Ideas - CBC Massey Lecturers reveal how the talks changed them

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

This podcast features an all-star, and bestselling, lineup of CBC Massey Lecturers from the past decade: Payam Akhavan (2017) and the police officer who pulled over to the side of the road to keep listening; Sally Armstrong (2019) and the women’s rights groups listening to her talks in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and China; Ron Deibert (2020) and his conviction that ‘philosophical’ radio is more crucial than ever; Esi Edugyan (2021), Tomson Highway (2022) feeling astonished when a stranger recognizes his voice after hearing him on the radio; Margaret MacMillan (2015); Tanya Talaga (2018) and her surprise when an older white man in the audience declares Indigenous activists should “go forth and conquer”; Astra Taylor (2023) and how her secret desire is to work at IDEAS; Jennifer Welsh (2016) comforting an audience member who’d served in Afghanistan; and Ian Williams (2024) on how his lectures have more meanings than he realized — so much so, that he’d like a “second date” with IDEAS.*This is the third episode in our special programming marking our 60th anniversary.

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to our special series marking the 60th anniversary of ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. The 60th anniversary is, of course, known as the Diamond Jubilee. And given the six-decade union between ideas and the CBC Massey lectures, that Diamond designation could not be more fitting.

The lectures, or the Massies, as we behind the scenes call them, have been given by some of the most brilliant minds of our time. Among them, Northrop Fry, C.B. McPherson, John Kenneth Galbraith, R.D. Lang, Doris Lessing, and others. Hudson Culture Center in St. John's Newton Land. Here's Margaret Atwood. This year's Massey lectures are given by Jane Jacobs. You have just heard a sermon on peace, delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King as the... Please welcome the 2024 CBC Massey lecturer, Ian Williams.

The lectures are always delivered with clarity and often with color. There was a tremendous burgeoning of spy literature in Britain and invasion literature, and this reflected British fears that the Germans were planning to invade them. One of my favorite ones, which was, in fact, reported in the newspapers, this was not a novel, this was actually true, was that the Germans had stationed 50,000 German officers disguised as waiters in Britain. It gives you a wonderful idea of, you know, Monty Python sketch, someone going into a restaurant,

and being told by a German colonel that he will eat his soup, Immediately. With both weight and wonder, lecturers strive to help us understand the most pressing issues we face while shining a light on a path forward. I still have a dream, and with this faith, we will be able to adjourn the counsels of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism. With this faith, we will be able to adjourn the counsels of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism. This faith, we will be able to speed up the day. Yes. When there will be peace on earth and goodwill toward men, it will be a glorious day.

The morning stars will sing together, and the sons of God will shout for joy. I am very happy to be asked to say a few words on this occasion. Tonight, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is inaugurating a permanent lectureship. The Massey lectures began in 1961, and were named after then Governor General Vincent Massey. I would like to say how touched I am that the corporation should have honored me by giving the lectureship my name. The very first speaker, and it came as a surprise to me when I learned it, was a woman, Barbara Ward. And her topic back then still very much concerns us today. Economic disparity.

Nearly everything begins with ideas, and it's our ideas that change the matter with which we deal. So let's begin with a revolution which is at work from one end of the world to the other. I think this is the revolution of equality. When ideas debuted four years later, in 1965, our program began both airing and producing the series. And it's been a pillar of our calendar ever since. And as in any union, time changes the way things are done.

This year, for the first time ever, the series will be leaving the confines of the CBC radio studios where ideas is produced. In 2002, we took the lectures out of the studio and started taking them on the road. And recorded in front of five live audiences in five Canadian cities, quite literally from coast to coast. This week, we've been hearing from you, ideas listeners, about how ideas and the Massey lectures have affected you and how you think. In this episode, we're going to hear from some of the people who made you think, Massey lecturers from the past 10 years. We asked them to reflect on how delivering the lectures has impacted them.

And we begin with what it was like for them to get that call. When I got the call from the producers of ideas that they wanted me to deliver the lectures, I was dumbfounded. I felt kind of faint, actually. And then when I got over it, I realized, man, this is such a profound honor. My name is Ron Debert, and I'm the director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. In 2020, I delivered the Massey lectures called Reset, Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. When I got the call from my publisher, she'd asked me out for. dinner with my editor and they said, oh, we've got something we want to talk to you about.

