Author Archives: ghotchkiss

When Herding Animals Go Solo with AI

Humans were built to operate in groups. Pretty much everything that makes us human operates more effectively when we are surrounded by others. We have exquisitely evolved social management and response mechanisms that come from our history as herders: we conform to the opinions of others, we are sensitive to rejection, we care about our reputation and we practice reciprocity, giving to others with the hope that they’ll be there for us when needed. Most of all, we care deeply about what is fair.

All these things have no benefit if you’re a lone wolf, but they are vitally important when you’re in a herd of sheep, or the human equivalent.

Even the way we determine what is real relies on others. If you hear or see something that falls outside the ordinary, the first thing you do is turn to others to see if they also saw or heard it. We want to make sure our own senses are not tricking us. Things verified by others have a good chance of being real. Things that only we can see or hear could be a symptom of psychosis.

This need to backstop the feedback of our own senses with the corroboration of others was a useful safety check in our evolutionary past. But today, AI technology is throwing us a curveball. As a recent essay suggests, when we turn to AI chatbots for confirmation, we can start following a downward spiral into a new affliction: AI psychosis.

The challenge comes with the very sociability of new AI models – they speak to us as a friend would. Actually, that’s not quite true. They speak to us as someone who desperately wants to become our friend would.

Chats with AI are typically sycophantic and sometimes downright smarmy. They are constantly congratulating us and primping our egos. For this reason, many of us are foregoing socializing with other humans in favor of chatting with our favorite AI client. This is especially true with sensitive subjects. In a recent U.S. study from Common Sense Media, one in three teens used AI for social interaction and relationships. Of those, almost half used AI for emotional or mental health support. And often, this is a closed loop. Many teens never tell another human about their chats with an AI confidant.

This makes sense. AI won’t judge us. We aren’t risking ending our friendship with our confessions. And AI is unfailing supportive. There are no mixed signals through contradictory body language, no fear of the other person shutting down the conversation and walking away. Small wonder that one-third of the teens surveyed said that AI conversations were as satisfying or more satisfying than talking to a human. By the way, that percentage rises every year a similar study is done.

But if our goal is to corroborate reality, then we run into an issue when we turn to AI. This turns us into an echo chamber of one. In its algorithmic need to please us, AI agents can take us further and further from reality. In another study, three of five AI models happily led participants down a delusional path without any type of pushback and, in some cases, active encouragement of the delusion. One experiment saw Grok 4.1 confirming the presence of a “malevolent mirror entity” and suggested the person “drive an iron nail through the mirror while reciting Psalm 91 backwards”.

That said, this does seem to be improving. More recent models are more apt to intervene with a suggestion that the person should perhaps seek professional guidance.

But the problem may be much larger than just the encouragement of clinical psychosis. Increasingly, we humans are replacing human interaction with AI chats as a critical criterion in our efforts to make sense of reality. And that leaves a large part of our ability to accurately sense at what’s real in the hands of a few AI tech companies, all with quarterly profit targets to hit.

What could possibly go wrong in that scenario?

Where Does Marketing Education Go From Here?

For the past decade I have served on the program advisory council for a local post-secondary business school. Just this past year, we met so the marketing profs could present their proposed course changes to us for our feedback.

I, for the first time in one of these meetings, didn’t know what to say. It was nothing about the proposed changes themselves. It was because I honestly didn’t know what role humans would play in marketing in the future.

Some of the course changes were for first year students who would still have 4 or 5 years of the program ahead of them. That means they’d be looking for their first job in marketing in 2030 or 2031. I assume that would be an entry level job. So what, I wondered, would you teach marketing students today to make them a wanted commodity in the marketing job market 5 years hence?

Given this question that has been lodged in my brain ever since, I read with interest fellow Media Insider Maarten Albarda’s post last week on “Humans in the Loop” in the marketing platform stack. In it, he said, “For decades, advertising relied on a strict human-in-the-loop chain with clear approval protocols. In today’s world, that has become optional and comes at a cost.”

The new advertising ecosystem is being built by AI technicians to eliminate friction, ensuring higher profitability generated by self-scaling programs without restraints. In that world, humans are nothing more than profit-sapping friction and therefore should be eliminated. I’m not sure what openings that leaves for new marketers trying to enter the business 5 years from now. What should we be teaching them to give them a fighting chance to avoid becoming both redundant and irrelevant?

Supposedly, the reason to keep a human “in the loop” is so they can step in when something unexpected arises that AI doesn’t have the operating parameters to cope with. These are called “edge cases.” The thinking is that with a human somewhere in the mix, we can all rest easy knowing that when these “edge cases” arise, expert judgement can hit the stop button and keep us all from being sent to AI Armageddon.

There are several things wrong with that comforting assumption.

