Ideas - Join IDEAS for our annual New Year's Levee

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

It's a time of reflection and looking ahead. Host Nahlah Ayed invites IDEAS producers into the studio to share ideas they are working on for 2025. You’ll hear about income inequality, Nietzsche, the power of itch, the intrigue of the yellow traffic light and the fascinating story of Henry Box Brown — an enslaved man from Virginia who mailed himself to freedom.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to the year 2025, and welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Happy New Year! Ever wonder what it takes to bring about change? It was only 150 years ago that Grace Annie Lockhart became the first woman to receive a bachelor's degree in Canada.

The first, in fact, in the entire British Empire. And only 20 years ago that same-sex couples were allowed to marry. Change can be imposed top-down or rise ground-up. It can seemingly come out of nowhere or emerge after percolating for decades. Looking back in history, it can often seem glacial. But in our own era, societal, political and technological change is happening at an unprecedented pace, literally living up to the adage that change is the only constant. And 2025 promises more of the same.

And we're going to be right here with you, trying to make sense of it all. Because it is ideas, after all, that change the world. It's our New Year's tradition here at Ideas to open the studio to our hard-working producers to give us a glimpse into the ideas they are pursuing in the coming season. The first to join me for the 2025 edition is Ideas producer Lisa Godfrey. Lisa, Happy New Year. Thank you, Nala, and to you. So what are you working on? I am working on an amazing story, an episode about the incredible life and ongoing cultural legacy of a man named Henry Box Brown. Some people might have heard of him. I had not. He was born into slavery in Virginia in 1815.

He made a legendary escape in 1849. And then he built a whole career for himself as a traveling showman in England and Canada. It sounds really intriguing. Where did you learn about Henry Box Brown? I was researching another episode, trying to find famous artists buried in the Toronto area in cemeteries. And I came across a famous guy, and his name was Henry Box Brown, no quotes, buried in the Necropolis, which is a famous cemetery. But why did you, like, what made you find out more? Well, I just thought, why does he not have quotes around Box? How is someone named Box?

Well, maybe it's just a given name. How is someone named Box? Well, maybe it's just a given name. And then I found out he was enslaved, subject to not beatings, but another kind of trauma that enslaved people went through, which is being ripped from the bosom of their family. He lost his mother and his siblings when he was about 15 years old. He was sold to a tobacconist. He worked in a factory. He observed a lot of terrible things going on. And he always had this philosophical and religious objection to slavery.

He just thought, everyone is born free. What is my country doing? He lost also his second family. He married. He had children. And this family, as happened to so many people, one day it was decided they would be sold and perhaps even his children separated from their mother. It's tragic. I think it just was the final straw for him and he thought,

I must find freedom or I must die. So what year would that have been about? I think it was 1849. And what are the options if you decide it's time to leave? There were some modes of escape, but he chose one that he felt was completely suited to him for some reason, which was he found two accomplices and had them nail him into a box, a wooden crate to be shipped. So he was shipped by wagon. Then he was put on a boat. People sat on the box. At any point, he could have died. And he did not. He mailed himself to Philadelphia, which was freedom at that point, relative freedom in the United States, into the hands of abolitionists, white abolitionists, who knocked on the box and found him still alive in pretty serious shape after 26 hours of travel,

but he was alive. How extraordinary. Yeah. And then what? And then things became even more extraordinary. He fled the U.S. because of fugitive slave laws, and he took up, he had done some public speaking and become quite a famous figure

in the States in abolitionist circles. But he then went to England and started this career as an unbelievably colorful showman. And he did magic tricks. And he also had this thing that people describe as a proto-film that people were doing at the time called a panorama, which was an enormous illustrated painted scroll, which the performer would unscroll and narrate. And this was called the Mirror of Slavery. And he would present it to the audiences in England and Canada, who you can assume were mostly white, and he would describe the evils of slavery to them, the mirror of slavery it was called. And additionally, he did hypnotism, in which he would hypnotize men in the audience to become animals and act like sheep and eat food

that was thrown to them, which I can only, other people have certainly pointed out, is a kind of a reversal of what he and enslaved people experienced. So Lisa, every time we make a discovery through this incredible work that we have privilege to do, it kind of shifts our frame of the world and it changes how we think about things. I'm wondering so far in your research, what struck you and what's kind of changed your, the way you look at the world, and it changes how we think about things. I'm wondering, so far in your research, what struck you and what's kind of changed the way you look at the world? Yeah, well, I'm speaking to some brilliant people, an academic and author named Martha Cutter, who wrote a recent book, beautiful book, called The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown. She was quite interested in the artistic influence of Box Brown. He's been taken up by performance artists, visual artists, writers.

