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The Current Transcript for October 22, 2024

Host: Peter Armstrong

Prologue

[Music: Theme].

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: There's no shortage of need for carbon-free power. So we're excited about the partnership with Google and we're looking forward to what it brings.

PETER ARMSTRONG: Google is going nuclear. The tech giant signed a first of its kind deal to use energy from small modular reactors to fuel its artificial intelligence data centres. Amazon and Microsoft are going down similar paths with their own plans to invest in nuclear power. Coming up in 30 minutes, the race to keep up with AI's insatiable appetite for energy. Also, this morning.

SOUNDCLIP

Speaker 2: Why does music have the ability to somehow remind you that you have a soul? How is it that music, just a collection of frequencies, can make you feel so many things and remember so many things?

PA: These are questions Daniel Levitan has been exploring for years. Now, the Canadian neuroscientist is looking at the healing power of our favourite songs. He's found that music can help with everything from Parkinson's Disease to brain injuries, including through his friend Joni Mitchell, who recovered from a brain aneurysm and learned to sing again. Coming up in an hour: Music as medicine. But we begin with our national affairs panel as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to face the most serious challenge to his leadership to date from within his own caucus. Good morning. I'm Peter Armstrong, sitting in for Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Trudeau’s ‘revolting caucus’ and Poilievre’s security clearance

Guests: Catherine Cullen, Stephanie Levitz, Christopher Nardi

SOUNDCLIP

PIERRE POILIEVRE: 2 million Canadians are lined up at food banks. There are 1400 homeless encampments in Ontario today. And what is the Prime Minister doing? Working to save his political skin from his revolting caucus. This can't go on. Will he call a carbon tax election now?

PA: That was conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, taking aim at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during question period yesterday. Now, that reference to his revolting caucus is not just a clever turn of phrase. There is, of course, a bit of a simmering revolt going on within the Liberal ranks. Trudeau is expected to face a heated caucus meeting tomorrow, where some MPs do reportedly plan to call for his resignation. The Liberals, meanwhile, continue to go after polio over the issue of security clearance and foreign interference. And these calls for change, they're not just coming from Ottawa. We're still waiting on the results from the provincial election in British Columbia. And Susan Holt's Liberals won a majority government in New Brunswick last night, toppling the Conservative government in that province. Our national affairs panel, thankfully, is here to unpack it all for us. Catherine Cullen is the host of The House on CBC Radio. Stephanie Levitz is a senior reporter for The Globe and Mail's Ottawa bureau. And Christopher Nardi is a parliamentary reporter for The National Post. Good morning to you all.

ALL: Good morning, good morning.

PA: Catherine Cullen, if I can start with you. Can you just sort of lay the land for us here? What are we expecting to hear from the Liberal caucus meeting tomorrow, specifically about the prime minister's leadership?

CATHERINE CULLEN: Yeah, I mean, Peter, this is so dramatic. There has been so much suspense around this. We know that there are a group of MPs somewhere in the neighbourhood of about 30, according to the sources that we've spoken to, who are, we believe, preparing to take to the microphone in this closed door caucus meeting and challenge the Prime Minister's leadership. There, there's been so much sort of cloak and dagger around all of this. Difficult to get a sense of exactly what is going to happen. There's a possibility that they present him with some sort of letter beforehand, but we expect the rubber to really hit the road in this caucus meeting. My colleague David Cochrane reporting that, in fact, they may, whoever it is who decides to step up to the microphone may ask for a secret ballot on his leadership. But that's one of the things that this group of MPs planning this so-called revolt, is looking at. And I think that would be a really dramatic next step, because I've spoken to several MPs who haven't signed this letter or pledge, whatever you want to call it, who say they would actually vote for the Prime Minister to go if there was a [inaudible]...

PA: Oh wow.

CATHERINE CULLEN: Said that to me, previous David reporting this. So, could be a pretty dramatic moment happening behind closed doors tomorrow.

PA: Indeed. Stephanie Levitz, there's a political headline that I love that called this a, quote "Slow, super polite revolt." Given, you know, what you're hearing on the ground, Catherine is just saying about the actual possibility that there may be some kind of a vote here. How serious is this?

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: So, the fact that they have this group of dissidents seems to have landed on a path forward. That's the part that makes it serious, because as soon as this story broke, whenever it was, you know, about a week ago, the question was, okay, you're going to call for the prime minister to resign, but with what authority, with what power and with what mechanism and then what would come next? They don't have an ultimatum that they're saying, right? They're not saying "You better resign, or else we will quit" and said it is independent vote against the Liberals. If they're they've landed on "We would like this to happen," then, they have a clear ask because if the Prime Minister just simply refuses to step down, which he could. Now, there's the next thing that could happen. And this maybe keeps this going forward a little longer than just an angry caucus meeting.

PA: And, Chris, I was around for the Paul Martin-Jean Chrétien revolt, and that was very clear, had very clear parameters and mostly had a very clear replacement for the existing Prime Minister. Is it clear who these people would want if, in fact, Trudeau agreed to leave somehow?

CHRISTOPHER NARDI: Well, Peter, just asking the question is basically answering in this particular case, right? We've heard about a number of potential contenders, but unlike the Paul Martin era, where Paul Martin had obviously done a lot of moving behind the scenes to take over local riding associations, to win over MPs and caucus and basically make sure that if Jean Chrétien left, he was the natural next step. Unlike that back then, this has not happened. We've had people who've expressed interest but then quickly backtracked or specified that, "Oh, but for now, Justin Trudeau is the leader and that job is not vacant." And I think that's part of the challenge that these frustrated MPs are facing, is that there's no really natural course of action. You ask the Prime Minister to step down, he steps down. You've got a void, in fact, with a party structure that's not ready or equipped for a leadership race. You don't have clear runners. No one's seems to be organised. Sure, leadership contenders might be making calls. But a leadership race is a lot more than just making a few calls and having a few people ready to write an op-ed for you when you're ready to go. So, that's part of the struggles that even though Justin, it still remains Justin Trudeau's party in that no one is clearly contesting his leadership. They're just frustrated and they're finding an outlet to express that. And this caucus is basically that outlet. But they're, I think, are very open to the idea that Justin Trudeau shows up on Wednesday with this large plan, or at least a form of a plan to get them out of the polling doldrums that they've been in for the last year. And that may be it quells everything significantly. That is also a possibility. Less likely, but a possibility.

PA: Right. Fair enough. Stephanie, the timing of this has confused me in that like there's no obvious trigger. We're not sort of facing an imminent sort of turnaround to an election. What should we make of, of why this is happening now?

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: Part of it is the, they're running out of runway. The Liberals, if they are going to change leader at the top, you know, I think most folks would prefer something that doesn't resemble a six-week leadership campaign with some time on the ground, some time to build the party, some time to lay out a vision. And the clock's running down on the next, you know, scheduled election, right? We're exactly a year out actually from the next scheduled election.

PA: Right.

