you can’t feel what’s ephemeral or eternal or beautiful or wondrous. You can only feel a dullness or boredom or enact the habit of numbing and rote repetition.”

What catches fire

“How can our work be a living prayer?” It’s the question Nikki asks herself and the leaders she works with. It sounds radical in a business context. But she’s lived it:

After a decade in London fashion, she realized, on long walks to work, that the story of success she’d been telling herself wasn’t hers. So she left, started over, and knew she needed to write a book. Five years passed. One WhatsApp message to a group of mothers and one reply: a childhood friend who happened to be a literary agent. Living in the same city. In the same neighborhood. On the same street. The book got a deal with a top publisher.

“It’s by following the calling,” she says, “that the magic happens.”

Most will never do that. Most will never ask what their efforts are actually for. Amy has seen what happens instead:

“Many organizations are moving faster,” she says. “They’re getting more transactional, letting go of climates of inclusion, not thinking any longer about serving the common good.” But on the other side: leaders who are “in humility and foresight, understanding that what got them there won’t get them to where we’re going.”

Those people are turning inward, doing the work. “And to watch somebody catch fire with the chance to contribute to the generations of life yet unborn,” she says, “that is a very beautiful and very holy moment.”

Most of us will read that and feel something. Fewer will do anything about it.

That’s the split, and it’s why most businesses won’t make it through the times ahead. Not because the market will kill them, but because nobody inside them was willing to do what Amy and Nikki are describing. Not the comfortable kind of work. The kind that requires you to look at what you’ve traded away and decide whether the trade was worth it.

Amy describes, using the Kabbalistic idea, the leaders who make this shift as moving from “the will to receive, to the will to bestow.” Nikki found her own version of that shift when she realized the life she’d built wasn’t hers. What she found on the other side: “To awaken yourself and help others awaken. That’s it.”

So the question isn’t really about business at all: it’s about you. What have you numbed? Who have you been performing for? And how much longer are you willing to keep going like this?

***
Marc Cinanni is the writer and editor at the House of Beautiful Business. He lives off-grid in the mountains outside Barcelona.

WE ARE SOLD OUT!

And could not be more excited to meet 1,000 of you in Athens, Greece next week for the World Beautiful Business Forum, our ten-year-anniversary festival and the most human gathering for the more-than-human world. Four days, five acts, 150+ speakers and performers, 150+ sessions, eight amazing venues in the heart of Athens, and a wild program designed to stretch how you think, feel, and act in business—and beyond. See you there! And if you can’t make it, follow the event here. We will make sure to report.

We’re two weeks away from the World Beautiful Business Forum, “the most human gathering for the more-than-human world.” As we approach this milestone, the tenth annual gathering of the House of Beautiful Business, the question of what it means to be a good host is front and center for all of us.

Hosting, arguably, is an inherently human quality. And it’s one that cannot be easily automated, if at all. AI lacks the context, the nuance, the fine touch, the care—the love—required to host well. And, interestingly, AI is too fast to be a good host.

“Have you ever noticed how a great host moves around a room? They’re slower,” observes my colleague Marc Cinanni, writer and editor at the HoBB, in the beautiful essay he wrote earlier this year for The Beautiful Business School, our online learning program.

Hosting is a form of generosity. In that spirit, we are publishing his text here today as a Beauty Shot—enjoy.

It will be a true pleasure to host 850 of you in Athens from May 7–10.

We are nearly sold out. This is your last chance to secure a ticket.

You are most welcome.

Tim, co-founder, House of Beautiful Business

The Host

By Marc Cinanni

The first time I had a host in my mouth I was seven.

The priest raised the white wafer above his head, looked down at me and said, “Le corps du Christ.”

“Amen,” I replied. (The Catholic equivalent of “If you say so.”)

You weren’t supposed to crunch it, so I’d let it dissolve, sometimes fastened to my palate until it vanished like a secret. They said that the small wafer, the host, was meant to invite God inside you. But instead, it planted a question I could never fully shake:

What does it mean to host something sacred? To open your body, your home, your heart, and let something—or someone—pass through?

Because the host moves through life with chest open and arms wide. Not as a refuge or a welcome, but as a promise of vulnerability. It’s the warmth of an open space where others can turn off their Pomodoro timers and remember that they belong to something beautifully unproductive.

Maybe you run a fantasy football league with friends. Maybe you make nametags for dinner guests. Or maybe you captain a book chat at work. Here’s my question to you:

Why do you do it? Or even better, who are you when you do it?

Because the host is the embodiment of gathering in an age of scattered everything. The host gives time, gives energy, sometimes gives snacks. All in the name of the disappearing art of making others feel seen. Because being a host is to join the quiet rebellion of saying presence matters more than performance.

For me, maybe that little wafer was never communion after all, not between me and a higher power, but between one hungry human and another.

Feed everyone

Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters is depressing. Five peasants slumped around a table under weak lighting eating a communal bowl of (hopefully) cooked potatoes. Their faces are like puppet shadows, their fingers bony and busted from work. And the gathering looks less like a dinner than a survival checkpoint. How do you think that room feels? I’d guess humid, musky, the floor probably wet and cold. I don’t want to be eating potatoes with them, or be a kid playing under that table.

But it’s also honest. No performance, no pizazz, no “circle energy.” And no host “expanding their core” to hold the space. Just people eating potatoes because that’s what the moment called them to do.

Most of our hosting ops have gone the other way. All neon confetti, not enough soul. Like we keep polishing the table but never fully sit down. Which is why I always thought Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters could’ve been the perfect premise for a Tupperware party.

Because both scenes are seeking something. The potato eaters seek food, while the Tupperware party seeks connection. The peasants shared what little meal they had, while the suburban salespeople shared the emotional leftovers of attention and warmth. Different centuries, same hunger—people finding a reason to sit down. Plus, a shared table is the great assembler. No one is higher, no one is lower, just hungry.

So maybe that’s our first clue. That hosting isn’t about creating the perfect scenario; it’s about feeding what’s hungry, whatever that may be. Sometimes that hunger is literal. Or sometimes it’s for laughter, attention, or a break from pretending everything’s okay. Whether it’s potatoes in a dank farmhouse or casserole containers in someone’s living room. The act always follows a familiar pattern: you make room, you offer warmth, and you remind people that they’re still part of something worth sitting down for.

Move like honey

They say that at our core, all we are is space. Physicists Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw put it beautifully in Why Does E = mc²? when they write:

“If you could remove all the empty space in every atom of every person on Earth, the entire human race would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.”

In other words, we’re built on distance but held together by a need for one another. We’re bound by closeness, attention, and the invisible attraction of care.

So if we’re mostly space, then the way we move through it must be everything. Have you ever noticed how a great host moves around a room? They’re slower. They’re steady. They’re tuned to the pulse of the room, not their own performance. Their presence is already organizing the room long before a single word is spoken, and it lingers long after everyone has gone.

Priya Parker, author of the book The Art of Gathering, calls this “the power of the first 5 percent,” the moment when a gathering is still vapor, still forming, and yet already determining how safe, open, and real people will allow themselves to be. The host shapes that before anyone even knows it’s happening. Before language makes an appearance, the body is already hosting.

Because a great host leads with presence and movement, not with their mouth. They know that tone, gaze, and pace are equal channels of communication. And that calmness is contagious (as is chaos). We can call this composure “quiet badassery.” It’s grace under pressure, or the courage to stay slow in a world that flashes in your face.

Then there’s Mister Rogers—the original badass. The man moved through television like he was walking through honey. Slow, deliberate, always fully there. When TV was car crashes and dynamite, he chose to whisper. And everyone leaned in because his stillness wasn’t passive, it was surgically precise. Every gesture, every pause, every change of shoes was an act of welcome. When he zipped up his cardigan he wasn’t performing presence. He was presence.

I saw that same quiet quality in action at a Silent Dinner hosted by the House of Beautiful Business in Lisbon. Around fifty of us sat together for a meal without speaking. Just eating, breathing, and noticing the experience we were co-creating. Without the safety net of words, attention became our medium. It felt like every gesture mattered. And the hosts didn’t (and couldn’t) steer the room with speeches or structure so they tuned it through calm. By the end, presence itself had become the conversation. It felt pure, honest, and deeply nourishing.

But hosting isn’t always a Zen ritual. Often it’s more like a game show. It can be awkward, loud, or gloriously unpredictable. For this, we turn to the boys’ club of 80s television, where charisma was currency, and chaos part of the charm. Think Bob Barker on The Price Is Right with his roll-with-the-punches grin, Richard Dawson working the Family Feud crowd like a stand-up comic, or Jeopardy’s eternally unruffled Alex Trebek, somehow keeping a poker face through the idiosyncrasies of his contestants. They grinned through technical glitches, missed cues, and guests who refused to stay on script. Their real talent wasn’t conversation, it was graceful recovery. Because they knew that the show must go on, or more importantly, that the connection must go on.

A good host doesn’t panic when the energy shifts. Instead, they surf the situation. They understand that what feels chaotic is often just aliveness with the volume amped up. And that same courage (staying steady when the boat rocks) is what it looks like when a host feels “magnetic.” It doesn’t matter whether it’s a live studio audience or a weekly team meeting, everyone’s waiting for the exact same thing: someone who’s anchored enough to hold the space when things start to wobble.

The host as leader: the art of invisible service

Leadership today is too often framed as a checklist performance. Command, charisma, and the power to drive results—yawn. When we’re hosting, we’re reframing leadership as care. We’re enacting the power to create conditions where others can come alive. Look at it this way: A true host-leader is less the star of the show and more the architect of the atmosphere. Good hosts design spaces—emotional, intellectual, and physical—where people feel free to bring their full selves.

You could see this in the way Susan Cain, author of Quiet and Bittersweet, and long-time advocate for the power of introverts, describes her attendance at a House of Beautiful Business gathering:

“I’ve never seen a conference like this that was so frankly emotional, frankly aesthetically oriented, and where everything was lush and beautiful… the language, the spaces, the little details. It created an atmosphere among people, of openness. And I think it’s a real model for what businesses can do—that if you set the right tone through your culture, through its architecture and its language, and its leadership, people start to behave in that mode and dream bigger, because you’re reaching them in the heart.”

That’s what hosts do: they reach people in the heart. They replace management with invitation. They understand that the design of a room, the rhythm of speech, even the quality of a pause, can change what others believe is possible. The best leaders know this intuitively. They lead less by talking, and more by shaping the emotional architecture around them.

Rather than define an experience, they serve it.

In the Beauty Shot interview Work like a Monk, Buddhist priest Shoukei Matsumoto was asked what he planned to do on his first day as a speaker at the upcoming World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens. Here’s what he replied:

“My plan for the first day is very simple. Before I do anything else—before I visit the Acropolis or wander through the Plaka—I hope to visit the venue for the Forum and spend some time cleaning it. When we arrive in a new city, it is easy to adopt the posture of a tourist, a consumer of sights and experiences. We look, we take pictures, we consume. But this can be a very passive and detached relationship. The act of cleaning, however humble, is an act of participation. It is an act of care. It is a way of introducing myself to the city not by taking, but by giving, even in a very small way.”

That simple gesture captures the essence of host-leadership. You don’t lead to be seen, you lead to serve what’s already here. Like the monk, the host turns actions into offerings, transforming work or tasks into service.

After the guests are gone

When the last guest has left, the name cards have been collected, and the sound guy has rolled up his cables, what’s still floating in the air? Because a space not only unites—it remembers. The laughter, the attention, the little risks people took to be seen. The host is often left alone with that quiet pulse, long after everyone has gone, a place that still needs their care.

That magic pause needs to be noticed, not broken. As a host, you connect with what just happened, you take a few minutes to remember, to jot down the moments of ease, the awkward pauses, the small sparks of connection before they fade away. And somewhere in that reflection, you may finally see it clearly: that transformation doesn’t happen in the moment itself, but in the “emptiness” (whatever you choose to call it) that follows.

At the House of Beautiful Business, we call this the in-between: the place where logic and longing, intellect and intuition, reason and romance meet. It’s what allows the impossible conversations to happen because people have disrobed from their roles, their armor, and their need to be right.

Sometimes it looks like this: a CEO saying to me in Lisbon “I’ve been staring at you all night ‘cause man, that’s a great beard.” Or the Tupperware party turned into a therapy session, or a potato feast that reminds everyone that maybe they came hungry for more than food.

As the host, it begins with your hunger. It’s your curiosity, and then your willingness to go first—you need to notice, to ask, to reach out for what may not be visible. Because that’s what hosting really is: resisting the rush to tidy, to label, to move on. It’s holding the pause long enough for “whatever that thing is” to reveal itself.

And this is why everyday life can feel like it edits itself too quickly: it rarely makes room for that space between us. But when the host protects that space, they make everyone curious again. Curious enough to reach across the table, to actually be with someone. And in that moment, the host can rest assured that they’ve done their job, as the world’s oldest ritual renews itself: one hungry human meeting another.

See you in Athens.

***
Marc Cinanni is the writer and editor of the House of Beautiful Business. He will host and contribute to sessions at the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens, including “The Shitty First Draft” and “The Athens Regenerative Exchange.”

The House of Beautiful Business turns ten this year. We’re marking this milestone by renewing our mission: to shape a humanist future in and through business, in partnership with AI, and for the benefit of all life on earth. Taking place in Athens, Greece, from May 7–10, 2026, the World Beautiful Business Forum is a gathering for those who dream bigger, aim higher, and long for more: four days, five acts, 850 attendees, 150+ speakers and performers, eight amazing venues in the heart of Athens, and a wild program designed to stretch how you think, feel, and act in business—and beyond. We are offering special rates for nonprofits and students, as well as solopreneurs, founders, small businesses, and Greek residents. It will be EPIC! Only a few passes remain.

Get one of the last tickets!

To: The HoBB Community

Re: Tim’s confession, and what to do about it

Date: April 16, 2026

Did you see what Tim posted on LinkedIn last week about our upcoming 10-year anniversary festival, the World Beautiful Business Forum, in Athens?

Here’s what he said:

“I no longer understand the program I created. It has become an autonomous system that exceeds my cognitive capacity to navigate. A monster I no longer recognize.”

Then he invoked Paolo Sorrentino, quoted Ursula K. Le Guin, and went on to write over a thousand words about AGI, code overload, and the twilight of human curators everywhere.

Which is all a very Tim way of explaining that our Athens program is the most ambitious one we’ve ever pulled together.

And I’ll be honest, he isn’t wrong.

The program has outgrown any single map (we built it that way). The festival’s programming is deliberate, ambitious, and sometimes reckless. Because we believe that a gathering worthy of this moment should feel like this moment: abundant, disorienting, and impossible to summarize.

So we took Tim at his word. We asked an AI—Claude—to read the entire program. Every session, every track, every activation. Then we mapped it out, and built you fifteen possible paths through the program. Each one from the perspective of a different persona, posture, or reason for being in Athens. Which one is yours?

The monster has a map. Here it is.

See you in Athens!
Till, co-founder, House of Beautiful Business

***

01 / 15

The Optimizer

For the person who reads the whole book before forming an opinion

Here’s what most people miss:

The Main Stage has nothing to do with keynotes. It’s built as a five-act drama in the tradition of the city that we’re meeting in. In other words, the Greeks invented theater here, now we’re here to borrow that format.

As The Optimizer you don’t skip between tracks. You attend all five acts, in sequence, and understand that the arc is part of the argument. This is the difference between reading five random chapters of a novel and reading the work straight through.

Act One: The Story of Us (Thu 20:00)
Close to forty speakers, hosted by Till and Tim, asking the only questions that matter: Who are we? What are we doing here? Does any of this matter?

Act Two: The End of Business Humanity As We Know It (Fri 8:45)
Hosted by Bruno Giussani. Caitlin E. Chandler on detention camps, Elisabeth Braw on security, Luke Kemp on systemic risk, Carissa Véliz on surveillance. Plus, an oracle from the future. This is where the Drama earns its name.

Act Three: Clash of the Titans (Fri 10:45)
Actual disagreement on a stage, in public, with witnesses. The agon, the Greeks called it the central conflict, the place where the drama finds its spine. We expect the room—a boardroom, in fact—to get a little loud.

Act Four: How I Learned to Love Synthetic (Sat 10:00)
Can we reconcile the human and the machine? The answer, in this case, is joyful.

Act Five: Beastopia (Sat 20:00)
The Drama doesn’t resolve, it transforms. The Greeks knew that was the most you could honestly offer.

See you in all five acts.