His story reinterpreted. And he himself seems like such a modern figure. I'm going to speak to the brilliant scholar Daphne Brooks, who wrote about him 10 or 12 years ago in a book about black freedom. 10 or 12 years ago in a book about black freedom. She calls him in an essay that she wrote, a figure almost too glam to be taken seriously in his political mission, but very much this sort of unconventional figure of black freedom.

And she likens him to a character from a blaxploitation movie. Everyone I talked to sees him as very modern, almost like the first black performance artist. Extraordinary. Of course, so close, buried here in Toronto, and yet so far away. If you could meet him, what would you ask him? Oh my gosh. I would just want to be in his presence. One is very much haunted by the fate of his wife and children and all the people who did not escape slavery and go on to these things. So where did he get the energy and strength to, as Martha Cutter says, sort of

act out trauma in a way and find purpose and meaning in that? It's incredible to me. Sounds like it's going to be a very inspiring episode. Thank you so much, Lisa. And I know you brought a song for us. What did you bring? Well, a spiritual seemed right, weighed in the water by the staple singers, which was a civil rights era anthem, but based very much in a slavery era spiritual. I also found out when I did a little research on that, that it is, in a way, perfect for this in another way, because spirituals were sung by enslaved people when they were working, and sometimes included coded instructions. Directions. Directions on means to escape, you know, where the Underground Railroad was, what direction to head in. And in fact, some scholars think that Wade in the Water, which sounds biblical and mentions Moses and God troubling the water, was advice on using the river as a way to evade the hounds that slave catchers would use to follow and hunt down escaped slaves.

to follow and hunt down escaped slaves. So either way, the religious meaning or the coded meaning, it's about redemption, it's about soul freedom, and it's a beautiful song. So, so very appropriate to the story of Henry Box Brown. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Nala. Wade in the water Wade in the water Wade in the water He's gonna trouble the water

He's gonna trouble the water Wade in the water The Staple Sisters rendition of Wade in the Water, as selected by Lisa Godfrey, to coincide with her upcoming documentary on Henry Box Brown. A note to podcast listeners. Copyright prevents us from playing whole cuts of music, but you can hear the full cut on our streaming version

at cbc.ca slash ideas or on the CBC News app. Next, we're heading all the way to the East Coast and to Ideas producer Mary Link. Mary, happy new year. Happy new year from the East Coast, my wonderful, incredible host. Oh, and our wonderful, incredible East Coast correspondent. Is that the right title? East Coast correspondent. All the way from Halifax. Nice to have you here in spirit. In spirit. You're always working on something fascinating. What is it this time? Well, I'm going to talk about a main one in a second, but I'll just tell you about a couple

things that are coming in the new year, just sort of in January and February, yes. And the first one I want to talk about is going to be, I think, February, and I'm producing a new doc with Moira Dunovan. And we've done three other doc series and docs together. We've done rats, we've done wetlands, and we've done disgust, and all science related, and this one is as well. And it's totally fascinating. It's about how we name species and all the unnamed species out there, and how we began the sorting out in the natural world by naming species. But there's also evidence, which is the fascinating part, that categorization is a deeply held human impulse. Yeah. So people with damage to the temporal lobe struggle to recognize and classify living things, though not inanimate objects.

