American Eagle Gold Town Hall, Update and Q&A

0:03 Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, depending on where in the world you're signing in from. So at least one person in the Asia Pacific region. So thanks for spending your midnight with us. Appreciate it very much. I've got with me today Tony Moreau, CEO of American Eagle Gold and Neil Prowse, the company's VP Exploration. Gentlemen, how are you today? I'm good. Thanks for having us on. It's been a long time. Yeah, it's been a minute. I know you guys had to go dark for a bit following your big news, so I appreciate you joining me today. Here's how today is going to work for those of us in the room. Tony and Neil are going to go through a quick presentation, just give some updates on the company. But this is an open forum, so there is a chat button at the bottom of the screen. I know some of you have already submitted questions in advance over email, appreciate that very much. But you can also ask questions during the event by using that chat button. There's also a new function for folks who have been on the system before. If you find that request meeting button at the bottom of your screen, you can, during the event, request a meeting with the American Eagle team and I'll try to get you in touch with them afterwards. If for whatever reason I don't get to your question today, we just run out of time, but it's very likely I'll get to most of them though. Also make sure the American Eagle team gets them and they'll be able to get back to you as soon as possible. Last housekeeping thing, this is being recorded and will be available for replay in the early afternoon Eastern time, really shortly after the video pops up. It'll be on Six's YouTube channel and I'm sure shortly thereafter on American Eagles too.

1:17 Only other thing is there will be some forward looking statements in today's presentation and during

1:20 our conversations, so keep that in mind as an investor. But otherwise, onto the meats and potatoes. Tony, I'll throw it to you and go off camera. All right, thanks a lot. Romeo, thank you. Thank you for everyone for coming here. It's been a while. I think end of February the last time I presented so we kind of had to go dark when you do a financing the rule of thumb is don't say anything that can screw it up. So we just put our head down and didn't really do any kind of public disclosures. But we were doing a lot of work behind the scenes. Obviously, we now have a little bit more than 55 million dollars in cash in the bank. We've been working hard, fast-forwarding our planning, looking to get out to site ASAP. It's looking like we'll probably be getting people at site next week to get eyes on the ground.

2:06 And the big thing this year is we're not using any helicopters as of now and we have an extended license to cut. We'll be doing strip logging, we'll be refurbishing historical trail network, building our own trail network to make sure we can access every single spot on the site that we want to drill, which will make drilling more efficient, less expensive, and allow us to drill more. And 2 big things that I've really been wanting to do over the last 4 years, we brought in South32, we brought in tech that gave us credibility. But I always said the big thing was getting that big person that people listen to when they invest. The very best person to have invest in your stock in the gold copper business is Eric Sprott. He is a Warren Buffett of gold mining, investing.

3:00 He is the Don of discoveries. He's the godfather of gold and we brought him on. It's absolutely amazing. And what that did is allowed a lot more of the world, investment world, to know who American Eagle Gold is. And sure, some invested because Eric Sprott came in, but almost more importantly, instead of spending 5 minutes on a presentation and our news results, people now spend 30. And they hopefully invest because they know what we have and what we're going to bring to the table. And each year that we've been on NAC, we have surpassed the cumulative amount of drilling we drilled the year before. That's a really good thing to do. This year we're looking at at least 50,000m of drilling. Like I said, we brought in that big cornerstone investor, that's Eric Sprott. The other thing I've always wanted to drill, and one thing we've always had a bit of an issue with, like most exploration companies outside of the desert, is that we always have downtime. We have about 6-months of no news.

3:57 How you get around that is you drill through the winter. It's about cost of capital. Now, with the money that we do have, we're going to drill all the way until April at the very least. So there'll be next to no downtime when the 2027 season starts. And what we plan to do over a two-year time plan before we got the investment from Mr. Sprott, we're now going to do over 1 year. We see light at the end of the tunnel now and it's going to be a really big year for American Eagle Gold. I couldn't be more excited. I'm going to do a really quick presentation, just give everyone a quick update. I realize that there's people on here that maybe don't know a lot about American Eagle Gold, so I'll give a quick synopsis on who we are, give some updates on what we've been up to since PDAC. And I'm going to let Neil give a presentation on the technical stuff.

4:45 Show you under the kimono a bit We kind of gave an update last week or 2 weeks ago on where we plan to drill There's gonna be a little bit more in-depth update. Keep in mind. This is still a work in progress We had a big technical meeting with South 32 We're getting feedback from our partners and we're defining the drilling right now. And we're gonna have a more robust, up-to-date technical news release before the end of April, right before we start drilling. So we're gonna start drilling towards the end of April, mid-May. It all depends on weather when the snow disappears. Again, it's not about not being able to drill during the shoulder seasons, it's about not being able to mobilize during those seasons. So once you're there, you can keep on drilling. So, you know, it doesn't really matter to us. We're gonna put 50,000 meters in the ground and whether we start in 2 weeks or 3 weeks, it's all really gonna be the same. We're gonna hit every single target we wanna hit. And it's the first time we've been able to say that in the history of NAC. So we're stoked and hopefully you can hear how excited I am by the tone of my voice.

