We just had the opportunity to return visiting some of the financial markets in New York, Toronto, Montreal and Chicago. And we had a very good reception and it was a very, very valuable tour. And so I'm sharing with you the same presentation that we provided on that tour. But the one thing that I know for sure as a proud British Columbian is that I think the world changed immeasurably for governments in 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the subprime mortgage meltdown and all the other concurrent problems around the world. I think we're in a very different world and governments have better adjust to that reality very, very quick. And the governments that do that I think are going to prosper into the future. The governments that retain the confidence of the investment community of their own taxpayers and of the financial markets are going to be in a very positive cycle, kind of a virtuous cycle that will play on itself, feed on itself and create a very, very bright future.  And we've seen evidence of that around the world. You people know better than anyone else but I can tell you as a British Columbian and a Canadian I have never been so proud to travel around the world and to be able to talk about our province and our country knowing how strong we are in relation to so many other jurisdictions. And I think that that strength is going to be something that will continue to grow and serve us well. So you can see here of course one of the reasons we have this slide starting off the show is because we like to talk about a strategy we've had in place for British Columbia now for about seven years called the Asia Pacific Gateway Strategy and it's a federal provincial private sector initiative to say let's work together identify the joint investments we can make to open up British Columbia to the fastest growing part of the world which is the Asia Pacific. And the opening of the or the containerization of the Port of Prince Rupert has been an enormous success. This is one of the rare times in government where we took a chance we often don't make because typically my experience has been that if the private sector is unwilling to make an investment it's probably not a good idea for government to move in and make that investment but in this case we both the province and the federal government really believed that there was a big opportunity in containerizing the Port of Prince Rupert a deep water port it was two and a half days sailing time close at Asia and we went ahead and did that in partnership with the private sector port and that has been an enormous success that has opened up and expanded the supply chain options for a lot of the buyers in the U.S. Midwest that are bringing in goods from Asia and vice versa it's opened up export opportunities for British Columbia I'll talk about that a bit more in the future but we start out on this slide so that the people in the United States understand that our geographic location is the only Pacific province in the country gives us a real advantage and it is really being strengthened by the Prime Minister today who is trying to open up new free trade agreements and make sure that Canada is part of new free trade agreements with many of the fastest growing Asian countries in the world so that's something we're very encouraged by but the reason why I would argue British Columbia enjoys a AAA credit rating is because of this chart this chart shows how we have performed over the last 11 years both in our budget targets and where we ended up so the dark blue band that you see there is the budget target that was set out at the budget beginning of the year and the light blue is where we ended up at the end of the year at what's called public accounts in July when we report out all the finalized numbers and you can see in 2001 when we first got elected we inherited a deficit a structural deficit in fact by the the prior NDP government that had been in power for 10 years and the following year you see it actually got deeper the reason it got deeper is you may recall in our first day in office we cut personal income taxes 25 across the board because we were trying to send a signal to you folks and to the public in British Columbia that we were going to be dramatically moving in a different direction we wanted to leave more money in the pockets of British Columbians and we felt that by doing so we would encourage investment and encourage confidence and every single year there you can see we outperformed in the good years where we ran those significant surpluses we used those surpluses to pay down debt and to continue to lower taxes both business and personal income taxes and then you can see in 0809 where the the beginnings of the market challenges started to hit North America and around the world and in 2009 was the one year we got it wrong and 2009 the deficit target was 495 million but the speed and the scale and the scope of the downturn was such that it it went well past that and we were off by about 1.2 billion now no government especially ours especially under our former Premier who was very felt very very strongly about fiscal discipline as does our current Premier as do as do we still but you know going and having that kind of situation was not a great thing but the rating agencies essentially said to us look you get a pass for that year because virtually everyone missed their targets in 2009 so the the key to us is how you're going to be performing and getting back to balance budget well you can see the following year we outperformed in the other direction by 1.4 billion we almost balanced the budget and we've got a very credible path to get back to balance but budget in 2013 the same as true with our debt to GDP ratio we have always typically outperformed our budget targets so when you look into our budget you see what are projected or the actual debt to GDPs are we typically will come in below that and that will continue in the future and I'll talk about debt to GDP a little bit more in a future slide we believe the triple A credit rating is important there is going to be a further wave of credit downgrades around the world over the next 12 months I believe and that is going to mean that Canada and British Columbia as a sub sovereign and and is going to join the ranks of a rapidly diminishing club but we think it's very important club because we think that having that triple A credit rating and demonstrating that you can operate in a low tax low debt environment that encourages investment growth and opportunity is possible in the world that we're in today and so that's something that British Columbia intends to hang on to and I'll talk about that in a moment too so just to give you an idea on our budget so we have always when we're building our budget tried to be very conservative in our growth projections and I think this is very important because what we don't want to see in a budget is optimistic outlooks that try to make the budget look better than it may actually be given the uncertain world economy so in 2012 you can see the light green is what we call the independent forecast council so it's made up of 14 economists from many of your institutions but also some other independent forecast economists that come together every year meet with the finance minister and sit down and provide us with a very detailed outlook of what they see for real GDP growth in British Columbia we then take the consensus average out of those 14 and we discount further from that and that's the number that goes into our budget and the reason we do that is because if there's going to be any surprises we want those surprises to be in the upside not the downside and it's important for you to know that because you can see that in 2012 2013 2014 that the independent forecast council your experts your economists believe that we're going to do better than what British Columbia believes now if they are correct then there's the potential for up to half a billion dollars in additional revenues to the province if the light green bars happen to be the