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The Current Transcript for January 17, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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[Sound: bird chirp]

VOICE 1: Woah, I just got retweeted.

VOICE 2: By who?

ALEC BALDWIN: Oops, I did it again.

[Sound: crowd laughing]

VOICE 3: Mr. Trump, please stop retweeting all these random people.

[Sound: crowd laughing]

VOICE 3: You’re not getting any work done.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Donald Trump's incessant tweets may be low hanging fruit for comedians, but they can be high risk for corporate leaders, just ask Boeing and GM. And now the very platform that carries the US president-elect’s volatile bursts of babble has its own problems with the populace. Twitter's growth has slowed, its stock has plunged, advertisers aren't interested and it is crawling with trolls and bullies. All this as younger users of social media gravitate toward private messaging networks. In an hour, we're asking wither Twitter? And what would Trump do without Twitter? And then...

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Well, I’ve often seen a cat without a grin for that is. But a grin without a cat. [chuckles] It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life.

AMT: That's right, from Trump on Twitter to Child's Play. Work with me here. What sounds like a classic children's tale to you is actually a life lesson for more than one dedicated loyal reader. In half an hour, Will Schwalbe offers his list of books for living. And we'll hear from Alberto Manguel, Louise Penny and Neil Pasricha on the books that shaped their lives. But we're starting with a woman whose own story of illness led her to try to control the ending.

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NOREEN CAMPBELL: The reason why I'm seeking med assisted dying is I am not going to get better.

AMT: Just before dying, one of the first Canadians to be approved for a medically assisted death explained her choice to the CBC's Brian Goldman. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

'For me every breath is work': Why Noreen Campbell chose assisted dying

Guests: Brian Goldman, Noreen Campbell

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NOREEN CAMPBELL: I need to, you know, because of my trach, I have to plug it to speak, right?

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Yes.

NOREEN CAMPBELL: So don't worry if there's a pause, I just, I do require breathing.

[Sound: taking breath]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Yes, breathing is good.

NOREEN CAMPBELL: Yes, yes. How can I help you? I'm really anxious to do this.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: That is Noreen Campbell speaking, just over a week ago, from her home in North Saanich, BC, near Victoria. Noreen passed away last Thursday, at a time of her choosing, in a medically assisted death. She was 71-years-old. Noreen had been ill with an aggressive form of oral cancer, before developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. And she was among the first in Canada to be approved for a medically assisted death. She submitted her application a day after the federal government legalized it last year. And just before her death, Noreen asked Dr. Brian Goldman if he would like to interview her about her decision. Dr. Brian Goldman is an emergency room physician. He's also the host of CBC's White Coat Black Art. And he's with me now in our Toronto studio. Hi Brian.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: Tell me more about how this interview with Noreen came about?

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Well, it started on New Year's Day. And I guess I pick up my email on New Year's Day, not everybody does, but a spokesperson for Dying With Dignity Canada sent an email saying that Noreen wanted to reach out to us. Dying With Dignity is a national organization committed to improving quality of dying, expanding end of life choices and helping Canadians avoid unwanted suffering. And Noreen Campbell was a long time supporter of Dying With Dignity Canada, and asked to see if I'd be interested in interviewing her. She's one of very few people in Canada to have been approved for assisted dying, who want to speak out about her symptoms. Above all, Norreen wanted us to understand why she was doing this. So I'll tell you in her own words, how she came to that decision.

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NOREEN CAMPBELL: Three years ago, I would have never dreamt I would be advocating for Dying With Dignity. But I had a toothache that turned out to be cancer and here I am. And it's odd, because I worked on oral cancer surgery for ten years as a clinical educator. It just never occurred to me that I'd have it, because I don't smoke. So as my pain got progressively worse, I finally said one day, you know, I was treated for a dental abscess, dental infection, on we went. And finally we said do a biopsy. And of course, it was squamous cell carcinoma, like, very extensive cancer. And at one point, when I was the educator, I asked the surgeon, what would make a person sign a consent for this surgery? Because you end up deformed, you know, you can't speak, many other problems with that surgery. And there's a good probability you'll die anyway. And he said the pain. And he was bang on. You know, as my pain got worse, I was really, I could have walked into my surgery. I had so much uncontrolled pain, after my surgery I had no pain.

[Sound: breathing into device]

NOREEN CAMPBELL: So when I had my cancer surgery, I did start to look into dying, Dignitas in Switzerland. At the same time, I found Dying With Dignity on the web. And I believe that it is important to do our own community work. So clearly, you know, advocating for Canada and the change in the law became my goal. I told my doctor, when I found out this, or end stage lung progress, I said, look, I'm terrified. I think I can do pain but I sure can't do suffocating.

AMT: So Brian, she wasn't solely dealing with cancer, she would have died from respiratory failure?

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Absolutely. And unfortunately, it can be a very frightening way to die. The fact that she has a tracheostomy makes it harder. But let's back up and talk about the fact that she had, she was diagnosed not only with cancer, but with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease as you've already said. It is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in Canada. At least 1.3, more than 1.3 million Canadians are diagnosed, and perhaps another four million Canadians have symptoms and don't realize that they have it. The symptoms include severe shortness of breath, wheezing, coughing, phlegm, it's often associated with smoking, but as was the case with Noreen, there are many instances with no smoking history. It is unfortunately a progressive disease, whose symptoms can be managed, but it is a frequent cause of death. And I want you to hear how Noreen describes how she was living.

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NOREEN CAMPBELL: My airway, the equivalent to understand how I move air, is if you had a straw, McDonald's large straw, and you put it in your mouth and hold your nose, see how long you can breathe. So I have a very small airway really. However, that happens to be the size of my trachea and that happens to be the way it is, that's it. For me, every breath is work. And I have air hunger. So sometimes I will feel like it's my last breath.

AMT: Air hunger.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Air hunger, yeah. It's, you know, air hunger is respiratory distress in which you're gasping, because of a constant feeling that you're not getting enough air. So you feel the need to take a deep breath, but you can't, so you're left with the distressing feeling that you're just not getting enough air. So some people feel that way when they're in an enclosed space and they feel better by opening a window or stepping out. Well Noreen couldn't do that.

AMT: It is, like, literally like sipping air then?

BRIAN GOLDMAN: She was sipping. She was sipping air when she wanted to gulp it.

AMT: Wow.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: And so she constantly felt like she was suffocating and, you know, you don't need to be a physician to understand how terrifying and agonizing that is.

AMT: No, you do not. Brian, tell us more about Noreen.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Well, Noreen came at this from a unique perspective, in some respects. She was a registered nurse, she died a registered nurse, a licensed registered nurse for more than 50 years. She kept her license right up until the end. And she did all kinds of nursing, she worked with cancer patients, people who were dying, she witnessed death throughout her career. She, you know, part of her career she spent in wound care. She wrote many articles, she was academic, and but most of all, she was well aware of what death entails. She told me the real conversations around death, based on her long experience, just weren't happening with patients and that frustrated her.

AMT: And from what you've seen as a doctor, how do you think the conversations around death are being handled by people in the medical profession overall?