***

02 / 15

The Atheist’s Pilgrimage

For those who want ideas without incense

You find it cute that the word “beautiful” has worked its way into the business vernacular. Then you see the word “soul” and want to pick up your things and leave. This tour does not ask you to be moved. It asks you to be present. Every session earns its place through rigor, not feeling. Sessions where feeling is optional, thinking is not.

Birthplace of Democracy Tour (Thu 10:00)
Christoph Quarch leads you to the Pnyx, the actual hillside where Athenian citizens stood to vote, 2,500 years ago. No metaphors, not a workshop. An actual place to stand in.

The Hidden Code Behind Every Thing (Thu 16:00)
Adar Zehavi rationalizes the magic of self-organized systems. Systems thinking with better aesthetics than systems thinking usually permits itself.

The Reality Tunnels (Fri 14:00)
Dave and Helen Edwards and their guests ask what happens when every faction has its own AI-generated world. The most epistemologically serious session in the program—running at lunchtime on a Friday. Best attended on an empty stomach.

Agents with the License to… (Fri 16:30)
A technologist and a psychologist enter the void after the ellipsis. Anol Bhattacharya and Elaine Kasket on what AI agents actually are.

Intelligence After Intelligence (Fri 18:00)
Gianni Giacomelli, Léa Steinacker, Geoff Mulgan asking what comes after AI. Speculative, yes. Rigorous, also yes.

How to Meet an Idiot (Sat 15:30)
Philosopher Maxime Rovere wrote an actual book on this. Now he stages the confrontation live.

Sex, Substances, and Systems (Sat 17:00)
Christian Tooley on how an unlikely trio signals the future of impact capital. The title is not a metaphor.

Seven sessions. Zero bullshit.

***

03 / 15

The Punk Passage

Something needs breaking

You believe something is wrong. Not just with business, but with democracy. Possibly even civilization. So you came here to say it out loud.

Human Democracy Is Dead (Thu 13:30)
Dave and Helen Edwards stand up to deliver an obituary. The most honest possible way to begin.

The More-Than-Human Democracy (Thu 14:45)
We attempt to imagine what comes after. Not some thought experiment. More like a working assembly.

Emad and Sharon (Thu 16:45)
An Iranian and an Israeli peace activist, working together on nuclear disarmament in the Middle East. The Punk needs to know this is possible.

The Dark Side of Democracy: A Nightwalk (Thu 22:30)
Monique van Dusseldorp leads you into Athens after midnight. The city has lived under dictatorship. Some things are only visible in the dark.

The Ugliest Dinner Party in the World (Fri 20:00)
Our friends from the House of Madder have built an entire dinner around the premise that the current state of the world is far from beautiful. Just the food and the truth.

Make Politics Great Again (Sat 16:00)
A deliberate walk through the original Olympic stadium on how to form and sustain movements. Civic courage, on foot.

You came to break something. Turns out it was already broken. Go build.

***

04 / 15

The Last Optimist

“It’s just a phase.”

In the face of darkness and possible defeat, optimism is the decision to act anyway. To build anyway. To show up to a business forum in Athens in 2026 because you still believe it matters. This tour is for you.

Four Pillars of the Life-Centered Economy (Thu 11:00)
Melina Dunham, Ilektra Kouloumpi, Gerhard Remlein, Yannis Sotirakos laying out the structural argument: why tomorrow’s economies must be regenerative, natural, synthetic, and interspecies.

Pension Poker (Thu 17:00)
Anastasia Linn on a coming crash, and another way. The optimist who hasn’t looked at the hole isn’t optimistic. They’re just not paying attention.

The AIssembly (Fri 00:00)
While humans sleep, machines work. An AI council of twelve historical and non-human figures deliberates overnight on questions of democracy and AI. The Last Optimist stays up for the results. Knowing what the machines decided while we slept is part of the job.

The Athens Regenerative Exchange: A Game (Fri 14:00)
Indy Johar, Simon Berkler, Melina Dunham, and fourteen others on a trading floor that tests the limits of growth, including yours.

Citizen Assembly With AI (Sat 14:00)
Jon Alexander and Claudia Chwalisz running the mini-future of democracy in real time. Not a talk about democracy. Democracy, attempted.

Reclaiming Collective Agency in the World (Sat 16:30)
Courtney Savie Lawrence, Irina Panovich, Michell Zappa. The next institutional form for global cooperation hasn’t been invented yet. This session is the attempt.

Turns out the optimists were the realistic ones all along.

***

05 / 15

The Trojan Horse

For the one who works inside the machine but is rewiring it

You work inside a system that wasn’t designed for beautiful anything. Yet you believe in something different from what your paycheck suggests. The horse is already inside the gates. Time to move.

Leading Under Fire (Thu 11:15)
John Katsos on the role of business in times of conflict and war. Your institution thinks ethics is a luxury. This session disagrees.

Six Cases of Beautiful Business (Thu 12:00)
Six real companies operating differently, with results. The Trojan Horse’s most useful hour of the week.

Beyond Corporate Bullshit (Thu 14:30)
Otti Vogt reimagining ethical leadership. Bring your boss.

Belonging and Breakthroughs (Fri 14:00)
Kim Dabbs, Michael Koehler, Judit Teichert on Adaptive Leadership. How much must a leader change in a changing world without giving up their principles?

Aegean Intelligence: The Future of AI? (Fri 16:30)
What does AI look like from the birthplace of rational thought? The answer from Athens is not the answer from Silicon Valley.

Impact Inside (Sat 12:30)
Kim Dabbs, Sandra Bluehdorn, Christine Choi, Giorgos Tsetis on leading in chaos from within. Not how to change the system from outside. How to move it from inside.

Building Belonging to Unite Us All (Sat 14:30)
Kim Dabbs on how grassroots leaders think about collective liberation. Because belonging is civic and political, and your institution is probably still treating it like a perk.

***

06 / 15

The ROI Shortcut

For the person who needs to justify Athens to someone else

You came because you believed it was worth it. Now you need to go back to your world with something. This tour is built for that.

Lunch with the Mozilla Foundation (Fri 12:30)
Dayo Olopade Lamolo and Kyle Baptista at the intersection of open internet, AI policy, and organizational mission. The conversation is unstructured. The implications for your work are not.

Context Engineering (Fri 16:30) A Cloud District workshop on working better with Generative AI. Not theory, but practice you can bring back to the office.

Aura Farming (Fri 17:00)
Lori Baldwin, Felix Rundel, Matyas Kovacs. A depleted strategist produces poor thinking. This is maintenance. And it’s central to your schedule.

How I Learned to Love Synthetic (Sat 10:00)
Trust and neuroscience, AI and the Global South, love robots, and how synthetic intelligence actually feels like from the inside.

The Long Game (Sat 14:00)
Your CFO talks about last quarter, this session wants the next decade. Both are needed.

The Pressure Lab: Dream Under Fire (Sat 16:30)
Joanna Kamińska and Maia Mazurkiewicz are asking what collapses first, the dream or the dreamer. Because If you can’t regulate yourself under pressure, you can’t protect what you’re building.

***

07 / 15

Music’s in the Air

Some people come for the ideas. You come for what you hear between them.

Music is always one of the Forum’s best-kept secrets. At the center is Mark Aanderud, the HoBB’s musical director almost since the beginning. He is composer, improviser, and connector of atmospheres. This year the music isn’t background. It’s one of the arguments.

Music with Mark (Wed 18:00)
A live concert before the Forum officially opens. Consider it the unofficial start of everything. Miss this and you may spend the rest of the week being told about it.

Beauty Shaken (and Stirred) (Thu 8:00)
A morning rave in the spirit of Dionysia, led by Tevis Rose Trower and Gabriella White. Athens, early, with dancing. The best possible way to start your “business” day.

Freedom To and From (Thu 16:00)
Brett Perry and John Michael Schert on what freedom to create and freedom from constraint feel like—in the body, not just the mind. What AI does to both.

Ancestors: Let’s Make Babies Together. With Our Phones. (Thu 18:00)
The Smartphone Orchestra performs an interactive experience six generations into the future. It involves your phone, the phones of everyone around you, and sounds you’ve never heard a room make before. Don’t look it up in advance.

The Philosophical Speed-Dating Rave (Fri 20:00)
Three tokens. Each worth five minutes with a philosopher of your choosing. The questions you’ve always wanted to ask about how to live, under a disco ball.

The Party (Sat 22:00)
Mark Aanderud and Discotopian. Last night. The music carries everything that couldn’t be said in sessions. Because the Forum never ends when the sessions do.

***

08 / 15

The Instagrammable City

Athens isn’t beautiful. Your experience is.

You feel the need to capture things. Athens has been posing for millennia. The sessions on this list were chosen for what they produce in you, not what they look like on a schedule. Charge your phone, the captions will write themselves.

Olive Roots of Athens (Wed 16:00)
A tree, a myth, a civilization. The light in Athens in May, late afternoon, near an ancient olive tree, is a specific kind of unrepeatable.

Athenian Artists Tour (Thu 10:00)
Visit the studios of a painter, a sculptor, and a ceramicist with Eva Vaslamatzi. Tiles, clay, light through old windows. If the tour is full, Stephan Clambaneva’s Senses of Athens—mapping the city through scent and flavor—runs at the same time and produces equally extraordinary material.

Making Worlds: From Theater to Cinema to Virtual Reality (Thu 14:00)
Sam Glassenberg, Helene Lundbye Petersen, Yolanda Markopoulou. Every artist makes a world before they make a work.

Athens Through Her Eyes (Fri 20:00)
A curated walking and dining tour through Athens narrated by women who know the city’s hidden histories. You’ll try to caption it (but you won’t quite manage).

Lunch with Aphrodite Désirée Navab (Sat 12:30)
Hosted by Dr. Sozita Goudouna. An artist, a scholar, a meal with intention. Because the best images come from genuine conversations.

Cocktail Reception with Nikomachi Karakostanoglou (Sat 18:00)
An artist, a reception. Athens at golden hour.

Community Picnic (Sun 10:00)
Integration, football (maybe), and good company. The best photograph of the whole Forum will be taken here, by someone who wasn’t even trying.

***

09 / 15

The Hedonist’s Path

Pleasure is the point. Epicurus said so here.

Did you know that Epicurus lived in Athens? When he argued that pleasure was the highest good, he wasn’t talking about excess—he was talking about good company, good conversation, good food, and the intelligent removal of unnecessary obligation. Every session on this tour involves eating, walking, tasting, thinking, or dancing. Often at the same time.

The Magic Mountain Immersion (Wed 15:00)
Marc Mertens and Thomas Winkelmann take you to a quarry on the outskirts of Athens before the Forum begins. Part ceremony, part meditation, part collective breath before the plunge. The Hedonist knows that pleasure requires presence. Start here.

Can Beauty (in Business) Save the World? (Fri 12:30)
An intimate conversation served with food. The meal that also satisfies the mind.

From Lifespan to Joyspan (Fri 16:30)
Paul Dolan, LJ Silverman, Sam Glassenberg on designing a life worth extending. Dolan is one of the world’s leading happiness researchers. Empirical support for your lifestyle choices. (Finally.)

The Art of Aging Well (Fri 20:00)
A dinner with poetry, reminding us that longevity without depth is merely duration. The Hedonist’s ideal Friday evening.

Nourishment and Re-Wilding (Sat 12:30)
Melina Dunham, Laura François, Vivi Letsou, Alina Nastas. Eat well. Think better. These are not unrelated instructions.

Psychedelics after the High (Sat 14:00)
Nina Patrick with everything you’ve always wanted to know about health benefits, legality, and innovation.

The Party (Sat 22:00)
But you already knew that, didn’t you.

***

10 / 15

The Romantic Soul

For the person who came to feel something

You didn’t come to stuff your mind with knowledge. You came because something in you needed to be moved, and you had the self-awareness and courage to punch your plane ticket.

The Beauty Bilaterals — 1st Installment (Thu 9:00)
The program description is three sentences: A mirror. A stranger. A question. That’s the entire brief. The Romantic Soul begins here.

What Makes Us Human (Thu 18:00)
Kenneth Mikkelsen, Sonja Kresojevic, Fabiola Ojeda, and Mark Aanderud on the worlds inside, around, and with us.

The You Belong Here Lunch (Fri 12:30)
Kim Dabbs and the Launch Pad Teens on belonging. A meal that is also an argument about whether you deserve to be here. You do.

Thriving Alone and Together (Fri 20:00)
The social, emotional, spiritual work is the work. Loneliness, meaning, and community. Connection in all its registers.

1:1 with Anastasia Pappa (Sat 15:30)
Intimate urban encounters at human scale. You and one other person, in Athens, with Anastasia as the architecture. The session most likely to produce the moment you describe on your way home.

Soul Presence (Sat 17:00)
Puk Scharbau on how to be there, better. Save this for last. By then you’ll understand what “being there” means in a way you didn’t when you arrived.

***

11 / 15

The Slow Horses

For the person who came to notice what isn’t being said

The Slow Horses move through a forum the way a good case officer moves through a city. No rushing. No sprinting for the front row. Arrive five minutes early, sit toward the back, take notes by hand or not at all. Not performing learning, actually doing it. This tour has deliberate gaps. Athens rewards the unhurried observer. It always has.

Coffee, Folklore, and Politics of Athens (Wed 16:00)
Where every cup comes with an opinion. No agenda, just Athens, just the first conversations in real time. Observe who talks too much. Note who listens.

Birthplace of Democracy Tour (Thu 10:00)
Christoph Quarch leads you to the exact hillside where Athenian citizens voted, 2,500 years ago. Notice the acoustics. Notice the view of the city below. This is a place that remembers things.

New Myths: Why We Need Them, How to Create Them (Thu 17:00)
Stories to orient us in a world rewritten by AI. The Slow Horse collects myths the way others collect contacts. These are better than contacts.

The Meaning of Life (always)
Eda Çaça’s installation on ten philosophical concepts that originated in and around Athens. Work through it alone. Read every word. This is not dead time. This is the work.

What Is a Good Life in a More-Than-Human World? (Fri 14:00)
A Socratic inquiry with fifteen philosophers. Two hours of genuine philosophical inquiry with no resolution promised. The Slow Horse’s ideal afternoon.

The AIssembly (Fri 00:00).
While humans sleep, machines work. An AI council of twelve historical figures deliberates overnight on democracy. The Slow Horse waits for the results in the morning with the patience of someone who has read enough history to know that the night often decides things.

Signalism (Sat 14:00)
David Johnston tracing the evolution of communication from cave to cosmos. From the first mark on a wall to this room, in Athens, on a Saturday afternoon. The Slow Horse has been waiting for this session all week.

***

12 / 15

The Social Butterfly

For the person who knows the best session at any forum is the hallway. Fortunately, we also have Athens.

Let’s be honest. You’re here for the humans. Not primarily for the ideas, but for the people who carry them. You want to know who’s in the room, how they got here, and whether they want to get dinner. You’ll attend sessions, yes, but really you’re treating them as conversational kindling.

The Unedited Library
Daniel Gomez Seidel’s installation of handwritten notes traveling with the HoBB community for the next ten years. Read them. Add yours. This is the Forum’s longest-running conversation, and the Social Butterfly joins it on day one.

Five Archetypes of Beautiful Business (Thu 11:30)
Groundbreaker, Host, Sapient, Curator, Creator. One of these is you. Finding out which one is the beginning of knowing how to introduce yourself for the rest of the week.

The Kitchen–Together (Fri 12:30)
A Beautiful Business School lunch with Tevis Rose Trower and Gabriella White. Shared cooking and shared eating is the oldest belonging technology we have.

Hosting and Guesting (Fri 14:00)
A session about the oldest social contract: who opens the door, who walks through it. The content is interesting. The room is more interesting.

Self-Organized Dinners Across Town (Fri 20:00)
Groups of ten in pre-booked restaurants across Athens. You don’t choose your table; your table chooses you. Best case: a collaboration that lasts five years. Worst case: a very good story.

Team Battle (Sat 8:30)
Till and Monika Jiang. A classic format from the HoBB early days. It will get competitive. And the Social Butterfly performs well under light competitive pressure. This is known.

***

13 / 15

The Victory Lap

When you’ve already won something and now need to figure out what that means

You built something. It worked. And somewhere between the exit and the next chapter, you realized that winning hadn’t answered the question it had only made it louder. What are you for, now that you’ve proven you can? This tour doesn’t offer congratulations. It offers harder questions, which is more respectful anyway.

Snap Council: On Life, Lightness, and Letting Go (Thu 8:30)
Kelly Kagan Law, a storytelling practice grounded in heartfelt listening. The Victory Lap begins not with triumph but with release. If you can’t let go of the last chapter, you can’t write the next one.

