We’re recapping highlights from the recent Cascade PBS Ideas Festival in Seattle, where innovators, journalists and industry leaders gathered to discuss the most pressing topics of today.
The late-May one-day event featured live podcast and TV tapings with top media companies and guests including former senators Al Franken and Jeff Flake, CNN anchor Jake Tapper, travel expert Rick Steves and many others.
During the festival, conversations tackled the harmful impacts of big technology companies on today’s users, First Amendment rights in the wake of a second Trump presidency and America’s growing isolation in the world.
Steves shared this explanation about why traveling can help people broaden their perspective: “When you travel, when you are an educated elite, you might look at things with a little more savvy,” he said. “For me, my secret juice, I think, is the fact that I’m a historian and I got my degree in European history, and I’m a traveler. So being a traveler, I’m less ethnocentric.”
“And being a historian, I’m less chronocentric. I really believe in the value of history, and I really believe in the value of getting to know people you’re afraid of ... When you’re threatened by somebody there, you’re probably more afraid than you need to be.”