And I was really kind of scared. I'm like, oh, no, what did I do? And they sat me down and they said, we want you to be the Massey Lecture. And I was like, what? Really? Me? Are you sure? My name is Tanya Talaga. I was the 2018 CBC Massey Lecture. And the title of my lectures was all our relations finding the path forward. I am an author, a journalist, and I'm a member of Fort William First Nation. Then I started thinking about it and saying, oh, this is a wonderful opportunity. I never thought that I would do something like this. And I started talking about next year.

So I will get all this time to write it and everything's going to be wonderful. And they said, actually, no, you have to deliver it in five months. And that was the shoe drop. Five months. And the funny part about that is, or not so funny, is you actually have to write a book when you do the Massey lectures. And the book comes first and the lectures come second. So writing a book in five months is not for the week of heart. My name is Astra Taylor. I am a writer, filmmaker, and political organizer. And I was the 23 CBC Massey Lecture. My lectures were called The Age of Insecurity, coming together. as things fall apart. When I received a message in early 2023 from the producers of CBC ideas asking me to make time for a phone call, I thought, you know, maybe they wanted me to suggest some themes for an episode.

When I was invited to actually give that year's Massey lectures, I felt this tremendous sense of responsibility, actually, because it's, I think, a huge honor, but also just an incredible opportunity to have a stage like that to talk about ideas. The Massey lectures meant a lot to me, and I had been very inspired by many Massey lectures and by the books on which the lectures are based. So when I got the call, I was pretty floored. My name is Jennifer Welsh. I am the director of the Max Bell School of Public Policy and a professor at McGill University. And in 2016, I had the great privilege and honor to be the Massey Lecturer on the theme of my book, The Return of History. So I was so excited at the thought of being

part of this tradition, but also a little daunted thinking about who had preceded me in the list of Massey Lectures. My name is Margaret McMillan, and I delivered the Massey Lectures in 2015 on the subject, History's People. When I first was asked if I'd like to do the Massey lectures, I was very pleasantly surprised. It's not something I thought of doing. And I suppose I tended to think that it was people who were older than me or more venerable than me. And so I suddenly found myself being asked to do this, this very important and prestigious series of lectures. It was rather terrifying because I said, what would you like me to lecture on? And the people at the CBC see, more or less said whatever you like, which is a terrifying prospect.

But the terror eventually subsides. It took me a while to sort of settle down and think what I'd like to do. I tend to write books on particular episodes in history, and they tend to be quite long and quite weighty. And what the mass electors did was let me think about history. What do I like about history? What do I find important in history? It was a very useful moment.

I mean, as historians, we should every so often step back and think about what it is we're doing. So how do we get, as historians at history, and how do we get the material that we need? Well, what we often do is the things that you really shouldn't do in private life today. We read other people's letters. We read their diaries. We speculate about their innermost thoughts. We pry. We're nosy.

We pick up the gossip. I mean, all of these things I wouldn't recommend doing with your nearest and dearest. But it is something that I think as historians we do. And so I thought, you know, I've always cared about people in history, partly because it's a way of connecting with the past, making history come alive. And I found when I was teaching, if I could tell my students' stories, they paid much more attention than if I was telling them, you know, some very worked out learned thing on different theories of international relations, for example. I tend to have what I call a drawer of ideas. It's metaphorical. It doesn't really exist.

but I tend to have outlines in my mind or senses of what I might want to work on. And so I knew right away that insecurity was something that I wanted to dig deeper into. And fortunately, the producers at CBC Ideas agreed. Today on Ideas from Prairie Theater Exchange in Winnipeg, we bring you the first of the lectures titled Cura's Gift. Here's Astra Taylor. Writing things exploring ideas. is on the one hand, it's an intellectual enterprise, but it's also from the gut.

You know, there's this gut feeling. Is this important? Does it matter? Can I enjoy the process of playing with this concept and writing about it? And for me, the age of insecurity checked those boxes. And then I had a series of really fun invigorating phone calls with Greg Kelly sort of refining the idea, just riffing on it. How we understand and respond to insecurity is one of the most urgent questions of our moment because nothing less than the future survival of our species hangs in the balance. And that gave me the affirmation and confidence to move forward on that accelerated timeline that almost killed me. It was like this is a really great opportunity to think about something deeply for a high pressure period of time, right?

