Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

Wanting what you cannot have applies to more than diets and dream cars. Tony Tedesco and Jen Kirsch dig into why the person just out of reach so often becomes the one we cannot stop thinking about, and why that pull rarely has much to do with who they actually are. They trace it back to a Psychology Today piece on why brief encounters and near-misses stick harder than real relationships ever do, a...

A six-year-old sample from asteroid Ryugu just confirmed all five major DNA building blocks, and Dr. Samantha Yammine breaks down why that finding matters more than the headlines suggest. It separates what the data actually shows from the more dramatic claim that life itself started elsewhere. The conversation traces the Hayabusa2 mission's pristine sample collection, built specifically to rule ou...

PlayStation discs are going away entirely by 2028, and Kris Abel makes the case that the industry is repeating a mistake music already made, minus the concerts and festivals that kept that transition from feeling like a total loss. Something as basic as playing your own game at a friend's house is about to require logging out of their account first.   The conversation shifts to Hollywood, whe...

Rocco Rossi has walked the Camino de Santiago 23 times since 2002, and what started as a way out of a corporate career he no longer believed in has become something he returns to every year. His new novel, Finding Grace, pulls two decades of that walking into fiction. A mentor's sudden death during a business trip is what first put him on the trail, chasing clarity a promotion could never give him...

A good party isn't about the location, it's about a short list of ingredients that keep showing up at the ones people actually remember. A backyard fire on a mild summer night takes the top spot over any big event, cottage weekend, or festival lineup.   One rule carries the most weight: there always needs to be a low-stakes activity for people to fall back on, and cornhole gets called out as...

Washing machine mold prevention starts with one habit almost nobody follows, leaving the door open after every load. Tech and DIY expert Andy Baryer breaks down the manual gasket cleaning most people skip, plus the yard work that keeps hedges and trees healthy without overdoing it.   Trim It, Clean It, Keep It Growing Andy walks through the right way to trim hedges and trees so they thicken i...

Festival day drinking follows the same script no matter where in the country it happens, water and sunglasses in the morning, a Caesar by noon, full chaos by mid-afternoon. Living beside one of Calgary Stampede's biggest party tents makes that pattern impossible to miss for ten straight days.   The noise complaints from last year haven't repeated so far, with the tents staying under the sound...

Canada submarine defence spending just became real, with a deal that won't deliver a single vessel for eight to ten years. The Monday study panel breaks down why the government went with a German partner over South Korea or Japan, and what that says about the pace of Canada's NATO commitments.   Pipelines, Pancakes, and Who Got Left Out Before the defence talk, the conversation opens with wha...

Some jobs stick with you long enough to become writing a book of essays about. Alex Boyd worked a bookshop in the 1990s, the same kind of job George Orwell once described in the 1930s, and found that almost nothing about the customers had changed. His collection, eighteen essays deep, moves through a warehouse job that followed four years of studying English literature, a piece on faith and search...

Canadian car buying tariffs are reshaping which vehicles are actually worth the money this year, and the answer isn't always the one buyers expect. Automotive journalist Lorraine Sommerfeld lays out which cars are genuinely built here, how to check a VIN in under a minute, and what that means before you sign anything. Days-on-lot numbers reveal where the real leverage sits. Cadillacs are moving in...

Canada submarine deal analysis from a military expert lands on an uncomfortable question: why did Canada pass on the faster, cheaper option? Richard Shimooka breaks down how South Korea offered quicker delivery, more production capacity, and a stronger partnership pitch, and still lost out to a German and Norwegian bid that may not deliver a submarine until 2035.   The timing raises its own r...

Canada Day landed on a Wednesday and somehow half the country took the whole week off. Shane and Ryan are both at their desks, mildly annoyed, and very much in the mood to talk about summer grievances. The conversation starts with how far in advance you actually need to plan a long weekend, moves into the sounds of summer in a small town and downtown Calgary, and lands firmly on pedal pubs. Ryan h...

