Andrii-zvorygin Peak-oil Meeting Transcript — October 15, 2026

00:00:01 SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: Okay, greetings everybody in the Love and Light of the Infinite Creator.

00:00:04 SPEAKER_001: I'm Andrei Vorgan, joined here today with David Miller, Iver Laughing, Barbara Brown, and Simon Michaud.

00:00:10 SPEAKER_001: And David Miller will be giving us a presentation, and then Simon Michaud, did you want to give us a brief update before we get started?

00:00:20 SPEAKER_001: I can give a brief update.

00:00:22 SPEAKER_001: I got nothing to present.

00:00:23 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

00:00:25 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

00:00:25 SPEAKER_001: I put together a data analysis map of the Brexit, of the BRICS economies, and also what I think the new American faction's plan is.

00:00:38 SPEAKER_002: I've put something together for that, and which involves understanding the old American plan.

00:00:44 SPEAKER_002: Right.

00:00:44 SPEAKER_002: So that's the database stuff I put together.

00:00:48 SPEAKER_002: I presented parts of it to you before, but I'm close to closing the circle.

00:00:57 SPEAKER_002: Nice.

00:00:58 SPEAKER_002: I've just come out of the Warsaw Security Forum briefing forum, and that was surreal.

00:01:09 SPEAKER_002: It was a dog and pony show, and there is propaganda, there's programming, and then there's conditioning.

00:01:17 SPEAKER_002: This was conditioning, and the purpose of the conditioning was the two and a half thousand people present.

00:01:24 SPEAKER_002: They're all the cream of the crop of what I call the normies.

00:01:28 SPEAKER_002: Yeah, they're all the prime ministers and ministers of defence, yeah, and all the military guys.

00:01:34 SPEAKER_002: They're all there.

00:01:35 SPEAKER_002: That was to actually condition everyone to be on the same page and they're all drinking from the same bucket of Kool-Aid.

00:01:41 SPEAKER_002: Oh, I see.

00:01:42 SPEAKER_002: But piecing together information in the background, you go and talk to a few people.

00:01:48 SPEAKER_002: They were very careful what they were saying, but what they didn't say, and I, you can sort of piece together.

00:01:55 SPEAKER_002: I picked up on some very disruptive patterns.

00:02:00 SPEAKER_002: Now I've got to be careful.

00:02:02 SPEAKER_002: Well, a lot of stuff I was told that people don't want to be identified, so I am writing up my notes.

00:02:07 SPEAKER_002: But I've got to be careful.

00:02:08 SPEAKER_002: I've got to think about what I'm going to do with those notes.

00:02:10 SPEAKER_002: But I now have an understanding.

00:02:12 SPEAKER_002: Okay.

00:02:14 SPEAKER_002: Yeah.

00:02:15 SPEAKER_002: Thank you, Simon.

00:02:16 SPEAKER_002: That was a great update.

00:02:17 SPEAKER_001: So, David, would you like to introduce yourself now?

00:02:22 SPEAKER_001: And you got unmute.

00:02:25 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, you go.

00:02:26 SPEAKER_001: No, no, I got a bad mouse.

00:02:28 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, no, my name's Dave Miller, and yeah, living in Ontario, living in a county called the County of Brant, municipality.

00:02:36 SPEAKER_001: So, I will talk a little bit about my presentation, but I'm just concluding the 16-year run in municipal politics, and I did mention to Andrei, you know,

00:02:49 SPEAKER_001: Limits to Growth has influenced me as much as the Bible in my life, so I was going to share Limits to Growth, municipal politics, and kind of how I see that all fit together.

00:03:01 SPEAKER_001: So that's my presentation in a nutshell.

00:03:04 SPEAKER_003: And at some point I will mention Simon because he influenced a little bit of the work we're doing.

00:03:10 SPEAKER_003: So thank you.

00:03:12 SPEAKER_003: So you tell me when you're ready, Hunter.

00:03:14 SPEAKER_003: Go ahead, you can share.

00:03:15 SPEAKER_003: Okay.

00:03:16 SPEAKER_003: Now we've done this once or twice, so hopefully it'll work out this time.

00:03:21 SPEAKER_003: You tell me when it's up.

00:03:23 SPEAKER_003: Okay, so I see the PowerPoint now.

00:03:25 SPEAKER_003: Just go into presentation mode.

00:03:27 SPEAKER_003: Very good.

00:03:27 SPEAKER_003: Okay, we can see it.

00:03:28 SPEAKER_003: Okay, so yeah, titled "Municipal Government Through the Lens of Limits to Growth."

00:03:33 SPEAKER_003: And for me, when I'm presenting this, I cannot see anything but the presentation.

00:03:38 SPEAKER_003: So somebody has a question or clarification.

00:03:40 SPEAKER_003: So you just go through, Andrei, and just shout it out.

00:03:43 SPEAKER_003: So without further ado, I'll very briefly give you some context of Brant itself and about myself, and then it explains kind of why we do stuff, how we do stuff, sort of thing.

00:03:59 SPEAKER_003: So, I'm not assuming that everybody is familiar with Ontario per se, let alone the municipalities and some of the rules around it.

00:04:08 SPEAKER_003: But I think a lot of the lessons are applicable to a lot of local politics around the world.

00:04:12 SPEAKER_003: So here in the County of Brant, yeah, population just over forty thousand, and our population is spread evenly between the larger towns and the rural areas.

00:04:23 SPEAKER_003: Now we are in southwestern Ontario.

00:04:25 SPEAKER_003: I'll show you the map in a second.

00:04:26 SPEAKER_003: One hundred twenty-five kilometers west of Toronto, sixty kilometers west of Hamilton.

00:04:32 SPEAKER_003: And I point that out simply because, and I know what happens where you are, Andrei, in Owen Sound, Toronto.

00:04:39 SPEAKER_003: It doesn't matter how far away you are in Ontario; it influences you, right?

00:04:43 SPEAKER_003: And we also butt the largest reserve in Canada, called the Six Nations of the Grand River, largest in terms of population.

00:04:49 SPEAKER_003: So that also impacts what we do here as well.

00:04:53 SPEAKER_003: We're 843 square kilometers, so a fairly good-sized municipality, mostly rural, mostly farmland, and we have good soil here and good climate.

00:05:06 SPEAKER_003: And if you know anything about Canada and soils, you know that we do not have a lot of Class One and Two soils in Canada.

00:05:17 SPEAKER_003: It's something like seven percent is considered Class One and Two.

00:05:21 SPEAKER_003: But here in the County of Brant, the bulk of our soil is Class One, Class Two.

00:05:28 SPEAKER_003: So we do have good soils.

00:05:29 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, the good soils.

00:05:30 SPEAKER_003: The lower the number, the better.

00:05:32 SPEAKER_003: Yeah.

00:05:32 SPEAKER_003: And when you have good soil combined with climate, you should be protecting that a little more than we are.

00:05:39 SPEAKER_003: Lots of rivers, so yeah, lots of moisture, lots of water.

00:05:42 SPEAKER_003: Unfortunately, with those rivers, we also have lots of aggregate gravel, which can be a problem.

00:05:47 SPEAKER_003: And we also have a major provincial highway, which allows us easy access to the U.S. and to Toronto.

00:05:55 SPEAKER_003: So, looking at a map, here's Ontario, and oh yeah, my mouse does work.

00:05:59 SPEAKER_003: So, there's a city here called the City of Brampton, and we actually here in the County of Brant surround that city.

00:06:06 SPEAKER_003: And that city has about 120,000 people.

00:06:11 SPEAKER_003: But yeah, there we are, nestled right in the Great Lakes area, and in like I said, super good climate, super good soil.

00:06:17 SPEAKER_003: So we're very—it's a great place to be.

00:06:19 SPEAKER_003: My grandparents immigrated from Europe, from Hungary, and they said this was so much like Hungary back then, back in the late '40s.

00:06:29 SPEAKER_003: So there's a map again.

00:06:31 SPEAKER_003: You see that city of Bramford?

00:06:32 SPEAKER_003: We surround that city.

00:06:34 SPEAKER_003: That's about 120,000.

00:06:34 SPEAKER_003: It does create a little bit of tension when they need to expand their borders, but we do deal with it.

00:06:42 SPEAKER_003: But as you can see, where basically villages and hamlets spread out throughout, and approximately half of our 40,000 people actually live in this town here called Paris or Saint George,

00:06:55 SPEAKER_003: and there's the Six Nations there.

00:06:58 SPEAKER_003: So, in terms of governing, we're what's called a single-tier municipality, and all that means is that we have to look after everything a big city does, and I use the example of Toronto.

00:07:10 SPEAKER_003: So when you look at the entire list of things that a single-tier municipality has to look after, it's phenomenal.

00:07:17 SPEAKER_003: I could only put down maybe a third of all the things when you get into it.

00:07:21 SPEAKER_003: But the big things are roads and bridges, drainage, water, wastewater, garbage collection, planning, social services, transit, emergency services, parks, cemeteries, arenas, trails, economic development.

00:07:34 SPEAKER_003: So the list is pretty extensive.

00:07:36 SPEAKER_003: Sometimes you wonder how we can do it, and I'll be honest with you.

00:07:40 SPEAKER_003: I've done it for a while, and I still wonder how we do it.

00:07:42 SPEAKER_003: Our budget for 2026 was 165 million dollars, all revenues.

00:07:49 SPEAKER_003: Just over half, 56%, come from property taxes.

00:07:52 SPEAKER_003: I call them regressive.

00:07:53 SPEAKER_003: I always have because it doesn't depend on your income.

00:07:56 SPEAKER_003: It's just how nice does the authority think your property is, and based on the value of that, that's what your property taxes are based on.

00:08:08 SPEAKER_003: So here in the County of Brant, the median property taxes for 2026 is forty-three hundred dollars.

00:08:16 SPEAKER_003: Go back a few decades, and you could buy a house for forty-three hundred dollars, and today that's what the property taxes are.

00:08:22 SPEAKER_003: Sixteen percent comes from user fees.

00:08:24 SPEAKER_003: The bulk of those user fees are for water, wastewater.

00:08:26 SPEAKER_003: So if you're using that infrastructure, you have to actually pay directly on top of your property taxes.

00:08:32 SPEAKER_003: So we're looking at just over seventy percent.

00:08:34 SPEAKER_003: actually comes from individuals, houses, residents, businesses.

00:08:39 SPEAKER_003: We do get some grants from the feds or from the province.

00:08:42 SPEAKER_003: Nine percent.

00:08:43 SPEAKER_003: The bulk of that money is targeted, so we have to use it for a specific programme.

00:08:48 SPEAKER_003: For example, they help fund our ambulances, so that money has to go towards ambulances.

00:08:56 SPEAKER_003: So that's how that works.

00:08:57 SPEAKER_003: Nineteen percent from other sources.

00:09:00 SPEAKER_003: It's a wide variety.

00:09:01 SPEAKER_003: We have some investments.

00:09:01 SPEAKER_003: We have some transfers.

00:09:02 SPEAKER_003: Investments.

00:09:02 SPEAKER_003: We have some transfers from reserves and like that.

00:09:04 SPEAKER_003: So that gets the nineteen percent.

00:09:06 SPEAKER_003: But what I think is important to point out for people that don't understand municipal politics is that nine—I would say ninety-five percent of what people use on a day-to-day basis is run by municipalities.

00:09:18 SPEAKER_003: So you get up in the morning, you take a walk on the sidewalks.

00:09:22 SPEAKER_003: You might put your garbage out.

00:09:25 SPEAKER_003: You take the roads, the street to work.

00:09:28 SPEAKER_003: You go under a bridge.

00:09:29 SPEAKER_003: You go over a bridge.

00:09:31 SPEAKER_003: Just, just you go.

00:09:33 SPEAKER_003: You go to a park.

00:09:35 SPEAKER_003: You go for a swim.

00:09:36 SPEAKER_003: It's just there's so much of what everybody sees on a day-to-day basis is run by a municipality.

00:09:43 SPEAKER_003: Maybe you drop your kids off at daycare; there's a municipality component to that.

00:09:47 SPEAKER_003: We're magicians.

00:09:50 SPEAKER_003: I think what we do with the taxes, because only ten to eleven percent of all taxes raised in Canada actually goes to municipalities, so we do a lot with it.

00:10:00 SPEAKER_003: But unfortunately, like I say, we don't get a lot of the taxes, so it is tough.

00:10:06 SPEAKER_003: We don't have a lot of wiggle room.

00:10:08 SPEAKER_003: Then our government itself: we have an odd number of people on council.

00:10:12 SPEAKER_003: Most councils should, so you don't have tie votes.

00:10:14 SPEAKER_003: So we're governed; there are eleven of us.

00:10:17 SPEAKER_003: There's the mayor and then ten councillors.

00:10:19 SPEAKER_003: We're divided up into five wards, and we have two elected representatives per ward, which is pretty good because if one is away, the other one can pick up any ward issues.

00:10:29 SPEAKER_003: Elections here in Ontario are every four years.

00:10:32 SPEAKER_003: We have one coming up, October 26.

00:10:34 SPEAKER_003: As some of you are well aware, I put in here: municipalities are creatures of the province and have very strict rules on which they can operate.

00:10:42 SPEAKER_003: What that means is that the province dictates the rules for municipalities.

00:10:46 SPEAKER_003: So you could be doing something the same way for years and years, and then one day out of the blue, the province just changes the rules, and we see that all the time.

00:10:54 SPEAKER_003: So we are very constrained; it's a constraint in terms of how we can operate.

00:11:00 SPEAKER_003: Not always a bad thing if you see some of the way municipalities operate.

00:11:04 SPEAKER_003: An individual councillor such as myself has actually, in actuality, has zero power.

00:11:10 SPEAKER_003: We have no powers at all.

00:11:13 SPEAKER_003: In well, you vote.

00:11:16 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, but well, okay, I vote yes, but that doesn't give me power.

00:11:20 SPEAKER_003: Where the power lies is with the majority of council.

00:11:22 SPEAKER_003: So you have to get the majority; in our case, six, to move things, to make things happen, to bring in bylaws.

00:11:29 SPEAKER_003: And only recently has the mayor gotten some powers through the strong-mayor powers in the province of Ontario.

00:11:35 SPEAKER_003: Now, what I've just told you: most people, including those running for council, know very little about municipal government.

00:11:44 SPEAKER_003: It's incredible.

00:11:45 SPEAKER_003: You know, we have an election going on, and people don't even know who's running.

00:11:49 SPEAKER_003: They don't know who the ward councillor is, and it's not a very well-known part of our society, and I say that's unfortunate because it can have some serious, serious repercussions.

00:12:00 SPEAKER_003: Try not paying your property taxes within two years; it's a two-year process.

00:12:05 SPEAKER_003: Your home, your farm, your business—whatever you're not paying property taxes on—can be seized and sold.

00:12:10 SPEAKER_003: So, very serious business.

00:12:12 SPEAKER_003: We do a lot, and not getting a lot of credit at the municipal level.