ones that are right but we we do believe it's important for us to be conservative and and I just want to talk about 2011 for just a moment because at the beginning of the year that light green bar was at 2.8 percent so the at the beginning of the year the forecast council average was more optimistic we set ours at 2 percent because we were worried about at that time the US debt negotiations were still underway there was rumblings in Europe and we just felt that it was not the time to be even remotely optimistic to be honest with you so we we set ours at 2 percent GDP growth and I got criticized last July the NDP and some of the even some of the media were saying oh you guys are low balling it and I gave the reason why we came in it too we were we were being cautious admittedly but we felt it was important to be cautious given the climate we're in well of course you can see what happened the private sector forecaster numbers came down to 2.2 and frankly 2 percent was the right right number for us to pick so that that's important for all your investors to know because British Columbia budgets conservatively and we'll continue to do so I'm going to blaze through some of these slides just to know the retail sales have bounced back factor above the the peak that we saw in 2007 and we expect them to remain steady going forward they're not going to like the world on fire but we think we'll have a slow but steady retail sales activity our employment our our employed in British Columbia is at the highest level it's ever been at and right now our unemployment rate is about 7 percent it's below the national average which is about 7.2 and we have some cautious optimism in terms of employment growth going forward we think that there's a lot of very good things happening in British Columbia we've seen some very significant investments Rio Tinto Alcan of course over a three billion dollar investment in the Kitimat smelter the Kamano project in the northwest of the province of British Columbia those kind of investments the shipbuilding contract the private sector investments we're seeing in the mining sector and of course even digital media technology etc so we're seeing some broad-based activity that gives us encouragement on the employment side housing starts are going to be steady we don't think that they're going to be what they were back in 07 or 08 but we think that the housing starts are going to be pretty steady we're liking some of the recent numbers that we're seeing because we think they're healthy and but not overly healthy if you will so I see good stability in the housing side we can talk about that during Q&A if you wish but at the beginning when I talked about the Asia-Pacific look what it's done to British Columbia's trade profile I mean we didn't look much different than Alberta and Ontario back when I first got elected in 2001 but you can see now that British Columbia exports less than 43% of our exports to the United States about 40% Asia and the rest to the rest of the world we are a very diversified economy and I think that that's important because that diversification acts as a bit of a shock absorber and we are also seeing real growth to the fastest growing part of the world which is Asia and that I think is a good thing for British Columbia and for Canada so that we believe will continue going forward you can see the US consensus outlook for real GDP growth has been varying this is the monthly forecast consensus outlook in the United States it started to drop pretty dramatically starting in June I can tell you as we started putting together the budget I was very very nervous about the United States and in fact I said in November that I was not going to be committing to a balanced budget in 2013 until I saw the year-end numbers coming out of the United States in December and and I wasn't going to make a decision until late January and I'm glad I did that because we started to see a flattening in October and then we start in November December and then we started to see the numbers edge up a little bit and that was the first time I had a sense that the floor wasn't going to keep falling underneath us and and so going forward the latest consensus average now is 2.3% you should know that for the purposes of our budget our budget model we have used 1.4% real GDP growth in the United States in 2012 so again British Columbia is very very cautious and obviously it looks like it's not going to end up at 1.4 thankfully the eurozone we all know what's happening there so I won't say much except that the consensus average is for negative growth and we watched the eurozone fairly closely not because we have much of a trade relationship we're not very trade exposed there but we are seeing pretty significant growth and export activities China and the eurozone is China's number one export market so that's why we we keep an eye on what's happening in the eurozone and hopefully we'll see some better things there so what's our fiscal outlook while we're balancing the budget in 13-14 I feel very confident that I can say to all of you we will balance the budget and I in fact I am hopeful that we will do what we always do and outperform we've got very strict expenditure control and discipline on the spending side I'll talk about that in a future slide we're protecting essential services and this is important because in many states in the United States they're having unfortunately to cut back on investments that are important like in healthcare or education or post-secondary in British Columbia we have not only been able to provide record levels of investment both operating and capital in our health sector or post-secondary sector or K-12 sector but even going forward although the amount of increases are going to be moderated dramatically they're coming off some pretty significant growth levels and that is important that we are able to as an economy make those important investments and we're going to continue to have a robust capital program and we will have be able to do that in a very sustainable manner so how are we managing expenditures this graph actually gives you a a pretty good idea of what's happening up until 0809 we were averaging annual spending growth of almost six percent once we got hit with the downturn we realized that we're in a whole different world and and at least this government was going to get used to the fact that we're probably in a low growth environment in North America for at least a decade and given that we better get our spending profile to more properly reflect what the growth rates are going to be and so we cut our spending growth in half to about three percent over the last three years we didn't just say we were going to do it we actually did it and that's important to understand because a lot of governments will make the promise but then I don't actually get there and going forward you can see that we're going to keep our spending overall growth to about two percent a year and virtually all of those dollars are going into health care k-12 education and post-secondary every other ministry is is pretty much frozen or is going to be reduced in spending so you can see how we do that in the big three ministries health care i'm a former health minister so I actually had the the luck of getting becoming a health minister right when the economy started to plummet across the around the world but you can see we took our health care spending growth from seven percent to four point eight percent over the next three years that'll be three point two percent but here's the thing what we didn't do is do what Canadians always do our Canadian governments always do in health care they just basically restrict the spending and create huge waiting lists and starve the system and create problems what we did is we said no we're going to fundamentally change how we deliver health care in British Columbia and it's not easy to do by the way but it's important to do because again in health care expenditures we have to recognize with an aging demographic and the fact that there is not