Ideas - The best — and worst — ideas of the last six decades

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

Sometimes the universe hands us a gift. Over the past year, our podcast listeners spent a total of 526,915 hours listening to our program. That's 21,954.8 days and that translates to 60 years of listening to us. So what better way to mark IDEAS' 60th year then to look back on the highlights and lowlights of the past six decades. To give you a hint on some of the picks, on the bad list: online identity management. Trickle down economics. On the good: Free Trade. Girl Bosses. Apparently open borders is still an open question.Panelists Jamie Liew, a University of Ottawa law professor and novelist; University of Toronto philosopher, Joseph Heath; and the Canadian Shield Institute’s, Vass Bednar, joined IDEAS producer Mary Lynk on stage, in front of a live audience at the Isabel Bader Theatre for this episode — the last in our special series celebrating our 60th anniversary.Listen to more episodes:The time when a guest said, "I love you!"How an IDEAS episode on traffic changed a doctor's practiceCBC Massey Lecturers reveal how the talks changed themHow IDEAS saved a listener from sending a regrettable email

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 becksavers.com. Welcome to Ideas and to our final episode celebrating our 60th anniversary. I'm Nala Ayyed. You know, sometimes the universe hands us a gift. Here's what I mean. Over the past year, our podcast listeners spent a total of 526,915 hours listening to our program. That's 21,954.8 days. And that translates to, wait for it, 60 years of listening to us in this our 60th year. That's the sound of a full house, settling in at the Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto,

just before we held a special on-stage discussion to mark our birthday, the best and worst ideas of the past six decades. But this time, the universe had a different idea. I couldn't make it because of a family matter. So ideas producer Mary Link, who's normally based in Halifax, filled in for me. And as you'll hear, it was a fun and festive soire full of free thinking and food for thought.

Welcome, welcome, welcome, everyone. Hello, I'm Mary Link. I'm the pinch hitter host for tonight for the team, and it's really unfortunate that Nella Ayat, our amazing, kind, brilliant host can't be here tonight. And I know she would be thrilled to be here. And I'm also, I'm thrilled to be here. six decades, or as would say in the East Coast, six friggin' decades, can you believe it?

Over the years, we've been fortunate enough to win various awards and honors nationally in Canada and internationally in the United States, Britain and Europe. And those distinctions point to something else that I do want to underline, and that is the wide range of the topics we feature. Thinkers like Nietzsche, Hobbes, and Hegel, the links between AI and racism, the hidden symbolism and movies like the Wizard of Oz and Jaws, we can be fun at ideas, the revival of the mig mall language, the nature of the universe, the dynamics of the atom, the alarming rise of multibillionaires, okay, that's mine and it's due soon, the advent of Chinese science fiction, the cultural meaning of shipwrecks, theater of the

absurd and oil pipelines and, close to my heart, the moral imperative behind the ideas of human rights. And I have you know that all of these topics are from this year alone. And what that range of them really speaks to is the appetite for them out there among you right here and with our listeners everywhere, or to quote a former team member, at our best ideas helps explain water to fish. You know our groovy ideas logo there right behind me and it's a psychedelic starburst

there. It's created in Surprise Surprise 1969. But what might be surprising is a promotional language I went with it at the time that this program is, quote, for people who like to think.

And you are all proof of that here tonight. and now to the best and worst ideas of the last 60 years and which ones may be the most important over the next six decades. If I were to read the complete credentials and accomplishments of our three panelists, we would be here all night.

So this is a bonzide version. Jamie Liu teaches law at the University of Ottawa. And she stood. practices law and somehow she's also managed to write a novel dandelion which was named by cbc as one of the best novels of 2022 thank you super achiever joe heath he's a philosopher at the university of toronto again that sort of sounds like the bachelor competition here but anyways he's written extensively for both academic and general audiences about political philosophy, business ethics, rational choice theory, action theory, and critical theory. This doesn't even include his substack. And Joe is also

the co-author of the bestselling book, The Rebel Self. And finally, but not least, we have Vass Bednar. She is a public policy designer. She leads a Canadian Shield Institute, which consults with leaders from industry, academia, government, and civil society, all with the aim of strengthening Canada's economy, competitiveness, and sovereignty. She's also the co-author of The Big Fix, How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians. Thank you for all being here. Thank you. So we're going to have a bit of fun. start first on the dark side we're going to start with bad ideas and discuss that and then next half

we'll be going to the to the light to the good ideas so let's start with the bad so we're going to start with just a lightning round to wet the appetite for the main course of really bad ideas which we'll talk about soon so who wants to go first vast us okay why not okay go happy birthday by the way i hope they get the rose so i used to have a fitbit like when fitbits came out right and my boyfriend at the time one day came up to me and was like, oh, I got X amount of steps more than you. And I took off that Fitbit, opened to the garbage, and tossed it in. Because I think the hyper quantification of everything, we're quantifying the weirdest things, our sleep, our number of steps, we're performing it, you know, trying to learn about ourselves.

