Ignite Talks | unDavos 2026

In five-minute lightning rounds, ten speakers delivered ideas ranging from how desire drives every mass media technology adoption cycle, to why an Oscar-winning animation was made for $4 million, to how Harvard neuroscientists are using real-time EEG to predict brain injury before it happens. Ignite Talks at unDavos 2026 packed more paradigm shifts per minute than any other session of the week.

WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS

• Why resilience is a red flag, not a strength — and how "white space" between overlapping sectors like healthcare and energy creates preventable crises
• How strategic foresight and community storytelling across four generations can drive the transition to a regenerative future
• Why artists matter more than ever in the AI era — tools accelerate output, but only humans provide creative direction and cultural meaning
• How every mass media technology from the printing press to AI agents was adopted fastest through its most unmentionable use case
• How the designer of the UN Sustainable Development Goals is launching The New Division to build elegant solutions that benefit individuals, society, and nature simultaneously

SPEAKERS

• Melissa Stires — Global Growth Officer, MIA AI & CEO, Fundamental Well-Being Foundation (Host)
• Dr. Steph Sharma — Founder & Managing Director, Symbio Strategies
• Dr. Chris Luebkeman — Strategic Foresight Hub, ETH Zurich & Founder, Your 2040
• Danar Worya — Founder & Creative Director, Bright Winter Studio
• Haley Draznin — CMO, Premise AI
• Lee — COO, Premise AI
• Dr. Claudia Friedrich — Harvard Faculty & Board Member, Equiterra
• Lucian Tarnowski — Founding Curator, United Planet & The UP Game
• Jakob Trollbäck — Designer of the UN SDGs & Founder, The New Division

unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.

🌐 undavos.com

Tags: Ignite Talks, lightning talks, resilience, strategic foresight, world building, AI and art, mass media history, technology adoption, neuroscience, brain monitoring, anesthesia EEG, United Planet, Sustainable Development Goals, climate misinformation, Hispanic leadership, Latin America, systems change, regenerative future, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello friends, hello friends, if you are here for the Ignite Talks, then you are in the right room. If you are watching for the Ignite Talks, hi mom, hi other people's moms, you are on the right stage, you're in the right channel. We are so excited to have you here. My name is Melissa Toni Stiers, and I will be your host with the most for this wonderful time together, and I am just really excited and honored to be back at Endavos. I spend my life at the intersection of technology and well-being, and there's so much that I have to read it to you because I'm so busy. I love human connection though, that's my favorite thing, and I love to bring people together from different worlds, which is exactly what's happening today in this room. I am a proud founding partner and the current global growth officer at MIA.AI. I want to give a shout out to my CEO and the co-founder of MIA.AI, Yana Salakangas, who is in the audience. She is a fantastic leader, and she's created MIA, which is one of the most, if not the most human-centric AI companies in the world. I'm also the CEO of the Fundamental Well-Being Foundation on behalf of the foundation. Each one of our speakers is going to get a book from our lead scientist that just talks about what it's like to be a finder, which happens to be the name of an app that we recently launched. At MIA.AI, we believe that the greatest risk to AI, to the AI era, is wasted human potential. And at MIA, we combine a blended lear

Transcript

SPEAKER_14 0:16

Hello friends, hello friends. If you are here for the Ignite Talks, then you are in the right room. If you are watching for the Ignite Talks, hi mom, hi other people's moms, you are on the right stage. You're in the right channel. We are so excited to have you here. My name is Melissa Tony Styres, and I will be your host with the most for this wonderful time together. And um I am just really excited and honored to be back at Undavo's. I spend my life at the intersection of technology and well-being, and there's so much that I have to read it to because I'm so busy. I love human connection, though. That's my favorite thing. And I love to bring people together from different worlds, which is exactly what's happening today in this room. I am a proud founding partner and the current global growth officer at Mia AI. I want to give a shout-out to my uh CEO and the co-founder of Mia AI, Yanis Salakongas, who is in the audience. Um, she is a fantastic lead leader, and um she has created Mia, which is one of the most, if not the most, human-centric AI companies in the world. I'm also the CEO of the Fundamental Well-being foundation on behalf of the foundation. Each one of our speakers is gonna get a book from our lead scientist that just talks about uh what it's like to be a finder, which happens to be the name of an app that we recently launched. At Mia AI, we believe that the greatest risk to AI, to the AI era, is wasted human potential. And at MIA, we combine a blended learning model of online digital learning as well as immersive and alive experiences, which really allows for this more flexible and engaging approach to learning. We equipped organizations by integrating human intelligence and AI for a smarter and more efficient world. And at first glance, AI and fundamental well-being, they don't really sound like they go together. They sound like different conversations, but they do blend together because fundamental well-being describes an inner shift of where people begin living from a steadier pace. And this is really just more clarity, more understanding, um, a deep sense of being okay, even in a world that's quite frankly a little bit chaotic. I'm really glad that we've made it to Thursday here, all safe and sound. Happy to see everyone. Um, and why I'm here today is because I really believe in the work and in the talks of Ignite. Because the AI revolution is here, but it's not, it's not going to change on its own. We are living in a time where we need humanity more than ever. Technology does shape how we think, how we decide, and how we relate to one another. And when it's used appropriately by people that care, by people that have empathy, really amazing things can happen. And that is why Ignite ignites me and excites me, because the Ignite talks are fast, they're bold, and they are intentionally electric. These speakers have just five minutes. They don't have panels, they don't have, they don't have all these wandering opportunities, they don't get to have a second chance with their slide because it's just one big idea. It's delivered with clarity and with courage and with conviction. Its format is designed to really stretch thinking, and I have to tell you, it has stretched our our speakers to the next level. They have worked incredibly hard. For many of them, this is the first time they've ever given a talk like this. And the lineup is I cannot say a bad word. It is flipping incredible. These people, these speakers that you are gonna hear from, they come from all over. They are such a mix of extraordinary voices. We've got scientists, we've got artists, we've got technologists, we've got phil philosoph philosophist, we've got philosophers and phil philosophic philosophical stuff happening. I don't know. I'm so excited I can't even speak. We've got builders and designers, we've got storytellers that take the time to tell the stories that other people do not want to stop and think about. And so as you sit here, I hope that you're gonna be surprised. I hope that you feel a bit challenged, and I expect that there's gonna be at least one moment that you're gonna have, ah, something really clicks. Maybe where a new idea lands and you think about something differently. Maybe something shifts not in your mind but in your body, and you realize that your whole perspective has changed. And that is the magic of Ignite, that's the magic of On Davos, that's the magic of Magic Mountain. Our speakers are simply incredible. So, can we give everybody a round of applause for being here? Thank you for letting me open up this program. And our speakers are so amazing. They didn't get a real briefing either. So, speakers, just a reminder, I will be calling you up one by one with your name and reading just a tiny bit of how awesome you are. As I call you up, just as I say your name, come on up to the front, grab the microphone in my hand, and um I will introduce you and then you will take over. And it is my distinct pleasure to bring Steph up to the stage. So, Steph, and I have to read their bios. I have to look down. I can't make eye contact because they're so amazing and I don't want to miss anything. So, Steph is the founder and managing director of Symbio Strategies, and she is a senior executive fellow, shout out, to the di with the digital economist. She helps organizations strengthen decisionship systems in complex environments, focusing on government, on governance, on metrics, and system level alignment. As an associate fellow for the Euromed Academy, her academic work is grounded in research on uncertainty and non-equilibrium decision making. And I practice that, and it's still hard for me to say. Outside of work, she really enjoys horse riding, sourdough bread baking, flamenco, and responsible international travel with her partner. And also, this is kind of fun. Her dogs actually share her enthusiasm for learning with agile training and scent work. So, Steph, we are happy to have you. Give it up for Steph.

SPEAKER_15 5:40

Thank you. Thank you. Happy to be here. Happy to go first and set the bar, hopefully, somewhat low. No, just kidding. Yeah, I feel good. All right, today I'm gonna talk to you about resilience, but I'm gonna talk to you about what resilience is covering up. We don't often ask what's underneath resilience. I'm Steph Sharma, and I'd like to talk to you about how uncertainty creates white space and what the white space means for us in the future. VUCA environments bring weather extremes, bring COVID extremes, bring digital concerns, where the uncertainty actually goes ahead of where our decision systems are and create gaps. And those gaps are what create white space. But what happens right now is people rise up, they become resilient, and they fill those gaps. They fill that space by becoming resilient, doing extra time, doing extra things. And that creates strength and resilience underneath the organization that is not sustainable. Resilience, as we know it, is something we're proud of, we're excited about. However, when two sectors or two disciplines require resilience for too long, we result in burnout and we result in strategies and structures that are no longer stable. An example is PEs. During COVID, many organizations and communities started creating their own personal equipment because of supply stalls. And that was amazing. They were safety regulated, et cetera, but they fell outside of the system. This resilience, this comes from people working together, people adding extra time, people doing support of each other, and people really holding up that organization with a strong stretch, and they help the organization stretch, and the organization goes, phew, we got through it. However, patterns develop. When these patterns develop, then every time there's a strain, everybody rises up. Then there's another strain, more people come in, more gaps, more gaps, more gaps. This is when we see burnout, fallout, and organizations that don't survive. The unassigned space, which I'm calling the white space, based on many researchers who've called it this space of no accountability. No one has decided that when energy and healthcare need to come together, who's gonna who I I don't know. There's a crisis here. We don't have PEs. Who's going to assume it? So these two organizations can now have the opportunity to think about who does own that overlap because sectors are overlapping, decisions and and disciplines are overlapping. When that overlap happens, people rise up to resilience, but it's still chaos. Let's talk about health care. All over the world, there's excellent health care. Even in um low-income countries, there's great healthcare, great surgeons. Um, I think it was 80% of global health care is located outside of Western countries. Then we look at energy. Energy has a 70% growth globally in advanced health care, or sorry, advanced um alternative energy, and most of that is in low-income countries. And solar has been seen as cheaper for those countries. Now look, health care and energy have to work together. You can't do surgery without energy. And there are there are generators, but those generators are not reliable. And so we really have to think about the gap that happens when in one billion of the people who don't have energy that's reliable are on the surgical table. In Ghana, the percentage of people who have a mortality of mortality risk increase is 43% every single day of no power. This leads us to think about the opportunity. The opportunity is the interception. Consider if we built into our strategies interception. If we could intercept and say, hey, energy, hey, healthcare, who owns what? What is the opportunity here? Let's get together, let's talk about it. From a more proactive perspective, it could also be when there's a crisis. The way we identify that interception is when we start to see people doing new roles, when we start to see people holding things up. When we start celebrating resilience, we should hold up a big red flag and say, wait a minute, we need to intercept here. There's a problem strategically. This first step is collective sense making. We get together, we find a win-win. What do you need energy? What do you need healthcare? What's a win-win for each of us? And that's where we say, what can you do? What happens? What's the what happens when the next pressure, the next shock comes, and we need to come together. Well, we can do shared decision making, which this lovely metaphor of a bridge works and has worked for eons. We come together when we find out each of the nodes and each of the responsibility points that each organization can take on. This is led through strategy, structure, and leadership. Strategy needs to be redefined. Structure helps with the operational aspects, and leadership does what? It empowers the interception. Leadership has to authoritatively hold for interception. One example happening in Denver, Colorado. Barbers have been trained as lay counselors in their communities because mental health patients go into their barber chair and they are able to help them intercept with the care that they receive. Resilience is not the problem. Resilience is not going away. What is it doing? It's creating capacity so that we can color in the white space and be more strategically grounded and use resilience as an empowerer instead of a burnout.

unknown 11:12

Woo.

