 If anything, then history has shown us that in any crisis, whether that's the financial crash in 2008 or the dot-com crash, you know, 1999, 2000, that companies that kept investing in culture and innovation and actually made big leaves, you know, Google to name one company that famously rose and emerged from the dot-com crash more resilient and stronger than before because it kept investing in new products and Apple did as well. So I think there's something to be said from an economic, from a business perspective, not to just completely go back to this reductionist view and be super pragmatically focused on the bottom line, but actually no, continue with a much broader view of business. But I think there is a real tension now and there's going to be a real struggle. So some of those fundamental market forces, they're going to be, I think, reinforced and they're going to see new support and for a more humanist way of doing business in the spirit of, for example, the CEO roundtable statement that came out last year and many companies changing their mission statements and changing the way they operate. I think they have to stick with their path. So it's either a back to the basics or it's a real, it's a license to reinvent business from the ground up, which I hope is the path that will take. Tim Lieberecht is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Tim is a German-American author, entrepreneur and a co-founder and co-CEO of the Business Romantic Society, a firm that helps organizations and individuals create transformative vision stories and experiences. Tim is also the co-founder and curator of the House of Beautiful Business, a global think tank and community with an annual gathering in Lisbon that brings together leaders and change makers with the mission to humanize business in the age of machines. Previously, Tim served as the chief marketing officer of NBBJ, a global design and architecture firm. From 2006 to 2013, he was the chief marketing officer of product design and innovation consultancy, frog design. His TED talks are so wonderful. Three ways to usefully lose control of your brand and most recently, four ways to build a human company in the age of machines. Having been viewed well over 2.5 million times to date, Tim is the author of the book, The Business Romantic, Harper Collins, which has been translated into nine languages to date. Tim's writing regularly appears in publications such as Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, Quartz, Psychology Today, and Wired. His new book, The End of Winning, Why the Future Belongs to Losers, will be released in hopefully in May or probably pushed back because of the pandemic, but his German version is coming out soon. I actually launched this on Thursday. If I understood him correct, my translation of the German into English would be win against dictatorships, how to lose without being a loser. But I'm sure he's going to correct me and help me make sure I've got the book and everything correct. Welcome, Tim. It's so good to see you. Thanks, Mark. Wonderful to see you too. Thanks for having me on. Gosh, this long file reminded me of how old I am. I took the shorter version, but in my mind it has absolutely nothing to do with how old you are. You've been on a mission, passionate, dedicated to have some pretty big, hairy and audacious goals and achievements for the future of work and how we work and how we look at big topics in our world, which is always something that has a long list of accomplishments and things to do. So by no means are you old. I'm probably date you a lot more because of my grandchildren and all the gray hair I have as well. I'm not there yet. Yeah. I don't have all the great accomplishments that you do. Before we dive in and get the explanation on your books, I believe and I want to ask you that you have had years of experience to know how to be resilient, how to design, how to think in different ways, how to apply the theme, the topics, the ways of working as a business romantic, which is the form of resilience. Has that helped you at all to whether this pandemic, how have you been and how have you gotten through this period? Could you kind of get us up to speed and tell us how you've been and if you've seen some positive things come out of it because of your pre-learnings or experiences or trials the way you've set up your life? I've been really lucky, I have to say, during this pandemic to be really privileged in a very privileged position. I mean, first of all, to be in a family, we have one daughter, my wife, we live together. So it's much easier, I think, in many ways than to be alone, live alone, be older. For example, my father has really not been really well. He lives alone and was really hit hard by the pandemic. Then, of course, then I live in Berlin, which Germany in so many ways has been the oasis. I mean, the numbers this week are rising again, but by and large, the government has done a really good job containing the pandemic and you feel somewhat secure and it's a competent government as compared to, let's say, the American one and how they have dealt with the pandemic. So it's been really privileged and for me personally, despite all the suffering of other people, it's been actually a really shocking, but at the same time also accelerating and intriguing and revealing experience. And so first of all, it has really, and many people have said that as well, it has really been sort of a decelerant that has slowed me down and I had done, I've been traveling a lot for speaking engagements and business travel. And the pandemic has really forced me to come to terms with a smaller life and new essentialism. So I remember that I was going on walks during the lockdown here in Berlin, like the radical lockdown for several weeks, when I just walked the same path and went on the same tour every night and suddenly noticed things I had never seen before because I was just distracted by my frenzy, you know, frantic travel schedule. So it has brought all the big questions to the fore, business questions, societal questions, but also in the relationships I think that you cultivate with your close ones or people who are on the periphery of your social networks. And, you know, the pandemic on a broader level has been like a magnifying glass. So it's really shed light on some of the underlying structural issues and crisis of our time, climate change, of course, first and foremost, but also social inequality, the erosion of the social contract and other and structural racism and other issues. But at the same time, it has also elevated us to the overview effect that astronauts report of when they look at Earth, right, from outer space and suddenly they feel this humility and this responsibility for planet Earth in a way that they had never felt before in a very visceral, personal way. And I believe the pandemic has had a similar effect. We were zooming out and