The Ben Mulroney Show - Festival sponsor in Toronto demands action / Carmi Levy on tech trends

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

GUEST:  Geoff Dancy / Political Science  U of T / gun violence expert GUEST:  Carmi  Levy/Tech Journalist 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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But yesterday after the show, hello, everybody. Hello, Canada. Thank you so much for joining us on the IHeart Radio streaming app on the radio. You may be listening to this as a snippet on Instagram or you may be enjoying the look of my mug on YouTube. In any event, after the show yesterday, I was brought in to facilitate a conversation with Gouradev Ravi Shankar, who's a, he's a spiritual leader, and he's sort of a leader in meditation. And he was brought to the Art Gallery of Ontario to talk about the value of meditation for executives,

for the C-suite, for the business community. And so we had an hour-long conversation, and I approached it, and I told them I was approaching, as somebody who has never successfully meditated. But I was very, very interested in this man's background. I think his background is what makes me think I'm probably going to give this thing a kick at the can. On top of that, Joy over here, took a course at the art of living, which is the not-for-profit that they set up to spread this type of meditation around the world.

They're in universities, by the way, they're in prisons. They are all over the place. And Joy, you were saying that you became a far less reaction. person. Yes. So it instilled calmness in me when I took it almost nine years ago. And it's a very good way of taking a bit of extra second before reacting to anything. And it gives you a different perspective of it altogether. Well, just so people know, so he was, he was brought in 10 years ago to break a deadlock in the 2015-2016 peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels. There had been a civil war brewing for years.

And he convinced the FARC leaders, the guerrilla leaders, to embrace Gandhi and declare a unilateral ceasefire. And he convinced them to essentially give up being a guerrilla group and become an official political party. So he fixed the FARC and joy. Yeah, both, yeah. Which one was more difficult? I don't know.

Well, and he encouraged rebels to ask for forgiveness from their victims and supported trauma relief programs. It was a 50-year civil war. Now, parts of it have held. The FARC is still non-violent, but in the power vacuum that they've left in certain areas, there are other violent groups that have picked up. But that doesn't happen by accident.

And hearing prisoners all over the world saying that they're finding some sort of peace in prison, I got to say, it was a fascinating conversation. I was glad to be part of it. And then at the end of it, we did a sort of meditation. I told him I didn't know what I was doing. But it lasted 22 minutes. I'm pretty sure I didn't fall asleep.

But I don't know if what I did constitute meditation. Anyway, you've got a, I'm a curious skeptic at this point. And I will, I'll come back to you if this goes anywhere. We believe here at the Ben Maroni show that you fell asleep. Well, I told him off the top. I said, I'm pretty sure I need this conversation because I say often, if the world doesn't make you at least a little bit angry, there's something wrong with you.

And here I am in a room full of people searching for Zen. But I was well received, and I thought the conversation was great. We actually pivoted it. Hey, guess what, open mind, right? Yeah. Open to other things you might find, like, bizarre? Oh, absolutely. Oh, I don't find it bizarre.

I just don't know that if I'm, I don't know that I'm capable of doing it. So anyway, so from peace, we go to anything but in the streets of Toronto with the salsa on St. Clair shooting, that it's still top of mind for so many of us. One of the founders has threatened to drop support for the festival unless Toronto ramps up policing. I guess the question is more policing the answer. So TLN Media Group is a major sponsor,

and the founder and media partner of what's called, the official name is TD Salsa on St. Clair Festival, posted on LinkedIn. And here's it's maddening to see the deputy chief of police with the support of the state of Toronto mayor Chow and the local councilor Josh Matlow

stand at the scene of a horrific crime on Saturday and normalized mass shootings. He said only city councilor Mike Cole stepped forward to object to the deputy chief's statement. We understand that social media accounts from the other night reported the arrival of groups of people looking for trouble

and making trouble. And he said, those public officials are responsible for directing and empowering police to deploy the necessary resources. He added, and here's, I think, the key. Unless city officials provide concrete commitments to enhance policing and security on and around St. Clair Avenue, we will discontinue our involvement. So essentially, he said they knew, they knew going into this, that there were groups of, you know, people who've gone down the wrong path. call them what you want, but bad people with bad intentions. They were looking for events like this to cause chaos. They saw a buildup.