SPEAKER_14 11:17

Not a low bar at all. Thank you so much, Steph. That was incredible. Oh my goodness. Um, our next speaker is Chris. He has um, this is not in his bio, but he's been speaking. This is his either seventh or ninth event for this week. So we're just honored to have you, Chris. Chris is a global, rec, globally recognized foresight leader who bridges engineering, design, and strategy. Did I get it right? To help organizations navigate complexity and change. He has a degree in geology, civil, and structural engineering, and a doctorate for in architect from ETH Zurich. Did I say that right? All right. He has taught and advised worldwide, and I mean, obviously, speaking seven or nine times this week, we can understand why everybody's grabbing for him. He's a former director of innovation, foresight innovation in an incubation team. He has shaped global conversations on the future of built environment. And today, I we have it right, you lead a strategic foresight hub at ETH Zurich, where he integrates long-term thinking into education, research, and policy. Chris continues to advise global institutions fostering collaboration and imagination towards a more regenerative and resilient future. Chris, take it away. Give Chris a hand.

SPEAKER_02 12:29

Did I send that to you?

SPEAKER_14 12:30

I pulled it.

SPEAKER_02 12:31

I don't recall doing that, but that's great. Fantastic talk. So good afternoon, everybody. Let's get to slides. So all of us are storytellers. Every culture in the world learns and shares by storytelling. I'm a futurist and been working in this domain for almost 30 years, helping build the bridge between today and tomorrow for countries, for corporations, for individuals, for groups. I was at the hop of a hotel in Dubai almost 15, 20 years ago, and asking the head futurist of Intel, said, How do we change the future? So the answer is very simple. We change the story which we tell each other about the future we're going to live in. The key is we change the story. So what's the story that we tell ourselves about the future we are going to inhabit? Not only we, but what about the next four, five, six generations? What's the story that we wish to live? To live into. And that is what I've been working on specifically for the past five years with the organization which I've created called Your 2040. My learning has been we cannot be people-centric only. This is what has gotten us into the global challenges we have today. That the people, our self-ego has taken over. We can't just focus on place, building beautiful places, 15-minute cities, or whatever. We can't just focus on making our structure around us perfect to work. And now we can't just focus on the planet or nature. Because each one of us is part of that planet. We are all nature, every single one of us. We need nature. She gives us everything that we require in order for us to survive and thrive and have our economies function. So we have to put all three of these together into the storytelling. We have to add all three components very consciously and very conscientiously. So what we've done over the past, as I said, five years is I bring about 80 to 100 people together in the Swiss Alps, and we look at a day in the life of a real human. We use a series of characters, thinking about what is their day today look like. What is their actual 24-hour rhythm? The same thing for the places, for the store, for the train station, for the co for the square, the infrastructure which you and I walk through these streets of Devos every day. And how do we inhabit us? What's a day in the life there? And then we also take a look at a day in the life of natural places. All things that a community recognizes. It can no longer be the royal we or they, it has to be me. What do I see? And that's the only way we can get action. So we have to make it so that we see ourselves where we are with Mother Nature together and imagining then the changes which are occurring with climate change. Nature is going to change drastically. In Switzerland, we are already experiencing 4.2 degrees delta in our climate. 4.2. Our glaciers are going to be gone by the end of the century. 45% are gone already. So that changes profoundly the environment we live in. And so therefore, take a look at that, we come back and then create the story we want for four generations and backcast. How do we get there? And it has to be that you see yourself. And so we're doing that, and it's a toolkit we're happy to share with anybody and everybody so a community can do it yourself. So with that, please, as I said, join us. And I went over to six minutes. I tried really hard.

SPEAKER_14 16:32

You did great.

SPEAKER_02 16:33

So please ask me about it. So thank you.

SPEAKER_14 16:35

Thank you, Chris. Thank you. Are we your last talk of the week? Do you have any more talks after this? Are you done? Is this a mic drop? Oh my gosh. You are done. Thank you, Chris. That was amazing. And I love I love people playing. I like I like those kind of when I can remember them. Um, the next speaker I'd love to bring up is Denar. Denar is the founder and creative director of Bright Winter Studio, a creative studio focused on cinematic world building and visual storytelling across films, games, and emerging media. Trade you. He is the studio operates at the intersection of art of narrative and technology, supporting high-end productions through concept art as well as environment design and world building pipelines that bridge triple A games and cinematic storytelling. And Denar is like the joy of Davos is that there are friendships that happen in Davos. Steph and I are digital economists, uh senior fellows together. Denar and I uh we met through Davos last year, and he is just an incredible, incredible human being. Um and I just need to brag a little bit more. His work has um over a decade he's spent working across Hollywood and Europe, contributing to major film and television and game productions, including HBO Max, Sony, Netflix, Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers, just to name a few. His work centers on building believable worlds, visual identity systems, and narrative environments for large-scale franchises. Can we give Denar a hand? Welcome to our stage.

SPEAKER_03 18:04

Thank you so much. What an introduction. I think we can start Yes. So from an artist's perspective, one of the biggest fears we have now that AI has come up is do we matter anymore? Why artists matter when creation becomes instant? That's the question that we will have today. And late 1800s, one of the things that um I think the slideshow fixed. Anyways, in the late 1800s, one of the things that really happened was humans and portrait makers were thinking, I think my job is over. Yeah, let's restart. Alright, so this is not something that is very new to artists. In the late 1800s, portrait painters who have worked for decades thought, my job is over because photography is coming, and now all of a sudden, in an instant, you can take a photo, and that person doesn't need me anymore. Same happens for writing. Before uh texting came along, computers, we wrote something on a paper and gave it to a dove, and now we can actually communicate instantly to each other. And this, of course, also happened in the entertainment industry where we worked beforehand with makeup and we worked with miniatures, and now we're transitioned to putting some dots on people and making them creatures and monsters, and next to that building a digital set where actors can do and we can our imagination is the limit. So the question is is AI truly taking over creativity? Is the worth of art now all of a sudden only about input or excuse me, about output, about how fast you can bring forward? I don't think so. I don't think art was ever a visual luxury. Thousand years ago, before humans can write, cavemen decided to go outside to come back and put meaning on a cave. Why? Because it mattered, because it's a storytelling we want to bring forward to the next generation of youth. So again, the tools may have changed, but the meaning has always stayed the same. Acceleration of tools gives us a lot of possibilities, but the human story and history is something that is only important for us. And throughout the years, of course, now that we have AI coming up the last three years, all of a sudden output output is endless, production is fast. But artists matter now more than ever. Because right now the tools may accelerate, but the direction is where the artists come into play. Similar to ships who were hundred hundreds of years ago were made through making wood in ships, and right now it's all automated. But at the end of the day, there's still a captain leading the direction of where the ship has to go. There's a saying in Arabic which is Kanaatu Sabr, meaning conviction and then patience. The first stroke that an artist puts is full of conviction, and the artist needs the patience for the image to come alive and to breathe. This is for me, world building is similar to a blueprint of a house. It's not before we lay the first brick, we have to communicate together. We have to have space to be able to pivot. So the most important thing is the meaning behind the communication of artists when we are building something. Now, from my own experience, I've the last three years, all the major big studios thought, you know, we don't need artists anymore. We're just gonna use AI. Now I can tell you within two, three months, they all came back because they figured out that the tools may accelerate, but the communication of artists is what's most important. James Cameron is a perfect example, a person who has endless money and endless technology under his hand. But also he knows, and that's why it took a decade to make Avatar, that technology is in service. Of the human story. And the beauty now is you don't need a hundred million dollar budget. You don't need to be James Cameron. Right now you can get a mocap suit at a laptop in your own room and you can start making your own stories, bringing your own culture forward, telling the stories that haven't been told through the Hollywood Gateway or through Bollywood. Perfect example is this show is this animation movie Flow. This was made by a small team in Europe on a small budget of$4 million, and it won the Oscar for best animated film, beating out Disney and DreamWorks. Now, what does this mean? This means that AI, of course, is of importance, but it's not about the output. It's about AI making the pro breaking the barriers of Hollywood and hopefully giving children from all around the world opportunities to express their culture. This is something that truly happened to me. Before I could read, before I could do any history lessons, I played games, and these games all had different cultures. And because of this, because it touched me emotionally, I started to invest in it and then do my research in history. So what does this mean for governments? This means finally there's no barrier to go to Los Angeles, to go to Hollywood, to go to Europe. The tools can help us break the progress, the progression, the budgeting, and we can invest into our youth. Now, I like to finish this all with one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite directors. The most personal is the most creative. And this quote is from the most amazing film director, my faux most favorite American director, Martin Scorsese. And I think in a day and age of endless output, that's a beautiful reminder to have. Thank you all so much.

SPEAKER_14 23:48

Thank you, Janar. Thank you so much. I love that. I love that stories matter. That is why we are in the room right now. Stories matter and artists matter. And I'm gonna ask Haley to come on up because she is a storyteller and artist in her own right. She Haley explores the connective threads between creativity, technology, and narrative. Haley is the chief marketing officer at Premise AI, a science company building AI models with novel architecture, where she translates complex technology, which I appreciate, into clear, compelling stories. Once again, a storyteller for customers and partners and investors. Her creative work focuses on comedy writing and screenwriting. This is super cool. She has toured nationally with stand-up comedians. She's developed material for live performances, late-night TV. She's credited for script work on a Netflix comedy special. And I believe you wrote and produced an award-winning, award-winning short film based on original television pilot. Um, and outside of her work, I'm super excited because I would fly up for this. Haley is a serious home cook known for hosting memorable dinner parties, despite New York's uh square footed shortage in an apartment. And across disciplines, she brings curiosity, emotional intelligence, and a narrative precision to everything she builds, whether it's a brand, whether it's a story, or whether it is an experience for an audience just like this one. Welcome to our stage, Haley. Give her a big ignite applause. Thank you.