suddenly understood the bigger picture and how everything is interdependent and interrelates. And at the same time, it has really, I mean, this is sort of pun intended, right, helped us zoom in quite literally and really question and examine every single aspect of our lives and scrutinize it and ask ourselves the question, is this the life I really want to lead? Is this the job I want to have? Is that the legacy that I want to leave behind? And it's been a real opportunity space and I've seen a lot of initiatives and people transform and change lives and coming out of this. I mean, well, we're still in the middle of it in many ways, but I think really changing the way they view the world. Now, there is a bit of disappointment. There is a lot of mourning. One mourning, of course, and one grief is that we're grieving for a life that is lost, I mean, not literally lost that too, but just sort of a sense of identity and concept of life that we will never be able to maintain. We know deep down inside that our lives are changing and we will have to live different lives. And of course, there's a lot of grief involved in that, but there's also some grief about the fact that this has been such an opportunity space. It could have been a pivotal moment for the species. A specious moment as Krista Tippett from Unbeing called it, but have we really seized it, you know, or have we squandered it? Because I sense that we're now rushing back to a desired sense of normalcy and that the big questions have suddenly become more incremental, smaller questions again. That big space is suddenly a small space again. We're pragmatic again, driven by practical concerns. So I wonder if we've squandered the opportunities, squandered that liminal space. And I hope not. And I hope that we have the courage and the stamina to maintain that space and then really reshape our economies, our societies and really drastically change things because we have to. I totally agree. I believe that many in our circles really have grasped the opportunity to not go back to normal, not business as usual, but to make a reset, to really take a deep look at how things are. I believe it's okay to grieve, to have those moments where you're caught up in the Netflix or the Prime Amazon videos, the streaming, whatever, Disney Plus. And you just say, oh, today's a chips and rerun night or whatever, but there is this tremendous pause and opportunity not only to reconnect with nature, but also do a re-evaluation of the human zoos or the homes that we live in, how we've created those, how they are for us, the type of life we have built for each other because now we've got this zoomed in view like you have no pun intended, how you described it, of where we are 24-7 kind of in a lock-down period, and we're really saying, wow, this is absolutely not the place I want to be 24-7 or I haven't designed it or created my life in the way that that's comfortable and some things have bubbled to the surface. So I truly believe that my hope is that the majority of people are really looking at kind of how the world economic form has described it as the great reset or a way to really move forward as a collective awakening, a consciousness that we move into a much better vision of what our future could be and how the future of pandemics and world unrest could look for all of us. The last time we saw each other was this year, actually, and DLD in Munich. We didn't get a chat very long, just shortly in the hallway, say hello, and I wish we would have had time to catch up. But actually, the year began for I don't know if it was for you, but for me it was really pivotal. It started with a bang, a lot of movement, a lot of actions, the decade of action, 2020, and a lot of movement, not only around the environment, but in businesses shifting more towards what you discuss in your book, The Business Romantic, but also in how they do business, the things that we've talked about in the past about the humans of new work and things like that, where I was really hopeful and optimistic. I still am. Do you see that now with the pandemic, that's really gone down or that digging in that new hope and optimism has actually gotten stronger in the aspect of businesses and how we do business and how events are done? I mean, it's affected both of us because we do a lot of events. Yeah, I believe we're really at a crossroads and this is kind of like a juncture. And as we come out of this pandemic, hopefully at some point next year when we really go back to the workplaces or to completely new workplaces. But I think the choice that we have is on the one hand to now really double down on bottom line thinking on pragmatism on a new economism and basically say all of those advancements that were made purpose driven cultures, more humane cultures and business, different sets of values, different KPI, different metrics and performance indicators. That they are nice to have, but at this point in this moment of crisis we really need to double down on what matters, which is the bottom line because at the end of the day that's what's paying the bills back to the basics. And those are always, so that's one choice and I certainly see organizations go there in, I can't blame them of course. You know, if you're a small, medium-sized enterprise, you're a family-run business and you're just like struggling to survive, of course your instinct is to double down on the basics and then not dwell on anything that this may not appear mission critical right now, which is more like soft or unnecessary. It worries me though, because of course that will undermine our ability in the long-term to actually build a more humane economy and build cultures of trust and innovation. And if anything then history has shown us that in any crisis, whether that's the financial crash in 2008 or the dot-com crash, you know, 1999, 2000, that companies that kept investing in culture and innovation and actually made big leads, you know, Google to name one company that famously rose and emerged from the dot-com crash, more resilient and was stronger than before because it kept investing in new products and Apple did as well. So I think there's something to be said from an economic, from a business perspective, not to just completely go back to this reductionist view and be super pragmatically focused on the bottom line, but actually no continue with a much broader view of business. But I think there is a real tension now and it's gonna be a real struggle. So some of those fundamental market forces, they're gonna be, I think, reinforced and they're gonna see new support and for a more humanist way of doing business in the spirit of, for example, the CEO round table statement that came out last year and many companies changing their mission statements and changing the way they operate. I think they have to stick with their path. So it's either a back to the basics or it's a real, it's a license