Happy Birthday Radio Davos! What we learned from years of Forum podcasts

Matt Damon: And it reminded me of how I was when I was 14 and Ben Affleck and we were going to go to the big city of New York, and we were going to be actors. And that's exactly what a teenager should be doing.

Robin Pomeroy: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week Radio Davos has turned five. We look back on some of the highlights of our more than 200 episodes.

Mission Control Houston: European Space Agency and participants, this is Mission Control Houston. Please call station for a voice check.

Samantha Cristoforetti: ESA, this is a station. I am ready for the event. Welcome aboard the International Space Station.

Robin Pomeroy: In the last five years, we've taken you from outer space to the bottom of the sea. We've looked at how we can confront the biggest challenges facing us all here on planet Earth.

Adam McKay: And I started reading this and going, Holy God, this is now. And I got very scared very fast. And I realised, well, you know, I'm a guy who makes movies, so I got to make a movie.

Robin Pomeroy: We've spoken to the innovators in energy and industry and science driving the economies of the future. And we've addressed big changes in society.

Jude Kelly: There's no doubt about it that the manosphere, as it's termed, is a growing and worrying situation. I think they're outriders, but there's too many of them to just let it go and not be worried.

Robin Pomeroy: And in those five years, we've seen the emergence of generative AI.

Nile Rodgers: Technology can be beautiful and diabolical., just like people.

Robin Pomeroy: I'm Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum. And looking back on five years of podcasts...

Nile Rodgers: Oh, my God - he just described an artist.

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos.

Radio Davos has just turned five, and I thought I'd mark the occasion with a look back over that time, during which I and my many colleagues at the World Economic Forum have sought to bring you stories of positive change. Yes, looking at the biggest problems and challenges facing the world, but also talking to the people with the ideas and the energy to help us confront them.

The strength of Radio Davos is that we cover no single topic, but each week we look at some particular major issue - the economy, the environment, health, technology, the future of jobs, to name just a few of our most popular topics.

With well over 200 episodes to choose from, it was tough to pick just a handful of clips for this episode, and the ones I have picked only scratched the surface of our back catalogue, which you can search through using keywords at wef.ch/podcasts.

But let's start with the very first episode, published in March 2020, as the world was shutting down due to a virus that was turning into a deadly pandemic. The podcast was then called World Versus Virus and was dedicated to covering the big challenge facing the world at that time.

Here's the opening of that very first episode.

Podcast soundbite: This is the calm before the storm.

Robin Pomeroy: It's the whole world versus a virus

Podcasts soundbite: Look, this is serious, you know? We must declare war on this virus.

Robin Pomeroy: Welcome to World Versus Virus, a podcast from the World Economic Forum that aims to make sense of the Covid-19 outbreak. Every week, we plan to bring you expert advice and analysis of the global crisis and what can be done to fix it.

Podcast soundbite: This is a time for prudence, not panic; science, not stigma; facts, not fear.

Robin Pomeroy: It's Friday, March the 20th. I'm Robin Pomeroy, digital editor at the World Economic Forum.

In this episode of World Versus Virus, we'll hear from a leading global economist on why the impact of Covid-19 is likely to be even worse than the 2008 financial crisis.

Podcast soundbite: During the global financial crisis, it took almost two years until the stock market was down 30%. Now it's taken less than a month.

Robin Pomeroy: And an expert in cognitive behavioural therapy gives tips on how we can all protect our mental health from the risks posed by the outbreak.

Podcast soundbite: : It is now about practising, working on what I can control and not trying to control stuff that's out of my reach.

Robin Pomeroy: But first, let's have a roundup of where things stand.

Robin Pomeroy: That was the very first podcast of what became Radio Davos. I actually sound scared there, not by hosting a new podcast, but I think due to the uncertainty we're all facing about dealing with this pandemic, which we didn't know what was going to happen.

But as the weeks of the pandemic turned into months, we branched out from covering just Covid into covering other major global challenges and talked to some great experts along the way.

