Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

Music industry commentator Eric Alper on the death of Clive Davis at 94 — the man whose roster reads like the history of recorded music and whose ear for a hit never stopped working, no matter the decade.

Davis didn't just sign artists. He picked the songs, the co-writers, the photographers, the look. He spotted Whitney Houston in a New York club before anyone knew her name and spent years shaping her before the public heard a note. He gave Bruce Springsteen a third album when almost no one else would. He signed Janis Joplin and Santana at Monterey. He...

Robinhood just closed its Canadian entry through the acquisition of two major crypto exchanges — and personal finance educator Dr. Preet Banerjee has some thoughts on what follows a platform with dozens of millions in SEC fines and a business model that profits from your trading activity, not your returns.

Dr. Preet Banerjee connects the dots between zero-commission trading, social media investing communities, meme stock mania, and the gamblification of markets — a term that captures something gamification alone doesn't. When sports betting went dark during lockdowns, people bet on stocks instead. That dynamic didn't disappear when the world reop...

Automotive columnist Lorraine Sommerfeld breaks down what your car already knows about you and why the politicians now panicking about Chinese vehicles are decades late to a problem that's been sitting in every driveway for years.

The harder question isn't whether Chinese-made cars belong at the US border. It's whether anyone is holding any carmaker accountable for what your vehicle records, sells, and keeps. Buicks, Volvos, Teslas — a significant portion are already built in China. The ban sounds clean. The reality isn't.

If you've ever plugged your phone into a rental car, hard-braked near a sc...

What do you say to a father you can't sit beside this Father's Day? This segment is one answer: a letter read live on air, tracing one lesson, just be one step better, through a rebuilt house, years of growing up, and the staples still being pulled out of old stairs.

It's also a pointer to the Wind Phone, a real-world tradition built around a phone booth where people go to speak to loved ones who are out of reach, including where to find one nearby for anyone whose Father's Day doesn't look like everyone else's.

Canada just slapped a ten percent tariff on canned vegetables and left the US off the list, and the reasoning behind that exclusion says more about how trade rules actually work than most headlines let on. The conversation runs from a Father's Day bike theft to the brutal on-field injury that ended Guatemala's World Cup match against Canada, before landing on the real test: a full list of bills passed by the House of Commons this year, checked one by one against what people are actually worried about in their own lives.

The bail bill, the sexualized...

A pub in Vancouver burns through two hundred extra kegs in one night because Australian fans showed up to celebrate a World Cup win, and somehow the bar staff still call them well behaved. That's the kind of story sitting in this Friday roundup, the ones that don't matter and still won't leave your head once you've heard them.

From there it's Washington's reflection pool, repainted instead of properly fixed, with hydrogen peroxide poured in to fight the algae underneath the new coat of paint. Then a video out of China of a kid getting kicked by...

Going into a fifth Toy Story movie with low expectations turns out to be a losing bet, and movie critic Steve Stebbing explains why this one earns its place in the franchise on emotional weight alone. The story leans into screens replacing physical toys in kids' imaginations, and a surprising side plot involving a lost shipment of action figures steals just as much attention as Buzz and Woody do this time around.

From there the picks turn darker, with a brooding retelling of Robin Hood's final days and a haunting Australian film about conversion therapy gone supernatural...

Show me your friends and a clinical psychologist can read the state of a relationship before either partner says a word. Dr. Laurie Betito breaks down why emotions and attitudes spread through a friend group the same way they do anywhere else, meaning constant exposure to friends who treat cheating or divorce as normal can quietly chip away at how someone views their own partnership over time.

A genuinely good friend looks different from that. Dr. Laurie outlines what separates healthy venting from corrosive complaining, and why a real friend supports a relationship instead of treating it...

Kids notice more than parents think, and new research from McGill University shows that when children see parental honesty and behaviour fall out of alignment, their moral reasoning shifts in measurable ways. Emilie Bélanger, PhD student at the School of Applied Child Psychology, brings findings that hit close to home for anyone who has ever faked a smile over a gift they hated with a child in the room.

The research zeroes in on inconsistent messages: what happens when a parent says one thing about honesty and then does another. It turns out children not only n...

Showing up every day feels like it should count for something, but master certified coach Rachel Levy explains why a manager hears that as nothing more than doing the job. The real lever in any raise conversation is impact, and most people have never learned how to talk about their own. Rachel breaks down why the story has to be told constantly, not saved for a once-a-year review nobody remembers the details of.

The fix starts with something almost nobody does: keeping a running log of what actually got accomplished, project by project, win by win. Rachel...