to reinvent business from the ground up, which I hope is the path that will take. But is that... That almost takes me down a rabbit hole there, which I'm not sure we wanna go there yet, but I do wanna just skim and touch upon it quickly. I believe the pause in the reset last year's last quarter, this year's first quarter, when we look from index of stocks and things, is really telling because we have this tendency throughout history, when we have a financial bubble, real estate bubble, some kind of economic bubble that when a burst that crashes, there's some issue with that, that we do a bailout, we kind of go back to business as usual, that's where the term go back to the old system that bubble burst and nothing really changed in the system or the way we did it. In the past, as I speak a lot about environmental, social governance, sustainability, climate environment and how we can shift our business models to one that's much more in line with business romance, with sustainability, with this long-term way of doing things that's not only fun, it's very enjoyable because of the people you get to do it with the culture. During these last two quarters, just from profit and return and investments, all those businesses that divested and changed their business model to environmental, social governance, directions and investments and divestments, the sustainable development goals and our goals, all we have to do is look towards the NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange, the S&P 500, S&P Global, Stocks Europe, 600 Benchmark, Coll Yard, Niki Index, Goldman Sachs, on and on and on, HB, HSBC research reports during the first quarter, during the last quarter of last year, basically said, sustainable index funds lost less than their conventional counterparts and conventional index funds. So not only is the proof in the pudding, but seven out of 10 sustainability equity funds finished in the top halves of their Morningstar categories, that's 24 out of 26 environmental, social and governance funds. So the money is there, that pause and reset also extended our Earth Overshoot Day. We went from last year, July 29th to this year, to August 22nd, so we've gained 24 more days. And I could go on of some positive things. I don't think they're long enough to make a big, huge dent, but they're really good examples for businesses that say, okay, let's go back to the way it was or let's just try to salvage this. Say, no, no, there is a better business model and it also weathered this pandemic and it's actually looking even better in the second quarter as well, that it's proof that there are better operating systems out there that are really more human centered, more consciousness, more worthy of the type of work we do and things, and also watch out for human health and our planet. And so you touched on all of those things and I'm hoping that through our work that we can educate those companies, those people that really say, hey, I know you need an answer to your chair, your board or whoever, the bottom line is important. Here's the proof, let's make that shift, you know. This is where I really wanna get into your book. So I've got the beautiful copy here that you signed and our picture together where you signed it for me. We met in Heiligen-Damm. Oh, right, right, oh my God. Heiligen-Damm. 2015, it must have been. Yeah, it was a while, quite a while ago and your book really changed and flipped of you along with other books that came out actually much later and your talks about how we look at work and how we have this romance and the people we work with and how we look at that whole system that we actually give most of our time to work instead of those who we love and be with. And so I would like you to just maybe talk about for those of my listeners who haven't read your book, a little bit about that book and then tease us about what's coming out on Thursday in German and what will be coming out in English, hopefully very soon thereafter and what the differences are and why and what's brought you to this point to go to the next step on your journey. I've always been very interested in the juxtaposition of two concepts that seem very much opposed to one another, just opposite pairs that don't attract one another. And then I wrote the business romantic. It was business and romance which seemed to be the opposite sides, opposite poles and only few business people would have said of themselves that they're romantics. In fact, there was a derogatory term, right? That was commonly used in business to basically label as something as eccentric or not realistic, right? Don't romanticize your romantic about this. And it always kind of irked me and it irked me that I was the person in the meeting and someone on the other side of the table had the data and was right because they had the data. And having a background in the humanities and the arts I always felt very strongly about and quasi-objective truth that is data-backed is only still part of the truth but it's not the absolute truth. And there's so much more through life into our understanding of the world. It's more elusive, mysterious that cannot be measured, it's not precise. That's not scientific. That is not quantifiable. And I guess that sentiment really Gell and I was working with frog design and I was working with a private equity firm which had acquired frog and I was working with the board members and it was a, you know they had a very numbers driven, ruthless numbers driven logic, very smart people. And yet so myopic in their view of business and that was the spark for me to then write the business romantic and what I'll try to do in the book which came out in 2015 is to look at the romantic movement really of the 18th, 19th century the poets, the philosophers which emerged in response to the enlightenment and this idea of scientific rationality and said, no, there's the human soul is much more complex, right? And there is a subjective, very emotional irrational side to it. And I got, became very intrigued by the parallels to this moment in time when the new enlightenment, if you will is the new data ism is the new Silicon Valley idea of for every single problem there is a software or data solution, right? You can engineer the world if you only have all the necessary information available. So the same sort of myopic trap that the enlightenment perhaps fell into and humans are like a machine so you can optimize them and they get better and better and better and can eventually overcome themselves. And so the business romantic was really a manifesto against that view and drew from romanticism saying like actually what we need is a counter movement we need another romantic revolution very much in the same way that the romantics revolted against the enlightenment now with business romantics revolting against this very reductionist simplified view of humans that the digital platforms were promoting and I