Davos 2026 Journey Song

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Spot the Burners in the House

Sunday · Ocean & Climate · The Spaces Between

I arrived in Davos on Sunday to join the Climate Scale Up Gala Dinner—an evening bringing together the climate community during WEF week to celebrate scale-up companies bridging the investment gap beyond Series A and B. Participants are invited to show up in climate-themed costumes. I showed up dressed as the "Oceans" at the door, only to realize I was the only one in a costume. This took only a moment, as the costume turned out to be a brilliant icebreaker. A few moments later, Adela stepped in from next door dressed as "Gaia"! Well, there go your burners.

Turns out wearing your purpose as a costume is a powerful way to communicate passion and authenticity. I caught up with old friends, made new ones, and got the latest on Climate Scale Up's cohort and success stories. I also met experienced people in energy storage and oceans—conversations I'll be weaving into collaborations in the months ahead.

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Settling In the Sacred Shell

Sunday evening · The Spaces Between

From there I drove to Sacred Shell House with Britta. As we got carried away in conversation, the car slipped off the track on a hill before we reached the house. Friends came out to help, but it didn't work. The car was rescued the next morning by the tractor of our kind host, and I parked it at the bottom of the street for the rest of the week. This whole experience stayed with me as the story I would tell my three-year-old son about Davos.

The next morning started with a long run as I prepared for the Tokyo Marathon on March 1st. I hadn't yet committed to the race—these two weeks in snow and ice would determine whether I could race in five weeks. The priority was staying uninjured, and the roughly eight hours of training during the week added both tension and relief: a moving meditation in the woods, away from the intensity of the town.

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Futures, Families, and the Role of Experimentation

Monday morning · Families as Units of Systemic Change

My first meeting of the week was with Melanie from Unearthodox, a conversation we'd been looking forward to since Impact Week in Singapore. We met by the MonkeyRock at Kulturplatz and dove into Unearthodox's Future of Conservation work—how they operate like a living think tank, surfacing themes through deep conversations and then convening the right actors to nurture those fields through capital and collaboration.

I felt a genuine curiosity about whether their outputs could serve as a framework for what we're building at Light Eagle—particularly the question of how families can come together as catalysts for systemic transformation. What I can bring to the table, as an agile organization, is the capacity to experiment: an ability that is rarely institutionalized, yet essential for navigating uncertainty.

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Networks of Truth: Governance, Capital, and the Future of Family Offices

Monday afternoon · Networks of Truth · Families as Units of Systemic Change

From there I drove back to Sacred Shell House to join "Beyond Capital: Designing Economies for Sacred Systems Architecture." The event had only come onto my radar the day before, yet it immediately resonated with my Reimagining Prosperity work—my exploration of how family offices might evolve through DAO-based governance, shared ownership, and decentralized decision-making. I entered the room listening for practical signals: what is already being built, what has been tested, and where governance, capital, and trust are beginning to reorganize beyond traditional structures.

The conversation moved fluidly between the philosophical and the practical—monetary diversity, data sovereignty, regenerative economies, the role of families and inner development as foundational systems. Again and again, the same insight surfaced from different angles: that extractive models are ultimately belief systems, and that designing new economies requires a parallel shift in consciousness—from scarcity to sufficiency, from competition to collaboration. One speaker challenged the idea of limited supply and unlimited demand as a manufactured myth. Another inverted the dominant assumption of "I need to get something before I can give"—arguing that in living systems, what we put in is what we get back.

These reflections set the stage for what impacted me most: Franz Joseph Allmayer's framing. Franz spoke with rare clarity about moving from networks of trust to networks of truth—from systems that ask us to believe and comply, to systems that allow us to verify, co-own, and consciously participate. He described our current economy as a monopoly of money and meaning, and proposed monetary diversity as a necessary condition for regenerative, life-aligned systems. His insistence stayed with me: this work is not about fighting existing structures, but about building higher ones—substrates, sandboxes, even gardens—where new forms of governance and value exchange can be lived into being.