Yeah, they saw a buildup. And yesterday, here's what's interesting, though. Yesterday, one of the BIA members, Dr. Hanna, the veterinarian who joined us, who was there, said there were plenty of police. So is it a numbers issue or is it the wrong type of deployment? Was it, did they just have a show of force, but a show of force that was ill-prepared, not the right trained police to deal with what he says they knew was coming. Well, clearly a show of force isn't enough.

Yeah, because we saw the videos from after the shooting. People run, you know, people were rushing around, rushing away from the scene. Yeah. But then all these cops, there were tons of them running down the street, a lot of them with rifles. Yeah, we said. And so there were a lot of cops there. So is it a deployment issue or is it the fact that they didn't have metal detectors? they didn't have proper precautions in place.

They didn't have the proper intelligence to know that these guys were going to be there. That's right. That's right. But look, I keep going back to the fact that since the pandemic, since the pandemic ended, we have still allowed people to conduct themselves to cover their faces with face masks. And we know because we've seen the videos of smash and grabs, for example, Yeah. People at protests doing and saying things that could run a foul of hate speech laws, for example.

We've seen people cover their faces and it's against the law to do that. There are laws on the books that could be enforced that could prevent. I don't know if these guys wearing face masks. If I were a betting man, I'd bet money that they were. I bet money that their faces were covered. And yet I would. I would have. Yeah, I don't know.

I would be surprised if they were covered in a large group setting like that. You think you think that a bunch of guys who had every intention of pulling out guns, you think they didn't have their faces covered in front of 13,000 people. I bet you they had hoodies. I bet you they had hoodies. And I would bet you that they had face masks. Because we don't know the circumstance. We don't know if these two groups happen upon each other and then the bullets started flying.

We don't know. I mean, they were targeted, though. So we do know that there was intent. Again, we have to wait for the cops to come out with more. But certainly there's, there is. But my point stands, there are, there is low hanging fruit that we could grab at that would make it easier, generally speaking. Yeah. When, when violence erupts in this city, either it's either the violence of a smash and grab or a home invasion or a bunch of people getting together and scaring.

and scaring the bejesus out of another group. All of those things would be, people would be dissuaded from doing them if we explained very clearly, as soon as soon as four teenagers walk into a mall with masks on and their hoodies on, they were summarily picked up by the cops

and said, get out of here or show us your faces. Yeah. One or the other. Like one or the other. Instead, we let them roam them all and the next thing, you know, a million dollars where the jewelry is taken. You know, like enough of that.

stuff. I mean, that's, you see, you see teenagers with masks in a mall and hoodies and stuff. Yeah, chances are pretty good. But again, but that's the, you know, yesterday we were talking, I can't remember who were you talking to about the, the, it's, it's a theory of the broken window. Like, if you, if you, if you don't allow those small petty crimes, uh, if you let everybody know that this aggression will not stand. I think that was Mike cool. Yeah, you, if this aggression will not stand, then up the ladder, you will. You will. slow things down as well. And eventually crime comes down across the board.

Giuliani proved that when he took over New York in the 90s. So the big debate now is with the city and what they're talking. It's like they have to stress what, the festival security. Balance openness versus safety. What are you, and that's the thing. How much openness do you want

and how much oversight do you want to be able to feel safe? All right. Well, coming up after the break, we're speaking with a gun violence expert about these very questions. and we're going to try to figure out, do facts about gun violence translate to the feelings that we have about gun violence? That's next on the Ben Mulroney show. Hi, I'm Jane Koston, former writer and podcaster for places like The New York Times, The Atlantic and National Review.

And now I'm here to hang out with you. Five days a week on what a day, Crooked's Daily News podcast. That's right. Now who's respected on both sides? Okay, yeah, it's not me. It's probably still just Dolly Parton. Moving on. These days, it's hard to separate what matters from all the noise, especially when the noise somehow also feels like it's made out of knives? That's why every weekday, the team and I scour the headlines to bring you the stories that matter most to the way you live in just 20 minutes.

Listen to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the Ben Mulrooney Show. Thank you so much for joining us. And as we are still trying to make sense of three consecutive days of gun violence in the city of Toronto, we're joined now by Jeff Dancy of the Political Science Department of the University of Toronto. who has a depth of knowledge on these affairs. Jeff, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, Ben.

