The Ben Mulroney Show - The existential crisis with Canada's auto sector

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

GUEST:  Raquel Dancho, MP Kildonan-St. Paul 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 Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I wish we were starting with good news. The lay of the land in the auto sector is not good. We know that Stalantis has decided that they are going to close a plant to the tune of 3,000 direct jobs, another thousand indirect jobs in the province of Ontario. We're going to get to that in a moment. but we just heard moments ago. The General Motors is ending production of its Bright Drop electric delivery vans at an assembly plant in Ingersoll, Ontario, leaving the plant's future uncertain. Now, production had paused in May due to slowing demand in the commercial EV market, and Bright Drop vehicles will not be produced elsewhere.

So as of right now, it's just marking the end of the line. Meanwhile, employees will receive hourly workers will receive six months salary, possible lump sum payments and benefits with GM working with Unifor and the government to plan the plants a future. Let's talk about that plant for a second. It launched the bright drop in 2021 as part of GM's push towards EVs, operated below capacity since late 2022 despite a $1 billion retooling investment. Now, there are about 1,200 workers affected, and it's been an economic driver in Ingersoll since 1989. So this is another story of the auto sector taking a hit. It's not the same as Stalantis, but it's still, look, you lose a job, you lose a job,

it doesn't really matter whether that job is moving to the United States or whether it's just that nobody is buying these EVs. So let's go to Stalantis, because that was the news last week, and there are a lot of upset politicians across this country. And Stalantis was summoned to Ottawa on Monday and to talk with members of the government. The meeting details have been murky. The CEO has made a statement, though.

He says, it's all about communities, all about communities. That's what they do at Stalantis. Let's listen to Antonio Filosa, the CEO of Stalantus. But this is about more than numbers. It is about our employees, our dealers, our suppliers, our customers, and all the communities we call home. It's about the future we are building together. Yeah, except for the Canadian communities that have been gutted, gutted. Okay, so the question is, will the government hold them to account?

We know that they're saying a lot of the right things, right? Even Melanie Jolie, who doesn't often, in my estimation, acquit herself as well as she could, I think said all the right things earlier this week. Meanwhile, so in committee, you've got the House of Commons and you've got these committee meetings. And in committee, Garnett Genuess, an MP for the Conservatives, was calling on the government to release the Stalantus contracts so we can know exactly what they committed to. and if, in fact, they are breaking any clauses in that contract. So we're going to move a motion today,

summoning, ordering to this committee, these contracts. And I am confident that a majority of members of this committee want to see these contracts. But it will be up to the government, whether they work with other parliamentarians to help us fight for Canadian jobs, or whether they run interference on behalf of this company. And let's be clear, the only reason to filibuster to block the exposure of these contracts would be to protect this company that is moving jobs out of Canada to the United States. Look, we don't know what's in these contracts yet.

We're hoping that they get released. But yesterday, I sort of threw out this comparison to the bailout of the banks in the United States. where the government did not foresee that the banks upon getting billions upon billions of dollars in bailouts would take some of that money and give bonuses, year-end bonuses, to their bankers, which upset a whole lot of people because they took taxpayers money and they enriched these bankers who themselves were probably in their own way responsible for the crisis that gutted the U.S. economy. But they didn't foresee that they would ever do that

so there was no clause that could prevent the government from or could make the government stop those banks from doing what they did. I don't know if that's the case here. I hope it's not. I hope that the Canadian government planned for all sorts of scenarios

but we'll have to see. So the question is, will we see these contracts? Here is Melanie Jolie in the House of Commons. Mr. Speaker, of course, what Salantis announced for the Brampton plant last week was completely unacceptable. And Salantis has made solemn commitments to this government and to their workers, and they need to honor their commitments. And that's why we will hold them to account.

While my colleagues are just right now talking, we already know that in committee we said that we would agree to the production of documents. Thank you. The Honorable Leader of the Opposition. Mr. Speaker, surely Stalantis would not be announcing that it is moving a 3,000 worker plant to the United States of America if this government had negotiated job guarantees in that contract, $15 billion. Well, that's the question. I don't know what goes into one of these contracts. I have no idea.

