War with Iran marks the first truly AI-native information environment in warfare where the human brain is both the target and the weapon, and the battlefield is your phone.

In this episode, producer and host Heather Bakken is joined by two experts in the field of cognitive and gray zone warfare.

Jennifer Irish is a principal at Pendulum Geopolitical Advisory Group and leader of the Information Integrity Practice. She's also a former Canadian diplomat and security executive.

Elizabeth Anderson is a former senior advisor to Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs and a fellow at the Montreal Institute for Global Security. Her research specializes in cognitive warfare and democratic resilience.

The 2026 threat environment has our adversaries working at machine speed against our human-paced institutions.

From deep fakes to cheap fakes and video cartoons, AI is industrializing information manipulation at warp speed. Identity can be cloned, platforms can be mimicked and content can be mass-produced.

Have we crossed a threshold where we cannot guarantee what truth is anymore?

Tune in to find out.

This episode host Heather Bakken is joined by Pendulum colleagues Jennifer Irish and Yaroslav Baran to discuss how the seemingly unplanned aspects of U.S. strategy in Iran are actually playing out geopolitically and what impact it has on Canada.

The trio unpacks what the war reveals about great power dynamics and the consequences that reach well beyond the Strait of Hormuz.

Irish argues this conflict is an example of what warfare is going to become in the hybrid warfare space, which involves multiple fronts, and the implications for Canada. She notes the yawning gap in cognitive warfare readiness as Iran deploys AI-generated disinformation at unprecedented scale.

Baran raises the stakes by arguing Canada needs to get serious about energy sovereignty and that while Trump keeps score on who shows up to help and who doesn't, the NATO military alliance underpinning Canadian security for 76 years may be more fragile than Ottawa wants to admit.

It`s time to make hard calls on Arctic sovereignty, energy infrastructure, and the information integrity that holds a democracy together.

This week marks four years since the most recent unprovoked attack on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Ukrainians have been at war for 12 years and have spent the last four shedding blood, tears, and the stability they once enjoyed to defend the freedoms and values of their democracy. It was – and continues to be – a cruel and unjustified assault on a sovereign country. It goes against international law and defies human decency.

This episode Pendulum host and co-founding partner, Heather Bakken, is joined by Valeriy Kostyuk, Executive Director of the Canada-Ukraine Foundation, and Pendulum co-founding partner, Yaroslav Baran.

They discuss how Canadians have opened their hearts and their wallets to provide humanitarian assistance for Ukrainians while Putin pummels civilian infrastructure. Hear about what's at stake, who is impacted, and why it's in Canada's interest to prevent Moscow from winning its war of ethnocide.

Closing out season one on The Swing, Pendulum`s Yaroslav Baran and Heather Bakken discuss the political year that was: who`s up and who`s down, communications wins and losses, and what actually got done.

The Liberals made the biggest comeback in Canada`s electoral history and the new prime minister rode the momentum through 2025. But electoral results aren't the only things that changed; Canadians stopped saying sorry and unapologetically rallied around the flag.

Prime Minister Carney governed with an executive temperament, launched transformational institutions, reshaped defence spending, and projected steady competence on the world stage. Yet beneath it all is a razor-thin minority Parliament encumbered by legislative paralysis that set in far earlier than expected.

The big question heading into 2026: can decisive leadership survive the grind of minority rule, economic headwinds, and an unforgiving electoral clock?

On this episode of The Swing, we dive into one of the most consequential, and least understood, aspects of the war in Ukraine: Russia’s frozen state assets. Roughly $300B USD were seized by the G7 and EU in 2022 and have been sitting in financial deep-freeze.

The Belgian securities depository, Euroclear, manages 90% of these frozen assets — including Canada’s share. What happens next could decide whether this money is used to help Ukraine, or flows back into Vladimir Putin’s war chest.

Joining Pendulum's Heather Bakken and Yaroslav Baran is Aaron Gasch Burnett, a security analyst at the European Resilience Initiative Centre based in Berlin.

Aaron walks us through the geopolitics, legal battles, European financial mechanisms, and the role Canada can play through double-frozen assets. Yaroslav breaks down the Canadian political timing, the risks, and why this debate may be the most important financial front of the war.

How do you clear a path for peace using a blueprint for capitulation?

In this episode of The Swing, Pendulum's Heather Bakken, Yaroslav Baran and Balkan Devlen (also an internationally renowned geopolitical strategist) dissect the most contentious development in the Ukraine war since the full-scale invasion began: a leaked 28-point so-called “peace plan” reportedly penned in secret by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, U.S. President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Kremlin-linked businessman Kirill Dmitriev. Noticeably absent in the drafting of the plan — anyone from sovereign Ukraine.

What does “peace” actually mean in international affairs with a global order struggling to define the difference between ending a war and legitimizing invasion?

Baran and Devlen break down the plan’s territorial concessions, its hollowed-out security guarantees reminiscent of the failed Budapest Memorandum, and the strategic imbalance it would impose by restricting Ukraine’s armed forces while leaving Russia’s untouched.

They also explore why Vladimir Putin might be entertaining talks at all, from mounting infrastructure losses under Ukrainian drone strikes to domestic strains Russians rarely see reported.

One thing they all agree on is the current approach echoes the appeasement logic of the Munich Agreement with an outcome that nobody wants.

Pendulum's Heather Bakken and Yaroslav Baran break down the narrow but decisive passage of Canada’s federal budget — a vote that hinged on the Green Party's unexpected support for the Liberals and the abstentions of some opposition MPs.

Baran explains the political theatre and narrows in on parliamentary procedure to debunk speculation about the Speaker’s role with a clear walk-through of the Denison rule, which would have forced a vote against the budget had the numbers deadlocked.

Zooming back out they provide a political assessment on why no party truly wanted an election: Liberals seeking stability while sitting just shy of a majority, Conservatives wrestling with internal turbulence and slipping momentum, the Bloc seeing low-risk upside, and the NDP effectively immobilized without a permanent leader.

With the budget through the final confidence vote, Baran and Bakken outline what comes next: budget-implementation legislation, major defence and infrastructure spending, and a political landscape that, for now, settles into a fragile, functional calm ...until the Pendulum swings again.

Canada's long awaited budget will be tabled on November 4th. It's the first one in 18 months and will lay out the new Carney government's agenda from a dollars and cents perspective.

What are the signals it will send to the markets? How does the process work? And what are the politics at play?

Yaroslav and Heather discuss the play-by-play process, estimates, ways and means vote, implementation bills, and more.

Sound complicated?

Hear from the guy (aka Yaroslav) who used to help whip the vote on The Hill and can nerd out in plain language to help you understand how it all works.

Headline spoiler: despite all the hoopla about a Christmas election, voters will probably be spared another trip to the polls by a few too many bathroom breaks. At least for now.