BRIAN GOLDMAN: I'm going to make a broad generalization. There are always exceptions. And I think we're getting better at this. But up until very recently, we have been a death denying profession practicing in a death denying society. Most of us are uncomfortable with death, and that includes physicians and other healthcare professionals, although I think nurses are arguably more aware. You know, nurses at the bedside are more aware than physicians of when a patient's illness is coming to the point where death is on the horizon and it's time to start shifting gears. For many physicians it's hard to switch from cure to talking about death, as if doing so is an admission of failure. And the irony is that patients and families may want to hear it, may need to hear it, so that they can have the conversations with each other, express how they feel, resolve things and have the kind of death that they’d have instead if they thought about it, instead of this kind of heading to, like, a try for life and a cure cure cure, heading towards an abyss and then you suddenly fall off, you know, fall off a cliff.

AMT: Well, and for Noreen then, this wasn't just personal.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: No, no. She had an activist streak, which was tied to her illness and also tied to her profession. And I have no doubt that because she was on the frontlines of healthcare, it shaped her decision, and she believes that even the people don't ultimately choose medically assisted death, having the option provides more comfort than you can imagine.

AMT: So tell us about her. When did she first make her decision about having a medically assisted death?

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Well, as you've already heard, before Bill C-14, the federal legislation on medical assistance in dying, which received Royal Assent in June of 2016, Noreen considered having an assisted death in Switzerland through Dignitas. Once the law came into effect, Canada was her option. And she went to her physician this August to get the paperwork done, in August 2016, to get the paperwork done, and sorted out for her final approval. And Noreen knew she wasn't doing well, and wanted to make sure that she was able to get everything in order. And then, over the holidays, things were not going well for Noreen.

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NOREEN CAMPBELL: I have decided on the 27th. We were at home, and the kids had said, my daughters, I have two grown daughters. And when you have the right to choose this, you get some really different conversations. And sometimes we'd laugh about it. Like mom, don't ruin Christmas, you know. So I tried, don't complain, you know, and I'd been working on a manuscript that finally got published in December. So I thought if I can really struggle for a manuscript, I can struggle so that the kids will have a good holiday. But on the 27th, my oxygen stats were in the eighties, my headache was killing me and I didn't feel like I was solving my problems well enough, you know.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: And this was the 27th of December, just after Christmas.

NOREEN CAMPBELL: Yeah, Boxing Day.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Boxing Day.

NOREEN CAMPBELL: Yeah. So I just said to my husband, my daughter, that today is, I'm going to call my provider. I’ve called her and we've had a chat, and she's a terrific, terrific person. When I went for my approval, it's kind of funny, I breed horses, and it’s sort of like going for a vet check and hoping you're failing. And she was so wonderful, she's so easy to talk to. And when I got my approval, the relief, and I told my family doctor and a few other people, physicians who have referred patients, and there appears to be a very common theme that people who are approved, that relief.

AMT: Mm. She sounds very sure and calm as she talks to you there.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Yes, she did. And, you know, one of the things, as I hear her voice, I realize she was suffering during that interview. And just get walking across to the kitchen to get a cup of water would have been a struggle for her, would have caused her oxygen to go down. But, you know, she was relieved that she knew she could choose the day, and I've talked to other people who were approved for medical assistance in dying, and many talk about that sense of relief and calm once they've been approved. And it's interesting that actually most people don't, who receive approval for medical assistance in dying, don't have it. They just want to know that the option is there should they ever require it.

AMT: That's interesting, because it is such a contentious issue still. How did she think the Canadian government had handled the legislation?

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Well, she told me in the interview that she felt she'd won the lottery, because she met the strict criteria to qualify for medical assistance in dying in Canada. And it bothered her that not everyone who might want medical assistance in dying would qualify. Under Bill C-14, death has to be seen as reasonably foreseeable for that part to qualify. And that was very problematic for her, because she thinks there's a lot of other people who might not meet the criteria, where there might be some disagreement. She also said that she didn't like the way the law handles one particular issue of consent. And here's what she told me.

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NOREEN CAMPBELL: If she wants to be a leader in thinking ahead, we should have the right to consent given a change in our physical status. Such as what might happen if I lost the ability to consent immediately before my injection? What would happen if I had a stroke? That would remove my right to have assisted dying. To me there's no logic here. My physical condition has not changed. So I feel that if we had a perfect world, we would have advanced consent.

AMT: Brian, what do you think of her concerns around consent, advanced consent?

BRIAN GOLDMAN: So this is Noreen Campbell being an advocate. And everybody understands that the legislation was a compromise. It didn't, in fact, it kind of drew criticism from opponents and proponents of medical assistance in dying. The idea, I think, the sense that I've gotten is that the law would be passed, we'd see how things go with current legislation, and then there'd be further study and consultations per the legislation to examine for the possibility of expanding eligibility, for instance, to people with mental health disorders. So she's talking about pre-approval of medical assistance in dying. You know, this is what I want now, if anything should happen to my mental status where I'm unable to reconsent later, these were my wishes. Staunch opponents of medical assistance in dying voiced concern about that, because they see it as the beginning of a slippery slope. These are early days, this is the first year that the legislation has been in effect and I think on that one, it's going to take another struggle, another debate for pre-approval of medical assistance in dying to become the law in Canada.

AMT: Mm, yeah and Bill C-14 was put into law last June. So do we know how many people have received medically assisted death since then?

BRIAN GOLDMAN: One recent survey put it at least 744 gravely ill adults who received a doctor's assistance since the legislation came into effect. And most of the people who've adopted for medical assistance in dying have suffered from conditions such as cancer, neurological diseases, multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's disease. It's not a mass movement, but there is a sense that the pace is picking up.

AMT: And you spoke with Noreen less than a week before she died. Was she nervous?

BRIAN GOLDMAN: She didn't sound nervous at all, she sounded like a busy woman who had lots of things to do. I have to say, I was more nervous than she. I was in awe the whole time, from the moment that she chose to have a conversation with me, wanted to have a conversation with me, and I kept thinking about, I'm a physician, and I kept thinking about the fact that I was talking to this intelligent human being and having this amazing conversation, she had so many things to say to me. We spoke for like 45 minutes and we could have spoken for hours, and I kept thinking that in a few days you won't be here, I won't be having a conversation with you. And I've had that experience when I've been in the resuscitation room and I see somebody, and I’m in conversation with them and I'm trying to find out about their wishes, and they're in severe respiratory distress. And an hour later they're gone. And I see their lifeless body and it's the, kind of the awe and mystery of life. But she was ready and resolute, and that was the impression I got from her. She was pragmatic when she spoke and she approached death in the very same way. This was a woman who was very certain about her decision.

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NOREEN CAMPBELL: We have never had the potential to say I will have a D-day, you know? How do you pick your D-day? Oh God, I don't like Wednesdays, you know, what I mean?

