Davos 2026 World Economic Forum

Seven-time Grammy and Academy Award–winning singer, songwriter, and composer Jon Batiste shares his perspective on music as a powerful force for human connection and social commentary – and why he believes creative community can help bridge all divides.  
Jon Batiste, Musician and Composer  

In conversation with: Adam Banicki, Editor and Head of Video, Fortune 

A New American Symphony

Conferences

Thank you, John, for being here. This is your first time at Davos for the World Economic Forum, uh, performing on opening night, which I think was aptly time for your new album or latest album, Big Money. How's your week been? What's, uh, what's been your learnings here at Davos? So many things. I, I'm, um, glad to be here at the USA House and, and, uh, to kind of process all of the learnings. I've been listening a lot. And the, the listening is definitely something that I, I see a lot of us doing here. I, I, I love the exchange of dialogue, the exchange of ideas. And just the thought of How we're really advancing general intelligence across every field, across the arts and culture, across the humanities, across technology, obviously, but the impact of that reverberating across everything else is, it's mind-blowing. It's, it's something that I don't think is precedented actually, even before with the industrial revolution, the agricultural revolution, all those different forms of change that we've seen, this is From hearing it now, truly unprecedented. Well, you bring up intelligence. A big topic of conversation this week has been artificial intelligence. You're a Juilliard trained musician. Uh, AI is changing the way we create. Uh, what are your thoughts on, on how AI is changing your industry? You know, I think that there's a certain sense of value that is being disrupted, which is the value of the human narrative, the human born person creating from their narrative, unearthing something from their expression in their life that feels universal but is deeply personal. And what is on the other side of that axis is the expression of something that is Hyper-intelligent and is referencing the whole history of human creativity, but it's not a human-born person and doesn't have the narrative or the, the whole combination of generations and intergenerational knowledge passed down through mentorship through a craft to an individual. Now, What we value is being challenge. I've seen people, particularly when I think about the examples in my industry, I'll think about the gospel music industry and people who have worshiped to a song that was created by AI or an AI song going number one, Christian music, right? And The realizing after the fact that it was created by an LLM and, and, and then having to the profound realization of having to, to, to negotiate how they feel about that. Do I feel violated? Does it matter? Is it something that because it was created by artificial intelligence, Did it sever my connection in that moment to the creator? This is a very profound question. It's a quandary. We have to figure out how we feel about that and what we value. It's another time of defining. And realigning our values, and that's the only way we're gonna be able to move forward productively together. And have you found yourself stumbling up on music that is AIA created and you didn't realize it at the beginning? I have a little bit of a, uh, I'm forming my opinion on that more and more. I've spent a lot of time, I've been blessed enough to spend time with folks who are really innovators in the field and, and a range of different views. Points and it's like a gumbo. I'm from New Orleans, so I gotta bring up gumbo. But this is the idea that there's this rich diversity of opinions and people are grappling with it and there's people who are on the uh the side of the spectrum of doomerism and people on the side of the spectrum of utopia and everything in between. And what I think about it so So much of what we create is the collective wisdom of generations passed on and on since the first drum, since the fiddle in Appalachia, since in my hometown, we have music for everything. There's music for when someone's born, music for when someone passes away. Music, in a nutshell, what I'm saying is music is more than just entertainment. It's a form of, of generational traditions being passed on. It's a form of lineage, it's a spiritual practice. So, I'm still forming my opinion about how I orient myself to This new reality, knowing that truth. Well, and music is a business too, yes, also entertainment. It can be both. Yes. Are, are you using AI in your work currently? Are you thinking about how you're going to use it in the future? AI has been used already. We just didn't call it AI. When musicians use auto-tune, uh, all of the DAWs, you know, these are, um, software that musicians use industry standard of creativity, Pro Tools, logic, all of the. The newer ones, even with sampling. There's a form of technological advancement that's been happening since the mid-seventies in the music, since we could multi-track, that's allowed us to do things that change the, the, the snapshot of a recording from a live performance to something that is produced. And we've been enhancing the tools that we use to produce these recordings. For decades. Now, every technological revolution leads to another genre of music. So, the question is, what is the genre of music that's to come from this and what is the value set of that genre? And It, it, it's a really interesting thing. I've been writing a lot about that in my journals. And with young artists that you see up and coming, like, uh, how do you, how do you recommend they navigate this? Uh, I mean, you've navigated an incredible career and, and the industry has gone through changes, it feels like it's always going through changes. How do you see that going forward? I feel that the, the, the best way is to be honest about Who you are, where you come from, and what you stand for. Everything else comes out in the wash. What's your true north? And, you know, a lot of times when I'm, I'm mentoring young musicians or, you know, I have, I have the the blessing of being able to learn from them because it's not, it's a, it's a two-way street. I always say we have to learn how to listen more. Yeah. The, the beauty of music is that it trains us. How to listen while it also is nourishing us. It feeds our soul and washes away the dust of everyday life at the same time as it gives us an insight into existence. It's a very existential and, and, and a very profound exchange when you have a deep, genuine experience with music. So you wanna always apply that frame to what you're doing. Now, if you do that by creating on an LLM or if you do that by creating on uh a broken upright in the corner of a ballroom. Both can have value. That's where I'm at right now. Yeah. So, um, switching feeds a little bit, you've successfully navigated ownership, branding, partnerships in an industry that, uh, at times can benefit creators, uh, but also exploit them. What's your philosophy around blending commercial partnerships with artistic integrity? I, I think that we have um A problem of, of equity, which comes down to ownership of the central resource of the industry, you know, it's, it's something that is It's an intangible thing because music is energy, music is frequency, and it emits intention and that intention goes out to people and it plants a seed in their subconscious and sprouts as ideas, as inspiration, make you wanna dance, make you wanna shake, what your mama gave you. All of that's happening. But we figured out ways to commodify it by putting it on an artifact like a vinyl and then our CD and now it's on streaming, and now that shifted the ownership of the asset to tech. And then there's a uh uh uh a shift that happened that was unexpected, so the music industry is still recovering from this, this, this shift that happened now two decades ago. So the artist is just in the balance of that, creating The, the thing, yeah. So you have to be savvy in order to really navigate what's happening and find a way out on the other side with equity and also with um a livelihood and a value set and a catalog that you're proud of. You have to really be, and you have been savvy throughout your career. How has your personal brand evolved? How have you have been flowed through this? Oh man, you know, as, as a fellow baller, we, uh, play basketball we just learned we, we both play basketball in Brooklyn. Yes, we play, and I'm, I'm, uh, proud to say I'm the Kenner Eagles teammate. We, we, we were the championship AAU team in 2003, and that was my last season playing. But I'll tell you what, from playing ball, you learn. Team interplay and dynamics, there's so many nuances there. There's so many unspoken things that once you learn to play, once you learn how to be together, even with a band and band culture, it's, there's an ESP extrasensory perception of Of what's gonna happen next, you have to anticipate a lot of things, you have to feel a lot of things to really be able