First, who or what flags these “edge cases?” If it’s AI, we’re assuming that it can recognize when something is above its pay grade and call in a human. But even if it does do that, what about all the other edge cases that AI didn’t recognize as such, assuming that these tasks fit within its normal operating procedures?

Secondly, even if exceptions are properly identified as an edge case and a human is called in to oversee, the places where human intervention is required is a constantly moving target. AI is light years ahead of where it was just a year or two ago, which means today’s edge case is tomorrow’s routine.

One example of this constantly expanding AI horizon comes from self-driving cars. Waymo self-driving taxis are coming to Toronto. One of the reasons they haven’t come to Canada sooner was because our notorious winter driving conditions represented an “edge case” for self-driving AI. But Waymo feels that they have now collected enough data from northern US cities to allow it to reliably model what is required to stay on an icy street during a Canadian winter storm. In this case, what was an “edge case” has now been incorporated into a “business-as-usual” data set.

Finally, to bring us back to our marketing students, the only reason to have a human in the loop is to allow the human to use their expertise and intuition to keep AI from going off-track. But this intuition only comes from thousands and thousands of hours of experience. And, as I have said before, as we off load more and more cognitive drudge work to AI, we don’t build that expertise because we haven’t immersed ourselves in the work required to gain it. Will a brand-new marketing student ever become an expert when 99% of the day-to-day work required to put a campaign together is now handled by AI?

These are just some of the reasons why I didn’t have a ready answer when the question came in that PAC meeting, “What should we be including in our marketing programs?” Someone else in the group quickly said, “Teach them how to work with AI.” And while I didn’t say anything out loud, the thought that thundered through my head was this, “Yeah. Good luck with that!”

How Bad Are Things, Really?

The other day, I was sitting at a table with 4 generations present, including the Silent Generation (born 1928 – 1945), myself, a Baby Boomer (born 1946 – 1964), A Gen X (born 1965 – 1980) and two Millennials (born 1981 – 1996). Two were great grandparents, two were grandparents and two were parents.

The conversation turned, as it often does, to the state of the world today. One of the great grandparents said, “I worry about the world we’re passing along. I don’t think the world has ever been this bad.” One of the Millennial parents responded, “I don’t think the world is any worse, it’s just different.”

Emotionally, I can see both sides. I sometimes wonder myself, is the world getting worse or is it just different? So I decided to put my emotions aside and tried to look at this as objectively as I could.

First, let’s look at existential angst, generation by generation, starting at the turn of the last century. Just how bad was the world when each of these generations were growing up?

The Greatest Generation (1900 – 1927) – Faced the First World War and the 1918 Influenza Epidemic.

The Silent Generation (1928 – 1945) – Faced the Great Depression, the Second World War, Mass Genocide and the Dawn of the possibility of Nuclear Annihilation

The Baby Boomers (1946 – 1964) – Nuclear Threats, the Cold War, Korean and Vietnam Wars

Generation X (1965 – 1980) – Inflation, Oil Crisis, HIV/AIDS, Renewed Nuclear Tension and the start of Terrorism.

Millennials (1981 – 1996) – Global Terrorism, the Beginnings of Climate Concern, Financial Crises.

I think it’s fair to say that each generation has had their fare share of cataclysmic things to worry about. But it’s also true that – by many objective measures – the world is a better place than it’s ever been before. In 1940, more than half the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Today, that has dropped to about 10%. Infant mortality rates have declined by about 90% over that same 86-year stretch. And, in that same time, our average life expectancy has increased by over 16 years.

Even with all those positive trends, I don’t want to be naïve about the problems we face today. I also have a broad streak of pessimism running through me. But, as Swedish physician and academic Hans Rosling said in his 2018 book Factfulness, “When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems.”

So, why do things seem so much worse now? Again, if we look at the human need to worry about stuff, it’s instructive to see how each generation viewed existential threats. Because it turns out that it might not be the degree of threat that has changed. Maybe it’s the way we learn about and worry about those threats.

If you look at the way humans have historically worried about things up until the middle of the last century, our circle of concern was centered around our own families: would our children survive to adulthood, would our husbands and fathers return from war, would we have enough to eat through the winter? Our circles were small because our worlds were small. What we worried about was what immediately impacted us where we lived.

But things changed with the Second World War. Suddenly, we started hearing about frightening things from around the world. It wasn’t so much that the threats got bigger, but mass media made every worrisome thing in the world our own personal worry.

The biggest contributor to existential anxiety is to gain knowledge of worrying things without being able to do anything about them. Awareness of threats without agency is incredibly debilitating for humans. It triggers something called the smoke alarm principle.

