Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

Digital ownership in Canada is mostly a polite fiction. You buy the movie, the game, the scale, the heated seat, and what you actually get is permission to use it until the company changes its mind. This conversation pulls the thread on a trend that keeps expanding into new territory. GTA 6, the most anticipated video game release in years, ships in a physical box with no disc inside, just a piece...

It's Throwback Thursday and Shane, Ryan, and Noah dig into one of 1995's defining fast food moments: the arrival of stuffed crust pizza and the competitive war that produced it. The story starts in 1958, when two college students borrowed six hundred dollars from their mom, found a small brick building with room for exactly nine letters on the sign, and called it Pizza Hut because that was all tha...

It's Throwback Thursday and the inflation conversation gets personal fast: in 1995, a large pepperoni pizza and a two-litre Coke ran twelve to fifteen dollars as a combo deal. Ground beef was $1.99 a pound. A big box of cereal was three dollars. Gas was fifty-eight cents a litre in Vancouver. Shane and Ryan run those numbers against today's receipts, take listener texts on the definitive best pizz...

Food inflation in Canada is running hotter than every other G7 country, and food professor Sylvain Charlebois says the reasons are closer to home than most Canadians want to admit. Charlebois breaks down what's actually driving prices higher right now: salmon up 80% in a single month, a weakening Canadian dollar hitting food importers hard, and CFIA licensing delays that are costing the industry o...

Retail analyst Bruce Winder joins on Amazon Prime Day to break down what the numbers actually say about where Canadian consumers are right now and whether the deals are what they appear to be. Adobe is forecasting twenty-six billion dollars across four days of Prime Day sales, with day one already up five percent. But Bruce flags the problem: a fragile consumer shopping for essentials on a platfor...

Columnist and commentator Rob Breakenridge joins for two stories: what King Charles's voluntary tax disclosure actually reveals about royal finances, and what's happening to the Corb Lund coal petition in Alberta. King Charles paid eleven million pounds in income tax last year, voluntarily, continuing a practice the Queen began in 1993. Rob unpacks why the numbers raise more questions than they se...

Technology analyst Carmi Levy joins to talk about where restaurant automation is actually heading, and what gets lost when the entry-level job disappears from the equation. Robots are already in restaurants, following servers from kitchen to table, handling the physical load so staff can focus on service. Carmi is fine with that version. What concerns him is the version where the human is removed...

You miss Pizza Hut. You'd go back. You just wouldn't go back next week. Ryan O'Donnell thinks that's the whole problem, and that he's seen it before. The parallel he draws is not about food. It's about what convenience does to the things people love, and whether nostalgia can survive the moment it gets what it asks for. The stuffed crust pizza at the center of this throwback has its own origin sto...

Historian and Retro Ontario founder Ed Conroy joins to trace the stuffed crust pizza back to 1995, the celebrity fast food wars that produced it, and why the nostalgia for that era says more about being a kid than it does about the pizza. Pizza Hut brought back its dine-in restaurants after years of people posting throwback photos online and guaranteeing half a million views. Ed explains why it di...

Film critic Richard Crouse joins for two conversations covering the week's biggest entertainment stories and a pair of cocktails built for a superhero movie night. A Single Line of Code Nearly Killed Pixar Toy Story 5 just posted the second biggest animation opening of all time, but Richard Crouse traces the franchise back to a near-catastrophe: in 1998, one misfired Unix command deleted 90% of To...

That device Ishmael Kone was holding on the stretcher after breaking his leg at the FIFA tournament wasn't a vape pen. It's called the green whistle, and it's a medical pain tool that more people probably wish they'd had when things went sideways on a trampoline, a sea-doo, or a toenail that wasn't quite frozen. Green whistle pain relief is the jumping-off point for a conversation that gets person...

Conflict of interest in Canadian politics is back in the conversation, and Jamie Ellerton and John Tory Jr. are here to sort out what it means when the Prime Minister has been recused from 17 deliberations and nobody's saying exactly why. The Recusal Nobody's Explaining Mark Carney's conflict screen is public record, and Brookfield's ownership stake in Westinghouse puts nuclear energy squarely in...

