One of the great things about living in British Columbia is having an enormous backyard to explore…so today I took bestselling B.C. author Stephen Hui out to play in it.

Stephen has spent more than 30 years hiking, backpacking, and scrambling through our coastal mountains and has written some of the best-known guides to exploring our corner of the world. So naturally, I decided the appropriate outing was to take the hiking expert off-roading in a buggy for the first time while I channeled my inner Lewis Hamilton. 😆

For anyone who loves exploring B.C., Stephen is the author of three bestselling guidebooks:

📚 105 Hikes In and Around Southwestern British Columbia — now in its fully revised 2nd edition: https://105hikes.com/
📚 Destination Hikes In and Around Southwestern British Columbia
📚 Best Hikes and Nature Walks With Kids In and Around Southwestern British Columbia

105 Hikes became a No. 1 B.C. bestseller and, for many people, has become something of a bible for hiking around southwestern British Columbia.

It was great fun spending the day talking about the mountains and trails of British Columbia…and then bouncing around considerably less gracefully through the backcountry.

And for all of Stephen’s fans and followers, he survived his first buggy adventure. 😆

If you’re looking for some inspiration for your next B.C. adventure, check out his books. And Stephen, thanks for being such a good sport!

Over my employment history, I’ve tried to be thoughtful and intentional about the places I’ve chosen to work for and the people I’ve selected to work with.

Roblox, co-founded and led by CEO David Baszucki, is arguing that an eight-year-old gave up her right to take the company to court because she clicked “I agree.”

I’m fairly certain that Mr. Baszucki, a parent himself, is aware that children are not sophisticated contracting parties. Companies cannot build platforms designed to attract children, profit from their participation, and then rely on “Terms of Service” to avoid having serious allegations concerning harm to children examined in open court.

And the case numbers continue to grow. As recently reported:

“Roblox is currently facing 150 cases alleging that children have been harmed as a result of using the software, and the U.S. Senate is now conducting a bipartisan investigation into the company regarding its child safety practices. Over the last couple of years, Roblox has finally begun to implement the most rudimentary attempts to offer any protection at all for children, and tellingly, a recent move to direct fewer young children toward the most viral games on the platform wiped $9 billion from the company’s value in a single day.”

Link: Roblox Claims A Dead Kid ‘Waived All Rights’ Because She Clicked ‘Agree’ At 8 Years Old: https://kotaku.com/roblox-legal-court-case-audree-heine-terms-conditions-dismissal-2000726607

If you can do one thing today, please 🙏 delete your child’s Roblox account.

And if you’re looking for work, please 🙏 scratch Roblox off your list.

Thank you.

And if you want to keep tabs on the cases, see Roblox MDL Case Count History: Tracking a New Federal Docket Without Inflating It: https://settlementadvocate.com/research/roblox-case-count-history

Missing you every single day, Dr. Jones.

Thank you to all that attended my session on “Preparing Future Physicians for Artificial Intelligence” at AHTBE 2026. There were so many fantastic presentations this afternoon on AI and its integration and use in medicine. I think where my heart and mind centred on today was how we define, cultivate, manipulate, and erode epistemic trust. We’ve developed technologies that invite us into a synthetic reality, exhausting human potential and attention as we increasingly expend our energy discerning what is true. Trust is foundational to the delivery of care, and we need to design AI platforms that recognize, protect, and preserve this vital human capacity.

Sharing my presentation here for anyone interested in AI, medical education, and the future of care.

#MedicalEducation #AIinMedicine #ArtificialIntelligence #HealthProfessionsEducation

Our first cohort of interns! I’m speechless at what Dr. Aisha Liman and our Primary Compassionate Care team have done over six years. What began as a commitment to supporting and strengthening the next generation of public health leaders continues to grow in ways I don’t think any of us could have fully imagined in 2020. We were in the midst of battling a pandemic and felt the weight of having to respond in a way that was meaningful, practical, and capable of making a difference in people’s lives.

And now, we welcome our first eight interns.

These eight remarkable individuals are stepping into PCCI with curiosity, purpose, creativity, and a commitment to taking public health to the next level.

I’m incredibly excited to see the ideas they bring, the questions they ask, the communities they serve, and the impact they will make.

A very proud moment for all of us at PCCI…and, I suspect, only the beginning. ❤️

Good morning team! If you have a couple of hours to spare, I highly recommend grabbing a cup of joe and listening to Dr. Andrew Huberman’s recent conversation with Dr. Fei Fei Li on using AI to increase your intelligence and enrich humanity.

They cover a variety of topics describing the evolution of AI, but my favourite segment is on vision and intelligence. AI has significantly progressed over the last few years in visual recognition, image classification, and discrimination (i.e., the ability to distinguish between two highly similar-looking categories).

Many might recall the blueberry muffin vs. chihuahua meme that early models struggled with 🫐 🐶 🫐 . Although it may have been funny then, this has some real-world value now that goes way beyond British Bake Off meets Westminster Kennel Club.

This type of technology has since improved and become instrumental in areas such as dermatology, skin disease diagnosis, and wound assessment and care, particularly for those living in rural and remote areas of the world.

However, those who know me know I like to test. So, late last night I put the Holloway vs McGregor AI models in the ring to examine exactly how far we’ve come. See the results below.

Or maybe the more important question is: did you pass? 😆

OpenAI and Claude: Pass

Open AI response:

Claude response:

Open AI vs. Claude:

Open AI response:

Claude response:

Another reason not to use Claude :).