We have evolved to be sensitive to threats. But our evolutionary landscape presupposed we could respond to these threats – through either fight or flight. The costs to investigate a threat – like a buzzing smoke detector – are outweighed by the benefit of responding that threat – preventing a housefire. This threat detection mechanism has been built to withstand a few false alarms. Burning toast that sets off a smoke alarm may be a little irritating, but it’s not going to cause us to throw the alarm away. But a smoke alarm that is constantly buzzing creates chronic anxiety, especially when it’s warning us about things we can’t do anything about.

There’s yet another cognitive quirk that leads us to catastrophize the world – called availability bias. We use information that is top of mind, such as what we’ve just read on our social media feed or seen in a news alert pop up – and apply it generally as representative of the state of the world. Because we are constantly bombarded by negativity, it’s only human to assume everything is bad, even if, as Rosling told us, statistics paint a different picture.

So, after this non-emotional analysis, I came to this conclusion: are things worse now than ever before? No. In fact, the opposite may be true. But for media owners, there’s no profitability in good news.

That said, we’re still a long way from good, and we should never stop aiming for that. As Mr. Rosling also tried to tell us, “Things can be both bad and better.”

Honest Politics – and other Social Anomalies

Here in my city, something interesting is happening. We’re having a civic election and one of the Candidates for city council – Brady Rogers – is taking a refreshing approach: self-deprecation and unvarnished honesty.

And it seems to be working.

His campaign yard signs have slogans like : “I Barely Want to Do This,” “Just Paying My Rent,” “How Hard Can it Be?,” “Fine, I’ll Do It.” and “Don’t Worry, I’ll Fix Everything (terms and conditions apply.)” I’ve only seen a few scattered in amongst the thicket of signs posted for his competitors (it’s a crowded field – 37 candidates for 8 available positions). But the scarcity of his signs kind of rings true with his campaign approach, “Really, how serious do you want me to take this?”

Even his website keeps tongue firmly embedded in his very self-aware cheek. His CV section reads as follows:

“Hi, I’m Brady
Do I Enjoy Politics? No.
Do I Know What I’m Doing? No.
But Am I Qualified? Also No.”

If Roger’s campaign signs are few and far between, his profile is anything but. His campaign has gained national and international attention. His social media following has mushroomed, but it’s also been amplified a hundred-fold through other people picking up on his unique campaign.  He’s had an estimated 2 million views of some of his content. And Instagram influencer “MandifromtheInternet” received over 150,000 likes on her post about Brady.

Now, this could be just another story of something going viral on social media. But I think it’s more than that. I believe Brady Rogers has managed to put his finger on something very timely – an ironic and self-deprecating yet sincere kick in the shins of democracy.

Democracy hasn’t had a great run lately. We can’t be blamed for talking an election – any election – with a grain of salt. In Kelowna, the city I live, this is especially true for civic elections. Typically, the same old incumbents run again and again, leaving little room for newcomers and fresh ideas. We are a conservative city that does not embrace change willingly.

But maybe that’s changing. And maybe Brady’s approach is the right thing at the right time. In his own self-awareness, he seems to be able to pick up the broader vibe of an electorate that could be ready for a shake-up. As one of his posters notes in a bright yellow bullet in the corner, he’s “Under 60.”  As you might guess, Kelowna’s City Council tends to be a little on the “grey” side.

Brady, who is 33, is of a different generation. As Mandi, the afore-mentioned internet influencer, said in her post about Rogers, his campaign might be “the most Millennial thing I have ever seen, in my entire life.”  And that, in a nutshell, seems to sum up Brady Roger’s approach to municipal politics. It is looking for authenticity by using irony, caring but doing so in a way that acknowledges the system could well be fundamentally broken and the things we used to take for granted can no longer be counted on.

If you scroll through Roger’s Instagram posts, you’ll find irony and a sort of “WTF” eyes-wide-open realism as he walks, busses and e-scoots through his city. But you’ll also find something else – a genuine sense of concern. One of our biggest issues this election is the homeless issue, and one post, in particular, has Rogers wrestling from a very personal and vulnerable perspective with an issue that is incredibly complex and sprawling, seeping into multiple cracks between overlapping levels of government, multiple programs and opposing political perspectives. Unlike many of the other candidates, Rogers freely admits he doesn’t have the right answer for homelessness, but maybe it starts by asking the right questions, “I realize saying “I don’t know” isn’t a great political platform, but I don’t know. And I think more politicians should be able to say I don’t know. “

It’s here, at the nexus of irony, authenticity, vulnerability and a certain amount of self-professed naivete, that Brady Rogers seems to have struck a nerve in my city, my province and my country. It’s undeniably refreshing. We’ll see if it’s electable.