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: But I think the other thing that's happening is that the House right now is paralysed. It hasn't been able to move forward on very much because there is a procedural dispute going on over the production of documents related to a funding scandal. And, you know, there's that great expression, Idle hands are the devil's workshop. And I think in this case, it's true. I think that there's a, you know, a larger group of MPs now who are watching sort of cabinet, still do cabinet things behind the scenes, but they don't have really anything to latch on to. They're thinking about their political futures. They just spent, you know, time in their ridings and are hearing, "We don't like your guy. He's got to go." "Hey, I'd vote for you, but I don't like your guy." And people start to talk and they start to look at this. And then I think there's also, you know, the knock on Kamala Harris effect, watching what happened in the U.S. when they switched leaders at the top. It's certainly revitalised the fortunes. The situations are not identical. You cannot draw a clear parallel between Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau. But people see that change does work. We're in a change moment in the Canadian political narrative. And I, you know, I know we'll talk about that a little later.

PA: Right.

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: But people are still looking for change, even from within.

PETER ARMSTRONG: It's interesting, though, like we have these calls for new vision, calls for some kind of new strategy. We don't have that. But at least there has been some pushback. You know, Prime Minister Trudeau went on the offence last week. He took shots at Pierre Poilievre at the foreign interference inquiry. Let's just take a quick listen to some of that.

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JUSTIN TRUDEAU: The leader of the official opposition, who is certainly trying very hard to become Prime Minister, is choosing to play partisan games with foreign interference and accusations of foreign interference, but not taking it the least bit serious as regards to his own responsibilities as party leader.

PA: So Chris, he's talking there about Pierre Poilievre and his security clearance as a federal party leader. Can you just like for people who haven't been following this, it can be a little confusing. Just walk us through the crux of the issue there.

CHRISTOPHER NARDI: The crux of the issue is that in Canada, there's obviously intelligence. And to access intelligence, you have to have the right security clearance, which is considerate of a very, very deep background check at the highest level if you're looking for the highest levels of clearance. And as Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau kind of automatically has access to everything. The government produces its de facto. But opposition leaders would have to go through a top secret clearance process, which is a very thorough background check. And NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet, have all committed to or obtain that clearance. And then, we're able to access intelligence that was deemed relevant to their job as party leader. So, it would be relevant to threats against or within their caucuses. Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, has refused to do so. He's argued that it would gag him because there are obviously laws that prevent you from spreading top secret information to people that don't have clearance. And so, he keeps arguing that I don't want to receive this information because then, I can never speak about it and I can never do anything about it. And that is a growing tension between the two with, as you just heard, Justin Trudeau lobbing, you know, a bomb at him, basically saying "There are threats in your caucus. I know about them. You don't know about them because you're not acting future Prime Ministerial and obtaining the necessary clearance to receive it." And that is kind of an ongoing clash. But also, as you can imagine, Peter, a little bit of a smoke bomb from the Prime Minister who was facing all sorts of, you know, negative headlines, the revolt in the caucus, the growing tensions with India. And so, you know, he dropped that in there knowing full well that all the headlines from his testimony at the foreign interference inquiry would be about that and try to put Pierre Poilievre on the defensive, basically.

PA: And so, yeah, this is the sound of a channel trying to be changed. Catherine, you know, Chris calls it the lobbing of a bomb. Trudeau admitted afterwards that he did get a bit partisan, he said in that testimony. What do you think of the language he used there?

CATHERINE CULLEN: Yeah. You know, I was on an airplane watching this on the Wi-Fi, and I'm sure that my seatmate was pretty alarmed because I know I had a visceral reaction specifically when the Prime Minister accused Pierre Poilievre of making a decision that lacks in common sense and of course, common sense being a key phrase that Pierre Poilievre uses all the time. There's no question it was deeply partisan. There's no question the Prime Minister knew exactly what he was doing. I think that particular phrase is probably not one he came up with on the spot. I did think it was remarkable. You know, the Liberals spent a lot of time saying that a public inquiry was not the right way to deal with foreign interference. And even though now they speak very positively of this inquiry, the truth is they were sort of dragged into this kicking and screaming, right? So, not something they wanted to do. But then, in that moment, the Prime Minister found a way to try to take this thing that was sort of a liability for them and try to turn it into a political advantage. And we know that this was to some extent, calculated because his Chief of Staff was at the inquiry a few days previous, also talking about this issue of party leaders needing to have this security clearance. Again, it was partisan. I think it was also frankly, effective, because there are you know, we've heard from people who are not partisans around this. People like the former heads of CSIS, Ward Elcock and Dick Fadden, saying that fundamentally they're quite critical of Mr. Poilievre's decision, although also critical of the Prime Minister's decision to be so partisan about this.

PA: Stephanie, I was going to ask you if Poilievre's refusal to get clearance makes sense. Can I tweak that slightly to say, does it still make sense? Because I think it might have previously. I wonder if it, if it's beginning to get stretched.

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: It's beginning to get stretched in the argument he can't sort of justify, [clears throat] excuse me, why he doesn't want to know beyond being gagged. Is he not concerned about foreign interference in his party? Does he think he doesn't have a problem? Is he not worried about the nomination race? And he's not, also, there's an inference there. When the Prime minister makes this allegation about Pierre Poilievre, there's an inference of, it's not just that he's not being Prime Ministerial, it's that the inference is that he's covering something up, he's colluding with a foreign government. He himself is caught up in all of this because of the leadership race that he won. All of these things cast some doubt on Mr. Poilievre and his caucus, not just his Prime Ministerial aspirations. Conversely, I mean, this question that Mr. Poilievre would be gagged and not be able to speak about it. True. Okay. But to say that he couldn't act on it, that's a bit different. I mean, there's all sorts of ways you can act on things quietly. Could he stand up, you know, in the House of Commons and point a finger to another MP and say, "J'accuse" and throw them out the door? No. I mean, he could and probably avoid prosecution.

PA: It would be fascinating to watch.

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: But politically he can't. But I think it's also, it's also important to note, and Chris made reference to this right off the top there about how the Prime Minister, de facto, has access to all of this information, which also means the Prime Minister could, should he wish, tell Mr. Poilievre what he knows. And if it was that egregious, if it was such a threat to national security, if it was so bad, the Prime Minister could go ahead and say something to Mr. Poilievre. There's all sorts of reasons he wouldn't. He can't. He might choose not to, but he does have the power to. And this leaves them both playing partisan politics with national security, and that's unfortunate for Canadians.

PA: I want to switch gears a little bit here and bring sort of the provincial landscape and overlay that on top of what we're seeing out of Ottawa, these fascinating provincial elections in B.C., we're still waiting for results. I know Catherine Cullen was there recently, so we'll get to that in a second. But I want to start with the New Brunswick election, where we had this, you know, Kayla Hounsell, our great reporter out of the region, had a piece on World Report this morning, touching on how Susan Holt, the Liberal leader, had to really work hard to distance herself from the federal Liberals in order to win. Chris, what do you think that dynamic in the provincial election in New Brunswick tells us?

