Shows
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦🥌 The Unburdened Heart: What a Curling Stone Taught Me About Letting GoSend a text📖 Read the companion articleLet me tell you something about systems.Systems — whether they govern corporations, nations, or the inner architecture of an elite athlete’s mind — tend to demand perfection in exchange for belonging. They offer a transaction: give us everything, and we will give you a place at the table. Jennifer Jones, Canadian curling legend and the subject of our latest deep dive on Heliox, understood this transaction from childhood. She accepted it. She even mastered it. And then, after decades of being one of the most deco...
2026-02-1931 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦Flowers, Pottery And The Ancient History of MathematicsSend a textRead the companion article on Substack What can 8,000-year-old pottery tell us about human intelligence, social justice, and the origins of beauty? In this episode of Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy, we investigate the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia (6200-5500 BC), whose exquisitely painted vessels hide a stunning secret: systematic mathematical knowledge embedded in flower petals.Through careful archaeological analysis, we discover how these ancient artists consistently used geometric sequences—4, 8, 16, 32, 64 petals—reflecting the same mathematical thinking needed to divide harvests fairly in complex village societies. This deep dive into "...
2026-01-2432 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦How Babies Rewire Both Parents' BrainsSend a text 📖 Read the companion essayWhat if becoming a parent changes you at the most fundamental level—your brain structure, hormonal chemistry, and neural connectivity?This episode of Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy explores the profound neuroscience of parenting. We unpack how fathers' brains adapt through hands-on experience, why mothers undergo a developmental stage as transformative as adolescence, and how decades of active parenting build cognitive reserve that protects brain health into late life.From testosterone drops and oxytocin surges to amygdala rewiring and gray matter optimization, the evidence reveal...
2025-12-0315 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦The Geometry of Forgetting: What Mathematics Reveals About the Limits of Human PerceptionSend a text📖 Read the companion essay What if your memories aren't stored files, but evolving geometric shapes in constant motion? This week, we're diving into a revolutionary kinetic model that treats memory as a dynamic system governed by mathematical forces—and reveals a stunning limit to human perception.We explore how every memory exists in tension between two opposing forces: focusing (which sharpens concepts through learning) and forgetting (which generalizes them through absence). This isn't just neuroscience—it's geometry.The breakthrough? Memory capacity doesn't increase indefinitely with com...
2025-11-2113 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦The Neurobiology of Trust: What Your Boss's Testosterone Is Doing to Your BrainSend a text 📖 Read the companion essay: https://helioxpodcast.substack.com/What if toxic leadership isn't just bad management—it's causing actual neurological damage?In this episode of Heliox, we go beyond the surface-level discussions of workplace culture to examine the actual neuroscience of trust. This isn't about feel-good platitudes. It's about oxytocin, dopamine, testosterone, and the brain circuits that determine whether your team thrives or merely survives.We explore:Why humans uniquely evolved to trust strangers (and what that means for modern organizations)The oxytocin-dopamine feedback loop that makes collab...
2025-11-0913 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦👻 Halloween Ghosts and Cold Ocean Therapy ( Bonus Episode ) 🎶Send us a textPlease see our corresponding Substack"Between, between" ( a Halloween-appropriate song ) 3:32An introspective pop anthem of changes in our world and our perception at this time of year, vanquished by a cold ocean swimOn CBC Early Edition in Vancouver, Stephen Quinn lost his voice this morning… which got me thinking about the origins of Halloween and the exceptions we have of it. Having recently watched “Ingress” by Rachel Noll James I realized How the brain maintains coherence: the present writes the past in real time. Grief res...
2025-10-3117 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦Heliox: Evidence, Empathy, and the Human Tapestry: Season 4 ReviewSend a textsee the corresponding Substack episodeThe information age promised that more knowledge would make us smarter. Instead, it's made us anxious, overwhelmed, and paradoxically less informed about what matters.I've been thinking about this problem a lot lately, especially after diving deep into the architecture of a podcast called Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy. What I found wasn't just another show trying to make complex topics digestible—it was a masterclass in how to build frameworks for understanding that can cut through the noise.Podcast analysis, evidence-based empathy, syste...