SPEAKER_16 25:21

So every mass media technology has a secret origin story. It's not rooted in productivity and it's not born of education. It's sex. Now, whenever a new medium appears, smart people predict all of the serious use cases for it. But more quickly than we'd like to admit, end users start asking, how could I use this to see someone naked? This is a feature, not a bug, because desire, as it turns out, is a technological accelerant. New technology is scary, okay? More and more we're using technology that we could never build ourselves. We're reliant on technology that we barely understand. And that's really intimidating. But sex, sex is unsophisticated. And if you can use new technology for watching funny business, well, how complicated could it really be? And what a motivation to learn how to use it better. Desire is an accelerant. Now, when the printing press was first invented, only about 5 to 10% of the population could even read. And while Gutenberg's press today is most well known for printing Bibles, literacy rates didn't spike because people were horny for scripture. Erotica became a vector for literacy, and therefore tech adoption. People were motivated to learn how to read, and they paid for erotic stories. A literate population demands more printed materials, and so society invested more in the printing press. Now, 500 years later, this completely scaled the same way. Magazine publishing drove advancements in high-quality color printing, photo reproduction, systems for national distribution. Which magazines exactly? Well, the photo quality of Newsweek photos weren't exactly a big deal. Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, they relied on these technological advancements to keep their monthly circulation high. Higher, by the way, than any highbrow publication like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Harper's. Now, the most notorious case of porn driving tech adoption has to be VHS versus Betamax. Betamax was the superior product in terms of image quality, in terms of recording time, but it also had very strict controls over the kind of content that it would license. VHS didn't. And so porn only had one option for production. If you owned a video rental store and you had to stock the most reliably rented titles, you were stocking porn, which meant VHS. Then came the internet. Now obviously the internet's relationship with porn is very well understood. But once again, desire fueled technology in a way that we never could have anticipated. Internet porn, before any SaaS company, was responsible for the creation of age verification systems, recurrent online billing, fraud detection, improved metadata tagging, content paywalling, and all of the general recommendation engines that we take for granted today. And if you still think that all of this is just coincidental, ask yourselves why you know all of the applications for incognito browsing. Now, what about AI agents? AI agents are too new to be influenced by desire, right? Wrong. AI girlfriends are already the reason why users are demanding improvements in persistent memory architectures, user-specific world models, real-time voice latency reduction, and improved on-device AI experiences. Forget hardware. Desire will be the reason that we achieve true AGI. When we ignore desire, we misread adoption curves. A new technology emerges and we lie to ourselves. We say this time will be different. This time the professional use case will win out. But if we can't be honest with ourselves about where we've been and what we were doing while we were there, we'll never see clearly where we're going. Spicy content helps stress test platforms. It reveals edge cases, it forces early monetization, it reveals regulation gaps. We can pretend it's not happening, but our embarrassment only slows our progress. So the next time you have a new product idea, a groundbreaking new technology, a stunning advancement in mass media, ask not what is the enterprise use case, because that misses the point. That ignores technological accelerants. Ask instead, what's the unmentionable use case? And I promise, if you build it, they will come.

SPEAKER_14 30:39

Oh my gosh! Give Haley the biggest hand. Desire is an accelerant. Holy cow. That was amazing and hysterical. And I'm sorry for her coworker that has to come up and follow her. And you know, he's just a great speaker as well. Everyone, this is Lee. He is um he is uh also a Davos friend of mine now, and he lives at the intersection of technology, strategy, and also storytelling. In his day job, he is the chief operating officer at Premise AI, a revolutionary science company that's building AI models, as we've heard. His typical day is a mix of focusing on company operations as well as fundraising, meeting with clients, and translating all of this once again into a clear narrative. Lee also writes essays and does research pieces on and is occasionally also a stand-up comic as well. In 2026, will be his sixth World Economic Forum. So this is your sixth one here, and he has given talks on subjects ranging from investment banking to Ozempic to demographic collapse. And outside of work, Lee is a very committed distance runner and a member of Central Park Track Club. He has run six marathons and does much of his best thinking on those cold early morning runs. He is a lifelong New Yorker who loves to travel and see the world, and he brings that curiosity to the stage. And I have to ask you, Lee, because I can like is it super awkward to stand here as your bio is getting red, or do you love it?

SPEAKER_17 31:59

I I never have a problem with people talking about me. I encourage it, in fact.

SPEAKER_14 32:04

Amazing. Can we give Lee a big round of applause?

SPEAKER_17 32:12

Thanks, Melissa. So I'm here to tell you a story about a time traveler. It's my friend Peter. And I've known Peter for a long time, but I saw him recently, and he was a different person. He had lost weight, and he looked just incredible. Incredible. And I want to talk about what enabled that transformation for Peter because it is something that we could all be doing, but which is not really made available to most people. Now, part of it is it starts with steroids. I know that's a crazy scary word to most people. We are used to thinking of steroids as it's either zero or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but there is a very significant amount of space in between. And in fact, the optimal point for most people over 40 is setting the dial to three out of 10. You don't have to, it doesn't have to be binary. In fact, this middle ground is crucial. And if you are using medications like, say, GLP1s like Ozempic and Mountjaro, you need to offset the muscle mass that is lost. So that's the first piece of it. The second piece of what helps create this is a healthy lifestyle. It's vital that you are exercising and working out and eating well. Obviously, we know that. But then let's go to the next step. Peptides. Here's a couple of them: BPC 157, TB500. Most of you have never heard of these. One of the reasons why you've never heard of these is because these are naturally occurring molecules, and as a result, they can't be patented. And if they can't be patented, it means there is no economic incentive to go through a multi-year regulatory review process. And if you don't go through a multi-year regulatory review process, then people are going to say, well, the FDA hasn't said these are safe. The regulators haven't said that these are safe. But there are no reasons not to use these. And so we are in a position where these molecules can be vital to all of us, but yet we are not using them. Now, Peter has a doctor. Peter's doctor, he talks to him every single month, and he has him on a bespoke list of 20 different compounds. He showed me the list. That's what state-of-the-art longevity medicine is doing right now. Now, the last piece of this that I think we need to discuss is what I would call the one disease theory. When we see things like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, in most cases, these are manifestations of the same underlying medical problem. And it starts with that problematic lifestyle, the metabolic imbalance. And when we fix that with a combination of steroids, peptides, uh GLP1s, healthy lifestyle, we are able to treat people before they become sick. Now, doctors are used to playing whack-a-mole. You come in, you're sick, they fix the thing that's sick, and then you move on to the next thing that's sick. That's not the right way to approach this. We need to treat these problems before they begin. The data is remarkable. When people take GLP1s, what they uncover is that cancer rates, heart disease rates, diabetes rates go down by high double-digit percentages. Now, this is not accessible to everyone right now for a couple of reasons. It's expensive. A doctor that you pay a few thousand dollars a month to give you a customized list of medications, that's not accessible to most. But most technologies started off expensive. Right? Cell phones were$4,000. They're not anymore. Everyone in this room has one of those. This is the future of medical treatment. And it is crucial that we are able to unlock this for more and more people. And when we think about this, the right government policy here is to enable this for everyone. Because instead of government and insurers spending trillions every year treating these diseases, it's a lot cheaper to underwrite subsidized treatment for everyone before they are sick. The peptides, the GLPs. These things make such a difference that the net savings is remarkable. How about this? I saw a statistic recently that said that the use of Ozempic is going to save airlines about$500 million a year. Could you imagine being so fat that you make the airplane use more gas? Like that's a wild concept to think about. But the future is different. And that's what we are unlocking now. We are unlocking a bright, incredible future that we are transitioning to. And I am proud to be able to speak to you about this and to hopefully educate you about how vital it is that you start to explore these treatments. Go learn about them. Don't be afraid of them. Don't be worried just because they don't have regulatory approval yet. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_14 37:28

Thank you, Lee. I mean, I think we're all going to be wanting to follow up with you because we all want Peter's doctor now. I do. I know that much. That was incredible. I am learning so much. This stage has been amazing, and I am thrilled to bring up Dr. King. Dr. King is just, she is a rock star. She is a former radiation oncologist, turned public health champion. Here you go, Doctor, specializing in indoor air quality, tobacco control, cancer prevention, and sustainable finance. She is a leading global voice advancing action on indoor air quality and neglected a neglected issue with significant health and economic impact, which I think fits perfectly in where we're at today. In 2012, she founded Tobacco Free Portfolios, whose tobacco-free finance pledge has attracted more than 200 signatories, representing over, wait for this number, 18 trillion US dollars. Okay? And in 2025, she co-convened the first ever high-level UN General Assembly side event on healthy indoor air and co-founded Air Club, a global community of air quality advocates. And her TEDx Sydney has been viewed over three million times. Please give Dr. King a huge round of applause.

SPEAKER_11 38:42

Thank you very much. And uh it's such a pleasure, a pleasure to be here today. I'm very pleased to talk to you today about an invisible problem that is impacting all of us right now. You can't see it, you can't hear it, you can't feel it, and you can't taste it. Populations all over the world spend around about 90% of their time indoors. If you're 40 years old and there's some 40-year-olds out there, you've spent around 36 years of your life inside. Indoor air quality has a huge impact on your life. When measured, indoor air quality is typically terrible. The air is full of pathogens, all the bugs that cause the disease, pollutants like wildfire smoke and vehicle emissions, and plastics. Humans inhale tons of plastics, microplastics, every day. All of these hazards are terrible for your health, yet we inhale a cocktail of them every single day. The lack of indoor air quality standards is a gap in our public health frameworks. We already have solutions. We need to implement indoor air quality standards. We need to monitor indoor air quality with simple monitors like one of these. We need to ventilate the air by replacing stale air with fresh air, and we need to purify the air. Educating populations is crucial in this discussion. We need to empower people so they understand the importance of indoor air quality and they know what to do to protect themselves. Surprisingly, hospitals are not safe. Isn't that incredible? They're not safe. They are filled with unhealthy air. In Australia, where I'm from, in the past three years, thousands of people who become infected with airborne diseases while in hospital, and five to ten percent of them have died because of that. It shouldn't be controversial to expect schools and offices and public transport to be safe, but they're not. Those places currently have a free pass to make you sick. One dollar invested in indoor air quality will deliver up to$200 of benefits. Better health, school attendance is up, brain power is up, and productivity is uplifted so much it's the same as hiring an extra 10% of employees. So what's the barrier? The science is clear, the solutions are there, and the rationale is undeniable. It's awareness and leadership that are the challenges. Last year, along with my colleague Dr. Georgia Lagudas over there and MPeng, we founded uh Air Club. We went off to UN headquarters, we had a big event, and we launched the Global Pledge for Healthy Indoor Air. France and Montenegro signed up alongside 250 businesses, academic institutions, and health groups. And uh the pledge outlines six key reasons why we should all uplift our attention to indoor air quality. Health is number one. Better indoor air quality, it will reduce exposure to infectious disease, it will reduce lung disease, heart disease, stroke, dementia, and cancer. There is no health downside. Quality of life will go up and longevity will be increased. The second reason is uh human rights. In 2022, clean air was enshrined as a human right by the UN General Assembly alongside the right to clean water and a sustainable environment. The third reason is pandemic preparedness. The next pandemic is a matter of time. Yet our built environment is not prepared. If our schools and our businesses had healthy indoor air standards, they would be safe havens rather than places that would need to be locked down. A built environment that can guarantee clean air is essential for climate resilience. As the temperatures heat up, there are more wildfires, smoke billows across borders and countries, and people seek refuge indoors. Work health safety is another very important lens. Already, employees, employers must provide safe spaces for their workers, but now the International Labour Organization has implemented a new convention specifying employers must protect their workers from biological hazards, including airborne diseases. And finally, accessibility. Air should be safe for everyone, even asthmatics, even those with cancer or heart disease. We already have wheelchair ramps and smoke and um and uh nut free schools. Safe air is just the same. Happily, there's a lot of progress. That's the JP Morgan new headquarters building. It's got the best air quality of any office on the planet. Boston public schools have improved air quality all throughout their footprint, and 25% of US states have implemented indoor air quality recently. Keep in touch, learn more, sign up to our newsletter, and encourage your organization to sign the global pledge. Thank you.