When Emily joined the conversation, bringing the lens of families, relationships, and trust repair, something clicked. It became clear that Franz and Emily were already engaged in building what Franz described in theory: a network of truth for families, where transparency, care, and shared reality could be leveraged for systemic collaboration. I knew I needed to continue this conversation beyond the room. Because another session pulled me away before the gathering concluded, I later reached out to Franz and Emily to invite them to a lunch meeting on Thursday.

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Families Reshaping the Spaces of Global Dialogue

Monday evening · Families as Units of Systemic Change · The Spaces Between

I rushed to the Inauguration Ceremony & Opening Panel: East Meets West: Reimagining Globalisation for a Fractured World at TPC House. TPC House is an initiative of Tsao Pao Chee Group, led by Chavalit Frederick Tsao—Chairman of the FBN Impact Community—who has long championed impact globally through gatherings that emphasize "inner transformation for outer transformation." Impact Week in Singapore last year was part of this lineage.

This year, TPC House has become a powerful addition to the Davos promenade, strengthening what InTent—an initiative started earlier by the Hoffmann family—had already begun. Both Fred Tsao and André Hoffmann are members of the FBN, which is increasingly positioning itself as a force for good. André Hoffmann's role as co-chair of the World Economic Forum makes this convergence particularly striking: family leaders who operate at the very center of global institutions are also choosing to create open, values-led spaces alongside them. These initiatives don't argue for transformation—they demonstrate it.

Watching Ray Dalio and Fred Tsao in conversation in an open, public space gave it a different kind of resonance than their panel at WEF last year. While the WEF Annual Meeting is accessible only to members, Davos itself remains public. Seeing these conversations unfold in shared spaces felt like a signal: ideas that were once confined to closed rooms are beginning to surface in open ones. In a place where every year there are rumors that public houses will disappear, the presence of TPC House and InTent suggests the opposite—that the future of global dialogue may depend less on control, and more on trust, openness, and who is willing to host the conversation.

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A Table Set for the Future

Monday evening · The Spaces Between

From here I moved to the TomorrowMensch Davos Dinner. The corporate venture capital arm of our family business, Vinci, had pointed me in this direction. Guided by a willingness to step into unfamiliar rooms, I followed the thread. What I found was an intimate dinner table—small enough to listen, open enough to engage—hosted by the charismatic and intellectually provocative Anders Indset.

Rather than a crowded reception, this was a setting where meaningful conversations could unfold naturally. I had the chance to meet people I wouldn't normally cross paths with and to get a much more grounded sense of the quantum computing community—scientists, investors, and builders thinking seriously about how quantum, AI, and energy systems might shape the next economic era.

Anders framed TomorrowMensch not as a tech project, but as a human one: asking what kind of future is actually worth building. Not replacing humans, but deepening our understanding of what it means to be human—consciousness, agency, vitality (Lebendigkeit), and the lived experience of being alive. "The future is a verb," he said—not something we predict, but something we actively do.

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From Legacy to Responsibility

Tuesday morning · Families as Units of Systemic Change

Tuesday morning began at Leveraging Legacy to Shift Systems: Business Families Accelerating Change, hosted by Family Business Network at InTent. The session opened with Alexis reminding us that family businesses make up 70% of the economy and are often described as 70% of the problem—yet here was a quiet insistence that they could also become 70% of the solution, precisely because they think in generations, not quarters.

Mary Ann Tsao, Charles-Antoine Janssen, and Isabelle Hoffmann spoke about finding their own purpose first, and then bringing it back into their families by intentionally using all forms of capital—business, investment, relationships, and voice—with a long-term responsibility mindset.

Falko's introduction of the Center for Sustainable Finance & Private Wealth (CSP)'s multi-capital framework shifted the focus from inspiring stories to our own responsibility. Once people mapped their purpose and multi-capitals and started connecting from that place, the room itself became a resource. I partnered with Antoine from Sacred Shell House, and it was striking how quickly the exercise shifted our relationship from housemates into collaborators.

The framework is practical, and powerful to see in action. I'd love to invite the CSP team to hold a similar session in Turkey to enable the local impact community—a clear social capital action for the year ahead.