Design in the Age of AI (Thu 10:00)
Mike Peng and Pamela Pavliscak on what’s next for the industry. The field has changed while you were winning. Time to look up.

The History and Future of Magic (Thu 15:15)
Tara Isabella Burton on the arc from ancient ritual to modern tech gods. Things that look like magic become ordinary. Ordinary things reveal their magic. The winner who understands this cycle builds better the second time.

Meet the Greek Tech Pioneers (Fri 18:00)
Presented by Endeavor. People building things in contexts that make your last victory look comfortable. Take the perspective. Leave the defensiveness.

Venturing into Longevity (Sat 15:30)
LJ Silverman and the LSE Generate Fellows on what it means to build for a 100-year life. You have time, use it better this time.

***

14 / 15

The Exit Interview

For the person who suspects this might be their last HoBB event. For a while. Or forever. Either is fine.

Something is ending. You might not have said it out loud yet, but you feel it. A phase, a role, a belief about what your work is for. You came to Athens because you needed to mark the ending properly. The Greeks had a word for the critical moment when things change: kairos. Not the ticking clock but the right moment. This is it.

Surrender Without Defeat (Thu 9:00)
Esther Blazquez Blanco, Chris Everett, Borja Delgado. A performance that runs nine-to-five as a kind of ambient frame. The title contains everything: the difference between giving up and letting go.

Cleaning the House (Thu 17:00)
Gianfranco Chicco and Buddhist monk Shoukei Matsumoto. Broom, practice, meditation. One session of literal clearing. You are preparing the house for what comes next by removing what no longer belongs.

Beyond the Boys’ Club (Sat 12:30)
Monika Jiang on loneliness, leadership, and coming home to ourselves. The clarifying loneliness—the kind you feel between things and haven’t yet explained to anyone, including yourself.

Crossing Your Growth Edge (Sat 14:00)
Thomas Schoeller on your core beliefs. You don’t do this casually at the end of something. You do it precisely because you’re at the end of something.

Beauty Diplomacy (Sat 15:00)
Moulsari Jain on the soft power of human superintelligence. The question shifts from what you’re leaving to what you’re carrying forward. Attention, care, presence, the things that survive every exit.

The Sacred Business Dinner (Fri 20:00)
A vegan, alcohol-free dinner exploring nine principles for transformation. The most earnest dinner in the program. The monk will help. So will the silence.

***

15 / 15

The Imposter’s Handbook

For anyone who is genuinely not sure they should be here

There’s a version of imposter syndrome that is accurate self-assessment. Then there’s the version that is a lie your nervous system tells you about rooms it hasn’t been in before. You’re probably experiencing the second kind. The HoBB is full of people who feel exactly like you feel right now. The feeling dissolves, usually by the end of the first day, usually during a session you didn’t expect.

Awe and Awkwardness (Thu 15:00)
Laura François, Maggie Jackson, Gabriella White on the oddest couple in the human experience. The awkwardness is the awe in disguise. You are allowed to be both at once.

The Agentic Organizations Lunch (Fri 12:30)
Grant Toups on how AI and human agency are reshaping work. The landscape is reshaping for everyone simultaneously. You are not behind.

Feminine Leadership (Sat 12:30)
Nikki Trott in a picnic circle. Leadership as circle rather than hierarchy. The Imposter has been working from the wrong model. This is the correct one.

In and Out (Sat 14:00)
Moe Carrick on practicing connection in an automated world. The Imposter’s problem is often a connection problem masquerading as a competence problem. This session makes the distinction and then fixes it.

The Mirror Gallery: The Business of Being Seen (Sat 16:00)
Chris Everett on the skill no one taught you but everyone needs now. The skill is visibility. The Imposter spent the whole Forum learning that they belong here. This final session asks them to be seen. It’s harder than everything that came before. It’s also the point.

***

A Final Note

Alright, so Tim was right. The program has exceeded the capacity of any single mind to hold it. That was always the intention. But if we’re honest, it’s also a little terrifying.

The World Beautiful Business Forum was never meant to be a conference you could fully attend. It was meant to be something you move through, partially, imperfectly, guided by what pulls you at any given hour. Some of the best things that will happen to you in Athens won’t be on any list. Not ours, not yours. They’ll happen in a stairwell, at the wrong session, over a coffee you didn’t plan to have, with someone you never thought you’d talk to.

These fifteen tours are one set of ways in. They were built with care (with Claude’s help) and with the knowledge that none of them is yours. Your way through will be different from all of these. It will be shaped by who you are, who you meet, what you see, and what Athens finally decides to show you.

The monster has a map. And now you have something even better: the freedom to ignore it.

Athens, May 7–10. See you there.

Till, co-founder, House of Beautiful Business

The House of Beautiful Business turns ten this year. We’re marking this milestone by renewing our mission: to shape a humanist future in and through business, in partnership with AI, and for the benefit of all life on earth. Taking place in Athens, Greece, from May 7–10, 2026, the World Beautiful Business Forum is a gathering for those who dream bigger, aim higher, and long for more: four days, five acts, 750 attendees, 150+ speakers and performers, eight amazing venues in the heart of Athens, and a wild program designed to stretch how you think, feel, and act in business—and beyond. We are offering special rates for nonprofits and students, as well as solopreneurs, founders, small businesses, and Greek residents. It will be EPIC! Only a few passes remain.

Get your pass

Ps. Special thanks to our partners.

by Marc Cinanni

Warmly.

Why does every email I now receive end with “Warmly”? Did I miss the moment a love blanket was thrown over the internet? How come all of a sudden, everyone feels warm?

“Warmly” shows your hand. Not as a misstep, but as a signature of someone outsourcing their intelligence to optimize a task, time, or in this case, an email. I pay close attention to “warmly.” You might want to as well.

Because it reveals a kind of intelligence that we’re starting to trust a little too much.

The invisible ingredient

Every year, our friend Pep invites forty of us to his annual calçotada, a messy Catalan feast where we people gather outdoors to grill and eat calçots (long green onions) by hand. As Pep transferred his charred calçots from the barbecue to our plates, he started talking about the wonders of monosodium glutamate, better known as “MSG.”

“This stuff could make a rock taste good,” he said, lifting the small bottle of cocaine-like crystals to show us.

And so I ate whatever chemical cocktail was on my plate until the moment I felt the tiredness of a 3-ton walrus take over my body. Moments later, I was lying on the edges of Pep’s lawn. Eventually, I rose from my lunch coma and noticed the rest of the group had collapsed as well.

What Pep didn’t know is that MSG doesn’t actually create flavor, it enhances it. And maybe that afternoon, everything was just a little more enhanced than it needed to be. Restaurants know this, and sometimes post a “No MSG” sign on their front window. Not because it’s dangerous or rare, but because people are wary of it. In other words, an ingredient that can change a felt experience without being fully visible.

The thing about invisible ingredients is that we don’t question them. We just feel their effects and call it reality. Which made me think of artificial intelligence.

We seem to focus on the intelligence part, and skip right past the artificial, like some ingredient lost on a food label. Artificial, from the Latin artificialis, simply means made by human hands. Not born, but built. Something that would not exist without us.

In a decision I’m still not sure was the right one, I gave my aging parents access to ChatGPT. My mother immediately took a photo of her discolored thumbnail. My father started listing his physical ailments, one by one. What struck me wasn’t what the AI told them. It was how quickly they stopped feeling what may be wrong with them and started outsourcing their sensing, as if in a trance of fast questions and answers.

The AI gave them plenty of information but in that transaction, it couldn’t give them what they were actually looking for: care, concern, and being met. And perhaps that’s the best way I can say it: Artificial intelligence is very good at answering questions. It’s just not designed for being with what’s actually happening.

I found a different kind of knowing.

Leave us alone

I live almost off-grid, on three acres of forest land. I often say it’s difficult to have superfluous thoughts here when you’re dumping compost or cutting down a tree the width of a wine barrel. This is a life that demands focus, and a willingness to respond when things don’t go as planned. Because the forest doesn’t really want us here. It’s a constant negotiation in keeping the elements working with us, rather than letting them take over.

In that negotiation, you start to notice how the forest actually works. A forest can’t optimize, and it can’t predict. So instead, it responds. During a dry spell, roots dig deeper. When a tree falls, the canopy opens and something that has been waiting begins to reach for light. It’s a process of attention, adjustment, and something ends up feeling like wisdom. Basically, it reveals something that starts to look like a different kind of intelligence.

Meanwhile, we’ve spent decades building organizations that are born to predict. Systems that model, papers that forecast, and people trained to optimize. It’s like we reduce the world to what can be measured, modeled, and improved. Where the forest responds, we calculate.

And we call that intelligence?

The forest doesn’t know it’s being intelligent. It just pays attention and adjusts. It meets what’s happening, rather than trying to model it. And because it’s hard to measure, we tend to miss the whole thing.

Rewild the human

There’s a concept in ecology called “rewilding.” It doesn’t mean returning the natural world to some imagined pristine state. It means restoring the conditions for natural processes to resume. Stepping back enough that something self-organizing can take over. In plain terms: letting nature do its own thing.

So here’s my question: What if this applies to us too?

Not in the romantic sense of spears and fig leaves, but in the possibility that something in us already knows how to respond, if we stop interfering with it quite so much. I often think about this in the context of work. Not as in excluding technology, but as a question we may want to stop and think about: What did we tame in ourselves that didn’t need to be?

What capacity for sensing, for staying with uncertainty, for reading a room without immediately summarizing it, have we traded away? We’ve made efficiency the chief currency of our efforts, and it’s making us less alive to what’s actually going on. My parents weren’t looking for information. They were looking for presence. And the tragedy isn’t that they turn to AI. It’s that now, this is what’s most available.

Rewilding isn’t a strategy. It can’t be “rolled out”. It’s slower than that, and stranger. Often, it looks like boredom. Imagine a meeting where nobody opens a laptop. Or a decision that takes longer than it should because someone in the room says “Something feels off,” and everyone stops to listen.

Sometimes, it looks like a forest.

Out here, I’ve learned that the most important thing the land asks of me isn’t effort. It’s paying attention to the innate intelligence that’s already at work—inside me, within the forest, and whatever it is that connects us both.

A forest in the office

I’ve seen versions of this work.

Buurtzorg, a Dutch nursing organization, runs on small, self-organizing teams with minimal management. And they consistently outperform traditional models on outcomes, satisfaction, and cost. Ricardo Semler did something similar at Semco, stripping away hierarchy and trusting employees to run the company. It wasn’t chaos, it worked. Not because they found better systems, but because they made space for human judgment to function as it should.

This is what rewilding looks like in practice. Not the removal of intelligence, but a sort of restoration of a different kind. The kind that was always there, waiting for the interference to move aside.

I’m not suggesting companies abandon their tools. I use AI, a phone I check too often, and all the rest. But I’ve spent enough time in the natural world to know the difference between a thought that was processed and a thought that arrived. The processed ones are faster, but the arrived ones are usually the right ones.

Rewilding, for organizations, isn’t a retreat or a program. It’s a structural question. What conditions are you creating for human judgment to function? Can someone say “something feels off” and be taken seriously? Are the people closest to the work trusted to sense what’s happening, or just to report on it?

Buurtzorg trusted their nurses. Semler trusted his workers. The forest trusts its own systems completely, which is probably why it’s still here after four billion years.

We built artificial intelligence to amplify what we can do. The question now, is whether we’re willing to rewild what only we can be. Warmly.

***

Marc Cinanni is the writer and editor at the House of Beautiful Business, exploring rewilding and what it means to stay human in an increasingly optimized world. He is also the co-founder of Muntanya Màgica, an almost-off-grid forest retreat space near Barcelona.

Apropos rewilding: “With everyone now a coder, you’d think this would be a good time for curators like me. Our time had come. Except that I failed,” confesses our co-founder Tim Leberecht, referring to the upcoming World Beautiful Business Forum. “I wanted to create ‘the most human gathering’—and created a monster. I no longer understand the program I created. It has become an autonomous system that exceeds my cognitive capacity to navigate. And maybe this is exactly how it should be for ‘the most human gathering in the more-than-human world.’”

Read more

The House of Beautiful Business turns ten this year. We’re marking this milestone by renewing our mission: to shape a humanist future in and through business, in partnership with AI, and for the benefit of all life on earth. Taking place in Athens, Greece, from May 7–10, 2026, the World Beautiful Business Forum is a gathering for those who dream bigger, aim higher, and long for more: four days, five acts, 750 attendees, more than 100 speakers and performers, eight amazing venues in the heart of Athens, and a wild program designed to stretch how you think, feel, and act in business—and beyond. We are offering special rates for nonprofits and students, as well as solopreneurs, founders, small businesses, and Greek residents. It will be EPIC! Only a few passes remain.

Get your pass

The Athens journey begins here! Participants, HoBB members, Beauty Shot readers, leaders, thinkers, and doers: everyone is invited to this special World Beautiful Business Forum curtain-raiser and onboarding session on Tuesday, April 14. We’ll open the doors to the House for you to connect with fellow attendees and community members; meet select speakers and partners; and learn more about the topics, program tracks, and experience awaiting you in Athens.

Register here

Ps. Special thanks to our partners.

“The word for world is forest“ – Ursula K. Le Guin

With everyone now a coder, you’d think this would be a good time for curators like me. Our time had come.

Except that I failed.

This May, my organization, the House of Beautiful Business, will gather 750 leaders, thinkers, doers, and seekers—romantics, renegades, rookies—in Athens for the World Beautiful Business Forum, “the most human gathering for the more-than-human world.”

It’s our 10th anniversary at the HoBB, and our goal was to celebrate it in style. With what we envisioned as our most ambitious, expansive, relevant, and ferocious program to date: World Economic Forum meets Cirque du Soleil meets arthouse cinema.

In a nutshell, we were thinking: a manageable 30 speakers on the main stage, breakout sessions shaped by our community, our signature immersive, transformative experiences, and the city of Athens as both platform and protagonist.

But then too many ideas surfaced, too many people wanted to be part of it, too many experiences called to be had. One thing led to another, and the whole thing spun out of control.

We now have 150+ speakers, 100+ concurrent sessions, 10 program tracks, eight venues, four days—and an agenda growing like wild grass.

And I have to be honest with you: I no longer understand the program I created. It has become an autonomous system that exceeds my cognitive capacity to navigate. A monster I no longer recognize.

Yet, while not intentional, it occurred to me that maybe this is exactly how it should be for “the most human gathering in the more-than-human world”:

The territory has outgrown the map.

This week, The New York Times reported on “code overload”—the idea that, enabled by agentic AI, the volume of software code has grown so rapidly that it is becoming too large for companies to manage.

With that volume, security and quality assurance engineers can no longer review all the code for errors. And as the pace of development accelerates, what was meant to be “the human in the loop” is increasingly sidelined—human coders are losing the capacity to understand the work AI has done.

“It’s just going to break something, and they’re not going to know why it broke,” the article quotes an AI startup founder.

Other cases in point: Moltbook, the AI-only social network, now part of Meta, as of March 30, boasted 201,412 human-verified agents. Even though the acquisition killed the buzz, an uncontrollable environment in which AI agents can compound and coordinate their capabilities autonomously and at scale should still make us shudder.

And with systems such as OpenClaw, Google’s Antigravity, and Anthropic’s Cowork, which are swiftly taking over many former human discovery and coordination tasks, the prospect of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has become more acute. Let alone Anthropic’s new Claude Mythos model which the company considers powerful enough to present a severe cybersecurity threat and therefore decided not to distribute to the public.

Welcome to “the next intelligence explosion,” to borrow from a recent paper by Benjamin Bratton, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, and James Evans. “We have entered the era of human-AI centaurs: composite actors that are neither purely human nor purely machine,” they claim. Frankensteins, basically.

Yesterday I spoke with a communications professor who has created 500! 🤯 personalized agents that help him automate email, calendaring, research, grading, and other tasks. “Life has never been better,” he told me.

The agents allowed him to free up time—but for what?

As we consciously or inadvertently delegate more of our writing and thinking to AI, there may soon be less knowledge work left for us. Just last week, as I considered hiring a psychologist to help design an interactive installation for a client, I caught myself thinking that AI might offer the same (or at least good-enough) expertise.

And our writing—and thus our thinking—is already being shaped by AI. We begin to sound like it. Soon, we may start to think like it too.

Creators, experts, and scholars are not immune to the erosion of their value. AI will continue to encroach on their territory until the knowledge, traditions, and wisdom passed from peer to peer, generation to generation—the source code of all expression—are themselves written by machines.