00:12:17 SPEAKER_003: So, and then I'll just again put myself in context, and then go from there because it kind of explains why I see what I see, and going from there.

00:12:30 SPEAKER_003: So, grew up in a farming background.

00:12:33 SPEAKER_003: Bachelor of Science in Ag Economics, which is actually a really good degree to have to really understand how a lot of the world works.

00:12:40 SPEAKER_003: Got my Bachelor of Education degree.

00:12:43 SPEAKER_003: I did spend a year in the military; learned a lot there.

00:12:46 SPEAKER_003: Worked for Agriculture Canada.

00:12:47 SPEAKER_003: I also taught high school for a couple years.

00:12:49 SPEAKER_003: I was involved with manufacturing, large-scale manufacturing, and I've been a small business owner.

00:12:55 SPEAKER_003: So, not your traditional career path, but it's certainly given me insight into a lot of how our world works.

00:13:03 SPEAKER_003: And in the last 17 years of my working career, which I've wrapped up already, I've been involved with energy conservation, building envelope and insulation specialist, and spent a lot of time with renewables.

00:13:15 SPEAKER_003: I got personally three sets of solar panels.

00:13:18 SPEAKER_003: I did try a hot water solar collector.

00:13:23 SPEAKER_003: Got a Tesla Powerwall.

00:13:25 SPEAKER_003: So a lot, a lot of experience in all that aspect.

00:13:28 SPEAKER_003: So, spent four terms, the last sixteen years on council, 2010 to 2026.

00:13:33 SPEAKER_003: That'll wrap up in exactly one month's time.

00:13:37 SPEAKER_003: I've been a lifelong resident of where I am, except for all those years I was in the military or away at university.

00:13:45 SPEAKER_003: Huge community booster.

00:13:46 SPEAKER_003: Have coached soccer.

00:13:46 SPEAKER_003: You know, coach soccer, you know, volunteered at the fair, helped out with the chicken barbecues, just hours and hours and hours, hundreds, thousands of hours of volunteer hours.

00:13:55 SPEAKER_003: So, I have given back hard and a lot, and people know that.

00:14:00 SPEAKER_003: So, I think that helped maybe explain why I was able to, you know, keep getting re-elected to council.

00:14:06 SPEAKER_003: It never hurts to be a huge community booster.

00:14:09 SPEAKER_003: And when I was coming into council back in 2010, this is where my mindset was: okay, I firmly believed that the 2008 global financial crisis was it.

00:14:20 SPEAKER_003: I thought it was civilizational collapse, and I use the example of a parking ticket.

00:14:25 SPEAKER_003: I got a parking ticket in the city of Branford, and I honestly thought I didn't even have to pay it because we're all going to collapse.

00:14:33 SPEAKER_003: Why bother?

00:14:34 SPEAKER_003: Oh my gosh!

00:14:35 SPEAKER_003: That's what.

00:14:36 SPEAKER_003: Anyways, that just shows you where my hat was.

00:14:39 SPEAKER_003: I did listen to Guy McPherson quite a bit.

00:14:41 SPEAKER_003: Actually met him in person.

00:14:42 SPEAKER_003: And if you listen to Guy, there's a lot of doom.

00:14:43 SPEAKER_003: Isn't the guy?

00:14:44 SPEAKER_003: There's a lot of doom porn out there.

00:14:45 SPEAKER_003: I think Guy was leading the way, but he had us all believe we'd all would have been dead by last year.

00:14:50 SPEAKER_003: We're going, you know, full-blown Mercury or Venus on here, and obviously that hasn't been the case.

00:14:57 SPEAKER_003: Not to say that there's not some merit in what he says, but yeah, you gotta take everything with a grain of salt.

00:15:03 SPEAKER_003: But that's all I'm saying is that was my headspace back then.

00:15:07 SPEAKER_003: And then as far as limits to growth go, I've known about it most of my whole life.

00:15:14 SPEAKER_003: And I will tell—I've told people—it's been a bigger influence on me than the Bible.

00:15:18 SPEAKER_003: It's just—it's a lens on everything I do: the car I buy, the house I buy, yeah, just everything I do.

00:15:25 SPEAKER_003: It's just—a lens on—and I can't change that.

00:15:29 SPEAKER_003: Once you know something, you know it; it's hard to undo.

00:15:33 SPEAKER_003: So, and Andrei, I know most of your audience probably knows this.

00:15:36 SPEAKER_003: I'll be very brief on this: limits to growth.

00:15:40 SPEAKER_003: Again, but having said that, well, I'll explain later because I'm all shocked at people that don't know it.

00:15:46 SPEAKER_003: But anyway, a 1972 system dynamics out of MIT study looking at the increasing population and resource consumption of our planet, and which you know now we're exceeding the Earth's carrying capacity.

00:15:59 SPEAKER_003: And according to Google's AI, we're at 1.73 times the Earth's carrying capacity in 2026.

00:16:06 SPEAKER_003: And this overreach, overreliance, overutilization is leading to increased pollution, which the earth can't absorb at a proper rate.

00:16:15 SPEAKER_003: Falling industrial food production and falling, followed by falling population.

00:16:19 SPEAKER_003: I put in there the end of population growth.

00:16:23 SPEAKER_003: I'm just finishing up that book by Ugo Bardi.

00:16:25 SPEAKER_003: If you don't, if you've never read Ugo, make sure you get to a bookstore or library.

00:16:29 SPEAKER_003: He's just a fantastic, fantastic.

00:16:32 SPEAKER_003: We've had him on the show.

00:16:33 SPEAKER_003: Okay, okay, great, great.

00:16:34 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, yeah, from Italy, Italian professor.

00:16:36 SPEAKER_003: Yes.

00:16:38 SPEAKER_003: Just, I just wanted to mention this too.

00:16:39 SPEAKER_003: I listened to Dennis Meadows' interview.

00:16:41 SPEAKER_003: That was about 20 years ago, and you know, they did this study.

00:16:45 SPEAKER_003: They found out, oh my gosh, look at the path; it's unsustainable.

00:16:49 SPEAKER_003: We're going to face a civilizational collapse.

00:16:52 SPEAKER_003: And he said at the time they were like, oh, okay, well now we know.

00:16:57 SPEAKER_003: He says all we have to do is present this information to our political leaders, and they're going to take care of it.

00:17:02 SPEAKER_003: They honestly believe that.

00:17:04 SPEAKER_003: That's, I guess maybe a little bit in you, and of course, you know, history shows that they were vociferously attacked for coming up with these conclusions.

00:17:13 SPEAKER_003: But the studies that have come out since that 1972 study, there's been various.

00:17:20 SPEAKER_003: Some have confirmed that.

00:17:21 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, we're basically on the business-as-usual approach.

00:17:24 SPEAKER_003: And there's a Gaya Harrison.

00:17:25 SPEAKER_003: Not sure if you know her.

00:17:26 SPEAKER_003: She's from Holland.

00:17:28 SPEAKER_003: She has a book out as well.

00:17:30 SPEAKER_003: But she just did the latest study.

00:17:32 SPEAKER_003: I believe early this year, 2026.

00:17:35 SPEAKER_003: And yeah, we're basically on track for business as usual.

00:17:38 SPEAKER_003: And she says we might even be a little bit further along.

00:17:42 SPEAKER_003: So that's where we are.

00:17:44 SPEAKER_003: Oops, how do I go back?

00:17:46 SPEAKER_003: One.

00:17:49 SPEAKER_003: So, what does limits to growth look like?

00:17:51 SPEAKER_003: Okay, globally, again, shouldn't be a surprise to many people.

00:17:55 SPEAKER_003: Obviously, it's changing climate patterns and disruptions, increased military conflict, protectionism, increased migration, more disease, and larger famines.

00:18:03 SPEAKER_003: Serious economic disruptions, institutional failure, as EROI or energy return on energy invested falls, and we're seeing it.

00:18:13 SPEAKER_003: We're living through it, right?

00:18:14 SPEAKER_003: May you live in interesting times.

00:18:16 SPEAKER_003: What does that look like at the municipal level, at the local level?

00:18:19 SPEAKER_003: We're seeing that through.

00:18:21 SPEAKER_003: And I find this for a lot of things.

00:18:24 SPEAKER_003: What, when they talk about economic problems, it translates into inflation for us, right?

00:18:29 SPEAKER_003: You're the food story.

00:18:30 SPEAKER_003: Everybody knows that higher diesel, higher gas prices, higher heating.

00:18:35 SPEAKER_003: Everything goes through inflation, almost, or stagflation, which is the worst because you've lost your job or your hours are reduced, but the prices are still going up.

00:18:43 SPEAKER_003: Supply chain disruptions.

00:18:45 SPEAKER_003: COVID was a really good precursor to that.

00:18:49 SPEAKER_003: Locally, I don't know how you guys are doing in Ontario, but I know here we've had a tremendous amount of population growth come.

00:18:55 SPEAKER_003: A lot of it from the GTA, which has seen a huge influx of out-migration.

00:18:59 SPEAKER_003: Right.

00:19:00 SPEAKER_003: Migration rate to Canada, and that translates into a massive strain on our local services.

00:19:07 SPEAKER_003: So, health, obviously, emergency rooms at hospitals, people without doctors, social services.

00:19:13 SPEAKER_003: You see it there a lot.

00:19:16 SPEAKER_003: I was on the social services committee.

00:19:18 SPEAKER_003: We watched the graphs go up.

00:19:19 SPEAKER_003: You know, number of homeless shelters, number of people.

00:19:22 SPEAKER_003: I guess the word is unhoused.

00:19:24 SPEAKER_003: And we're not the only one experiencing it, but everybody else is as well.

00:19:28 SPEAKER_003: Obviously, the police are kept busy.

00:19:30 SPEAKER_003: Education.

00:19:31 SPEAKER_003: There are portals everywhere because they don't have room.

00:19:34 SPEAKER_003: The schools are bursting at the seams.

00:19:36 SPEAKER_003: Water, wastewater.

00:19:37 SPEAKER_003: We just don't have enough infrastructure.

00:19:40 SPEAKER_003: One of our towns, we spent 20 years trying to get a wastewater treatment plant and a new water treatment plant, and that water treatment plant capacity has already been exceeded,

00:19:53 SPEAKER_003: and it hasn't even been built yet.

00:19:54 SPEAKER_003: So, wow.

00:19:56 SPEAKER_003: And again, more severe weather.

00:19:56 SPEAKER_003: And more severe weather, many municipalities, and you can Google this.

00:20:02 SPEAKER_003: But I talk to municipal leaders all the time.

00:20:04 SPEAKER_003: Have declared weather-related states of emergency over the last several years.

00:20:08 SPEAKER_003: And of course here in Canada, we get a lot of ice and snow and wind.

00:20:13 SPEAKER_003: Right, wind will come along.

00:20:14 SPEAKER_003: It'll be a hundred kilometers an hour, and it'll take out our power grid.

00:20:17 SPEAKER_003: Right, right.

00:20:18 SPEAKER_003: This number of power outages.

00:20:20 SPEAKER_003: And of course, rain.

00:20:21 SPEAKER_003: Rain has been a huge one.

00:20:24 SPEAKER_003: So there's a photo of Oriole, which is in Ontario municipality, I was talking to one of their councillors.

00:20:32 SPEAKER_003: In 2025, they had to declare a snow emergency because they got something like you know a metre of snow over three or four days.

00:20:41 SPEAKER_003: I don't have the picture of their road where it was just like this, where they had to carve along Highway 11 just so you know people can get in and out.

00:20:50 SPEAKER_003: Not good for emergency services if you're having a heart attack, right?

00:20:53 SPEAKER_003: So this picture is actually from Highway 20.

00:20:53 SPEAKER_003: This picture is actually from Highway 21, which I believe travels along Lake Huron, but that's what it looked like.

00:21:00 SPEAKER_003: Just this massive amount of snow had to be carved out so people could get around.

00:21:06 SPEAKER_003: And the weather-related events aren't anecdotal; they exist.

00:21:11 SPEAKER_003: And this is from the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

00:21:14 SPEAKER_003: They showed this at one of our municipal conferences, and they've adjusted for inflation, so everything is based on 2008 prices.

00:21:23 SPEAKER_003: And what they did is they said, well, how many weather-related events have caused $25 million or more in losses, just weather-related, right, across Canada?

00:21:33 SPEAKER_003: And you look at the 1983 to 1990 period.

00:21:35 SPEAKER_003: In that period, there was about 15.

00:21:38 SPEAKER_003: Right?

00:21:38 SPEAKER_003: Going to the next period, that's doubled, right?

00:21:42 SPEAKER_003: 30. 1991 to 2000.

00:21:44 SPEAKER_003: Then you go to the next time frame, 2001 to 2010.

00:21:50 SPEAKER_003: Again, it looks like it's gone up significantly.

00:21:53 SPEAKER_003: And then you go to 2011 to 2018, and they were up to measuring 80 large catastrophic weather events in Canada per year,

00:22:02 SPEAKER_003: and that is defined as $25 million dollars in losses based on 2008 prices.

00:22:08 SPEAKER_003: So I don't have the latest one, but from my friend there I talked to, he says it's just gone up.

00:22:14 SPEAKER_003: So not just something that we're noticing; it is a fact.

00:22:18 SPEAKER_003: So something to be aware of.

00:22:20 SPEAKER_003: Barbara, you have a question.

00:22:22 SPEAKER_003: Actually, I have a comment on that from the Gulf Coast.

00:22:25 SPEAKER_003: Ours looks even worse than that, as far as damage.

00:22:31 SPEAKER_009: But it turns out that at least half of that is because the U.S.

00:22:38 SPEAKER_009: has free flood insurance, essentially free flood insurance for McMansions along the coast and very expensive infrastructure down in flood plains.

00:22:49 SPEAKER_009: And so people are building in places where no sane person would build.

00:22:55 SPEAKER_009: You know, it's one thing when I built it in 1940 in a floodplain, right?

00:23:00 SPEAKER_009: But they're building in places that no sane municipality would allow building, and so at least half of that along the Gulf Coast, U.S., is simply from municipalities, state counties,

00:23:17 SPEAKER_009: and cities allowing massive building of very expensive facilities in areas that were already known to be sensitive to wind and floods.

00:23:31 SPEAKER_009: Dave, did you have a comment on that?

00:23:33 SPEAKER_009: Just yeah.

00:23:34 SPEAKER_003: To Barbara's point, she's talking about the U.S. And my understanding is because we're looking at some flooding in Texas, and basically, when the hurricane came in, the waves just swept over Texas.

00:23:46 SPEAKER_003: so far inland because it was all flat.

00:23:49 SPEAKER_003: And talking to some planners, and I know the planning system isn't quite maybe as rigorous in the U.S. And here in Canada, we have flood plains and whatnot, like hazard lands.

00:23:59 SPEAKER_003: Hazard lands, and I sit on this conservation authority for the Grand River, and they have jurisdiction over that.

00:24:06 SPEAKER_003: And they do not allow building in those areas.

00:24:08 SPEAKER_003: We have a very good understanding of what's a hazard land in Canada, and we do not allow building in those areas.