I don't know that how it works when a government. government guarantees money for a private company. So I don't know what Pierre is talking about when he talks about job guarantees. I'm sure that that's a best practice. I have no idea. I will take him at his word. And here's hoping that that is in the contract and they broke the contract so we can seek redress in the courts.

That to me is the easiest way to make these. employees whole, making sure that Stalantis, if they are, in fact, running a foul of contract law, that there is a way to go to the courts and demand some sort of payment from them so that that money can then be diverted to the workers, the 3,000 workers plus the 1,000 knock-on jobs, 3,000 plus 1,000 jobs that are just gone. I mean, these are people who woke up every single day and went and did their job as best as they could and probably didn't think too much that that that job would just disappear one day. But as soon as Donald Trump said jump, Stalanta said, how high? And where do you want me to jump? Oh, you want me to jump to Illinois? We'll jump

to Illinois. So here is, I don't know. Like I said, I don't know what's in these contracts, but my sense is that they are thick. My sense is they cover a whole lot of ground. And It's going to take smart lawyers to sift through them and identify if Stalantis has, in fact, broken their contracts. And if they have, I suspect that government will do everything they can to make them pay. But it's going to be a while, I suspect. And I'm glad that the government has committed to sharing them. I'm glad that they've committed to letting us see behind the curtain because I think everyone in this kind of needs to know that these contracts were, they were written for the workers.

They were written for the people on the factory floor to protect them against something like this. And if it's not, somebody is going to have to answer. If this contract was so easily broken by Stalantis that they could just up and leave whenever they wanted without any sort of penalty if that is if that's what ends up coming out of this

whoever wrote the contract is going to have to answer for it and whoever signed the contract whoever was minister at the time is going to have to answer for that because it really when 3,000 jobs are on the line it should not be this easy

to just up and and leave just say you know what sorry we're closing this one we're opening one down in Illinois. That to me, if you're going to do it, there should be a heck of a lot more money on the table for those who have been negatively affected. For all of those families, for that entire city, everybody deserves a heck of a lot more than just, we're really sorry, but we'll see you when we see you. So that is a to be continued, my friends. All right,

should the liberals be more transparent about their auto industry deals? Our next guest says, hell yes. Don't go anywhere. The Ben Mulroney Show marches on. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. And as a reminder, you can fall, find us almost anywhere on podcast platforms, on social media platforms, and on YouTube. If you want to watch the show as well as hear the dulcet tones of Ben Mulrooney, then feel free to find us on YouTube and like and subscribe and share our content if you can because that's how we're going to grow this show. one listener and one viewer at a time. All right. So before the break, we were talking about these contracts,

these Stalantus contracts. And the more I was talking to you about it, the more I realized these things have got to be big. They got to be beefy contracts. There's to lay out so many scenarios and so much, with so much at stake with so many people, depending on these jobs, there's no way that this is a five-page contract, right?

So what are we going to uncover when we ultimately see these contracts. To dig in, we're joined by Raquel Dancho MP for Kildonan, St. Paul. Welcome. Great to be with you, Ben. All right. So talk to me about your role in this discussion, this conversation. So you'll recall that a few years ago, just about two, three years ago, the government, the liberal government, led by Justin Trudeau, signed about $50 billion worth of deals to pursue this electric vehicle battery subsidy mandate for Canada. And in particular, a company called Salantis, that is one of the largest auto sector employers in Canada,

they signed a $15 billion subsidy over to Stalantis to create electric vehicle batteries, all right? That's about two years ago. And fast forward to today, or just this last week, Salantis has announced that a major plant that it has is moving its production down to Illinois in the United States, which puts 3,000 Canadian jobs at risk. Further to that, they're investing $13 billion in the United States over the next decade,

which will represent tens of thousands of American jobs. So effectively, Ben, the Canadian taxpayer is providing $15 billion to Stalantis, who's now moving jobs and billions of investment to the United States. So what we see as conservatives and my job as the critic for industry is to hold the liberal government accountable for what we see is what's looking like a very bad deal for Canadian taxpayers and Canadian auto sector workers. Raquel, have you ever seen one of these contracts? Like, I'm trying to wrap my head around what sort of work you and the committee are going

to have when you ultimately get these contracts. I have to assume that they are thick. So we've been calling for the public release of these contracts for over two years, and they have refused and fought tooth and nail every step of the way. And so now our excellent conservative colleagues at the government operations, Commorations Committee have successfully negotiated the private release of those contracts. We want them to be in public today. Sorry, what does that mean private release?