P.S. I started this column a week or two ago. Last Saturday, Brady Rogers received the fourth highest vote tally in our municipal election, securing one of 8 council seats. That night, he posted again, in typical Brady fashion: “Thanks everyone for voting for me – and stuff. That’s cool. I guess I’m on council now.”

Making Our Own Personal Peace with AI

AI usage has reached the tipping point. According to a recent PEW study, half of U.S. adults use an AI Chatbot regularly. Since the rollout of ChatGPT in late 2022, adoption of AI has exploded at a rate not previously seen, outpacing adoption of both the Internet in the late 20th century and Smartphones between 2010 to 2015.

The survey is looking just at the deliberate use of AI through an agent like ChatGPT, Claude or Google’s Gemini. It doesn’t include the AI that is now baked into everything we do in our virtual world. But today I want to explore how our own personal feelings about AI evolve over that adoption cycle, and that requires us to know that we are using AI.

As I mentioned a while back, I am one of those 50% who have been tentatively adopting AI. As a self-professed geek and early adopter, I love to kick the tires of new tech. I’ve always been like that. I was one of the first in my city in British Columbia to drag myself online when the siren call of a dial up modem beckoned back in the mid 90s.

But AI adoption feels different to me. I have never had such mixed feelings about a new technology. I have adopted – in turn – computers (late 1970s and early 1980s), the Internet (mid 1990s) and smartphones (around 2008 or 2009, thanks to a delayed iPhone roll out in Canada). With each of those, I was a kid in a brand-new candy store. I rushed to embrace the future with wide-eyed wonder, focused exclusively on the “gee-whiz” possibilities that lay ahead.

This time is different. Maybe it’s the “once burned – twice shy” knowledge picked up over my life where I’ve learned that new technologies always have a dark side (I’m talking about you, social media).

Or maybe it’s the intensely personal nature of AI itself. As a dilettante in the realms of neuroscience and psychology, I am keenly aware of the downsides of any technology that creeps into the fundamental ways we humans think and act. It’s quickly appearing that AI doesn’t just creep. It kicks our cognitive door down.

So I, like many of you I suspect, have been trying to figure out what part deliberate use of AI will play in my life. And I have found that it’s a process. At first, the “gee whiz” part of me was amazed at what AI could do. But lately, I have been trying to reconcile that with the growing feeling that by embracing what AI could do, I was surrendering what I could do.

We have now reached the point where we can’t ignore AI. It can, and does, allow us to do things we couldn’t do without it. AI will run our world. If we want to be a participating part of that world, we’d better figure out how, when and what we will use AI for.

As I’ve progressed past simply being – in equal parts – amazed and terrified at what AI can do, I have found that for me, it comes down to a balance of risk and reward. I tend to use AI as an information gatherer, especially in areas where my domain knowledge may be limited. In that, I use AI as search on steroids, sending it to gather the information I need to make informed decisions. The risk is high and the potential reward is low. These tasks are typically drudge work and if you miss something, it can have serious consequences.

But where I find AI more threatening is in areas where I am intrinsically rewarded for doing something. Creative pursuits, for example.  I, like many people, have used AI to produce pictures or even create songs. And while the results were genuinely astonishing, I felt like I was cheating somehow. Yes, the output was impressive, but my contribution was simply writing in a few prompts and doing some fine-tuning. There was little of “me” in the finished product.

The same is proving true in another personally rewarding realm – travel. There is a new backlash against trips that have been overly optimized by AI. Vykintas Maknickas, CEO of the travel eSIM app Saily, recently said of AI planned trips, “We’re not losing directions, we’re losing permission to be lost. That used to be a core part of travel. You would miss a turn, ask someone for help, end up in a conversation and sometimes even in the wrong place, and that is often where the stories came from.”

But it’s not just travel where ruthlessly efficient AI is stripping away the joy that comes from being imperfectly human. Just like when we’re wandering through Rome on vacation, we humans seldom travel in straight lines. To be human is to experiment, to err, to adjust and – on that journey – to learn. Educational philosopher Gert Biesta would love to see education slow down and become more serendipitous. In a recent essay, he explained, “It’s being confronted with your own freedom, when you need to figure out: What do you do if no one tells you what to do?

“The faster [the students] go,” Biesta said, “the fewer the opportunities for hesitation, judgment, or uncertainty.”

That’s the danger, but like many new technologies, once AI becomes a habit, it’s a notoriously hard one to break. Biesta warns us, “AI is a highly addictive technology. It easily sucks you in and then makes you forget yourself.”

Ultimately, each of us will have to make our own peace with our use of AI. And, like most things that are human, that will play out along a bell curve. Some of us will use AI for everything. Some of us will try to avoid it as much as possible. Most of us will be somewhere in the middle.

For me, I will be somewhere in that middle. I’m just not sure where that will be yet.

