It’s been a whirlwind news cycle here in Canada, in the wake of President Donald Trump imposing 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods . Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has now announced that these tariffs are on hold for 30 days, as Canada implements its 1.3-billion-dollar border strategy, aimed at stopping the flow of fentanyl. The American tariffs have come as a surprise for many in this country. But our guest on today’s program says they have, in fact, been in the making for some time. Jeff Rubi...
Feb 05, 2025•27 min
The Liberal leadership race is heating up, and former deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland has now thrown her hat in the ring. Freeland is a powerful figure in Canadian politics, a former journalist who went on to become one of the Prime Minister’s most loyal cabinet members — until her surprise resignation in December. Today on the program, as Freeland campaigns to win the Liberal leadership, and thus the top job in the country, we take a closer look at her life and its ...
Jan 29, 2025•42 min
This week on the Lean Out podcast, we continue our coverage of a chaotic time in Canadian politics. As many of you know, in the wake of Justin Trudeau’s resignation , the Prime Minister asked our Governor General to prorogue Parliament until March 24, as the Liberal Party conducts its leadership race. This move has sparked a legal challenge , and over the weekend a judge agreed to expediate the court’s hearing . Our guest on the program today is a Canadian lawyer and bestselling author who has i...
Jan 22, 2025•20 min
If you follow Canadian politics — and even if you don’t — you probably know that we are in a historic moment in this country. Just over a week ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that he would be resigning as leader of the Liberal Party and intended to step down as prime minister as soon as a new leader was in place. Parliament is now prorogued until March 24, at a time of heightened tensions with the United States. Our guest on the podcast today is a veteran Canadian journalist. She re...
Jan 15, 2025•47 min
Lean Out is back from our holiday break, and we are resuming our interview series on the challenges facing modern men. Our guest on the program this week is someone we've been wanting to speak to for some time. He’s a former martial arts fighter who has spoken to tens of thousands of men — and he has some insights to share on how to forge healthier ideals for masculinity. Richie Hardcore is a retired Muay Thai champion in New Zealand. He’s a coach, and an educator and public speaker on masculini...
Jan 08, 2025•53 min
New Year’s Day is often a day of quiet contemplation. A day to take stock of our lives, to review the past year and to look toward the one to come. As we settle in with our coffees, we wanted to bring you an encore presentation of one most powerful interviews of the year — with a war reporter who spent his adult life on the frontlines, until one day the frontlines came for him. Today on the program: A near-death experience and what it reveals about the sacredness of life. Sebastian Junger is an ...
Jan 01, 2025•41 min
No podcast series on the challenges facing modern men is complete without hearing from my guest on today’s program. He’s a policy scholar who has been ringing the alarm on the social, economic, and health crises facing men for years now — so much so that he recently founded a national research organization dedicated to tackling these issues. Today on Lean Out, we’re pleased to bring you an encore presentation of our 2022 conversation about his ground-breaking book. Richard V. Reeves is the found...
Dec 18, 2024•37 min
This week at Lean Out, we continue our podcast series on the challenges facing modern men, from declining educational achievement to rising suicides and overdoses. We’re happy to bring you an encore presentation of an interview from 2022, with a political economist who says prime, working age men in America are facing Great Depression-era levels of joblessness. The collapse of work — today on Lean Out. Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise...
Dec 11, 2024•35 min
Today at Lean Out, we continue our series on the challenges facing modern men. My guest on the program has done pioneering work on the increasing gender gap in American society and politics. He’s thought a lot about the dangers of men and women growing apart — and about how we might come together. Daniel Cox is director of the Survey Center on American Life . He is also a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute. His forthcoming book is titled Uncoupled , ...
Dec 04, 2024•30 min
The American election highlighted ongoing tensions between men and women — but election commentary often failed to acknowledge the crises that modern men are facing, from declining educational achievement and employment to increased suicides, overdoses, and loneliness. Today at Lean Out, we kick off a series exploring these issues, with a guest who’s recently published a powerful essay highlighting why we need to reconsider how we think and talk about men. Zaid Jilani is the freelance American j...