So it's going to be done. It's called in-camera. So only a certain MPs can see them and cannot release them publicly yet. But we're going to continue to fight for that. So there's some inter- there's sort of some procedural political wrangling there from the liberals. We want those contracts released publicly, have called for that for two years. Yeah, is this, sorry, I don't mean to keep interrupting, Raquel, but I want to get some details. If you see these in camera, does that mean that you can see them, but you can't comment on them publicly?

Not at this time, no. So anything done in camera is sort of in private, in a confidential setting. So we want them to be public, but this is all the liberals are allowing us for now. And why? What's their justification? So it's sort of been the same thing. They're hiding behind sort of this sort of commercial secrecy sort of of a convaled. sort of of a contract. But for what we know, the only thing that there may be some elements of

these contracts that may have to be redacted for just intellectual property reasons, for example, which may be very standard. But the terms of the taxpayer dollars that were handed over on mass, again, $15 billion plus, that needs to be publicly available. We've held that conviction for a very long time. And now that we're literally seeing 3,000 jobs at risk and production of the Brampton plant moving south. We think it's high time that the liberals show their work and show Canadians exactly what they did or did not deliver for them with a $15 billion contract. Beyond this contract with Stalantis, Raquel, is there anything else that the government has that you want to see for the benefit of transparency? So Stalantis was one of a number of auto sector

companies in Canada that signed at these agreements a few years ago with the liberal government. concerning electric vehicles. So unfortunately, or unfortunately for those contracts and for the Canadian people who invested, again, almost over $50 billion as a total of that commitment for electric vehicles, we're seeing a great decline of global demand for electric vehicles, and particularly in North America. Again, looking back to when President Biden was in charge, the liberals brought forward these contracts as a response to what the Americans were doing. But again, writing's been on the wall with Mr. Trump for quite some time now. It was about a year ago almost that he was going to resume his presidency or have a second go in it, so to speak, and yet the

liberals have failed to pivot. You'll know that the electric vehicle mandate, for example, is still in place in Canada. Mr. Carney has said he's, quote, postponing it for one year. But again, this is a $20,000 penalty. The government will put on gas-powered auto manufacturers if they don't me government-imposed electric vehicle quotas. Can you imagine if you're an auto sector company right now dealing with Trump tariffs? Are you going to be expanding capital and jobs in Canada with this mandate, this electric vehicle mandate, also hanging over your head? No, of course not.

This is something, for example, that can be done immediately to bring some investment certainty to our auto manufacturers in response to what's going on with Trump. And because, frankly, it's just a bad policy. And really, folks are buying electric vehicles like the liberals want them to. So here we are with this big, gigantic man. and so my job and our job is conservative is to hold them accountable for that. Okay, so, but we don't know what we don't know at this point. Raquel Dancho is my guest, MP for Kildon in St. Paul.

We're talking about Stalantis and what could be uncovered by finally seeing the contract that had them come to Canada and then decamp to Illinois. This is an existential crisis for the industry. And because you don't know what's in the contract, is it possible? Like, are you prepared that you see this? contract and everything is above board, but what you uncover is Stalantus broke their word. They broke the terms of the contract. But from the government's perspective, are you prepared that, you know, you don't know,

good faith, let's look, it's entirely possible that the contract is fine. It's just that Stalantis did not behave properly. And certainly that they need to be held accountable. Again, this is a $15 billion, which is a 100% subsidy for a trick vehicle battery. and the Windsor plant their building next star. So, of course, if they broke their contract with the Canadian government, which ultimately is the Canadian taxpayer, then they need to be held accountable for that.

But I think what we're thinking is that given their flip-ins to just announce these large investments south to shut down the Jeep Compass production at their Brampton facility putting 3,000 jobs at risk, that's quite a bold measure to take if they're in clear violation of a Canada-wide jobs guarantee and a contract that they would have signed. So we'll see if that's the boldness that Solentis has taken. We don't know yet, as you've pointed out. But our suspicion and our great concern is that the liberal government signed over 15 billion tax dollars to Atlantis with no guarantee for Canada's job security.

