The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben's mailbag plus Canadian tech innovators

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

GUEST:  Sanveer Dhanju/data scientist GUEST:  James Wells / CEO Sanctuary AI If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠��⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Share the wonder of Christmas with friends and family at Roy Thompson Hall. Tickets are on sale now at Salvationist.ca slash Christmas. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney's show. It is the 11th of December, 2025. Thank you so much for joining us on this Thursday edition of the show. And this is a dialogue. As much as I am screaming into the microphone most days, I'm screaming into the microphone in the hopes of hearing back from you. Sometimes you call in and sometimes you're writing in on all our different platforms. And we decided that we didn't want you to think that you writing into us and you commenting us was for naught. And so we decided to start a weekly segment where we read. read some of your mail and answer some of your questions. And on that note, please, it's time to introduce the Ben Mulroney Show Mailbag. Doop, do up. Welcome friends to play and sing. This is Reply all the Ben Mulrooney Mailbag.

Love that song. Very classy stuff. So good. Yeah, so good. All right, you want to start this out? Yeah, you know that was my voice, right? I sung. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. You're very talented. Yeah, thank you. So we got a lot of messages, lots of messages. lots of messages about the, when we did the talk about back-to-work chatter. Yes. Remember, if you want to remind our listeners about what Mark Carney said and here in Ontario with Doug Ford. Yeah, well, it's all about what to do with the work-from-home class of the Civil Service,

either federally or provincially. And we were looking at two examples, the federal government and the Ontario government. And the Ontario government has already made its moves. They are by the 3rd of January, civil servants will be back at work five days a week, although over 11,000, almost 11,000 civil servants have asked for a special dispensation, so many in fact that they just can't get processed. There's too many. And then on the federal side, it's a little trickier because one of the reasons that Pierre Polly have lost his riding to Bruce Fanjoy was Bruce Fanjoy. He positioned himself as the ally to the civil servants. He wasn't going to cut the civil service.

The liberals weren't going to cut the civil service. And now they're saying 30,000 jobs will be going the way the Dodo Bird. And those who do keep their jobs are coming back to the office. So the civil servants are none too happy with the liberals. That's the state of play. So based on that, we did get a lot of people calling in, as you recall, but a lot of messages as well. And I've got three different ones. So let's hit them one at a time.

This one is from Stacey D. no offense, but this is from a guy, I'm guessing you, who likely doesn't spend seven and a half hours a day, five days a week in an office, and scheduled hours, not flexible hours. There is nothing wrong with balance and working from home. What's wrong with wanting less stress mentally and physically a few times a week and the workers still getting done?

Okay, well, first of all, you don't know my life, and my life is very busy. And I get up very early and I work very hard and I work until the work is done. And if that means working until 10 p.m., I work till 10 p.m. And if it means working on the weekend, I work on the weekends. And that's my life, and I love it. And I love it. And I have never complained or begrudged it. And it is what it is.

Everybody has their stuff. And everybody has to deal with their stuff. I concur. You have more balls in the air than most people. Well, thank you. But you know what? I don't know that. I don't know how many balls people have in the air.

What I do know is most of these civil. servants got their jobs when the prior to the pandemic. The contract was to work from the office. And so that's why I said yesterday, unless you got your job during the pandemic and you were working from home, I don't necessarily think you

have an automatic claim to staying home. Yeah. So then we also had these, a couple of comments. These are back-to-back ones here. Somebody wrote, sounds like a great time to start making cuts to the government workers. And then the next comment, this just shows how divisive this is. It's easy to judge people with

without knowing their condition. Can you justify the traffic and the amount of time I'm going to spend in my car? No, I can't justify the traffic. I think it's disgusting. But everybody has to deal with it. Again, you're not saying anything

that makes your case unique. You're just not. You're not showing me that the civil servant is extraordinary. I'll tell you what. The fact that you are paid by the taxpayer and the taxpayer is the one stuck in traffic and you think you can work from home,

That is the height of privilege. And it's privilege, by the way, that you did not earn. You did not earn it. It was given to you exceptionally because there was a global pandemic, which is now over. I can't make it clearer. If you can't see it, you're going to keep trying to change the point, pivot to something else, so that you never have to address the fact that fundamentally you do not have an argument for not coming back to the office. Yeah.