So, listen, you've got expertise in gun violence, the impact of gun politics, and there are few topics that are as politicized as guns in this country. There's a few narratives out there that I want to throw your way and you tell me of whether they make sense or not. We can maybe separate fact from feeling.

For example, Toronto's gun violence problem is escalating and becoming more brazen. When you hear that, what do you say? Yeah, it is increasing, though, I would put the increase in kind of more global, regional, or even continental perspective by comparing it to other places. So I'm from the state of Louisiana, and there you've got a homicide rate, a gun homicide rate of around 12 per 100,000 people. the gun homicide rate in Toronto is is less than one per 100,000 people.

Yeah, but everything's relative, but when you're not used to it, Jeff, you know, like if someone who lives in Toronto, their whole lives is used to the winter, somebody gets off of the plane for the first time from Jamaica, they're going to feel that cold as if it's the end of their life. And so it just, for somebody who's been here for 25 years, it just feels out of control. Yeah, it looks like levels are returning to where they were about 20 years ago, which is never a good thing, because you want progress. Yeah.

Right? People want things that improve rather than decline. And the lowest ebb was around 2014, 2015, in crime and crime severity in Toronto and in Ontario. So it's increased over the last 10 years. It's a problem. And I'm not trying to deny that there's a problem that needs to be addressed. but it's one of those things like this will regress to the mean to some extent this weekend has been has been very unfortunate but we still need to keep it in perspective and do some things that we know can lessen this violence or stem it or prevent it from happening

more in the future what are some of those things i think a lot of people are hungry for solutions that can take impact we can feel the impact of quickly yeah it's a good question because I mean, I mean, the truth of this is something that nobody wants to hear is that even criminologists who are genius in studying crime can't really tell you exactly what is going to solve this problem. But I do think that we have a sense of some things that can be generally positive. I would recommend, for example, there are community-based solutions where you intervene in communities where you know that there's a problem. And the intervention can be like talking to people that you know are going to seek retaliation for other acts of guns. violence. Like if there are gangs, they often want to respond to, you know, their brothers are getting shot and then they want to shoot back. And so one thing that they've done in New Orleans is to open lines of communication with everyone to try to de-escalate that violence. I think that's a good thing. And gun violence is actually decreasing in New Orleans because of that. There are other things too. Like I think I've moved to Toronto just four years ago.

I've noticed that there's kind of generally a permissiveness towards like petty crime and low-level theft and people drinking, you know, six packs of beer on the street and stuff like that. I think that's the kind of thing that you might try to clean up a little bit because it kind of creates this overall atmosphere of permissiveness that maybe we don't need to have. What about this, the narrative, and I'm pretty sure it's rooted in fact that the vast, vast majority of the violent gun crimes in Toronto are perpetrated by violent offenders who are using illegal handguns that came over the border from the United States.

I think, you know, I don't know if we have very good counts of that, but it's certainly a concern that's valid. I'll just say that. I don't know what the exact data are on how many handgun. I know that handgun incidents are increasing, and handguns are quite popular. popular in the United States and they are trafficked and easy to traffic. So I would imagine that part of it is that it's bleeding over from the U.S., which is basically starting to, you know, pushing to send guns and handguns in the mail to people. Yeah. Yeah. It's, there's more than one

gun for one person in the United States, which is insane. But, but, you know, I think that Canada does need to focus on not allowing that level of mass diffusion of firearms to exist in Canada. One thing that Canada has is restrictive gun laws, and that has been productive over time. The other thing where I think feelings might be overwhelming, the facts of the case is that major public events are starting to feel unsafe. And this salsa on St. Clair event was a big one. We have a lot of public events, and I don't know that we've got a ton of gun violence, but this one was so big in front of so many people while the sun was still shining.

Feels like that had overstated impact on people's feeling of safety in crowds. Yeah, and I don't blame people for that. I mean, guns, I've talked about this before, but gun violence, you know, even if mass gun violence or gun violence of public events is a relatively small proportion of all acts, it has a chilling effect. It decreases our enjoyment if we're, if we have a fear that this kind of thing might happen. And I wonder, you know, there's part of me that wonders whether this coinciding with the World Cup and where there were almost no violent events to report. And I think that the city did a very good job handling the World Cup.

