The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - A Wednesday Endbits Special

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

One of our loyal listeners wrote in the other day suggesting that instead of our regular Wednesday encore episode that we try a program just of endbits. Enbits have been a popular part of our program over the last few years to fill out shorter programs. So, maybe once a month might be possible as a program on its own? Interesting idea so we decided why not?  

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away. It's the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday, and you know what that means? Wednesday means Encore edition, except for this week. We're going to try something a little different. It's just a one-off. It's just an experiment.

And it was suggested by a listener to have at least an occasional Wednesday that we call a kind of special Wednesday end bits. special. So that's what we're going to try today. And we'll try it right after this. And hello there. Welcome to Wednesday. Peter Mansbridge here.

This is the first of a test, as I said in the T's top. Kind of a Wednesday end bit special. Now, for those of you who are new to the bridge and wondering, what's an end bit? Well, over the last couple of years, sometimes to fill out a program, I ran what I called an end bit. A story that I found interesting that I'd seen on the wires somewhere. Could have been anywhere in the world. And I'd read it.

I'd tell you where it came from, who wrote it. and what it said, and occasionally I have a few comments about it. And it seems that for some people, they kind of liked NBits. So that's the suggestion. Wednesdays which I take off, because here in my retirement,

the old pensioner needs the odd day off. But we'll throw this together and see, we'll see how it works. for an occasional program. But for the most part, Wednesdays will remain an encore edition where we'll run, you know, good bridge programs from the past. So that's what an NBit is. And who compiles these?

Well, my friend, my co-author, Mark Bulguch. You know, Mark, we've written a couple of books together. Mark does a lot of the heavy lifting, most of the heavy lifting on our books. But we've worked together for years. I think we started working together in kind of somewhere around the early to mid-80s. Mark had been in Montreal. I'd been in Ottawa and Winnipeg and Regina. So I had a fair degree of experience.

Mark had a lot of experience out of Montreal through, you know, some very heady news days. Graduate, I believe, of the Carlton School of Journalism. I may have that wrong, but I think that's right. And Mark is a terrific writer and a terrific journalist. And he, like me, is retired now from his CBC days. He still does a lot of work. On occasion for the CBC, he works a lot on their Olympic programs, and we'll be working on the next one, which is in, what, Italy coming up this winter.

I don't think he gets to go to Italy, but he gets to work a lot on the program. But Mark is the one who loves looking through the day's news and looking for those odd quirky stories as well as the major ones. And when he sees something that he thinks I'd like and he knows the kind of things I'd like, he sends it along as a potential end bit for the week. So I'm looking at the first four he sent

for this first week of the new season of the bridge. And we're going to see what I can make out of this. terms of a program okay so let's get started they're in no particular order so they're not you know they're not sort of classified by hey this is the most important one down to the least important one they're just the role important because they're interesting so the first one comes from the guardian and the headline is is burner phones, wiped socials, the extreme precautions for visitors to Trump's America. Now, as Canadians, we know all about this.

Because we've seen it, for those of us who have traveled to the U.S. so far this year, and I've done one trip into the U.S., and I tell you, I was, I spent a lot of time preparing for that trip because I'd heard all these horror stories as well. So I'm not sure how many of you have done that. Clearly, travel to the U.S. is way down, just like buying U.S. products, is way down. You heard yesterday, was it James Moore, who was saying the things he'd heard in car lots,

that people are saying, which of these cars, these new cars, was made in Canada because I don't want anything that was made in the States. So you've got to break it down for me. Which of these particular cars was made in Canada,

assembled in Canada. And that's how people were, at least people in that car lot, were making their decisions. So we know how extreme the feelings have been on the part of Canadians this year, ever since Trump started his, It's not just the tariff thing.

It's all the insults. You know, the 51st state crap. Calling whoever the prime minister was a governor. That kind of stuff. That's really irritated people. And as we said yesterday, I think it's a generational thing. I think it's going to take a long time for Canadians to get over this, no matter what happens.