Which would just be shocking, a shocking disregard for Canadian taxpayers. And just to put it into context for your viewers, $15 billion means $1,000 per Canadian household is invested in Solantis. And yet they're moving production and jobs to the United States and investing money there and just leaving us hanging in this way. So, again, Canadian taxpayers deserve much better and much more respect, much more due diligence for their tax money. And so we're concerned that like in so many other examples over the last decade under the liberals that that wasn't applied. And of course, we will hold them accountable if that's the case. Right. One of two things is true.

Either Stalantis broke the terms of a good contract or they are abiding by a bad. contract. And so we will see when, if and when those terms are allowed to be released publicly, which you can rest assured that the Conservatives at the Government Operations Committee will push to have that information of the contracts released publicly, as we have for two years, but it'll really be up to the liberals if they're going to permit that. When do you think that the public will finally have a sense of what's going on in these contracts?

Oh, gosh, I'd like to know the answer to that. to be honest, we've been demanding this for two years. I wish it was today. But our understanding is that the government, the liberal government, is required to get the government operations committee in short order. Those contracts to be reviewed again in private, in camera.

And then the committee will deliberate of what they will agree to to be released. All right. So it could be weeks, a few weeks in best case. Well, listen, we appreciate your attention in this matter. I think the entire country needs to know what we're dealing with here.

Concertive MP, Raquel Dancho. Thank you so much for joining us on the Ben Mulroney Show. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've been following the news, like really following it, you know how exhausting it can be. Politics, conflict, uncertainty. It's a lot to carry. And for many men, there's this expectation to stay calm,

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Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you so much for spending time with us. A lot of stories in tech. No better person to check in with than Carmi Levy, our tech journalist and expert. Carmi, welcome to the show. Good to be here, Ben. Thanks for having me. So everybody knows that Amazon is influential as Amazon, but I don't think people realize how much influence it has behind the scenes for other companies because of its Web Services Division. Yeah, they are the world's largest provider of cloud services.

If you think about sort of the Internet infrastructure, they're responsible for about 30% of it around the world through a company called Amazon Web Services. That's their cloud division. And yesterday they had a meltdown. In the middle of the night, while most of us were sleeping, their system, starting in a data center in West Virginia, went down, had an outage, and before you knew it, it was rippling around the world because a whole bunch of different companies. For example, Facebook was down, Lyft was down, Reddit was down.

All these, even the McDonald's and Tim Horton's apps weren't working because they rely on cloud services. on cloud services provided by AWS. And so if you wanted a Big Mac, you weren't getting one. And so by the time all was said and done, billions of people could not use the internet because of this one outage in this one data center in the U.S. Okay, so two questions.

One, do they know what went wrong? And two, what are they going to do or what are the other companies going to do to remedy this to make sure it doesn't happen again? They called it an operational issue. at one point it had to do with the addressing system as the domain name system they didn't provide any more details than that obviously for competitive reasons but was interesting following their debt they have a dashboard that kind of shows when there's an outage what they're doing to resolve it and it took them most of the day to bring it back up it's incredibly complex it's not like rebooting your laptop just to kind of load balance and get everything sort of adjusted took them literally almost half the day until they said you know what we're done and we're back up and running. I think the solution to this is very similar.

Remember a few years ago when the Rogers outage happened? And a lot of people were freaked out because 911 service was down. And it turns out that they could have had the other telecommunications companies connect to them and sort of share the load. And so now there's legislation on the books and the telecom companies are working together. We could see the same thing in cloud services that if one of them has a bad day, Microsoft, which has its Azure services, Google, which has Google Cloud, they could work together in order to provide support if one of them has an outage.

