Thomas Wiesel - Les Sommets - conférence sur la transformation

I'm going to react a bit to everything that was said today, on this first day. I was asked to be offbeat, to step aside. Today, I don't need to step aside to be offbeat...

I have no idea what I'm doing here, honestly. I'm not in my element. I'm a stand-up comedian, I'm not in my country, I'm Swiss, it's not very far. I come from Lausanne, I think I traveled less than you to be here tonight. Then, I'm a bit stupid, because there are many cross-border workers who live here and go to work in Switzerland. In the other direction, I'm the only idiot doing this. There weren't many people on the road, I thought there was something I didn't understand...

I was scared of this day at first, at the very beginning. They played the jingle, PPC made you clap your hands. I was like 'oh shit, what is this, is he the Club Med GO?' It looked a bit like those Herbalife conferences, pyramid scheme, we'd have to invest our savings, recruit our loved ones, I almost left. Then David said 'Can the old-timers applaud the newcomers?' I was like: damn, it's a cult, that's it... Plus, the old-timers were only 15, so apparently there's a mass suicide ritual at some point... Ah, not many came back... Then they made us stand up for Xavier's arrival on stage. 'Well, there's the guru.' Why is he wearing a vest? I didn't get it... First time I see a guru in a vest, you have a special relationship with this garment in your country, vests... It depends on the color. That's very important. If the vest is yellow, you block a roundabout to protest gas prices. If it's black, you block a hotel for three days to do intellectual masturbation.

No, they told me it's not that at all. The conference, the principle of the conference is 'no bullshit'. Me, I'm here to make fun of bullshit, so that sucks. Then I thought, 'no bullshit' when you need to specify it, generally, it's not a good sign... Then I looked at PPC's CV, and I was reassured. He's 'chief digital evangelist'. Good, we have some bullshit. Digital evangelist, so for him basically, if Jesus had a verified account, that would be it.

PPC gave us the presentation of the summits telling us 'It's a lot of greed' and I understood it was a metaphor. I went to the lunch cocktail, there wasn't much. Or there was nothing in your dining car and you looted everything, but when I arrived, I managed to grab a piece of bread so I wouldn't faint. I think I came too late... And we had the founder interview, it wasn't the finest hour of investigative journalism. PPC said: Let me ask you a question that's been bugging me. Actually, it wasn't a question. It was a pretext to roll out the founder's CV in a super flattering way. 'Xavier is a successful multi-entrepreneur who founded this, co-founded that, finished third in pole vaulting at the Atlanta Olympics...' 'You make scrambled eggs like no one else, you saved 46 guys' lives by landing the plane instead of the pilot, what's your secret, Xavier?' It was major ass-kissing, he was in Chupa Chups mode. We felt he wants to be rehired next year. Ah, yes, you said 'feedback is a gift'. I'm a bit like Santa Claus, just in case...

No bullshit is one of the principles, there are other principles: diversity. That's also a principle of the Summits. Not today... Fortunately, Grégory Pouy specified that diversity isn't just about skin color. Well, fortunately, because on stage today it was still 50 shades of white. It's so white that I wondered if it wasn't a conference on brunch... or a Cnews debate on wearing the veil. It's true we had great diversity on stage, it was more or less the guys who spoke and the girls moved the furniture. So it was a division of tasks... I'm sorry, it's not normal, we had more bald speakers than female ones. We had as many speakers named Romain as women. Sorry, I didn't mean to make jokes about bald people. We're not allowed anymore. I don't know if you saw what happened at the Oscars last night. Chris Rock made a joke about Will Smith's wife's baldness and he got slapped in the face. For those who were too attentive today, you'll see later. It's a bit of a controversy going around the world and so, comedians... Lots of people are reacting and quite a few people say: Chris Rock's joke about Jada Smith's baldness wasn't funny because it's a disease. Well yes, but you can make unfunny jokes. If every comedian who made an unfunny joke got their face smashed in, we'd all have Stephen Hawking's physique by now. Well, from the comedian's point of view, it wasn't a good idea to mock the wife of a guy who trained for several months to play Muhammad Ali, but that's... that's why I make fun of PPC, I choose a bit... You have to choose your targets, huh... 'He's tall, David.' David is tall but you notice I said nothing about him... I'm not daring. But all that to say no jokes about bald people. It's a shame, because I had one about Grégory. Still... It's the first time I see a guy who has more hair on his tongue than on his head, but no we can't, I won't.