And then we have this one here, which I think is, it sums it up well. you would think that we would have learned through COVID that human connection is so important in everyone's lives. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of these people are like, no, I'm fine. I'm doing all my work from home. I said, it doesn't even matter anymore. It doesn't matter if you can do all the work. You're expected in the office. That's what your boss wants, the guy who signs your paychecks. And if you want that paycheck, show up for work. I don't understand this. I don't know where the, where the, entitlement comes from and again let me let me be clear i'm not trying to be heartless here some people have a child with special needs or they have to care for an elderly parent or who knows what many problems that are unique to you that's where you ask for special dispensation but but by in large all things being equal get back to the office there you go that's it okay our next topic that uh the bc land claims we've done a lot of stories on bcc because

there's a lot of stuff going down there. So from specifically about, I guess, the land claim, but also some of the other decisions with the school board and the way everything's falling. Oh, the querying of the forest, right. The querying of the forest, but there's so many different things that people were talking about. We did get a couple of messages, and pretty much all on one side of the issue as well. BC, this is from a super car collector. I don't know if that's your given name. BC has become Canada's version of California, dominated by woke, far-left culture, void of any common sense. Businesses and citizens with common sense are leaving California in droves.

Take note, BC, and followed up by from Helleroo, E.B. is an activist, that's the premier, David E.B., whose goal is full compliance with Undrip. Undrip is the United Nations declarations on the rights of indigenous peoples and who cares only about himself. Yeah, look, I don't know what David Eby's previous life was before he became a politician. So I don't know if he was an activist. Well, what do I say about activists? They make the worst politicians. Remember, during the, in the lead up to the Olympics in Vancouver, he was out protesting. and suggesting that they were going to have mass protests

outside of venues and trying to organize to make sure that they had legal representation he was one of the voices. Ah, I see. Yeah, I mean, I just don't, I do not believe that it's like, you can't take a,

you can't take a knife and turn it into a shield. You know what I mean? And you can't take an activist and turn them into a politics. You can't take somebody who's a single issue, a laser-focused wedge and turn them into something

that's a catch-all to try to help as many people as possible. Can you think of any activists that have made good politicians? No. I'm trying to think of any. I mean, I can think of a lot of activists like Stephen Giebo. Yeah, it's a super politician. Would be one. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I'm trying to think of him. I just can't. Well, look, Eve Engler has tried to be, who wants to be a politician, and he's so much of an activist that even the NDP told him they don't want him as part of their leadership race. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. And so then this is further on

closer to the BC Bridge story. Oh, the Petulah Bridge. Do I remind our listeners about this? Yes, a Petulow Bridge. So there's a new bridge being built next to an old bridge. The old bridge is called Petulow Bridge. And now this new bridge has been given a very difficult to pronounce a First Nations name. And it's difficult to pronounce because there are letters there that most people wouldn't recognize.

Yes. Exactly. And I forget with it. I apologize. I forget what the name of it was. But it is difficult. Yeah. Because it's got backwards ease and the postures above the L's. And anyway, the comment from Mark A. Chung is L.O.L. We call it Petulow 2 Bridge. It's literally built right beside the original Petulow. Followed by another person saying, give an inch and they'll take a mile. You say you want reconciliation. Well, congratulations. This is what you signed up for. Yeah, well, yeah, again, the bridge thing doesn't bug me too too much. It's just in the context of everything we've been discussing, it takes on all the more importance. And so we've got to tread carefully. It's just we've got to keep an eye on everything. We've got to keep tabs on everything and ask ourselves like, is every step that we're taking a step in the direction of reconciliation or is it simply busy work that is just mudding the waters?

But hey, thank you to everybody. Keep writing in. Wouldn't it make sense for the government to have an easy. Easy to use website to help find people a family doctor? It would, right? Canada's Wonderland is bringing the holiday magic this season with Winterfest on select nights now through January 3rd. Step into a winter wonderland filled with millions of dazzling lights, festive shows, rides, and holiday treats. Plus, Coca-Cola is back with Canada's kindest community.

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Welcome back to the Ben Mulrooney show. If you are a follower of health care news in this country, you know that sort of the baseline is always we are just a few bad breaks away from the system breaking, right? You hear these terrible stories. of people not having a family doctor, having access to primary care. And so what are they doing? They are going to emergency rooms.

And in a lot of cases, they're waiting there for six or eight hours and they're not getting any help and they're leaving. And this is not a recipe for long-term success. So that's the bad news, right? And then earlier this week, actually yesterday,

we were talking to the head of the Canadian Medical Association who said that there is a plan afoot to unlock the potential of over-tort over 10,000 foreign trained doctors who are currently in Canada and they're not plying their craft as doctors and putting them to work in the system as doctors, which could alleviate so much pressure and connect so many Canadians with so many doctors. Until that happens, however, it's all about being more efficient. It's all about picking your spots, finding your seams, getting from point A to point B as

quickly as you possibly can to connect with a doctor to get yourself healthy. However, we don't know how to do that, right? We pick up the phone. We do it the way we always used to. Check the website. Make a phone call. Ask if a doctor is available. Are they taking new patients?