But I think it's ridiculous and it's got to stop. I agree. I agree. Okay. Do you want to go? Yeah, I would pitch in a nonconformity that's one of the best. bad ideas. And so, like, I'm going back a little bit. So because it's the 60th anniversary, I'm thinking back to the ideas of the 1960s. And so, like, my parents were people who had drunk deeply from the cup of the 60s counterculture. So I was raised with that. And then I think it's, like, helpful to step back and say, you know, which ideas planned out, which ones

didn't. And one of the ideas that was, you know, really, really popular in the countercultural idea was that we live under a system and that that system requires conformity. And that therefore, in order to rebel against that system, all we have to do is act in a non-conformist manner. And it was very flattering to a lot of people to be told this, you know, artists and like jazz musicians and stuff like that, to be told that they were undermining the foundations of the techno structure of civilization through their acts of rebellion. But a lot of that just didn't pan out.

And that it actually, I mean, it turned into a very entrepreneurial source of gains for people of that generation, but it didn't really, you know, impact the system in any significant way. And then I guess the last thing I'll say is we're now living in a time where that countercultural impulse of wanting to sort of defy the man is clearly drifted from the left to the right. And so it's the right now, which is acting in the more like, you know, sort of non-conformist and anti-authoritarian way. And I think that's causing, again, a lot of people to realize that this wasn't necessarily a politically useful impulse. Do we be conformists? Is that what you're saying?

we should all follow the... Yeah, on the Rebel Cell, Andrew Potter, my co-author and I, on the back, we wore like matching uniforms for the picture, and the slogan was Dare to conform. Jamie? I'm going to say screens,

and I think this is a, I'm a parent, this is a preoccupation amongst all of my friends who have kids. It's like, you know, how do we get kids off the screens, back on their bikes, into the park? And these are the conversations that are animating our dinner tables lately with our friends.

And so I'm just going to say screens because they're pulling us away from human face-to-face contact and going into nature and discovering and getting bored. Not just kids. Us too, right? I should not just throw the kids out there, but it is definitely us. And we're leading the way in modeling that behavior, right? Absolutely. Any others?

Any other quick ones? Maybe trickle down to economics. anybody uh that was a that was a bad idea perhaps some people think it's still good but we're not here to shoot fish in a barrel yeah i mean i also think just to pick up on screens email like how we communicate has changed so much over the past 60 years i think reducing the cost of communicating so much is actually problematic and creates kind of more noise in our everyday lives and it can be a kind of fake kind of work. Maybe we're over corresponding. I say bring back, not a fax, but I feel like after 10 emails a day, you should have to pay to send me one. I also love like the classic

letter writing thing. And you know, and I grew up in a time where boyfriends would write you letters and it would be very romantic and it would take a long time to receive them and you would cherish them and you would fold them into their envelope and put them in a nice box and read them again in the future kind of thing. So, you know, it's more. romantic and personal that way. So back to the letter writing, I don't know. I don't know if that's going to happen or not, but council culture. What about council culture? Like, everybody gets angry so quick and it just drives me crazy, but no? Um, I mean, at the risk of cancellation, uh, let me say, um, well, okay, here's one. You want an idea. Like we're talking of abstract ideas. All right,

here's one, social viscosity. There's a good one, right? So, like, when we do network theory, one of the properties of a network is called viscosity, and viscosity is basically how hard it is for people in one part of the network to interact with another part of the network. So it's like, you know, when you're building these things, you can specify it as a variable, right? So one of the things that we've happened in our society is that there's been a massive decline

of social viscosity, which means that it's incredibly easy now to interact with people who historically you would never have interacted with. And that means people outside your social class, people with a different education level, et cetera, et cetera. So you go on Facebook and what you have is an incredible decline of social viscosity, which most people have found in the end is a kind of unpleasant experience, right?

This is like a reason 100 years ago that people wanted to be strongly insulated from people who are outside of their social class is because it's very difficult often to interact with people you don't have a lot in common with. So part of what happened with cancer culture, was that decline of social viscosity made it incredibly easy to summon up a mob of people who are willing to condemn a particular kind of behavior.

Right? So it used to be that, you know, you'd have a fight, you know, like with your domestic partner about how you load the dishwasher and it stays at home, right? Maybe you talk to a couple friends about it. But now, you know, someone will post a picture on Facebook or on Reddit or whatever, like, you know, this is how my husband loads the dishwasher, right? Are you speaking from personal experience? but you seem kind of angry.

No, I was surprised because I saw this on the front page of Reddit with 5,000 comments. And I thought, no, it didn't have me personally, but I was struck by it because I thought, imagine coming home from work, and it's not just like your wife's mad at you about how you load the dishwasher, but like 5,000 strangers have taken her side on the matter, right?

So cancel culture is just a blown-up version of that. I know somebody, a young person in their 20s, And he went to AI to ask, how is this supposed to deal with this problem with this girlfriend? It's the answer. Oh, my God. I thought, well, what could you be told? You know, we know from Kim Kardashian that they're not always true because she failed her bar exam. So don't trust AI.

But no, I just thought, wow, he's gone to AI. And what are they telling him, you know? Probably obvious things that are correct. You think? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like how to look the dishwasher?