What I liked about the Summits is that it's about transformation and they applied transformation to themselves, it was the Digital Summits. It became just the Summits. They changed their name to reinvent themselves. Like Facebook became Meta, like the National Front became the National Rally, like Matt Pokora became M. Pokora. Those are truly three incredible transformations that will mark history. One thing I really liked: I asked about participation prices, and it's a dynamic price. It depends on the size of your company. You don't pay as much for small companies as for big ones. I thought that was great, dynamic pricing. It adapts, especially since as an intermittent performer, the price is negative, they pay me to come. That made me happy and they explained the idea: that everyone stays all 3 days, attends all conferences, listens to everyone, participates in informal moments or activities. The most important thing is really those little moments between things and I'm super happy that Raphaël Enthoven really understood the principle. I say that and honestly, you won't see me networking. If I have to choose between networking and having a tooth pulled, I'll say: well, the left molar, I don't use it, just in case. Networking activities? I took a look: electric bike ride, raft building, it's your Koh Lanta thing, there's the ice bath. The day after tomorrow you can bathe in ice water and apparently it's to reduce stress. It's true that after that, you have no more stress, but you have pneumonia. 2 weeks of sick leave to rest, it's ideal. They put a disclaimer: 'This activity is contraindicated if you have a cardiovascular condition, if you are pregnant, or if you suffer from Raynaud's syndrome.' So if you don't know what Raynaud's syndrome is, take the ice bath. If you survive, well, you don't have Raynaud's syndrome.

I was told another goal of the summits is to break away from Parisianism and the contempt for the provinces. And I feel like it's not a done deal. Three-quarters of you arrive by TGV from Paris. Earlier, we applauded someone because they had moved to Niort. Okay, so Houellebecq says it's the ugliest city in France. Can we really trust Michel Houellebecq's opinion on aesthetics? You see the guy's face, you feel it's not his number one priority. I've pulled things out of my drain that look like Michel Houellebecq.

What did we have today? Philippe Gabilliet, who opened the day, his talk, he created the League of Optimists, I looked at who was in it. It's Jean d'Ormesson, Erik Orsenna, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. That's when you feel: It's easier to be an optimist when you earn 2 million in royalties per year. Not many people on welfare in the League of Optimists. It's a bit of a league of white-haired best-selling authors. Then he used formulas, I didn't understand everything. 'Our life will have been nothing but an uninterrupted series of bifurcations.' Philippe, you need to stop using Apple Maps. Download Waze, it'll be better. He told us: uncertainty is an intellectual thing. On the other hand, sentences like: 'the real has invented a countermeasure to the plan: chance.' That's not intellectual, for example. You say that to a guy on a construction site, he says 'Yeah, totally, you're right.' He talked to us about the 6 major emotions. That sparked controversy. Someone said 'no there are 2' He said 'no there are 6' I didn't think that would be the first point of contention of the day. He talked about surprise, surprise, apparently, can only be a quick emotion. He said: you can't be surprised for 3 days. On the other hand, you can be bored for three years. I studied, I can confirm. The different types of surprise, I found that interesting, the surprise that makes you happy, the surprise that scares you. In Switzerland, we have an expression, we say we can be 'pleasantly disappointed.' Yeah, emotions, in Switzerland, we haven't quite figured it out. We don't master it very well. It's not our area of expertise. There are two things we don't have: access to the sea and emotions. When we eliminated France on penalties, I don't know if you remember that? No? It was last summer. Kylian Mbappé missed... well, you'll look it up on the internet... People honked a bit and I swear it's true, we're allowed to honk until one hour after the match ends. Otherwise, the police intervene. They calculated the maximum time we're allowed to be happy in Switzerland. Mr. Gabilliet finished with the joke about the Titanic lobsters that ended up in the water, they were happy. It's a funny joke. It's also a joke that's been circulating on the Internet for 20 years. And it shows that it's not just students who lack inspiration who look for stuff on the Internet. University professors do too, so that's good.

