Podcast
Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift
Hosted by iHeartRadio · EN
Shane Hewitt & The Nightshift is your late-night companion for real talk, bold ideas, and unfiltered conversations that matter. Hosted by Canadian radio veteran Shane Hewitt, each episode dives into the headlines, human stories, and hidden truths shaping our world—always with curiosity, compassion, and a sharp edge.
From politics and pop culture to mental health, technology, and everyday life, this podcast is where night owls, deep thinkers, and curious minds come to connect. Featuring expert guests, passionate callers, and Shane’s signature style—thoughtful, fearless, and refreshingly real.
If you crave meaningful dialogue, smart perspectives, and late-night radio energy in podcast form, subscribe now and join The Nightshift.
154episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Nobody Planned This Wednesday Holiday. Now Nobody's Working
3d ago00:09:59Tap to summarizeCanada Day landed on a Wednesday and somehow half the country took the whole week off. Shane and Ryan are both at their desks, mildly annoyed, and very much in the mood to talk about summer grievances. The conversation starts with how far in advance you actually need to plan a long weekend, moves into the sounds of summer in a small town and downtown Calgary, and lands firmly on pedal pubs. Ryan has thoughts. Strong ones. Shane isn't sure pedal pubs are the problem so much as context, but agrees the mid-intersection group sing-along version of Mr. Brightside is a legitimate public menace. Also: Christmas in July starts now, summer is the right time to test your Christmas lights, and we are officially one week past halfway to Christmas. You're welcome. Topics: Canada Day long weekend, vacation planning, pedal pubs Calgary, summer noise, Christmas in July Originally aired on 2026-07-03
Transcribe →NEW - You Almost Always Turn Left. Here's Why!
4d ago00:09:18Tap to summarizeHuman movement bias is more consistent than almost anyone expects, and Samantha Yammine is here to explain why the research is harder to dismiss than it looks. Studies in Spain and Japan, with children, adults, individuals, and crowds, all point to the same result: people veer left, and they can't explain why. Handedness doesn't account for it. Driving conventions don't account for it. Walls and social norms don't account for it. The researchers ruled them out systematically, and the bias remained. What's left is something that appears to be intrinsic, without yet having an explanation. The finding has real implications for how cities and venues move people, and a genuinely strange implication for anyone who's ever stood up from a chair and turned the wrong way. Topics: left-turn bias, crowd movement, human behaviour research, urban planning, cognitive bias GUEST: Samantha Yammine | http://samanthayammine.com | @‌science.sam Originally aired on 2026-07-03
Transcribe →SHIFTHEADS: Stories You Did Not Need. Avoiding Them Was the Right Decision
4d ago00:09:16Tap to summarizeIt's Canada Day weekend, give or take, and Shane and Ryan have three stories that will improve nothing about your life and yet somehow feel essential. First: the banana car. Twenty-three feet long, Ford F-150 engine, open top, eighty-five miles an hour, and a dedicated app so you always know where it's headed next. Second: Contemporary Calgary is currently housing a thousand-pound butter cowboy, kept from melting by fans running twenty-four hours a day inside a Monopoly exhibit that runs five months. Third: Florida paddleboarders pulled off a dramatic water rescue for what they were confident was a dog. It was a coyote. Everyone survived. Good job, Florida. Also in the mix: the definitive Batmobile ranking and a brief detour into Homer Simpson's car design philosophy. Topics: weird news Canada, banana car, butter cowboy Calgary, Florida coyote rescue, useless stories Originally aired on 2026-07-03
Transcribe →NEW - Horror With Headphones and Minions in Hollywood
4d ago00:21:11Tap to summarizeSteve Stebbing, film and entertainment critic, splits this week into two rounds. First, Canadian titles built for a long weekend at home. Then, what's actually worth the theatre seat right now. Three Canadian Films Worth Your Canada DayUndertone is the one Steve keeps coming back to: a Canadian horror film built on sound, picked up and finished by A24, following a paranormal podcast whose hosts start working through nine anonymous tapes until things start happening at home. Headphones required. Mile and Kicks is a Montreal coming-of-age story set during the Arcade Fire era, starring Barbie Ferreira as a music critic leaving Toronto for her first big shot. Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie is Matt Johnson making one of the funniest Canadian films in recent memory, using old web series footage to build something that somehow brushes up against Back to the Future copyright territory. What's in Theatres NowThe Invite keeps its biggest reveals off the trailer, which Steve argues should become standard practice. Olivia Wilde directs Seth Rogen opposite Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz in a dinner party that dismantles itself. Enola Holmes 3 delivers exactly what the first two promised. Millie Bobby Brown is charming, Henry Cavill is reliable, and Philip Barantini, who directed Adolescence, makes a sharp pivot into action. Minions and Monsters exists. Trey Parker voices a small Cthulhu. That's the pitch. Topics: Canadian films 2026, Undertone A24 horror, Mile and Kicks film, Minions Monsters Trey Parker, Enola Holmes 3 GUEST: Steve Stebbing | http://stevestebbing.ca Originally aired on 2026-07-03
Transcribe →Shiftheads - How Do You Measure What AI Actually Does?