00:24:15 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, yeah.

00:24:15 SPEAKER_003: Control a little bit better here.

00:24:18 SPEAKER_009: Yeah, it's a U.S. problem where the developers basically often control the municipalities.

00:24:25 SPEAKER_009: Yeah.

00:24:26 SPEAKER_009: Well, very bad situation.

00:24:29 SPEAKER_003: They control a little more in Ontario than I would like, but yeah, like I said, I'm pretty sure it's a little more rigorous as far as where you can build in Canada.

00:24:39 SPEAKER_003: Okay, so I'll go on.

00:24:39 SPEAKER_003: But anyways, yeah, just wanted to say that was a really good graph, and it just puts light on the fact that the weather is getting more severe.

00:24:51 SPEAKER_003: So if I look at the County of Brant's response to limits to growth, good news, bad news story.

00:24:59 SPEAKER_003: The bad news, in like I said at the beginning, I think most of Andrei's audience understands limits to growth.

00:25:10 SPEAKER_003: It's not common knowledge for most people.

00:25:14 SPEAKER_003: I asked our CAO.

00:25:16 SPEAKER_003: He's a chief administrative officer, very bright guy.

00:25:19 SPEAKER_003: Though the CAO in municipalities is the top employee.

00:25:23 SPEAKER_003: Right, everybody else reports to him or her.

00:25:27 SPEAKER_003: He never heard of it, and he's my age.

00:25:29 SPEAKER_003: Right.

00:25:30 SPEAKER_003: Our senior environmental manager, a young lady, very bright, very smart.

00:25:34 SPEAKER_003: You know, went to university.

00:25:35 SPEAKER_003: Obviously, she's responsible for our water, wastewater, waste, and all that.

00:25:41 SPEAKER_003: Never heard of it.

00:25:42 SPEAKER_003: So, if these people haven't heard of it, a lot of the councillors haven't heard of it.

00:25:47 SPEAKER_003: It's obviously very difficult to develop a coordinated response.

00:25:50 SPEAKER_003: So, but again, the bad news, good news.

00:25:53 SPEAKER_003: Good news is people do see; people do recognize when there's a problem.

00:25:59 SPEAKER_003: They may not know what's causing the problem, but they do tend to respond to emergent issues as best they see fit.

00:26:07 SPEAKER_003: And then I say, but this does produce a piecemeal response, which I'll kind of talk a bit about in a second.

00:26:13 SPEAKER_003: Ideally, though, we would.

00:26:15 SPEAKER_003: This was my slogan of all my campaigns, but I will say we should think globally, act locally.

00:26:21 SPEAKER_003: And for limits to growth, we really should be coordinating across all departments in order to be as sustainable and resilient as we can be, right, for our residents.

00:26:28 SPEAKER_003: So, for sure, that's the idea.

00:26:31 SPEAKER_003: Obviously, to get there, you need a lot more education, a lot more people on board.

00:26:37 SPEAKER_003: And I'm just going to go over a few of the things that we have done.

00:26:40 SPEAKER_003: And this, keep in mind, like I said, we're not looking through the lens of limits to growth, but we are looking through the lens of what we see problems.

00:26:47 SPEAKER_003: You know, energy is one.

00:26:49 SPEAKER_003: We know energy is getting expensive.

00:26:52 SPEAKER_003: So in Brant, we've done heavy investment in solar.

00:26:55 SPEAKER_003: In fact, we probably, I know for a fact, we've invested more per capita in solar than anywhere else in Canada.

00:27:04 SPEAKER_003: We've retrofitted all our existing municipal buildings for insulation, right?

00:27:08 SPEAKER_003: Makes sense.

00:27:09 SPEAKER_003: We've done preliminary work on a six hundred kilowatt low-level hydroelectric dam.

00:27:14 SPEAKER_003: Now keep in mind, hydroelectric.

00:27:17 SPEAKER_003: I don't know.

00:27:17 SPEAKER_003: Maybe there's a cleaner energy source out there.

00:27:19 SPEAKER_003: I don't know, but I think that's got to be the best because it's just beautiful base load there all the time, night, day, winter, summer.

00:27:26 SPEAKER_003: It's always there, right?

00:27:27 SPEAKER_003: Six hundred kilowatts.

00:27:29 SPEAKER_003: We did have a contract signed with the provincial government in 2018.

00:27:33 SPEAKER_003: They got elected, booted by the electors.

00:27:35 SPEAKER_003: The conservatives come in, and they tore up all those contracts.

00:27:39 SPEAKER_003: So, unfortunately, that never did happen.

00:27:43 SPEAKER_003: I do hope it happens.

00:27:45 SPEAKER_003: So, we are supporting the expansion of natural gas.

00:27:49 SPEAKER_003: Natural gas is not a municipal responsibility, but we can do things to try and encourage it.

00:27:55 SPEAKER_003: Natural gas is the cheapest way to heat your house right now.

00:27:59 SPEAKER_003: We have a lot of our citizens not on natural gas.

00:28:02 SPEAKER_003: They are on propane.

00:28:04 SPEAKER_003: They are on electric heat.

00:28:05 SPEAKER_003: They are on heating oil.

00:28:09 SPEAKER_003: Heating oil is basically the same thing as diesel.

00:28:11 SPEAKER_003: So the price from last winter to this winter, they're going to see their costs of heating their house double.

00:28:19 SPEAKER_003: And I think we're going to see a lot of energy poverty.

00:28:21 SPEAKER_003: You know, throw that in with you know the price they have to pay for their own gas, right, to drive around, or food prices.

00:28:28 SPEAKER_003: Then coming in with high, you know, you try and eat.

00:28:31 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, you try.

00:28:31 SPEAKER_003: You don't want high property taxes increasing every year, so yeah.

00:28:35 SPEAKER_003: So we have been supporting that: EV charging stations at all new builds.

00:28:38 SPEAKER_003: That wasn't something that was taken for granted not that long ago.

00:28:42 SPEAKER_003: Arena equipment upgrades.

00:28:43 SPEAKER_003: Arenas use a tremendous amount of equipment, right?

00:28:47 SPEAKER_003: Energy, sorry, to run that equipment to keep the chillers going, to keep the ice there, and so we do.

00:28:54 SPEAKER_003: We've upgraded the equipment, right, and make sure it's energy efficient.

00:28:56 SPEAKER_003: All street lights have been upgraded.

00:28:58 SPEAKER_003: This was done several years ago.

00:28:59 SPEAKER_003: Obviously, little hanging fruit.

00:29:02 SPEAKER_003: We are very supportive with roundabouts.

00:29:05 SPEAKER_003: We actually have quite a few roundabouts for traffic.

00:29:09 SPEAKER_003: They show obviously they use a lot less, save us a lot of gas or diesel, right?

00:29:14 SPEAKER_003: For traffic, so keeps the traffic moving.

00:29:16 SPEAKER_003: I'm a big supporter of it.

00:29:18 SPEAKER_003: I just don't like them too close together.

00:29:20 SPEAKER_003: Our landfill: we haven't done it yet, but we will have future methane capture there.

00:29:26 SPEAKER_003: Water, wastewater systems—we got some serious upgrades, and for those are brand new ones.

00:29:31 SPEAKER_003: And for those ones, we are using the most efficient equipment going.

00:29:35 SPEAKER_003: Water, wastewater systems—another tremendous, tremendous user of energy.

00:29:41 SPEAKER_003: Climate—we declared a climate emergency.

00:29:43 SPEAKER_003: I put a couple question marks there simply because I'm not sure if that was the smartest thing to do.

00:29:48 SPEAKER_003: I don't think we're in a climate emergency.

00:29:50 SPEAKER_003: I think climate emergency—I think the climate is a symptom of a much larger problem.

00:29:55 SPEAKER_003: That being us living beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth, which causes obviously climate problems, but a few others.

00:30:04 SPEAKER_003: So, anyways, that's what we did here.

00:30:05 SPEAKER_003: I know a lot of other municipalities did as well.

00:30:09 SPEAKER_003: For climate, we're striving for thirty percent forest recovery in all our settlement areas.

00:30:15 SPEAKER_003: We're encouraging new infrastructure to go beyond the minimum requirements, especially drainage.

00:30:19 SPEAKER_003: And here in the province of Ontario, you have to build for what they call the hundred-year storm, which for us was Hurricane Hazel back in 1954,

00:30:30 SPEAKER_003: but we're finding that the 100-year storm is coming probably every once every 10 years.

00:30:36 SPEAKER_003: It might even be coming ever more frequently.

00:30:38 SPEAKER_003: So that's what we're doing that, and we're maintaining the work-from-home model that came about from COVID, so employees don't have to drive into work.

00:30:48 SPEAKER_003: They still have to come in two or three days a week, depending.

00:30:52 SPEAKER_003: Some of these employees: Brandon's a good example.

00:30:52 SPEAKER_003: I mean, this at least, Branton's a good example.

00:30:54 SPEAKER_003: He said, "No, all employees have to come in every day, all the time."

00:30:57 SPEAKER_003: I'm thinking, "Well, why?

00:30:58 SPEAKER_003: If they're getting the work done, let them work from home."

00:31:01 SPEAKER_003: And we declared ourselves a B-friendly community.

00:31:04 SPEAKER_003: It's not a big deal, but in this scheme of things, we're trying, right?

00:31:08 SPEAKER_003: Just showing them.

00:31:10 SPEAKER_003: And there's an example of a community building we built just outside Brantford, a little hamlet called Canesville, and that thing is actually net energy positive, so it's very well insulated.

00:31:21 SPEAKER_003: Everything's efficient; uses a lot less energy than it produces, so those solar panels will put out more energy than that building we use on an annual basis.

00:31:30 SPEAKER_003: So you drive around the county, but you'll see a lot of those going.

00:31:39 SPEAKER_003: And then a few other areas of municipal concern, as far as positive steps go, I think in the right direction.

00:31:47 SPEAKER_003: Planning, planning, and as Barbara and I just talked about: we are pretty robust here in our planning.

00:31:55 SPEAKER_003: We have a well-thought-out official plan, and that gives strong protection for agricultural and natural heritage lands.

00:32:03 SPEAKER_003: So yeah, you can build on those, but you got some hoops to go through if you're going to do it, and you better have a good reason.

00:32:10 SPEAKER_003: We are focusing on better interconnectivity, but within towns and trying to work between towns; we do have some multi-use trails, but that's such a long-term project.

00:32:21 SPEAKER_003: It's a lot of money, and yeah, when you're doing things like that, you just need to keep your foot on the gas and never look back.

00:32:27 SPEAKER_003: Transit: as I showed the map earlier, we're a bunch of villages, a bunch of hamlets spread out, and it didn't make sense to have a fixed route system.

00:32:38 SPEAKER_003: Think of a city bus, a smaller city bus travelling this fixed route, and two people are on it or three people are on it.

00:32:45 SPEAKER_003: So, transit was something that was my baby.

00:32:49 SPEAKER_003: We copied it from a municipality called Innisfil, which is the other side of Toronto.

00:32:53 SPEAKER_003: They have a very similar municipality.

00:32:56 SPEAKER_003: That's as far as towns spread out and whatnot.

00:32:58 SPEAKER_003: And that's what they had.

00:32:59 SPEAKER_003: So somebody needs a ride, they call up.

00:33:02 SPEAKER_003: They'll go pick them up.

00:33:03 SPEAKER_003: Usually it's an SUV, and then if there's other people along the way that need a ride, they go pick them up.

00:33:11 SPEAKER_003: So it's a perfect note, but it's not a bad compromise for us, right?

00:33:18 SPEAKER_003: For our waste, we have lots of landfill capacity here in the County of Brant.

00:33:25 SPEAKER_003: Probably, I think, till 2070.

00:33:27 SPEAKER_003: In the province, province-wide, we only have between ten and fifteen years left as a province.

00:33:32 SPEAKER_003: So, not quite sure what the provincial plan is for waste going forward within the next decade.

00:33:39 SPEAKER_003: And even though we do have lots of landfill capacity, we have a fantastic couple staff there—a couple staff there that are constantly working to divert waste from the landfill.

00:33:48 SPEAKER_003: So construction material, right?

00:33:50 SPEAKER_003: That takes up all kinds of space.

00:33:52 SPEAKER_003: Well, we found a company in Woodstock that will take it; so we got paid for the cost of shipping, but that beats landfilling it.

00:33:59 SPEAKER_003: And they use it; they reuse it.

00:34:02 SPEAKER_003: Solar panels: that's unfortunately, if a solar panel showed up at our landfill today, October 15th, 2026, it would be landfilled.

00:34:13 SPEAKER_003: I said that's not right.

00:34:17 SPEAKER_003: So it's not just a County of Brant issue; it's across because they're tough to break down, right?

00:34:25 SPEAKER_003: To get the stuff out of them.

00:34:26 SPEAKER_003: But there's a lot of good stuff in those solar panels, and that's what Simon got me thinking about:

00:34:33 SPEAKER_003: that he talks about how kind of short on copper and silver and a few other things we're going to be, well, electrify everything.

00:34:40 SPEAKER_003: Well, we're going to need obviously those metals as well as a few others.

00:34:45 SPEAKER_003: So I know, and we're going to see this wave coming.

00:34:49 SPEAKER_003: My solar panels are 17 years old, and I can see the decreased production.

00:34:54 SPEAKER_003: They do stop working well after you know 20 years.

00:35:00 SPEAKER_003: Mine didn't even make it that long.

00:35:01 SPEAKER_003: So we're going to see a wave coming.

00:35:04 SPEAKER_003: We just got to make sure we don't landfill them and all the good things that are there.

00:35:10 SPEAKER_003: And then, as far as waste goes, we'll have an organic programme coming in the early 2030s.

00:35:14 SPEAKER_003: Big municipalities have them right now.

00:35:17 SPEAKER_003: Smaller municipalities don't have to; they got to reach a certain size.

00:35:20 SPEAKER_003: So, and I will talk a bit about organics later.

00:35:23 SPEAKER_003: And then financials: of course, everything comes down to financials.

00:35:26 SPEAKER_003: We do have a long-term financial plan that kind of guides us for all major investment infrastructure projects.

00:35:33 SPEAKER_003: Because we've got to make sure we're not doing it all in the same year, and we spread it out.

00:35:37 SPEAKER_003: I put ceteris paribus, which is Latin for all else being equal, because it's like everything.

00:35:43 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, you got a good plan, and you're going to go with it.

00:35:47 SPEAKER_003: But who knows what comes up?

00:35:48 SPEAKER_003: A war in Iran, COVID, whatnot, right?

00:35:52 SPEAKER_003: So just assuming everything stays the same.

00:35:55 SPEAKER_003: So that's like I say: at the end of the day, okay, we're not looking at it through a limits to growth lens,

00:36:04 SPEAKER_003: but I think we made a lot of positive steps in the right direction.

00:36:10 SPEAKER_003: Could we do more?

00:36:11 SPEAKER_003: Of course, you can always do more.