2025-07-1522 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦The Physics of Ancient WeaponrySend a textAncient weapon engineers—working without advanced mathematics, computers, or even basic calculus—created devices so effective they changed the course of history and embodied physical principles we still use today. They didn't need venture capital or TED talks. They needed results.Listen to this fascinating Heliox podcast episode on ancient siege weapons, and you immediately notice something striking: engineers from Greece and Rome were applying sophisticated physics principles centuries before Newton or Leibniz formalized them.They understood energy conversion without differential equations. They grasped leverage, force multiplication, and trajectory optimization thro...
2025-05-1613 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦Climate Change's Silent Threat: The Fungal AwakeningSend a textsee the episode substack for more detailWe're witnessing the quiet emergence of a global threat that could redefine public health in the coming decades. While the world fixates on flashy disaster headlines and political theater, a more insidious danger is evolving in the shadows of our warming planet—pathogenic fungi that are adapting to higher temperatures, including our body temperature, with alarming speed.The recent Heliox podcast deep dive into fungal pathogens and climate change revealed a reality that should disturb us all: the environmental shifts we've set in mo...
2025-04-2729 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦The Languages We Speak Are Programming Our MindsSend a textGo deeper with the substack for this episodeThe words we speak are more than just vehicles for communication — they're the hidden architecture of our thoughts.Except most of us never realize it.When you look at how different languages handle time, possibility, and events, you're not just studying grammar. You're examining the fundamental ways our brains process reality itself. The latest episode of Heliox dives deep into concepts like tense, aspect, and modality — terms that sound technical but actually reveal how language silently shapes our cognitive landscape.
2025-04-2329 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦The Heliox Principle: Season Three Review - Where Evidence Meets Empathy in a Post-Truth WorldSend a textSee episode substack for categories, indexes, essay, mind maps & more.Heliox Season Three Review: Evidence Meets Empathy in a World of Big IdeasIn this deep dive into Season Three of Heliox, we crack open the vault on 73 episodes that tackle everything from quantum biology to witch hunts to the collapse of our emotional connections. You're not getting watered-down takes here—this is concentrated intellectual nutrition without the academic pretension.The hosts dissect how Heliox uses four recurring frameworks—boundary dissolution, adaptive complexity, embodied knowledge, and quan...
2025-04-1915 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦🧘 Beyond Words: Thought, Consciousness, and Buddhist InsightSend a textSee episode substack to go deeper Please Subscribe, Follow & LikeHere's something that should shake you: every single thing you think you know about the world is filtered through language that predetermines what you can perceive.That's not new age philosophy or postmodern ramblings. It's a conclusion reached by both 2,500-year-old Buddhist philosophers and modern linguistic revolutionaries alike. And it has profound implications for how we navigate reality.The recent Heliox podcast episode exploring early Buddhist understandings of language reveals something stunning: these ancient thinkers had a sophisticated theory of l...
2025-04-1520 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦The Iron Cage: How COVID Locks Away A Vital Resource and Creates Long-HaulersSend a textsee our related substack for more resourcesIn this eye-opening episode of Heliox, we dive deep into groundbreaking research that may finally explain why some COVID survivors never fully recover. A landmark study published in Nature Immunology followed 214 individuals for a full year after infection, uncovering a previously overlooked connection between long COVID and iron dysregulation. When COVID-19 triggers inflammation, it sets off a chain reaction that traps iron in certain immune cells while depriving others, essentially creating a metabolic hostage situation inside your body. This iron imbalance persists long after the...