Nov 27, 2024•30 min
With Donald Trump winning the presidency, the popular vote, the Senate, and the House, in what The New York Times has described as a “crushing electoral rebuke” of the Democrats, there is a lot of soul-searching going on in the party. Our guest on the program today tried to warn the Democrats in his previous book . He says the progressive moment in American politics is now over — and the Democrats are going to have to face that fact if they want to win again. Ruy Teixeira is a cofounder and poli...
Nov 22, 2024•48 min
In 2016, the election of Donald Trump took the mainstream media by surprise, with many in the press struggling to understand his rise to power and the factors driving it. Now, in the wake of Donald Trump’s decisive win, here we are again. My guest on today’s program suspected we might be missing the story, and just days before the election, published a brilliant podcast episode unpacking the comeback of Donald Trump. Andy Mills is an award-winning American reporter and podcast producer, and co-c...
Nov 20, 2024•1 hr 18 min
Since last week’s election win for Donald Trump, we are seeing a renewed sense of scorn for Republican voters in parts of the mainstream media. The Guardian’s Rebecca Solnit, for example, writes in her column that “our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do.” My guest on today’s program doesn’t see it that way. She’s a lefty Democrat who moved from Park Slope, Brooklyn, to Trump country — and she writes that the gift of living in a rural county is that “I keep finding reaso...
Nov 13, 2024•30 min
If you’re living in Canada and you have a cell phone plan, or a bank account, or have taken a flight recently, or struggle to afford groceries, you already know how expensive and dysfunctional the country has gotten for consumers. Our guests on the podcast today have written a book about the rise of corporate monopolies (and duopolies and oligopolies) — and, as they write, this market concentration “goes well beyond the usual suspects.” Vass Bednar is the executive director of McMaster Universit...
Nov 06, 2024•36 min
What makes us fat? It’s a contentious debate in the world of health science. Is obesity caused by energy imbalance — consuming too many calories — as has long been conventional thought? Or is obesity caused by the effects of carbohydrates on insulin? My guest on today’s program attended an invite-only global gathering of obesity experts. The resulting paper in Nature Metabolism , co-authored with fifteen other researchers and published this fall, compares the two competing hypotheses side-by-sid...
Oct 30, 2024•39 min
This past summer was the summer of the divorce memoir . Books glamorizing marital breakdown were everywhere, depicting the act of walking away from a marriage as radical self-empowerment. But I could not find a single memoir about the opposite perspective: staying and working things out and rediscovering love. My guest on today’s program has written the book I’ve been wanting to read, and he’s here to tell us how a dead marriage can live again. Harrison Scott Key is an American writer. His lates...
Oct 23, 2024•42 min
There has been a story on the progressive left for some time now that individual actions are largely futile. That for society to change, we must instead focus on systems. Our guest on the program today belongs to a generation that was raised on this message. But now she’s written a powerful piece about the costs that come with such a worldview — and how volunteering in her community helped her to rethink it. Rachel Cohen is a reporter for vox.com, covering American social policy. Her essay is “ ...
Oct 16, 2024•23 min
The period often referred to as The Great Awokening is winding down now, and we’re starting to get a better understanding of what happened. Our guest on today’s program argues that we have seen these kinds of social justice-styled movements before in American history — and that they are in fact driven by, as he puts it, “frustrated erstwhile elites condemning the social order that failed them and jockeying to secure the position they feel they deserve.” Musa al-Gharbi is an American sociologist ...
Oct 09, 2024•52 min
Statistics Canada released new data last week, showing that in 2023, the fertility rate in Canada reached a record low — just 1.26 births per woman — making us one of the “lowest low” fertility countries in the world. It’s true that material conditions, like the housing crisis, have play a role. But there is something else going on, all across the West. Our guest on today’s program has published a fascinating book about that something else: a profound ambivalence towards childbearing. Anastasia ...
Oct 02, 2024•39 min
The activist left in America has been very visible in recent years, often dominating the public conversation online and in prominent institutions. But our guest on today’s program says that the modern left is curious in that it is “largely leaderless” — that no one in particular is “speaking directly for it, or to it” — making this “a singular moment” in the country’s history. Ross Barkan is an American journalist, novelist, and Substacker , and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazi...
