When Our Hearts Beat Together

Two years ago, I was walking with my friend Bruno over a hillside in southern Portugal. My company’s annual ideas festival was just days away, and we were discussing how rehearsals were progressing. Bruno was characteristically full of ideas. He wanted two presenters to swap spots to create a stronger sense of narrative momentum, he suggested another speaker could find a more compelling way to frame his message, and he recommended two others to practice some basic breathing exercises. The next morning, I found him on stage coaching several of the presenters individually. He knew exactly how to relate to each one, dishing out tough love to an experienced keynoter and gentle encouragement to a first-timer with a case of stage fright. Watching Bruno in action was like watching a horse whisperer conjure spells over his new charges.

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In fact, you might call Bruno Giussani the world’s leading “event whisperer.” For the last two decades, he has been a major force behind the TED conferences and the popular online TED Talks. As the organization’s Global Curator and the co-founder and curator of Countdown, TED’s climate initiative, he has programmed events featuring some of the most recognizable names on the planet, from Pope Francis and Prince William to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jennifer Doudna. In an era when more and more is happening virtually on screens, Bruno is a huge advocate of in-person events. “People are different when you get them in the same room. We are so much more open and available,” he told me. “When there is effort involved, when we’ve disrupted our regular routines to be somewhere, we are present in a different way.”

I chuckled when he said this. I’d never told him that our entire friendship was made possible by the kind of disruption he was describing.

Presence is a physical phenomenon

In 2008, I was head of marketing at the San Francisco-based innovation consultancy Frog Design when a mutual acquaintance put me in touch with Bruno. I had of course heard of TED and was instantly intrigued. After exchanging a few emails, Bruno asked if I planned on being in London any time soon, and invited me to drop by a reception at the Tate Modern should the dates happen to align. I had no plans of being in London in the foreseeable future, but I booked a flight and a hotel that evening. On the night of the party, I waltzed into the gallery’s Turbine Hall as though I’d merely thrown on a jacket and walked around the block.

I’m so glad I acted on impulse and made this extra effort. Not only did I enjoy a star-studded evening, but Bruno and I connected in a way that wouldn’t have been possible over Zoom. He cuts a striking figure in person—tall, broad-shouldered, a little debonair—but there’s a softness and playfulness to him that needs to be experienced up close to be appreciated. Meeting him that evening and feeling an instant intellectual affinity drove home something I already knew: Presence is a physical phenomenon. To be truly open and alert, your mind and body must occupy the same space. To be present is to exist in the here and now, to “live in the moment,” as the adage goes. You can’t be fully engaged in a live-streamed keynote when your here and now is the laptop screen in your kitchen, where you’re simultaneously preparing dinner and trying to keep the peace between your kids(or reading an email in another screen window). 

“Ease is the problem,” Bruno says of virtual events. “Great things don’t come out of ease; they come out of friction. Live events require that you get there; for some people that means traveling a great distance and, perhaps, saving up to afford the trip. Then there is the friction and discomfort of sitting in a room with strangers, possibly in a place you don’t know, where you don’t speak the local language. All these are powerful factors in putting you into a position of openness and acceptance.”

There’s also a kind of “false presence” that occurs when audience members are physically in the room but not especially engaged. The psychology behind this is fairly straightforward; when we are presented with a hackneyed or unoriginal format that doesn’t draw us in emotionally or provide much opportunity for participation, we have a tendency to offer little in return. If the event is too conventional, or the content not especially fresh or engaging, attendees will often tune out. So in order to engender genuine presence, it’s important to truly meet your audience where they are, finding immersive activations that make them—and their contributions—an integral part of the experience. The last thing you want to do is make an audience feel as though they’re superfluous or unimportant.

And then presence allows for something else: Serendipity. When you’re in person, you avail yourself to happenstance. “You bump into someone in the corridor between sessions and sit down for a coffee. Three hours later you’re still talking, ”Bruno says. “Or you’re invigorated by a presentation and need to grab the speaker afterwards to ask them a few questions—that can’t happen over Zoom. ”Whether it’s a spontaneous conversation in a sunlit courtyard or an unexpected collaboration in an open creative space, these moments of serendipity are “by design,” waiting to happen in a live setting. Events are not just about performances and presentations, but the shared discoveries and connections made in those fleeting moments between the acts and behind the scenes. “And we are more authentic in person, when our presence and engagement isn’t mediated by a screen,” Bruno adds. “The takeaway is more powerful—and I mean that in terms of the connections you make, the knowledge you gain, the experiences you have, and the energy you feel,” he says. 