Full video of the session is available here.

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A Bench in the Sun

Tuesday midday · The Spaces Between

I stepped outside to get some sun before my next meeting. I sat on a bench and soaked in the sunlight.

A few moments later, a gentleman sat next to me. In Davos, proximity usually triggers introductions and card exchanges, but instead we both seemed to quietly agree that we needed a moment of fresh air and sunlight to pause and recharge.

Once we did introduce ourselves, it was Ole Qvist-Sørensen, who had just sketched the session I'd been part of as a visual note. I'd seen his work last year and had long been fascinated by his gift. The conversation unfolded into a rich exchange on visual thinking and collaboration. He gifted me his latest book, filled with tools and images to help convey complex ideas.

It reminded me how much we need new language—visual, symbolic, embodied—to shape the next paradigm.

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A Table Set by Purpose

Tuesday lunch · Ocean & Climate

Next was a lunch meeting with the NatureRe team and community. In one sense, it was a moment to acknowledge the challenges we've navigated together; in another, it was simply a rare chance to gather this diverse, international community in person. Sitting around the table with investors and partners united by shared purpose felt powerful. Once trust is built and people gather around a shared purpose, an abundance of opportunity naturally follows.

Coming from a founder background, I never take these moments for granted. I know how rarely the work allows space to pause and simply be together without an agenda beyond shared appreciation. These moments of celebration are not distractions from the work; they are what sustain it.

I'm especially inspired by the authenticity with which Daniel has channeled his love for his family into a commitment to nature-assisted restoration—an energy that has drawn this community together and carried the startup through. With my awareness freshly expanded by the morning's multi-capital session, I invited the NatureRe team and community to Turkey as a next step in deepening our shared work.

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A Prototype for Circular Collaboration

Tuesday afternoon · Families as Units of Systemic Change

Next was Circular Leadership, Innovation and Growth: Family Enterprises at the Heart of System Redesign, co-hosted by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and FBN, bringing together global perspective and regional depth to explore circularity as a driver of systems change.

What made this session significant was how it was convened. FBN was hosting the conversation in partnership with a regional network, CII, in service of one of the seven Open Space themes. This kind of global–regional collaboration feels genuinely new—a shift from dialogue to deployment, where FBN's shared frameworks begin to intersect with the local intelligence, relationships, and execution capacity of regional ecosystems. We began by introducing ourselves around the table, then listened to Julia Binder ground us in the strategic importance of circularity as a lens for resilience, innovation, and future readiness. That framing opened space for a deeper inquiry: how business families, working through both regional and global networks, might leverage their combined influence to accelerate a more circular economy.

This session felt like a prototype—an early expression of what emerges when trusted family networks, shared language, and long-term capital are intentionally aligned around a common systems challenge.

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Embodied Communication

Tuesday evening · The Spaces Between

I stopped briefly at the Investing in AI: Cocktails & Conversations at the AI House—packed to the teeth, dense with bodies, conversations, and signals—before making my way to Finnish Flow for dinner.

The Finnish Flow gathering had its familiar quality: a strong lineup, a lively room, and the sense that something unexpected might unfold. I found myself seated next to Dr. Gino Yu, whose work at the intersection of consciousness, technology, and human development had fascinated me since I'd listened to him speak on stage a couple of years earlier.

Gino asked me a simple but disarming question: whether I would like to improve my communication skills—dramatically. What followed was an embodied lesson. Drawing on over twenty years of research into consciousness, he spoke about how the body does not distinguish between threats arising from direct sensory experience and those generated by thought. The same physiological systems are activated either way, meaning much of our fear, conflict, and emotional reactivity is rooted not in the present moment but in mental narratives we unconsciously feed. He demonstrated this relationally—through eye contact, breath awareness, and noticing how the quality of connection shifts the moment attention moves into conceptual thinking. Conflict, he suggested, only arises when emotional attachments meet emotional attachments; when one side remains grounded and present, there is little for conflict to hold onto. Communication is less about what is said and more about the state of being from which words arise.

