Ideas

If you inherited $120 million dollars, could you give away 75 per cent of your wealth? Abigail Disney did. She's an heiress to the Disney fortune. The philanthropist, filmmaker and activist offers an insider perspective into the twisted perils of extreme wealth — on society and the human psyche.

Part two in a four-part series called The Billionaire Age. Listen to Part One: How did we get here?

Guest in this episode:

Abigail E. Disney is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, philanthropist, and activist. Her films include The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, the Emmy Award-winning The Armor of Light — both co-directed with Kathleen Hughes — and Pray the Devil Back to Hell. As a philanthropist and activist, she has championed peacebuilding, gender justice, and systemic cultural change.

She is Chair and Co-Founder of Level Forward, an ecosystem of storytellers, entrepreneurs, and social change-makers dedicated to balancing artistic vision, social impact, and stakeholder return. She also founded Peace is Loud, a nonprofit that uses storytelling to advance social movements, and the Daphne Foundation, which supports organizations working for a more equitable, fair, and peaceful New York City.

She is currently working on a book about wealth, power, and privilege.

This podcast is about testing the limits of fairness. It's about taking to heart the meaning behind "Beyond the Pale" — a phrase referring to ideas that are so outrageous it's impossible to deal with them in reasonable terms. Follow IDEAS producer Tom Howell as he covers uncomfortable terrain. When the time for ‘open-mindedness’ stops and prejudices become — possibly — a good thing. *This is the final episode in a series tackling the implications of bias. It originally aired on on June 8, 2022.

Guests in this episode:

Eduardo Mendieta is a philosophy professor at Pennsylvania State University. He edited the final book by Richard Rorty, Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism.

Barbara Kay is a columnist at The National Post and The Epoch Times.

Misha Glouberman is co-author (with Sheila Heti) of The Chairs Are Where the People Go. He runs a negotiation course called How to Talk to People About Things.

Rahim Mohamed is a freelance writer and college instructor at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. His opinion columns are published in the online newsletter, The Line.

Anne-Marie Pham is an executive director of the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion.

Michael Bacon is a political theorist at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Pragmatism: An Introduction.

Martin Zibauer is from the Cosburn Park Lawn Bowling Club in Toronto, Ontario.

All of us are biased. We have individual biases, momentary biases, morning biases and evening biases. Our institutions are biased. Our constitutions are biased. So what to do about it? IDEAS producer Tom Howell explores the art of naming your most important biases — and deciding which to keep, as he continues his investigation into what the field of ‘bias studies’ has to offer us. *This episode is part two of a three-part series exploring the meaning of 'bias.' It originally aired on Feb. 3, 2022.

Guests in this episode:

Olivier Sibony is the author of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment and You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake.

Jessica Nordell is the author of The End of Bias: A Beginning.

Jimmy Calanchini is assistant professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside.

Jack Nagler was the ombudsman at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Driftpile Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt's favourite place in the world is his mother's house. It's marked with a horrible, dark past — built for nuns who ran the local residential school in Northern Alberta. Belcourt grew up in the shadow of that school. But his mom drenched this home with love so powerful it surpassed the haunted context. Belcourt's mother's house provokes questions reconciliation couldn't quite answer: what does it mean to live inside history and how do you imagine your way out? In this lecture for Vancouver Island University’s Indigenous Speaker’s Series, he makes the case for literature as a more honest reckoning.

Estuaries are a meeting of two worlds: the river and the sea. They’re incredibly fertile ecosystems that sustain 80 per cent of coastal fish and wildlife in British Columbia. For thousands of years, estuaries were central to Indigenous agriculture on parts of the West Coast. Then a new kind of agriculture arrived, profoundly altering the landscape. IDEAS visits the Cowichan Valley, where an ambitious project aims to restore an estuary — and to revitalize language, culture and traditional agriculture.

Guests in this podcast:

Tom Reid is the West Coast Conservation Manager for the Nature Trust of BC.

Jared Qwustenuxun Williams is a passionate traditional foods chef who works with elders and knowledge holders to keep traditional food practices alive.

Dr. Jennifer Grenz is a Nlaka’pamux scholar and a member of the Lytton First Nation. She is the principal investigator at the Indigenous Ecology Lab at UBC.

Siil'na'mut Ken Elliott is a Cowichan elder and plant knowledge keeper who has worked in habitat restoration for decades. With his wife, he runs Ken Elliott's Native Plant Nursery.

Alyssa Zandvliet is a graduate student at Simon Fraser University conducting research with the Historical Ecological Research Lab at SFU and the Indigenous Ecology Lab at UBC.

Kim Lagimodiere is the acting marine projects manager at the Lulumexun Lands and Natural Resources department of Cowichan Tribes. She is also the coordinator of the S-hwuhwa'us Thi'lut Kw'atl'kwa (Thunderbird Protecting the Ocean) program.