This might take some government intervention, maybe in the U.S., maybe here, but I would love to see that because the Internet was supposed to be this thing that survived a nuclear war, but apparently it all comes down to one data center in one location. That's kind of a terrifying prospect. Carmie, do all of these cloud service companies speak the same language? Like, could AWS be replaced immediately by Microsoft or by Google? It all depends. If you are a client, so let's say you're Mark Zuckerberg and you're running meta and, you know,

Facebook and Instagram and all that, you make decisions on who your cloud provider is going to be. And so I would expect after what happened yesterday, a lot of companies who they've only done a deal with one cloud service provider, basically putting all their eggs in that one basket, I would expect a lot of companies are starting to ask that question, maybe we should have more than one cloud provider. Maybe we should have the ability that if one of them goes down, we just flip to the other one and keep going that we don't go dark just because one cloud provider is having a bad day.

So it is going to change a lot of IT people's minds in the next few days, weeks, and months. Very interesting. All right, let's come back to Canada. apparently we have some sort of government program first ever financial crimes agency in an effort to combat what online scams yeah this is a big deal they're calling it it's the national anti-fraud strategy and part of that is that financial crimes agency which essentially it will allow them to investigate crimes money laundering online fraud financial scams and get people their money back if they have been defrauded uh and then also you know give the the bank

banks more sort of room to change their rules. In other words, make it not so restrictive so that you and I can, for example, limit online transactions and make our account safer. You know, maybe change the rules so that, you know, we don't get penalized if we're defrauded. So often banks shrug their shoulders and walk away saying, well, you answered the call. You said yes to the fraudsters. Therefore, we're not going to cover your loss. Thanks to this new strategy, consumers will have more protection. and law enforcement will have more tools to go after the bad guys.

You know what? I think it's a good idea, but the devil is obviously in the details. Let's go to Tesla. They've got, okay, what is this Mad Max self-driving mode? It's a new mode that basically allows when you turn on full self-driving or FSD. The new version allows you, let's say you're rushing somewhere. It drives at higher speeds and it makes more frequent, more aggressive lane changes. basically drives like a maniac. And we're already seeing videos of Tesla influencers

showing how they drive with the automation on and they show it driving about 35 kilometers an hour above the speed limit and making lane changes like a Formula One driver. I find this really kind of rich and frankly, you know, disturbing because the company is already being sued in multiple courts and jurisdictions over this very technology because it has a habit of running into ambulances,

running into 18 wheelers, killing drivers because they think the automation works when it doesn't. So why when you're getting sued you would introduce Mad Max mode and then share it, you know, publicize it to the world? That sounds like peak Elon Musk. All right. Compare that to Miami's new, what is this, a drone police car. Yeah, this is wild. They call it a pug, which stands for police unmanned grounds vehicle. Basically, it's an autonomous vehicle.

It has a whole bunch of surveillance technologies on it. So, AI-driven analytics, collects real-time data, 360-degree cameras, thermal imaging, license plate recognition. It can even launch drones. Just imagine the visuals on that. Carmier, are there going to be cops inside this car? There could be. A cop can ride inside the car.

The cop will not drive the car. The car drives itself. And they're saying that it allows the cop to focus on people, focus on being a cop instead of focusing on deploying all these technologies, giving them the answers that they need to deliver better policing. But who determines how fast this cop car drives? They don't say. They're not providing a lot of details, and they're not even deploying it yet.

They're attaching it to their PR unit. and they're going to be sort of taking it to public events, demonstrating it to people getting feedback to figure out, you know, how they should use it in the day-to-day. So I think that answer will come from this PR campaign that's going to play out over the next few months. I would love to know what cops on the ground, the beat cops think about not driving their own car anymore.

Something tells me some of them will have a problem with that. Yeah, I think so. And especially seeing some automated vehicles, for example, if you ever seen demos of those Waymo, vehicles from Google. They're not really aggressive at all. They're very hesitant. They're sort of very passive. I can imagine when you flip the lights on and you go to an emergency and the vehicle is driving at four miles an hour, probably not something the average cop would be happy with. This might make for a fun, I don't know, spoof video on YouTube, but certainly not to effective

policing. Well, you know, we've had so many stories that we've talked about, about how AI is just not necessarily ready for prime time in every sector. I have a feeling that cops are going going to want to take the wheel? Exactly, especially in the case of an emergency where, you know, you are kind of breaking the rules. You don't have time for the algorithms to figure it out. There's a bad guy literally right there. He's shooting at you. Are you going to trust the automation to move the vehicle in a way that will keep you safe? Absolutely not. And I think that's the, I think it has a role in policing, maybe not frontline policing in a violent area, maybe not in the absolute emergency