I felt a quiet recognition—the same principles I've encountered again and again in ceremonial spaces, where presence, breath, and attunement shape connection long before words enter. I added this to my tool belt and carried it with me through the rest of the week.

Back at Sacred Shell House that evening, I finally had the chance to properly meet my roommate Yoshi. Even though we'd been sharing a room for two days, our paths had only crossed in passing. He'd been carrying a vision of creating retreat centers around the world as sanctuaries for inner work. We discovered unexpected resonances in what we are each called to build.

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Oceans Day at Davos

Wednesday morning · Ocean & Climate

The morning began at the Ocean Breakfast: Mobilising Long-Term Capital for the Ocean, hosted by TPC together with Parley Future Materials and the One Planet Sovereign Wealth Fund Network.

What stood out immediately was the architecture of collaboration in the room. Sovereign and long-term capital, family offices, philanthropy, innovators, multilateral finance, science, and platforms capable of turning ideas into pipelines were present—in recognition of one another. Voices from Parley for the Oceans, Mission Blue, UNCDF, Builders Vision, UBS Optimus, Minderoo Foundation, Katapult Ocean, the French Government (Mission NEPTUNE), WEF, and the One Planet Sovereign Wealth Fund Network spoke into what becomes possible when capital, policy, innovation, and stewardship begin to move together.

As the session came to a close, Dr. Sylvia Earle anchored the conversation with moral clarity and calm urgency: this moment isn't about waiting for perfect conditions, but about responsibility, agency, and courage. "It's taking whatever it is you've got and putting it to work."

Her invitation stayed with me, turning my attention inward toward the multi-capitals I can offer. Two impulses became clear: a pull to begin co-creating a Mediterranean chapter of Parley for the Oceans, and an invitation outward—reaching out to participants, wearing my Turquoise Coast Environment Fund (TCEF) Chair hat, and inviting them to continue the conversation at COP31 in Turkey.

Designing Investable Pathways for Ocean Regeneration

The breakfast room was transformed into a conference space for the next session: Oceans Day Panel 1: Unlocking the Blue Economy. I stayed, drawn by a curiosity around the investability of the ocean space as an impact investor, alongside my philanthropic responsibility through TCEF.

The panel moved fluidly from the stark reality that only ~0.6% of venture capital currently flows into ocean investing, to a reframing that felt both practical and catalytic: "We are not predicting the future when we invest. We are shaping the future." The conversation then grounded this ambition in concrete pathways: family capital as patient risk-taker, science as the missing infrastructure to de-risk investment, and institutional capital as the scaling force once early uncertainty is absorbed. Philanthropy appeared not as an end in itself, but as a catalytic layer—funding data, community resilience, and early experimentation—unlocking pathways for commercially viable, regenerative investment to follow.

Rather than treating impact and returns as opposing forces, the panel demonstrated how, in the ocean space, they are most effective when consciously designed to move together.

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Walking the Promenade, Sensing the Shift

Wednesday midday · The Spaces Between

From this session, I stepped out onto the Promenade and walked toward the HeimatMuseum. I've walked this street many times in past years—often up and down, day after day—but this year was different. It was only on my third day that I found myself walking the full length. The reason was simple: a purposeful neighborhood had formed at one end, around TPC House and InTent, and there was little need to drift far from it.

The clustering of these venues felt less logistical and more gravitational—a convergence shaped by shared intention. Movement followed meaning, not the other way around.

A few impressions stayed with me. This year, inner work appeared explicitly on the signage of more than a few houses—a subtle but important shift. Last year, nearly every corporate house was centered on AI as a headline; this year, the language had evolved toward AI agents and agentic AI. One massive billboard declared, "We found the AI ROI businesses are looking for," complete with a long security line leading into the building it adorned. The scene instantly reminded me of Disney World thrill-ride queues—and, honestly, it made me laugh.

There was also a distinct U.S. presence this year. The USA House—a converted church wrapped in eagle imagery—was impossible to miss. Trump was in town, and his speech was widely expected to be a highlight of the week. Yet last year, his inauguration speech seemed to freeze Davos in place. This year, life moved on. I was engaged in meaningful sessions, and the speech barely registered beyond awareness. A telling signal: attention was no longer being pulled by headlines, but increasingly directed toward the work of building what comes next.