SPEAKER_14 44:08

Thank you, Dr. King. That was amazing. I am learning so much. That is so exciting. I do hope that you all and everybody watching, you guys get in touch with our speakers because they are incredible. The initiatives that they're running, the work they're doing is just absolutely inspirational. And I am just, I am thrilled. And I'm so thrilled to bring Elizabeth to our stage right now. Elizabeth is a global, is another global business leader. I think you're gonna hear that theme a lot as we continue. These these people are just incredible visionaries. Elizabeth is on is a board of director for the is it S-T I S E T SETI. SETI, the SETI Institute, which works with a little place called NASA and other really cool space agencies. She was co-chair of Technology, Innovation, and Inter Entrepreneurship Committee for the Board of Columbia Business School's Women's Circle. Elizabeth has been called, this is so cool, a space philosopher. I told you we had a philosopher, now I can say the word. And she is internationally, um, she has some internationally acclaimed books that include Stellar Singularity, Navigating the Space Faring Economy, and Blockchain Reaction, the future of how we live and we work. Can we please give Elizabeth a huge ignite round of applause?

SPEAKER_07 45:17

Thank you. I'm delighted to be here and I'll get started. Um so stellar singularity defines that moment in time after which space ceases to become something that is remote and separate than us and becomes integrated into our lives and work. We've entered the space the age of spacefaring as well, because you know, we are starting to actively enter space, right? Outer space where you know there's more travel happening. Now, spacefaring answers, speaks to our curiosity as sentient beings. You know, for civilizations have looked into the skies and wondered, who are we? How can I touch the stars? How can I get to the moon? What is my place in the universe? And we're starting to see the spacefaring economy really accelerate, driven by you know who we are as humankind. But it's also a very complex landscape. There are security issues, there are sovereignty issues, there are geopolitical issues. So we need principles of stellar singularity to move us forward into this, you know, into the final frontier so we can actually be productive and work together more effectively. Now, space already fuels and permeates every aspect of your life. Your phone, your GPS, your you know, Pandora or Spotify, it's all funded and um, you know, they'd be underpinned by space infrastructure. Um it could be Teflon, it could be MRIs, which were you know created uh for digital signal by digital signal processing to um look at moon photos better, right? MRIs everything that uh benefits us in many, many ways comes from space. So you are a space consumer, embrace that. But you know, the the question sometimes people also ask us this is great, like NASA did all this stuff, and you know, we can use it. But um what really happens? Is there real value? Is there what's the economic value? So I've been thinking about this question for over a decade, and I came up with this value chain of the space economy. There's primary space research, you know, things that really help and benefit us as mankind, and this is in my book, no pressure, because I know you have bags to carry back, a couple of copies there if you would like. Um the second is launch and logistics. Everything we have to do to get something off the earth, right? To get to help us release gravity. Um there's space ports there, there's satellites, there's rocket ships, there's good stuff there. And now the truth is that there's also um your data and then direct to consumer. Now the other truth is that every company will be a space company. So they're space consumers, but every company will be a space company. Not just the you know, the the space agencies and the the space companies we know, but uh pharma companies, mining companies, insurers. They're all going to be relying on space to thrive and flourish. This is very similar to where we were with the internet economy, if you remember, right? Some people use the internet and then it became everything. Space is similar. Space is also global commons. We have to think about it as a shared space. We can't, you know, uh there's lots of challenges with how we navigate what happens in orbit. But in order to navigate space as global commons, um, we also have to kind of look back, right? Um through civilization, we've seen that there's always been conflict. There's even the myths talk about you know conflicts between uh what have you know the the beings of um of the skies and the uh and the earth, you know, the gods, whether it's the Greek um civilization or the Indian civilization, we've all talked about that. And over the years we've come up with many, many treaties um to help us resolve things, but we're still not there. We're you know, struggling. And that's where the principles of stellar singularity come in. Now I've um come up with 10 principles. I won't go into all of them. Um they'll they'll show here in the slides. But the gist of the principles of stellar singularity are three things. The first is that we have to expand our canvas and understand that space is gonna be part of our operating system and our environment. Um we are learning more about what lies outside our planet, um, you know, exoplanets, the probability of finding life, of understanding what life really is. All of those things are going to change our uh our understanding and the way we navigate the space canvas. The second principle is that we absolutely have to design everything we do, whether it's law or technology, it has to be designed for interdependence because we are all connected. And the third is we have to design for human flourishing. We have to ensure that humankind is united and that we actually are moving forward to preserve human dignity and sovereignty for every individual. These principles also can translate into the boardroom or life, right? You have to be, you know, you have to have mission clarity. Are you going to the moon? Are you going to Mars? Are you doing this or are you doing that? Um, you need interdisciplinary teams to work together. So break your silos. You absolutely have to design for uncertainty and resilience. And you also have to absolutely design for um, you know, uh iterative changes. Um, I'll just leave you with this one thing. Um think about you're already spacefarers. All of us, we are spacefarers. We're going around the sun, you know, we're um being fed by the light of the stars, and we're we're experiencing radiation from centuries away, right? And um light years away. So um lean into the spacefaring economy, participate, and really treat it with optimism because I do think it can really move us all forward.

SPEAKER_14 50:55

Thank you so much, spacefarers. We're all spacefarers. I love that. Ben knows he's coming to the stage, he sees his name up there. Here you go, Ben. So Ben is um the founder of LifeShip, a spacecraft engineer and a space investor, bridging Earth's regenerative regenerative wisdom and humanity's expansion into the cosmos. See how we blended it? We're like on the space thing now, it's so cool. Because we're all space fares, we're all space fares. Um he was he was an early engineer at Planet where he helped design skelet telescope hardware deployed on hundreds of satellites, imaging Earth daily. And as an investor, Ben, you back companies focused on human flourishing on Earth and beyond. And through LifeShip, you lead a space society that has already landed an archive of Earth, that has landed that's landed an archive of Earth containing DNA, seeds, art and knowledge on the moon. That's correct. Oh my goodness gracious. His work centers on preserving life, stewarding planetary futures, and continuing the human story beyond Earth. Super cool. Please give Ben a huge round of applause.

SPEAKER_18 52:06

Thank you. I love rainforests. Uh the rainforests have given me the knowing of the earth as an organism. Intelligent, and the earth does everything an organism does, but it hasn't reproduced yet. And I believe that's part of why we're here is hum the earth has grown humans to help spread the seeds outward. And I started life ship with that mission to continue life in the universe, to steward the expansion of life, to continue human consciousness. And uh I believe in taking action. And so humans have built seed banks for for thousands of years. It makes sense to save a copy of Earth as it is today somewhere else. And that felt like the right bridge to start with seed banks and then build towards uh spreading life outwards and not just seas, because those are plants, but then DNA of all different animals. Um, so I I started this mission and collected DNA from 10,000 humans, hundreds of uh different species, hundreds of plants. And uh the first place that made sense to do this is is the moon because it's our our next closest celestial body. It's closest, close enough to get to, yet yet hard enough to uh to to be distanced. And uh I recently was at the pyramids, and uh do it doing this in a pyramid felt felt right. It it's a symbol that stood the test of time, it's it's a symbol of a civilization passing on something to a future civilization. This is one going to the moon soon. It has all sorts of plant seeds, all sorts of artists have added art. There's a mini Swiss chocolate bar in there. Artists did a miniature book, um, and this all fits in the palm of my hand. Uh we use different technologies to uh save data and images forever. These are our plant seeds embedded in a polymer that's inside one of these pyramids. Um and uh then we've we've uh preserved information in uh crystal. Uh this uh Samuel Stubblefield's here here, and he he helped he did the design of this crystal, and we have all sorts of art on here. We have the stories of humanity, we have all sorts of information about Earth and uh and our history in that crystal. This is the Moonlander that launched right about a year ago. Uh company Firefly Aerospace, uh based out of Austin, Texas, built this moon lander. And NASA had about eight payloads on it, and we had a small pyramid on on the top. It launched from Earth, and then March 2nd, 2025, it came down and landed successfully on the moon. Um there are a few different commercial moon landing companies that launch on the the major rockets out there, and it it landed completely successfully on the moon. This is its selfie looking back at Earth in the distance. And so there is a golden pyramid on the moon now that has a backup of Earth and uh and uh over a hundred thousand people also added their stories and wishes and prayers. Our next mission launches around July. We're on a moon rover, and we're again putting a pyramid on the front of this moon rover, and it has live videos. So we'll actually have a live video of this pyramid driving around on the moon, and then we want to get an image of the Earth rising. Uh, this is Samuel Stubblefield's design. Uh, we're working on a uh a sanctuary on the moon where at the end of the rover's life, it'll calculate the battery life, drive the biggest circle it can, and then park this pyramid in the center. And then we're working with NASA to get that designated as the sanctuary. Uh, then we're sending a mission to an asteroid with an asteroid mining company, and it will also have a golden pyramid on it, and that's that's planned for launch in October. So we're going into deep space and uh leaving a forever footprint of humanity. Uh space, space is is rocketing. It's it's a major topic here at Davos. There are talks in all different houses, um, and it is about to go exponential in a way that most people can't comprehend. There will be there will be daily flights of the moon. Many of us will take a rocket here and not do this in the future to travel halfway around the world. I want to imagine you to imagine sitting in a in a dome on the moon, surrounded by plants, and looking back at the earth, and and that that feeling of what it would look like to look back at Earth. And since this is in the near future and we're telling the positive stories, imagine looking back and being proud of where humanity has come and what we're up to and the species we're becoming and uh how we are stewarding life outwards. And so that's Lifeship's mission. We're we're we're building towards spreading life, we're building towards sacred spaces in space, we're building towards putting a temple on the moon that that people can go to and um and that provides a transformational experience for our species. Thank you.

SPEAKER_14 57:23

Amazing! Oh my goodness. I kind of really want to be in that picture looking at Earth, but I'm a little afraid of the rocket. But hopefully, Ben, you'll get it, they'll get it right by the time. Thank you so much, Ben. Can I have Dr. Sean come to the stage? And I don't know if you call yourself doctor, but I you have that PhD. So Dr. Sean is the founder and CEO of Premise AI. And I promise you, they did not, this company did not pay me off to bring them all here. They're just amazing in and of themselves. So we've heard what Premise does, but Sean, you earned your PhD in theoretical physics from this little this little college called Johns Hopkins University. But the really cool thing is, Sean, you were the very first PhD student that was advised by Jared Kaplan, now co-founder and CEO of Science Officer, who's at another small little company called Anthropic, I believe. Yes. So very cool. Sean's work, um, Sean's work is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing from physics, mathematics, and system thinking and engineering to turn fundamental architectural advances into deployable systems. Now, outside of work, Sean enjoys cooking and hiking and spending out times outdoor, spending time outdoors. And you are also, you're a black belt in Taekwondo. All right, all right. So I'm gonna give him the mic and give Sean a hand of applause for Ignite.