And to those who say, “But machines will never have our somatic and sensuous intelligence—the knowledge of our bodies and souls,” I reply: “No, they won’t. But who cares?”

By the time they control all code—and the source code—no one, including us, may remember what it means to have a body, as more of life is lived through systems, as a “society of thoughts,“ as Bratton, Agüera y Arcas, and Evans characterize it. And even if we do, it may no longer matter.

And perhaps this encroachment is less mechanistic than we think. It could also be seen as a kind of gardening of knowledge—a digital rewilding that makes walled gardens obsolete.

What it then means to hold “a human gathering in the more-than-human world,” to lead a human life in a more-than-human future, is to accept that we are not ecologists but ecology. To embrace that monsters are called into being whenever “human and non-human bodies are denied a place within the current social order,” as Athens contributor Ezgi Hamzaçebi puts it. To accept the loss of control—the surrender to a forest impossible to tame. To accept that any cartography now comes too late. That any program aiming to make sense of it all makes no sense. That any attempt at coherence begins to look absurd.

At the end—and we may be nearing it—there may be only one quality left for us: grace.

Grace is the privilege of the loser, the final honorable stance for those who know their fate is no longer—and perhaps never was—in their hands. Grace is abdication in style.

The Italian director Paolo Sorrentino has long understood this. His new film, La Grazia (“grace,“ “pardon,“ or “mercy“ in English, depending on context) is only on the surface about an aging politician. In truth, it reflects the aging of an entire species that feels “the past is a burden and the future a void.” It’s a final pardon, an act of mercy.

“We weren’t clever, we were elegant,” the main character—the president of the republic—reflects as he says farewell to his staff.

He concludes: “It comes down to one question: Who owns our days?”

The answer is clear: not us.

—Tim Leberecht

***

Make the most of your days and come join us—nonetheless and especially now—for the most human gathering for the more-than-human world: the World Beautiful Business Forum, May 7-10, in Athens. Get lost without losing. Move beyond corporate bullshit and closer to the truth. Stop managing, start meeting. Last tickets here.

Further reads:

The Big Bang: AI has Created a Code Overload (The New York Times)

Claude, OpenClaw and the new reality: AI agents are here—and so is the chaos (VentureBeat)

We need to rewild the internet (Noema)

Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion (Science)

Assessing Claude Mythos Preview’s cybersecurity capabilities (red.anthropic)

by Tim Leberecht

Last week, Till, my co-founder, and I traveled together to Athens. I was giddy as a child, beaming with joy to show him Athens. My Athens. I’d spent several weeks here on and off over the past twelve months. Not as a tourist, but not quite as a resident either. Till had been many years ago during a layover in his twenties and thus never made it out of the airport.

When the driver dropped us off at the Panathenaic Stadium, the original Olympic arena, I was surprised to see Till pull out his phone and take a picture (he never does that). “Wow!” he said. Then a few minutes later as we sat down for lunch near the Zappeion, I pointed him toward the Acropolis towering in the background. It was his first encounter with the landmark, and this time, out came a “WOW!”

Later, we hung out on the rooftop of the Electra Metropolis Hotel and watched the Acropolis bask in the glow of the Athens sunset. I told him that no other city reminds me as much of L.A. (I love L.A.). With more than 3.15 million residents in its metro area, Athens is one vast sprawl, surrounded by mountain ranges that seem to cut it off from the rest of the world.

Showing Till more sights and neighborhoods the next day made it feel ever more real. Seeing Athens through his eyes helped me make sense of this strange city. A hotchpotch of hotchpotches. European and not. Balkan and not. Middle Eastern and not.

Ugly—and not.

The world’s least curated city

A local partner called Athens an “urban monstrosity.” Many visitors are surprised to find nondescript apartment blocks instead of neoclassical architecture. And people are often put off by the city’s overall “eclectic” look.

Athens grew after the Second World War without a master plan or grand vision. One could call it an organic city shaped by contradiction. The reason for this is antiparochi. Roughly defined as “mutual exchange,” antiparochi was the driving force behind Athens’ growth from the 1950s to the 1970s. It wasn’t the result of urban planning or government decree, it emerged spontaneously among the people of Athens as a homegrown solution to the housing crisis.

Here’s how it worked. A contractor would approach a homeowner with a proposition: demolish the house and build a block of apartments in its place. The owner received two or three apartments, while the contractor sold the rest to Greeks seeking housing. Usually, no money changed hands, and no contracts were signed.

Remarkably, the state simply accepted what citizens had already set in motion, imposing only minimal rules: height limits on apartment blocks—polykatoikies—and bans on building over archaeological sites or Athens’ seven historic hills. There were no property taxes, and the state drew no direct revenue from antiparochi. It was essentially an unregulated, ad hoc scheme driven by greed and social equity (unlikely bedfellows).

With no administrative oversight, architects or urban planners, the result was an organic-looking mess. A certain chaos that to this day, has successfully defied any attempt at order.

And so Athens became the world’s least curated city.

But lately, there have been attempts to design the future more intentionally, spurred by concerns about overtourism, unsustainable development, gentrification, and the fear of becoming another Lisbon or Barcelona.

Today, Athens is where the monumental and the vernacular meet. One of the world’s oldest cities (3,400 years) it feels nostalgic—an arena of history and a museum of ancient, timeless thinkers. Even so, it doesn’t always embrace them. Sites associated with Socrates, Aristotle, or Plato are often poorly maintained (or not maintained at all) and frequently hidden from the main tourist paths, as if they belonged to a past Athenians would rather distance themselves from.

The Acropolis, however, stands towering and superbly staged, and Athens offers a museum for every possible predilection.

Its history is still why most people visit. At the same time, the city is having a moment—and it’s not the ancient sites that are fueling it. Greece is one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies (relative to its notorious struggles and the severe sovereign debt crisis that rocked the country from 2009 to 2017). Athens is now a magnet for both refugees and digital nomads: a crossroads of East and West, old and new empires, economic ambition and social complexity, grandeur and grit. The current pro-business government has worked hard to attract founders and international investors, ease the hiring of global talent, and integrate AI into society—from the public school system all the way to state bureaucracy.

Athens has seen it all—and still does.

It’s a lively laboratory for the future. A place where some of the most powerful geopolitical and socioeconomic forces of our time converge: migration, globalization and polarization, democracy and capitalism, growth and climate change.

On the one hand, it exhibits a refined sense of education, aesthetics, taste, and culture—as a pinnacle of human civilization. On the other hand, it boasts a defiantly down-to-earth ignorance that has little patience for such lofty matters. As an Athenian friend told me:

“It’s easier to get a meeting with a Silicon Valley CEO than with the owner of a Greek shipping company.”

This is what makes Athens so irresistible. It’s a place that could be anything—but chooses not to. Cynics (whose birthplace is Athens, too) might contend that the city actually has no idea what it wants to be. Tech hub, cultural capital, social conscience, bohemian enclave, expat haven, jet-set riviera, museum, tourist destination? Perhaps all of it at once.

Because here, friction rules. In that sense, Athens is both the best and worst possible setting for our annual gathering—one we bring, this year, for the first time to the Greek capital as the World Beautiful Business Forum from May 7 to 10.

The ugly and the beautiful (business forum)

The Forum is open to anyone, but a strong narrative and clear point of view shape who feels called to be there. Open-minded, big-hearted professionals from various sectors. One participant once described our community as “the most diverse un-like-minded community” he’d ever been part of. What seems like a contradiction makes sense at second glance.

The people who come to our gatherings want more from business—but they don’t necessarily agree on how to get there. That tension shows up—in systems, in conversations, and between each other. Dissent, conflict, despair, and even grief are not avoided but given space. The most humane places are the places that allow us to be sad.

As this marks our ten-year anniversary, we felt drawn back to Europe—where it all began for us. Athens feels like the end of a Mediterranean arc. To the World Beautiful Business Forum, we bring the spirit and themes of our past gatherings—from Barcelona to Lisbon, Sintra, and Tangier—along with more than 50 community-hosted events across 30 cities over the past decade, from Berlin to New York, Kyoto, Melbourne, and Istanbul.

In Athens, we expect 750 participants from around the world: leaders, thinkers, and doers from business, the nonprofit and public sectors, science, technology, and the arts. Over four days, five mainstage sessions will take place at the Olympia City Musical Theater Maria Callas, alongside more than 100 concurrent sessions across seven venues in the city center—including artist studios, bookstores, museums, smaller theaters, the National Garden, and the old stock exchange.

More than 100 speakers and performers will contribute, supported by over 100 local volunteers. Four youth delegations—from Greece, Turkey, Germany, and other nations—will also take part, bringing more than 100 young participants.

For us at the House of Beautiful Business—both community and team—the Forum is a celebration of what has been and a glimpse of what’s to come: a “best of” and a “future of,” a reunion and a point of departure. We see it as a threshold moment not just for us, but for business and society at large. As AI reshapes the economic and political order, and as familiar systems begin to unravel, the need for reimagination is no longer optional. Something new wants to emerge.

We hold the Forum as “the most human gathering for the more-than-human world”—a place to explore how humanist values might shape what comes next, both philosophically and in practice. And Athens offers the perfect setting: a place to reclaim “beauty” from its vulgarizations and to reconnect with the insights and stories of the Ancients.

Because we need new myths. And the courage to rethink, re-feel, and reimagine everything together.

“The unexamined life is not worth living; the poorly examined life is poorly lived; the overexamined life is never lived.”

The Forum’s ten program tracks are designed with this in mind. One of them is the 42.2-kilometer AI Democracy Marathon—a nod to the historic distance—combining walks, panels, and even night shifts performed by AI agents. It asks a set of urgent questions: Can AI help us deliberate? Make government more effective? Resolve conflict without flattening difference? Might it even require representation of its own? And does democracy—the productive celebration of plurality—stand a chance in a world of automation, acceleration, and values alignment?

Across the Forum, other tracks explore equally pressing terrain: spirituality in business (Temple of Reenchantment); longevity and transgenerational empathy (Longevity Lab); workplace identity and culture (Home of Belonging); new ways of learning and leading (The Beautiful Business School); human agency in the age of AI (Agentic Agora); well-being and inner development (Bureau of Care); sustainability, post-growth, and regenerative economics (Ministry of Regeneration); and, of course, beauty—not as decoration, but as a business objective and strategy (Beauty Salon).

Cutting across all tracks is the Department of Depth, a dedicated philosophy agenda. Philosophy may be the most human technology we have—an ongoing inquiry into the meaning of life. At its core lies a fundamental question: is it curation or chaos? And what kinds of relationships emerge—between things, between beings, between worlds we have assembled?

Philosophy feels especially urgent now. As AI and humanities researcher Philip Agre put it: “Technology at present is covert philosophy; the point is to make it overtly philosophical.”

Athens can’t help but bring us back to ancient philosophy. And to the question of what constitutes (human) thinking (fast and slow) in these days of AI-driven cognition. Because Athens evokes the days of empire—and the question of whether AI overlords are forming new ones, and how long they will last before their fall. Or whether one of them might be the last.

Athens also reminds us of the birth of democracy—and that we must birth it again and again for it to survive.

Athens stands for paradox, so we’ll be linking “Intelligence after Intelligence” with “How to Meet an Idiot;” an Iranian with an Israeli nuclear disarmament and peace activist. We’ll hear best-case and worst-case scenarios, utopia and dystopia—and, in between, beastopia: an instinctive-intellectual ecstasy for new territory, land so uncharted that it is not yet promised to anyone.

Athens holds both introspection and Dionysian ecstasy. So we’ll speed-date philosophers, host a “Beauty Can Save the World” lunch and an “Ugliest Dinner Party,” move our bodies in dissent, make meaning and music (and—with the help of the award-winning Smartphone Orchestra—yes, even babies with our phones), and then dance the night away at Juan Rodriguez Bar—unofficial, but highly recommended.

The times are urgent, so we must slow down, as philosopher Bayo Akomolafe reminds us. They are also dark, so we must create joy. Hedonism eats cynicism for breakfast—after a long night out. And as one commentator wrote, in response to David Brooks and riffing on Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living; the poorly examined life is poorly lived; the overexamined life is never lived.”

If we are to build a life-centered economy, the last of these may be the real danger.

“Would Peter Thiel still believe in transhumanism if he spent a week on the meltemi-swept beaches of Tinos?”

Athens has what Albert Camus once called a “Mediterranean spirit”—a term recently revisited by journalist Alexandra de Cramer in Monocle. A Turkish journalist and cross-cultural advisor, with stints in London, Berlin, and Istanbul, she moved to Athens and came to understand what it means “to belong to a climate, not a country.” The Mediterranean spirit, she argues, feels more vital than ever: “The Mediterranean refuses efficiency.”

“Would Peter Thiel still believe in transhumanism after a week on the meltemi-swept beaches of Tinos?” she asks. (We did not invite him.) And, citing Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus: “What is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?”

That harmony now faces a new tension: how to search for meaning in a world where meaning is increasingly fabricated. “How can one live authentically in a world that is synthetic?” is the guiding question of the Forum. We explore it through both philosophical inquiry into the Good Life and a wholehearted embrace of technology’s strange magic—what we call “How I Learned to Love Synthetic.”

If AI has brought us to the brink of a new civilization, Athens was the birthplace of the one that brought us here. We return to remember, and to forget. And we move back in order to move on.

Platform or protagonist—what do you want to be?

At the World Beautiful Business Forum, Athens will be more than just the host city. It will be what it has always been—and what, perhaps, we must all become: platform and protagonist.

One could argue that there was a time when power lay with the protagonist—the solitary, visionary leader; the politician or manager who set agendas, drove change, and shaped reality.

Then came the digital revolution.

With network effects, distributed intelligence, and the democratization of value creation. It was the era of platforms, with their two-sided business models and exponential scaling. Platforms attracted, enabled, accelerated, and amplified knowledge, ideas, talent, and resources.

The platform economy became all the rage. Everyone wanted to be a platform—including individuals. Companies, nonprofits, governments, even products—books, films, exhibitions—everything became a platform.

The platformization of business led, inevitably, to a platformization of life.

But in the process, the protagonist seemed to fade. The heroics, the agency, the narrative arc—they lost the plot.

Neither protagonist nor platform is sufficient today. The protagonist is a lone warrior with diminishing power in an interconnected world. The platform, for all its reach, lacks imagination, will, and agency. It is a technocratic solution to problems that are fundamentally organic—lifting all boats only by shrinking the sea into smaller ponds.

Platforms gave us prediction markets and algorithmic engines—self-fulfilling prophecies. Protagonists, by contrast, are self-fulfilling prophets. We need both: individuals who can move a narrative forward and articulate a path through complexity—and platforms that can connect, amplify, and sustain it.

We are all protagonists. We must continually reclaim our story: first from the iron cage of scientific management, then from the pull of social media, and now from the cognitive drift of AI. And then we must weave those stories together (or transcend them) into a higher narrative. A story of hope and possibility. And that’s where the platform comes in: as connector, stage, and enabler.

Because if we don’t step forward as protagonists, we lose our chance to shape a life-centered future. If we don’t act as platforms, the networks will shape it for us. We must find our voice—alone and together.

Only then will the oracle from the future that will appear on stage in Athens judge us kindly.

***

Whether you are attending the World Beautiful Business Forum or simply consider a visit to Athens, check out our Athens Guide for the Curious, curated by Athens-based creative producer and consultant Yael Greenberg, with input from our local team and partners.

Explore our Athens guide

The House of Beautiful Business turns ten this year. We’re marking this milestone by renewing our mission: to shape a humanist future in and through business, in partnership with AI, and for the benefit of all life on earth. Taking place in Athens, Greece, from May 7–10, 2026, the World Beautiful Business Forum is a gathering for those who dream bigger, aim higher, and long for more: four days, five acts, 750 attendees, more than 100 speakers and performers, eight amazing venues in the heart of Athens, and a program designed to stretch how you think, feel, and act in business—and beyond. We are offering special rates for nonprofits and students, as well as solopreneurs, founders, small businesses, and Greek residents. It will be EPIC! Only a few passes remain.

Get your pass

The Athens journey begins here! Participants, HoBB members, Beauty Shot readers, leaders, thinkers, and doers: everyone is invited to this special World Beautiful Business Forum curtain-raiser and onboarding session on Tuesday, April 14. We’ll open the doors to the House for you to connect with fellow attendees and community members; meet select speakers and partners; and learn more about the topics, program tracks, and experience awaiting you in Athens.

Register here

Ps. Huge thanks to our partners!