For World Water Day in March 2021, I had the chance to interview Hollywood star Matt Damon and his co-founder of the water charity Water.org, Gary White. With Matt filming a movie, still under lockdown conditions, in Australia, and Gary in the US, the timezone differences meant it was midnight for me in Geneva when I met them on Zoom.

Robin Pomeroy: Hi, Matt and hi, Gary. How are you both?

Guests: Hi, Robin. Great. Thank you. Well, Robin, good to be here.

Robin Pomeroy: What is it about water? I mean, for those of us who are used to it just being there the whole time. Why have you found actually that working on that as a kind of a building block to bringing people out of poverty. Why is it so fundamental?

Matt Damon: Well, I mean to start with, you've got a million people, children dying of entirely preventable things every year, right? Like diarrhoea. Right? Which is a ridiculous idea to those of us in the West to, you know, whose kids might miss a day of school or something like that.

But, but there's this whole, the actual impact is incalculable. When you start to look at the lives.

Like the very first water collection I ever went on 15 or so years ago was with this little girl. She was 14 years old and I was waiting for her when she came home from school. We were in rural Zambia. We went for this walk. There was a bore well about a mile from her house, and she put her book bag down and we went for this walk together.

And it was just the two of us with the translator and, and through the course of our conversation, she was telling me, I was asking you if she was going to live in this village for the rest of her life. And, and and she kind of confessed to me that she was getting out of there and she was going to go to the big city. She was going to go to Lusaka, and she was going to be a nurse. And she had all these great dreams and plans, and it reminded me of how I was when I was 14 and Ben Affleck and we were going to go to the big city of New York, and we were going to be actors. And that's exactly what a teenager should be doing, right? And thinking about what the what their life might be and this world of possibility in front of you.

And it wasn't until I left this kid that I went, had someone not had the foresight to sink the bore well a mile from her house, she would be spending her entire day searching for water and collecting water for her family, and she wouldn't be in school and she would have no hopes and no dreams. So the actual impact of not having access to water is is truly incalculable. It just keeps, it prevents people from living, living up to their their full potential.

Robin Pomeroy: That was Matt Damon speaking to the podcast in 2021.

In the last couple of years, the rise of generative artificial intelligence has got the world talking about how this technology might change our lives in ways most of us could not have imagined before the release of ChatGPT.

We've covered the issue closely on Radio Davos and have several new episodes in production right now. Look out for them in the coming weeks.

But way before that, one of my favourite episodes and one which won us our first Signal podcasting award, was an interview with Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who has spent a career thinking and writing about the potentially transformational impact of artificial intelligence.

At that time, when I spoke to Professor Russell, I'd never used an AI bot. It's something now we're all used to doing only a couple of years later. And at that time, I found it hard to conceptualise the power that AI might have in the future.

So I asked Stuart Russell in this episode, called The Promises and Perils of AI, if we could expect AI eventually to solve the world's most intractable problems.

Robin Pomeroy: On the bright side, if these machines are going to be so brilliant, will there come a day when we just say: fix global hunger, fix climate change, and off they go. And you set them six months or whatever to, you know, a reasonable amount of time, and suddenly they fix climate change.

Stuart Russell: There's a big difference between asking a human to do something and asking, and giving that as the objective to an AI system.

When you ask a human to fetch you a cup of coffee, you don't mean this should be their life's mission and nothing else in the universe matters, even if they have to kill everybody else in Starbucks to get you the coffee before it closes they should do that. No, that's not what you mean. Like you mean. And of course, all the other things that we mutually care about, you know, they should factor into your behaviour as well.

And the problem with the way we build AI systems now is we give them a fixed objective, right? The algorithms require us to specify everything in the objective. And if you say, you know, can we fix the acidification of the oceans, yes, you could have a catalytic reaction that does that extremely efficiently, but, you know, consumes a quarter of the oxygen in the atmosphere, which would apparently cause us to die fairly slowly and unpleasantly over the course of several hours.