5:46 So here we go. I'm gonna do a share slide. So let me think about this for a second. Here we go. So American Eagle Gold, ATSX Venture. That's our property, I always show that. Why is it great? We're not dealing with mountains. You can literally drive a Ski-Doo or a golf cart or a bike right onto our property. We're not dealing with crazy mountains. Most of our property is on a clear cut. It's a great place to work. If you're looking at actually building this thing, which we hope somebody, maybe us will do someday, it'll come at a fraction of the cost. A lot of other BC porphyries would cost to build. And then the big thing is access to people, access to power. Right next to the town of Smithers has 10,000 people. Amazing location as you can see here.

6:40 That's what it looks like all over the property. Again, we're not in the mountain. A lot less challenges for us than a lot of other porphyry projects, most actually. So to give people a quick idea of who we are, we have everything at NAC. So we're right next to Smithers, about 85 kilometers away. What do we have? We have high grade. We have areas of really high grade. Towards the end of the season, we came out with hole 78 and 80. And what it showed was our South Zone, which is getting bigger. We believe this is kind of the focal point, the beginning of a starter pit. We believe that this thing is a minor zone. It's only getting bigger. It's high grade and we believe it will be economical. So we have high grade. What we also have is scale. This thing is big, robust. What I have a target on, let's get a resource that can be into the multi-billion ton size. We're well on our way And with this drilling, we're hoping to string all the different mineralization together. So that's really good. You obviously want high-grade, but you want scale. And hopefully within that scale that we're going to tie together this year, in early 2027, we'll find other areas of high-grade that we've been able to do during the 4-years that we've been on the property. Again, we're going to drill nearly as many metres this year that we've done to get our company to a US$250M market cap over the last 4-years. So, There's going to be a lot of blue sky that we'll be able to open up or whatever the saying goes.

8:07 We have a lot of upside. There's a ton of our property that has not been drilled. We're going to drill it this year. I mentioned the topography, the elevation, the infrastructure. That's a huge advantage of our property. Miners obviously want to build mines, but you know what the most important thing is making money, money, making economical and having the lowest cost for the amount of money you have to put in the very beginning is the most important thing. And we believe we have the biggest advantage here in BC in terms of our location. So that's amazing. Now look at our strategic back and before we just had tech and sell 32 tech owns 13 percent sell 32 owns 19.9. Now Eric's product owns just under 10 percent and between the ore group Stephen and myself that's 53 percent of the shares outstanding Very tightly held. It's amazing. We have one of the strongest balance sheets in the entire industry with over $55 million in cash that we're ready to deploy.

9:01 That's absolutely amazing. We're excited. Now, quick highlights here. What happened since PDAC? Right before the PDAC happened, at the end of February, we came out with hole 2570. That was an amazing hole that was drilled in the porphyry stock going west, and it was over 900m of over 0.4% Copper equivalent from surface. And what it showed there, it showed the potential for scale. We drilled in the area we hadn't drilled before. It also shows areas of other high-grade that we can have. So that one of our first holes that we're going to drill in 2026 is going to follow up on that drill hole. Hole 80 was also really important. It was in the cell that hit super high grades. It was across against a scissor hole 78. I think people thought maybe we're drilling down the vein or something now that we had 80 going Right right across it. It showed that we weren't going down a vein We were actually drilling through a really high grade zone. It shows that this high grade zone is big robust comes to surface I'll talk about that a little bit more now the Sprott financing some people ask. Well, you didn't need the money Yeah, maybe we didn't need the money, but like I said, we had a two-year plan. Now we're able to do in 1 year what we plan to do in 2 years. So this Sprott financing allowed us to have a big investor that people know who they are, who he is, they follow him and we know he's a long term shareholder.

10:24 So allowed us to have enough money in the bank to squeeze our 2 year program into 1 year and not make us have to do a raise through a really successful program. So now we have enough money in our bank account to fully last us at the very least through the end of 2027, possibly 2028. And when I say that, that means another 50,000 meter program after this year. So the sky's the limit for us. The other really big thing, SELL32 topped up their 19.9% investment. That was somewhat expected. Now, what wasn't necessarily expected by the market, We sort of expected it based on what we've been seeing with their drilling and knowing what companies like. Tech topped up. So tech didn't top up for the last 2 financings, but they did top up on that. And that was a really big dog whistle to the market. So in total, we brought almost $33 million into our treasury. Now, I have Neil Proust on this call Neil's amazing guy an amazing geo he was working as our VPX through CJ Greg and associates we have brought him in to officially work for American Eagle. So everything's pretty much the same, but officially he's an American Eagle Gold employee right now. So Neil, welcome day 3.