to, to, to know. How you will react or what are the options of how to react. And that's how I've, I feel that I've done what I've been able to do. It's just a, a sense of study, but also a sense of really being able to build the muscle of anticipation and being rooted in something that I believe in. So, uh, building off of that, for years you were famously a, a sidekick, and I hear very close friends to Stephen Colbert. Uh, CBS is, is ending the Late Show, uh, this year, um. What do you think this means for, uh, for late night television and, and this iconic show that was in so many American households for so many years? Well, I think that Steven will be OK. He's a he's a very brilliant guy. And I think that for late night, one of the things I loved about my time there is We have this, this pipeline to people's living rooms and There's a point where it felt less political and it felt more like we were delivering culture to people. And that's what I'm gonna miss the most about it, which is this idea that you can speak to people. And talk about these things that transcend all of the mire of a division and and all of the isms as my mentor Alvin Baptiste said to separate us, but something that really gets the main line of the human soul and being able to put music out there like that in my early twenties, like, you know, when I was just coming out of college and Really being able to express something with a guy who was a uh he became family to me. We, we, we, uh we have Thanksgiving dinners every year for I was on the show for 7 years and we had dinner together every, every time we'd have a milestone on the show and then we'd have holidays, we would spend those together. He's just someone who really represented what he believed. Whether everybody on the staff even agreed with it or not, there was a uh integrity to it. And that's what I, I love about it as well, the cultural piece. And what these shows represent is, you know, it goes back to the first band. I remember Nat King Cole had the first variety show on television. And I thought playing songs from that era and playing songs from even before, playing songs from Beethoven to Nina Simone to Stephen Foster to to be able to play that and and and put that on the airwaves and have dialogue. This is something that we need more of, for sure, across the world, but definitely in our country. Would, would you ever wanna go back to a daily television show? Do you, do you ask me that all the time. I don't. What are you excited about? What's your next big collaboration, your big project? There's so many that I'm actually thinking right now to take space to decide how I wanna put my energy forward next. I've, I've, I'm in a phase as I'm here and, and as I am. All, all, all, all other places that I have the privilege of going to be around these people who have such knowledge, such rigor in their craft, such intellect, and, um, such heart. I'm listening, and I know that the thing that, that I'm supposed to do next that will have the greatest impact that is most rooted in my skill set and all of the things that I'm interested in will emerge from listening. And I encourage everybody to do that. Yeah. Uh, so you mentioned these shows that are in, in American, uh, households, uh, playing on TV sets. We are weeks away from the Super Bowl, one of the biggest events in, in American households. You sang the national anthem, uh, at last year's big game. Uh, are you excited for Bad Bunny to perform at the halftime show this year? Any advice for him? I love, first off, last year in New Orleans, we had the Super Bowl and I played and we were in. My hometown during Mardi Gras. Now, Mardi Gras is carnival time and that means anything that you know of or think about New Orleans times it 100. And then the Super Bowl was on top of that. So I, I, I, um, I'm so, so glad I was able to do that. That was an honor. And I think about how we played the night before in the 9th ward. We did A free concert and we gathered folks who were my mentors growing up, my peers growing up, my family, my dad, he played Cyril Neville, Ivan Neville, a lot of the musical families, we gathered together and we gave a free concert to people in one of the neighborhoods that's still not recovered from Hurricane Katrina. So it was a powerful thing and what I love about what Bad Bunny's done is that he's brought attention to his home in Puerto Rico. By creating this residency in the lead up to the Super Bowl, I really like that. I like that concept of giving back to where you came from, no matter how far you go from there, coming back. So, um, I really appreciate that. No, beautifully put. Uh, so we only have a few minutes left. Uh, so I wanna do some rapid-fire questions, uh, just to get your, your take. Uh, biggest musical artist to watch in 2026. Biggest musical artist to watch in one Olivia Dean. Olivia Dean, all right. uh, Spotify or Apple Music or other, other, other, oh, tell us why. I just like, first, I like listening to vinyl. Second, I like going to hear people play live. I think there's nothing that will ever replace the genuine human exchange of a live music performance and That goes for AI too. Um, but, but, um, I also feel that streaming, while it is an incredible gift to everybody out there who's a music listener, music connoisseur, anybody that's enjoying music passively, it's an incredible gift to have most of the history of music in your pocket. It's an extreme disservice to an artist who spends their life developing a craft to make less than one cent on a stream. So, I don't agree with that business model, and I've been able to circumvent that business model by the bobbing and weaving we've been talking about, but I still am a victim to it too because I'm on streaming services. But I also think that they do some great things, so I can't choose between one of them. I still got beef with both of them. Fair. Uh, and you can say yourself for this next one, Grammys are in 22 weeks. Uh, next week, next week, uh, you're nominated for 3. yes. Who's gonna be the biggest winner next week? Mm. So it's interesting, you've mentioned Bad Bunny. He has the opportunity to to be the first Spanish-language album to win Album of the Year. Which I think is an interesting thing to watch. If you think about putting an album out, that's a global success, and the majority of the population can't understand any of the words. Yeah. That's pretty deep, brother. That's a deep thing. That's like a profound, wow. That's a deep place the world has gotten. So I think that's interesting to watch. I think it's also interesting to watch Kendrick Lamar and From the time that he first started out and what he was and how he's evolved and how the world's evolved, it's an amazing journey for hip-hop music. Whether you like hip-hop or not, it's, it's something to watch and I would pay attention to that. That could be a very big night of validation for the form, 50+ years in in in in um the forms from since since the inception of the form. I think It's, it's, um, fascinating to watch country music and folk music and Americana, which is growing and growing and fusing more with Christian music, which is a deep alignment of values and sonic traditions, um, because gospel music and blues music and all of those musics are the same. I've been saying this for a long time, but it's all really the same in a spectrum or concentric circles, however you wanna see it, and the forms create each other. And they come out of dialogue with each other. So it's interesting to see how that's becoming more fused in a popular zeitgeist way. Um, it's deep this year too, you know, being nominated in Americana folk, um. It's, it's been a fascinating journey. I looked up and now I'm the 2nd most genre diverse nominee in the history of the Grammys. Quincy Jones is the 1st, he was my mentor. So I'm very proud of that. I wish I could call him, um, you know, when, before he passed away, I got a chance to sit with him and he would always tell me, it's up to you and your peers to de-categorize the music, to get it from the silos that it's in, and to, to expand it beyond. These terms that we use to organize them for marketing and for streaming. But, so it's, it's gonna, it's a lot of things to watch. I also think it's deep to watch the dominance of women in popular music. If you look at Sabrina Carpenter, well, basically, if you look at Taylor as the ocean and all of the rivers that come from Taylor Swift. It's an amazing, Taylor is like what disco was to the seventies. It's an, it's, it's deep to watch how that both sociologically and musically will reverberate over the next 20 years. Man, I just watch all of this stuff. It's interesting to me and I love being a part of it. Congrats on your, your three nominations for next week. We'll be watching. Um, my last question, Davos 2027, are you coming back? Man? Yeah, if I'm invited, it'd be fun. All right, thank you so much, John, for closing out our day, uh, at USA House in Davos with class and culture. Uh, I, uh, round of applause for John. Thanks, John. Thank you. That was fun.

