Substack Live with Daniel Gerlei - President & Co-founder of the Global Young Entrepreneur Society

Описание: Last month, a small group of young leaders found themselves in rooms most people only read about. The Digital Life Design conference in Munich, known as DLD, brings together heads of tech companies, policymakers, investors, and researchers to talk about the future of technology, society, and power. It is the kind of conference where the people shaping decisions tend to be decades older than the people who will live longest with the consequences of those decisions.

That imbalance was part of what made this conversation between Emma Lembke and Daniel Gerlei so compelling. Both are part of a generation that is increasingly present in these spaces, but still far from centered in them. Daniel attended DLD as part of the Global Young Entrepreneur Society delegation, a group designed to connect young founders and social impact leaders with networks of power that are often closed to them.

One of the strongest themes that emerged was how isolating it can feel to be a young person trying to build something meaningful. Daniel talked about starting GYES with two friends because they each felt alone in their own communities. The organization grew out of a simple insight: if young people who are trying to build, create, and change things could find each other, they would move faster and feel less alone doing it. That sense of peer support carried into the delegation at DLD. The most valuable moments were not the keynote speeches or the high-profile panels, but the side conversations. The late dinners. The quiet strategy sessions. The moments where young leaders compared notes about what had gone wrong in their own projects and what they were trying to build next.

DLD itself surfaced a set of tensions that feel increasingly familiar. Europe’s struggle to retain young entrepreneurial talent. The weight of regulation on innovation. The sense that entire regions are worried about becoming less relevant in a global tech economy dominated by the U.S. and China. For young leaders, this was not abstract policy talk. These were conversations about where to build their lives, their companies, and their futures.

AI hovered over nearly every conversation. Some speakers framed it as a tool that will unlock enormous social and economic benefits. Others warned about catastrophic risk, from mass job displacement to deeper manipulation of public life. What Daniel named, and what resonated, was how incentives shape those narratives. People who profit from AI tend to emphasize optimism. People who have built careers warning about AI tend to emphasize danger. Both sides make real points. Neither side tells the full story on its own.

For young people sitting in these rooms, the challenge is not choosing a camp. It is learning how to live with the nuance. AI is not a single future. It is a set of choices being made now, by institutions that young people rarely control, but will absolutely inherit. The question is not whether to be optimistic or pessimistic. It is how to push for governance, design, and accountability that reflect the reality that this generation will be downstream of today’s decisions.

One idea that came out of the conference was a simulation exercise for AI risk, modeled after pandemic preparedness drills. Instead of debating abstract futures, bring decision-makers together and walk through concrete scenarios where AI systems fail, manipulate, or cause large-scale harm. Practice what response would look like before a crisis hits. The point is not to be alarmist, but to treat AI governance as something that requires rehearsal, not just white papers.

What stood out most in this conversation was not a single takeaway from DLD, but a pattern. Young people are not just asking to be invited into these rooms. They are bringing their own frameworks for how power should work. Less performance. More preparation. Less spectacle. More accountability. Less token youth presence. More real voice.

Conferences like DLD and Davos often frame themselves as spaces where the future is imagined. But the future is not just imagined there. It is lived by the people who are rarely centered in the room. If institutions are serious about shaping technology in ways that serve the public, then youth participation cannot be symbolic. It has to be structural.

This conversation is a reminder that the next generation is already here. They are not waiting to inherit the world quietly. They are trying to shape it while the decisions are still being made.