Okay, well, since the doors are closed, I'd like to welcome all of you and we're going to start, and we promise this is going to be a fun and energetic debate, and by the time you walk out the door, you will, we promise you will learn a lot from our panelists and our virtual hubs joining. My name is Afshin Yudhikul, I'll be moderating the session on meeting the Youth Imperative. I'd like to tell you beforehand, if you haven't done this session before, meaning this is a special shaping Davos session, and it has a different format than what you're used to at Davos. We have speakers, we have panelists who are joining me here in Davos, but we're not alone because we have virtual hubs connecting from four different cities, and they have been doing local projects about the issues that we'll be discussing today, and they will be bringing local insights, and they will share us their own insights from the projects that they have held, and then we're going to see where we situate those local problems, local issues in the global context, and that will be what we're going to be doing with our panelists here in the room. So I have to admit I'm passionate about this format because it really makes it a very dynamic, global conversation, it's not just a Davos conversation that we're having here, and I should also let you know that this session is being webcast live, so there are probably hundreds of thousands shapers who are also watching online, so we say hello to them too, that's my camera. I'm joined by great panelists today, I want to first introduce them, and also introduce you to our virtual speakers who have been waiting patiently for us, and I haven't had a chance to say hi to them before, so hi to all of you. So my panelists here, I'd like to start with our studio, Claire Boonster, founder of Operation Education from the Netherlands, hi Claire. Omar Alganim to my left, chief executive officer of Alganim Industries in Kuwait, welcome Omar. Thank you. And Ashish Admani, president and chief executive officer of JA Worldwide USA, thanks for being here, and you see the virtual hubs behind me, and I'd like to introduce our hub speakers as well, and then we will just kick off the debate. From Baku we have Faris Ismailzade right here, waving at us, hi Faris, we're also waving back, but you probably can't see us at the moment. We have from Bangalore, Krishnamurti Shankar, and well I forgot to tell you what Faris does, Faris is vice rector at Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, and he is board member of AMCAM, and member of board of directors at State Exam Center for Baku. From Bangalore we have Krishnamurti Shankar joining, and Krishnamurti is managing director of Human Resources at Infosys. From Budapest we have Leela Sarolta Balook, who is an international project manager at the Central Bank of Hungary, and from Monterey we have Juan Pablo Moura, who is the business school dean at Secretary of the Board, Technológico de Monterey University. Excuse my pronunciation over there, Juan, but I tried my best. So after this long introduction, so it's not just three, I guess we have seven of them, I should also give a shout out to all of you watching us online, you can send us your questions using the hashtag shaping Davos, we promise we'll get to your questions too, we have plenty of time. After taking care of all the housekeeping notes, I'm going to go to our virtual panelists first, and ask them, and in the order we presented them, to tell us about the projects that they have been doing locally, and how we can sort of add on to that here at our Davos discussion. 1.8 billion people in the world today, when we were talking about youth, that's the population that we're talking about. So there are more young people in the world today than ever before, which makes this debate even more urgent, and we will be looking at how business leaders, political leaders can come up with creative solutions, with ideas to get them off the streets, and promise them a bright future that they can be hopeful about. There are so many aspects that we hope to cover today, ranging from access to education to radicalization, how we could stop that, and what societies could do, what, how political and business leaders can think out of the box to come up with solutions to this problem, and what else could we ask for? We have great people who'll give us ideas. So Baku, let's start. Faris Ismailzadeh. I should look back. Good afternoon, special hello from Baku. It's a great honor for me to be part of this session, joined from Baku. It's a rainy weather here, but happy to be part of this discussion. With wonderful discussion here, let's go on to 300. Let's discuss the problem that young people see, both in other countries, so in the broader... Faris, I will have to interrupt for one second, and we have amazing tech geniuses in the room who will take care of the sound glitch, and we'll get back to Baku, but don't forget what you were telling us, because we want to hear about the local projects that you were doing, and you will bring us local insights. And to all our virtual panelists, I would like to let you know that what we want to hear from you is not just how great and smooth you ran the projects, but how much you kept pushing and where did you get stuck? What were the challenges? Why did you think you could not move forward? Was it business leaders? Was it the political system? Was it just mentality and culture? So tell us those as well so that we can add on to them and perhaps use them as our starting point for the discussion that we're going to have here. My friends in the tech team, let me know, wave at me, shout at me when the sound is ready for Baku. I would like to move to Bangalore while we're fixing Baku's sound glitch. Krishnamurti Shankar, let's hear from you. What projects have you been doing and what were the challenges that you faced? Hi, good afternoon, everybody. I think India is a complex country and I think the challenges kind of span across various sectors from the agriculture to the manufacturing and the services sector. Let me just give you a quick context. If you look at the challenge in India, we're going to be adding one million people into the workforce every month for the next 10 years. So that's almost about 12 million a year joining the workforce. And that's a huge challenge. And it's all across various things. Rural India, urban India, the high-tech part and the other part. So that's a big challenge. And when we look at the kind of issues that are there and how we tackle it in our projects here, I think there are four big challenges that came. I think the first is we have to reimagine the way our education system is run. It's archaic, people are not ready for jobs. They're not ready for the future jobs. I mean, not even for the current jobs. So how do we really transform our education system is one big challenge. And I think we need the government, the industry to really work together in partnership to do that. I think the second big area is really the industry to be more future-oriented, more open to flexible ways of working. Also to be partnering with the communities to talk about the future challenges and the future of skills that are needed and help people develop that. So that's going to be the other big thing. The way to create micro-entrepreneurs or entrepreneurship in India, I think India is just about 17% people who are getting into entrepreneurship. We would like more of that. And that's one big challenge for this country. The third big area we see is what I would call as the way learning is going to happen in the future. And we discuss because there's got to be examples where we take learning to where people are. There are projects like the maker space where we allow people to come together and learn and create things based on what they need. I think we've got to take learning to the communities, to the poor communities, like the slums of Haravi and others so that people get to learn what they need at the time, at their location, maybe on their phones or on something else. So I think the reimagination of learning completely is going to be a big challenge for us. I think the last big area is what I would call as culture. I think India, if you look at the participation of women in the workforce is abysmal. We are just about, rural India is about 16% women participating in the workforce in urban India and rural it's about 26%. And that's very low. So how do we get women to participate more is a challenge we've been debating. Culture in the sense that people in the future need to be much more nimble, much more experimentated with different jobs. They're going to learn and unlearn jobs quite fast and collaborate more to create things. And that's a culture that we need to really start building from our children in school. And how do we do that is the other big area. So I think these are the challenges that we have been discussing in our projects. Fantastic, four points that you summed up for us. I'm sure we'll have plenty of time to talk about those. Let's move to Budapest. Briefly tell us the project that you've been working on at the local level and the challenges you faced. And if there's any hope, please add that and let us know as well. Go ahead. So hello, everyone. I'm here from Budapest. As you can see my background, there is the Basilica. And we are so excited here. We are having a great event actually for the past four hours. So we have amazing panelists and we have our audience. We have our press representatives that are all putting thoughts into the discussion. And this is something that I would now