Fireside Chat With TDG Gold Director Michael Kosowan

0:04 So I got a number of questions that are going to go from your background, your experience into TDG's projects. I hope you're ready for a bit of a grilling while I got you today. Looking forward to it. And thanks for your interest in the company and sort of what we're about and certainly an exciting period of our company's development. Awesome, yeah I know for sure. And I gotta ask, looking back at your history with, I see over 20 years in junior mining from mining engineering and then as a financier,

0:31 How does that kind of dual experience, you've really seen both sides, the engineering bit and also the financial background, how does that shape your approach to picking which opportunities really work in mining? Yeah, I mean, just to start out, I mean, I don't feel that old. But I think it's pretty important to have the right kind of technical backing if you're a financial person and financial backing if you're a technical one. So I think it's the marriage, if you will, of 2 really important worlds as far as getting things together and getting things right, understanding what you're seeing on an ongoing basis, because in both the financial world and sometimes in the technical space things can happen pretty quickly. And so I think a good breadth of development

1:13 and experience and knowledge is really, really useful in sort of putting those 2 things together. And we're finding out how critical financing is, particularly in the junior resource space these days where sentiment remains quite low. And no matter what gold does, no matter what market does, the sentiment still remains low. That's kind of how it's going right now. So financing is challenging. But I know looking at your experience before TDG, it looks like you worked with Sprott, Sprott Private Wealth and Sprott Global Resources. Curious, you know, with your time there, what would you learn about what makes a junior mining company work? What is the magic sauce that makes these companies successful or not? Well, there was a lot to learn, certainly, from the investment acumen of the gentleman's name who graced the front door of the building and sort of getting an idea of his strategy, his perspective with regards to different types of investment objectives, what looks, what can work, and the use of capital therein. So that was a great That was a great experience for me, and there was a lot to be learned there. Also, prior to that, I worked with Rick Rule

2:24 down in Southern California. We were acquired by Sprott at the time, and the potential of melding what I would call 2 of the best iconic investors in the resource space and sort of their mentality was really, really useful. But how that applies these days to me on the junior side, I would say a lot of it has to do with humility. And what I mean by that is you have to always be looking at various sources of capital, various avenues that you can get your best strategies, your best ideas financed correctly. You know, the problem for junior companies in taking a source of funding for granted is this, that once you do that, that medium or source of financing is no longer belongs to you. It actually owns you. So I think as a junior company you always have to be thinking in terms of spanning yourself out properly with regards to looking at both retail, institutional, corporate style investments that are out there and available to junior companies in this space. So I'd say that that was probably the most critical 1 point to distill it all together and say 1 point from all that learning.

3:46 No, I like that. You don't hear humility

3:48 much in this industry as a lesson to take, so I appreciate that. I do want to touch on your engineering experience and similarly how it helps you evaluate projects. Because I know as an engineer who's worked with Falcon Bridge, Plaster Dome, Inco, Given all of that, what are the technical aspects that when you're evaluating a project or a company, what are you really looking to look for when you get into the details? Yeah, it's a great question. I think, you know, in particular, 2 to the 3 companies that you just named, we focused a lot on the concept of life of mine. So this is a well-known mining phrase. It's basically you look at your production level, you look at your resource base, you divide 1 by the other, and then you figure out how long is this mine going to last. But in evaluating both, in working very closely with a couple of the senior companies in particular, to me I kind of changed the thought process a bit to think it was more a life of mill.

4:43 So the mill, an unfed mill for a senior company becomes a major liability very quickly. So I think the idea of how do you extend production, how do you increase resources, how do you find that reserve base that's going to really, really keep your mill and region

5:01 happy. And, you know, if you look at the, you look at distilling this down as well, I mean, it's proximity and logistics is really, really important to the senior companies in trying to decipher that or solve that riddle that they would have. These mills are in the billions of dollars of cost and infrastructure. And there's something that they can be real value generators but if they aren't well taken care of, they can turn into real liabilities. No, appreciate that. I do wanna zoom in on TDG Gold. So here's my question. What initially, with all your experience, attracted you to this specific junior? And what convinced you to join on as a director? Well, the going joke among some of my fellow directors is I look at the company and I say, you know, the old Gillette commercial where the guy says something like, you know, I liked it so much I bought the company.

