Downloading Davos 2025…..

“There are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen”. So said Lenin, and last week he was right. The pieces have all been thrown up into the air, and we are waiting for them to land, and while we are waiting, there is much speculation about how they will eventually fit together.

This level of uncertainty can be disruptive, and can breed despondency, but it can also be refreshing. And these were the two emotions that were ‘in the air’ in Davos this year - often held simultaneously by individuals, rather than having people falling into just one camp or the other.

Conversations obviously focussed on President Trump and what his Presidency might mean for the world, for specific topics like DEI, ESG or climate change, and particularly what it might mean for the to do list – the SDGs - that the elite have developed over these past few decades. But interestingly, given Trump’s position on many of the big global issues, intrigue and fear did not overwhelm the debate. I think that this speaks to the incredibly disruptive impact of the other topics that are on the agenda.

This year it was hard to escape technology mania, or indeed to dodge robotic dogs on the Promenade. AI stole the show. In particular, I was inspired by the Nobel Prize winning work of Google DeepMind , creating AlphaFold, an AI system that accurately predicts protein structures, solving one of biology’s most fundamental problems and demonstrating the potential of AI to advance drug discovery.?

It’s clear that we are now in an industrial revolution of historical proportions that will affect every aspect of life on earth.

Connected to that, there was significant optimism about the prospects for the US economy in the next few years. There was lots of talk about how far ahead the US tech sector is, compared to the rest of the world, and the huge contribution that this will make to the US economy in the coming decade.

Oh, the irony, given that on Monday this week, once all of the delegates had returned home, a Chinese company unveiled DeepSeek – a free AI powered chatbot, which looks and feels like ChatGPT or Gemini, but has been built cheaply and using ‘outdated’ computer chips from 2022. It sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley, knocking a trillion off the value of the sector, and upending all of the assumptions that I heard in Davos and brutally dinting American swagger.

The Chinese presence in Davos was not overly visible this year, perhaps deliberately so. This year’s top official on the ground was Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang. He used the opportunity to tell the world that his administration rejected a “cold war mentality” and supported greater global cooperation. He reiterated China’s commitment to a green transition and shared his view that a trade war (between the US and China) would be painful for everyone. There was much talk about the dominant position that China now has globally when it comes to renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs), both from the perspective of manufacturing and usage.

China is building almost twice as much wind and solar capacity than the rest of the world combined and in doing so it has accelerated the energy transition to its fastest ever pace. India is not far behind.

The feeling seems to be that “Drill baby, drill” can’t change the direction and pace of travel. Additionally, and ironically now given the news about DeepSeek, while the US still outspends China on AI, there was much talk about ‘China speed’ of development, enabled by the population size and centralised control of the economy which is resulting in rapid model development and refinement that cannot be replicated in western democracies.

From a technology perspective China and the US took up most of the airtime, Europe, and my own home the UK, did not get much of a look in. That said, the region was on the agenda in a fairly big way - Europe is suffering from a crisis of confidence and a lack of statesmanship.

Who speaks for Europe on the world stage? What European companies are leading the AI charge? How can investments be made and bets placed when there is an energy crisis, high inflation, political instability, and a hot war on the continent?

I thought that this disparity between Europe and the US was best visualised by the growing difference in the size of its key banks, and therefore the available funding pool. J.P. 摩根 and 美国银行 are today significantly bigger than their European counterparts. Only 汇丰 , 法国巴黎银行 and Banco Santander fly the flag for Europe, and even then, HSBC at least, is heavily focussed on Asia, and Santander earns a place at the top table by virtue of its huge customer base and geographical spread, not by the value of its assets. The funding pool is in stark contrast to the brainpower and innovation that is flowing out of European Universities and across the pond, over to China or increasingly towards the ginormous funding magnet thats in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

The mood was so down on Europe, and in particular on its ‘overbearing regulatory burden’, that some ‘glass half full’ participants were suggesting that we had reached the bottom.

I seem to recall that it was Batman that said: “The night is darkest just before the dawn”, and perhaps that’s what BlackRock ’s Larry Fink was thinking when he said that “the time has come to be investing back in Europe”. A ray of light in these difficult times!?

If technology was topic number one, two and three, and Trump number four (this is an unashamedly unscientific analysis!), then the fifth topic was conflict. Unlike last year, Gaza was openly discussed, principally in the context of how to how to get a huge surge of aid into the territory to relieve the humanitarian crisis. On Ukraine, Zelensky was in town trying to shore up international support for his efforts on the battlefield. Meantime the word on the street is that it will be much more difficult to resolve this war, possibly taking far longer than President Trump has indicated. There was much discussion about the need for European countries to up their defence spending, and very few ideas shared about where this extra funding might come from!

I’ve been going to Davos for more than a decade now, and it’s always felt like a bubble, a gathering point for the carefully-scripted elite that ‘run the world’. Indeed, one YouTuber (with many millions of followers) that I spoke to told me that he had come up the mountain this year to establish whether or not the Reptilian Humanoid theory (I kid you not) had any truth behind it. The hypothesis being that: Anyone wearing the SDG pin is in fact a Reptilian Humanoid illuminati overlord waiting to take over the world in 2030. While I do know a few slithery Davos attendees, I assured him that this was indeed a conspiracy theory.

But for me this highlighted an important point: That outside the bubble, people are sceptical of the Davos elite and are keen to speak freely, to ‘drain the swamp’, and in the process shake up the global priority list.

Indeed, as MAGA suggests, the new priorities may start closer to home. This is a real challenge to international action on health, development, climate etc. While this was a topic for discussion, I was surprised to see campaigners in these areas saying that they needed to redouble their efforts and shout louder in response. It felt to me as though we are in a ‘fingers in ears’, la la, moment, where there is an unwillingness to accept that the world has changed. If we are to make progress on these topics we will need to listen, empathise, and change the narrative. I do wonder if we are only in the foothills of the Kubler-Ross grief model. Denial and anger dominate, and it will take a while for the community to move through depression onto acceptance.

And that’s where my head is at after a week in the snow. We have been working on the SDGs for a decade now, and the harsh truth is that we are not doing a good job. Not enough progress has been made, so I’m open to disruption. Let’s look at things from a different angle, change how we describe the problem, bring new people into the tent, and try different solutions.

I started this summary with a quote, so I’ll end on one as well. Although last Monday will be remembered for the inauguration of President Trump, in the US, it was also MLK Day, and he famously said that:

"The time is always right to do what is right."

So, let’s keep that in mind as we navigate these tricky waters and get comfortable with looking at things in a different way - Something we’re consciously going to do more of with Goals House throughout 2025 and welcome you to join us in this effort.

See you at the Munich Security Conference !