situations. Maybe, you know, a couple of layers back from the front lines might be a little more appropriate. Carmi Levy, always love talking to you, my friend. Thank you so much. So good being with you. Thanks, Ben. Yeah, I just don't know what the use case is for that, that driverless cop car. Because I don't know a single cop that doesn't want to be behind the wheel. Yeah, and you kind of have to be able to drive a little erratically. If you are a cop, Well, I'm not erratically, but you have to make decisions that you wouldn't normally make in terms of, say, going through an intersection with a red light, et cetera. Yeah, I have no, honestly, like, maybe there's a role for it to play in the larger police force, but not as a frontline vehicle, I don't think. Maybe it has a grand theft auto mode.

You can just hit the Mad Max mode. All right, up next, the invention I thought was too good to be true, but I really, really wanted it to be. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. And right now it's all about the Blue Jays, not just in Toronto, but indeed across this country. They are Canada's team. And if you are without gear right now, you might have a difficult time finding a jersey, a hat, whatever you're looking for because it is flying off the shelves. Now you've seen and you've heard the Blue Jays celebrating. But what did it sound like in the visitor's locker room?

I think that's an important thing to compare and contrast. Now, we listen to this interview with Mariners pitcher Brian Wu. Having gone as further than any other team in franchise history. Yeah, that's got a hurt. That's got to hurt when you hear the. cheers from outside your locker room. Yeah, that's no Bueno. But listen, in every one of these

there's a winner and a loser. I think that was inside the locker room. That wasn't outside. That was somebody in their locker room screaming just in cheering? Oh, that was anger. That was like, no. It was difficult to hear because I guess it was recorded off the TV or something? No, no, no. That was, well, possibly, but it's somebody in the locker room. He's doing the interview and then he looks over and because somebody is maybe in the showers

just yelling because they're so angry. Well, as you said, they were eight outs away from making their first world series. Yeah, they were. And it's not easy to get there. No, no, it's not easy to get there at all. But after 32 years, the Jays are back. Congratulations to the Blue Jays.

All right. So a couple of days ago, or was it yesterday? Yesterday, I saw something on social media and I sent it to my intrepid producer, Mike Droulet because I said this machine could change my life and I send it to him

I send it to our social media producer Amy and we all decided this thing is the cat's pajamas this thing is the best and could it be too good to be true so we decided that we were going to do

a little investigation I smell a BMS Investigation. Yes, it's a new segment called a BMS investigation where we drill down into a story that nobody asked us to drill down into the story of the foldy mate. So this machine is about the size of a small washing machine. It's about the size of like an ice maker, right? No, because it looks that way in the picture. But when you actually see the videos of it, it's like a washing machine.

Oh, that's how deep it is. That's how deep. No, no, no, it's tall, too. Okay. So anyway, this machine, you throw your, you throw your shirts and your sweaters in it, and apparently what's supposed to come out is everything, and your towels

and all that stuff, everything comes out folded. That's what it looks like in the videos. Like, you just throw it in, and it comes out folded. It looks like magic. We decided, yeah, and according to what we were looking at yesterday, 250 bucks or something like that for one of these machines, or $400? $400. $400, like, on sale.

On to, look, not unreasonable. Like, there's lots of stuff that's more good to be true. Yeah, well, that's why we're doing an investigation. With. I smell a BMS investigation. And look, when we say it's a BMS investigation, we just ask a question to Carmi Levy. That's the extent of the investigation. We put it to him.

Is the foldy mate actually a thing or is it a scam? We were gobsmacked when we saw this thing on social media, a machine that will fold your laundry for you. And we want to hear from you, is this real or is it BS? I think we all want this to be real. And for a while, the hope was that it was real. In 2018, it was brought to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. They also brought it for a demo in 2019. It said they were about to introduce it.

