What on Earth is Going on?

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Farzana Doctor's new novel, Seven, juggles family, history, culture, and the incredible weight of those forces on women today. It's a detective story and travel novel, and a powerful insight into a woman struggling with sex, identity, her past, and her vast network of relatives. But the overarching issue throughout the book is female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice still common around the world.

Farzana joins Ben to talk about the book, FGM, her writing process, and much more.

About the Guest

Farzana Doctor is a writer, activist, and psychotherapist. Her ancestry is Indian, and she was born in Zambia while her family was based there for five years, before immigrating to Canada in 1971.

She became interested in community organizing as a teen (primarily environmental issues, gender violence and LGBTTTIQ rights). From 2009-18, she curated the Brockton Writers Series and has been a volunteer with The Writers’ Union of Canada and the Writers’ Trust. She currently volunteers with WeSpeakOut, a global group that is working to ban female genital cutting in her Dawoodi Bohra community.

She studied social work in the early nineties and has been a social worker ever since. She worked in a variety of community agencies and a hospital before starting part-time private practice, where she sees individuals and couples.

She has been writing all of her life but it became a more regular practice around 2000, when she began writing her first novel, Stealing Nasreen, which was published by Inanna in 2007. Her second novel, Six Metres of Pavement, won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award and was short-listed for the 2012 Toronto Book Award. In 2017 it was voted the One Book One Brampton 2017 winner. Her third novel, All Inclusive was a Kobo 2015 and National Post Best Book of the Year.

While all her books are distinct from one another, some common themes include loss, relationships, community, healing, racism, LGBT rights, diasporic identity and feminism. She seamlessly blends strong stories with social justice issues. Her genre so far has been contemporary literary fiction, but here is usually a hint of magic realism in her stories.

She's just completed a novel, Seven (August 2020, Dundurn), and a poetry collection. You Still Look the Same. She is currently at work on a YA novel. Farzana was recently named one of CBC Books’ “100 Writers in Canada You Need To Know Now". She is represented by Rachel Letofsky of CookeMcDermid.

She’s an amateur Tarot card reader and has a love of spirituality, energy psychology, hypnosis and neuroscience.

She lives with her partner and dog near the lake in Etobicoke, the traditional territory of the Haudenosauneega, Anishinabek and Huron-Wendat peoples.

Mentioned in this Episode

Female genital mutilation (FGM), also called female genital mutilation. Read this WHO fact sheet about the practice that affects millions of women and girls worldwide.
The Dawoodi Bohra community
Farzana's advice column, Dear Maasi
Hussonally Abdoolally Nasirudin Dholkawalla, an Indian entrepreneur on whom a key character in the book is based
The book, Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity among the Daudi Bohras by Jonah Blank
The 2020 Vice documentary, Meghan Markle Escaping the Crown

The Quote of the Week

We are human beings. We make the traditions so we should have the right to change those traditions.
- Malala Yousafzai

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It's been over two years since host Ben Charland kicked off this podcast in a basement in Kingston, Ontario. After nearly 100 fascinating conversations about everything from the mafia to the water supply, from science to philosophy, we're revisiting some of the best moments.

Author, science broadcaster and previous guest Ziya Tong (Episode 85) interviews Ben with questions from listeners about what on earth is going on behind the scenes. Enjoy this very special centennial episode!

About the Guest Host

Award-winning host Ziya Tong has been sharing her passion for science, nature and technology for almost two decades. Best known as the co-host of Daily Planet, Discovery Canada’s flagship science program, she brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm to the stage. Tong speaks on leadership, how to shift perspective, and the role of science and technology in society in her riveting and eye-opening talks.

Before co-hosting Daily Planet, Tong served as host and field producer for PBS’ national primetime series, Wired Science, produced in conjunction with Wired magazine. In Canada, Tong hosted CBC’s Emmy-nominated series ZeD, a pioneer of open source television, for which she was nominated for a Gemini Viewer’s Choice Award. Tong also served as host, writer, and director for the Canadian science series, The Leading Edge and as a correspondent for NOVA scienceNOW alongside Neil deGrasse Tyson on PBS.

In the spring of 2019, she participated in CBC’s annual “battle of the books.” After a national four-day debate, she won Canada Reads.

In May 2019, Tong released her bestselling book The Reality Bubble. Called “ground-breaking” and “wonder-filled”, the book has been compared to The Matrix. It takes readers on a journey through the hidden things that shape our lives in unexpected and sometimes dangerous ways.

Tong received her Masters degree in communications from McGill University, where she graduated on the Dean’s Honour List. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the World Wildlife Fund and is the founder of Black Sheep.

Learn more about Ziya or follow her on Twitter (@ziyatong).

Mentioned in this Conversation

Episode 85: The Reality Bubble with Ziya Tong
Episode 1: Populism with Keith Banting
Episode 52: Science with Bob McDonald
Episode 56: Men and Gender Equality with Michael Kaufman
Episode 38: The Mafia with Antonio Nicaso
Episode 93: Politics and its Future with Kent Hehr
Episode 2: The Digital Age with Carlos Prado
Episode 25: Water with Pascale Champagne
Episode 52: Science with Bob McDonald
Episode 42: Live Performance in the Digital Age with Colleen Renihan, Craig Walker and Michael Wheeler
Episode 66: Acting and Storytelling with Andy Curtis
Jake Adelstein, a US journalist with a focus on crime reporting in Japan
Eric Hobsbawm, a British historian
The Ezra Klein Show, a podcast
In Our Time, a BBC radio program and podcast

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The one thing that doesn't change about cities is the fact that they are constantly changing. Most people now live in cities, transforming them with their consumer behaviour, their culture, their ideas and their advocacy. City planners have to balance the natural development of these vast social organisms with complex, long-term plans. How do they do it?

Ben chats with veteran urban planner Teresa Goldstein.

Follow Teresa on Twitter (@teresagoldstein).

Mentioned in this Episode

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism, a book by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Episode 45 of this podcast, featuring broadcaster Terry O'Reilly on counterintuitive ideas and more
"Where Libraries are the Tourist Attractions", article in the New York Times featuring Calgary's new Central Library
Article in the Guardian discussing the Mayor of Paris's plans for a 15-minute city

The Quote of the Week

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.
- Socrates

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The coronavirus pandemic is altering our lives in ways we cannot yet comprehend, and in decades we will marvel at this transformative time. COVID-19 is not just accelerating trends that were in place beforehand, but it is creating new realities. How are artists coping? How about our politics and ideologies?

Alex Green's podcast, Stereo Embers, addresses the current creative moment of the artist. He joins Ben remotely from San Francisco for a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation.

About the Guest

A native of California, Alex Green is the author of four books: The Heart Goes Boom (Wrecking Ball, UK), Emergency Anthems (Brooklyn Arts Press), Let The West Coast Be Settled (Tall Lighthouse) and The Stone Roses (Bloomsbury Academic).

Alex is a known live moderator, interviewing authors, musicians and artists for the Bay Area Book Festival, LitQuake, A Great Good Place For Books and Green Apple Books. Over the course of his career, he's interviewed David Bowie, Maira Kalman, R.E.M., Kristin Hersh, Joshua Mohr, Stephan Pastis, Sherman Alexie, Janice Cooke Newman, and Alison Moyet.

He's the host of Stereo Embers: The Podcast, a weekly long-form interview program that focuses on the creative life and the artist's commitment to their craft. The program is already one of the fastest growing podcasts on iTunes.

Alex is also the host of the weekly radio show "The Heart Goes Boom," which focuses on new music coming out of the UK and beyond.

Alex is the Editor of the daily entertainment site Stereo Embers Magazine (www.stereoembersmagazine.com) and he currently teaches in the English Department at St. Mary's College of California.

Learn more about Alex or follow him on Twitter (@EMBERSEDITOR).

Mentioned in this Conversation

Whiskey Sour Happy Hour featuring Ed Helms
For Emma, Forever Ago, debut album from Bon Iver
"Studio Notes on Your Rom-Com, for the Coronavirus Era", a short in the New Yorker, 29 June 2020
Dune, a classic science fiction novel by Frank Herbert
The Coddling of the American Mind, a book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, a book by Michael Kimmel
Episode 26 of this podcast, featuring Professor Sulaimon Giwa discussing racism
Here are some of the writers, artists and musicians we discussed: Jon Bon Jovi, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Tom Waits, Joe Strummer, Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, DH Lawrence, Gord Downie, Green Day ("American Idiot"), Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Billy Bragg, Bob Dylan, Dead Kennedys

The Quote of the Week

"He was trapped in a haircut he no longer believed in."
- Billy Bragg

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What makes a book interesting? Beautiful? Provocative? Necessary? Is reading still the best way to get a message across and tell a good story, and how is it changing in our world today?

The Kingston WritersFest is one of Canada's premiere literary events, drawing headline international authors as well as big crowds from the bookish Ontario city. Ben chats with the festival's artistic director and alumnus of the podcast, Barbara Bell, about writing, reading, and what goes on in between.

About the Guest

Barbara Bell is the Artistic Director of Kingston WritersFest. She has extensive experience in programming, management, and event planning and production, including several years as Events Coordinator with Chapters Bookstore. She has produced numerous stage plays, several independent short films, including the award-winning Digging Up Plato, and a feature film. Barbara is also an award-winning actor and playwright and a freelance editor, and for two seasons programmed, produced, and hosted a monthly television book club – Page Turners – for TVCogeco in Kingston. Barbara sits on the Community Arts Advisory Committee for the City of Kingston, as well as on the Arts Advocacy Committee of Kingston Arts Council.

Learn more about Barbara.

Mentioned in this Episode

A quote from William Clifford, 19th century English mathematician and philosopher: "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. ... Inquiry into the evidence of a doctrine is not to be made once for all, and then taken as finally settled."
The Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years War (1618-48)
A quote usually attributed to Thomas Edison: "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club, a novel by Megan Gail Coles
The Difference, a novel by Marina Endicott
The Tragedy of the Commons, a concept that describes how shared resources are depleted due to deep-seated self-interest
Greta Thunberg, Swedish climate activist
The Lymond Chronicles, a book series by Dorothy Dunnett
A Song of Ice and Fire, a book series by George RR Martin on which the HBO series Game of Thrones is based
My Year of Living Spiritually: One Woman’s Secular Search for a More Soulful Life, a book by Anne Bokma
Ender's Game, a novel by Orson Scott Card
Europe: A History, a book by Norman Davies
Barbara's top books from childhood:
- The Borrowers series by Mary Norton
- The Chronicles of Narnia series by CS Lewis
- The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
- Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion
- The books of Enid Blyton

The Quote of the Week

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.”
George R.R. Martin

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We will all encounter disability in our lives, either ourselves or someone we know and love. What is our responsibility when that happens? What role should the greater community play to provide care and support? What about government, public policy, and spending? What's changing when it comes to disability and how we care for those who truly need it, and why is this important?

Ben has an enlightening conversation with Helen Ries, an Ottawa-based advocate with a powerful story of her and her brother Paul.

About the Guest

Helen is a strategic thinker and analyst with expertise in stakeholder engagement, planning and program evaluation. Helen uses research to explore issues, develop practices and make changes in a way that is systematic and evidence-based.

Helen has a special interest in working with people, groups and organizations who are helping to improve the well-being of under-represented, excluded or vulnerable populations.

Helen has been in the non-profit and public sector since 2003 creating and evaluating programs, establishing performance measures, creating plans and strategy, analyzing and revising policy, and supporting people and organizations to build their capacity and effectiveness for better outcomes.

Learn more about Helen and follow her on Twitter (@helenries).

Mentioned in this Episode

Episode 46 of this podcast, featuring Canadian senator Kim Pate about the prison and justice system
The Ottawa Adult Autism Initiative
"What I Never Knew About My Mother", a blog post by Helen
The Sibling Collaborative, an organization co-founded by Helen
"Disability, Poverty and #MeToo", an article by Helen
Memory, Witness and Hope, an initiative recommended by Helen that brings together French- and English-speaking institutional survivors labelled with intellectual disabilities.
"People First of Ontario", a video recommended by Helen about the bond between siblings

The Quote of the Week

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.

Helen Keller

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What if being a Member of Parliament or Congress had nothing to do with an election, but rather worked like jury duty? What if our officials were seated randomly in a legislature? What if we innovated the very idea of government itself?

Dave Meslin says our politics is broken, but instead of repeating this from the sidelines, he's got 100 common-sense fixes. They are all detailed in his fascinating and provocative book, Teardown: Rebuilding Democracy from the Ground Up. Ben chats with Dave in Toronto.

About the Guest

Multi-partisan and fiercely optimistic, Meslin’s presentations focuses on how we can overcome cynicism and create a culture of participation. His unassuming presence, creativity and sense of humour keep audiences enthralled. Meslin encourages those present to find what was important to them and become engaged in the process of promoting change by creative participation.

The Toronto Star has described him as “mad scientist”, “a start-up genius” and “a peripatetic public convener”. The Globe and Mail simply calls him a “persuasive rabble rouser”. Dancing between the worlds of mainstream politics and grassroots activism, Meslin has found positive ways to bring them both together and turn energy into action.

His TED talk “The Antidote to Apathy” has been viewed over 1.7 million times and translated into 37 languages. A CBC appearance in 2015, involving towers of colourful LEGO, has been watched 2.5 million times on Facebook.

Meslin’s resume of non-profit start-ups also includes the Toronto Public Space Committee, the Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto, City Idol, Spacing Magazine, Unlock Democracy Canada, the Downtown De-Fence Project, Dazzling Notice Awards, and DandyHorse Magazine. While he feels most comfortable working with small grassroots non-profits, Meslin has also donned a suit and tie and worked as an Executive Assistant at both City Hall and Queen’s Park. Meslin is currently crowd-sourcing 100 Remedies for a Broken Democracy for his next book.

Learn more about Dave or follow him on Twitter (@meslin).

Mentioned in this Conversation

Episode 1 of this podcast, featuring a conversation about populism with political scientist Keith Banting
The Magna Carta, literally "great charter, an agreement of rights signed in 1215 by the English monarch and a group of rebel aristocrats. While the charter failed to prevent conflict at the time, it presaged what would come and became a historically vital document for our modern conception of democracy.
The Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, created by the government of British Columbia in 2004 to investigate changes to the province's electoral system.
Data collected by the Inter-Parliamentary Union ranks Canada no. 61 (previously 62) in gender representation in government.

The Quote of the Week

Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.
- Archibald MacLeish

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Rosemary Sullivan is an acclaimed Canadian poet and biographer. She has written definitive biographies about Elizabeth Smart and Gwendolyn MacEwen as well as a book about the early life of Margaret Atwood. In 2015, Rosemary published Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva to widespread praise.

Ben sits down with Rosemary in Toronto to talk about what goes into making a biography (such as calling the CIA first), how she wrote Stalin's Daughter, and much more.

About the Guest

Biographer and poet Rosemary Sullivan is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. Her 14 books include the critically acclaimed Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape and a House in Marseille and Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion and Romantic Obsession. Shadow Maker, her biography of Gwendolyn MacEwen, won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. She has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Trudeau, and Jackman Fellowships and was awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal by the Royal Society for her contributions to Literature and Culture. In 2012 she became an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Learn more about Rosemary.

Mentioned in this Episode

Video of Christopher Hitchens discussing his idea that religion was humanity's "first attempt"
Episode 78 of this podcast, featuring political scientist Jonathan Rose
Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein
Oscar Wilde, a biography by Richard Ellmann
The Writers' Trust Rising Stars program
"The Long War Against Slavery", an article in the New Yorker from January 2020 by Casey Cep
Video of Howard Stern on how Donald Trump's 2016 run for the presidency was a publicity stunt
The Family, a Netflix miniseries documentary about an evangelical Christian group
Varian's War, a made-for-television movie about the Holocaust
The Death of Stalin, a 2017 satirical comedy directed by Armando Iannucci

The Quote of the Week

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
- Virginia Woolf

Shadow maker: The life of Gwendolyn MacEwen

Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille

Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion and Romantic Obsession

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Kent Hehr is a former federal Liberal cabinet minister and member of parliament for Calgary Centre. As a so-called "recovering politician" with careers on both the federal and provincial levels, Kent has a lot to say about what on earth is going on -- but he’s also got an incredible story. In October 1991 he was with some friends in Calgary when someone in another car opened fire. The bullet went into Kent’s spine, and just like that, he was paralyzed from the chest down as a C5 quadriplegic.

About the Guest

As a former cabinet minister, Kent has been at the table when big decisions are made. His understanding of how government works and what decision makers are looking for is invaluable for businesses and not-for-profit organizations looking for results. He recently started his own firm with two other partners, Jessie Chahal and Robbie Schuett: HSC and Associates.

Kent has over 20 years of comprehensive experience in civic, provincial and federal government work. Kent has an extensive background in dealing with complex problems, systems, and policies.

He has a proven track record of managing divergent stakeholders’ interests, collaborating with federal government departments, intergovernmental relations, and chairing committees.

Prior to his entry into public service, Kent was a practising lawyer with the prestigious national law firm Fraser Milner Casgrain (now Dentons). Kent has a long history of serving on not-for-profit boards. He is currently on the board of the Cerebral Palsy Association of Alberta. He is married to Deanna Holt.

Mentioned in this Episode

The discovery of oil in Turner Valley, Alberta, in 1914 started over a century of the province's oil and gas industry
BlackRock, a global investment management company based in New York
Mad Money with Jim Cramer, a long-running CNBC television program dedicated to stock markets
STEM and STEAM education programs
Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, a 2016 book by Thomas Friedman. Check out Episode 60 of this podcast for a conversation about the book.
The Heritage Savings Trust Fund, a sovereign wealth fund established by the province of Alberta in 1976. Often compared with Norway's far more successful sovereign wealth fund, which is now worth over US$1 trillion.

The Quote of the Week

Excellence is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice. We do not act ‘rightly’ because we are ‘excellent’, we achieve ‘excellence’ by acting ‘rightly.’
- Plato

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Aurora Browne is one of Canada's national treasures. Best known as one of the cast members of the Baroness von Sketch Show and as co-host of the Great Canadian Baking Show, Aurora has been creating daring, funny and original work for theatre, television and film for many years.

Ben catches up with Aurora in Toronto to discuss her career as an actor and comedian, as well as her fascinating with the oceans, video games, clowning, and Dungeons & Dragons. Don't miss this wide-ranging conversation!

About the Guest

Aurora Browne is proud to be one of the co-creators, writers, executive producers and stars of CBC’s sketch comedy series, Baroness von Sketch Show. Browne graduated from York University's theatre program with a BFA in Acting, and has been honing her sketch chops since 2000 when she was hired by Toronto’s Second City Troupe. Since then she has appeared on Comedy Inc, The Gavin Crawford Show, Comedy Now, The Ron James Show, InSecurity, Corner Gas and many others. She recently co-created and starred in Newborn Moms, a web series about new motherhood on ABC Digital. She is also currently in development for season 2 of The Writer’s Block with Frantic Films.

Browne has been nominated for numerous Canadian Comedy Awards for her work in Toronto’s red hot live sketch and improv scene, and in 2008 won the CCA for Best Female Improviser. She was also a nominee for the Tim Sims Encouragement Fund Award. Her son thinks she is hilarious.

Learn more about Aurora or follow her on Twitter (@aurorabrowne).

Mentioned in this Episode

Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop roleplaying game that was first created in the 1970s and is seeing a resurgence in popular culture as well as among casual gamers.
The Manitoulin Conservatory for Creation and Performance, sometimes called the "clown farm", a performance training centre founded and run by John Turner (one half of the famous Canadian clown duo, Mump & Smoot).
Newborn Moms, a CBC TV series.
Succession, an HBO TV series.
Chernobyl, an HBO miniseries.
Zootopia, a 2016 animated film.
Come on Eileen, a 1982 song by the Dexys Midnight Runners.
The Long Dark, a survival video game developed by Hinterland Games in Vancouver.
"How Sid Meier Almost Made Civilization a Real-Time Strategy Game", a YouTube video by Ars Technica featuring Sid Meier discussing his breakthrough original strategy game, Civilization.
Starcraft, a real-time strategy game series.
Fallout 3, a post-apocalyptic role-playing game.
The Lord of the Rings, a classic three-part fantasy series by JRR Tolkien.
They Shall Not Grow Old, a 2018 documentary about the First World War produced and directed by Peter Jackson, in which historical footage is drastically enhanced.
Tolkien, a 2019 film about fantasy author JRR Tolkien.
Sapiens and Homo Deus, two books by historian Yuval Noah Harari.

The Quote of the Week

Creativity is intelligence having fun.

Albert Einstein

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What does it take to write a novel? What about genre? How does marketing define the books we read before we even open the first page? What does it mean to find a space that isn't programmed? And is the old right-left divide being replaced by a new one: the axis of smart-stupid?

Ben is in Toronto to chat with award-winning novelist Andrew Pyper about his work, his writing process, and his take on what on earth is going on today.

About the Guest

Andrew Pyper was born in Stratford, Ontario, in 1968. He received a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature from McGill University, as well as a law degree from the University of Toronto. Although called to the bar in 1996, he has never practiced.

His most recent novels include The Homecoming (2019), The Only Child (2017), and The Damned (2015). His 2013 novel, The Demonologist, won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Hardcover Novel, and was a #1 bestseller in Canada and Brazil.

A number of Pyper’s works have been acquired for TV or feature film. The Homecoming is being developed by eOne with Andrew acting as Co-Creator and Executive Producer. Other active projects have not yet been announced.

Among the earlier novels, The Guardians was published in Canada (Doubleday Canada) in January 2011, the U.K. (Orion) in February 2011, and following this internationally in various territories. It was selected a Globe and Mail 100 Best Books of the Year.

The Killing Circle, Andrew’s fourth novel, was a national bestseller in Canada, and has been published in the U.K. (HarperCollins) and U.S. (St. Martin’s/Minotaur). Translation rights have been sold in Holland, Spain, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Japan.

Kiss Me, a collection of short stories, was published to acclaim in 1996. Following its publication, Mr. Pyper acted as Writer-in-Residence at Berton House, Dawson City, Yukon, as well as at Champlain College, Trent University.

His first novel, Lost Girls, was a national bestseller in Canada and a Globe and Mail Notable Book selection in 1999 as well as a Notable Book selection in the New York Times Book Review (2000) and the London Evening Standard (2000). The novel won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel and is an Otto Penzler pick on Amazon.com. Lost Girls has been published in the U.S. (Delacorte Press) and U.K. (Macmillan) in 2000, and has also been translated into Italian, Dutch, German and Japanese.

Andrew’s second novel, The Trade Mission, was published in Canada, the U.K., U.S., the Netherlands and Germany. It was selected by The Toronto Star as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year.

Andrew’s third novel, The Wildfire Season, was a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and has been published to acclaim in the U.K., Canada, U.S. and Holland.

Andrew’s creative writing teaching experience includes terms at Trent University, the University of Toronto, and, currently, Colorado College. He lives in Toronto.

Learn more about Andrew and follow him on Twitter (@andrewpyper).

Mentioned in this Episode

The Paris Review, a quarterly English-language publication that often features long-form interviews with writers.
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Norwegian writer known for his clock-work approach to writing plays
This is Horror Podcast episode 38, featuring Andrew Pyper
A quote from German composer Gustav Mahler: "A symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything."
The definition of the word "catholic" (not to be confused with the Catholic church): "Including a wide variety of things; all-embracing."
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a 1956 film

The Quote of the Week

Sometimes people close a door because they’re trying to figure out a way to get you to knock.

From The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper

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Elizabeth Hay is a Giller Prize-winning author of novels such as Late Nights on Air, His Whole Life, and Alone in the Classroom. Most recently, she published a memoir about her parents' final years in Ottawa: All Things Consoled. She has been writing since she was fifteen, and also spent ten years working as a radio broadcaster, living in Yellowknife, Winnipeg, Toronto and Latin America.

Ben sits down with Elizabeth in her Ottawa home to talk about her books, her writing process, and much more.