Yeah, but my daughter had this, so her boyfriend wouldn't let her look at his chat GPT history because he was asking Chad GPT, like, how to deal with her, right? This is recorded. Yeah, sorry. But, you know, he was like an 18-year-old guy. Like, he's missing some obvious stuff, right? Like, even I could see he was doing some stuff wrong. So, chat GP, I'm perfectly capable of believing that chat GPT was giving him good advice.

And if an 18-year-old kid is willing to listen to chat GBT on relationships. On a serious side, there are also kids who are dying of suicide because of chat GPT. So there's a, it's not all good. No, I'll just say like the general social trend. Right. Like the mere fact that people are talking to AI to ask it about personal problems is not something that causes me alarm. Okay, so let's move on from this lightning round. and we'll dig more deeply into the worst ideas of the past 60 years.

So let's start with you, Bass. What bad idea over the last six decades would you like to nominate and denigrate? Ooh, I would like to nominate the kind of undercurrent of digital narcissism that we all participate in, whether we know it or not or like it or not. We ask young people on Instagram or Facebook to sort of perform the sell. as they're trying to become someone, right? And I don't think it's helped us because I think in the back of our minds,

we're in so many situations where we're thinking, you know, what's the picture from the night out with our friends or how will this appear? Or, you know, should I say that I was thrilled to be here on stage on LinkedIn and how many people will interact with it? There's just...

Yes, you are supposed to say that. I will say that. That's the thing. I'll say it. And I don't always question it as much as I should, right? I think we're all kind of, even if we're not staring, we're glancing at ourselves in that, in that digital pool. And I think on the whole, it hasn't been helpful. Yeah, what's so truly bad about digital narcissism as an idea? What are the implications beyond the selfie stick?

I think if we go to some of that social viscosity, if we go to some of the council culture elements, there are so many more microcalculations and sort of restrictions in terms of, of how people interact or what they perform, right? The causes they align with, the symbols you put on your Twitter or your blue sky, right? We've maybe hyper politicized that version of ourselves under the guise of this will be a optimistic place. And there's such pressure, right? There's such pressure on kids to have TikTok, to do all these things.

There's pressure to be a performer, to be your PR agent, your own personal PR agent. Right, or to participate. I mean, some of the work, some work that's been done by an economist that used to be at Google showed that, you know, who we project that we are online tends to really differ from who we actually are. I might say in my, I'm not sure what kind of profile I'd say this on, but that I listen to that I'm a big fan of the Backstreet Boys, right? But if you look at my Spotify listening history, this is just an example. It's not true. But I listen to NSYNC a lot of the time, right? So you start to see those like foils, right? This kind of. of who we say we are or who we want to be as individuals instead of, I think, some of, not that they're mutually exclusive, but just some of that work of just being yourself. Jamie, what made it to the bottom of your list? Well, I'm going to flow from Vass's great comments on narcissism on tech and just look behind the tech and the people that are responsible for creating these platforms, the tech bros, the broligarchy. I'm, you know, kind of harkening back to the term toxic masculinity, which

was created around the 1980s. This is an idea that kind of expresses to me the best way in which to explain the behavior of this homogenous group that has so much power over our lives. And they've somehow gained a lot of authority around a lot of issues that are tangential to the things that they're working on. And it's all resting on their, you know, accumulation of wealth. But if you examine how they treat people that work in the workplaces that they have, they're breaking labor laws that would be expected in other workplaces, they find ways to get around rules and regulations. Why is it tech bros and why is it not, you know, why is there a gender attached to it? Because if you look at the people that are making

these decisions are predominantly white and male. So I think one of the things that I think is really important is to look at the bottom. And this is, you know, one of my favorite legal philosophers, Mary Matsuda, crafted this term looking to the bottom. And it's a philosophy that looks to the impact of decisions and regulation and lawmaking and structures in our societies and how does it impact the people who are unseen and sometimes invisible in our society. And if we look to the bottom, we see media stories around the treatment of Amazon distribution. workers or the treatment of people who are, you know, delivering our packages and how, you know, going to the washroom is a luxury. And they're engineering us. That's what makes me most nervous

about the tech pros, is that they're engineering us in ways that I don't know, but it's, I know it's happening. Any of you thoughts on tech pros? Some of my best friends are tech bros, so I can't really comment on that. I'll just say they don't know what they're doing. Okay, so let's move on now from the tech bros, even though they're your friends. And so, Joe, I know you've got an umbrella term for a school of thought that you don't much care for. What is it, pray tell? I was going to say, like, what I was thinking about, like, the worst ideas. I mean, again, that's sort of too easy.

I mean, there's lots of bad. The cultural revolution wasn't such a great idea. You know, there's all kinds of things weren't great ideas. So I was kind of, I was thinking about things that have been overdone a little bit, right? So there were ideas that were, like, good, but then we overdid it. And so one of them was just the concept of social critique and of criticism. So, like, in universities, this has been the case for a really long time that, like, no matter how cool your field of study is, it's cooler if you stick the word critical in front of it.