To set yourself that challenge, right? If I've got a year to sort of work at my position and my ideas on something that's important to me. What would I say? It's important for us to talk about conversations at this particular moment for several reasons. First, we need to address the deterioration of civic and civil discourse. On the civic side, we speak to each other as if we have all become two-dimensional profiles. My name is Ian Williams. I'm a writer and I was the 2024 Massey lecturer. Those lectures were called what I mean to say and it was all about conversation. On the civil side, our leaders speak to us,

goad us with incendiary rhetoric. We fall for it. Their inflammatory language combined with the usual hot air combined with a stressed, seething citizenry is enough friction to cause wildfires across our democracies. What I had been avoiding was, why am I feeling so terrible about media? Why do I feel so awful about what's going on on the internet?

online we can make false and hurtful comments yet escape consequences online we are emboldened to attack counterattack gloat when we win parade our victimization when we lose all in the video game that we have traded our lives to play why do strangers fill me with a kind of dread since the pandemic what's going on politically in the u.s and in Canada and what's what's our fate right if we continue down this path all of those things They were disorganized and jumbled, but overlapping and intersecting. And, yeah, the Massey's allowed me to sort of work out those lines like musically and see kind of where they were talking and overlapping with each other.

So when I think back to that year of 2021, it feels like a very cloistered year. Of course, we were very much in the middle of all of the pandemic lockdowns. Children were still out of school. There was just so much that felt so overwhelming. My name is S. Udujan, and I'm a novelist. And I was also the 2021 Massey Lecturer. My lectures were called Out of the Sun on Race and Storytelling. You know, we had seen those horrible, horrible videos

of George Floyd being murdered. And, you know, this was a time when people really, really wanted to, wanted to engage with the realities of black life. And so it seemed to me, you know, when I was approached to do the lectures, that this was an opportunity to explore that using, you know, historical figures and different historical eras and various geographies to kind of look at blackness and the diaspora through a lens of, you know, what are the stories that we've always told ourselves about race, the histories of black people that maybe haven't been quite true or quite

right. And what are those angles that we've been missing? And once those angles have been explored and the questioning, researching, writing, editing, and rewriting are done, it's time to hit the road. I remember speaking to the producers and the producers saying to me, well, these are the cities that we always go to. Sometimes we change them up a little bit. but we always have a certain roster. And I remember saying to them, oh, Thunder Bay is not on this list. I would like to start the lectures in Thunder Bay.

Because I'm a member of Fort William First Nation, that's where my mother grew up. That's where a lot of my writing is from. And I wanted to have the lectures, say the lectures for our community, our First Nations community in Thunder Bay, and also our non- First Nations community in Thunder Bay. And this is a funny story, but when CBC agreed to do the lectures in Thunder Bay,

you said, okay, we're going to do it in this one theater. And then we came back to you and said, no, we don't want that theater. It's too small. The other theater was a community hall. And that theater seats about 1,500 people. And I could see everyone in ideas was like, oh, is this going to work? because it's going to work, but boy, did it ever work. It was an amazing night, and on stage, the great Nan Drum, welcomed the crowd.

We had over 1,700 people attend the Massey Lecture, that very first lecture, Thunder Bay, and it was standing room only. There was Bannock given out to almost everyone that was there, courtesy of Fort William First Nation, My Nation. We had so

many elders there. We had the Nishnabi-A-Assi Nation drum. It was a really beautiful, beautiful night. What I remember most of that night is seeing the family members that I wrote about who lost their daughters because their daughters took their lives at such young ages sitting in the front row as I was

delivering the lectures. Also to so many of our leaders, our community members, the chiefs of many First Nations in the north came. My grandmother, she was still alive and she was there. Anties were there. My good friends, I think we filled up the first two rows of the theater. It was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Boozo, Thunder Bay. I am so very.

very, very happy to see you all. You have no idea, all of you, all the way up there, all the way over, everywhere, standing room only. It's really quite remarkable. Because you see, this place for me under the shadow of Anna Mikkiwaji is where it all begins. I needed to be giving these lectures from here from where my mother from where my grandmother and from all the grandmothers before her have walked

for thousands of years what impressed me the most about delivering the Massey lectures was the goodness of people you know one can become very cynical especially in political and academic and these elite circles.