looked at all the principles of making meaning in business and I realized that to me at least they were all romantic principles. So mystery, intimacy, serendipity an unconditional commitment to things, passion, right? The idea of a labor of love. So I was looking at all of these tropes and then converted them into principles of running a business or a leadership. And it's interesting because when I wrote the book in 2014, it came out in 2015 it was very much a book about humanism and at the end of the day it was about a book that was driven by this idea of being human centered. And I had never been really very much attuned to nature I'm a total city boy and I remember that I spoke at a conference in South Carolina at some point I think it was New Year's and I talk about business romanticism and someone came to me after the talk and said, you know, this is so interesting there's one really glaring omission in everything you were just talking about which I wholeheartedly agree but there's some really noticeable omission which is you never talk about nature and the communion with nature the relationship to nature and finding ourselves in nature and understanding humans as a part of nature is was such a crucial was such an essential element of romanticism, right? They almost like mystified nature and celebrate the just communion with nature and it's interesting enough and sort of thinking about this for years and just recently because of the pandemic and many other people share it the same experience with me. I think it just began I began to realize like, you know how alienated I had been from nature and I had a few experiences just in the few months where I felt like finally I've sort of found my own you know, I'm beginning to develop my own relationship with nature and now what is interesting and that's maybe the second way to my new book about losing is that I actually believe human centered is really over in many ways that's the problem we don't need more human centered design or a human centered way of running business which in so many ways got then reduced to convenient, efficient, right? Comfortable, but what we really need are businesses that have what Casper to kill called soul centered or what some label as planetary boundaries or planetary wellbeing or an animist view of the world, right? Where you recognize that everything every animal, every living thing has a soul and has a spirit that we need to honor and we're just part of a much bigger ecosystem and I think that's kind of interesting and that's also what I'm trying to explore with the book about losing that we are in a time now where it's becoming clear what we're at risk of losing if winning, which was sort of the engine behind growth, right? On the psychological level if winning is the only option, we lose everything including our planet, we lose everything and this is why it's important that we shift away from the entropocene the human at the center of all things to what the German philosopher Tobias Ries I just read a really fascinating essay by his called the micro bioscene so realizing because of the pandemic and the virus that the virus is us, it's in us. In fact, it's part of evolution it's how we actually progress we can no longer separate ourselves and differentiate ourselves he calls it the great differentiation when he talks about the pandemic we can no longer differentiate ourselves from nature we're one and so the question is not so much how do we humanize business? The question is actually how do we biologize, naturalize, ecologize business, right? That's the much more pressing question and that goes hand in hand with another technological development that is quite intriguing that I'm just beginning to wrap my head around which is the emergence of what some people call deep tech synthetic biology co-designed with nature biomimicry basically no longer just studying nature to then design in a human centered way but actually co-designing with nature in a symbiotic fashion and if you combine those two trends so here you have like the move away fundee from the human centrism the endropocene and new humility if you will and then there is this interesting technological development this intertwining of nature and human agenda in the way we run business and create products and services and then you have I think a whole new playing field so it's a mindset change it's a technological change but it's also a business model change which goes beyond I believe that doing well by doing good or more traditional notions of sustainability or this idea of like hey we have to humanize business by making it more amenable and more convenient for humans so I think that's the next radical shift and that's part of what I'm exploring with in the book The End of Winning or Against the Dictatorship of Winners which is coming out in Germany this week that was a long answer to your question No that's perfect fine I'm so glad to hear it it's so beautiful because a lot of the things you're saying are also things that I talk about I often talk about a symbiotic earth and that we matter of fact last year I was in Songdo, Korea at the United Nations NAP Expo doing the next iteration after the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals which possibly would be the resilience frontiers or resilience goals and at that five day event this conference Expo Professor Chin spoke and he says we need to evolve from Homo sapiens to Homo symbios so as an integral part of our world, our planet this is our world bank our world bank is not some physical structure or location it is our world it's where we get all our resources but the biome of our planet is integrally tied to the biome of our gut and our body and who we are and they are really one and if our biome of our earth is doing bad guaranteed the biome of humanity will be doing bad as well and have problems because those viruses live in us those microorganisms live in us I just also think it's so pinnacle that your book came out in 2015 which was actual year where there was a huge shift in all sorts of ways of viewing the world not only the Paris agenda and SDGs and many other shifts in consciousness awareness towards food or biome and planet and that you really provided some new lenses to view how we're operating what we're doing, how we're acting in our daily lives and we can touch upon this later how the Romantic Society and other things that evolved out of that that kind of another movement in another self and how I mentioned in your biography that it was in Lisbon during the same time as the web summit where 70,000 people or more were there for web summit but the who's who of business leaders were at your event to the Romantic Society business Romantic Society event that you held there and you can maybe touch on what an event like that looks like because they are also seeing man we need to make a shift we need to make some changes and I need to surround