We moved on to the round table special 'Feel Good' of the channel. I don't remember what it was called? Ah yes: 'We're all going to die, but let's keep a positive attitude.' They talked about the urgency of changing our lifestyle, our production model. And to illustrate this, Sophie almost died live on stage from choking. They lost me a bit at the beginning. Fabrice Bonnifet who told us: 'I am a hummingbird who tells the truth.' Eric Duvernay told us: 'See yourself as a tea bag.' Are there other options? Because me, I... Are we in Pokémon? I can't quite choose my team. And what I really liked about this round table was the gratitude they had among themselves. They thanked each other, they congratulated each other, Romain Roy paid tribute to everyone. It was an Oscars speech. Thank you Emery. Thank you Eric. Thank you to my agent without whom none of this would be possible. Clair Gaymard, who was also very positive: France is a wonderful country. The French are very committed people. I think she confused it with her speech for the presidential election. Then she started talking about leaders who live to the rhythm of Powerpoints in windowless meeting rooms. We don't like that, huh... They are people disconnected from reality. Then Fabrice Bonnifet was warming up, he started with the hummingbird. It was just the warm-up. I'm supposed to be the person who kills the mood at the end of the day, I wouldn't have needed to come, he did it all. 'The invisible hand of the market is not always right.' 'The illusion of infinite growth, energy sobriety.' 'We will realize that money is not edible.' In my opinion, at Bouygues, they don't invite him to all the meetings... I think there's a double system of agendas. There's the list of stuff with Fabrice and without Fabrice. When important decisions need to be made, they move him away. For example, a three-day conference on the shores of Lake Annecy. No, but I love what he said! 'Companies don't pay for the negative externalities they produce.' 'We must put human and natural capital on the same level as financial capital.' 'We must stop inventing products we don't need with money we don't have to impress people who don't give a damn.' I had a semi! I almost got up and sang the Internationale. He surprised me! He has the look of a Medef guy and the speech of an Extinction Rebellion guy. He's the opposite of Florent Pagny. He was saying: 'We really need to stop destroying the planet.' If you want to know more, it's his book you can buy, which is 272 pages on non-recycled paper, that's really important. He needs to get one too, though. No, it gave me hope, that round table on sustainable development. What they reminded us at the end calmed me down a bit when they said that their opinions weren't majority, that it wasn't representative. That capitalism was still dominant in the US, in China... It's true we had the tip of the iceberg. It's encouraging. But we have to stay realistic. There's a selection bias. If you take these 4 to tell you that capitalism will soon end, it's a bit like watching Destiny's Child and thinking in Texas they're all black R&B singers. It's like watching the Ch'tis vs the Marseillais, you think: the French prefer going to the solarium than to school. It's not exactly the most representative thing. There was David Abiker who interrupted talking about end of the month vs end of the world. He's a bit of a troll. When people agree with each other, he interrupts. Earlier he said: it's better to put sunscreen on a yacht than in a 2CV, Gregory was like: 'Shut up, finally...' He's the old guy from the Muppet Show. Four minutes I haven't spoken, I have a microphone.

What I also liked about the round tables is having a screen that spans the whole room, except they put furniture and people in front of it... You try to read the slides, you're like this... I think the Summits have a partnership with a physio clinic down in Annecy. I also liked your questions, about half of them. Honestly, they weren't questions. They were people taking the opportunity to roll out their CV. I found that quite impressive, you feel they didn't get a keynote, but they still want to talk a bit. But I don't judge, if I had an incredible story like some of you. If I had been blind, in a wheelchair, unable to move. Suddenly, I walked and saw. I would want to say it all the time. Me, I haven't experienced anything crazy. Well, actually, I was also nearly blind and unable to move. But hey, I was ten days old.