going to be unlimited dollars that you're going to be able to put into health care we're going to have to find better ways as Canadians to deliver our health care system in a sustainable way so we can talk about that in the Q&A if you want but we just as a couple of examples we did we set up we collapsed all the different supply chains and the different health authorities into a single purchasing organization that alone is generated savings that will hit about a quarter of a billion dollars over the next couple of years we've delivered services differently we're having patients what we call patient focus funding where dollars follow the patients to try and drive productivity and efficiency in health care delivery we've had remarkable results in that in British Columbia and there's a whole bunch of other things that we're doing to try and bend down the cost curve in health care but do it at the same time is driving better outcomes in the system and it is possible debt to GDP you can see we got as low as 13.3 percent before we got hit with the downturn we will peak at 18.3 percent and then our debt to GDP will start trending down again but remember we typically outperform those numbers so for example you can see in 1112 we've got 16.4 percent in the budget it was 17.5 percent so we we feel pretty confident that that we'll continue to be very disciplined on the debt to GDP of course this is in a world of course where you've got Canada at about 36 Quebec is about 50 Ontario's on its way to 50 and who knows where and of course you've you know what's going on the United States is about I think about 73 percent if you don't include you know Fannie Mae Freddie Mac France is over 80 and you know Greece forget it it's way way out there I won't depress anybody we're competitive with the corporate tax rate side just to quickly point out BC share of the general corporate tax rate so this is for the larger businesses doing over half a million in revenues we've reduced from 16.5 to 10 percent so combined with the federal 15 percent rate we're 25 so that's a good story we believe I think we're very tax competitive on the small business side we've raised the threshold for what we define as a small business from 200 to 500 thousand dollars a year and we've dropped the rate from four and a half to two and a half percent for small business and we we think we're we've got a good story to tell that we're you can see what's happened on personal income tax side again 37 reduction across the board since 2001 British Columbians pay the lowest personal income tax rates in the country if you are enough to 119 thousand a year over 119 thousand we're second lowest behind Alberta so we think we've got a good story to tell there too and for all the people that like the left wingers that tell you that by cutting taxes you starve yourself of revenue we're collecting more personal income tax revenue today than we were in 2001 and and back in the 90s when the NDP had us at 54.3 top marginal tax rate the highest in North America so it is a myth to believe that you can't reduce rates and grow the economy and generate additional revenues we all know that but I just like to say it anyway um our competitiveness we got a jobs plan so we're going to focus on creating a high paying jobs expanded small business venture capital when we say we're promoting our competitive advantage what we mean by that is we put aside dollars in the budget 15 million dollars to go into key markets to get in front of key decision makers find out what they read what they look at and get the bc story in front of them basically some of the key elements that I'm explaining to you today we want to get into some key capital markets because we think that there's a lot of scared money in the world today and we want to make sure we bring it home to British Columbia Canada because there's a lot of investment looking for a safe harbor and we're going to make sure they know about British Columbia when they're thinking about what to do we eliminated the provincial jet fuel tax on international flights because we want to encourage more tourism and we also had an agreement with yvr that they had signed agreements from a number of airlines making a commitment to add additional flights if bc took that step so that's something we're we think is a a good business case and on our port tax municipal port tax rates we've capped in British Columbia in perpetuity and that's because we wanted to make sure that we were encouraging additional investments in port infrastructure it has been a huge success since we put that in place in 2007 and there's been well over a billion and a half dollars of new private sector investments in the ports which is again helping to open up the gateway opportunity and it's something we want to see continue and so we're we've made that permanent and we make up the difference to the municipality so they're held whole finally or not finally but we've got a robust capital program it's not as big as it was during the downturn but it's still very significant at almost record levels and over the next three years there's 19.2 billion dollars of capital investment in British Columbia 10.7 billion of that is what we call taxpayer supported debt the other eight and a half billion dollars is what's called self-supported so that would be like the the Portman Bridge project which is supported by toll revenues or the BC hydro which is probably 85 percent of the self-supported debt so a very significant capital program that will be investing in strategic investments in transportation and healthcare facilities new hospitals in new investments in post-secondary and new schools literally dozens of new schools throughout the province in the K to 12 sector we're still a leader in the country in private public partnerships we've done 35 plus partnership projects representing over 12 billion dollars of capital five billion of that is private sector investment and what's important I used to really emphasize this on our tour that we did particularly in the US there's a lot of people that believe that we do private public partnerships to keep debt off book you should know that it's all on book in British Columbia and I say all of it we have a very conservative auditor general who insists that the entire amount including the private sector equity is all shown on book so we do it because we have found through every single p3 project we've engaged in that all of them have been delivered on or ahead of schedule or on or under budget and this is something that is very very good for the province and we will continue we've got new projects coming through the pipeline on a regular basis there will be new hospitals being announced there will be new major transportation projects and something that I think will be certainly welcomed in the investment world our budget also has several levels of prudence between our contingencies and our forecast allowances we've got 1.6 billion dollars of cushion to ensure that we meet our budget targets so again that's something that we want to make sure we do and of course our conservative economic assumptions provide the potential for up to half a billion dollars in additional revenue so between all three of those well over two billion dollars of cushion to ensure that we meet or beat our targets so we're looking ahead we're diversified we're competitive tax wise we got a sound fiscal management record we got huge activity happening in the mining sector a lot of natural resources in British Columbia the gateway and making sure we have a sustainable health system we added this slide because last time I was in New York we had a lot of questions about pension funds and in the United States this is a very ugly story as you know they've got lots of unfunded pension liabilities that are literally bankrupting cities municipalities states are at risk etc so we like to talk about our pension story we have fully funded public sector pensions in British Columbia they're operated and designed and on what we call a joint trusty ship basis where there's an employer representative employee representative that have judiciary obligations to ensure that every three years when there is an actuarial undertaking that's that's done if there's any shortfalls identified they have to either add additional contributions by employer employees or scale back the level of benefits that are being offered and I can tell you that is a very positive story when we were telling that in Illinois for example they have an 83 billion dollar unfunded pension liability and a pretty optimistic discount rate of eight and a half percent returns that they're expecting and not too many people believe that that's likely so you can just imagine some of these jurisdictions and I can't talk about the other provinces I think some of the other provinces I believe have unfunded liabilities too that they're going to have to manage but I think this is a very very positive story for British Columbia