CHRISTOPHER NARDI: Well, I think that Liberals here in Ottawa absolutely licking their lips at the Holt victory in the hopes that that the name recognition, you know, broadcasts to Ottawa directly, even though Miss Holt made those efforts to separate herself from Trudeau, I can guarantee you Trudeau is going to be trying to stick to that party and that brand very closely. That being said, I think you really touched on a point there, is that, you know, the Trudeau brand is not what led Ms. Holt to win. This was a ground game. This was frustration against, you know, the incumbent, Mr. Higgs. There was a lot at play here, but it was not the implication or Mr. Trudeau or his government, I believe, that turned that tide. And the Liberals would be very, the federal Liberals, sorry, would be very, it would be very risky for them to think that that could mean that their tides are currently turning in Atlantic Canada, broadly speaking, when ultimately, we also know that the revolt in caucus is being partly led by Atlantic Canada MPs who are just really, really mad, who go to doors and just get shellacked about the leadership of their party. So, you know, they, the Liberals, the federal Liberals will be very happy to see the Liberal brand winning somewhere. But I really don't think that they should think, "Wow, okay, we're saved. Atlantic Canada" or, you know, "New Brunswick, we're good." Don't think that, it's not true.

PA: Catherine Cullen, you just got back from your, what, five days in B.C. covering the election there. We still don't have a winner. We're still waiting on these recounts. Why do you think in the end this was such a tight race?

CATHERINE CULLEN: Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot, Peter. And I think one of the really interesting questions to me is to the extent to which such a close race speaks to a divided electorate or an undecided one. I think it's a hard thing to sort out. I mean, in British Columbia, like in so much of the world, there is a lot to be concerned about. The housing crisis is so acute there. They've really led the country in an unfortunate way on that issue. Crime and the drug crisis, really visceral concerns, you know. I lived in B.C. for a couple of months, like two decades ago, and coming back to Vancouver and seeing how particularly the toxic drug crisis itself is playing out in the streets is a really striking thing. The thing is, you know, if you take that sort of discontent with the incumbent or the state of things on one side, you also have an alternative in B.C. that was unproven. And the B.C. Conservatives had some candidates saying very troubling things. I mean, one of the things I'm going to retain from this election: The Surrey South candidate said hateful things on social media, uh, Brent Chapman, calling Palestinians "inbred, walking, talking, breathing time bombs" on social media. Again, this is, this is years and years in the past. Suggesting the Quebec City mosque shooting, the Pulse nightclub shooting weren't real, didn't really happen. He won by almost 4000 votes in Surrey South, nearly 20% ahead of his rival. So, I think there's some real reflection to do there. But overall, I think because, you know, people might have not been happy with the state of things, but not so sure about the alternative. We've seen this really close result. And I think it's people just not being really sure which path they're most comfortable with going forward. But there's also an argument to be made that people are just ultimately less indecisive and more divided about where we go.

PA: I'm going to steal that divided versus undecided line and use it everywhere and claim it as my own. Stephanie Levitz, what do you make of that? Especially like, there used to be that great rule of thumb that like as the provinces begin to all go Liberal or all go Conservatives, that tells us a lot about what might happen in the next federal election in Ottawa. How, how accurately do you think we can overlay the provincial changes and mood with the appetite in Ottawa?

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: Well, certainly out in British Columbia. I mean, although Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader did not explicitly endorse the B.C. Conservative leader, one could take a look at some of the issues that became the driving narrative in British Columbia that led to the formation of the B.C. Conservative Party at all, or the rebirth of it, I suppose, and realise that Mr. Poilievre himself had been driving those issues specifically in the Lower Mainland, specifically in places like Surrey, for the better part of, you know, two and a half years since he started his leadership bid. And with him driving that narrative there and people being exposed to sort of him raising the concerns in a much more national way, in a much more spectacular way, think about his videos, think about his hyperbole. Some of the things that he was talking about were already in the minds of voters. And then, you head to a BC election. He was effectively campaigning against David Eby well before there was a provincial Conservative party to do that for him. So there, I think you have an echo effect of Mr. Poilievre changing the conversation. If you flip and you go over to the other coast, there is what you're seeing is the appetite for change. As I mentioned before, we are in a change moment in politics and in B.C. I mean, Cath, that was a great line about, you know, divided versus undecided. And in, in New Brunswick, there was a decision. It was "We want change." And that's the thing I think we can all look forward to coming in the next federal election cycle: How high is the appetite for change?

PA: Indeed. And I mean, it's going to be a fascinating week. So, I really appreciate all you guys taking time to help us better understand it this morning. Thanks for this.

CATHERINE CULLEN, STEPHANIE LEVITZ: [Almost in unison] Thank you.

PA: Catherine Cullen is the host of The House on CBC Radio. Stephanie Levitz is a senior reporter for the Globe and Mail's Ottawa Bureau. And Christopher Nardi is a parliamentary reporter for The National Post. The CBC News is next. And then...

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Each data centre uses about the same amount of electricity. I guess, the typically someplace between 5000 and 20,000 households worth of electricity being running through there at a given time. And that needs to be running 24/7.

PA: Artificial intelligence is everywhere and it takes a massive amount of energy to fuel it. Major tech companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft are all investing billions in nuclear power production. Coming up in six minutes time, powering AI as the demand for more carbon-free energy grows. And what all this nuclear hype may mean for Canada. I'm Peter Armstrong. You're listening to The Current.

Google goes nuclear to fuel AI

Guests: Jacopo Bongiorno, Sasha Luccioni

PA: I'm Peter Armstrong. You're listening to The Current. They're in a race to secure the insatiable power needs of AI without compromising their net zero goals. And now, big tech companies are investing billions in nuclear power. Microsoft was the first ones out of the gates. It's looking to reopen one of the units at Three Mile Island. That is, of course, the infamous site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history. Then last week, Google signed a first of its kind deal with a nuclear power startup to buy electricity from seven small modular reactors that have yet to be built. Two days later, Amazon signed a similar nuclear deal. Jacopo Bongiorno is a nuclear science and engineering professor and director of MIT's Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems. He joins us from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jacopo, good morning.

JACOPO BONGIORNO: Good morning.

PA: So let's start with really the basics here. Why are these tech giants turning to nuclear power?

JACOPO BONGIORNO: Well, let me first say that I don't have a particularly strong opinion about artificial intelligence. I think everybody else I'm reading that it could be useful or dangerous to the extent that we agree that is useful. My understanding is that it's going to require a lot of electricity to run the data centres that performed.

PA: Exactly.

JACOPO BONGIORNO: The AI algorithms.

PA: Right.

JACOPO BONGIORNO: And in that context, the use of nuclear reactors is almost like an ideal energy source to power these data centres. And that's because nuclear reactors produce electricity 24/7. We buy reliability, no carbon emissions, which of course is desirable if we wish to perform these operations without incurring additional greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere and aggravate the climate change crisis. And then, and then lastly, they utilise medium blend. And so, basically they can be co-located located near these data centres and reduce also the cost of the transmission and distribution infrastructure. So, there are some features of nuclear energy in general and small nuclear reactors in particular that make them, as I said, almost an ideal energy source to power these data centres.

