Juno News - January 15, 2024


World Economic Forum wants to ＂rebuild trust＂ but won't share its guest list


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

163.58209

Word count

548

Sentence count

23


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The theme for this year's World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland is Building Trust. But what does that actually mean and how can it be achieved? Andrew Lawton and True North's Andrew Lunton try to answer these questions and more.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 I'm once again on the promenade in Davos, Switzerland, on day one of the World Economic Forum's 2024 annual meeting.
00:00:08.080 True North is back on the ground covering this conference for the whole week.
00:00:11.160 It's when all of the world's rich and powerful, well, maybe not all, just the select invite-only crowd,
00:00:16.380 are here for a bunch of official meetings and also unofficial meetings,
00:00:20.260 including, in some cases, bilateral and multilateral sessions, which don't appear on any public agenda,
00:00:25.640 but nonetheless happened behind closed doors, just down the road here in the Davos Congress Centre.
00:00:31.280 The theme for this year's conference is rebuilding trust.
00:00:34.600 Now, I don't think most people watching this or listening to this would disagree that there is a deficit of trust.
00:00:40.340 People are very distrustful of many institutions, from the media to the institution that we are here because of,
00:00:46.820 the World Economic Forum itself, not to mention governments and corporations.
00:00:50.540 Now, whether they think they are the problem or shoulder some of the blame for this trust issue stands to be seen.
00:00:58.180 This is what Klaus Schwab said when describing why rebuilding trust was going to be this year's theme in the first place.
00:01:03.720 Now, why did we choose the theme or the motto, rebuilding trust?
00:01:12.460 If we compare the world today with the world before we had the COVID pandemics, we find a completely different mood.
00:01:24.260 First, the world has become very fearful, very fragmented, of course, and in such a situation, trust has vanished.
00:01:43.180 We have lost trust to a certain extent in each another because we all have become, under the pressure of the crisis,
00:01:51.520 of the multiple crisis, we have become more egoistic.
00:01:55.780 So, and if you are more egoistic, you think first of yourself, and this distorts an atmosphere of trust.
00:02:05.560 As you hear there, he's describing it as though people are the problem, not the institutions themselves,
00:02:11.420 as though the reason we distrust them is our fault and not theirs.
00:02:14.960 One thing that is noteworthy this year is that there has been a lack of transparency from the World Economic Forum on who exactly is meeting here.
00:02:23.840 In years past, the organization has published a list of participants and a list of public figures,
00:02:28.800 a list by country of who is actually here at this conference.
00:02:33.020 This year, no such list has been made public.
00:02:35.280 We actually reached out to the World Economic Forum's Media Relations Department and asked for it and received no reply.
00:02:41.300 So, how is this process of rebuilding trust going to take place if they're not even going to give us the courtesy of telling us who is meeting here?
00:02:49.860 By the way, attendance costs tens of thousands of dollars for business leaders, for politicians.
00:02:55.340 They're here for free because, as we know, this is one of the biggest opportunities for business leaders
00:03:00.740 and leaders of government to meet without the prying eyes of the media.
00:03:05.440 True North has been relegated to the street this year.
00:03:07.580 We were not given accreditation to go inside the Congress Centre as we were last year.
00:03:12.460 Perhaps they didn't like our coverage.
00:03:14.280 But again, if they want to start rebuilding trust, why not look in the mirror first?
00:03:18.760 For True North, from Davos, I'm Andrew Lawton.