Sep 25, 2024•46 min
This week saw the arrest of an armed man in Florida, in the wake of an apparent assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump — the second in roughly two months. Our guest on the program today is a reporter who’s been covering the rise of political extremism in America for The Washington Post. In this episode, which was taped in late August, she shares the insights she gained reporting on a man who went to prison for uttering threats against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. R...
Sep 18, 2024•27 min
The social and economic crises that we are experiencing in Canada are frequent topics of conversation in this country, with many Canadians expressing the belief that we have seen a decline in quality of life. Our guest on the program this week is a former foreign policy advisor to Justin Trudeau’s government — but today he’s on the show to talk domestic policy, and what he sees as “a betrayal of the Canadian dream.” Omer Aziz is a former Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and a contributing ...
Sep 11, 2024•23 min
One of the big stories of this summer was immigration. Canada has had a decades-long, bipartisan, pro-immigration consensus — but in recent months, that has collapsed. And one of the most contentious parts of our system is now the Temporary Foreign Worker program, which was deregulated during 2022 in the midst of pandemic labour shortages. Our guest on the program today was just in Halifax at the Prime Minister’s cabinet retreat, making the case that the low-wage, non-agriculture stream of this ...
Sep 04, 2024•25 min
The news cycle is currently dominated by the American presidential election — but there’s also a lot going on here in Canada. Our guest on the program today is a veteran journalist and the publisher of a reporter-owned and operated outlet in Ottawa. As you’ll hear, there’s been no shortage of consequential stories this summer. Tara is away this week, but she asked podcaster Aaron Pete to bring you this interview with Holly Doan, the publisher of Blacklock’s Reporter . You can find Tara Henley on...
Aug 28, 2024•34 min
One of the bright spots in the Canadian media landscape is the emergence of a new generation of digital creators, who are filling the gaps in coverage in innovative ways. My guest on the program today is at the forefront of this movement, helming a thoughtful, nuanced current affairs podcast out of British Columbia. He will be guest hosting this podcast next week, and I’m thrilled to get to introduce him to you today. Aaron Pete is a Councillor for the Chawathil First Nation, and the host of the...
Aug 21, 2024•36 min
With J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, the economic populism that’s ascendent in the Republican Party is in the spotlight. To understand this set of policy concerns, there is no better person to speak to than my guest on today’s program, who has been influential in driving this agenda — and in challenging the economic orthodoxy on the right. Oren Cass is the founder and chief economist of American Compass, and the author of The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in Americ...
Aug 14, 2024•31 min
J.D. Vance was once a liberal media darling. But in recent weeks, since Donald Trump selected him as his running mate, the Ohio senator has been the subject of almost wall-to-wall negative coverage — in both the liberal press, and on left-leaning social media. But our guest on today’s program says that Vance is a complex figure, and one we should take a closer look at. Zaid Jilani is the freelance American journalist behind the Substack newsletter The American Saga . His recent essay for Compact...
Aug 07, 2024•22 min
Given the state of our politics right now, it is easy to feel hopeless. But our guest on this week’s program says things are not as bleak as they seem, that people want to heal our deep societal divisions, and that the answer to bridging these divides lies in rebuilding civic life — one conversation at a time. John Wood, Jr. is a former nominee for congress, a columnist for USA Today, and a national ambassador for Braver Angels . Its new campaign is called American Hope . You can find Tara Henle...
Jul 31, 2024•34 min
America is in the grips of polarization, and the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump has underlined the potential for an escalation in political violence. It has never been more important for the media to complicate dominant narratives and resist oversimplification. Today, a journalist I admire returns to the program to model what that looks like in practice, bringing us a nuanced story about tensions within the conservative movement over school vouchers . Alec MacGillis is an award-win...
Jul 24, 2024•17 min
This summer, the glamorization of divorce has reached its apex. There are divorce rings , divorce parties , divorce albums , and divorce memoirs — all portraying the act of walking away from a marriage as inherently empowering for women. But our guest on today’s program argues that so much of the current divorce discourse is just narcissism disguised as feminism. Kat Rosenfield is an American novelist, cultural critic, and podcaster – and a columnist for The Free Press. Today, we discuss her ess...
Jul 17, 2024•22 min