00:36:13 SPEAKER_003: And I throw in a bunch of things.

00:36:15 SPEAKER_003: Some of these, maybe they're not municipal responsibility, but the municipalities with proper staff could certainly make it easier.

00:36:23 SPEAKER_003: You could get volunteer groups to do it.

00:36:26 SPEAKER_003: I just throw some things out.

00:36:28 SPEAKER_003: There's obviously lots out there.

00:36:29 SPEAKER_003: Repair cafes: you know, you throw things out.

00:36:32 SPEAKER_003: You have somebody fixing that old coffee pot that broke down.

00:36:39 SPEAKER_003: We really, really need some good teaching kitchens to demonstrate low-cost healthy meal prep.

00:36:44 SPEAKER_003: You know, people talk about the price of food.

00:36:46 SPEAKER_003: Well, beans and rice goes a long way towards cutting down that food bill.

00:36:50 SPEAKER_003: And food storage for seeds and produce.

00:36:53 SPEAKER_003: A gleaner programme: they grow broccoli right beside me, and I'm always amazed at how much is left over once the Mexicans are done.

00:37:01 SPEAKER_003: More community gardens, composting, increased local purchase.

00:37:03 SPEAKER_003: Increase local purchases, shortening supply chains, local currency, local investment—lots, lots more.

00:37:08 SPEAKER_003: I put lots, lots more.

00:37:09 SPEAKER_003: I think, as far as housing, Andre has some very good suggestions in his mayoral run.

00:37:16 SPEAKER_003: So, thank you.

00:37:17 SPEAKER_003: Also, I'm saying is I think there's a lot more we could be doing.

00:37:23 SPEAKER_003: Barbara has a question.

00:37:24 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, yeah.

00:37:25 SPEAKER_003: A question on your local food.

00:37:29 SPEAKER_009: I was horrified to see the statistic that Iowa, which also has a lot of Class One and Class Two farmland, as we do here across the border in Wisconsin,

00:37:44 SPEAKER_009: only actually has 10 percent of their food that people eat grown locally, which was sort of a horrifying number.

00:37:54 SPEAKER_009: Yeah, and they're doing some major efforts to get seasonal local food into the local food chain instead of shipping stuff off, some of it even abroad to come back as processed food.

00:38:15 SPEAKER_009: What does it look like where you are?

00:38:19 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, it's unfortunately it all comes down to price at the end of the day.

00:38:24 SPEAKER_003: Like, and there's obviously been various initiatives, you know, the 100 Mile Diet.

00:38:28 SPEAKER_003: And it's frustrating to see that because yeah, we do.

00:38:34 SPEAKER_003: As I started at the beginning, we have great soil, we have great climate.

00:38:36 SPEAKER_003: We grow a lot of food here.

00:38:38 SPEAKER_003: How do we get people to do that?

00:38:40 SPEAKER_003: It would be nice if we could approach that voluntarily, like get our ducks in a row and do that.

00:38:46 SPEAKER_003: When growing up, a lot of our food was from here.

00:38:49 SPEAKER_003: Like you go to the grocery store, you bought local apples.

00:38:52 SPEAKER_003: We used to grow raspberries on the side, and yeah, we'd take them to the local food store and give them there.

00:38:58 SPEAKER_003: Unfortunately, I don't know if that's going to come about voluntarily.

00:39:02 SPEAKER_003: I think it will come.

00:39:03 SPEAKER_003: I just think it'll take you know very very high diesel prices and gas prices to get us there, right?

00:39:10 SPEAKER_003: So because like I said, I've seen all these initiatives come forward, haven't been super successful, but I think as time goes on, yeah, we're going to see more things support local food.

00:39:22 SPEAKER_003: We have in the county, we don't even have a farmers market, right?

00:39:26 SPEAKER_003: Wow.

00:39:26 SPEAKER_003: To go to the big city.

00:39:27 SPEAKER_003: Oh, that is pathetic.

00:39:29 SPEAKER_003: Yeah.

00:39:29 SPEAKER_003: Well, to be fair, there are farmers' markets in the area.

00:39:32 SPEAKER_003: We just don't have any in the municipality, right?

00:39:35 SPEAKER_003: But I think as time goes on, we'll see more of that.

00:39:39 SPEAKER_003: Not out of choice, but by necessity.

00:39:42 SPEAKER_003: That's how I see it.

00:39:43 SPEAKER_003: Anyways, Simon, we're having a lot of that.

00:39:46 SPEAKER_009: The other thing that we are noticing is that when I was a kid, you know, we don't talk about how long ago.

00:40:02 SPEAKER_009: Longer than you, no doubt.

00:40:05 SPEAKER_009: We had a lot of local food processing.

00:40:08 SPEAKER_009: We had butcher shops.

00:40:10 SPEAKER_009: Yes.

00:40:11 SPEAKER_009: We had yeah, and cheese factories.

00:40:13 SPEAKER_009: I mean, there was a cheese factory every ten, twenty miles, and they're all gone, and everything gets carted off to big operations.

00:40:25 SPEAKER_009: Yeah.

00:40:26 SPEAKER_009: And so during COVID, we had a problem.

00:40:29 SPEAKER_009: This is a dairy area.

00:40:31 SPEAKER_009: We had plenty of dairy, and there was no way to get it processed.

00:40:41 SPEAKER_009: There was no way to get cheese processed.

00:40:45 SPEAKER_009: And so there's also a thought that one of the big holes right now is local food processing capacity.

00:40:54 SPEAKER_009: There's a few initiatives around here to get some of the local kitchens more set up to do it, like on an emergency basis.

00:41:06 SPEAKER_009: Yeah, some of them have big freezers and stuff to have, you know.

00:41:10 SPEAKER_009: Yeah, and we all can't set it up and pop it in the freezer because we can't send it anywhere.

00:41:17 SPEAKER_009: That kind of thing.

00:41:19 SPEAKER_009: So it's something to keep in mind.

00:41:21 SPEAKER_009: I'll just say real quickly too.

00:41:23 SPEAKER_003: As far as local food and whatnot.

00:41:27 SPEAKER_003: There's been some strong economic forces that have pushed everything to become bigger and bigger, right?

00:41:33 SPEAKER_003: Because they want to cut costs.

00:41:35 SPEAKER_003: They want to increase that profit margin by a penny per unit or two pennies per unit, and it's forced out a lot of the local butcher shops and the local cheese makers.

00:41:46 SPEAKER_003: So we've seen those kind of fall by the wayside because they haven't been able to keep up, right?

00:41:51 SPEAKER_003: So they're not profitable.

00:41:52 SPEAKER_003: People don't shop there, and they just go buy at our local bakery or go buy at Sobeys, right?

00:41:57 SPEAKER_003: The big grocery to get your bread.

00:41:59 SPEAKER_003: So we've seen that being pushed, and then we see those guys try and enforce, or they do.

00:42:06 SPEAKER_003: They get legislators to pass these rules that say, well, you got to do this, and you got to do that.

00:42:10 SPEAKER_003: So you see all these rules that make it very hard for a local person on their own to do those because they have to comply with all this legislation.

00:42:16 SPEAKER_003: Have to comply with all this legislation, so there has been a push to kind of get us to go towards these bigger operations.

00:42:23 SPEAKER_003: But like I say, I honestly believe we will be going back to more local and more small.

00:42:29 SPEAKER_003: Just my thoughts.

00:42:30 SPEAKER_009: Regulations here are a major problem.

00:42:33 SPEAKER_009: Yeah, they're geared towards somebody who's big.

00:42:36 SPEAKER_001: Let's let Simon have a word in here.

00:42:39 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

00:42:40 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

00:42:42 SPEAKER_001: Simon, you got unmute.

00:42:43 SPEAKER_001: It's all good, guys.

00:42:46 SPEAKER_001: The value of these discussions, these podcasts, is the discussion.

00:42:50 SPEAKER_002: And as I like to say, never plan an act of violence; let it happen naturally.

00:42:55 SPEAKER_002: Fuck yourself out.

00:42:57 SPEAKER_002: Hang on, let me get rid of that hand.

00:42:59 SPEAKER_002: David, excellent work in the face of difficulty and adversity.

00:43:04 SPEAKER_002: It's been really, really hard for everyone I talk to to try and put these ideas on the ground while the old system still works.

00:43:12 SPEAKER_002: Yeah, no one wants to hear about it, and it's exhausting.

00:43:15 SPEAKER_002: And the longer things can keep going, and there's still food in the supermarket, you know, the more it's a river in Egypt.

00:43:25 SPEAKER_002: Let's just say that the Nile.

00:43:30 SPEAKER_002: Yeah.

00:43:30 SPEAKER_002: Anyway, my question is this: How did you handle sewage in a cold climate?

00:43:36 SPEAKER_002: Sewage?

00:43:37 SPEAKER_002: Yeah.

00:43:38 SPEAKER_002: Or did you handle sewage?

00:43:41 SPEAKER_002: I know.

00:43:42 SPEAKER_003: You know, in today's society, I don't know how they handled in the past, right?

00:43:47 SPEAKER_003: Yeah.

00:43:48 SPEAKER_003: How are you planning to do it?

00:43:50 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, that's a good one.

00:43:51 SPEAKER_003: I mean, I live obviously.

00:43:53 SPEAKER_003: I live in a cold climate.

00:44:00 SPEAKER_003: I have a septic system, right?

00:44:02 SPEAKER_003: So it's underground.

00:44:03 SPEAKER_003: Never freezes, right?

00:44:04 SPEAKER_003: Never freezes.

00:44:06 SPEAKER_003: So I have a storage tank, and then I have weeping tiles, and it flows out to the soil to spread out, and then the solids are pumped out.

00:44:15 SPEAKER_003: You know, depend on the size of your tank.

00:44:16 SPEAKER_003: Once every two years, that's how we're doing it now.

00:44:19 SPEAKER_003: I don't see it changing.

00:44:21 SPEAKER_003: You know, even though it's cold, I know for the big cities that stuff never freezes, right?

00:44:27 SPEAKER_003: Because it's in pipes; it's always given off heat and through organic breakdown.

00:44:32 SPEAKER_003: So, not sure where you're going with that.

00:44:36 SPEAKER_002: Okay, so I saw a couple of pictures where you had metres of snow, and I thought, oh,

00:44:39 SPEAKER_002: see here in Finland they've got a real problem because it's below zero for like you know four or five months of the year.

00:44:46 SPEAKER_002: Yeah, and so they've got this very clever engineering system where they'll have heating pipes coming in wrapped around or with the sewage pipes going out and the drinking water going in.

00:45:00 SPEAKER_002: Okay, and it's really quite innovative and synergistic.

00:45:05 SPEAKER_002: The reason I asked is since we spoke, Andri, I invaded Thailand.

00:45:10 SPEAKER_002: Okay.

00:45:11 SPEAKER_002: I decided Thailand was now my personal sandbox, and I engaged in industrial reform for the entire nation state to apply the purple transition.

00:45:19 SPEAKER_002: Okay.

00:45:20 SPEAKER_002: Ah.

00:45:23 SPEAKER_002: Um.

00:45:24 SPEAKER_002: So, I suppose I could present the results of that at some point.

00:45:28 SPEAKER_002: What I found, though, was some very interesting things.

00:45:32 SPEAKER_002: Like some of the problems could be turned into solutions, and sewage was one of them.

00:45:37 SPEAKER_002: So you've got, you know, several tens of millions of people in a small area.

00:45:42 SPEAKER_002: What do you do with all the sewage?

00:45:44 SPEAKER_002: And with the old adage, there's money in shit.

00:45:47 SPEAKER_002: So what I did was I put it into a pyrolysis plant and converted to syngas and a series of organic liquids out and char outputs.

00:46:01 SPEAKER_002: The liquid and solids went off to organic fertilizer, but the gas was then used to recycle iron powder, and that iron powder was then used to deliver high-end heat to industry.

00:46:17 SPEAKER_002: It didn't.

00:46:18 SPEAKER_002: It only accounted for like two percent of the Thailand cement industry.

00:46:22 SPEAKER_002: So it didn't solve any problems as such.

00:46:24 SPEAKER_002: But we were able to.

00:46:26 SPEAKER_002: I was able to take a problem and take it off the board and turn it from the problem column into the asset column.

00:46:32 SPEAKER_002: And uh, David, you're...

00:46:33 SPEAKER_002: David, your work was what you described.

00:46:37 SPEAKER_002: There was not just a plan; it's what you were doing.

00:46:40 SPEAKER_002: That's some damn good stuff there.

00:46:43 SPEAKER_002: My compliments.

00:46:44 SPEAKER_002: Thank you.

00:46:45 SPEAKER_009: You're not having a problem with the PFAS in the waste?

00:46:49 SPEAKER_009: The U.S. has tried that and destroyed some good farmland.

00:46:57 SPEAKER_001: Well, I just wanted to mention about that.

00:47:00 SPEAKER_001: I agree with David about the regulation, especially for meat processors; is one of the main reasons why we don't have small meat processors.

00:47:09 SPEAKER_001: It costs like one hundred fifty thousand dollars or something, and to set one up, or more.

00:47:16 SPEAKER_001: And so I actually had emailed the council of the federation or Team Canada, you know, the prime minister and the premiers about it on like Agriculture Day,

00:47:28 SPEAKER_001: and it was one of the few responses where they actually responded to me and said that we're looking into this intensely.

00:47:49 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, so that was nice.

00:47:52 SPEAKER_001: Iver.

00:47:55 SPEAKER_001: Oh, oh, and just one more thing about the sewage.

00:47:59 SPEAKER_001: So, at least in Grey County, we have different options as well.

00:48:05 SPEAKER_001: Not just septic, but there's also compost toilets, and those can be cheaper.

00:48:11 SPEAKER_001: Okay, go ahead, Iver.

00:48:12 SPEAKER_001: Well, I was on the Conservation Commission for about 20 years in my town, and we did two comprehensive plans.

00:48:20 SPEAKER_001: And on the first one, most of the farms were commodity farms.

00:48:24 SPEAKER_001: In other words, they sold their milk wholesale or whatever it was.

00:48:26 SPEAKER_018: Sale or whatever it was, wholesale to big processors, and then the second one, which was 10 years later, most farms marketed locally to the local farmers market, which got bigger and bigger.

00:48:41 SPEAKER_018: And the farmers market is really a great thing to have in the town.

00:48:44 SPEAKER_018: That kind of created it all, and we even had a local cheesery win a world prize in Switzerland for their ricotta cheese.

00:48:52 SPEAKER_018: So, you know, best in the world.

00:48:54 SPEAKER_018: So, I think it just gets it going, and that was all because some people really got the farmers' market going.

00:49:02 SPEAKER_018: The farmers' market took off, and a lot of people are able to make a living selling, you know, retail, not wholesale.

00:49:12 SPEAKER_018: Yeah.

00:49:12 SPEAKER_018: Okay.

00:49:16 SPEAKER_018: Okay.

00:49:17 SPEAKER_001: David, was that the end of your presentation, or you got more?

00:49:20 SPEAKER_001: A couple more.