11:42 We have some other key hires too. We're bringing in Alan Wilson, a renowned geologist, protege of Dick Zilato. He's going to be a consultant for us working on NAC. We have brought in another big resource geologist to help us out with the MRE that we plan to do in 2027, as well as our PEA. The last thing we want to do is have a 50,000m program and then be 4,000m short of what we actually need to do our MRE, for example. We have a really big expert geologist that's worked on other big deposits. We're hiring him this week and he's going to help us out with our drill hole location, give us advice and we'll work closely with him. Neil is going to be interacting with him directly so that's absolutely amazing and when you see all these big people join your company like Gord Stothert who were joined our board It kind of shows you the tea leaves a bit that Mac is something special.

12:35 So what are we doing starting next week? We're building our roads. So we have a really complex infrastructure that's already there. We're refurbishing historical trail roads for logging. We're also gonna build our own roads. So every single place on our property we'll be able to access with a skid rig. So that not only means cheaper drilling but it also means we'll be able to change things right on the go. You're kind of handcuffed a bit by heli drilling it also improves your health and safety less chances of an accident happening. We're right in the midst of our drill planning in about 2 weeks time

13:09 I think we'll have our final drill plan and towards the beginning of May end of April we'll provide that to the market again Neil's gonna give a little sneak peek of that but look with 50,000 meters planned There's a lot of work to do and we're almost there So just talking again about that whole 80 that was that was really special 618 meters of 0.77 percent copper equivalent from surface that followed up a whole whole 78 and that was almost equally as good as 645 meters of 0.82% copper equivalent when I was talking to Eric Sprott He was actually in the Caribbean and he brought something up really interesting to me because I said Eric, you don't really usually invest in gold companies And he said yeah, but you're have something really special here at this property. It's a copper property goes, but I'm on the beach right now They said that's 618 meters son. I'm looking at people I go do you know how far 618 meters is?

14:08 It's more than half a kilometer. He goes Tony, you have over 0.4 grams per ton gold in that This thing is a gold mine in my mind. He's a gold bug and you look at that from that perspective He says this is gold. This is copper. This is great. I want to invest. I never really thought about that From that perspective. So we have a lot of gold here gold is hot copper is doing well So we have both it's good to diversify yourselves metals and we're relatively high grade of both So it's amazing that southern zone hole that southern zone here on the left. That's our high grade south zone Most of the holes we put in here have come up with Fabulous grades Companies would be lucky to have 1 hole like that. We've had many. And look at all these on the left. All these Copper equivalent grades, huge lengths coming from surface, all above 0.55 Copper equivalent.

14:59 Absolutely phenomenal. And this thing's just getting bigger. This thing started as a very small little area and look how big it's come so far. And again, if we're able to get that big in 4-years drilling 60,000m, think of what we can do if we allocate some of the over 50,000m we're drilling this year. So our plan that Neil's going to show is to also increase the size of this cell zone, because as of now, we think that can be where the starter pit's going to be. It's very important. Now kind of showing you a bit of a sneak peek on our plan. There's that blue area here. That's what we define as our mineralized zone. That red area there is some of the areas we believe have high grade. And all the other areas here that we don't have a blue zone, it's not because there's not mineralization there, just hasn't been drilled.

15:45 So what are we gonna do this year? We're gonna drill everywhere. As Andrew O'Kwang says, who's become a friend of mine, big investor, we're going to turn this thing into Swiss cheese. So every target you can imagine, South32, tech, us, investors, we're going to drill it, and we're going to piece it all together. And look, for the most part, we're gonna assume we don't have a next year. So we gotta bring as much value to the table as possible and see where we are in 2027. And now that we have the money, the plan is to drill, drill, and drill. So we have a ton of mineralization. You can kind of see the model on the right there. And yeah, it's absolutely amazing. Now, where am I going here? Okay, so I already mentioned this, over 50,000 meters plan.

16:31 If you look at the number of targets we'll be drilling around 80 drill holes. We'll be starting off with 3 rigs. We'll be transitioning hopefully to 4 rigs once the team has the sea legs under them. And we'll stop drilling mid-December. We'll stop for a month, give everyone a little Santa break and start again January 15th and drill at least until April. But we'll just see how we go. So we'll bring another 3 rigs back in the new year. And that will give us essentially assays and news throughout 12 months of the season. No downtime for news. No reason for people to sell out of NAE and invest in a South American property that they get catalyst for. If you want catalyst, you come to one place, you invest in American Eagle Gold. So we're extremely excited. And our plan is to do an MRE and a PEA next year So that's why we brought on that renowned resource geologist will announce who he is once the contract is signed So again just going over this again 3 ranks transition to 4 And just showing everyone this is what we've done We put our money where our mouth is. If you look at our GNA, Antonio does resource talks, he always asks me the question, how much do you spend on GNA?