try to synthesize and give it to you so that you can get a holistic picture of all the views that came up during our discussion. So our take on the youth imperative is the drivers of brain drain and how we can combat them. So when we talk about brain drain, we really have to differentiate between temporary and permanent economic migration of the most talented and highly skilled individuals because while the temporary kind of migration can actually be beneficial for the economy in a way that those individuals can bring back skills and language knowledge and working culture approaches that can be beneficial for all of us, actually permanent migration is very detrimental on the economy because our best talents leave and they decrease our productivity therefore. So this is kind of what we have been discussing. And even though India, I would think it's a very different country than Hungary, I could relate to a lot of points that have been mentioned before because obviously we also talk about education. How can we change our education system to prepare youngsters to be more flexible so that they can be more entrepreneurial so that they can actually create those jobs that they would like to have. And also the fact that we need to include millennials, so the younger generation, also from a point of view of the industry, but also in policymaking. So this is more or less what we have talked about. These are the challenges. Lila, thank you so much. And I want to just a quick note why we're doing this, why we're starting with the virtual hubs because by first touching upon the local issues, we're trying to identify trends. If there's anything similar that they're experiencing and it was great that from the Budapest Hub we heard something, the similarity that they're going through in terms of the problems. I mean, Bangalore, sure in terms of kilometers or miles, whichever one I use because I know we have people from all over the world here. Despite the distance, they are encountering similar problems and we're gonna go back to the panel and see why. Which is, I wanted to just remind you why we're starting with the virtual panel first. And Budapest, I think it was great, Lila, that you made a reference to what Shankar is going through in his work and pointed to the similarities which we will get back to Monterey. Let's move to Monterey and see what you've been working on the challenges. And I know that Baku is ready. So have patience, Baku, we're on our way. Go ahead, Monterey. Good morning, everyone. And I'm very happy to be here with you. Yesterday we had a great panel, a great discussion on some of these issues. For sure, here in Mexico, the issues of unemployment but also under-employment and low-value jobs are very, very relevant for the country, for our youth and for the world, I think. Three topics that we discussed yesterday that I think are very relevant. One is, and I think this is important, we tend to put in the same bucket all the talent acquisition issues that we have. And we mix talent acquisitions at all levels for an entry-level job, for mid-level jobs or even for business leadership. There are issues at all levels that we tend to mix and the same with the educational offering or services. And we think that issues are different and therefore the diagnostics should be different and the solutions and the medicine should be different and be careful of not mixing everything in the same bucket. That one was one important element. The other one, of course, was technology and the capacity of technology to improve education in terms of access, quality, pertinence, equality, even productivity or cost. And you see that in examples in the private sector, social sector and the government trying to enhance the use of technology, which I think will shape educations in a way we cannot even start to imagine. And the last point that we spent a lot of time yesterday discussing was the mindset issue. It was surprising for me to find out that from the public sector, the dropout rate from after the first year of high school was almost 50%. And in most cases, it was not due to economic reasons. Most of it were psychological or cultural reasons that led these young guys to drop out and to jeopardize their future. And I think we have not spent enough time discussing those issues and how we can inspire youth for them to imagine a different future than the one their parents lived. Because if you don't generate this intrinsic motivation, even if we eliminate many of the external barriers in terms of access, cost, opportunity, they will not even embrace or take leverage of those opportunities. And that was the main point of the discussion yesterday and the points in which we will be working going forward. Thank you so much Juan Pablo from Monterey and Baku is on. Okay, Fires Is Masada, sorry about that. So we're back and we can hear you fine.  Can you hear me now? Yes, perfect, go ahead. Okay, good afternoon once again. Sorry for technological problems. I am connecting you from Reini Baku. It's a great pleasure to be part of this discussion. Two days ago, we hosted more than 300 young people in our panel discussions here in Baku. They have come from different sectors, mainly from civil society, but also from education, business. And we discussed what is needed for young people in Azerbaijan, in the region around the globe, how we can empower young people, what are the needs of young people. Our discussion mainly focused on two issues. First issue is how to fix education, how to make sure that education quality, education standards, the demands of employers, the demands of market. And that way, young people are using the necessary skills and talent to find a job. Okay, Faris, we gotta stop again. Ah, well, it's not too far away. What is going on with this? You know, Baku and Thomas, it's not even that far, but let's try again. We want to be, you know what? I promise you extra air time because you deserve it. And it's just blame it on the technology. What can I do? You know what I mean? Who says it makes our lives easier after all? Sometimes it just makes it way harder than it's supposed to be. We'll get back to Baku, right, Jessica? You let me know when Baku is on. So, have faith, be patient, we'll get back to you. But I think we already have a good set of issues that we can work with, ranging from culture to access to education to how we can provide employment opportunities to how young people can imagine a future that's different than their parents with more opportunities and more access. So those are great starting points and I would like to turn to my panel here. And Claire, why don't we start with you here? It's meeting the youth imperative and these are the issues that local hubs are experiencing, the problems that they're experiencing. What is the global context in which we can situate these local challenges? How can we have a global perspective when it comes to understanding what they're going through and how it resonates globally? Yeah, so my field is education reform and it was interesting that spontaneously all four of them, even Baku was the last thing we could see here, was saying we need to fix education. And interestingly enough, also on the entire web forum, even though education still is not a priority on the global agenda, it somehow seems to pop up spontaneously in every single panel discussion here, as far as I heard, because obviously I couldn't be there myself on all of them. So it is a big thing and I think people are finally starting to wake up to that, there is an issue there. And it's not a new issue. We've been talking about education for ages. However, it is super hard to change it. Why? Well, the thing is most people immediately try to jump into solutions. So what are the solutions? What do we need to do? And then there's a lot of tech obviously coming in there and iPads and MOOCs and massive online open courses and immersive learning experiences. That's all fantastic. However, we need a completely new paradigm. That is a bit of a problem. So if I ask people, so what do you really think education should be about? What should be the true purpose of education? People always say something along the lines of unleashing or developing everybody's own unique potential and learning how to make that valuable lifelong for a better society, basically. Do you hear that across cultures? I'm curious about that. Because different cultures and different parts of the world are experiencing different issues. Yeah, but some cultures, like the American ones, would say more, well, have a good job. But underneath that, it depends a bit on what age group you ask. So the younger people would typically want to have more value for society or for a better world, and the older people would typically more say, high pay job. But still, people feel like we need something else. So that is what people somehow seem to agree. People say, well, you can't disagree with that. But what we are completely used to in all our cultures, it almost got engraved in our deepest habits, is the paradigm of success means higher grades, higher diplomas, and higher inner rankings. And even though we all feel that that is the good thing to do, lots of parents say, yeah, I totally agree that this should be. However, I want my kids to do well, equaling a high score and going to an Ivy League university. Even though that may have nothing to do anymore, or very little to do with core values such as happiness, or feeling value, feeling that you matter. And it's that paradigm we need to address first before we can jump into conclusions or solutions. Because if you build