What is going on guys, welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here. Today we have the massive weekly update to go through and I mean massive. Now this is the update which you placed the Curse of All South Alive stream which was supposed to have come earlier. They decided to drop this update as more so than not people wanted answers for the future of the game. This gives us a massive insight into the future of Destiny 2 in my opinion. But before we go any further people, if you'd like to win some epic loot, I have exclusive emblem codes, spiral codes, gift cards and more. To win some simply drop a like on the video, leave a comment down below and join my discord server linked within the video description. Can we reach 3000 likes? That'd be absolutely epic if we could. But let's get into it people and talk about the major changes coming. Now they state there are four key areas we're targeting for improvements in December. Some of these updates will arrive with the DLC on December 5th and some additional updates will be included in a patch that will be deployed the following week on December 12th. Both updates combined include improvements set against the following goals. Deepened rewards for advanced players provide more player control over obtaining rewards. Make sure it's useful by adding things to use them for and provide general quality fixes wherever possible. Okay so we're going to move on to the features they include within this update. New systems and rewards to give our most engaged players additional optional pursuits including a new weapon tier. Masterworks which will feature stat trackers, random, rerollable stat bonuses, unique item tooltips and item detail screens. These will come with the patch on December 12th. Legendary weapons will drop as or be upgraded to become masterworks versions. Masterworks will have a few advantages over the baseline Legendary weapon. Track and display the number of kills with that weapon a choice between a total count or crucible kill count only that's up to you. You can generate orbs for you and your allies on multi kills that sounds great for people like me who like to play PvE. Add weapon stat bonuses that are selected randomly from a small pool and are rerollable so that sounds good too. These masterworks drop from any source of Legendary weapons for characters above that 250 power level. Unwanted masterwork weapons can be dismantled into materials that can upgrade an existing Legendary weapon into a masterwork. Raid and trials and nine weapons will have a very high chance to be masterworks.  Now this in my opinion does sound promising but I do need to hear a little more on it. The idea though that I can go out and use my Legendary weapon and even upgrade it further that would be absolutely great it just depends on what you can actually do with it. They say there's a small pool and are rerollable but why is in that loot pool which you can apply to this weapon that's what I want to know that's why I cannot wait to find out more on. They go on to say better incentives for players who complete challenging prestige activities they're targeting a genuine update to provide a better basically incentive for us to do so. I mean I want that because I don't do prestige versions of anything because I just just not point really just not point not the way the game is at its current state anyway not in my opinion so hopefully in January the better incentives are actually better incentives they then state that rewards and replay value for strikes adventures and last sectors in December we'll be introducing a heroic strikes playlist and more generous stroke rewards rewards for adventures and last sectors are still on our radar but will not be delivered for a December updates the only thing I can think about here is strike exclusive loot that's the only thing in my opinion that's going to make me want to go out and play strikes it really is. They then state new ways to spend surplus currency and materials now these ways will be able to spend legendary shards will be mentioned in a short while after we've talked about these ornaments now they're adding armor ornaments to grant visual permutations of armor as players complete specific challenges on December 5th this is armor ornaments will be added to some existing armor sets for more visual customisation without losing you're already equipped shaders and mods these ornaments will be included by completing objective specific to each set and are permanently unlocked account wide just like our exotic weapon ornaments they will be applied to the base pieces that you may already have basically collected and can now unlock on vendors if not in season 2 the following sets have ornaments unlocked in their respective activities vanguard faction armor crucible faction armor trials of nine armor i am banner armor and all three factions that's dead orbit future walkout and new monarchy as well as the eater of worlds raid lair armor so that's great i mean that is a lot that is a lot to play for that is a lot to grind for each one of these faction armors basically have their own unique set of ornaments to go with them that's great in my opinion it seriously is now on to zeur and zeur has some new offerings for us players collecting exotics every week you'll be able to acquire one of the new fated engrams using the legendary shards that will be equipped as exotics that ain't already in your color election i have one question here though what happens if you already have every exotic in the game can you just not buy these who knows a simpler three coins that boost exotic drop rates from any source for four hours so no obscure stacking mechanics or need to reply before every boss just like we used to do in destiny one these will cost you legendary shards and you can have as many as you like here banshee has some updates on weapon and armor mods too for players wanting to clear out some mod inventory space rare quality mods will dismantle into gunsmith materials and have a chance to produce legendary quality mod components i mean i've deleted hundreds upon hundreds of rare mods i seriously have for players chasing specific legendary mods including legendary kinetic mods will offer a selection of specific legendary mods for direct purchase with a selection that will rotate daily and cast legendary shards and mod components so that's a great feature to be honest they go on to talk about continued improvements to the iron banner and faction rallies including uniqueness of rewards which we all know about the ornaments already but they state faction armor and weapons will be unlocked for purchase for legendary shards and faction tokens and most faction vendors all five armor slots will always be present and weapons will rotate weekly on factions that have them slots will be unlocked by claiming reward engrams for the respective faction you will get credit for engrams you may have already claimed since launch so i will have a lot of credits waiting for me for sure for players chasing a world legendary or looking for masterworks master are all worth selling some of his rumoured horde of legendary