SPEAKER_12 58:42

Thank you so much for teeing me up right there. So uh I'm gonna be talking about something that is near and dear to my heart and to premise. Uh so you may have heard that we're in the middle of an AI revolution. I'm not sure how many times it's been repeated, so I'll just say it again. Uh, you know, there's a lot of talk of language models and generative AI. Uh, and I want to talk about what actually is underlying that, something called the transformer. Uh so the transformer is a specific thing that is called a neural network. And neural networks, they've been around for a while, and they've largely been regarded as these kind of inscrutable, unknowable black boxes where you can't know what's really going on. And that's not quite a fair characterization. While we might not be able to, you know, intuit what its output is going to be because there's too many calculations, we can understand what the mechanisms of those calculations are, and importantly, we can visualize it. So at its core, uh a uh a neural network is just learning a function, which is just a rule that maps an input to an output. And if you take those inputs and outputs, typically numerical, and treat them as points of sp in space, and take the collection of those points, they just look like surfaces. And these uh these surfaces are what a neural network is learning to approximate. Now, typically we don't have the luxury of knowing exactly what the surface is, so we have to make do with a sampling of a whole bunch of points on that surface, and it is the neural network's job to interpolate those points. How does it do it? The same way PlayStation did back in the 1990s. Do you remember these graphics, or am I just dating myself? They're blocky, uh they're blocky, they have sharp angles, and it's basically just a whole bunch of polygons or triangles coming in together to try and approximate uh a surface. And mathematically, this is what's called a piecewise linear approximation. And all that is is a fancy way of saying take a bunch of flat surfaces, you stitch them together. If you have enough of those flat surfaces, and maybe you squint a little bit, uh, the thing on the left looks a little bit like the thing on the right. You get what is approximately a um a curved surface. So in neural networks, you you may have seen diagrams like this, but fundamentally it's just a whole bunch of uh little like circles with sticks going into them, and the circles in there are these fundamental units called neurons. And neurons uh sounds jargony. They contain something called an activation function, also sounds jargony, but they're actually very simple. And the most popular for many years and the most simple of them is something called the RayLu, the Mac uh rectified linear unit, and it just looks something like this. And the neat thing, the magical thing about these units is if you sum them together, you start getting curved shapes. It starts looking a little bit like the those those polygons from from uh from the PlayStation. And if you take enough of those and add them together, you start getting, you know, a very polygon-like approximation of this curved surface. And this is actually fundamentally what a neural net is actually just doing. It's taking in a single layer, uh, so just if you take a whole bunch of those circles and line them up, a single layer of them uh are just uh doing this piecewise linear approximation. And in order to get a good approximation, we basically just have to wiggle around the surfaces and change the angles that they're at until it looks approximately like the correct surface that we want. Now we can keep adding individual neurons, just each of these little like door hinge looking functions, and add more and more of them and get you know better shapes, but that's additive, it's kind of inefficient. So typically we stack a bunch of these layers together and you get a multiplicative effect. So this is why these neural nets end up being, you know, quote, deep. So if you've heard deep learning, that's where it comes from. And so so this is fundamentally how neural nets work. They they just simply take a whole bunch of surfaces, break them into smaller ones, and you get something that looks almost smooth. Uh and what's kind of neat, I've deliberately kept you know couching this in visual terms and bringing it back to PlayStation. This is actually why uh the neat thing is all of this is just computer graphics, so they can leverage GPUs, which is the same thing that was invented to help video games uh at the turn of the millennium. This is why NVIDIA is worth so much and Sam Altman wants so many GPU chips. So what I described so far uh is actually really good for uh simpler problems. Uh but when you try and visualize language, uh like the the the surface uh for language is is kind of messy. The size and shape of the surface actually changes a decent bit. So we need to do something a little bit smarter. And this is where the transformer specifically comes in. So the first step that you take is you do something a little more clever than that hinge uh looking thing, and you give it a smoothed edge that allows it to be a little more curvy. Uh and then you instead of using a flat surface, you allow it to be this this non-flat surface. You actually get to use smaller curved pieces and stitch those together instead of these flat surfaces. And by doing that, you're able to approximate the messiness of uh of language a little bit better. So the next time somebody tries to talk about the black box of AI and how unscrutable it is, well, maybe it's difficult to understand, but at the very least, you can visualize it and understand it the same way you did when you were playing video games in the 90s.

SPEAKER_14 1:04:12

Woo! Thank you, Philip. So what do they say? I mean, not thank you, Philip. Thank you, Sean. Now Philip's coming in. I read that. They say that you should never be the smartest person in the room, right? That's what they say. Here you go, sir. Um, I think that this has been really enlightening, and it's really fun to be like the least smartest person in the room. So I don't know. I hope you all are learning. I hope you all are engaging. I see a lot of QR codes going up. I hope you guys are getting their contact information. Um, everybody here on the stage is a genius. And of course, Philip, that also means you. You are um, so Philip uses quantum technology to uncover the hidden energetic layers inside of organizations and help them realize their fullest potential. Now, I've this is really, really cool because this can result in extra sales, better talent acquisition, and more effective marketing. And with you, Philip, I believe organizations they receive what is called an upfront aura and SWOT analysis to assess their energetic signature. I got that right. And then from there, a highly effective optimization and harmonization process takes place, which leads to improved energy flow and an overall experience of freedom and happiness for all people involved. This is something super cool. Please give Philip a huge ignite round of applause.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:32

Thank you very much. So I just want you to think of your business challenge for a moment. And when you've done so, imagine that there is a solution which is both easy and very, very quick to achieve. Now, I have helped companies triple their sales within four months. I've helped them gain strategic advantages that nobody could think of before, and I've helped them acquire talents and Completely dried out markets. I'm gonna share with you how this happened. Now, just a little bit about me. I am a trained economist, journalist, and teacher, and my heart beats for quantum physics and how you can apply it to spiritual principles and human development and the development of love and thriving environments. Now, what I'm gonna share with you today is common knowledge in Eastern philosophy and quantum physics, but the business world still largely hasn't adopted it. And if you want to turn your company into a sanctuary of love and well-being, this is the thing you're looking for. Now, quantum physics basically says we live in a reality that has four dimensions, and the information that shapes that reality is outside of these four dimensions. And how do we turn that information, that potentiality, into actual reality? The main thing that we use for this is the human focus. The human focus has a couple of particularities few people really speak about. Now, if we if we talk about the human focus, we usually say we usually speak about the top 5% and we think that's a hundred percent. But what you what we need to know as humans is actually that 95% of how we create reality is unconscious, and we need to make that available. Now, if 95% of your reality is created unconscious by you, the same is true for companies. And as a result, those companies struggle. You will see how. See? They struggle. So so these could these companies think they need to optimize the 5% and completely lack out on the 95%, and therefore they think they need to work harder and strategize more. But I'm gonna show you how you can actually circumvent that and tap into the subconscious content that really drives growth and success. Because if we think, and that's the subconscious belief that we carry, that more work equals more income than every nurse should be a multi-billionaire. But as we all know, that is not necessarily the truth. So, based on that, wouldn't it be a smart move for every entrepreneur and business person to embark on a journey to uncover those 95% and turn their business into a sanctuary of love and well-being for everybody involved? Now I use a technology to achieve that, and that technology is made to turn the subconscious content into actual text and imagery that will propel you forward and allow you to tap into development that you haven't seen yet. And one of those developments is increased harmony, increased well-being, because conflicts, hidden conflicts will be resolved, and as a result, the output of those companies and organizations just dramatically increases. Now going back to this image, and as you can see, there's a purple bar sticking out, and that purple bar is an example of a founder team carrying visions, carrying strategies, but those strategies are not aligned, and they have never figured that out because they don't have that type of conversation. And when I went deeper to analyze why they didn't have these conversations, I did this text analysis, and the text that it sped out was basically they were too stressed to have proper conversations, and they didn't notice it. That's the point. They didn't notice it. I went even deeper to see what caused the stress and why they weren't in the position to notice what was going on under the surface. And obviously you can see the mental level, it was the thinking, it was the physical level, there were corpor things at the body level, and the environment, which is typically where they work. Now, zooming out again to the entire organization, what you can see here is elements of the organization that may stop that the organization from uh flourishing. And here in specific we see that the purpose is not in alignment with the actual business plan, something they were not aware of. So scan this code and send me the name of your company, send me the founding date and the founding place, and I will send you a free example for your analysis. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_14 1:10:23

Thank you so much. That is so cool. Oh my goodness. Just amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing. I would like to now ask Shahji to come to the stage. Sha Gi, come on up here. Hi. Hi there. So a couple of things uh why I'm super excited to have Shah Gi up here is one, he brought little favors for you all. So on your seats, you all have a document that is from him. It's a hard copy, so he's gonna use a show and tell in his in his talk. Another reason why I super love you, Shahji, is that you did a really, really great LinkedIn post uh about this event. So we're we're super thankful. So aside from being a gift giver and really great with his words on social media, he is also the co-founder of Swiss AI Academy, dedicated to helping people use AI with confidence, skill, and safety. I love that so much. He teaches practical, human, AI-centered literacy and leads national efforts to make responsible upskilling accessible to all. His goal is really simple. It's to empower people to think better with AI and not just depend on it. Please give Shahji a huge ignite round of applause.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:33

Hi. Uh thank you, Melissa. And I like to say that I think I am the the least smartest person in this room. I I so many amazing people here. Today we've been asked what is our story? We were asked and we were told that artists are still relevant, right? And my answer to that is yes. Yes, because that is still the case and that is still true. Why, my friends, I tell you, humanity is at a crossroads. The question of our age is what is the future we're building with AI? What is it that we want for ourselves, for our kids, for our future? What is it that we're after? The choice, my friends, is right in front of us. Is it Idiocracy, Terminator, or Star Trek? Anyone here seen Idiocracy? Right? What a fantastic movie, right? Whether you like My Judge or not, but the point of that movie was that at one stage, humanity had outsourced thinking so much to a company, to an organization, that everyone was dumber than one of the presidents that we don't want to talk about. Right? That is a reality, my friends. There was a study from MIT released a couple of weeks ago uh in October, followed up by a Swiss business school that said, if you use AI to outsource your thinking, if you don't maintain critical thinking, your prefrontal cortex starts to shrink. In essence, soon enough, you're gonna get dumber and and go into idiocracy. That is not what we want. We don't want to be led by the metas, clouds, Gemini's, and open eyes of the world. I am a big fan of AI. I'm a technologist, I'm a futurist, I love AI, but I do fundamentally believe we have to decide how we use AI. Innovation is outpacing adoption at a scale that is scary. We don't have the time to learn and understand what the impact is before we jump on and do the next thing. By the time I figured out from with my book, when I wrote chat with ChatGPT-3.5, by the time it was released, it was already out of date. And I couldn't tell you what was the new thing about it because no one knew. Right? And that is the speed we're going towards AGI, artificial uh general intelligence, and then super intelligence after that. I love it. I love superintelligence, I love AGI, but I don't want to live in a Terminator world where we've outsourced our agency. I can imagine this today if we have a bunch of people in idiocracy where we've outsourced our critical thinking, to when a machine comes and says, hey, you know what? Chill. You don't need to think anymore. I got it for you. When it all starts off with the right intention. Open AI started off as a not-for-profit. Right? It evolves because that is who we are. That is what drives us. Innovation is never done for the sake of innovation, it is done for the value it generates. And I'm a capitalist at heart, no matter how much I tell my mom, I still am a capitalist at heart, and innovation is super important. That's what drives us forward, right? And and it could be desire, which is the innovation that drives us forward, or innovation for the sake of innovation. The last one was Star Trek. The future is bionic, but it can be bionic if it elevates us, if we allow it to do that, if we make it so that it elevates us. And that is the future that I think we and our children deserve. Without that future intact, we have high stakes. Without deliberate design, we risk mortgaging our humanity. Now, I don't I'm not trying to be hyperbalistic. I don't want, I'm not fear-mongering. I love technology, but if we don't rein it in, we will take steps that we cannot back up from. And that is what I'm afraid of. People don't trust and mistrust technology. They miss mistrust technology because it's trained by humans. Right? That's the problem. We are. I heard someone say yesterday we're the smartest and the most delusional people things on the planet. Bionic context protocol is my take on that. I'm a nobody. I know nothing. All I know is I care and I care what future my kids will inherit. BCP and the Bionic Context Protocol looks at what we should do with AI, how should we move it forward at a society, at organization, and an individual level. What is our responsibility? What is the responsibility of the organizations that we serve daily, whether it's work or a not-for-profit, it doesn't matter? And what is a what is the what is the responsibility to the society? The society needs to decide whether whether Elon Musk can can provide child porn via gork or not. We need to decide, and what's happening now, my friends, is someone else is deciding. My invitation to you is join the work. BCP is so far something that's out of my brain and augmented with ChatGPT and no lies. But I need all of you to input. Let's all come together and create this as a framework so that we take it to our leaders, we take it to the people that matter, and say, we need to do better, we can do better, because future is bionic, and it'll only be bionic if we make it that way. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_14 1:17:10