How do we avoid this problem? You might say, okay, well, just be more careful about specifying the objective, right. Don't don't forget the atmospheric oxygen. But you know, and then of course, it might produce some side effect of the reaction in the ocean - poisons all the fish. Okay. Well, I meant don't yeah, don't kill the fish either. And then, well, what about the seaweed. Okay. Well don't, don't, don't do anything that's going to cause all the seaweed to die. And on and on and on. Right.

And the reason that we don't have to do that with humans is that humans often know that they don't know all the things that we care about, and so they are likely to come back. And so if you ask a human to get you a cup of coffee, you know, and you happen to be in the Hotel George V in Paris, where the coffee is, I think €13 a cup. It's entirely reasonable to come back and say, well, it's €13. Are you sure you want it? Or I could go next door and, you know, get one for much less. And that's because you might not know how you know their price elasticity for coffee. So you don't know whether they want to spend that much.

And it's a perfectly normal thing for a person to do. Right to ask. I'm going to repaint your house, you know. Is it okay if I take off the drainpipes and then put them back? You know, we don't think of this as a terribly sophisticated capability, but I systems don't have it. Because the way we build them now, they have to know the full objective.

In my book, Human Compatible, the sort of main point is if we build systems that know that they don't know what the objective is, then they start to exhibit these behaviours like asking permission before getting rid of all the oxygen in the atmosphere.

And in the extreme case, if we want to switch the machine off, it actually wants to be switched off because it wants to avoid doing whatever it is that is upsetting us. It wants to avoid it. It doesn't know which thing it's doing is upsetting us, but it wants to avoid that. So it wants us to switch it off if that's what we want.

So in all these senses, control over the AI system comes from the machine's uncertainty about what the true objective is, and it's when you build machines that believe with certainty that they have the objective, that's when you get the sort of psychopathic behaviour. And I think we see the same thing in humans.

Robin Pomeroy: For more great interviews on AI and on the work of the Forum's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its AI Governance Alliance, check out the back catalogue.

Staying with futuristic technology, Radio Davos has had several episodes on space and even a couple from space.

Mission Control Houston: European Space Agency and participants. This is Mission Control Houston. Please call station for a voice chat insert.

Samantha Cristoforetti: This is station. I am ready for the event. Welcome aboard the International Space Station.

Robin Pomeroy: That's Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, connecting from the International Space Station to the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos a few weeks ago. Here's Samantha Cristoforetti speaking from space. She was interviewed at Davos by Andrew Sorkin of The New York Times and CNBC.

Andrew Sorkin: I've never, by the way, interviewed an astronaut in space before. So I want to know what it's been like and what's it like the second time up? There's a different have you did you bring different things with you? Are you getting better sleep? What is it? Just tell us about what the experience is like.

Samantha Cristoforetti: The second time is very different. Not worse or better, but different.

I would say that the first time I came to space station as a rookie, it was quite overwhelming. You know, all the way from from launch. It was this influx of new experiences, new physical sensations, new skills that I had to learn, you know, like floating and in zero-G and handling this rather complex environment of, of space station and handling the work up there or up here.

And, I think if I looked back at those, especially the first days and weeks, it was all a little bit of a blur. I didn't have very clear memories. So I was really looking forward to come a pure second time as a veteran astronaut this time, and have a little bit more of both cognitive and emotional buffer to experience this a little bit more in slow motion.

And it's definitely been the case. I mean, you know, I didn't have to learn everything from scratch. It came back to me fairly quickly, like riding a bicycle, I guess. And so I had that space in, you know, in my heart and in my mind to observe the experience and really take note of details and, and hopefully also remember it better for the future.

Robin Pomeroy: Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti speaking to people in Davos from the International Space Station. Talking of space, here's one of my very favourite episodes of Radio Davos, from 2021.

Movie clip: Are we not being clear? We're trying to tell you that the entire planet is about to be destroyed.