About the Guest

I was born in 1951 in a beautiful part of the world. Owen Sound, Ontario, is on the southern shores of Georgian Bay. When I was five, we moved about twenty miles north to Wiarton on the Bruce Peninsula, a small town defined by limestone cliffs, icy water, poison ivy and an abundance of colourful characters. I roamed as freely around Wiarton as I did through books. My otherwise strict parents let me read whatever I wanted to.

With Eric Friesen at The Lodge on Amherst Island, April 2008.

My father was the high-school principal. My mother painted in her spare time, not that she had much time, since I was one of four children. The public library was almost a second home, a place in which I didn’t have to set the table or do the dishes or cope with being teased. I read good and bad alike. We had no television until I was nine, when we inherited my grandmother’s television set and were allowed to watch it for two hours a week. It stopped working after a few years and was never replaced.

Then when I was almost ten, we moved inland and about a hundred miles south to another small town, this one on the edge of Alice Munro country. My five years in flat, agricultural Mitchell were probably the worst in my life—the years of puberty, unpopularity, self-consciousness. When I was fourteen, everything changed. Out of the blue my father moved us to London, England for a year and the world opened up in a thrilling way. I saw places every reader dreams about—the British countryside and famous cities—and I went to plays, ballet, art galleries, to Covent Garden as it used to be. That year I attended Camden School for Girls, where by accident (a random English assignment) I discovered that I could write poetry of a sort.

A year later we came back to Canada, settling in Guelph, Ontario, where I finished high school. My years at the University of Toronto convinced me that what I needed was not academia but the real world. At the end of second year, I hitchhiked to Newfoundland, and at the beginning of third year I dropped out for a year and took the train to the west coast, eventually making my way to the Queen Charlotte Islands, now Haida Gwaii. I returned to university at the end of August and completed my third year, but went no further in school.

After that, I moved west again, then north to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories to join the man who would be my first husband, Craig McInnes. The northern photographs on the website are his. In Yellowknife I began to work in radio. During the ten years I was a broadcaster, I was a writer with a split personality, writing to a formula for radio and writing privately in the notebooks I began to keep. It took me a long time to see that the clarity and economy and directness required to tell a story to a radio audience would serve me well in whatever I wrote. After Yellowknife, I moved to Winnipeg, then Toronto, and then I freelanced in Latin America for a time, basing myself in Mexico. While in Mexico I met Mark Fried and we have been together ever since. We have two children, a daughter and a son.

For six years we lived in New York City, where I put together my first books, Crossing the Snow Line and The Only Snow in Havana, and gathered the experiences that I used in Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York. Finally, my homesickness became intolerable and I dragged everyone to Ottawa, where we’ve been since 1992. Small Change, the collection of stories about friendships gone wrong, draws on material from throughout my life and explores the pain we experience in the name of friendship.

My neighbourhood is Old Ottawa South, the setting for part of my first novel, A Student of Weather, and for all of my second novel Garbo Laughs. The Rideau Canal is two blocks away, the Rideau River an easy walk in the other direction. The streets look much as they did in the 1950s. It’s a quiet backwater, which suits me. I like to walk, I don’t like to drive and avoid it. The Sunnyside branch of the public library is a ten-minute walk from my house. I use it a lot. Almost directly across the street from the library is the Mayfair movie theatre, in constant use since the 1930s. This is the part of the world, not Ottawa but the Ottawa Valley, where my mother grew up. It has a lot of emotional resonance for me as a result. While I was writing my third novel, Late Nights on Air, I was already making notes for my fourth, Alone in the Classroom, which focuses to a large degree on the Ottawa Valley. His Whole Life, which has the 1995 Quebec referendum woven through it, moves between New York City and a lake in eastern Ontario. All Things Consoled, a daughter’s memoir is about my mother and father at the end of their lives. They both died in Ottawa, in a retirement home a six-minute walk from my house.

From the age of fifteen I have been writing. The great struggle has been to believe that I have enough imagination of the necessary kind to write compelling material. I am dogged but self-doubting, and happiest at my desk.

Learn more about Elizabeth.

Mentioned in this Episode

Late Nights on Air, 2007 novel by Elizabeth Hay
All Things Consoled, 2018 memoir by Elizabeth Hay
A Life in Letters by Anton Chekhov, a collection of letters published in 2004 for the hundredth anniversary of his death
Video of the comedian Louis CK saying "everything is amazing and nobody is happy"
His Whole Life, 2015 novel by Elizabeth Hay
DH Lawrence, English writer (1885-1930)
The Only Snow in Havana, 2008 novel by Elizabeth Hay
Succession, an HBO television drama
The Crown, a Netflix television drama
Oedipus Rex, an ancient Greek tragic play by Sophocles
Tomas Tranströmer, Swedish poet and Nobel Laureate
Gustav Mahler, renowned 19th century composer
Charlie Kaufman, American screenwriter of films such as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
A Moveable Feast, a 1964 memoir by Ernest Hemingway
"The Mere Presence of Your Smartphone Reduces Brain Power, Study Shows", article from the University of Texas
Margaret Atwood, Canadian writer
A quote from American writer Kurt Vonnegut: "Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time."
Franz Kafka (1883-1924), German-speaking writer
Beryl Bainbridge (1932-2010), British writer

The Quote of the Week

You are confusing two notions, "the solution of a problem" and "the correct posing of the question". Only the second is essential for the artist.

Anton Chekhov

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Is dividing people up by their generation (Baby Boomer, Gen X, Millennial, etc.) unhelpful and even harmful? Is it a form of ageism, along the same lines as racism or sexism? What is the coming crisis of our time, and have we already arrived? And is it ethically justified to have children in this world in flux?

Ben is in Kingston for a fascinating conversation about all this and more with philosopher Christine Overall of Queen's University.

About the Guest

Christine Overall's teaching, supervision, research, and publications are in the areas of feminist philosophy, applied ethics (including bioethics), philosophy of religion, and philosophy of education. She is the editor of four books and the author of six. Her book, Aging, Death, and Human Longevity: A Philosophical Inquiry (University of California Press, 2003), won both the Canadian Philosophical Association’s Book Prize and the Royal Society of Canada’s Abbyann Lynch Medal in Bioethics. Her book, Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate, was published by MIT Press in 2012. She also recently edited Dying in Public: Living with Metastatic Breast Cancer, by Sue Hendler (Michael Grass House, 2012). Dr. Overall was a weekly columnist for the Kingston Whig-Standard from 1993 to 2006, and also wrote a column for University Affairs/Affaires universitaires from 2008 to 2011.

Mentioned in this Episode

A quick guide from CareerPlanner.com about generations, by Michael T. Robinson
The Pax Americana (Latin for 'American Peace', modeled after the Pax Romana during the Roman Empire), a term for the relative global peace and prosperity in the years following the Second World War
The Greatest Generation, a 1998 book by US journalist Tom Brokaw about those who grew up during the Great Depression and went on to fight in the Second World War
"Will turning your phone to greyscale really do wonders for your attention?", a 2017 article in The Guardian
Samuel Beckett, 20th century Irish writer and author of the famous play, Waiting for Godot
Sophocles, ancient Greek playwright and author of the Oedipus Rex
The Ethics of Belief, a book by 19th century philosopher and mathematician William Clifford
Cui bono, a Latin phrase meaning, 'who benefits?'
"The Story of the WWI Christmas Truce", an article in the Smithsonian Magazine
The Prisoner's Dilemma
"The Case for Not Being Born", an article about philosopher David Benetar in The New Yorker, 2017
Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar, 2006
Philosopher's Index, an online philosophy database
'Turtles all the way down', an expression of the philosophical problem of infinite regress
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it", a quote often ascribed to Aristotle

The Quote of the Week

"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
- William Clifford (1845-79), mathematician

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One of the key features of the democratic process is opinion polling, whether it is leader likability or attitudes on various issues. But do these snapshots of the horserace have an impact on the race itself? How has scientific polling and statistical analysis changed? How will it change in the years to come? And, what happens when the data shows us that the story we think is happening is not the one actually playing out?

Ben joins writer and political analyst Eric Grenier at his CBC office in Ottawa.

About the Guest

Éric Grenier is a senior writer and the CBC's polls analyst. He was the founder of ThreeHundredEight.com and has written for The Globe and Mail, Huffington Post Canada, The Hill Times, Le Devoir, and L’actualité.

Mentioned in this Episode

FiveThirtyEight, a comprehensive website dedicated to statistics, especially related to politics, founded by Nate Silver
Outliers: The Story of Success, a 2008 book by Malcolm Gladwell in which he describes his popular theory of the 10,000 hours needed to master a skill
"The Polls Are All Right", a 2018 article written by Nate Silver for FiveThirtyEight
Episode 3 of Bob Rae's Political Stripes podcast, featuring an interview with guest Eric Grenier

The Quote of the Week

"One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening."
- From The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail (2012) by Nate Silver

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Do our names shape our destiny? What does it mean to live life as Don as opposed to Donald or Donnie? What prejudices do we carry with our names and the names of others, and what about those who change theirs? When we name our children, are we projecting our own battles and biases onto them before they even know the value of a name?

Ben is in Toronto to sit down with Mavis Himes, a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist who wrote The Power of Names: Uncovering the Mystery of What We Are Called.

About the Guest

Mavis Himes is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with a full-time private practice in Toronto, Canada. She is also clinical consultant at Wellspring, a cancer centre for patients and their families.

Himes received her doctoral degree in Psychology from the University of Toronto (OISE) and completed her analytic formation in Lacanian psychoanalysis at Apres-Coup Psychoanalytic Association in New York City. She is a member of Apres-Coup Psychoanalytic Association and a guest member of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society.

With over thirty-five years of experience, Himes began her career in child psychology, working in a variety of children’s mental health clinics until she opened her private practice in 1988. Gradually, she shifted the population of her practice from that of children and adolescents to mainly that of adults. Even during the time of her work with children, she pursued her analytic interests and studies, always working with an appreciation of the effect of unconscious processes in the human psyche.

During her years of work with children, Himes became involved with Bereaved Families of Ontario (BFO) where she ran the children’s program and was a member of the Professional Advisory Committee. Subsequently Himes became clinical director of Wellspring for a two-year period, developing and running a number of group programs. Now she offers short-term counseling at Wellspring Westerkirk House on Sunnybrook campus.

Since 2003, Mavis Himes has been the director of Speaking of Lacan (SOL), a Toronto-based forum dedicated to the study of Lacanian psychoanalysis. SOL has hosted a speakers series and interdisciplinary colloquia on topics related to psychoanalytic thought, in addition to running seminars and reading groups (www.speakingoflacan.com). As part of this work, Himes has organized a series of lectures entitled Psychoanalysis and the Arts: In Conversation that provides an opportunity to explore and exchange commonalities and differences between psychoanalysis and the arts. In this series, she has been in dialogue with a number of prominent dancers, musicians and actors.

As a writer, Himes is the author of the current book The Power of Names: Uncovering the Mystery of What We are Called published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2016. The Sacred Body: A Therapist’s Journey, a book about her work with cancer patients, was previously published by Stoddart in 2002. She is also the author of numerous psychoanalytic articles and book chapters that have been published in a variety of journals both in North America and abroad. She has given numerous presentations on psychoanalysis to a variety of audiences.

Mentioned in this Episode

Jacques Lacan, famous French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist
Video of George Carlin's comedy skit on boys' names
Sigmund Freud, Austrian neuroscientist and founder of psychoanalysis
King Lear, a 1606 play by William Shakespeare
Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva; see the recent biography of her by Canadian biographer Rosemary Sullivan
Selfie, a book by Will Storr; also check out Episode 11 of this podcast, about the book

The Quote of the Week

"I wish my name was Brian because maybe sometimes people would misspell my name and call me Brain. That's like a free compliment and you don't even gotta be smart to notice it."
- Mitch Hedberg, US comedian (1968-2005)

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Humans are living longer, delaying disease and decay later and later. It's conceivable that we could eradicate the big killers and attain a certain kind of infinite postponement of death. But what would this mean for our humanity? What does philosophy have to say about this, and about the state of our ongoing social experiment with democracy?

Ben sits down to chat about all this and much more with Queen's University political philosopher and National Scholar, Colin Farrelly.

About the Guest

Colin received his PhD from the University of Bristol in England in 1999. Over his 20 year academic career he has held academic appointments in 10 different departments in Political Science, Philosophy and Public Policy in England, Scotland, the United States and Canada. Previous appointments include Visiting Professor in UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at the University of Manoa in Hawaii, Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University, Visitor in Oxford’s Program on Ethics and the New Biosciences, as well as permanent academic appointments at Waterloo University, Manchester University and the University of Birmingham. For the past 5 years Colin has been involved in teaching philosophy to male inmates.

The author and editor of 6 books and approximately 50 journal articles, Colin’s publications include articles in journals in political science, philosophy, feminism, law, science and medicine. He has published on a diverse array of topics, including the health challenges posed by population aging, the creation and evolution of patriarchy, virtue ethics, virtue epistemology, virtue jurisprudence, play and politics, freedom of expression, judicial review, non-ideal theory, gene patents, deliberative democracy, nanotechnology, sex selection, toleration, a citizen’s basic income, enhancing soldiers and economic incentives.

Colin’s next major research project explores the idea of the “playful” society as a realistic utopia and draws on empirical insights from evolutionary biology and positive psychology.

Learn more about Colin, watch his TED Talk and check out his blog, In Search of Enlightenment.

Mentioned in this Episode

Colin's TEDxQueensu Talk on global aging and longevity science.
An article by Colin about the naked mole rat's resistance to cancer
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
Thomas Hobbes, 17th century English philosopher known for his work, the Leviathan, and its theory of the social contract
'Epistemic virtues'
John Dewey (1859-1952), American philosopher and psychologist
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

The Quote of the Week

"Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question."
- Yuval Noah Harari

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Ziya Tong is "one of the world's most engaging science journalists" and after co-hosting Discovery Canada's Daily Planet television program for ten years, she wrote her first book, The Reality Bubble. It's a veil-removing tour-de-force, filled with wonder, rigour and a powerful thesis about our role in the world and how we are often blinded, sometimes by our own choice, from what on earth is really going on.

Ben is in Toronto to chat with Ziya about The Reality Bubble and so much more.

About the Guest

In the spring of 2019, she participated in CBC’s annual “battle of the books.” After a national four-day debate, she won Canada Reads.

Learn more about Ziya or follow her on Twitter (@ziyatong).

Mentioned in this Conversation

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Norwegian writer
Lebenswelt, a German word roughly translating to "lifeworld"
Tom Robbins, American novelist
Extinction Rebellion, a global climate movement
Greta Thunberg, Swedish environmental activist
Galileo Galilei, Renaissance Italian scientist
Yuval Noah Harari, Israeli historian
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
The Animal People, a 2019 documentary
The Matrix, a 1999 film
The Interpreter, a series and newsletter from The New York Times
"Irony poisoning", an emerging social concept
Nav Bhatia, the Toronto Rapots "superfan"
The "Beer Summit", a 2009 White House meeting arranged by US President Obama between Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and the police officer who arrested him, Sgt. James Crowley, allegedly because of racial profiling
Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), French stage actress
Ghostbusters, a 1984 science fiction comedy film
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), British philosopher

The Quote of the Week

"We have the technological lenses to see into vast distances of outer space, to see the tiniest microscopic organisms, to see right through the human body, to see the very atoms that make up the material world. But there is one fundamental thing that we do not see. When it comes to how our species survives, we are utterly blind."

From The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong

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Guy Gavriel Kay is a bestselling, world-renowned author whose works have been translated into over 30 languages. Originally from western Canada, Guy practiced law, developed a radio series with the CBC, and even assisted Christopher Tolkien with the editing of his father JRR Tolkien's The Silmarillion, before becoming established as a fantasy writer.

Ben is in Toronto to chat with Guy about writing, creativity, the intersection of art and power, and even the vagaries of pricing single malt whiskey.

More About the Guest

Guy Gavriel Kay is the international bestselling author of many novels and a book of poetry. He has been awarded the International Goliardos Prize for his work in literature of the fantastic and won the World Fantasy Award for Ysabel in 2008. In 2014, Kay was named to the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honour. His books include Tigana, The Lions of Al-Rassan, Children of Earth and Sky, and most recently, A Brightness Long Ago.

Learn more about Guy and his books, or follow him on Twitter (@guygavrielkay).

Mentioned in this Episode

San Gimignano, a walled Italian town known for its medieval towers, often called the "Manhattan of the Middle Ages"
An Interview with John le Carré in the Paris Review, 1997
Edward Greenspan, renowned Canadian defence lawyer
Bill Hammond, New Zealand artist (mentioned mistakenly in the conversation as John)
"Mr. Tambourine Man", a song written by Bob Dylan, 1965
Andy Patton, Canadian painter, critic and scholar based in Toronto
Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes, playwrights in the ancient Greek theatre
Lysistrata, an ancient Greek play written by Aristophanes
The Irishman, film directed by Martin Scorsese, 2019
Margaret Mead, 20th century anthropologist
The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, a book by Philip Fernbach and Steven Sloman. Also check out Episode 24 of this podcast, about the book.

The Quote of the Week

"How we remember changes how we have lived. Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives."

From Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

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Lucy Ellmann's groundbreaking and award-winning novel, "Ducks, Newburyport", consists of a single sentence broken up only by the small bits of a parallel story of a mountain lioness protecting her cubs. It's a powerful, engrossing and genuinely readable piece of literature that challenges how fiction is read as well as our base assumptions of history, women, motherhood and the incredible flux of the 21st century.

Ben discusses the book with Barbara Bell, Artistic Director of Kingston WritersFest.

About the Book

Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens. Also, America’s ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda. But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son’s toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When are you allowed to start swearing?

With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport lays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of America’s barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy—and a revolution in the novel.

About the Guest

Barbara Bell is the Artistic Director of Kingston WritersFest, with which she has been involved since the first meeting in 2009, becoming Artistic Director in 2014. “I love working in the arts,” she says, “and offering writers and readers a place to come together to celebrate literature.”

Besides being a brilliant organizer, she is an actor, theatrical and film producer, television host, editor, and writer. Barbara won the Eastern Ontario Drama League’s Award for Best Actress for her ‘courageous’ and ‘riveting’ title role performance in Dacia Maraini’s Mary Stuart.

She wrote, produced, and performed the one-woman play, Dreams and Desires in Kingston and at fringe festivals across the western provinces. She co-produced: a 28-minute film, Pretty Pieces, which screened at the Reel Heart International Film Festival, among others; several shorts including the award-winning Digging Up Plato; and a feature — Fault — which debuted at the Kingston Canadian Film Festival. A second feature is in post-production. Barbara co-produced and hosted TVCogeco’s Pageturners: Kingston’s Book Club, sparking lively conversations with local authors.

Barbara is past-chair of the City of Kingston’s Arts Advisory Committee, sat on the inaugural Mayor’s Arts Awards Nominations Working Group, and also sat on Kingston Arts Council’s Arts Advocacy Committee and the Kingston Writers’ Refugee Committee.

Mentioned in this Episode

Mrs. Dalloway, a 1925 novel by Virginia Woolf
The Gnadenhutten massacre, referenced often in Ducks, Newburyport, occurred in 1782 when US militiamen killed 96 Delaware people
James Joyce (1882-1941), an Irish writer
The Infinity of Lists, a book by Umberto Eco
Lolita, a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov
A People's History of the United States, a book by Howard Zinn
A clip of featuring comedian Louis CK in which he famously says, "everything is amazing, and nobody is happy"
Michel Foucault (1926-84), French philosopher

The Quote of the Week

"...the fact that we all go on pretending things are fine, hoping everything’s a-okay, even though everything is nowhere near okay and we all know it, no matter how many candlelit vigils you hold..."

From Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

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Do the problems we face today -- political gridlock, climate change, social upheaval, accelerating economic inequality -- stem from fundamental imbalances in our society and thinking? What role might the plural (or civil) sector play in rejigging our systems? And why should we be ditching 30-year plans to focus on ones just a few weeks out?

Ben sits down with world-renowned scholar of management, Henry Mintzberg, about these questions and many others.

About the Guest

Henry is a writer and educator, mostly about managing originations, developing managers, and rebalancing societies (where his attention is currently focused), also an outdoorsman and collector of beaver sculptures.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal (1961), working in Operational Research for the Canadian National Railways (1961-1963), and doing his masters and PhD at the MIT Sloan School of Management (1965 and 1968), Henry has made his professional home in the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill. He sits in the Cleghorn Chair of Management Studies (half-time since the mid-1980s), and has had extensive visiting professorships at INSEAD in France and the London Business School in England.

Henry has authored 20 books, including Managers not MBAs, Simply Managing, Rebalancing Society and Managing the Myths of Health Care, also 180 articles plus numerous commentaries and videos. He now publishes a regular TWOG (TWeet 2 blOG), as “provocative fun in a page or 2 beyond pithy pronouncements in a line or 2” (@mintzberg141 to mintzberg.org/blog). A new collection is being published: Bedtime Stories for Managers.

I co-founded and remain active in the International Masters Program for Managers (impm.org) and the International Masters for Health Leadership (imhl.org) as well as a venture CoachingOurselves.com, all novel initiatives for managers to learn together from their own experience, the last in their own workplace.

Some consequences of all this have been election to the Order of Canada and l’Ordre national du Quebec as well as to the Royal Society of Canada (the first from a management faculty), two prize- winning Harvard Business Review articles, and twenty honorary degrees from universities around the world.

I may spend my professional life dealing with organizations, but I continue to spend my private life escaping from them, especially in the Laurentian wilderness of Canada, usually with my partner and sometimes with my two daughters and three grandchildren.

Learn more about Henry and follow him on Twitter (@Mintzberg141).

Mentioned in this Episode

Democracy in America, book by Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)
Episode 35 of this podcast, about public policy featuring Rachel Laforest of Queen's University
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a landmark US Supreme Court ruling that Henry says essentially "legalized bribery"
The End of History and the Last Man, book by Francis Fukuyama (1992)
"There is no Nobel Prize in Economics...and why that matters", an article by Henry Mintzberg
The Yellow Vest (gilets jaunes) movement in France, which started with increasing fuel prices
The New Deal, a series of reforms enacted under US President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s

The Quote of the Week

The capitalist credo is: “greed is good, markets are sufficient, property is sacred, and governments are suspect.”
Henry Mintzberg

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Do music and poetry share the same roots? How do you write poetry that embraces complexity, history, beauty and atrocity? How can literature confront the self with the past, and the events that seem out of our control with the urgent need for a new language to understand them? What is creativity, and is there some kind of salvation there?

Ben joins poet and teacher Canisia Lubrin for a fascinating conversation at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where she currently works as writer-in-residence.

About the Guest

Canisia Lubrin is a writer, editor, critic and teacher. Her work is published widely and has been frequently anthologized, including translations into Italian and Spanish. Lubrin’s debut poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, longlisted for the Gerald Lambert Award, the Pat Lowther Award, and was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. She was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award for her fiction contribution to The Unpublished City: Vol 1 and 2019 Writer in Residence at Queen’s University. Lubrin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her upcoming book, The Dyzgraphxst, featuring seven inquiries into selfhood, will be published in 2020.

Mentioned in this Episode

Lesley Belleau, Anishnaabekwe writer from Ketegaunseebee Garden River First Nation (Ojibwe), near Bawating/Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario
Kaie Kellough, Canadian poet and novelist based in Montreal
Robin Richardson, Canadian poet and founding editor of the Minola Review
The Epic of Gilgamesh, a nearly 4000 year-old text from ancient Mesopotamia, widely regarded as one of the earliest surviving pieces of literature
"Obama on Call-Out Culture: 'That's Not Activism'", article in the New York Times by Emily S. Rueb and Derrick Bryson Taylor
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes
A quote from poet Mary Ruefle: "Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world"
The shooting of Philando Castile, July 2016
Dionne Brand, renowned Canadian poet

The Quote of the Week

“Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words.”
Dionne Brand

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What is the future of technology, and what does it take to be a real lifelong innovator at the ground level? Ben's guest is James Brown, a serial entrepreneur, technologist, and head of Limestone Technologies in Kingston. They have been at the forefront of polygraph and other security technology in Canada for years, and their most recent endeavour might sound unorthodox until you hear the backstory: PLANTChoir, a device that lets you hear the music of plants.