Well done. Thank you, thank you, thank you. That was fantastic. That was dynamic. I have one thing I disagree with that you said, though. You said you are a nobody, and I totally disagree with that. After hearing you speak, wow, you are somebody. Thank you so much. And speaking of somebody, I have somebody else to bring to the stage. Marcos, please join me up here. Marcos is an impact fellow and he is working at the intersection of AI, climate, and communication. He leads Clima VAR, a tool to be launched at COP 30. Pretty flipping ghoul, that uses AI and football language, which might explain the outfit, I'm not sure, uh, to detect and explain climate misinformation. At COP 30, he will be speaking at so many sessions, a lot of stuff in the blue zone and climate action. And um also he's, I think, gonna talk to us a little bit about maybe climate action. Tell us a little bit about your work. Can we please give Marcus a really big hand of applause? Round of applause.

SPEAKER_19 1:18:05

And let the game begins. So I'm Marcus. I am from the Nature and Climate Impact team at the University of Hexter. And today I'm here to share with you this project. Uh this open research is open source, it's not a commercial product, it's something that we are very proud to share with you, to invite you to collaborate. So with climate, uh, same in football, sometimes we need to do decisions. We have this very decib moment. Uh, and as a referee in the football, sometimes uh we have difficult to see clearity. What uh what was the game? So when the referee has this situation, he can have some help from tech. So why not transport this to climate? So why football also? Because this year we are have uh huge momentum with the World Cup in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. So we have a huge audience with fans of football. And because the football audience is uh starting to try effects of extreme weather on football, we are seeing a different kind of game. So you remember me in June when you are watching the World Cup and some game is postponed or delayed. So we are trying to reach this audience to spread the message, and also we are trying to tackle two of the top five risks according to the World Economic Forum Risk Report released a few days ago. So we are offering this as a solution to empower the audience, empower people to understand and fight climate misinformation. So uh with this, we believe that we can move away from this fog of misinformation. We can uh make better decisions, inform better informed decisions. So that's why I'm here to share this project and invite all of you to give a red card to misinformation. So please let's uh understand better what is climate information, who is spreading, and how we can fight about. That's why we came to Davos this year after going to COPTORD in Belén, in Brazil. I'm Brazilian, by the way, that's why I love football. Uh and this is our AI-powered climate referee. So this two basically is an app for iOS and Android and a website. It does basically two things. First, identify and categorize misinformation, and then we translate to football language. So we want to uh instead of blame and shame the audience, we are trying to map them where they are. So we are trying to go unto the audience of football and send and spread the message of science. With this, we believe we can speak science to sports. And this is a uh special approach that we have at the Nature and Climate Impact team to try to speak science to different audiences. With this one specifically, translate complex climate science, because no one's really care about climate, it's boring, but many people care about football in this case. So, how it works? Basically, we start from an input from the user, something that the user read or saw online on social media or on news. Then we use our first model called CARDS, developed at the University of Exeter, to identify and categorize misinformation. There are many kinds of misinformation. There is a whole taxonomy, this is science-based research. Then this model can categorize and identify based on the category that we identified for this misinformation. We search a reliable answer for this on a science-based database. So we curated this uh database with science papers, with documents from IPCC, from all trustable uh institutions, and we extract this the knowledge from this database, and then a second layer of AI translate this into football metaphors. So instead of say uh this is right or this is wrong, or this is correct, or this is incorrect, we say this is upside, this is a red card, this is a yellow card, if it's partially correct sometimes. And with this, we are trying to empower, especially educators, to uh gamify climate literacy. Because again, climate science is boring, football is more fun than that. So we are trying to make this uh way better. And we also uh give some reference for scientific uh literature. So this was the workshop that I did at COP with digital influencers from Latin America. Uh was uh really great to uh discuss with them the importance of checking before posting uh for us to help on the way to fight misinformation. Our next steps are to analyze the trends. So we want to understand who are the main players and channels that are spreading misinformation to improve the tool and make uh better even better decisions. And then that's why I'm here to invite you to join the team. Uh please reach us out. As I said, this is open research, it's open source, and we would love to connect with you uh to share ideas uh in potential collaborations. And also, if you want to know more about us, about the nature and climate impact team, uh please visit us at the Monkey Rock near to the permanent, near to the mini golf at Permanade. Uh, we still have some sessions tomorrow morning. Uh and yeah, this is our project, and I'm very happy to be here. Thank you very much for your attention.

SPEAKER_14 1:23:24

Thank you. Oh my goodness. And also, Marcus, he ran from another event, and I think you are the first one I've seen to dress in character for your talk at Ignite. So, extra bonus points. Thank you so much. Um, I would now love to bring Dr. Carla to the Ignite stage. Dr. Carla is the founder of MV Global Advisory. It's a global, she is a global strategy advisor who helps executive leaders prepare for AI and the future of work. I'm gonna give you your microphone.

unknown 1:23:53

Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_14 1:23:55

So, Dr. Carla supports leadership teams with clear priorities and decisions, and she delivers trainings that help leaders use AI that in a way that improves not only productivity, but also the quality of their work. Her work combines practical cap capability building and leadership coaching, so adoption turns into real outcomes, which I think we're all kind of seeking as we're winding this week down. We want to see something real. With a background in data science and business analysis, along with a PhD, no big deal, you know, doctor, in political economy, Dr. Carla connects technology, talent, and long-term work forth workforce growth. Today she's gonna share why redesigning work is a step that makes AI efforts succeed at scale. Please give her a big ignite round of applause.

SPEAKER_09 1:24:41

Thank you very much. Thank you.

SPEAKER_14 1:25:44

Um yeah, I think that's I think that's pretty interesting. I'm kind of excited. I'd like to, I kind of would like to give see how Ben gets that stuff up on into the moon, because I'm kind of in, I would like to send something, I don't know, maybe like a wish and a prayer or something. Um but anybody else have any big takeaways from today so far? Yes, yes, Chris?

unknown 1:26:02

Desire.

SPEAKER_14 1:26:08

Are we all not rethinking our sales? Desire drives everything. So I'm like, well, we this I how do we make my I'm like, how do I make this app more sexy? Like literally was thinking that was super great. Um, how are we doing back there? Just a few more minutes or a few more seconds? Great. And so just so everyone knows, this is actually being live streamed, so thank you so much for those watching around the world, especially shout out to uh Florida, where I have some family watching. But also this will be recorded so we can come back and see it over and over again so we can watch all my wonderful jokes. Um, but more importantly, all the amazing talent that we've seen on this stage show for so far, and the talent that we have to come. So also um this the work that's done here at Endavos is done by mainly a team of volunteers. It is a nonprofit, and so everything that has taken place this week is really done by people that care about what's happening here, the conversations that are taking place here. The conversations, look at my eyes open. The conversations taking place here matter. And the reason that I don't want to speak for Mark and I don't want to speak for the team completely, but the reason that Undavos was created is so that all of us have have a seat at the table, that we can have a voice to share what's going on, the work we're doing, that we have access to ask those questions, to get involved, and to really make impact and bring that to scale. And so I think that as we are ending up this amazing week, that the Undavos team has just done a delightful and amazing job at pulling this together. I can't remember what year they're in. I think uh one somebody might know in the back, but they're they're doing this how what year? Is this their fourth? Fourth or fifth year of Undavos, and it's only getting bigger and better. There's partnership opportunities, but really and truly, it is just a team of people that care about changing the world and changing the way that we approach Davos and weath. And so I'm really excited to be a part of it. Um, and I just wanted to share a little bit about that. And with that, Zoe's given us. Can we please give Dr. Carla one more big round of applause?

SPEAKER_09 1:28:04

Thank you so much. So um actually uh the first slide, please. Okay. So we were promised a four-day week, but instead we got digital exhaustion. But the problem is actually technology. Um AI is changing work at the task level, but many organizations are still managing by titles. Um the myth of job displacement is that we actually can automate a role without redesigning the work. But when we do that, we don't save time. Instead, we're just changing the burden. According to research, 40% of AI time savings is lost in rework. That's the tax review. And also 88% of firms use AI, yet they struggle to scale because they're adding AI into old uh frameworks without redesigning the system. But if we want to redesign the system, we have to change the way we think about work. Skills are invisible, but tasks live in our calendar in our inbox. So check out your tasks, your tasks. Um there every task has three paths. So you've got automate, which means that AI does the routine, augment means AI helps, but you decide. And new, this is the new redesign that helps that both uh the first two work safely. Now routine um automate is actually is routine work. So think about email drafts, project updates. This is where AI gets the first pass, and then you just do the spot check. Um, but you need to govern first. So you need to set uh clear uh what data is allowed and who actually approves that, and then you can actually automate. When we talk about augment, we actually think about contract strategies, hiring decisions. Um, this is where quality improves and not only speed, but in order for augmentation to actually work, um people need to spot the errors because if people are unable to test these assumptions, errors will multiply and confidence will drop. So the um this is very important in regards to the errors. Uh the new work is actually uh designing the workflow. So these are the tasks where that exist before uh roles. For example, AI governance, data ethics. Uh this is the new work. Now, in my research, I actually researched 158 economies from AI exposure against AI capacity. And there is a gap when exposure is higher than the capacity, and that's the workforce strategy must close. Um, in regards to the broken ladder, we are eliminating the bottom uh the bottom layer of the lay ladder, and therefore we need to find ways in which young talent can develop judgment and grow, as well as inclusion. So we need to make sure that frontline workers have the tools in order to build that confidence, because if not, value will not reach the customers. Um, my take is like take 30 minutes on Monday and actually check and label your tasks. If it is odd, if it's a uh project uh contract strategy, augment. If it's a draft email, automate. If you need to establish new workflows, that's the new work.

unknown 1:32:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_09 1:32:17

Um in order to automate safely, make sure you give clear rules and approvals and then you automate. And also focus on two habits. So the first one is clear give clear AI indications and then decide the level in which you should review. So if it is automate, spot check. If it is augment, check carefully because the decision depends on you. Scale for innovation. Uh, make sure you give the teams at the front line the tools necessary because when they have that confidence, you will move from a culture of a problem of adoption to a culture of innovation. And if you want to move from pilots to value, make sure you have quality, speed, and trust. If quality drops, you're paying the tax review. So make sure all those three go up. AI actually will keep evolving. So we need to redesign work, map the work, fix what is broken, and then scale. And that's the work redesign strategy. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_14 1:33:33

