State of the Metals Markets with Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse and Byron King

0:04 I'll say good morning, good afternoon or good evening, depending on where in the world you're watching from today. And thanks so much for joining us. I'm very excited about today's session. I've got with me today Byron King, editor at Paradigm Press and mining luminary and CEO of Contango Ore, proposed to be merged with Deliberate and Silver, Rick Van Doornhuyzen, to discuss the topic du jour, what can we expect from metals markets? That's sort of impossible question. I will say, keep in mind, as we go through today's conversation, none of what's discussed constitutes personal financial advice. The suits have told me to say that before this conversation, but Rick Byron, how are you today? Doing just great. It's good to be here in the new year with markets doing what they're doing. And Brian, always a pleasure to see you again. Rick, it's wonderful to be with you. Thank you so much. Everybody out there, I've known Rick for, you know, like what's coming on 20 years or something like that. So if we if we get a little friendly, that's because we're friendly.

0:52 Friendly is good. Friendly is good. And yeah, there are certainly worse months to talk about the metals market than this one. But I'll let people know how today is going to work for those in the room, because I know there's quite a few of you. So I've got a couple questions, just thought starters. Obviously you guys are here to see Rick

1:04 and Byron. So I'll just be throwing a couple questions out to them to get the conversation started. But this is an interactive event. So if you do have any questions, please feel free to use the chat button on the bottom right of your screen at any point during today's events, I'll be monitoring it. If any question fits into the conversation, I'll slide it right in. If there's really specific questions about an individual's security, I probably won't get to today, depending, but still do feel free to put them in. I'll make sure that the Right team gets it afterwards and they'll get back to you as soon as possible. But enough out of me. I want to get right into the good stuff. So, Byron, I'll start with you. I know this week Chairman Powell dropped a pretty, we'll call it, censorious

1:42 video this week that had folks buzzing. Continued instability across the globe, which shows no sign of slowing. Gold and silver still appear to be on wild rides. So I'll start with the toughest question I got. What comes next for metals? Well, what comes next? First of all, everybody out there, thank you for being here. I know a lot of paradigm people are here because I mentioned it yesterday in the Morning Reckoning. Thank you for subscribing and thank you for signing up for this. So we're going to give you your money's worth here in the next hour or so. What comes next? Well, the first thing you have to understand is that much of what you read in the press is an op. You know, you're being swayed, you're being propagandized and everything else. This whole thing about the Federal Reserve, and oh, Trump is investigating the Federal Reserve. The real story is that, I guess, the Department of Justice made 3 requests to the Federal Reserve for discovery. Give us the documents, show us about this, you know, these cost overruns that you got on this reconstruction of the Federal Reserve building down there, they had no answers.

2:41 I mean, they were non-responsive to the Department of Justice. And so, you know, so then they, you know, sent them a formal letter saying, you know, okay, this is like discovery, give us that stuff, give us what we want to know. And then Powell came out with this video like, oh, you know, they're beating up on me. And then very quickly, you know, Quickly, he organized all these other central bankers around the world to say, stop beating up on our buddy Jerome Powell and everything. This is an op, okay?

3:09 This is the central banks of the world and the Fed looking to defend their power and their so-called independence. You are being played, don't be played. But the other side of it is that the price of gold and silver and platinum and copper and everything else spiked up really hard over the weekend just on that news alone, you know, let alone everything else that's going on in the world. Venezuela, Greenland, and all these other issues that are driving world politics, de-dollarization and everything else. Gold has been going up for a long time. Before Trump Took the oath of office last year. It was going up gold silver platinum You know, I mean it bounced around and everything but but you know, we're we are in a trend It's a long-term trend and if you own gold and silver good for you If you've been in the miners great for you If you haven't been in the minors, it's not too late to get in, you know?

4:06 And so, I mean, we'll leave it at that because we could talk about that all day, but I know you've got a bunch of other questions. Rick has things to say too. Let's go keep proceeding here. Strong, strong, strong. I'll just add the interest, short-term interest rates are already lower than the Fed rate, so it's a bit of a so what. But it is a power struggle, and Trump is turning pretty much everything on its head. And there's good reason for some of it. The messaging might wanna hear the message a little differently, but that's not Trump. So let's not expect that. And until they take his social media accounts away from him, that's the way the world's gonna work for a while here.