And so the weirdest one was the school of the science of genocide studies, which is a significant discipline. And then people decided to become, like, critical genocide studies. And I'm like, well, what are the other people doing? But anyhow, so there's been, as everyone knows, there's been like critique has been all the rage for the entire 60-year period, right? And so I was raised to question authority. And the suggestion was that that's a real danger that we all have to worry about being trapped by just sort of accepting the line that we're told about why the world is the way it is. And we have to struggle to achieve critique. But I think we've clearly tipped into a realm of over-critique.

I mean, what's left? Like, what hasn't been criticized, right? If you look also at the way in which we're educating students, we're teaching them to think critically. And that's been a dogma, right, since I was a kid, is that we have to teach people to think critically. But what exactly, I mean, let's think critically about what it means to teach people to think critically, right? Like, teaching people to think critically seems to get them to repeat exactly the same complaints about society that we've heard a million times before. So if you ask people, what's wrong with society, they can tell you exactly what's wrong with society. but if you ask them like, okay, why is it that way?

Or like, why hasn't that problem been fixed? Like, it seems like it shouldn't be too hard. They've never studied that question, right? Like, similarly, I can turn on CBC radio and I can hear a lot of complaints and critique about Canadian society, but seldom do I hear anyone explaining to me why it is that good-faced efforts to address certain kinds of problems have nevertheless proven difficult, right?

Like, why there are tough nuts to crack out there? What are the trade-offs that are involved when we try to fix things and so forth, right? So I think a lot of critique has become almost facile where we can list these things, but we don't really understand then why, despite the fact that everyone's been complaining about stuff for the last 60 years, why it is that certain kinds of problems are persistent. Ooh, very good, very good. I won't critique that. I'll just say, good, good. Okay, so now we're... Not to be patronizing, but I'm genuinely surprised that that got applause.

Like, thanks. I'm not the only person who thought this. That's really great. Okay, so Jamie, you had another bad idea. I mean, it was a good bad idea. The one that related to your occupation is immigration lawyer. What was that? I'm going to critique, as Joe has asked us not to do so much.

But looking at the border and to kind of critique the stickiness or the permanency of the idea of the border. and, you know, kind of invite us to think a little bit more about what it would look like in a society or in the world if we were to imagine open borders. And I know that seems so wild to think of this kind of idea. But I'll give you two examples of ways in which I think borders have been very harmful to our society and not just at the border, but harmful writ large. And the first is, you know, I recently discovered that the Chinese Exclusion Act, which came into play in 19. In Canada and earlier in the United States, the idea of excluding people by race ignited ideas about how do we identify these people to ensure we can exclude them. And the technology of using photographs like passport photos came about through this system of trying to identify people by race and then excluding them outright from coming to Canada or for staying or being admitted to Canada.

And so this, it's very ubiquitous now. We see passport photos in everyone's passport. We see identification now, like driver's license with photos on them. And this was technology used to identify, but survey and control populations. And I think we kind of take it for granted that this technology has always been around. But, you know, it begs the question of how identification itself has been used to not only exclude people, but identify them and control them. And we see this in many places in the world where other information can be tagged with these photographs and deployed against people. The very nature of asking

people to identify themselves is taken for granted and seen as a proper way to engage with enforcement. But Jamie, would you see, what would you imagine in place of borders as they are presently configured then? I think one of the ways in which we can imagine is to say, What are the problems that the borders trying to address and to address the root causes of that? For example, a lot of people say, oh, this would open the floodgates of migrants coming from, you know, war zones, from humanitarian crises. And, you know, it would force us to think about addressing these issues in more concrete ways. So one of the things I think that borders have done very dangerously is characterize people as illegal, characterize the movement of people as illegal. And I think that's a legal fiction.

And I mean, 9-11 created a lot of border security measures that we now take for granted and accept. The research has shown is not really made travel or borders safer, but have actually made it more harmful and actually gives us reason to racially profile and target and label people as terrorist criminals and illegals. So I think there's a lot to be said about critiquing the border and the ways in which technology is being tested that is a laboratory site for a lot of the new technology that we're going to be seeing used by police in our communities or by institutions in the way that we survey and control our populations. Vass, what's your next bad idea?

Have you ever watched a scary movie and then a really scary part comes and you just sort of close your eyes and wait for it to be over? That's not the idea, but that's kind of what we've intentionally done when it comes to thinking about the role of the state vis-a-vis regulation. In 1999, the United States took a very particular stance. They put it in writing, permissionless innovation. It didn't catch on as a catchphrase, but they decided we are going to let that spaghetti get at the wall.