these new solutions on the old paradigm, then something goes wrong. What explains that gap? I mean, you were talking about basically parents even, of course, they want their kids to do so well. Ivy League schools, they will be proud when they say their kids go to school, like school Y, perhaps scholarships and a bright career and a good paycheck. But there's still happiness at the center of what parents want for their kids. What explains that gap? The Ivy League answer is the elitist. I don't want to use the word that, but that's probably more the Davos crowd. But for most people, it's just simply having a diploma, right? And as high as possible, but high versus low. So what explains it to me is that it's all about identity. Our education also made us who we became to be. And we turn out just well, right? So why change it? And somehow, we also have a feeling very unconsciously that education is so important. So they must have thought very well about it. So there must be a reason why it's this way. And I can definitely challenge that, but it's made me for a later in this discussion. We will definitely. Omar, what is your response? You've heard from our virtual panelists and the problems they laid out. And Claire also shared with us from her experience and her work what education means to different people. And sometimes, it ties to our own identity and how we think of ourselves. And maybe that's also a challenge that we need to address. But your response to the issues that we've laid out so far? Well, let me give a quick backdrop. So I come from part of the world. In Europe, 35% of the people are underneath 30 years old. In my part of the world, 60% of people are under 30 years old. We also have the highest unemployment rate. And over the next 10 years, we have 70 million people coming into the workforce. But we talk about education. And we assume education is something that adds value. And in preparing for this panel, I came across an interesting quote, an economist. In some Arab countries, the more time you spend in school, the less chance you have of finding a job. In Egypt, 34% of your university graduates were unemployed in 2014, compared with 2% of those with just primary education. So there's a negative correlation between education and your ability to be able to be productive within economies. And that's because in our part of the world, education is made to dull the mind. Young minds are crammed with as much information as possible so that they don't challenge the status quo. And in a world where, at least my view in education, is to create curious minds. And that you can't teach any one subject matters, as subject matters are changing so fast, but creating a curious mind that knows how to learn and continually learn is what differentiates somebody who's going to be successful in the coming world and somebody who's not. Whereas, unfortunately, in my part of the world, education system does the opposite of that. They fill the mind with specific content matter and actually stop the learning and stop that critical thinking piece. So we have the double-edged problem of this youth bulge that's coming on. And an education system and misuse of education that, for the most part, really don't address this and, in fact, are creating a larger problem. But through your work, you're trying to challenge exactly these problems that you were talking about. How hard is it to convince people that human beings are not machines and you can't just put flash disks and upload information and then you're an educated person? How do you actually cultivate that culture where curiosity, inquisitive minds, they can, that's the hot thing as opposed to read all these books and memorize it all and do well on the exams and just, voilà. Great job. Great university. So what are the two of us? It's been a great area of frustration for me.  Why aren't we addressing this problem? It's so obvious. If you look at we're spending the most per capita by getting the lowest in terms of standardized tests across the world, something is wrong. And, but there's so many political things in play in different misuse education. There's so many different political parties. So what I did and what I wanted to do is to find ways to be able to work around the misuse education and to be able to affect the lives of young people. It's funny that Ashish is here on the board with us but I've been involved with NJAS which is part of the global junior achievement. And, you know, it's in 14 different countries and helped set the regional board for that. And what that does is teach young people the ability to be able to be entrepreneurs and have mentors from the private sector go in, sit with those young people, and teach them how to run a company, how to think critically and how to think out of the box. And in Kuwait, where 93% of the population works for the government. Many of these young people, it's the first time they ever come into touch with people from the private sector. So it's never something they have an opportunity to think that there's something beyond just going and getting a job with the ministry. So we have lots of companies and lots of different things over the last 14 years, 4 million plus youth that have gone through the programs and they've affected many different lives. But, and I think that's one way to do it. But it's, you're sort of trying to work through the back door. Whereas what really we need to understand, what we need to perform is that there's a tsunami of youth coming forward that's ill-equipped to deal with the challenges that the world has today. And we as a region are not competitive because we don't have a workforce that's skilled to deal with the global economy that we're in. Ashish, I'm sure you have a lot to add. I've been waiting for such a long time.  So I think there is so much urgency to this problem that we're ignoring. A million new people entering the workforce in India every month. Unemployment rates of over 20, 30% double the youth, the adult unemployment rates. And what we heard from everyone, one common thread, we heard it I think loud and clear from Leela and Krishnamurti particularly, is the need for education system reform. Which, let's be honest, is gonna take a long, long time. To turn a super tanker, you need to find the rudder and watch and wait for it to turn. What Omar's done is to find funding in a way to get around it and work with a speedboat to get ahead of the problem. And then what happens is ministers of education see the success and then they wanna find the rudder and to move the ship in a certain direction just to pick a crazy analogy. And I think that's a dual track way to do both education system reform, which will take time and to have concrete programs that actually showcase what's gonna work. Just to give you a couple of examples. So in Europe, we've been doing entrepreneurship programs to build a culture of entrepreneurship education in schools. We do a variety of things. We give awards to the most entrepreneurial teachers to get some change happening at the school level. And we bring real world entrepreneurs and corporate executives into the classroom to create role models for kids. We can't rely just on parents and teachers. We need these role models. So it's a pull strategy to get the kids thinking, oh yes, I can be like that and I can have a role model. At the same time, we work with employers to really lower the risk of hiring a person and understanding what they're like. Apprenticeship programs, which Jay doesn't do today, I wish we did. We've got some great other nonprofits that do apprenticeships. What we do is job shadow programs which allow young people to meet employers and create the connectivity to actually understand from the employer's perspective, it's risk-free to hire this 18-year-old or 20-something in the job. So you need to pull strategy and a push strategy to create that speedboat while at the same time working on education reform. I think that's great material you shared with us, but I can't help but think, okay, you're saying that, just like Amar was saying, use the back door. Don't get stuck. If ministries of education are, what are you gonna wait until forever? You're going to wait for this thing to be fixed. So initiative, do it on your own. Just go out and do it and challenge the norm and challenge whatever it is that's blocking the way. But I can't help but think or ask this question. Then how are we, well actually here, it's going to be very helpful from the Global Shaper Survey that Jessica was so kind to bring to my attention before this debate. It's a very interesting survey here which ties back to what ministries of education should be learning or I hope they're watching and they're also tuning in and how we can sort of move forward. It's very interesting, the numbers from this Global Shaper's annual survey, numbers from 2006 to give you brief background. It's more than 26,000 participants between the ages of 18 to 35 participated in the survey and answered various questions about what they think about their societies, the world, the future that they want to live in, all those future-oriented questions mostly. And there is one statement here which I thought was quite striking and let's see if you're going to agree. My country's education system meets the needs of a competitive economy. Answer from the survey, 67% disagree or strongly disagree. We're talking about more than 20,000 participants who completed the survey from 187 countries and territories. So that is huge. And given that number, I'd like to focus on both of you because I remember our conversation, Claire, while