Wow. So suggesting that the taxonomic impulse is rooted in our physiology. So inevitably, we were going to come up with it. We're wired for it. Interesting. We're wired for it. And here's the thing. It's estimated that 80% of land species and 91% of marine species remain undiscovered. And so at the crux of everything then is with unprecedented changes to the natural world underway, climate change and all that stuff, are we running out of time to classify the life around us? And what is lost if we don't? Wow. Those are big questions. Yep. So that's February. And then in January, so going backtracking a bit, I have a show with Aaron Boley, and he's a professor in planetary astronomy. You know, Nala, that I love astrophysicists. Yes, I do.

know, Nala, that I love astrophysicists. Yes, I do. And so he's a professor at UBC. And at the heart of this lecture, astronomy lecture at SMU, St. Mary's University, is who owns space, which is really an interesting question, because, you know, space exploration is no longer the domain of countries. I mean, the space race, which began in the late 1950s, played a major part in the Cold War between the Americans and the Soviets. It was a contest of superpower dominance in the world. But now, space is becoming the domain of private money, right? Business interests, right? So the amount of satellites currently orbiting the Earth, okay, so the beginning of this year, Amount of satellites currently orbiting the Earth. Okay, so the beginning of this year, 28,000 plus satellites.

And here's a question that I'll give you a billion dollars if you can answer. Oh boy. Okay, ready? I'm ready. Who owns half of all these satellites? Elon Musk. Good, you now are part of the 0.01%. And that brings me to what I'm doing, my main project for this year. Yes, see, nice segue, baby.

This spring, I'm doing a series on the astronomical rise of extreme wealth, the 0.01 percenters. Not the 1 percenters, but the 0.01 percenters who are rising their wealth. They're leaving the 1%ers behind. And so, okay, here's my question for you. Now that you have a billion dollars, you won that contest. Do you know how much you need to be worth to be in Canada's 0.01%? Oh my God, I can't imagine. I'm sure I can't count that high. Well, you're in it because you've won a billion dollars. I can't imagine. I'm sure I can't count that high. Well, you're in it because you've won a billion dollars.

So you have to have a family worth around $200 million. Extraordinary. So here's another question, quick question. How much do you think Elon Musk is worth? Let me guess, like $10 billion. $350 billion. Extraordinary. Jeff Bezos is next at $240 billion.

And in Canada, the top of the list is David Thompson and his family, and their net worth is $67 billion. Wow. Okay, so the vast majority of the ultra-wealthy are living in the States, number one, America. Number two, China, then Germany, then India. And number five is what? Is who?

I can't begin to guess. Which country? I don't know. You know it well. Canada? Yes. With a population, a wee population of 40 million people, we are number five. You have a very interesting title for this series. The working title is The Modern Medicis. Who are the Medicis? The Medicis, well, we all kind of know them. They're in our vernacular in many ways, but this is a family that ruled Florence for 300 years, from the 1400s to the early 1700s. They patronized the arts, so that's a good thing,

but they were kind of nasty, greedy folk in many ways, too. They had a very dark side and extreme wealth. And what's particularly fascinating, and you could argue it's what's happening today to a certain extent, is that the Medicis managed managed without formally changing the institutional architecture of the political system to reap extreme wealth and power. So you've been looking at this idea for quite some time. I'm just wondering where that interest started. Why now?

Well, I guess it's about democracy. Can democracy flourish with a growing band of global oligarchs? Because they're not just oligarchs of one country. You know, it's about democracy. Can democracy flourish with a growing band of global oligarchs? Because they're not just oligarchs of one country, you know, it's transnational. And because with great wealth comes great power. And so that relates to the Medici's in many ways, how extreme wealth can lead to domination of the political and social institutions without changing their structure. And it's about what extreme wealth means in terms of inequality. And I also want to look at extreme wealth through the philosophical and moral lens.

I can't wait to hear this. It's a series, right? It's not an episode. Yeah, it's a series, yeah. So you have brought a song to go along with the theme of your series. What is the song? It was really hard to find a song, I tell you, without looking like a leftist manifesto. I mean, Eat the Rich by Motorhead was not what I was looking for. So it took me a long time. A friend of mine, Ian Pearson, knows music really well. He helped me. So I found a song, and it's based on a hit song by Hank Williams from 1947. It was called The Mansion on the Hill. And Bruce Springsteen, then in homage to Williams, wrote his own version. And so it's like the entire song structure and meter he takes from Hank Williams,