2025-04-0924 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦🧠 The Illusion of Choice: How Nudges Shape Our Decisions Without Us NoticingSend a textsee our substack for additional episode resourcesYou make decisions every day—what to eat, how to save money, whether to click that “accept cookies” button without thinking. But what if those choices aren’t as free as you think?In this episode of Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy, we unravel the science of nudges—those subtle, often invisible forces shaping our behaviour. From hospitals reducing medical errors to marketers influencing what you buy, behavioural science is everywhere. But when does a helpful nudge become a manipulative shove? And are we really...
2025-04-0525 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦⏳ Beyond the Paradox: Why Time Travel May Not Break the Universe After AllSend a textmore resources for this episode on substackTime travel has captivated our imagination for generations, but what if it's more than just science fiction? In this mind-bending episode of Heliox, we dive deep into groundbreaking research by physicists Tobar and Costa that suggests paradox-free time travel might be possible. Their work on "Reversible Dynamics with Closed Time-Like Curves" introduces the revolutionary concept of process functions—essentially rulebooks for how information could traverse time without creating those pesky grandfather paradoxes that have long been the stumbling block for time travel theories.Fr...
2025-04-0117 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦Why Our Brains Are Wired for Narrative: The Biological Imperative of StorytellingSend a textWe're drowning in information but starving for meaning. Every day, we're bombarded with approximately 34GB of data—equivalent to watching 34 hours of Netflix in a single day. Yet how much of this information actually sticks? How much of it changes us in any meaningful way? Almost none of it. Unless, of course, it comes wrapped in a story.This isn't just a marketing trick or a quirk of human psychology. It's a survival mechanism as old as our species itself. As I discovered while listening to a recent episode of the Heliox po...
2025-03-2515 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦🧘 Quiet couples: Alone time togetherSend a textenjoy our substack for this episodeIn "Quiet Couples: The Power of Shared Silence," Heliox examines the unspoken language that shapes our most intimate relationships. The episode unpacks groundbreaking research on what our silences really mean, revealing four distinct types that can either strengthen or undermine connection.While we obsess over the words we exchange with partners, those wordless moments often carry more weight than we realize. This episode dissects the science behind comfortable silences that deepen bonds and uncomfortable ones that create distance. Using self-determination theory as a framework...
2025-03-2418 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦Beyond Rules: Gilligan, Kohlberg, and the Morality of CareSend a textIn a world increasingly driven by algorithms, efficiency metrics, and universal protocols, we're witnessing a profound crisis of connection. Our institutions champion impartiality and standardization while our souls crave recognition, empathy, and care. This tension isn't just a modern dilemma—it's a philosophical battleground that's been raging for decades.A recent episode of Heliox dives deep into Lawrence A. Blum's 1988 analysis of Carol Gilligan and Lawrence Kohlberg's competing visions of morality. While this might sound like abstract academic territory, the implications couldn't be more relevant to our daily lives and the social fr...
2025-03-2318 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦🌍 The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing: How Market Thinking Conquered Our WorldSend a textGo deeper with additional material on the substack related to this episode. In this provocative episode of Heliox, we dissect Mark Carney's groundbreaking work on how our obsession with market values is eroding our humanity. We explore the dangerous shift from "economies that use markets" to "societies defined by markets" and examine how this transformation is reshaping everything from healthcare to climate policy. The episode dives into the "three lies of finance" that fueled the 2008 crash and connects these financial failures to our current environmental crisis. We contrast the...
2025-03-2028 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦The Invisible Economy: How Family Work Shapes Modern CanadaSend a textSee related resources in the substack for this episodeThe modern family is unraveling under pressures our parents never imagined. In this eye-opening episode, Heliox dives into the "Families Count 2024" report, exposing the uncomfortable truth about how Canadian families are buckling under dual burdens of workplace demands and unpaid care labor. We unpack the radical shift from 1970s gender roles—where fewer than half of women participated in paid work—to today's reality, where over 61% of women are employed and 32% of heterosexual couples rely primarily on female breadwinners.The...