And then you go on a tour, which in my case was a reflection on my own life experience of exile and engagement with human rights causes across the world. You know, it wasn't a feel-good story. It was about suffering. It was about injustice. The injustice that we witness in the world is a reflection of our own apathy, our arrogance, our greed, our failure. to embrace the humble truth that we are one single human race. My name is Payam Akavan.

I had the privilege of delivering the CBC Massey Lectures in 2017. I'm currently the human rights chair at Massey College at the University of Toronto. I was deeply touched by the people I met from coast to coast. We began in Whitehorse, Yukon. We went to Vancouver. St. John's, Newfoundland, Montreal, Toronto, and I met the most extraordinary people, you know, shamans from indigenous communities, a single mother of three who's struggling to make ends meet, a refugee from the former Yugoslavia who now works in the Human Rights Commission,

and you see that this program draws an extraordinary array of Canadians from incredibly diverse backgrounds. So it is also building a community. So as the Massey Lecture, first of all, you feel very welcome in a town. My name is Sally Armstrong. I'm a journalist. I was the Massey Lecture in 2019. And my lecture was called Power Shift, the longest revolution. So there was White Horse and then Vancouver and then Fredericton. Now, in the summertime, I live on a beach in Northern New Brunswick. I think the entire beach went to Fredericton. It was so much fun. And my relatives are from there. I felt like I had my posse with me. The other thing about being the Massey Lecture is there's always something afterwards, even after the Q&A. There's a lingering

conversation. And then the fourth one was Montreal, which is my hometown. So I mean, imagine giving a Massey lecture in front of your high school friends. So I'd never spoken in front of so many people in Thunder Bay, in particular like that. And Thunder Bay has had a rocky relationship with our people. And that's been since the beginning. And so when the lecture was over and I just couldn't believe it and I was feeling just wow, amazed and, you know, it's done. And then we went to questions and the very first person to ask a question was an older man with gray hair. He was like a white guy and I wasn't sure at all what he was going to say. And I was expecting him to ask me something that was, I'm just going to say it was a

racist question. I was expecting it because oftentimes that is what happens. Everyone was holding their breath. And he started to do a lead into the question was, you know, well, you've said this. said that, you've said this, and he starts to go like a laundry list of what I... I listened intently to what you had to say and your staunch advocacy role for our First Nation community in this country. And I want to say, first of all, I was deeply moved, but I want you to know that change happens, I think, one person at a time. And certainly, I feel that way tonight, having listened to you. I've changed a lot of my perceptions, my inherent stereotypes, just by listening and empathizing,

trying to empathize with your native community. And I want you to say, from my perspective, Native Canadians are more than a squiggle on a Toronto roadmap. You have the right to self-determination. You have the right to nation-to-nation contact at the highest level of our government. Go forth and conquer. Migwit. He said, go forth and conquer. What a thing.

What a thing to say. But such remarkable things don't always. happen on stage. They also happen when the speakers step away from the microphone, maybe weeks, months, or even years later. I was in Sudbury, Ontario, and I took a taxi from the airport to downtown, which is a long distance. I'm Thompson Highway, and I am an author who wrote a Massey lecture called Laughing with the Trickster. And on that ride, the taxi driver said, oh, you're so-and-so, so-and-so, that you did the Maxey Lectures, and I listened to it. I listened to all of it, and I've loved it, and I think you're fantastic, and all the sort of

stuff, like positive encouragement like that, which is just very moving. And another occasion was at the National Art Center here in Ottawa. We were intermission, breaking for intermission, go out into the lobby, and an older man, an older gentleman said, oh, you're Thompson, Henry, he said. And I said, how did you know? She said, I recognize your voice. I heard it on radio the other night. And I just wanted to thank you for a beautiful lecture. I was moved. Well, he could tell, of course, that I am, I look very native. I look very Aboriginal. And that's what I am. And the subject that I was talking about was about native mythology, native theology. In terms of mythological, when you die, your spirit sheds its body and leaves

that side of the circle where it sits the animate beings, that is the ones with living spirits and ostensibly under the guidance of the clown called trickster, crosses over to the other side of the circle to sit with inanimate beings, that is, the soulless ones, and simply goes on existing on another plane entirely, a plane that can be explained biologically scientifically. But your spirit is still here on this planet. It hasn't left. It hasn't gone anywhere. There was nothing sentimental or delusional about it. Biology can prove it. So they were anxious to learn more about a subject that they didn't know enough about. And I was glad to know that I was helping them out by expressing the ideas that I was.