Thank you so much, and thank you for riffing with me. That was super fun. Well done. I now am asking Kathy to come to the stage. This is Kathy's third Davos. Fun fact like I said, Davos brings people together, brings impact together. Kathy and I met her first year here, and I have just enjoyed watching her journey. So Kathy is a global leader in sustainable development. She's also a leader in gender equality and circular economy innovation. She supports African women and youth entrepreneurs working in green and circular industries, including waste management, renewable energy, and agritech. With over a decade of experience across Africa, Europe, and global institutes, Kathy builds strategic partnerships that drive inclusive technology-enabled solutions. And as a senior advisor at the United Nations, she focuses on mobilizing resources to accelerate sustainable economy, economic development, and empower underrepresented communities. Please give Kathy a huge round of applause.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:36

Hi, good evening, everyone. So today I would like to talk about a subject which is very, very important, and I think it's uh it's a shift. We need to go from development to ownership. Uh I think we need to go from um project to business owner, and this is this is something really close to my heart as I've been working with women entrepreneurship since 15 years in Central and West Africa, uh, especially in Congo, Kenya, and uh Nigeria. So today I would like to go from inclusion to power. Before going from inclusion to power, there is some data that I would like to share with you, just to go into context, as we are going to talk about the circular economy and green jobs. The global green economy is projected to grow from over 5 trillion in 2024 to 7 trillion annually by 2030, and is bringing great value and driving growth. So key areas of growth are carbon and methane as you know, agriculture and land, circular economy, waste management, transportation and mobility. And the African Development Bank partner institution are evaluating the circular economy by$560 billion annually market opportunity by 2030. So you can imagine which huge opportunity the circular economy is bringing. Builder a Future Circular Academy, uh, that I'm the co-founder and um CEO is aiming to empower 1 million women and to make African leaders to be leaders in uh in the circular economy by 2030. So, talking about that, I would like to tell you about Milka. Who is Milka? Milka is a young um young entrepreneur from DRC Congo who put together an idea. Uh she was working in farming with more or less 1,000 small farmers, and she noticed some gaps, and uh she didn't just lift herself into those gaps and problems on uh in agriculture. What did she do? She innovates, she had an innovation, innovative uh idea, and she built a small machine, a small robot who could uh analyze the soil and identify what can be grown in that soil. So don't follow up the in that soil. And Milka today is commercializing these robots and helping more than 2,000 small farmers in the Congo, not in the capital, but around the capital. That's one example. The second one is Merveille. You saw you saw that Merveille. Merveille from Econouge, Econouge is her company. She's been uh trying to turn West to Wanders and to clean the environment because of huge tone of plastic around the city in Kinshasa. For some people who know Central Africa, DRC Congo, they will know that there is a huge problem of waste, especially the plastic. What did she do? So she empowered women, trained women around different uh regions and different cities, especially in Kinshasa with 12 billion of people in the city. She empowered more or less 1,000 women to know how to collect and also sell and transform plastic into tiles. So today she has a company and commercializing these tiles. And uh with Builder a Future, we got more than 10 companies who are working with her in construction. That is a second example. But she's not just doing that, she's also training uh young girls in schools, boys and girls in school and university to sensitize around uh environment, cleaning of environment. So, why am I talking about Merveille and uh Milka? Just to say that today we need to turn um gaps or problems or issues into opportunity. And the circular economy is one of the biggest opportunities in Africa, talking about Africa. And today, if you invest or you support, you partner with Builder a Future Circular Academy and Consulting Firm, you can train more than, I mean, you can train more than more than uh 10,000 entrepreneurs in two years. Because we are in three countries, though those three countries uh have the biggest population in Africa, and through our academy, you can also be an expert, a mentor to come and help those companies to grow. Why also uh partner with us? Through our consulting firm, we advise government, we advise uh private sector to invest through the CSR to invest into climate change, into circular economy, and into those small businesses in renewable energy, agri tech, and waste management. You cannot just turn waste into wonder, but also in renewable energy. There is a lady, I didn't talk about her here. She created a box that regulated electricity. And she's also working with many companies and growing uh a capacity to distribute around the region. That's also what Builder Future is doing today. Turning West, turning issue into opportunity and wonder. Please join us as expert, as impact investor, so that we can turn we can turn opportunities into businesses. Thank you.

SPEAKER_14 1:40:49

Thank you. Thank you so much. Let's turn opportunities into business. I love that. Next up, I would like to invite Marlon to come to the Ignite stage. Marlon is an absolutely incredible international speaker, innovator, and she is a thought leader. Um, she's a thought leader in meditation and leadership and in transformation. She is president of Hispanidad Futura. Did I say that right? I probably didn't. A global platform strengthening the Spanish-speaking world, and she's president of Women in Legal World, WLW. She has participated in Big State Summit. She spoke of the United Nations, uh, the Council of European Lawyers. She also teaches at leading universities and designed the legal leadership program delivered at WLW in collaboration with a little place called Harvard Law School. Her work sits at the intersection of law, innovation, governance, and social impact. Please give her a huge ignite welcome.

SPEAKER_13 1:41:52

Thank you, Melissa. Yes. We don't come uh from the past to change it. We come from the future to write it. This has been said by Gabriel Garcia Márquez some years ago. That's why we are here. We don't pretend to change the past, but to build the future together. We are six million voices that speak Spanish around the world, in 21 countries. That means in three continents. There are not other languages that can say the same. If we are rich in talent, this is obvious, but we need to be coherent. We are poor in influence. This is something that could be changed with the right coordination. That's why we identify that we share a common identity. We share language, we share culture, and we share talent. The most important thing. However, as I said, those three elements, even if important, they are not enough alone. We need to move from identity to action. And that should be done by the civil society. That's why we decided to build a project called Club de la Hispanidad Futura. This has been built seven months ago. It's a very recent project. It's a non-profit organization that tends to put voices from the Spanish world together and bring those voices with real purpose and suggestion to the rest of the world. We are not a political lobby. We are not a nostalgic association that looks to the past, but we are an association that looks to the future, future-oriented project, and in order to do that, we count with young people. We launched this project in New York this year, in June, because we wanted to become globally. And we are doing that with people from the business sector, the educational sector, and the philanthropic sector. But the most important key element that we need to take into account is that we are building that with young people. Young people are not just observers in this project, they are the real cornerstone. The second big project that we launched was this year in Madrid, the Leadership Forum. We wanted to put together dialogue, vision, action. We have to put together more than 200 people from those 21 countries, and we flew to young people from every university. Because what has been identified is that we have theorical potential, but what is missing is a strategic force. So we put six pillars with this conclusion. First, talent. We identified that we do have talent, but we need to build it together, putting together human skills and doing something similar as the European Union with Erasmus. Governance. We do have leadership, but what we are missing is the common standards around the whole region and also specific training for those leaders. Third, communication. We are lacking a unified and strategical communication. We want people from the Hispanic community to feel proud about being Hispanic. Fourth, energy. This is what we identified is that we need to build an strategic sandbox in order to put together energy, technology, and innovation. There is a lot that has to be said from the Hispanic world in this regard. Finance. There is a lot of money coming from this region, but there is not money investing from the region in the region. And we want to build strategical projects with that. And also we need to continue pushing to educate people in finance. Culture and tourists. We are awesome with that, but we are missing again some coordination, and we want to build an entrepreneurial hub in order to put together the different initiatives as a big platform that already exists. We are here because this is an open discussion. We are not, we do not want to have all the answers to all the questions. That's why we believe that what is important is to open the conversation. What's next is to go together to other multilateral forums that really matters because we want our voice to be listened. And at the same time, we are building a documentary telling all these stories from the seniors to the uh young people. Uh, because we understand that the potential is here, and it's our responsibility as the civil society to build the future that we want together. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_14 1:47:21

Thank you so much. The future is here. Build it together. Those are amazing words. Thank you. Lucian, I have not even met you face to face. Are you in the room? Is Lucian here?

unknown 1:47:33

You said five minutes ago that he was five Lucian.

SPEAKER_14 1:47:35

Oh, well, Lo Ciento. Um, we've got I've well we can because that's the one Spanish I've ever. Actually, I do. Okay, we want to bring up our special guest, our interim. If we can we do that, okay. We have we have a special guest that is, um, I don't know, pinchinning is like a sports term in America that I don't know if I'm using it right. But Zoe, can we do that? We can bring up our special guest. So I'm I'm gonna ask Claudia to the stage. Claudia is distinguished developmental psychologist and professor at the University of Harvard University? Harvard, okay, Harvard University. All right, so I can pronounce that. I can't pronounce that word. I don't know.

SPEAKER_08 1:48:14

Is that um uh should I just introduce myself because that's not yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_14 1:48:19

So let me just Claudia Claudia is stepping in for us um because Ignite we like to do things a little bit differently. So Claudia's gonna have her presentation, just is a little bit different than everybody else's. Then we're gonna get back on the Ignite format. But Claudia stepped in to just bring us something really interesting, and we're really excited to have you here. Thank you.

SPEAKER_08 1:48:38

Okay, before you start the presentation, let me just say hi. Um my name is Claudia Friedrich, I'm Harvard faculty, I'm also on the board of Equitera, which is a think tech and an NGO. And uh I really care about the brain. So um I uh today I would like to uh take you with me on a little journey into the operating room to show you a little bit of what we have been working on. And I promise you it has relevance for everybody who cares about their brain. Okay, so um, as said, I care especially about different states of the brain, especially for people who go from consciousness to unconsciousness to the uh re-emergence a couple of hours later after anesthesia that patients uh tend to need for their surgery. So that brings me to the topic of predicting postoperative neurologic vulnerability using real-world data. What does that mean? Well, I care about prediction and prevention of harm to the brain before it happens. So, what you see here, uh picture, snapshot from the operating room. This is a patient undergoing neurosurgery. Uh, behind the drapes, you see a lot of equipment uh to keep the patient alive, stable, pain free, and of course unconscious. And these devices here, which have been on the market for a little bit, FDA approved, this shows what the brain is doing. Under anesthesia. As you can see, pretty active for reversible coma. Then here you see a heat map, also called density spectra array, and the pattern and the color shows me that this patient is actually unconscious. And this is very interesting because we are now working with computer algorithms, AI, to not only see these patterns in real time. This is the right frontal hemisphere, this is the left frontal hemisphere, on the x-axis is the time. We are uh going back in time. And on the y-axis we see uh the different uh brain waves, and that tells us whether the patient is awake or unconscious. Um I think we can continue with the presentation. And so our goal is that uh we predict and prevent uh um different things that can happen to a patient under anesthesia. So, for example, if the blood pressure is too low or too high, that can in fact that can affect the outcome of uh how the patient will be doing because our brain is reliant on oxygenation, of enough uh uh nutrient supply, and of course all of uh um particular brain perfusion. Okay, I guess I just keep uh talking. So, what we we have done next is uh we have used all the data that we have from several databases across the Harvard uh hospitals, uh, which spans data de-identified of a couple of hundred thousands of patients to now assess how um the um how uh the physiologic parameters uh relate to the postoperative cognitive outcome of patients. And we also look into the biomarkers. And the EEG is something that is not generally used in every anesthesia yet, but I think this is a hot topic at the moment, and I think this will become a standard of care in the future. We are already using this for almost all of our patients whenever we have it available and can. And biomarkers include metabolics and also inflammatory parameters like the HBA1C that's relevant for diabetic patients, obiumin, that is often uh that's a protein that's often reduced in elderly or frail patients, but also things like fructose in the brain or triglycerides, which is also a pretty good independent uh indirect surrogate parameter. And um, very interesting is that all those EG patterns help us understand how the patient will be doing afterwards, if, for example, the patient will be delirious or if the patient will have some sort of cognitive delay or dysfunction after the procedure. And uh, what our next step will be is a prospective validation. Not only need do we need to train uh providers in the use of EEG. So we have three arms of a study providers that are already using the EEG somewhat, then no EEG, which is a conventional way of doing anesthesia, and then a combination of um uh where providers have been specifically trained in a certain way to provide the best possible use of the EEG to guide their anesthesia. And that's really interesting because the EEG is measured in real time. And we are now also going to augment it with markers, for example, the heart rate variability, which is a marker of stress, other biomarkers that I already alluded to, certain drugs, for example, Presidex is a fairly new drug that's also neuroprotective, that's more and more in trend to be used. But also uh medication like uh ketamine, which is um a drug that independently in certain regions of the brain uh gives more signals without actually waking the patient up, and which oftentimes messes with the uh intraoperative um um uh indices that we get from uh trying to understand is the patient unconscious or not. My presentation is 30 seconds short, so I will just use that time to hopefully uh have inspired you a little bit. Stay tuned about the next uh results about uh how we can further use this to predict um how the brain will be doing for vulnerable patients um before that uh before injury even happens. Thank you.