About the Guest

James Brown is the President of Limestone Technologies in Kingston, Ontario, where he has led the way with electronics, software development, polygraphy, phallometrics, employee screening and much more. From 1986 to 2003 he was a project manager with Queen's University's Psychology Department. James's most recent endeavour is PLANTChoir, a technology that lets you tap into the music of your plants. He

Mentioned in this Episode

Cleve Backster, early developer of polygraph technology and experimenter of the same technology on plants
Episode of Dragon's Den, where PLANTChoir is pitched by Limestone Technologies
The Reality Bubble, a science book by Ziya Tong
Avatar, 2009 film directed by James Cameron

The Quote of the Week

"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

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Live theatre is one of the oldest art forms, but rather than fade away in the face of easy social media and instant entertainment, it is experiencing a resurgence. What is it about live drama that keeps filling theatres around the world? How are theatre directors keeping the form relevant, accessible and engaging? What are the cultural touchstones of the stage, and what makes it so much fun?

Ben is in Edmonton to chat with Daryl Cloran, Artistic Director of the renowned Citadel Theatre.

About the Guest

Daryl began his tenure with the Citadel in September 2016. He came to Edmonton from his role as Artistic Director of Western Canada Theatre (WCT) in Kamloops, B.C. Past chairman of the Citadel Board of Directors, Sheila Witwicky, has said of Daryl that “he has the special combination of vision, skill, experience and artistry that running a theatre centre like ours requires.”

Originally from Ontario, Daryl was at the artistic helm of WCT for six years and, in addition, is a nationally recognized director of productions across the country, including at the Arts Club, Theatre Calgary, National Arts Centre, Shaw Festival, Canadian Stage and Neptune Theatre. He was the Artistic Director of Theatrefront, Toronto, known for its unique international theatre collaborations in countries such as South Africa and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which played across Canada and internationally to much acclaim. He’s also the co-creator and director of DRUM! a musical celebration of the founding cultures of the Maritimes which features a large cast of dancers and musicians from Celtic, Acadian, African-Canadian, and First Nations origin.

Daryl is thrilled to be spending the next chapter of his career in a theatre town like Edmonton. “My passion as a theatre-maker and Artistic Director is community. It will be my job as Artistic Director of the Citadel Theatre to become a contributing part of Edmonton’s artistic community and to provide opportunities to local artists and train emerging artists from the region and across the country,” he says. “I believe the Citadel must maintain a high profile leadership role within Edmonton and continue to figure prominently as part of the national theatre scene. As Artistic Director, I will pursue partnerships and opportunities to showcase the Citadel’s work on national stages. I believe a theatre with the profile of the Citadel should be known nationally for its work, and while the Edmonton community will always be our primary audience, audiences across North America should see our fabulous productions.”

Growing audiences is a particular focus of Daryl’s. He’s keenly interested in having young people experience the magic of theatre, as well as in the importance of multi-cultural voices on Edmonton’s stages. WCT is a national leader in the creation of First Nations theatre work and the support of First Nations artists. Children of God, a musical co-developed at WCT about the residential school experience in Canada, premiered at the National Arts Centre in June 2017, and will appear on the Shoctor stage at the Citadel March 3 to 24, 2018.

Daryl also has a great interest in theatrical experimentation. At WCT, he created the annual High-Wire Festival, which challenged the relationship between artist and audience by exploring different theatre formats (micro-performance, immersive performance, interactive productions). Daryl intends to bring this desire for experimentation and attracting non-traditional audiences to the Citadel.

“I value theatre that asks questions important to its community; I value creative risks,” he says. “The Citadel is an incredible theatre company with a history of innovation, high production values and important contributions to the Canadian theatre landscape. I want to build on this success, honour its traditions and also take appropriate risks to lead the Citadel into the next phase of its artistic growth. My wife and I and our two young sons are excited to be calling Edmonton home.”

Learn more about Daryl or follow him on Twitter (@DarylCloran).

Mentioned in this Episode

Western Canada Theatre, a company based in Kamloops, BC
Poetics, an ancient work on aesthetics by Aristotle
Theatrefront, a theatre company based in Toronto and originally founded by Daryl Cloran
Theatre Yes, a theatre company based in Edmonton
Highwire Series, a new theatre program produced by the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton
Fight Night, a play that was produced at the Citadel Theatre in October 2019
Late Fragment, an interactive film co-written and co-directed by Daryl Cloran
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, an interactive Netflix program
Rashomon, a classic 1950 Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa
Mump and Smoot, a renowned Canadian performance clown duo
Prison Dancer, an upcoming Citadel Theatre project inspired by this video

The Quote of the Week

"I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being."
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

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Rampant and increasing polarization of our politics? The turn to populism as a result of economic inequality? The growing, scarcely regulated political power of social media and Big Data? These are some of the forces that are reshaping our politics in North America, with a minority government in Canada and an impending election (and ongoing impeachment inquiry) in the United States.

Ben chats with Queen's University political scientist Jonathan Rose about all this and more.

About the Guest

Jonathan studied at University of Toronto and Queen's where he received his Ph.D. In addition to Queen's he has taught courses at the International Studies Centre (Herstmonceux, UK), Charles University in Prague, Bratislava, Slovakia and Kwansei Gakuin in Osaka, Japan where he was the Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies. In 2008, Jonathan was a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Political Science and International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

He is the author of Making Pictures in our Heads, Government Advertising in Canada (New York: Praeger Press, 2000). He is also the co-editor of Canada: the State of the Federation, 1998 and is the lead author of First Ministers’ Conference, the Art of Negotiation, a simulation exercise published by Broadview Press and translated into three languages. His most recent book co-written with Patrick Fournier, Henk Van der Kolk and R. Kenneth Carty is When Citizens Decide: Lessons from Citizens' Assemblies on Electoral Reform (Oxford, 2011).

Jonathan's teaching is varied. He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in Canadian politics, political communication, federalism, the mass media, electoral systems, intergovernmental relations and public policy. In 2010 he received the Frank Knox Certificate of Commendation for Excellence in Teaching. In 2011, Jonathan was the recipient of W.J. Barnes Teaching Excellence Award.

He has provided advice to the Auditor General of Canada on government advertising and sponsorship, and is a member of the Advertising Review Board for the Auditor General of Ontario, a board that enforces legislation regulating government advertising in Ontario. In 2006, he had the privilege of being the Academic Director of the Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, the first such body in Ontario and second in the world.

Learn more about Jonathan or follow him on Twitter (@JonathanRose).

Mentioned in this Episode

POLS 101: "What is Going on? Explaining Donald Trump", a course taught by Jonathan at Queen's University
UN Speech by climate activist Greta Thunberg (video)
Teardown, a book by Dave Meslin
Jody Wilson-Raybould, independent Member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville
Path dependence, a concept in the social sciences
"Justice Dept. Is Said to Open Criminal Inquiry Into Its Own Russia Investigation", an article in the New York Times
Episode 45 of this podcast, about marketing and human nature, featuring guest Terry O'Reilly
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, a book by Marshall McLuhan (and origin of the quote: "the medium is the message")

The Quote of the Week

"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."
- Marshall McLuhan (1911-80)

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We can't seem to talk about gambling without reference to its very real, very serious social problems -- whether it's the association with organized crime, the addictiveness, or the ruination of many people's lives. But what if we look at gambling through the lens of everyday life? Where does it come from, what does it say about us, and how should we manage it in our society?

Ben is in Edmonton to chat with University of Alberta gambling expert Fiona Nicoll.

About the Guest

My greatest strength as a researcher is the creation of interdisciplinary conversations about some of the most challenging political issues of our time, from cultural genocide and reconciliation to gambling policy, white nationalist movements and the challenges facing the neoliberal university. I apply this research expertise to facilitate public art and other knowledge transfer projects. In addition to producing a body of art writing for books and catalogues, I have curated, managed and produced media (including websites and film) related to whiteness, reconciliation and Indigenous sovereignties.

In 2002 I curated a social history exhibition for the Liverpool Regional Museum on the life of Aunty Nance DeVries, a survivor of the ‘stolen generations’ of Aboriginal children and speaker to the New South Wales Parliament on the occasion of the Government’s apology in 1997. Working with veteran documentary photographer, Mervyn Bishop and videographer, Sandra Peel, I drew upon and exhibited extracts from a large archive of documents about Nancy’s ‘case’, from her birth up to the age of eighteen when she was released from institutions of state care. Titled Ten Hours in a Lifetime (a reference to the time spent with her biological mother), this exhibition was the most popular in the museum’s history, with thousands of school children attending tours while it was on site, before later travelling to the New South Wales Parliament House.

In 2014-2015 I delivered a major project for the University of Queensland titled Courting Blakness: Recalibrating Knowledge in the Sandstone University. This project centred on the Great Court as the symbolic and material heart of the University of Queensland. Reflecting the University’s heritage, traditions and prestige, this gathering place and thoroughfare is also a space where images of Aboriginal people prior to, during and after the colonization of Australia are carved in sculptural reliefs. Curated by Fiona Foley, Courting Blakness entered a creative visual dialogue with these carvings. Works by eight Aboriginal artists (Archie Moore, Ryan Presley, r e a, Natalie Harkin, Megan Cope and Michael Cook, Christian Thompson and Karla Dickens) made the Great Court a unique staging platform for discussions about the relationship between Indigenous people and the University; the edited collection of essays published by UQP provides a permanent record of these discussions. While on site, it reached over 25,000 people, including 800 students across fourteen different courses through disciplinary specific frameworks of discussion and assessment tasks. It delivered staff training through public seminars and two university-wide ‘Diversity Discussions’ and provided over 1,000 hours of volunteer activity. The website attracted over 3031 unique users and was a valuable teaching, learning and research resource for the exhibition. It now forms a digital archive for future research on public art and universities.

As convenor of the 2017-2018 Political Science Department Speakers’ series, I brought scholars to campus to reflect on some of the most difficult questions raised by the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Speakers included Glen Coulthard, Audra Simpson, Jaskiran Dhillon, Robert Nichols, Jeremy Schmidt and Aileen Moreton-Robinson. I am currently producing a short film titled Afterlives of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: What Comes Next? Directed by award winning Métis film-maker, Conor McNally, it will feature provocative research presentations by Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics and interviews with leaders of Prairie Aboriginal communities. The film will be used in classrooms and boardrooms to educate non-Indigenous people about the meaning and ramifications of ‘cultural genocide’ and current aspirations to national reconciliation.

Mentioned in this Episode

Where the Action Is: Three Essays by Erving Goffman
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Beyond Freedom and Dignity by BF Skinner
The Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions that Shape Our World by Ziya Tong
Yuval Noah Harari, popular historian
Anzac Day
No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs by Naomi Klein
Governmentality, concept invented by French philosopher Michel Foucault

The Quote of the Week

"Gambling is a principle inherent in human nature."
- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

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What makes an election work? Is it the technology aggregates our preferences? Is it trust that our choices will be fairly counted, that they have an impact? Is it the institutions that manage the voting process? Or is it, ultimately, the people we elect and whether or not they choose to respect the process? What happens to our democracy when these components are stretched and strained?

Ben chats with Holly Ann Garnett, political scientist and elections expert at the Royal Military College of Canada.

About the Guest

Holly Ann Garnett is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, and cross-appointed faculty at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Her research examines how electoral integrity can be strengthened throughout the electoral cycle, including electoral management, registration and voting procedures, election technology and cyber-security, civic literacy and campaign finance. She is a co-convener of the Electoral Management Network, and contributes to the Electoral Integrity Project.

Holly Ann was an Endeavour Research Fellow at The Australian National University (2017), a visiting fellow at the Åbo Akademi, Finland (2017), a visiting researcher at the University of Sydney (2014), and a Killam Fellow at Cornell University (2009).

She completed her PhD in Political Science at McGill University (2017), where she was a student member of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship. She is also a proud alumna of Queen’s University (MA in Political Studies, 2011) and Nipissing University (BA (Hon) in History and Political Science, 2010).

Learn more about Holly or follow her on Twitter (@HollyAnnGarnett).

Mentioned in this Episode

Episode No. 68 of this podcast, about Higher Education with Mark Sollis
Episode No. 13 of this podcast, about the division of political power with Anthony Sayers
Elections Canada
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, a book by Robert D. Putnam
Pippa Norris, comparative political scientists at the Harvard Kennedy School
The Electoral Integrity Project, an academic research project based in Harvard and Sydney Universities
Episode No. 74 of this podcast, about gamification with David Chandross
On Liberty, classic philosophical work by John Stuart Mill
Michel Foucault (1926-84), French philosopher
Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, a book by Eric Posner and E. Glen Weyl

The Quote of the Week

"When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it."
- John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006), Canadian-born economist

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Some argue that all of humanity today faces an identity crisis, as we struggle with rapid change and a deteriorating habitat -- and that the solutions may lie in indigenous social technologies, especially the power of the story. This is a wide-ranging discussion covering a lot of ground (reconciliation, diversity, Back to the Future), but one that should be relevant to all.

Ben is in Edmonton for an inspiring conversation with Jacquelyn Cardinal, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Naheyawin.

About the Guest

Jacquelyn Cardinal is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Naheyawin, as well as Co-President and Director of Social Awareness Group. Jacquelyn was nominated for Edmonton's Top 40 Under 40 class of 2018, and received an Esquao Award for Achievement in Business and a SHEInnovates Award from the UN Women's Global Innovation Coalition for Change.

In early 2019, her first play, Lake of the Strangers, co-written with her brother and co-produced with Fringe Theatre, premiered and received the Sterling Award for Outstanding New Play. When she isn't using ancient tools to solve contemporary problems, she is learning all she can about emergent technologies and exploring her love for film.

Mentioned in this Episode

The Reality Bubble, a book by Canadian science journalist Ziya Tong
Hunter Cardinal, Jacquelyn's brother and Naheyawin's Director of Story
The Inconvenient Indian, a book by Thomas King
Back to the Future, the 1985 film
Wilfred Buck, Cree astronomer mentioned by Jacquelyn
Caravaggio, prolific 16th and 17th century Italian painter
Episode 70 of this podcast, featuring Fleming Puckett on Power, Colonialism and the San People

The Quote of the Week

"Everybody has their stories about the sky, because everybody lives under the sky."
- Wilfred Buck

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We often see video games as a form of consumer entertainment—an escape from reality, not that different from watching TV or reading a book. But the structure of games are perhaps fundamental to what it means to be human. By playing them, we can learn to be and rehearse as doctors, pilots, engineers, lawyers, and more. We might also overcome real conditions, such as depression and addiction.

Ben has a powerful and provocative conversation with gaming, gamification and learning expert David Chandross.

About the Guest

David Chandross holds masters degrees in both cognitive neuroscience and higher education and a doctorate in curriculum design. As one of the founders of the field of gamification he has not only developed numerous games for training in industry and universities, but also participated in broad research projects in this field.

His original work was on neuroscience, pharmacology, and the role of attention in the brain. This transformed into an interest in education for the health professions, where he held the rank of Dean, Assistant Dean, and Program Coordinator across sectors like medical technology management, medical education and allied health professions training. He developed an interest in the use of simulations in medical education which then focused on the design of games to use simulations effectively in undergraduates. After participating as a researcher in the $3 million dollar SAGE gamification grant at Simon Fraser University he worked with organizations across many sectors to improve learning through serious game design.

Since that time Dr. Chandross has designed game systems for improving memory in seniors, training health professionals for management of the frail elderly, the design of instruction for the financial sector, cyber-security professionals, Elections Canada, the Canadian Armed Forces, the Faculty of Medicine at University of Toronto, Baycrest Health Sciences, Ryerson University, the National University of Health Sciences, ARC Business Solutions, the energy sector, the College of Family Physicians, Ontario and Humber College.

His current research focus is in two areas: (1) The treatment of memory loss in seniors with dementia using streaming digital technology and (2) the optimization of virtual reality and immersive technology in learning. He is the program coordinator for seniors’ off campus education at Ryerson University and is active in the development of advanced systems for training health professionals as part of the E-Campus and Contact North initiatives for the province of Ontario.

Mentioned in this Episode

Walter Greenleaf, a behavioural neuroscientist at Stanford University
David Kaufman, professor of education at Simon Fraser University
Martin Seligman, American psychologist (positive psychology)
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, a book by Robert Sapolsky
Richard Bartle, British professor and game researcher
Paul Howard-Jones, professor of neuroscience and education at Bristol University
Ready Player One, a book by Ernest Cline followed by a 2018 film directed by Steven Spielberg
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
The Matrix, the 1999 film
Jordan Peterson, University of Toronto psychologist
Black Mirror, a series on Netflix
Donald Trump, Doug Ford and Jordan Peterson, an article in the National Post by guest David Chandross

The Quote of the Week

“A game is an opportunity to focus our energy, with relentless optimism, at something we’re good at (or getting better at) and enjoy. In other words, gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression.”

From Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

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What is consciousness? Where does the mind reside? Can we create artificial intelligence that can fake intelligence, or maybe just have it? What happened in 17th century Europe that led to such a fascinating time for deep thinkers? And are we going through a similar period of churn today?

Ben has a fascinating and wide-ranging chat about these big questions with University of Alberta professor of philosophy Amy Schmitter.

About the Guest

Besides her position as Professor of Philosophy, Amy is an Executive Editor and Board Secretary for the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.She is also involved in the project “New Narratives in the History of Philosophy,” supported by a Partnership Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In April 2016, she was a Visiting Professor in the Facultad de Filosof Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, where she lectured and held several seminar sessions. Before coming to the University of Alberta, Amy taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Hamilton College in New York, and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and at New York University, and during 2002-03, held a Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University. She has received several awards for Summer Institutes and Seminars from the National Endowment for the Humanities (U.S.A.) and two Standard Research Grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She also serves on various committees, including the Religious Studies Advisory Council for the U of A, the Program Committee for the Pacific Northwest-Western Canada Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, and review committees for several grant organizations.

Amy's main areas of research and writing are the history of early modern philosophy and philosophy of art. But those are broad and eclectic areas that (necessarily) take her into many different topics, historical periods and approaches to philosophy. Her teaching interests and educational history cover yet further fields. The result is that she knows a little bit about many different things.

Mentioned in this Episode

Here are the thinkers we mentioned in this episode: Hume, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Russell, Marx, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Poulain de la Barre. Check them out!
A History of Western Philosophy, a book by philosopher Bertrand Russell
Crash Course on Aesthetic Appreciation, a video that mentions the example of a chained cat statue (is the chain part of the art?)
The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History, a book by Stephen J. Gould
The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle and the Struggles for the Soul of Western Civilization, a book by Arthur Herman
Discourse on Method, a 1637 work of philosophy by René Descartes
Physics, a 4th century BC work of philosophy by Aristotle

The Quote of the Week

"One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another."

René Descartes

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It's Friday 13th! What does that mean? Is it an unlucky day? According to science—no, it means absolutely nothing. But there is one exception: the date has meaning if we think it does. As meaning-machines, we impart significance everywhere we look. We don't want to live in a world where randomness reigns. So what traps have we set?

Ben has a fascinating chat with University of Toronto Professor Jeffrey Rosenthal, statistician and author of "Knock on Wood: Luck, Chance, and the Meaning of Everything".

About the Guest

Jeffrey Rosenthal is a professor of Statistics at the University of Toronto, and author of Knock on Wood: Luck, Chance, and the Meaning of Everything.Born in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada in 1967, he received his BSc in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science from the University of Toronto at the age of 20, his PhD in Mathematics from Harvard University at the age of 24, and tenure in the Department of Statistics at the University of Toronto at the age of 29.

For his research, Rosenthal was awarded the 2006 CRM-SSC Prize, and the 2007 COPSS Presidents' Award, the most prestigious honour bestowed by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies. For his teaching, he received a Harvard University Teaching Award in 1991, and a University of Toronto Outstanding Teaching Award in 1998. He was elected to Fellowship of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2005, and to the Royal Society of Canada in 2012, and was awarded the SSC Gold Medal in 2013, and a President's Impact Award in 2019.

Rosenthal's book for the general public, Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities, was published in sixteen editions and ten languages, and was a bestseller in Canada. It led to numerous media and public appearances, to his work exposing the Ontario lottery retailer scandal, and to a President's Impact Award. Rosenthal has also published two textbooks about probability theory, and well over one hundred refereed research papers, many related to the field of Markov chain Monte Carlo randomized computer algorithms and to interdisciplinary applications of statistics. He has dabbled as a computer game programmer, musical performer, and improvisational comedy performer, and is fluent in French.

Despite being born on Friday the thirteenth, Rosenthal has been a very fortunate person.

Learn more about Jeffrey at his website or follow him on Twitter (@ProbabilityProf).

Mentioned in this Episode

The Secret, a book by Rhonda Byrne
Poisson clumping, a phenomenon where random events tend to occur in clusters, clumps, or bursts.
The hard problem of consciousness

The Quote of the Week

"Luck has a way of evaporating when you lean on it."
- From Keys to the Demon Prison by Brandon Mull

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What does it mean to have a good conversation about politics, democracy, our place in the world, Donald Trump and sports? How do we bring disparate and distinct voices into that dialogue, and keep it fresh? The Walrus, a weekly Canadian magazine, has been trying to figure it out.

Ben is in Toronto to chat with Jessica Johnson, executive editor and creative director of The Walrus, about democracy, conversation, and the magazine's unique and ever-evolving response to "what on earth is going on?"

About the Guest

Jessica is the executive editor and creative director for The Walrus. She is an award-winning journalist who has worked with a range of North American publications, including The Globe and Mail, National Post, Saturday Night, Lucky, Elle, and The New Republic. Her work has also appeared in the BBC and Medium. Jessica was named executive editor of The Walrus in 2017. She is also a visiting professor at the University of St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto.

Learn more about Jessica or follow her on Twitter (@ejessicajohnson).

Mentioned in this Episode

Thank You For Being Late, a book by Thomas Friedman (also check out Episode 60, about the book)
Jason McBride, a writer at The Walrus
"The Charmed Life of Esther the Wonder Pig", an article in The Walrus by Jason McBride
Black Mirror, a program on Netflix
Cover of The Walrus magazine from December 2018
Video of "A More Perfect Union", a 2008 presidential campaign speech by Barack Obama
Jordan Peterson, University of Toronto professor of psychology
Sidewalk Labs, a company owned by Google that is developing Toronto's Quayside neighbourhood

The Quote of the Week

"Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards."
- Theodore Zeldin

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Is colonialism ongoing in the Kalahari Desert? What do the struggles of the San peoples tell us about democracy, tradition, adaptation to the environment, and the exercise and imbalances of power in today's world? What role does tourism take in all this, and is education still the silver bullet? And, can a people be truly free and fulfilled without meaningful sovereignty?

Ben chats with higher education consultant, scholar and Program Director at the Kalahari Peoples Fund Fleming Puckett.

About the Guest

Dr. R. Fleming Puckett is Program Director for Land Rights & Governance for the Kalahari Peoples Fund, working to increase awareness, funding, and advocacy related to land rights, community governance, and San/government relationships across southern Africa. He began his fieldwork with the !Xun, Khwe, and ǂKhomani San people of South Africa in 2009 and received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Oxford University in 2013. He is also the Senior Director of Strategic Research for EAB.

Dr. Puckett's continuing research focuses on indigenous systems of governance, decision-making, land use, and community organization and the impacts of conflicts between these systems and the stated goals, requirements, and implementation procedures of national land and “development” legislation. His professional background includes research, teaching, writing, public speaking, legal practice, consulting, and negotiation.

In addition to his doctorate, Dr. Puckett holds an MA in Higher Education from Columbia University, an MBA from Cornell, and two law degrees, from Boston University and Cambridge University. He was admitted to the State Bar of New York in 2002. Fleming is co-editor of the book, Research and Activism Among the Kalahari San Today: Ideals, Challenges, and Debates (2017).

Learn more about Fleming and the Kalahari People's Fund.

Mentioned in this Episode

The San People of the Kalahari
The Notre-Dame de Paris fire and reconstruction
The Inconvenient Indian, a book by Canadian author Thomas King
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)

The Quote of the Week

"We are not primitive. We live differently to you, but we do not live exactly like our grandparents did, nor do you. Were your ancestors 'primitive'? I don't think so. We respect our ancestors. We love our children. This is the same for all people."
- Roy Sesana, San activist

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What is social media doing to our politics from the inside? Are politicians themselves getting along, or are the deep partisan divisions in our culture also fraying the relationships of the people who we have elected to get things done? What does it take to run and win a political campaign these days? And how can democracy evolve. Or, should it?