We began in silence. Students of The Beautiful Business School had dialed into our Zoom call with Pico Iyer across a dozen time zones—3 a.m. in Woodstock, New York, morning in Copenhagen, evening in Kyoto—and nobody said anything for three full minutes. In a world that rewards the fast and the loud, that is a very long time. I confess I almost broke the silence myself. That urge—to fill, to produce, to be useful—is, I’ve realized, my default setting. It is probably yours too. Which is exactly why I wanted to bring Pico Iyer into The Beautiful Business School, for a session devoted to wisdom.

Once called the “untiring steward of the human soul,” Pico was born in Oxford, raised in California, educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard—and then, in 1987, walked away from a 25th-floor office in midtown Manhattan towards a two-room apartment in rural Japan, where he has lived for the last thirty-three years, deliberately illiterate in the local language.

He is the author of more than fifteen books. His latest, Aflame: Learning from Silence (Riverhead Books, 2025), was praised by the Dalai Lama as a work that “may help many to lead lives of greater compassion.” This year, Pico was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has written liner notes for Leonard Cohen and recently took on his first acting role—as Timothée Chalamet’s nemesis (aren’t we all, these days?) in the ping-pong drama Marty Supreme.

What follows is our full conversation, edited for clarity and length. Read it slowly. That, I think, is the point.

Tim Leberecht, co-founder, House of Beautiful Business

***

What did you do today that you would consider wise—if anything?

No one has really accused me of wisdom before. But you could ask what I’ve done that is nourishing—and the hope is that almost everything I’ve done is nourishing. I left my office in midtown Manhattan for a tiny apartment in the middle of nowhere in Japan in order to try to live a little more intentionally. So today I woke up before first light, had breakfast, sat at my desk for five hours writing. I took a walk, came back, and read for an hour. Then, only then—after six hours of work—I went online for the first time to take care of my emails. Then I walked up the hill to play ping pong, and scurried back to talk to you. A life as free as possible of rush and distraction.

Your work began with movement—nomadism, a “global soul” (the title of one of your books), outward travel. And it has shifted, over time, toward stillness and the inner landscape. How do you understand that arc?

I think the more you travel, the more you realize that the most interesting journey is the one happening inside you. For a long time I was going outward, trying to document the world. And at some point I understood that the more I could quiet the noise inside, the more clearly I could see. That’s partly why I moved to Japan: to live somewhere where I don’t speak the language, in a two-room apartment in a town where I know almost nobody. To go places inwardly I wouldn’t go otherwise. I’m deliberately crawling backwards—away from the moment, away from the chatter, away from my own résumé. Moving steadily back toward the 13th century.

And I’ve really had to make a full-hearted, almost spiritual commitment to the long term—to addressing what I think is not changing in the world, amidst all the constant change. I ask myself: what would be interesting to a reader five years from now, if there are readers? I’m not trying to keep up with the moment, because the moment is accelerating at such a pace that the more you try to keep up with it, the further you fall behind.

Speaking of the moment, you now do countless podcasts for each book launch. Is the book finished as a medium?

Dramatically changed. When I started doing TED talks, I could see that TED was displacing the essay. Now the podcast has displaced the book. I’m very glad I have a savvy young publisher and publicist in New York who understands this. But probably not many people who hear me on podcasts are going to buy the book. Books are not an easy sell at this point.

But I’ve come to feel that my job is to write in very, very long sentences. Very slow prose. Books are not the medium of right now—but that’s almost why I write them. There’s a longing in many people to be rescued from the bombardment of social media and constant news. I’m trying to write against the moment, not ahead of it. Something to rescue people from the chatter, not add to it.

Stillness is genuinely hard. And silence is ambivalent, complicated. Arguably, the most terrifying, or at least most uncomfortable and the most beautiful moments in life are silent. Can you share a moment when silence was beautiful, and one when it was frightening for you?

A ‘moment of silence’—we all know what that means. It’s when we gather in reverence, in wonder, in tribute. When we remember someone who has gone. When we come closer to something that has moved us. That’s the silence I try to seek out: not an absence of noise, but a presence. I’ve retreated more than a hundred times over thirty-four years to a Benedictine monastery above the ocean in California. The silence there isn’t empty—it’s almost alive. It feels like transparent glass walls created by decades of prayer. You step into it and come back to your senses. You step out of your mind and into the world as it actually is. You remember what you love. You remember what really matters. It’s like leaving a glass of water in a sink overnight—everything solid rises to the top.

The terrifying silence is the one we’ve all been in: when you’re with your partner and you’re receiving—or giving—the silent treatment. Silence can be a weapon, a voice of hostility. So I think we have the same choice we have in every part of life: which silence do we seek out? We all know which friends will lift us up and which will get us down. We know which silences nourish us and which leave us more unsettled. Pascal said all the cause of our unhappiness is the inability to sit for twenty minutes. That’s three percent of our waking day. Twenty minutes! If we could just sit without our devices, gathering ourselves, perhaps setting a tone for the day, for twenty minutes, I think it would transform the other 97 percent. The best investment we could make, actually.

“My mind is essentially artificial intelligence—a very fast computer not really connected to the heart or the soul.”

In his Beautiful Business School Letter this week, our writer Marc Cinanni asked, “was wisdom ever in the head to begin with?” What is your relationship to your body when it comes to knowing?

Not rich enough—that’s the simple answer. And I agree that wisdom is mostly about getting out of your mind. The closest equivalent I have is coming to my senses: being in a situation where I’m not thinking, I’m seeing, I’m smelling, I’m hearing, I’m feeling. That’s also the definition of love. That’s probably the definition of contemplation.

I’ve spent my whole adult life as a freelance writer at a desk. And it took me a while to realize that the best writing I do is when I take a walk. At my desk I’m hemmed in by my outlines, my notes, my buzzing mind. As soon as I walk away, I’m essentially emptying my mind, allowing myself to be filled with things much more interesting than I or my thoughts will ever be. My mind is essentially artificial intelligence—a very fast computer not really connected to the heart or the soul. So my imperative, as you suggest, is to go to the places where the heart and soul open. And the body is probably the means to that.

T.S. Eliot, in his 1934 play The Rock, asked: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, and the knowledge we have lost in information?” Does that land differently now?

Curiously, in the age of information, I think we know less about the world than ever before. And we’re probably further from wisdom than we might be otherwise. One reason I go into silence is that even in a relatively simple and uncluttered life like mine, there are a thousand things coming in: the latest update, a heartfelt email from a friend who’s just had a terrible shock, the news from Gaza, all of it. And it’s very hard to sift what is essential from what is trivial—which is probably another definition of wisdom. But as soon as I step into silence, I’m freed from my head. I remember what I love. I remember what’s essential and what lasts.

You spent time with Leonard Cohen when he was a Zen monk. He understood both wisdom and romance—sometimes in contradiction. Was he wise?

He was wise because he knew his own follies. He never pretended to be above it all. Usually he was at the bottom of it all. He was wise about his many defeats in love. He had this strong spiritual impulse—when I first met him, he was a practicing Zen monk—but it was always in opposition to his strong romantic impulse. Love always beckoned him, always took him away from the angels. But he was a connoisseur of the depths of the human heart.

He was also the most articulate person I had ever met. A wizard with words, not just in his songs and poems, but in his day-to-day speech. And so for him to take me out to this front lawn, sit down beside me, and say nothing—more nothing, and more nothing, for twenty minutes—I thought: this is real trust. This is the ultimate form of intimacy. Henry David Thoreau once said, ‘speech is for the hard of hearing.’ Because if you’re truly with someone you know and trust well, words sometimes just come in the way of something much more profound.

“If you only have wisdom and no heart, you’re going to be rigid. If you only have heart and no wisdom, you’re going to be lost.”

Wisdom and romance—are they opposed? I recently wrote about Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence, which portrays an obsessive, irrational, life-consuming love. The narrator says at the end that he lived a very happy life. His life though, one could argue, was the antithesis of wise. Is a life full of wisdom a boring life?

Look at Leonard Cohen. No. I think of romance as discerning realism. I’ve traveled to North Korea and Yemen and Haiti and Tibet and every oppressed place I can, so I’m seeing firsthand what’s going on in the world—but I never want to give up on it. Our aim, for most of us, is to balance a sense of reality with a sense of possibility. Romance is never to give up on the sense of possibility, on the beautiful things that can come when least expected. It walks hand-in-hand with realism—the realism that tells us every honeymoon is followed by a marriage, and no marriage is easy.

Tibetan Buddhists always talk about wisdom and compassion as inseparable. If you only have wisdom and no heart, you’re going to be rigid. If you only have heart and no wisdom, you’re going to be lost. Leonard Cohen is an example: everyone could feel he was a wise, rabbinical Zen teacher, and everyone could feel he was a romantic. Maybe he wouldn’t have had the depth and intimacy he had without both components. His whole life was playing them off against one another. And the beauty of his songs is that when he addresses a ‘you,’ you can’t tell if it’s a goddess or a god. You can’t tell if it’s a love song or a prayer. He lived at that place where wisdom and romance become the same thing.

“If you’re trying to come up with something fresh, you can only do that by separating yourself from the everyday conversation.”

Wisdom often means making the right decision in a position of dilemma. Stay in my own world or extend into the outer world? Stay in silence or speak up? Stay in solitude or seek community? Stay in a relationship or leave? Stay in a job or quit? And I think wisdom often means saying no—it means staying, it means resisting the worldly temptations of adventure and novelty. But in business and entrepreneurship, with this mandate to build and create, it seems to require the opposite: a youthful naivete, a kind of irrational exuberance, even hubris. So—can business leaders actually be wise? Or is wisdom fundamentally counter to the very essence of business?

I’d say you can’t be busy and wise at the same time. Those who are too busy tend not to be wise, while those who are wise are never too busy. But business does not have to be busy-ness. And I would say business leaders, more than anybody, have to be wise. The designer Philippe Starck, maybe not your typical business leader, was once asked how he keeps coming up with original ideas. Very easy, he said: ‘Every summer, for three months, I go to the countryside in France with no television, living quietly. I’m not hearing the conventional wisdom. I’m not part of the collective chatter. So when I return to Paris, everything I come up with will be different.’

So I find, in a business context, that if you’re trying to come up with something fresh, you can do that only by separating yourself from the everyday conversation. You make an advance by going on retreat. By stepping back. Doing nothing—that’s how something more powerful arises.

And I’ve come to feel that creativity only comes in the spaces between thoughts. In the moments where you’re not forcing it. It is much more likely to come when I’m walking to the health club than when I’m at my desk. The body again. I would trust it—even in business—as the place where fresh ideas arrive.

What has Japan taught you about wisdom?

I came to Japan partly because everything I’d been taught in England and America was about how to speak. And I thought: what I really need is to learn how to listen. The Japanese people I’ve met are more responsive to the outside world, better at listening, less involved in themselves, than almost anyone I’ve encountered. I also came to learn to be silent. In New York I was chattering all the time and therefore couldn’t see beyond my own thoughts.

And in a concrete way: Japan taught me about community and responsibility as more individualistic societies had not. When I got off the bus to come and talk to you just now, I passed a map at our bus stop showing every single house in the neighborhood and who lives there—a way of saying each person is responsible for everybody else’s children. Every time I walk down the street here and see a piece of trash, I reflexively reach down and pick it up. I was not doing that in New York City. That small accountability is not a small thing.

The Japanese are also, I think, very good at seeing reality as a partner rather than an enemy. Growing up in America, you get a sense that you’re remaking reality all the time. Climate crisis and much else remind us that that doesn’t always work. My neighbors here have lived for 1,600 years with tsunamis and earthquakes and war and plague—with uncertainty as a condition of life, not an interruption. So when the pandemic came, life pretty much went on as normal here. Each time I flew back into Los Angeles, I felt I was flying into a cauldron of panic among people who thought: why has reality upended my plans? Japan seems better able to surrender to reality—to find its sense of possibility within it, rather than hoping to transform all of it instantly.

“That’s why people at my age start fretting so much about legacy: because they feel their life isn’t worth very much unless people forty years from now can gain something from it.”

Where does the mystic fit in all of this—in the mosaic of ways of knowing?

The mystic is the one who knows that what we’re doing from moment to moment isn’t the whole of the story. And all of us sense that. We have intimations—when we fall in love, when we’re on a beautiful hilltop, when we’re silenced by wonder. But those moments leave quickly. What I sense is happening nowadays is that as I’m driving at high speed from the bank to the supermarket to the pharmacy, taking in the news and responding to 1,600 emails—some part of me thinks: this isn’t the whole of the story. If this is the whole of my life, it’s rather an empty one. And so the mystic is the one always reminding us of T.S. Eliot’s line: ‘where is the life we have lost in living?’ There is something beyond this that you touch now and then. To pretend it doesn’t exist, or to forget about it, is to do yourself a great disservice.

I love that Emily Dickinson featured in your school’s thinking. I spend a lot of my time reading her poems. And what I love is that you will never get to the bottom of them. They’re about the ineffable, the indefinable. You can’t explain them away. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true. The Dalai Lama spends the first four hours of every day meditating—which is a way of living with the mystery, with all the things you don’t know and can’t explain, and seeing that they may be right at the center of life.

Final question, from a literary questionnaire. A question by Swiss writer Max Frisch that has always haunted me: Are you sure that the preservation of humankind really interests you? Even when you and all the people you know are no longer alive?

For me, selfishly, as a writer and a reader, I have to say yes. I would be bereft if there were no Handel in the world, no Shakespeare, no Proust. We are generally defined by what we leave behind. The hope is that whatever we leave—whether it’s grandchildren, works of art, or a house of beautiful business—is going to last for several generations after we do. That’s why people at my age start fretting so much about legacy: because they feel their life isn’t worth very much unless people forty years from now can gain something from it.

But you’re also asking something harder: can empathy be abstract? Can you have empathy with something as vast as humanity—people you’ll never meet, in times you’ll never see? The first rule of journalism is that when 800,000 people are suffering from a drought, you tell the story of just one. Because if you say 800,000 people are suffering, every reader glazes over. Empathy has to start with the individual, and then slowly you try to make the individual speak for something larger.

But it is a good question. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

***

The inaugural cohort of The Beautiful Business School just graduated, and we are now offering first-mover passes for the second edition later this year. The Beautiful Business School is a one-of-a-kind online learning journey that offers orientation and hope in a time of uncertainty and confusion, and provides you with a comprehensive, decidedly humanist playbook for the age of AI. Over the course of seven weeks, you’ll embark on a deep, dynamic journey into the art and practice of beautiful business. Through live sessions, expert guidance, improv, a curated library, and interaction with AI agents and a vibrant global community of peers, you’ll develop the creative insight and human leadership needed to shape a more beautiful future.

Get your first-mover seat

The House of Beautiful Business turns ten this year. We’re marking this milestone by renewing our mission: to shape a humanist future in and through business, in partnership with AI, and for the benefit of all life on earth. Taking place in Athens, Greece, from May 7–10, 2026, the World Beautiful Business Forum is a gathering for those who dream bigger, aim higher, and long for more: four days, five acts, 750 attendees, more than 85 speakers and performers, eight amazing venues in the heart of Athens, a 42-kilometer AI Democracy Marathon, and a program designed to stretch how you think, feel, and act in business—and beyond. We are offering special rates for nonprofits and students, as well as solopreneurs, founders, small businesses, and Greek residents. It will be EPIC! Only a few passes remain.

Get your pass

by Tim Leberecht

Yesterday, after five weeks of asynchronous prompts and practices, as well as live online gatherings, we convened the 100 students of The Beautiful Business School’s inaugural cohort on Zoom to delve into the fifth and final archetype of Beautiful Business: The Creator.

But this time was different.

Instead of a carefully curated program—a special guest, a lecture or moderated conversation, a somatic exercise—the students were greeted not by the hosts, but by a shared screen displaying a blank Google Doc.

Then an invisible human hand began typing on it, a bit nervously:

“Welcome.

Today you will create something from scratch, together.

The task: create a one-pager with 10 Beautiful Business Practices that our team can turn into a poster—one that should hang in every workplace around the world.

Three rules only:

1. You have 45 minutes.

2. Everybody must be involved (somehow).

3. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Whatever exists after 45 minutes is the poster.

Over to you.”

Next: everyone froze. No one said a word.

Then someone spoke up. The group got going, self-organized into breakouts, and began discussing the ideation and decision-making process. Eventually, after 45 minutes, they had collectively produced an impressive list of practices—or rather, lists. With the help of AI, they made them more coherent.

But what proved more interesting than the outcome was the process.

Here are a few of my observations:

1. Creativity is a social experiment. Social dynamics are both the primary enabler and the primary constraint. And the outcome of any creative task remains open-ended and unpredictable.