Maybe, you know, resources were expended there and taken away from some of the other festivals, even though there wasn't a direct, you know, coincidence of this event with the World Cup. You know, there still might be, police have been a bit stretched lately, you know, and they did a really good job concentrating on downtown in an Ontario place for all that. So, yeah, I think that that could be partly responsible, but also that, you know, we need to do a better job of protecting public events. But yeah, I think one of the overarching concerns that is making people feel uneasy is that it feels like gun violence has become more unpredictable. Not to say anybody should have been comfortable saying, all right, well, all the gun violence is up there in that region of the city. And that doesn't affect me.

that just affects a different group of people, so I'm okay. But the issue is motives, very, victims, very, locations, very. Patterns are harder to track. At least that's how it feels for the layperson. And it's causing, I think, a level of anxiety that may be, like I said, overstated, given where we are in terms of how violent the city actually is. Yeah, it could be. I mean, and there could be a bleed over from, like you said, activity that was previously isolated to certain groups or communities. or, you know, certain illicit kinds of behaviors.

You know, they were all kind of clustered together. Now that it's starting to bleed over into the suburbs or into the street festivals, then people will start to get concerned, and that's understandable. But I think if you try to address the root causes of gun crime and the patterns of gun crime that exist in those isolated communities or previously did, then that will also have an effect and help prevent the events from bleeding over into the mass public. And so I think the response is kind of the same. But I would caution, again, moderation around there. There doesn't need to be a hardcore crackdown or some kind of

like crazy response based on all of our anxieties. But we do need to take some measures that try to prevent things like this from happening again. Well, Jeff Dancy, I want to thank you very much. And I thank you for being part of the reversal of the brain drain, an American coming to Canada. Very happy about that. We'll take our wins where we can get them and we got somebody at the top of the heap for the University of Toronto. Thank you very much. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you, Ben. We will obviously stay on top of this story because gun violence is not a problem that is isolated to the city of Toronto. When we come back, China has done something in its own way that up until now, only Elon Musk has done. What have they done? We'll have they done. We'll be

We'll talk about that on the other side of this break. Don't go anywhere. This is the Ben Mulrooney Show coming at you from coast to coast to coast on the Chorus Radio Network and the I-Heart Radio streaming app. There is a new space race. It's not U.S. versus USSR. It's U.S. versus China. And the ace in the hole for the United States has been Elon Musk doing things with

reusable rockets, the likes of which, well, we've never seen before. Well, China, as they try to get a jump on the United States to go to the moon and eventually land on Mars, has taken a big step, a giant leap, if you will, in that race with China's state-owned rocket developer, achieving a major milestone of successfully recovering a reusable orbital class booster for the first time. To talk about this momentous accomplishment and many more tech stories were joined by, our good friend, Carmi Levy. Carmie, welcome. Hi, Dan.

Good to be with you. Yeah, so this is a big deal for China. Yeah, I had to sit down when I first saw this headline. This is huge. I mean, this is only, they now become the second country in history to ever land an orbital class rocket safely back on Earth. But it's less elegant than what SpaceX is doing. A little bit less.

So it kind of looks familiar. So basically what happens is the rocket is called Long March 10B. It's a new rocket. It is going to also be another version of it's going to be the basis of their new human launch system as well. They're developing a new bigger capsule to go to their space station. So this rocket, it's going to be reusable for both cargo satellites as well as manned space missions. And it kind of looks a lot like a falcon. It's a little bit smaller, a little bit less capable, carries a little bit less weight to orbit.

But it's the same class. And basically what it does is the first stage, which is the one that gets it off the ground, When it burns out, it returns to a barge in the ocean, which looks a lot like SpaceX's architecture. But when it gets there, a Falcon 9, of course, has these landing legs that unfold, and then it just lands in the middle of this barge. In the Chinese version, it lands, there's like a big box on top of that barge, and there are a bunch of cables. And those cables pull closed as the rocket lowers.

They kind of grab it, like they sort of snag it, and then the rocket just hangs there mid-air. And it's landed safely. And the reason they use that is they don't have to put landing legs on. It weighs less. So the less weight you have for landing legs, the more weight you have for cargo and things like that. You can launch more to space. So slightly different approach than SpaceX, but it's pretty clear they've been watching what Elon Musk is doing. And they've been learning from that experience.