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Mini House of Impact at Davos

Wednesday afternoon · Families as Units of Systemic Change

I arrived at the Heimatmuseum just in time for lunch. This is a place held in trust by senior caretakers, and over time Johanna Lazuletta has cultivated a relationship of deep respect with its guardians, earning permission to host cultural and purposeful gatherings here. This year, the Mini House of Impact was held within these walls.

After lunch, a brief museum tour helped me deepen my relationship with Davos itself. I learned that Davos is the highest city in Europe, sitting at 1,600 meters above sea level—which suddenly explained my struggles with running. I also discovered that tuberculosis treatment was pioneered here, based on a remarkably simple prescription: hours spent lying on sun loungers in the fresh mountain air, drinking plenty of milk, and eating well.

Grounded by this sense of place, we moved into the afternoon sessions: The Art of Family-to-Family Collaboration and Designing Systems with Families at the Core.

The first was held as a lived experiment. Family-to-family collaboration was framed as an art shaped by trust, resonance, and human connection rather than structure or scale. Families spoke about investing together not because a deal was optimized, but because trust had already been built through shared inquiry. Founders and family investors reflected on how doing business together reveals values more clearly than any formal diligence process. A clear pattern emerged: collaboration deepens where authenticity, patience, and aligned motivation are present, and it frays when short-term thinking or poor communication take hold.

The second session, Designing Systems with Families at the Core, began with a physical separation in the room—families on one side, everyone else on the other. I felt it immediately, a tightness in my gut. What loosened it was naming what I know to be true: that what connects us is not role or capital, but our willingness to bring everything we have to the table. When we do, the system begins to reorganize from the inside out.

It has been beautiful to witness how TIO is growing into its own. Risto and Adela brought their dynamic partnership into four sessions in Davos, and the House of Impact community is clearly taking shape with strength and intention.

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Ecomimetic Governance in Practice

Wednesday afternoon · Networks of Truth

From there I caught the funicular up to Schatzalp, where I met with Hank Holiday—a friend deeply immersed in developing ecomimetic organizations: structures designed to function more like living ecosystems than rigid hierarchies.

Hank is building Quorum1, an organizational operating system and stewardship framework that weaves together governance models, legal abstractions, economic flows, and social architecture to enable collectives to coordinate at scale without central control. What resonated was how closely this mirrors my own exploration of family office DAOs. Where I've been asking how long-term, values-aligned capital might reorganize itself beyond traditional funds, Hank is building the infrastructural layer that makes such coordination viable—turning shared intention into operational reality. Adjacent pieces of the same puzzle: designing institutions capable of holding complexity, trust, and collective stewardship in a post-centralized world.

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Inside the Tent at Arctic Basecamp

Wednesday evening · Ocean & Climate · The Spaces Between

I stepped into the Arctic Basecamp for "A Fireside on Impact & Collaboration." The Basecamp is hard to miss—a literal tent on the mountain, a science-led initiative founded to "speak science to power," bringing the rapidly accelerating changes in the Arctic directly into conversation with policymakers, investors, and civil society.

The session unfolded in a way that felt true to the setting. Less panel, more gathering. We stood shoulder to shoulder inside the tent, leaning in as people spoke—no slides, no scripts, no safe distance. What emerged was a living conversation about collaboration as a practice that is difficult, relational, and time-intensive. Voices from across philanthropy, impact investing, grassroots movements, science, and systems leadership named trust, cultural translation, and relationship-building as the real work beneath any structural solution.

I briefly shared my work and the multi-capital lens we're exploring within the FBN Impact Community—not just to discuss collaboration, but to acknowledge and participate in the collaboration already present in the tent.