Robin Pomeroy: Imagine discovering a comet the size of Mount Everest is hurtling towards Earth and will kill us all. That's the premise of Don't Look Up, an Oscar nominated movie that was intended as an allegory for climate change disaster. On this episode of Radio Davos, we talk to Adam McKay, who wrote and directed the film, to lead us into that interview. Here's a clip with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence's characters trying to explain the situation to Meryl Streep's President Orlean, and her even more revolting chief of staff, Jonah Hill.

Movie clip: Using Gauss's method of orbital determination and the average astrometric uncertainty of 0.04 arc seconds, we then ask ... Whoa whoa whoa whoa, what that was for? Just tell us what it is. Seriously, stop.

What Doctor Mindy is trying to say is that there's a comet headed directly towards Earth. And according to NASA's computers, that object is going to hit the Pacific Ocean at 62 miles due west off the coast of Chile.

And then what happens? Like a tidal wave?

No. It will be far more catastrophic. There will there will be mile high sunamis fanning out all across the globe. If this comet makes impact, it will have the power of a billion Hiroshima bombs. There will be magnitude 10 or 11 earthquakes.

You're breathing weird. It's. It's making me uncomfortable.

I'm just trying to articulate the science.

I know, but it's like so stressful. It's like trying to, like.

Listen, I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation.

Robin Pomeroy: It's my pleasure to welcome to the show an Oscar winning filmmaker, the writer director of The Big Short, of Vice and now of Don't Look Up, an epic disaster movie, a satire, a comedy, a tragedy. Adam McKay, how are you?

Adam McKay: I'm good. Robin, thanks for having me.

Robin Pomeroy: It's such a pleasure to have you. Now, for those few people who are listening to this who haven't seen your movie, how would you set it up for people? What is it about?

Adam McKay: I would say it's a big, ridiculous comedy about two scientists trying to warn the world that a death comet is going to hit. And they're trying to warn a world that is much like the world we live in right now in 2022. So yeah, it's a comedy, and then it's got some dramatic, tragic elements to it as well.

Robin Pomeroy: So your inspiration for this movie, I believe, was climate change. You're reading a book and it suddenly dawned on you what an awful situation humanity's in. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that, but I'm just curious to know, why didn't you make a movie about climate change? Why did you turn it into this kind of allegory and turn into a meteorite strike?

Adam McKay: Yeah, I had read the UN climate report about four years ago. I had read David Wallace-Wells' book Uninhabitable Earth, which I highly recommend. And I had this moment where I realised the climate crisis, which I always thought it was very serious and something we had to deal with, but I always kind of thought it was 50 years away, 80 years away, for my grandkids.

And I started reading this and going, Holy God, this is now. The models have all been too optimistic, and it's impossible to model a system as complex as planet Earth when you talk about turning the heat up the way we're doing it.

And I got very scared very fast. And I realised, well, you know, I'm a guy who makes movies, so I got to make a movie. I mean, no matter, you know, if I made sandwiches, I. Well, that doesn't quite work. I was going to say I would have made a climate crisis sandwich. I guess you could.

Robin Pomeroy: You could. I'm sure. Depends where you source of your products, doesn't it?

Adam McKay: Yeah. Oh, by the way, you're right, you're right.

Robin Pomeroy: When people ask me what is Radio Davos, I often say, well, it's not radio, it's a podcast. And it's not Davos. We make most of these shows in Geneva, a day's train ride away from the Swiss town where the World Economic Forum has been holding its annual meetings for more than 50 years.

But occasionally we do podcast from Davos, and we have made what are effectively daily morning radio shows to help people at the Annual Meeting prepare for the day ahead, and to give the rest of the world a feel of what's actually going on up that mountain.

The pandemic meant there were no in-person Davos Annual Meetings for a couple of January's, but as soon as the situation around the World Economic Forum did return to Davos, but it wasn't in winter, it was in the spring of 2022.

This is how that first episode, from an in-person Annual Meeting, live from Davos, started.

Robin Pomeroy: It's Monday day one of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. This is Radio Davos.

Welcome to Davos. And for the first time since we created Radio Davos we're actually talking to you from Davos.