00:49:21 SPEAKER_001: We're almost done.

00:49:22 SPEAKER_003: I'll just say that in Maine, I think, in the U.S., you get a little bit more entrepreneurial spirit,

00:49:28 SPEAKER_003: and maybe not quite the hand of government over your windpipes as we do here in Canada because it's hard, you know, to start businesses.

00:49:39 SPEAKER_003: And just on large-scale sewage here in Canada, here in Ontario, anyways, I know I'm sure it's the same across Canada.

00:49:46 SPEAKER_003: We do a little bit of processing on the waste, not too much, because we have to put the water back into the river, so we do clean it up fairly well.

00:49:54 SPEAKER_003: The solids we de-water it.

00:49:56 SPEAKER_003: There's a little bit of processing after that.

00:49:58 SPEAKER_003: Dry it out and it's spread on fields.

00:50:00 SPEAKER_003: So it is a resource.

00:50:02 SPEAKER_003: At the same time, we have to be careful because we can't put it on the fields too frequently because of the heavy metals in it.

00:50:09 SPEAKER_003: So I just want to make that note.

00:50:12 SPEAKER_003: So I'll just continue.

00:50:13 SPEAKER_003: Got a couple more slides here.

00:50:15 SPEAKER_003: Okay.

00:50:16 SPEAKER_003: So like I say, there's a lot we can do.

00:50:18 SPEAKER_003: Why don't we?

00:50:20 SPEAKER_003: Well, there's a few.

00:50:21 SPEAKER_003: I'm not making excuses, but these are realities.

00:50:24 SPEAKER_003: Again, I go back to the ignorance of the limits to growth, and I find so many people just assume the future will be like the past, and it's not.

00:50:36 SPEAKER_003: I know the next twenty years are going to be vastly different than the past twenty years.

00:50:40 SPEAKER_003: I guarantee.

00:50:40 SPEAKER_003: I would bet serious money on that.

00:50:43 SPEAKER_003: As mentioned before, municipalities in Ontario are subject to provincial rules, so we don't even determine our population growth.

00:50:53 SPEAKER_003: It's the provinces that do that.

00:50:55 SPEAKER_003: So they said to us, "You're going to have fifty-nine thousand people by 2051, at a minimum."

00:51:01 SPEAKER_003: We're already probably well on our way in terms of planned housing.

00:51:05 SPEAKER_003: The province tells us where we can put our money, where we can invest.

00:51:09 SPEAKER_003: Most of it is interest-bearing instruments, which is unfortunate because you know they were pretty low for a while.

00:51:18 SPEAKER_003: They've got a lot; the province has a lot of control over how we do our planning, and I just mentioned here planning rules, and this kind of goes back to what Barbara said earlier,

00:51:27 SPEAKER_003: favour development.

00:51:29 SPEAKER_003: So we have strict timelines to hear these applications.

00:51:32 SPEAKER_003: So a developer comes forward says I want to build a subdivision here, and you have sixty days to respond.

00:51:40 SPEAKER_003: And if you don't, we're going to appeal this, and they appeal it to the what's called this OLT or Ontario Land Tribunal,

00:51:47 SPEAKER_003: which the University of Western Ontario did a study and found out of all their rulings, just over ninety-two percent were ruled in favour of developers.

00:51:56 SPEAKER_003: So, anyway, so we're constructed that way.

00:51:59 SPEAKER_003: I just put in there, you know, when you look at the good farmland with good soil in a good climate, I hate to lose any land,

00:52:08 SPEAKER_003: and we've lost at least a thousand acres to gravel pits since 2010, since I started on council.

00:52:14 SPEAKER_003: So, when they talk about loss of farmland, I see it, and it's just precious little we can do about it.

00:52:21 SPEAKER_003: I also think there's a lot of uncertainty about well, what does the future hold?

00:52:25 SPEAKER_003: Even for people who know about limits to growth, what exactly does collapse look like, and when's it going to happen?

00:52:31 SPEAKER_003: What's it look like if you knew it's going to happen in 2028, this is going to happen June 1st, you'd probably take a few more concrete steps.

00:52:39 SPEAKER_003: But it could be just simply a gradual decline, right?

00:52:42 SPEAKER_003: A process over decades.

00:52:45 SPEAKER_003: It could be a sudden event.

00:52:47 SPEAKER_003: You know, one day some planes hit the twin towers, and our world suddenly changed, right?

00:52:53 SPEAKER_003: Or it could be a stair-step downwards.

00:52:55 SPEAKER_003: So you see a rapid decline, and then we plateau for a while, and then another rapid decline, and like human health as we age.

00:53:03 SPEAKER_003: So much of what happens is also beyond our control.

00:53:06 SPEAKER_003: You know, wars leading to higher energy costs, inflation.

00:53:09 SPEAKER_003: Trump putting on tariffs on Canadian things.

00:53:12 SPEAKER_003: We got mass migration.

00:53:15 SPEAKER_003: It's tough to control, and we have lousy leaders.

00:53:18 SPEAKER_003: Most countries do.

00:53:19 SPEAKER_003: I'm sorry.

00:53:20 SPEAKER_003: That's just how I see it.

00:53:22 SPEAKER_003: Why don't we?

00:53:24 SPEAKER_003: Well, keep in mind we are smaller government, and we have to be cautious, right?

00:53:29 SPEAKER_003: As decisions around infrastructure can last for decades, and we can't afford to be wrong.

00:53:34 SPEAKER_003: So we have limited dollars to work with.

00:53:36 SPEAKER_003: I put in brackets Calgary water pipes.

00:53:38 SPEAKER_003: Calgary had a new system for water pipes—they were made differently.

00:53:44 SPEAKER_003: I believe they're wrapped in concrete or things like that.

00:53:47 SPEAKER_003: They're supposed to last really long.

00:53:48 SPEAKER_003: Well, they didn't.

00:53:49 SPEAKER_003: They had premature failure, and Calgary paid through the nose for them.

00:53:54 SPEAKER_003: So, got to be very cautious.

00:53:56 SPEAKER_003: There's a reason we're cautious, right?

00:53:59 SPEAKER_003: In municipal councils, you see that you might have ten people or eleven people, and it's funny, like they all kind of maybe think the same way.

00:54:09 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, I don't know if it's because they read the same reports and hear from the same staff and hear the same answers to the same questions, but there's this group thing that takes over,

00:54:18 SPEAKER_003: and you come along with a radical new idea, makes sense, and you gotta really know how to sell it.

00:54:25 SPEAKER_003: I did that transit bringing it in, you know, shared ride service.

00:54:28 SPEAKER_003: It took me four years, four years, and I knew what I was doing.

00:54:31 SPEAKER_003: I had people I was working with.

00:54:32 SPEAKER_003: It took me four years to get it.

00:54:34 SPEAKER_003: Group thing takes over, and then maybe, just maybe, the human situation self-corrects over time because we're seeing a massive drop in fertility.

00:54:44 SPEAKER_003: Right?

00:54:44 SPEAKER_003: You look at sperm fertility; it's just, it's literally collapsing.

00:54:49 SPEAKER_003: Right?

00:54:49 SPEAKER_003: You look at the numbers.

00:54:50 SPEAKER_003: So, what's causing that?

00:54:52 SPEAKER_003: We don't know.

00:54:52 SPEAKER_003: We have atrazine, possibly.

00:54:55 SPEAKER_003: We got these forever chemicals there in our water, here in my local town.

00:54:59 SPEAKER_003: Plastics everywhere.

00:55:00 SPEAKER_003: We all got the equivalent of I don't know.

00:55:03 SPEAKER_003: Somebody said like a teaspoon of plastics in our body, in our brain.

00:55:06 SPEAKER_003: Everybody's getting.

00:55:07 SPEAKER_003: There's so many vaccines we don't know the effect of how they interact with each other.

00:55:12 SPEAKER_003: It's never been studied.

00:55:14 SPEAKER_003: Climate change could be part of it.

00:55:18 SPEAKER_003: Lack of affordable housing is another.

00:55:20 SPEAKER_003: Well, that's the economic portion of it, and I didn't put that in there.

00:55:24 SPEAKER_003: But just getting back to fertility, we may see it correct itself before we crash to zero.

00:55:28 SPEAKER_003: Now, when we get to the ideal amount is two point five billion, like we could operate sustainably.

00:55:35 SPEAKER_003: It's possible.

00:55:36 SPEAKER_003: It self-corrects.

00:55:37 SPEAKER_003: And at the same time, keep in mind we do not have perfect information.

00:55:42 SPEAKER_003: Right?

00:55:42 SPEAKER_003: We always are working with imperfect information.

00:55:45 SPEAKER_003: You know, we're in the information age, and there's so much that's just not good.

00:55:50 SPEAKER_003: So, interestingly enough, people wanting the same goal, and we can sit around.

00:55:54 SPEAKER_003: We all want what's best.

00:55:55 SPEAKER_003: And you can have completely opposing views on the same topic.

00:55:58 SPEAKER_003: And I just threw seven up on a page, right?

00:56:01 SPEAKER_003: In this group here, just in the chat, we could have a vigorous debate and come out, you know, half for one and half the other, right?

00:56:10 SPEAKER_003: So I just threw out seven there, but these are real-world examples of issues that we faced here at our municipality, and I know others were right.

00:56:19 SPEAKER_003: Wind turbines, of course, we're going to put up wind turbines.

00:56:23 SPEAKER_003: It's a clean source of energy, and then I felt well.

00:56:26 SPEAKER_003: People have told me who oppose them.

00:56:28 SPEAKER_003: They said, well, they create infrasound so long waves, not ultrasound.

00:56:35 SPEAKER_003: And apparently, I don't know this for sure.

00:56:39 SPEAKER_003: They say it's damaging to our human organs.

00:56:42 SPEAKER_003: Could be, I don't know.

00:56:42 SPEAKER_003: We do know they kill birds and bats.

00:56:44 SPEAKER_003: I know an engineer who's worked on wind turbines in Australia for 20 years, and he says those things do not make money, right?

00:56:54 SPEAKER_003: Because they just break down too much.

00:56:56 SPEAKER_003: So he'll swear by it.

00:56:57 SPEAKER_003: He'll gladly talk a year off on that issue.

00:57:00 SPEAKER_003: They also need a large amount of capital, and they use up valuable agriculture land.

00:57:05 SPEAKER_003: So, yeah, I could support wind turbines if I looked at everything through a climate change lens.

00:57:10 SPEAKER_003: But then, if you think about other things, you could come down on either side.

00:57:14 SPEAKER_003: Interesting, because I'm sure everybody here agrees that climate change needs to be fixed, right?

00:57:18 SPEAKER_003: We need to do something about it.

00:57:20 SPEAKER_003: Fluoride in drinking water.

00:57:22 SPEAKER_003: We put fluoride in the Paris town.

00:57:25 SPEAKER_003: The town of Paris is drinking water, but then I find out well, it's actually a neurotoxin.

00:57:31 SPEAKER_003: There was a couple studies that came out and said, well, it lowers IQ, not by a lot, but enough to measure.

00:57:36 SPEAKER_003: And that's yeah.

00:57:37 SPEAKER_003: Whoa.

00:57:38 SPEAKER_003: So anyway, but the dental society and our public health agency, they'll tell you fluoride, fluoride, fluoride.

00:57:45 SPEAKER_003: Not sure I need fluoridated water to have a shower in or to wash my car in, but that's what they say.

00:57:51 SPEAKER_003: And then organic pickup.

00:57:53 SPEAKER_003: You know, of course we should be picking it up.

00:57:55 SPEAKER_003: It extends the landfill.

00:57:57 SPEAKER_003: It recycles nutrients.

00:57:58 SPEAKER_003: But then you think, well, those trucks use a lot of diesel going up and down the roads, right?

00:58:03 SPEAKER_003: So, hey, you could argue both ways.

00:58:05 SPEAKER_003: I think what we're going to do eventually is just stick to the built-up areas and maybe not do garbage every other week.

00:58:12 SPEAKER_003: Because if you're not putting organics in your garbage, then you can at least, you know, you can go an extra week.

00:58:17 SPEAKER_003: So, there's that natural gas expansion, which I talked about earlier.

00:58:21 SPEAKER_003: I firmly believe it, but I have others on council who say, no, no, no, climate change.

00:58:24 SPEAKER_003: Don't know climate change, and I don't want any natural gas expansion because you're just going to use stranded assets, and they should go with a heat pump.

00:58:33 SPEAKER_003: And I say, yeah, but they need to be heated now, and our grid is not so stable, or our electrical grid fails a lot.

00:58:40 SPEAKER_003: So we could argue that, right?

00:58:42 SPEAKER_003: And we all want the same thing: battery storage.

00:58:44 SPEAKER_003: Well, if we're going to go to an electrified system, we need battery storage.

00:58:47 SPEAKER_003: I have a couple on council who say, yeah, but if those things catch fire, they got chemicals leaking into the water table.

00:58:52 SPEAKER_003: Five G towers.

00:58:55 SPEAKER_003: I thought that was a no-brainer.

00:58:57 SPEAKER_003: You know, everybody's using more data.

00:59:00 SPEAKER_003: We need to make our 911 emergency calls, the police and fire and all that good stuff.

00:59:06 SPEAKER_003: And then we had a group present that our council said, no, no, we don't want these 5G towers because the radiation creates all kinds of problems.

00:59:14 SPEAKER_003: Yeah.

00:59:14 SPEAKER_003: I don't know.

00:59:15 SPEAKER_003: I do.

00:59:15 SPEAKER_003: We just go by what Health Canada says.

00:59:17 SPEAKER_003: Health Canada says it's just a small amount of radiation.

00:59:20 SPEAKER_003: I'm told no, it's the type of radiation.

00:59:22 SPEAKER_003: But anyways, and then an indoor pool, right?

00:59:25 SPEAKER_003: From a climate limits to growth lens, no, no, no, no, right?

00:59:31 SPEAKER_003: Huge energy chemical user, but guess what?

00:59:34 SPEAKER_003: We're an aging population.

00:59:35 SPEAKER_003: A lot of seniors really like an indoor pool.

00:59:38 SPEAKER_003: We do have an outdoor pool, but that's only three months of the year.

00:59:41 SPEAKER_003: And there's a lot of people that want to learn how to swim so they don't drown.

00:59:44 SPEAKER_003: So, what is the right answer locally?

00:59:47 SPEAKER_003: And I just throw those semantic issues because we've seen those here.

00:59:49 SPEAKER_003: We've debated those here, and I think every one of us here would agree that we want the same thing, but we just aren't quite sure how to get there, right?

00:59:58 SPEAKER_003: So, say, Andrew, you could take any one of those and just we just talk about it for an hour.

01:00:04 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, yeah, I know Barbara did a presentation on the wind turbines.

01:00:08 SPEAKER_001: Okay, there you go.

01:00:09 SPEAKER_001: Just a couple months ago.

01:00:10 SPEAKER_001: Yeah.

01:00:11 SPEAKER_001: All right.

01:00:11 SPEAKER_001: So.

