In this short, impactful talk, Pierre du Plessis reflects on the transformative power of friendship across differences. He argues that the most valuable friends are often those who do not look like us, think like us, or share the same background. Such friends hold up a mirror, exposing our hidden biases, prejudices, and limitations. More importantly, they help us see the world as larger, richer, and more complex than our own experience.

Du Plessis emphasizes that real growth and understanding come from relationships that stretch us beyond the familiar and comfortable. By engaging with friends of different cultures, races, religions, or sexual orientations, we discover humility, compassion, and a broader perspective of humanity. The video ends with a reflective call: who do you call a true friend?

Pierre opens by framing his core work in strategy and his passion for human behavior. He introduces two teenagers, Noa and Luther, to illustrate how people form radically different “money stories.” Noa is the saver-entrepreneur who arbitrages a five Rand coin and reinvests; Luther is the fundraiser who can always generate cash on demand. These contrasting behaviors set up the thesis: humans are storytelling creatures, and money is one of our strongest narratives.

He introduces phenomenology as the study of how things appear to us, then uses Plato’s Cave to contrast the pursuit of objective truth with the practical need to examine the “shadows” that shape our experience. Applied to money, we must interrogate why we feel what we feel. Pierre cites mental accounting, “girl math” and “boy math,” and everyday sales rationalizations to show how context distorts value.

Using Ken Wilber’s integral quadrants, he maps how individuals and collectives know things internally and externally, narrowing to the individual interior where money narratives live. He explores scarcity versus abundance, referencing research on how scarcity impairs cognition and long-term thinking, and uses cultural touchstones from Grandpa Joe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Terry Pratchett to show how status, comparison, and symbolism attach to money.

Pierre pushes past surface-level goals with Theodore Levitt’s drill-versus-hole metaphor: people do not want money itself but the power, resources, and adoration they believe it unlocks. He notes why banks resemble temples and why leaderboards of wealth capture attention, then challenges the audience to identify their personal, organizational, and client money stories. He closes with practical prompts: run a “Money is …” exercise with your team, surface hidden narratives, and adjust strategy and client counsel accordingly. The final quote reframes value by contrasting gold with potatoes, reminding us that money matters because we agree it does; meaning and decisions live in the stories we share.

Pierre du Plessis explores how curiosity and mystery fuel creativity. He opens playfully by asking what we do when we kiss and why we close our eyes, using it to illustrate that sight is a forceful sense while smell, touch, and intuition are subtle. We live in a hyper-visual culture dominated by emojis, selfies, Instagram, and endless images, which skews how we judge value and truth by appearance. He cites food waste driven by cosmetic standards and a French supermarket campaign that sold “ugly” produce to prove appearance does not equal quality.

Pierre contrasts past eras that prioritized listening with today’s emphasis on seeing, noting how technology curates our feeds around likes and confirmation. He argues that logic and reason alone do not guarantee wisdom, and that over-lit, hyper-rational environments stifle nuance and originality. Fluorescent light becomes a metaphor for a culture that eliminates shadow and therefore romance, ambiguity, and surprise.

He champions shadow as the place where treasure is found, telling a story of hidden coins discovered in an old ceiling and drawing on Japanese aesthetics that value patina and the unseen. Mystery matters because we secretly love magic and do not need to know how everything works to benefit from it. He warns against “white room” torture as an image of life without contrast.

Practically, Pierre encourages purposeful randomness and getting lost to find new references, rather than consuming what we already like. He offers a simple experiment: pick a cinema by number and watch whatever is showing there, then extract at least one useful idea. He closes by tying curiosity to life and creativity. Shadows are romantic. Uncertainty is romantic. To lead and create well, choose the unknown, cultivate curiosity, and step off the well-worn path.