Banking is being reshaped by artificial intelligence, and Robin Vince, CEO of BNY, is embracing the shift. We’ll learn how America’s oldest bank is deploying AI as a leadership tool, how it is being integrated alongside human talent, and why culture, not code, remains the foundation of long-term transformation. 
Robin Vince, Chief Executive Officer, BNY 

In conversation with: Diane Brady, Executive Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media 

Culture Meets Code

Thank you everybody. Thank you, Ray, and that was a great conversation. Robin, thank you for joining us. You too are a man in demand. Welcome to Davos. For those of you who don't know, BNY Bank of New York, I think you're more than 240 years old. Is that right? That's right. Great, I must say, and you, the reason I've wanted so much for you to be here is I think of all of the banks, all the financial services institutions, you are well down the road on AI to the point where I don't even think you talk about it as AI. You just talk about outcomes at this point. Give us a sense of how you did it and let's start with the fact that you now have digital agents as employees. I think that's fascinating. Yeah, well, it's great to be with you and thank you for the question, Diane. So the way that I think about AI, we view it as the most transformational technology in frankly, hundreds of years, maybe since the real commercialization of electricity. It's got that order of magnitude. It's really intelligence leverage in the same way that machines have been. Providing mechanical leverage for a long time. And so with that determination, it's critical that we've got to be a full participant, enjoy the full benefit, the superpower that we can give all of our people, and that's really how we think about it. So AI for everyone, everywhere, for everything is our mantra at BNY. So with that mindset, it really becomes a cultural question about how do we create full adoption and integration of AI because the technology is already at a level where it can provide. Incredible capabilities. True for all of us individually, true for institutions, true for governments as well. And so therefore how you bring it into the environment is key. Culture matters. We're a culture first firm and that's really what we've been focused on. So we have tried to enlist our people to pull AI towards them. It's not the enemy. I understand it can be perceived as scary, but it shouldn't be scary because it's actually a helper, can make us smarter, can make us go. Faster and so we built a platform, Eliza, and within that platform it's multi-genic. We leverage all of the general intelligence models, but you're right, not only have we built agents, we've built multi-agent solutions, and some of them we've wrapped with some additional capabilities so they can behave in our environment a little bit like an employee. We call them digital employees. They are digital employees. Well, let, let me, since we're talking USA House, let's talk about the culture of the US because I want to tie it back to A lot of the conversations in Davos right now and questions about the US and where it's going on innovation. What's your thoughts on that? Well, look, innovation, I mean it's one of the stories of the US. The US has welcomed over the course of 250 almost years, the best and brightest of the world to come to the US to be able to thrive and be successful, and it really is a beacon for people because it creates an environment where entrepreneurs can thrive, where people can. Hopefully live the American dream. Obviously that's a big topic of discussion at the moment in the US to make sure that prosperity can be broadly shared because that is very important and it was one of the original principles of America. But for us, this innovation and this constant desire to push forward has been a great backdrop for our company as we've been innovating. That's how you get to be old. You get to be old through having great people and great culture. Through being resilient, which means you have to be a prepper for things that can go wrong, being resilient means thinking ahead, being ready for the unexpected sometimes, and of course innovating, not trying to pretend that the world's going to stay the same because it doesn't. Now the words financial and innovation sometimes have gone together in ways that don't always have happy results. I'm thinking of 2008. What's What's different this time, because AI is one of the areas where I think finance, healthcare, where the data is so important you can't have hallucinations. Tell me a little bit about how you think about just the security environment and ethics and all the other factors that you have to think about as a as a bank, right? Well, financial product, uh, sort of innovation and transformation, that's kind of a different thing these days. We're really a financial services platforms company. We provide technology. We provide enablement really for the global financial system, but you're right, uh, we're a trusted brand, trusted institution. Client trust is. Really important to us. You've got to look after the things that are precious. That means intellectual property, it means our facilities, our people, but most of all, it really means our client data and all of the things that we do for our clients. And so we really engineer to those outcomes. The world's a dangerous place. There are a lot of threat actors out there. AI can be used for bad things as it can be for good things. So it has been and continues to be a real priority for us. You're right though that AI also Has to be done right because if you're sloppy about AI, sloppy input, sloppy output. Let's personalize this a second because I know for example your CTO Leanne Russell has a digital twin. Every night she comes home, she downloads maybe conversations with you to her twin, and that twin is now basically restructuring her week. What are you doing yourself as CEO to be ahead of the curve on AI just tactically? Well, you know, there's the world. Of inside BNY and then there's the world outside as well. I use AI quite extensively. I use it to whether I'm trying to make a decision like a shopping decision or something like that. I actually can also use it as a coach. I asked my AI for feedback as well, and not dissimilar to the way that Leanne uses it. If you're a regular prompter on an AI application, you know, I challenge you to just go to AI and ask it to give you constructive feedback and actually tell you how it grades you on how. You are as an AI user. I did that. It helps to make, helped to make me better. Can you give us some sense? I know we just, our time is winding down here. What should we be talking about this time next year with regard to BNY? Take us a little bit on the journey because as I said to those of you who don't know, it's well acknowledged that you are further along than many of your cohorts. Well, you know, our story has been a company of an incredible longevity, great period of time, success. Over a long period of time, but about 3 years ago we decided that we looked deeply at ourselves. We decided that we had all of these terrific businesses, these capabilities, this great client reputation, but we weren't making the most of it, and we determined, resolved that we were going to do it. Our financial performance over that 3 years, really delivering more for customers, turning up as one company, bringing our people along on the journey again. It's culture to us that's really led to a terrific reimagining of the firm. We had a. last year, record revenues, record net income. It was a real year of records for us, and we just reported our earnings recently. On the back of that, for the next 3 year chapter of our reimagination, we see AI playing a big role. It's AI plus the magic of our human employees together delivering for customers. That's what I'd expect us to be talking about. Well, here's to more digital employees. Here's to more innovation. Robin, thank you very much for joining us.