4:56 So yeah, you forgot to buy Iran too. Yeah,

5:00 That's on the table this week. Just a minor other story to talk about. The other story that the mainstream media is not covering at all, hardly. It's terrible, terrible coverage on that. You've got to look at pretty bespoke podcasts to get to that one. But Byron, I'm going to throw you the next one. This will cover so many of the questions that we got in advance. And honestly, I don't think I've ever seen so many questions come in advance of a webinar. I know you've been writing about gold, precious metals generally, for decades. When you look at the central bank buying, the chatter about de-dollarization,

5:31 and we'll call it, I have my question, the fiscal situation in Washington, but the everything situation in Washington. What should investors be looking for as signs that gold specifically is still on a ride versus getting close to at least a temporary top? Gold is definitely on a ride. I mean, and obviously it bounces up and down. I mean, there's the little trading noise every day and the trading noise in gold, holy smokes, it can be 50, 80,100 bucks, you know, one way or the other. And where we are now with gold, I mean, it wouldn't shock me at all. We were talking about this in the green room just before we came on, it would not shock me at all, to see something of a pullback. I mean, and if that happens, if you've got some cash out there, if you've got some, you know, you know, currency cash, buy some more gold, you know, or, you

6:16 know, take advantage of the gold miners that are, you know, that are out there, you know, pull back because we are on a long-term drive here. I mean, it has to do with, you know, U.S. Debt. It has to do with interest on the debt. It has to do with annual deficits that are built into the system. They're so cyclical. And even much of it may be fraudulent, as we're seeing in things like the whole Minnesota scam and all that. But there is no cure for the overspending and the debt and the interest on the debt, which is essentially unpayable other than by monetizing it. And so, you know, at the very, very least, your gold and your silver and your, you know, your hard assets will preserve wealth over time. And you know, and the mining shares and such are going to do really, really well.

7:05 It's the middle of January. We are coming into earnings season for gold miners, big mining companies in general. And man, oh man, oh man, you're going to see some blowout earnings. All these people on the other side of the investment universe who are all, you know, they're wrapped up in their little vaporware tech companies and their little biotech companies and their little chip companies, all kinds of stuff. They're going to look over at these gold mining companies and say, where did these guys get all this money? And so I do anticipate more of a movement of rotation from the other sectors of the market back into hard assets, gold, silver, copper, it's all doing well.

7:52 If you don't have some of these gold coins, get some. You can still get them. You've missed the first couple of thousand dollar rise since gold was picking up for 1,500 bucks. There's plenty ahead over time. You don't want to trade in and out of hard metal. I mean, between the markups and the markdowns, when you buy it or when you try to sell it, don't try to trade that stuff. That's for the big boys. This is generational wealth that you're looking at. I hope that answers a lot of people's questions.

8:21 Should I sell my gold? Well, if you absolutely have nothing else to sell, sell the truck, sell the lawnmower, have a bank sale, but hang on to the metal because it'll go up and down, but generally it's going up. Great. Rick, I'll throw it to you for any additional thoughts on that. Yeah, I'll just add when the central banks stop buying gold, that's probably when you should probably start paying attention. But I don't expect that anytime soon. And that's all related to de-dollarization. And that doesn't happen in 6 months or a year. That's a, as Byron says, that's more of a generational switch. And gold was in the dumpers for many, many years. Central banks were selling gold for many, many, many years. In 2010, 2011, they started, they switched.

9:15 And we talk about U.S. Debt, which is huge. And but it isn't just the U.S. It's all nations. It's Europe, it's Japan, it's China. Everybody's in debt. We sanctioned Russia, But guess what? They have a lot of gold

9:35 and and had 1 bit of it hasn't really stopped or slowed down Russia. So what's the golden rule, right? He's got the gold. It's pretty strong. And it's interesting, you know, you talk to folks in the Trump administration, they don't seem as opposed to de-dollarization as previous administrations do. There's a strategy there, certainly. So it's interesting to see play out. I got one from the chat, actually, just really specific. I'm curious about your perspectives on it from Professore, who just writes in, what will happen to the price of gold if the government shuts down next month for a month or 2? Is that a bullish or bearish signal for metals? Whoever wants to give it a first shot.