Okay. Back to the article. Burner phones, wipe socials, the extreme precautions for visitors to Trump's America. The story is written by Josie Harvey in The Guardian. It was written last week. So I'm going to read part of it. It'll get us into this. was set to bring a show to New York City's fringe festival this year but pulled the plug a few weeks out after 35 years of traveling to the United States

he says he no longer feels safe making the trip the fact that we're being evaluated for our opinions entering a country that at least until very recently purported to be an example of democracy Yeah, there are things that make me highly uncomfortable, said Seri, a Canadian performer and attorney. You're left thinking that you don't want to leave evidence of bad opinions on your person.

Seri is among a substantial cohort of foreign nationals reconsidering travel to the U.S. under the Trump administration after troubling reports of visitors facing intense scrutiny and detention upon their arrival. Now, that's the same kind of stuff I was hearing, too, when I was, I'm trying to remember when it was. I think it was in April or May, I had a speech to a group of concerned people who wanted a better understanding of what was happening between Canada and the U.S. and the speech was in Miami. So I kind of wavered initially, and I thought, oh, these people are serious, they won't understand as little as I can explain.

So I decided to agree to it. However, then I went through the whole process that clearly this fella, Sari, was going through as well. How do you prepare for a trip like that? So, you know, friends of mine said, you know, whatever you do, don't take your laptop with you because they could go through it and see everything you've ever written or, in my case, said, because I have recordings on those laptops, about Trump, about the U.S. administration, about the whole tariffs issue, all of that. And they said, don't take your phone. Take a, you know, buy a burner phone. You know, basically phone you can throw away.

So I thought, really, really? Am I going to do all that? I mean, I've traveled to the States. I don't know. It seems like hundreds of times in my career. And those are things you never thought about. But, clearly. I was thinking about it earlier this year,

and I would think about it today if I was asked to go down to the States to give a speech or do whatever. Now, I'm not going to pretend that everybody who goes to the States goes through this process of having their phone check, their laptop check, looking in their bags,

reading notes, whatever. But some could. So I got a different phone that had no past on it, no history. I did not take my laptop. And off I went. Now, as it turned out in my case, when I got to Customs, I was in and out in a matter of seconds. So there was no issue. But there could have been, right?

Let me get back to the same. this article a little bit. More than a dozen countries, once again this is from the Guardian, more than a dozen countries have updated their travel guidance to the U.S. In Australia and Canada, government advisories were changed to specifically mention the potential for electronic device searches.

On the advice of various experts, people are locking down social media, deleting photos, and private messages, removing facial recognition, or even traveling with burner phones to protect themselves. In Canada, multiple public institutions have urged employees to avoid travel to the U.S. and at least one reportedly told staff to leave their usual devices at home and bring a second device with limited personal information instead. That's what I did. Everybody feels guilty, but they don't know exactly what they're guilty of, said Heather Siegel, founding partner of Siegel Immigration Law in Toronto, describing the influx of concerns she's been hearing.

Did I do something wrong? Is there something on me? Did I say something that's going to be a problem? These are the kind of questions a lot of people are asking themselves. For Heather Siegel, she advised travelers to assess their risk appetite by reviewing both the private data stored on their devices and any information about them that's publicly accessible and to consider what measures to take accordingly. And that's a good thing to be doing. You know, what information is available on you? If you punch in my name, you see all kinds of stuff. some of it's even true.

But like a lot of things, there's a lot of disinformation and misinformation out there. I look at my Wikipedia profile. And there's a good chunk of it that is totally made up by somebody. It's got nothing to do with me. And I know you can change it, and it's been attempted to be changed more than a few times in the last 20 years, but I just said at a certain point, you just say to hell with it.

Anyway, it's kind of out there stuff, and anybody can see it and make their decisions based on it. I'm not going to read this whole article, as good as it is. You can find it on The Guardian. I gave you the title. Let me just read one little bit more. U.S. Customs and Border Protection at CBP has brought, broad powers to search devices with minimal justification.

Travelers can refuse to comply, but non-citizens risk being denied entry. And we've heard about that happening. Somebody say, no, you can't look at my phone or my laptop. And they say, fine, you can't come into our country. CBP data shows such searches are rare last year just over 47,000 out of 400,000. 120 million international travelers had their devices examined. This year's figure show a significant increase with the third quarter of 2025, reflecting an uptick in electronic device searches higher than any single quarter since 2018

when available data begins. Anecdotally, it seems like these searches have been increasing, and I think the reason why that is true undoubtedly, I think they are more targeted than before, said Tom McBrine counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. It seems like they are targeting people who they just don't generally like politically. So there you go. We've all heard about this. And if you believe the Guardian and the people they've talked to,

It's true. It does happen. It's rare. Still, you heard the figures there. But still, you want to take a chance? Okay, that's item one in this Wednesday, end bit special. Here's item two. This comes from

A website called, I'll get it right here, Zockelopublicsquare.org. I hadn't heard about this before, but Mark found it. It seems legitimate. Well, it is legitimate. Here's the headline. What happens when you trade doom scrolling, for hope scrolling.

Our phones have become misery machines. Sharing positive news can change that. Okay. This is written for the public square.org by Jennifer Mercease, M-E-R-C-I-E-C-A, M-C-I-E-C-A, M-S-E-S-E-E-S-A. And she wrote that, this summer. This is interesting.

You know, I know we, a lot of us tend to do this. I've talked about this before, especially the lying in bed looking at your phone when you can't sleep. And then when you start reading your phone, you really can't sleep. So let's read it on a little bit into this article and see what we can learn from it.

My students tell me that they don't sleep. They stay up all night, endlessly scrolling their social media feeds. Their attention has been captured, but not by anything in particular. Not really, they say. Like a lot of us, my students are chronic doom-scrollers. And like a lot of us, they're miserable as a result. Doom-scrolling, which psychologists define as the compulsive act of endlessly scrolling through negative or distressing news on social media,

often leading to heightened anxiety or stress, turns our phones into misery machines, and those misery machines are hard to turn off by design. So this is what I learned about that in this article. Jennifer Marceas, by the way, is a contributing editor to this website. She's also a teacher, and that's why she's talking about her students and doom scrolling. So listen to this about how hard it is to turn these machines off in the middle of the night, and that's by design.

Developers, this is the claimant. the article. Developers engineer our phones and apps to capture and keep our attention to make us lose time by mindlessly moving from app to app. This design attacks us where we're most vulnerable by taking advantage of our innate need to scan our environment for threats. The apps and their algorithms are very efficient at exploiting the way that negative news, polarized outrage, and other negative emotions attract and keep our attention. Spending all of that time on our misery machines cultivates our reality,

making us think that the world itself is miserable, which is what media scholars like George Gerbner call Mean World Syndrome. Those of us who are heavy media users tend to have a distorted view of how dangerous the world is, often for the worse. Consuming miserable content leads us to feeling miserable about the state of the world, which makes us more likely to scan our environment for threats,

and so we continue to doomscroll. It's a win, win, win situation for the misery machines and a lose, lose, lose situation for us. So is there an answer? Well, the answer in this lengthy article, and I'm not going to read it all. is this. Instead of doom scrolling, we should hope scroll, looking for positive news, not threats. I asked my communication and journalism students to try it this year by creating class social media accounts devoted to sharing positive news.

Our hope scroll accounts didn't go viral. Our posts hardly. got any attention at all. The engagement with our accounts across all social media platforms was so pathetic, in fact, that I considered canceling the assignment. Stories of progress and problem solving don't get a lot of attention or engagement. That's depressing. But what my students told me about their experience surprised me and gave me hope. My students reported that they didn't care about the attention and engagement metrics. They felt that spending time intentionally seeking out solutions, journalism, about environmental problems being solved, human health and welfare advances, discussions, or sorry, diseases being eradicated, renewable energy

adoption rates, and advances in childhood education. And more. Was itself joyful? So a little bit of hope scrolling in spite of everything else. Interesting. So the next time you're falling asleep, ignore that distressing story. Look for the hopeful story.

They do exist. They're out there. There may not be anywhere near as much. many of them, as there are ones that fit the doom scrolling pattern. So maybe that's the answer. I don't know. Okay. Hey, we're going to take a break.

We're going to take a break in this Wednesday episode of our N-Bit special, our Wednesday in-bit special. We'll be right back after this. And welcome back. And welcome back. You're listening to, well, something a little different for Wednesdays. Wednesdays will still be the main home for our encore editions of the bridge.

But we're trying something out. Add a suggestion of one of our listeners to do some in-bit stuff, do an end-bit special on the odd Wednesday. So we're looking at it today as a test. We'll see how it goes. We'll see what you have to say about it, if anything. It does mean a little more work for me, but hey, that's okay. Why not?

And you're listening on Series X-M, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite. podcast platform. Keep in mind, tomorrow is your turn and the random ranter Friday still to come with Good Talk, Sonteli Baron Bruce Anderson. I'll give you the update on your turn a little later.

Okay. Let's move on to our next. Next one. And this is kind of scary. My initial thought when I read this was, I don't know, this doesn't really fit. But then when I realized who was saying it, I thought, oh, maybe we better listen to this.

The headline, in Archive Today. Okay. Archive today. What's the proper? It was picked up by the Daily Mail. But it's in Archive Today. Archive. Dot Today. I'm sure you can find it.

There have been a lot of comments already. We're up into four figures from people who've read this. I feel one way or the other about it. It's written by a TV critic Christopher Stevens. Here's the headline. It's a long headline. It's got the whole story in the headline. The world will end in 25 years.

Humanity will die and towns will become slaughterhouses. Oxford scientists nightmare prediction. And it's scientists, not just one. their proof it's inevitable and why billionaires in their bunkers should tremble. All right. Let's get into this. See how much of this we want. In a game of Russian roulette with a standard colt revolver,

the chances of instant death are one in six. Terrifyingly, that's the same as the odds of humanity. being wiped out within 75 years. Everyone dead in a cataclysmic and total breakdown of civilization. This according to Oxford University futurologist Toby Ord an expert on the threat of artificial intelligence.

Does it sound impossibly bleak? Uh, yeah. His colleague, Nick Bostrom, is more pessimistic still. He rates the possibility of human extinction by the next century is one in four. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jared Diamond is even less hopeful.

Predicting our species' chances of survival beyond 2050, that's just 25 years away, are no better than even, or 50-50. Not so long ago, Only oddballs in sandwich boards and evangelical cult leaders seriously believe the end of the world is nigh. The phrase itself was a comic cliche, so gloomy, it was funny. But the voices now warning of our impending extinction

come from highly respected scientists, not kooky doomsayers. They point to multiple existential threats faced by the human race, not only nuclear weapons, but rampant climate change, artificially engineered viruses, and even malevolent AI capable of manufacturing its own super weapons. I told you this was scary stuff. Some of them talk about Goliaths after the giant warrior in the Old Testament who appeared invincible until a single stone from a slingshot

failed him. That's in trying to deal with some of this stuff. goliath societies are rapacious they suck up all the available wealth and funnel it to the ruling class when the rest of society starts to starve a violent reaction sets in weak goliaths are overthrown easily stronger ones fight back using military dominance to cling to power and the harder they fight, the harder they fall. Their civilizations are gradually hollowed out by corruption in fighting among the rulers,

over-expansion, degradation of the environment and what one scientist calls emisseration of the masses. The collapse of infrastructure, political... Are you getting... Are you checking out of this story? I know some of you are going, what is he going on about?

Listen, this is coming not from some cookie people. This seems to be coming from legitimate, high-end scientists. People who think this stuff every day. Anyway, I'll just read a bit more. The collapse of infrastructure, political systems, and the rule of law, put these societies at the mercy of drought, wildfires, an earthquake, or tsunami, floods, war, and disease, events that could normally be weathered,

but here become the final death blow to civilization. It's a nightmarish vision. What makes it so compelling and frightening is the proof. Some of the scientists suggest that this pattern is an ancient one far older than the Bible itself. He traces, one of them, traces it back to the earliest farmers, where the boom and bus cycle of primitive agriculture

led to the rapid growth of towns that would be abandoned when famine struck. Okay, I'm not doing this article justice, or maybe it doesn't deserve justice, but it is it's as I said at the beginning this is scary stuff because they think destruction is imminent this century

it's worth remembering that in the 1950s nuclear weapons were our sole existential threat that has now or that has not gone away, an estimated 10,000 such warheads are stockpiled, controlled not only by the superpowers, China, Russia, and America, but also by India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea,

as well as France and the UK. Iran was also close to building a nuclear bomb and detonator until its underground facilities were targeted in U.S. strikes in June. But weapons of mass destruction are no longer the only nightmare, nor even the worst. In the past, diseases such as the black death, which killed between a third and a half of the British population in the 1300s, were limited by the spread of spread, excuse me, were limited by the speed of spread, no faster than people could travel. Now, a novel virus such as COVID engineered in a bio-warfare lab using gain-of-function technology can move around the world as fast and in as many directions as passenger airliners. Climate change is taking place at an unprecedented rate,

10 times faster than the global warming that triggered the greatest mass extinction in the planet's history. The great Parmian dying, which wiped out between. 80 and 90% of all life 252 million years ago. And in 2023, hundreds of AI scientists, including the bosses of leading developers such as Google DeepMind, issued a statement highlighting real fears the software they were developing was seeing some of the consequences. that have been issued in this article.

So there you go. What do you think of that? Okay, let's try and end on a more positive note as opposed to the doom scrolling note we just went through. Let's do a hope scrolling note. This was in the Washington Post. And it'll be our last one, our last end bit for this special Wednesday end bit show. Here's the headline.

This 92-year-old sprinter, 92-year-old sprinter, not walker, not runner, but sprinter, has the muscle cells of someone in their 20s. She's 92. She's got the muscle cells of somebody in their 20s. Stories by Teddy Amunbar and Stefano Petrelli. Emma Maria Mazinga likes to win. She once dislocated her shoulder during a race in Germany when she threw herself ahead of a competitor at the finish line.

The woman next to me was about to overtake me, Mazinga said, who ended up winning the race in 2012. She was 79 at the time. Well, now she's 92. And Mazing, who lives in Padua, Italy, or Padua, is running out of competition. At 5'1, she's an elite sprinter. with four age group world records to her name and very few opponents to race against.

In Italy, it's just me, as Angus said, in Italian over the phone, this summer. At the World Championships, it was me and an American. I'm trying to imagine the story. It's amazing. It's so amazing that it's a very short story. And here's how it ends. The 92-year-old sprinter has the muscle cells of someone in their 20s. Costco, one of America's largest warehouse retailers, recently alerted consumers.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the story of our 92-year-old. Sprinter. So there you go. I guess that was it. But it's got something to do, obviously, with their sales. I don't know where the rest of that story is. I'll find it enough if it's worth the story. discussing, I will add it to you.

Somehow the Costco got into that story. I don't know what it is or why it is. I don't know. It's a bit of a bit of a downer to end that way with all the full details. Although, you know, I guess we know enough that if she's 92 and she can't find any competition, and she keeps winning these races,

there's something very special about herself. But I love the fact that she basically bowled over the competition when she was a mere 79 to make sure she ended up winning the race. Okay, as I said, this has been an experiment. I can see some of you sitting going, okay, man's pretty. Why don't you just go back to the idea of an encore edition? Or take a harder look at some of these pieces before you tell us about them. Hey, I don't know.

I thought two out of four ain't bad. Two and a half of four. Let's say that. Right? Okay. Okay. I was going to tell you about tomorrow. Tomorrow, being Thursday, it is your turn and the random ranter.

The random ranter will be here for the first time in, well, in a couple of months, and we're looking forward to seeing what he has to say. I haven't talked to him much this summer. I know he took some holidays. He drove halfway across the country, as he often does in the summer. He loves to drive. so whether his opening rant is going to be something about the country that he saw

we'll just have to wait and see until tomorrow as for the question of the week the question of the week was pretty straightforward very simple in the summer of 2025 what did you see that caught your eye was it something about Canada

was it something about the world, was it something about technology, was it something about AI, it could have been any number of things. So that's what we're looking for. Your answer to that question. In the summer of 2025, what did you see that caught your eye? And you send it to the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. And you have that email sent before 6pm Eastern Time on Wednesday. Always include your name. Always include the location you're writing from. And always keep it under 75 words.

All those are firm guidelines for question of the week. So you follow them and the odds are you have a good chance of having your letter read on the air on Thursday. Friday, as always, good talk with Chantelle A. Bear and Bruce Anderson. They're looking forward to coming in with their first of season six, good talks. We were just on last week as their final summer special aired. But they'll be up to the challenge this Friday on Good Talk. That's it for

this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge with a special Wednesday in bits can't wait to hear what you thought of it and we'll talk again in less than 24 hours take care thanks for listening