01:00:12 SPEAKER_001: And the infrasound is real.

01:00:14 SPEAKER_001: We're measuring it.

01:00:15 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

01:00:15 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

01:00:17 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, and that's that's what I've heard.

01:00:18 SPEAKER_001: And again, I don't know much about it.

01:00:20 SPEAKER_001: That's it.

01:00:20 SPEAKER_001: I just know what I heard, right?

01:00:21 SPEAKER_003: So, just letting you know, we did say no to wind turbines.

01:00:25 SPEAKER_003: So, lessons learned.

01:00:27 SPEAKER_003: Just to sum it up, I know a lot, but I'm certain of almost nothing, right?

01:00:34 SPEAKER_003: And look at everybody else, right?

01:00:36 SPEAKER_003: A lot of these peak oil experts thought the price of oil would be two hundred dollars if you closed the Strait of Hormuz for six months, and it's at a hundred dollars.

01:00:43 SPEAKER_003: So, there might be reasons for it, but I'm just saying that you don't know for sure a lot of things, right?

01:00:51 SPEAKER_003: But I am trying to connect the dots.

01:00:53 SPEAKER_003: I do know that death and taxes are will happen.

01:00:57 SPEAKER_003: And reading Mike Maloney's and that stuff, all fiat money dies, right?

01:01:03 SPEAKER_003: They looked at five thousand different fiats over the centuries in different countries, and every single one of them died.

01:01:09 SPEAKER_003: So we know that.

01:01:10 SPEAKER_003: We know the climate is getting warmer.

01:01:12 SPEAKER_003: Growing up, fifty years ago, I lived on a tobacco farm.

01:01:15 SPEAKER_003: Very sensitive to frost, and if you didn't have that tobacco off by the first week of September, you're running the risk of losing what you have out there to frost.

01:01:25 SPEAKER_003: First week of September.

01:01:26 SPEAKER_003: Now, we it takes till late October to get a killing frost around here.

01:01:32 SPEAKER_003: So just in fifty years, my time, I've seen it extend like the growing season extended a full month.

01:01:38 SPEAKER_003: Right, so the climate is getting warmer.

01:01:40 SPEAKER_003: Going, and I know Simon deals with a lot of these people, but those at the highest levels of government are sadly at best no smarter than us.

01:01:49 SPEAKER_003: So, as a municipal councillor, you tend to go to a lot of the same functions, right?

01:01:55 SPEAKER_003: Celebrations, whatnot, or you have delegations with your MPs and MPPs.

01:02:01 SPEAKER_003: God, you just at some point in my life, I know I thought these guys were smarter than us, or the people, the top people in business.

01:02:08 SPEAKER_003: Then you get talking, you realize it's just not the case, right?

01:02:11 SPEAKER_003: So, I think we as a group could sit around together and run a country better than some of these guys.

01:02:18 SPEAKER_003: One thing I have learned is that a poor leader can do a lot of damage.

01:02:21 SPEAKER_003: We had one for ten years as prime minister.

01:02:23 SPEAKER_003: He did a lot of damage.

01:02:25 SPEAKER_003: He really did, and I could list a lot, but in the interest of time, I won't.

01:02:30 SPEAKER_003: And at the municipal level, I've seen it many times.

01:02:33 SPEAKER_003: Haste makes waste.

01:02:35 SPEAKER_003: It really does.

01:02:36 SPEAKER_003: Let's resurface that road.

01:02:37 SPEAKER_003: They do, but meanwhile, over at infrastructure, they tear up the road two years later because they're going to put in water pipes or whatnot.

01:02:43 SPEAKER_003: So we do have to be a little bit careful.

01:02:45 SPEAKER_003: You have to go a little bit slower.

01:02:47 SPEAKER_003: Make sure you got your ducks lined up in a row.

01:02:51 SPEAKER_003: And then finally, last screen: listen to others and be prepared to change your mind.

01:02:56 SPEAKER_003: Again, I thought I knew some stuff, and then you listen and you listen.

01:03:00 SPEAKER_003: You know what?

01:03:01 SPEAKER_003: I think I'm wrong.

01:03:03 SPEAKER_003: So I've been humble.

01:03:04 SPEAKER_003: I'll be honest.

01:03:05 SPEAKER_003: I've been humble by a lot of things, but I didn't know.

01:03:08 SPEAKER_003: And I found just through my own personal life, insulating oneself from inflation and prepping and have a lot in common.

01:03:14 SPEAKER_003: I've read a lot of prepping books and they talk about guns and you know creating a defensive perimeter and all that stuff.

01:03:19 SPEAKER_003: And I think, yeah, but if you grow a big garden and you got solar panels and you insulate your house and you got a plug-in hybrid, inflation comes along.

01:03:28 SPEAKER_003: And guess what?

01:03:29 SPEAKER_003: I own a lot of commodities in my retirement portfolio, and I feel pretty protected against inflation.

01:03:36 SPEAKER_003: So a lot of what the preppers talk about is actually helps save you from inflation.

01:03:40 SPEAKER_003: Right?

01:03:41 SPEAKER_003: Life is getting harder.

01:03:43 SPEAKER_003: We know if we go back to the '70s, a family could get by on one income.

01:03:47 SPEAKER_003: They had a house, they had a car, they went on vacation every year.

01:03:51 SPEAKER_003: Fast forward to 2026; you got two people working.

01:03:54 SPEAKER_003: One of them working a job and a half.

01:03:55 SPEAKER_003: They're renting.

01:03:56 SPEAKER_003: They can't afford nothing.

01:03:58 SPEAKER_003: So it is getting hard.

01:04:00 SPEAKER_003: It doesn't just seem like it.

01:04:01 SPEAKER_003: It is getting hard.

01:04:03 SPEAKER_003: So, but at the end of the day, what can we change, right?

01:04:06 SPEAKER_003: So you got to learn what's truly important in your life.

01:04:09 SPEAKER_003: It's family, it's community.

01:04:11 SPEAKER_003: So that's why I say get involved with your community.

01:04:13 SPEAKER_003: The world will grow smaller.

01:04:15 SPEAKER_003: We're going to travel a lot less.

01:04:17 SPEAKER_003: Even big government, big corporations, their reaches, their reach will weaken as energy becomes more and more expensive.

01:04:24 SPEAKER_003: So I firmly believe the world will grow smaller.

01:04:28 SPEAKER_003: And stay positive, right?

01:04:31 SPEAKER_003: But prepare to have expectations lowered as time moves on.

01:04:34 SPEAKER_003: So you know, a great time is a trip to Disney.

01:04:36 SPEAKER_003: Times a trip to Disney, you know, a great day is a day at Disney, and maybe in the future, a great day might just be the fact that you had three meals that day, right?

01:04:44 SPEAKER_003: So we're going to have lower expectations, and just prepare for that.

01:04:49 SPEAKER_003: And I think if you can get that mental frame of mind, I think life's going to be a lot more pleasant.

01:04:53 SPEAKER_003: And then at the end of the day, be grateful for what you have.

01:04:57 SPEAKER_003: And that presentation, sir.

01:04:59 SPEAKER_003: Thank you, Simon.

01:05:02 SPEAKER_003: You had something.

01:05:05 SPEAKER_003: You got on mute.

01:05:07 SPEAKER_003: Just to throw a comment, Dave.

01:05:09 SPEAKER_002: Yes, I do indeed meet lots of people from all over the world.

01:05:12 SPEAKER_002: And a couple of days ago, I met all the senior people in the military-industrial complex in Europe, and I am struck again and again and again how ordinary all these people are.

01:05:23 SPEAKER_002: They're just ordinary people.

01:05:25 SPEAKER_002: Now, they're just like us.

01:05:29 SPEAKER_002: But what's happened to them is they've been conditioned, right?

01:05:32 SPEAKER_002: They're part of a system.

01:05:35 SPEAKER_002: They do a job, and their job has instructions, or their job has requirements, which allows them to operate in a very narrow window.

01:05:43 SPEAKER_002: If they were to engage in much change at all, the system around them would replace them.

01:05:50 SPEAKER_002: So what I've come to the conclusion is the sort of leadership we're all hoping for is something like John Galt out of Atlas Shrugged.

01:06:02 SPEAKER_002: We need a dangerous lunatic to come out of nowhere with a plan, and then somehow get a vast amount of resources, and then disrupt things to the point where suddenly things get better.

01:06:14 SPEAKER_002: That's kind of what we're asking for.

01:06:16 SPEAKER_002: It's not going to happen with the kind of leadership that's allowed to exist in the world that we're in at the moment.

01:06:26 SPEAKER_002: And so what I think will happen is when we start getting the real trouble on the ground, ordinary people will do extraordinary things.

01:06:35 SPEAKER_002: So those leaders are around us.

01:06:37 SPEAKER_002: Some of them in power now, but they're dormant.

01:06:41 SPEAKER_002: And that's how it is.

01:06:42 SPEAKER_002: And also when I'm talking to people, and someone's throwing rotten tomatoes at me, or while I'm on stage presenting something, yeah, yeah, full of shit, get off the stage, da da da da da.

01:06:53 SPEAKER_002: Who I'm really talking to is not them, but at the back of the room there'll be a junior intern, who is a junior intern today.

01:07:01 SPEAKER_002: But tomorrow they'll be the leader of the whole division.

01:07:04 SPEAKER_002: That's who I'm talking to.

01:07:06 SPEAKER_002: And if I can remember that, it's manageable.

01:07:11 SPEAKER_002: Very good.

01:07:12 SPEAKER_002: Yeah.

01:07:13 SPEAKER_002: Anyway, David, you're doing remarkable work.

01:07:15 SPEAKER_002: More strength to your arm.

01:07:19 SPEAKER_002: Uh huh.

01:07:19 SPEAKER_001: Uh, David, did you want to respond to that, or but also, can you stop sharing your screen?

01:07:25 SPEAKER_001: Oh, my apologies.

01:07:27 SPEAKER_001: I stop sharing.

01:07:27 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, my apologies.

01:07:29 SPEAKER_003: Just yeah, the only thing I would well, one thing I would add to that, and like I said, that was a hard lesson for me, right?

01:07:35 SPEAKER_003: You think they, you think they're smarter than you, and they just aren't.

01:07:38 SPEAKER_003: You know, what do you mean you haven't heard of this or that?

01:07:41 SPEAKER_003: So, one thing I've noticed at council, and it goes back to maybe a radical idea.

01:07:47 SPEAKER_003: Well, it isn't really radical.

01:07:49 SPEAKER_003: It's just something that needs to happen.

01:07:52 SPEAKER_003: And I find just broaching the subject, right?

01:07:55 SPEAKER_003: Just broaching the subject, getting it out there, letting people hear those thoughts, right?

01:07:59 SPEAKER_003: And then you, what you said is right.

01:08:01 SPEAKER_003: Like somebody else will pick up on that idea.

01:08:04 SPEAKER_003: It takes time, and I know that, and I've done it.

01:08:06 SPEAKER_003: I know how to get kind of weird things through, right?

01:08:10 SPEAKER_003: But it just takes some time, and you got to know how to work the crowd.

01:08:13 SPEAKER_003: But talking about it is the first step.

01:08:16 SPEAKER_003: And Simon, you're up there talking these things.

01:08:18 SPEAKER_003: Like that's the first step.

01:08:22 SPEAKER_003: Awesome.

01:08:23 SPEAKER_002: You have to be okay with being shot in the ass every now and then.

01:08:25 SPEAKER_002: like once a week or so.

01:08:31 SPEAKER_002: All right.

01:08:31 SPEAKER_001: Well, I think yeah, we're over an hour now, so I'll dive into my presentation here.

01:08:39 SPEAKER_001: You guys are right with that.

01:08:41 SPEAKER_001: Yep.

01:08:42 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

01:08:43 SPEAKER_001: And okay.

01:08:45 SPEAKER_001: So AI after peak energy, when energy tightens, who owns the useful intelligence?

01:08:53 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

01:08:54 SPEAKER_001: And you guys are probably familiar with this.

01:08:56 SPEAKER_001: Jean Leharer was nice enough to put this together earlier, and it's got all of the oils and the fossil fuels by weight.

01:09:05 SPEAKER_001: And so what it shows is that we're past peak on all of our fossil fuels, other than NGPL, which is this little one at the bottom down here.

01:09:16 SPEAKER_001: And so when energy gets tighter, every sector seeks efficiency.

01:09:24 SPEAKER_001: There's a picture: a municipal crew planning a root growing, planning a harvest, and the clerk scheduling maintenance.

01:09:31 SPEAKER_001: Each person needs the same useful result with less fuel, power, material, time, and waste.

01:09:36 SPEAKER_001: Coordinated software can search records, compare options, route work, schedule the next step.

01:09:41 SPEAKER_001: People still choose the plan and do the physical work.

01:09:44 SPEAKER_001: The gain is more useful work from each scarce input, which leads naturally to the cooperation communities used to keep essential services moving, and so we saw that historically, pressure creates new levels of cooperation.

01:10:00 SPEAKER_001: In the three communities, faced material pressure in a world powered by sunlight, food, wood, and animal labour.

01:10:07 SPEAKER_001: Climate shifts changed water and biomass, declining tree cover and scarcer fuel reduced availability.

01:10:13 SPEAKER_001: Mesopotamian towns organised rivers, irrigation, and fuel.

01:10:17 SPEAKER_001: Indus settlements coordinated around changing water systems, and Centausta communities joined metalworking, horses, chariots, and long-distance exchange during the Indo-Aryan expansion.

01:10:26 SPEAKER_001: Shared work became infrastructure in each.

01:10:29 SPEAKER_001: The later question is whether computing can become another shared capability, close to the work.

01:10:35 SPEAKER_001: So we're looking through like these people.

01:10:38 SPEAKER_001: It was the climate changed and it dried up, so they had less wood and less agriculture.

01:10:44 SPEAKER_001: And for us, it's the fossil fuels that are drying up, and so we have less energy.

01:10:48 SPEAKER_001: And so if we look at the computing investment over since 2019, you can see it's been rising steadily, at 11.8 percent a year, roughly or 10 to 11 percent, and now.

01:11:02 SPEAKER_001: But if we look at the share of GDP, the graph gets more interesting, and so we had the pandemic, and then everyone was at home.

01:11:16 SPEAKER_001: And then buying various computers so that they could do remote work, and so we had this kind of dip.

01:11:23 SPEAKER_001: That was the initial peak, and then you know they had enough, and this improved productivity because people had computers at home, they were able to produce more productivity,

01:11:35 SPEAKER_001: and that led to a dip in terms of the share of how much computing was of the total GDP, and then you can see the similar kind of dip just after ChatGPT launches.

01:11:49 SPEAKER_001: So ChatGPT launched, and it created a massive productivity boost in the GDP of the U.S. at least, which is what we're looking at here.

01:12:00 SPEAKER_001: And so the share declined.