10:13 I view it as bullish, you know, and to kind of pick up on what Rick was just saying, the central banks of the world that are buying gold are on a gold buying program. And they don't it's not that they don't care what the price is. They are definitely opportunist if the price drops during a correction. You know, they'll run in and, you know, grab what they can. But they have, you know, central banks of the world have determined that they need to,

10:39 you know, to firm up the foundations of what they do in their central banking arena. And so they are buying gold on a program. And if it's 3,500, that's what they'll pay. If it's 38, that's what they'll pay. If it's 4,000, that's what they'll pay. They are not looking to trade in and out. Central banks don't buy gold to trade it. They buy gold looking, again, generationally, 20, 30, 50 years from now. I mean, the Chinese think in terms of 100 years, so that gold that goes to China, we will never see it again. Yeah, and you look at charts that show how many Treasury bills that China used to have and how much gold they've gained. They've lost Treasury bills and they've bought gold.

11:28 So the switch is on. That's a central bank plan. As Byron said, you're not just doing it for trading purposes. But back to your question on Congress, if we have a shutdown, that's unstable. That's not normal. We shouldn't have a shutdown in government

11:52 in the United States every few months. That sounds more like a Venezuela thing. But that's potentially what we have. And so, you know when when people get nervous You know gold is something that makes you kind of calm your nerves because you know, you've got real wealth I'll just have one more thing. I was talking with some friends of mine yesterday, some of my Navy friends, you know, and we were talking about the National Defense Authorization Act, you know, trillion dollars for defense, and it's a lot of money. They passed the National Defense Authorization Act, but one of my friends was saying, yeah, but the Navy doesn't have any money. What do you mean? They haven't appropriated the funds yet. So they passed the authorization, but they didn't pass the appropriation. I kind of knew that, but I didn't, I wasn't thinking in those terms. So in terms of, you know, just plain old funding, the ability for the contracting officers to write checks, let alone pay the troops.

12:49 You know, all of that's at risk in, you know, what, in like in 2 weeks from now, when, you know, if they don't, if they shut the government down, and they, and they just, you know, don't pass the rails. So it, I mean, our US governance is just so dysfunctional. It's unbelievable. Again, no wonder price of gold, silver, it's everything else is going up.

13:09 Metals in general, gold, silver in particular, are remonetizing. Let's take it from there. I will say just for my Canadian audience, when the gentlemen here say that central banks are buying gold, they don't mean Canada. I'm sure some of you have more gold than the Canadian government has. Keep that in mind for this conversation. One thing I wanted to throw, Byron, I'll start with you, but Rick, I obviously want to get you in too, because I do want to talk about Silver. Silver I think has surprised everybody this year a little bit, even though some of the most bullish analysts seemed a little surprised. It's kind of been thought of as the rowdy little brother of gold, always threatening to break out, but not quite getting there. But now, obviously the moment's changed. So my question to you is, do we think this is a breakout? How far is it and how far left can it go?

13:56 Well, I'll bat that one. This is a breakout. There are a couple of, you know, on the supply side, there is an absolute, you know, physical shortage of silver coming out of the mines compared with demand. And that's been the case for several years now. And They've masked it over, wallpapered it over by just pulling down stocks out of the warehouse stocks, things like that. The demand side is exploding upwards. Electronics,

14:27 everything has silver in it in terms of electronics, solar panels, that whole industrial story, medical uses. And then also the monetary side of silver. I mean, again, just like central banks are buying gold, they're buying silver by the ton, you know. And so this whole thing that we've dealt with, this whole situation we've dealt with for many, many years where the paper traders push down the price because you can always get the physical metal. I think we've come to the end of that line. We saw the explosion upwards in silver prices in just, pick a number, the last 2, 3 months And I think this morning it was over 90 bucks an ounce or something like that. Again, they might have a way to go back. One of my colleagues, Sean Ring, likes to talk about Mr. Slammy comes in and he sells it down. Yeah, great.

15:18 Mr. Slammy will show up, but then the Chinese buyers will show up the next few hours later and say, we want the real McCoy here. Before we came on, I said I was doing some cleaning around the house, whatever. I went into one of my chest of drawers and I was kind of organizing my socks, literally organizing my socks. And I found a bunch of silver that I had just sort of thrown in a drawer a couple of years ago. I forgot all about it. But when I looked at it, I remember buying this particular item at the New Orleans conference. I think I paid

15:50 24 bucks an ounce for it. And it was just it was pretty. It's like the British mint or whatever. So but I threw it in a drawer and didn't think about it. And now it's over. It's over a triple. It's been a couple of years. But if you have silver, hang on to it or you can sell it at the jewelry store or at the people who are buying all your old gold and your old silver and everything. Like a couple of my sisters and my niece, they go, oh, Uncle Byron, We sold our 1980s and 90s stuff and we got all this money for it. I'm good for you.