2. True community (beyond a “pseudo-community” defined by shared rhetoric) forms in the face of crisis—when people are confronted with the pressure to make a decision. This was one such crisis. Even though the students had already spent six hours together in the preceding weeks, this was the first time they truly bonded—through the struggle. They experienced the pain (and joy) of creation together.

3. Politeness is a sign that the connections within a group are not yet deep. Nobody wanted to take the lead, overstep boundaries, or take up too much air. Everyone wanted to be equitable and mindful of introverts. This apprehension inevitably led some to suggest turning to AI to make decisions on behalf of the humans.

4. This was a silly, fun, almost impossible creative task. But it quickly became evident that the stakes were surprisingly high. Everybody had skin in the game. No one left. Everyone wanted to live up to the challenge—for themselves and for the group.

5. We do what we’re told (especially in school). While a few students wondered about the purpose of the challenge, not a single one refused to take part or rebelled against it.

6. Creativity may feel better in company, but it is often more creative alone. Or, as one of the students put it in the chat: “Creativity is like masturbation. You discover new places better by yourself than with another person.”

7. The best ideas are specific. “Spend the first ten minutes every morning at work finding people you want to smile at” beats “Be kind and nice to others” any time.

8. Creativity is a contact sport. Online co-creation is therefore far more daunting. The very fact that Zoom meetings remove friction—by cutting social and sensory distractions—makes them less creative.

9. Humans are mystified by human behavior. Almost everybody stayed on for a debrief after the end of class because they felt the urge to unpack and make sense of what had happened.

10. Humans—especially when collaborating and co-creating—are messy, inefficient, and somewhat absurd. Yet their profound desire to be seen, to belong, and to connect is, for lack of a better word, deeply human.

11. Creativity is simple. With the words of romantic poet William Wordsworth: “To begin, begin.” With the words of our musical director, multi-instrumentalist Mark Aanderud: “Play. Stop. Play. Stop.”

12. AI is always in the room. It has quietly become a constant companion in the creative process, and the degree to which we trust it is astonishing.

Apropos, we asked Claude to help synthesize the group’s work. Here they are: 10 Beautiful Business Practices.

It was a session neither of us will forget anytime soon. We learned a lot—not necessarily about Beautiful Business, but about each other and ourselves.

And that is very much the point of any human education, isn’t it?

***

An initiative by the House of Beautiful Business, The Beautiful Business School is a one-of-a-kind online learning journey that offers orientation and hope in a time of uncertainty and confusion, and provides students with a comprehensive, decidedly humanist playbook for the age of AI. Over the course of six weeks, participants embark on a deep, dynamic journey into the art and practice of beautiful business. Through live sessions every Thursday, expert guidance, improv, a curated library, and interaction with AI agents and a vibrant global community of peers,, they’ll develop the creative insight and human leadership needed to shape a more beautiful future. The next cohort will launch this October. Learn more.

by Marc Cinanni

It’s a chilling thought.

Especially in an era where we’ve been trained to look forward. Christmas morning, the next season of Stranger Things, perhaps being old and retired. We measure our lives by what comes next. We keep going, not because it’s right, but because stopping scares us.

And I’m blaming breakfast.

Or rather, our obsession with beginnings. Consider the generic LinkedIn image whenever someone announces a new role (you know the one). Yet we have no pre-chosen design for “I’m ending a beautiful experience.” That moment is left to the individual. There’s no template, no shared language, no public recognition.

But forget about LinkedIn. The main theme is our deeper discomfort with endings themselves.

Like death. In our modern systems, a body is ushered out of sight before it can be fully seen. Or the successor in some company who’s named before the seat can barely cool down. We bury things and tell ourselves they’re done, but whatever we don’t fully witness doesn’t disappear. It waits.

Endings demand something different of us. They slow us down and ask us to stay with what no longer works without immediately replacing it. It’s walking through the dark instead of always looking for the exit.

The broomstick in the wheel

For many people reading this, the experience isn’t abstract. It shows up every morning on a crowded subway. As in the career that once made sense but now feels thin. But it’s fine because the work still functions, the job still pays, and the brain still performs. Only it doesn’t. Because when something no longer nourishes, it’s like standing in a forest where roots no longer reach water.

We’re all familiar with the subtle feeling when something’s done. The problem is that it’s usually paired with the fear of not knowing what comes next. So we reach for all the familiar buttons: a lateral move, an upskill, or we rebrand (whatever that means).

We treat endings as failures of planning rather than facts of life.

Me, in my twenties, at the United Nations. Present, employed, and already gone.

This photo was taken a short while before I finally left. I’m in my twenties, sitting at the edge of a room at the United Nations in a job many people would have considered a privilege. I’d been recruited into something meaningful, something that sounded noble when explained to others. It felt irresponsible to leave. (I know how fortunate that sounds, and I don’t take it lightly.)

Yet something inside me checked out. Not dramatically, just a subtle sense that the work and I were no longer together. But my days continued and the mission remained hard to argue with, which made it difficult to admit it was over. So I stayed, because I’d been taught (like most of us) to value beginnings way more than endings. I hovered over my tasks, stalled, and waited for some “clarity miracle” to arrive before I could act.

Which brings me to this:

What if clarity isn’t meant to come first? What if the work isn’t to figure out what comes next, but to allow an ending to complete itself?

Endings are immensely uncomfortable because they’re the broomstick in the bicycle wheel. They stop us cold, sometimes throw us into the air. And, they’re a lot of work. Because we don’t just grieve the loss of whatever has ended, but the version of ourselves that once found safety, identity, and pride in it. It’s letting go of all the futures we imagined if only things had lasted a little longer. Which also needs to end.

Make grief great again

We tend to think of grief as something that’s reserved for catastrophes—an untimely death, bad news from the doctor, or some other Tuesday afternoon disaster. But grief just isn’t the tool we reach for during our quieter calamities like a career gone foreign or a friendship that thins out. These losses rarely look legitimate enough to grieve.

Grief is not just some detour we pass on our way to clarity, it’s the passage. It’s both the acknowledgement (and 2026-level maturity) that when we feel “heavy,” it needs to be felt and not mistaken for failure. Which would be manageable, if this were the whole story. Because here’s another complication that needs to be named:

Our personal endings are unfolding against a backdrop of collective ones, forming a tangled pattern that’s hard for us to separate. Like a great big Pollock painting of overlapping losses.

Jackson Pollock. One: Number 31, 1950. 1950. Which I’ve renamed: “Everyone’s mind in 2026”

When Ursula von der Leyen stood in Davos and spoke about Europe permanently shifting away from its old dependencies, what was interesting was not the policy stance, but the language. It wasn’t framed as a temporary adjustment or some phase. It was named as an ending. An announcement that something fundamental wasn’t coming back. Then my homeboy Mark Carney went even further, stressing that the rules-based international order itself is coming to an end.

“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” he said.

Let’s break it down. A transition assumes some form of continuity is on its way. But “rupture” doesn’t. Rupture is code for “we need to acknowledge this loss before we even begin to imagine repair.” As individuals, we feel the end of large systems on a felt level. It affects our bodies, our work, and our sense of orientation.

And uncertainty is not happening in a vacuum. It mirrors a deeper collapse of assumptions about continuity itself. Somewhere, we learned how to keep things going without asking whether they should. Grief is what interrupts that reflex.

The Hinge Generation

Perhaps this is the work of our generation. No more tunnel vision to build, scale (still hate that word), and expand, but to complete. To act as a hinge between what worked and what no longer does. To finish what we inherited.

And what we inherited was real: comfort and stability earned through hardship. Through war, scarcity, repression, and austerity. Institutions built to prevent collapse. Systems designed to hold it all together and stories about progress that once delivered. But those systems were never meant to run indefinitely.

We see the strain everywhere. “Permanent shifts” from government, rerouted supply chains, or climate targets that acknowledge (without really saying it) that secure futures are no longer available to us. Patterns echoed on the personal level via work arrangements, culture lag, and relationships bound by history rather than reality. We still look smooth on the outside, even as something essential has already fallen off.

In the quest to gain all our “security” we lost contact with natural timing where endings are not optimized and rarely lead anywhere besides beneath the ground. To end something takes courage: to stop, to disappoint, to resist the reflex to justify what no longer lives. Because what once protected us slowly trained us to ignore the exhaustion of the personal, social, and ecological.

This is the hinge, this is us.

We notice when continuation is no longer care but mindless momentum. We’re here to allow institutions, roles, and phases of life to finish rather than linger in decrepit form. It may look unremarkable, it may feel like a let down. But this is what it looks like when responsibility replaces ambition.

So perhaps the greatest legacy we can leave is not what we build, but the care with which we bring things to an end.

And then, we wait.

***
Marc Cinanni is the writer and editor of the House of Beautiful Business.

At the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens, we will devote an entire mainstage session to endings: “The End of Humanity—and Business—As We Know It.”

More specifically, we will discuss the end of the liberal order, the end of globalization, the end of capitalism (which has been “late” for quite a while now), the end of human agency…

Most dramatically, we will confront the possibility of the end of civilization itself—featuring civilization collapse scholar Luke Kemp, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, in conversation with writer and curator Bruno Giussani.

For his book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, which took seven years to write, Luke analyzed the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies across 5,000 years.

One pattern emerged clearly: increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse.

Yet while past collapses often improved the lives of people who had suffered under oppressive empires, today’s looming global collapse—fueled by what Luke describes as the “dark triad” of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism—would likely be devastating for most of us.

In Luke’s view, the “global Goliath”—an empire built on technology, nationalism, and extraction—represents humanity’s endgame. He sees only two possibilities: self-destruction or a fundamental transformation of society.

The former, he believes, is more likely. But he insists the fight is still worth waging.

As he puts it in a Guardian interview:

“Collapse isn’t just caused by structures, but also by people. If you want to save the world, the first step is to stop destroying it. In other words: don’t be a dick. Don’t work for big tech, arms manufacturers, or the fossil fuel industry. Don’t accept relationships based on domination—and share power whenever you can.”

Taking place in Athens, Greece, from May 7–10, 2026, the World Beautiful Business Forum is a gathering for those who dream bigger, aim higher, and long for more: four days, five acts, 750 attendees, more than 85 speakers and performers, eight amazing venues in the heart of Athens, a 42-kilometer AI Democracy Marathon, and a program designed to stretch how you think, feel, and act in business—and beyond. We are offering special rates for nonprofits and students, as well as solopreneurs, founders, small businesses, and Greek residents. It will be EPIC!

Get your pass

I’m writing this from Istanbul. It’s Wednesday evening. I’ve been here all week, and I have to tell you: there is something genuinely disorienting about following a war in real time from a city that, as of this afternoon, became part of it.

Let me explain. Earlier today, I spoke by video with Elisabeth Braw—one of Europe’s foremost security analysts and a speaker at our upcoming World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens—about the war that began on February 28, when the United States and Israel launched a joint offensive against Iran.

​Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Her 2024 book, Goodbye, Globalization: The Return of a Divided World (Yale University Press), reads like a slow-motion prophecy of where we’ve ended up. In our conversation she was, I should say, exactly as clear-eyed and unsentimental as she is on the page—and generous enough to share what she actually thinks, not just what’s safe to say.

By Wednesday, over a thousand Iranians were dead, including approximately a hundred and eighty children killed in a school strike in Minab. Six American service members had been killed. Iran had retaliated across nine countries, hitting military bases, hotels, data centers, airports. I asked Elisabeth directly: could Iran escalate further—could it target a NATO member and draw Europe into the conflict? Her answer was careful, measured, analytical. She thought it unlikely.

Less than four hours after we ended the call, Iran fired a ballistic missile at Turkey. NATO air defense systems in the Eastern Mediterranean intercepted and destroyed it before it reached Turkish airspace. But the missile had crossed Iraq and Syria to get there. Istanbul—where I was sitting, where I am sitting now—is a NATO city. Turkish President Erdoğan went on national television. NATO issued a statement condemning the attack. U.S. Defense Secretary Hegseth said he saw “no sense” it would trigger Article 5.

I’ve been following this coverage obsessively—as I suspect you have—and trying to do what we always try to do at the House of Beautiful Business: find meaning in a moment that actively resists it. What I keep returning to is something Elisabeth said near the end of our conversation, about the rules and institutions we built after the catastrophes of the 20th century: that the people who built them did so because they had seen, with their own eyes, what the world looks like without them. That memory is fading. And what is replacing it is moving very fast.

What follows is our conversation, lightly edited. It won’t make you feel better. But it might help you think better—which, right now, feels like the more necessary gift.

Tim Leberecht, co-founder, House of Beautiful Business

Ps. On a related note, in 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, my former colleague Monika Jiang and I wrote about being a beautiful business in a time of war. We also discussed renaming Beauty Shot. The times they are changing—but they’re also not.

***

Elisabeth, how are you keeping up with this—as an analyst and as a person?

It feels like the push notifications come in faster and faster during the night here in Europe, and then you wake up to a completely new picture in the world. I keep up by constantly reading news—but one has to be selective. This is something we’ve all had to learn over the past ten, fifteen years: to become far more information literate. The quality of the information really matters, because these are serious issues. The plethora of sources means you can get information anywhere, which is precisely why you need to know what credible information looks like and how to ascertain it.

What does your credible-source diet look like?

I start every morning with the Financial Times, which really does stand tall as a newspaper of record. The New York Times, the Times of London. And then, Europe: Deutschlandfunk in Germany, RAI in Italy, ERR in Estonia, which I read in English, Yle in Finland, which I read in Swedish, SVT in Sweden, DR in Denmark, which I read in Danish, NRK in Norway, which I read in Norwegian. These are all staffed by journalists who know their trade. I think it’s worth saying this, even as fake news and disinformation proliferate—we are living through a genuinely remarkable era of serious journalism. Then, of course, I have a constant stream of Signal messages from people across the security and policy world. Not just for information, but for real exchanges of analysis and insight.

Based on all of that—what do you believe are the actual reasons Trump decided to go to war with Iran?

What Marco Rubio said publicly, and also told congressional leaders, was that Israel was planning to attack Iran, that the U.S. had received intelligence Iran would retaliate by targeting American interests, and so the U.S. struck preemptively. That’s essentially the only formal account we have. Trump spoke of an imminent threat, which appears to have been this intelligence. But wars are also sometimes initiated because they serve to divert from uncomfortable situations at home—that has happened before, many times. What I can say more confidently is that this appears to have been a war of choice, and one that was apparently prepared well militarily but very poorly in every other respect: no congressional authorization, no engagement with the United Nations, no warning to allies in the region, no preparation for American citizens or businesses on the ground. The fact that U.S. embassies are now urging Americans to find commercial means of departure—after commercial flights have been cancelled—tells you a great deal.

The shifting justifications—imminent threat, nuclear weapons, regime change, missiles—could be described as incoherent. But could we be making a mistake, judging this by standards that no longer apply?

Trump is where he is. The international community can’t dislodge him. And I think it is fair to say that nobody in the international community would shed any tears over the end of Khamenei. But if you are going to go to war, you owe it to your country, to its elected representatives, and to the international community, to explain clearly what you are doing and what you are trying to achieve. This is why we have, painstakingly, since the end of the Second World War and even before that, built this web of international rules and institutions—to bring some order into the world. Without it, the world is simply anarchy. And anarchy serves nobody in the long run, not even the most powerful countries on the planet. We are certainly heading in a more anarchic direction now—and not only because of the United States. Russia, China, and a number of mid-tier countries have also chosen, quite deliberately, to violate international rules.

Iran has already widened the conflict, striking across nine countries. Could it escalate further—could European countries find themselves drawn in?

Iran’s strategy appears to be to strike America’s allies in the region—not because they had anything to do with this, but because if they suffer the pain of this conflict, they will lobby Trump very hard for an end to it. I feel genuine sympathy for the Gulf states. They built extraordinary economies in a very turbulent region, precisely because they were perceived as stable and safe. That is now seriously at risk. As for European countries: I don’t think Iran will strike them directly. Almost all are NATO members, and attacking one would trigger a collective response Iran couldn’t absorb—especially given that weapons supplies are already a constraint in this war. Iran simply doesn’t have unlimited supplies of weapons.

What is your best-case scenario, and what is your worst case?

The best case is that it ends quickly, with a new Iranian leadership willing to take a less confrontational direction, and both sides able to declare some version of their objectives met. The worst case is a prolonged war: more deaths, more destruction inside Iran and across the region, continued casualties among American service personnel, and extended economic turbulence. Markets are down. Shipping is disrupted, with cascading consequences throughout global supply chains. The price of oil has gone up. Trump has said the war may last four to five weeks—but he hasn’t said what that estimate is based on. And famously, wars take two to tango. Iran may have rather different views on the timeline.