17:43 Well, our GNA is paid by our interest. The money that we have goes into the ground. That's the only way you're ever going to have sustainable returns for your investors. So 2022, 7,000m. 2023, 7,000m. So you can see on the brackets, that's the cumulative meterage. And on the left side of the bold, you can see how many meters we drilled that year. And each year we've actually managed to surpass our cumulative meters. So it's a really good pattern there. It brings a lot of value and shows that we're focused on discovery and we're focused on drilling. And that's what you want to do when you invest in junior mining company. And last but not least, a big thing I get asked questions about specifically outside of Canada is the First Nations. I want to say one thing, we're partnered with Lake Babine Nation, half of our employees at site are from Leekbabine Nation. I think there's a lot of misinformation out there. People got to know there's over 600 First Nation groups in Canada. They're all different. They all have different needs. They all,

18:45 They're all located in different parts of Canada, but what I can say, there's not a better group, I think, in Canada to work with than Lake Babine Nation. We only have to work with them, which is great. There's not multiple groups, but they're amazing people. And honestly, when I work with people, and I work with Lake Babine Nation. How you treat them is how you treat your family. Treat them with respect. You have communication,

19:07 no surprises, and you work with them. And we've had a really great relationship over the 4 years and we expect that to last. So truly is a partnership. This is their land. They want us to be there. When we first got on the property, we called them every day and we talked to them and we said, if you don't want us to be there, we don't want to be here either. They said, Tony, we want you to be there and they actually fast tracked our initial permit. We're on our fourth exploration agreement right now and look it's fantastic.

19:35 If you're so lucky to have a property in the region you'll be lucky to work with Lake Babine. I just want to give them a shout out the same way I give people like Neil a shout out. I see them as partners and they're absolutely fantastic to work with. So I want to end on that and let Neil take over on the technical side. Thank you very much.

19:58 Neil, you can share screen, buddy. That sounds good. Yeah, it's going to look very similar to what you have there. Yeah, thanks for the kind words in the intro, Tony. It's pretty exciting to be officially on board as VPX and being able to say that officially, which is nice. It's a good honor. I'm going to share a screen here.

20:30 Go Right into the presentation. Just let me know if you can see this. Sorry, Tony. I see it. Okay. All right

20:39 Yeah, so Tony's already covered the the little preamble into this and just gone over how Unique neck is amongst these few projects in terms of its its access and location. So with that in mind I'll go into a little bit more detail. I'm going to keep it fairly high level still because the planning is in progress. I just want to give good top-down visuals as to the The great potential and the scale potential we're seeing over the neck property and how that's fed into our whole planning and then how that whole planning has been reintegrated with existing site logistics to design a whole plan that's both very good from an exploration perspective, but also logistically feasible

21:29 once we get on the ground, right? And maximize efficiency. I know we have a lot of money still, but the more money you have, the easier it is to spend that money. And I think we've run a pretty tight ship at Mac, and I don't see any reason to stop doing that, right? The market is uncertain, and we're in a very fortunate position and I want to make sure we We kind of maintain that advantage

21:54 So, yeah, let's get into the the high grade so This is a surface projected higher grade mineralization footprint approximately above 0.4 copper equivalent And these are zones that hold together over 20 meter plus scales. So there's lots of narrow zones of punctuated high grade mineralization, but When we're trying to figure out a continuous mineralization model,

22:23 those narrower zones don't necessarily contribute. So what we have here are zones with nice, well understood continuity.

22:34 And what you can see is this is largely concentrated as a function of what we know to exist and where we've decided to drill along the western margin of the stock. So we've got nice drilling density along this western margin and with that we've been able to confidently string together these higher grade mineralized zones. What we've learned about this is that geology is key. We now understand there are multiple different intrusive events. And these each bring in successive pulses of alteration and associated mineralization. And a host lithology is also a very important control upgrade.

23:20 So we have more porous sedimentary wall rocks around our porphyry stock.

23:27 There's pretty good evidence that shows proximity to a variety of the different dike phases and whether or not those are implicitly mineralized dikes or not, the fact that the intrusive hydrothermal activity comes in kind of primes up wall rock to host grade. So These are important considerations when we're planning follow-up drilling. That said, even with the drilling density, there's still excellent potential for expanding these currently delineated high-grade zones. I think there's also excellent potential for adding more to this.