16:22 I treat Silver coins like my fidget toys at the office. They've suddenly become very valuable. So I've got to be careful, but I'm fidgeting with them. But Rick, I'll throw it to you, obviously, with the upcoming proposed merger with Dolly Varden Silver. Silver must be on your mind. So I'm curious what your take is. Yeah, you know, our portfolio of assets in Alaska at Contango was definitely Gold biased. I mean, we did that on purpose. And so, you know, when we looked at Dolly Varden, we thought it was a perfect mix because what we'll end up with is more of a balanced precious metals portfolio of Gold and Silver, roughly half and half. And so, yeah, We think that's a good mix. Obviously, from a Dolly Barton side, our cash flow from Moncho allows us in a joint way to get not just to have Silver in the ground, but to produce those bars of Silver that Byron's holding in his hand. And so having the ability to realise the real value out of the asset at Kitsalt by joining forces, That's what this is all about.

17:33 The mining industry is in the exploration business. If you just focus on exploration, there's value to be had for sure. But the big value is producing and becoming a producer.

17:45 That's the holy grail of being in our business. And so, that's what we do. And when we look at the future, Silver's gone up, I don't know, 50, 60% since we made the announcement, which is amazing because it wasn't that long ago. But then you read, okay, well, Samsung's going to invest multiple billions of dollars building a solid state battery factory, which uses what I think is a kilogram of silver in every battery. So I mean, that's like an order of magnitude more silver in any other factory

18:27 usage. And so it's just, that's a step change in the amount of physical silver. And you know, you can't be buying paper silver if you've got to build a battery. So you've got to convince the Byron Kings with his bar of silver that he found by his socks that he has to sell that in order for that battery to get made, because we've been in deficit for years, not just months, but years. And that speaks to the underinvestment in the mining industry in general, because you can, whether it's Silver or Gold or Copper or Zinc, all of the metals have been under-invested in from an exploration standpoint. That's why you see grades declining.

19:16 It's easier for a BHB to, you know, expand the mill, spend half 1 billion dollars expanding the mill and fractionally lower the cutoff grade, than go through all the pain and suffering and trying to find a new Escondida. That's generational, you don't do that in a year, you do that in 20 years. That's the game we're playing right now. And it's, yeah, So this train's not stopping anytime soon. Let me just add to what Rick was saying. I'm good friends with Rick, I've known him for years. I had no idea that they were going to put Dolly Varden together with Contango. We don't have those kind of talks.

20:03 We talk about other things. But when I heard the news, it was like, this is brilliant. Because I've visited the Dali Vardhan site just a little over 2 years ago, I guess. Went up there and had a beautiful tour of the place. They've got fabulous rocks. They've got a fabulous exploration program.

20:21 A great, great, great advanced exploration and to some extent early development. And it's really fun because it's, when I say fun, It's fun because for where the Dali Vardhan site is, it's not too far from a fjord that comes from the Pacific Ocean through the mountains and everything else, up to their, near to where their camp is. So basically you can mine the mountains, but you can haul it literally down to tidewater and put your ore on a barge or a ship, whatever, and haul it out and take it anywhere in the world. So right away, your logistics are cured. You don't need a highway, you don't need a road. I mean, you need electric power, things like that, but that's all up there. But in terms of just the logistics of where they are, and then the quality of the ore is fabulous. I was up there with Frank Joostra, who you may know him, and he and I were just, we were like kids, we were going through all their core samples, we were going through, oh, look at that, look at that. We actually took a big chunk of material over to the core shack and asked the kid to slice it for us on the saw and said, I have a photo of me and Frank holding this beautiful, shiny piece of ore that they have there. And you can just see the silver. It was like it was lead, but really rich in silver.

21:37 And it's a fabulous ore body that they're looking at, an entire ore system, really, mineral system that they're looking at. And then the idea that they combined it with Contango, which like Rick said, it's nice to have an exploration program, nice to have ounces and pounds in the ground. That's wonderful. We love that. But it's even nicer to have pounds in the ground that you're pulling out and you stick it off to a mill and the mill crushes it up and then they write you a check and they hand you a check, that's even better. Yeah, the check part is really what everybody's in the game for, so I respect that. Otherwise it's a long walk between the mill and the bank. I'll just add that, and Byron, you've been to Johnson Track too.