[Sound: breathing]

NOREEN CAMPBELL: I think for some people, it will have to be, like, urgent. I can see people desperate and they come in, that's not a choice. But when you have a choice, you can do preparation. You can have, we've had friends over, we've had terrific times. So you can, you know, imagine that, say goodbye in a decent way.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: And Anna Maria, it was incredibly important for Noreen to have control over her death. She didn't want it to be a troublesome one, a problematic one, a one with a lot of distress.

AMT: And so you say she wasn't nervous about the decision, but was she at all afraid of dying?

BRIAN GOLDMAN: I did ask her, and she told me this story, which I think sums up her feelings quite well.

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NOREEN CAMPBELL: When I took one of our barn cats in to be euthanized, because she was doing so poorly. She was on the table, the vet patted her, the cat was purring, she had an IV, and that was it. She never stopped purring. And I looked at the vet and I said if I could only have a death like this cat. Just think of it, I now have parity with my cat.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Mm. Are you scared of the actual moment of dying?

NOREEN CAMPBELL: No. No, not at all. When I see my cat have such an easy way out, and I see patients who have not, and I know the experience when I've been not able to breathe, this is not even a hard decision.

AMT: Parity with her cat. You said she had a different sense of humour, at the same time, that's a really profound thought. Yeah.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Yeah, it is. And, you know, she had more to say about what she wanted people to do. There was a purpose right to the end. She was completing things that she wanted to complete and talking to me was part of it. You know, she said she wants people to get engaged and to be political, to understand the debate that's going on, and Anna Maria, Noreen Campbell did die last Thursday. Dying With Dignity Candida contacted me to say that her death was peaceful, that she wasn't afraid and she, in sorting out the last of her affairs, the last things on the list of things to do, she sent me an email. “Brian,” she wrote, “my last days have been calm, tears, but much more laughter and awesome discussion. The opportunity to say farewell while capable, looking good, having fun, is a miracle. Medical assistance in dying will change the dying experience. My family and friends will not have memory of suffering. This is a good start to society taking on the life cycle as a circle from birth to death.” Those were some of the things that she said to me in that final letter to me, which she took the time to write in the last couple of days of her life.

AMT: Final words from Noreen Campbell. Really important to hear this. Thank you Brian.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: You're welcome.

AMT: Dr. Brian Goldman, an emergency room physician, also the host of CBC's White Coat, Black Art.

[Music: Bahamas]

AMT: Lost in the light by Canadian singer-songwriter Bahamas. Stay with us, the news is next. And then the life affirming power of great literature. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

Life-altering books? Author Will Schwalbe has 26 that changed his

Guests: Will Schwalbe

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, it is the social media platform that shapes so much of modern conversation today it may even have given the world US President-elect Donald Trump. Twitter can do anything it seems — except make money. We're peering into the uncertain future of the online service everyone loves to hate in half an hour. But first, reading the classics for inspiration and guidance in the age of Twitter.

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[Music: classical violin]

A mad tea party. There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it. The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it. No room, no room, they cried out when they saw Alice coming. There's plenty of room, said Alice indignantly. And she sat down in a large arm chair at one end of the table. Have some wine, the March Hare said in an encouraging tone. Alice looked all around the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. I don't see any wine she remarked. There isn't any, said the March Hare. Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it, said Alice angrily. It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited, said the March Hare.

AMT: Well, that is one of Alice’s many mad encounters from Lewis Carroll's book Alice in Wonderland. We heard the British actor John Gielgud reading it there. Alice in Wonderland is a classic of course. You may be surprised to learn that the Argentinian-Canadian writer Alberto Manguel — whose books include A History of Reading — considers Alice to be an all-time favourite, with some important lessons for living in the modern world.

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ALBERTO MANGUEL: Alice is a Victorian girl who is brought up to respect adults, and she realizes that those adults are crazy and they are absurd, and they do things that are unjust and unfair. And she rebels from her childhood logic and manages to overcome all these absurdities. Alice has taught me that reason will help you to overcome absurdity. And it won't go away, but at least you will recognize it for what it is and be able to point your finger at it.

AMT: The writer Alberto Manguel, who these days is the director of the National Library of Argentina. And like Alberto Manguel, many of us can point to a particular book that has changed our life, our lives forever. Here in Canada, we remain fairly enthusiastic readers. More than 80 per cent of us say we have read at least one book in the past year. But as a pastime, reading comes in fourth, behind watching television, browsing online, and spending time with family. My next guest, Will Schwalbe, would like to see reading a little higher on the list. You may remember Will Schwalbe as the author of The End of Your Life Book Club. He's a long time book editor and reader, and he has a new book out entitled Books For Living. Will Schwalbe is with us from New York. Hello.

WILL SCHWALBE: Hello Anna Maria.

AMT: Alberto Manguel says Alice in Wonderland carried him from his early years to adulthood. What's that childhood book for you?

WILL SCHWALBE: For me, the childhood book is E.B. White's marvelous Stuart Little. That's the story about the human family that gives birth to a mouse. And I just love that book. For me, it was really a tale of a radical acceptance. A story you could be whatever you want and your parents would still love you.

AMT: And how many times have you read that book?

WILL SCHWALBE: Oh, as a kid I read it dozens of times. Every couple of years I go back and reread it.

AMT: Do you give it as a gift?

WILL SCHWALBE: I love to give it as a gift, along with Charlotte's Web, which is another E.B. White classic.

AMT: Mm, you’re right, yeah. So what is the importance of reading books?

WILL SCHWALBE: Reading books does so many things for us. It's a great way of quieting the mind, it takes us out of the crazy world we live in. And it's almost like a form of meditation. But I think far more than that, reading books gives us a sense of empathy. It puts us into someone else's soul as it were and it causes us, at least for a moment, to put aside our own prejudices, our own opinions, and listen, really listen to someone else. One of the things I love about books is you can rant about them, you can scream at them, you can even scribble in the margins or throw a book across the room. But what you can't do is change the words on the page.

AMT: Mm. Is there something actually better about reading books than reading magazines or a blog post or a tweet?

WILL SCHWALBE: I really think there is something better. It's because books are composed to stand the test of time. For the most part, magazine articles and newspaper articles, blog posts, comments on Facebook are by their nature ephemeral. When you think about a book, someone has taken time and effort, composed words to last forever in a particular way. So I think books are more timeless, more thoughtful and have more to offer us. You can also, which I love, you can read the same book again and again throughout your life. And a book which means something to you or maybe even nothing to you when you are in, say, your twenties may mean something incredibly different to you when you’re fourties or fifties. And you're really not the same reader at the end of a book as you were at the beginning. That every book changes you.

AMT: Why is the question what are you reading much bigger than it seems?

WILL SCHWALBE: What are you reading is the most terrific question and I love to ask it of everyone. I ask it of people standing in front of me at line at the deli, I ask it of all my relatives, friends, strangers. It really allows someone to share something of themself and it opens up a conversation. That most of the questions we ask each other really just require yes or no answers or a number. But what are you reading is an opportunity for someone really to share something. I’m very frequently amazed by what someone is reading and also by how thrilled they are to be asked that question.

AMT: Mm. You have made a list of 26 books and we will put them on our site. What do these books mean to you?