Then we had the highlight of the show. PPC and David started reading Baudelaire's Albatross, without transition. I thought: damn, they sniffed something during the break. We found Captain Hawk's coke. I really appreciated listening to Raphaël Enthoven. Which gives me a common point with Raphaël Enthoven. What I liked was this simple language, these short sentences... it's not verbose, we don't at all get the impression he ate three Bescherelles and a Larousse. Apart from that, he has a beautiful mastery of the French language. I find that quite impressive. It doesn't make up for the fact that he inspired a song by Carla Bruni, but it's impressive nonetheless. As much as I liked the form, I understood nothing of the substance: 'the obsolescence of gigantism as a weapon.' We all said the same thing after ten minutes of Enthoven. Finally, philosophy classes, I didn't miss them. Romain Lacroix said: It's not easy to debate with Enthoven. I don't give a shit: he's gone! But I think the programmers slightly overestimated our intelligence, at least mine. The only time I felt so lost was once I set my iPhone to Turkish for a laugh. And then I couldn't get back into the settings to change the language back... 'The strong is less strong than the weak, because the weak is more numerous than the strong.' I felt like I was hearing Jean-Pierre Raffarin in his famous English speech 'yes needs the no to win for the yes and the no'. They gave him 30 minutes, after 20 minutes he was still saying: Before starting to get to the subject... Management in Latin, comes from manus... Generally when someone starts with etymology in Latin, it's to fill time. Gradually, fewer and fewer people understood what he was saying. At one point he got lost himself, he didn't know what he was talking about. It reminded me of when I played The Sims, sometimes I put my Sim in the pool. Then I removed the ladder. He couldn't get out but he kept swimming until he got exhausted. And that's Raphaël Enthoven giving a speech. Fortunately, David interrupted him, he would talk forever! Enthoven never stops talking, you just move him to another place and he keeps talking. That's why we don't understand anything, because we never get the beginning or the end! Did you see? He still has the little AIDS ribbon on his jacket. World AIDS Day is in December. He hasn't been home to change in 4 months. I saw that Sidaction was this week. But I had already written the joke and I liked it so... It's Ricky Gervais who said you should never let the truth get in the way of a good joke. Me too, I can quote people who are more famous than me. Enthoven did nothing but that: Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Aristotle, Cynthia Fleury, Plato, Seneca, Rousseau. He's the guy who calls his stronger friends to help him. I don't like it, because I can't go on stage and do jokes by Coluche, George Carlin, Dave Chappelle. Otherwise, I get a shitstorm for plagiarism, and then a lawsuit from Gad Elmaleh for counterfeiting the business model.