PA: You know, because the argument when we sort of started to get a sense of just how much power these AI data centres were going to need, everybody was writing how it's simply not realistic for them to keep their they keep themselves carbon neutral if they're going to do this. With that in mind, in looking at small modular reactors instead of the bigger, more traditional nuclear sites, how realistic is this idea that they can get this much energy 24/7 and stay carbon -free?

JACOPO BONGIORNO: It's quite realistic. I mean, nuclear reactors of much larger size, to your point, what we use currently on the grid are on the order of a gigawatt. So that's 1000MW, operate 24/7. So, you get that energy all the time. Very, very reliable, very reliable. And the small modular reactors actually are not that small, honestly, because there are few hundred megawatts. So, they're smaller than what we're used to, but not that small. And, and again, it seems that these data centres that that, that performed AI operations, the AI algorithms need these sort of power level hundreds of megawatts. And so I think again, small modular reactors quite realistically could provide them.

PA: I wrote a piece, this is going back a number of years, but it was looking at like how quickly solar power was growing in terms of capacity. And I quoted a guy back then saying that, you know, if you were to start a new town or a city, there's no way you'd use the traditional grid. Everything would be solar power. And I look at this where they have this enormous appetite for, for new power in clean energy sources. Why is nuclear the better fit than, say, solar or even hydropower?

JACOPO BONGIORNO: Well, my understanding is that they need the power now, right? So, it's going to have to be deployed very soon, within the next few years. So, all the three deals that I think you could mention in the introduction, the one by Microsoft where they're going to bring back online the Three Mile Island reactor is probably the quickest because, yes, there is going to be a cost. There's going to be a time required to bring that reactor online. But you're looking at maybe a couple of years and then you have, in that case, 800 plus megawatts available right there for your data centres. The other two deals, Google and Amazon are going to require the deployment of whole new reactors. So, it takes a little bit longer time to license to license those technologies and then, and then, build in them. So, you're looking realistically at the early 2030s. Is that soon enough? Well, according to the tech companies, it's strong enough. Now, to your question, why this versus solar? I don't think it's honestly an either/or. I mean, if you have enough solar capacity that is relatively close to the location of the data centres, you could do solar, of course, be solar and wind. The issue is intermittency. So you need to back it up with energy storage batteries and that adds to the cost and adds, of course, to the land usage associated with that power generation. So again, nuclear is in that sense almost ideal because it's very compact, it's reliable, it doesn't have the intermittency issue. It is not cheap. So, building a new nuclear plant is, is expensive. The good news is that once you have built it and amortise it, then the marginal cost operation and maintenance plus fuel are actually pretty low and predictable over decades. So, that's another feature that I think the data centre owners will appreciate.

PA: I want to glom onto a date you mentioned, that they want to have these up and running by the 2030s, which is really fast and I know they're already making these in China. These ones that Google is looking at, the small modular reactors is slightly different. Is that timeline feasible? Like, that seems really fast.

JACOPO BONGIORNO: I think It's feasible. And I got good news. You guys are in Canada, the first small modular reactor project in North America actually is taking place now at the Darlington site in Ontario. By OPG - Ontario Power Generation. So, that's going to be the first online at the moment. Seems to be on schedule to become operational by 2029. So, I think if again, the investment is there and the and the need is there, the demand is there, it's, it's absolutely feasible.

PA: It might be worth just for a second here, taking a step back and explaining like Google and Amazon are opting for that technology. You're just talking about small modular reactors. And when I think about that, I have an idea in my mind. But the more I read about it, it feels like it can mean a bunch of things. So can you just walk me through what we mean when we talk about small modular reactors?

JACOPO BONGIORNO: Yes, I can. Do you have an hour and a half?

PA: No, but you know, a couple of minutes.

JACOPO BONGIORNO: Yes, absolutely. I'm joking. I'm going to give you the 30-second version of this. You're absolutely correct. Small modular reactors is sort of a catch-all phrase, which is very vague. It simply means that the power output, instead of being a thousand plus megawatts, is on the order of 100MW. Now, within that smaller range, there is a very, very big number of designs that are being developed by different companies, etc. The one that I just mentioned that is being deployed in Ontario actually is a fairly traditional technology in terms of the nuclear fuel that it uses, the structural alloys that it uses, the coolant, which is water, etc., etc.. So it's a relatively low risk from a technology point of view. But the tool that have been chosen by Google and Amazon respectively, are a little bit more advanced, a little bit more innovative. With that comes the promise for perhaps higher efficiency, perhaps even lower cost, although the jury is still very much out on that. But certainly what comes with it is a little bit higher technology risk. So, you know, there are pros and cons as usual. You could decide to take a longer step towards innovation and the potential for, for benefit there is higher, but the risk is also higher. So, that's something that the companies got to sort of wait when they make these decisions.

PA: So, those, the SMRs - the small modular reactors. That's where Amazon and Google are going. Microsoft has this plan to restart Three Mile Island. It is hard to think about that without thinking about nuclear disasters. What safety concerns should we have about turning it back on?

JACOPO BONGIORNO: About Three Mile Island, the resurrection now?

PA: Yeah.

JACOPO BONGIORNO: Virtually, none, I would say. So let me give you a again, 30-second history. That so, Three Mile Island, a nuclear power station, was designed to have two reactors back in the '70s. One of those two reactors suffered a big accident, as you mentioned, in the introduction, and that was back in 1979, I believe. And that reactor has never operated again. Of the, that the one that did not have the accident operated very successfully for 40 years and then it was shut down in 2019, mostly for economic reasons. The market in that, in that region of the United States is such that, that particular plant was not economically competitive. Now, the company that owns the plant has made a small investment in the past five years to maintain that plant in good, in a good state. You know, the components are not rusty and things of that type. And so now, they have to go through, of course, the relicensing effort by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If that process is successful, if the NRC determines that it's safe to restart it, then they'll be able to restart. But it's a technology that we are very, very familiar with. Like I said, it operated for 40 years safely and reliably before it was shut down for economic reasons. So, it's going to take a little bit of time. As I said earlier, a few years. It's going to take a couple billion dollars. So, nothing is cheap to do these things. But, but when it's all said and done, it'll come back and it'll be 800, 900MW of, of clean electricity. So, you know, good news for from Microsoft.

PA: As you say, that was not cheap. And it used to be that, you know, these huge tech advances that we'd made as a society were often made as a result of investments, usually through the military and through governments. What should we make of this investment coming from tech companies and what changes that may bring for more general consumers down the road?

JACOPO BONGIORNO: Well, I'm not going to be able to comment on sort of the impact or the implications on the general consumer. But I can tell you two things. First, clearly, the tech companies are willing to pay a premium, let's call it above market price for electricity that is carbon-free and reliable. And that's, I suppose, good news, right? It could go with just generic electricity from the grid, which at the moment is not particularly clean because it comes in part from coal and natural gas as well as nuclear, and solar and wind. But you get what you get on the grid. Instead, they decided to make a bigger investment and buy directly electricity that is carbon-free from nuclear reactors. I think all of that is great, is great for the environment, and it shows that they're committed to reducing their, their carbon footprint. It's also honestly fantastic for the, for the nuclear technology development companies because these first-of-a-kind reactors...