I met a woman this summer who comes from China. Her name is Qing Tian. And she did something extraordinary. She started supporting young women through a program she calls Educating Girls in Rural China. She's now actually changed that to the... Qing Tian Foundation for Women. But what she does is she brings young girls along through a undergraduate program and a master's program looking for leadership, looking for women in leadership.

And I was so delighted to have a chance to meet her this summer when she was visiting near where I was staying. And she wanted to meet me because, believe it or not, she wanted to tell me that she used my Massey lectures as a teaching tool with those girls. I was thrilled. You know, we like to think our lectures will be heard by, well, certainly the Massey community, which is huge. But you'd like to think it had reach beyond that. And here she was telling me, these young girls, her students are now in China, Afghanistan, Bangladesh,

and they were listening to the Massey lectures. Imagine that. After the lecture, and that was after the Winnipeg lecture, a man came out to me, to ask for my signature on the book, and I had been talking about the war in Afghanistan in the lecture. And he was a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who was clearly dealing with trauma and questions. And we sat and we talked for a long time. And it was just one of those chance moments when you realize that you can say something in a lecture. and someone's listening either at home

or in the audience that it is going to touch something in them and is going to raise questions for them and very rarely do you get an opportunity to have a conversation with someone with whom that has happened so that really stood out for me. There were many stories

in terms of the interactions I had with people but one of them was striking because here I am giving lectures about my career as a human rights lawyer, war crimes, prosecutor, and conflict zones across the world. And I received an email from a police officer in southern Ontario who said that as he was listening to the lectures on the Highway 401 here in Ontario. And he says, I pulled to the side of the road. And I just listened. And I started thinking about my own life. And what I have done, that has really touched people's lives.

And what was really remarkable is he said that, you know, I remember the time when an elderly couple had lost their beloved dog. And I went out and I found that dog and the happiness on their face when they were reunited with their pets brought me such incredible joy. And I was so touched by, you know, a police officer, you know, writing this, taking the trouble to write this email to me. And the point about the lectures, obviously, were not that everyone should run off to a war zone

and help genocide survivors. The point is that each and every one of us can do immense good in our own circle, in our own universe of possibilities. It's about caring in a deep way for your fellow human beings, but also understanding that you're nobody's, savior but your own, by living a life full of meaning and purpose, you are doing nobody

of favor except yourself because you will understand really the true meaning of the pursuit of happiness. I'm Nala Ayyad and I can't tell you how happy and proud I am to say you're listening to a special series this week celebrating the 60th anniversary of ideas. If you'd like to hear more of our special 60th anniversary episodes, they are all linked in the description. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps in dim light, even late night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that Independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes.

Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cairists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexsavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff. 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little.

You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.ca. We've just heard from some of the great minds who've delivered Massies over the past decade, like the one you just heard,

international human rights lawyer, prosecutor and scholar Payam Akavan, who delivered the 20, 2017, CBC Massey Lectures called In Search of a Better World, a Human Rights Odyssey. Over the years, the book versions of the Massey Lectures often make the bestseller lists in Canada. So maybe it's not too surprising that recent Massey speakers have found inspiration in the words of those who came before them. Ron Debert. I went out and I bought my...

Most of them, C.B. McPherson, Ursula Franklin, Noam Chomsky, on and on and on. And those were foundational to my education because as an undergrad in international relations and later in political science, these were not just public lectures. They were important texts that you had to understand. All of the books in one manner or another, my own colleague, Janice Stein, Margaret Atwood's book, you know, they're all very important. And they certainly influence you, maybe in subtle ways more than others. Ursula Franklin sticks out to me because of the focus on technology. As I see it, technology has built the house in which we all live.