Fragments of Reality seen through Media’s Mirror

Colorful paper fragments radiating from scientific diagrams against a dark cosmic background

We live in a real world, with real issues, trying to make real decisions that will have real consequences. The problem with all that is that it’s getting difficult to determine what is actually real.

For the past three centuries, science has been the driver of reality. It was a systematic quest to discover objective truth, beyond refute. As such, it overturned old beliefs that were formed over millennia based on religion and tribal affiliation. Before science, beliefs were how we dealt with things we could not understand. The problem with that was there was no way to debate belief. I had what I believed, and you had what you believed. As such, our collective perceived reality was fractured along the fault lines of what we believed. There was no universal understanding of what was “real.” Many wars were fought and many people died because of incompatible beliefs.

Beliefs are the default way we make sense of the world. It takes a lot less of the brain’s processing power to simply believe something than to question it and seek to verify it in some provable way. The enlightenment and the adoption of science represented a huge leap forward in human development by moving our understanding of the world from the lowest levels of cognition, based solely on what we could see or hear, to a more rational, mutually agreed upon, perspective. It allowed us to rise above beliefs and start to create a common sense of reality based on verifiable facts. It also unleashed our ability to innovate by building on a solid base defined by scientific discoveries.

Most of the last 300 years has been marked by science slowly replacing beliefs as the lens through which we view the world. But that progress has been systematically eroded over the past 3 decades and I suspect that the biggest culprit in this has been media. Yes, the same media most of us work in, write about and analyze. The very same media we both create and consume. If we are looking for someone to blame for the current state of the world, perhaps we should look in the mirror.

It’s media – our media – that has reversed the tide from embracing science back to building a bulwark of our beliefs. Today, our understanding of what is real has not only become fragmented, it has been split asunder, with a yawning chasm in the middle. Science used to supply the middle ground of reality. Today, many ignore science as an inconvenient truth.

Here’s the most frightening thing about that. Those ignorant of science are in charge of consequential things, like healthcare, social programs, environmental protection agencies and national defense. As astrophysicist Adam Frank said in a recent essay, “Now we live in a time when science denial inhabits the highest levels of power and receives broad acceptance.”

But for those who choose to ignore science, an alternate reality has to be presented. If that reality happens to align with pre-existing beliefs, it’s a much easier sell. And it’s exactly that human foible that has been seized upon by all types of media because, as it turns out, polarizing for profit is a pretty sweet gig. It has massively driven up advertising revenues for media companies. Some – admirably – still try to cling to the journalistic standard of trying to tell the truth. Others have rushed headlong into making a business of portraying alternate realities based not on science, or the truth, but on profit projections. If you were to look for the single biggest factor leading to the sorry state of the world today, it would not be Donald Trump, or MAGA, or any political movement. It would be media’s deliberate abdication of its responsibility to tell the truth because there are other – more profitable – alternatives.

We have to do better than this. Maybe – just maybe this week’s show of solidarity from all the major networks, including Fox News, in protest of the banning of CNN, MSNow and Politico from the White House because of their reporting of events that challenged Trump’s Alternate Reality will – finally – be a step in a more truthful direction.

The Transactionalist’s Turning Point

Pete Hegseth is nobody’s idea of a politically correct person. He proudly hoists the anti-Woke banner high. And in doing so, he has carved a place for himself in MAGA hearts and minds.

But I, for one, have had enough. I’m all for trying to find middle ground. But when the leader of the world’s most powerful military force decides it’s cool to body-shame a cadet instructor in an ally’s military, that is a line that should have never been crossed. 

I get that I’m sensitized to the vast amounts of anti-Canadian BS pouring out of Washington right now- AI generated slop with the puerile sense of humor you would normally only find in an elementary school playground. Yes, I take exception to putting the actual governing of a country and managing a war you’re losing on the back burner while the President renames bodies of water willy-nilly (no, he didn’t actually name a lake Lake Willy Nilly – but that would at least shown a shred of humor). 

Seriously, enough is enough. Even die-hard brown-nosing sycophantic Trump-loving Republicans must – deep down in some remaining vestige of their rational brain – realize how truly asinine this is. And it’s not just the Canadian stuff. Unfortunately, that is just the tip of this astoundingly stupid world-wide iceberg.  

ChatGPT tells me that there are probably a little over half-a-million Republicans attached to the federal government in some capacity. One assumes they get through the day by holding their nose and gamely executing this farcical game plan. Take the current renaming of Lake Ontario, for instance. Yes, Trump signed the Executive Order, but as that bit of “stable genius” trickled down through the required layers to get implemented, dozens – if not hundreds – of people had to actually do something to make it official. Did any of them think to themselves, “OMG, he’s finally flipped his orange wig. Call in the dementia patrol, our POTUS has pooped the bed on this one.” 