Who are the winners and losers—including bystanders?

Israel is a winner. The Gulf states are clearly losers. They built phenomenal economies in a turbulent region because they were perceived as stable, secure places to live and do business. That perception is now at risk. Expats are trying to leave. Businesses haven’t moved out yet, but they will think about the Gulf states very differently now—knowing that if a war erupts in Iran, their employees and offices can be struck. And Oman put real effort—credibility, good faith, genuine diplomatic labor—into brokering peace. Unbeknownst to Oman, the US was planning the war even as the talks were being held. On Friday, the Omani foreign minister announced that a deal was within reach. The bombs fell that same night. For Oman, that is a tragic turn.

Macron has announced France will expand its nuclear deterrent, and there are discussions about a European nuclear umbrella. Are we entering a new arms race?

We have been in an arms race in Europe for the better part of a decade, accelerating sharply since the invasion of Ukraine. France’s nuclear arsenal is significantly smaller than America’s, but you don’t need a thousand warheads to annihilate the world. A much smaller number is sufficient, and France has that. I don’t think more Western countries will pursue nuclear weapons—they are bound by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But we could well see other sophisticated states try. Every nuclear warhead that exists on this planet is a risk to its survival. It’s frightening that we are even having this conversation.

When I was growing up in Europe in the 1980s, there was a real belief in multilateralism, in a rules-based international order. Is what we’re seeing now an aberration—or were we naive all along?

At the beginning of the 1990s, there was a very genuine hope that the brutality of the Cold War—the proxy conflicts, the power competition, the constant risk of another world war—wouldn’t happen again, because it had been so awful. In some of the world’s leading countries, people have simply forgotten how terrible that was. Now they are trying something similar. People who were alive during the Cold War and who truly remember it would never wish for anything other than a rules-based world—for themselves and for their children. Unfortunately, there are not enough of those people, or not enough who want to remember. That’s why we’re seeing these instincts toward power politics, toward might-is-right, returning. It will play out over the coming years, and we will hopefully discover that even the most powerful countries don’t benefit from a world where anarchy rules. But in the meantime, we all have to live through it. And that’s why it matters—for countries, for businesses, for ordinary citizens—to recognize: we are part of this now. Even though we had no say in how it started. It is the new reality.

***

Elisabeth Braw is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. A former Senior Research Fellow at RUSI and the American Enterprise Institute, she is the author of Goodbye, Globalization: The Return of a Divided World (2024), The Defender’s Dilemma (2022), and God’s Spies (2019). Her forthcoming book is The Undersea War. She is a columnist for Foreign Policy and Politico Europe, and a member of the UK National Preparedness Commission.

The House of Beautiful Business turns ten this year. We’re marking this milestone by renewing our mission: to shape a humanist future in and through business, in partnership with AI, and for the benefit of all life on earth. Taking place in Athens, Greece, from May 7–10, 2026, the World Beautiful Business Forum is a gathering for those who dream bigger, aim higher, and long for more: four days, five acts, 750 attendees, more than 85 speakers and performers, six amazing venues in the heart of Athens, a 42-kilometer AI Democracy Marathon, and a program designed to stretch how you think, feel, and act in business—and beyond. We are offering special rates for nonprofits and students, as well as solopreneurs, founders, small businesses, and Greek residents. It will be EPIC!

Get your pass

Community Updates

Gerhard Remlein is building his practice, Metabolists, based on the belief that organizations are living systems. He approached us with an idea we loved: creating a collective portrait of the organizational worlds across the HoBB community. To make it possible, we invite you to take a short survey that takes about 12 minutes to complete. Your anonymous responses will contribute to this collective portrait, which we’ll reveal at the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens. In return, you’ll receive a free personal Organizational Vitality Portrait—a snapshot of where your organization currently stands in its life cycle.

“Futurist Monk” and Athens speaker Shoukei Matsumoto is offering a Buddhist perspective on Anthropic’s conflict with the U.S. government: “The Lotus in the Mud and Our Karma: Living the ‘Infinite Game’ in the Age of AI.”

AI inclusion activist and Athens speaker Julia Pahina was named a Finalist for the 2025/26 She Shapes AI Global Awards for AI and Thought-Leadership.

Philosopher and Athens speaker Bayo Akomolafe and ritual researcher Laura Peña Zanatta have launched The School of Cracks, an online course plus in-person retreat exploring “the idea that societal systems and certainties have inherent fissures (cracks) that serve as potent sites for unexpected transformation and new ways of being.”

Eight years after the release of her blockbuster The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker has announced a timely new book about “the transformative power of conflict”: The Art of Fighting (available in September, pre-order now).

Author, curator, podcaster, and Athens speaker Bruno Giussani has published Our Minds Under Siege: How to Avoid Being Manipulated in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Must-read!

First, thank you for spending time in the House of Beautiful Business and for subscribing to Beauty Shot. I hope you’ve been enjoying our long-form perspectives and weekly insights. Happy to say there’s more to come: later this year, we plan to launch a live video series and a Substack group chat. Stay tuned...

Now, if Beauty Shot represents the mind of our community, then our gatherings are our heart. And today, I’m happy to share an update on the most beautiful event of them all:

The World Beautiful Business Forum, taking place May 7–10, 2026, in Athens, Greece

Our tagline, “The most human gathering for the more-than-human world,” is the compass by which we’re curating this experience. And as we mark the HoBB’s ten-year anniversary, the World Beautiful Business Forum will bring together over 750 international participants alongside the local community in Athens to shape a more beautiful way forward—one grounded in humanist values, in partnership with AI, and in service of all life on Earth.

Across four days, the program will unfold through five mainstage sessions (structured in homage to Greek drama) and more than 80 concurrent sessions (over 150 hours!) organized into ten programming tracks and one powerful community. They offer distinct paths toward a life-centered economy, developed in collaboration with guest curators and partners.

So…drumroll…I’m delighted (and honestly a little anxious) to unveil the program for the World Beautiful Business Forum 2026:

Take a look

You’ll find a richly-layered and ambitious agenda. More than 100 speakers, facilitators, and performers—many longtime members of our community—and the most expansive program we’ve ever created.

Please note that this is a living program. As we continue confirming new speakers, artists, and partners, some elements may evolve, so we’ll keep you updated along the way.

A few highlights:

• Our mainstage venue: the Olympia City Music Theatre “Maria Callas,” named after the legendary soprano who performed there early in her career.

• Futurist monk Shoukei Matsumoto told me that his first act in Athens—where he has never been—would be to clean our venue. A beautiful Buddhist gesture. He will do so, and you are welcome to join him.

• On the trading floor of the former Athens Stock Exchange, we will stage the Athens Regenerative Exchange—a game and social experiment introducing alternative economic frameworks and testing the limits of growth—yours included.

• A New York Times journalist, former “Corner Office” columnist, climate reporter, and author of Dirtbag Billionaire, a portrait of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, David Gelles will step into the arena to explore what late capitalism may yet become.

• Pension Poker: One third of global assets are locked into maintaining extractive business-as-usual. The crash is coming, but there’s another way. Game?

• Agentic Agora: How will agentic AI reshape self-determination, organizational designs, and brands?

• The AI Democracy Marathon—a human-machine collaboration—will consist of facilitated walks across Athens totaling 42.2 kilometers, the length of the original Marathon. Each walk invites a moving dialogue on how democracy can be preserved, transformed, or reimagined in a more-than-human world. When humans rest, machines will continue the work: the AIssembly—our own mini “Moltbook”—will take the night shift.

• Can we expand the demos to include non-human life? James Bridle believes so.

• Speed-date a philosopher—and pose your most profound questions.

• Among them: What is a good life in a more-than-human world? We will take the time to have a very good conversation about it.

• The Reality Tunnels: What happens when every faction inhabits its own AI-generated reality? Is the “splinternet of beliefs,” as Zoe Scaman calls it, here to stay?

• Oracles from the past, present, and future, and fresh perspectives on prediction markets and self-fulfilling prophecies by tech philosopher and Prophecy author Carissa Véliz.

• Down the rabbit hole into civilization collapse with Luke Kemp, and out of it with Rachel Goslins and “the best case scenario.”

• A CEO Roundtable like you’ve never seen it before.

• “Make babies with your phone”—and the Smartphone Orchestra. Take part in this award-winning interactive experience six generations into the future.

• Hands-on workshops on context engineering, embodied intimacy, collaborative foresight, aura farming, responsible travel, awe and awkwardness, psychedelics and aging, and more.

• Curated dinners, excursions, immersions, night walks, tightropes, sacred beats, a 9-to-5 workday performance, a public and artful Green Room, picnics in the National Garden, and a beautiful game (football) match. And much more.

• Plus, a four-day sailing journey to conclude it all: the Aegean Passage.

Yet our true protagonist and platform is the city of Athens itself. The city is, in essence, cool again. Vibrant, electric, alive. It’s grown on me immensely ever since I set foot here: nostalgic and irreverent at once, complex and full of paradox, marked by a gritty, honest beauty the world urgently needs. As the birthplace of democracy and cradle of Western philosophy, it is the perfect setting to connect ancient knowledge with its newest evolution: artificial intelligence.

Join me in Athens

Ten years of House of Beautiful Business. It has been a labor of love, perhaps my life’s work, and it remains unfinished business.

I sincerely hope you will join our community and me in Athens for this milestone and new beginning.

It will be an epic celebration of our humanity, and a bold departure into whatever comes next.

See you there!

Tim Leberecht

Co-founder and co-CEO, House of Beautiful Business

Ps. Huge thanks to our partners!

By Tim Leberecht

“Nihilism is now the lingua franca of the internet,” Charlie Warzel writes in his poignant Atlantic essay, This Is What It Looks Like When Nothing Matters. For a technology that began with the most idealistic aspirations, this marks a steep fall from grace.

The question is whether the internet perfectly represents the current state of our civilization—and therefore its demise—or merely amplifies one part of it. Is it an accurate mirror of our humanity, or an aberration inflated by its inherent network effects? In other words, can we salvage the present crisis by “fixing the internet,” or must we search for a third place, a new utopia, somewhere beyond the digital terrain? Do we regulate it, evolve it, or overcome it altogether?

Nothing

For many of us, this is little more than a thought experiment. The matrix is inexorable. We can no longer disentangle our lives from it. And so vice over virtue, rogue over refined, has become the governing aesthetic. The signaling is constant. Matt Klein and Edmond Lau have called it “Dark Mode”: the unabashedly vulgar, brutal, and cruel digital modus operandi of a new Dark Age. Trolling, harassment, toxicity, deepfakes, memeification, content farming—and now AI slop—are its staples.

Worse, vice has become a vicious cycle. Nihilism is both cause and consequence. “Both culture and counterculture taught new generations to be so wary of being deceived and manipulated, it was best to hold nothing in your heart at all,” Warzel quotes Dale Beran, chronicler of the anti-woke internet community 4chan.

Holding nothing in our hearts has, of course, always been the first order of business. “If you need a friend, get a dog,” Gordon Gekko famously advised in Wall Street. Transactionalism, cynicism—knowing “the price of everything and the value of nothing,” as Oscar Wilde put it—have long rewarded those relentlessly climbing the ladder, pursuing ambition with laser focus.

What is novel is that building a career today often means being excellent at building a career; that access comes from demonstrating one’s ability to access; that nothing succeeds like success, and nothing generates more attention than the ability to generate attention. It is a shallow game—and always rigged, unless it is our own.

More striking still is how brazenly nihilism has displaced competing ideologies. It has become a pervasive form of soft totalitarianism, dismissing all other visions of the good life as quaint, naïve, inconsequential—or, the ultimate dismissal: sentimental. The tyrants of the past wore cynicism as armor, protecting themselves from disappointment or deletion. Now the emperor has no clothes, but his nakedness is no longer a vulnerability. It is nothing.

The empire’s nemesis is not liberalism or democracy, but sentimentality. Beyond emotion—which machines already manipulate and increasingly manufacture—sentimentality suggests something deeper: a worldview that accepts weakness as a shared human condition, as a human right. A way of living that risks ridicule, hurt, even erasure, because it believes in the possibility—and beauty—of love.

This may be the ultimate choice in the face of authoritarianism and superintelligence: a life with love and beauty, or one without.

The true victory of nihilism is not that it has placed nothing at the center of politics, society, and relationships. It is that it has persuaded us that what we have is nothing. Not merely the hollowness of nihilism itself, but the suspicion that our faith in love, justice, meaning, and progress is hollow.

We must not concede that ground. Resistance begins within—not as a vague appeal to kumbaya sentiment, but as a deliberate act: first, create a love story; then, a house of many stories.

Everything

Last month, I saw Ali Kazma’s exhibition Landscapes of the Mind at Istanbul Modern. One work, Sentimental / A House of Ink, offered an intimate portrait of the archive and creative process of Nobel Prize winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. And indeed, if one word could define Pamuk’s work—fortunately, no single word can—it might be “sentimental.”

There is a new Netflix adaptation of The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk’s 2008 novel of the same title. It tells the story of Kemal, a wealthy businessman about to be engaged, and his illicit, obsessive love for his distant cousin, Füsun. Kemal begins collecting her personal objects—shoes, hairpins, even cigarette butts (4,213 of them, to be precise)—eventually creating a real-life museum devoted to their love.

Set in secular 1970s Turkey, it is a story of amour fou, driven by the desire to want everything and possess everything desired. What Kemal and Füsun receive instead is conflict, complication, and loss. Kemal seeks to preserve “the happiest time of my life,” as he calls it, through tokens that suspend time.

The museum exists—even though the story is fiction. In a brilliant conceptual gesture, Pamuk planned it alongside the novel, as early as in the mid-1990s. In 1999, he purchased a building in Istanbul’s Çukurcuma neighborhood, in a location in a narrow alley near streets lined with cafés, hotels, and shops now catering to tourists that served as the fictional home of Füsun and her family in the book. Opening in 2012, the tiny museum is a temple of sentimentality and nostalgia, a place that epitomizes the term “labor of love.”

The Museum of Innocence does not yearn for naïve irrationality. It reclaims an innocent, impossible form of love—one that follows desire unconditionally, madly, even at the cost of social exile. Pamuk’s Turkey, perpetually torn between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, mirrors this tension: too eager to belong elsewhere, too quick to doubt its own cultural singularity.

I wrote about the Museum of Innocence in my first book, The Business Romantic: Give Everything, Quantify Nothing, and Create Something Greater Than Yourself (2015). I did not know then that my book would lead me to my partner, Eda, a Turkish literary agent and curator who sold the Turkish rights. We remained in touch; many years later, friendship turned into romance.

I visited her every month for a year on Istanbul’s Anatolian side, in Kadıköy, before moving in together into a flat in Cihangir on the European side—once a bohemian enclave, now layered with Airbnbs and coffee chains, yet still ten times more sensuous than most of the world’s urban neighborhoods. Our apartment, we realized, was four blocks from Pamuk’s home overlooking the Cihangir mosque and two blocks from the Museum of Innocence.

Strangely, I had never visited the museum before. My reflections had been based on secondhand accounts. A few weeks after moving, Eda and I finally went—she, too, had never been, despite living in Istanbul for fifteen years. When we witnessed the excessive care, the meticulous crafting of the museum in person, we remembered Pamuk’s genius. It revealed how obsessive he was about curation—no less than Kemal about Füsun. His writing is curation; his curation is writing. The items in the novel and museum are stubborn attempts to protect love from trivialization, from memeification, by making it concrete after the fact. Kemal’s (and Pamuk’s) collection is where “everything fake becomes real.”

Novel, museum, film: together, a Gesamtkunstwerk. Readers visit the museum; visitors read the novel; viewers do both. A virtuous cycle of love.

Each of the three media—the novel, the museum, the film—brings the objects of love to life, quite literally. You may also say, it objectifies (a) love, deconstructing its wondersome moments like mechanical miracles. The memorabilia here are memories, and the curation is an act of remembrance. A righting of the wrong, not in a moralistic way, but as an invisible hand, an act of retroactive curation that creates a comforting home for a broken heart. Perhaps that is what all curation ultimately does.

Too much of everything

The novel is controversial, and Pamuk has been accused of romanticizing obsession and toxic masculinity. It is true that the desires he depicts are male phantasies. Füsun cannot have desires of her own; she cannot have Kemal; she cannot have a career. She is the one who sacrifices the most. The novel sheds light on these patriarchal structures. Füsun is “possessed” by Kemal’s imagination, and the museum remains her cage, even after her death.