01:12:03 SPEAKER_001: So if you look behind, see this is where it was released, and it stays flat, but the actual GDP grew a lot during that time, and then you can see it goes back up here,

01:12:16 SPEAKER_001: and we had more or less the same kind of ChatGPT interface until quarter four of 2025, when we got agentic coders,

01:12:29 SPEAKER_001: and you see that led to another big boost in productivity that we've been living in, and so what people call AI is really modern software.

01:12:41 SPEAKER_001: The modern software has several parts.

01:12:45 SPEAKER_001: A model is a compressed database of patterns learned from text, code, images, video, speech, and other records.

01:12:52 SPEAKER_001: Its weights store relationships used to generate tokens.

01:12:57 SPEAKER_001: Different models use different methods.

01:12:59 SPEAKER_001: Language models predict tokens.

01:13:01 SPEAKER_001: Diffusion models denoise images or video, and vision, speech, music encoding systems have their own forms.

01:13:07 SPEAKER_001: Tools connect a model to current web pages, local files, databases, compilers, and tests.

01:13:13 SPEAKER_001: The task prompts, retrieval records, and tool results form short-term working memory.

01:13:18 SPEAKER_001: Saved records, tests, and later training preserve institutional knowledge.

01:13:23 SPEAKER_001: So you have the database, and it generates in different ways, and the working context lets it have a short-term memory, while it's figuring things out.

01:13:33 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

01:13:34 SPEAKER_001: And then if anyone has a question, just unmute because I can't see you, and like ask the question.

01:13:38 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

01:13:39 SPEAKER_001: Open models climbed the GPQA ladder, and so there's this test.

01:13:48 SPEAKER_001: It's called the GPQA.

01:13:50 SPEAKER_001: It asks difficult science and mathematics questions that compares answers with people who have graduate level subject training.

01:13:57 SPEAKER_001: So that means like masters, PhD people.

01:14:01 SPEAKER_001: And Qwen 3.5 9B reaches that human reference line.

01:14:04 SPEAKER_001: So that's over here, and it was in 2026.

01:14:07 SPEAKER_001: So for since 2022, when ChatGPT was released, a lot of these they were not smart, but they were smarter than your average person, which scores about 22% on the GPQA test.

01:14:22 SPEAKER_001: And now a graduate expert in a particular domain will score about 81.3%.

01:14:29 SPEAKER_001: And so our open models achieved that in 2026, and you see we've got a lot. 26, and you see we've got a lot of them.

01:14:36 SPEAKER_001: The last few points require much larger models.

01:14:39 SPEAKER_001: So, whereas say Qwen 3.5 9B, that means it has 9 billion parameters.

01:14:45 SPEAKER_001: It is 81.7% accurate, and an expert is 81.3%.

01:14:51 SPEAKER_001: So, so this is about like human level.

01:14:53 SPEAKER_001: And so these other ones are superhuman in terms of 89% and and stuff like that.

01:14:58 SPEAKER_001: But they require more parameters, as you can see here.

01:15:02 SPEAKER_001: See these ones, 300, 30, you know.

01:15:02 SPEAKER_001: Thirty hundred thirty, you know, a lot more, and you can see the percentages on the side here.

01:15:08 SPEAKER_001: And then omniscience, knowledge, and restraint.

01:15:12 SPEAKER_001: So in terms of hallucinations, because this is an issue that comes up, and so we have humans.

01:15:20 SPEAKER_001: I mean, this is an honest human, I guess.

01:15:22 SPEAKER_001: There was the Truthful QA, and so humans are prone to giving false information by accident, about six percent of the time.

01:15:33 SPEAKER_001: Whereas our current models are still much higher.

01:15:36 SPEAKER_001: So the Qwen 3.5 9B I was talking about earlier is like eighty five percent, very very high.

01:15:41 SPEAKER_001: But some of the newer models, like 27B, is closer to eighteen percent, which is still much lower than even the frontier models like Claude Opus and GPT-4o.

01:15:55 SPEAKER_001: Here, so I'm just trying to see if okay.

01:16:01 SPEAKER_001: Everybody's still following along, okay.

01:16:04 SPEAKER_001: And so we actually there's three ways to check a piece of work because you don't want to if you if you're having automated worker you want to make sure you have good results.

01:16:20 SPEAKER_001: And so we looked at humans and say you have a human supervisor that checks over your work.

01:16:26 SPEAKER_001: Well, a human supervisor is on average only catches about 46% of the errors, whereas even these older models would catch 92.7% of the errors.

01:16:39 SPEAKER_001: And this is Claude 3.

01:16:40 SPEAKER_001: This is from before the Q4 2025.

01:16:44 SPEAKER_001: And so, really, the best chain is to have a hybrid chain where you have the automated workflow, and then you have a human managing exceptions or major changes.

01:16:56 SPEAKER_001: And so, another thing is that useful model performance has dropped a lot since it was back in 2020.

01:17:04 SPEAKER_001: It's like 850 times lower than before.

01:17:08 SPEAKER_001: And here it says local LLMs are mostly hardware.

01:17:12 SPEAKER_001: So because the larger the model you have, the more hardware you need.

01:17:16 SPEAKER_001: However, also software has been improving.

01:17:19 SPEAKER_001: So the Qwen FlashNext coder, even though it's a much larger model, can be run on the same hardware as the Qwen 3.8 27B, even though this has at one hundred eight billion parameters, okay,

01:17:32 SPEAKER_001: billion that is, and so here we're looking at the cost of intelligence, and so in comparison to humans, so if you have a one million tokens,

01:17:43 SPEAKER_001: now a million tokens is would take several weeks for a human to generate.

01:17:50 SPEAKER_001: So a token is about four letters, give or take.

01:17:55 SPEAKER_001: So like 1.25 words.

01:17:57 SPEAKER_001: I mean, so a word is 1.25 tokens rather.

01:18:02 SPEAKER_001: And so, if we were to pay a human to generate a million tokens at GTA living wage, it would be 1,847 dollars.

01:18:14 SPEAKER_001: Whereas the same amount of output from Qwen 3.8 27B, which is smarter, would cost 35 cents.

01:18:25 SPEAKER_001: And so helpos.ca is one of the examples that well I've made, and so it has local inputs based on council meetings and agendas, PDFs, and things like that.

01:18:38 SPEAKER_001: And then it transcribes everything, and then makes summaries and articles about it.

01:18:46 SPEAKER_001: And so it takes all of those, and then what I do is I check through it, and then make sure that it's accurate, and then I update the chain.

01:18:57 SPEAKER_001: The but otherwise, it can more or less autonomously do things even without my intervention and make very good summaries.

01:19:08 SPEAKER_001: So modern software is a coordinated system.

01:19:11 SPEAKER_001: So you have the inputs, so it can accept images and convert images to text and PDFs.

01:19:19 SPEAKER_001: It can hear speech.

01:19:21 SPEAKER_001: You know, and make captions and things like that.

01:19:23 SPEAKER_001: Then there's the reasoning aspects.

01:19:27 SPEAKER_001: So there's the you have the models.

01:19:30 SPEAKER_001: They're kind of like the mushy stuff, and they can do the reasoning summaries and things like that.

01:19:35 SPEAKER_001: And then you can actually have code and tools to do verification, make sure that it's meeting your security standards or that this actually really was in the text.

01:19:46 SPEAKER_001: There's different levels, and then there's also searching.

01:19:49 SPEAKER_001: Like web searches that help.

01:19:52 SPEAKER_001: And then you can output as images or as text or as voice or as music, basically any kind of digital media we we can do, either input or output.

01:20:02 SPEAKER_001: And so I made a Pash coordination layer and a reliability framework that helps manage the many large models all together.

01:20:12 SPEAKER_001: And so and all of this can run on a single piece of hardware.

01:20:16 SPEAKER_001: A piece of hardware, and so what it costs in human time.

01:20:20 SPEAKER_001: So based on my HelpOS archive from like a week or two ago, when I took a snapshot, I had transcribed 174 videos and 75 agenda pages,

01:20:32 SPEAKER_001: and so the amount of text work it would have been 15,000 human equivalent labour equivalent in the transcription.

01:20:40 SPEAKER_001: So it would have cost if I had hired a human to do the transcription, it would have cost sixty-four thousand dollars, but what it ended up costing me was well close to zero.

01:20:52 SPEAKER_001: It was just like the electricity cost, and I already had the hardware.

01:20:55 SPEAKER_001: And if I had done it through an API, it would have cost about three hundred bucks.

01:21:00 SPEAKER_001: So workflow helps.

01:21:02 SPEAKER_001: And this over here talks about how because online you may hear on some videos that oh there was a study and people used AI and they were actually twenty percent slower when they were doing

01:21:19 SPEAKER_001: their software programmes,

01:21:20 SPEAKER_001: and this is actually based on old types.

01:21:26 SPEAKER_001: This is the pre-Q4 2025 models.

01:21:29 SPEAKER_001: So these were old models, and they also had a bad way of doing it, where they were generating the code and then they were reviewing the code and then maybe running it,

01:21:41 SPEAKER_001: and so this made everything take longer.

01:21:43 SPEAKER_001: Whereas when they had the improved workflow, where basically the person is saying what they want and how to verify that it was there, like with tests and scenarios and stuff, then it was 22% faster.

01:21:58 SPEAKER_001: And this is still with those old models that aren't even very good.

01:22:03 SPEAKER_001: And so this is the Q4 2025 changed what stays cloud heavy.

01:22:09 SPEAKER_001: So we had the chat error work when it was prompt answer.

01:22:13 SPEAKER_001: This is all local friendly and like basically I can run the equivalent of that 2022 ChatGPT with that 9B model on my computer.

01:22:24 SPEAKER_001: And the agentic coding is kind of the new thing.

01:22:28 SPEAKER_001: And over here we have these.

01:22:31 SPEAKER_001: We basically entered the super intelligence era in Q4 of 2025 because all of these models are just so smart now.

01:22:40 SPEAKER_001: Humans can't compete with their coding abilities, and so this is the deep software engineering base over here.

01:22:49 SPEAKER_001: And you can see basically this is the more expensive over here, and this is the cheaper over here, and the more intelligent, the faster you go up.

01:22:56 SPEAKER_001: And see, you've got FlashNext base over here, and it is very close to Luna, and which is one of the frontier models that I use.

01:23:10 SPEAKER_001: So more software is made, much stays private.

01:23:12 SPEAKER_001: So we already know that even since since this happened, Q4 of 2025, we've had 240% more commits, 80% more projects, but the users has stayed flat.

01:23:27 SPEAKER_001: But I think that has more to do with who who can afford to be a user.

01:23:32 SPEAKER_001: But we do know there's a lot more internal use and companies are saving costs by not using software as a service and instead using custom builds.

01:23:44 SPEAKER_001: And already 51% of companies surveyed, and I think there was hundreds or like here, 1,719 respondents over 97 countries, 51% are building their own software now.

01:23:56 SPEAKER_001: So this is a massive sea change globally.

01:24:00 SPEAKER_001: So 32% passed on a software purchase because they could build it in house.

01:24:05 SPEAKER_001: There we go.

01:24:06 SPEAKER_001: Data centres are growing faster than the U.S. grid.

01:24:09 SPEAKER_001: Well, we probably already all knew this, and so you can see this is the customer electricity, and this is the summer capacity, and so it's not in a good situation,

01:24:23 SPEAKER_001: and that's why we're actually seeing the announced data centre buildout is outrunning construction.

01:24:27 SPEAKER_001: So, twelve big projects were announced for 2026.

01:24:32 SPEAKER_001: Well, twelve gigawatts worth of projects, but only five gigawatts are under construction, and the reported bottlenecks are transformers, power connections, switchgear, and batteries.

01:24:41 SPEAKER_001: So there just isn't enough energy to power this buildout.

01:24:45 SPEAKER_001: So new networks attract too much investment.

01:24:49 SPEAKER_001: So we had like canals; there was a boom, too much building, crash.

01:24:53 SPEAKER_001: Within the railway, same thing, electricity, and telecom.

01:24:57 SPEAKER_001: Like this is the 1990s with the fiber optics and models, and so we can expect excitement builds.

01:25:05 SPEAKER_001: Infrastructure have expanded.

01:25:06 SPEAKER_001: This is an example of my usage over time.

01:25:11 SPEAKER_001: So, so this this was basically Q4 of 2025, when the models got good enough, I started using them on my computer.

01:25:19 SPEAKER_001: And so here I was just figuring out how to use it, and I'm paying twenty dollars a month, but the API cost that I was pushing it to was about five hundred dollars a month.

01:25:33 SPEAKER_001: So OpenAI was paying roughly, you know, maybe three or four hundred dollars for every twenty dollars that I was paying them.

01:25:42 SPEAKER_001: And then over here, they kind of lowered their limits or something, or maybe these models became less efficient.

01:25:48 SPEAKER_001: I'm not sure why, but you can see my token count; the total tokens I was using dropped precipitously from near two billion to like half a billion for May, June, July.

01:26:00 SPEAKER_001: And then 5.6 Sol, it was smarter, so you could do a lot more with fewer tokens.

01:26:06 SPEAKER_001: But then GPT-5 or Luna came out, and you can—it was almost as smart as Luna, but you have basically unlimited usage.

01:26:16 SPEAKER_001: And so I went way over three billion tokens of usage in September.

01:26:21 SPEAKER_001: And so right now, so Luna versus FlashNextCoder.

01:26:27 SPEAKER_001: FlashNextCoder, I don't know.

01:26:29 SPEAKER_001: Are you guys still with me there?

01:26:32 SPEAKER_001: Yes, we're here.

01:26:33 SPEAKER_001: Yeah.

01:26:34 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

01:26:34 SPEAKER_001: Cool.

01:26:35 SPEAKER_001: And so, okay.

01:26:38 SPEAKER_001: FlashNextCoder.

01:26:39 SPEAKER_001: So, if FlashNextCoder, I could run on my own computer, and it would be a similar speed to Luna, but because it's so heavily subsidized for twenty-eight dollars a month, I, you know,

01:26:56 SPEAKER_001: get the same amount as I would, and so this is one of the reasons we're not seeing as much of a local hardware transition right now because of the heavy subsidies.

01:27:05 SPEAKER_001: And so the data centre demand, demand, and so you can see the data centres, because they're getting all of this investment from Saudi Arabia and governments and things like that.

01:27:16 SPEAKER_001: They're actually eating up fifty-seven percent of all of the RAM that's being produced on the planet, whereas consumers are getting the other forty-three percent, and it has made prices skyrocket.

01:27:29 SPEAKER_001: So, like a couple years ago, I would be able to get thirty-two gigabytes of RAM for like one hundred and thirty dollars.

01:27:37 SPEAKER_001: Now, that's over like a thousand dollars.

01:27:41 SPEAKER_001: So it is a completely different ball game right now because of it.

01:27:47 SPEAKER_001: Cloud model services.

01:27:48 SPEAKER_001: I'm hungry.

01:27:49 SPEAKER_001: Yeah.

01:27:50 SPEAKER_009: Is this like Walmart driving out our local grocery store?

01:27:55 SPEAKER_009: And our local retailers—is it sort of in that line?