Let's see what happens. Close your eyes. We reduced the role of the state. state in our everyday lives. And we echoed that in Canada, right? So back to those kind of, you know, you were joking and sort of saying trickle down economics, but this kind of ongoing conversation about, you know, is the role of the state inherently kind of in opposition to this thing we all crave and want for the country and marvel at innovation? Do we need to get out of the way? And I think what we did is we kind of created a bit of a almost self-hating

government, right, where instead of re-articulating the role of the state in terms of stimulating and making new markets and putting in those guardrails, I think this ties into some of Jamie's points about not liking the tech bros. What do we resent about that? Is that I think a lot of the other elements that I was reflecting on in terms of these, you know, bad ideas that we've got a ditch, dynamic pricing, right? An economist's wet dream, nightmare for everyone else. Loyalty programs we're supposed to reward our devotion. They've built corporate surveillance empires and state. That's something I think we need to get rid of because sometimes I worry that we're still doing it. And we're just hoping this thing called innovation will be inherently good

for everyone. And that's not necessarily the case. And it historically has not been the case. Thank you. Joe, briefly, some bad ideas. We're still on bad ideas? You just give me a couple and then we'll wrap it up. A couple more bad ideas. Mine was a bad one. Like populism was bad ideas. idea. It's not a super new bad idea, but that was a bad idea. I think open boarders is a bad idea. Smart devices, honestly. It's a toaster. My God. Yeah. I mean, internet of things wasn't so great. Do you don't like hyper-scepticism? You always sort of talked about that. Yeah. Okay. So beyond that, everything's good, right?

I don't want to be curmudgeonly. Yeah, that's all I can think of all. That's okay. I think we need to move into the light. So I'm just going to do a quick mid-show here. So you're listening to the last episode in our special series marking the 60th anniversary of ideas. I'm Mary Link, sitting in for Nala Ayyad.

We're talking about the best and worst ideas in the last 60 years and chewing over, which may be the most important over the next six years. decades. I'm joined by lawyer Jamie Liu, philosopher Joe Heath, and public policy designer Vass Bednar. 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 spec 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 spec savers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at specksavers.cavers.capsavers.caiens are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.ca 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.com. Okay, we're going to the light. So, uh, we'll kick off. with this lightning round of good ideas from the last six decades starting ready set go joe good ideas well i mean so what i was thinking of good ideas i thought it'd be good to have ones that that i thought were bad ideas and then i decided that i was wrong about um and so one of the ones i have so i'm a philosophy professor right so one of them was just liberalism so when i was young and i

read the sort of boring classics of liberal political philosophy like john stuart mill i thought like everything he said was wrong. And then growing up and learning more has been nothing but a humiliating climb down of that and realizing that he was right about most things. And so liberalism was kind of a sleeper sleeper hit of the late 20th century. So in the early 20th century, it was like dead as disco, right? Like nobody was a liberal. Well, you try to teach it. You try to find a book written between 1900 and 1950 and there's like no books, right? So everyone was either like a communist or a fascist. And no one had anything good to say about liberalism. And then it made this sort of huge comeback. And what people don't like about liberalism,

and of course, it's still like controversial, all these debates about cancel culture and where's the due process, right? Like those are liberal concerns, right? So liberalism is unattractive to the young in particular because it's explicitly a second best political philosophy. So it says like instead of having this ideal world in which we're all going to, you know, love each other and share values and everyone's only going to say nice things and everything's going to be perfect. We have to recognize the fact that people disagree, people are obnoxious, people have whatever, right? And so instead of having this perfect community, we're just going to try to specify some rules so that we can all get along with each other. And so that's what I mean

by second best. And so it's not exciting. And yet it kind of persists and every generation learns that same lesson, which is that they have this sort of hugely ambitious project that they'd like to have carried out. And then it generates a ton of conflict. And it generates a huge blowback. And then they say, oh, well, maybe it wasn't such a bad idea just to have some rules that we all respect. So that's why I think liberalism is kind of a sleeper success story. Is it lightning round that we're doing right now? Oh, sorry. You're short with the other rounds? No, it was a very good answer. What they call Deformation Professionale.

Okay, yes. Bass. I'll give you two quick ones. They will be quick, I promise. So I thought of this. I love how Joe thought of it as like, you changed your mind on something. I thought of this, like, you know, good ideas or interesting ideas that kind of faded away or like didn't really get their due. Does anyone remember when we were going to have free public Wi-Fi everywhere? Yeah, good.

I got a murmur. Everyone else is getting claps, but I got a murmur. I'll take it. You know, we sort of flirted with that. traumatized, okay, we didn't get us. We sort of flirted with that. And then, you know, we have interesting kind of more localized experiments with municipal broadband, et cetera. But we never really got there.

We sort of lost the vision. And then something else that I actually think got canceled, which should be uncanceled, honestly, is the girl boss. Like, bring back girl boss. What? Because I think in this moment. You define that for me? Says the girl boss. So I think that in this moment where we're seeing pressures through social media around like tradwife stuff,

and the fact that we had this trope that maybe you could argue was a foil to kind of the tech bro and probably is highly problematic and we could critique in class because of the word girl, right? I think I think it's worth looking at that kind of moment in history and why it worked for the period of time that it did and why we were so happy to. abandon it in, you know, a moment where we're moving away from DEI, where we're not always making great progress on wage parity, these sorts of things. I think it's important. And you're hearing people say, yeah, I didn't mind it. And you're right. I feel that maybe I did recently enter a girl boss error. And I'm just like, you're not even allowed anymore. Like, you're just not. Any sort of... I have a genuine lightning one, super fast. Okay, good. No, you don't be that fast. The GST.