Oh, they're not. Okay, I've got to call somebody else. Well, enter Sanvir Danju. He's a data scientist who has put together an AI tool called Doc Maps that calls clinics and checks to see if they're accepting new patients and maps availability for users. This could be that key to efficiency that we need until we are able to solve the structural problems that we have in our system today. San Vier, thank you very much for being here. Of course.

Thank you, Ben. Thanks for having me. So tell me, listen, anytime somebody builds a product, they first have to identify a gap in the market. So tell me what you saw. We all look at the system and we all see a problem. But you not only saw a problem, you saw at least. least part of a solution? Yeah, the problem started, I think it's exactly what you mentioned. It's something we all feel. The search for a family doctor is so incredibly, so incredibly tough here.

Myself was in a situation where I need to find a family doctor and it's so time consuming. I asked so many people around me and the best advice I got was you drive around the neighborhood, you call every clinic you can, and it's just like never-ending project. And I knew a lot of people around me who were also facing a similar problem. And me being like, I like to tinker around the technology. I saw this fit of like, you know, instead of me taking all my time to call all these clinics, why don't I just have a program to do it? These AIs have gotten pretty good at that.

Yeah. So that's where this all started. I just hacked it together. It started working. And I saw something that could really work here. Okay. So let's assume, let's live in a world where I can download doc maps onto my phone. walk me through what it can do for me.

Sure. So Doc Maps, it's this voice technology platform. So it takes all the work out of that search for you. So behind the scenes, there's this AI phone agent that we, you know, configure to go call the clinics and ask them questions. And it's all running behind the scenes. So you don't have to do anything yourself as the patient. All you have to do is go to the website and you'll see the data being refreshed.

We run these like campaigns behind the scenes to call these clinics. to update its data to get information about the clinics. And ideally, if I'm looking for a doctor, the AI will scour the network, make the phone calls, and find a doctor for me, and make an appointment? Is that the case? Yeah, maybe the appointment part is something we can do in the future. But the idea today is we want to take that search away from you as a patient.

We're going to call all these clinics. If there's a clinic accepting patient, who you want to be the ones who know that they're accepting patients. Where this all started was, you know, as I was talking to people, we all know that the problem stems from not having enough doctors. And my whole idea around this was, yeah, I think that's like 80% of the problem. But the other 20% of the problem is when there are clinics accepting patients, you just don't know where to find them.

No, of course. You're absolutely right. And so this, you think, gets us close to solving for that 20%. Yeah. I want to make it easy. and like just out there and available if for like one centralized place for patients to go. Yeah. To find the clinic that's accepting patients.

And how, um, what is the scope of, uh, doc maps right now? We started with the GTA, uh, primarily because that's where I live. And, uh, I think there's a really good fit for what some of the work Ontario is doing. As you mentioned, there's this primary care action plan that was put in places here. It's a multi-billion dollar plan to, um, to attach patients and get that full coverage we need. So really hoping that this can work with that plan. But I've always built this with it in mind that this could work across the country.

Yeah. Yeah. I've got to ask you because we all have images of Arrive Can in our heads. How much does this cost you to build so far? So the beauty of this is that I myself, I'm a developer, I'm a data scientist, like all that labor. and work like I do in my free time so I'm not charging anyone right now

the actual cost to run it is like you'd be surprised by how little this would cost the government have you been in discussions with the government have you brought this up with the Ontario government we started having conversations with some local health teams they're really interested in

trying out this technology for their plans So there are some plans in place to work with these local health teams and like we're going to try this technology out for some local jurisdictions. And if that goes well, I'm hoping that those conversations move up and we can talk about something that's wider scope. I mean, it's so very impressive. And the fact that you've done this in your spare time, now just for reference, I should remind people that the initial development of the Arrivecan app was budgeted at approximately 80,000. and I can't remember how much... Oh yeah, there's what it is. $54 million.

That's what it came out to. Could you... If you needed to, Sanvere, could you spend $54 million on this? I honestly don't know how I would. You could try, though. I could try, but that's all in itself is a whole other problem.