we were talking about this panel that you said, well, I will be talking about how we should approach education entirely different from an entirely different perspective. And yes, perhaps it will take a long time if we wait for ministries to think differently, take action or change mentalities and cultural barriers to this, but at the same time, that's an important number. And when we kicked off this debate, we said what can business leaders and political leaders learn from this in order to come up with creative strategies? So given this number, and I understand that we have brave individuals who are born to challenge the status quo, but at the same time, you guys are only few on this planet. So what can political leaders learn from this and how are we to make sense of these numbers? So there actually is one education minister who is, for me, the biggest hero. He's actually here in Davos. He's a fellow young global leader, Esteban Buurik. And as an education minister, he is completely transforming the system, starting first with the teachers. So he's setting up new teacher schools everywhere in the country and also starting with educating the leaders, the school leaders, the principals, the headmasters. And that is where it's starting. It starts with the people. So there are multiple problems on that level. So, and this is a global phenomenon that education was somehow always to blame. It was the teachers who did it. And so also the whole, the status of the profession of a teacher and of a headmaster has declined over time. So we don't see them anymore as important people. Whereas in my opinion, we're all very important people here, but for me, the single most important leaders and people in the world are those who educate others. Think about the impact that every such person has on the amount of lives they impact. So we should definitely be taking them very, very serious. And it starts with the way we equip them and facilitate them to be the best leaders in the world. And they're seriously lacking there. So it should be a government task to really transform that. And Esteban Buurik is totally doing that. But yeah, in many countries, the education ministers are finding it super hard because there's often the unions and the teacher unions tend not always to be as, I mean, there can be some exceptions, but they tend to be on the conservative side. So many political leaders are a little bit afraid of the unions. So, you know, where that's failing, then it should definitely be civil society and business stepping in and saying, okay, we are gonna take charge of this and we are gonna facilitate the leadership development of these people. But that's essential. And of course, what we need in the same time to develop a new framework for defining what is actually good because the old paradigm for success is scoring high, you know, having so many STEM, you know, educated people. And, but that's only the academic side of things. But if we're serious about empathy, cooperation, creativity, et cetera, how do we measure success? That's the second thing we need to develop everywhere. And that's also typically something that would happen here on such stages. I see both of you nodding. Sure, I completely agree with Claire on this. I think because we can't measure empathy, it's really difficult to assume the teachers will all of a sudden start to focus on that as opposed to test scores and getting their kids into even employment, frankly. So I think one of our challenges is we have not done a great job of replacing the old model with a clear set of goals for the new model. We have an SDG, just to pick one example. We have an SDG, number four, all about quality education. And unlike climate change, we have no metrics to show what success means for quality education. While, if you look at, and I've said this in other panels, so excuse me for saying it again if you've heard me say it, but if you look at the climate change NGOs, civil society and business partnership, as challenging as it has been to build consensus, and it's been tough, what they've done really well as they've said, clear objectives with measurable targets between now and 2030. We haven't done that for education. And frankly, if the people in this room or this conference can't do it, who's gonna do it? You know, we've got some people I can even see some faces in this room who actually are passionate about this topic and have started a dialogue about doing so. So I'm very optimistic that we can do it, but that I think is the kind of step that we can take. Yeah, I mean, I just echo what my fellow parents are saying. You get what you measure. And I think very often ministries of education have the wrong KPIs. They measure how many desks they have, how many computers they have, how many teachers they have, but very little around the quality of the education that's being delivered. And so like for instance, if you look at the Middle East, we have wonderful schools, wonderful facilities, but terrible results so far as education. If you go to Lebanon and you look at the Palestinian refugee camps and you look at the facilities, they're tense and they're terrible, but you look at the quality of education and if you were to consider that a country, they would have the highest ranking of any Middle Eastern country because what they measure is the quality of the teachers and the quality of the interaction between the students and the teachers. So I think that's really important. I think one other thing you touched on is how to get the private sector more involved with finding solutions. So last year, I was chairing the Regional Business Council for the Middle East, which is a great group and produced many studies as many of the groups here at the WEF have, but during my chairmanship, I said, well, look guys, we can't produce another report. Let's try to do something. And so let's use a bandwidth of our organizations in order to be able to affect change in our region. And so we've got 100,000 young people brought in by those different organizations and trained up internships, different training courses, and just to use a bandwidth of a gathering like this. And so rather than sitting there and year after year reanalyzing the same problems, going out there and using our organizations and inherent bandwidth that we have within our organizations in order to be able to affect change. I would like to go to our virtual panelists. They've been very patiently listening to the discussion here. And I need to see if Baku is so-so, maybe? Shall we try again? Baku, are you losing hope? Okay. No, I'm here. Okay, okay. Well, you know what? Let's give another try. Faria, you've heard the discussion here. And we've been sort of talking about the role of politicians or political systems or ministries of education and how they can think differently and how they could be perhaps inspired to think differently and think out of the box when it comes to raising the quality of education or even approaching education and how they should be approaching education, I shall say. And what sort of private initiatives just like Ashish and Omar was talking about and how that's helpful in creating momentum. What perspective can you bring in from Azerbaijan? What is the role of politicians, political systems, ministries? Is that what we need to be focusing on? Or is it individual efforts that we're supposed to be focusing on? What local insights can you bring in from Baku to this debate? Thank you. One of the things we were discussing here is the role of vocational education in fostering opportunities for young people, especially employment opportunities. And this is where the role of ministry of youth and ministry of education is so important. Changing the vocational education system, transforming the political, modernizing labs, all of these are very important. And the young people that gathered at our discussion today, they focused on these important needs, how to change the vocational education system, how to create a startup for young people. This is where ministries are going. We're doing our best. I promise we're doing our best. And if we can go back to Baku, let me know. Maybe even just the phone number would be easier. So let's think of that too. But I would also like to go to Monterey, to Juan Pablo, I would like to ask, because you also do projects for access to education for young people, you do local projects, are you experiencing similar challenges? What insights can you bring to this discussion from Monterey? So I really like the idea that was mentioned earlier during the panel of the dual track. I don't think it's either or. I think we need to go for system-wide reform. But understand that even if the ministry of education in a country has the right mentality and we can overcome the political hurdles and work out with unions, it is still hard. For example, in Mexico, you have over a million teachers. So developing, retraining, changing the mindset, developing the competencies, it will take time. We need to keep at it and embrace that. But in parallel, I do think that it's important to identify projects or these speedboats that can move very quickly and lead by example. And that's the part, at least for tech. My university, we're focusing on working on and the type of projects that we are connecting with industry and with the social sector. Of course, I agree, it is about the teachers, but it's not only about training the teachers, it's about giving them the tools, the technology and the mindsets to be a different type of teacher. I think content will be increasingly more available, but the