PA: Right.

JACOPO BONGIORNO: They're not going to be cheap and they need a customer that is willing to pay that premium. And then, as they build more and they learn about their technology, costs will come down and then, they can start to penetrate markets where the expected prices are a little bit lower. So, I think it's a win-win situation. All good news.

PA: Well, listen, really appreciate your insight on this. Thanks so much.

JACOPO BONGIORNO: My pleasure.

PA: Jacopo Bongiorno is a nuclear science and engineering professor. He's a director of MIT's Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems.

PA: Now, the growing energy needs of AI data centres, they do present an opportunity to some. Alberta wants to be a data centre hub, is trying to lure tech companies to build in that province. Jackie Forrest is the executive director of the ARC Energy Research Institute in Calgary.

SOUNDCLIP

JACKIE FORREST: Actually, these AI data centres could advance this nuclear technology faster than it would have otherwise, and I think that can be a real positive in terms of moving to an emissions-free power grid. But on the other side, you know, we have a fairly small power market. That is a bit of a concern because of the power demand that will come with it. And although there'll be some jobs, you know, where their power bills go up. And will it cost Alberta more than the benefit?

PA: Now, some communities in the United States have decided it's not worth it. Wendy Reigul has successfully fought against these kinds of data centres in Indiana.

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WENDY REIGUL: There had been a data centre proposed right across the street and it was going to be like eight buildings, 70ft tall. They were to have nine generators each. We don't want hyperscale data centres built in our residential neighbourhoods because they're heavy industrial and they do. And all this power, our company would go broke and so would we. It's not worth it what that would do to our community. I mean, it would just be horribly expensive for everybody. So we're not interested.

PA: Sasha Luccioni is watching this debate play out. She's an artificial intelligence researcher and climate lead at Hugging Face - a company which builds AI tools. And she joins us from Montreal. Sasha, good morning.

SASHA LUCCIONI: Good morning.

PA: Can you just give us a sense because I see these numbers and I frankly can't wrap my head around it, how much energy AI data centres actually consume around the globe?

SASHA LUCCIONI: It's really hard to get that number because data centres tend to run everything in parallel, everything from email to Netflix streaming to AI. And so, and we haven't managed to get exact numbers because essentially cloud providers, cloud compute providers are like, well, we don't know what people are running on our servers. You know, it could be your bridgerton addiction or it could be AI models. But we do know is that as we're switching out more and more tools and, and consumer facing products with AI, we know that that's contributing to the growth. So, we do have that, like, relative portion. We just don't have the absolute numbers.

PA: But we're talking like vast sums of energy. So I read somewhere that it was as much energy is used by like the entire country of the Netherlands.

SASHA LUCCIONI: Yeah, there have been some estimates. Essentially, it's hard is hard to say exactly. As a as a scientist, I tend to focus on the on the models themselves because [MG: Right, fair] the, the high level numbers are hard to get. But we do know also that the, so the computing chips, like the GPUs [MG: Mmm, hmm] that are specifically used for AI models are more power hungry than those used for normal kind of streaming and web services. So, that's also part of the problem is that even if you have like one chip for AI, one chip for Netflix, the AI chip will be, will be consuming more energy overall.

PA: We just heard from Jacopo Bongiorno explaining why nuclear makes more sense than other kinds of power generation. What do you think of these tech giants turning to nuclear power?

SASHA LUCCIONI: Well, actually, it's interesting because in the last couple of months, both Google and Microsoft have both publicly announced that they missed their net zero goals for the year and that actually their emissions are rising and their energy use is rising, which is a first because, you know, companies set these goals themselves, so they tend to set goals that they can meet. And so this year they're like, "Oh, oops! Like, AI caught us by surprise." And so since I think May-ish, they've been scrambling to find new ways to meet those goals. I mean, the new goals that they've set. And I think that nuclear is the, is the solution they went with. But as Jacopo said, that's going to take a couple of years for sure. I think even for Three Mile Island, I think the earliest was 2027. So, there is going to be a couple of years when the demand is going to be outstripping any kind of renewable energy supply. But what's interesting is that actually tech companies for the last five years have been the biggest purchasers of renewable energy credits, which is a way of offsetting energy. So, so you use your energy in, I don't know, Singapore where it's 100% coal-based energy, and then, you can offset it with renewable energy credits that you buy in a grid that's not where you use your energy, but it's like a way of, of planting a tree, if you will. And so, tech companies have been using these kinds of offsetting approaches for several years. And so, maybe that they'll continue expanding that and essentially doing this creative accounting situation when it comes to emissions.

PA: You know, there was a time not all that long ago where we almost universally felt like tech companies were going to be the saviour of humankind and they were going to rethink how we did everything. And it would take us to this much better place. And we've begun to rethink that in a lot of ways of what benefits and what harms tech companies and their products have, have brought and done to society. When we think about something as potentially volatiles nuclear energy being in the hands of tech companies, what concerns should we have?

SASHA LUCCIONI: Well, I think that tech companies have gotten away with a lot just because it's a new area. And, you know, the approaches tends to be move fast and break things in, in start-ups and in Silicon Valley. And so, what worries me is, is that approach transposed to nuclear energy, because nuclear energy is something that has to, it has to involve a lot of care that you can't just like "YOLO" your way through a nuclear reactor. No, but honestly, like I do speak to a lot of people who are in the tech industry and even in A.I., the approach is like, "Well, let's see what sticks, right?" Well, like we know that Google does AB testing to see how many ads people click if they, you know, put them in this place or this place, right? There's a lot of these approaches that are very empirical as it may. And this is, this is a new even, machine learning AI is a new field. And so, a lot of what we do as A.I. researchers is empirical. There's no literature. You can't go back 50 years. There hasn't been like the algorithms haven't existed for that long. And so, what worries me is this approach in this like, philosophy of like, see what sticks and then transposed to a domain that has had disasters and has very rigorous safety protocols to deal with those risks.

PA: AI is still so new to all of us. We don't know what it's going to bring. We do know that it's going to just consume a bananas amount of energy and power from grids that, that are already tested. I wonder if you've thought much about how else could AI keep growing but also keep reducing emissions, if not using nuclear power?

SASHA LUCCIONI: Well, I think that we should be focussed on is really kind of the root cause because nuclear energy is definitely a way to respond to the demand. But I think that we should be curbing the demand. And currently we're in this A.I. boom where companies are trying to put generative A.I. So really, the A.I. that can generate text or images, they're trying to stick that into anything that moves, anything that a customer can interact with. And I think we should rethink that and we should also start mandating transparency. So, for example, one question that profoundly irks me is how much energy does ChadGPT use or how much energy does a generative Google search use? Now that we have these little summaries that pop up and then at the end of the day, we don't know. We have no answers. And some of my work has looked into this. But what we should be mandating is transparency and also the ability to opt out, the ability for, for users to say, hey, no, I don't want, you know, WhatsApp generative AI search to like, I don't want it forced upon me. And then once we start getting more numbers and more ideas of like how much relative energy this represents, I think governments can step in and say, okay, well if you've got a model that is used by 10 million people a day like ChatGPT, it can only use this much energy per query or per hour or whatever in order to be able to be used by like our citizens. Right? And I think that at that point, the governments can really start mandating more, more rigorous laws around this.