WILL SCHWALBE: These 26 are all books that found me at a time when I really needed them. They're not, I think, the 26 greatest books in the world, although some of them are, nor are they even really my 26 favourite books. But they're books that taught me something and that I think have the opportunity to teach others something.

AMT: Mm. Well, we asked a few other people about the books that changed their lives. Neil Pasricha is the author of The Book of Awesome and The Happiness Equation. He says the book that taught him most about the modern world was one from 2,000 years ago Seneca's long essay On The Shortness Of Life. Listen to Neil Pasricha.

SOUNDCLIP

A couple of key phrases really stuck with me. One is that life is long if you know how to live it. And another is that we don't protect our time the way we protect our property. You know, somebody builds a fence on your lawn in the backyard, you are up in arms. Somebody books an hour long meeting with you on a Wednesday afternoon, you had accept mindlessly. And yet time is really the ultimate finite resource. We only have 30,000 days of life each. That's a Canadian lifespan for you. So life is long if you know how to use it. But the key thing is to overvalue your time

AMT: Will Schwalbe, what do you think?

WILL SCHWALBE: I think that's a wonderful message. And actually several of the books that I write about have that exact message. One of the books that I really love and write about is Anne Morrow Lindbergh Gifts From The Sea. And Anne Morrow Lindbergh was the wife of the famous aviator, bestselling author in her own right, explorer, pilot, adventurer. But she writes this wonderful book about a trip to the seaside, and how different shells taught her to value different things. And one of the things that taught her to value is time and especially time alone. And I think in this world, where we're so bombarded by social media by television by appointments and obligations, preserving time alone is really more important than ever.

AMT: You learned an interesting lesson from The Odyssey, what was it?

WILL SCHWALBE: The Odyssey taught be something very unusual, which is to embrace mediocrity. I'm sure that's not the lesson most people got from it. But I tell a story about a wonderful teacher I had who gave me a really hard time when I was grade grubbing, he'd given me a kind of mediocre grade and I had argued that I deserved a much higher one, and he gave it to me. He just said OK, here's the grade. And then he said something wonderful, he said, “your paper was a mediocre paper. It will always be a mediocre paper but I'll give you whatever grade you like and it won't change a thing.” What he really taught me that day was to appreciate and celebrate mediocrity, because if you don't do that then you'll never really realize what excellence is. The course I was taking with him was a course on Homer and we were reading The Odyssey. Odysseus is an amazing guy but there's one thing he's pretty mediocre at and that's getting home. Takes him a decade, everyone else manages it quite quickly. But the message for me and for this teacher of mine was that's OK. You don't have to do a great job getting home, you just have to get home.

AMT: Mm. And that brings me to another book on your list, The Importance Of Living by Lin Yutang. What is this book?

WILL SCHWALBE: This is a book I return to again and again, it's one of my favourite books. It was published in 1938 and was one of the biggest best sellers of the 1930s. The author was a Chinese scholar, and he calls it a book about the noble art of leaving things undone. And in it he presents Chinese philosophy to the West, and the type of Chinese philosophy he presents is the philosophy of relaxing, lying in bed, drinking tea, enjoying nature, spending time with friends, it's a marvelous book, very digressive, very long, with all of these great asides about savouring life. One of the things that really fascinates me about it is at first you think it's this very charming book about kind of goofing off. But then you start to realize Lin Yutang was writing in the late thirties, he writes specifically about Hitler and Stalin. And he writes about a world gone mad and about greed and ambition and lust for power. And what he's really presenting is a humanist response to this. So the importance of living is about human values. One of the values that he champions most fiercely is reading.

AMT: Now, reading Lin Yutang lead you to another book, a book called A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre. You really took his lesson to heart.

WILL SCHWALBE: Oh, I love this book. It's written in the 1790 by a French count and it has a crazy story. So this count was caught dueling, and dueling was illegal, and he was sentenced to 40 days house arrest. So what he decided to do when he was under house arrest is write a travel guide to his room. One day he visits his bed and another day his chest of drawers and another day a wall and another day the bookshelf. And even sort of scooched himself around the room sitting on a chair. And again, it's one of those books that at first it seems quite frivolous and a little silly, but he has a very important message. There are incredible wonders right in front of our eyes but we have to take the time to look at them. And the book also has quite a serious turn at the end, because he spends some time looking out his window and he says you don't have to go anywhere to see suffering. Right outside my window I see children shivering from the cold trying to keep each other warm. And it's a great lesson too in the responsibility we have to those immediately around us.

AMT: You made a point of traveling around your own apartment?

WILL SCHWALBE: I did. I visited some of my favourite things and there's a really beautiful part of this book where the French count visits the letters that a beloved comrade had written him. And this is a comrade who had died of disease in his arms. And I made a point when doing my own trip around my room to visit letters that had been sent to me by my best friend who had been killed in a tragic accident a couple of years after college. And that was a wonderful way to spend my day and I try to do it quite regularly. I try to turn off all the media, turn off the computer and visit things in my room. Visit a beloved vase or a book on my shelf, or as I said, these letters from my friend.

AMT: Mm. Speaking of your friend, you read David Copperfield in your teens and it's now come to be connected with that friend.

WILL SCHWALBE: Yeah. I remember when I read it in my teens, and I turned the last page of David Copperfield and I was sobbing. And I was sobbing because I thought that's the last I'll ever be able to spend with David Copperfield and Steerforth and Dora and little Emily. But over time, I came to realize that my relationship with David Copperfield and those other characters had really just begun and that they would be with me for life. And I write in this chapter about all the Davids in my life, but one in particular, my best friend David Baer, the one who was killed in this accident. And I write about my total sorrow and misery when he died, when he was killed and how I thought that that would be the end, that would be the last that I would ever be able to think of or spend time with my dearest friend. But David Copperfield made me realize that when I think back on David Copperfield, I get to choose whether I remember reading David Copperfield or whether I remembered my sorrow when it finished. And when I think back on this friend of mine David Baer, I get to choose whether I remember his life or whether I remember his death. And I try to choose life.

AMT: Mm. I have another anecdote of a life changing book to play you. This is a bit of a twist. This one is from Louise Penny, the author of the Armand Gamache detective novels. Have a listen to her talking about Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf.

SOUNDCLIP

I read in school, and with most school books, I payed, you know, very little attention to most school books. It was just something I had to do. But this made an impact, it made an impact not only because the story was riveting but because the teacher mentioned, I think, almost in passing that Farley Mowat is a Canadian. And it struck me then that it was possible to be a Canadian, a writer, and alive all at the same time. And from that moment forward, I knew that not only did I want to be a writer, but that I could be a writer. And that was a seminal change. I passed through a membrane at that time.

AMT: So this is less about the story and more about her experience with the book itself. How much does the life altering ability of books come down to where they land in our own lives?