22:24 And to me, Kitsal is the Silver image of Johnson Track, which is a Gold-dominated precious metal system, but it's on the water, it's on tidewater. So there's a lot of good synergies between these 2 projects. So that's why it's such a good fit. I think that's why the market likes the combination. Yeah, that's great. Again, I visited with Rick and his team in Alaska in

22:50 the end of July, just 4 or 5 months ago. Rick was an extremely gracious host. We had a terrific rundown of everything. I visited the Lucky Shot project, and we visited the Johnson Tract, and the Moncho. We had a real good scrub on that. And so you've got real live production of high-grade ore that goes up to Ken Ross, And they do all the work. And Rick didn't have to build a mill and build a processing or anything. He just had to make a deal with Ken Ross. That's fine. But their money's good. Their check is good. And then the lucky shot, I mean, here's some of their ore right there. I'm holding it in my hand. This is the country rock, so here's the contact between the ore body and the host rock right there.

23:39 And then the Johnson tract, it's just a beautiful, beautiful piece of geology down there. And again, it's not too far from the coastline. And you can, again, not a long run to get to tidewater. And you can put it on a barge, put it on a boat, sail it wherever you want to take it. And so the convergence between them is certainly interesting. Sometimes you read the kitso notes, and it sounds so much like Johnson Tract. Some of the details of it, I'm like, yeah, it sounds really familiar. But Rick, I want to throw you 1 and I'll call this currently a champagne problem. But

24:12 I know you've built mines before and you know the cycle from discovery to production intimately. When you're making decisions today, what metal price assumptions are you pencilling in, whether that's mentally or on paper? And how do you balance optimism, which I think a lot of the sector is feeling right now, myself included, with prudence? Yeah, I mean, You definitely have to take a long-term view and that's difficult to understand what's the right number and it'll change. So just a couple of reference points. So really what we, right now for Moncho, from a planning standpoint, we're using $3,700 Gold. So we're almost $1,000 off in terms of spot. So if we plan around $3,700, we're going to err to the upside.

25:02 We should be error to the upside. But I mean, my plan is so many tonnes at so many grades, expect this recovery.

25:09 Those are the basic 3 numbers of the plan. So that's 3,700. Just the other day, I received a couple of emails from our favorite bankers. They both put out lists of, I think it's about 25 of their peer group. They both, 2 or 3 different banks do this. And they're always pretty close on what the analysts are using for 2026 prices. Usually they go out 27, 28, and then they use a long-term price. And I've always found it interesting that most of the long term prices are much lower than certainly the spot or 2026 or 27, 28 prices, which I always find odd because that means you're in backwardation. And if you're in backwardation, that's really weird.

26:06 Silver is in backwardation, right? It's your silver, your spot price is much lower. So but it's a conservative way of doing things. And I sort of get it. But I actually I think Tanacord was the one exception that they went out 27, 28, 29. And I don't remember the number anymore, but whatever number they had, it was higher number than today. And then they just use that number for long term. And that actually logically made more sense to me than saying it's going to be, you know, 5000 in 29 and it's going to be 3000 long term. The average, get back to your point, the average is median. The median value is 3000.

26:50 So analysts are the folks who work for the banks and they send out notes to their clientele saying, you know, here's how we're valuing company X or company Y long term, that's a $3,000 Gold price that they're using as a median price. And it ranged, there wasn't a lot of volatility between the analysts on what they were using. They were all within, you know, 2, $300. Certainly for the spot prices, but I'm talking about the longer term price. There wasn't like a huge, you know, somebody wasn't at 7,000 or there's nobody up at 7,000. Sure. Guys who were out there were up at 5 and you might see them before the end of the month.

27:36 That's certainly possible. Can I add something to what Rick just said here? Of course. And this is for the audience out there, obviously, but a lot of people don't really understand what that number truly represents, your baseline assumption number. When you think, oh, yeah, oh, you know, $4,000, we should be making money. That's not how you think inside the company. No. When you're developing a mine, and especially when you're mining it up, you have a really good idea of the size and the shape of your

28:08 ore body, what the pit shell looks like or what the tunnels look like, you know, what are you going to mine? You have built little wire diagrams, you've built little, you know, now they're all electronic, they're all computerized, in the olden days you did it on paper, you know, but you know where like every, pick a number, every cubic 10 feet of rock is, you've got an idea of everything for, you know, for kilometers all around, you know, if you drill it all up, everything else, so you know what you're going to mind. And so you say to yourself, if I use if I use $2,000 gold, you know, well, I can mine this and this and this, but I'm not going to get that other stuff. But if I use $3,000 gold, oh, now all of a sudden, I've just increased the whole shape of what it is I can mine. And $3,700 gold in a $4,500 world, you are adding so many ounces, you're adding an entire scheme of how and what you're going to mine in terms of, I'm gonna mine this, I'm gonna mine that. And then you bring it out of the ground and depending on what it is you've mined, now you blend it with other ores so that you can run it through the mill and run it through the whole downstream processing and refining system in the most efficient manner. It's a lot of engineering, a whole lot of math involved.