2025-03-1620 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦🏠 The Quiet Revolution Reshaping Canadian FamiliesSend a textSee our substack posting for this episodeThink you know what a "typical Canadian family" looks like? Think again. In this eye-opening episode of Heliox, we unpack the dramatic transformation of family structures across Canada over the past three decades. Marriage rates have plummeted to less than 50% of adults over 15, while common-law partnerships surge, especially in Quebec and Nunavut. We explore the later-life timeline that defines modern Canadians—marrying at 34.8 years old (over three years later than in 1994), having fewer children, and increasingly choosing to live with parents well into adulthood....
2025-03-1419 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦The Air Between Us: How We Forgot (Then Remembered) That Disease Travels Through AirSend a textSee the substack for this episode for more informationIn this eye-opening episode of Heliox, we unravel the forgotten history of airborne disease transmission. Join us as we trace how Florence Nightingale intuitively used ventilation to save lives in the 1850s—long before germ theory existed. We explore the fascinating twist where medicine's obsession with hand washing and droplet transmission inadvertently pushed airborne precautions to the sidelines for decades. Learn why technological limitations led scientists to focus on bacteria in droplets while missing the crucial role of viruses in aerosols. This scientific bl...
2025-03-1209 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦🚀 The AI Revolution Nobody's Talking About: How Diffusion Models Could Change EverythingSend a textSee our substack for this episodeIn this eye-opening episode of Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy, we dive deep into the technology that's silently reshaping AI as we know it: diffusion language models (DLLMs). While most people are fixated on ChatGPT's latest features, Inception Labs has been developing something far more revolutionary – Mercury, a family of AI models that could make current large language models obsolete.Unlike traditional models that generate text one painful token at a time, DLLMs work like digital sculptors, simultaneously refining entire blocks of content. The re...
2025-03-1023 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦The Circular RNA Revolution: Why This Matters More Than You ThinkSend a textRelated Substack Article and Reference MaterialsIn this eye-opening episode of Heliox, we dive into groundbreaking research from Nagoya University that could revolutionize how we treat diseases. Scientists have cracked a critical problem with circular mRNA – how to make it both stable AND efficient. By developing innovative "Internal Cap-Initiated Translation" methods, researchers have achieved up to 100-fold increases in protein production from circular mRNA, potentially creating treatments that last longer while requiring fewer doses.The implications? Think therapeutics that work better with fewer side effects, diagnostic tools that detect cancer ea...
2025-03-0813 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦🧠 The AI Limitation We're Not Talking About: Why Current Machine Learning Could Be Hitting a WallSend us a textsee the related substack for more resourcesIn this mind-expanding episode of Heliox, we dive deep into what might be the next evolutionary leap in artificial intelligence. While today's AI dazzles us with its ability to generate text and images, a fundamental limitation lurks beneath the surface: the inability to truly adapt to novel situations without massive pre-training.We explore an audacious claim by a company called Intuacel that they've revolutionized machine learning by abandoning traditional backpropagation in favor of decentralized sensory learning. Their robot "Luna" seemingly demonstrates autonomous...
2025-03-0316 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦The Cosmic Connection: How Solar Storms Are Messing With Your HealthSend a textWhen most of us think about the sun, we picture a constant, reliable presence in the sky. But scientists know better. Our star is more like a temperamental toddler having regular meltdowns.These solar tantrums—technically called solar flares and coronal mass ejections—send massive waves of charged particles hurtling toward Earth at millions of miles per hour. When they slam into our planet's magnetic field, they create what scientists call geomagnetic storms. These storms might be fundamentally altering your health, mood, and even your immune system.In this riveting epis...
2025-03-0313 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦An Emergent System: Chromatin Conformation, Transcription, and Nucleosome Remodeling (E2 S25)Send a textRelated Substack Article & Reference MaterialsIn this mind-bending episode of Heliox, we dive deep into the revolutionary research upending everything we thought we knew about DNA function. Forget the simplistic "on/off switch" model you learned in school—your genome operates more like a city with dynamic neighborhoods. Scientists have discovered "packing domains" (PDs) that create a spectrum of gene expression, working like dimmer switches rather than binary toggles. Even more fascinating: the very act of reading genes shapes how DNA folds, creating a two-way street of influence. Most surprisingly, those supposedly "in...