Well, David, I liked it when you said: Socrates couldn't have a career today. Because he was banging the people he worked with. It's true, powerful people who sleep with subordinates, that... Fortunately, we left that in ancient Greece. It's a distant memory. Whenever I felt like I understood what Enthoven was saying, 2 sentences later he lost me: How to transform an Antonov into a starling? But what? In any case, one thing is certain, it really enlightened us on management. Thank you very much! I think you'll all go back to your companies and change everything following Raphaël Enthoven's keynote. 'What values do my values have? If we have an interest in being virtuous, is it still virtue?' 'Darty, the contract of trust.' But what? 'Do you need to make a contract with someone you trust?' I don't know what that means, but Darty, they're not going to recover anyway. There was a lady who asked a question, who said: I retained a lot of things. Well damn, I didn't, in any case... I'm not the only one. For me, an Enthoven speech is a bit like a dream. It's beautiful, lots of things happen, it goes in all directions and ten minutes later you have no memory of it. In both cases, most of the time, you're asleep. Ah, it's just me? Ok... I liked it because after 25 minutes he landed on his feet: 'Ah yes, I was supposed to talk about the Albatross' and I love it. He said 'Do you have the text in mind?' Well yes, you think! We all reread and learned it by heart before coming here. Les Fleurs du Mal is on my bedside table. I can't sleep if I don't read Spleen and Ideal every night. I'm a bit mean to Enthoven, because I'm jealous. He has everything going for him. He's super handsome, super cultured, he's rich. Then, what reassured me was seeing him speak in front of his large black and white portrait. Ah yeah, he's much uglier with a beard. He was super handsome in the photo. And now it's a bit of a mix of Robert Ménard, Robert Hue. I think honestly, he said to himself: I fuck too much, it's a problem. It encroaches on my schedule, I need to do something. Me too, that's why I let mine grow, it was... It became unlivable. I no longer had time to do my laundry, it was a nightmare. Unfortunately, it's not true. I don't fuck much, I'm in love, I'm faithful. And Christophe's girlfriend is in the room... No, but I don't kid myself, I know I understood nothing of what he said. 'I am the midwife of my interlocutor.' How am I going to use that in my life? Next time I'm in a conversation: Breathe hard, Madam, push! I see the look! No, but seriously... There's just one thing I understood what he said: everyone loses sometimes, even Venus Williams. So, Venus Williams is 466th in the world, for 10 years she's been losing more. He meant Serena, yes, philosophy, I understand nothing, but tennis, don't come at me, Raphaël, please, I'll correct you.

Then we had Grégory Pouy, who explained that humans are the only animal that holds conferences on its extinction but does nothing to change it. According to David Abiker, if we were dogs sniffing each other's butts we'd be happier... And we'd save money on speakers. That would be good for this conference. I liked Grégory's big slides in light blue with fluorescent yellow writing. I think it's the official graphic charter of bad French films that come out in theaters, French comedies. It's always in yellow, on a light blue background. I thought Kev'Adams was going to come out of the wings to fart. Then he displayed 12 Points and said: I'm only going to talk about three because I don't have time. It wasn't that, the other 9, he invented them. I saw the other 9, it was bullshit, it was lorem ipsum. And one of them said: triple bottom line accounting. He copied from PornHub: triple bottom line... He said: The greatest transformation is within you. I looked up, hey Matthieu Ricard, he came without his orange poncho, what's going on?

We moved on to the round table of heirs. Who explained that it's not easy to inherit dad's company... Well no, it's tough, ask Marine Le Pen or Kim Jong Un. It's really not easy... Romain Lacroix told us: power shouldn't be kept too long, it can corrupt. Look at the faces of Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin, it's quite violent. And I liked Apollonia Poilâne who answered the question: What did you think when everyone was making bread? 'Ah, I thought it was great.' Well of course, we all realized that making bread at home was disgusting... Poilâne's turnover went up after that. Emery Jacquillat who said: 'when the mission is clear, it illuminates.' The Grand Corps Malade of Niort. Last speaker, Gregory Haag who starts by saying: 'I love Annecy, it's the second time I've come here.' Well, you don't like Annecy then... You're 40, you've come twice and one of the two times you were paid. It's mad love. Since I didn't really listen to what she said, I couldn't hear everything he said, sorry I said Grégory. Christophe! I couldn't hear everything because I was going on right after. He was praising kindness, I thought: I think that's not addressed to me. Anyway... Well, there was good advice. If, for example, in your life as a business consultant, one day you find yourself attacked by a lion. I don't know, in Angers, for example, you know what to do thanks to Christophe Haag. I loved his slide that said: COVID is the Chance Offered to Validate Your Identity. It looked like the Facebook stuff from conspiracy theorists when they start circling numbers and letters randomly in things. The vaccine pass was validated on November 13 at 2:17 PM. Open your eyes. I couldn't hear everything, Mr. Haag, but from what I understood, he was talking about all the wonderful people who survived attacks, plane crashes and do incredible things, and don't complain. The subtext was a bit: what's your excuse, you bunch of shits? In any case, I took it that way. Thank you for listening to me. I wish you good networking, I'm going to the dentist.