24:06 There's a lot of geophysical, geological similarities all around the porphyry stock and we just don't have the drilling density to confidently say where these as-yet-undiscovered high-grade zones are. It's not to say they're for sure there, but we see enough similarities in the scout drilling so far that we're reasonably confident that expanding drilling all around the stock, within the stock, is the right way to bring up the scale and the grade. So this is bringing in the broader mineralization footprint. This is around 0.1 to 0.15 Copper equivalent, again projected to surface so you can see where it is. This is not all necessarily continuous right from surface down to an unlimited depth.

24:54 There's room for expansion at depth. There's room for expansion

24:58 in the lateral dimensions as well with additional drilling. This is a very broad mineralization footprint. And what's really nice about NAC is that it holds together as a single broadly continuous zone, right? So you're not dealing with narrow isolated pods and small multiple pits, each with their own different strip ratios and things like that. This is so far holding together as a single cohesive unit.

25:28 And so again the exploration drilling is designed to continue to show continuity through the mineralized zone. Again, like I said, open to significant expansion and I'll get into that where we're looking to drill. So

25:50 our early 2026 whole plan was designed to maximize the coverage on the property and confidence within what we've drilled. It's gonna be an extensive drill season and we're gonna have ample opportunity to test all the target areas.

26:06 We're trying to stick entirely with skid rig drilling. It's much more efficient and economic than helicopter drilling. And the other thing that you get with skid drilling is that responsiveness to new information. You don't have the time delay between hitting a zone and then having to construct a new pad, sort out the orientation, and then again being limited on that follow up by pad constraints. So

26:35 we're much better poised to do spins, steepenings, marginal step outs, rather than be fixed into a locked into an initial plan with helicopter drilling.

26:51 This initial whole plan was formed purely by subsurface factors, geology, mineralization and adding coverage to underexplored areas. This is what the team at CJ Gregg & Associates has been putting together in terms of where we would like to add coverage to this. And that's a lot of drilling. This is just shy of 70 hole collars. And there'd be optionality for multiple holes off of each of these proposed centers. You can see there's considerable focus along the whole 59 zone up to the North and adding, finally adding some decent coverage out to the far east where there's a really positive

27:33 geophysical signature, with some more pilot scout drilling up to the north, because I don't think we fully ruled that out yet. We're still seeing the right hints of mineralization in some of those intrusive units I mentioned earlier, up into the north where we have very, very sparse testing. And that's the same story down to the south here too. So this is a pretty extensive plan. And what we've been doing very recently, as recently as yesterday, sitting down with the team, is going through and looking at how we can implement this plan as best we can with existing infrastructure, and then planning any new construction to be a maximal utility to follow up. This is the existing trail network.

28:20 It's actually not too bad when you throw the plan on there. A lot of this is going to be very accessible with minimal modification to the whole plan and caller locations. So bringing in our phase 1 collar location plan, and this is what's gonna start getting prepped and flagged in, and like Tony said, you know, as soon as a couple of weeks time, when we send our initial team up to site, These are all designed to utilize existing trail where possible. The whole orientations are factoring in all available data. That's vein orientation, dike orientation, the orientation of the bedding, and the broader geophysical signature. And the plant collar locations are also set up to test multiple directions. So this is going to maximize volume tested and use optimal orientations dictated by those above geological parameters.

29:18 So going forward to phase 2, you know, this whole area of where we have outlined these fences and strings of drill holes are areas that will eventually be tested. How we go about that in terms of sequencing is going to be dictated by results. The nice thing about skid drilling, like I said earlier, is you can be flexible and adaptable. And with the long season, we have the advantage that any difficult to access areas, that's a bit of a combination between rolling fairly dry, cobbly till to some lower lying more swampy depressions. Those areas where we want to drill can be very effectively accessed once freeze up begins in late October. And those areas will remain accessible well into March of the next year.

30:08 So we have, again, ample opportunity to test everything. And some of it's gonna depend on what the access looks like, and the plan will continue to evolve. But yeah, drilling through the winter will ensure that pretty much every desired location we want to test will be tested. Stepping back out a little bit, We're trying to set ourselves up for success, not just in the drilling front, but also from a potential development pipeline. So we're continuing to work with LBN Forestry and Canfor to work on potentially clear cut logging, some proposed blocks that are right over some very, very prospective areas we would like to drill.

30:56 We're having, we've set up regular consultation with an external resource specialist like Tony mentioned. This will provide regularly updated models and this will inform follow-up drilling, especially within zones where we already have pretty solid coverage. What's going to be the best hole to take something from maybe not enough confidence to put into a resource and move that into an inferred or an indicated category. So that's kind of the eye we're looking to this with. And the other thing that Tony mentioned is potentially adding rigs. So I wanna make sure that we have the option for scalability right from the outset. So with continued success and various site factors, if it's a good summer with a decent amount of rain and our water sources are holding up, there's a very reasonable opportunity to add additional rigs. We'll be ready on day 1 to accommodate that increased meterage.