myself with people who are in line with this instead of being at an event with 70,000 people all trying to pitch and sell me something that has no value to save humanity or to do business in a different way you know, so I love that but I'd like you to touch on that first and then I wanna go back still I wanna not only talk about my slaughtering the new name of your German your book first in German in English and what that kind of addresses as well but first I'd like you to touch a little bit more on that shift in the Romantic Society as well. So whenever there are these big epic shifts in society or in business I believe there's always a three stage process so leaders myself included first of all there's a, there's heart beats or there is an unarticulated desire for something right, there's an itching but you don't really know you can't put your finger on it you don't really know what it is and there's no new narrative yet there's no promised land even it's just this desire because this nebulous desire for something that is different from what you're doing today and then the next step is really to craft new language so I think the next thing that happens and that people like you and I can then in a modest way do is to provide new lenses, new frames, new language or rehabilitate language like Romantic that had been neglected or had been moved out of business and move it back in so that the playing field gets bigger again and new possibilities open so the language and the narrative and the story is really important and that's what I did with the book to some degree I was trying to do with a business Romantic but then I also felt and this is the feedback that I got from readers that they said, well the third step in this journey of course is the embodiment so this is all nice and the language inspires but what we'd love to see now what I really wanted to do now then as well was to give it a container give it a form and embody it and the best way to embody something of course at least for me was to hold the gathering to literally create a space my friend and actually one of our board members Jean-Pierre Petlieri he's a professor in Seat in France he once said, you know any vision is always a space and any space is always a vision so if you have a vision of the future of the world like inadvertently you think of a promised land or a house or a beach or a forest or a city in our case it was really a house we wanted to create a house that whose doors were open and you walk through them and it would do something to you and in that house you could find a new version of doing business in a very playful way you could go into one room and find out what intimacy social intimacy might look like at the workplace you go to another room and you could learn about blockchain it's something very practical blockchain and inclusive growth you go to a third room with a music studio and people who learn to listen and by learning to listen to collaborate better and become better leaders so it was this house of opportunity and it really provided managers and freelancers and academics and CEOs with an opportunity to play and to maybe try on a new identity try on a new concept even without really realizing all of the consequences but just in a playful way and then return after this very often very intense emotional experience return to their workplace to their team, to their organization at least be inspired enough to say okay you know I'm gonna change something and that's really why we created what we call the house of beautiful business in 2017 we've now held four annual gatherings in Lisbon and it's grown organically and is now really a global think tank and community with the goal to make business more beautiful and again you have there this juxtaposition of business and beautiful how do the two belong together but that's exactly the point that wanna play with this tension and wanna leave enough space for interpretation without providing an ultimate distinctive definition a definitive definition of that and now of course the pandemic has also completely disrupted our plans to do in-person gatherings and this year we decided in June basically to pivot and host a gathering which is something completely new to us and probably for a lot of people it's a hybrid festival over four days that will have an in-person component there'll be 30 local hubs in cities worldwide from Melbourne to Hong Kong to Sao Paulo to Toronto to Johannesburg but there's also of course an online programming but the online programming is beyond Zoom it includes WhatsApp and many other inner work assignments, many other channels and the idea is really that we bring thousands of people together who are pursuing the same vision and dream and wanna get toast into this new way of doing business these big shifts that we talked about earlier but do it in a very experiential way and connect them all even though they don't have to be literally connected digitally all the time it's just like the sense, the spirit that connects them all so it's a decentralized hybrid festival a journey over four days and the name of it is The Great Wave which is really bizarre because we chose that name in December last year we said okay, that's, we sort of had this sense to 2020 and you alluded to that earlier as well it was gonna be just epic year and there were some real momentous changes afoot of course we didn't know that that would be the pandemic and we had no idea what was gonna unfold but we had this sense that something big was gonna happen it's also the year of the US presidential election of course in November and now and this goes back to what I said earlier about nature in a weird way it's for us it all is making sense it's all coming together so we had to surrender to The Great Wave it had sort of assumed a power that we were no longer able to stop suddenly became this global event and we had to change and we had to sort of give in so in a strange and very beautiful way it kind of showed us the way where to go and so the event is from October 16th to 19th and we're equally excited and terrified because it's really a massive experiment anyway but yeah that's the story of the house of beautiful business from its origins to what we're now setting out to do in the fall and I'll include a link on the show notes so people can go and check that out and I'm sure you have enough information on how to get involved and be part of that as well the new book so in the German version dictatorship how to lose without being a loser that my poor translation you know how to win against dictatorships and I'm sure the English version is called something totally different but just in the name itself the German for me as an American who speaks German is kind of like this current civilization frameworks that we have are not working for us anymore there's kind of this you know fail fast but how can you fail and still be a winner or not be