Drawing on decades of market experience and a long-term view of history, Ray Dalio examines the economic and geopolitical cycles shaping this moment, the risks he’s watching most closely, and what history suggests about what may come next. 
Ray Dalio, Founder, Bridgewater Associates 

In conversation with: Kamal Ahmed, Executive Editorial Director, Fortune U.K. and Europe

Turning Points

Thanks so much for joining us here, Ray. Now, as, as Jeremy said, you've, you've been an investor, you've been through a lot of cycles, Ray, uh, 60 years, if, uh, if I'm not wrong. Uh, so you'll have seen a lot of crises, you'll have had to think about the long term. Is it important that we step back? You have written the book The Changing World Order, that when we see the drama of this week, as I said, I've been coming to Davos for 16 years, the drama of this week, the tension between European politics and American politics. Is this the most important time to actually step back and consider those broader forces? I think we have to step back and think of broader forces. One of the problems that repeatedly happens is everybody pays so much attention to each news item, and then it's it's so startling the US with Uh, uh, its international relations, Greenland and so on, and this is so startling. Minneapolis is so startling and so on, and they don't look back at the arc, even a year is a small time in that arc of history. I know that um the reason I anticipated the 2008 financial crisis or the European crisis from 2010 to 202015 is because I studied the 1930s. And so maybe I can just give you a sense of that. I, because I wanted to study the rises and declines of reserve currencies. I studied the last 500 years of history because they, they take a while and um and what I learned through that exercise is the same thing happens over and over again and it's like a movie for me, it's like watching the same movie happen. So what does that movie look like? um. In brief, there are 5 big forces that interact and tend to uh evolve in a cycle pertaining particularly let's say to most importantly perhaps as a leadoff is the money debt cycle, OK. Uh, so, uh, and we start in 1945, OK. 1945 is the new order and OK and so there is a um a money, debt. Economic market cycle and what happens is very briefly is that when debts and debt service rise faster than incomes. The debt service payments squeeze out spending until you can't do that anymore. And for governments, when that debt crisis happens, there's a question of um do you print money or do you let debt crisises happen and since 1971 when we broke the link with the dollar, we choose to print money with a fiat monetary system. So there's a monetary order. And that also has to do with the supply and the demand for debt and that, so we think what is money, what is the storeholder wealth, central banks hold it and what is it like? So uh we are now dealing with the breakdown of the monetary order. OK, we'll get into this, but I'm I'm sure, but you have um how central banks are changing the reserves, why they are buying gold, why you are seeing the change in the complexion. So that monetary order and throughout history, monetary orders have always broken down. Related to this economic cycle is the domestic political cycle there because money and economic conditions affects politics. And so you, um, throughout history, you've had these cycles where you can come and have irreconcilable differences when there's great wealth and values gaps, then there is great conflict about what should be done and democracy becomes threatened because it's now populous at each side and it's winnable at all costs and there's not the same belief in the system working. For them and it's almost perceived as everybody's on one side or another and I, and it's a corrupt system and so that's what we're seeing operate now across countries and the third influence is the change in the world order. How was the world order and at the end of World War II because the United States was the dominant power, it brought in the idea of a new type of world order, almost representing an analogous version of the American representative. System, in other words, a multilateral world order where there's a United Nations and there's a World Court and there's a World Trade Organization and a World Health Organization and these multilaterals where there's representation, OK, and that didn't exist before. And then we, it's almost a naive system when you have um the fact that the most power, every system, every representative legal system has to have enforcement mechanisms. So what happens when the leading power doesn't want to abide by. By the vote. Do you really expect that there's going to be a United Nations vote or a world court that's going to resolve these things? So you're seeing a breakdown of the world order and going from a multilateral system to a unilateral system. So people in their minds with with Uh, sympathy for a rules-based system. OK, who makes the rules? Who enforces the rules? How does that work? OK, that's, that's a question of our time. Number 4 influence is acts of nature. Droughts, floods, and pandemics through history have killed more people and toppled more orders than before. And number 5 throughout history is man's inventiveness of new technologies and certainly we're having the greatest, one of the greatest inventions, if not the greatest invention when human intelligence is working with artificial intelligence and so on, and what that means. So those five forces you can. operate in certain cycles and everything that we talk about has to be related to the interactions and that cycle. So there's not a question you can ask or a topic that we can't that is not interdependent, but there is this broader cycle that we're in, so we have to be realistic about those things. When The Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, is saying this is a rupture, not a transition, when President Macron of France is saying that the rule book, rulebook has been ripped up. How do businesses, given your outline of the five rules, how do they respond, because if it is a rupture, and we're on this journey, the global rules-based order, which businesses often have to abide by or are part of, how should they respond now, given the statements of people like Carney and Macron? I, I, I think the particular question is, uh, ask yourself who makes the rules, who enforces the rules? And how are you going to deal with that? When there's different countries, you would say there's focus on America then. I think each is focused on themselves and we're increasingly dealing with, we're not so sure that the rules will be the important governor and how will that rule-based system, how, what happens when jurisdictions and enforceability are not respected. OK, so this is happening um within the United States. What is law? What is, but power matters more. So you're dealing with questions of do you have the National Guard, do you have the military, do you have the police, and who's on my side, but you're also having that internationally. So if you have a Greenland question or you have um a question, uh Venezuelan question and so on, OK, who said You can't be naive, OK? So if you're relying on the law in the same way, you must be practical in thinking about that. So that's why people are going to their jurisdictions. They're going to different jurisdictions. Within the United States, they're going to different jurisdictions, different states. Within the world, they're going to different places, which is where they are in like-minded and that they're in support of each other because that's what is giving them the assurance, not the rule-based system. Let's not be naive, OK, and say, oh, we're breaking the rule-based system. It's gone. It's going, it isn't that that could strike fear though into leadership groups, into boards, into CEOs that they're going to have to navigate this world which is going to be much more nationally shored, I think. What always scares me is the lack of realism. When you say that can scare you. Or I, I No, I think that they have to deal with these things, right? They have to deal with jurisdiction questions. They have to deal with law prevail and internationally. Everybody is having to deal with that question. Will law prevail? Ray Dalio, I know you're very tight for time, so we'll have to stop there, but thank you so much for giving us some historical perspective. Thank you.