31:55 We've got an additional course check structure set up on site, and we have camp providing us with all the required regulatory equipment first aid wise for a larger personnel contention on site. So we're making sure we're ready to go should we need to go that route? Yeah, so that kind of about covers the planning here. And yeah, I think we can open it up to some questions for Tony. We can go into things in more detail if people like, but yeah, thanks everyone for. I think 1 caveat to add, Neil, is that we're showing our preliminary plan. There's still a lot of holes there that we're going to drill, probably over 80 meters.

32:41 Not all the holes are there yet. Obviously, that will be dictated by how we drill. For example, you saw that Eastern fence of holes, like there's a good chance we can step even further east from there and that's not on the, call it the other side of the IP shoulder. So that's not- Yeah, this would be all part of phase 2 and beyond follow-up. So there's a bunch of initial information we need to get before we can confidently see that's a good idea, but we're always thinking about that when we plan these holes and where we would plan additional strings of exploration trail. We want to be able to maximize that, right? We want to be able to maximize that, right? We want to be able to punch some trail into a site with an idea to potentially drilling up along that road to make sure that we can get a good section of whole fences along there. So yeah, and I want to bring some more attention down to that high grade south zone.

33:38 There is still room to expand that 78, 80 area down in the south. Some of those holes aren't penciled on there right now because the access for those is not a logistical challenge. It would be a pretty turnkey thing to decide, you know, we wanna drill a fence on 78, that's right in cut block. There's, it would take a couple hours to get the rig moved out there. So there's some areas where we do plan on doing follow-up that don't require the level of planning right now. So what I've focused on here is the areas of new, broader exploration here. Awesome. I think we're ready. I do have some questions. I know a lot of people submitted some over email, but there's also a bunch in the chat. So if you guys are ready, I'll throw to a couple of those if that's all right.

34:34 Awesome. 1 that came in over email, it's also reflected in the chat. So I just want to talk about it broadly is jurisdiction. How are you finding working in BC? Is it supportive of exploration right now? Is it basically a good province within Canada to be exploring and mining in? Well, I'll take that. We've had a great experience. I can only speak for myself. From my point of view, you don't look at the province in terms of how, how you look at it, how it is in the region where you are and how's your relationship with the First Nations because whether you want to say it or not, the First Nations really do kind of direct how things go in terms of getting permits, et cetera. So, you know, our experience is very good. I mentioned LLBN and, you know, we'll dovetail to BC there, but we've had a really good experience and specifically our location. So we have no issue with BC at all. We love it.

35:30 Awesome. Yeah, and I, further to that, I've spent pretty much my entire career working in BC in a variety of different jurisdictions up in the Golden Triangle, down in the Okanagan Thompson area, in central BC, Chaco Plateau area. And like Tony said, there's, the province is pretty hungry for this kind of development work. And Everyone at the ministry I've ever dealt with as well has been, you know, they want to make sure it's done the right way and done responsibly, but they're there to help you do what you need to do. I haven't encountered big hurdles or regulatory obstacles, right? There's always ways around them that factor in environmental and social factors, but the end goal of everybody seems to be able to be to get people out there working and exploring.

36:27 Awesome, I do appreciate that. There's one question that came in about, have you started conversations with local groups? But I think we've already talked about that both in the presentation and your last answer. Somebody wrote in over email asking what current cash balance is and are you funded through to the end of the year? Yeah, so going back to the local community, that's the very, very first thing we did. Like the very first thing. So that's been done from very day 1 before we hired Neil or CJ, Greg, or anyone. So yeah, our cash balance is around $55 million. So that's what we have right now. And what's the size of our program going to be this year? Right now you have 50,000m, it's going to be approximately $20M to $23M. So we're more than funded. But again, that's the minimum we're going to drill. So we have the ability to scale. But even if we do a 60,000m program this year and a 60,000m program next year, We're still funded into 2028.

37:23 So We have a bit of a fortress of cash right now, but you know cash is king It's what you need in this business to weather the storms Etc. And you know also from my standpoint makes my job easier We come out with great results and we're advancing things the way I think we can advance things this year. We don't have to do a raise. So if we're getting momentum, we can keep that momentum. The only thing that's going to get in our way is macro. And macro, we unfortunately, folks in this room can't necessarily make decisions on how much you'd like to. You want upside, but I always tell people, you always want to limit your downside and look no further than the American Eagle Gold stock during the last month when everything kind of fell off a cliff. We've held up very, very well. So that's one thing we've done for investors. We've been able to weather this recent storm and we're ready to get into drilling starting in May.