WILL SCHWALBE: Oh, I think that's a huge factor. And when people talk about the books that changed their life or sometimes even saved their life, it's often because for the very first time they recognize themself in a book. For me that book actually was Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. I was a young gay kid in Episcopal boarding school, there had never been an out gay kid or faculty member at this school. So I sort of thought I was the only one. And reading James Baldwin's marvelous Giovanni's Room, which has this joyful scene between the young American David and his Italian boyfriend Giovanni, made me realize that I could be gay and also I could be a writer. And so to hear Louise Penny talk about she could be a Canadian, she could be alive, she could be a writer, really just hearing that now kind of gave me a chill, because that's exactly the experience I had with Giovanni's Room. And I think in some ways it saved my life. And I also think it saved the life I have. And by that I mean it allowed me to imagine a life that I could look forward to without dread, which is something very big. It allowed me to go through my teens in a hopeful fashion. And I don't think I would have the life I have today had it not been for James Baldwin and Giovanni's Room.

AMT: That's a lovely phrase, that you can imagine a life.

WILL SCHWALBE: Books, I think that's one of the incredible things they do for us. Another book I write about is Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi, about this extraordinary class she ran in Tehran right after the revolution with a group of young women. And she helped them to imagine a life for them through Nabokov and Persian classics and The Great Gatsby.

AMT: I wonder if some writers understand that somewhere down the road someone will pick up their book and their life will be forever altered or they will never be forgotten. It must be a very profound thing.

WILL SCHWALBE: I wonder how many writers think about that and how they think about it. But I think they must, because writers are readers. And you can't be a reader without that in some way having happened to you. That's what reading does. It's a profound obligation but also wow, what a privilege.

AMT: Mm. And we make your book list sound more highbrow than it is. You also read things like Paula Hawkins thriller The Girl on the Train and the Edna Lewis’ cookbook The Taste of Country Cooking. How can books like that change our lives?

WILL SCHWALBE: Well, I loved Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, and in fact I love thrillers and suspense novels. And one of the things that kind of book can do is really help us hone our ability when it comes to who we can trust and who we can't. And knowing who to trust is an essential skill in life. When I read a thriller like that, I get to test my instincts and my impulses against the characters, and in the end I get to find out if I was right. One of the marvelous things about The Girl on the Train is one of the three narrators isn't even sure she can trust herself and I think that's an incredibly valuable lesson.

AMT: Mm. Very insightful, huh?

WILL SCHWALBE: Yes.

AMT: I have another clip for you. This is from a skeptic, novelist Russell Smith has his doubts about books as a moral force. Listen to him.

SOUNDCLIP

Psychologists and other scientists have been trying for decades to establish any kind of link between increased empathy and other moral skills and the consumption of large amounts of literature. And although they claim to have results. if you look at them closely, they're really not very convincing. We also have all known personally people who have been very cultured, very well read people who are complete jerks The other danger in thinking that literature is good for you is that one starts to then think that that is the role of literature. And so one starts to then seek out improving literature. And improving literature, moral literature is that in which the good are rewarded and the bad are punished. And it's very simple minded literature and that's actually not what most people turn to literature for, they turn to illuminate moral complexity. And guess what? We also turn to literature for really bad impulses to be titillated for example, to be turned on, to be turned on by badness, to explore our own dark side. And this is why people, particularly religious institutions, and other philosophers throughout history have said literature is corrupting. And as a novelist, that's how I want to be seen. Not as somebody as good for you but as somebody who's possibly bad for you. It makes my literature much more attractive.

AMT: OK, novelist Russell Smith. Will Schwalbe, what do you think of that?

WILL SCHWALBE: Well, I mean, I love contrarian points of view and in fact it makes me want to read his books. But my own experience and the experience of so many readers I've met presents an opposite picture, I would say. I don't think that you can spend time in someone else's shoes, seeing the world through their eyes and not be a little bit changed and a little bit improved. And of course, the more varied works that you read, the more you'll be changed and the more you'll be improved. No, literatures purpose is not moral, it's not to change just for the better. But I feel it can't help but do so.

AMT: You know, I spoke to a psychologist earlier this month who argues empathy plays into our prejudices, that we have more empathy for those who are like us. How do we prevent the books we read from reinforcing our prejudices?

WILL SCHWALBE: Well, it is very important to read broadly. And if we just read things that we know we're going to agree with, then I can see that that could have a very bad effect. But I think to be a reader is to be curious. And it's to be curious about a lot of different things. And one book leads to another. And in fact, if we're really thoughtful about how we choose what to read and read things that we never would have expected we would like but were simply the answer to that great question what are you reading? Then we can't help but expand our horizons. I wish I thought that the world's biggest problem was too much empathy but I don't think that's exactly it.

AMT: If you could convert more people to be readers of books, how would the world change?

WILL SCHWALBE: Well I think the world would become a quieter place, because people would have their noses buried in books and reading.

AMT: [laughs]

WILL SCHWALBE: That would be a nice thing. I think the world would become a place where people were more capable of concentration, which is a skill that I feel are, alas, we're losing. And I think the world would be a place where we were more able to see issues through each other's eyes. And I think that would be a great thing indeed.

AMT: And so I have to ask you finally, what are you reading?

WILL SCHWALBE: Well, I just finished a really marvelous novel by an Australian writer named Joan London called The Golden Age, set in a polio hospital in Australia. And I'm on an Australian kick. I'm just starting a new book, a suspense novel called The Dry by an Australian novelist Jane Harper.

AMT: Fantastic. OK. And why are you on an Australian roll here? What is it about Australian writers?

WILL SCHWALBE: Well, one of the things that I love about reading is I love how one thing leads you to another. So one Australian writer led me to another and who knows where I'll go next. But I love to follow my impulses, follow one book as it leads to another book. And sometimes for example, if I'm reading a novel about a period of time, it'll make me really want to read the history of that time or another book by that author or book by a teacher of that author. I'd love to follow books as they sort of show me where to go. Because I have a real belief that the universe puts in your path the book you need when you most need it.

AMT: That's a very beautiful thought.

WILL SCHWALBE: You know, I think we just have to listen to it, be open to it. And that's why I have some superstitions. For example, if I'm in a bookstore and I knock over a book, I must buy it, because that's the universe telling me I need to read that book.

AMT: OK. OK. Well, I'd like to go book shopping with you sometime Will Schwalbe. [laughs]

WILL SCHWALBE: I'm clumsy, so I must say bookstore owners love that.

AMT: [laughs] It's great to talk to you. Thank you.

WILL SCHWALBE: Thank you Anna Maria.

AMT: Will Schwalbe, author of Books for Living. Also author of The End of Your Life Book Club. He is in New York. If you want to see the list of his 26 most meaningful books, head to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Let us know which books you would add to the list, which books changed your life and how they did. We will post a list of your most life altering books. Go to our Facebook page CBCTheCurrent. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC, send us an email by going to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. And if you want to hear my latest conversation with Will Schwalbe about the books he shared with his dying mother with The End of Your Life Book Club, we will post a link to that on our site cbc.ca/thecurrent. And if you want to know what my childhood book was, it was The Wizard of Oz series. Not just The Wizard of Oz, the whole series by Frank Baum. That's another conversation. Stay with us. Coming up next, we go from a life changing literature to the never ending stream of the Twittersphere. Social media platform where so much of our politics and social commentary happens these days is part of the infrastructure of the internet. But it's not without some serious problems. Could Twitter disappear like a deleted late night tweet? We are going to ask our Twitter panel in about 90 seconds. I'm Ana Maria Tremonti, you are listening to The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and online on cbc.ca/thecurrent or on your app.