There's hardly today any human activity that does not take place within this house. As somebody who studies the Internet and the world, the digital ecosystem we live in today, having a deep thinker like that, put it all in context and historical perspective in such a provocative manner was very foundational to me. One of the funniest memories and reactions I had was recently I had a student show up and say to me, oh, do you know, I was given your book in my very first political science class, the return of history. It's a student at the Max Bell School of Public Policy, where I teach and am the director. And I smiled because I was given C.B. McPherson's The Real World of Democracy, his book based on his Massey lectures, in my very first political science class. And I remember C.B. McPherson's book, I still have it. And so it was such a wonderful feeling to know that that was still.

happening. And of course, so many of those Massey lecture books and lectures were so influential on me. Charles Taylor's malaise of modernity. Michael Ignatius, the rights revolution. I remember reading that and being so shaped by that. Willie Brant's danger is an option. So when people write and say, I read your Massey lectures or I listened to you and it was rebroadcast on the radio or often ask me questions. You know, what do you think about X now? It's a way to continue the conversation and that the conversations can continue well after the lectures are over is one of the great pleasures of the Massey Lectures. Delivering and, of course, writing the Massey Lectures is a monumental task. And it's not just

the time constraint that's don't take. It's knowing that on some level, what you write and say has to speak to the moment, yet stand the test of time. Astra Taylor And so I've written books before, but this book was always suffused with this idea that I would be speaking the words to people in person and across the airwaves. And that gave it a sense of urgency, immediacy, a kind of. of viscerality that I haven't had with other projects. It felt like I was being given this amazing opportunity to connect with people that would help people make sense of their lives and their emotional landscapes and their aspirations, their anxieties. There was something about

the fact that was going to live in these different modalities that made it really unique and I think special and shape the writing and shaped thinking. I really thought I was writing about conversations, but in fact, there were so many other things that emerged. And books change over time, right? And so now I feel it's about friendship. It's about listening. I think those two things really stay with me. Friendship, listening, and strangers. And that conversations aren't just like these tools to preach and persuade, right? It's not about persuading or anything. it's just a kind of like ribbon right between two human beings and on that ribbon like a lot happens right a lot sort of passes through those lines but the listing parts I've like reread and I find like I can still learn things from this kind of bizarre to me how you think you've written a book and then the book turns back on you and you realize all these unconscious layers novelist will tell you this, right, that a good book, a good book ends up being smarter than its writer.

And, you know, five, ten, twenty years down the road, you'll go back to your book and be humbled by it rather than proud, right? Yeah, you'll realize that the book has somehow continued to grow beyond you, and you've remained, you've grown at some mediocre, reasonable pace, but a really good book will sort of take its root in the world differently. I travel all over the the country and people still come up to me and tell me that they listen to the lectures or they read my stories, that all our relations is the backbone of university level courses in social work, in politics, in healthcare, in nursing. And that is pretty cool when you write something and you deliver a lecture series that people still hold on to.

I think my most memorable call that I received was actually a Facebook message from Dorothy Stewart who said to me, she knows an elder in Chassabee, First Nation, Chesaspe, Cree Nation. and that's on the eastern side of James Bay in Quebec. And Nellie Berskin House is an elder there. And Dorothy contacted me, she said, because Nellie wants you to come to Chassaby and to talk about your lectures. Nellie listens to your lectures all the time

and she wants to get to know you. and she wants you to come and talk about this in Chassabee because she feels the community needs to hear it. And she said, you know, Nellie is blind. So she listens and she hears your voice and she wants you to be there. So it took a while, but I went to Sassabee last summer and I visited Nellie and her sisters.

and some of the Indian residential school survivors. I've gotten to know them, George Pachano at Chesasabee. And that, I think, is the most beautiful story to come out of the lectures. You know, I can say that being a Massey lecture puts you in a club that you really want to belong in. Thank you. Thank you so much. I am so glad to be here. You know, when CBC and House of Anancy told me,

that we were going to Whitehorse for the Massey lecters. I felt like I'd won the lottery, honestly. I felt it was a great privilege. I have had occasion to speak to other Massey lecturers, and many of us have the same feeling at the beginning. Why me? How can my work be important enough to be in the Massies? And in my case, I thought, I'm not an academic.