a loser type of a thing those are images that kind of bubble to my mind but I'd really like to hear from you what it is and is it tied a little bit to these civilization frameworks that are no work no longer working for humanity in some respects yeah it's really funny how times are changing when I first told my agent about this editor at this book two or three years ago or two years ago you know I mean she said this is a really interesting topic but just make sure you don't put losing on the cover or winning no one's going to buy that book and also specifically in America and actually a friend of mine just told me after reading an essay about the book she said that's the most un-American essay I've ever read the end of winning you know that is a very un-American idea that in many ways I guess it's very European very German so it's very heavy but now I think it's changing because now through the pandemic and through everything that we've come to realize I think we're ready to have a conversation about losing and we are realizing that we've applied this binary framework dividing the world and ourselves and members of society into winners or losers whether we like it or not even in the most progressive liberal society at the end of the day yes you can fail and I distinguish failing and failing fast from losing in the book but failing is a dramatic event you can recover in some cultures such as the American one it's a badge of honor if you fail with a startup and you try another one you become better you learn from your failure but losing is a much more it's almost like the sand slipping through your fingers it's permanent irrational anxiety that is with you it's a fear of losing face of losing control of losing status influence power material wealth as well and I think that's the ultimate fear that you no longer belong and of course essentially that's a fear of our own mortality right that we don't win that we don't we are not covering up right for the very basic insight that yes we're incredibly fragile and we are going to lose and we're all losing all the time every tiny second bit of our lives so what I'm trying to do with the book is to proclaim the end of winning that this framework that was so obsessed with winning for the sake of winning at the expense of everything else I mean look at Trump right this it's interesting that Trump promised Americans we're going to win so much we're going to get tired of winning and everybody else who's not with him is not is not you know any other sort of insulting remark no loser loser is the ultimate insult and I think it's really interesting and so that's really the ultimate fear and what I'm trying to do with the book is to establish a culture of losing not just a culture of failing fast but a culture of losing arguing that the this obsession with winning has produced too many externalities right obviously the the climate the planet is one but it also has increased social inequality it has increased dramatic increases in mental health issues worldwide and it has also led if you look at the digital economy that has led to a real threat right that that we're abdicating to AI and that there is the super optimization machine that is threatening our human agency and then there's the new humility that that I spoke about earlier it's sort of this realization that maybe we're not in control maybe we've lost control maybe that's a good thing maybe we have to become more humble and see ourselves more as an integral part of nature the end of human-centered design so all of these these themes I explore and I'm trying to then find I examine stories of losers and losing from death of a salesman Arthur Miller's play to a Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet in traditional literature Shakespeare two more recent stories of losing and I'm trying to then develop what I call strategies for losers so very provocatively establishing losing is something that we need to embrace and that is not a stigma but rather a quality especially for people at work who have to reinvent themselves to become more resilient even I mean even more so than ever before and so there are strategies for losers on the societal level on the organizational level at the workplace but also on the personal level and a lot of them have to do with rituals or practices that we can master that just help us become more comfortable not again with a fail project that too but with this real basic acceptance of the fact that losing is part of our life and we shouldn't stigmatize it yeah it's really a part of learning as well if you don't fall down and get back up you know that learning process is really big there's another one and this may be going down a rabbit hole and I don't want to tease or release your book before it comes out and give too much information away but there's this thing we talked about symbiotic earth before and about in the nature but really what you're saying is neo-darwinism, neo-liberalism survival of the fittest only the strong survive natural selection severe competition that that's how the world works well that's bullshit the world does not work like that it's about cooperation and collaboration and it's about failing and learning from your mistakes that we have this fierce battle of freedom and winning and this and that's not how our world works our world really works as a symbiotic earth in nature and harmony with a lot of collaboration and cooperation and I see that in some of the things you just mentioned kind of naturally coming out which is probably the deeper court you know you're addressing you know there is no neo-liberalism no neo-darwinism our world functions in a much different way and so you're putting a different type of not spin is probably not the right word but a voice or narrative on how we can view it a little bit different I understand you know that old way that we were doing it or the way that we thought was right is actually probably the one that's holding us back the most or keeping us from getting where we really want to be I actually was going to ask you about that because you know much more about those natural processes and you know biology than I do because I had the same thought when I wrote the book that you know and I read this from other experts as well right that the competition yes is an element of nature but it's superseded basically by cooperation or co-opetition at least so can you give me some examples I'm just curious to yeah well the principle of winning debunked by by nature yeah yeah so the real really bubbled to the surface with Carl Sagan's wife which is it's really it's really neat how it ties in because you know you talk about overview effect and how how we see our planet from outer space and Carl Sagan was an astronomer big on space but his first wife was Lynn Margolis she is one of the pioneering women in science and also in not only bio microbiology and she coined the term