The sharing that stayed with me most was Lucien's. He opened by saying, "I have the honor… I am a time-traveling storyteller, and I come from the future to say that we did it," immediately shifting the room into a different register. He shared how up.game convenes 40–60 change-makers each month to spend six days living inside the future their hearts know is possible—beyond extractive systems and toward a life-centric planetary civilization. From there, he introduced Gaia AI, trained on this collective future vision alongside Indigenous wisdom, envisioned as a voice representing life itself. His invitation was simple and radical: to collaborate, invest, and design from the assumption that we have already succeeded, and to work backward from that lived future.

This exercise of working backward from a lived future reminded me of the Dance for the Star Nation Ceremony, where prayers are consciously crafted and then carried to the Tree of Life. We connected with Lucien around how these two forms of prayer meet.

The evening carried me to A Night of Music by Diplo by Global Citizen—a brief collective exhale amid the intensity of the week, as a guest of TPC House.

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A Black Rhino in Davos

Thursday morning · Ocean & Climate · The Spaces Between

The morning unfolded at TPC House with Reimagining Systemic Change & Nature Regeneration, hosted by Unearthodox. Rather than positioning innovation as a pipeline to be optimized, Unearthodox reframed it as an ecological process. Drawing on years of research into incubators and accelerators working in nature-based solutions, they surfaced a pattern many recognized instantly: ideas rarely fail for lack of creativity or ambition, but because of the environments they are placed in. Speed, competition, and premature scaling may produce outputs, yet they often narrow possibility, exhaust innovators, and reproduce extractive dynamics—particularly along Global North–South fault lines.

We heard how Unearthodox designs "containers" that embody the values they seek to see in the world—care, humor, commitment, collaboration—not as branding, but as daily practice. Incubation becomes co-learning. Funding becomes trust-based. Success is felt as much as it is measured.

The morning widened through a series of "sparkers," each offering a different angle on the same underlying truth: Indigenous wisdom and modern technology held not as opposites, but as necessary partners. Innovation, we were reminded, does not need to be pushed—it needs to be tended.

The most unexpected turn came when the room made space for a non-human voice. Through Mbali, a VR- and AI-powered Black Rhino, the conversation slowed even further. His response to the question, "What do you believe humans have to give up?" lingered with me—an invitation to release our obsession with speed, scale, and control in favor of patience, protection, and care.

We moved into roundtable conversations, capturing notes on how this framework might be applied across our work. This wisdom is now out there—published, shared, accessible. As if a new ring of consciousness has been added to life itself, one we can now consciously build upon.

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Coffee, Continuity, and Scaling Impact

Thursday midday · Ocean & Climate

From here I moved to Kulturplatz to meet with Manuel. Two years after our first conversation in Davos—one that ultimately led me to become an investor—we found ourselves back here again over a simple cup of coffee. MPower is a platform unlocking solar power in Africa by combining high-quality solar hardware, in-house software, and accessible financing, enabling local distributors and installers to deliver reliable clean energy to households, SMEs, and agribusinesses in regions with unstable or nonexistent grid infrastructure. With the familiarity of an existing partnership, we spoke openly about how MPower has matured operationally, the realities of scaling impact in complex markets, and what the next level could look like. A natural continuation of a shared journey, grounded in trust and curiosity.

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When Dream Seeds Meet the Light

Thursday afternoon · The Spaces Between

From Kulturplatz, we walked back to TPC House with Manuel to join From Noise to Signal: A Coherent Landing for Davos and Beyond, held by Britta and Jenaan. Britta opened with a guided meditation, skillfully weaving the ambient noise of the space into the practice itself—guiding us beyond distraction and into the present moment. As the journey unfolded, my mind drifted back to a conversation we had in December, when she visited Izmir and we built a medicine wheel together. She had just begun articulating a framework then, and in that moment I realized I was walking its pathway—experiencing something meeting sunlight for the very first time. I felt blessed to witness the unfolding of what Britta is bringing into the world.

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Coherence in the Making

Thursday lunch · Families as Units of Systemic Change · Networks of Truth

It was finally time for the long-awaited lunch with Franz and Emily—a meeting that unfolded more like a remembering. Franz, a systems builder working at the intersection of blockchain, governance, and bioregional design, carries a rare ability to translate between worlds—indigenous cosmologies and digital infrastructure, public institutions and decentralized networks. Emily, a thinker and practitioner attuned to family dynamics, emotional intelligence, and intergenerational agency, brings a steady human grounding to complex systems work.