Green whistle pain relief became the most searched phrase the moment Ishmael Kone waved from a stretcher mid-exit at the FIFA tournament, and Dr. Mitch Schulman, emergency room physician and chief medical correspondent for CTV, is here to explain exactly what that device is and why a healthy athlete on a soccer pitch is precisely the right person to use it. Methoxyflurane has been approved in Cana...

FIFA World Cup 2026 is putting Canada on the world stage, and the cost is real: BC alone is on the hook for up to $114 million after revenue offsets, and a two-hot-dog-two-pop combo just got discounted to $51.75. The numbers are what they are. What the numbers don't capture is a Japanese fan in front of a camera who says he cannot speak English, then says he is excited, then says Japan, and means...

Soviet espionage during the Cold War was not paranoia. It was infrastructure, and Lee Kuhnle lays out exactly what that looked like from the inside. Kim Philby was recruited as a journalist in the 1930s, embedded himself in British intelligence from the ground floor, and then personally proposed and was handed control of the department responsible for monitoring Soviet activity in the West. He ran...

Software engineer burnout is the reason your app looked different this morning and nobody on the team can explain why it changed. Greg Fish of Cyberpunk Survival Guide has spent years inside the industry watching companies ship work not because it solves a problem but because it lets someone say they're AI first at the next shareholder meeting. The programmers know it's pointless. They hate it. An...

FIFA World Cup Canada is handing brands a masterclass in constraint-as-opportunity, and Tony Chapman says most of them are missing it. The organizations spending millions on stadium naming rights are watching those names disappear for the duration of the tournament. The ones responding with imagination, covering their logos with shapes so recognizable they don't need words, are generating more con...

Sports dating Toronto is having a moment, and Tony Tedesco and Jen Kirsch are here to explain why major sporting events are doing something dating apps have never figured out. Sociologists call it collective effervescence: strangers sharing the same emotion at the same moment, high-fiving, hugging, talking to people they never would have approached on a Tuesday. The game is the opening line. Nobod...

Good News Tuesday runs on the idea that good news makes more good news. Tonight it also runs on swearing. Dr. Robin Hanley DeFoe's research says dropping a casual expletive, not at anyone, just into the void, can block pain receptors and reset the nervous system. A French tennis player proved it in a post-match interview. The Calgary mayor proved it on Twitter during Stampede. It fits. The actual...

Good News Tuesday goes coast to coast this week, and the stories range from eleven hundred pounds to a cup of tea at a library table. The throughline is the same: simple things done with intention tend to matter more than anyone expects. A Chilliwack-based fishing crew pulled an eleven-and-a-half-foot white sturgeon from the Fraser Valley, the biggest catch of their run. A grade nine student in Ed...

Myles Dininio is running nearly eight thousand kilometers across Canada to raise funds for CAMH, and when this conversation happened he was somewhere near Agawa Bay in northern Ontario, just past the halfway mark. He stopped running long enough to talk. Then he started again. The idea has lived in Myles's head for twenty-two years, since he rode his mountain bike across the country at eighteen and...

Less than twenty-four hours before Canada faced Switzerland, Kyle Horner called in from Windsor, Ontario, right on the American border, to talk about what this World Cup run is doing to a country that isn't used to winning at football. Kyle Horner, radio host at AM800 CKLW, makes the case that what's happening right now is bigger than the game. Windsor is uniquely placed to feel it. School across...

Calgary mayor Jeremy Farkas put out a video during Stampede and dropped some language that got attention. The swearing was the hook. The issue underneath it is real and a lot more specific than noise complaints. Ryan O'Donnell lives three minutes from the Cowboys tent and has something to say about what ten straight days of that actually looks like from the inside. Downtown Calgary during Stampede...

Entrepreneur and investor Arlene Dickinson makes the case that what Canadians need most right now isn't a new plan — it's the belief that they already have what it takes to execute one. Dickinson traces how curiosity became her operating system, why she chose to go more public — not less — as the noise around her got louder, and what it cost her to admit she's dealt with depressi...

Kris Abel, tech and entertainment commentator at krisabel.com, covers three things this week that actually earned the attention. The Sennheiser Accentum Clip launches July 23rd in Canada, before the US gets it, at $270. It clips around the ear instead of hoping your ear canal cooperates, combines broadcast-grade Sennheiser audio quality with situational awareness, and has a design borrowed from ea...