I need to figure out. See, I tell you what you got to do. What you got to do is you've got to buy a private jet and you've got to do all of your coding on the private jet. that will take care of the $54 million in a heartbeat. That's a good idea. We should put that in the business plan.

No, but this is wonderful. Because like I said, you know, we could be turning a corner with the unlocking of the foreign trained doctors. From what I understand that's happening in real time. They're going to be fast-tracked very, very soon. In which case, your app, while it doesn't solve for that, your app will have an easier job. exactly yeah if there's more positions out there it'll be easier to find them the other really interesting thing i've heard is that there's a lot of people who have family doctors today but they're looking to switch yeah there are some people who have family doctors really far away

some who just don't feel like they're the right fit yeah there's also this problem of people want to choose the doctors um that that they they have so that's i could see this going there if we have more family doctors and like availability is not an issue yeah maybe the search is not an issue You want to compare a doctor, shop around, and choose. Yeah. So I think that's somewhere if this could go in the future as well. But fundamentally, I can't see why this wouldn't work in every province, because in every province, the dynamic that you're trying to solve for is ever present. You know, you've got patients and you've got doctors and you're trying to figure out if the doctors are accepting patients and you want the patients to know about that.

That's the same in every province, regardless of the system. exactly and all the clinic needs is a phone which they all do they all have it so it would work with any clinic anywhere you don't have to build these complicated systems and ask these clinics to implement it and then hire like project managers like develop it and and run administration like it's just it's so easy yeah accessible last question real quick have you talked to anybody who's been on the receiving end of one of these AI phone calls absolutely yeah when I first started this out. I took a few of these sample calls. I walked around Toronto into these clinics and I just started playing these recordings to the front desk. Yeah. And they didn't know that they were

talking to an AI. They didn't know. Oh, that's great. They didn't know. Hey, Sanvier. Well, I thank you very much. Congratulations on the good, hard work. I know that you're doing this. You want to make sure that it remains free for people. So you're doing tremendous work. And I'm so glad to have been able to highlight your accomplishment today. Amazing. Thank you so much, Ben. I appreciate you having all right the robots are coming but at least they're Canadian right the robots are coming the robots are coming and my goodness not a day goes by that we do not see a humanoid robot on social media doing something I never thought we'd see a humanoid robot do.

I genuinely did not think they would be as have the dexterity that they have to be able to do what they do. But sure enough, we're living in that time now. And one thing I didn't expect, though, I did not expect to be talking about a Canadian company bringing

humanoid general purpose robots to the market. But sure enough, please welcome to the show, the CEO of Sanctuary AI, James Wells. James, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks, Ben. Thanks for for having us. Yeah. So, okay, so

look, everyone's got a different robot. You know, you got Optimus. That's Elon's robot. You got there's two or three other companies doing stuff. I think Boston, what is it? Boston Dynamics has been doing this for years. I saw one that was doing martial arts and boxing a couple

of days ago. Very, very impressive stuff. What's Sanctuary AI's niche? So we're developing a system to automate both, humanoid, but also off-the-shelf robots. So I know there's some amazing videos out there, but you've got to ask yourself, what value is driving for the economy for employers? And

unfortunately, we're still in the type cycle where, yeah, you see robots boxing, you see robots walking around, you know, carrying drinks and whatnot. But we're really focused on delivering industrial customers, valuable ROI. And what that means is doing work. And And a lot of the big bottleneck now is actually around Dexterity. So, Sanctuary, you know, we've been around 2018, and the only reason you really need a humanoid is for the hands, is for the manipulation capability to do valuable work. And that's an area we spend an awful lot of time on. Okay, so what do you mean? Because I saw some videos, and I saw the fingers of your robots moving in a very human-like way.

but talk to me about what you're focusing on that others may have bypassed. So there's three ways you can move a robotic hand. You can do it electromechanically, which is traditionally what a lot of the groups are doing out of China. You can do it via a cable-based methodology, which is what Elon is doing.

And is the cable base sort of like the Terminator? You know the Terminator arm? It's a bit like the Luke Skywalker arm. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. You're trying to emulate the ligaments in your forearm to... Gotcha. Okay. And so we built those types of hands, too, because instinctively, that's where you start.