engrams for legendary shards this will come on december 5th with the dlc update on december 12th a speaker of commander savannah and lord shacks will basically sell gift consumables for legendary shards that can be used during a strike or crucible match that will serve the following functions grant bonus rewards to everyone in their activity upon completion friend or foe alike award anything from faction tokens to a round of exotics for everyone in that match that is just crazy another thing they mentioned come in december 12th exploit safeguards on chests and resource nodes are greatly relaxed and players should encounter them less frequently even if they do drop rates for tokens it's only reduced by 30 instead of zero percent glimmer though will not be affected we want to associate a visual indicator with this in a future update but we weren't able to pull that off with this update but they say they hear us december 12th vendors were now beaking you to hand in your reputation tokens only when you're carrying enough to earn a reward engram which is great i hated going back to the taiwan scene every vendor wanted to see me just because i had one token to cash in they speak about changes affecting the reputation tokens coming on december 5th daily challenges will have reputation tokens awards increased across the board cage treasure chests still offer valuable rewards but now guarantee at minimum a pair of destination appropriate reputation tokens strikes will drop a larger number of vanguard reputation tokens common quality destination resource tokens will have their drop rates increased to 100 percent and values per token increased as well by 50 percent for your common quality tokens and 250 percent for their quality tokens under balance reputation required per reward engram will increase for destination factions by plus 37 percent and the gunsmith by plus 50 percent loviathan raid tokens will be redeemed at benedict immediately upon obtaining a token instead of requiring a full clear before unlocking so there's a lot of big changes coming to pve for damn sure now we're going to move on to the info for pvp players right here private matches for the crucible they're still targeting a early 2018 release and expect to have a better insight into the timing of this in the new year we're also moving rank pvp to the top of our priority list for next year to support the competitive community and a lot of pvp players are going to be loving this they seriously are crucible tune like adjusted supremacy scoring and better spawning rules in december we're willing to do additional updates and bug fixes intended to improve these areas of the crucible better incentives for completing crucible matches and penalties for quitting competitive games a quitter penalty system is currently in development you can expect an update on the deployment of this system in the new year and they then speak about that emote interface that allows players to creep salty spice rayman six shooter and flip it all out at the same time emote interface improvements are still on the list you can expect an update on the deployment of this within the new year and they basically end the weekly update with this with the launch of the cursor or source and the beginning of season two you can expect to see a full suit of patch notes that will document all of the changes outlined above as well as additional gameplay and sandbox tuning changes the team is making to improve destiny 2 we'll also soon be providing pre-lord and launch day details as well as a roadmap for season two content which includes the dawning in mid december so people damn there's a lot of things being changed with the game but is it enough i mean there's a lot of things a lot of new incentives to play the game here and to be honest i don't really mention anything about the cursor of cyrus 2 besides a few of the ornaments within the red layer but that new weapon tier feature in my opinion probably sounds the best here besides the fact they actually acknowledge that people want a ranked pvp system too which i cannot wait to hear more on but yes people it's definitely heading in the right direction for sure i'm not sure how much endgame here though is mentioned but like i said a few core mechanics need to be changed in order for any endgame to work and it seems as though they're heading in the right direction and that for sure but guys let me know what you think about the changes i've mentioned that are coming on december 5th december 12th and into the new year do you think it will save destiny let me know down below do you think it's too late let me know that down below also but guys i hope you enjoyed the video thanks as always for stopping by and hopefully people i will see you on that next one always


Okay, thank you very much, Helen, and thank you very much for inviting me to quite a salubrous occasion. I'll just share my screen now, and hopefully it's all happening. Yes, thank you very much for the introduction, Helen. Can you see that screen? Is that all okay? I'll assume yes. Yes, that's fine, Gary, thank you. Yes, I will be talking about Bold and the Cliff today, but part of the rationale for this discussion was to link it to the public outreach and cultural heritage and public outreach. So I will start talking really about my role in the trust rather than with the University of York at the moment and Bold and the Cliff in the trust and that element of public outreach and how the trust tends to work in that dynamic and how we need that public outreach for the society, let's say, to appreciate the work we do. And it goes back about 30 years when we were set up 1991 to promote interest, research and knowledge of the maritime architectural heritage and for the advancement of engagement with the public. So we needed to really look into the maritime archaeology, a lot of it was shitwrecks at the time, and try to reach out to the public and let them engage with it as well. Now that was a bit tricky because what we had really apart from ships like the Mary Rosa came up, we just had a lot of dots on the map. So it's how do you really get people to engage with all this broad cultural heritage. We can start in the intertidal zone and of course here we have lots and lots of wrecks that are under threat. So this is something that you can grab the attention of the public for this particular site here, lots of publicity back in the 1990s. A lot of interest, even so we didn't manage to say that it was a site that was under threat, it ended up being burnt, but there are lots of complaints about some smoking people's washing so they had to stop the burning. It affected people's. Yes, nice clean sheets. But we have to go underwater. So we have to try and get the images from underwater. Also, I introduced people to the hundreds and thousands of ships and sites that were underwater. And how are we going to do that, if you couldn't get people to see them, you just couldn't really stop the interest. So we started to work with photography and identify the sites, but you can only see a little bit at a time, especially around the sort of, we're talking here and sort of in the channel, the English channel area where visibility is limited. So we've got sites like naval vessels warships like hazardous 1786. We look at cargo vessels like the Fener 1818 with lots of barrels and sheets of glass really well preserved underwater and incredible results, but you just can't really get it to the surface very easily for people to engage, which is by the remit. And things like the SSS and in all 1918 for the mines and ordinance still there were thousands of ships warships on the seabed, but and war graves, but these were just under the radar very few people would see them. So we set about three of the trust to try to go ahead and try and raise interest to these sites and I was mindful as a diver, but I could see these sites but I couldn't get them to all the other millions of people that couldn't see them. So we had to think of ways of doing so. So as you can only see bit at a time we use