Admit it. Oh, yeah. Admit it. CBC audience. It was a good idea. Admit it. Maruni was right. Yeah.

It was a good idea. Okay. Hotter take. Free trade. So GST, I thought, was a good idea from the get-go. I mean, anyone who does wonky stuff knows that a VAT is a superior form of taxation. But free trade, I thought, was going to be terrible for Canada, because I'm a member of the Laurentian elite. So, you know, the left-wing.

cultural establishment of Canada was convinced that free trade was going to be like the death of the economy of cultural production in this country, whatever, right? It was going to be a terrible catastrophe. It was not a catastrophe the way we thought. And in particular, it didn't lead to the race to the bottom in things like labor standards, pressure on our health care system and stuff like. We had like Toyota open a factory in Canada because the workers had health care, right, as a competitive advantage for Canada. We had the movie industry. moving to BC and stuff like that. I mean, like, you know, it did not unfold the way people were claiming it was going to unfold.

And in retrospect, you know, even now with a capricious U.S. president imposing tariffs on us on a whim, the free trade agreement is still offering us, like, protection, like a degree of protection against that, because, you know, certain goods covered by free trade are exempt from that, right? And so that, I, you know, that was one I had to change my mind on money. It simply wasn't as bad an idea as John Turner thought it was. I mean, if only the U.S. thought the rule of law was still a really good idea. Yeah. Okay, so let's get deeper. Joe. Well, what I had was sort of, there's been this big discussion about abundance and economic growth and green energy and stuff.

So I was going to say growth as well was kind of a sleeper in that, you know, so I was born for, you know, so I was born for, five years before the publication of those of you who are a bit older will remember the limits to growth, which predicted that all economic growth was going to end by 1990 and that the human population would be decimated and so forth. And so, and people have been saying similar of things ever since, right? But so throughout my entire life, people have been forecasting and into growth and saying that the kind of changes that you see going on in Western societies can't possibly continue. And yet they continued. And I mean, I'm always just struck by this. I mean, I'm looking around just like how much wealthier Canada is as a society than the

country that I was born in. And, you know, and that that has had all kinds of negative consequences, but it's had all kinds of positive consequences as well. So right now, you know, the big climate change summit is going on in Brazil. And one of the things that people are having to cope with, I mean, as a kind of communications issue, is that the really, really negative scenarios that were the basis of climate forecasting over the last 20 years, like the worst of those scenarios clearly now is not going to happen. And a lot of people think that the second worst scenario is also not going to happen, in part because of how well the transition to renewable energy is going. That's not to say that climate change is not a serious problem. I didn't hear it was so

jolly on that matter. So this is why it's a difficult communication. I come to Nova Scotia where there's no water, but okay, keep going. It's a difficult communications problem because it's still a very, very serious problem. Yes. And so now people are having to adjust a little bit their political messaging on that question, right? And it's complicated. But that's just an example of, like, it's very easy to kind of

pooh-poo technological change, innovation, green energy, things like that, right? But those have actually had a discernible impact on this problem. Bass, what's the one idea that kind of got passed over and should really be given a proper shot? Okay, here's

one that got kind of trash and went went totally off the rails, but I think had more promise and is worth revisiting. Wait for it. The sharing economy. The sharing economy was like, I think that on the, on the, just on the down of our techno-optimism, right? But the sharing economy had a vision for a future where more infrastructures or large purchases were part of things like tool libraries, right? Or, you know, not everyone on the street needs a snowblower. Nobody needs a snowblower. You know, these, you know, and And we see glimmers of it now. We see, you know, we're in Toronto.

Toronto has an excellent bike share program. You could argue, okay, you know, you're still paying to access it. You're still paying a premium. That's true of things like tool libraries. But we just sort of lost the vision for what else and where that could be. You know, we don't have toy libraries for children's toys and infrastructures. Instead, to sort of share those things, instead, we've still commodified through like Facebook marketplace, right?

and focus on acquisition or with, you know, those snoo bassinets, companies make it harder to sort of pass those on to somebody else by kind of locking you out of the kind of software, the subscription to the software, which is also totally an idea we could have gone to, like, get rid of that. I think it's worth thinking of again as we're in a cost of living crisis and as we're trying to figure out how do we want to come together as Canadians? because buying Canadians sort of worked for a little bit and our economic nationalism was like almost brutally consumerist, right?

But it reminded us that we have power and we saw that power again when people made particular decisions about their summer travel and now we'll see it with holiday travel. But like, who do we want to be? And do we have to buy everything? And could we share more in kind of more structured ways? I actually think it's really promising. You know, it makes me think of the co-op movement, which, you know, began Father Cody and Moses Cody in Nova Scotia.

And there used to be grocery stores all throughout Nova Scotia of cooperative. And there's only maybe one or two, just a few left. And I wonder why, what happened? Well, I mean, Canada used to think more about having a public competitor in the mix, right? That's actually more a part of our heritage. And that could be the case going forward, especially as we're talking about digital infrastructures or sovereign cloud, right? To what extent are we going to build something or kind of build these digital rails that are truly maybe owned and operated by the state? Or is this going to be more of a kind of procurement choice?