I'm a storyteller. How am I going to go through this? Sally Armstrong is an award-winning author, journalist, and human rights activist. As a journalist, she's reported from some of the most dangerous and broken places in the world. And I've had that same conversation

with several other mass electors. And I think we are all so delighted to be chosen to do this massive amount of work in a short amount of time that we worry. The imposter's in creeps in, and you think, am I the right person to have this extraordinary opportunity?

The answer to that would be left to whoever listened to my lectures. My assignment for the Massey Lecture 2019 was to find out why women were oppressed in the first place. Who did it? And how did they manage to sustain that for thousands, if not millions, of years? And where are women today? And what do we have to do? to get to tomorrow. Well, I can tell you it has been a gigantic but deliciously revealing task.

And the first lecture that I will deliver tonight is called In the Beginnings. But I can tell you when I listen to the others, I know they were chosen for a reason that fit the Massies

and educated the public and carried us a step forward. You know, one of the lectures that came out after I gave mine was Thompson Highways laughing with the trickster. All right, that's enough. This is the fifth of five lectures,

the last of five lectures, and the subject is death, which, according to the trickster's interpretation of the phenomenon, is not a tragedy, as you will see. A family member of mine had passed away in the summer and I listened to his lecture on death

and I listened to it over and over and just the power of his voice and the cadence when you die your physical self formerly animate becomes inanimate and merely melts into the earth and becomes one with it and it is the right word for the creed noun for earth aske is inanimate

It is not anna-as-ki, but anima-as-ki. There's something beautiful about what you can do on radio and how you can really engage. And it can be with ideas like the return of history in Cold War, or it can be listening to Thompson Highway give his incredibly beautiful perspective on death. My younger brother's last words to me before he slid into unconsciousness for his last two weeks on Earth,

were, don't mourn me. Be joyful. So my job is to be joyful. Not for one person, not for myself, but for two people, him and me, which is why you will always see me having twice as good a time as everyone in any given room at any given time. I have no time for tears. I am too busy being joyful. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. That remarkable power of really listening to a single voice is something that's unmistakably a part of the Massey Lecture Experience

and of the program that hosts them. Ideas as a program has been part of my life. for such a long time that I'm actually surprised that when you think back to the amount of time you would spend sitting by the radio, listening to somebody tell you something

you didn't know before, or helping you to understand something, I'd tell you I'd be sitting in a parking lot, listening to the end of the program and being late for a meeting because I couldn't bear to miss it. Now, of course, we can podcast it

and get it in many other ways. I can even recite people that I heard on ideas a decade later, it's a very powerful source of information and entertainment. And I think it speaks well for a country that's in a situation we're in at this time that people still turn on ideas. When I think about the importance of ideas, I less think about my own personal commitment to philosophy and to media making, but really I think about my position as a human being as a citizen. I think that it's so important to have spaces where we engage

ideas and we think more abstractly and think in a bigger, more profound kind of way to get us out of sort of the daily news and get us out of just kind of keeping up with the times and try to engage in a bigger act of meaning making. The value of a show like CBC Ideas is that it provides that space to knit things together, to make connections between current events and big concepts, big ideas. It's an incredibly unique show for that reason. I mean, so much is extremely ephemeral in our worlds. you know, we consume, I listen to so many different podcasts and, you know, not to name names, but I would say half of them are, you know, this is sort of something that feels disposable and that I won't return to, but I'm enjoying it in the moment.

But there's something so substantial about CBC ideas and just the breadth of topics that gets covered and the brilliance of Nala Ayyed. And with her probing questions, she's just unparalleled in her talents as an interviewer and as an intellectual. You know, it's this endless array of topics for the listener to discover, you know, to go through the back catalog is quite a marvelous thing. The current media landscape, I think, where there's such pressure to respond quickly and to respond in a pithy way, which will then be retweeted, will become a meme, we'll sort of catch the headlines, I think is a very dangerous one, because there are lots of things that really need to be thought about, considered, talked about, debated, and cannot be solved in a 30-second sound clip, and which is why I think programs like ideas are actually more important than ever. And we have

all sorts of evidence that our attention span is getting less thanks to social media and thanks to the ubiquity of electronic media and cell phones and so on. And so I think something that makes us stop, pause and think is a very good thing. I sometimes wish our political leaders could do it a bit more often. If I had to describe the cultural significance of a program like ideas, I would say as someone who grow up on the prairies, who never live. left North America before I was 21 years old, that ideas, while giving us an in-depth picture of ideas in Canada, ideas that shaped Canada, ideas that were important in Canada,