PA: You mentioned ChatGPT, so it's powered by OpenAI as a company and that OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, he's argued that AI will be worth it because at least in part, it's going to help us come up with the solutions to climate change. What do you make of that argument?

SASHA LUCCIONI: So, I, complicated. So, I'm part of an organisation called Climate Change AI and essentially what we try to do is we try to bridge the gap between AI research and the climate change community and people doing, you know, biodiversity monitoring and etc.. And I actually just came back from giving a talk at the Canadian Entomological Society about how AI can help insect monitoring. But at the end of the day, the approaches that are used for these kind of climate positive applications are not large language models. They're not ChatGPT. They're really very, like, specific models, very efficient models that can run on your phone, on your laptop, that don't even need a data centre. So this argument of, well, we need to train ever bigger ChatGPT-type models in order to stop climate change doesn't make sense because, you know, these people are just using kind of like a random forest that they run on their phone that's, you know, and oftentimes they don't even have Internet access because they're in the middle of the woods. Right? So...

PA: Meanwhile, just as we introduced you, we heard from Wendy Riegul and from Jackie Forrest in Alberta. And they were both kind of questioning the cost of the load on power grids. What kind of a burden do these data centres put on local electricity grids, which, as I say, are being tested these days?

SASHA LUCCIONI: I think that the load, the problem is that we have energy grid operators have, I mean, have the historical kind of data for normal loads like heating and cooling. And you know, they know that, you know, when it's hot, the load tends to go up, etc.. And, and, you know, people sleep at night and so the load goes down and there is kind of trends like this. And a lot of the models that they use are actually either very light AI models or mathematical models, just kind of like the more old-fashioned ones, whereas hyperscale data centres, though the ones that run these AI models, they use a lot of energy and it's 24/7 and, and it's essentially you don't have these down periods, you don't have these like [MG: Right.] Cyclical processes. And I think that's really hard to deal with for grid operators. And this is why nuclear has emerged as a candidate, because, for example, solar energy, if you wanted to have a solar farm that's powering a hyperscale data centre, that means you need to have a massive amount of batteries for the night time when you don't have solar energy, right? So, you can't have this 24/7 output from these kind of weather-dependent renewable energy sources.

PA: And that was initially the pitch from jurisdictions like Ontario and Quebec that have a ton of hydroelectricity that they've just got this steady renewable energy and that that'll be enough. Why then do you think or what do you make of Alberta's pitch in, in trying to get some of these data centres to move there?

SASHA LUCCIONI: So, it's true that I mean, Ontario has a fair amount of nuclear, but Quebec and Ontario both have hydro, but we're nearing capacity. Like, we're not at 100% capacity at all, but building us one or several more hyperscale data centres can push that towar-- it can push us towards that capacity. So, either we need to make the existing hydroelectric dams more efficient, which is possible definitely, but you need to, like, put in a lot of work. Once again, it's not going to happen overnight, or we need to build new dams, which takes, you know, really can take a decade depending on getting the permits and all that. So, I think that if you want to really have this flip the switch, an existing nuclear reactor like Three Mile Island might be the shortest possible time frame for that. And, and for Alberta, if you have energy sources like natural gas, well then, exactly. You can just, you know, pump more natural gas into your power plant and get more output. So, definitely it's the easiest on that in that sense.

PA: Before I let you go, AI is your field. And I wonder when you have these kinds of conversations with more general audiences like, like us, how do you balance out the trade-offs and the benefits of AI?

SASHA LUCCIONI: So, I struggled with this a lot. And actually so, I started out in the climate positive applications, and then someone came up to me and they're like, Well, what if you're doing more harm to the planet than good with your work? And that made me pause. And so for the last five years, I've been working on understanding AI's carbon footprint, AI's energy use. And I think that at the end of the day, it's like with anything. You know, when we have a choice, whether we take the bus, the train, the plane, the car, you know, we have some numbers. We have some, like, general idea of how much the carbon footprint varies or energy usage. And we start having habits. And I think that with AI and new tech in general, it should be the same. Like, for example, someone recently told me, "Oh, I don't even use a calculator anymore. I use ChatGPT." [MG: Right.] I was just like, you know, that's like 100,000 times more energy. It makes no sense. But I'm going to hand, you know, if you do want a whatever, brainstorm some cool new titles for your research paper, which is, which I do a lot because I'm bad at coming up with funny titles and you sure using ChatGPT once a month makes sense, right? And so, it's really about kind of thinking critically about the tech. And in France, they talk about digital sobriety, which I really like the term. So, adopting this stance of digital sobriety.

PA: Alright. We're gonna have to leave it there. Sasha, thank you for this. Really appreciate it.

SASHA LUCCIONI: Yeah, thank you.

PA: Sasha Luccioni is an artificial intelligence researcher and climate lead at Hugging Face in Montreal. Coming up after your regional update, music as medicine.

SOUNDCLIP

DANIEL LEVITIN: It was extraordinary because she had been not very communicative when she got back. She'd been in a coma and the music reached deep down inside of her and reminded her of who she was and what she liked.

PA: [Music: Theme fading in] Canadian neuroscientist Daniel Levitin says music was instrumental in helping his friend Joni Mitchell recover from a brain aneurysm. Coming up, the science of how music can help us heal and why we get that tingly feeling when listening to a song we really love. That's coming up in 90 seconds. I'm Peter Armstrong. You're listening to The Current. Stay with us.

[Music: Theme]

Music’s healing power

Guest: Daniel Levitin

PA: I'm Peter Armstrong. You're listening to The Current.

[Music: Hallelujah by k.d. lang]

PA: Kind of makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, doesn't it? That's the great k.d. lang, of course, and her version of Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen. Those opening lyrics inspired the title of a new book "I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music As Medicine." We know that music has the power to soothe the soul, but we're also learning that music can help heal the body and the brain. The author of that book is Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill University and a musician himself, Matt Galloway spoke with him last month. Here's that conversation.

SOUNDCLIP

lovely to start a conversation with a little bit of k.d. lang. What is going on in the brain when k.d. lang sings Hallelujah and you kind of get that tingly feeling?

DANIEL LEVITIN: I got the chills too, just... I mean, yeah. The music hits every part of the brain that we've so far mapped. And it activates different areas of the brain in different ways. One of the discoveries we've made having to do with the chills, the auditory system, the eardrum basically has direct connections to the parts of your brain that would get you to move out of the way if you heard a sudden loud noise, the so-called startle response. And that hair on the back of the neck, the shivers down the spine are connected to all of that.