Ben chats with Stephanie Rea, longtime conservative political staffer and current communications director for the Ontario Minister of Education.

About the Guest

Stephanie Rea is a long-time political staffer who originally studied journalism and writing. She has worked for several conservative governments and politicians over the years on the federal and provincial levels, and currently works for the Ontario Minister of Education, Stephen Lecce, under Premier Doug Ford.

Mentioned in this Episode

Black Mirror, a series on Netflix
Edward Snowden, activist and whistleblower

The Quote of the Week

"Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
- Winston Churchill

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What is the future of the university and higher education? Will the local, broad-scope, brick-and-mortar campuses that form a critical part of our society give way to a fragmented system of hyper-focused online learning nodes? What is learning, anyways? And what's the purpose of an educational institution in the first place?

Ben has a fascinating chat with a key thinker in this space: writer, strategist and higher education engagement specialist Mark Sollis, whom you might remember from Episode 60.

About the Guest

Mark Sollis is a strategist and creative with D3 Advancement Strategies & Communications.

Noted for his disruptive thinking and willingness to challenge the status quo, Mark served for almost five years as the first Associate Vice-President, Alumni at the University of Calgary. Building on leadership roles in planning within various institutions, he led the creation of, and delivered on, the institution's much-lauded first Alumni Strategy, which set the university as one of the most forward-thinking and performance-driven operations in the field of alumni engagement.

Previously, at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Mark served for three years as the project manager for Canada’s leading alumni facility, the $20 million UBC Alumni Centre, while working as the Senior Director, Operations and Planning; and Interim Associate Vice-President Alumni and Executive Director, Alumni Association, for UBC Alumni.

Noted for his considered approach, and his ability to execute with focus, agility, and collegially, his post-secondary experiences also cover media relations; student leadership; finance; major project management; as well as serving as strategic counsel to higher education executives. Mark served on the CASE Commission on Alumni Relations from 2013-16 and the CASE District VIII Board from 2014-16. A frequent presenter in North America and internationally, with significant experience with CASE and the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education (CCAE), he has also worked closely with institutions and colleagues across Canada, the US, Australia and the UK in the areas of performance management, planning and organisational development. Other leadership roles include successes in two major Canadian political campaigns and serving as a caucus chief of staff, and as a VP Advancement in Scotland.

A proud graduate of Mount Royal (Calgary) with a Bachelor of Applied Communications (Journalism), Mark has recently launched his own consultancy to focus on performance management, strategy development, and business planning in advancement.

Mentioned in this Episode

A quote from George Bernard Shaw, from Back to Methuselah: “You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”
Episode 60, in conversation with Mark Sollis about Thank You For Being Late by Thomas Friedman
ACAD (Alberta College of Art and Design), now the Alberta University of the Arts
State of Higher Education in 2019, a report by Grant Thornton
The End of History and the Last Man, a 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama, based on his 1989 essay
Hegel's Dialectics (thesis-antithesis-synthesis)

The Quote of the Week

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."
- Plutarch

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How do we understand and engage in today's conversation about gender? What on earth is going on with gender and identity politics, and what is the personal dimension?

Ben is at Queen's University in Kingston to chat with Dr. Lee Airton, author of Gender: Your Guide — A Gender-Friendly Primer on What to Know, What to Say, and What to Do in the New Gender Culture. It's a fascinating, important and unexpectedly fun conversation about the unique historical moment in which we live today.

About the Guest

Dr. Lee Airton is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies in Education at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. As a researcher, blogger, advocate and speaker, Dr. Airton focuses on enabling individuals and institutions to welcome gender and sexual diversity in everyday life. In 2012, they founded They Is My Pronoun, a Q+A-based blog about gender-neutral pronoun usage and user support with over 30,000 unique visitors in 2017 alone. Dr. Airton is also the founder of the No Big Deal Campaign, a national social media initiative that helps people show support for transgender peoples' right to have their pronouns used.

In recognition of their advocacy work, Dr. Airton received a 2017 Youth Role Model of the Year Award from the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity. Dr. Airton's first book is Gender – Your Guide: A Gender-Friendly Primer on What to Know, What to Say and What to Do in the New Gender Culture, which offers practical steps for welcoming gender diversity in all areas of everyday life. As a university-based teacher educator for over ten years, Dr. Airton has worked with hundreds of teacher candidates to widen the circle of belonging and participation for students of all genders and sexualities.

Dr. Airton's current SSHRC-funded research explores how K-12 schools are responding to the inclusion of gender identity and gender expression protections in human rights legislation, including implications for teacher education. Dr. Airton's scholarly publications have appeared in the journals Gender and Education, Sex Education, Curriculum Inquiry, Teachers College Record, and the Journal of Education Policy, and their editorials have been published in The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. With Dr. Susan Woolley, they are also editing a forthcoming collection of lesson plans on gender diversity for K-12 teachers.

Learn more about Lee or follow them on Twitter (@LeeAirton).

Mentioned in this Episode

Episode 2: The Digital Age, an episode of this podcast featuring philosopher Carlos Prado.
The No Big Deal Campaign
Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), an activist alliance formed in the UK in 1984-85
Two books by psychologist Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, and The Coddling of the American Mind (with Greg Lukianoff)
Episode 24: The Knowledge Illusion, an episode of this podcast about The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach
Lev Vygotsky, Soviet psychologist and founder of cultural-historical psychology
Freedom, music video of a song by Beyoncé featuring Kendrick Lamar
Michel Foucault (1926-84), French philosopher

The Quote of the Week

"Don’t aim for no mistakes. Aim for better mistakes."
- From Gender: Your Guide by Lee Airton

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What does it mean to be a storyteller? What happens when we look into the mirror after a long day, let the masks drop, and come face to face with who we really are? What does ownership mean in the arts, and what can theatre be when it isn't a commodity? Why do we act in the first place, and are our stories and audiences changing? And what's going on with Samuel Beckett?

Ben is in Calgary for a funny, fascinating and quite unique conversation with local actor and theatre artist, Andy Curtis.

About the Guest

Andy is a founding artist of Black Radish Theatre in Calgary, where he recently performed the role of Vladimir in the company's production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.Andy is also a member of the One Yellow Rabbit's Ensemble, which creates original works in the Big Secret Theatre, performing and touring internationally for over 30 years. In 2007, the Ensemble was awarded the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Award. Andy has worked with many Calgary theatres companies, including Theatre Calgary, ATP, Ground Zero, Loose Moose, Quest, Stage West, Ghost River, Vertigo Theatre and Lunchbox. Andy had the great fortune to perform alongside his daughter at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in MAKING TREATY 7, an ongoing project which explores the historical significance and aftermath of the events which took place at Blackfoot Crossing in 1877.

Learn more about Andy.

Mentioned in this Episode

Keith Johnstone, Calgary-based improv artist and teacher who worked with Samuel Beckett in London
The "Allegory of the Cave", from The Republic by Plato
The Okotoks "Big Rock", a glacial erratic in southern Alberta
The Maori myth of the Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand
Making Treaty 7, an arts collective in southern Alberta
Michelle Thrush, Canadian actress and First Nations activist
Tanya Tagaq, Canadian Inuk throat singer
Eya-Hey Nakoda, a musical drum group from the Stoney Nakoda First Nation in southern Alberta
Proust, a 1930 essay by Samuel Beckett
A clip of Ian McKellen describing his acting process on Extras
The High Performance Rodeo, a yearly theatre festival in Calgary
The Genesis Centre, a community institution in northeast Calgary

The Quote of the Week

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."
- Samuel Beckett

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How important is culture to the long-term success of an organization? What role does being vulnerable play in leadership? How does story help weave and even make up our everyday experience? And what can putting ourselves out there with travel teach us about our own inner storyteller and context in the world?

Ben is in Ottawa to chat with Jana Dybinski, consummate traveler, thinker, innovator and VP for Marketing and Culture at Rebel.com.

About the Guest

Jana's bio on her website is just too good, so instead of any tinkering, we've copied it here.

Stories shape us.

My Irish dad was an astrophysicist. He told me about worlds beyond our universe. He launched rockets, and once took a road trip from France to Iran, where it was so hot that his steering wheel melted. My German mom was a teacher - the kind that inspires a deep and profound love of learning. She moved to California before doing her Master's degree and traveled around in a Westfalia. One time she charmed a stunt pilot to take her flying and barrel-roll his plane. As kids, my brother and sister and I spent hours passing our old globe back and forth, creating stories of the infinite possibilities the world held for us.

No one was surprised when I saved all my spares to spend the last two months of high school exploring New Zealand alone, or when I came back to study journalism. After graduating I received a fellowship from the Aga Khan Foundation to work in Zanzibar, Tanzania.

The stories in East Africa were intoxicating. The women I worked with were changing the face of education in their communities by training teachers and building vibrant classrooms out of recycled scraps. They laughed infectiously at each other's jokes, and at my frequent state of bewilderment. Like the time in central Tanzania, when a baby was passed onto my bus, alone, with a note of his destination tied around his wrist. For reals. While I panicked, the other women on the bus took turns bouncing a stranger's baby, until hours later when he was unceremoniously released into the arms of someone waiting at the specified stop.

I was friends with a Massai warrior. One night we tried to figure out how long it would take to walk to the moon. I called my dad. The answer is 9 years. In Kenya I camped among hippos and drank gin with a British expat who lived in a house with only two walls. In Ethiopia I fed wild hyenas from a stick and a 7-year-old boy showed me a cave with a floor made of human skulls.

A chance encounter with some fellow Canadians while stuck in an Ethiopia sandstorm landed me a job managing comms for the international organization CODE. I worked to travel. While hiking to Machu Picchu I learned about e coli and Peruvian hospital care. One time while smoking shisha in Istanbul with my childhood best friend I looked up and knew the Canadian guy walking past. The world’s like that. Small. Magical.

When a boyfriend broke up with me I decided to leave my coms job to go explore India. My mom thought I was being irresponsible, but I went anyway. A month later that boyfriend showed up and proposed to me on a train leaving Varanasi. We were travelling in third class and sharing a tiny space with an Indian family of 6, all staring and loudly eating papadum. It was romantic anyway. We got married a year later. Our vows were taken from pages of the journals we wrote for each other during those crazy colorful months in India.

I took a job at a digital marketing agency and learned new platforms for storytelling. It wasn't as purposeful as the international work, but it was fun and creative and I liked the psychology behind it all. I loved studying what motivated and inspired people.

By then my dad had lost his rocket scientist job. Consumed by darker stories, he’d become a no-longer-functioning alcoholic. He was always talking about how Bill Gates ruined his life, and also that he invented the internet, neither are true. He’s never even met Bill. It was hard to witness his suffering. Addiction's like that. I got lucky with an incredible mom that made up for it, and enough world experience to fully understand that all we ever really control is how we show up.

My husband and I road tripped around California with paper maps. We watched a van speed right off a winding road and over a cliff near Death Valley. In Thailand we snorkelled at night in blue plankton. It was like a dream. I got knocked up and we bought a little 1.5 story house from a man who hoarded antiques and kept three intact bullmastiffs in the basement. It was a fixer upper. Our daughter was born on Christmas Eve in our living room. I’ve never felt so alive - so completely unleashed. She’s a wildly quirky and curious kid. At 6 years old she already has a daily ritual of creating art before sunrise. I wake up to her nudging me, the latest piece in her hands. Mornings are the best.

My digital agency job had warped into leading the marketing at Rebel.com. I worked with a talented leadership team to evolve Rebel’s outdated brand, vision and negative workplace into something to be proud of. Changing corporate culture is hard but purposeful work. We won awards for the transformation we created, and I geeked out over the philosophical side of inciting change within teams and organizations. I wrote articles and took stages to share our story of turning a bad culture into something really special.

All that learning around how to transform organizations and teams gave me a heightened awareness around the power of transforming individual leaders too. I got introspective. I loved my life and at the same time felt unsettled inside. My untethered traveler identity was diluted by all the other things I’d become - a female leader in a tech company, a corporate culture junkie, a speaker, a marketer, a wife, a mom. My family and friends told stories about my success, but I could feel something was still missing. It was like my intuition was yelling at me but I couldn't make out a word. I felt stuck and guilty for wanting more out of my easy, privileged life. I worried that if I didn't figure it out I'd have big regrets. I was deeply uncomfortable with my own pain, which I labelled as trivial.

I decided to patiently follow the whispers of intuition that I could hear. They led me to pour thousands of hours (and dollars) into the study of change at a personal level - into mastering the principals behind positive psychology, personal development, self connection, and the delicate art of balance. I hired a talented coach who supported me to reconnect with myself.

I learned that we're not just shaped by stories, we're made of them.

The stories we believe. The stories we let others write about us. The stories we write for ourselves.

My story is about discovering how to connect with the evolution of yourself, and how to live audaciously in all your identities. My story is about a travelling explorer who's also a proud female leader in a tech company, a wife, a mom, a speaker, and a leadership coach. Because my intuition wasn't yelling at me at all, it was calling me - to share my story and support other leaders that are passionate about transforming themselves and their organizations, but stuck where I've been stuck. To do this, I co-founded a fun consulting company with a couple of my favorite humans, called We Human.

Learn more about Jana or follow her (@janowhatimsayin) on Twitter and Instagram.

Mentioned in this Episode

Thank You For Being Late by Thomas Friedman (check out Episode 60 about the book)
The Aga Khan Foundation Canada
Sapiens, a book by Yuval Noah Harari
The Future of Education, video of a conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Russell Brand
21 Lessons for the 21st Century, a book by Yuval Noah Harari

The Quote of the Week

"Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change."
- Brené Brown

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

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George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1984) is a touchstone of 20th-century English literature and a key piece of modern political thought and speculative fiction that continues to provoke conversation, and comparison, today. Orwell's novel from 1949 describes a bleak future where the state (Big Brother) has weaponized technology, language, propaganda and memory to exert near-total control over every person.

Jaret Hargreaves joins Ben in Calgary to discuss this classic and frighteningly prescient book.

About the Book

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controlsthe past."

Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal. George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four is perhaps the most pervasively influential book of the twentieth century.

About the Guest

Jaret Hargreaves is a Product Management professional with more than ten years experience bringing products to market at health tech startups.

Spending more time in school than his parents could reasonably have foreseen, Jaret studied Biochemistry and Computer Science, splitting time between the Universities of Calgary and British Columbia. He studied medical imaging while completing an MSc in Biomedical Engineering at the Foothills Medical Centre, where his thesis investigated image processing to aid neurologists in stroke diagnosis.

With the slowly dawning realization that he would never be a truly exceptional programmer, Jaret decided to pursue an alternate career in health tech, where he could utilize his ability to speak both rudimentary “doctor” and “developer”. He spent 7 years at Calgary Scientific (now PureWeb) managing a series of medical image viewing products including ResolutionMD Mobile, the first FDA-cleared diagnostic viewer for Apple and Android mobile devices.

Next, Jaret lead development of Brightsquid’s Secure-Mail, which provided secure communication between doctors and dentists, including with their colleagues and patients. Jaret currently serves as Director of Product Management at two health tech companies. At the Calgary-based medical imaging startup Kent Imaging, he leads development of SnapshotNIR, a near-infrared camera for assessing tissue health. He also manages partner opportunities for the eponymous Auxita platform for the company out of Brisbane, Australia.

In his spare time, Jaret has volunteered for organizations including the Alberta Children’s Hospital, the Calgary Youth Science Fair, and local political campaigns, where he is motivated by the potential of exceptional candidates. He served as the Data Lead for the successful 2015 campaign for Calgary Centre MP Kent Hehr.

If you’re looking to engage him in an animated discussion, any of the following topics are a safe bet: near-future dystopian fiction (any format), Star Trek (not-so-near-future utopia), amateur home barista-ry, returning to hockey as an adult, disc golf, 3D printing, and the collected works of Joss Whedon.

Check out Jaret on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter (@jaretis).

Mentioned in this Episode

"George Orwell's '1984' is Suddenly a Best-Seller", article in The New York Times, January 2017
"Kellyanne Conway: Press Secretary Sean Spicer Gave 'Alternative Facts'", video from Meet The Press / NBC News
Firefly, a television series created by Joss Whedon
Wag the Dog, a film directed by Barry Levinson
Noam Chomsky, scholar, historian, activist and writer
The Handmaid's Tale, a book by Margaret Atwood and subsequent television series
The Lives of Others, a 2006 German film
Guns, Germs and Steel, a book by Jared Diamond
Brave New World, a 1932 book by Aldous Huxley often paired with 1984
The Road, a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy
The Lord of the Rings, a fantasy trilogy by JRR Tolkien

The Quote of the Week

"The best books...are those that tell you what you know already."

From 1984 by George Orwell

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What does it mean to be an introvert, and is it harder in our society to keep to oneself? Is there a pressure to conform to an Extrovert Ideal? How do introverts assert themselves in education, the workplace and daily life without giving up what makes them unique, thoughtful -- and just them?

Ben brings back Jody MacPherson (Episode 11) to talk about "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" by Susan Cain.

About the Book

The book that started the Quiet Revolution

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society.

In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts—from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.

About the Guest

Check out Jody on social media:

http://about.me/jodymacpherson

Jody MacPherson is an Accredited Business Communicator (ABC) with 20+ years of experience in corporate communications and public relations.

Graduated from Carleton University in Ottawa, Jody spent her teenage years in Fort McMurray working for the local weekly newspaper and radio stations throughout high school as a columnist and on-air reporter. She paid for university, by literally going underground at Syncrude Canada, working in the extraction plant of the oil sands operation in the 80’s, working as the only woman on her shift, logging hours in the underground portion of the mining operation, cleaning up spills and collecting lab samples.

After graduation, Jody stayed in the north to work as a journalist but soon made the leap to public relations in 1986 where she wrote and edited employee publications (and co-authored a book) for several years in Fort McMurray before moving to Edmonton.

As community relations team leader, Jody managed donations programs and organized community relations activities across the province, including a $1 million community investment program in Calgary. She went on to receive an international award of excellence for work in employee communications.

Formed her own communications consulting company and for the next six years specialized in stakeholder consultation (including cross-cultural communication), employee communication, website content and writing/editing for numerous clients.

Beginning in 2005, Jody switched to full-time employment in the public sector in various leadership roles including director of communications and media relations for the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Medicine. Left the U of C in July of 2010 to pursue political interests, including volunteer positions as the former VP of Communications for the Alberta Liberal Party (2008-2010) and as communications/media chair for Kent Hehr’s successful election as Member of Parliament in Calgary Centre in 2015 (Mr. Hehr was also appointed to the federal Liberal cabinet as Minister of Veterans Affairs).

After the last municipal election, Jody left a position with a local non-profit organization to supervise a team for the City of Calgary in digital/web communications and social media.

Mentioned in this Episode

Episode 11: "...according to the book, Selfie", a previous episode featuring Jody MacPherson in a discussion about Will Storr's book
Episode 45: "...with Marketing and Human Nature", a previous episode featuring Terry O'Reilly
The Power of Introverts, a TED Talk by Susan Cain
Who Are You, Really? The Puzzle of Personality, a TED Talk by Brian Little
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, a book by Malcolm Gladwell

The Quote of the Week

"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."
- Albert Einstein

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

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What does it mean to be creative? Where does creative expression lie: in the individual, in the shared experience, or in the coming together of public and private? How can an actor be more than just an interpreter, but a creative artist in their own right?

Ben is in Toronto to chat with Brian Smith, acting teacher, coach and Professor Emeritus from the University of Calgary, about his own journey, and the meaning and importance of finding one's creative voice in our difficult and accelerated age.

About the Guest

Brian researches the practice of contemporary theatre performance through acting, directing, coaching and devising performance. He is especially interested in the creativity of the actor, and has particular expertise in the use of masks in actor training and performance.

In directing, Brian has focused on the reinterpretation of plays from the modern theatre for contemporary audiences. The modern Russian theatre has been an area of particular interest.

At the University of Calgary, Brian taught acting to advanced-level undergraduates. In this work, process took precedence over immediate result, and students investigated how technique and the creative imagination support one another in the creation and interpretation of works for the theatre.

At the graduate level, Brian taught a course that investigates the creative and communicative practices of collaborating artists as they conceptualize theatre works together.

Today, though retired from university teaching, Brian still works in the theatre, and divides his time between Toronto and Nova Scotia.

The Quote of the Week

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.."
- Pablo Picasso

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Denise Clarke is one of Canada's most respected performing artists, perhaps best known for her work with One Yellow Rabbit. Since 1997 she has opened up the company's process with the Summer Lab Intensive. She recently published The Big Secret Book: An Intense Guide for Creating Performance Theatre.

Ben talks with Denise about her book, the recent Calgary production of Waiting for Godot (which she directed for Black Radish Theatre), the life of an artist, the meaning of art in an age of noise, and much more.

This episode contains some swearing.

About the Guest

Denise began working with One Yellow Rabbit in 1983 and became Associate Artist and a permanent member of the Ensemble in 1986. She has created or co-created several shows including The Erotic Irony of Old Glory, Touch, CD Dance, Breeder, So Low, Permission, Featherland, Sign Language, Heavens to Murgatroid, A Fabulous Disaster, Smash Cut Freeze, and wag. In 1997, Denise created the Summer Lab Intensive and as Director continues to welcome a broad range of established and emerging artists from all over the world. She continues to teach, provide master classes, and lecture across Canada and abroad.

Other work includes choreography for Theatre Calgary and Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary, Edmonton's Citadel Theatre, Crows Theatre, Canadian Stage Company in Toronto, the Belfry Theatre in Victoria, and the Shaw Festival in Niagara on the Lake. Denise has toured extensively in shows including Ilsa, Queen of the Nazi Love Camp, Mata Hari: Tigress at the City Gates, Doing Leonard Cohen, Thunderstruck, Sign Language, and Dream Machine.

On December 30th, 2013, Denise was appointed as a Member to the Order of Canada, one of Canada's highest civilian honours. Prior to this appointment, she was also recognized by the University of Calgary with an Honorary Doctorate from the Faculty of Arts.

Recently Denise wrote The Big Secret Book, An Intense Guide To Creating Performance Theatre.

The Quote of the Week

"Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence."
- From "Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann, 1927

The Big Secret Book: An Intense Guide for Creating Performance Theatre (Artist Survival)

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Thomas Friedman has been explaining the modern predicament as an author and New York Times columnist for decades. With Thank You For Being Late, he turns his sights to the unprecedented rate of change today. His main focus here is on the three M's: Markets, Moore's Law and Mother Nature, and the book's scale is grand as it tries to answer our eternal question, what on earth is going on?

Joining Ben to tackle the book is Mark Sollis, strategist, writer and engagement specialist in higher education.

About the Book

A field guide to the twenty-first century, written by one of its most celebrated observers.

We all sense it―something big is going on. You feel it in your workplace. You feel it when you talk to your kids. You can’t miss it when you read the newspapers or watch the news. Our lives are being transformed in so many realms all at once―and it is dizzying.
In Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, a work unlike anything he has attempted before, Thomas L. Friedman exposes the tectonic movements that are reshaping the world today and explains how to get the most out of them and cushion their worst impacts. You will never look at the world the same way again after you read this book: how you understand the news, the work you do, the education your kids need, the investments your employer has to make, and the moral and geopolitical choices our country has to navigate will all be refashioned by Friedman’s original analysis.

Friedman begins by taking us into his own way of looking at the world―how he writes a column. After a quick tutorial, he proceeds to write what could only be called a giant column about the twenty-first century. His thesis: to understand the twenty-first century, you need to understand that the planet’s three largest forces―Moore’s law (technology), the Market (globalization), and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loss)―are accelerating all at once. These accelerations are transforming five key realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community.