Even Google, which in better times said they were going to “organize the world’s information” and “do no evil” has stuck nose firmly up POTUS posterior and flipped the switch on Lake America. Oh Google, there was a time when I respected you. Guess I’m going to have to re-download MapQuest.

The question I ask – seriously, incredulously and – yes – urgently – “When is enough enough?” What line has to be crossed before spines begin to regenerate? When the leadership of your country is modeling behavior that wouldn’t be tolerated in pre-school, when does some sensibility switch flip in your brain and suggest that perhaps it’s time to end this chilling charade? Because nowhere in the realm of all possible outcomes does this lead to a scenario where American is great. This is the time-lapse rotting of an empire. It’s blindingly obvious to the rest of the world. Why – those that still cling to Trump’s bulky backside – can’t you see that from where you’re stooping?

But maybe you can. Maybe you’re edging close to a tipping point. And if history has taught us anything, it’s that when malignant facades crumble, they do so quickly. America today is a transactional regime, where many follow the path they believe will personally do them the most good. Up to now, they have believed that alignment with Trumpism equals more money, more power and more prestige for themselves. But, at some point, that balance will shift and all those transactionalists will discover they’ve been betting on the wrong horse. Then, abandonment will not be a trickle, it will be a stampede of morally corrupt grifters heading for the exits. 

It happened to Nixon. After 2 prolonged years of Watergate, his presidency crumbled in just two weeks. On July 24, 1974, he was ordered to release the “smoking gun” tapes.  By August 9th, he was gone, primarily because his Republican supporters abandoned him en masse.

And if we go back a little further, it also happened to Mussolini in World War Two. On July 10, 1943, after Mussolini had been in power two decades, the Allies landed in Sicily. By July 25th – again, two weeks later – Mussolini in prison. The lesson to be learned here is that when your support is transactional in nature, it can pivot away from you in the blink of an eye.

Looking at what’s happening today in Trump’s America, I don’t think it’s a question of “if” this will happen, it’s a question of “when.”

Canada is the Canary in America’s Coal Mine

Ten years ago, I wrote a piece called “To Get the Hip is to Get What it Means to Be Canadian.” By using our national obsession with The Tragically Hip, a rock band most Americans had never heard of, I tried to pry the lid off the reticent Canadian noggin and give you a glimpse inside. I especially tried to explain our complicated relationship with America. At the time, Obama was still the president and Donald Trump had just landed the Republican nomination. If we thought it was complicated then, we blissfully had no idea what was to come.

Who did? Seriously, who could have predicted the last 10 years?

Since then, a lot has happened. But most of what I said 10 years ago still stands. It just needs an update, because now, Canada and the U.S. are actively at war. A trade war, true. But a war, nonetheless. Those are words I never thought I’d say ten years ago.

First of all, I’m happy to tell you that Canada still holds a place in our oversized and slightly frost-bitten hearts for the Tragically Hip. This weekend, Canadians got together from coast to coast to coast to watch a rebroadcast of the show I wrote about 10 years ago. The numbers were fewer, but the love was the same. The Hip’s music still touches something deep in our souls.

Also, this same past weekend, trade talks between the U.S. and Canada broke down. Prime Minister Mark Carney called negotiators back from Washington after a list of last minute, impossible demands were presented by their American counterparts. On Saturday morning, Carney delivered what was – for a politician – an unusually frank assessment of what went wrong. One phrase stood out – that when dealing with Trump’s America, we’ve learned that “it’s signature was written in pencil.”

Ouch!

10 years ago, I used an analogy to try to explain the weird mix of emotions Canadian have baked into our relationship with the US: “Living next to you is like becoming friends with the kid who lives next door and who lives in a much bigger house. One weekend, you’re invited for a sleepover. You bring your toys and pack your sleeping bag. The good news is that for breakfast, you finally get to eat all the sugared cereal your Mom would never buy for you.  The bad news is you have to give all your toys to your friend. Sure, you can still come over and play with them any time you want, but they’ll never be yours again.”

Here’s what’s changed in the past decade. Those mixed feelings from then, which included envy, some passive aggressive resentment, a genuine love and a nagging feeling that our relationship was taken for granted have now taken a much darker turn. One thing that was true then – which isn’t today – is that we trusted the U.S. We trusted you so much, we integrated our entire economy with yours. We tore down our fences, gave you the keys to both our house and garage, loaned you our car and said help yourself to anything in our fridge. You did the same. We never, ever, ever dreamed we’d have to protect ourselves from you.

It’s a stunning shock to us that this is no longer the case. It’s taking time to sink in. But it is. In a recent Pew Survey, 59% of Canadians polled identified the U.S. as the biggest threat to us. That puts you miles ahead of China (at 17%) and Russia (11%).