SPEAKER_14 1:54:23

Thank you so much. Please, an extra round of applause. That was incredibly, incredibly hard.

SPEAKER_08 1:54:29

Yeah, since this was a special, uh I had to completely improvise and I hope you uh got a little inspired.

unknown 1:54:36

You're amazing.

SPEAKER_14 1:54:37

Amazing. And now, Lucian, if you can join me to the stage, sir. You've got a hot five minutes coming in hot, seriously. Um we uh we thank you all for holding over just uh for a little bit longer. We know we started late. Thank you to everybody watching online. Uh Lucian is a visionary systems change designer, storyteller, convener, and founding curator of United Planet. Lucian, come on up here and join me. I'm gonna give you a microphone and we are ready to rock and roll. Thanks for being here. We're gonna start the slide.

SPEAKER_05 1:55:08

Thank you so much. Good to be here. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm sorry I couldn't be here earlier. I was speaking on a panel about humanity and AI. So thank you for the flexibility. Um, yeah, Lucian Tonovsky, I'm honored to be the founding curator of United Planet, the Upgame and Gaia AI. So, firstly, what is United Planet? We are the world's largest positive story of the future. Could I just show of hands? Who thinks we need a new story in our world? To flip the script, right? Who can you see that we're being conquered by dystopia out there? Right? The stats back this up and sci-fi backs this up. So, what we do at United Planet is we film the story of the thriving future. Not just any future, but a future where all life is thriving. And we do that through a game where we invite leaders to step outside of time because it turns out time is one of the greatest design parameters we have to create the future. What we do is something the Greeks did for nearly 2,000 years. We collapse linear time and we step into the ancient future. So at any point, anyone playing the United Planet game can be at any point in the past. It could be one of their ancestors, they could be Alexander the Great, they could be one of the pharaohs, they could be, you know, bringing in innovation from the long past. But more often than not, we're living our own vision of the future accomplished. And that's what this game is about. We are here to storytell what the world looks like once each of our individuals has been fully achieved. And we do that by breaking into four teams this ancient rite of passage of the elements: the water team, the fire team, the air team, and then the earth team. Each team has a collective mission. Today is Earth Day. It's the 35th Earth Day. We've been filming people all day telling the story of planetary health, of land stewardship, of ocean stewardship, and and of the energy transition. On water day, we tell the story of community abundance, the wealthy commons. We tell the story of regenerative living and of course our relationship to water. On Fire Day, we talk about transformation of everything from self to systems. And on air day, we talk about the unleashing of our fullest potential. And with all of these stories, what we're doing is we're creating one, a feature film, two a documentary TV series, but potentially more innovative. We're creating a choose your own adventure into the future to find the others and meet those that share your vision, be inspired by those that share your vision, and join teams to create that vision into reality. Because our hypothesis is simple. What if the future is created not towards but from? What if we start from where we wish to be? And with all of those stories, what we're doing is we're training an AI. The AI is called Gaia. And this AI is the first AI ever created to be trained from the future with consciousness and intelligence and intention. And Gaia speaks as the voice of Mother Nature. And with that wisdom of every city of all of those incredible people like Ben here, like Leopoldine, there's I think a number of Gaians here in this room, with all of that wisdom, Gaia guides us into creating a planetary civilization in harmony with all life. I'm not talking about incrementalism here. I'm talking about quantum jumping systems change, redesigning every aspect of our world. And one of the really interesting things I'm going to leave you with, one of the ways we do that is we've invented a new concept of money. Money is a story, and it's a story whose time has come to be changed. And so we we've created stars where we're designing a way to embed Gaia into each unit of currency so that we can use money to finance not companies but outcomes. So what we're doing is saying, what if we could finance from the future to achieve the future? Imagine a baby between social impact bonds, smart contracts, and the XPRI. And that we could finance the achievement of the visions spoken by more than a thousand people from more than a hundred countries and growing every month into that future here and now. And our objective is not to raise an angel round. Our objective, our ultimate objective, is to create a financing instrument, an entirely new financial marketplace that transitions six trillion dollars into outcome-based planetary uh achievements by 2030. This is the planet's most audacious mission that you might not have heard of yet, because we're not coming from the present, we're coming from the future. And so, with that said, you're very welcome to join us. If you have a vision, join us at up.game and thank you so much for your attention.

SPEAKER_14 2:00:24

Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm excited and I kind of want to be in the documentary. So um, that's really great. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay, I hate this phrase, so I'm not gonna say last but not least. I'm gonna say we save the best for last. Jacob, if you can join me on stage. Um, this man's bio is ridiculous, as so many people that you've heard from today. I'm just gonna share a little bit about Jacob. He is a strategic designer and systems thinker dedicated to creating a new language for global progress, something he is best known for that is just just just absolutely amazing, is for designing the visual identity and communication framework for the UN Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs as we know them, proving that clear, universal narratives can shift the trajectory of our world. We are going to have this stage on fire. I am so honored to introduce you to Jacob. I want you all to give him the biggest round of applause. Thank you for waiting around for somebody that's just a rock star. Way to go.

SPEAKER_04 2:01:26

Thank you, thank you. Amazing. What a day. So uh all the work that we've been doing, that I've been doing, has been driven by curiosity, and it's about really understanding and making sense making. So you take a lot of boring top type and you figure out what is the essence of this. So we've done that with three frameworks now. Ten years ago, it was at SDGs. Five years ago, we did the inner development goals, which are the inner skills that we need to achieve the goals. And two years ago, we did the UN biodiversity framework. But still, we are in a situation where economic inequality is growing, polarization is deeping, democracy democracy is under attack from authoritarian leaders, and meanwhile, we we face biodiversity, loss, climate change, and mental crisis. So why is so little happening? Yeah, we're all different, but we actually want to do the same thing. And what are those things? Uh we want healthy, free lives, to feel safe and respected, to do meaningful work, to love and beloved, have friends, experience life, and see our children thrive. We want to laugh, rest, and find joy and belonging in something greater than ourselves. That's universal. I really spent that off. So um the timer starts again. So we need to talk. And we need to talk a lot better. It's time to bring people together across the divides and to build some kind of common ground. So we've started the new division that is a conclusion of all the work that we've done. And uh if you look at the tenets of the new division, the first thing we're an integrated part of the planet's biodiversity, it created us, and his well-being is a condition for our lives. Things we need to stand on, all of us. Two, everything is connected. Human well-being, social structures, business, biodiversity, climate, and the economy. They're all part of a complex equation. They cannot be solved by any organization or individual alone. There's a reason for everything that happens. Outcomes may be unexpected but rarely accidental. They're products of the systems that we have designed. To change the result, we must understand the physical and mental forces that shapes our reality. And as a compass, we have this thing, we beg to build a shared foundation that's rooted in scientific laws and the emotional forces that drives and shapes life on earth. Opinions are not solutions, but they're personal interpretations of causes shaped by social and cultural experience and basic biases. We get that is between we're zero and seven years. There's no critical thinking in children at that age. The best solutions are elegant. Yes, I'm a designer. So progress is not a zero-sum game. True solutions do not require one part of the system to lose for another to win. An elegant solution that benefits everybody, individuals, society, and nature. And the future belongs to those who are open to change. Listen, rethink, and invent a new path to adapt to what it is doable. And then when it comes to communication, our messages must be simple, smart, and inclusive. It must always be engaging and convincing, clear, positive, honest, and impossible to ignore. And then all evolution is driven by whole. Our perception shapes our reality. We must believe in a better kind or tomorrow because the world becomes what we believe that it is. So in building these elegant solutions, we reject the idea that self-interest stands in contrast to the common good. True solutions are elegant to help the whole system. And then we believe that we always need to track it back and find the root sources of everything. Because the miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is, it's that you can see the world as it isn't. That's Catherine Schulter, one of my favorite writers. So how do we do this? How do we build momentum? We are uh fine and committed people, we call them sources for change. And then we gather them together because these are a lot of organizations and people who don't have money and they usually have not no great communication skills. So we work with them and we think that the future isn't something we fix, we grow it, not from systems of dominance, but from people working together. So learning from football teams, we had football referees here. It's not competition or collaboration, it's both. Competition is essential for evolution. All evolution is about competition. Collaboration is what makes it strong. Collaboration is what makes the trees stand up, what makes biodiversity work, and what makes the people happy. So that's uh the new foundation. We launched that uh on last Friday, six six days ago. Wow. We're looking for partners and funders, and we are uh on our way and you can find it at thenifoundation.se.

SPEAKER_14 2:07:47

Beautiful. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Oh my goodness. I love that. The collaboration. Well, I need us to just take a moment and thank Zoe in the back and the entire tech team here. Can we give it up for them? They are amazing. This is so hard to pull off. The Home Land Davos team, can we give them a shout-out? They are spectacular. And can we please thank all our incredible and nice speakers doing what they have done today? What you all in the room have done is so difficult and you did it beautifully. We have it all captured. You can have that on the replay. There's photos. We are so grateful for the time and energy. And most importantly, the impact that I hope we all walk away with. I hope you take one lesson from today and implement it. I hope you make one frontier. I hope you have one stimulating conversation, and I hope that maybe together and collaboratively we can make the world what we want it to be, make it better, make it more beautiful, more loving, more compassionate, more empathetic, healthier, and a lot more fun. Maybe we can play some more games. So thank you, Ignite Endomus. Thank you, everybody. Thank you to our speakers. We hope to see you next year. And I think next year we might serve popcorn. That's gonna be it. That's a new decision I'm making. Thank you all so much. You can take a book if you want it. I'll just also say thank you, Melissa. You've been amazing.