Why is this happening? As Friedman shows, the exponential increase in computing power defined by Moore’s law has a lot to do with it. The year 2007 was a major inflection point: the release of the iPhone, together with advances in silicon chips, software, storage, sensors, and networking, created a new technology platform. Friedman calls this platform “the supernova”―for it is an extraordinary release of energy that is reshaping everything from how we hail a taxi to the fate of nations to our most intimate relationships. It is creating vast new opportunities for individuals and small groups to save the world―or to destroy it.

Thank You for Being Late is a work of contemporary history that serves as a field manual for how to write and think about this era of accelerations. It’s also an argument for “being late”―for pausing to appreciate this amazing historical epoch we’re passing through and to reflect on its possibilities and dangers. To amplify this point, Friedman revisits his Minnesota hometown in his moving concluding chapters; there, he explores how communities can create a “topsoil of trust” to anchor their increasingly diverse and digital populations.

With his trademark vitality, wit, and optimism, Friedman shows that we can overcome the multiple stresses of an age of accelerations―if we slow down, if we dare to be late and use the time to reimagine work, politics, and community. Thank You for Being Late is Friedman’s most ambitious book―and an essential guide to the present and the future.

About the Guest

Mark Sollis is a strategist and creative with D3 Advancement Strategies & Communications.

The Quote of the Week

"When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings, they start. You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible and, most importantly, you start to reconnect with your most deeply held beliefs. Once you’ve done that, you can begin to re-imagine a better path."
- Dov Siedman, CEO of LRN, as quoted by Thomas Friedman in Thank You For Being Late

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What are the challenges and pressures that face growing cities like Toronto? How do we make housing affordable in such places? And what does the future of the city look like?

Ben is in Toronto to chat with a panel of experts on the past, present and future of the city: Adam Brind, managing partner and broker of record with Core Assets Real Estate; Pamela Robinson, Associate Professor at the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University; and podcast alumnus Blair Scorgie, Senior Planner and Urban Designer at SvN Architects and Planners.

About the Guests

Adam Brind

Adam Brind is a co-founder of Core Assets Real Estate. Since launching in January 2013, the company has quickly become one of the leading full-service brokerages in the Toronto market selling in excess of $500,000,000 in the first five years of operation.

As a real estate Broker, Adam has over 10 years of experience selling luxury properties and is one of Toronto’s foremost real estate Brokers putting him in the top 1% year-over-year, among Toronto Real Estate Board members.

Adam has a focus on the luxury markets in central Toronto including custom built homes, recently renovated properties and underdeveloped land. Adam’s team adds value by staying involved and advising his clients through low-rise building projects (infill homes, additions and renovations).

He often contributes to various media publications as both an author and an industry expert which have included the Globe and Mail, Canadian Real Estate Wealth Magazine, Toronto Life and many others.

Adam holds a Bachelor of Arts from Wilfrid Laurier University and continues to develop his skills and education. He has attended Harvard Business School and completed the Executive Education Program on Urban Development, Design and Construction.

Adam lives and works in central Toronto with his wife and two kids.

Learn more about Adam or follow him on Twitter (@AdamJBrind).

Pamela Robinson

Pamela Robinson (MCIP, RPP) is the associate dean, graduate studies and strategic initiatives at the Faculty of Community Services and an associate professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson. She is also a registered professional planner. As part of the geothink.ca research team, Robinson's research and practice focus on urban sustainability issues with a particular focus on cities and climate change and the use of open data and civic technology to support open government transformations. She serves on the board of directors of the Metcalf Foundation and has participated in four Metrolinx Community Advisory Committees. Robinson is an editor of Urban Sustainability: Reconnecting Space and Place (University of Toronto Press, 2013), Teaching as Scholarship: Preparing Students for Professional Practice in Community Services (WLU Press, 2016) and is a columnist for Spacing magazine.

Learn more about Pamela or follow her on Twitter (@pjrplan).

Blair Scorgie

Blair is a Senior Planner and Urban Designer as well as SvN’s Business Development Director. He holds a Master of Architecture, specializing in Urban Design, from McGill University as well as a Bachelor of Urban and Regional Planning from Ryerson University. Blair is a Registered Professional Planner, and a member of both the Canadian Institute of Planners and the Ontario Professional Planners Institute. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Ryerson University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning and was formerly the Acting Chair of the City of London Urban Design Review Panel.

Blair’s diverse project experience includes streetscape and public realm design strategies; architectural control and private realm design strategies; revitalization and intensification strategies; waterfront, campus and district master plans; policy reviews and amendments; development approvals and appeals; and urban design peer reviews.

Listen to Blair in Episode 22, learn more about him, or follow him on Twitter (@BlairScorgie).

The Quote of the Week

"The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand."
- Italo Calvino (1923-1985)

Urban Sustainability: Reconnecting Space and Place

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Making films is often about balance: between the singular vision of the script and director and the ideas and impulses of the team; between getting the perfect shot and keeping the project on time and under budget. And yet the end result can be like a magic trick. How do they do it?

Ben is in Toronto to chat with filmmaker Christopher MacBride, who has written and directed films such as "The Conspiracy" (2012). He is currently in the editing suite for "The Education of Fredrick Fitzell.

The Quote of the Week

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."
- Orson Welles

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People take to the streets to change the world. Sometimes regimes fall and power shifts, yet too often nothing much happens -- it's business-as-usual the next day. But are we missing the spirit of activism? Are mass protests actually about changing the conversation and altering our perspectives? Or is disobedience the goal in itself?

Ben is in Toronto to chat with Lesley Wood, activist and York University Professor of Sociology, about her work on how ideas travel and the true purpose of protest.

About the Guest

Lesley Wood is Associate Professor of Sociology at York University in Toronto. She is interested in how ideas travel, how power operates, how institutions change, how conversations influence practices, how people resist and how conflict starts, transforms and ends. Lesley is the author of Direct Action, Deliberation and Diffusion: Collective Action after the WTO Protests in Seattle (2012) and co-author of the third edition of Social Movements 1768-2012, and Crisis and Control: The Militarization of Protest Policing. She is an activist in the global justice and anti-poverty movements.

Learn more about Lesley, visit her blog, or follow her on Twitter (@lesleybikes).

The Quote of the Week

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference."
- Elie Wiesel

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Michael Kaufman's newest book, The Time Has Come: Why Men Must Join the Gender Equality Revolution, is a stirring call for men to step up for women's rights, as well as a poignant analysis of what on earth is going on with gender equality today.

Michael has been a prominent figure in promoting social justice and women’s rights for decades. He sits with Ben in Toronto for a timely and insightful conversation about why men should do more, what they have to gain, and how to get it done.

About the Guest

Michael Kaufman, PhD, is a writer, advisor, and keynote speaker whose innovative approaches to engage men and boys in promoting gender equality and transforming men's lives has taken him around the world over the past four decades. He has worked extensively with the United Nations and with governments, non-governmental organizations, corporations, trade unions, and universities.

Michael is also the co-founder of the White Ribbon Campaign, the largest effort in the world of men working to end violence against women. He is a senior fellow at Promundo in Washington DC and co-writer of the State of the Worlds' Fathers Report.

He is a member of France's G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council. In 2017 he was awarded Canada's Meritorious Service Cross.

His work in the UN system, including with UN WOMEN, UNFPA, UNICEF, UNDP, IFAD, and UNESCO has taken him to New York, Rome, Paris, Beijing, Katmandu, Ankara, Geneva, Nairobi, Jakarta, and Delhi. He has worked with numerous NGOs including OXFAM, International Red Cross, Save the Children, and Amnesty International, as well as with governments on six continents. He wrote the training program on sexual harassment used by tens of thousands of staff at the United Nations.

His latest book is The Time Has Come. Why Men Must Join the Gender Equality Revolution. He is the author or editor of eight other books on gender issues, on democracy and development studies, and two novels, the award-winning, The Possibility of Dreaming on a Night Without Stars and the anti-war tale, The Afghan Vampires Book Club. His articles, which have appeared in newspapers, magazines, and journals around the world, have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Finnish, Estonian, Russian, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Hungarian, Turkish, and Arabic.

He has worked across Canada and the United States; in Europe (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Holland, Belgium, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Germany, Austria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, and Russia); Latin America and the Caribbean (Mexico, Chile, Jamaica, Trinidad, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador); Africa (Namibia, Kenya, South Africa): Asia and Australia (Japan, China, South Korea, Philippines, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Nepal, Australia, New Zealand.)

Michael previously taught at York University in Toronto where he was Deputy Director of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean. He lives in Toronto, Canada, is married, and has a grown daughter and son.

Learn more about Michael or follow him on Twitter (@GenderEQ).

The Quote of the Week

"Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance."
- Kofi Annan

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In April 2019, Jason Kenney returned the Conservatives to power in Alberta. Is this a return to normal in Alberta politics, where one party usually rules? What's happening underneath the platforms and rhetoric? And what do these events tell us about politics, populism and power elsewhere?

Ben is in Calgary to address these questions with renowned pollster and political analyst Janet Brown, lawyer and former politico Denise Brunsdon, and University of Calgary political scientist Anthony Sayers.

About the Guests

Janet Brown

Based in Calgary, Janet Brown is one of Alberta’s most-recognized pollsters and political analysts. With over 25 years experience in polling and marketing research, Janet has developed a knack for asking the right people the right questions. Janet sees beyond the headlines and talk radio chatter to assess and interpret what’s happening beneath the surface in Alberta politics.

In partnership with journalist Paul McLoughlin, Janet publishes the Wild Ride Update – a quarterly report on Alberta’s rapidly evolving political scene. She is co-author of "Marginally Better: Polling in the 2015 Alberta Election", a chapter in Orange Chinook: Politics in the New Alberta, an edited volume released by the University of Calgary Press in 2019. Janet is a regular commentator on the CBC Calgary News at Six, Alberta Primetime on CTV2 in Alberta, and The Weekend Morning News on Global News Calgary.

Learn more about Janet or follow her on Twitter (@planetjanetyyc).

Denise Brunsdon

Denise is a confident and creative thinker who works tirelessly for her clients and community. She is a general commercial litigation lawyer at Bennett Jones in Calgary, Alberta, with particular experience in court and arbitration disputes in digital, intellectual property, construction, health, and real estate matters.

Besides appearing before arbitration tribunals, Denise has appeared before the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench, the Alberta Court of Appeal, and the Federal Court of Canada.

Denise is a co-founder and member of Lawyers for Education, Access, and Diversity (LEAD Alberta), and volunteer legal counsel for the Women’s Centre of Calgary. Prior to law, she was a senior director in public relations and a researcher for the Centre for Research & Education on Violence Against Women & Children. She worked for the Liberal Party of Canada as well as the BC Liberal Party for political leaders such as Stephane Dion, Paul Martin and Christy Clark.

Denise has earned awards in sex discrimination law, leadership in business and the law, and outstanding community leadership. She is proficient in French and Spanish.

Learn more about Denise or follow her on Twitter (@brunsdon).

Anthony Sayers

Anthony is a previous guest on the What on Earth is Going on? podcast, when he discussed the division of political power with Ben. He received his undergraduate education at the University of Western Australia and completed an MA and Ph.D at the University of British Columbia. His research deals with major political institutions including political parties, elections, federalism and parliaments. He is particularly interested in the organizational and campaigning aspects of political parties and the distribution of power in federal states, and wrote Parties, Candidates, and Constituency Campaigns in Canadian Elections. He also writes about Alberta provincial politics.

Listen to Anthony in Episode No. 13 or learn more about him.

The Quote of the Week

"Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen."
- Winston Churchill

Parties, Candidates, and Constituency Campaigns in Canadian Elections

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What does it mean to be human? Is the world a mirror or a window? Should our experience of reality be mediated, and if so, who should be the mediators? We ask these questions earnestly today, but they were tackled in revolutionary ways during the European Renaissance, an extraordinary period of progress and creativity.

Ben's has a powerful and spirited conversation with a world-renowned historian of culture and the Renaissance, Professor Kenneth Bartlett of the University of Toronto.

About the Guest

Kenneth Bartlett is a Professor of History and of Renaissance Studies, a program he helped establish in 1979, at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. He teaches courses ranging from first year to graduate levels, with his research interests in the fields of Anglo-Italian relations in the sixteenth century and Italian humanism. Professor Bartlett was also the founding director of the Office of Teaching Advancement (now CTSI), and founder and director of the Faculty of Arts and Science's undergraduate experience programs, which include the First-Year Seminars, the Research Opportunities Program and the Independent Experiential Study Program, which won the Northrop Frye Award for excellence and innovation in linking teacher and research. Professor Bartlett was also the founding director of U of T's Art Centre, and currently serves as a trustee for the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art.

During his career at the university, which spans over 30 years, he has been the recipient of the Victoria University Excellence in Teaching Award, the Students Administrative Council and Association of Part-Time Students Undergraduate Teaching Award (on two occasions), and the Faculty of Arts and Science Outstanding Teaching Award. In 2005, Professor Bartlett was awarded both the prestigious 3M National Teaching Fellowship and a University of TorontoArbor Award. In 2007 he was awarded an inaugural LIFT Award by the Province of Ontario and was a finalist in the TVO Best Lecturer Competition.

In addition to teaching, he has published over 35 scholarly articles and contributions to books, and several editions and translations of Renaissance texts. He has served as the editor of Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, and President of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies. He has produced four video series on various aspects of Italian Renaissance culture and European civilization, and has also appeared in televisions series such as Museum Secrets.

Some of his publications include The Experience of History, A Short History of the Italian Renaissance, The English in Italy 1525-1558: A Study in Culture and Politics, The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance and The Northern Renaissance and the Reformation.

Learn more about Ken.

The Quote of the Week

"Learning never exhausts the mind."
- Leonardo da Vinci

A Short History of the Italian Renaissance

The English in Italy, 1525-1558: A study in culture and politics (Bibliothèque du voyage en Italie)

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Sally Armstrong has been to some of the most dangerous places to speak with, learn about and report on women and girls in conflict zones. Countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia have been her beat for decades, and yet she has always found her way to the heart of the human story.

An award-winning journalist, author and human rights activist, Sally joins Ben for a timely conversation about the ascent of women everywhere, and why we need to do more to make the world a better, more equal place.

Read the blog post about this episode.

About the Guest

Sally Armstrong is sometimes called “the war correspondent for the world’s women.” She’s also known as “La Talibanista”.

Sally has covered stories in zones of conflict all over the world. From Bosnia and Somalia to Congo and Afghanistan, her eyewitness reports have earned her the Amnesty International Media Award four times over, as well as acclaim all over the world. Armstrong shares her experiences reporting from the front lines and imparts her audiences with the lessons she’s learned from the battlefields surrounding the complexities of “human rights” versus “human wrongs.”

In addition to her journalism, Armstrong is the author of the books Veiled Threat: The Hidden Power of the Women of Afghanistan; The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor; Bitter Roots, Tender Shoots: The Uncertain Fate of Afghanistan’s Women; and her most recent title, Ascent of Women: A New Age is Dawning for Every Mother’s Daughter.

2017 was a busy year for Armstrong — it saw her on assignments in Iraq, Kenya, and Afghanistan, and she gave a speech in Oxford, UK, and at Oxford University.

Also in 2017, Armstrong was promoted to Officer of the Order of Canada, and won, along with photographer/videographer Peter Bregg, the Amnesty International Canada Media Award for their work in Iraq (her fourth Amnesty International Canada Media Award). She and Bregg also won the Gold Award for Investigative Journalism at The Canadian Online Publishing Gala for their work about the Yazidis called Resisting Genocide in 2017.

Armstrong is a former member of the International Women’s Commission at the UN, and is the recipient of ten honorary doctorate degrees.

Her newest book, Power Shift: The Longest Revolution, will be published in October 2019.

Learn more about Sally.

The Quote of the Week

"Talking is the antidote for oppression and injustice."
- Sally Armstrong

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Bob McDonald is one of Canada's most recognizable voices. An author, science journalist and chief science correspondent for the CBC, Bob has been hosting Quirks & Quarks (a weekly radio show about science) since 1992. He's interviewed thousands of scientists over the years, and this week he joins Ben for a conversation about science and technology, the power of curiosity and storytelling in communicating science, and the urgent need for us to see the long game in order to face today's big challenges.

About the Guest

Bob McDonald is one of Canada’s best known science journalists, bringing science to the public for more than 40 years. In addition to hosting Quirks & Quarks, the award-winning science program that is heard by 800,000 people each week, McDonald is also science correspondent for CBC TV’s The National and host and writer of the children’s series Head’s Up.

The host and writer of numerous television documentaries and more than 100 educational videos in Canada and the United States, Bob has also authored four bestselling science books, and contributed to numerous textbooks, magazines, and newspapers, including The Globe and Mail. His latest book is Canadian Space Walkers: Hadfield, MacLean and Williams Remember the Ultimate High Adventure.

An Officer of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Queen’s Jubilee Medal, Bob has been honoured for his outstanding contribution to the promotion of science with the Michael Smith Award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; the “Sir Sanford Fleming Medal” from the Royal Canadian Institute; and the “McNeil Medal” from The Royal Society of Canada. He also won a 2008 Gemini Award for Best Host in a Pre-School, Children’s or Youth Program or Series.

In 2015, asteroid 332324 was officially named “Bobmcdonald” in his honour by the International Astronomical Union.

He holds eleven honorary doctorates from Canadian universities.

Learn more about Bob or follow Quirks & Quarks on Twitter.

The Quote of the Week

"Science is an organized way of being curious."
- Bob McDonald (from today's podcast)

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Yan Lianke is one of China's most influential living writers. His often-satirical works have earned him an international readership. He has been touted for the Nobel Prize in Literature. And yet, most of Yan's books are effectively (if not formally) banned in China.

Ben brings together three previous guests (Tricia Baldwin, Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant and Daniel Woolf) to discuss the rise of China, the absurdity of modern life, and what government power will look like in the future. Their point of departure is a 2018 profile of Yan Lianke in The New Yorker magazine.

Note: you don't need to read anything before listening to the conversation; the below piece is a starting point only.

Read the article in The New Yorker by Jiayang Fan.

Read the blog post for this episode.

About Yan Lianke

Yan Lianke has secured his place as contemporary China’s most essential and daring novelist, “with his superlative gifts for storytelling and penetrating eye for truth” (New York Times Book Review). His newest novel, The Day the Sun Died—winner of the Dream of the Red Chamber Award, one of the most prestigious honours for Chinese-language novels—is a haunting story of a town caught in a waking nightmare.

Yan was born in an impoverished region of Song County, Henan Province in 1958. His parents, illiterate farmers who lacked the means to send him to university, encouraged him to enlist in the army, where he rose in the ranks to become a propaganda writer. Upon returning to civilian life, Yan embarked on a career as a novelist. Over the last 30 years, he has produced an extensive body of work that ranges from novels, novellas and short fiction to essays and criticism. Although he has had two of his novels banned in China and was, for a period of three years, prohibited from obtaining a passport or travelling abroad, Yan continues to speak honestly about the impact that government censorship—and self-censorship—have had on contemporary Chinese writers.

His full-length novels include: The Dream of Ding Village (丁庄梦, Ding Zhuang Meng), a tale of the blood trade and subsequent AIDS epidemic in a rural Henan village; The Joy of Living (Alt title: The Living, 受活, Shou Huo), a sweeping tale of the lives of disabled rural villagers from the Chinese Communist revolution through the years of reform and opening; The Sunlit Years (日光流年, Riguang Liunian); Solidity of Water (also called Hard as Water, 坚硬如水, Jianying Ru Shui) and Serve the People (为人民服务, Wei Renmin Fuwu), which was banned in China and later translated into English, French and Japanese.

He has published ten collections of novellas and short stories: among them, the critically acclaimed Days, Months, Years (年月日, Nian Yue Ri), Song of Balou (耙耧天歌, Balou Tiange) and a five-volume set of his collected works. He is a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association and the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the first and second Lu Xun Literary Prizes and the Lao She Award for literary excellence, awarded in recognition of his novel The Joy of Living (受活, Shou Huo), considered by many to be his master work. Yan is also a winner of the Franz Kafka Prize.

About the Guests

Tricia Baldwin

Listen to Ben's previous podcast conversation with Tricia (Episode 12 on The Role the Arts Play)

Tricia Baldwin became the Director of the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts (‘the Isabel’) in December 2014, and works with a tremendously talented team at the Isabel. Tricia is responsible for its programming featuring top diverse emerging and established artists, education, student and community engagement resulting in significant increase in audience participation, socially engaged art, and facilities management. She established the Isabel as an arts incubator for new works, the Ka’tarohkwi Festival of Indigenous Arts with curator Dylan Robinson, the Isabel Human Rights Arts Festival, and the Isabel Overton Bader Canadian Violin Competition. Tricia is the co-creator of Queen’s University’s new M.A. in Arts Leadership program with Queen’s Dan School of Drama and Music, and is the course developer and instructor of the program’s Contract Negotiations in the Arts graduate course. A champion of training the next generation of arts leaders, Tricia has been a mentor with the Canadian Heritage Talent to Lead Program and the Cultural Career Council of Ontario Mentor Program. Tricia recently served on the International Association of Venue Managers Association conference panel on arts management education.

Prior to the Isabel, Tricia Baldwin was the Managing Director of Tafelmusik from 2000 to 2014. During this period, Tafelmusik doubled its operating revenues and increased its endowment seventeen fold. The orchestra undertook over 50 national and international tours, created 20 recordings and films that garnered significant industry awards and nominations that led to the launching of its recording label and digital concert hall, established artist training programs attracting pre-professional musicians from around the world, and undertook a successful $3M venue renovation. Tricia also headed up Tafelmusik’s expansion of venues within Toronto that contributed to the doubling of earned revenues and significant audience development. Prior to Tafelmusik, she was the Executive Director of Ballet British Columbia and General Manager of the Kingston Symphony. Tricia received her Bachelor of Music (University of Toronto) and her MBA (York University), and has continued her education with courses from Harvard Business School, University of Oxford School of Continuing Studies, the Harvard Kennedy School, and Boston University.

Tricia Baldwin has been awarded the Canada Council for the Arts’ John Hobday Award in Arts Management, a scholarship to attend Harvard University’s Strategic Perspectives in Non-Profit Management program, First Prize for Student Philosophy Essay from the University of Oxford School of Continuing Studies, and the Queen’s Human Rights Initiative Award. As a volunteer, she currently serves on the Advisory Board of the York University Schulich School of Business Arts, Media, and Entertainment Management program, the City of Kingston Arts Advisory Board and Professional Development Working Group, and St. Lawrence College Music and Digital Media Program Advisory Committee. She has been a panel advisor/juror/assessor for the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Manitoba Arts Council, City of Toronto Cultural Services, City of Barrie Department of Culture, and the Department of Canadian Heritage.

Learn more about Tricia.

Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant

Listen to Ben's previous podcast conversation with Elizabeth (Episode 37 on US Politics: Women, Polarization and the Media)

Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant (Ph.D. McGill) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University, and the Director of both the Queen’s Institute of Intergovernmental Relations (IIGR) as well as the Canadian Opinion Research Archive (CORA). Her research focuses on Canadian and comparative politics, with particular interests in electoral politics, voting behaviour, and public opinion; news media; and the political representation of women. She is the author of Gendered News: Media Coverage and Electoral Politics in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), which won the 2016 Pierre Savard Award from the International Council of Canadian Studies, and was one of three books shortlisted for the Canadian Political Science Association’s 2014 Donald Smiley Prize.

In Gendered News, Goodyear-Grant presents compelling evidence that gender structures certain aspects of news coverage of candidates and politicians – not how much they’re covered, but certainly how they’re covered – and demonstrates that these differences can impact negatively on female candidates’ and leaders’ electoral prospects and political careers, contributing to the persistent under-representation of women at all levels of politics. Goodyear-Grant has also published work on attitudes toward democracy and political representation, attitudes toward the use of referenda, and so on, all part of a larger research agenda that concentrates on representation and political behaviour published in venues such as Political Behaviour, Politics & Gender, Electoral Studies, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, and the Canadian Journal of Political Science.

In the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s, Goodyear-Grant teaches courses on campaigns and elections; women, gender, and politics; Canadian politics more generally; and empirical methods.

Learn more about Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant or follow her on Twitter (@eplusgg).

Daniel Woolf

Listen to Ben's previous podcast conversation with Daniel (Episode 10 on History and Jazz)

Daniel Robert Woolf is the 20th Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s University, a role he stepped into on September 1, 2009.