5:53 But kidding aside, I put my money where my mouth is on investments. So I ended up really liking the, you know, the positive aspects and the characteristics, the optionality in particular with regard to TDG Gold. And I found myself increasing my position going on through time. And I think that that's important with regards to

6:15 aligning yourself with the shareholders day 1. And you know I would credit some of my mentors in particular of having that aspect or say you know really planting that seed in my mind. The other thing that I see in this space is because of the lower sentiment we mentioned and because of the many roles that the CEO has to play in particular. CEOs, in my opinion, are playing too many roles. They're wearing too many hats in a space that's starved for capital at this point in time. So if I could get involved as a director and assist certainly on the capital markets side and marketing what we have as a great story, I think that that was a really important step as well in trying to help with the development of the company.

7:01 No, it's great. I do want to get into the geology as well. So I know you've got multiple copper gold porphyry targets, Trident, North Quartz, Erebus, and Alexander. Which to you, as somebody with that kind of technical experience, which of them excites you the most and why? Well, those are all great targets, and they have a lot of merit. But I'm going to cheat on your question. I'm going to tell you, I'm going to say the word Newberry. And Newberry is significant as far as being a geological target par excellence and also the fact that it's something that really, really has been looked at in the past but hasn't been properly developed or drilled. I jokingly say, or maybe not such a joke, is that it's Newmont's best exploration target that they never got to drill. And it is the prospect that brought them into the Teutogon way back in the early 80s.

7:54 So Newberry has it all. It has the porphyry, it has the epithermal, it has both layers involved in 1 target. And I think that in that sense, you've got multiple prospectivity involved in looking at it as a new target area. The other targets you mentioned, I

8:12 mean, to be a little bit fair to myself, they are very new targets. They're very new targets that have come up based upon a model that we've just found as of January of this year to be really relevant to us and sort of expanding on that. So I'd like to let our technical people and our better geological minds than me get involved in sussing out what those targets really look like before I, you know, before I tell you that this is my favorite or the other one's my favorite. But I'm looking forward to evaluating them. That's good. A cheat and a swerve. I appreciate that. It is a good answer. There's one question, this is one of my favorites to ask people because I am just curious what everybody's philosophy on it. I know TDG does have the existing resource at Shasta. What's your personal, like, philosophical version of how to balance advancing a known resource and exploring the new targets?

9:03 Yeah, I think it goes back a little bit to what I said before about humility, humility to capital. So I think there are expectations, certainly with the investment dollars that come in our front door. And in a sense, try to, I'll say, helpingly guide us on the right kind of path. Market expectations are such as well and have built a certain way. And we see that in the share appreciation of our stock and interest level. So there is a degree that we have to be very mindful of what that capital is looking at and trying to crack. Having said that, looking at this market space in general, gold is the bright shiny metal. And for a variety of reasons, it's getting a lot of attention and very justified.

9:51 But that attention is being paid to it to a fairly high extent. But to be very candid, if you think of the history of TDG gold before, we weren't getting much valuation for the gold resource that we already had. You know, I've talked to some analysts and one of them had a joke. He said, well, 1 million ounce gold resource in northern British Columbia is like a belly button. Everybody's got one. And the thing that has changed for us, which is why we were getting basically nil value. But what has changed for us is now we're beside so much ore that this million ounces of gold represents something that is going to be developed. So it's the cherry on top of the sundae.

10:38 And the sundae, we know, have a lot of interested spoons that are going to be digging into it. So I think that, You know, from that perspective, it's all of a sudden ramped up in a lot of value. And then, you know, my philosophy as a mining engineer is always trying to find that baseline value to even the most speculative investment that you might be making and is in your portfolio. So I think we have it. So that's a very roundabout way as well. It's not a cheat. Maybe it's a roundabout way of sort of saying we like both. We like the porphyry because of the market attention that it's bringing us. But we're not going to forget about the gold. That was really the historical concept that got us here in the first place. And from my perspective

11:21 we can really expand upon even what we have at Shasta fairly readily with near field exploration. I appreciate that very much. I do want to zoom out just a bit further even to talk about the shiny metal, as you said, because obviously I'm going to ask you to do some crystal ball gazing here, so forgive me in advance. But generally, I know gold is still hitting all-time highs, you know, bounce back a bit, but still generally all-time highs. And copper is viewed still as critical for the upcoming energy transition, and we expect to see Chinese buying pop up. How do these dynamics affect juniors right now? When does that gap start to close is, I guess, really my question. MICHAEL ASHTON It's a great question. And the most honest answer is I don't know.