The pharmaceutical industry is being reshaped by new scientific, operational, and global demands. The CEO of Novartis shares how the company is embracing data, AI and new breakthrough therapies that make a real difference in people’s lives. 
Vas Narasimhan, Chief Executive Officer, Novartis  

In conversation with: Jeremy Kahn, AI Editor, Fortune

Reimagining Medicine

Great, Vaz, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, great to be here. Great to be here. So the title of the session is all about sort of reimagining medicine, but because we've just heard the president speak and he happened to talk a little bit about drug prices in the pharma industry and broadly speaking, that's one of the issues I think a lot of people think about when they think about medicine and healthcare going forward. I just want you to react a little bit to what he said about pharmaceutical companies and drug prices. I know. You guys have actually in the US challenged in court some of the price reductions for Medicare, but how do you react to what he said? Look, I think the president identified a very valid issue, which is when you look at what underpins the R&D in our industry, it's been primarily in the United States. The United States is a source of more than 50% the profits of the industry, and without the United States, you wouldn't have all of these innovations, all these incredible medicines. So we need Find a way now to have a more balanced approach to actually funding R&D and creating those returns, and I think the mechanism that we've come up with now with the government, we're one of the 17 companies that have agreed with the government, I think is a reasonable way to do that. We're really benchmarking against the 8 largest economies in the world on a GDP adjusted basis and saying future medicine should be priced similarly in the US to those countries. Now what It's going to mean though is a complete policy shift in Europe, Japan, and Canada. There has to be a complete rethink of how they value innovation, and that's now the next chapter of the story that has to unfold, right? Of course, one of the issues, as you say, with, with, with the reason the prices have been high and the reason that a lot of the profits have had to come from the US is the tremendous expense of developing new medicines. Now I think with some of the technologies we're seeing, including AI, which I cover frequently, there is this maybe an opportunity to bring some of that development cost down. I don't know if you can talk about how that looks at Novartis and how you're maybe seeing a path to reducing research and development costs. Yeah, absolutely. Now first I'd say that the reason the medicines cost what they do is because of the value they deliver and I think if you look at the value of a human life and the longevity, the fact that we can tackle cancer and rare diseases like we never could in the past, that's why we want to create that value. Now AI, I think, has the opportunity in a 7 to 10 year horizon to transform R&D in our sector. We have completely new ways to research new medicines, develop new medicines. We have partnerships with companies like DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, with Palantir, and these are already tangibly accelerating what our scientists can do. Things that would normally take our chemists or biologists 6 months can now be done in a day. Uh, analyses that would be needed to be done in a clinical trial that would take 4 to 6 months can be done in a week. And as that starts to compound, I think we'll get drugs faster and hopefully cheaper. But the real thing we should be excited about is can AI help us find cures or treatments for diseases that have no treatment today, problems we were never able to solve. And I think that's what's really exciting actually with isomorphic labs. What we do is we work on undruggable drug targets and we say, can we use AI to solve. These problems that human approaches over the last decades were never able to solve. That's fascinating. And what do you think the timeframe is for potentially delivering on that vision? Yeah, I think this is, this is a 7 to 10 year time horizon simply because we still can't move away from studying these medicines in clinical trials, and that's just how long it takes. And so we're going to learn a lot in the meantime, I think we'll start to see things go faster, but it will, it will take time for this really to unfold. Now I would say more tangibly in the near term, it's clear that AI AI will transform how we approach customers, how we run our operations. I'll give you one very concrete example. We're building 9 facilities in the United States as part of our $23 billion investment. I mean, those facilities are filled with AI enabled robotics and really the ability to automate large parts of the production process. So we need a fraction of the people. We get higher quality and also manages down our costs. So there are all these other optimizations you can bring to bear to hopefully ultimately lower lower costs while maintaining more. Yes, that's right. I mean, look, I think in the past, why did manufacturing often go out of the US? It was a cost of goods issue. Now with automation, AI, and technology, we can actually produce in North Carolina or in California or in Texas or in Florida or in Indianapolis at prices that are very similar to what we have in the rest of the world, right? One of the other, I think, big promises of technology is the idea that medicine will become much more personalized, much more targeted. But of course pharmaceutical companies have the old model was definitely. You sold you attacked the diseases that were sort of most frequently encountered, that were most prevalent, where there were the biggest markets. Now if you move to a world where it's much more personalized, does that change the model of how you develop and does it change the model of how you go to market? Yeah, we've had an experience with this. I mean we brought forward one of the first gene therapies for a terrible condition called spinal muscular atrophy that can lead to children dying before their first birthday, sometimes their second birthday, and we can actually with a one time. Therapy have these children almost grow up with a normal life. And that made us completely rethink our go to market model. In these cases, now you have to come up with new models where governments or states in the United States can fund a one-time therapy, but also if the drug doesn't work, we would return some of the value back. And I think these kinds of value-based agreements are going to be the future if we really move to these one-time therapies and precision-based therapies. Now I think that's taking a lot longer than we had expected. It's not easy to find these kinds of. Innovations, but I do expect as we continue to see technologies like RNA therapeutics and gene therapy mature, we're going to have portfolios of medicines that can tackle a whole range of rare diseases. I mean, it's worth remembering that we can only tackle about 10 to 20% of known human diseases, and many of those diseases not as well as we hope. And so I think with technology constantly improving now, especially with AI, we're going to bring more and more of these technologies forward, but we will have to innovate. The payment models, I mean some of the things that have been talked about is, can you, can you come up with some sort of basket model where you pay a single amount of money for the whole basket of gene therapies as an example. So I think those payment models will need to be innovative. And what, what have your discussions been like with the insurance industry, particularly in the US where that's the primary payer of a lot of these medicines? What have those discussions been like about these moving to these more innovative pricing models? Not easy. I mean whether it's in the US or around the world, that's one. of the things that has to get reformed just because the whole bureaucracy is designed behind chronic therapy. And so when you want to go to a one-time therapy where all the cost is up front, there's no way to do that. But then when you say you want to amortize that, that, that cost over years, there's also no mechanism to do that either. So it's been, it's been tough. And as one of the first companies to roll out, I mean our gene therapy is actually reimbursed in 50 countries around the world. And so that that has been a learning process, but I think we can get there. It'll take time. But what it'll take is more of these innovations coming forward, right? Uh, you know, one of the things that's enabled a lot of people in, in, outside of the developed countries to access drugs has been the, the huge rise of the generics industry. Um, and I know, you know, you, you're constantly facing this issue if you have drugs that are going off patent, um, that you have been making money on. You have to have this pipeline to replace those drugs. There's a lot of pressure in, in some places to, to shorten IP life lifespans or to bring these generics. Market much faster. I'm curious how you're looking at that evolving picture and making sure that you have the pipeline, but also that, you know, there is a real issue around equity and care for people around the world. So I don't support eroding IP. I mean, IP is the lifeblood of our industry, but I think all of the tech industries that also I know you cover, without that IP protection we would never make the return. And I think it's always worth remembering once, as you know, once we finish our IP protection, our medicines. Become very cheap. Think about this. In the United States, over 90% of the volume of all prescriptions are for generic drugs, and the United States pays the lowest price in all developed countries for generic drugs. Once our heart failure medicine Entresto went generic last year, it went down to pennies a pill. And then for the rest of the history of this medicine, it's available to the globe at those very low costs. So I think it, it's a short term win. Wind politically to short term to shorten these IP protections, but the long term cost is you'll have less innovation. Venture capital based biotech will not be able to fund, you know, their business model, will, will be eroded. And so, I think actually that's why you see China protecting intellectual property. You see India moving to protect intellectual property. And I think what will happen over time is many of those emerging markets will come to that model. Now that said, in low income and low and middle income countries, we don't enforce our IP. For those countries, we encourage authorized generics or sometimes just allow generics to go into the market because those poor countries need access to those medicines, and we're actually the global leader. We actually go 300 million patients, we have our medicines, we were ranked number one in the access to medicines index because we get innovations to the poorest countries in the world. So I think you can do both, but just we have to keep reminding ourselves when you hear sometimes from the democratic. Party in the US, a desire to shorten IP that will, I think, have a disastrous impact on innovation. There's also this idea in many parts of the world. I often cover from my beat looking at AI on how do you create these data sets and under what terms are they available to the world. So the UK, for instance, where I live, has the UK Biobank, great source of data. There's a constant debate about what terms that should be allowed. that should be allowed for commercial development. Do you have a sense of, you know, how we should think about these data sets, some of which were created by governments, by, you know, national healthcare systems, and what the terms of access should be to? Well, first, I think data is now becoming an absolutely critical asset. We actually, of course, keep our data proprietary. In fact, with some of our agreements with tech companies, they don't want payment and money. They want payment and access to our data, and it just shows you how valuable data is. Now I think for governments and public sector groups, I think it's very reasonable to monetize those data sets that we absolutely as a private enterprise should pay, and we do pay the UK Biobank as an example, but there are other examples around the world, and we should pay for that and we should provide certain rights for that because that is in the in the public interest. But it's very important actually is we get that data and actually what I would encourage is we need governments to make sure that that data is clean and curated. I mean, the amount of energy that's spent in actually making that data. And analyzable is immense, and I think that would be actually enable us to move much faster with those data sets. Great. One other question I wanted to ask is with the advent of a lot of new technologies, is it really changing the way pharma thinks about innovation? For a while, you know, the pharma companies developed drugs and they tested them and they took them to market, and then more recently, pharma companies have tended to try to de-risk the development by saying, we'll let a biotech do all the development and do maybe even some of the testing. Thing and we will then come in and we'll license it or we'll buy the company and we'll take it to market and that's become the model. Do we see, are you seeing a reversal of that model now with some of these new technologies? I mean, certainly, look, I can tell you for Novartis we never moved away from a belief that you have to invest in internal research. So we invest $11 billion a year in R&D, about $3 billion a year consistently now for over a decade in basic science research and early clinical development because we believe that that's the core of the company. That said, 35% of our medicines to 40% come from the external world. What I think will be interesting is how AI changes that. AI will certainly enable biotechs to move faster, but also us to move faster. The one twist to the story though, and I think for US competitiveness, is China biotech can now use AI to actually hack patents and actually move extremely fast with fast follower medicines, and that is completely reshaping our industry. Last year was the first year ever China biotech. Tech had more exits and deals than US biotech, and I think strengthening the patent regime in the US, while also enabling biotech in the US to thrive is going to be very important to compete with the rise of China biotech. Is there more that can be done on the clinical trial side also in the US? I keep hearing that China in the last 11 to 2 years, past 11 or 2 years, has really advanced on doing clinical trials very quickly. There are these clinical research organizations that have sprouted up that can, can get your drug, you know, through testing. Much faster than you could maybe in a developed market. How, how are you looking at that Novartis? Certainly, I mean, China has become, I think, the fastest place in the world right now to register a clinical trial for early clinical development, run clinical trials. So it's definitely part of the ecosystem. I think it's a wake up call for both the US FDA and the European Medicines Agency that they need to streamline processes to make clinical trials much easier to start, and I think that's starting to happen. I know the FDA is working on it. I heard today the CHMP. is working on it and that's going to be absolutely critical. But I also think what we have to remember, even with all the trade wars and other things happening, we need data to be able to flow. We need the knowledge to be able to flow. We do global clinical programs. We in order to find the innovations, we need to access global minds and global innovation. And so I wouldn't want to lose that amidst all of the other things that we're trying to work through in geopolitics. Fantastic, Vz. Thank you so much. We're out of time, but thank you for joining us. Thank you all very much. Thank you so much.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Nigel Farage reflects on the U.S.-U.K. relationship and the political forces reshaping the U.K., Europe, and global markets. 
Nigel Farage, Member of Parliament of the United Kingdom, Leader of Reform U.K. 