It's usually a snow covered ski resort high in the Swiss Alps. For the first time in the more than 50-year history of these Davos meetings, the World Economic Forum's annual meeting is being held not in January but in spring.

The pandemic has meant there's been no physical Davos meeting for the last two Januarys, so this really is a remarkable event. The first major in-person meeting really of its kind perhaps of any kind since Covid stopped business as usual.

And how different the world looks now. On these daily podcasts, every morning, we'll be looking forward to the day's action and picking up on the highlights as they happen...

Robin Pomeroy: Doing live or as live shows from Davos meant we could get what journalists call 'colour' from the event. Sometimes that meant running around the Congress Centre with a handheld recorder to grab interviews, and sometimes the colour came to us.

Podcast soudbite: [singing and cello]

Robin Pomeroy: It's Friday the 20th of January, I'm from the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting 2023.

Podcast soudbite: [singing and cello]

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos.

Robin Pomeroy: Singer Angelique Kidjo and cellist Yo-Yo Ma struck up an impromptu performance just outside the Radio Davos studio. It kept us from recording any interviews for a while, but not for long. On this episode: European Central Bank Chief Christine Lagarde insists inflation will come back under control.

Christine Lagarde: Inflation by all accounts. However you look at it ...

Robin Pomeroy: Welcome to Radio Davos and welcome to Davos to my co-hosts for today, Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel.

Guests: Hi, Robin. Hello hello, lovely to be with you.

Robin Pomeroy: So happy to have you here. Big fan of your podcast, the News Agents. If anyone's not heard it, which one of you is going to tell us what it is?

Emily Maitlis: I think we've come from a world in which there were stories that we felt we had to...

Robin Pomeroy: Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel co-hosting Radio Davos with me during a week of podcasts where I was joined by prominent podcasters to present those daily shows - still available at wef.ch/podcasts or wherever you're listening to this.

We record podcast interviews at most Forum events throughout the year. And if you've been listening to recent episodes, you may have heard football star and Unicef Ambassador David Beckham talking to us in Davos last January about the importance of positive male role models. That's an issue we've touched on before, particularly in this episode with British theatre director Jude Kelly. She's the founder of the Women of the World Festival, and she's also run festivals for men to discuss men's health and masculinity.

I asked Jude Kelly what she thought about this notion of 'toxic masculinity'.

Jude Kelly: Well, there's no doubt about it that the manosphere, as it's termed, is a growing and worrying situation.

There's been a recent poll done by the Reykjavik Summit, which is a kind of women political leaders, that's demonstrated that 57% of men think that women's rights has gone far enough or too far. And those are not older men. They're younger men.

And the implication is that boys and men are feeling rattled and insecure and worried about their identity and their status, and they want to reclaim it.

Now, I do always feel that including men and boys in the discussion about equal rights is critical because, I mean, you know, we love men, we live with men, we're born of men, we, you know, have sons, we have nephews, etc., etc. And not all the language of change can be about women. It's got to be about society as a whole. It's got to be about gender as a whole.

And actually, I think that one of the reasons that the manosphere is growing in misogyny is because not only are women much more confident about speaking about their rights and their needs, but more men are also, maybe much more quietly, are also agreeing with them.

So it makes those men who are like pushing the misogyny back, I think they are outriders, but there's too many of them to just let it go and not be worried.

Wow welcomes everybody. You know, I always say, if you know a woman or you are a woman, it's for you. And increasingly, I think that fathers who have daughters are wanting to make sure that their daughters have the same rights as their sons. And they want to make sure that the daughters aren't coming into a world where they've, you know, where they're subject not just to disadvantage in career choice or education or pay gaps or whatever. But also they don't want by girls to be harassed and, you know, sexually abused by other men.

So a lot of men are looking out for how they can contribute to a fairer world for everyone.

But some men and some boys are finding it really threatening because they don't know, like what is the new identity then. If if girls can do as much as boys, are men still required to be the breadwinner, or men are still required to be the strong man, are men still required to sort of strut their stuff, as studs, this kind of thing.