symbiotic earth and that found mycorrhiza and this mycelium connectedness of soil and our biome that type of thing but she was also the biggest proponent against dockins and many other scientists she did a lot with Jim Lovelock James Lovelock you know the Gaia principle and things like that and they collaborated a lot in different ways but she was like the lone ranger the wonder woman in science that went up against all these male figures who were really pushing and promoting neoliberalism and neodarwinism saying that at survival of the fittest natural selection and she said no actually it's not like that it's through the mycelium the mycorrhiza our world was began for if you look at the timeline of the earth the birth till of our earth till now not only we're all made up of star stuff like Carl Sagan said but our earth begins with bacteria microorganisms and we evolved out of this primordial soup and in 2015 that pinnacle year was the year that on the bacteria tree of life we discovered a whole section that all has to do with our gut health gut health with the microbes the microbial genes the microbial cells all in our body that we didn't know about in the beginning and that all comes really from the work of Lynn Margolis and this whole thinking of symbiotic earth and really the pushing off that was really instigated through corporates and organizations kind of pushing that on those scientists to say you know it's this competition severe competition we must win and and it's okay if you don't but if you look at anywhere in nature whether it's birds or a snake's hatching out of an egg or whatever it is none of that is reality it's all the symbiotic symbiosis evolving and so I don't know if that answers your question but that's kind of where this it's pretty old and it's also really tied deeply to the big history our big history and so that you have not only with business romantic and your new book and those things that you're really getting the narratives the lenses for laypeople for everyday people to and business people to say hey you know that's right and here's this other way of doing things I just love that it just is amazing because you don't really need to know all that science it's great to know it and have all the facts and graphs and figures but the reality is it's just works it's really how how life works and how we go forward I mean it's been proven in the data in the science in the big history that that's a better way of doing things and the biggest the biggest example and then I'll shut up and we'll get back into some deeper things of this whole thing is we have more than 12 civilizations on this earth that no longer exist the early antiquity Mesopotamia, Incas, Aztecs, Mayas, Romans, Greeks and more than 12 of them don't exist because of ecological or environmental collapse only two of them don't exist because some kind of a conflict conflict or boundary changes some other non ecological environmental collapses but it's all kind of in line that you know it's time for that new awakening that shift, that new model because that old one is either going to become a mythology a ruin of a civilization that doesn't exist if we don't continue that evolution to where it needs to go which also ties Neo Darwinism and Neo liberalism and ties to that that other way of thinking so interesting yeah thank you and are you if I may ask you know you're sure you know you may have read Jonathan Franson's very controversial as in the New Yorker last year where he said basically American author and likewise Paula Antonelli had this exhibition Broken Nature where she said basically the only thing we can design for is a beautiful ending but we have to accept that the ending is near and Franson similarly was saying we have to stop fooling ourselves because climate change is irreversible at this point and there's absolutely no indication that humans are able to change the behavior at such scale that we can still prevent it from happening so rather than directing or allocating resources on combating climate change we should think about how to live with climate change and he was particularly keen on heralding the power of community so and it was very it was a very controversial asset because of course it's very provocative and some people accused them of defeatist attitudes and cynicism and I'm just curious to I'm curious to hear your perspective for someone who is you know speaking about these topics and an expert how optimistic are you and if this civilization is indeed going to die is that in the grand scheme of things such a bad thing well I'm very hopeful and optimistic the short version I believe in humanity I believe we can shift on a dime that we've shown it during this pandemic that we can shift and change on a dime and pivot and create amazing things and do things but we've also seen big history in the past how some sadly mainly from the United States we've seen that some amazing things are possible during times of conflict or collapse or deep troubles that we can rise above the other thing is I really believe in the exponential function I understand it and I believe there is a window of time we are on we need to realize we have to take that exponential roadmap but the more we hit that critical mass of people who not only believe and understand and have that optimism but more so take action daily in their lives and it's actually a better type of an action the way we we live our lives is actually nicer it's more romantic it's more enjoyable and connected with nature that those shifts are also ones that really can hit that critical mass get us on the exponential curve where we can truly reach all not only the 17 sustainable development goals the targets indicators the monies the transitions transformations needed to get there there's a lot of education enlightenment awareness and reaching that critical mass so that we can make make that moment happen the thing that I do know and I agree I've heard both of those views and there's always something too someone else's view and they need to be regarded and thought out of so a lot of humanity is waiting for the future to happen for them they're not creating it they're not doing that and that's going to be a disappointing thing if you're waiting for the future to happen to you it's like having a ship without a plan or a course or a rudder it's like having driving a vehicle without knowing where you're going you're really only going somewhere slower in the wrong direction and you're not going in the direction that you desire that where you want to see yourself in the future I absolutely do and it's probably too long of a discussion to get into how and what and why we need to do that humanity will die but we're talking hundreds of millions of years to billions of years in a sustainable resilient type of operating system a model for the earth if we continue on the path that we have and that enlightenment awakening and