but he changes the melodics and he rewrites the lyrics. So essentially, it's a new song, but an ode to Williams. So both Hank Williams and Springsteen, they both employ the mansion. So it's called The Mansion on the Hill. So they both employ the mansion as a metaphor for a life that seems unattainable to the narrators of the song. But, you know, Williams' song is about heartbreak. This guy sitting in his cabin looking up at the mansion to the woman who rejected him. You said you could live without love, dear In your loveless mansion on the hill But Springsteen took this and changed it, The Mansion on the Hill,

and it's much more a song about inequality, and it's a slower tempo that just rips your heart out. And it's based on the car rides he used to take with his dad past the neighboring but unreachable mansions. And I can think, Noah, of towns in Nova Scotia, one town in particular in Cape Breton that comes to mind, that are based on a single industry, and they're populated mostly by modest homes,

very modest homes in many cases, with a large mansion on the top of the hill. Mary, thank you so much and Happy New Year. Happy New Year. There's a place out on the edge of town Rising above the factories and the fields Ever since I was a child I can remember

That mansion all the years That was Bruce Springsteen's rendition of Mansion on the Hill. You'll be hearing Mary Link's series on the modern Medicis in the springtime. Happy New Year, everyone! You're listening to Ideas, on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear Ideas on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed.

My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short-sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities.

Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. Every New Year, we gather together ideas producers and contributors to share a bit about what they're working on and play a tune related to the theme. From the East Coast to the West Coast. And a check-in with ideas producer Matthew Lazenrider. Happy New Year, Matthew. Happy New Year to you, Nala. How are you doing?

I'm great. Nice to hear you. Nice to hear from you. You always got something up your sleeve, and I really apologize for the question, but I understand you have an itch to scratch. I do. I'm working on something about itch, itchiness, scratching, and that's not any more abstract than it sounds. Nala, I am looking into the sensation of itch, which I have learned is a topic full of history and science and psychology and medicine and superstition and mythology and religion and the whole darn gamut that makes for a good episode of ideas. I'm getting itchy just listening to you.

Well, that's a thing. So itchiness is contagious, right? A lot of research has gone into this. If you show someone a picture of someone else scratching, you feel itchy. And it's a good likelihood that as we're speaking about itchiness right now, the people out there listening are getting a little itchy themselves. And it's kind of a, you know, probably an evolutionary social defense mechanism.

Like, ooh, that ape over there has some kind of bug on his arm and he's scratching it. So I might have a bug on my arm, so I'm going to scratch it too. So interesting. I mean, curiosity is usually not a word I associate with being itchy, but I'm curious, what got you curious about itchiness? what got you curious about itchiness? Well, winter. Winter and the dry air. Dry skin, yeah. And you're walking around and your skin gets dry

and you've got to moisturize and things get itchy. And it's even worse for a lot of people out there who suffer from something called chronic itch, which has been kind of a medical mystery for a long time. But over the last four, five years or so, there have been a number of huge breakthroughs in the scientific side of itch, like what it actually is, what causes it, what sends a signal from the skin to the spine to the brain that makes you think, ooh, there's something funky going on on the surface of my body?

And it unlocks the potential for all kinds of new treatments for people who live with a really annoying, frustrating condition, which is chronic itch. It's interesting to hear that it's a whole field of study. I mean, who are the scientists looking at this? Institute, which does a lot of work around dermatology and eczema and itching and scratching, and as well, some recent research out of the University of British Columbia. So neurologists, dermatologists, scientists of all stripes, we are living in a golden age of itch research. Wow. What have you learned that surprised you so far? I mean, you just told me that there's a whole field of study on this, which surprises me, but what's, what's surprised you so far about what you've learned? So really interesting thing to me is the social dynamics of itching and scratching. And this is a big thing in history as well. I'll give you one example. Victorian London seized with fear over something called the itch, which was actually probably scabies.

Scabies spread primarily in workhouses and brothels and prisons. this kind of cultural association sprung up between people who were itchy all the time and immorality and lustfulness and criminality. And there are a lot of other instances like that where itchiness and scratching becomes connected to morality and social status and all kinds of other strange factors. As I'm listening to you, I'm also thinking of how often that word or that verb shows up in just our everyday language, like having itchy feet, meaning wanting to travel, or having, as I said at the beginning, an itch to scratch. Yeah, tons of superstitions about that, right?

