We're not machines. Why should our online world define life?
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player
Get ready for a brand new season of Dragon's Den with a new full-time dragon, Drew Scott from Property Brothers, Thursdays at 8, 8.30 Newfoundland, streamed now on CBC and CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by AWS. This is a CBC podcast. So I thought I might begin with a story. Many years ago, one hot midsummer evening, I was in my family home in the hills of California, and I saw this distant knife of orange cutting through a faraway hillside.
Author, journalist, and essayist Pico Ayer speaking At the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. So naturally, I went downstairs to call the fire department. When I came upstairs again, just four minutes later, it was to find that our whole house was encircled by 70-foot flames, five stories high. It was 1990.
The infamous painted cave. fire in Santa Barbara. It was the worst fire in Californian history at that time. It had broken out just up the road from us, and I was caught in the middle of it for three hours. I grabbed my mother's aging cat, I ran out of the house, we jumped into the car, and we drove down our little driveway, and when we got to the bottom, we saw that we couldn't go up and we couldn't go down.
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