12:08 But the better answer for you and your audience is really the fact that if we're getting attention on 1 aspect of our company and we're not getting full appreciation for the other, we have time and tenor to really develop the copper aspect, because nobody's really waiting with bated breath with regards to the base metal part of our portfolio, I don't believe. I mean, they're interested exploration-wise, but there hasn't really been a lot of pressure from the perspective of our copper development side of the story. So I like that. It allows us to be rational, sensible about tackling these exploration targets. It's also useful to note that in general, copper exploration targets are cheaper in price from the perspective of a potential buyer.

13:02 So that lower price gives us a real opportunity in the context of growing this company forward, whether we're looking at copper gold style mineralization in addition, or expanding organically and really doing the technical back work that's required in order to to bring those out. So I actually like the place that we're in and we can play these metals off one another. I think they both have a great future And I think that it's important for us

13:34 to have that perspective within this company. Just to sort of step back a little bit, when you look at the senior companies, notably Newmont and Barrick, they really made forays into the copper space. And you could argue that they've been punished for it. But I suspect that that punishing is going to lighten up, especially as we start to see more interest, higher copper prices, these types of things. It makes sense and I appreciate the kind of overall view of both metals because I do find people, they love to pit metals against each other when it's often a both and not an or. I know TDG does have strong backing from larger companies like Skeena and funds like Natural Resource funds. In your experience, how important is that kind of support for a junior and what should it tell the market?

14:22 Yeah, I think it's critical as I alluded to earlier. It's important to think in terms of, you know, the analogy you could use is you want many horses pulling the chuck wagon. And when we've got institutional, retail, corporate support, internal management support, you know, all of these things, they represent different levels and more strength pulling that chuck wagon into the great beyond. So it's critical. From an individual investor's perspective, I think they can look at it selfishly and say, well, look who's already done the homework on this. You've got institutions that have very, very smart analysts on board that they're not used to making, you know, they don't make unfounded investments. They really do their homework with respects to geology, potential, corporate organization, structure, tenor, all of these types of things which are very important for individual investors to learn but may not have the time to research themselves, they can gather a degree of comfort knowing that you're aligning your investment with an intermediate corporate company in our case. You're aligning your investment with one of the biggest fund managers on the West Coast, or 2 of the biggest fund managers out of the West Coast, and also a very big significant 1 out of London. So these groups are, you know, they're with it, they do their homework, and I think having, you know, there's worse you

15:52 could do as far as throwing a dart at the dart board and at least limit yourself to getting involved in junior speculations that have, you know, a backing of people who have been there and put real capital to work in this sector. That makes sense. It's that vote of confidence. Before I let you go, I do want to ask a question that will honestly summarize a lot of what you've already talked about, but I want to get in as fine a point as possible. But really, based on all your experience, technical and financial, what do you think sets TD Gold apart from the other junior explorers? What makes your belly button different, I guess, is what I'm going to say. Yeah, you're stealing my bylines there. But I think it's the efficiency at which this company has been able to operate.

16:41 TDG Gold was born out of a bear market. And As such, they haven't had incredible amounts of largesse at their disposal. They've never had the liberalness to be wasteful. So when you look at the acquisition they made of Shasta even, which was a $7 million acquisition for 1.1 million ounces of gold. They subsequently spent about $30 million on this project. And to have it play up to the kind of company it represents today, which is about a 75 million market cap company. So they've been very, very efficient. So that would be one major aspect. The second is the idea that logistically the property package is fantastic.

17:28 Not only are the timelines shortened, which is very important in this business. But, you know, I think all roads lead through TDG's ground, whether we're looking at gold development in the Teutogon, whether we're looking at copper development in the Teutogon, whether we're looking at exploration upside in the Teutogon. It's all coming, you know, all roads lead through Rome type thing. And that's what we are with regards to the advanced situation that we represent. So I think that optionality kind of sets us apart. We're kind of the Swiss army knife of junior resource companies because there's so many ways that we can be right. So many ways that we can be successful more accurately.

18:14 And I think that is going to translate into very, very high degrees of corporate interest going forward, especially as we prove up additional resources, which we're hot on the heels of doing here in about a month and a half. So very, very short timeline to get involved. You know, when you're at your sort of making a little bit reminiscent here, Romeo, about what I'm looking at, and I think of the words, you know, Why did I get involved in this company to the extent that I did? And I think of the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald who said, our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss. And I don't want those words to come back to haunt me. And that's why I got as involved and became a very significant shareholder of this company.

19:05 Appreciate that very much. Michael, this is so great. Thanks so much for joining us today. My pleasure. Thanks, Romeo. You