role of the teacher needs to change, again, to be more mentors of their students, to guide them and to help them think differently about life. These things are much easier said than done. But if you can test them and pilot them and they work, then we will need to figure out how to scale them, but at least we will have a model that works and needs to be expandable, right? Again, the concept of collaboration with industry is very, very important. We're piloting in the university and in our high schools, many projects in which we're stopping classes for the full week or for the full semester. And last year, we worked with industry and governments to define 1800 different challenges for students to solve from a multidisciplinary perspective. It was an amazing, amazing experience of opening up the university and taking our students and our faculty outside of the university. And I think that's something that is important for education systems and for educational institutions overall to be more open and more connected to their community, to their industries, and building these bridges will be fundamental. Thank you, Monterey. Ashish, you have something to add. I just want to jump in and remind everyone as we go through this the importance of technology being a leapfrog solution to the issue which was raised about vocational training by Faris and teacher training by Juan. So if you look at corporate training today versus 10 years ago, now almost all corporate training, 80% is done through web-based training. The cost has gone down. The scalability has gone up. So when we are defeatist with ourselves, and I was a bit defeatist earlier with my two-track method, so I take blame for this, we forget that we can really accelerate teacher training in a way that fundamentally has never been done before. So when we set these goals, we can execute vocational training and teacher training. I feel like what Khan Academy has done to allow every kid in the world to now study for their SATs to get into US universities, that type of disruption is possible for teacher training. Thanks, Ashish. Well, so far we've been talking about systemic changes and problems that we've been facing. I'd like to, Omar, focus on how this picture is actually shaping our future because after all, this conversation is about the future because it's about young people and what kind of a world they're going to be living in and we're all going to be living in because at some point they'll take over and they will be ruling. So it's a conversation about the future generations too. You mentioned youth bulge, which I think is a hugely important topic that we need to talk about and especially the part of the world where you do your projects, Middle East and North Africa, it's one of the most important regions where youth bulge remains to be an important problem to be addressed.  What kind of a future awaits us if we don't urgently address these problems? So give us a perspective. You know, it's not a pretty picture because I think when you have economies where you have people who aren't, they're disenfranchised and who don't take part in those economies and feel like they're left out in the fringes and they see wealth creation being created but they can't be part of that or they feel like they have not given the opportunity to be part of that because of an unfair system, that's where radicalization happens. And I think if you look at however, you know, Ka'id or ISIS or whatever you wanna call it or whatever the next five will be called, it's all the same thing because it's finding disenfranchised youth that don't feel like they have a future within that economy and then can be fertile ground for people to go out and radicalize. And I think in my part of the world, that's, you can see that being, we can see that taking place now, which I think even further brings in the urgency to be able to go forward and give young people the skills and the opportunity to be part of economies. And so it's part of that education, part of that is the ability for them to go out and start their own businesses. You know, if you look at entrepreneurship in our part of the world and the ability to be able to go out and start businesses, most people when they look at the risk reward quotient of starting a business and saying, hey, should I start this, should I not start this? They think about the capital they're gonna put in, the time, but in many Middle Eastern countries, they still aren't bankruptcy laws. So actually if somebody goes out and starts a company and isn't successful, they face criminal charges. And so there's the social stigma of people failing and not being successful as entrepreneurs, but there's also the criminal backlash to it. So there needs to be a radical change to our legal structure and then also to the ability of people to go out there and create these young corporations. One thing that I just sat with the people at the WEF and the next Jordan summit happening this spring, they're gonna be bringing in success stories of young entrepreneurs in the Middle East, which I think is great, because we need a lot more of that. And if you look at entrepreneurs as a percentage of our GDP or whatever, however you want to mention it, we're well behind the rest of the world and we really need to find ways for young innovators to come in and to be able to be disruptive and be disruptive with their thought process, with their business models and to the economy and to the status quo. And do you think that's the answer because what you say is fascinating. I mean, I'm from Turkey and I know very well what it means to live with the stigma of failure. Oh, you didn't do well at school. You don't have a good job.  You're not an engineer. You're not a doctor. Exactly, we know the story too well. So it's quite inspiring when you mention entrepreneurs from the Middle East and from other cultures. We could go back to our virtual panelists too. I'm sure they have similar examples that they have ran into or maybe they experienced themselves. This stigma of failure, do you think it's the brave disruptive ones who will go out there and do it and then fail and actually see the bright side because as they fail, they learn next time when they try to do something, it's going to be better because it will be a learning experience as opposed to just a failure that society thinks is a stigma. Do you think that's where the answer lies? We need more people who are brave enough to go out and do it and transform the way society thinks about failure? Well, I speak at lots of different startup conferences and things like that where you have young entrepreneurs going out there and coming up with different ideas and trying to pitch them to a room. And we all talk about celebrating failure, right? And it's easier to say when we're all sitting here in Davos with our degrees and all of our backgrounds and we can celebrate our failures ain't too bad. We can brush off the dust and go back at it. But when you're sitting there and your parents before you have all been doing a certain thing and you want to do something differently and the first time you try it, you're not successful at it. Well, it's really tough to recover from. And I mean, so when you sit there in this room full of these hundreds of young people who all really wanted to go out there and try to do something different, but our culture and the way that we do things really just stigmatizes them. So I've been trying to think of ways whereas as a leader of one of the bigger businesses in the region, how can we take some of these failures and look at them? And the first question I asked the women from the WEF that we're talking to today about this upcoming thing in the spring is how are you compiling your list of the top 100 entrepreneurs? And she was not able to answer. How many times they failed? Because I was fascinated because I thought it was such a great topic. But I'm just curious as to how that gets done because I spent a lot of time at these different things. I spent a lot of time going out there. And because when you have role models, when you have people you can emulate yourself after and you can have people who've gone out there failed a bunch of times. And you can see that. And I've had many people come in from the West and speak to local audiences and talk about their failures and how to celebrate failure. But I haven't been able to find many entrepreneurs from my part of the world. There's lots that have been successful the first time I want to talk about it. But there are not that many who want to come and talk about their failures and celebrate that with a room. What was the local response when your guest speakers from the West came to deliver talks about the failures? What was the local response? Is it like, oh, what's wrong with you? You were talking about your failures. Was it that or is it transforming? Is it changing? I think a lot of people looked at it, understood it. And I think people in that room, there was a resonance within that. But I think to really make that stick within society overall, because when you have a room and you have a great speaker coming in, it's easy to get that idea across. But you have to start somewhere. I mean, but then to take that out and the person goes out and starts up a business. But the bankruptcy law actually puts them into criminal liability, the business doesn't work out. I mean, you need to have your legal structure into place. Right, right. And you need to have the things to be synced up. Not just the cultural stigma, but also the legal structure. Well, if you don't fix the legal structure, how are