Like if your palm itches, then you might come into money. And if your eye itches, you might run into an old friend. Tons of things like that. And it's really baked into the English language. And it's used often as a literary metaphor, itching. Aside from the kind of medical side of things, there's a sort of life itch. It comes up so often in various forms of literature. So it's not pain, but a yearning. You know, a part of being alive is an itch that you just can't scratch. You feel like you're missing some bit of satisfaction. And it's not pain. It doesn't harm your life, but it's a suspicion that you are missing out on just a little something, this constant itch in the background that you can't quite get to. Yeah. If there was one question that you wanted to answer in pursuit of answers about

itching, what would that be? It is why we are cursed to do the one thing that you probably shouldn't do when you're really, really itchy, which is scratch. There's this thing called the itch-scratch cycle. So it's this strange paradox where your skin gets itchy because of inflammation and your brain thinks, ooh, you know what would make me feel really good is if I scratch that. And by scratching it, you inflame it and it gets more itchy. So I would like to know what's at the heart of that strange psychological paradox that the one thing that makes us feel better is the one thing that makes us worse.

Finally, I'm almost afraid to ask, but what song would be appropriate for this piece? All right, I got a song here from Glen Campbell. This is the B-side to his 1969 single Galveston. The why of this is obvious. This is every time I itch, I wind up scratching you. You know my love, my only wish is happiness for you. So I work real hard to strike it rich. But every time I do,

I blow it all on some old witch I hardly ever knew. How come every time I itch, I wind up scratching you? That was Every Time I Itch, I End Up Scratching You, inspired by Matthew Lazenrider's upcoming documentary on, you guessed it, itch. And the idea's senior producer has come out from behind the glass of the control room and into the studio. Nicola, thanks for coming. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. It's such a delight to be here. Oh, I love it when everybody's actually in the studio together. Yes, it's nice to be face to face.

So I'm curious what you're working on for this new year. Well, this new year, I think, is going to bring an extra level of angst in the United States as a certain president-elect takes hold of power. So the episode I'm working on is somewhat related to that. My colleague Tom Howell and I, we went down to the States shortly after the election took place. We went down to Virginia to this conference where there was, it was the annual conference for political theory. And there were a couple hundred political theorists there and so many topics. And I came across one that really jumped out at me. And the title of the paper that was being presented was it was called On Passing By, A Way of Seeing Creativity and Sufferers. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, I got to look into this, creativity in sufferers.

Okay, it's intriguing. And the person who was presenting this paper is actually presenting on Nietzsche, on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. So obviously I approached her and I learned that she is really interested in this one particular chapter in Nietzsche's major work called Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is called and this chapter is called relevant for this moment of high anxiety and as the anxieties continue to mount, especially in America, where there's a lot of anger, vengefulness, toxicity's the professor who was presenting on this. I'll let her give you a brief synopsis of what she means and what she believes Nietzsche means by passing by. There's a really key line in the book that reads, where one can no longer love, there one should pass by. And I'm really interested in this idea of passing by because I think it's about making us more hesitant about engagement and dialogue and sort of agonistic contest. It is suggesting, you know, the option is always available not to engage, not to contest. not to engage, not to contest. And at before every engagement, it's worthwhile asking what its effects are going to be. And I don't know if we always ask that because we almost see

engagement as a good in itself and as a sign of caring about shared life. But I think sometimes caring about shared life means that you engage less. But one thing I will say is that passing by is not disengagement because it's still consonant with caring for collective life, for shared life. But I describe it as coming close and then veering away. It seems counterintuitive, but it actually kind of makes sense. Yeah, and it gives people a bit of space because we often think, okay, I see somebody with an opinion that's contrary to my own. I must

engage. I must argue them down. But her interpretation of Nietzsche, and especially in this particular text, is that if you continue to operate in a space where you're constantly engaging and constantly in conflict, it does not allow space for other thoughts, other approaches, other ways of thinking. So that's where that creativity, impulse, and instinct comes from. That's so amazing. I can't imagine walking into a room full of political theorists and walking out thinking about passing by being the solution to life's problems. Yeah, it's so funny because, you know, Nietzsche, popularly, he's seen as kind of an apologist for fascists because the Nazis unfortunately took aspects of his writing