that change doesn't happen it will be a lot sooner in death I must say there is a lot of joy hope and optimism because in death there is a rebirth and it brings a lot new life and and things to our world we're breathing the same air that Gandhi breath we're breathing and drinking the same air that they have in China and of the same waters that they have in China because we're all on the same planet you know and I don't know if that answered your question but it does answer my question makes me very hopeful hearing this from you and I agree and I think that's the right the right attitude but I think it is interesting to as you said to regard other views and they challenge in many ways solidify I guess a case for optimism Mark I think I have to go because we had scheduled an hour and my daughter is claiming she has a or did you want to continue for a few minutes I don't want to abruptly but I just want to give you a heads up that I can I get make space can I get two more questions sure of course I would appreciate it we could actually talk for hours because honestly there's so much to go into we haven't even hit my major questions but I'm going to ask three of them I'm going to try to do a quick answer on your answer and I won't make my answer sure I won't make any commentaries the first one is do you feel like you're a global citizen and as if you do as a global citizens or as a human being can you envision a future without nations borders divisions of humanity I cannot okay I am a global citizen I am a German and an American citizen and I remember when I was sworn in as an American citizen because of marriage to an American woman there were a hundred nationalities with me during that day during the ceremony it was quite moved to see that diversity and and and you know a citizenship nationality but at the same time also like how global that is so I I believe in global citizenry and I think we share a lot of values as a species and as humanity and nations are not terribly important to me at the same time I think we should not underestimate the power of the nation state and national identity we've seen it with the pandemic as well like you know at the end of the day how do you define yourself who do you identify with it's is it your neighborhood yes it's your city yes but during the pandemic I think we've seen that national identities should not be discredited quite yet you know they matter and I'm not opposed to the video I like borders boundaries I think they give us identity identity is always a question of you know if everybody's family is my friend Priya Parker once said then no one is family so I think it's important to also exclude and include so that those are meaningful actions I think we just have to do it in a very mindful way to not marginalize and to not shut down and disadvantage of course many many populations but I think borders and boundaries are not always a sign of division or of strife they can be meaningful distinctions and actually enhance diversity so in that sense I don't necessarily see a view where borders will fall and it's going to be one collective tribe that is with a lot of distinctions you know leveled out I don't see that yet thank you we could dive down several rabbit holes for that question alone but it's good to hear hear your point and views on that maybe we'll have to pick that up in another discussion the next question is the burning question WTF and it's not the swear word it's what's the future and I'm talking about the future for you I would say WTF because I have no idea because you know I've always had a pretty good idea of what's to come and the next year and where I would like to be and how I would my place in the world and what I could do I think I do know that I think through the house of beautiful business I've this has been kind of like a calling or a family sort of came home and it's been a real arrival of sorts like I found my tribe I found my my role but because of the pandemic and the whole volatility that we've experienced over the past six months or so I can't even think beyond the great wave it's also because I'm so focused on executing this event that is in front of us but I can't even think beyond October I have no idea what the world will look like next year it you know it could be very dystopian it could be really a beautifully reset world in so many ways the US presidential election of course are going to be a bell weather you know they are super important they're going to change a lot of things the outcome will change a lot of things I really don't know you know what that is really great I love that the future not just mine but our future has maybe become a little bit less predictable that it was four or five years ago that's scary but it's also liberating that's nice to hear I've never heard that view before but thank you for sharing that and the last thing I have and then I'll let you go is if you were to share one take away one sustainable take away to my listeners something that would empower them or make their lives better of you or something that they should adopt could you kind of give us kind of a free tease or wisdom of learning from from Tim and what they could apply or do or what might make their lives better if they're an inventor entrepreneur or whoever I would say embrace intimacy if there's one thing I've realized over the past few years is there's this beautiful quote by Richard Bach who said the opposite of loneliness is not being together or connected it's intimacy emotional intimacy or intimacy in all of its various shades and forms but intimacy is something that is uniquely human machines cannot be intimate because they can suffer and suffering the ability to suffer the ability to be vulnerable makes us or gives us the ability to also develop intimacy so it's such a uniquely human experience and if you dare being intimate on so many levels with your emotionally intimate with your colleagues your friends strangers objects nature right I think you'll have a much more fulfilled life and you will develop a tenderness and a sense of care that we as a collective desperately need but they will also make your life better even though it comes at a greater risk to pursue intimacy than convenience or other you know qualities that you might want to pursue but ultimately it's more fulfilling so that's something that I'm not always good but I've come to realize that that's really something I want to nurture thank you so much Tim and it's been a sheer pleasure we could talk for hours for so much please have a good day and greet your daughter I want a signed copy of the new book when it comes out please know that in advance I'll pay for it but you if you'll give me a signed copy and I look forward to it and I hope my listeners get it because I know it will be great learnings thank you so much have a wonderful day Tim thank you so much Mark it's going to be a pleasure bye bye take care bye