Source: ChatGPT
Dear Friends,
On Thursday, the last evening of the World Economic Forum in Davos, I was asked onstage to come up with one word that summarized Davos. My answer, “Windmills.” I chose the word, first of all, because Donald Trump had inserted a peculiar discursion on them during his stump speech earlier in the week. China, he asserted, manufactures these filthy, forsaken bird-killers but is too smart to install and use them. The word was also a reminder of rarely-talked about environmental issues in Davos this year. Sustainability was out in 2026; Greenland and Iceland were in. The audience laughed, but then at the end of the dinner, as I was leaving to go, a woman came up to thank me sincerely. She was, she noted, the head of a giant windmill-installation company that operates in China. Dinners in Davos do really bring business leaders together.
The most important idea from the week was all of the discussion about sovereign AI. Right now, the AI industry is dominated by a very small number of very large companies, all headquartered on America’s West Coast. This has been good for the American stock market and, in not insubstantial ways, to Trump’s foreign policy. The President’s swagger on the Davos promenade wouldn’t be possible if there wasn’t the impression that he runs the country building the technology that is going to run the world.
The rest of the world doesn’t like this. And so there was much talk about whether Europe could develop its own national open-source AI models. I moderated a fascinating panel with Yoshua Bengio, Yuval Noah Harari, Yejin Choi, and Eric Xing that included a discussion of whether new ideas in AI—continuous learning, neuro-symbolic AI, World Models–could shift power in the industry. If new ideas are what creates winners, and not just the money for more scaling of compute and data, then maybe there’s a chance for new, smaller companies to get in on this competition. I had several fascinating conversations about the risks to privacy of AI agents, and the possibility of building systems to authenticate them in ways that could keep us safer. And I had a new idea about why there’s such a disconnect in the industry: with tech companies claiming that it’s transforming the way their businesses work, and everyone else wondering when this magical technology will actually help their P&L. I was also blown away to learn about the massive data advantage that Google has over its AI competitors.
The best speech in Davos was that of Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, which began by quoting one of the most important essays of my life, Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless, which describes the way totalitarianism could come undone when shopkeepers removed from their windows the political signs they never had believed in.
“We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is,” Carney said. “We are taking the sign out of the window. The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, and more just. This is the task of the middle powers, who have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from a world of genuine cooperation.”
The best essay I read, outside of Davos, is this astonishing piece in Bungalow about a man named Mohammad Farooq, who makes a bomb and intends to blow up St. James’s hospital in Leeds. Deep in the night, as Farooq gets close to going through with it, a patient named Nathan, who had just been drinking a beer on a park bench, comes over to chat. Nathan doesn’t know that he’s stumbled in front of an act of terrorism that would surely lead the news for days and weeks to come. He just starts talking. The story winds and winds until, eventually, Farooq hands his phone over to Nathan to call the police.
If you want some good news, read this piece on The Atlantic on the astounding decline in crime over the past few years in American cities. And I very much enjoyed this story about the strange case of two men who, for reasons no one can quite understand, crept out in the middle of the night and cut down the Sycamore Gap Tree, known as the most-photographed and most-famous tree in England.
I also loved this interview with one of my running heroes Kílian Jornet, likely the greatest ultrarunner of all time (and, I might add, one of the folks who wrote a blurb for The Running Ground). He talks about how he thinks about pain, and how he dealt with the sudden death of one of his closest friends, who slipped off a mountain ridge as they ran together. At the end of the interview he says, “Today I went skiing in the powder, and that’s pleasure. It’s training too, but it’s pleasure. It’s not only about performance; it’s about getting to a place where you look around and it’s beautiful. Now I’m at a point in my life that I really do what I want to do and try not to feed on what people expect me to do. If I have a gala, now I can say, No, I really don’t want to do that because I enjoy going to bed early and waking up early and having a quiet morning and seeing the sunrise. It’s just about embracing this beauty.”
I’m no Kílian Jornet, and I love both restaurants and galas. But I did skip all the after-parties in Davos so I could get up early and run in the mountains and along the river. Here’s a photo a friend and training partner took as I ran up to the top of Strela Alp, just as the sun was coming up. It was the morning after Trump’s speech about the windmills, Greenland, and more. I was starting up the road just above the Schatzalp, the hotel where Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain. I’m sure Jornet would have approved.
Cheers * N
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