Your other neighbor, Mexico, is even more worried. There, 68% put the finger on the U.S. as the biggest bully on the block.

Look, I get that this may be coming as news to you. We Canadians are painfully aware that we think about you much more than you think about us. If you scanned a Canadian news site this Monday, the break down in trade talks dominated over 80% of the above the fold story headlines. On CNN, we were pushed into one tiny corner. Updates on the Iran conflict dominated most of the page.

But at least we made CNN’s home page. Fox didn’t think a massive rupture and an escalating economic war with your biggest trading partner was as newsworthy as – say – Trump waving a green flag at a Nascar race or a 69-yard field goal kick in the NFL.  

You do see where our insecurity with our relationship might come from, don’t you?

But here’s my point. You may not be paying much attention to this, but you should. Consider Canada the canary in the coal mine you’re descending into (Note: I wish this was a figure of speech, but it’s literally the truth. Trump is investing heavily in a resurgence in coal power). When your next-door neighbor and former closest friend is saying you can’t be trusted, you should maybe listen. Because it’s trust – the kind we Canadians have banked on for the past several decades – that has got you where you are. It literally put you on top of the world. It’s the currency that gave you the power your president is now flexing.

And that trust has disappeared. According to the 2025 RepCore Nations Study, The U.S.’s international reputation slipped 18 places, from 30th to 48th place, putting you squarely between Kuwait and Kazakhstan in the “weak” reputation category.

Nothing against Kazakhstan, but is that really the neighborhood you want to hang out in?

Autism Conspiracies That Will Never Die

Futuristic megaphone broadcasting data across a neon cityscape

The other day, I read a report from a new study that reassures us that circumcision does not lead to autism.

To be honest, I didn’t even know that was a concern, but apparently two studies more than a decade ago said it might be. And many have been worried about it ever since.

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that this new scientific study will be enough to allay these fears. Male circumcision will continue to be one of the many things (on a list that includes childhood vaccines, the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy, environmental toxins and Wi-Fi radiation) that some will say is linked to the dramatic increase in diagnosed autism cases in recent years.

I’m not here to take sides on this debate. I will believe what I believe and you all will most likely do the same. What I’m interested in is how autism itself and its prevalence became such a hot topic in the current debate on healthcare, because it is a perfect example of the interplay between our current media ecosystem and how we chose to inform ourselves.

First of all, here are some facts we can all probably agree on. The diagnosis of autism has skyrocketed in the past few decades. The US Center for Disease Control now estimates that 1 in 31 eight years olds are somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Twenty-five years ago, the prevalence rate of autism diagnosis was one in 150. If you look at the numbers alone, that is almost a five-fold increase. It’s hard not to ask what might be causing this explosion in autism.

However, as Mark Twain noted, there are lies, damn lies – and statistics. If you look at these numbers the natural assumption would be that something has caused the explosion of autism in the past 25 years. There must be something to blame. But most professionals would agree that most of the increase, if not all of it, is simply due to the fact that we now recognize autism and diagnose it much more often than we used to.

In fact, saying that something is causing autism to explode would be roughly analogous to saying something in the last century is causing left-handedness to explode. One hundred years ago, the incident rate of left-handedness in the general population was less than 3%. Today, it’s about 11%. There are almost four times as many lefties today as there was in 1926. But the simple reason behind that statistic is this; today left-handed people are allowed to be left-handed. In schools 100 years ago, it was beaten out of them with a cane and by tying their hand behind their back and forcing them to use their right hand. Left handedness was thought to be an omen of evil. That is why Latin-based languages use some variation of the word “sinister” to refer to anything to do with the left.

But autism lives in a special place in the conspiracy-minded heart. It has all the prerequisites of something that triggers knee-jerk reactions. It is not well understood. The cause is not fully known. It is a thing that causes understandable worry on the part of a parent. And – perhaps most of all – based on the numbers alone, it appears likely that a system we should trust has let us down.

This makes autism the perfect battle ground for information vs misinformation. Science can – and has – tried to do its best to put the conspiratorial fears about the causes of autism to rest. Study after study has come out saying that there is no link between vaccines, or Wi-Fi radiation, or – apparently – male circumcision and autism. There may be correlation, but no causation has been found.

Unfortunately, this information is delivered through the same screen as the TikTok video damning the MMR vaccine as irrefutably being the cause of the autism explosion in the past few decades. There is no qualification, no vetting of source material, no threshold of reliability to cross over before the message is streamed to us. The 10-year observational study done with impeccable methodology is summarily dismissed based on a 30 second video done in the kitchen by a 32-year-old influencer with zero medical training but who happens to have 450,000 Instagram followers.