Basically, it looks like a big washing machine. You put your clothes in one at a time through a hole at the top of the machine and then it folds it and it stacks them up on the bottom and you take them out. Got a lot of hype, but by 2021, the company was gone out of business. The Foldemate website now exists. It kind of didn't exist for a while. But just kind of looking around online, I know of nobody who has bought one. It looks like a scam. And apparently, you know, it doesn't seem like.

it's actually live. I suspect it's just trying to get people's money. So, yeah, we did a little more research, and the EFoldemate store has been flagged by multiple users as a scam. The site is associated with the product that we're talking about, the EF, the foldymate, originally a legitimate project that has since disappeared. The current site appears to be trying to trick people into making purchases for a product that will never be delivered. It reminds me, I actually got caught in one of these scams. It was something called the coolest cooler. It was like, yeah, it was like a cooler on steroids.

And I got involved in the, like the Kickstarter campaign. And I put some money into it. And I was waiting for, I was going to be one of the first people to get my cooler off the line. I bought it for my brother because he loves, he loves, like, hanging out with his friends. It was going to be great for his backyard. Two and a half years of waiting for this. And they kept asking for more money, if we just get more money, we will be able to

finish these coolers. I did not send any more money, but then what I found out is in an effort to raise more revenue, they actually built some of these things. Rather than give it to the first people who invested in the Kickstarter, they sold them on Amazon. So people who did not invest in the early days got their coolest cooler. And people like me were stuck holding the bag. It was about two, two and a half years. And eventually, I think the U.S. government like jumped in because there were way too many angry people. So this thing, the foldy mate, it began as a startup. It made press appearances, as we said, at CES 2017, 2018.

See, that's a thing. I saw it on social media. And it didn't look like it was five, six, seven years old. No, it did not. It looked like it was brand new. But I took a deeper dive into the websites. Yeah. And the website that's out there is on all these.

scam alert sites. Apparently what they're doing is they're getting people to do direct deposits. You can't get a refund on a direct deposit. They want your banking info? And they want you just to be able to send them money directly from your bank. Yeah. Yeah, forget that. If you do that, then you lost your money. More than likely it's a scam. And by the way, this could be a new segment that we do. BMS investigates. If you have a question about something out there that you would like us to do a deep dive into, let us know it doesn't have to be a scam, but if there's a question, you know, hey, is this true? Is that true? We will investigate it on Ben Mulrose. The BMS investigates.

I smell a BMS investigation. Yeah, look, Drolet spent a lot of time on that, so I really want to get our money's worth out of that little sting right there. Well, come on, the sniff part of it. I smell a BMS investigation. Meanwhile, here are a few other things that you may not want to be investing. And there's a device called the jewel cooler, a device designed to cool down your jewelry. Yeah, not the jewels as in, you might think like... Yeah, not the family jewels. No.

No, just your jewels. Why do your jewelry need to get cooled down? Well, you know, the rich people got a rich? I don't know. Do they warm up? I don't know. I don't know. But that is something that you could invest in if you want. Meanwhile, there's also the butter stick.

It's a stick of butter in a lipstick-like tube for easy application. Like, what do you need? Maybe for a corn on the cop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about the scooter with the built-in toilet? Yeah, it's a scooter designed with a toilet seat. That's, that's it. Somebody said, you know what, let's combine the best.

Let's combine the best of both worlds. But that sounds, that sounds like illegal. It's a product nobody wanted. But this is my favorite one because I really can't understand. I can't understand this one. It's the Aqua alarm. This is a gadget that alerts you when you're underwater. I think you should know.

I'm pretty sure you would know if you were underwater. I don't think you need the Aqua alarm. I mean, is it like when maybe there's water in your basement? Is that what this is? No, it's when you're underwater. When you personally are underwater. Because there are gadgets that let you know when there's flooding in your basement. They do have that with the alarms.

So this is not that. No. This is not that. This is actually, like, if you find yourself submerged, it'll let you know. It'll let you know. And somebody thought that that was. So never mind the fact you can't breathe or that you're wet. No, it's a gadget that you need.

All right. Why can't I breathe? Oh, I'm underwater. God love entrepreneurs. Listen, we love entrepreneurs. They're the good and the bad. All right. Thank you for that.

A kidnap child whispers dark secrets from his past in a language he no longer understands. But a lost cassette will reveal the ugly truth. From Curious Cast and Blanchard House comes a cross-continental Odyssey to recover a stolen past. This is Stop Rewind, The Lost Boy, available. on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.