And I think it needs men to talk to other men at these men, to talk to boys and reassure them that actually the idea of being a strong man doesn't require them to have to be a weightlifter. It doesn't require them to have to dominate a woman. Their status doesn't have to come from those things.

But I do think it's got to be men that step forward and and talk to other men about this. It can't just be women trying to get men to come into their space. That's not going to work.

Robin Pomeroy: That episode, from March 2024, is called In the age of the manosphere, what's the future for feminism? It's more relevant than ever, as the debate about masculinity remains a big talking point around the world.

Time maybe for one last clip in my scratching the surface kind of overview of five years of Radio Davos.

They say don't meet your heroes. But when I met Nile Rodgers, the creative force behind many of the most hummable pop songs of the last 50 years, he did not disappoint. He was in Davos in January 2024 to receive a Crystal Award for his services to society beyond his music.

In a world where we can now ask a free AI bot to create a song in seconds, I asked Nile Rodgers what was the value and power of a great song.

Nile Rodgers: Here's something that my jazz tutor taught me. One day I was I was going out to do a gig, and that's how I grew up. I used to do cover songs for money, and sometimes we were lucky and we could do original songs because in the old days, people liked original bands playing new music. That was the discovery engine - go to a club.

And one day I was taking a lesson and my jazz tutor, who's never had a hit record in his life, but he saw that I was really upset this particular day, and he asked me why, because normally I'm so upbeat. And I said, well, look at these like lame songs that I got to play tonight, you know? And he says, Nile, don't you realise they're, they're all hit records? Why would you call them lame? I said, look, the first song I got to play tonight is Sugar Sugar by The Archies.

Robin Pomeroy: That was number one the day I was born in England, by the way.

Nile Rodgers: Oh my God.

Robin Pomeroy: Exactly? It's not the coolest thing in the world.

Nile Rodgers: Oh, so check this out. So he said to me, he said, now, do you know that Sugar Sugar has been number one for about six weeks now? And I said what does that got to do with it? He says Sugar Sugar is a great composition. And I said how can you call 'Honey. Doo doo doo doo doo doo. Sugar, sugar' - how could you call that a great composition?

Here's the greatest lesson in my life, he says, because it speaks to the souls of a million strangers. And I went, oh my God, he just described an artist. I'm not an artist yet. I need to learn how to speak to the souls of people I will never, ever meet.

Robin Pomeroy: This idea of that, the artist touching people from a distance in time or in geography, is really important. And I wonder what you think of, at this meeting here in Davos, everyone's talking about artificial intelligence, generative artificial intelligence. And now you can make a record in seconds by just telling a computer to make one. I want a song that sounds like Chic, you know, do me a song like that. And maybe it sounds a bit like it.

What is what's your opinion of, because I know you've made those records, but I love the records for the music, but I love the fact there's a connection with you, particularly because I'm having the privilege of talking to you now. But do you see artificial intelligence as a danger to to that kind of human connection?

Nile Rodgers: So a few years ago, I was down in Costa Rica with Deepak Chopra, and we're sitting there and we're talking about AI, and this is years ago. And and he say: Nile, technology can be beautiful and diabolical, just like people. And I thought to myself, wow, he's absolutely right.

So I think AI can be beautiful, but AI can be diabolical, just like people.

Robin Pomeroy: Nile Rodgers.

So happy birthday, Radio Davos. You can find five years of our episodes on your podcast app or at wef.ch/podcasts. And don't miss our other podcasts, particularly Meet the Leader, hosted by my colleague Linda Lacina, who appeared on the very first episode with me, five years ago.

I'd like to thank Linda and the many colleagues who've helped me produce this podcast over the last five years, and are still working on great stories that we'll be bringing you in the weeks and months to come.

Please follow Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any of those.

Radio Davos will be back next week with more stories about how the world can tackle the biggest challenges. But for now, thanks to you for listening this time and over the last five years. And goodbye for now.