Sam Roberts + Ethan Lou

House of Crouse

This week on The Richard Crouse Show Podcast we are joined by Sam Roberts who joins us via Zoom from his home in Montreal. His band, the aptly named Sam Roberts Band has been nominated for fourteen Juno Awards, they’ve won six, including Artist of the Year twice. They’ve been very busy since the world pressed pause back in March. The band’s song ‘We’re All in this Together’ became an anthem of sorts for various promos featuring frontline workers and Canadians alike. They put the finishing touches on their new album and played a part in each and every charitable opportunity they could to help artists and Canadians across the board. Sam Roberts Band have a new album called ‘All of Us’, the first in 4 years Then, Ethan Lou is a journalist whose work has appeared in in the Globe and Mail, the Guardian, the Toronto Star, the Walrus and the Washington Post. He has broken stories about the Canadian spy agency’s secret briefing to parliament, the snubbing of Sri Lanka by the country’s prime minister and the possible non-depiction of the future King Charles on Canadian bank notes. This year was supposed to see the publication of his first book, "Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West" but the pandemic pushed that release date into next year… but he still has a book in stores right now. It’s called Field Notes from a "Pandemic: A Journey Through a World Suspended" and was inspired by two articles he wrote for MacLeans magazine after a January visit with his ailing grandfather in Beijing allowed him to witness the very earliest stages of a COVID-19, a virus he says, will forever change the world as we know it. The book says that over decades, globalization has crafted a world painfully sensitive and susceptible to shocks such as this pandemic… and examines the virus's beginnings and how it spread and the unprecedented measures to contain it. He also looks at past pandemics in other crises and how they shaped the world--and has an argument for why this one's different. "Field Notes from a Pandemic: A Journey Through a World Suspended" is a timely look at how the virus has transformed the world.