Books unchained

A great good, and almost a divine benefit to the world.

Jakob Wimpfeling, 1505 — The German humanist, on the new art of printing. A hand-copied book was valuable enough that libraries chained theirs to the reading desks.

Next week, I’m looking forward to presenting at the 2nd International Conference on Advancement in Healthcare Technology and Biomedical Engineering (AHTBE 2026) in Vancouver.

My presentation, “Preparing Future Physicians for Artificial Intelligence: Medical Students’ Perceptions, Experiences, and Educational Needs,” draws on the research I completed at the University of Oxford as part of my MSc dissertation in Translational Health Sciences. My integrative literature review examines how medical students are experiencing AI, what they understand about it, and what they are asking from medical education to prepare for its growing role in healthcare. If this is a topic that interests you, then join me on Friday, August 21, from 13:00–14:30 during Parallel Session 2.

And If you’re attending AHTBE 2026, please come and say hello! I would especially welcome the opportunity to connect with others interested in artificial intelligence in medical education, clinical training, and preparing future physicians to use AI thoughtfully, safely, and effectively.

Looking forward to some great conversations in Vancouver!

This morning, I had the opportunity to facilitate a Planetary Health & Public Health session with our Primary Compassionate Care Initiative mentees in Nigeria.

We began by examining the intersection between environmental change and public health and what these issues actually look like within participants’ own communities. The group discussed challenges including air pollution, waste management, flooding, erosion, sanitation, and the health consequences that follow when environments and communities are under pressure. That pressure can often divide people and result in conflict and violence distracting from the community and their recovery effort.

One of the slides examined the epidemiological impact of environmental conditions, including their disproportionate effects on children. But it also highlighted something that can be overlooked when we discuss environmental emergencies: these events can amplify existing social vulnerabilities and increase the risk of displacement, exploitation, abuse, harassment, trafficking, and gender-based violence.

That slide took the conversation somewhere I had not anticipated and after the formal session ended, we continued discussing human trafficking in Nigeria, sexual exploitation, and the people who may be suffering in silence within our communities.

The discussion moved beyond identifying the problem to asking a much harder and more important question: What can we do as public health workers to support them?

Dr. Aisha Liman offered an important perspective during our discussion: public health cannot be separated from the social and legal conditions that shape health. If we are going to care for people holistically, public health professionals need to understand not only disease and epidemiology, but also human rights, relevant laws and policies, social systems, advocacy, and the protections available to survivors. This is public health outside the box.

That means knowing when someone needs more than clinical care. It means being able to recognize vulnerability, understand the systems surrounding that person, advocate appropriately, and help connect survivors with the support and protections they need.

Our session began with planetary health and the relationship between people and the environments in which they live. The discussion reminded me just how interconnected that relationship really is.

Environmental disruption can become economic disruption.

Economic disruption can become displacement.

Displacement can increase vulnerability.

And vulnerability can become a profound public health and human rights issue.

This is why I continue to value these discussions so much. Sometimes the most important learning happens when the conversation goes somewhere you did not plan for.

#PlanetaryHealth #PublicHealth #Nigeria #GlobalHealth #HumanRights #HealthEquity #HumanTrafficking #GenderBasedViolence #PCCI

Bright and early this morning, I had the opportunity to facilitate an Academic Half Day (AHD) session with our UBC Department of Family Practice Abbotsford-Mission residents on an increasingly important patient-safety issue: how to respond when ransomware or a major technology outage disrupts clinical care.

We began with a roundtable exercise exploring how residents would approach a ransomware attack: Who would they immediately contact? Which tasks would be essential? What tasks needed to transfer to paper, whiteboards, and face-to-face communication? And what were the greatest risks to patient care?

Then we dove into real-world examples, including the “WannaCry” ransomware attack and the CrowdStrike outage, and examined the impact that these two events had on healthcare systems, hospitals, clinicians, and patients. I also emphasized the important role our governments and healthcare systems play in tracking and reporting these incidents, conducting thorough debriefs, and disseminating findings and recommendations following these threat-to-life crimes.

To quote Black Widow in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, “This is big, big potatoes.” 🕷️ 🤣

If you just look at the Change Healthcare (UnitedHealth Group) ransomware attack in 2024:
* Records affected: 192,700,000
* Data exposed: names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, government ID numbers, health insurance and policy numbers, etc.
* Aftermath: UnitedHealth reported roughly USD 3.1 billion in cyberattack-related impacts for full-year 2024, the most expensive healthcare cyber incident ever recorded. (https://lnkd.in/euMYQ94u)

A key message from the session that I wanted to drive home was that we all have a role in cyber preparedness. Clinicians should be alert to any phishing attempts and clear on local downtime procedures, including knowing where approved paper resources are located, protecting patient information, and working closely with clinical, privacy, and technical teams during a disruption. These events also quickly highlight the importance in understanding how to work together as a team.

This is the first time “ransomware” has been addressed with our residents in the history of our site and I want to thank our Site Director, Dr. Holden Chow, for allowing me the opportunity to facilitate this exercise.

To the residents reading this post, I encourage you to consider focusing a quality improvement project on educating and preparing your clinic for a ransomware attack or major technology outage. The time invested in strengthening your clinic’s preparedness could ultimately help save someone’s life.

#MedicalEducation #Cybersecurity #Ransomware #PatientSafety #HealthCare #ClinicalEducation #EmergencyPreparedness