Run With the Machine. Even in the Louvre.

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Souheil Ben Slimane is a former mobile app developer who is now a licensed Paris tour guide. He builds his own museum tours for families, including a hand-illustrated booklet, designed with his wife and another guide, that turns the Louvre into a deciphering game playable only in person, with him.ChatGPT, he says, does a hell of a good job describing artifacts. The famous ones, anyway: Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. On pure description, the machine wins.What it can’t do is be present. After COVID, the consensus inside his profession was that virtual tours and live-streamed visits would permanently reshape demand. The opposite happened. Bookings came back stronger, and the pattern shifted in a specific direction: visitors who used to book a single guide for several tours now book five different guides for five different tours. They want to meet locals. They also want to skip the line and see rooms without crowds. Human connection, but in low-density form.The booklet is the tell. Ben deliberately built a product that can’t be played without a human officiant: kids receive a coded letter from one of Napoleon’s officers, and only the guide holds the key to decipher it. Apps were cheaper, more scalable, easier to ship. He gave them up because they didn’t teach the kids anything. The deciphering only works if someone is standing there, with you.We also get into how children see the museum differently from adults (not as masterpieces but as birds, angels, things that haven’t been named yet) and what that says about the inner child every adult still drags into the Louvre. We close on AI, where Ben makes a distinction worth keeping: the future museum will have bots that decipher your emotions and adapt to you. They will be better than him on content. Not on presence.This is that conversation.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe