Fascism and conspiracy theories: The symptoms of broken communication

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The world was saner when we spoke face-to-face, argues John Cameron Mitchell. Not looking someone in the eye when you talk to them raises the potential for miscommunication and conflict.

Social media has been an incredible force for activism and human rights, but it's also negatively affected our relationship with the media. We are now bombarded 24/7 with news that either drives us to anger or apathy.

Sitting behind a screen makes polarization worse, and polarization is fertile ground for conspiracy theories and fascism, which Cameron describes as irrationally blaming someone else for your problems.

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JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL:

John Cameron Mitchell directed, starred in and co-wrote, with Stephen Trask, the musical film Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), for which he received the Best Director Award at the Sundance Festival and was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actor. His recent Broadway production garnered the 2014 Tony Award for Best Revival of Musical and a 2015 Special Tony for his return to the role. His latest work is the radio-cinema podcast Anthem: Homunculus.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL: There is danger in the incompleteness of digital communication. It's not enough bandwidth to really feel. You know, I have -- even right now, I'm looking at your face, which is superimposed onto a camera in the Interrotron, invented by Errol Morris. And that's how he got people to talk to the camera honestly. But we don't have those on our phones and computers yet. The camera is on top of the screen in a phone and a computer, so no one is actually looking into each other's eyes and there's trouble because of that.

Tweet wars means you can't see the expression in someone's face when they're saying something, which has complexity. And you take offense easier. And you give offense easier. And in fact, giving offense is proof of existence. And you have people screaming things that they don't necessarily always believe, because they want to exist, because they're behind a screen; they're not in a group. A lot of it has to do with being present, physically present, when you're dealing with a crisis. You know, you don't text a breakup. You know, you shouldn't. It's like, there's misunderstanding -- there's too much to be misunderstood in words.

My advice -- in some ways we're in a better world than we've ever been, in terms of health and human rights at least being considered in different countries. And partly that's because of digital stuff. You know, you can't actually shut down digital communication, no matter how hard you try in China or wherever; there's VPNs. People get through. So there are advantages to that. But the way we get the information, 24-hour bombardment, makes people feel afraid. And you've got a lot of people who feel like dangerous shut ins, you know? Who are railing against how sad things are, or dropping out because they're overwhelmed. And because of that drop out and that polarization you get a regime like Trump. You get a fertile ground for fascism, which is about blaming someone irrationally for other problems in your life. It's an old game that has been played for millennia. That immigrant, that transgender person, that person who is of a different race, their very existence threatens you because they're getting attention, money -- they're stealing something from you. And that certainly happened -- you know, found its way in to a World War II. But also the lack, the kind of fragile state of truth right now, which also comes out of digital addiction, is that all conspiracy theories are true, all news is suspect, facts are fungible. And in a world like that, that's the biggest danger, you know, apart from climate change. You know, and they are linked, God knows. Somebody has convinced themselves that it's a hoax because they'd make less money if it wasn't a hoax.

Consider your conspiracy theories. You have a problem with them if you only believe the ones you want to. Since they're not really based on facts, you only believe what you want. You read the news you want to read. You ignore the ones you don't. Read the stuff you don't want to believe. Even consider the conspiracy theory you don't want to believe. You know, then you can consider yourself a fair-minded nut. It's the -- think about it. Are you only believing conspiracy theories because you want them to be true? That's when you know there's trouble.

Nanotechnology vs. cancer: How tiny particles sniff out the deadly disease

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Cancer is an aberrant function of a normal cell, where the regulators of that cell's dividing are broken and the cell starts to divide without regulation. Left to its own devices, that dividing without regulation will overcome the entire body.

Until we have a cure, early detection is the holy grail. MIT professor Sangeeta Bhatia is currently devising a simple urine test that works just like a pregnancy test to detect cancer the moment it starts.

How does it work? Nanoparticles are injected into the body that force specific peptides, previously invisible signs of cancer, to be easily detected in urine. In the future, this test may be part of your yearly physical check up.

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SUSAN HOCKFIELD

Susan Hockfield is a neuroscientist based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2004 to 2012, she served as the 16th president of the university. Hockfield was the first woman, and the first life scientist, to lead the institute.

Prior to MIT, she worked at Yale University, where she served in myriad capacities. Among them, the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Neurobiology, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Provost.

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TRANSCRIPT:

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: Take them away from their loved ones, And cancer has been, for all of human history, among the most insidious. The best way to address cancer or any disease is to prevent it. Vaccines are enormously important in preventing disease. It's much harder to fix a disease once you get it than it is to prevent you from getting the disease. So vaccines are very important. For cancer, we've determined a number of carcinogens things that will drive the development of cancer in some people. And so prevention is sometimes avoidance. Stopping smoking. In the United States, smoking cessation has resulted finally in a reduction of deaths from cancer.

Staying away from asbestos, wearing sunscreen when you go in the sun. But even if all of us were to have all the vaccines that are prescribed and exercise all of the preventions, cancer would still be with us. Cancer is an aberrant function of a normal cell, where the regulators of that cell's dividing are broken and the cell starts to divide without regulation. Left to its own devices, that dividing without regulation will overcome the entire body. And that is how cancer kills you. Now cancer is easier to treat if you can stop it where it starts. Cancer usually starts as a very small group of aberrantly dividing cells. With time, those cells break loose from the original site and will metastasize to other sites and set up new cancers there. And these cells are very mutagenic.

That means their DNA changes very rapidly. Most cancer cells have lost the ability to regulate their DNA mutation. And it is a biological challenge to control cancer once it has progressed to a certain level. So if you can't prevent cancer, the next best strategy is early diagnosis. Because if you can stop it when it's only a few hundred cells, before it's escaped its original location and gone to another location, there's a very high probability of cure. We have some very good diagnostic tests that have reduced the rates of death from colon cancer and breast cancer. Quite remarkable advances on those two cancers and some others. But even those technologies don't detect cancer when they're small enough and don't detect it reliably enough. There is a possibility I say a very real possibility that using a biology-engineering convergence based on nanotechnology, we may have a way to diagnose cancers much earlier than we can today.

One example that I give in the book is from the laboratory of Sangeeta Bhatia. And she has devised a young approach that she calls synthetic biomarkers. Biomarkers are things that measure something that's going on biologically in the body. Synthetic means that her biomarkers are something that she has synthesized, and she's synthesized them using nanotechnology. So one of the remarkable things about living things, about humans, all animals and plants, is there's a lot of specificity. There's a specificity in different tissues. There's a specificity in different diseases. So for example, our skin looks different from our liver. It looks different from our brain. And it's because the cells that make up each of those tissues expresses a different set of genes and a different set of proteins. It's absolutely remarkable, and one of the mos...

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Befriend your ideological opposite. It’s fun.

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Former president of the ACLU Nadine Strossen and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia were unlikely friends. They debated each other at events all over the world, and because of that developed a deep and rewarding friendship – despite their immense differences.

Scalia, a famous conservative, was invited to circles that were not his "home territory", such as the ACLU, to debate his views. Here, Strossen expresses her gratitude and respect for his commitment to the exchange of ideas.

"It's really sad that people seem to think that if you disagree with somebody on some issues you can't be mutually respectful, you can't enjoy each other's company, you can't learn from each other and grow in yourself," says Strossen.

The opinions expressed in this video do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles Koch Foundation, which encourages the expression of diverse viewpoints within a culture of civil discourse and mutual respect.

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NADINE STROSSEN:

Nadine Strossen is the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law at New York Law School. From 1991 through 2008, she served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union, the first woman to head the nation’s largest and oldest civil liberties organization. Her most recent book is HATE: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship.

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TRANSCRIPT:

NADINE STROSSEN: I was very good friends with Nino Scalia, as I called him, not despite the fact that we had very strong disagreements on issues that were of fundamental importance to both of us, but because of that fact, because of those disagreements we were invited to debate each other in various forums all over the world. And as is true for any two thinking people there are some deeply important issues where we strongly disagree, but also some issues that are deeply important to both of us where we strongly agree. And both our mutual respect and liking arose from the exchange of ideas in a respectful manner, the open listening and grappling with each other's ideas and doing it for an audience.

As a teacher and an advocate, I am so grateful for Justice Scalia's generosity in speaking before all kinds of audiences. The mutual respect, I think, is evidenced in the fact that we were doing those kinds of events. I would have liked him just for the fact that he was engaging in that process of exchanging ideas and he would often do it in audiences that you could expect to be hostile to him, right, not just preaching to the choir. I think the most dramatic example was he agreed to do one of these exchanges with me at an ACLU National Membership Conference.

It's really sad that people seem to think that if you disagree with somebody on some issues you can't be mutually respectful, you can't enjoy each other's company, you can't learn from each other and grow in yourself. Because I have found that having friendships and collegial relationships with people with whom I strongly disagree has been not only advantageous to advancing causes and concerns that are deeply important to me, but also have just been so enjoyable on a personal and human level and have really enriched my life. So, for example, I care very deeply about education. I think I'm a much more effective educator when I teach students or speak before students in the context of an exchange with somebody else who has different ideas. I think that deepens the student's understanding of the multiple perspectives that are plausible on particular issues and enriches their own analysis and their own understanding.

Working with the ACLU, which has always been a staunchly non-partisan organization by definition, through our own corporate charter never oppose or endorse any candidate, official, party or organization, rather we will criticize or praise every individual or every group on an issue by issue basis. And once you do that you have to acknowledge that there is nobody with whom you do not strongly agree on at least some important issues, no matter how strongly you may disagree on other important issues.

And in terms of advancing your causes, if you can work together collaboratively with somebody who you agree with on a particular issue you should do that regardless of whether you disagree with them on another issue. It's going to make it easier and more likely that you are going to succeed in your jointly shared cause -- but also on a human level it's just fun and interesting to get to know and spend time with and learn from people who have different ideas.

‘Fighting the good fight’: Why free speech has no political party

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There's a reason you're free to wear clothing with protest statements on them today. In 1968, 19-year-old Paul Robert Cohen was arrested for disturbing the peace by wearing a jacket that read "F*ck the Draft" in a California courthouse. His case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided that being offended by the jacket did not merit censorship.

Jonathan Zimmerman argues that the history of debate in the U.S. – of who gets to say what, and how that has evolved – should be taught to every American.

Zimmerman also says it's ahistorical for free speech to be cast as a conservative issue. For much of U.S. history, champions of free speech were those who fought for social justice to help the powerless keep the only power they had: their voices.

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JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN:

Jonathan Zimmerman is Professor of History of Education at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. A former Peace Corps volunteer and high school social studies teacher, Zimmerman is the author of "Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know" (Oxford) and six other books. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and other popular periodicals.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN: If we're talking about free speech, the reason we need to study history, I think, is to understand how fortunate we are to have that right and in how many different times and places it's been contested and restricted and denied. One of the things you'll learn when you read history is that actually, the Vietnam War was the first war that Americans had the right to criticize. And it became a Supreme Court case called Cohen v. California. And in Cohen v. California, a guy walked into a draft board wearing a jacket that said "F the draft." And he was arrested. And the only reason you can walk around now wearing a jacket that says "F the draft" or "F the war in Iraq" or "F the president" is because of Cohen.

If you don't know that history, you don't know how precious this freedom is. No freedom is absolute or should be, right? You can't call the White House and say you want to assassinate the president, right? I'm a university professor, and I can't say to a student, 'I really like the sweater you're wearing. And if you wear it on Thursday, I'll give you an A', all right? That's, if you want a restriction of my freedom, by the way, it's one that I'm happy to abide by. It's just a gratuitous example of how there's all sorts of speech that we do not allow and should not allow. But we also don't have to reinvent the wheel. There's 100 years of case law and constitutional discussion about this very question. Who should be able to talk? And when is their talk, their speech so intolerant and so awful that we can't allow it? And so it seems to me the other thing that we should be teaching in schools is precisely that history -- that is, the history of the debate surrounding who gets to talk.

So every American should know about Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous dictum, freedom of speech doesn't include shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. But they should also know that in that case, Oliver Wendell Holmes actually upheld the censorship of somebody that wanted to distribute anti-conscription, anti-draft leaflets. Because he said there was a war going on, the First World War, and he believed that distributing anti-draft literature during the war was the equivalent of shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. Now, the doctrine has evolved since then, right? And now, during the Iraq and Afghanistan war, you were perfectly free to distribute pamphlets saying you didn't think there should be a draft. So our standards of what's acceptable and our standards of what should be tolerated have changed over time. And I think that everybody should know about those changes. I think that's part of becoming a citizen.

I am a liberal Democrat. In fact, I'm almost a caricature of a liberal democrat. My father was in the Peace Corps. I was in the Peace Corps. I'm Jewish. I have a PhD. I'm like a cartoon, alright? But part of my liberalism is an absolute commitment to free speech. And one of the things I find most upsetting, both at the partisan and at the intellectual level, is the way that free speech has now been cast as a kind of conservative value. I find this profoundly ahistorical, because all of the great warriors for social justice in the past, with names like...

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God was watching me. And I was watching porn.

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Comedian and writer Pete Holmes explains how he lost his faith after a long struggle with what he calls his Christian, puritanical, shame psychology.

Holmes found the antidote to internalized shame was 'thoughtless, irrational love'. Love should be as indiscriminate as light, he says. Many people only give conditional love to themselves and others.

Sexuality is not a mistake, says Holmes. Pretending to be pure by saying frack instead of fuck, and not seeing R-rated movies and being really "nice" is not what a connection to the divine is about.

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PETE HOLMES:

Pete Holmes is a comedian, writer, cartoonist, "Christ-leaning spiritual seeker", and podcast host. His wildly popular podcast, You Made It Weird, is a comedic exploration of the meaning of life with guests ranging from Deepak Chopra and Elizabeth Gilbert to Seth Rogen and Garry Shandling.

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TRANSCRIPT:

PETE HOLMES: It was the horniness that was the teacher. I thought it was in the way of my teaching. I was like, if I could only stop being horny, I could meditate and I could find God. Fuck that shit. God is in the horniness.

The reason the book is called "Comedy Sex God" is because God and sex were so closely linked for me. When I was a kid, I wasn't tempted to lie or cheat or steal, or certainly not murder anybody. Those were all very easy ordinances from the church to follow because I wasn't tempted to do them. But sex, it's a biological, pulsing, organically occurring, fresh-batch-every-morning temptation that all these 12, 13, 14-year-olds were being told was the thing, the sin, that was keeping God, basically, from loving us. You know what I mean? We were all good to go to heaven, but three, sometimes four times a day, you're very tempted. Or in my case, I would succumb succumb! to temptation, and I felt terrible about it because that was my understanding of God.

And one of the reasons I wrote the book was to try and reform that understanding of God as this like, basically a bully, as Nadia Bolz-Weber says, with a killer surveillance system who's watching you and who really hates you. He hates what you are and wishes that Richard Rohr calls it willpower Christianity, it's like we can just push these giant boulders away and lean on them, and be at church and be like, "Hey, brother!" But really, you're as human as anybody, and that is a cognitive and spiritual dissonance that is a heavy, heavy weight. So I joke that the book is called "Comedy Sex God", but most of the sex is with myself because it was so internalized and it was so shameful and private. So when I lost my faith because my wife here's sex again: My wife had an affair. So sex, again, betrayed me. I was trying to be a good boy and I got married almost so that I could have sex, so I was playing by the rules. And then she broke the rules. But even worse, it felt like God, who was almost like the mafia -- I paid him a fee to watch my bakery, if that makes sense, and then somebody threw a brick through my bakery window. And I was like, 'You didn't hold up your end of the bargain.' So I lost my faith, and then I really had to redefine what sexuality was. It was almost like coming out of the closet as straight. I'm not trying to minimize how serious and how difficult it can be to come out of the closet as gay, but I had to announce to myself and to the world: "I like boobies." And that was hard because you were waiting for lightning to strike you down.

So the wonderful thing that I've discovered about the universe we don't have to call it God because I understand and sympathize that that's a loaded word but I see a universe that uses these wounds and these traumas and these wrong programs in our favor, ultimately. So I spent all this time, first, repressing my sexuality. Then I lost my faith. Then I went through a period of embracing it as best as I could. I bought the Playboy that I hid in my bedroom in a chair that used to belong to my grandmother. I cut a slit in the lining of that chair and I hid this Playboy that I had stolen with my friend, Opie. So that was two sins, really. And then when I lost my faith, I bought that Playboy on eBay and put it on my coffee table, because I knew that my psyche needed symbols. I was trying to outwardly manifest a world where I wasn't ashamed of being a sexual person. So like a swinger or like Burt Reynolds, I just kept or a barbershop just open air...

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Which voter type are you? How politicians divide and conquer.

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People seeking to win an election often use emotional words to trigger voters.

These emotional words tend to trigger people into four different groups: loyalists, riled-up resisters, mild moderates, and disenchanted drop-outs.

What we see today is people getting into power with less than a majority of people because they're able to divide this four-way voter split.

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BILL EDDY:

Bill Eddy is the co-founder and president of the High Conflict Institute, a company devoted to helping individuals and organizations deal with high-conflict people. Eddy is a Certified Family Law Specialist and Senior Family Mediator at the National Conflict Resolution Center in San Diego. He is also a Licensed Clinical Social worker with twelve years' experience providing therapy to children, adults, couples and families in psychiatric hospitals and outpatient clinics.

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TRANSCRIPT:

BILL EDDY: So high-conflict politicians — or what I call "wannabe kings"— because that's really what they want. They want to take over and eliminate opposition. How they effectively gain power in an election — and we're not talking about people that just became dictators from a war or something. We're talking about people getting elected. And what happens is they put out all this emotional message — all these emotional words. And these emotional words tend to trigger people into four different groups.

And I call this the four-way voter split. What happens is, they are loving loyalists. They seduce by saying, you're wonderful. You and I want the same thing. We know and believe in all of that. It's really calculated, because most of these politicians shift all over politically to see what works to get them power. What the loving loyalists want to hear. And so the loving loyalists just go, we love this person. And then they change their policy. It's all right. We're already in love. So that's maybe 30% of people. Then on the other side of that, they trigger the riled-up resisters.

And the riled-up resisters are emotionally hooked and they're angry. They don't like this person. They see this person as very dangerous and a threat to society. And we've got to do something about this person. But they're emotionally engaged as well. Then there's the mild moderates. And to some extent, they're stuck. They don't know. Well, is this different? Or is this politics? And they generally view it through the lens of-- this is politics. So if they're on our side politically, we'll support them. But we don't like the personality. We wish the person would stop talking so much. And if they're on the other side, they go, we don't like this personality. But we really don't like his politics. But they're kind of mild moderates. So they're not really emotionally activated. In fact, they may actually be emotionally intimidated, because they don't want to get fired upon by the verbal tongue-lashing that HCPs are always putting out.

But then the fourth group is the disenchanted drop-outs. And these folks feel emotionally pushed away. It's like, just leave me out of this. I'm not political. I don't want to be involved. In all the countries where we see high-conflict politicians rising to leadership, there's a huge percentage of people that emotionally drop out. And so they don't need a majority of people. Typically, they may have 40%, maybe 45% of the vote. But these high-conflict politicians rarely get over 50%. But because they're able to divide these other groups — that they push away the disenchanted drop-out so they just don't vote. And the riled-up resisters go with, maybe, extreme candidates who don't have a chance. And the mild moderates often have a candidate that has a chance.

But the moderates and the resisters are opposing each other, mostly because the high-conflict politician has divided them. And so what we see, over and over again around the world, is they're getting into power with less than a majority of people, because they're able to divide this four-way voter split.

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Jared Diamond's immigration thought experiment: Divide the strong and weak

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Every American, without exception, is an immigrant. Native Americans immigrated 13,000 years ago, and everybody else has immigrated within the last 400 years.

The decision to emigrate is made by people who are healthy, strong, willing to undertake risks, and face the unknown. Those are also essential qualities for innovating.

It's no coincidence that the great majority of American Nobel Prize winners are either first-generation immigrants or the children of first-generation immigrants.

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JARED DIAMOND:

Jared Diamond, a noted polymath, is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his many awards are the U.S. National Medal of Science, Japan's Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of the international best-selling books Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse; Why Is Sex Fun?; The World Until Yesterday; and The Third Chimpanzee, and is the presenter of TV documentary series based on three of those books.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JARED DIAMOND: Immigration in the United States is a controversial issue just as it is in most other countries of the world. Many other of not just first-world countries, like Japan, Australia, Western Europe are wrestling with immigration, but many developing countries. When I was last in Indonesia, Malaysia, Indonesia's neighbor, is having a problem with Indonesians migrating into Malaysia because the standard of living in Malaysia is higher than in Indonesia. And South Africa, an African country, is having issues with immigration with neighboring poorer African countries such as Zimbabwe sending immigrants into South Africa.

So immigration in the United States the fact is every American without exception, is an immigrant. Native Americans immigrated 13,000 years ago, and everybody else has immigrated within the last 400 years. My father immigrated at the age of 2 in 1904. My mother's parents immigrated around 1890. Most Americans are immigrants. If you look at the contribution of immigrants, if you ask yourself, do a thought experiment: take the citizens of any country in the world out there, take the citizens of Poland or Russia and divide them into two sets. Suppose you had a mechanism for dividing every citizen of Poland into either two categories. One category are those people who are healthy, ambitious, willing to take risks, willing to try new ways, young, strong. And the other category consists of those people who are weak, unwilling to take risks, unwilling to experiment, wanting to carry on in their old ways. In effect, dividing a country into those two groups is what's accomplished by the decision to emigrate. The decision to emigrate is made by people who are healthy, strong, willing to undertake risks, and face the unknown. And those who don't emigrate, on the average, lack those qualities. But willing to take risks and experiment, those are essential qualities for innovating. And the United States is a country of innovation. It's therefore, no surprise that the great majority of American Nobel Prize winners are either first-generation immigrants or the children of first-generation immigrants.

So immigration has made a strong contribution to the history of the United States. But it's controversial because whenever you get a batch of people who are there and then another batch people coming who are different the Vietnamese of the 1970s, etc. they are different and there are likely to be prejudices. There have been prejudices against immigrants throughout American history, beginning with the first non-British immigrants, the Irish and the Germans. And eventually, that settled down. Then the prejudice against the Eastern Europeans, the Japanese and Europeans of the late 1800s, and then the prejudice against the Vietnamese. So it's unsurprising that immigration is an issue in the United States today, but reflect on our history. Students of immigration say that the United States has benefited more from immigration than any other country in the world, and that for the United States, a higher percentage of our immigrants are highly trained, skilled people who contribute to our economy than the immigrants into any other country in the world. Yes, it's a problem for us. But we are better off than any other country with that problem.

Does life feel too short? Get off your ass.

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Explorer Erling Kagge is the first person to have completed the Three Poles Challenge on foot: the North Pole, the South Pole, and the summit of Mount Everest.

The average American spends 4 hours each day on their phone. Imagine that 20% of it is productive.

That still means that at the end of your life you'll have spent a cumulative 4,000 days on what Kagge calls "bullshit".Walking is the engine of life – you can do it alone, learning to cultivate your thoughts; you can walk to meet people and learn to respect humanity; and you can walk to experience nature. Don't live through other people or through apps. Get out and explore.

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ERLING KAGGE:

Explorer, art collector, publisher, and author, Erling Kagge is the first person to have completed the Three Poles Challenge on foot--the North Pole, the South Pole, and the summit of Mount Everest. He has written six books on exploration, philosophy, and art collecting, and runs Kagge Forlag, a publishing company based in Oslo, where he lives.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ERLING KAGGE: I think the origin of all the problems we have in life is that we cannot sit alone in a room doing nothing. And I didn't come up with this theory. This was Blaise Pascal who wrote about it in the 1640s.

Here in the States, people, on average, they watch the telephone four hours every day, which means in the States, you probably live at around 30,000 days in your life which means that you sit watching a telephone 120,000 hours. And let's say only 80% of it is wasted, which leaves you with 96,000 hours you're actually doing mostly bullshit with your time. And then life will feel really short, because in life you need variety, you need novelty, but when you keep on doing the same thing throughout the whole day throughout your whole life, the conclusion of your life will be that it has been really short and very boring.

To me, wandering is the engine of life. And I walked really long distances. It took me actually almost 40 years before I learned the pleasure of walking short distances. But I walked, for instance, to the North Pole, with my friend, Borge Ousland, all the way to the top of Earth. And then I also walked to Mount Everest Base Camp, and eventually climbed all the way to the top of the mountain. And thirdly, I walked all the way to the South Pole in total solitude, as the first in history. I didn't have any radio contact. I didn't talk to anyone on my trek. I was absolutely left to myself. For the first couple of hours, maybe for a day or two, you have all this noise in your head. Although it's absolutely quiet around you, you're thinking. And you think about the past. You think about the future. And all this, you know, it's like noise. But then time passes by, and you slowly start not to think so much. You start much more to experience, to feel being present in the moment. And that's when it's really great to be on an expedition that somehow, the future doesn't matter. The past doesn't matter. All that matters is to be present in your own life.

I've traveled to more than 100 countries in the world and met many people in each place I have been. And my impression is that most people underestimate their own possibilities in life. Obviously, some people are overestimating their possibilities, but in general, people are underestimating their own possibilities. And things that some people tell me: 'I don't have time for silence. I'm too busy. I'm too important. It's not for me.' I don't believe it. I think they all have time for some silence. But the reason we try to avoid silence is because silence can be a bit frightening and it can be a bit uncomfortable, because silence is about getting to know ourselves, while noise, not only sounds, but all kinds of distractions and expectations and beeping and buzzing from your phone, it's about running away from yourself. It's about forgetting yourself. It's about living through other people. It's about living through apps. And consequently, not fully, but partly, it is about wasting your life. It's about missing out on this huge opportunity to live a richer life.

The first story I love about walking is the story when Adam and Eve actually walked out of paradise. And I really love that story because they left paradise and became history's first true explorers. They wanted to eat from the tree of knowledge, and as soon as they did, they just walked out. And that's what we...

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Take a pause to let your mind work

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Taking a pause after consuming a piece of art or media is essential to our memory, emotions, and intellectual digestion, says writer, director and podcaster John Cameron Mitchell.

We live in an age full of influencers and YouTube personalities, but fewer narrative powerhouses. Storytelling takes time, skill, and requires us to make space to gather our thoughts.

Podcasts are a storytelling rebellion against so-called ADHD culture. If the internet ruined our attention spans, can the single-sense format of podcasts bring it back?

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JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL:

John Cameron Mitchell directed, starred in and co-wrote, with Stephen Trask, the musical film Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), for which he received the Best Director Award at the Sundance Festival and was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actor. His recent Broadway production garnered the 2014 Tony Award for Best Revival of Musical and a 2015 Special Tony for his return to the role. His latest work is the radio-cinema podcast Anthem: Homunculus.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL: I'm feeling like a lot of people are feeling helpless lately with nonstop bad news. And even ADD has reduced our resistance not our resistance, but our capacity for nuance and for empathy. You know, if you are moving from moment to moment and avoiding a pause, consider that neurologists tell you that the pause is where the memory becomes entrenched. And it's where emotion is synthesized, after the event, in the pause. If you don't go down you can't feel the going up again. So in this era where every pause is filled with checking your phone, when porn, when you skip to the cum shot, you know? From cum shot, to cum shot, to cum shot. You know, and if there's no pause, the orgasm feels like nothing. And the same with joy, the same with sadness. If you never stop you can never feel, fully.

So my goal at times is to create pauses more than create the actual thing between the pauses, which some would call things, or events, or words, or just sounds, in this case with the podcast. I was very careful of, like, this needs to be 24 more frames of pause; I use the film term because there's 24 frames per second. I said, the audience is not feeling it because they don't have enough time to pause. So the art of the pause is what I'm encouraging now.

Anthem is the name of our series. Every season will be a different musical, in probably 10 episodes. And our first season is called Homunculus. My character, Ceann, is a down and out failed writer in a trailer park in the Midwest who's run out of insurance, and he's got a brain tumor. And the tumor, one of the names of the kind of tumor he has is homunculus, which is Latin for little man. And the tumor becomes a character. But my character's online, he's doing an app-based telethon to crowd-fund his treatment.

This piece is really more about me. It's really more of an alternative autobiography. The characters became really me; If I never left my small town, what would I be like? So I wrote it as a TV series. It was too weird for Hollywood, you know? The resting pitch faces at desks across LA were saying no. And a company called Topic Studios said yes, in New York, as a podcast. It was an old form that is being rebooted for today. You know, audio theater has always been a traditional part of radio, and it's sort of been forgotten, and except for some comedy, let's say but this, I really wanted something more like cinema of the mind. Obviously, it's much cheaper. Though, we may be one of the more expensive podcasts ever made because of the density of it. And it's really something that we want to push the podcast form into a more complex, nuance, dense, fictional place. I'm used to theater. I'm used to novels. You know, the words and the music evoke images. You know, sometimes a thousand words is better than a picture, too. Otherwise we wouldn't have Dostoevsky and Nabokov, you know, lasting so long. I'm a word person. You know, I'm a music person. But I love words. You know, when people say films shouldn't be too wordy, and, you know? It's like, why not? You know, Eric Rohmer, so many great filmmakers, they're word based. So in our case, when there is an image that's important to see, for our listeners to envision, we have characters that describe them in a poetic way, which is, of course, the ancient form of prose poetry, that evokes images, and evokes other feelin...

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John Stuart Mill's big idea: Harsh critics make good thinkers

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19th-century political philosopher John Stuart Mill defended the right of free societies to explore radical and dangerous ideas.

One of his arguments was based on humility: You must be prepared to be wrong, and genuinely be open to being persuaded. Put your ideas into intellectual battle by exposing them to the harshest critics. These critics will show up your flaws and make you a more sophisticated thinker.

Another of Mill's arguments was concerned with arrogance. He criticized the common tendency to want to shield other people from dangerous ideas as paternalistic. You can judge good ideas from bad ideas; you should afford everyone the same respect.

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KEITH WHITTINGTON

Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He is the author, most recently, of "Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech", as well as "Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present".

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TRANSCRIPT:

KEITH WHITTINGTON: John Stuart Mill was an extraordinary and influential thinker in the early 19th century in England. He was something of a radical within his society at the time and, as a consequence, was very interested in the ability to develop and communicate radical ideas that were outside the mainstream, because he was interested in a lot of those ideas himself, and he was much more interested in how a free society should operate the ability of people to think for themselves in a free society, and sometimes run against the grain of public opinion and mainstream thought in general.

He offered a variety of arguments about why it is we ought to value that kind of speech, those kinds of spaces, that kind of robust debate. So one of those arguments I characterize as an argument driven by humility. That is, that part of what Mill wanted to remind us is that we all might be mistaken, that our own understanding is limited. Our own set of ideas are very limited. And that we can learn from each other. And we can learn from others who have different ideas than ourselves. But that requires some willingness to accept the possibility that we, in fact, might be mistaken. And of course, we walk around most of the time with the belief that we are upholding a set of correct ideas, that we think we know our own minds. We think the ideas we hold are true. That's why we hold them in the first place. And so it can be challenging to go into a conversation and go into a discussion, go into a public space and accept the possibility that we might be wrong. But Mill wanted to emphasize that it's only by accepting that possibility that we're wrong that we can have the opportunity to learn. And it's important for our own sake that we be able to continue to learn and grow by talking to people with different ideas and being genuinely open to the possibility that they might persuade us. They might show the flaws in our ideas. They might expose our mistakes. And as a consequence, they might help us make progress.

But he also constructs an argument that's really grounded instead on a concern with arrogance of others. Here, the concern is not so much that we be willing to hear from people that we disagree with because we accept the possibility that we might be wrong. But instead, he wants to speak to our instincts to want to suppress opinions that we find disagreeable or dangerous so that no one else can hear them, instead. And this is fundamentally a paternalistic concern, a concern that we're worried about other people, that they might be misled by bad ideas. And so even if we think that we ourselves are capable of separating good ideas from bad ideas, and so as consequence, we should be able to hear a wide range of views and arguments, we might be much less comfortable that other people can make the same distinctions, will come to good decisions, exercise good judgment when listening to those ideas. And so as a consequence, there's a certain arrogance where we want to impose our own beliefs on others and shield them from the opposition; shield them from listening to the critics so that the only voices they hear are our own. And it's difficult to resist that tendency and that instinct, precisely because when we're thinking about what ideas in society we find as wrongheaded, disturbing, maybe dangerous, it becomes all the more tempting to think, when confronted with that dangerous id...

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