An unpredictable journey with strangers

I wasn’t at the iconic Glastonbury music festival last summer, but Bruno and I shared a serious case of FOMO when we read about what happened. Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović took the main stage and asked an audience of thousands to be silent for seven minutes. They obliged. For seven minutes. “Imagine being able to make that happen,” Bruno mused, shaking his head in disbelief. If you look at photos from what Abramović described as a “public intervention” to reflect on conflict and peace, you’ll see the most incredible images of people standing side-by-side in clusters of various sizes, standing and sitting, their eyes closed. They are different ages, races, and genders. Some are dressed in dirty camping attire, while others wear the latest high-street fashion. They are each distinctly individual, while simultaneously part of a vast, dynamic whole in the midst of powerful—almost mystical—experience.

I had my own profound communal moment at a Broadway play twenty-odd years ago. It was my first time seeing Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill’s brooding masterpiece about a family in crisis. Let’s just say I wasn’t prepared for the visceral intensity I’d signed up for. Sitting on the edge of my seat, I was swept away by the characters and the overwhelming depth and pain of their suffering. But underneath this current of empathy, I felt something else: a powerful sense of being alive and sentient among other people. A powerful awareness of being alive now, at no other moment in history, and the spectacular coincidence that I was joined by the people around me, who’d elected to come with me that evening on an unpredictable emotional journey. When the lights came on at intermission, the woman sitting beside me turned to me and said, “Wow.” In odded. Nothing more needed to be said. 

There’s hard evidence behind what I experienced in that theater. Research has shown that live performances can synchronize the pulses of people in the audience, so that hundreds of hearts literally beat together. Other studies have shown that audiences tend to breathe in unison when they’re moved by what they're watching or listening to; they even experience goosebumps and shivers at the same time. We all know what it’s like to sense an entire room hold their breath at the same climactic moment, the thrill of exhaling in a great communal huff. There’s something spiritual in these occurrences, as though each life is touched differently by the same all-powerful hand.

Grazing the natural world together

A few weeks after the festival in Portugal, Bruno and I had a chance to debrief on how it had gone. He was thoughtful and generous with his feedback, offering both praise and constructive criticism. But what struck me most were his reflections on our proximity to nature—the festival had taken place entirely outdoors, in a forest, a park, an orchard, and around a pool—and the impact he thought that had on our sense of belonging to a whole. “I think being in nature, wandering from one talk to a discussion in little clusters, with the ocean in the distance, the sun, the chirping of birds—I think this made us a community more than anything else,” he said. “Rediscovering the natural world and our connection to it is becoming increasingly important in this digital era.”

All of Bruno’s reflections on effort and time have given me fuel for thought. Too often, in both work and life, I resort to the easiest way of getting things done. Whether this means a text instead of a phone call, an email instead of meeting a friend for coffee, or picking up groceries at the nearby supermarket instead of making time to attend the charming weekly farmer’s market a few blocks away, my time-saving tactics have always seemed like rational, practical measures. But how often do I pause and ask myself what I’m saving my time for if not for a good conversation with a friend or a relaxing stroll on a beautiful day? Why are we saving our time if not for the activities that bring value to our lives?

I’ve worried on occasion that ease and efficiency have become our default setting in this digital life, to the extent that it’s become natural and instinctive to think of “living” as something that can be partly done remotely. But there’s a flip side. Maybe the prevalence of screens, text threads, and Zoom meetings, are making live events that much more sacred. When a hundred heads gather in one room, each putting aside a hundred of their own preoccupations, and for a short stretch of time, channel their focus onto one and the same thing, something exceptional happens. We mark time and space together; we have an experience that is fleeting, irreversible, and inimitable. Together, we create something unique that will never happen just the same way again.

These days, I’ve been trying to honor this spirit of presence, togetherness, and unrepeatableness in more aspects of my life. A quote from the late British theater director Peter Brook, someone who dedicated his life to the power of live experiences, has been guiding me: “Take nothing for granted. Go see for yourself.” As a business leader, I shouldn’t take anything for granted—it would be the surest recipe for isolation and irrelevance. I need to feel actively and genuinely connected to the people I work with, the communities that support that work, and the larger social and cultural currents that shape these. Here are a few ways that I’ve been “seeing for myself” lately; they may just inspire you, too.

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Bruno Giussani is a curator, writer, and cultural critic. He spent 20 years as the global curator and European director of TED, the organization behind the popular online TED Talks, and the co-founder and curator of its climate initiative, Countdown. During his tenure, Bruno curated over one thousand TED Talks, interviewed leading figures on the world’s most pressing issues, and hosted numerous events around the world. Prior to TED, Bruno was an Internet columnist for The New York Times and head of online strategy at the World Economic Forum.

Tim Leberecht is the co-founder and co-CEO of the House of Beautiful Business, the network for the life-centered economy. He is the author of the books The Business Romantic (2015), The End of Winning (2020), and the upcoming Picky: How the Superpower of Curation Can Save the World (2026). His two TED talk shave garnered millions of views.

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