the information to try and create models on the seabed and with those models, we could then introduce them and promote them through education programs, this one here is a collaborative program working with the Dutch and so with the Belgians, the French and British, looking at British ship being manned by the French and owned by the Belgians, you know right. Because of the international nature of it. We developed an education program working with schools in the three different countries and trying to get people to link to this first war wreck by people they might have known, might have known or engaged with or and we got them to develop programs around the site to understand the sinking, how the ship went down, what's happened to it on the seabed, it's now an artificial reef, it's also a great, it's a multitude of things, not just the underwater cultural heritage, because we have to be as multidisciplinary as we can with that outlook to engage lots of people in this heritage for all the different aspects of it. So it becomes a key tool for ocean literacy. And we've got things like a maritime bus which we've got methods we take the information around around Europe to Mediterranean and around the UK so all these different elements we've had to develop and devise really to try and get make sure that not just researchers but of course people the community the public engage with it because once they engage with it it becomes significant, and then it's a job, then there will be ongoing support for us if it's recognized as something of value and for the underwater cultural heritage. The next step of course is to start looking more technology. So 10 years ago, all this worldwide web stuff and drawings and Google Earth came to play. So we started using it to see if we could tell the story of the underwater cultural heritage. And of course here we can start with the intertidal cultural heritage. Try and tell that story to get it out to as wide an audience as possible. Using 3D models, Jonathan showed some wonderful ones just now, same sort of technology to try and give people sort of interact and access to these sites. Great intertidal areas tend to be well or challenging, but sometimes not quite as challenging as underwater sites. So we tended to apply some of that information, take it underwater and turn it into a resource to make it accessible to people through their computers using gaming technology to make it a resource that people can actually get to these sites and look around it and start to appreciate all these different massive resources underwater. Or this was entered through a web based portal, you can then get to this information. And also navigate around it with modern gaming toys and 3D etc. So you can put yourself on the seabed. The whole aim was really to get people down there so they could recognize the underwater cultural heritage, engage with it, and so they would make it significant and hopefully influence policymakers. But what about these submerged landscapes that we're here really to talk about. Well, they're sort of not quite as exciting in many ways. I mean we've seen some wonderful examples this morning and yesterday's a wonderful research. These research, these landscapes intertidal and underwater and a lot of the really fundamental research questions that they can address and that can be answered by looking at them. But this is something sometimes it's hard to sell to the public. But this is something that we started to do about, again in the mid 1990s, had to be led by the archaeologist, the other white David Tomlin who you just saw with a 3D headset on previously. But he was down in the other white in the intertidal zone and he was seeing all these sort of submerged forests and Roman and Neolithic bits of material coming out the seabed. And he recognized they were just being revealed, but also they were very interesting to help understand climate change, cultural change or sea level rise through time. It could be used for index points etc. And this is something that we're discovering more and more. The more we look, the more we tend to find. And these are sites that just recently been discovered over the last year on the north-west side of the settlement. And here we have a Neolithic forest, we have the data at the top, about 5000 years ago. And associated with that, we had some nice Neolithic sites of habitation or occupation Neolithic posts. This is one of several different features we found in the area, dated to just before the inundation. So they looked like there were some estuarine settlements and occupation on the coastline. These were utilizing or using these coastal resources, but significantly these posts still survived. These were buried of course in the mud flats, but they still survive today. And recently we've just come across another Bronze Age material. So as well as Neolithic, you've got the Bronze Age. This basket looks like a fishing basket. We've yet to look at it in more detail. The trouble is it tends to get covered in water. It looks like it's built in a pit, but it's the low water mark. And as the tide comes up, of course it covers it, so it makes it less accessible, less accessible for archaeologists and also less accessible for the public to see and understand what's going on. So we do look at some of these sites and, of course, nearby the site that's only 10 kilometres away, another bunch of Bronze Age posts from 147 to 1373 Cal BC. An area that there's dozens of posts would have been the basis for a structure that would have been at the time in the intertidal zone. So as soon as you go below the funny lumps and bumps that are exposed on the surface of the intertidal zone, you can start seeing wonderfully preserved remnants of these Bronze Age features. I mean, it's not quite a must farm, but we have some incredibly well preserved relics that can tell us about sort of interaction with the coastline and coastal exploitation through the ages to address some of the research questions that Geoff has raised earlier. And when looking at preservation, here we can see some very fine cut marks from Roman material from the same sort of area. So we've got sort of Neolithic here, we've got sort of Bronze Age going through the stages and we've got some Bronze Age about 1000 BC and we've got Roman from just after the conquest here of Great Britain, and then some sort of later Roman features as well that is sticking out the foreshore. So we have a massive resource in this intertidal zone, which is great, but the reason we've got it and the reason we can see it is because all the protective sediments that were once there and I've gone making it accessible, they're gone or they're going. And you can see that if you have a look at this aerial shot of the region. In the, say in the Northwest Solent of Hampshire, between Hampshire and the Isle of White, this was an area that was once covered in mudflats by a cow shot, but now looking down towards the West, we can see the whole area has been stripped. And if we put the water back, of course, that's great, you can't see it so well. But now all those exposed bits of timber are being eroded away. They're being eroded away really quickly, particularly by the marine brewing organisms. So all that resource is steadily being lost. So what we want, we want to find nice areas like this, which is another part of the so and I will show you a map in a second to give you a better idea where it all is, then the other part of the so where we do have these mudflats still remaining and it's underneath these mudflats that we can find the material and this has been alluded to by a lot of the work in the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, where you have these thick deposits of Holocene sediments, below which we know the land services do remain. What we have in the Solent is an area where these land services do remain and we can actually get to them. I've just been showing you the sort of material that we can find on the shores of Solent, and shortly I will go underwater to Bolden the Cliff. And so