The Herle Burly was created by Air Quotes Media with support from our presenting sponsor TELUS, as well as CN Rail.

Alright, this is a perfect episode for you curiouser and curiouser Herle Burly-ites. And it’s also a perfect episode for you anxiouser and anxiouser Herle Burly-ites. The 2 adjectives aren’t mutually exclusive, not at all.

In fact, when you consider what’s happening in the world, on almost a minute-by-minute basis – the shifting power dynamics, the destruction of alliances and trading relationships, the obliteration of norms – highly curious and massively anxiety-provoking are descriptors that go together pretty well.

We have the perfect guest to talk about it all. If you’ve been reading the great columnist, Andrew Coyne, either in The Globe and Mail or on Twitter, you know he’s been frank in his calling out of Trump and his alliance with Putin , as well as his observations about what’s at stake for Europe, Ukraine and
Canada. We’re going to dive into all of that today. He's always unfiltered, but for the next hour, consider this Andrew unleashed.

Thank you for joining us on #TheHerleBurly podcast. Please take a moment to give us a rating and review on iTunes, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Watch episodes of The Herle Burly via Air Quotes Media on YouTube.

The Herle Burly was created by Air Quotes Media with support from our presenting sponsor TELUS, as well as CN Rail.

Greetings, you curiouser and curiouser Herle Burly-ites. We have a great show teed up for you today. It’s not an American topic, because it’s broader than that (which we’ll get to in a minute) but if you watched Trump’s inauguration, you couldn’t help but notice all the “tech-bro billionaires” seated on the dais, in their places of honour, flanking the incoming President. Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Cook.

So, I want to have a conversation about this growing influence of big tech and business... on our government, our politics ... and how they view journalism and media today.

I couldn’t have a better guest to do that with: David Skok! David is the founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of the very excellent “The Logic”, Canada’s Business and Tech Newsroom. Prior to that, he was the associate editor and head of editorial strategy at The Toronto Star. And the managing editor and vice-president of digital for The Boston Globe.

And, there’s a Canadian context for all of this is: Tobi Lütke, founder of Shopify, is part of a group of tech entrepreneurs who have just launched a new platform called “Build Canada”, an effort to influence government policy on issues like immigration, healthcare and so on.

Thank you for joining us on #TheHerleBurly podcast. Please take a moment to give us a rating and review on iTunes, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Watch episodes of The Herle Burly via Air Quotes Media on YouTube.

The Herle Burly was created by Air Quotes Media with support from our presenting sponsor TELUS, as well as CN Rail, and TikTok Canada.

Greetings, you ever-curious Herle Burly-ites. I’m going to get right to it today, because we’ve got a topic that’s both pervasive and invasive, and I’ve wanted to explore it for a while... It’s Cybersecurity and Cyber Espionage Day on the podcast!

With me is a guest whose CV in the field is as long and tall as a grain silo in my hometown of Prelate, Saskatchewan. Ron Deibert is here.

He is a professor of political science the founder and director of the Citizen Lab – the world’s foremost digital watchdog – at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. The Citizen Lab focuses on research, development, as well as strategic policy and legal engagement at the intersection of information and communication technologies, human rights, and global security.

Ron’s been a principal investigator and contributing author to more than 160 reports covering cyber espionage, commercial spyware, Internet censorship and human rights. Those reports have over 25 front page exclusives in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times and other media outlets, and have been cited by policymakers and academics. And his brand-new book – “Chasing Shadows” – tells the story of Citizen Lab and the dozens of cyber espionage cases it’s exposed.

So, we’re going to find out more about Ron today, his backstory and what led him to the field. We’ll dive into some of the cases he’s been involved with. How governments and bad actors use these surveillance techniques, via our own computers and smartphones. And ask the question: how the hell can we be protected from all of this?

Thank you for joining us on #TheHerleBurly podcast. Please take a moment to give us a rating and review on iTunes, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Watch episodes of The Herle Burly via Air Quotes Media on YouTube.