and they turned it into an argument for the horrors that they then inflicted. But that interpretation, Chalini would argue, is very narrow and misconstrued because there's so much more to his thinking that we can gain from. And this one idea of passing by is almost like I joked with her. I was like, oh, my gosh. He's almost like Nietzsche as a yoga instructor. It's like accept that there is this tension, that there's this disagreement, and take a moment, pause, and don't engage.

It almost sounds stoic. Yeah. Yeah, Nietzsche almost sounds stoic. Yeah. Yeah. Nietzsche is a stoic. That makes total sense. And he's not interested in arguing for the sake of arguing. And he believes that that kind of space just brings out emotions that are not healthy to actually shifting values in a communal and beneficial way. Like, the heightened emotion leads to blurred thinking, leads to further contestation,

which is not helpful to anybody. So what's the soundtrack to a conversation about passing by? Well, Zarathustra is that prophet, this fictional prophet based on a real prophet that Nietzsche writes about in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And the idea is that Zarathustra comes down from the mountainside after 10 years of reflecting, and he comes down. And the moment where he's confronted

with a tense situation with the character called Zarathustra's fool, this character is goading him. He's making a bit of a mockery of him. And it's at that point that Zarathustra's like, okay, it's time to take a deep breath and accept that I have to move on. And that's where the line, where one can no longer love, one should pass by. So I figured Lenny Kravitz, bring it back to the 90s, and his song Fly Away. Thank you so much, Nicola. And Happy New Year to you and your loved ones.

To you too. Thanks, Nicola. your loved ones to you too. Thanks. I wish that I could fly into the sky so very high just like a dragonfly I'd fly above the trees over the seas and all the greens to anywhere I please.

Oh, I want to get away. I want to fly away. Lenny Kravitz and Fly Away. A nod to an upcoming documentary on Nietzsche and the idea of passing by. My final visitor of the evening is Sean Foley. Happy New Year, Sean. Happy New Year, Nala. So what do you have cooking for us for next year? I guess I'll lead with the title, which is the philosophy, the physics, what is the working title? The physics and philosophy of the yellow light. The yellow light.

The yellow light, the one in between the red and the green as you're driving along, just going about your business, not trying to bother anybody. But then sometimes, you know, you misjudge. I misjudged this particular yellow light and it led to this upcoming Ideas episode because I got nailed by a red light camera. And then I was like, that was the shortest yellow light I've ever seen in my life. What are they doing? And there's a red light camera at the intersection. What is going on here? So when did it go from an incident that probably cost you money to an actual story idea? Well, now to be fair, I haven't actually paid it yet because I'm hoping to appeal it. But anyway, that's my own business. You know what? It was a kind of lemons to lemonade thing to extend the yellow metaphor. I was just kind of angry. And just as I was meditating on this, you know, I've learned to turn

away from feelings of anger and resentment towards like, there's got to be something deeper going on here for me as a human being. And I thought, what is the deal with the yellow light? What is that space created by the yellow light? Like, I mean, i get it as a functional thing like we need time to be able to stop um but is like what's how did that happen how did that come about how do they decide how long it is and then what is the human what are we doing in there as as creatures like what's the existential reality wow of of being in that yellow light moment. That's extraordinary. What an idea.

I don't want to predetermine the outcome of this episode, but I'm curious what adjective you would apply to the yellow light. What is that state? Well, I would say it feels liminal, but liminal always implies to me maybe more of a, like you've got more time. You know, you've got more time to kind of be suspended in this kind of in-between state. And like a lot of beautiful things can happen there, right? Like it's often acknowledged to

be this kind of very fertile spiritual moment, this liminal state that you can enter into. But that you've only got about three and a half seconds, by my reckoning, with the yellow light. And that's the light itself. That's not your perception of the light. That's not when you notice the light. That's not how the light feels, depending on how fast you're going. So I don't know what that space is called.