It wasn’t his first time on the campus, of course: Principal Woolf studied at Queen’s as an undergraduate in the late 1970s, graduating with a degree in history in 1980.

After earning his doctorate at Oxford University (DPhil’83), Dr. Woolf returned to Queen’s in 1984 as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow in history.

His teaching career took him from Queen’s to Bishop’s University, before he joined the history department at Dalhousie University in 1987. Seven years later, he became a full professor, then associate dean and later, the acting dean of Graduate Studies. In 1999, Dr. Woolf moved to McMaster University, where he held the role of dean of the Faculty of Humanities. He joined the University of Alberta as dean of Arts in 2002.

Dr. Woolf, who is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Historical Society, admits that learning he would become the principal of his alma mater initially inspired feelings of “shock, elation, and a little bit of fear,” and he continues to regard his role as both an honour and a challenge.

A specialist in early modern British cultural history and the history of historical thought and writing, Dr. Woolf continues to teach at Queen’s on a part-time basis as a professor in the Department of History, and also pursues his own research and writing. He is the author or editor of a number of scholarly articles, monographs and books, including the five-volume Oxford History of Historical Writing (2011-2012) and a textbook on historiography entitled A Global History of History (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which has been translated into several languages.

But Principal Woolf isn’t just about books (though he does have a growing collection of old and rare ones!) – he is also a fan of music (especially jazz), classic movies and is the father of three (one of whom is also a Queen’s graduate).

Born in London, England, Dr. Woolf grew up in Winnipeg. A love of academia runs in his family: his mother taught English at university, his physician father was a member of a medical school faculty, and his uncle is a historian of modern Europe.

Dr. Woolf, who began his second term as principal in 2014, is motivated by Queen’s students and by their dedication to making a difference in the world. While the university is a bigger place than it was when he was a student, it is also more research-intensive and has a more diverse student body.

Since taking the helm, Dr. Woolf has built new connections with government, industry and institutions across Canada, led Queen’s through an extensive series of planning exercises, established the Principal’s Commission on Mental Health, and overseen the Initiative Campaign, the most ambitious fundraising campaign in Queen’s history.

Principal Woolf’s term concludes on June 30, 2019.

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What is the optimal emotional state of eSports players to increase their win rate? Can the range of emotions displayed in movies determine which are most likely to win an Oscar? And when should Bradley Cooper cry in such a movie to produce the greatest effect?

These are just some of the questions that artificial intelligence (AI) is solving. Ben's guest Jeff Lui is at the forefront of the field. Formerly a Global People and AI Designer at Google, Jeff is now the Director of AI for Deloitte in Toronto.

Read the blog post for this episode.

About the Guest

Jeff Lui is currently a director of artificial intelligence in Deloitte’s Applied Innovations Practice. His current role has Jeff spearheading Deloitte’s EmotionPlus Platform, which uses machine learning to predict emotions and sentiment, and determine predictive recommendations based on data science. He also helps companies with their transformational AI journey, particularly at the intersection of IQ and EQ. Prior to Deloitte, Jeff spent 4 years working at Google on their People & AI Team, both in Toronto and at GooglePlex in Mountain View, where he helped Google transform from a traditional tech organization into one that is now fully driven by data science.

Jeff is currently a PhD Student at Queen’s University, focusing on AI and Ethics. He is also a CPA, has an MBA from the Schulich School of Business and holds an undergraduate degree in Finance and Computer Science from the University of Western Ontario. In his spare time, Jeff continues to code and experiment with machine learning models, while driving research on how organizations can optimize for happiness.

Learn more about Jeff Lui or follow him on Twitter (@jefflui).

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If there is one industry that exemplifies the extraordinary disruption and change we have undergone over the past couple decades, it might just be the news. The way we produce, deliver and receive the news is changing fast, and social media is just one of many forces that upends this cornerstone of democracy. How can journalists and newsmakers compete?

Joining Ben is Jessica Vomiero, National Online Journalist for Global News, who is also studying "media disruption" at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Read the blog post for this episode.

Sources and Links

Here are a few sources mentioned in this conversation:

JSource: J-Source/ProjetJ is a publication of the Canadian Journalism Project, a venture led by the journalism programs at Ryerson University and Carleton University and supported by the post-secondary journalism programs at member institutions of J- Schools Canada/EcolesJ (j-schoolscanada.ca) as well as by a group of donors.

Niemen Lab, Harvard University: The Nieman Journalism Lab is an attempt to help journalism figure out its future in an Internet age.

About the Guest

Jessica is a National Online Journalist with GlobalNews.ca.

Jessica has been a journalist since the age of 15, when she talked the editors of a local paper into giving her a monthly column. Since then, her work has been seen in outlets like TechVibes, MobileSyrup, the Financial Post and CBC Radio, among others. In 2017, she graduated from the Ryerson School of Journalism, where she specialized in multimedia journalism.

She’s worked in a wide variety of digital mediums and most recently spearheaded the Business section for Canada’s largest technology news site, MobileSyrup.com. During her time there, she wrote often about Canada’s innovation policy, the changing face of Canadian transportation through ride sharing and autonomous cars, and the relationship between digital streaming and Canadian content.

She’s interested in technology, entrepreneurship, politics, and the different forces at work in the market today.

Learn more about Jess or follow her on Twitter (@JessicaVomiero).

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Should the artifacts of history be owned by any country, or should they be shared as common human heritage? If ancient Greek and Roman civilizations remain in many ways the backbone of our culture, society and laws, who gets to interpret them? And what about those with an entirely different lineage, especially indigenous peoples? Who are Classics for and to whom do they belong?

Featuring:

Fabio Colivicchi, Professor
Raphaelle Walsh-Beauchamp, Student
Desmond Wong, Alumnus
Ben Charland, Moderator

This panel discussion and Q&A was recorded with a live audience at the Department of Classics, Queen's University, on 21 March 2019.

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Terry Fallis is a celebrated Canadian author of novels such as Up and Down (2012) and One Brother Shy (2017). Before writing the hit 2008 novel, The Best Laid Plans—about a man who must run a seemingly hopeless political campaign in order to get out of politics—Terry worked as a political staffer for several MPs and ministers, and in public relations with Thornley Fallis.

Terry joins Ben to discuss the SNC-Lavalin scandal, the liabilities of Justin Trudeau's style, the power of perspective in politics, and much more.

About the Guest

“Terry Fallis writes just about the tidiest romantic comedic novels you can find on earth, let alone in Canada.”
- The Globe and Mail

A two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, Terry Fallis is the award-winning author of six national bestsellers, including his most recent One Brother Shy (2017), all published by McClelland & Stewart.

His debut novel, The Best Laid Plans (2008),won the 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and was crowned the 2011 winner of CBC Canada Reads as the "essential Canadian novel of the decade." In January 2014, CBC aired a six-part television miniseries based on The Best Laid Plans earning very positive reviews. In September 2015, it debuted as a stage musical in Vancouver, produced by Touchstone Theatre and Patrick Street Productions. The High Road (2010) was published in September 2010 and was a finalist for the 2011 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Terry’s third novel, Up and Down (2012), was released in September 2012. It debuted on The Globe and Mail bestsellers list, was a finalist for the 2013 Leacock Medal, and won the 2013 Ontario Library Association Evergreen Award. Terry’s fourth novel, No Relation (2014), hit bookstores in May 2014, opened on The Globe and Mail bestsellers list, and won the 2015 Leacock Medal. M&S published Terry’s fifth novel, Poles Apart (2015), in October 2015, opening on several bestsellers lists including The Globe and Mail. It was a finalist for the 2016 Leacock Medal. One Brother Shy (2017) was published in May 2017 and was an instant bestseller.

In June, 2013, the Canadian Booksellers Association presented Terry with the Libris Award for Author of the Year.

Terry Fallis earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree from McMaster University (1983) where he became engulfed in university politics and somehow persuaded the undergraduates to elect him President of the Students Union.

After graduation, he turned his back on engineering and joined future Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s full time staff for the 1984 federal Liberal Leadership campaign.

He served on the political staff of the Liberal Minister of State for Youth, the Honourable Jean Lapierre, in the short-lived cabinet of Prime Minister John Turner. He stayed with Lapierre as his Legislative Assistant in opposition (1984-85) following the landslide victory of Brian Mulroney and the Progressive Conservative Party.

Terry returned to Toronto in 1985 as Legislative Assistant to the Honourable Robert Nixon, Treasurer (now called Finance Minister) in the newly-elected Liberal Ontario government led by Premier David Peterson.

For nearly eight years (1988-95) after leaving provincial politics, he was a government affairs and communications consultant with the international PR firm, Hill and Knowlton, including stints as Vice President running the Ontario government affairs group and finally President of Berger & Associates, a Hill and Knowlton subsidiary.

In 1995, he co-founded Thornley Fallis with Joe Thornley, a full service communications consulting agency with offices in Ottawa and Toronto. Terry also created and co-hosted more than 200 episodes of the popular business podcast, Inside PR.

For more than 25 years, Terry has counselled corporate and government clients on various fronts including crisis communications, media relations, issues management, marketing communications, public opinion polling, public affairs, stakeholder relations, etc. He has also written speeches for CEOs, cabinet ministers, and other community leaders.

Terry is a sought-after speaker, sits on a number of boards, and lives in Toronto with his wife and two sons.

Learn more about Terry and follow him on Twitter (@TerryFallis).

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Before she was appointed as an independent Senator in 2016, Kim Pate was already a powerful and outspoken voice for marginalized people in Canada, especially women and girls caught up in the criminal justice and prison system. For over 35 years Kim has advocated for policies and practices that lead to fairer, more positive outcomes, and has recently fought against segregation and solitary confinement. She is also the host of a new podcast: Appointed.

Senator Pate joins Ben to discuss the deeper and often personal journey of reform and justice in Canada.

About the Guest

Kim Pate was appointed to the Senate of Canada on November 10, 2016. First and foremost, the mother of Michael and Madison, she is also a nationally renowned advocate who has spent the last 35 years working in and around the legal and penal systems of Canada, with and on behalf of some of the most marginalized, victimized, criminalized and institutionalized — particularly imprisoned youth, men and women.

Senator Pate graduated from Dalhousie Law School in 1984 with honours in the Clinical Law Programme and has completed post graduate work in the area of forensic mental health. She was the Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies (CAEFS) from January 1992 until her appointment to the Senate in November 2016. CAEFS is a federation of local societies who provide services and work in coalition with Aboriginal women, women with mental health issues and other disabling conditions, young women, visible minority and immigrant women, poor women and those isolated and otherwise deprived of potential sources of support. Prior to her work with CAEFS, she worked with youth and men in a number of capacities with the local John Howard Society in Calgary, as well as the national office. She has developed and taught Prison Law, Human Rights and Social Justice and Defending Battered Women on Trial courses at the Faculties of Law at the University of Ottawa, Dalhousie University and the University of Saskatchewan. She also occupied the Sallows Chair in Human Rights at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law in 2014 and 2015.

Kim Pate is widely credited as the driving force behind the Inquiry into Certain Events at the Prison for Women in Kingston, headed by Justice Louise Arbour. During the Inquiry, she supported women as they aired their experiences and was a critical resource and witness in the Inquiry itself. She also persuaded the Attorney General and Minister of Justice to initiate the Self-Defence Review and appoint the Honourable Madam Justice Lynn Ratushny to review the convictions and sentences of women jailed for using lethal force to defend themselves and/or their children against abusive men. She then worked tirelessly in pursuit of the implementation of the many positive recommendations from both. Senator Pate has been instrumental in building coalitions across the country with other equality-seeking women’s, anti-racism, anti-poverty and human rights groups and organizations; and, in this capacity, has worked with feminist legal scholars, lawyers, other professionals and front-line advocates and activists — from Indigenous communities to transition house and rape crisis centre workers.

Kim Pate is a member of the Order of Canada, a recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case, the Canadian Bar Associations’s Bertha Wilson Touchstone Award, and five honourary doctorates (Law Society of Upper Canada, University of Ottawa, Carleton University, St. Thomas University and Wilfred Laurier University) and numerous other awards. Her extensive list of publications, national and international speaking engagements and her strategic intervention and advocacy for substantive equality testify to her commitment to broader social, economic and cultural change. She continues to make significant contributions to public education around the issues of women’s inequality and discriminatory treatment within social, economic and criminal justice spheres.

Senator Pate strongly believes that the contributions of women who have experienced marginalization, discrimination and oppression should be recognized and respected and she seeks to credit and empower women. She maintains contact with women in prison through her numerous visits to Canada’s federal prisons and strongly encourages other advocates, scholars, service providers, judges and parliamentarians to ground their efforts in a similar way.

Senator Pate lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

Learn more about Kim or follow her on Twitter (@KPateontheHill).

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Terry O'Reilly is the host of CBC's Under the Influence (formerly The Age of Persuasion), and he joins Ben this week on the podcast. They discuss Terry's advertising career, his book This I Know: Marketing Lessons from Under the Influence, his ceaseless curiosity, the counterintuitive insight of chickens painted purple, and the unrelenting power of an idea. Terry also gives Ben the scoop on an exciting new project!

The full archive of Terry's Under the Influence is now available for free, wherever you get your podcasts.

About the Guest

Terry O'Reilly began his career as Copy Chief for FM108 Radio in Burlington, Ontario, where he discovered that with meticulous planning and attention to detail, you can still fall flat on your face. With that learning, he went on to become an award-winning copywriter for Toronto advertising agencies Campbell-Ewald, Doyle Dane Bernbach and Chiat/Day. He created campaigns for many of the top brands in the country, including Labatt, Molson, Pepsi USA, Goodyear Tires, Tim Hortons, Volkswagen, Nissan and the Hudson’s Bay Company.

In 1990, Terry co-founded Pirate Radio & Television. A creative audio production company producing scripts, sound and music for radio and television commercials, Pirate grew to a staff of 50 with 8 recording studios in Toronto and New York City.

Terry has won a few hundred national and international awards for his writing and directing, and has worked with such notable actors as Alec Baldwin, Ellen DeGeneres, Kiefer Sutherland, Bob Newhart, Martin Short and Drew Carey. He even managed to create an advertising campaign for a group of nuns. (Good story there).

In demand as a keynote speaker, Terry talks about key marketing issues all companies and organizations face – from the critical need to embed emotion in marketing, to why customer service = profit, to how to change a negative perception, to why smart marketers don’t outspend their competitors – they outsmart them.

He served on the inaugural Radio Jury at the Cannes International Advertising Festival in 2005, and was named chairman of the following award show juries:

The Marketing Awards (Co-Chair) Canada
The International Clio Awards in Miami
The London International Advertising Awards

When he’s not creating advertising, he’s talking about it as the host of the award-winning CBC Radio One/Sirius Satellite/WBEZ Chicago radio show, Under The Influence, which is the follow-up to the hit series, The Age of Persuasion. The New York Radio Festivals awarded his show the Grand Prize as Best Radio Program in 2011 and again in 2012, and iTunes chose it as “Best New Podcast of 2011” and one of the Best Podcasts of 2015.

Terry has been given the following career awards:

Lifetime Achievement Award – American Marketing Association
Lifetime Achievement Award – Advertising & Design Club of Canada
Lifetime Achievement Award – Television Advertising Bureau

Honorary Degrees have been bestowed on Terry from these great institutions:

McMaster University – Honorary Doctorate of Laws
Humber College Institute of Technology & Advanced Learning – Bachelor Degree in Applied Studies
St. Mary’s University – Honorary Doctor of Civil Law

He has also been honoured by Ryerson University with the following:

Inaugural inductee to RTA School of Media Hall of Fame
Alumni Achievement Awards 2015

He has co-written a best-selling book called The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture, published in Canada by Knopf, and in the U.S. by Counterpoint Press in Berkeley.

He has written a new book titled This I Know: Marketing Lessons From Under The Influence, published in Canada, the U.S. and China.

He has a wonderful wife and three lovely daughters.

Who like some of his work.

Learn more about Terry or follow him on Twitter (@terryoinfluence).

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Climate change could be the greatest crisis we have ever faced. Is it possible to deal with it under the economic frameworks that gird our society -- the very frameworks that allowed carbon emissions to spiral so far out of control in the first place? And can we solve these existential problems at the same time as address economic inequality and the global democratic deficit?

Joining Ben is Kyla Tienhaara, academic, activist and author of Green Keynesianism and the Global Financial Crisis.

About the Guest

Kyla is a Canada Research Chair in Economy and Environment and Assistant Professor in the School of Environmental Studies and Department of Global Development at Queen’s University. She completed her PhD at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2008). She also holds a Master’s degree in environmental science and law from the University of Nottingham (2002) and a Bachelor of Science in environmental science, with a minor in international relations, from the University of British Columbia (2001).

Kyla's main area of interest is the intersection between environmental governance and the global economic system. Her PhD thesis examined investor-state disputes concerning environmental regulation that were brought to international arbitration under bilateral and regional investment agreements. This research was published in The Expropriation of Environmental Governance: Protecting Foreign Investors at the Expense of Public Policy (2009).

Kyla's most recent book, Green Keynesianism and the Global Financial Crisis (2018) explores the experience of Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, and the United States with green stimulus programs following the 2008 global financial crisis.

Learn more about Kyla or follow her on Twitter (@KylaTienhaara).

The Expropriation of Environmental Governance: Protecting Foreign Investors at the Expense of Public Policy

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There are countless resources about personal development, and they all express a similar theme: summon the will and make things happen. Whether intrinsically or because of years of practice, Logan Brown lives what he preaches.

Logan is a musician and music teacher who also hosts the Brown Sound Podcast, which gives its listeners the tools to lead more meaningful lives. He joins Ben to discuss the creative and business sides of music, learning to play music, and the backstory of his own weekly podcast.

About the Guest

Logan Brown is a guitar player and singer/song-writer unlike any you have ever heard. Blending the lazy backbeat of funk, the virtuosity of fusion, and the story telling of soul and blues he is a spectacle to witness live, the listener is taken on a journey through decades of influence and transported to the future.

Getting his start in his hometown of Kingston, Ontario, Logan donned a pseudonym that would later evolve into a full fledged character, in the same vein as Ziggy Stardust or Sasha Fierce, called NUBS. After releasing three records under this name Logan realized it was time for a change.

After the release of his second EP “Spend The Night” Logan found himself putting away the bells and whistles he used to use when writing and beginning to extract all that he could out of his voice and his guitar. Instead of thrusting the listener into this brand new NUBS, Logan decided it was better to put an end to the pseudonym and continue his story without the nickname.

Logan still performs all of his music released under NUBS as well as brand new songs pushing the boundaries of music and guitar playing. As a full time professional musician he is always writing and learning, no two shows will be the same, the only option is to catch Logan whenever and wherever he is playing next.

After five years as a professional musician, averaging 300 shows per year, countless sessions, and records being played worldwide, Logan launched a subscription-based teaching service (Brown Sound Lessons) as well as the Brown Sound Podcast, a weekly motivation centric podcast aimed at bettering the lives of listeners and providing value to those looking for tools of a meaningful life.

Listen to Logan's podcast, visit his YouTube channel, or check out his music duo, Taylor Angus.

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Watch the video of this episode.

What does it mean to be live? Can a hologram be considered performance? Is going to the theatre a private or communal act? And should performing artists embrace and incorporate technological change—or should they resist, and build an oasis from social media and screen time? What on earth is going on with live performance in the digital age?

Listen to the first-ever recording of the podcast with a live audience! The panel, moderated by Ben, features Colleen Renihan, Craig Walker and Michael Wheeler of the Dan School of Drama and Music.

About the Panel

Colleen Renihan

Colleen Renihan was delighted to join the Dan School of Drama and Music faculty as a Queen's National Scholar in 2016. She earned a B. Mus. in Vocal Performance from the University of Manitoba, an Artist Diploma in Opera Performance from the Vancouver Academy of Music, and an MA and PhD in Musicology at the University of Toronto in 2011 with generous funding support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her dissertation Sounding the Past was a finalist for the Society for American Music’s Housewright Dissertation Award.

Dr. Renihan’s research considers aspects of opera and operatic culture from a postmodern perspective. Inherently interdisciplinary in nature, it explores cultural politics, popular culture, performance theory, temporality, memory theory, opera’s interactions with media (specifically film), and opera’s potential for intervention in current debates in the philosophy of history. Her work has been published in a variety of edited collections and journals, including, most recently, twentieth century music, The Journal of the Society for American Music, and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image. Forthcoming publications include an invited chapter on Benjamin Britten’s coronation opera Gloriana to an edited collection for Boydell & Brewer, and a chapter on affective listening in Harry Somers’s Louis Riel for Wilfrid Laurier Press. Two current book projects explore the historiographical dimensions of American postwar opera, and innovation in Canadian opera and music theatre 1970-2010.

Dr. Renihan has presented her research at academic conferences in Canada, the United States, and Europe, including chapter and national meetings of the American Musicological Society, and in 2010, she participated in the Society for Music Theory’s graduate student workshop on ‘Music and Narrative’ with Michael Klein. She was a founding member of Operatics (a working group for the interdisciplinary study of opera) at the University of Toronto, a founding member of IPMC (Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Music in Canada), and has been involved with several research and writing projects at the Canadian Music Centre.

Learn more about Colleen.

Craig Walker is Director of the Dan School of Drama and Music and Professor of Drama, and is also cross-appointed to the Departments of English and Cultural Studies. Dr. Walker earned his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, where he had taken his earlier degrees in English. He has taught courses in most subjects in Queen's Drama at one time or another.

As a director, for the Queen’s Drama, Dr. Walker has directed the world premiere of Orbit, a play about the daughters of Galileo by Jennifer Wise (2014), a double-bill of Michel Tremblay’s Counter Service and Nina Shengold’s Lives of the Great Waitresses (2012), Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (2010), his own adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Drums In the Night (2008), John Lazarus’ Meltdown (2005), Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles Soeurs (2003), Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (2000), his own translation of Odon von Horvath’s Judgement Day (1999), Richard Rose and D.D. Kugler’s adaptation of Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage (1997), the medieval morality play Everyman (1996) and Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (1993). From 1997 to 2007, Dr. Walker was Artistic Director of Theatre Kingston, during which time the company produced 54 plays, 36 of which were Canadian, including 18 world premieres.

On the academic side (see profile on academia.edu), Dr. Walker's most recent publication is "Canadian Drama and the Nationalist Impulse" in The Oxford Handbook to Canadian Literature. He is the author of The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition and co-editor (with Jennifer Wise of the University of Victoria) of The Broadview Anthology of Drama: Plays from the Western Theatre, Volumes I and II and The Broadview Anthology of Drama, Concise Edition. He was Book Review Editor for Modern Drama for two years, from 1998 to 2000. In 2009, he was appointed as a Corresponding Scholar at the Shaw Festival. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Learn more about Craig.

Michael Wheeler is Artistic Director of SpiderWebShow Performance, an online performance company working at a national scale. His previous position was as Executive Director of Generator, a mentoring, teaching, and innovation incubator that empowers independent artists, producers and leaders in Toronto. He has co-curated The Freefall Festival with The Theatre Centre and HATCH emerging artist projects with Harbourfront Centre. In 2017, he will co-curate the first Festival of Live Digital Art (foldA) at The Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts.

As Founding Artistic Director of Praxis Theatre and a theatre director, he has produced and created numerous independent works including Rifles (2 Dora nominations), the World Premiere of Jesus Chrysler by Tara Beagan presented in association with Theatre Passe Muraille, a National Tour of the SummerWorks Award-winning G20 drama You Should Have Stayed Home, and Jesse Brown’s Canadaland World Tour of Canada.

Much of Michael’s work has intertwined with online tools, as editor and publisher of websites like PraxisTheatre.com (Winner Best Blog Post & Best Arts and Culture Blog: Canadian Blog Awards), DepartmentOfCulture.ca, AfricaTrilogy.ca, WreckingBall.ca and most recently SpiderWebShow.ca. He holds a BA (distinction) from McGill University and a Masters of Fine Arts from The American Repertory/Moscow Art Theatre Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University.

Learn more about Michael.