Everybody who built an MP3 library remembers the tools. Winamp, Napster, the slow crawl of dial-up giving way to broadband fast enough to actually steal music in bulk. This one walks through 1999, the year Napster broke open, and 2001, the year it got shut down for it, with torrents picking up right where it left off.

What replaced it didn't exactly clean up its act first. Spotify spent its early years grabbing tracks from torrents before streaming rights caught up to it, paid its fines, and turned into the giant it is now. Apple sold songs for a...

Music industry commentator Eric Alper on the two years that permanently rewired how the world hears music, and why the streaming subscription you pay today traces directly back to a college kid's side project in 1999.

Before Napster, hearing a specific song meant buying an entire album or catching it on the radio. Within months of launch, millions of people were trading files from their bedrooms, and the expectation of instant, free, on-demand music was set in place so firmly it has never reversed.

The story behind the labels' slow response, why Metallica and Dave Matthews...

Food professor Sylvain Charlebois on why Canadian grocery prices are so high, what a Lidl store in Cork, Ireland reveals about what we're actually paying for, and why Ottawa's new Competition Bureau food study is long overdue but unlikely to deliver easy answers.

Charlebois was calling in from inside a Lidl in Ireland when the conversation happened, pricing out a kilo of mozzarella at the equivalent of a dollar seventy-nine Canadian. The comparison to Canadian shelf prices is not subtle. What's behind the gap goes deeper than grocer margins.

From supply management to anti-competitive lease...

Twenty million users in year one. Eighty million at the peak. Then a lawsuit took Napster down in about six months. This one walks through how a platform built by Sean Fanning in June 1999 grew that fast and fell that hard.

Metallica chose to be the band everyone resented, betting that looking greedy in public was worth it if the industry finally took piracy seriously. Prince chose silence instead, walking away from digital music rather than negotiate with any of it. South Park noticed the gap between those two reactions and built a 2000 parody around it that...

Instead of cutting the gas tax, Alberta sent residents a flat hundred dollar cheque, and the math broke almost immediately. Journalist Rob Breakenridge explains why electric vehicle owners, who pay nothing at the pumps, are getting the exact same payout as everyone filling up every week, and why that detail is fuelling most of the backlash. The bigger question of who funds road repairs as gas vehicles disappear is only getting louder from here.

The conversation moves to social media age bans and the identification problem nobody's solved: if a platform has to verify age, someone has...

Twenty-five years after Napster got shut down, the company that replaced it built its own empire on a strikingly similar shortcut. Tech expert Carmi Levy breaks down how Napster's 80 million users forced the music industry's hand, and how Spotify quietly repeated the same playbook before settling into the legal giant it is today. It's the kind of pattern that shows up again every time a new technology threatens an old business model.

There's also a number worth knowing if a song has ever played on the radio: artists in Canada actually get paid per play, while American...

Falls aren't accidents. Aging and balance science now shows exactly why older adults are more vulnerable — and the answer is inside the brain. Dr. Samantha Yammine breaks down new research that mapped which brain regions control balance and what changes as we age.

Younger brains handle most balance automatically, without a second thought. Older brains have to consciously recruit the thinking parts of the brain for movements that once required no effort at all — slowing reaction time just enough to matter. It's not carelessness. It's neuroscience.

That shift reframes something most people misread entirely: the deli...

Writer and historian Ed Conroy on what Napster actually opened up for music fans beyond the free, and why the resentment and entitlement it created have never left the way we think about paying for music.

For Ed, the real revolution wasn't the price. It was Aladdin's cave: live recordings, unreleased albums, European EP editions, things a music obsessive could spend a lifetime hunting and never find. Napster made them available overnight, and once that happened there was no going back regardless of what the courts decided.

Within an hour of Napster going dark, something...

Film critic Richard Crouse on the auction that is about to put Luke Skywalker's lightsaber, Rocky's boots, the Wicked Witch's hat, and John Lennon's handwritten lyrics up for sale, and why the stories behind these objects are worth more than the objects themselves.

The Stuff That Actually Existed

Heritage Auctions' Entertainment Signature Auction runs July 13th through 17th, and the prices tell you everything about what people will pay for a piece of something real. The lightsaber from The Empire Strikes Back, cobbled together from scrap metal and old camera parts by a designer with...

The satanic panic of the 1980s turned rock music, Dungeons and Dragons, and Ouija boards into instruments of the devil. Tonight the target is He-Man, and the claim that a cartoon prince with a magic sword was secretly recruiting children into devil worship through action figures.