In conversation with: Kamal Ahmed, Executive Editorial Director, Fortune UK and Europe

A View From London

Raj, for those who don't know, is a phenomenon in the United Kingdom. He is someone who has led many, many new debates in the United Kingdom about the type of politics that he wants to see and. Through many arguments and discussions, he's actually built a party that is now leading the polls in the United Kingdom, which many people would never have predicted even 2 or 3 years ago. So Mr. Farage, please do come onto the stage to join Fortune. Thank you very much. shake hands and honorable. So Nigel, yeah, or Mr. Farage, I'm shook hands with the BBC. How about that? The old BBC, the old BBC. So I'm gonna call you Mr. Farage, quite rightly, quite rightly, quite rightly, don't do that. So, well, OK, Nigel, you, you and I have spoken many, many times. I've been a journalist in the UK for, for many decades, as long as you've been a politician, almost, uh, as long. But give us first, um, your overview of er the speech, we've heard from Kellyanne particularly, who's obviously very, very supportive of what Trump um is doing. As I made clear in the opening comments, there isn't just one view from Europe, and I think we can sometimes, when we're looking at that global footprint, we can sometimes think from Europe there is one point of view, which is we don't like Donald Trump very much. You have a very different point of view, and I think it'd be useful to share that at the kick-off. Yeah, well I mean first things first, thank you to our hosts. Happy birthday, happy 250th, you were the first Brexit in the world. When you broke away from us and you've gone on to become the richest and most powerful country on Earth, just goes to show the nation state is a better building block than any artificial globalist structure that some at Davos have dreamt of for decades. There isn't one view from Europe, you're right. And perhaps I've been a big part of that. I think The Brexit vote The United Kingdom saying no, we don't want any part of effectively government by bureaucrats that we can't hire, we can't fire, has led to big political changes. So you've now got the eastern parts of the European Union. Hungary, Poland, very distinctive national voices, Denmark itself increasingly taking views that are very different to the so-called consensus in Brussels. So no, there isn't one single view that comes from Europe and and and Brexit has changed the architecture. I, I, I think of European politics in many, many ways. What did I think of the speech? Well, it's nice to get a tip that the stock market's going to double, isn't it? I've just bought some call options off the back of it, um. I mean, the US, the US economy is just phenomenal. And if we really are looking at Q4 growth at 5%, I mean come on, these are numbers we expect from third world countries as they rapidly develop. They're they're they're mind blowing numbers. Um, our growth in the United Kingdom for Q4 will be 0.2%, maybe 0.31% if we're very, very lucky, and we'll call that a good day. So America is powering ahead and there's one statistic that I find amazing. At the time of the global financial crisis, the size of the American economy was identical to the size of the eurozone, and here we are 16 years later, and it's double the size of the Eurozone. So America is getting some things right economically that Europe is getting wrong, and I think at the center of this is the debate about energy. Now, you know, Trump railed against wind turbines and they, they killed the birds and they cost $1000 a spin and all of that, but actually, Europe has gone down this route towards net zero. Davos, of course. Has been encouraging Western countries to go down this route for decades now. America had the shale gas revolution. They've gone from being an energy importer to an energy exporter, and just to think, this week last year when there was no wind blowing across the UK, no sun for solar, we were importing up to 25% of our electricity every day at inflated prices from Norway and elsewhere. So on the economy. There's no argument. America's doing great, and he spoke about that, and he wasn't. He wasn't exactly modest when it came to his economic achievements, but they're undeniable. The second half of the speech is more difficult. From a NATO perspective. And I want to say this, I have believed since I first discussed it with him in 2016. In the campaign, I've believed all the way through that Trump would be a very good thing for NATO. And I think in many ways he has been a very good thing for NATO. You know, he's he's bullied NATO countries into upping their spending commitments even before the Ukrainian invasion by Russia, which happened a few years ago. Even in that first term, he was pushing and actually he's right. Secretary Generals of NATO like Donald Trump, he's getting, he's getting Europe to wake up to the fact that it needs to do something. And also it's waking up to the fact that the European Union itself is just never going to get defense right. So on that NATO stuff, on that further push today, I agreed with all of it. I agreed with him saying that America had borne a very heavy burden, but there was one thing that he did say that I have to take issue with. He said NATO have never given us anything back, and I would object to that politely by saying this. When the decision was made to go into Afghanistan, we went in with America and a coalition of the willing. We stayed by America for the whole 20 years. We proportionately spent the same money as America. We lost the same number of lives as America pro rata, and the same applies actually to Denmark and other countries too, so it's not quite fair. Yet, in money terms, America's provided more. In terms of surveillance equipment, etc. America still provides more, but we have when it comes to honoring our commitments to America more than done our bit in terms of action over the last 20 years. So I, I want to make that point very, very clear, and I'm a big fan of the president, I'm a friend of the President, but I think it's right to say that friends can disagree. What do you feel? Nigel, about building on that, about the comments about Greenland, and although he can make all the security arguments, he can even make economic arguments, I didn't hear once in that speech anything about self-determination and democracy, and that is why I think you have seen such a direct. And pretty aggressive for the European Union. Macron talking about a world without rules. You've got the Belgian PM Bart de Weer warning against not being a miserable slave of America. You've got the strength of that response because of an apparent lack of respect for democracy. Look, you know, I mean, first things first, I'm delighted that Trump and now Scott Bessant have done everything they can to torpedo. The terrible deal that would threaten the American base of Diego Garcia, I do want to say that, Diego Garcia is the most important American base in the world outside of the American mainland, the British government, Ironically, are gonna pay to give away what is ours, and there's no doubt there will be Chinese spies and all the rest of it, over that American base, so I'm delighted with that. On Greenland, I have no doubt, That the world would be a better, more secure place if a strong America was in Greenland because of the geopolitics of the High North, because of the retreating ice caps, and because of the continued expansionism of Russian icebreakers, of, of Chinese investment. So yes, would America owning Greenland be better for the world in terms of safety and stronger for NATO? It would, however, If you believe in Brexit, And if you believe in celebrating America's 250th birthday, if you believe in the nation states and not globalist structures, you believe in sovereignty. And if you believe in sovereignty, you believe in the principle of national self-determination. That's what you guys fought the British for, your right of national self-determination, and you won. So I agree strategically with the arguments that he makes. Although many say that you can do that through NATO. There is no reason for America to own Greenland because it is the most powerful force in NATO, and NATO is able to call the shots in Greenland. But you can understand America saying, look, if you want us to, if you want us to make the whole place a strong military. Base, you know, we need a bit more than just pumping money in now. Look, you know what he did say. So look, 0.1 you must respect the rights and views of the Greenlanders because that is what national self-determination is and that's a key part for those of us at Davos that are fighting the globalists, belief in national self-determination is at the root of what people like me, albeit the minority here, believe in. So I think that's really, really important. Tell us a little bit about um reform, for many people here, some people will know, of course, the story of what's happened with reform in the United Kingdom, you're ahead in the polls, er many people predict that you will be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Um, what is the reform phenomenon? What lessons does it have for the audiences in Davos? So Americans ask me, what's happening? And I say, well, think of this, you've had the Democrats and the Republicans for years, a two party system. Yeah, sure, the Libertarians run, the Greens run, they get 1.5% or 2% or whatever they get. We have been since the end of World War One, it's either been Labour or Conservative. And what happened is those two parties became so similar. There wasn't much to choose, and it left a very big gap in the political market. If I was American. I would have gone for the open primary system. And try to take over the Conservative Party. That's what Trump did with the Republicans. You can't do that in Britain. There are no open primaries. The Conservative Party and Labour Party are like sort of private members' clubs, and they certainly wouldn't let me in, I can tell you. So we've had to do it on our own, and the fact that reform is now. An average of 10 points ahead in the polls. We've led the last 200 opinion polls. It's a bit like Ross Perot's party becoming the biggest in America. And remember, our electoral system is the same as yours. It's designed to be two party politics, so it is a complete phenomenon, and it represents, number one, the sameness of the two parties. Number 2, disenchantment. With politics not delivering, with promises not being kept, and number 3, and I'm sad to say this. But it represents a Britain that is in very serious decline. Economic decline, social decline, uh even moral decline in many ways in knowing the difference between right and wrong, and so people are desperate for something different. And with me, well, I mean, not everyone loves me, I mean people love me, they hate me, that's fine. But with me, I've been around for decades, they know who I am, they know that I'm pretty consistent, they know that I'm pretty determined, they know that I won't bend or wave, they know that I can't be bribed, they know that I can't be bullied. So they're looking, they're looking for a government, for a party that'll give a government that'll bring radical change to the United Kingdom. And if we don't get radical change to the United Kingdom, I shudder to think where we're gonna be in a few years' time. Already we've got. About a quarter of a million British people deserting the country every year. Young entrepreneurs, our highest taxpayers, many of our best businesses just fleeing the country. So we, you know, we're here, we're here, we're fighting to bring a radical turnaround in, in, in Britain's fortunes, and we've plugged the gap, we've filled the gap, albeit there could be a long way to go till the next election, but I, I mean honestly. I think we've got every chance of winning the next election. I really do. Did you ever think that you would be here? You have been very critical of Davos. You've been very critical of the discussions that go on here. I've been coming to Davos for 16 years, Nigel, and, and, uh, there you are. I, I've, I've not seen a tension, a geographical tension between Europe and the USA as we have here, at least by amongst the European establishment and the USA as we've seen this year. What changed? Your mind to bring you here because in the end you are speaking, whatever your view of Davos to some very significant business leaders, the chief executives of the most powerful, the most successful businesses in the world are here in Davos. They believe it's worthwhile. Isn't it simply rude, if I could put it like that, to criticize the fact that businesses come here to discuss the best way to think about the future. Well, two points to make on that. Number one, just because I've turned up in Davos doesn't mean I've gone native, you know, doesn't mean I've changed the views that I've had for decades. And don't forget I went to the, I was a member of the European Parliament for over 20 years. I never changed one little bit. I mean, actually being here today walking around, it feels a bit like being back in Brussels pre-Brexit. So, so you know, it's a very similar kind of vibe, not so much in USA House, of course, I assure you. Is it rude Is it rude to say to the biggest companies in the world who don't give a damn about the nation state, who don't give a damn about borders, who have encouraged us for decades to open up to unlimited immigration, regardless of cultural consequences, who've encouraged us to go for net zero, so we've deindustrialized and seen India and China take our steel making and much else. Uh, is it rude? To mention the fact that the high regulatory model that these people pursued through the European Union made life impossible for small and medium sized businesses to come through and challenge because of the barriers to entry of cost and regulation in the market. Is it rude of me to come here and meet those firms and say to them, my country's been craven to you for decades, that is about to end. It's ended with America, it's ended with Malay of Argentina, so my message to those big businesses is yes we'll work with you, yes we'll cooperate with you. We will not be dictated to by you, we will not be told what policies we must have, um, and we will bring back something that is called the national interest. Is it rude to come and speak to people frankly face to face like that? Well, I mean I can be quite charming if I want to be. Nigel Farage, leader of reform in the United Kingdom, thank you so much for joining us at Fortune very much. Thank you, Nigel.

Join Fortune Editors and special guests as we unpack key messages from President Trump’s address at the World Economic Forum and explore how his Administration’s new brand of American Exceptionalism will impact global trade and business. 		 
Mark Penn, Chairman and CEO, Stagwell  
Kellyanne Conway, Former Counselor to U.S. President Donald J. Trump  

In conversation with:  
Diane Brady, Executive Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media, and  
Kamal Ahmed, Executive Editorial Director, Fortune UK and Europe 