[Music: Extro]

Can Twitter remain a viable business?

Guests: Shane Dingman, Alice Bonasio, Rob Enderle

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

NEWS ANCHOR: Maybe you've been hearing the chatter at the watercooler or reading it in the headlines. Twitter is going to be trading on the market for the first time in history tomorrow.

REBECCA JARVIS: Hi, I'm Rebecca Jarvis and I'm here with @ Kutler Scott. This is @ Rebecca Jarvis in Twitter parlance. And we're at the post where Twitter is eventually going to be trading as a public company. And it’s T-W-T-R, that's the ticker symbol.

SCOTT KUTLER: Correct. This is going to be the most visible event in the capital markets for the year. And we want to make it--

REBECCA JARVIS: Are you live tweeting it?

SCOTT KUTLER: We are.

AMT: Well there you go, just some of the frenzy surrounding the lead up to Twitter's initial public offering in 2013. The social media company set its opening price at 26 US dollars a share at that time. Over the following year the price rose and rose on the excitement to 69 dollars a share. But despite hundreds of millions of Twitter users around the world, the company has struggled to generate ad revenue and attract new investors. And today after an exodus of top executives, Twitter's stock sits just above 17 dollar a share. Of course, Twitter's usefulness as a communications platform for the digital age is not in doubt. The US President elect Donald Trump proves its power every day, sometimes every hour. He has of course been tweeting this morning. But Twitter's future as a company is less certain today, as it battles both financial woes and the PR problems caused by problems with trolls and bullies on the service. We have three guests ready to share their thoughts and we will not be limiting them to 140 characters per thought. Shane Dingman is The Globe and Mail's technology reporter. He is in our Toronto studio. Alice Bonasio is a technology consultant and writer for Wired, Quartz, FastCo and others. We reached her in Crystal River, Florida. And Rob Enderle is a tech industry analyst with the Enderle Group. He is based in Bend, Oregon. Hello to you all, welcome.

MANY VOICES: Hello good morning.

AMT: Rob Enderle, I want to start with you. If someone was thinking of buying Twitter stock right now, what would you tell them?

ROB ENDERLE: Well, I think it's more of a shore until they finish their financial problems or at least resolve their financial problems. There's not a lot of upside here. They're facing a lot of competition or increased competition. As you pointed out, they’ve had issues with regard to bullies, trolls and threats, I’ve experienced some of those myself and they're not yet resolving them. And finally, as you pointed out, they’ve bled an awful lot of executive staff and it's really hard to see a future for a company, that's a positive future for a company, when most of the indicators are in the wrong direction.

AMT: Shane Dingman, what has Twitter done wrong up until this point?

SHANE DINGMAN: It's a really interesting question because Twitter is so unique that it's almost hard to imagine living without it. But when you look at their business, you know, something like 90 per cent of their business is advertising, you know, maybe 10 per cent of it is in selling data. People thought with all the, you know, 300 million people generating all sorts of unique sort of thoughts and data about who they are and where they are and what they feel, it would be the perfect medium for advertising data. But it just hasn't been able to sell at nearly the rate of Facebook or Google. I think part of that has to do with the fact that for the most part Twitter's advertising stays on Twitter. Whereas data from Facebook and Google goes out across the web and you can use it to inform and buying and purchasing decisions, if you're a seller of ads or just a merchant in lots of different places. And Twitter just doesn't do that, it sort of sticks in its own universe.

AMT: And it's failed to continue to attract users at the same rate. I guess?

SHANE DINGMAN: Yeah. I mean, the growth has really slowed. I think it was like in 2014 they were growing about 20 per cent users, in 2015 it slowdowned to, like, six this year, or sorry 2016 it was like single digits, again low. So it's not, it's still growing, just very slowly compared to previous years.

AMT: And why do you think that is?

SHANE DINGMAN: People have pointed to a number of different reasons for that length, essentially maybe it's reached the natural limit of the number of people who want to write and broadcast text, you know, like to put little micro blogging notions of who they are out into the world in a public way. Other people say it's because of the bullies, because of the Nazis, because of the terrible terrible things that have been going on. Everything from Gamergate to the alt-right really scared off a lot of people who maybe would be interested in such a platform for expressing their views, only to find that if you step wrong according to some of these groups, they will turn the incredible power of mob justice against you.

AMT: Mm. Alice Bonasio, what are your concerns about Twitter's business woes?

ALICE BONASIO: I believe I actually do agree with both Rob and Shane there. I think what has become really clear is that the advertising model strategy, if you want to call it that, which is employed so far, it is clearly not working. And I don't really see that changing in future. They have got access to a large community, that's again not likely to grow in the near future, so they can't bank on fast growth and they can't bank on advertising revenue. So I think that what they're doing wrong is that they're not doing a good job of actually capitalizing on what their true value is and this is something I've written about, in that the true value of Twitter in my mind, is not it's data and it's advertising as such, but it is in the way that it provides a voice to the community, and it does so in a way that is unique to that platform. Now, I don't think that that came about as a design thing, it's grown organically to become that. And we've seen it in, you know, very dramatically in the way that it's enabled political movements, anything from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, and the way that now it's a way for individuals to hold governments to account to get their voices heard. And I think with Twitter, its true value actually lies is as more of a public service than a commercial platform. And that's a very strange position for a major technology company to be in. But I think that the leadership actually needs to recognize it and do a radical pivot if it is to actually survive going forward, to be honest.

AMT: And so you have the popularity doesn't actually show up in terms of the dollars?

ALICE BONASIO: Exactly. I mean, at the moment they are focusing on monetizing in let's say the traditional sense. I mean, the advertising is the first business model that these platforms turn to. And with all the hype around the IPO then everyone just assumed that it would be something along the lines of what Google's managed to do or what Facebook has managed to do in terms of monetization. But yes, Twitter is very unique for the exact reasons that Rob and Shane have pointed out and also, you know, that it does have many issues around bullying, which again, I feel have been in part to the lack of leadership. Because I think that Twitter has been very reluctant to step in and actually sort of regulate the environment but not in the top down way, but it's failed to empower its community to regulate the environment in the way that some other platforms have done and that vacuum has left it, you know, open to those problems as well. But I think that it's not a lost cause and I think the community is still very engaged. And there is, as you say, a widespread recognition of the value of Twitter and of reach of Twitter. I think the risk there is that if we continue to just focus on the monetization, what it does it leaves Twitter incredibly vulnerable to a takeover. You know, basically if it ends up being sold to the highest bidder, what is that bidder going to do? Because at the moment Twitter is not officially recognized as a media platform, it's just the tech company. So if I wanted to, if I had a big enough check book, I probably couldn't go out tomorrow and buy The New York Times without, you know, a huge amount of scrutiny as to my motives. But, you know, as we saw with Jeff Bezos when he bought The Washington Post, there was this huge amount of scrutiny around that. But if you wanted to buy Twitter, anybody can buy shares on Twitter and anybody can buy Twitter.