4d ago00:09:55Tap to summarizeAI evaluation in business sounds straightforward until you try to do it. Mohit Rajhans says most companies are realizing the math doesn't work the way they thought it would. Mohit runs http://ThinkStart.ca and tracks where technology meets business reality. This conversation starts with a simple problem: there's no gas pump ticker on AI. No visible meter telling you what you're spending as you use it, what it's producing, or whether the output justifies the cost. Two employees, same salary, same AI spend, wildly different results, and no clear reason why. The conversation moves into what that means for workers trying to prove their value in a moment when their job is being quietly reevaluated, and lands on a story about an intern who built something impressive, shared client data with a public model to do it, and nearly got fired for the thing she thought would save her. Doing more with AI isn't the same as doing the right things with it. Topics: AI evaluation, AI ROI, measuring AI productivity, AI and jobs Canada, AI tools at work GUEST: Mohit Rajhans | http://thinkstart.ca Originally aired on 2026-07-03
Transcribe →ICYMI - She Planned It for a Year. Still Blew the Budget
4d ago00:09:50Tap to summarizeVacation budgeting is something Jessica Moorhouse thinks about professionally. She still went to Italy for three weeks, blew past her carefully built spreadsheet, and came home with zero regrets and a slightly rejigged budget. Jessica is a personal finance expert and the author of Everything But Money, and this conversation is as honest as it gets about what travel actually costs versus what we plan for. She covers how she and her husband used a WISE account instead of credit cards to stay out of debt while still going over budget, why a plan that bends isn't a plan that failed, and how the money rules from her childhood, the ones that said don't buy the souvenir, don't get the trinket, followed her all the way to an Italian gift shop and had to be actively unlearned. She also has a few quiet tricks for keeping costs down mid-trip without feeling like you're cutting corners. A five-euro bottle of wine helps. Topics: vacation budget Canada, travel overspending, WISE account, flexible budgeting, childhood money stories GUEST: Jessica Moorhouse | http://jessicamoorhouse.com Originally aired on 2026-07-03
Transcribe →The Game That Saves Lives: Dungeons and Dragons
4d ago00:09:31Tap to summarizeDungeons and Dragons started in 1974 with no budget and a simple idea, and Ryan O'Donnell makes the case that it has been saving lives ever since. If you've never rolled a die, this is the episode that explains why people who have can't stop talking about it. For neurodivergent kids especially, the game builds social skills that don't come easily anywhere else. A CBC story on a D&D group and a TED talk called Saving Your Brain with D&D back that up, and the story of Storm King at summer camp makes it impossible to dismiss. A professional Dungeon Master joins to explain what the role actually involves, and why the person running the table might matter more than anyone gives them credit for. Topics: Dungeons and Dragons, neurodivergent kids, social skills, tabletop RPG, community Originally aired on 2026-07-02
Transcribe →NEW - Borrowing Against Your Investments: Good Idea or Trap?
5d ago00:19:36Tap to summarizeWealth Simple is expanding fast and Vincent Gregoire, Canada Research Chair in Finance and Technology at HEC Montreal, is paying close attention. Lower fees and less friction are good for investors. The new ability to borrow against your portfolio, including potentially your registered retirement savings, is where the conversation gets harder. The mechanics are straightforward: hold a thousand dollars in stocks, access a thirty percent line of credit against them without selling and without triggering a tax bill. Use that money to reinvest, cover expenses, or do what you want. It levels the playing field for people who don't own property and have never had access to that kind of leverage. It also amplifies losses when markets drop, and if the loan gets called on a registered account, the withdrawal penalties stack on top of the portfolio hit. Gregoire's concern isn't the tool. It's whether the people using it understand what they're holding. Gamification nudges frequent trading. Frequent trading, the research consistently shows, is bad for smaller investors. Topics: Wealth Simple investing, margin loans Canada, RRSP collateral risk, gamification investing, fintech Canada GUEST: Vincent Gregoire | @vincentgregoire Originally aired on 2026-07-02
Transcribe →SHIFTHEADS: 1974: Trudeau, Nixon, and 79-Cent Ground Beef
5d ago00:08:44Tap to summarizeCanada Day 1974 means a federal election, a sitting prime minister fighting for his majority, and a American president about to become the first to resign the office. The past has a way of arriving right on time. This Throwback Thursday lands on the Canada Day long weekend and goes back fifty years to a moment that feels uncomfortably familiar: Canadians worried about mortgage rates, gas prices, food costs, and the cost of living while the political ground shifted under everyone's feet. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was campaigning hard. Robert Stanfield was pushing back. And south of the border, Richard Nixon was telling the world he was not a crook, with about six weeks left before he proved otherwise. Bread was thirty-five cents. A dozen eggs cost seventy cents. Gas was twenty cents a litre. The more things change. Topics: Canada 1974, Pierre Trudeau election, Watergate Nixon resignation, Canadian cost of living, Great Lakes water protection Originally aired on 2026-07-02
Transcribe →NEW - Secrecy Creep: What Governments Hope You Don't File For
5d ago00:09:51Tap to summarizeCanadian politics commentator Rob Breakenridge joins the Canada Day long weekend to make a distinction most people skip: the country is not the same thing as the people running it, and one can be worth celebrating while the other deserves serious scrutiny. A piece Rob wrote a year ago on Alberta's secrecy creep turns out to be more relevant now than when he wrote it. Delayed access to information requests, redacted documents, topics quietly pulled from committee agendas — Rob walks through how governments limit what Canadians can see, and why most of it happens in plain sight. With trade uncertainty, provincial tension, and a new federal government still short on deliverables, Rob lays out what he's watching in the months ahead — and why how people feel about this country depends heavily on what happens next. Topics: secrecy creep, government transparency, Canadian politics, national unity, access to information GUEST: Rob Breakenridge | Rob Breakenridge | Substack Originally aired on 2026-07-02
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