And those engineers clearly inspired by what the Americans were doing first. But see, this is what is reminiscent about why it felt like the pace of technological, change in the 60s and 70s, up until the 80s, when the Challenger exploded, was far faster than anything we saw in the 90s and early 2000s because competition breeds excellence. And the Americans do not want to lose this race to the Chinese. And the Chinese feel that there is something about beating the Americans that will give them prestige. And so they are learning from each other.

and you're going to, I'm convinced you are going to see even more of this, this revolutionary change happening at a far faster clip than we've ever seen, I've seen in my lifetime. I'm right there with you. Pressure breeds competition and it breeds technological innovation. And of course, in an era when the U.S. didn't have that push, there was no reason for it to push the envelope of technology now. Suddenly we're back in a space race, you know, China and the U.S.

both want to have human boots on the ground on the moon by 2030. And they're both developing entirely new architectures to make that happen. And so this is exciting. You know, I think this is good because you and I and everyone back here on Earth, we benefit from that. A lot of the technologies that we're using right now to do this radio program have their origins in the space race. Yeah.

Because they're developed for orbital flight. They're developed for lunar flight, interplanetary flight. And then eventually they get commercialized. And so the Internet wouldn't have been possible, if not for a lot of these investments. And so, you know, we tend to think of it as just, well, it's Elon Musk versus China. No, absolutely not. That technology eventually becomes part of the broader economy. We all win if these things succeed.

All right. We got to talk about the surprising knock-on effects that are not good for the consumer about sort of our mass adoption of AI. We heard about the huge investment by META into Alberta. they're doing an even bigger investment into Louisiana. Microsoft has cut a big chunk of their workforce to focus on AI, and their carbon emissions grew by 25% this year, I think because of what, because the carbon footprint of these AI data centers.

And so I want to talk about that, but I want to follow that with this, the fact that so much memory is being, you know, these companies that build, memory for for PCs and for computers and for iPads and for gamers. They are prioritizing data centers over the consumer, which means the memory that is being built out by companies like Samsung, it's going to cost more to the consumer. Yeah.

They're calling this Ramageddon, right? That's a great name. And I love it. It's one of my favorite terms in tech. And it's a very real crisis because every company, every major tech company, is racing to build out AI infrastructure, build these massive data centers that are packed with lots of high-powered computers that require lots of storage. They need solid-state drives.

They need lots of RAM. And there's only so much capacity in the world to make these components and these data centers will pay more than the companies that make laptops for us and desktop computers and smartphones. So guess what? Less RAM and storage available for devices that you and I buy because it's all going into data centers. prices have spiked.

We know that Apple has raised the prices. We've talked about that. Microsoft, just about every other major vendor. And now, of course, Microsoft's saying, and Microsoft is, they're playing both sides. Microsoft is an AI company. And they also make laptops, the surface line. And they've also increased prices on those. And so they have now announced that as of, they were aiming to be carbon neutral by 2030.

But they just released their annual sustainability report that shows their carbon emissions actually went up by 25% last year, weren't going down. they're moving in the wrong direction. And as it turns out, they're not the only company. Amazon's carbon footprint up by 16% last year. Google's up by 18% last year. And this is all because of Ramageddon, because they're building huge data centers. They've got to go AI. Something's got to give.

And I'm guessing it's the environment. It's the first thing that's going to go. And let's give people a sense of how big of an issue this is. Microsoft's annual carbon footprint is now on the scale of a country like Panam, or Lithuania. If anybody thinks, and I have to assume that we are, we are ramping up to even more carbon emissions. I don't know that we've created the demand

that these companies want yet for AI adoption. So I think it's only going to go up. And you've got the Bitcoin mining, which in and of itself is a massive carbon emitter as well. I mean, what are we supposed? to do here. I'm bringing, I'm bringing cloth bags to the, uh, to the, uh, to the grocery store. And I'm, I'm told to eat my, my takeout on wooden forks, uh, because that's my responsibility. But what kind of, what kind of help can I do if these giant companies are going to be, uh,

and who knows what's going on in China? Like, this seems like a losing war. It does. And it's unfortunate because you and I are, you know, we're pitching in with our own eco-friendly initiatives, but clearly it isn't enough when these, the world's largest companies seem to just be flouting the rules. And this is where I look to governments. You know, establish some rules. And, you know, just last week, meta announced that they're building that massive data center just north of Edmonton. And that thing is so big that it'll consume almost as much power as the entire city of Edmonton. A million homes. And what are they building to power it? A dedicated natural gas production facility. So you're going to burn more carbon