The whole idea of AI, too, is supposed to be publicly shared too. And now it's being more commodified to when you see. Listen, AI, every product you want to experience online. I was talking about adding you on LinkedIn. LinkedIn just decided that all your material can be used to train their, all your behavioral data to, their AI systems. They're assuming that it's opt in by default. If you do opt out, it's many clicks to do that. All the past years of that information stay in their model, right?

You can't pull that out. So this idea of implied consent, right, maybe goes back to maybe that tech bro attitude too, but also a weakened kind of diminished self-hating state that sees these things, happening in plain sight. It doesn't step up for people. Jamie, I happen to know you have a special regard for something you could call the art of hospitality. Yeah. So I think one of the things that's tied to my research is just thinking about when we travel, you know, this kind of thing came around in the 1980s about responsible tourism and corporate social responsibility and things like that. And I think One of the things that we forget is that, you know, travel and the movement of people is a business, right?

And I spent some time in Hawaii and looking at the harm of the tourism industry there, for example, and the Hawaiian concept of Kuliana, which means responsibility, being mindful of the kind of person that you're going to be while you're visiting a place. And I often think this is tied to the ideas of, like, decolonization and reconciliation and reconciliation. and how many of us are guests on the lands that we are acknowledging that we're on and, you know, and thinking about how we're all in some ways tourists in many different facets of our lives. And this movement of just not extracting as we travel, as we are present in different places, shopping local, being mindful about where we shop, who we give our money to. And I think the power dynamics in that, I mean, the famous.

The show of White Lotus really has us interrogating, you know, the power dynamics and plane who benefits from certain aspects of the tourism industry and who doesn't. And why is it that certain things like particular performances of cultural dances and things like that might be consumable, but in other ways why certain communities are not benefiting from the industries that are part of this extractive practice? Joe, the promise of green energy often seems to never completely take hold. But I've been told that within your substack, you have a different take. Well, so my kids are tired of hearing about this, but I just got solar panels put on my house.

And it's like, they're way more fun than I thought they would be. It all started because the power goes out I live in the country And the power goes out a lot So I wanted to get a backup So I contemplated a generator And then realized that a battery backup system Is actually not that much more expensive

So then I was like, okay Well, in for a dollar, in for a dime Or more like in whatever It was very expensive But so I got the full thing EV battery backup solar panels They're just like pets And I have this little app

It's like your little tomogachi Yeah But yeah you can look at your panels And see how they're doing At what time a day you know like right now it's terrible they have a foot of snow on them they produce something like three watts of power all day um but on like a sunny day they like blast that out power and it's like woo right i would hate it if you were competing with your solar panel friends and it was like a

dashboard and you like got stressed yeah and if it became too much part of my personality yeah don't you have something about how much the sun in terms of the energy compared to what we produce well i was really shocked at how much just a little cloud like um why watching it and like a little cloud goes by and all of a sudden, they stop producing and I'm like, get another way and then they come back to life. It's not quite like them, but I should say, one thing about it is that it changed my attitude towards electricity and it made me realize, well, I mean, so I, you know, grew up in a home where we always turned off the lights and we were like very, very conscious of not wasting

electricity. And so I internalized like a whole sort of system of guilt around consumption that a lot lot of it was based on the fact that it was both expensive and polluting. And so then I realized suddenly when you have, like, as much free energy as you like, it's freeing in a way that you realize that it's almost kind of, you realize you had these Freudian inhibitions about the pleasures of using power. And now it feels like an illicit pleasure to like, you know, I'm saying, I'm just going to put the air conditioner on it. Like, you know, I don't care if it's 635 and the price of power doesn't go down until 7. You know, because I'm saying, I'm just going to put the air conditioner on it. Like, like, you know, I'm

I want to be cool, right? Like, as in physically cool. Or putting on a heater or leaving you on the lights, whatever, whatever, right? Turn the dryer on. So I actually found it kind of transformative, like recognizing that, you know, there is like a certain, you know, element of environmentalism that is about inner anxiety, about the pleasure of being at ease and about being wealthy and so forth. And suddenly you have green energy, which there's simply no reason to feel guilty about consuming.

that you then realize how much of your ordinary attitudes towards consumption were based on perhaps some unhealthy inhibitions. So if we could actually harness the sun to speak, at least the power from the sun, the energy from the sun, how free would we be? Quite free. So, I mean, not to be professorial, but so I teach a class on this. And so all human energy consumption combined is 20 terawatts. And at any given time, the sun is striking the earth with 150,000 terawatts of power.

In other words, like, the solar budget... You mean kilowatts to terawatts? Terawatts is like, I don't know, like a lot more than a kilowatt. I know. I looked it up. It's one billion more. It's one billion more. Is it 1,000 or a million more? No, 1 billion more. Yeah, 1 billion more. A terawatt's 1 billion more than a kilowatt hour. There you go.

The point is that the solar budget is just so vastly, vastly exceeds human needs, right? Like all plants combined capture only 150 terawatts. I hope that you know that. And so, like, it's like this tiny fraction of what's available. And so when you start thinking about limits to growth, I mean, if you look at terrestrial resources, there are constraints. But if you look at the solar budget as what we're tapping into directly, it's like so vastly exceeds human needs. The ability to tap that in an efficient way and make it available would just be utterly transformative. Well, why aren't we?