you going to fix the stigma, right? Absolutely. Because if you're going to be prosecuted criminally, how can you do this? Oh boy, it's okay. Exactly. I want to go to our virtual panelists and see what, is this conversation interesting to you over there in Bangalore and Budapest? I'd like to hear your perspectives on, and in that order, this failure and how societies, cultures approach failure and whether that's a big obstacle in terms of meeting the youth imperative and giving a chance to young people to go out and realize their dreams. Krishnamurti from Bangalore first and then Leela from Budapest. Yeah, no, I think, you know, if you look at the culture in India, I think it's a very competitive culture. I think failures are not seen very positively. Yeah, I think people, I think the education system is very competitive. They're all out there to really score the best marks and go to the best schools. So I think if you look at urban India, it's very competitive and failures are quite, and sometimes, you know, in India, we've seen people, you know, go into depression or suicides because of failure. So it's pretty tough there. I think, you know, what we also see in the last few years is a lot of startups that are coming up, and I think there's lots more for the government that is doing, plus I think the various other investors are trying to kind of start this culture of creating more entrepreneurs. I think we've seen more positive news there. I think people are giving up work to do things in entrepreneurship and then trying to make a success out of it. So I think there's some good news out there, but I think the challenge for us is also, if you look at India, 50% of our people are in the rural India. Yeah, I think, and they add just about 15% to the GDP. That means they're not paid very well. They are still living below the poverty line. I think that's a big challenge. How do we really, you know, what kind of entrepreneurship can we do there? And that's a big challenge. I think there are pockets in urban educated India where I think we're seeing some change, but there's still a lot, lots to be done in the other parts of India. So yes, to answer your question, I think failures are still not seen positively. I think it's a big kind of a pressure on the youth here, but I think we're seeing that the better educated ones are taking risks. They are going out and doing something supported by a good ecosystem, which I think is positive. And hopefully it'll have some good spin-offs. Thank you. And an additional question I thought about, obviously, when we're talking about failing, we also need to keep in mind that it might be, you know, even harder for women, for young women, for girls to fail. Because cultures have, you know what I'm talking about. So what perspective can you bring in? Is this something that's important to you as a question, or have you experienced these obstacles, these problems in your society? What does it mean to fail in your culture and is it more difficult to deal with the aftermath of failures for young women? I'd love to hear what you think about that. Oh yeah, thank you very much for this question, because this is really something that I feel very strongly about. So actually, I'm so surprised that we share so many things, so many of you from different parts of the world. Failure is absolutely an issue also in Hungary, that this culture of, you know, always avoiding failure. We actually have a common saying which goes, like, if you stay silent, you would have seemed smarter. Like, it's better to not say anything than saying something silly and, you know, be corrected. So this is an attitude that kids are being taught at school, and they are, you know, being taught to just stay silent and not show themselves. And this is something that completely blocks creativity, and I'm not only talking in terms of entrepreneurship, but I'm talking also at universities, I'm talking at the workplace, because it's not seen as a constructive approach. You know, if you have some kind of question, or some kind of issue that you want to address, and people many times just keep things to themselves, and that is really an obstacle for development. And coming back to your second question, so how is the situation for women?  Still, our culture is very much towards male dominance in the workplace, so it is very difficult as a young woman to go further.  And so definitely, I can say that as a young woman, you have one chance to fail because then they won't give you opportunities anymore, so very much an issue. Thank you, Lila. One chance to fail for, if you're a young woman, one chance to fail. Claire, if your voice is okay. Yeah, I'm okay. I know we're all getting that hold. It's minus 17 degrees outside. What can you do to stop us? Go ahead. What I wanted to, so I was really intrigued by a model actually introduced by Harvard professor Dutch Leonhard. He's been studying different paradigms for which type of organization are successful and which type of circumstances. And in circumstances where everything is predictable and the context doesn't change, you can very well deal with having KPIs to anticipate, to have budgets, to train, to, you know, all the things we call currently management, but on the other far end of the spectrum, if you are operating in a context with changes continuously and which operates in the unknown, unknown, you cannot deal with, you know, these criteria just don't work because there's nothing to anticipate for. You can't train, you can't budget, KPIs won't work. So what always works then, he's been studying so many different organizations. At first of all, it's all a matter of diversity. The more diverse the different perspectives you have, the better your analysis of what actually is happening there.  You invent new things, you invest in the new things, you apply them, and then you learn what works and doesn't work. So failure is actually part of the system. And then you iterate. And that process he calls explore versus exploit. And this all has to do with leadership and leadership has nothing to do with playing the boss, obviously. So it's these two worlds and everywhere, I think we are experiencing that the world is increasingly there, but all our systems are more of this, of the old paradigm. And simply because we're so afraid of failure, we're afraid of letting go, you know, and taking the boxes, you know, I didn't do it. And so I think with all of our societies, with all of our organizations, we have to become two learning organizations which operate in that spectrum. And interestingly enough, also, so schools back to the education thing, which do really well, all of them are schools which operate here in this paradigm, diversity, explore, iterative process, feedback process. And also as a concrete example, in the Netherlands, there's an organization, it's a Dutch name, it's called Stichting Leerkracht, which literally translates as foundation teacher. They should definitely have a Dutch name or an English name going forward, but they have been implementing a simple method such as lean, agile, and scrum. So all these processes which are very known to the software development world into education. Simple things such as having a stand-up, having board sessions with your entire teacher team. So telling you what you wanna achieve, then going back, so what did you achieve? Introducing feedback into classrooms. So actually in the lesson plan, make sure there's space for teachers actually to get into each other's classrooms and to give feedback. Having student arenas that you actually, like in business, right, so you have your product being spoken about by consumers, real consumers, you look at them, so they do the same with learners. And it's actually, it's a super scalable model. They've now been actually, well, doing 10% of all Dutch schools and it only exists for a few years. So that's a model that can really work. And the thing is that also learners and students learn how to adapt this methodology and it becomes really sustainable as a skill to learn. Sure, I'll jump on that. So as we think about how to help young people deal with failure, this is something which has been known for a long time and there's been research done on how to build that persistence, resilience, self-efficacy in young people. There's some people in the world who just are okay failing three times and don't care what their parents or their parents' friends say. That's just true. So how do they get that way? Regardless of culture, and across all cultures this is true, maybe a little bit more so in some cultures which are failure friendly. And the way you do it is you become a very optimistic person. You have the self-efficacy. And there's a wonderful book written by Martin Seligman called Learned Optimism which has the beginnings of a five-step plan or a 10-step plan for what you actually have to do to build the self-efficacy in yourself. And it comes down to some relatively obvious and simple things and role modeling is one element of that. So if you think about a young woman and thinking about her desire to start a business and deal with potential failure, she's not gonna read a book about Steve Jobs and all of a sudden change her life and go start a business. She wants to meet a person just like her, ideally a woman. Ideally somebody who's lived at least some part of her own reality, maybe even in her geography. And that's why I keep coming back to this idea of connecting people to mentors. Almost every successful entrepreneur comes back and wants to honor a mentor or a teacher. At JA we reach now over 10 million young