38:13 That's true. Folks listening, A lot of stories obviously have gone down 30, 40% over the same period. So it's good to keep that in mind. Somebody wrote in the chat, basically as soon as the event started, is Eric open to expanding his investment in the future? I don't know if that, no, you don't want to speak on behalf of him, Tony, but just talk about how that relationship might evolve in the future. Yeah, look, it's like anybody. If you do well by investors, you make the money, they'll invest more with you even at a higher price. I can't speak for Eric, I think he's comfortable with his holdings. But look, you know, either speak to Eric yourself or kind of look at a history of some of his investments. I think look at, for example, Discovery Metals. You know, he's a big shareholder in that and he kept on investing along the way and he believes in it. So he's currently holding just under 10 percent, but there may be a day where he holds more, etc. So, you know, look, time will tell.

39:05 But right now, we don't need any more money. Great. But Eric's welcome to buy in the open market. Yeah, fair enough. True. I got a lot of questions really specific to drilling. So I'll kind of loop all those together and kind of tackle them in order they came in. Johan from the chat asks, how many rigs will you use when starting in May? And will you release assays as early as June? 3 rigs starting in May. We're going to transition to 4. Like Neil said, if the water is good, etc., let the team get their seed legs. 3 rigs is a lot to drill for 12-months. Sure, you see companies that have 6-8 rigs, but it's in areas like Bruce Jack where you really have a short time period when you can drill. There's a lot of areas in GT, in the Golden Triangle and the Tutugon, you have 3, four-month windows. So it's different for us.

39:54 And in terms of assays coming out, I say this every year, I'm not going to predict when the assays come out. They'll come out when they come out. We're having over 50,000m of drilling. And once they come out, there's gonna be a lot of news on the way. Great. I appreciate that. Graham from the chat asks, what's dollar per meter for drilling this season in BC? Right now we're targeting somewhere between 400 and 450 all in. We were at 444 a meter last season, and that was with some helicopter work. I'm anticipating a big spike in fuel prices, So that's going to factor in some cost. Things like drill steel as well has also gone up in price. And labour costs continue to tick up every year. So every year gets a little bit more expensive. But I still think it's very reasonable we're within that sort of 400 to 450 range, all in per meter. That's with assaying, that's with camp, that's every facet of the program.

40:58 Makes sense. Another question from Nate. Can you give an initial percentage breakdown of drilling assignment in fill expand Wildcat of the 50,000m that you've got? Yes. So, I mean, I don't think any of the drilling we're doing right now is truly wildcat. We had one, what I would consider wildcat hole last season, which was way down at the south end of the property. This year, about 80% of the drilling is devoted to expanding what we have. And another 20% is to upgrade and expand upon those known already fairly well delineated zones. So about an 8020 breakdown of new exploration drilling versus adding to to what we have and potentially upgrading our confidence leading towards a model in the zones that we've already drilled.

41:57 Got it. Doug from the chat asks if you can release the name of the drilling contractor and do they have enough experienced crews to support 4 rigs? Yeah, I'm more than happy to tell who the crew is because we love working with them. We've worked with them from the very beginning. We're a loyal company. They're loyal to us. It's ITL. And they started with us when we had 7,000 meters. They believed in us and we've been with them every step of the way. We love working with owner operators. It's people that really have skin in the game. They have the best crews. Pete and Steph, they're married. You know, consider them friends just because we work them so much and you know, Steph's the brains of the operation, she runs the back end, you know, Pete's the brawn, and they do anything for us. It's not just the drilling, it's being able to problem solve on the go, it's being able to build trail, it's being able to access their boat, If we need a spare part right away from Smithers, we can jump on the boat, we go across.

42:52 And then Jay is another person, co-owner of the company, also a foreman. So the people that own the company are there and it improves your rates, improves your health and safety. And you know, they're going to be there every step of the way we work together. So it's ITL and look, we got all the rigs so I'd like to hire them. Glenn asked from the chat will sell 32 be in a position to be able to suggest additional drill holes for its own exploration input intent. Like, still 32, as part of the IRA, we had an agreement. They gave us $30 million in December, 2024. It's like, they can choose 4,000 meters in year 1, 4,000 meters in year 2, so a maximum of 4 holes. So that's what they have by agreement. And one of the holes, Neil mentioned the big Wildcat 1, that was a South 32 hole.