But they're plagued with all kinds of maintenance issues and cost issues and thermal management. And so we had to come up with a completely new way to actuate the hand, and that is hydraulically. So that's moving a non-compressible form. fluid. And it's a really challenging problem. But if you can overcome it, it gives you all these benefits related to speed, strength, reliability, cycle life, all the things you need in order to make it like commercially viable. Okay. So give me, I just want to get a sense of, I want to level set for the audience, right? So it sounds to me like what you're saying is you're doing all the work on these, on this, this dexterity so that when Robo,

robots come to market, they are as, they have as much dexterity in their hands as is absolutely possible. Sure, yeah, but you got to remember, hardware is just like one part of the equation. Yeah. You then have to build an AI control system to move, you know, highly complicated hand. And just for context, like most robots today are six degrees of freedom so they can move independently in six different ways. The human hand is 27 degrees of freedom.

Okay. So our robot hand is around 21 degrees of freedom. And so traditional program, the way you traditionally program robots, it doesn't apply here. You've got to use these novel AI techniques. So we're developing both the hardware, also the AI control system. So, James, are you building this with the goal of building your own robots from head to toe, literally? Or are you looking to license this technology to other companies? Yeah, we started off that way because it, I mean, it really is a system's integration.

You've got to understand every subcomponent and how they all interact. Yeah. But boy, has the world changed, right? So, Ben, we were one of the original folks to do this in 2018. And then I think it was in 2021, over 100 Chinese humanoid companies were launched. Wow. State funding. But there was just an absolute assault.

And what they're focused on is the body, right? the actuators for the upper torso, lower torso. So that's been largely commoditized. And so where we're really the best in the world and where we think we can compete is to leverage some of that supply chain, but focus on the hands and high control system. So it's a bit of both. Yeah. And let's live in a world where, you know, because if everyone's placing their bets, you know,

they're all hoping that their bet pays off. Let's live in a world where your bet on the hydraulics and the 21, ways of moving is the right bet, right? So what are your hands going to be able to do that nobody else's hands are going to be able to do? So it's largely... Well, first of all, survive in an industrial environment.

That's like the first thing. So again, you see all these hypey videos of cool gesticulation of fingers, but that's a demo that, you know, works one out of a hundred times. So the first thing is actually survive in an industrial environment. And then it is,

It's a lot of an assembly task. You know, we call them the four geese, the dull, dirty, dangerous, dexterous task that no one really wants to do. Like a lot of the automotive and manufacturing folks we engage with, they have over 100 to 150% turnover on the people doing these jobs. They are sort of highly repetitive, but they are beyond what traditional robots can do. And, you know, when we talk to corporate leaders, they kind of want to get to lights out automation. There's, you know, thousands of tasks that you just can't automate. It's just too, you need precision, dynamic responsiveness, you need dexterous manipulation. So that's really what we're focused on.

Yeah. I mean, I find it really interesting because there are these theories that one of the reasons Elon Musk has created his optimist is because he's going to build an army of them and send them on a SpaceX spaceship to Mars. and they're going to do all the work on the outside. And meanwhile, his boring company is going to dig underneath the Mars surface where it's safe for human beings to live. And that's going to be part of how he terraforms Mars. I kind of want my robots a little closer to home.

Like, I've been watching these things. And I could absolutely see five years from now having some version of one of those in my home as an assistant to help with the laundry and to keep things clean. And I could see that happen. I could absolutely see those happening. Do you believe that that's on the horizon, consumer-facing robots? It is on the horizon, but you got to qualify that with the timing.

So unfortunately, I-Robot, which is that lovely Roomba vacuum cleaning. Basically just went under. And so here's the simplest form of a consumer household robot not being able to thrive or make the economics or reliability work. So, you know, there are some fundamental gaps in the technology that we don't yet understand. Oh, yeah. Are required to be solved before we get there.

Yeah, well, there's one company that says they're already shipping robots, but what that robot's going to be doing, it's going to be operated by a human being remotely until it gets smart enough to do these things itself. Yes. So yeah, exactly. So not ready for prime time. It is not ready for prime time. No. And if you let, there's some, you know, under the hood videos that actually show its capability. And I think it's kind of for the novelty innovator market. You know, I got, I got a young family and I think would cause me more problems than actual time saving, which is really the point of it. Right. So you, you see dishwashers or washing machines all. service the home by saving us time, right? And that's the, that's the panacea that they're trying to achieve there. Well, let's, I'm, go ahead. We've got about 10 seconds left.

Okay, I was just going to say, so Ben, we are the global leaders in IP. So we own the most patents in the entire field. And although we're not going after that market, we're, to your earlier point, you know, we're interested in supporting the ecosystem. Yeah. Well, I'm very excited to see where you go with Sanctuary AI. It's very exciting to learn about a great Canadian company like this. All the best you, James, and looking forward to seeing these products when they hit the market. You bet. Thanks a lot, Ben.

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