MATT GALLOWAY: How much do we know scientifically about how music affects us? Because this has been studied and people have been talking about this for a long time.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, it goes back to Aristotelis, the ancient Greeks and Pythagoras. I mean, Aristotle. I mean, why does music have the ability to somehow remind you that you have a soul or make you think that even if you're a skeptic, that there might be something more to this world than just us toiling away at our jobs? That there might be something that connects us all as human beings and common inhabitants of the planet. It's something that's been studied for a long time, but when we got brain imaging, it made it tangible. You could see biologically what was going on and I would say experimental science, in the last 20 years has become more focused on having suitable controls.

MATT GALLOWAY: This is work that you do at your lab at McGill University, and you've been studying how music can-- I mean, one of the things you look at is how it can help us tolerate pain. Tell me a little bit about this. How did you test that?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, so the first study we did was actually showing that we can't tolerate pain using music. It was an interesting upside-down experiment. My colleague, Jeff Mogil, who's from Toronto and played in a boy band and it was signed to A&M Records when he was a kid, he runs a pain lab at McGill. And what we found together was that if you play music with somebody that you haven't met, even for 20 minutes, it causes you to feel such empathy for them that if they're in pain, you feel pain. And we demonstrated this in an experiment, that music making creates a bond between people that launched a separate thought, which is that, well, maybe listening to music can relieve pain. And my lab at McGill was the first to show that when you listen to music you like, your brain releases opioids, natural pain relievers. Not at the pharmaceutical levels that you might get from a Vicodin, but enough that it reduces your experience of pain.

MATT GALLOWAY: What do we know about that? Part of this is about why we like the music we do. I mean, what kinds of music work best? Or how do you figure out what kinds of music work best that would reduce pain?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Yeah. So, I mean, I guess you're going to say if we're talking about music as medicine, what's the prescription? What song, what genre do you prescribe and what's the dose? And the funny thing is that music is so subjective and so personal. It's not like there is a single healing song or a list of healing songs. We now know that music can boost your immune system through modulating levels of serotonin, which in turn increase the production of T cells and natural killer cells that travel to the site of an infection. So, from a wellness standpoint, music that you like, it's not about genre. It's not like heavy metal is bad or classical is good. What we find in brain scans, Matt, is that the differences between genre pale in comparison when you look at brain activity to the similarity of the way it makes you feel. So, very divergent songs can produce almost identical brain activity in the amygdala, the limbic system, the parts of the brain that make you feel pleasure.

MATT GALLOWAY: What's happening in the brains of people who have Parkinson's or Multiple Sclerosis or Tourette's that would allow music to help with movement?

DANIEL LEVITIN: So, let's unpack those one at a time. Parkinson's is a neurodegenerative disease, and it damages circuits in part of a structure called the basal ganglia that help us to coordinate smooth, continuous movement when we're walking. Those circuits are degraded. And Parkinson's patients either freeze or they start walking and then speed up and almost fall over because they're running rather than walking, or they can't even get started. Music, because it has a tempo, a steady beat, causes certain neurons in the brain to fire in synchrony with that beat. And so, you've got supplementary circuits in the brain that were not damaged by the Parkinson's that are now keeping time. And so, in that way, the music acts as an external timekeeper, allowing Parkinson's patients to walk smoothly and with rhythmic auditory stimulation. Parkinson's patients can not only learn to walk while the music's playing, but can retrain the brain so they can walk even without music. And the effects of the training can last for months.

MATT GALLOWAY: That's amazing. MS, what's happening there?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Similar things with motor control movements and MS. MS has a different cause. There is an insulating sheath around neurons called myelin. Neurons are sending electrical signals. You need to have an insulator just like the wires in your house or you short circuit. And myelin is a fatty white substance, which is why we refer to it as white matter. That gets degraded. And yet there are circuits that are not de-myelinated and music is able to activate them. You mentioned Tourette's and stuttering. Tourette's disease is often accompanied by tics, uncontrollable body movements. Similar to Parkinson's, you've got a problem with a timekeeper. You've got a problem with a brain circuit that's not keeping time and doing things in the right order. And music can overcome that by activating circuits that are undamaged. And eventually, as Torontonian and Norman Doidge has shown, the brain can retrain itself.

MATT GALLOWAY: Want to play an example of somebody who grew up with a stutter. And if you listen to their music now, perhaps you would have no idea of that. This is Kendrick Lamar.

[Music: 'good kid' by Kendrick Lamar]

MATT GALLOWAY: That's Kendrick Lamar from his album: good kid, m.A.A.d city. He is not the only musician who was credited with helping-- using music to overcome a stutter, but it just, it's remarkable to listen to that and think that that's what he was able to do.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Just extraordinary. And, you know, Elvis Presley stuttered when he spoke. James Earl Jones, the great actor who just passed away, he stuttered when he spoke. You would hear it in interviews.

MATT GALLOWAY: And there's something about music that would allow those individuals to not, override that, but compensate for that.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, so, you know, stuttering is an inability of the brain to put things in the right order and at the right time. Music has, of course, its own internal momentum. It has a schedule. And we have fortunately evolved populations of neurons that fire in synchrony with the music, keep a kind of an internal clock going. And so, it's like having this richly elaborated metronome in your head that's telling you when things need to happen. We take for granted that we have an internal clock. For somebody like Kendrick to be able to sing like that, a lot of the work is being done for him by the timekeeping of the drumbeat. Now, James Earl Jones had a little harder time because he didn't have music, but I read that the way he approached memorizing his lines was he would memorize them with a rhythm, almost like a Shakespearean rhythm.

MATT GALLOWAY: And that would give him that internal. [DANIEL: Yeah.] Metronome.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Yeah.

MATT GALLOWAY: There are amazing stories in this book of people who have used music to overcome extraordinary things, including brain injuries. I want to play something from someone you know and have played music with.

[Music: 'Motherless Children' by Rosanne Cash].

MATT GALLOWAY: Daniel Levitin, who were we listening to right there?

DANIEL LEVITIN: That's Rosanne Cash, who suffered, well, she had a chiari malformation. Part of her brain needed to be operated on to remove it. She lost her ability to play music after her brain surgery. And it's something that, of course, was very hauntingly distressing for her. But the miracle of it all, or the science of it, depending on how you look at it, is that she was able to retrain herself in just a fraction of the time it took to learn the stuff in the first place. And we see this over and over again. What might take you 30 years to learn the first time you can relearn in a month. And in her case, she sat down with her elementary piano books and she had to retrain her fingers to move because the part of her brain that was operated on, the cerebellum, governs movement.

MATT GALLOWAY: What is Rosanne Cash's story? Tell us about the ability of the brain to heal and the role of music in that. Because you will often hear stories from people who have a family member who had a stroke or some element of neurological damage. They seem different. You play music and suddenly it's like they came back to who they were. What's going on there?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, so for one thing, it's a myth that we don't grow new neurons and we don't make new connections. We're growing new neurons all the time when we're making new neural connections all our lives. Every time you learn something, taste something new, do something new, that is, that learning creates new pathways in the brain. That's what learning is to neuroscientists. It's the creation of new pathways. When you hear about people who recover with music, it's because music is such a rich stimulus. It has rhythm and pitches and loudness profiles and different timbres of different sounds. It's got a beat, it's got metre.