43:39 But also the hole 59 was their hole too. So they picked some really good holes. But we're not just gonna leave them with 4 holes. We all work together. South32 is a great crew, similar to ITL, Bill, Andrew, Mike, Gary. They're all amazing guys. We love working with them. We work with them quite frequently. And I always say it takes minds to find a mind. So if they have good ideas and they want to share them, they want to put more drill holes in different locations, we'll do that. But if you look at the size of a property, if you see that we're drilling 80 holes, almost every single area is going to be drilled. So it's not really like Sub 32 is picking a hole, we're picking a hole. I think more of the agreement we're going to come up with is what is the sequence of the holes? When are we going to going after them? That's more than a talk we'll have with Cell32, but you know, they've made discoveries. They're building Taylor Homosa. They're a big company. They have smart people working for them. And you know, we'll work with them and you know, they like to work with us. We like to work with them and maybe Neil has more comments on that because he's really into the weeds with Cell32.

44:39 Yeah, no, it's been a very productive relationship. Their suggestions are, again, maybe a bit more resource development focused, which is good, right? That's a very good thing to be considering at this stage. And the fact that their comments are directed at AtRoot is, you know, it's a bit of a vote of confidence in the project. We're trying to do exploration, but, you know, I think everyone working on this project thinks there is definitely a path to potential development. So we want to keep that in mind in South 32 as being instrumental in kind of directing us down that track, not just with individual whole planning, but program planning on a broader scale. So yeah, it's been very helpful. I think being a fly on the wall and participating in these technical committees without being a technical guy, I think they take the grades there. I think what they're kind of most intrigued by is the size, pushing the boundaries, see how big this thing can get. And, you know, if you keep on pushing the scale, I think their belief and our belief aligns there. We'll find other areas of high grade.

45:52 So you just focus on increasing the size of this thing. And then during that time period, you'll fall into other high grade areas like we did with hole 70. And then you have more drill holes around that area. But it just starts with just building scale. And that's something that both of us want to do. So we're aligned with that. Awesome. There's one question from the chat. And Neil, if you want to take this offline, I'm happy to connect you with the person to have a more in-depth discussion. But They want to know if you can break down the drilling costs. So removing assay costs, if you can just break down what the drill costs are. Yeah, I mean, that's... Sorry. Straight up drill company cost, all in and that's including consumables, that's including, ITL is the contractor that also does our trail construction, our drill pad construction, our drill pad reclamation.

46:44 So that's a little bit more difficult to separate out of the cost per metre. But ITL's cost all in, bearing in mind some fairly deep drilling, is around the sort of $210 to $200 a metre mark. And then the rest of the cost comes from other factors. That's geological personnel costs, that's camp and accommodation costs, that's transportation costs, there's fuel costs, there's the fuel costs are external to that. So drill fuel is supplied by camp. And then assaying costs, which can, depending on your frequency of sampling, if you do 3 meter samples, your assay costs aren't nearly as much per meter. If you do 1 meter samples, so your high grade zones, which is fairly customary, then your assay costs go up.

47:35 So there's a variety of factors. 1 consequence of hitting lots of nice high-grade mineralization is that you're sampling a bit more frequently through it. So your all-in cost per meter does increase. But that's a pretty good trade-off. So good problem to have there. Awesome, appreciate it. One last one from the chat right now, and keep in mind while Tony's answering this one, you can ask any last questions you've got. You can also use that request meeting button at the bottom of the screen to request meeting with the team. But Tony, somebody asked, is there a number market cap or share price in your mind when NAC's going to go over the table to a major? Look, I just I think you just keep on building. Obviously, you know, I'm thinking triple comma. That's like, you know, That's my goal. We call it 1 billion market cap.

48:22 But look, I was kind of stumped. Antonio from Resource Talks asked me a question right around PDAC. And I think I said our target was 1 billion for now. He says, well, your target was 100 million before. And I said, well, if your goal is to run 5 kilometers, you don't just only run 5 kilometers. Then you do 10, then you do a half marathon, then you go do a marathon. So it depends on a lot of things. How's the macro doing? How's the price at copper and gold? How's our discovery? But look, let's aim for 1 billion and let's see where we are and reset from there. Maybe we have more lofty goals. You don't just stop because you hit your goals. That's a good lesson in life. But my mother always told me it's good to have goals. So that's what we're doing. And whether or not we hit it, which I believe we can, is the next thing. But look, we got from a US$3M-US$2M market cap to a US$250M market cap by drilling 60,000m over 4-years.

49:14 What can we do in a better metal market environment, drilling that same amount of meterage with 3 partners instead of 0 in 1 year. That's a question you have to ask yourself. We've done nothing but deliver and we plan to keep on delivering. Awesome. Well, as it Looks like we're out of questions in the chat. I'll say, Tony, Neil, thanks so much for going through both the presentation, but also being open to questions from the audience and having an answer for everybody. I know some of these questions are a little challenging or got different angles, so I appreciate you guys taking the time. And for everybody in the audience, If you do think of a question that you really want to ask, but forgot to during the event, please do reach out. I'll make sure the American Eagle team gets it. But Tony, Neil, thanks so much. Hope you guys have a great weekend. Thank you