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Chemistry is often considered the 'central science', because it serves as a bridge between so many disciplines: physics, biology, engineering, computers and the environment. And chemists are also on the forefront of some exciting research that could change our world.

Joining Ben is Professor Cathy Crudden, award-winning chemist and head of the Crudden Research Group. They discuss the cutting edge of chemistry research as well as Cathy's mentoring philosophy, traveling and working in Japan, and more.

About the Guest

Cathleen Crudden was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland to Patrick and Linda Crudden. Shortly thereafter, her family emigrated to Canada, where they settled in Toronto and gave Cathleen two younger sisters, Mary and Sarah, and her only brother, Patrick.

Cathleen grew up in Toronto attending Notre Dame high school in the Beaches before starting her B.Sc. at the University of Toronto. After this, she stayed on at the U of T to complete a master’s degree with Professor Mark Lautens.

Ottawa was the next stop where Cathleen completed her Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Howard Alper. During this time, she had the pleasure of an extended stay in Japan, doing research with Professor Shinji Murai and Naoto Chatani at Osaka University.

After completing her Ph.D., she was an NSERC postdoctoral fellow with Professor Scott E. Denmark at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. In 1996, she started her own research group at the University of New Brunswick.

After 5 years at the University of New Brunswick, where she learned to canoe, pick fiddleheads and tell the difference between hostas and skunk cabbage, she was offered a job at Queen’s University, where she moved in 2002 as a Queen’s National Scholar.

In 2006, Cathleen and the distinct pleasure of taking part of her sabbatical back in Japan, this time in Nagoya in the Noyori Research Labs, with Professor Kenichiro Itami as her host. In addition to learning some great chemistry, she experienced an earthquake, improved her Japanese (すこしだけ) and enjoyed a few nights out at local karaoke bars. In 2007, it was off to Spain for a half sabbatical with Elena Fernandez, enjoying the fabulous Catalan hospitality, chemistry and food.

In 2010, Cathleen became Mom to her beautiful daughter Caitlin, and shortly after her return from maternity leave, became head of an NSERC CREATE award in Chiral Materials. For 2011-13, she was Vice President, President and Past President of the Canadian Society for Chemistry.

In 2013, Cathleen was offered a position at the Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules in Nagoya Japan as a Research Professor. With the help of her very talented Assistant Professor Masakazu Nambo, she runs a satellite group there year round.

Learn more about Cathy and the Crudden Group.

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Alex Huntley is a writer and editor for The Beaverton, Canada's foremost source of satirical news, as well as co-author of The Beaverton Presents Glorious and/or Free: The True History of Canada.

Alex joins Ben for a fascinating, wide-ranging and provocative conversation about how he got his start in comedy writing, the purpose of satire, the danger as well as opportunity of fake news, and why William Lyon Mackenzie King is the one person he'd like to chat with (maybe through a séance).

About the Guest

Alex Huntley is an editor and senior writer with The Beaverton. Born and raised in Niagara, he earned a BA with Honours in politics and history and a Master’s in Public Administration from Queen’s University, and has an expired basic first aid certificate from the distinguished school of St. John’s Ambulance. Since joining The Beaverton in 2012, this government policy analyst turned comedy writer has expanded the publication’s presence in Canada by living in Montreal, Whitehorse, and exotic Winnipeg while recruiting local writers. Having a love affair with Canadian history since childhood, he created The Beaverton’s Moments in Canadian History in 2013. Writing a book satirizing the nation’s story is a dream come true. He lives with his wife in Kingston.

Learn more about Alex and follow him on Twitter.

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Uncertainty and doubt are central to the human experience. Yet in the 'post-truth' era, when you can curate your own experience of the world, our democracy seems under threat from such relativism. And making things black-and-white could be just as bad. Theatre and, ironically, the "theatre of the real" (stage performances based on actual events) could be a way for us to grapple with the unknown.

Joining Ben is Jenn Stephenson, theatre writer and Professor at the Dan School of Drama & Music.

About the Guest

Jenn Stephenson is a Professor at the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen's University, where her principal areas of research interest are contemporary Canadian drama, participation, metatheatricality, "theatre of the real," autobiographical performance, and performativity in fictional worlds-within. She studied at the University of Western Ontario, University of Victoria and University of Toronto before taking on her current role at Queen's University in Kingston.

As Associate Dean (Studies) for Queen's, Dr. Stephenson's portfolio includes oversight of the undergraduate operations in the Faculty of Arts and Science, as well as the oversight and implementation of undergraduate academic regulations. The Associate Dean also reviews student appeals or academic integrity cases, and manages complex academic cases involving individual students and faculty members. Dr. Stephenson participates in all committees of the Faculty relative to students or programs and liaise with the division of Student Affairs, Student Wellness Services, the Human Rights Office and the Office of the University Ombudsman. The Associate Dean’s portfolio also includes Admission and Recruitment, Orientation, and the implementation of the Senate Policy on Academic Consideration for Students in Extenuating Circumstances.

For more about Jenn, check out her blog, Upsurges of the Real.

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The Mafia is one of the most successful threads of pop culture—so successful that many real mobsters take their cues from it. The Godfather, The Sopranos and even Narcos have built a mythology we all recognize. But when it comes what's really going on, these touchstones are dwarfed by actual organized crime.

Joining Ben is Antonio Nicaso, whose life is dedicated to demystifying a Mafia that prefers to remain romanticized. He is a bestselling author of books such as Made Men: Mafia Culture and the Power of Symbols, Rituals, and Myth, and executive producer of the Netflix true crime drama, Bad Blood.

About the Guest

Professor Antonio Nicaso is a bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, a researcher and an internationally recognized expert on organized crime. He has published 30 books on Mafia and Mafia-type criminal organizations.

He is a regular consultant to governments and law-enforcement agencies around the world. Beside his appointment at Queen's University, where he lectures on the social history of organized crime in Canada, and mafia culture and the power of symbols, rituals and myth, Antonio is also a lecturer at several other universities: Italian School of Middlebury College in Oakland, Califronia, and St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario.

He sits on the Advisory Board of the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security at York University in Toronto, on the International Advisory Council of the Italian Institute of Strategic Studies “Niccolò Machiavelli” in Rome (Italy), and on the Expert Advisory Committee on Bullying, Intimidation and Gang Violence in Montreal.

He is also the President of Centro Scuola e Cultura in Toronto.

Learn more about Antonio Nicaso.

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The 2018 US midterm elections were historic: increase in voter turnout (50%), victory for the Democrats (40 seats), and the 'Pink Wave' (a record 127 women elected to Congress). Other firsts, such as the youngest woman in the House and the first-ever Native American congresswomen, mark an election that was seen as a rebuke to President Trump. But the US political landscape remains angry, divided and precarious.

Ben chats with political scientist Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant to get underneath the headlines.

About the Guest

In the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s, Goodyear-Grant teaches courses on campaigns and elections; women, gender, and politics; Canadian politics more generally; and empirical methods.

Learn more about Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant.

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Cixin Liu's novel, The Three-Body Problem, is a hallmark of modern Chinese writing. When it was first published in 2006, it took readers, critics and even scientists by storm. And when it was finally translated into English in 2014, it became the first Asian book to win the Hugo Award for science fiction. A piece of scientific imagination (folding protons, communicating with aliens, VR suits, and more), Liu's book continues to stir big questions today.

Ben gets to the bottom of it with Andrew Miller.

About the Book

"Wildly imaginative, really interesting." — President Barack Obama on The Three-Body Problem trilogy

The Three-Body Problem is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience the Hugo Award-winning phenomenon from China's most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin.

Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

The Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy
The Three-Body Problem
The Dark Forest
Death's End

Other Books
Ball Lightning (forthcoming)

Learn more about The Three-Body Problem.

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Despite the constant flux and disruption of politics, the wheels of government continue to turn. And the professionals who keep those wheels greased (squeaky or otherwise) are often the backbone of civil society. But there are thousands of voluntary organizations who contribute to the public life as well -- the so-called Third Sector. How do they interact?

Ben chats about all of this and more with Queen's University Associate Professor Rachel Laforest, Director of the school's MPA program.

About the Guest

Rachel Laforest is Associate Professor and head of the Public Policy and Third Sector Initiative in the School of Policy Studies, Queen's University in Canada. Her areas of expertise are the study of governance and inter-sectoral collaboration. Her current research interests focus on poverty reduction strategies, mental health and addictions, and education policy. She is also interested in intergovernmental relations and Canadian politics.

Rachel is the author of Voluntary Sector Organizations and the State (UBC Press), which won the ANSER-ARES best book award in 2014. She is also the editor of Government-Nonprofit Relations in Times of Recession (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013) and The New Federal Policy Agenda and the Voluntary Sector: On the Cutting Edge, (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009). She is currently Visiting Professor in the Institute for Public Policy and Governance at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has held Visiting appointments at the Centre for Nonprofit Management, School of Business, Trinity College Dublin and the School of Criminology, Politics and Social Policy, University of Ulster.

Learn more about Rachel Laforest.

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The subtitle of Yascha Mounk's powerful and chilling book is, "Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It". Mounk describes populism and the current disruptions in our politics with a sweeping look at polarization, economics, social media and more. But he also exposes something deeper: the rot in our democratic institutions. Individual rights and the world rules-based order are not the same thing as democracy. Now, they may be in opposition.

Joining Ben to discuss the book is Alex Slusar.

About the Book

“We can no longer assume that liberal democracy is the wave of the future… This splendid book is an invaluable contribution to the debate about what ails democracy, and what can be done about it.”—Michael J. Sandel, author of Justice

“Everyone worried about the state of contemporary politics should read this book.”—Anne-Marie Slaughter, President of the New America Foundation

The world is in turmoil. From Russia, Turkey, and Egypt to the United States, authoritarian populists have seized power. As a result, democracy itself may now be at risk.

Two core components of liberal democracy—individual rights and the popular will—are increasingly at war with each other. As the role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of “rights without democracy” took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to the people. But in practice they create something just as bad: a system of “democracy without rights.” The consequence, as Yascha Mounk shows in this brilliant and timely book, is that trust in politics is dwindling. Citizens are falling out of love with their political system. Democracy is wilting away. Drawing on vivid stories and original research, Mounk identifies three key drivers of voters’ discontent: stagnating living standards, fear of multiethnic democracy, and the rise of social media. To reverse the trend, politicians need to enact radical reforms that benefit the many, not the few.

The People vs. Democracy is the first book to describe both how we got here and what we need to do now. For those unwilling to give up either individual rights or the concept of the popular will, Mounk argues that urgent action is needed, as this may be our last chance to save democracy.

Learn more about The People vs. Democracy.

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People don't just get their news, entertainment and friend fixes from social media. In the digital age, there are whole universes in which to learn, shop, explore, broadcast, develop tastes and be creative -- to influence and be influenced. There is enormous space not just for individuals and enterprises to grow, but for whole new forms of business. What's happening in this brave new world?

Ben has a fun, unplifting chat with Kingston-based influencer and serial entrepreneur, Claire Bouvier.

About the Guest

Claire Bouvier's work is dedicated to the hashtag, #SpreadYourAwesome. She believes that life should be about dedicating moments of your day to creativity and curiosity.

Claire has a background of teaching, music, sports, fashion, design, travel, photography, art directing and creative design. She has dedicated the last ten years to helping women reach their full potential through the arts and entrepreneurship. Her goal is to help thousands of women around the globe become strong women, entrepreneurs and leaders in their communities.

One of Claire's newest project is a TV show. In the summer of 2018, Claire was approached by Bell Canada - Bell Fibe TV1 to create a TV Show for 2.8 million Canadians!

The TV Show is called FEiST-Y. It's about a young female entrepreneur that travels through her town interviewing other interesting entrepreneurial characters. Through her conversations she learns how they have struggled and succeeded by selling hot dog carts, winning the Olympic silver medal, becoming top 10 on the country music charts and selling out beer festivals.

Follow Claire on Instagram or visit her website.

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Whether it's energy for electricity, gas for cars or ships or militaries, fuel for heating, or plastics pretty much everywhere -- petroleum is the key ingredient for modern society. The politics of oil and gas influence any government or business, yet the headlines only tell part of the story. What's really going on?

Joining Ben is John Foster, an energy economist who spent 40 years with organizations like the World Bank. His new book, Oil and World Politics, attempts to unmask the real forces at play.

About the Guest

John Foster is an international petroleum economist, who has worked on staff of the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and two oil companies (BP and Petro-Canada). His work has taken him to more than thirty countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Born in London England, he graduated from Cambridge University in economics and law. He served in the Royal Navy and went to Suez. He has worked in London, Montreal, Washington DC (twice), and Ottawa. His interests include current affairs, Canadian Club of Kingston, and Kingston Choral Society. He has been writing and talking across Canada on petroleum geopolitics and recent conflicts. His articles have appeared in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and the online magazine Open Canada (Canadian International Council).

For more information about John, visit johnfosterwrites.com.

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In Canada, a sophisticated and prosperous first world country, there are whole communities living in third world conditions. Many First Nations people don't have adequate access to good health care, proper education, clean drinking water, and other government services. Thanks to strident advocacy, laws are in place to stop such unfairness. But the reality is still a slap in the face. What needs to be done?

Ben is in Ottawa to chat with Andrea Auger of the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society.

Read the blog post about this episode.

About the Guest

Andrea Auger is the Reconciliation and Research Manager for the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society. Raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Andrea is Ojibwe and a member of the Pays Plat First Nation. She joined the Caring Society in 2008 to work on the Touchstones of Hope. With her background in education, Andrea is passionate about teaching, mentoring, and learning from others, especially children, youth, and Elders. Her main areas of interest include engagement in reconciliation, reconciliation approaches, child and youth engagement, and human rights. She is the proud mother of a beautiful son.

For more information about Andrea and the Caring Society, visit fncaringsociety.com.

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You've heard the statistics. Income inequality in the west is at its highest level in half a century. The three richest people are worth more than the poorest 48 countries in the world, combined. The top 1% of the world's population own 47% of the world's wealth. It goes on, and it is getting worse. But what are the forces underneath these changes? What was done the last time inequality was so bad? What can be done today?

Ben chats with the highly-regarded economist, Miles Corak, about all this and more.

About the Guest

Miles Corak is Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research focuses on social mobility, inequality, and child rights. His findings documenting that higher inequality is associated with lower economic opportunity have been widely cited, and used by policy-makers worldwide.

Top print and electronic media, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and the BBC have all used Professor Corak’s research on "The Great Gatsby Curve", as has the White House.

Prior to joining the Graduate Center, Corak was Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada, and for many years a member of the senior management at Statistics Canada, Canada’s national statistical agency. He has been a visiting researcher with the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, Italy; the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the University of London; the Office of Population Research at Princeton University; the Russell Sage Foundation; and was a visiting professor with the Department of Economics at Harvard University. During 2017, he served as the Economist in Residence with the Canadian federal government, advising on social policy reform and the country's poverty reduction strategy.

For more information about Miles, including his blog and much of his writing, visit milescorak.com.

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Public art can make cities beautiful, inviting, inspiring and thought-provoking. It can bind communities together not just in what the art communicates, but in how it is made. Public art can even be controversial because of its content and the fact that government commonly foots the bill. However, what is art if it isn't subversive, even dangerous?

Ben is in Toronto to chat with Calgary actor, writer and public artist Dawn van de Schoot about the meaning, purpose and future of art in the public realm.

About the Guest

Dawn van de Schoot is an actor, writer and public artist from Calgary, Alberta. Her MFA studies centred around the healing qualities of the creative process which led her to the fields of Community Cultural Development and Social Practice, where she uses interdisciplinary arts practice to strengthen community and bring people together in new ways and with new understanding.

For more information about Dawn, visit dawnvandeschoot.com.

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In his acclaimed thriller, Butcher, Canadian playwright Nicolas Billon asks, how do we punish the unpunishable? How can there be true justice when everyone has their own take on what justice is and how it should be served? How can live theatre as an art form successfully pose such questions in our accelerating digital age? And above all, how does empathy fit into all of this?

Ben sits down with Nic to discuss his play, the power of theatre, and the crucial role of empathy in our lives and society.

About the Guest

Nicolas Billon writes for theatre, film, and television. His plays have been performed in multiple languages around the world. His first, The Elephant Song, was made into a feature film starring Xavier Dolan, Bruce Greenwood, and Catherine Keener, for which Nic won a Canadian Screen Award and a Writers Guild of Canada Screenwriting Award. His latest, Butcher, was produced across Canada and is in development as a feature film for Rhombus Media. Nic has won over a dozen awards for his work, including the Governor General’s Award for Drama.

For more information about Nic, visit nicolasbillon.com.

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Disability can change everything, and many of us have a hard time understanding what it means for a curb to be too high, or an electrical socket too low. For Rossana Pasquino, who has spent most of her life in a wheelchair, disability has presented some steep challenges, but it has also opened up some unexpected opportunities. She is not only a respected chemical engineer from Naples in Italy, but a Paralympic wheelchair fencer -- a sport that requires intense focus, intelligence, physical prowess and mastery of the 'appeal'.

Ben sits down with Dr. Pasquino for a wide-ranging conversation about fencing, chemistry and the exchange between Italy and Canada during her temporary posting to Queen's University in Kingston.

Read the blog post for this episode.

About the Guest

Rossana Pasquino currently works at the Department of Chemical, Materials and Industrial Production Engineering, University of Naples Federico II. Rossana does research in Materials Physics, Materials Science and Surface Chemistry. Their most recent publication is 'Effect of polymer concentration and thermal history on the inverse thermogelation of HydroxyPropylCellulose aqueous solutions'.

Learn more about Rossana.

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Complete show notes are below the description.

Racism has been a sad part of the human story for a long time. After slavery was finally abolished in the United States in 1865, it took a hundred years for governments to make formal legal equality real -- and still, social segregation, ethnic discrimination and systemic prejudice continue today. It might even be getting worse. What is racism all about in our age of rising white nationalism and the re-emergence of identity politics, and what can we do about it?

Ben is in St. John's, Newfoundland, to get to the bottom of it with Professor Sulaimon Giwa of Memorial University.

What on Earth is Going on: Podcast Episode 26.

Show Notes

Episode 26: What on Earth is Going on with Racism?

Notes on the Conversation

Ben and Sulaimon discuss the meaning and manifestations of racism, especially in the often-overlooked and downplayed Canadian context. In addition, they hit upon the following:

Racisms (plural), identity politics, cultural appropriation and privilege
Diversity of thought as well as background in academia
The built-in prejudices of a society that is increasingly data-driven
The concept of truth and truths as distinct from fact
The interesting idea of leveraging white identity
Racism and identity in the local context of St. John’s and Newfoundland

About the Guest

Dr. Sulaimon Giwa is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Critical Thinking and Reflection, Social Justice, and Social Work Practice.

His doctoral research explored the experiences of, and resilience (including coping strategies) of gay men of colour, to racism. It received the runner-up distinction for the Barbara Godard Prize for the best York University dissertation in Canadian Studies.

Dr. Giwa holds a Diploma in Law and Security Administration from Fleming College, with a specialization in Police Education; a Bachelor of High Honours in Criminology and Criminal Justice from Carleton University, with a concentration in Law and minor in Women’s Studies; a Master’s of Social Work from Carleton University, with a substantive focus on Social Policy and Administration; and a PhD in Social Work from York University, in the specialty areas of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture.

Dr. Giwa’s professional experience includes direct practice; research and policy work at the community and federal level, primarily in youth health promotions, community and organizational practice in diverse communities, corrections (including as a Community Parole Officer and Case Manager for Time for Change, a Crime Prevention Ottawa funded gang exit program), and policing.

His applied research program and professional activities centralize critical race transformative pedagogies and theories as frameworks and analytic tools for social justice and equity. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of race and sexuality; critical social work pedagogy; antiracism/oppression; and the criminal justice system. He has taught in the social work programs at Ryerson University and York University, and in the Police Foundations program at Sheridan College.

Further information about Dr. Giwa’s academic and professional work can be found at Academia.edu.

Written by the Guest

Non-Academic Publications

LGBTQ immigrants need better settlement services by Sulaimon Giwa, published in the Conversation Canada, 27 May 2018

Newfoundland needs immigrants and anti-racism action now by Sulaimon Giwa, published in the Conversation Canada, 18 April 2018

Academic Publications

“Coping with Racism and Racial Trauma” by Sulaimon Giwa, published in the Psychic Life of Racism in Gay Men’s Communities, edited by Damien W. Riggs (Lexington Books, 2018)

“Foundations of Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression in Social Work Practice” by Gordon Pon, Sulaimon Giwa and Narda Razack

“Is There Racial Discrimination in Police Stop-and-Searches of Black Youth? A Toronto Case Study” by Yunliang Meng, Sulaimon Giwa and Uzo Anucha, published in the Canadian Journal of Family and Youth (Vol. 7, No. 1, 2015)

Further Reading

The Government of Canada’s Anti-racism Resources: a list of supporting resource materials.

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism by sociologist Robin DiAngelo, with a foreword by Michael Eric Dyson. Non-Fiction, analysis. New York Times Bestseller. Published in 2018.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, correspondent for The Atlantic. Written as a letter to the author’s teenage son, with a focus on race relations in the United States. Winner of the 2015 National (US) Book Award for Nonfiction. Published in 2015.

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King, American-Canadian writer and broadcaster. Canadian bestseller and winner of various prizes, including the 2014 RBC Taylor Prize. Published in 2013.

The Quote of the Week

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

From Our Dead Behind Us: Poems by Audre Lorde (1934-1992), American writer and activist.

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Water is foundational to human life. Many of us live in places where it is clean, cheap and flows freely from the tap, and where it can be taken for granted. But a billion people go without adequate access to clean drinking water, and due to the enormous increase in the demand for water from agriculture and industry, by 2040 most countries will not be able to meet their basic water needs. And water is a finite resource that exists in an ever-moving ecosystem. What we pour down the sink or flush down the toilet must come back. Are we paying enough attention?

Ben chats with Pascale Champagne, Professor of Engineering at Queen's University and Director of the Beaty Water Research Centre.

About the Guest

Enhancing the value and sustainability of our natural and renewable resources has important societal, economic and environmental impacts. The key to ensuring a sustainable future requires the integration of a resource management approach for the valorization of residual streams and environmentally sound processes in the production of energy, fuels and bioproducts from natural and renewable materials. Scientific and technical progress in this field is increasingly dependent on the development and application of more environmentally sustainable processes; recovery, reuse and valorization of waste streams; and the discovery of innovative routes in the extraction and synthesis of bio-based products. The integration of lower environmental impact technologies and green chemistry is paramount to establishing a future supply of green and sustainable bio-based energy, fuel materials and chemical products, as well as a better management of liquid and solid waste streams. The challenge is clear – develop technologies that will be both efficient and effective over a long lifetime that will be compatible with the natural environment.

Dr. Pascale Champagne’s research focuses on the development of alternate water and waste management strategies and environmentally sustainable approaches with a focus on integrated bioresource management. Her research activities are interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary and have commonality with the fields of environmental and chemical engineering, biology and green chemistry; hence, she collaborates and has evolved synergistic relationships with a number of researchers in these fields to develop new integrated bioresource management practices, to introduce alternate aqueous and solid waste management approaches, and to create unique opportunities for the bioenergy and bioproducts sectors.

Learn more about Pascale.

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“How is it possible that people can simultaneously bowl us over with their ingenuity and disappoint us with their ignorance? How have we mastered so much despite how limited our understanding often is? These are the questions we will try to answer in this book.”

The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone was written in 2017 by cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach. Ben chats with Sean Fenlon to find out what on earth is going on according to their provocative and insightful perspective.

About the Book

We all think we know more than we actually do.

Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individual-oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. The Knowledge Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the community around us.

Learn more about The Knowledge Illusion.

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We all know hard power: tanks, planes, guns, even cyberwarfare units. But since the end of the Second World War, the normal method for a country to achieve its goals has been through openness, dialogue and mutual agreement. War, and the threat of war, has taken a backseat to what Joseph Nye defined as "soft power": the ability to get the other side to want to do what you want. Is this starting to shift? Are we being forced to embrace Donald Trump's harder, zero-sum approach to global affairs?