also introduces listeners to the world. So it's Canada in context. And that I think was so important about CBC radio in general. but ideas in particular. I didn't have much familiarity with CBC ideas before I delivered the Massey lectures, but it was quite a revelation, quite a revelation that amidst all the noise superficial spectacle that passes as journalism, as the news,

that there was this program, which I now regard as a national treasure, as a refuge of thoughtful, profound reflection on the human condition, on the state of the world at a time when that space where we can really speak about, the most pressing issues in an intelligent, reflective way, is shrinking. And CBC Ideas, I think, is unique in terms of the quality of the material that it produces for the Canadian public. And I realize now having communicated to national audiences through the radio that really allows people to go beyond a superficial spectacle and really reflect more deeply and engage with these issues. in a much more profound and thoughtful way. So I remember thinking that I was not very employable, but perhaps one day I could get a job at CBC Ideas.

I first became aware of CBC ideas probably 2004, 2005, when I was living in Quebec and finishing up my film on Slava Zhijek, the philosopher. And I wanted to spend my life at that point making movies about philosophy, which is quite an eccentric theme for documentaries. And it just gave me some heart and some encouragement to know that there was a radio show that was quite popular that also believed in making philosophy accessible and engaging for a broader public. It is the most philosophical radio show on the radio. And by that, I mean something maybe

broader than most people think about. It has to do, as the title says, with ideas and deep, complicated, complex, uncomfortable ideas that are exchanged with very smart people. And in fact, what you're doing is you're actually enriching people's life and contributing to the public sphere at a very high intellectual level. And that's something that's good for the nation. It's good for us as a society to be able to have that touchstone and be able to talk to each other or listen to conversations in that way. And that's why I think it's so important. It's, you know, the philosophical material that comes across the radio and we're so lucky to have it. I think it's just a perfect example of the value of public broadcasting.

Happy 60th birthday ideas. I hope for 60 more and 60 more beyond that. The first time I remember hearing about ideas, I was driving home. I think it was after class at university, and I parked in the driveway. And I can't tell you what I was listening to, and I can't recall exactly what the show was. But I remember the company of being in the car with these voices and these ideas and just sitting there for a while in the dark. Like, there are people who share my really sort of singular and private world for a moment. And I also remember the feeling of, I hope this happens again.

It was kind of like a fling. And we were just sitting like in some secret space together for a while. It was kind of bizarre, right? To think of having a romance with the radio and a romance with a program, right? Like with a bunch of voices on there. It's like intellectual intimacy. But you realize that there's a future. There's some kind of relationship that you hope to develop with this thing, right?

How many times do we have that in life, right? Like, occasionally art will transcend or you'll get a good piece of music or there's a song that you hope will play again when you're in the supermarket. But to have an hour with something on the radio, an hour with your media, and afterwards feel like, I want to see you again. Let's make a second date. Yeah, it's rare. Agreed. It's a date.

Thank you so much for joining us for this special episode marking the 60th anniversary of ideas, featuring the CBC Massey Lecturers from the last decade. It was produced by Donna Dingwall and Karen Chickaluck. The CBC Massey Lectures are a collaboration of ideas, Massey College in the University of Toronto, and the House of Anancy Press, which publishes the book version of the lectures. Technical production by Emily Kiervasio and Sam McNulty. Special thanks to Patrick Mooney, John Scaife, and Kate Zeman from CBC Library Services,

as well as our radio colleagues in CBC Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Victoria. And of course, a big thank you to our Massey lectures from the past decade. Hi, I'm Akhavon. Sally Armstrong. Ron Devert, Desiudgeon, Thompson Highway, Margaret McMillan, Tanya Talaiga, Astra Taylor, Jennifer Welsh, Ian Williams.

A big thank you as well to all the other thinkers who've delivered the CBC Massey lectures over these past 60 years. If you'd like to hear more of our special episodes marking our 60th anniversary, you can get them anywhere you listen to podcasts. You'll find all five of this week's episodes as well as a rich back catalog of ideas episodes that you can hear whenever you want.

The web producer of ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, Go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.