If you follow Angela Han on LinkedIn (and you should!) you probably know why she's appearing in this episode: she's a life coach, podcaster, and lawyer, sure, but more importantly she's someone who speaks candidly and compellingly about the importance of curiosity, being compassionate towards yourself, asking better questions, feeling your feelings, and setting your life up so that you're doing the things that only you can do. Check out Angela's podcast, Fit to Practice, and find her at angela-han.com

Andrew Kirsch spent a decade as a spy with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) - he joins me to talk about his new book, I Was Never Here: My True Canadian Spy Story of Coffees, Code Names and Covert Operations in the Age of Terrorism. We discuss what motivated him to Google "How do I become a Canadian spy?" and then submit the application, how being a spy impacted his efforts on the dating scene, and how he looks back on his time working to keep Canada safe from threats to its security.

You can find I Was Never Here wherever books are sold, and at iwasneverhere.ca

How does a four-day work week sound? With no reduction in pay? Quinn Ross thought it sounded so good he implemented it at the law firm he runs. Oh, and he also increased the size of the team to 70 people. During a pandemic. We talk about how his commitment to the four-day work week is both driven by and enables taking care of people, and how you could say it all started with a tornado. Really.

Find out more about Quinn M. Ross and his work by checking out https://rossfirm.com/ 

Connect with Quinn on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/quinn-m-ross-81b81319/

A few weeks ago I was listening to a podcast hosted by my friend Jonathan Kay - he's a writer and journalist who has authored such insightful books as Your Move: What Board Games Can Teach Us About Life (co-written with Joan Moriarty) - and he offhandedly mentioned that he liked watches. "Hey", I thought, "I like watches too - maybe me and Jon could talk about the psychology of why middle-aged guys often suddenly find themselves deeply invested in new hobbies like watch collecting". Well, this episode is the record of that conversation. As you'll hear, we cover a lot of topics that, at best, only obliquely shed light on why we like watches... until suddenly everything becomes perfectly clear.

Erin Zipes wears a few different hats: she's VP Legal at Shopify, one of the country's biggest and most successful companies, and she's part of the Backbone Angels investing collective - but just naming those roles doesn't shed enough light on how thoughtful and insightful she is about how lawyers can be their best professional selves. We cover a lot of ground in this engaging discussion, from how she built the legal team at a company experiencing hypergrowth, to how she learned to be a lawyer who adds value rather than simply mitigating risk, to grappling with the sacred trust imparted in being responsible for managing people, to the message she would deliver to her younger self. 

Learn more about Backbone Angels here: https://www.backboneangels.com/

Dilemmas of Free Expression, a collection of papers edited and contributed to by Professor Emmett Macfarlane, presents a variety of perspectives examining ways to confront the challenging moral issues and policy problems inherent in controversies such as hate speech, far-right populism, campus speech debates, and censorship. In this wide-ranging discussion, we touch on matters including how the book came about, the extent to which those on university campuses face a chilling effect, and how we can productively think about, and potentially overcome, the challenges posed by expansive conceptions of free expression and competing values such as inclusion and harm reduction.

You can find the book Dilemmas of Free Expression here: https://utorontopress.com/9781487529307/dilemmas-of-free-expression/

If you've been to Toronto's Kensington Market, you're probably familiar with Good Egg: an eclectic and personable shop offering a curated collection of cookbooks and kitchenware. Mika Bereket is Good Egg's owner and we chat about how she discovers and chooses what to carry, how being located in Kensington has informed her approach to cooking and the store's identity, how cookbooks have evolved, the different national cultures of cookbooks, and the meditative pleasure she has discovered in expanding her efforts to include publishing cookbooks (including the books Blood and Limes). You can find out more about Good Egg at http://www.goodegg.ca/ and https://goodeggbooks.ca/

Chris Claremont was the writer of Uncanny X-Men from 1975 to 1991 - the longest tenure in history on a mainstream superhero comic - during which he turned it into the best-selling comic in the world, featuring iconic characters like Wolverine and Storm and lauded stories such as The Dark Phoenix Saga and Inferno. Claremont's work featured strong female characters, gripping interpersonal dramatics, and lengthy, complex and engrossing storylines that have influenced contemporary storytelling in a way that can be seen on TV and movie screens around the world. Professor Andrew Deman is studying Claremont's work in The Claremont Run - an academic project, funded by Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), exploring the impact of Claremont's UXM run on the representation of gender and sexuality in comics and on "long continuity" in modern entertainment. Andrew and I discuss how to think about Claremont's legacy, his collaboration with artists and editors, and how readers can best approach the Claremont Run. You can learn more about The Claremont Run at http://www.claremontrun.com and follow it on Twitter @ClaremontRun

It does what it says on the tin: to mark the 30th anniversary of the release of Guns N' Roses' "Use Your Illusion" albums, me and my friend Chris Ross argue about which tracks deserve attention, which album is better, whether they're any good at all, and where they rank among the historically rich profusion of rock and rap records released in 1991.

Actor, painter, photographer - Kate Kelton's an artist with a creative lineage stretching back generations, and a cv that ranges from movies like Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and a decade as the "Tic Tac Girl" to exhibitions in galleries from Los Angeles to New York to the UK. Her "Sentry" series of portraits of women who took public stands against Hollywood's endemic sexual harassment and assault garnered acclaim, and she continues to create with an emphatic aesthetic that is unmistakably her own. We talk about being an outsider and how that informs her creativity, the benefits of art school, being in dialogue with her mother's abstract expressionism, and how technology has empowered her to connect with her audience in a way that gives her total control.

For more about Kate and her art:

https://katekelton.com/

https://www.instagram.com/k8kelton/

https://twitter.com/katekelton

Details on the opening reception for the new "Perceive Me" exhibition featuring her work can be found here: Kristine Schomaker | Perceive Me at MOAH, Opening Reception