fuels in order to fuel this thing. This is not green energy. Don't tell me that natural gas is green. And this ultimately is going to contribute. Meta, of course, when we see their sustainability numbers, they're going to go the wrong way as well because of this, not just this one facility, they've got 33 others that they're running now and they're building dozens more. So the industry's moving in the wrong direction. And governments don't seem to have the wherewithal to draw a line in the sand and say, maybe we should be doing this a little bit differently. Maybe we should be insisting that instead of building natural gas plants to keep the lights on, you're focusing on green energy and that, you know, you can keep your carbon emissions promises, but still also build these

things out and fuel yourself for the AI war. You can have both if you want to, what we're going to make you do it. Yeah, but the problem is, is China going to do that? And again, this race is as important, if not more important than the space race. So anyway, well, unfortunately, we're going to leave it. That's one of the benefits of operating when you're not a democracy, I guess. Yeah, exactly. You can't trust anything online these days. Apparently in Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa, the airports are backing concerns by Toronto's Pearson over fake, bot-driven travel stories about all sorts of things,

flight delays, cancellations. So we're going to continue our conversation with Carmi, Levy Carmi. To what end? To what end are they doing this? Your summer travels deserve an upgrade With select Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac vehicles connected by OnStar, you can stream, game, and more on the go. Whether you're headed to a music festival or a cottage getaway, you can access hundreds of apps on Google Play right from your center display. Explore OnStar Tech Today at OnStar.ca and discover how to take your summer to the next level.

OnStar. Better never stops. Well, it's clickbait, and these are sites that are designed to generate traffic there. They're adjacent to a legitimate site. So you would normally check Pearson Airport's website, as well as the app of the airline that you're flying, to make sure that your flight is still on time, that you've got all the information you need. So they post themselves up and they kind of pretend to be legitimate alternatives to it. So if you're looking for flight information from Pearson, they'll show up at the top of a Google search. You click on it.

You think they're legit, but in fact, they're not. And in many cases, they're powered by AI. Bots are actually creating the app. assets creating the schedules, for example, because they're AI, though. Sometimes they get it wrong. So you may very well look at this site instead of the legitimate Pearson site. And you look at your flight and, oh, goodness, it's delayed so you don't go to the airport on time. But then when you do go to the airport, you find out that site was wrong. You've now missed your flight. Oh, so it's not necessarily nefarious. It's just incompetent.

Well, see, it could be. And, you know, at its most benign, all they're trying to do is generate traffic so they can put up ads and make revenue off of those ads. At its worst, you sign in as a legitimate user. They get your authentication information, and then they use it to launch identity theft attacks against you. So it can have significant malevolent intent. It can be used as kind of the opening play in a cyber attack. And there's a whole range of bad things that can happen.

Either you miss your flight or you get hacked or both, but take your pick. But either way, these are not legitimately sanctioned sites and not just Pearson, but every airport, major airport across the country in Montreal. Vancouver elsewhere. They're also in Ottawa, they're signaling the alarms you're saying they're noticing that traffic is also being diverted away from their legitimate sites to these sites to, and travelers are being put at risk. Well, that's just super.

That's exactly what we need these days. It costs an arm and a leg to travel. And so you finally decide these scrounge your money, you save your money so that you can take your family on that one single trip, that one vacation. It's going to make you forget all the trials and tribulations and headwinds that you're facing all year long. And some AI website makes you miss your flight and they get into your bank account. That's just super. That's great news.

Well, let's talk about something that's probably good news. The first American autonomous ground vehicles are being used in the fight for Ukrainian independence. Yeah, this is really interesting. So basically what they do is a company called Fortera. And what they do is they take a regular like an ATV. It's like one that you would buy, you know, to just abas through the woods. And they turn it into this vehicle to bring cargo to and from the front and also to evacuate soldiers in case they've been injured on the front. Because normally what you would do is you would use humans driving regular trucks to do this.

And of course, we know in war, those are often targeted because, you know, they make legitimate targets. If you kill their supply chain, you can kill their ability to fight. And so replacing these vehicles with autonomous vehicles is having a huge difference. They're saving dozens of lives. They're saving huge amounts of money because it's a lot less expensive. And now they're even thinking about it. This is kind of where, you know, this is not, they're not actually wage war. They're not firing any shots.