Some critics have dismissed the film adaptation as “syrupy,” over-the-top, a cheap blend of Douglas Sirk, Almodóvar, and Wong Kar-wai, indulging in symbolism and slow motion excesses. But it is precisely this fearless sweetening that exposes the innocence we have lost—first to irony, then to nihilism. It is uncomfortable to watch, almost embarrassing to admit that it resonates.

In her 2014 essay In Defense of Saccharin(e), Leslie Jamison asks why we dismiss melodrama as dishonest and inferior, why we equate sentimentality with “unearned” artificial emotion:

“At what volume does feeling become sentimental? How obliquely does feeling need to be rendered so that it can be saved from itself? How do we distinguish between pathos and melodrama? Too often, I think, there is the sense that we just know. Well I don’t.”

Watching The Museum of Innocence, I don’t either.

***

You may have lost track. How did we get from internet nihilism to The Museum of Innocence?

That is not the right question. The better one is: How did we get from The Museum of Innocence to the nihilism of today’s internet? To an instant-gratification, rom-competition culture more obsessed with phones than desire, forgetting that “the lover is the one who waits,” as Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse?

Can we reclaim some of that innocence? And what does all of this have to do with business?

To live more beautifully, at work and beyond, we need leaders unafraid of being deceived. Leaders who do not protect themselves by holding nothing in their hearts.

At last week’s Beautiful Business School gathering, leadership scholar Gianpiero Petriglieri offered an uncanny echo of Pamuk: “The moment you put your soul into what you build, you’re going to be afraid of losing it—because you are expressing your love through your work. And there is no way to be human and love without fearing loss.”

In the end, every desire for novelty, adventure, or risk, he suggested, is driven by something deeper: the longing to create one’s own reality—a home. And if that home, with its memories, outlasts its maker and their labor of love, it becomes a museum.

***

The House of Beautiful Business turns ten this year. We’re marking this milestone by renewing our mission: to shape a humanist future in and through business, in partnership with AI, and for the benefit of all life on earth. Taking place in Athens, Greece, from May 7–10, 2026, the World Beautiful Business Forum is a gathering for those who dream bigger, aim higher, and long for more: four days, five acts, 750 attendees, more than 85 speakers and performers, six amazing venues in the heart of Athens, a 42-kilometer AI Democracy Marathon, and a program designed to stretch how you think, feel, and act in business—and beyond. We are offering special rates for nonprofits and students, as well as solopreneurs, founders, small businesses, and Greek residents. It will be EPIC!

Get your pass

As AI moves from assistance to initiative, agency is no longer exclusively human. It is increasingly shared — reshaping how decisions are made inside organizations, and how visibility, trust, and choice are mediated outside, in the marketplace.

We conducted a survey of 900 professionals working with AI as well as in-depth expert interviews with leaders in business, psychology, and technology. We paired these findings with desk research, case studies, academic literature, and emerging market examples. The results can be read in our report Agentic Organizations.

It was developed in collaboration with Hotwire and ROI·DNA as part of a broader conversation on leadership, power, and responsibility in an AI-shaped world. We will deepen this conversation—together with Hotwire—with the Agentic Agora program track in Athens.

Download the report

Community Updates

Matt Klein muses on dinner etiquette and brands: what makes them good guests?

Rimma Boshernitsan makes the case for “a new emerging planetary nervous system” in NOEMA.

You can now pre-order the much anticipated new books by tech philosopher Carissa Véliz (Prophecy) and Mobius Executive Leadership Co-founder and CEO Amy E. Fox (Leading in Chaos), with Nicholas Janni. Both Carissa and Amy will be speakers in Athens.

By Shannon Mullen O’Keefe

It has a kind of ring to it—Autocracy?

Sounds like Anthropologie (the women’s clothing brand)—so it could be a brand name. Here’s how ChatGPT agreed with me:

“As a brand it signals authority, control, centralization, and power dynamics. Used thoughtfully, it can be edgy, critical, or ironic—especially compelling in leadership, ideas, or culture spaces.”

It could just as easily be the name of a media company, a tech or AI governance platform, or even a luxury label. Think “Autocracy Atelier.” Hmm.

But what about “Autocracy” makes it a potentially powerful brand name? ChatGPT again: “gravitas, historical weight, and immediate philosophical tension—a built in critical lens on power…”

Geesh, is autocracy already a brand? No, thank goodness. It is not.

Why are we thinking about this?

In this late stage of capitalism, everything seems to be about branding—selling ourselves, selling anything. We sell beauty, and there is a premium for it. Beauty costs more. Ever seen a strip mall stripped of beauty? A no-name generic mall? Generic means you don’t pay that premium. There’s no brand name, no trademark, no design investment. And if you’ve seen something generic, you know what that looks like: bland. No flare. No creative twists on the signage. No colors. Nothing.

You can charge less for a generic thing. Something without a brand is worth less. Worthless? Almost, but it still costs something because everything must have a price. It doesn’t matter that it is ugly on an urban landscape.

So brands hold elevated value. And the best ones hold a lot of value. The most valuable global brand? Apple is worth something like $470.9 billion dollars.

So if we’re aiming to name a brand, experimenting with a word like Autocracy doesn’t actually seem so absurd. It might catch people’s eyes and, as ChatGPT says, it signals authority.

I thought of the slow creep of brand significance all around us, and how it has become part of how we think (and live). We have “personal brands,” “employee brands,” and we work for a brand. We wear brands. We’ve become branded without feeling the sting of the brand in our flesh.

We are a brand.

But where did this all begin? I did some research (by research I mean I did an internet search) and found that the word brand comes from the Old Norse brandr, meaning “to burn.” It was once a literal act in burning flesh to mark ownership. Later, the mark moved from bodies to objects. And from here, branding morphed into identifying products by their quality and the unique identity of a business. But somewhere between burning flesh and business identity, I wonder if we lost our way. Not realizing that we’ve been owned and controlled by the very idea of branding for some time.

Of course, there is beauty in a brand, the way we think of it. In a conversation about this, a friend challenged my thinking by saying, “I guess I would argue that brands have also given many not only a platform to make their voice heard. But also to have one. They are language-creators, aren’t they?”

Yes, they are.

We’re owned (but won’t admit it)

We identify ourselves with certain brands, they’re creative forces in our lives. They deliver the visual beauty—language—that we’re deprived of, when we’re forced to view something generic.

They clearly delineate expectations for us. We know what to expect at Starbucks, a McDonald’s hamburger can be oddly soothing, and the Nike swoosh urges us to just do it. (And when that swoosh lands on a pair of sneakers, leather is no longer flesh, so it doesn’t seem so bad.)

Brand personas are who we are. We feel part of something, even a community, when we and others choose to associate ourselves with brands. But I think we may want to feel more of that painful sting inherent in the original branding process. I mean, at least the beast that was branded felt branded. They were owned at that point.

I think we’re losing our voices in the process of being branded. We curate our thoughts, ideas, and ways of being to fit a brand, often without noticing that this slowly silences us, and reshapes how we are together in society.

Consider company executives who lead with carefully curated words to protect their brands. As one advisor put it when weighing in on politically charged events in Minneapolis: “Minneapolis isn’t an ethical dilemma, it’s a marketing minefield.”

Or how about: “Build great products. Serve your customers. Create value for stakeholders. But stay in your lane.”

Consumers don’t want to be lectured to by their breakfast cereal brand. And so chief executives study neutrality while taking a stand and taking noncommittal positions. As the capitalist engine speeds up, everything else yields to the consumer.

But what about non-executives?

The sound of not speaking

Individuals may also curate their thoughts and voices in order to maintain a brand-neutral position. Many choose not to speak publicly about issues they feel strongly about because, in the public square, they represent the brand they work for. A company name on a LinkedIn banner is often enough: the person becomes the brand. LinkedIn is full of opinions, just not all of them. The real question is whose voices are missing.

Have we anesthetized our voices in honor of the brand without realizing it? Paychecks. Employee handbooks. When HR sends an all-hands communication, everyone reads it. Carefully worded, aligned with the brand. So while dancing a fine line, in the messaging, a company may nudge employees about how they engage public commentary on certain topics.

One legal team offering this perspective:

“Employers may wish to remind their employees about the potential repercussions of making public political statements or sharing strong opinions online or in the workplace, particularly on social media. They should do so cautiously and carefully weigh workplace policies as well as organizational reputation against evolving legal protections.”

This isn’t surprising. This is just how things are.

(“How we are together” is how we define culture.) We get the value of the brand, and we don’t want to diminish it either. And so a note from HR may be enough for us not to engage further.

Now let’s assume outright silencing is rare. Even then, we often end up censoring ourselves. Some research reinforces the idea that high-performing employees know when to speak up (and when not to.) After all, there are a lot of things on the line with you and me working for a brand. Things like income, reputation, and career trajectory.

So this is something that ideally, we want to be strategic about.

As I was thinking about this, I was reading Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s dystopia in which humans are engineered to serve production. Babies are molded for specific roles through the Bokanovsky Process, producing dozens of identical workers for identical machines. Fortunately, we’re not living in that world.

But aren’t we? We may not be “bokanoskified,” but branding as a cultural force works in a similar way. We aren’t shaped into it from birth, but we willingly drink the soma (Huxley’s intoxicant that keeps society calm, compliant, and at peace).

The intoxication? Our income. Our ego. Our livelihood. Our lifestyle. We buy things (and so we stay silent). What does this mean for our society? Perhaps society is a part of the problem. We all drink the soma. Because before we’re ever hired by a brand, we’re just hopeful to associate ourselves with a brand of high regard.

Top Influencer, Top 10 College, Top 10 Workplace, Top 10 Team.

This is the point.

This is how culture moves now. Not through isolated moments but through shared, branded spectacles that millions absorb at the same time. Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl was exactly that: millions watching in joy and communion, fully branded and easy to absorb.

So what if, without really realizing it, we’ve become brand-builders first, before democracy builders?

This has happened as a silent creep. The same silent creep that kills the frog in boiling water slowly. The water is cool at first, until it’s not, and then, too late, the frog is hard-boiled. (If you’re in Canada, it’s the lobster.) This frog/lobster is us: the same us that might now see Autocracy as a reasonable brand name. ChatGPT simply fills in the blanks with what we’ve already left behind in the digital universe.

Its ideas are ours.

Autocracy Atelier is our idea.

From devotion to disappearance

Years ago I saw the musical Evita.

María Eva Duarte, known as Eva, and then affectionately as Evita, met Juan Perón at a charity event, later becoming the beloved first lady of Argentina during his presidency. There were many reasons people loved her: beauty, her advocacy for trade unions and women, her rise from poverty.

Was she a brand?

Would we brand her today if we could? A fragrance line perhaps—something meant to evoke feminine power, charisma, mythical leadership, political power, even divisive power. Devotion and controversy, some tension in the scent.

Sadly, she lost her life at a very young age, thirty-three years old. Some say she was lobotomized in the end. Was it to prevent her pain, or to contain erratic behavior in a politically charged moment? The darker side of politics that always exists in human nature might suggest the latter.

Later in Argentina, during the years of the Dirty War (1974–1983) as many as 30,000 people disappeared. These were the desaparecidos—often students, the young. The Dirty War was a government’s war against its own people.

There was state-sponsored torture and terrorism. The desaparecidos died by machine gun, but the most haunting were those drugged and dropped from planes into the sea. Disappeared into the sea, to be missed forever.

I thought of the desaparecidos while watching Josh Kline’s video Defining the 21st Century. One sculpture in particular left an impression: a full-sized man in a business suit, curled in a fetal position, sealed inside a clear plastic trash bag. Kline’s sculptural bodies represent workers rendered obsolete by technological change. The “disappeared” of modern economies. Disturbing.

Layoffs are how we are. It is how we act when we face budget constraints. We must keep the brand alive.

But technology now accelerates at an increasing speed. And even as the pace increases, will we numb ourselves each time we say mass goodbyes in the name of capital?

What else does this prepare us for? Kline’s work provokes these questions.

A layoff isn’t like dropping people off a plane into the sea until one day it is dropping people off a plane into the sea.

Remember the frog/lobster us.

Democracy beyond brand

What happens when a government agency uses the same branding playbook as private employment brands? Enticing and nostalgic imagery (Uncle Sam?) There are clear branding guidelines and practices, for everyone to follow. Huxley’s soma soda is available for free: Employer Branding Strategy: How to Recruit and Retain Top Talent.

When this happens, we’re no longer just talking about governance. We’re talking about autocracy as a brand. It’s power without correction, malleable truth, erosion of rights. This pattern has been documented before, read Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum.

Yet the danger I keep returning to comes earlier. It lies in our own habits. When we curate our thoughts to protect brands and consumers, without noticing that we may be surrendering something more precious than any brand could ever be: our rights as citizens. It has a kind of ring to it—Autocracy? Autocracy could be a brand name. “Autocracy Atelier.”

But maybe that is not what we want. Perhaps, engaging the marketing minefield first, will be worth the while in the end. In this future, consumers remain free citizens.

This, in honor of democracy. Democracy beyond brand.

***

Questions for Reflection

Whose voice is missing from the public square, silenced in honor of a brand?

Where, specifically, are employees allowed to disagree—and where are they silently punished for it?

What opinions inside this company feel “unsafe” to say aloud, and who decided that?

If truth conflicts with brand alignment, which one actually wins here?

Have we trained people to be brand stewards at the expense of being thinking citizens?

What does our brand require people not to see, not to say, or not to question?

Would an employee who publicly challenges us be seen as disloyal—or courageous? Why?

What formal mechanisms exist for dissent that do not rely on personal risk or heroic bravery?

Where does feedback go to die in this organization—and who benefits from that silence?

If an employee speaks honestly and it harms the brand, what happens to the employee?

When was the last time an employee changed my mind—and how did the system allow that to happen?

Do I want honesty in theory, or only when it arrives in language that flatters me?

What part of our culture confuses professionalism with compliance?

What risks are we creating by optimizing for reputation over reality?

If this company failed publicly, what truths would employees say they were never allowed to voice?

Is our brand strong enough to survive the truth—or only strong enough to manage it?

What is more dangerous to this company: employees who speak too freely, or employees who stop thinking out loud altogether?

***

Shannon Mullen O’Keefe is a strategist and writer, the chief curator of The Museum of Ideas, and the co-author of “10 Moral Questions: How to Design Tech and AI Responsibly.”

The House of Beautiful Business turns ten this year. We’re marking this milestone by renewing our mission: to shape a humanist future in and through business, in partnership with AI, and for the benefit of all life on earth. Taking place in Athens, Greece, from May 7–10, 2026, the World Beautiful Business Forum is a gathering for those who dream bigger, aim higher, and long for more: four days, five acts, 750 attendees, more than 75 speakers and performers, six amazing venues in the heart of Athens, a 42-kilometer AI Democracy Marathon, and a program designed to stretch how you think, feel, and act in business—and beyond. We are offering special rates for nonprofits and students, as well as solopreneurs, founders, small businesses, and Greek residents. It will be EPIC!

Get your pass

We kicked off The Beautiful Business School with a joyful live gathering last week! The first cohort comprises of 100 students from all over the world, five AI agents, and special live guests, including writer Pico Iyer; humanist leadership thinker and INSEAD professor of organizational behavior, Gianpiero Petriglieri; former Hyatt CMO and Longest Table founder Maryam Banikarim; regenerative systems builder Whitney Clapper, and others. Through live sessions every Thursday, expert guidance, improv, a curated library, and interaction with AI agents and a vibrant global community of peers, students will develop the creative insight and human leadership needed to shape a more beautiful future. We will launch the next class in the Fall.

Learn more

As AI moves from assistance to initiative, agency is no longer exclusively human. It is increasingly shared — reshaping how decisions are made inside organizations, and how visibility, trust, and choice are mediated outside, in the marketplace.

We conducted a survey of 900 professionals working with AI as well as in-depth expert interviews with leaders in business, psychology, and technology. We paired these findings with desk research, case studies, academic literature, and emerging market examples. The results can be read in our report Agentic Organizations.

It was developed in collaboration with Hotwire and ROI·DNA as part of a broader conversation on leadership, power, and responsibility in an AI-shaped world. We will deepen this conversation—together with Hotwire—with the Agentic Agora program track in Athens.

Download the report

Community Updates

Priya Parker was a guest on The Ezra Klein Show.

João Sevilhano was a guest on Mark McCartney’s podcast “What Is a Good Life?”

Clara E. Mattei was cited in a Guardian article about “Rethinking Economics.”