It sounds absurd. It was also believed by a lot of people. And the more interesting question is how much of that fear quietly shaped the way an entire generation still sees the world, hidden in the background of what feels like ordinary judgment.

The show also gets into...

Strategic communications veterans Jamie Ellerton and Lindsay Broadhead join to sort through the agreement to sign an agreement that may eventually become a peace deal in the Strait of Hormuz, and what any of it actually means for global energy markets, Canadian foreign policy, and the geopolitical leverage Iran just quietly secured for itself.

The ceasefire may be good news for oil markets in the short term. But closing the Strait of Hormuz turned out to be the most powerful card Iran held, and the world just watched them play it successfully. Jamie and Lindsay dig into...

Gas rewards expert Patrick Sojka of http://RewardsCanada.ca joins to map out which loyalty program and credit card combinations are actually worth the effort this summer, and why the system has gotten a lot more complicated than it used to be.

Stacking Scene Plus with Shell, linking CAA to Scotiabank, converting Petro Points to car washes instead of fuel: the savings are real, but only if you know where to look. Patrick breaks down the per-litre math on the combinations that deliver the most value, and names the ones where the effort outweighs the return.

The phrase old wives tale goes back to a play written in 1595. By 1611 the King James Bible was using it to dismiss the knowledge of older women. The irony is hard to miss, because the women being dismissed were often the ones carrying the most practical knowledge about health, childbirth, and community care.

Tonight runs through the greatest hits: junk food and appendicitis, gum stuck in your stomach for seven years, sitting too close to the TV, carrots fixing your eyesight. Most are false. Almost all of them are built on fear, which is what made them...

Nathan Radke of the Uncover Up Podcast is here to explain why a new He-Man movie is the perfect entry point into one of the most useful ideas you can carry into the news cycle right now.

In the 1980s, He-Man was accused of recruiting children into the occult. Experts testified. Documentaries were made. Cassette tapes were sold. What was actually happening is a much better story, and a much more revealing one about who benefits when a society decides it has found the thing to blame for everything going wrong. Radke connects the Satanic Panic to...

Cyberpunk Survival Guide author Greg Fish breaks down the economics behind AI token pricing and why the free ride is ending faster than most businesses realise.

Every AI request costs money, measured in tokens: the subdivisions of language a large language model processes on the way in and the way out. The more complex the request, the more tokens burned, and the bill lands whether the answer was useful or not. Fish explains why that pricing has always been intentionally hard to track, and why it was designed that way: get companies dependent on the infrastructure, then...

Relationship columnist Jen Kirsch and commentator Tony Tedesco join date night to unpack why the people closest to us have the most power to hurt us, and what that actually reveals about the patterns we carry into every relationship.

The disappointment you feel in love rarely has much to do with what just happened. Jen and Tony get into why our unspoken expectations set the stage for the arguments we think are about something else entirely, and why the things that bother us most about a partner tend to say more about us than about them.

Medication safety gets a closer look as emergency physician Dr. Mitch Shulman breaks down why the liquid you use to take your pills can change how much of the medication actually reaches your bloodstream, and what most people have never been told about it.

Grapefruit juice blocks an enzyme in your intestines that breaks down certain medications, meaning you can end up absorbing far more than your dose was designed to deliver. Milk binds to some antibiotics and reduces how well they work. Mineral water's alkalinity interferes with absorption in ways most product labels never warn you...

Good News Tuesday opens with small wins: a 15-year-old BMW diesel that needed nothing more than a new air filter, and a Calgary venue tour that put a real wedding date one step closer to real.

Then the show pivots to a question worth sitting with. The indie horror film Obsession has made near Star Wars money on a budget of under a hundred thousand dollars, built around a single premise: a wish made for love that turns into something unrecognisable. The One Wish Willow grants exactly what you ask for, and that is the p...

Good News Tuesday takes a turn toward the hypothetical this week, and the question is harder than it sounds: if you had one wish and no consequences, what would you actually wish for?

The prompt comes from Obsession, an indie horror film made for under a hundred thousand dollars that is outpacing recent Star Wars numbers at the box office. The premise is simple: a novelty shop, a stick called the One Wish Willow, and one wish that goes catastrophically wrong. Not because the willow is cursed, but because the wish itself was the problem.

Something changed in your Claude window this week and technology analyst Carmi Levy is here to tell you it was not an accident. It was a decision, made by a government that is not yours, about a tool you depend on.