It's not the autonomy deciding who to attack. But they're saying the next versions of these could very well have arms on them. and the technology might be used to decide who gets targeted and who gets shot. So we are starting to approach some sort of lines, moral and ethical and legal lines, but I don't think anybody can argue that we want Ukraine to have the best possible weapons to repel Russia. And if that's the case, if technology can allow a smaller force to fight off a bigger one and to survive for another day, I think we can all agree. That's a reasonable use of the technology.

So how are these, is there somebody, is this like a drone where somebody in, you know, hundreds of kilometers away is driving it from a distance? Or is this an AI-enabled ATV? In this case, it is, so it looks like if you've ever seen a Polaris ATV, you can buy them at a dealer here in Canada. It looks like that. But they are actually fully autonomous. So they can, like you tell them, this is the mission, go execute the mission, and it will then go do it independently. There is the option for human operators to take over. So there is a remote control alternative as well in case the autonomy kind of gets stuck. And there have been some losses. Sometimes the technology doesn't kind of figure itself out or sometimes it dries itself into a

bog and it can't get out and even human operators can't fix it. So there have been some losses. But there still is human involvement in the process when necessary. But for the most part, these things operate on their own until they can't. And at that point a human steps in and picks up the remote controls and tries to fix it. So we're getting to the point. point where between drones, either in the air, in the sea, on the sea, or on the land, I mean, we're going to get to a point where it's just autonomous vehicles fighting autonomous vehicles. And whoever has the largest bank role to, I mean, it's going to be, who can bankrupt the other

country? I mean, if no lives are being lost on the battlefield, it's going to be, it's going to be which autonomous army can penetrate the autonomous defenses of the, you know, the, the autonomous defenses of the other side cause civilian casualties and bankrupt the other country, correct? I mean, that's where we're going. It is. You know, so the notion of a human soldier holding a weapon may be somewhat quaint at some point, but then again, there's also the possibility of an invading force using autonomous

weapons to go after civilians. And, you know, I think that, you know, the thing that sort of strikes me here is that, you know, that it isn't always, you know, it is an economic fight as well. Russia is significantly more resourced than Ukraine. What Ukraine has done with aerial UAVs has been a lot of their citizens have been making them in their homes and their garages, basically cheap weapons that are designed to counter multi-million dollar Russian missiles and other, you know, and aircraft and smart bombs and things like that. So it's asymmetric warfare, but it's asymmetric economic warfare as well.

autonomy can be the route toward allowing a country like Ukraine to fight back against a much better resourced enemy. And then maybe, you know, give them something to think about. You don't necessarily have all the resources to take over.

Maybe you'll think twice next time about even invading in the first place. This could be, if we play our cards right, a potential deterrent to war in the first place. But there is going to be, at some point, there will be a battlefield experiment of, Autonomous vehicles, autonomous weapons that have no human beings in the loop, no decision-making by any humans versus those who are fully autonomous.

Yeah, you know that's coming. And whichever one wins in that game is going to, there's going to be some decisions that have to be made by the people who chose wrong and those moving forward. Because if the autonomous ones destroy the ones with the human beings in the loop, that's it. We're going to, it's going to be a race to see who can, who can close that loop and take the, take the, the human interaction out completely. And that's going to be a very scary day. That's, I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's terminator right there. Very much so.

You know, the term they'd like to use is, as he said, human in the loop or HITL. And up until now, every time a country or a weapons manufacturer has talked about incorporating autonomy and AI into weaponry, they've always taken great pains to say, oh, but we. will continue to retain HITL. Humans will always be in the loop. Humans will always have the final say over when weapons are targeted and when the trigger is pulled. But we know full well that we're rushing very quickly toward a horizon where that is no longer the case, where autonomy is so good, so sophisticated that someone's going to decide, you know what, we're going to take the human out of the loop. We're going to allow the technology now to make all those decisions

from beginning to end. And I think that's where we're going to some very frightening moral Well, yeah, we've seen that script. Then that autonomous vehicle decides, all right, once I've dealt with the enemy, then I'm going to go, I'm going to turn around, and I'm going to take care of the sticking points in my own country. I've seen this script a thousand times. That's right. Who's to say we're not going to have friendly fire incidents involving autonomous vehicles as well?

It's only a matter of time. All right, Karmie. Now we really do say goodbye. I thank you very much for your time. Enjoy the rest of your week, my friend.