Because you can't commodify. We can't commodify this sun that, you know, it's not like something you can have in your dig out on your backyard? Like what? Well, we weren't doing it for a while because fossil fuel were also, fossil fuels were also kind of magic, right? Like that is, like, oil has an incredible energy density. So when people first started trying to replace fossil fuels with batteries, you saw what a great gift fossil fuel was.

I mean, remember, I don't remember, like, you know, like laptop batteries used to last like two hours or whatever. And there was some company who invented, like, a butane stick that you could, like, stick, like they used to use it for like, you know, hairdriers and stuff. So you could put a butane stick in your laptop and it would run for like a month or something like that. Like it was ridiculous. Like it was completely

dangerous and might light on fire, right? But the amount of power in a little stick of butene just like vastly exceeded what was in batteries at the time, right? So part of the reason we didn't invest in this stuff was because fossil fuels were like cheap and plentiful and so on, right? And that's why things like a carbon tax

are important in order to adjust prices in order to incentivize people, to, you know, to do research into green energy. So it's like all of this is technologically really complicated. But when you start to see what the future could look like, it's actually quite promising. You know, we were talking about earlier about iPhones and the way it captures our attention and our children and everything. But also, there are also smartphones kind of a great idea at the same time, I mean, or just the internet itself. how we can access knowledge.

Do you see that too? That's a good idea? Can it be both a good and bad idea? Potentially. I guess I would say, I think, you know, one of the best ideas that has happened in the modern era

is this concept of human rights and how that idea has really grown and developed and expanded. And, you know, the early human rights international law conventions that have now been brought into many places in domestic law have expanded to not just

political and civil rights, but also socioeconomic rights. And I mean, you see concepts like harm reduction, like housing first, the right to housing. You see concepts like, you know, harm reduction in addressing drug addiction. You see really interesting movements about recognizing bodies of water as persons in legal discourse. Recently in Canada, there's a river in Quebec called the Mac Pie River, and that has recently been recognized as a person, recognizing, you know, the ideas that indigenous legal traditions and transferring that into a rights discourse. So I think there's some really exciting movements and ideas that comes from the human rights discourse. And if you marry that with our ideas about trying to decolonize and the movements for reconciliation, I think

there's a lot of exciting ideas that could come from that. And not just be performative. One of the beautiful things about the human rights movement is that it is people-driven, right? All of the rights that have been recognized in law come from a person that is a non-lawyer, an everyday person who has experienced a wrong and demanded something to be corrected or demanded change and a different way of looking at our world. People have really grabbed hold to it. It's changed the way we think about our relationships. it has given way to same-sex marriage,

it has redefined families. You know, there's no part of our life today that has not been touched by human rights. And I think it's an important time now to reinvigorate that as we're talking about AI and keeping checks and balances on the things that should not be accepted as inevitable or just because it happens to be decided by a small group of wealthy people.

And I think human rights will be the tool that we're going to be using to keep these people in check. That was very, very well good. Sorry, I'm just, go ahead. Oh, sorry, Vass, go ahead. Don't be sorry. That's one of the things that's got to go. I'm Canadian.

And that's it. Okay, look, I want to go to bat for public policy and the role of the state, right? I kind of want, you know, the kind of state that writes you a romantic letter and puts it in the mail, okay? Enrique Anglesias, I could be your hero baby. Like, public policy is the software of society.

So we want a state that reflects reality. Yes, things are changing. Yes, there are new technologies. Yes, they're exciting. But also, who remembers the hit song from Ricky Jay, no means no, no is a full sentence. Algorithms that inflate the price of rent. We could say, no, we don't want to have that.

We don't need to watch it unravel or close our eyes because it's the scary part and pretend that it's going to be something that's innovative. So that's something that I think needs to be revisited. Well, that was a very meaty and fun discussion on bad and good. And how about this good idea, that ideas will continue to thrive for another 60 years? I'd like to thank our three panelists tonight, University of Ottawa, lawyer and novelist, Jamie Liu. University of Toronto philosopher Joe Heath and the Canadian Shield Institute's Vass Bednar

The Best and Worst Ideas of the last 60 years. the final episode in our special series marking our 60th anniversary. You can check out photos of our anniversary bash on our website, cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. Special, special thanks to Ideas producer Mary Link for pinch hitting for me. And to the ever-helpful folks at the Isabel Bader Theater, as well as to Karen Chichikiluk, who spearheaded all the behind-the-scenes production.

Our audio technician was Sam McNulty. And the hardworking and hard-thinking people who bring you ideas five times a week are web producer Lisa Ayuso, episode producers, Annie Bender, Donna Dingwall, Sean Foley, Lisa Godfrey, Pauline Holdsworth, Tom Howell, Matthew Lazen Rider,

Elisa Siegel, and Chris Watts, Our senior producer is Nikola Lukshic. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly and I Nala Ayyad. Stay tuned for the next 60 years. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.