Ben chats with Sara Greco, PhD Candidate in Political Science at Queen's University.

About the Guest

Sara Greco is a doctoral candidate of political studies at Queen’s University, an R.S. McLaughlin Graduate Fellow, and a Student Fellow at the Centre for International and Defence Policy. Her most recent article, co-authored with Stéfanie von Hlatky, is entitled “Soft Contributions are Hard Commitments: NATO and Canada’s Global Security Agenda" and has been published in Canadian Foreign Policy Journal.

Learn more about Sara.

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Cities are the principal engines of growth and innovation, not just in the west but all over the world. Crowded and sprawling, manic and beautiful, these gravity wells for the human experience constitute our future. But what is the future of the city? Whether it's rising inequality, affordable housing, or the intensifying mashup of language and culture, how do cities adapt and renew?

Ben is in Toronto, a city that faces intense pressures and where such conversations are at the forefront, to chat with urban designer Blair Scorgie of SvN.

About the Guest

Blair is a Senior Planner / Urban Designer and SvN’s Business Development Director. He holds a Master of Architecture, specializing in Urban Design, from McGill University as well as a Bachelor of Urban and Regional Planning from Ryerson University. Blair is a Registered Professional Planner, and a member of both the Canadian Institute of Planners and the Ontario Professional Planners Institute. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Ryerson University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning and was formerly the Acting Chair of the City of London Urban Design Review Panel.

Learn more about Blair.

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The #MeToo movement struck hard and fast in the film industry, capturing international attention for much more than a few news cycles. It exposed some of the men who abuse their power, and highlighted what women have dealt with for decades. But is it enough to truly change an image-based industry? What are the deeper forces at play? Are we changing the way we watch movies in the face of technological as well as social disruption? What on earth is going on with the movies?

Ben chats with Mike Sheppard, host of a new show on CFRC radio show called Screening in Kingston; and Wendy Huot, owner and operator of the popular downtown Kingston cinema, the Screening Room.

About the Guests

Wendy Huot is the proprietor of The Screening Room, a former librarian, and a longtime participant in Kingston’s “Stay At Home Resistance Movement.”

Mike Sheppard is the Business Manager for CFRC radio in Kingston and the co-owner of Social Schmoes Social Media.

Learn more about Mike and Wendy.

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Institutions and norms, both written and unwritten, underpin our rule-of-law, human rights-respecting democracies. Some of these have evolved to serve a dynamic and diverse society. Others have withstanded centuries of disruption and change. But it seems that many of them are now under threat in an era of flux and populism. What are the deeper forces at play, and what's beneath the constant churn of consumer partisanship and identity politics?

Ben is in Toronto to speak with Dr. Miriam Smith, Professor of Social Science at York University.

About the Guest

Miriam is a professor in the Law & Society Program in the Department of Social Science at York University. Previously, she held full-time faculty positions in political science at Carleton University (1989-2004) and Trent University (2004-2007). She received her B.A. in political science in 1982 from McGill University and her Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1990. Her research areas include Canadian and comparative politics, social movements, legal mobilization and public policy, especially, the LGBT movement in Canada in comparative perspective.

Learn more about Miriam.

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“Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.”

That’s from the bestseller, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by psychologist Carol Dweck. Ben discusses the book and its powerful lessons with Mark Stovel.

About the Book

World-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, in decades of research on achievement and success, has discovered a truly groundbreaking idea—the power of our mindset.

In this brilliant book, Dweck shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we approach our goals. People with a fixed mindset—those who believe that abilities are fixed—are far less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset—those who believe that abilities can be developed through hard work, good strategies, and mentorship. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment.

Learn more about Mindset.

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Glass ceilings are being shattered everywhere. Women now shape the world in every field and discipline. The archetype of leadership is less and less the old white male. But big problems remain, whether it's big picture pay equity or the guy you know who mansplains in budget meetings. What are the next steps?

Ben has a powerful, insightful and surprising chat with Laurie VandeSchoot, a senior public servant at the City of Calgary.

About the Guest

As Deputy Chief of Department Review, Laurie VandeSchoot oversees the Community Services and Protective Services (CS&PS) department-wide review, the Calgary Fire Department’s (CFD) diversity and inclusion initiatives, and CS&PS’s 2015-2018 capital strategic planning. Her current portfolio requires extensive partnering and liaising with members of the community, private industry and provincial and municipal representatives to ensure quality, safety and consistency of services.

In her previous role as Deputy Chief of Logistics and Infrastructure, Chief VandeSchoot oversaw several CFD business units including facility management, IT services, capital and urban planning, emergency apparatus repair and equipment supply. She was responsible for the logistics and supply-chain management for large-scale incidents; managed team and business resources, budgets and approvals; and ensured compliance with departmental policies and standards.

Chief VandeSchoot began her career with The City of Calgary in 1988, providing organizational and program development for Parks and Recreation before taking on the supervision of recreation services at Village Square Leisure Centre — Calgary’s largest public recreation facility. She joined the Calgary Fire Department in 2006 as Manager of Strategic Services, where she provided hands-on leadership for all strategic initiatives, business planning, research and development needs. Moving into the position of Finance Manager of Tangible Capital assets in 2010, Chief VandeSchoot led The City through the single largest reform to public sector accounting in 100 years. She later returned to the CFD and was promoted to Deputy Chief in 2012.

In recognition of her work with The City and her involvement with various cultural diversity initiatives, Chief VandeSchoot has received a number of accolades including an Immigrants of Distinction, Organizational Diversity Award for outstanding achievements in implementing cultural diversity initiatives, and a Federation of Canadian Municipalities Award for outstanding contributions to international cooperation.

Chief VandeSchoot holds a M.Sc. in sustainable development from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, a bachelor of kinesiology with a double major in philosophy from the University of Manitoba, and has completed the journalism and public relations program at Mount Royal University. She has received certification in change management, strategic management and project management from a number of professional organizations and post-secondary institutions. She also maintains membership in several associations including the Alberta, Canadian and International Fire Chiefs Associations, Government Finance Officers Association, Institute of Public Administration of Canada and Commission on Fire Accreditation International.

Apart from work, Chief VandeSchoot is married, has two children and is an active participant and volunteer in sports, arts and social justice activism.

Learn more about Laurie.

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Gustav Mahler once said that a symphony must be like the world, in that it must contain everything. But when it comes to classical music, is that 'container' (think of the pageantry, the dressing up, the protocols of when to clap or cough) getting in the way?

Ben sits down with the young, ambitious and innovative Music Director of the Kingston Symphony, Evan Mitchell, for a conversation about the meaning and power of music, the responsibility of those who make it, and the onus on us in the audience to meet half-way.

About the Guest

Evan Mitchell is proving to be one of the most able and imaginative young conductors in Canada. Mr. Mitchell has enjoyed four triumphant seasons as Music Director of the Kingston Symphony Association, garnering praise for his programming, approach, and musical results. During the past two seasons, the Kingston Symphony's entire Masterworks Series has sold out under Mr. Mitchell's leadership.

During his various conducting residencies, Mr. Mitchell has led over 200 concerts, acted as a Canadian ambassador during a historic two-week tour of China, Korea and Macau, and served as an official consultant to the Vancouver Olympic Committee and Assistant Producer for the recording of the medal ceremony national anthems.

He has also brought the magic of orchestral music to over 500,000 students and children, many of whom had never experienced a live performance first hand. His programs for young people have been recognized for their appeal and educational mandate.

Equally comfortable in the realm of contemporary music and opera, Mr. Mitchell has premiered over 20 new Canadian works and is a strong advocate for music by Canadian composers. He is also the Principal Conductor of Opera 5, an award-winning independent opera company based in Toronto, which is responsible for a popular web series entitled Opera Cheats.

Mr. Mitchell is a champion of initiatives designed to enhance the live concert experience, such as insider videos, informational podcasts, pre-concert talks, and special concerts devoted to live, onstage insights into major orchestral works. His program SoundSync, which involves real-time updates delivered silently to mobile devices during the concert, was hailed as the greatest technological innovation in the concert hall of 2014 by the CBC.

Among his recent career highlights, Mr. Mitchell was Principal Conductor of the World Harp Congress, in which he conducted eight harp concerti with some of the world’s best harpists. He is a regular guest conductor with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. He has also led orchestral collaborations with the Barenaked Ladies, Judy Collins, and Pink Martini.

Learn more about Evan.

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Is education the closest thing we have to a silver bullet for the ills and ailments of our society, even if it takes generations to have a real impact? What's the history of education and where might we be headed? What are the forces that compete to shape our schools, our students and our minds?

Ben chats with Ted Christou, a teacher, historian and educator of educators at Queen's University.

About the Guest

Dr. Christou is an Associate Professor in the Curriculum Studies and Educational Studies fields, with a cross-appointment to the Department of History in Queen's University's Faculty of Arts and Science. He began his professional teaching career as an elementary school teacher in Scarborough with the Toronto District School Board. Following a circuitous path, which included teaching at the Primary, Junior, Intermediate, and Senior Divisions (Continuing Education), Dr. Christou returned to the academy to pursue doctoral studies in history of education. Dr. Christou commenced his academic course on the tenure track in Fredericton at the University of New Brunswick in 2009. In July 2012, that course led westwards, back to Kingston, Ontario, and to Queen’s University.

Dr. Christou's teaching in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s extends to several disciplines; in particular, he concentrates upon history of education, philosophy of education, social studies, and the theory and practice of history.

His research, which spans several fields - history, philosophy, curriculum, and teacher education - is tied together by two questions: a) What is an education for?, and b) How might we imagine an education individual? These questions are bound by historical, as well as contemporary, context and complexities.

Learn more about Ted or visit his website.

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"Since the turn of the millennium, and particularly over the last decade, no fewer than twenty-five democracies have failed around the world, three of them in Europe (Russia, Turkey and Hungary)... Can the West regain its optimism? If the answer is no – and most of the portents are skewing the wrong way – liberal democracy will follow. If the next few years resemble the last, it is questionable whether Western democracy can take the strain. People have lost faith that their systems can deliver. More and more are looking backwards to a golden age that can never be regained. When a culture stops looking to the future, it loses a vital force. The search for Eden always ends in tears."

That's from The Retreat of Western Liberalism, a powerful, insightful and chilling book by Financial Times columnist, Edward Luce. Ben is with Eric Peters in Calgary to get to the bottom of the acclaimed bestseller.

About the Book

In his widely acclaimed book Time to Start Thinking, Financial Times chief US columnist and commentator Edward Luce charted the course of America's relative decline, proving to be a prescient voice on our current social and political turmoil. In The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Luce makes a larger statement about the weakening of western hegemony and the crisis of liberal democracy - of which Donald Trump and his European counterparts are not the cause, but a terrifying symptom.

Luce argues that we are on a menacing trajectory brought about by ignorance of what it took to build the West, arrogance towards society's economic losers, and complacency about our system's durability - attitudes that have been emerging since the fall of the Berlin Wall. "We cannot move forward without a clear diagnosis of what has gone wrong. Unless the West can rekindle an economy that produces gains for the majority of its people, its political liberties may be doomed. The West's faith in history teaches us to take democracy for granted. Reality tells us something troublingly different. Combining on-the-ground reporting with intelligent synthesis of the literature and economic analysis, Luce offers a detailed projection of the consequences of the Trump administration, the rise of European populism, and a forward-thinking analysis of what those who believe in enlightenment values must do to defend them from the multiple onslaughts they face in the coming years."

Learn more about The Retreat of Western Liberalism.

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On July 22 a lone gunman opened fire on pedestrians and crowded restaurants on Danforth Avenue in the Greektown District of Toronto. He killed two and wounded ten others before turning the gun on himself. Three months earlier, just a subway ride away, a man drove a rental van onto busy sidewalks, killing ten and injuring 16. What is driving people, particularly young men, to throw away their lives and those of others? Were these incidents of terrorism or just mad acts of violence? What's the difference?

Ben heads to Toronto to speak with Joseph McQuade, a terrorism expert at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, to get to the bottom of these urgent questions.

About the Guest

Joseph McQuade is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute’s Centre for South Asian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, with a dissertation that examined the origins of terrorism in colonial South Asia in international perspective. This research is currently being revised into a book manuscript, tentatively titled Anti-colonial nationalism and the birth of ‘terrorism’ in colonial India, 1857-1947. His postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto will interrogate the role of terrorism and insurgency in defining national identity in postcolonial India and Burma (Myanmar). His broader research and teaching interests include critical genealogies of ‘terrorism’ as a political and legal category, the global history of political violence, and the relationship between insurgency and nation-states.

Learn more about Joseph.

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What is the nature of political power and how is it distributed? What are the pros and cons of a federal system like Canada's, where power is shared between governments? Is it possible that Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump are singing from the same "make our country great again" song-sheets, just on opposite sides of the populist choir? And how likely is it that the American president will be impeached?

Ben addresses these questions and more with Dr. Anthony Sayers, Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary.

About the Guest

Anthony received his undergraduate education at the University of Western Australia and completed an MA and Ph.D at the University of British Columbia. His research deals with major political institutions including political parties, elections, federalism and parliaments. He is particularly interested in the organizational and campaigning aspects of political parties and the distribution of power in federal states, and wrote Parties, Candidates, and Constituency Campaigns in Canadian Elections. He also writes about Alberta provincial politics.

Learn more about Anthony.

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What is the role of art and music in our society? Is art supposed to effect change or simply represent it after the fact? Is all good art subversive, and is all subversive art good? What does it mean for an arts organization to be responsible to its audience: give them what they want, or help them develop newer, deeper, unexpected tastes? How do you nurture art and artists who work on a cutting edge that is not always popular or immediately accessible, yet still keep it commercially viable?

Ben chats with the award winning arts administrator, and Director of the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts in Kingston, Tricia Baldwin.

About the Guest

Learn more about Tricia.

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"We live in the age of the individual. Every day, we're bombarded with depictions of the beautiful, successful, slim, socially conscious, and extroverted individual that our culture has decided is the perfect self, and we berate ourselves when we don't measure up." So begins the publisher's description of Will Storr's new book, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us. It's a fascinating and timely read about the whole notion and history of the self, and how our cherished individualism seems to be getting way out of control.

Ben goes to Calgary to discuss the book with communications professional Jody MacPherson.

About the Book

We are supposed to be slim, prosperous, happy, extroverted and popular. This is our culture’s image of the perfect self. We see this person everywhere: in advertising, in the press, all over social media. We’re told that to be this person you just have to follow your dreams, that our potential is limitless, that we are the source of our own success.

But this model of the perfect self can be extremely dangerous. People are suffering under the torture of this impossible fantasy. Unprecedented social pressure is leading to increases in depression and suicide. Where does this ideal come from? Why is it so powerful? Is there any way to break its spell?

To answer these questions, Selfie by Will Storr takes us from the shores of Ancient Greece, through the Christian Middle Ages, to the self-esteem evangelists of 1980s California, the rise of narcissism and the selfie generation, and right up to the era of hyper-individualistic neoliberalism in which we live now.

It tells the extraordinary story of the person we all know so intimately – our self.

Learn more about Selfie by Will Storr or follow the guest, Jody MacPherson, on Twitter (@jody_macpherson).

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What can we learn from the trials, tribulations and shipwrecks of our collective human past? How does that past shape the human story today? How can we liberate history from its eurocentric roots? And, most importantly, what's the link between history and jazz?

Ben chats with the Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University, and renowned historian/historiographer, Daniel Woolf.

Read the blog post for this episode.

About the Guest

Dr. Daniel Woolf has been the Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s University since 2009. He continues to teach part-time, and is a specialist in early modern British cultural history and the history of historical thought and writing. Principal Woolf is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Historical Society. He is the author or editor of numerous books on history and historiography, including the five-volume Oxford History of Historical Writing.

Learn more about Daniel.

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Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is going to change everything. From self-driving cars to deliveries to your online retailers that can predict and deliver your order before you make it, businesses are already cashing in on the AI revolution, which will soon be worth trillions. Where are we headed, what are the risks and opportunities, and what is it all going to look like?

Ben chats with Dr. Stephen Thomas, Director of the new one-of-a-kind and first-of-its-kind Master of Management in Artificial Intelligence program at the Smith School of Business, Queen's University.

About the Guest

Dr. Stephen Thomas is the Director of the new Master of Management in Artificial Intelligence program at Queen’s University, an exciting first-of-its-kind program at the Smith School of Business. Dr. Thomas once ran a big data startup, and now works extensively in Computer Science where he focuses on databases, data analytics, and natural language processing.

Learn more about Stephen.

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There is a pressing need to rethink how we produce, consume and transmit energy, to diversify our energy sources, and to reorder our daily lives as well as the larger structures of our economies. These shifts, whether in the form of self-driving cars or backyard geothermal plants, are coming regardless of climate change – they’re happening naturally. But such changes are not just about convenience and leisure. They may transform the way we conceive of our ecology, our society, and our place within it.

Ben chats with forester, geographer and public policy professor Warren Mabee.

Read the blog post for this episode.

About the Guest

Dr. Warren Mabee is, in his own words, a forester who somehow became a geographer. He is a professor and head of the department of geography and planning, as well as a professor of policy studies, at Queen’s University in Kingston. He is a Canada Research Chair in Renewable Energy Development and Implementation as well as the Director of the Queen’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy. His research focuses on the interface between renewable energy policy and technologies, with particular emphasis on wood energy and biofuels.

Learn more about Warren.

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Are we on the verge of a trade war, or already in the midst of one? Is NAFTA doomed to the same fate as the Iran Nuclear Deal? What is behind the US president's unprecedented attacks on free trade and the rules-based order that his own country once helped create and champion? Are the motivations purely instinctive, or political, or is there a deeper world-shaping agenda at play?

Joining Ben is Robert Wolfe, expert in international relations and trade and Professor Emeritus of Policy Studies at Queen's University.

About the Guest

Robert Wolfe is Professor Emeritus of Policy Studies at Queen’s University, where he is also the lead director of the Annual Queen’s Institute on Trade Policy. Before joining Queen’s in 1995, Dr. Wolfe was a Canadian foreign service officer for nearly two decades, serving around the world and in Ottawa. His current projects focus on digital trade and how members of the World Trade Organization can use enhanced transparency to encourage institutional learning.

Learn more about Robert or follow him on Twitter (@BobWolfeSPS).

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Climate change is real, and we are causing it. At least, that’s the consensus among scientists around the world. A tiny handful of academics disagree, and that is a critical feature of science, but does this mean we should debate it as if it were an open question? Part of the reason we seem to so freely and so brazenly challenge those who have done their homework is because we lack the tools to distinguish between fact and fiction. We, as citizens, need to be literate in science in order for the real debates to be had.

Joining Ben for an impassioned conversation is renowned climate scientist Dr. John Smol.

Read the blog post for this episode.

About the Guest

Water pollution, climatic change, declining fisheries – these environmental problems are at the forefront of many people’s minds. And so are the dreaded diseases like cancer, asthma, autism, that many experts feel are linked to toxic chemicals in our environment, in particular, our fresh water supplies.

John Smol and his team at the Paleoecological Environmental Assessment and Research Laboratory (PEARL), at Queen's University, go deep below the surface of our lakes and rivers to uncover the secrets of our environmental history, written in the mud and silt.

Professor Smol’s work has been informing policy discussions and decisions nationally and internationally for many years, starting with his acclaimed role in the acid rain debates. With the help of the PEARL team, his research has enabled policy makers to make knowledgeable, proactive decisions in areas such as agricultural runoff, clearcutting, protection of fish habitats, and air pollution control.

With a public more concerned and informed about the environment than ever before, PEARL’s ongoing discoveries enable governments to be leaders in the stewardship of Canadian natural resources.

No matter how complicated paleolimnology might sound to you, to John, it’s all about one simple vision: the more we know about our environment, the better decisions we can make to protect it.

Learn more about John.

Mentioned in this Episode

A poll from 2018 that shows 1/3 of Canadians don't believe humans and industry cause climate change
James Powell, a US geologist and author who argues that the acceptance of anthropomorphic climate change in the scientific community is virtually universal
27th International Polar Conference (2018)
A poll from 2017 that shows nearly half of Canadians think science is a "matter of opinion"
A Short History of Progress, a book by author Ronald Wright based on his 2004 Massey Lectures
Clip (YouTube) from the television program Newsroom, featuring a climate scientist who has essentially given up

The Quote of the Week

The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
- Malcolm Forbes

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There's an election coming up in Ontario, and as always, one of the big dividers is taxes. Cut them, raise them, change them, fix them. A lot of the arguments are weary (Doug Ford's PCs want to make gas and beer cheaper; the surging NDP want the wealthy to cough up more cash) -- but some want to change the fundamentals. There is lots of talk about a universal basic income, in a province with the largest real-life study of such a program in the world.

Joining Ben for an analysis of this subject, as well as the deeper issues of redistribution and federalism, is Queen's Emeritus Professor of Economics Robin Boadway.

About the Guest

Dr. Robin Boadway is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at Queen’s University. He is one of Canada’s foremost thinkers on tax policy, fiscal federalism and redistribution. Dr. Boadway is the author, co-author or editor of 30 books, including From Optimal Tax Theory to Tax Policy: Retrospective and Prospective Views. Dr. Boadway is a long-standing Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada as well as an Officer of the Order of Canada. Recently, he has conducted research into implementing a basic income guarantee, or BIG, similar to a universal basic income, in Canada.

Learn more about Robin.

From Optimal Tax Theory to Tax Policy: Retrospective and Prospective Views (Munich Lectures in Economics)

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Part 2 of 2.

For his bicentennial in May 2018, it's a good a time as any to re-evaluate the life, work and ideas of one of the most influential philosophers and economists of the modern era, Karl Marx. Following from last week, we delve deeper into not just Marx's ideas, but how they have evolved and been interpreted over the last century and a half. How has Marxism, let alone communism and socialism, taken off in ways that Marx himself could not have foreseen and, perhaps, would not have wanted. And we ask, what on earth is going on with the human story today when seen through the lenses that Marx provided.

Returning to the program for a second excellent and insightful conversation with Ben is Queen's sociologist Rob Beamish.

About the Guest

Dr. Rob Beamish is a Professor at Queen’s University in Kingston. In 1992 he wrote Marx, Method and the Division of Labour. After serving as the head of the Department of Sociology, Professor Beamish has since returned to work on projects related to the development of Marx’s ideas. Keep your eyes peeled for when his work hits the shelves – I’m sure it will be worth the read.

Learn more about Rob.

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Part 1 of 2.

May 5 was the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx's birth. Over the past few years there has been a surge of interest in the 19th century philosopher and economist, who challenged capitalism and predicted that it would eventually destroy itself. But his diagnosis has turned out to be more accurate, insightful and helpful than his prescriptions. Make no mistake: Marxism may be dead, but Marx is very much alive and kicking. His insight into the way the world works has profoundly influenced academia, economics, government, social programs, the way we study and view history, and yes indeed, capitalism itself. We may not be Marxists anymore. But many of the foundations of our world and the way in which we conceive of it are built from his material.

Joining Ben on the program is Queen's sociologist Rob Beamish, who will return next week to continue the excellent conversation.

About the Guest

Learn more about Rob.

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In the Digital Age, the Internet and social media have utterly transformed the way we live and perceive the world, and there is certainly more to come. But when we started upending norms in the media less than a generation ago, we couldn't perceive the consequences which are now becoming apparent. What on earth is going on with fake news, post-truth, and a new relativism in media and the public discourse? How on earth did we get so polarized in our societies and in our politics? What happens when extremism shares space with mainstream thought? Is it getting worse, or are we just incapable of seeing this transformation for what it really is? And what's on the horizon with the Digital Revolution?

Joining Ben is Carlos Prado, editor of America's Post-Truth Phenomenon: When Feelings and Opinions Trump Facts and Evidence.

Read the blog post for this episode.

About the Guest

Professor Emeritus Carlos Prado was born in Guatemala and immigrated to Canada in 1965. He is a professor of philosophy at Queen’s University, and has published 15 books on numerous subjects, including the 20th century French philosopher Michel Foucault, assisted dying, the effect of social media, and most recently the whole meaning behind the post-truth era. Dr. Prado was named one of the top ten most influential Canadians and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Learn more about Carlos.

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Ben Charland