And maybe that's something that we could, or how to describe that space. Maybe that's something we could flesh out a little bit. Do you remember that song when we were kids? Do you know what traffic lights mean to you? I don't, but would you continue? Well, the words there were yellow means be careful. Green means you may go, but red is the most important and that's stop. You know. Okay. All right. So maybe we don't need an episode. Maybe we've got it. But it feels like pause, be careful, you know, wait a bit. Yes. Wait a bit. Or like, I think it's a considering moment. So, so I found this article,

here's a crazy story. I was talking about this experience with a friend, like an acquaintance that I run into every now and then. And we don't know a lot about each other, but we're fond of one another and we get along. We didn't know what each other did for a living. And I said to him, I described this, I said, I work at CBC Radio on this program called Ideas. And here's my, I'm thinking of this next thing I want to do is about yellow lights because I got nailed by a red light camera. Isn't that a pain? And he said to me, well, I actually happen to work for the like regional authority

in the area of like traffic. Like I'm a huge, basically he said I'm a huge yellow light nerd. Perfect. And then, and then, so we, it just, just big sparks, you know, started to fly. It was really exciting. And I got, you know, he's pointed me to some interesting articles on the subject. So I got a bit of a leg up on the research. from 1959 that basically identifies the problem of the amber signal light and traffic flow. Because to this point, there was so much variability in it that it really hadn't been studied as like a physical mathematical reality. And so there's a lot of graphs in this article, but there's also some kind of lovely prose things like, for instance, I just love the

introductory paragraph. This will give you a sense of kind of where this all starts. Please. We live in a difficult and increasingly complex world where man-made systems, man-made laws, and human behavior are not always compatible. You know, like that's a pretty amazing statement, you know? And the article goes on to establish a mathematical argument for what would be a reasonable way of calculating an interval during which, and this is kind of speaks to the liminal thing. Yes. Let me see if I can find that.

Okay, here we go. It is our hope that in pointing out the existence and nature of the amber signal light problem, we may stimulate others to pursue it further and make certain that the driver is confronted with, and here's the three words I love so much, a solvable decision problem. I mean, that's all I really want as a person. Yeah. You know, a solvable decision problem. And here you are picking up, picking up the research.

Yeah. I know you're just kind of getting into all of this, but have you learned anything, do you think, that kind of shifted your gaze on the world, even just a little bit? I would say that, no. Okay. No, I'm just kidding. no. No, I'm just kidding. The thing I've learned so far is that a lot of thought goes into how long your yellow light is.

And I'm kind of interested to see whether that sort of 60-year-old equation, how well it's held up over the years and maybe how we have changed as drivers. That would be, I think, sort of, I'm not sure it's a takeaway yet, but I think that's part of what's cooking for me. Okay. And you have brought a song that kind of fits the theme here.

What is it? Well, it's a little bit of classic Canadian pop music from the, I guess, early 80s. The Spoons, Romantic Traffic. Because it has the word traffic in the title. But it's really kind of about, I think it's probably about a relationship. But it's just catchy and nice. And also the video, while it doesn't really involve cars at all, it's a very cool video of the

TTC at a certain point in its evolution. So if you're a public transit nerd, I'd say check out that video. Sean, thank you so much. I look forward to hearing the episode. Happy New Year. Thanks, Nala, and Happy New Year to you too. He's changing lanes Sees his chance He passes up ahead She's losing him In romantic traffic A place with no signs The Spoons with Romantic Traffic And that's just a tiny glimpse into some of the episodes

that we have in store for you on ideas in the opening months of this new year. I'm going to leave you with one last song related to an episode that I'm working on myself on efforts to reinvent the global order. After the year that was, it seemed a fitting inquiry. So as the calendar flips to 2025, here's Tracy Choplin with New Beginning. Too much pain, too much suffering Let's resolve the start all over, make a new beginning Don't get me wrong You're listening to Tracy Chapman with New Beginning, wishing you a new beginning for 2025.

This edition of our New Year's Levy was produced by Nikola Lukšić. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? brought to mind Should old acquaintance be forgot

And days of auld lang syne For auld lang syne My dear For auld lang syne We'll take a cup of kindness yet For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.