AMT: OK. Well, let's take some of these ideas and pick them up apart a bit. Because you're talking about a lot of different things. Shane Dingman, are there ways that it can generate more money through advertising, do you see somewhere in there?

SHANE DINGMAN: Well, we should say that Twitter is not teetering on the brink financially, they got about three and a half billion dollars in cash just on hand, ready to go. They haven’t really been spending it very much. And I think that's part of the problem, people think the pivot that we've been talking about, towards video, they bought Vine, but of course they're shutting that down today. They bought Periscope, a live platform, but it hasn't really exploded in growth the way they may have hoped. They've been moving towards video as a way to sort of balance off that old world texty feel of the original Twitter, which initially only supported text. You know, and they also make about 600 million dollars a quarter in advertising revenue and then they are planning on being profitable in 2017. It's not that they don't make money. It’s that they don't make enough money for the kind of company they are with the kind of audience they are, compared to peer companies like we've said about Facebook and Twitter, or sorry Facebook and Google. So, you know, in terms of transferring it over to a different kind of ownership structure or a public ownership structure or anything like that, really, even in terms of a buyout, these companies who we heard about in the fall about maybe sniffing around Twitter and looking to buy it, their main issue really was that the price was still too high. And this company is still valued it multiples it makes it a very pretty expensive proposition for what people view as a failing company in the public markets, but it would still be billions of dollars to buy this company.

AMT: OK. So I just want to understand Rob Enderle, it's popular, it's a prominent part of our discourse. It's got cash in hand, it does have money coming in, it plans to be profitable in 2017 but it's not growing the way it used to and that's the crux of the problem, am I right?

ROB ENDERLE: Well, that and it’s not making enough money. Realize that when you're losing your executive staff and you're doing layoffs to break even, that’s selling off your future. Layoffs are not a way to grow. You know, that's their problem. They're trending in the wrong direction, as both Alice and Shana pointed out, the economic model that surrounds them isn’t broad enough to generate enough revenue to get them to the valuation that they hold and so they can't be acquired because they're simply too expensive. Yet as they cut the company to bring their cost in line with revenues they killed their future growth. And so it becomes kind of a spiral where you just can't get to the destination that they want from where they are. They fundamentally need to rethink the firm and their offering. And my view is that needs to be part of something else, some other entity that values its community reach but has ways to either subsidize the firm or to share that cost on the firm, for instance that already has people that go out and acquire advertising revenue and the rest of it that Twitter can leverage and therefore can lose those costs itself. And so it can drop in line without losing resources. But right now as a standalone entity, it's very much like a company that sells parts for an automobile that automobile companies could sell themselves. It's kind of lost in a quagmire. I mean, if you look at other companies that perform a social service or a community service like Wikipedia, their valuations are a small fraction of what Twitter’s are. And so the difficulty is they can't fully pivot to what they are and they can't be sold, simply because the market holds their value at a level that's too high for their revenue and profit to sustain.

AMT: And I just want to talk a little bit more about the potential for growth. Shane, you've pointed out that we're really in a second or third wave of social media use now. Where do you see younger users going? Are they on Twitter?

SHANE DINGMAN: I mean, there are some, you can find them. You know, they can oftentimes, at holidays they show up, you know, tweeting about their hot cousins and other weird things. Twitter is still unique in terms of providing a view into the thinking, the text sort of world of young people and old people like us. But when you look at where the growth is in social, it's on video based services, messaging services, you know, Snapchat and Wechat in China, you know--

AMT: Much more private messaging.

SHANE DINGMAN: Much more private. They don't, it’s not public, you know, even Facebook is increasingly driving a lot of their functionality toward their Messenger platform and not their sort of news feed platform, because they know that's where people are spending their time. You know, there's really high engagement numbers among people in small peer groups and, you know, the lower engagement is now coming from these more public broadcasting. I think of it really, and Twitter is kind of like, I mean, I'm in print, and it's a lot like the problem we have. You know, there is an audience for print, it's not the biggest possible audience out there for all types of media. And Twitter fundamentally is a tech service that has some photos on it and even Instagram which is just pretty much photos is growing faster than Twitter still.

AMT: And Alice, you have been musing about the idea of it moving over to an ownership under a system not unlike Wikimedia or even NPR?

ALICE BONASIO: Yes. Basically, what I looked at, and this is the unique thing about Twitter, is that as both Shane and Rob have pointed out, is it is in a totally unique position. So what I have done is I have looked at the Wikimedia model, I have looked at public ownership and also at the ideas around co-operative ownership. And I don't think there is any one model that we can say this has happened with this company, let's apply it to Twitter. But I do think that what we need to do is really start a very serious conversation with not only the Twitter leadership, whatever that looks like after this week, but with the very engaged Twitter community and with governments and everyone else to actually figure out what we expect from Twitter as a media platform going forward, as a social platform going forward. And, you know, in that broader social service way. Because there are elements of all of those models that could be applied to Twitter and, you know, for example, to support it through donations. I think that a lot of people would be open to that idea and if it helps to engage the community in that, in the same way that the community is engaged with the self-regulation of the Wikimedia, Wikipedia platform. That would be really useful because so many people get their information from Twitter these days, for better or for worse, that to actually develop it into a more credible source would be really worthwhile, I would argue necessary thing to do going forward. So I think that that sort of financial ownership and support of the community in the product could just help to engage and also to perhaps even boost growth. The cooperative idea is quite interesting because that's been floating around. There's even a We Are Twitter campaign going on to actually encourage people to start buying shares in Twitter, you know, and to some extent pivot it into a cooperative. Technically speaking, if one percent of Twitter users bought around 2,300 dollars worth of shares each, they would be able to vote in block to pivot the model towards a cooperative one, that they would have a real say. So it's an interesting thing because it is a real possibility and if you actually think of, you know, blue skies, if for example, Trump were looking to buy Twitter, and that would him or anyone else who was able to do that would then own all of that data as well, which is an interesting prospect.

AMT: What do you think of that Shane? What do you think of those ownership potentials that she raises, Shane?

SHANE DINGMAN: I mean, I think the more likely scenario is that you get a benevolent billionaire, you know, along the lines that a lot of newspapers have seen. You find yourself a billionaire and you can preserve your public service elements, you're at the whims of that billionaire. Another option of course is private equity. There’s always private equity guys thinking that they've got the solution to some uncrackable problem. You know, and as Rob had mentioned that there are still companies out there who are looking for that moment when it becomes just the right price to maybe grab it up. I mean, unlike a lot of other social media companies, there's no like, the voting control is not firmly in the hands of one person at Twitter. You know, there’s sort of three founders who have some chunk of the voting shares and they, you know, they could be persuaded shall we say.

AMT: Rob, this is not really the route that the founders of Twitter thought they'd be going on though, is it?