In fact, in terms of audience reach, there is no comparison. The most popular cognitive scientist I know is Steven Pinker from Harvard, a man with a 46-year academic career who has written 17 books, most of them on how brains operate. In fact, one is literally called “How the Mind Works.” He has repeatedly debunked the link between autism and vaccination, saying that, “Vaccines are one of the best things our sorry species has ever accomplished. But the link to autism is The Lie That Never Dies.”  

His Instagram follower count? A paltry 44,000.

It was never a fair fight.

Our Digital World is No Place for the Elderly

My family is discovering – firsthand – just how the world could care less about the elderly.

My stepfather just passed away. He was just a few months shy of his 91st birthday. For the past 10 years, my sister has been looking after the official side of Dad’s life – things like his income tax, pension, healthcare and other related needs. All these things have rushed online as local service counters and real, live humans whose job it was to assist their customers have virtually disappeared. The inner workings of these programs lie on the other side of either a website or a call centre. Neither of these things are designed for the elderly. They are barely functional for any of us, including those much younger than my stepdad.

For the past decade, as Dad has aged, it has become increasingly apparent that our world is not designed for the superannuated. In the last few years, his loss of hearing made it impossible for him to understand someone talking at a normal volume in the same room, let alone someone on a telephone call. This led to him being unable to follow the gist of most conversations. My sister, who has the patience of Job, acted as translator and guide for Dad but was constantly flummoxed by bureaucratic rules and privacy regulations that left no wiggle room for the elderly. A typical phone interaction (usually after waiting over an hour on hold) would go something like this:

My sister: “Hi, I’d like to ask about my father’s income tax return for 2025.”

Phone Agent: “I’m sorry, we can only give information to the person who files the return.”

“He’s here with me. I have his permission.”

“I’m sorry, I have to speak to him.”

“He can’t hear you. That’s why I’m calling.”

“I need to hear it from him. Can you hand him the phone?”

“He won’t hear you, but sure, knock yourself out.”

(Dad puts the phone to his ear, having no idea what’s going on. You can hear the person talking but Dad just looks at us blankly. My sister takes the phone back.)

“Your dad was unable to answer the security question I asked him to verify his identity.”

“As I said – repeatedly – Dad can’t hear. Can you ask me the question and I’ll ask him?”

“I need to hear the answer from him.”

“Is there an office we can go to and talk to someone in person?”

“No, all our support functions have moved online. You can use our website. Does your dad have an online account?”

“My dad has never touched a computer in his life. How would he have an online account?”

You get the gist. These scenarios always played out along the same lines but were typically spaced out so my sister had time to regain her incredible patience before the next episode. But when a person passes, suddenly all these things must be dealt with right away. Her days have been filled with circuitous phone calls trying to tie up Dad’s loose ends, stymied at every turn by the fact that while the system didn’t support him when he was alive, it’s doubly difficult now that he’s gone. Much as I’d like to help, I live in a different province and don’t have the legal authority to deal with these issues.

My Dad was caught on the far side of the grey digital divide. For the past few decades, technology has enabled companies and government services to offload the effort required to deliver their services or products from themselves to us, their customers. We now pump our own gas, do our own banking, configure our own phone plans, administer our own insurance policies and monitor our own pensions and income tax accounts. Programs and companies have gleefully eliminated physical locations and laid off customer support people to cut costs by transferring those functions to us. The only contact we have is either through a woefully designed website (I can tell you the Canadian Revenue Agency’s website is a usability nightmare) or a call center where one-hour waits are considered the norm.

Most of us, given no alternative, grudgingly jump through the hoops required to do what we have to do, which is what these agencies and companies used to do for us as part of their job. We struggle through archaic interfaces, learn new platforms every few years, constantly have to reset passwords and scramble through our various devices and authentication apps to sneak past the impenetrable security hurdles of two step verification. J.R.R. Tolkien made gaining access to Mordor look easy in comparison.

I understand that online fraud and identity theft is a real concern, but at some point, typically north of the age of 70, it gets harder for us to keep up. As our brains age, they tend to rely more on remembered strategies and routines because learning something new gets harder and harder. The world used to reward this accumulation of knowledge with age. Now it just kicks it to the curb like last week’s trash.

There are exceptions, of course. The elderly who are familiar with computers and technology can push the grey digital divide back substantially. But this was not my dad. In his life, he was a farmer, a sawmill worker and a chimney sweep. None of those things – especially in a time several decades past – required learning how to use a computer. The world literally passed Dad by. Just how far he was left behind has become acutely apparent to us in the last few weeks.

Through this all, we keep asking ourselves one very frightening question – If it was this hard for Dad, what is it like for those elderly who don’t have a person like my sister to help them?

What happens to them?