Seated together, the mountains holding the space, we spoke about serendipity as something curated through intention. We traced parallel journeys—from indigenous cosmologies to blockchain protocols, from family legacies to DAO architectures—circling around a shared question: how do we design structures that support coherence rather than extraction? Franz spoke of ancient–future technologies, of digital tools that could honor land, community, and multi-capital value flows. Emily grounded the conversation in the human need for clarity, emotional safety, and agency across generations. I shared my own path—from entrepreneurship to impact investing, from ceremony to systems work—and the growing conviction that the family is the smallest viable unit of systemic change.

By the time we stood up to leave, it was clear this was the opening of a longer collaboration. What had begun as resonance had matured into alignment around a concrete next step. We agreed to continue the work beyond Davos—to explore a first, real-world use case rooted in family governance and long-term stewardship, and to test how these ideas might move from conversation into practice.

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Declaration of Interdependence: A Generational Handoff

Thursday afternoon · Networks of Truth · The Spaces Between

I left the lunch fulfilled, with a quiet sense that Davos had been unusually generous this year. I've called this place the winter Burning Man more than once. On the playa, there's a shared understanding that "the playa provides." This week, I kept repeating a different mantra: the Magic Mountain provides. And so it had.

On my way back to Sacred Shell to begin packing, I passed the Davos Church. This is where Wisdom House is held—a place that, year after year, has surprised me with some of the most consequential conversations, often through pure serendipity. I'd checked earlier in the week, found it empty, and assumed this time it simply wasn't part of the story. Still, I felt a nudge to step inside one last time.

At the entrance, I ran into Franz. That alone felt like a sign. A session was about to begin in ten minutes, though the space had run out of water, so we walked together to the nearest market. On the way, I learned the session's title: "Declaration of Interdependence."

The gathering was convened to honor the 30th anniversary of A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, written by John Perry Barlow in Davos in 1996, and hosted by his daughter. What unfolded felt like a generational handoff. Those who had grown up shaped by that declaration—by the early promise of the internet as a planetary commons—had come together to sit in circle and ask what must now be declared, in a world defined not by separation but by interdependence.

The second floor of the church became a quiet, almost sacred container. People introduced themselves by what had drawn them to interdependence: digital commons, climate adaptation, cooperation science, indigenous wisdom, sovereignty, animism, governance, art. A shared recognition emerged—across disciplines and lived experience—that many of our interlocking crises trace back to the same spell: the illusion of separation.

Again and again, the conversation returned to a simple truth surfaced across cultures and systems: cooperation is not moral idealism, but an evolutionary strategy; interdependence is not weakness, but resilience; sovereignty and interdependence are not opposites, but prerequisites for one another.

Small groups formed to articulate principles as living statements. What emerged were phrases more than policies: I am because you are. No law shall pass that will harm the children. Shared vulnerability is the ground of trust. Strength and safety are cultivated from within and extended outward.

As the session drew to a close, Baba Brinkman rose to offer a synthesis as an activation. He performed a spoken-word rap—a rhythmic distillation of everything that had just moved through the room: interdependence as mutual aid, as commons, as lived practice; cooperation as something that scales not through force, but through invitation; many voices, one sentence. It was joyful, irreverent, precise, and somehow exactly right.

We had to leave quickly as the church prepared for prayer, stepping back into silence almost mid-breath. But something had already landed. The Magic Mountain had provided one last gift: not a conclusion, but a continuation—a reminder that declarations are not endpoints but social technologies, whispered into being so that the future might reorganize the present.

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FBN Dinner: A Gentle Landing

Thursday evening · Families as Units of Systemic Change

Before leaving Davos, I joined the FBN Dinner—a final circle of exchange, a chance to share reflections with friends who had been walking their own intense journeys across the mountain. A gentle landing: a moment to process, to integrate, and to close the week with connection.