people a year and a subset of them actually have our entrepreneurship programs and we now have over 100 million living alums and we're giving them the opportunity to come back to honor the one mentor or one teacher in their life which actually gave them the self-efficacy as part of a fundraising campaign. But it's a great way for people to honor who's helped them. I feel that way personally because I know who that person is for me and I think it's gonna work. Super. That's fantastic. Omar, do you have anything to add to specifically this conversation because I have other questions and I know that we have about 15 minutes to go. I think another way to do this is by private sector. If you're a company and the way that you run your company is very different to your peer group and you end up being very successful, people emulate success. And so I think for instance, we're a company in the Middle East and we run our company very differently to other companies. I came up with the thought that we're in a part of the world that has no scarcity of opportunity, no scarcity of financial capital but choose scarce resources, human capital. So we ought to optimize towards that. So we invested very heavily in training programs, making sure that we got the best people and be able to retain them and bring them in, but not only men but also women and to be able to really have the very best systems. We took number two, HR Life and GE came in about eight years with us and so really ran things very, very differently to our peer group and we're a lot more successful than our competitors. So I think by being successful in business that also gets people to emulate you. So I think that's another way of doing that. I mean, we've done a lot around getting more women involved in our workforce and so just for our part of the world, things that are very, very different. So we give double the amount of days off that the law requires. We unpaid leave, all things like that but not only do we do all that but also we have a panel because at the end of the day you can have all these rules in place but if they're not deployed fairly then people don't have their fair shake and women don't feel like they have their career track there. So we have a panel that even gets raised up to me if people are within the Hypop group and so anytime people feel like they have a grievance and they're not being treated fairly because maternity leave or other things like that they can then come back and do that and that makes us more successful in what we do because we have a more diverse set of people making decisions and we have a more diverse set of talent going forward and who are more loyal to our company because we have a work environment that's fairly different than our competitors. That's certainly an inspiring example which sort of subject-wise brings me to the last big thing that I would like to touch upon given our time restraints. We talked about so many different aspects and we all realized that this is such a big, heavy issue that there's so many dimensions to it ranging from culture to systemic challenges that we have to address but we only have such limited time that's why we're trying to do our best to touch upon at least briefly even if it's briefly on those. You just shared a very inspiring example and I wanted to ask you, good diplomas not necessarily always mean good jobs either. I mean, going back to Arab uprisings we saw this phenomena in Tunisia and in Egypt. I remember it was one of the big drivers of protests too. You went to good schools, you have great diplomas but there are no jobs, there are no jobs to do and I remember quotes from people who took to the streets in Egypt saying that they can't even afford getting married or renting their own apartments despite their good degrees. So what can business leaders do or is it just a problem that business leaders have to be thinking about or is it just the entire system that needs to, like I said at the beginning, think out of the box and sort of see these aspects as well. So what is your idea? What is your perspective? Well, I mean, I started off by giving that quote from the economist that said that 34% of people with college degrees were unemployed in Egypt as opposed to 2% with just primary degrees. So there's a negative correlation with getting higher education, your ability to be successful in the private sector. So I mean, I think it's the way that people are educated. What we need in the private sector are people with curious minds who can look up problems and solve them. What the way our education systems teach is lots of one subject matter and lots of memorization of the subject matter and not that mental agility that's required. So I mean, we touched on June achievement and JAWS and being that speedboat around and trying to find ways around the status quo and around the system that's in place. But I also think that vocational training and the ability for businesses to be able to set up training for young people and everybody to get that done is also very important. But we really need to turn the education system upside down and change it completely. Because if we don't do that, then I think that's the only way to have the bandwidth to take on these 70 million people over the next 10 years that need to be employed. Claire, clearly we're nodding and clearly you agreed with everything, but what else would you like to add to that to what Omar said? Yeah, and now what? Absolutely, I'm super pleased we're having this conversation. I want everybody to acknowledge that turning around the education system is not something that they do. It's not something that is only on a policy level or it's a matter of just the teachers. Each and every single one of us is the education system. We are all parents, we have been students, we are lifelong learners, we are employers, we are leaders and all our decisions influence the system. So let's please also take something, because it's also really inside of us. I talked earlier about this identity thing. As employers, we have to ask ourselves, how are we recruiting people? Are we still primarily, if we have for example, a lot of vacancy tax and lots of people reacting, are we primarily looking at good grades and then only at the rest? Or are we first of all really sincerely thinking what are we looking for and what does that mean in terms of diplomas or not? For our own children, how do we really enable them to be happy and valuable people who contribute to society? What does that mean? Some people say yeah, they can't just do whatever they like, sure, but it's a starting point at least and already today's youth is so much more in my experience aware of what the world really needs and that's why everybody here says, we're so frustrated that we cannot show the world what we actually truly have inside of us. So give some space to your own children, to the youth around you to truly develop their full potential and really ask the youth what do you need? So rather than us here having this conversation what you need, no, let's truly engage and facilitate whatever is necessary. This has to become a bottom up thing. Of course, governments will play a very important role. They can really play a good role but it's from all directions but let's start with asking the youth, even young children, what do you really need? And the answers will surprise you. We often think that they're too young to say valid things. Well, they're not, even toddlers can say very, very relevant things. So let's absolutely involve everybody and that's why I'm really pleased with this panel. It's already much different from the old fashioned Davos style but let's do more of them. Wonderful, Ashish. And then we can perhaps go to the panel and see if anybody has questions because I think we have time for maybe two but let's hear from Ashish first. So we have the youth voices through the Global Shaper Survey. If you haven't seen it, check it out. It has at least half of it is counterintuitive. So you're gonna get something out of going to the Global Shapers website and I actually really learned a lot from it. I also think we have to be optimistic ourselves about how speedboats can create change in the super tanker. Just to go back to the example of Europe. So after running these entrepreneur model schools we actually got written into the Europe 2020 plan for how to bring entrepreneurship as a cultural trait to a European school. So policy change, Ministry of Education can collaborate. It happens. My personal theory of change is you need to be the speedboat to make that happen not just lobby, lobby, lobby. You need to do both dual track. And I think we have to, I wanna return to the point I made earlier because it really gives me hope is some bright entrepreneurs from all over the world are gonna create ed tech companies that will make teacher training ridiculously cheap and possible. We have to support them, find them, elevate them, put them on a panel not me and make them into superstars so we all know who they are so we can scale proper teacher training. And the same is true for vocational education although I think it will be different. Fantastic. Any questions from our audience? Go ahead please. And then you have two questions. I think that's how much time we have, but fire away and please tell us your name. Trisha DeBorgrove, I'm an opinion writer. I agree with everything you said. It's incredibly positive for the future but I think where you can galvanize and really give a helping hand to very impoverished communities who are not even near what you're talking about. I know this sounds really sort of basic but that speedboat thing can happen incrementally hugely if a child for the first even 10 years has very, very basic but brilliantly learned skills. And where we failed now in places like Britain because I've been teaching kids is that they don't have those basics anymore because they have information. Often the parental situation is broken so teachers are taking over those jobs as well. And so they get to a point of eight, 10 and they really don't have the advantages because they can't read right. And happiness is being able to express yourself and analyze something and that leads to critical thinking without a teacher. Then you put those kids at 10 into a speedboat, let's say, situation where in rural communities it could be then you implement technology for them, then you bring it in, then you can allow them to access it. It doesn't have to be from a very young age and then they actually catapult themselves into whatever field. They will take everything but if they cannot communicate and they cannot read, I know this sounds very basic, but we all get obsessive about getting them in there from the start. All they need are those three R's for the start and between the ages of 10 and 20, it's the equivalent of 50 years for them. Perfect. Questions directed to any of our panelists? Okay. Yeah, yeah.  