2025-03-0214 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦Franken-Food: Ultra-Processed Kibble, Your Dog's Health, and a Look at AlternativesSend a textRead related article on SubstackWhat if that convenient bag of kibble is slowly compromising your dog's health? In this eye-opening episode, Heliox dives deep into canine nutrition, challenging the pet food industry's standard offerings. Drawing parallels between human ultra-processed food research from Yale Medicine and commercial dog kibble, the hosts explore how high-temperature processing destroys nutrients, synthetic additives replace natural ones, and mystery meat "meals" substitute for quality protein. The episode doesn't just criticize—it offers practical alternatives from freeze-dried raw to gently-cooked meals, detailing the benefits of each approach. Whether yo...
2025-03-0126 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦The Light Within: How Your Cells Are Speaking Through PhotonsSend a textJourney into the microscopic realm of cellular light in this mind-bending episode of Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy. We're exploring ultra-weak photon emission (UPE), the fascinating phenomenon where our cells emit tiny amounts of light - so faint it's almost invisible, yet powerful enough to reveal crucial insights about our health.Our deep dive uncovers groundbreaking research showing how these cellular light signals connect to oxidative stress, the same process that causes rust in metal but occurs inside our bodies. Through cutting-edge experiments with specialized white blood cells, scientists have discovered that...
2025-02-2814 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦Blind Spots in Canada's Leadership Race That Nobody's Talking AboutSend a textIn this eye-opening episode of Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy, we peel back the layers of Canada's recent Liberal leadership debate to expose what lies beneath the rhetoric. As Gould, Bizz, Freeland, and Carney vie for the chance to lead Canada into an uncertain future with a newly re-elected President Trump, we analyze not just what was said, but what was strategically omitted. From trade war strategies to climate policy contradictions, we examine how each candidate's approach reveals their vision for Canada's global role. But the real insight comes when we apply t...
2025-02-2720 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦The Four Narratives That Will Transform How You See EverythingSend a textBreaking Down Reality's Boundaries: Four Paradigm-Shifting NarrativesThink you understand how the world works? Think again. In this mind-bending episode of Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy, we crack open four groundbreaking narratives that are revolutionizing how we see everything from AI ethics to urban planning. We're diving deep into boundary dissolution (spoiler: you're not as separate from the world as you think), adaptive complexity (why change is the only constant), embodied knowledge (there's more to knowing than data), and quantum-like uncertainty (embracing the unpredictable). These aren't just abstract concepts – they're pow...
2025-02-2415 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦Mysterious Vision Loss in Children Linked to Covid-19?Send a textIn a gripping exploration of a mysterious new threat to children's vision, this episode of Heliox delves into Hyperacute Outer Retinal Dysfunction (HORD) - a condition causing sudden, severe vision loss in children following fever. Through careful analysis of groundbreaking JAMA Ophthalmology research and emerging COVID-19 connections, we unpack the disturbing pattern of cases first identified in China. The episode weaves together clinical findings, potential mechanisms involving immune system dysfunction and vascular damage, and the heart-wrenching reality faced by affected families. While most children show improvement within a year, troubling questions remain a...
2025-02-2311 min
Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦When Silence Becomes Complicity: The Hidden Crisis in HealthcareSend a textThe media silence on COVID's devastating impact on our healthcare system isn't just an oversight—it's a calculated omission that's costing lives. In this raw, unfiltered episode of Heliox, we dive into the alarming reality that one in five physicians may have left practice due to Long COVID, a statistic the mainstream media conveniently ignores.We expose how corporate interests, pharmaceutical advertisers, and outdated "expert" opinions create a perfect storm of misinformation through omission. When 30% of COVID cases are acquired in healthcare settings and one in 49 Americans is currently infected (with 60% showing no...
2025-02-2217 min