POTUS Speech Reaction & Analysis

Welcome to Fortune Live from USA House here in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum. I'm executive editorial director Diane Brady. Today's event is actually going to kick off a yearlong initiative for Fortune called America Leads, where we look at innovation with and in the United States as the US celebrates its 250th birthday. We're excited to bring you insights from CEO. Those who are on the front lines of that innovation as well as leaders who are shaping it, we'll hear from Nigel Farage, member of the UK Parliament, Vaz Narasiman, who is CEO of Novartis. Our editor in chief Alison Chantel will sit down with Uber's CEO Dara Khosroshahi. I'll sit down with Robin Vince, CEO of BNY, and we'll be joined by the founder of Bridgewater Associates, Ray Dalio. But next up, and then we Also, of course, let me not forget we're going to have 7 time Grammy winner and singer and songwriter Jon Batiste. Next up we're going to kick off today's event with a live reaction and analysis on President Trump's address. First, let me introduce my colleague Kamal Ahmed, who is the new executive editorial director for Europe for Fortune. So thanks very much, UK and Europe, I should say in deference to where the UK is now, and we're joined today by Mark Penn, chairman and CEO at Stagwell, as well as Kellyanne Conway, KA associates and former counselor to President Trump. So welcome both of you, all three of you, of course. Let me start with just some general reaction to the speech. Obviously it was a big domestic component. We did touch on a lot of the hot button issues. Let's anchor it back to what should the business community be thinking about this, Mark, I'll start with you and then go to you, Kelly. Well, I, I think the first thing was, whew, OK, I mean, everybody thought the US military was gonna land any minute in Greenland, uh, and we were gonna have like combat against Nino, and I think the president, uh, does the magical thing that he always does, which is he raises the stakes. Uh, everyone takes the bait. He takes Greenland from something nobody talks about to a central issue. And then he brings it back down to, you know, basically he made a pitch that what has the US done for NATO and what has NATO done for the US, and fundamentally he said I'd appreciate it if we work out a deal on NATO. He didn't threaten tariffs. He didn't threaten. He took military off the table as though it was on the table ever, but everybody, everybody bet. Uh, and I think second you pretty much heard the State of the Union, right? You pretty much, uh, you know, maybe it'll be the longest State of the Union in history with President Clinton. We used to not want to go like more than an hour this, this. This one, but he pretty much covered his policies. I'll make, you know, one observation. I thought he did a really good job at the beginning summarizing the differences in policy with what he characterized the Democrats and characterized the Europeans. As about government spending, unlimited immigration, foreign imports, and higher energy prices, and what he said was basically he discarded all those policies and believes in basically firing the bureaucrats, said they found better jobs, cutting taxes, cutting regulations, tariffs to rebalance and create domestic incentives, and low energy prices, and he he did a nice job actually outlining those policies. And then I think again I think his central message, what have we done for you? What are you going to do for us? Greenland is a small price to equalize it. Finally, the interesting thing that wasn't there to me Iran. He did not say anything about Iran. Why? I think he's got ships heading to Iran, and this was not the time to say something. I can't believe the 20,000 dead protesters is not a major issue that he's not fully briefed and familiar with, but he chose this not to be the place for that. This is the place where he wants progress on Ukraine. And a signing for the border of peace, and I think that's going to be dealt with later. Kellyanne. Wow, well, Mark said an awful lot that I could have said and would have liked to say, and I agree with most of that, and thank you for having me. Thank you, Fortune, for welcoming me here today. I do agree that the very beginning of the president's speech, probably 10 or 15 minutes in, was a good recap of the first year of his second term, particularly when it comes to domestic economic vitality. I think when the president lays out the facts and figures he's at his best because I would challenge anybody to fact check what he was saying at the beginning. 52 records in the stock market, gas prices below $3.02 dollars in some places, things that really do hit everyday consumers. I know domestically, and this is important for the business community, instead of just gas and groceries as a central focus for affordability and inflation and rising prices. It's also going to be housing and healthcare. Gas and groceries obviously is very vexing and perplexing for many households and families, individuals, and commercial enterprises, but you can kind of figure that out, and many Americans have over the last 5 years. You can't do the same if housing costs went up, rent and mortgage 30% or less over the previous 4 years, if the cost of healthcare is causing so many Americans to do without and making employment decisions based on the benefits being offered, and I think that's a great message for a business in America as well, really international businesses. What was going to happen in 2026. And he said at the very beginning, Besson said it yesterday in two different at a dinner we happened to attend together and here on the stage that we can be 5 to 6% GDP. These numbers are unheard of. They certainly aren't predicted. Forget about the naysayers and the critics and the gloom and doom folks. The president's talking about boom, not doom and gloom. And it's after you've been through what he's been through, it really just it falls on hollow. It sounds very hollow. It sounds very negative. It doesn't mean he doesn't care what other people think and won't take that into account, of course he would. He came here with an olive branch and said, let's work together. I'm showing you an instruction package. Look what we did in one year. We could do this together. But Greenland, you said over $200 million you were going to invest. You invested about 1% of that. Um, Europe, I got you to pay the 5% NATO dues, otherwise we wouldn't be in this together as much as we are. That's meant to be for the common economic and military, um, cooperation and also vitality. So let me, if you don't mind, and thank you for that insight. I appreciate it. I want to bring in the view from Europe. I know Kamal, you don't represent the whole continent, of course, and uh there's, but I, I do think that. Clearly one of that that permeated the talk that he just gave. It's something we've been hearing a lot here in Davos. You and I have been speaking with a lot of European CEOs. Give us a sense as to what the reaction would be to this speech. Is this what they expected? I think Mark's absolutely right. This actually took the temperature down, not put it up, and I think, as Mark says, lots of us were expecting it to go down in the way he does. I was here in 2018 when Donald Trump came, came to speak, and he actually spoke again about America first but not America alone, a sentence that he used in this address. I think there's a fundamental issue though, which is maybe difficult to understand from America. As part of the established voice of Europe, and I think we need to be really clear, and we'll hear from Nigel Farage, the leader of reform in the UK after this panel, there isn't just one block of voice from the European Union and from the United Kingdom, there are different voices, but the established voice in Europe is still wedded to a model. For very significant reasons, because it is a model that brought peace to Europe. It involved America and American military strength and economic strength, and it also involved free trade. Free trade to Europeans, or to the established view, means peace. And that is very different from the American approach to tariffs, where tariffs was about income and also didn't have as developed an income tax system until 1913. And so there is a very different language from the European establishment which you've been really hearing. Ursula von der Leyen from Macron. A little less strongly from Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the UK, and I think for business leaders it's explaining that different gut response to the idea of your nation's first because we still Remember the language of the first half of the 20th century and the fact that Europe has been at war for many centuries over that line in which NATO and such were formed, but I think what we'll hear from Mr. Farage next is that there is a new drumbeat. Which is much more sympathetic to the journey that the President is on, and I think that one of the clever things about the President, which we don't see much here, we don't see as much of the president in the way that you see him regularly in America, is that he ties it back to everyday what you might call mom and pop politics. He spoke about the restaurants in Washington and there's going to be some new grass planted, and wasn't it great to see, you know, he ties the narrative back to real people, which I think is something that could be a lesson there for many of the European leaders. I love that. And let me, before we go. To Nigel Farage, I want to ask Mark Kellyanne. Let me bring in another leader. Mark Carney spoke about a new world order, the Canadian Prime Minister. If you think the order that the post-World War II order has changed, and certainly on drug prices we were talking about how the rest of the world pays relative to the states, what's the advice you have in In terms of how to be looking at navigating this new world, the one that President Trump laid out, the one that the Europeans are now talking about, and certainly one that we heard yesterday from the Canadian leader. Thoughts as to what that world order looks like and how you grow in it? Well, look, I think the number one thing is that Trump is setting the agenda here at Davos and for the world order. But he's not really setting a discordant world order. He's saying we need to reset the balance. He's saying that, you know, this whole thing about Switzerland and the 41 billion, he said, look, you all have been taking advantage of America. You're going to have to buck it up. And on the drug prices, what he said was, I didn't ask you to pay, you know, 100. Times I want you to pay something higher so that our prices could be lower and that we both win and we all get better drugs, but what he said consistently was not that I want to overturn, take you over. What he said is I want to rebalance the economy, and that was the message. And when I think that some of the politicians overreact and expect to get domestic political reaction by that overreaction, I think they're going to be mistaken. Let me move to Kellyanne. What you have some final thoughts if I had boiled down the theory of the case for the first year, and really Trump too, it's this investing in America. It's his message to countries, companies, cities, individuals, whether it undergirds his tariff and trade policy, clearly the sharpest tool in his well-stocked arsenal, whether it's what he's saying to companies who are coming in, support us on the one big beautiful bill, I'm glad he went beyond no taxes on tips, overtime, Social Security. Everyone knows that what they don't know and love in our polling is the 100% expensing and the deduct. Stability and the factories and facilities and doubling the child tax credit. People like all the benefits in there for employers because they know it benefits them. It benefited in time, the first tax cut and jobs act. One last important thing Dreg important. The one success, and I think moving forward that doesn't get enough credit that we can all be part of is energy. This is probably the. Sort of the under talked about underrated success of the first year we had LNG permits paused that only enriched and empowered Putin to sell power to energy to Europe, including Eastern Europe. The EU is still buying Russian oil. India has gotten a little better. Went from 1% to 22% because it got cheaper. Brazil, India, China still buying Russian oil. That's got to change. I think there's an important Lindsey Graham deal about that made with 85 co-sponsors, very bipartisan. The energy policy stopping the war on fossil fuels. I think replacing ESG and DEI and all of that with good old fashioned USA, stopping the war on fracking, producing again, and encouraging other companies, other countries to produce, but go back to investing in America. It undergirds everything he's saying. OK, great. Listen, this is just a taste, of course, the conversations to be continued, and thank you again for joining us. We have a full afternoon and thank you. Please join me in thanking Kellyanne and Mark, and I will leave you on stage tomorrow for the next interview. Thanks again.

The Next Phase of AI: Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy on What It Takes to Scale

Scott Galloway joined Fortune’s Diane Brady at Davos for a frank conversation on how the mood of the World Economic Forum—and the global climate—has shifted since his last visit in 1999, reflecting a move away from optimism and cooperation toward uncertainty around America’s credibility and leadership.