I mean, yeah. Sorry, we've let and that's our mistakes if rural communities can actually learn from our mistakes, that is a major mistake that we're now trying to rectify. That's what you mean. Yeah. Sorry. Thank you. Your name? Fadi Mikati from Tripoli, Lebanon, Global Shaper. My question is that, unfortunately we're at least in my region that the private sector is looking at the education or students as beneficiaries, not as an assets for them in the future. So to which extent do you think that private sector can play a role in shaping the educational system? Who's that question for? Omar, please. Omar. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, as a private sector, we have a responsibility because in the Middle East, we're great at saying our government's hard doing this and our government's hard doing that, but not doing enough about it ourselves. And so I think that we need to go back to some of the universities and one thing that we do very much is because we're a big recruiter, so we tell them, look, these are the skills that require, these are the types of things that require, so please can we, you know, we want to hire X amount of students this year, but can you skill them this way so that we can get that done? I think the area where I've been very frustrated with the lack of ability to affect change is with governments and mysteries of education because there's so many different political parties at play there and there's so many different political stakeholders that that's a big issue. And one other thing that you touched on earlier is just that it's a big political bullet to bite because in many cases, the easiest place to get a job is to get somebody a job as a teacher in the University of Education. And so when you look at teacher proficiency exams and you look at things like that, politicians are afraid to bite that bullet because there are so many people who aren't gonna pass those exams and then they just, well, let's just not deal with this issue now, but hey guys, we have 70 million people that need jobs over the next 10 years. If we don't deal with the 50,000 people that are gonna get employed in the University of Education, you have a much bigger issue you need to deal with in terms of the millions of people that aren't gonna get educated properly. Omar, thank you so much.  But Claire Boonstra, Omar Alganim and Ashish Advani here with us at Davos and our virtual panelists from Baku Bangalore, Budapest and Monterey, thanks to all of you for your time. And to all of you tweeting with the hashtag shaping Davos, thank you so much for your support and for all, you've quoted many of our panelists here. I can tell our online audience was really enjoying this conversation too. So that's all from us here in Davos. Thank you so much for joining.


Erich Le Berg has published a thought-provoking paper in biojarentology that offers a critique of geroscience. When people discuss the prospects of targeting the aging processes to prevent, halt, or even reverse age-related diseases, their beliefs often fall into two opposing categories. The first is overly optimistic blue sky thinking, and the second is an overly pessimistic view that it is simply impossible. Both extremes are problematic. One side largely ignores the challenges involved, but the other side discounts the progress being made by the professionals working in the field. What is needed is a balanced view that accepts the difficulty of the task ahead but does not outright dismiss the possibilities. The author of this paper is not opposed to the idea of tackling the aging processes but offers some valid criticism of the field as it stands. His aim is to actually offer critique, not because he thinks the field is nonsense, but rather because he wants to see it mature and be taken seriously. Geroscience is a simple term, gyro means old age, so geroscience refers to the science of aging. While some people see it as an attempt to rebrand life extension, rejuvenation biotechnology, anti-aging, and so on, the word has become more popular lately, particularly in academic circles. The author points out that there seems to be debate in the geroscience field that it is possible to increase health span without increasing lifespan. This seems unlikely and others have criticized this apparent disconnect. One argument is that the goal of geroscience is the extension of lifespan by extending health span. This is in contrast to most current medicine, which focuses on tackling one disease at a time. Medicine today does a great job of extending your lifespan but not your health span. In other words, you can medically manage an age-related disease and remain alive for many years while still being sick. However, extending health span without extending lifespan seems quite unlikely. This is because geroscience interventions do not seek to simply treat and manage the symptoms of age-related diseases. Rather, they seek to slow or even reverse the actual aging processes themselves. It is difficult to grasp how someone could instantly transition from being healthy to dead in a world where aging is partially under medical control. It is likely that compression of morbidity would occur in such a scenario and that the diseases of aging would be pushed back further into advanced old age. This would most likely also increase lifespan as well as health span. However, if aging were comprehensively understood and interventions could fully control it, then there would naturally be no limit to healthy human lifespan. This is with the understanding that if medicine could fully suppress the diseases of aging, then aging itself would also be effectively suppressed. While it is unlikely that such comprehensive control of aging would occur as the result of initial geroscience interventions, it is perhaps a longer-term possibility as the field, technology, and effectiveness of interventions are refined. Our field has a reputation for being tall on promise and short on delivery, and this could continue to be a problem. The author of the paper points out that there are quite a number of publications that hint that we are close to a breakthrough in slowing or even reversing human aging. This is a fair point, and indeed, there are a number of people who continue to support the narrative that the defeat of aging is just around the corner. This is misleading, and such ambassadors for the field would do well to curb over-enthusiasm and present a more realistic and balanced view of where we are now and the challenges ahead. For example, there is currently a lot of enthusiasm for partial cellular reprogramming as a way to rejuvenate the body. While the animal studies so far have been promising and there has been a flood of investment into this approach, there is a lot of work to be done before it reaches people. The same applies to senolytics. There was once a huge amount of hype and enthusiasm for senescent cell-destroying technologies, yet here we are years later and we are still waiting. This is because, as it turns out, senescent cells do have necessary functions and are not as black and white as their initial portrayal, and simply destroying them all is probably not a good idea. It is dangerous to apply reductionist thinking to complex things like aging, and the development of medicine is a slow process and we still have a long road to reach our ultimate goal. The fact of the matter is that while considerable progress has been made in animal studies regarding the reversal of aging, the increase of lifespan and health span, and the rejuvenation of tissues and organs, those results are a long way from translation to humans. The work of our field is very much a long haul, and we should always be mindful of that, especially when talking to other people about it. The author goes on to highlight further issues with the gerascience approach as it currently is. While some of it is probably not going to be palatable for people who have unrealistic hopes for things to move faster than they really are, it is important that we remain grounded and consider the real situation when we talk about the field. Gerascience is a great concept, and it could potentially be a game changer. However, it has some image and technical issues that really need to be addressed before things can move forward.