ROB ENDERLE: Well no, but part of the problem is, and this came out of the dot com era is this idea of developing a product and figuring out the revenue and profit later. That's been problematic. Remember, we had the vast majority of companies that did that in 1990s failed. Twitter for now is the exception because they are generating enough cash to at least survive. But that's the issue, and my own view and it is with regard to turning this thing around, is now they know enough about the service and enough about the dynamic so they could design something from scratch that probably could do what Twitter does and be profitable. And once they did that then they could design a program to migrate the user base from the old model to a new model. But it looks like they're reticent to do that. And don't get me wrong there’d be risk because if they couldn't migrate from the old model a new model it could accelerate their decline. But my own view is that, you know, you've got a choice sometimes when you're running a company, it's you can decide to make the big bets, often that's exactly what you do when you start a company up. And if it pays off then you go forward and if it doesn't then you fail. But if you're on a path to failure anyway, and I still view that Twitter is still on a path of failure, these problems look unsolvable at the moment.

ALICE BONASIO: Yeah, I would agree with that.

ROB ENDERLE: That--

ALICE BONASIO: Yeah, sorry. I would agree with that. You know, basically the idea of a billionaire buying Twitter though is, you know, you are trusting that it would be the right kind of billionaire. And I think that's the attractiveness of trying to instill a more sort of spread out model and get more people on board with active ownership of Twitter. Is the idea that Wikipedia runs on, and basically that because nobody owns it, everybody owns it. And it might be a little bit on the utopian side when you when you start to think about it, but actually the way that things are shaping up at the moment politically and in that sphere, it is actually something that I think is worth thinking about. Not in the traditional sense, I mean, Twitter is very much still holding on to the idea that it is a traditional tech company, and I don't think that the model is working for them as you pointed out.

AMT: Right. And if we're going to talk about it as a really important platform for public discourse, we have to ask about Donald Trump. Shane Dingman, what would Donald Trump's story look like without Twitter?

SHANE DINGMAN: I think that he has used it as a cudgel, and well above his actual influence. I mean, he's about the 63rd most popular person on Twitter, he's got 20 million followers. There’s Avril Lavigne has more followers than him. So it's not that he is like the, you know, the straw that stirs the drink, it's just he is already a celebrity, and then he uses this platform to speak directly to media, who then assume that he has an enormous influence over all these people. You know, I think Donald Trump's story in the last, you know, two years has essentially been always about an outsized impact above his actual popularity. I mean, losing the popular vote and winning the presidency is the object lesson to that. And I think Twitter has a lot of people like that on their platform, who have the ability to reach into sort of our imagination and make it seem as though they're part of a movement. And I think the alt-right is another example of that. There's lots of little clusters of alt-right people, they represent a tiny proportion of total Twitter but they're a very active part of Twitter.

AMT: Right.

SHANE DINGMAN: And so Trump whips up these kind of people and he turns that rage that's out there into, you know, tweets and so forth and so on. And so when you see emotion whipped up like this in a platform, it can look really ugly really quickly.

AMT: Where would the trolls go Alice, if there was no Twitter?

ALICE BONASIO: Exactly, well that is basically it. And you get, you know, I’m on Twitter a lot and I do come across a lot of trolling and some of it is absolutely terrible. And I think that what you do see is some really positive voices on Twitter really get silenced and shut down by the sheer volume of it. You have to actively, If you're speaking out on Twitter, you know, on issues around feminism, race, or anything else, you have to make that conscious decision to just weather that storm. And a lot of people just, you know, they can't do it and they close down their Twitter accounts. And I think that that's where the issue of leadership is so crucial because if the leadership doesn't empower the community to actually change that from the inside, that's what you're going to end up. I don't think Twitter is going to go anywhere as a company it will still be there, but what will happen is that all of those positive voices will get silenced and they will leave. And what you’re going to end up with is a hollow sounding board, a megaphone for those people who--

AMT: Right.

ALICE BONASIO: Are able to manipulate it and--

AMT: OK.

ALICE BONASIO: that is the worst possible outcome.

SHANE DINGMAN: You end up with Reddit.

AMT: Yeah, OK. [chuckles] We have to leave it there. Thank you all of you for weighing in on this one.

ALICE BONASIO: Thank you.

AMT: I've been speaking with Shane Dingman, Globe and Mail's technology reporter. He's in our Toronto studio. Alice Bonasio is a technology consultant and writer for Wired, Quartz, FastCo and others. She's in Crystal River, Florida. Rob Enderle is a tech industry analyst with the Enderle Group. He's in Bend, Oregon. Well, as we discuss despite Twitter's falling stock price, it does have one major fan in US President-elect Donald Trump, who manages to keep it in the news almost daily on account of his frequent and controversial tweets. But as you just heard, he doesn't necessarily have the most clout on the site.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: tweeting bird]

VOICE 1: Twitter has 317 million monthly active users, a number it has struggled to grow.

[Sound: tweeting bird]

VOICE 1: But these days, it's fair to say that President-elect Donald Trump is the site’s best known user.

[Music: Patriotic American war music]

VOICE 1: But that doesn't mean he has the most followers. @RealDonald Trump has 20 million followers.

BARACK OBAMA: I just have two more words to say, Obama out.

[Sound: crowd cheering]

VOICE1: That's a lot lower than outgoing President Barack Obama’s 80.6 million followers. But as everyone knows, Trump likes to tweet a lot. He's produced some 34.3 thousand messages, more than twice as many as Obama has.

[Music: Katy Perry]

VOICE 1: Katy Perry remains the Twitter user with the most followers. A whopping 95.3 million. And according to her feed, she’s preparing to take part in the women's march planned for Washington DC on Saturday, the day after Trump is sworn in.

AMT: Well, we're ending right there. That is our program for today. Now, remember you can always take The Current with you on the CBC Radio app, it's free from the App Store or Google Play. In case you think you missed anything, you can go back on there as well. Now, earlier we were speaking with writer and book lover Will Schwalbe about power and importance of reading in life. It just so happens that in an interview with The New York Times this week, the outgoing President Barack Obama revealed that what got him through some of the most stressful periods of his two terms in the White House was reading. And he shared some of the books that offered him wisdom and solace. We leave you today with Barack Obama reading to school children in Arlington, Virginia and sharing the story of another president. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

BARACK OBAMA: Alright. So I've got a bunch of other people in here, but I'm going to go down to the end. I'm going to talk about somebody I think everybody knows. Everybody know who Abraham Lincoln is?

SCHOOLKIDS: Yes.

BARACK OBAMA: What was one of the most important things Abraham Lincoln did? Yeah, go ahead. Of the, civil war? Yeah. So Abraham Lincoln was the president when the Civil War happened. And what else? He helped to end slavery in the United States. So I talk about, have I told you that you're part of a family. A man named Abraham Lincoln knew that all America should work together. He kept our nation one and promised freedom to enslaved sisters and brothers. This man of the people. Simple and plain. Asked more of our country that we behave as kin, that we behave as a family. So he helped to free the slaves. So the I'm going to leave this book with you guys and you guys can take a look at it and you can read about all these other different people who are brave and imaginative and creative and smart, just like you guys are. And I hope you enjoy it. I'm going to leave it in the library. OK?

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January 17, 2017 full episode transcript

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