Scott Galloway on America’s Credibility and Global Leadership

So let me bring up our guest tonight to set us all off. Scott Galloway, who has not been here in, I believe, 1999, was the last time he was here, and Scott and I met, um, I believe we were mentoring young people with Dick Fold, who knows the Dick Fold, the former Lehman Brothers, uh, at the stock exchange. With a very confident kid named Encore Jay, who now is a billionaire, and I don't know where Dick Fold is. Do you know where Dick Fold is? I have not seen Dick. OK, so there we've lost track of Dick, but, um, here we are today. What brings you to Davos, sir? Let's start with that. Uh, Larry Finn called me and said, I want you to come, and that's enough. That's all it takes. That's way more than enough. OK, very good. Well, give us your impressions. I know you've been doing some video. Let's start with that. It's been a while, 26 years, yeah, 27 years. So when I was here 27 years ago, I would describe it as, so Bill Clinton gave the speech of the day. That was what everyone was excited about, slightly different speech than the one we heard yesterday, uh. I would say the American brand or as I was an American entrepreneur. I was one of these guys, you know how you can't run into, can't go 10 ft without meeting someone who has an AI startup they're dying to tell you about. I was one of those guys pitching e-commerce startups back in '99. The biggest shift, so is the internet. The brand of America though, I sort of feel like this is a gathering to basically let Americans just boast and Europeans just politely listen. Um, the, Call sign of America back then was kind of consumerism. It's very consumption oriented. It was it was more cooperation, I would say alliances. And now transition 27 years later. My impression is now it's not the internet, it's AI. It's all AI, and the American brand is sort of Chaos, corruption, and. Coercion. Uh, I'm just incredibly fucking embarrassed as an American. Um, there's no getting around it, and. I feel as if, You know, we begin the week with this language around annexing a sovereign nation, an ally, which is Latin for invade. And tariffs And the market crashes, and then by the end of the week, invasion is taken off the table and the tariffs go away. And my question is, if you're running the largest economy in the world, and in 96 hours, you reverse decisions like that. What what does that do other than erode trust? And credibility just around the world and as someone who loves statistics and math. We're under the impression. Two of the four most valuable companies in the world, most valuable companies in '99 were Microsoft, Exxon General Electric, and Walmart. Now it's Saudi Aramco's in there. They're still an energy company, number 3. it is, um, Apple, Nvidia, Saudi Aramco, and Alphabet. So two of the four companies have an operating system. If you have the operating system the world lives on. You can just figure out all sorts of ways to monetize different applications that have to comply with your code. Essentially, America's been the operating system for the world since 1945, kind of our laws, our means of going about business. Has it changed, do you think? I mean, you were complimentary of Carney, for example, and taking a stance. Yeah, so we're 33% of the world's GDP and we were the operating system for 60 or 70%. And somehow we've decided that we can go at it alone with 33%, which just to me is nothing but. A pure self-inflicted injury of diminishing our own power. It's like it's, it's as if Android decided to kick 80% of their handsets off of the Android operating system. So I find the whole thing, and there's also the, I don't know if I'm getting older and more depressed, but it feels that there's just a sense of unease where in '99 we were like, we want more, whereas now it feels like we just hope things don't get worse. There's just a really unsettled feeling here and someone called me and said, what would you have done differently, someone from the European Union? And I said, someone should have got a hold of Mark Carney's speech, realized it was the best speech any of you were giving. And all 27 EU member states should have been sitting behind him. And you should have had a list of to do's. We're going to start selling treasuries as a unified group. We're going to have our own trade zone and just lay out these things sequentially, calmly and carefully. Right now, the EU, I mean, the reality is they're leaderless as a, as a result of pushing back on Trump. Who, who, who on earth represents the EU right now? I mean, raise your hand. Yeah, no, nobody in here. That's all good. It's like, you know, Germany and the 26 dwarves. It's just sort of and also the reality is. The reality is the economy here is just a wet blanket. Um, I was, I was at the Black Rock dinner last night, and one of the gentlemen there pointed out correctly, there was someone there who'd started a company 5 years ago that would be one of the 7 most valuable companies in Europe right now, anthropic. So, it, it's, It's just, um, I find it very, I leave here exceptionally unsettled is, and I, I, you wanna be optimistic, but I find all of this very, um, quite frankly embarrassing as an American and unsettling as someone who thinks about their kids and stability and. And taking for granted how much peace and prosperity we've had the last 80 years. So what advice do you have? I don't know if you caught Elon Musk's speech. What do you say better to be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right, which I disagree with, but What advice do you have? I mean, obviously I know you've just for this room full of leaders. I know you talk a lot about AI, and we've talked a lot, you know, the whole Lost Generation Gen Z. There's been a lot of attention on that here at Davos, right? So I'll come back and you feel like a woman too. You mentioned that in your video, so thank you for that. Yeah, I won't say why because it was crude. Um, everyone, everyone, when, whenever a bunch of mammals get together, there's a hierarchy. I don't care if you're sniffing each other's butts or looking at your badge, but I feel like a woman, and that is people look at my eyes and then they look at my chest to see my badge, um. That's why I'm not wearing my badge, I guess, yeah. Yeah. I, I thought that'd be fun. It is on the record. There you go. Sorry, yeah, go ahead. So look, uh. If I were a business leader, I feel like, I feel like the EU is leaderless and pushing back on some of these uh ideas breaking apart, the greatest alliance in history, and I feel like US leaders, US corporations are leaderless. If you go back to the early 30s in Germany. The darkness all started with Hitler creating informal alliances with corporations and basically said, if you support me or stay quiet, I'll get rid of the unionists. And the corporations decided that shareholder value is why we're here, and they made these deals with Hitler. And I feel like the silence, I'm going to list, so the Fortune 500. There are a lot of great Americans, a lot of people who wake up in the morning and say, hello, Mr. President, when they look in the mirror who think they should be leaders, and I'm, I'm on to do list of Fortune 500 leaders who have, who have pushed back on what is an irrational and sometimes weird and cruel policy of the administration. OK, done. So, uh, the problem is if anyone, if anyone goes first, they're punished. So it strikes me that we need a leader, a corporate leader in the United States who calls people on the lowdown and says, unless 50 of us come out at the same time. We can't do it, so I feel like people who consider themselves leaders are showing a striking lack of leadership and aren't familiar with the history in Europe around the role that corporations played in the lead up to an incredibly dark period in Europe. AI, the thing I'm worried about, we were talking about this before. I'm an AI optimist. I think it's going to create more jobs than it destroys. I've never bought into the notion. If you look at every technology in history, short term job destruction, but over the medium and the long term, it creates jobs. I don't see any reason why this would be any different. The V might be deeper this time, but I find a lot of my colleagues, we sound smarter when we catastrophize. So, you know, 90% unemployment. I, I just don't think that's true. And so far we haven't really seen it. There'll be certain pockets that are hurt more than others. I was an investment banking analyst. I imagine that job's going to get, we won't need as many of them. But The thing I'm most worried about is um synthetic relationships, and that is character AI. And uh I'm sort of a hammer. I, my focus is, or my big issue is, uh, young men in America and the West. No cohort has fallen further faster than young men. They're 4 times as likely to be addicted, 3 times as likely, excuse me, 3 times as likely to be addicted, 4 times as likely to kill themselves. If you go into a morgue in the United States and there's 5 people died by suicide, 4 men. Um, 12 times more likely to be incarcerated. 1 in 3 men under the age of 25 are still living at home. 1 in 3 men at the age of 30 are still living at home. Only 1 in 3 men are in a relationship, whereas 2 in 3 women under the age of 30 are in a relationship, you think, well, that's mathematically impossible. It's not because women are dating older because they want more economically and emotionally viable men. Trus, it's true. That's, and on a note of hope in the last, no, I'm just kidding, um, but it's got about a minute, in a minute, and limerick, whatever you want. Well, how do you, what anything else you want to lead this group with? Uh, what gives you hope? What gives you joy, Scott Galloway? How about that? What gives you joy? I hate my life less and less every day. No, but you're, I mean, you like your, you love your job. There's, what gives me joy? Do. OK, good. Oh, OK, you want, you want to end on a cheery note here? No, I do not want. I want to end on a you note. I don't know there's you. Well, first off, in terms of the markets, let's be clear, the, uh, the optimists have won. Right? I said Tesla was vastly overvalued 10 years ago or 8 years ago. Elon started calling me names on the internet, and he won. His stock's up 700%. By the way, the most overvalued company in the world right now, with the exception of Palantir. Um, but the optimists have won the last 10 years. That's the bottom line. So I think it's always healthy to ask what could go right. I always ask myself what could go right because I tend to see the glass is half full, but the most encouraging statistic or piece of data in the world right now is they've begun tracking the amount of time that people spend. Helping people either through volunteer work or financial contributions that they will never meet, right? That number is at an all-time high. So there's more people globally planting trees the shade of which they'll never sit under. So that's a reason to be optimistic. Um-hum. Great. Please join me in thanking Scott Galloway. Thank you.

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The Next Phase of AI: Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy on What It Takes to Scale

Scott Galloway on America’s Credibility and Global Leadership