01:28:02 SPEAKER_009: Similar?

01:28:03 SPEAKER_001: It's kind of like imagine if Walmart was your grocery chain and they bought fifty-seven percent of the food, but not for retail customers, just for five or ten of the richest customers,

01:28:24 SPEAKER_001: and then you get to—you have forty-three percent of the food.

01:28:27 SPEAKER_001: You share the rest amongst yourselves.

01:28:30 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, and okay, yeah, pretty pathetic.

01:28:34 SPEAKER_001: Yes, yes, exactly.

01:28:35 SPEAKER_001: And so, and then you could rent the—you know—calories from a big company.

01:28:43 SPEAKER_001: That's what's happening right now.

01:28:45 SPEAKER_001: That's basically the situation.

01:28:48 SPEAKER_001: Um, and so where were we?

01:28:52 SPEAKER_001: So here we go: strategic price flat subscription, and they're trying to say, "Oh, we got million, we got hundred million users."

01:29:00 SPEAKER_001: Look, because you know, because they're subsidizing them so heavily.

01:29:03 SPEAKER_001: So when the bill comes due, subsidies, market conditions that can change.

01:29:07 SPEAKER_001: And here we look at the market conditions.

01:29:10 SPEAKER_001: And so you can see OpenAI and Anthropic, and this is how much money they're losing.

01:29:16 SPEAKER_001: This is so in 2024 they were losing two billion a quarter, and in 2025 they were losing about five to six billion dollars a quarter, and then Anthropic, who owns Claude,

01:29:31 SPEAKER_001: they stopped releasing their information, and now they're pursuing what is called creative accounting, whereas OpenAI is continuing to produce their financials, and it says you know here they lost nine billion in quarter one,

01:29:50 SPEAKER_001: and they lost over twelve billion in quarter two.

01:29:53 SPEAKER_001: So their losses are escalating very quickly because, you know, they've made these commitments to buy this huge amount of hardware, and they're subsidizing all of their users, and so they're really not making any money.

01:30:07 SPEAKER_001: So rules favour big labs, and so that's why we've seen Anthropic and like Dario and Sam Altman.

01:30:17 SPEAKER_001: Um, who's the OpenAI CEO?

01:30:19 SPEAKER_001: And they're like, they're saying, "Oh, we need regulations.

01:30:22 SPEAKER_001: Oh, we need to slow down, you know, because look, look at how much money they're losing, right?

01:30:27 SPEAKER_001: We could just assume Anthropic is on the same thing."

01:30:30 SPEAKER_001: And what I was talking to some people and how they're doing their creative accounting, where Anthropic is claiming they're net zero, is that they're selling shares.

01:30:38 SPEAKER_001: They're selling shares and saying, "Oh, well, we managed to cover our debt by selling shares," but that's you know, that's not legitimate.

01:30:43 SPEAKER_001: Um.

01:30:44 SPEAKER_001: Legitimate.

01:30:44 SPEAKER_001: OpenAI is also selling shares to make up the difference.

01:30:48 SPEAKER_001: But it's anyhow, and so they want to have regulations.

01:30:52 SPEAKER_001: They want to make illegal those open source models that we were talking about earlier that you can run on your own computer because they want to force everyone to buy, you know,

01:31:05 SPEAKER_001: their compute rather than let you know people have their own food or whatever, and so, like that, you have to buy it from the fast food store.

01:31:16 SPEAKER_001: You shouldn't prepare your own food.

01:31:18 SPEAKER_001: That's basically where we're at.

01:31:21 SPEAKER_001: And so, after buildout crashed, the network remained.

01:31:23 SPEAKER_001: So we're likely headed for crash.

01:31:26 SPEAKER_001: We don't know when.

01:31:28 SPEAKER_001: Just like the railways crashed, but the owners lose money, but the network survives.

01:31:34 SPEAKER_001: And so, the new owners open cheaper routes, and in the fiber cables remained.

01:31:40 SPEAKER_001: Bandwidth reached more users.

01:31:41 SPEAKER_001: Bandwidth reaches more users eventually, and the data centres, the buildings, the power, the fiber move to cheaper owners.

01:31:48 SPEAKER_001: So, when these companies go into receivership, these large data centres will then have to sell off their server racks to regular consumers who have been, you know, highly constrained over the last couple of years.

01:32:03 SPEAKER_001: So, a hardware correction can make local coding affordable, and because you know, fifty percent liquidation case is fairly reasonable because they are consuming fifty-seven percent of the market right now.

01:32:13 SPEAKER_001: So we would have basically double, or potentially as much as double, of the stuff that we have now.

01:32:20 SPEAKER_001: And so here an RTX 3090.

01:32:22 SPEAKER_001: This is what I have, and so ninety-three point five output tokens per second.

01:32:29 SPEAKER_001: And so this is an agentic model that's like ninety percent GPQA and that you could use for coding, and like some of the other ones, you know they're faster.

01:32:39 SPEAKER_001: So right now on the cloud, you get about one hundred twenty tokens per second, and so a human generates about four tokens per second when you're speaking at like one hundred thirty words per minute,

01:32:52 SPEAKER_001: or sorry, one hundred eighty words per minute, or something like that.

01:32:58 SPEAKER_001: But so this is a lot faster than a human.

01:33:01 SPEAKER_001: But it's just like I've gotten used to somewhere around this range.

01:33:04 SPEAKER_001: So if I had like some one of those, that would be great, and the price would drop from what it is now, six and a half thousand, to like two and a half thousand,

01:33:12 SPEAKER_001: which is more affordable.

01:33:14 SPEAKER_001: Okay, the opportunity: resident-owned local software, lower fees, where you own your own hardware, you can repair it, and you can share with others.

01:33:25 SPEAKER_001: So at the municipal level, you've got your records, your public information, easy to process operations, local memory.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_001: And so, yeah, the first uses are records, public information operations.

01:33:40 SPEAKER_001: Models draft and retrieve, staff verify and decide.

01:33:43 SPEAKER_001: The town can begin with time-saving work, keep public control, and share useful tool with the county or the province.

01:33:50 SPEAKER_001: And so, model provenance shapes behaviour.

01:33:53 SPEAKER_001: And so, this is something that Dan was talking about: is that if you're using models, open models, most of them are from China, and they do have a bias.

01:34:03 SPEAKER_001: And say, for instance, the cloud models from the U.S. They also have a bias, and so it would be good as a sovereignty thing for Canada to produce its own models.

01:34:14 SPEAKER_001: But this is a small bottle.

01:34:17 SPEAKER_001: So, for example, the DeepSeek R1, it was found to produce, you know, more vulnerable code if it was told that it was operating in the U.S., like twenty-seven percent more of the time,

01:34:31 SPEAKER_001: and it was the same when.

01:34:31 SPEAKER_001: And it's the same with Quan models.

01:34:34 SPEAKER_001: And Canada has its own laws and histories and records, and so it would be good for us to have our own.

01:34:40 SPEAKER_001: And so independent modes can check one another.

01:34:43 SPEAKER_001: So meanwhile, while we don't have that, we can use verifiers, and we can verify using a different model because you know there's Quan, but there's also NemoTron,

01:34:53 SPEAKER_001: and there's different kinds of and GLM that there's different models, and they would check different things, and we can also have hardware checks.

01:34:59 SPEAKER_001: Where checks so that we can generate secure code, and this is for like you know governments or military or somewhere where security is very important, financial institutions.

01:35:14 SPEAKER_001: And so the general purpose nine B frontier is nearing today's ceiling.

01:35:20 SPEAKER_001: So this Quan thirty-five-nine-three point five-nine B it was released early in twenty twenty-six, but basically we've never—we haven't managed to get anything that's smart.

01:35:28 SPEAKER_001: Get anything that's smarter that still fits within that type of nine B profile, and so the companies just aren't producing anything at that level because they simply can't do it.

01:35:41 SPEAKER_001: But we might be able to make more domain-specific nine B models, and so pre-training compresses a huge record into a small model.

01:35:53 SPEAKER_001: And so, if you take all of the information that was created in the world, all the written information before the invention of the internet, it would be about three trillion tokens,

01:36:11 SPEAKER_001: and it would take about twenty-four thousand years to read.

01:36:16 SPEAKER_001: And but the current models are being trained on the pre-training from three to thirty-six trillion tokens.

01:36:25 SPEAKER_001: So they are a distillation of all known knowledge in the world.

01:36:31 SPEAKER_001: So, so first you curate and deduplicate, and these are the deduplicated, and then you pretrain a teacher, like a 2.4 trillion token teacher, and then you distill it to create a local 9B model.

01:36:46 SPEAKER_001: And so, large open teachers live in the 400 to 3 terabyte range, and so here.

01:36:55 SPEAKER_001: You can see these are just examples, and then it costs them quite a bit of money to make these.

01:37:06 SPEAKER_001: We have some examples, and it depends on how many GPUs or accelerators you have, how long it will take to do it.

01:37:16 SPEAKER_001: And here we have some numbers: quarterly refinement fits a regional model lab.

01:37:21 SPEAKER_001: So, for example, uh.

01:37:23 SPEAKER_001: Example: If you want to just make a regional refinement to a model, then you can do so with a 10 to 15 kilowatt facility and 100 terabytes storage.

01:37:35 SPEAKER_001: Whereas regional distillation, you would need substantially more, and frontier teacher, you would need more still.

01:37:45 SPEAKER_001: And then here it gives kind of the more of the understanding of how much it would be.

01:37:52 SPEAKER_001: So.

01:37:52 SPEAKER_001: Because a lot of people are concerned about water usage.

01:37:55 SPEAKER_001: So local refinement, one could use maybe ninety liters of water a day if it was in the industrial lands, existing building facility.

01:38:04 SPEAKER_001: Oh, and I just wanted to give an also an explanation about how much electricity is being used here.

01:38:10 SPEAKER_001: And so I had it written down, but basically here, maybe it's.

01:38:21 SPEAKER_001: Here.

01:38:22 SPEAKER_001: Two.

01:38:23 SPEAKER_001: Well, okay.

01:38:25 SPEAKER_001: I must have.

01:38:27 SPEAKER_001: But ten to fifteen kilowatts is two chargers, two car chargers.

01:38:34 SPEAKER_001: This is how much electricity it's using, and this is like five or ten chargers, and this is well a lot more.

01:38:41 SPEAKER_001: And so there's different locations that have that amount of water and electricity available.

01:38:48 SPEAKER_001: Um, and oh, yeah, okay.

01:38:54 SPEAKER_001: And so, the frontier campaigns could happen in the larger places like Quebec City, Levee, Winnipeg, and Prince George.

01:39:06 SPEAKER_001: So that's like Quebec, Manitoba, and B.C. And then you could have regional distillation on Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and then every local place could have its own, you know, local bylaws, records, procedures,

01:39:20 SPEAKER_001: and then the province-wide distillation could you could have models that are familiar with provincial law, history, practices, and then the frontier campaigns would have all the Canadian law and history,

01:39:31 SPEAKER_001: and that way we would have like a truly sovereign intelligence to be working with.

01:39:39 SPEAKER_001: And so you, this is just talking about how distillation works.

01:39:45 SPEAKER_001: Okay, less surplus energy, more local skill.

01:39:49 SPEAKER_001: So from less surplus to local skills and production.

01:39:53 SPEAKER_001: So the chain now returns to the local table.

01:39:56 SPEAKER_001: Declining surplus raises pressure on labour, money, and coordination.

01:40:01 SPEAKER_001: Capital builds large models, serving systems.

01:40:04 SPEAKER_001: Correction can lower the price of used computers and mature models.

01:40:07 SPEAKER_001: A town office, farm, or household can then own a capable machine for repair, crop planning, teaching, or records.

01:40:14 SPEAKER_001: The choice is where people place the capability and which useful work they strengthen together.

01:40:20 SPEAKER_001: So residents want safe public space and timely help.

01:40:24 SPEAKER_001: A public safety modern software can search permitted reports and video records, build a timeline, prepare disclosure, and help match a call to a civilian paramedic or police response.

01:40:35 SPEAKER_001: Police can keep more time for serious theft, drug trafficking, and emergencies.

01:40:39 SPEAKER_001: The same system can publish response times, repeat calls, body camera policy, and compliant reviews result.

01:40:45 SPEAKER_001: Facial recognition or continuous tracking carries a stricter boundary.

01:40:48 SPEAKER_001: It can serve as an investigative lead under a clear policy or warrant with human verification and independent evidence before any arrest or conviction.

01:40:56 SPEAKER_001: The resident benefit is better use of police time and clearer public accountability.

01:41:00 SPEAKER_001: So, so these are use cases that we could have for a municipal using modern software.

01:41:08 SPEAKER_001: Healthcare models inherit the legal institute.

01:41:11 SPEAKER_001: Inherit the legal, institutional, and commercial setting around the data and deployment.

01:41:14 SPEAKER_001: U.S. systems are built inside a for-profit U.S. healthcare market.

01:41:18 SPEAKER_001: A Canadian system can set a different public goal.

01:41:21 SPEAKER_001: It can help residents understand nutrition and prevention, compare evidence-based low-cost choices, and find provincial or local services before they need a clinician's appointment.

01:41:30 SPEAKER_001: This can reduce avoidable demand and paperwork while leaving clinicians more time for serious cases.

01:41:35 SPEAKER_001: This is a design goal.

01:41:36 SPEAKER_001: Current models differ by.

01:41:38 SPEAKER_001: Okay, basically this is because if you ask ChatGPT, most of the time it's going to tell you, "Oh, go look at a doctor, go get this expensive procedure," because they are within the U.S.

01:41:48 SPEAKER_001: regulatory framework that wants as much healthcare spending as possible.

01:41:53 SPEAKER_001: Whereas in Canada, we have free healthcare, and so we want to help people as cheaply as possible.

01:42:00 SPEAKER_001: So, so we have different use cases, and so it makes sense for us to have a different healthcare model.

01:42:06 SPEAKER_001: Education, reading, writing, and numeracy are the foundation.

01:42:09 SPEAKER_001: Human teachers build those abilities and help learners develop judgment before they rely on teaching software.

01:42:15 SPEAKER_001: Once that foundation is in place, a Canadian teaching modern software system can provide college courses, graduate-level seminars, professional training, advanced trades instruction, literature reviews, research methods, and help with original projects.

01:42:28 SPEAKER_001: Canadian curriculum, history, language, and civic knowledge can shape the examples, and this is because, like I was saying, like these models are much smarter than any human, and so can provide these kinds of courses,

01:42:42 SPEAKER_001: and especially in remote areas where you might have trouble finding an expert, it's very useful to have these kinds of models to help with education, public services.

01:42:53 SPEAKER_001: One clear front door.

01:42:54 SPEAKER_001: The same approach applies to municipal, provincial, and federal services.

01:42:58 SPEAKER_001: The Civic Modern software system searches the relevant Canadian laws, regulations, permits, benefits, bylaws, and forms, explains what they require in plain language and helps residents navigate an application process.

01:43:09 SPEAKER_001: Residents keep the source and the record of what they submitted.