MATT GALLOWAY: And historical context and memory tied to it, as well. Right? It just takes you back to that moment when you heard that song the first time.

DANIEL LEVITIN: It really does. And so, music is able to activate a lot of different pathways in the brain all at once. Auditory pathways, memory pathways, emotional pathways. As we were talking about earlier, direct access to your movement centres. Music is the only art form that makes you want to move whether you want to move or not. And so, in terms of recovery, what we're talking about with neuroplasticity is rewiring the brain to do what it did before, but with new pathways.

MATT GALLOWAY: In 2015, your friend, the great Joni Mitchell, suffered a brain aneurysm and you were involved in helping to choose the music that might help her recover. And some of the choices that you made, I think, might be surprising to some people. Have a listen.

[Music: 'Johnny Be Good' by Chuck Berry]

MATT GALLOWAY: Why did you think that Chuck Berry, Johnny Be Good would be instrumental in helping Joni Mitchell recover?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Instrumental. Matt, you're giving me a little too much credit because I didn't actually choose the music. In the early 2000s, Starbucks created their own record label, and they put out CD's called Artists Choice, and they asked musicians for their desert island discs. And Joni was one of the first artists who was asked to create, you know, a CD of what would you want on a desert island? And she very generously involved me in the conversation. She had me over to her house for several late nights across a period of weeks listening to records. We just spun records and CD's and she was sort of talking out loud, Should I include this? Should I include that? What about this? What do you think about that? And it's not that she really wanted my advice, I think. She just liked, you know, the company. The-- playing music together is so much more rewarding than playing it by yourself. But Chuck Berry was on her desert island disc, and after she got back home from the hospital and being in a coma, I spoke with her nurses and I said, Play her the music on that desert island discs. That is the stuff she, by her own description, loves the most.

MATT GALLOWAY: That's in her DNA, in some ways.

DANIEL LEVITIN: It's in her musical DNA. Yeah, it's what she perks up to. And it was extraordinary because she had been not very communicative when she got back. She'd been in a coma and the music reached deep down inside of her and reminded her of who she was and what she liked.

MATT GALLOWAY: People will see that video of her when she performed at Newport and played Both Sides Now and will burst into tears because of what that song means, but also because of what she has gone through. How much of that, the recovery, how much of that has to do with music? It sounds obvious to ask somebody about that, given what she means to music, but it feels like the recovery was driven by music.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, you really nailed it with why we're moved to tears. I mean, the song Both Sides Now is talking about looking at life from two different sides. When she recorded it with the London Symphony Orchestra and the arrangement by Vince Mendoza later in her life, and she had that husky, deep Eartha Kitt voice instead of the angelic aunjanue voice, you were hearing the Both Sides Now, "I've looked at love from both sides now," not from a 22-year-old, but from a 62-year-old. Right? And now we are hearing it from somebody in her 70s who's just recovered from a serious brain injury. Very, very moving. I have to say, although music was a catalyst, Joni has such a powerful will and indomitable spirit that I don't know that simply music would have recovered most people to the extent that she recovered. It really was a force of her own determination that got her to where she's going to be playing the Hollywood Bowl this fall.

MATT GALLOWAY: I mean, there's a-- obviously, and this is the work that you're doing, scientific kind of evidence that is being accumulated around this. But given what we've been talking about, is there kind of a, I mean, and this is the 'secret chord' thing, like kind of a spiritual element to this, that you still don't understand? Something that exists outside of our grasp, but we know it. The hair on your arm stands up when you hear that.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Matt, it's all outside our grasp. There's nothing in the grasp. I mean, we're kind of hand waving and saying, well, this is what's going on in the brain. But the ability to say this is what's going on in the brain is something that's important for doctors and health insurers to be able to say, yeah, this is real. But I think so much of it is, for want of a better word, ineffable, mystical even. How-- I mean, the ancient question-- how is it that music, just a collection of frequencies can make you feel so many things and remember so many things?

MATT GALLOWAY: How would you want this to be used in future? In the best-case scenario and incorporating it in a more intentional way, how do you think music could be used as medicine in the future?

DANIEL LEVITIN: I think in the not-too-distant future we're going to see, right now all the streaming companies have recommended lists and they're pretty dumb. They don't really work for me. But I think this is a golden age for music. There are 100,000 new songs being uploaded every day.

MATT GALLOWAY: You have access to everything.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Two hundred million songs as of last count across the major streaming services. And so, finding the right thing for you is the trick. And so, I think I will help there, not writing music, but in helping to select music based on the features of the music that you've liked before and help you discover new music. And on a more practical level, what I see is health insurance companies and governments and doctors and clinicians realising that instead of prescribing drugs, which can be harsh on the body and have side effects, we can be doing what people have been doing for 20,000 years, but with a more targeted scientific basis. And that is to use music for helping with injury, recovery, treating depression, all the other things we've been talking about.

MATT GALLOWAY: One of the things you say in the book is that it's never too late for you to learn how to actually play something, to pick up an instrument and learn how to play it.

DANIEL LEVITIN: I'm so glad you brought that up, because I do think all of us are musicians. Whether we play an instrument or not. We are a musical species. We're wired for music. Infants start musical babbling around the time they start linguistic babbling, and many infants sing before they can speak. So, we are musical, but we're told that in our current society, well, if you don't play well, you shouldn't play at all. And that's ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. Playing an instrument has been shown to be neuroprotective and it is never too late to start. My grandmother, when she was 80, she was an immigrant to the United States. Around her 80th birthday, she shared with my mother and I that every morning since 1939, she sang God Bless America. She was so grateful for a country to take her in-- a song written by another immigrant, by the way, Irving Berlin. And so, my mother and I bought her a little keyboard and we put masking tape on the keys so that she could play, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And she just loved playing it. And she learned at some point to take the tape off the keys because she'd memorized it and, in a year, or so, she'd worked out a rudimentary harmony with her left hand. She learned to play the piano at age 80. It gave her a sense of purpose, a sense of agency and accomplishment, even at 80. And she played that keyboard every morning until she died at 97.

MATT GALLOWAY: We'll leave that there. Daniel Levitin, thank you very much.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Thank you, Matt.

PA: That was Matt Galloway speaking with Daniel Levitin, a professor emeritus of psychology, neuroscience and music at McGill University. His latest book is called “I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine.”

PA: And that's our program for today. Stay tuned to the CBC Radio One for Q now. Daniel Levitin mentioned Joni Mitchell is going to be performing at the Hollywood Bowl this fall. Well, that happened just this past weekend with not one, but two sold out shows. On Sunday, her Johnny Jam band was star studded with guest appearances. There's Elton John, Meryl Streep, Brandi Carlile, Marcus Mumford. It was a long list. Nine years after a near-fatal brain aneurysm that led many to believe she'd never perform again. So, we're going to leave you today with the moving performance that Daniel lives in. And Matt talked about when Joni Mitchell first returned to the stage after her recovery. This is both Sides now recorded at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022. I'm Peter Armstrong, sitting in for Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Music: Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell]

Tuesday, October 22, 2024 Full Transcript

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