Bolden the Cliff is marked here with the big arrow, and this is on the south side of the Solent. And just now I was showing you images from just up area here off coal shot, looking down to the west, and all these areas here were once covered literally decades ago or hundreds of decades ago and coming back for a few hundred years were covered in mudflats all the way to the extent down here. In fact, this channel has only been formed about 3000 years ago, before which it was an ashrine basin, not dissimilar to some of these harbours over here, Portsmouth harbour, Langston harbour. Of course, this is the UK at the bottom here and the island white is right at the south of the UK for those that aren't familiar with it. But this was been a nice sort of sheltered ashrine embayment until about 3000 years ago and meters and meters of sediment, just like the sediment I showed you in the last night built up within it. And you can still see some of that sediment that remains underwater. I should say, the bottom of the area here, the sea level came in about 8200 years ago and started flooding this basin. And from about 8200 years ago onwards, the sediment built up until 3000 years ago, when a new channel came through and took that sediment away. And looking at the cliff itself, you can see the top of those sediments, which is that's the top of a mudflat deposit, an alluvial deposit that was built up from 8000 BC onwards. And there's an edge here, and at that edge, there's a cliff. And going underwater, this top pink area here is the top of that cliff. Well, that's the top of that sort of covering alluvial sediment here, and it drops for seven meters, drops for seven meters. And this cliff here, seven meters. And this is all that soft alluvial sediments that is a bit like cream cheese when you put your hand in it. And at the bottom, there's a more robust strip here that's sticking out because erosion has come from this way in. And it's a long section that stretches for a kilometer, but at the base of it, you've got this nice, pretty flat surface. It's a peat deposit embedded with trees, trees and woodlands and streams, as well as that we discovered archaeological features. Looking in section at the site, there's a section coming across that cliff. We've got the top in four meters of water, drops down to about 11 meters down here. This platform 12 meters right at the very base. This is below a British ordinance datum, rather than chart datum. And within it, you've got this sort of marine brackish clay, and then you've got these seams of peat and a base of deposit at the bottom. Very murky in the sodent, very green. But this little bench here, this woodland bench with trees, has sort of been defended by tree stumps, which are then eroding away as the sodent moves towards it to get rid of it. But as well as the sea eroding, we also have marine life digging holes in it.  And here's the oak tree at the top of the picture here with bark on it still. That's tumbled, it's got underneath and some soft sandy silt, and it's excavated lots and lots of flints. And it was these flints that we discovered back in 1998, 1999, which led us, we excavated the back of the lobster burrow, and it led us to a site stratified site where we find in situ lithics embedded within a sort of peat horizon and lots of archaeological material. And dated, as you can see here, 6,000, 6,000 Cal BC, so 6060 to 5,900. So about 8,000 years ago, quite a tight timescale when this particular land built up just before the sea came in and overtook it and flooded it. When you go down into today, this is all sort of eroding away quite quickly. We still have those root systems in place defending it. All these are going back the contemporaneous with the land surface, 8,000 systems or 8,200 years old. And then amongst that, we've also found more archaeology, and this archaeology, which is quite significant, of course, timbers and lots and lots of bits of timbers, two main sites about 400 meters apart. One of them has lithics, but mainly timbers. The other one is dominated by lithics. This is the one where mainly have timbers. And what we find, which were a bit anomalous, we have finally sort of pieces of the word laid out in what look like organized fashions. They're flat on one side, and they were curved on the other. And you can see them in situ at the site here. And then if we look at some of them in the lab, you can see they're nice and flat and squared on one side. When you look at them, it's hard to distinguish whether they're worked or not. It's really where we're seeing them in the assemblage, that it's giving us indications that they are anthropogenic. But you turn them over, of course, I should say, in amongst them, you do have a whole bunch of nicely fine chopped or worked pieces of which there isn't an analog in the Mesolithic record. So we're not quite sure what the purpose is. But when we turn them over, we can see they're all round on the other side. This was something we weren't quite sure what they were. But work detailed analysis over the last few years has identified that they are most of these things are oak or bark and sapwood. So what we have is the remains of an oak tree that's been stripped of bark and sapwood and all these bits of timber are then being laid on the seabed. And it's making sense to them. And we find about four or five of these particular sort of clusters or organized pieces of wood lying on the seabed. It wasn't really until last year when we identified a particularly large one with over 60 pieces of timber. And we found, we were diving on the site yesterday and we found another sort of half dozen, which are starting to erode from out the seabed. So we found about 60 pieces of timber that have been laid, criss-crossed, right angles on top of each other to form some form of platform. And the platform was just next to this over to the left of the picture at the top here. It's sort of a flue of an outcrop that was coming out from underneath the peat. So there's a peat deposit on here. This timber, this timber platform was actually came just from this area here, which WFO4 within the peat platform. And last year we recovered it and activated it. And you can see the actual bark on it and you can see how it's fitting together with the sack wood. And they're all, you know, about sort of 30 to 60 centimeters long, these pieces of timber that have been stripped from an oak tree. Back in 2007, we found what we believed to be that oak tree that they were stripped from. And of course, there's been several of these sites laid around this area that we're looking at. And central to this piece of timber was a large, central to this collection timbers was a large flat piece. So all this area to the top had been eroded away. So all that was left was this sort of cluster here and one piece at the top. This large piece here was about a meter long, 60 centimeters wide. And it was hewn from a slow grown oak tree and it was tangentially split. That means it could be one large plank that could have been many meters long and about a meter wide. It came from a tree that was about a meter wide. And so it could have been many meters long and a meter wide plank. Or it could have been the base of a log boat. And as it happens, we found many other clues, burnt flints, burning, et cetera, that indicate that it looks like they were working, building a boat, but maybe hollowing out a structure or a timber or tree, as well as all this evidence about stripping it, stripping the bark from it and reusing it. And so the most probable explanation will be a log boat. What's more, sea level was rising at this point, of course. The channel was starting to connect with the North Sea around our region, sea level was rising. And there was a lot more water about, I think it's simplistically. And the use of a log boat would have been a much quicker and easier way to transport goods to and from around the south coast and as necessary over to mainland Europe. A challenge has always been, though, to get people to understand this, we've been working on