Human movement bias is more consistent than almost anyone expects, and Samantha Yammine is here to explain why the research is harder to dismiss than it looks. Studies in Spain and Japan, with children, adults, individuals, and crowds, all point to the same result: people veer left, and they can't explain why. Handedness doesn't account for it. Driving conventions don't account for it. Walls and s...

It's Canada Day weekend, give or take, and Shane and Ryan have three stories that will improve nothing about your life and yet somehow feel essential. First: the banana car. Twenty-three feet long, Ford F-150 engine, open top, eighty-five miles an hour, and a dedicated app so you always know where it's headed next. Second: Contemporary Calgary is currently housing a thousand-pound butter cowboy, k...

Steve Stebbing, film and entertainment critic, splits this week into two rounds. First, Canadian titles built for a long weekend at home. Then, what's actually worth the theatre seat right now. Three Canadian Films Worth Your Canada Day Undertone is the one Steve keeps coming back to: a Canadian horror film built on sound, picked up and finished by A24, following a paranormal podcast whose hosts s...

AI evaluation in business sounds straightforward until you try to do it. Mohit Rajhans says most companies are realizing the math doesn't work the way they thought it would. Mohit runs http://ThinkStart.ca and tracks where technology meets business reality. This conversation starts with a simple problem: there's no gas pump ticker on AI. No visible meter telling you what you're spending as you use...

Vacation budgeting is something Jessica Moorhouse thinks about professionally. She still went to Italy for three weeks, blew past her carefully built spreadsheet, and came home with zero regrets and a slightly rejigged budget. Jessica is a personal finance expert and the author of Everything But Money, and this conversation is as honest as it gets about what travel actually costs versus what we pl...

Dungeons and Dragons started in 1974 with no budget and a simple idea, and Ryan O'Donnell makes the case that it has been saving lives ever since. If you've never rolled a die, this is the episode that explains why people who have can't stop talking about it. For neurodivergent kids especially, the game builds social skills that don't come easily anywhere else. A CBC story on a D&D group and a...

Wealth Simple is expanding fast and Vincent Gregoire, Canada Research Chair in Finance and Technology at HEC Montreal, is paying close attention. Lower fees and less friction are good for investors. The new ability to borrow against your portfolio, including potentially your registered retirement savings, is where the conversation gets harder. The mechanics are straightforward: hold a thousand dol...

Canada Day 1974 means a federal election, a sitting prime minister fighting for his majority, and a American president about to become the first to resign the office. The past has a way of arriving right on time. This Throwback Thursday lands on the Canada Day long weekend and goes back fifty years to a moment that feels uncomfortably familiar: Canadians worried about mortgage rates, gas prices, f...

Canadian politics commentator Rob Breakenridge joins the Canada Day long weekend to make a distinction most people skip: the country is not the same thing as the people running it, and one can be worth celebrating while the other deserves serious scrutiny. A piece Rob wrote a year ago on Alberta's secrecy creep turns out to be more relevant now than when he wrote it. Delayed access to information...

Holistic nutritionist Alyssa B of nourished.ca makes the case that protein isn't a fitness trend — it's the foundation everything else depends on. Muscle protects bone. Bone protects you from the fall that changes everything. Getting enough protein is how you stay independent at seventy. Alyssa breaks down exactly how much protein you actually need, why front-loading it at breakfast changes...

Dungeons and Dragons for beginners sounds like a rulebook problem. Dean McKinnon says it's actually a playing pretend problem, and once you solve that one, everything else opens up. Dean is a professional Dungeon Master who runs eleven campaigns a week for kids on every continent, hosts a D&D summer camp, and takes bachelor parties through their first dragon encounter. He makes the case that D...

Flipping the script, going against the grain and breaking away from the norm. Dungeons and Dragons was crucial in setting up the counter culture of the 80s and 90s. And it started in 1974!   Guest: Ed Conroy Originally aired on   2026-07-02

Entertainment journalist Richard Crouse of http://richardcrouse.ca joins for two conversations that together cover everything worth knowing about pop culture right now — from Canada's biggest honour going to one of its most beloved exports, to a new comedy that Richard says will land on his best-of list by year's end. Michael J. Fox, Larry David, and a 21-Year-Old Who Saved the Show Michael...