The AI you were using had already been dialed back before it reached you. The full-strength version was quietly restricted to a handful of trusted governments and researchers under something called Project Glasswing because it was capable of breaking through existing cybersecurity protections. What you had was the safer version. Then the US government t...

If the idea of riding a motorcycle has been sitting in the back of your head, Lisa Best of CFAX 1070 is the person who will either push you toward it or give you a much more honest picture of what it actually takes.

Best has been riding for thirty-five years and teaching for nearly as long. She knows exactly what draws people to two wheels, what stops them from committing, and what separates the riders who stay safe from the ones who don't. What she has learned from decades on the road and in the c...

Bob Addison is back, and he's made some decisions that his wife knows about and his son does not yet.

From firing a golf ball bazooka at a fundraising tournament to watching Hockey Night in Canada die after ninety-plus years on the air, Bob's week has been eventful. The Tommy Hunter deep cut is free of charge.

Then Bob confesses he bought more FIFA tickets, this time with his own money, for Canada's Thursday game, and makes a case for why twenty-five hundred dollars is completely reasonable when your national team might win its first-ever...

Aaron Hagey-MacKay, investigative content creator behind The Goose Media, did something simple: he searched Alberta separatism on Twitter and checked where the accounts were from. Kenya. India. The United States. Fifteen minutes of looking.

What he found is less about separatism than about who profits when Canadians fight with each other, and how little it costs to get them started.

The conversation goes to foreign ownership of Alberta oil, the tech platforms blocking researcher access to their own data, and why engaging against disinformation feeds it just as much as agreeing with it does. The...

Tech expert Kris Abel shows up every week with the stories that make you stop and say wait, that's real? This week he brought three of them, and not one of them requires any imagination to top the last.

There is a reason people who follow technology closely never seem surprised by anything anymore. They have been paying attention to someone like Kris Abel, who tracks the stories before they become the thing everyone is talking about. This week that means sports, hospitals, and a forty-year-old franchise that just did something nobody thought to do u...

Canadian citizenship certificates are being recalled, and immigration lawyer Joel Sandaluk has a message for everyone panicking: surrendering the document does not surrender the status.

The harder question is how thousands of people became Canadian citizens without knowing it, why the government is asking for proof back instead of simply auditing the files, and what happens to the people who already built plans around that piece of paper.

Joel also has a different problem with citizenship by descent that has nothing to do with the recall, and it is worth hearing from someone who spends...

Summer gets easier when you know two things: how to take back your backyard and how to stop your phone from running your night. Andy Baryer, home and technology expert at Handy Andy Media, brings both in the same conversation, and neither fix costs much.

The Five-Dollar Mosquito Trap Nobody Told You About

A five-gallon bucket, grass clippings, water, and a couple of days is all it takes to build what Andy calls the bucket of doom. Female mosquitoes are drawn to the fermented water to lay their eggs, which is exactly the p...

PBR bull riding is unlike anything else you will sit in an arena and watch, and the reason has nothing to do with the spectacle. Shane Hewitt spent the weekend at the Professional Bull Riders event and came back with an observation that is harder to shake than the backflips and fireworks. In every other sport, there is someone to boo. A rival team, a bad call, an opponent to root against. Bull riding has none of that. One rider, eight seconds, and every single person in the building cheering for the same outcome.

The c...

Every move has a moment where something goes wrong that nobody planned for. The difference between a move you survive and one you are still recovering from three weeks later usually comes down to four things, and none of them are the ones that show up on a moving checklist.

If a move is coming, these are worth fifteen minutes of your time before it does.

Topics: apartment moving advice, moving mistakes Canada, DIY move versus movers, landlord accountability, moving day tips

Originally aired on 2026-06-15

Gas prices Canada-wide are dropping this week, and Dan McTeague, President of Canadians for Affordable Energy, is here with the regional breakdown and the reason not to get too comfortable. The ceasefire sent markets into relief mode, but sentiment and supply are two different things, and the global oil shortage that built up over the past several months is not going to be resolved by a signed memorandum in Switzerland.

McTeague maps the gap between what futures markets are pricing in and what a barrel of oil actually costs on the spot market right now, w...

Two political stories landed this week that are worth sitting with, and neither one of them is as simple as it first looks.

The Poll That Feels Like Good News Until You Do the Math

Fifty-five percent approval sounds strong until you remember it was sixty-three percent two months ago. That sixteen-point swing between Carney's rise and the Conservative recovery is the kind of number that changes how a room full of strategists sleeps at night. The panel breaks down what is driving it, what the NDP's quiet climb back to twelve percent m...