the site now for over 20 years, and it's really difficult for non-divers to go down and understand and see the nature of the seabed and understand it. So we've been using this photogrammetry underwater in these bad conditions and putting them together to form these images of maybe sort of 8, 900 pictures, trying to recreate the 3D area. And hopefully this will work. Oh, sorry about this. And this, and so we're building up with many, many pictures when the visibility allows us better images of this subterranean or submerged land surface. What we have here, the nice trees, but an area that's quite interesting is just at the back of the, in the middle of the picture here, that little seam, that little cliff that's eroding away. And it's just below that on a little plateau of sort of human material that we're finding lots and lots of more of these pieces of timber eroding at the cliff. We're just getting to these sites as that cliff steadily erodes back. That little cliff there that's protected little embayment in between those tree root systems is eroding back and as it does, it's revealing more and more these bits of timber. And we were down on the site yesterday, and you can see the sort of timbers that are coming out. These couple of bits here coming up at an angle, but they're flat on one side, and they're sort of round and trimmed on the other. Two of those sort of comparable bits of timber that we've seen all around the region that will be associated with that sort of stripping that tree in the middle of the site. There's always also those sort of ubiquitous flint tools on the sites, and we're having transjeaxes or transjeaxes or adzes, as well as tools, playlists and scrapers finding across the site and in particular we're finding them at this location 400 meters away, where they're falling out of a sand deposit near eight, you can just sort of make an eight and nine, this sort of sand in months and lumps of clay. That's a hollising clay deposit on top, breaking up, falling down, and it's sitting on top of what used to be a point bar system 8000 years ago that people lived in on. And as that clay breaks down, the sand is pouring out from underneath it. And when you go down and have a look at the site, you can see the sand that's coming out from underneath the clay and as it comes out is bringing out these lithics with it. And this is another ad that we picked up, discovered that it had come out of the site. At the moment we're looking at the distribution of these adzes to really look at the concentration of material to identify the area that's got the main centre for the occupation area on top of that, the gene system. But that was an area that we looked at last, despite the COVID, we got out to the site last November. And while there we came up about 30, 40 more lithics flakes and blazing tools that have been sort of eroded from the environment, we just out there yesterday on there's a collection so there's a various tools scrapers. Adzes, the heads of tranjectors at the back there that have been broken off, a mirror out of different tools, and out there yesterday and in the same location, more and more flints just being rolled down on top of that sand deposit. And a quick shot last night, I thought I'd include, give you an idea, little bladeless core up there on the left and a little bladed with a scraper on the end at the bottom in the centre. In addition to all this sort of wood and all these flints, we found things like string and we found bone. This particular auric bone was interesting that was came from the site, where the flints came from, because that married in with some of the analysis of cedar DNA that was conducted with Vince Gaffney and with work, Robin Albee and Rob Warwick University, identifying a whole range of evidence for a whole range of life be it aurics, dogs, duck rodents, etc, etc. So what was included in that was wheat, which of course is rather significant. So when we're trying to push back our understanding of how people moved and linked through time. In many ways we need to look at these sort of underwater archaeological sites, which as Jeff pointed out right at the beginning, cover such large tracts of land around the continental shelf that were occupied, and all of which is largely overlooked. So look at some of these areas to see if we can draw some more information, more understanding about human dispersal, cultural dispersal and understanding the various different cultures. So we're finishing coming back to this need I suppose for disseminating the information as widely as possible. We can do that with pictures with videos we're trying to do that with 3D models. And of course paintings but it's a long time ago in the artifacts aren't quite as dramatic as shitwrecks. But here we have a reconstruction of the site log boat being built on the right there of course or in the background, a dogs, a lot of this elements of this image of built up on the pollen and all the cedar DNA DNA evidence, and we have someone here making what could be some form of beef burger just by the fire in the middle here. So we've finished with another going back to the decade of ocean science and sustainable development, looking at the outcomes, something Helen alluded to just now, because I can see that when it comes to dissemination and outreach I see it's an opportunity for the likes of us within a maritime archaeological trust to look to see how we can use the evidence we're finding with the shitwrecks and the smooth landscapes to feed into some of those sustainable development goals and help us better understand and link with the oceans in the sea. And I suppose get the information out into very broad spectrum of people. I want to work within the academic community as much as we do because we, that's what we do as well but we do need to leak out into the much broader community as best we can. So that note, I'll say thank you very much for listening and I'll hand back to Helen. Thank you Gary thank you very much. I mean it's fantastic to see the development of what's been happening at that site because I've been sort of watching it now for a number of years and so good to see the photo of the site because it really does change how we can see the site and how you can share it as well as in terms of outreach it's just brilliant it works so well, because we all know that diving there in the Solent can be like diving in cold tea quite often. You don't see very much. So it's a really good way to actually be able to properly see the site. We do have a question just quickly from Duncan Ross, who says, is the erosion at Bordner considered a positive in some ways as it sometimes reveals the archaeology. So that's sort of yes and no, because when it reveals it. I mean the platform was something that we wouldn't reveal we might never have seen that but once it reveals that a lot, a lot of the damage has been done. A lot of the detail is detailed is washed and eroded away. And I think that was demonstrated by these posts I showed from the intercital zone. There are lots of posts you just see all riddled, griddled and eaten away material but it's only this material that's protected that really has the information we need, trying to address some of those broader research questions. So really we want to be going in there for archaeological purposes to excavate before it's eroded. Yeah, absolutely. I'm very much looking forward to seeing a whole log breaks in the paddle please. Actually, Gary, we have got one other question that's just come in from Gil or is it Jill Hey, hi Gary, what is the earliest date you have got for wheat. Well, there's that we've got it bold and a cliff that comes. It's it's by 8,000 years give or take 20 or 30 years. That's the date we have the oldest thing we have it bold and cliff in the UK. It's what you're moving on a couple of thousand years and prior to that you're going to the about 11,000 years ago into the Middle East, when you go north Turkey north Iraq areas but our this is the oldest evidence of wheat in the UK by a couple of thousand years.