The Paul Wells Show

Paul Wells interviews Jill Lepore, Harvard historian, New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize winner about The Rise and the Fall of the Artificial State, her latest bestseller.
"Few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless,” Lepore writes, "than the rise of what could soon be “government without consent, even government without humans.”
But she's not here peddling despair. She believes a democracy of and for real people can make a comeback, if people only have faith in institutions and in themselves.
The Paul Wells Show is sponsored by Cameco and The Transition Accelerator. For more of Paul's writing, go to paulwells.substack.com

Toronto-born James Appathurai is one of the top civilians in the administration of NATO, the Western military alliance. As Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Innovation, Hybrid, and Cyber, he helps the alliance respond to a terrifying range of emerging threats, from new weapons to attacks that can hardly even be detected. In a rare interview from NATO headquarters in Brussels, Appathurai tells Paul Wells about all these threats, and about Canada's fast-changing role in NATO.

For more from Paul Wells, read paulwells.substack.com

Pulitzer-winning historian Anne Applebaum is releasing a paperback edition of her book Autocracy Inc., on the autocrats who are eroding democratic freedoms around the world. Her timing is impeccable: she says Donald Trump is moving the United States closer to autocracy. In this week's episode she discusses all the ways Trump is undermining democratic norms, and explains why his attempts to stop the Ukraine war are coming up short.

Author and Globe and Mail writer John Ibbitson joins Paul to discuss his book, The Duel: Diefenbaker, Pearson and the Making of Modern Canada. Ibbitson talks about how the decade-long showdown between these two Prime Ministers set the stage for the world we live in today, and why he believes Diefenbaker has been unfairly maligned in the historical record.
This interview was recorded live at the National Arts Centre. It first aired October 18th, 2023

The year since Wayne Eyre retired as Chief of Defence Staff has seen unprecedented change in Canada's national-security environment. Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced plans to boost Canada's defence-related spending from less than 2% of GDP to 5%. The United States has become an unsteady ally. What do those big changes mean for the future of Canada's military? An in-depth conversation.