29:24 And I mean, one of the reasons, for example, that Ken Ross really likes Manchurian ore is that you can take this high-grade Manchurian ore and you can blend it. And as long as you do the math right and do the accounting right, you know, then at the end of the day, you're processing a lot more ore and you're getting a lot more out of it. But if you use too low of a number,

29:48 if you're the company and you use a low number, you're leaving a lot of gold in the ground, and you're not really representing the true picture of what it is you have out there. And every company does it differently. I mean, some companies like Barrick are really conservative. They tend to use really, really remarkably low-ball numbers

30:10 on valuating their ore bodies. Other companies are more aggressive. But considering where gold is now and the assumptions of where it can go, you know, Rick and Contango and 3700. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Good. Good number. You know, we're going to we're going to pull out what's there and ship it up and, you know, you know, produce it and sell it and cash the check. There you go. We got a comment from the chat. If analysts knew what they were doing, they'd be working for mining companies. I think they'd make a good throw pillow. The analysts in my audience probably love that one. I got one, just zooming back Byron, because I want to talk about kind of your history in following Contango for a second. I know you followed the company for a while, as you said, right at the top of the hour. What originally caught your attention about the story and how has that thesis evolved as the company's changed? Even since I've known the company, it's changed. So how's your thesis evolved along with it? Okay, well, I mean, I get a lot of emails, I get a lot of phone calls, you know, hey, Byron, I want to tell you about this, you know, great idea I've got.

31:08 Okay, yeah, great. I've known Rick for many, many years. And before I knew Rick, I knew Nova Gold and Donovan Creek, Alaska, which, you know, Rick, you know, found, he was the prime mover on that one, you know, 30 some million ounces ago. So I followed Rick Van Neuenhuis for many years. I mean, I remember, before I kind of knew him, I talked to Rick Rule about it. And I said, Rick, do you know this Rick Van Neuenhuis guy? And he says, oh, yeah. And I said, what do you think about him? He says, well, he says, if anybody

31:41 can make a project work, it'll be him. So I've always followed Rick through a bunch of different companies, Nola Gold, Nola Copper, Trilogy Metals in the Ambler District on the south side of the Brooks Range up there. And then 1 day, I get an email or a phone call where it was from, hey, hey, Barney, I got this new project I'm putting together. OK. And so right away, you know, this is a different phone call than just, you know, you know, 25 other phone calls I get, you know, OK, what do you got? And he gave me the story and he says, we've got this place called Manchow. And we were putting together this thing, this lucky shot was this mine that closed during World War 2. And, you know, and this was before the Johnson track thing that was that was in high gold had that. And so anyhow, so he gave me the pitch.

32:30 And I'm like, wow, this is really interesting.

32:33 And and that that really turned me on to it. So I just I started following it. And like like Rick Ruland said 20 years ago, that if anybody can do it, that Rick Van, Rick Van N can do it. You know, so he got the whole Manchow thing working. He made the deal with Kinross. And you say he made a deal with Kinross. I mean, in order, it's one thing to mine rock, you know. It's another thing to like have a mill process it, you know, crush it, process it, and pour gold bars. That part is really expensive. It takes a lot of permitting, takes a lot of years and a lot of money. And if you if you just want to kind of be in the business and make cash flow, make a deal, you know, and so no deal is forever. But right now they've got a good deal with Kinross up there. So they mine the manchot. They haul it up there on a truck. Kinross does it.

33:22 They pour the gold. They split the money. And then you've got funds to do other things, like go back to Lucky Shot, which has this very high-grade oar right there. And it was discovered in the 1920s by a couple of guys who were out, I guess, hunting or something. And somebody shot at a bird. And they said, hey, where's my bird? So they went to find the bird, because that's their dinner. You're out in the middle of nowhere.

33:48 And instead he sees this vein just kind of sticking out of the ground. So this is the lucky shot ore body right here. And so they mined it until World War II when the government shut gold mining down because gold mining wasn't critical to the war effort, although you might think that mining money is critical to a war effort, but that was then. And so, anyhow, so Manchow has worked really well, mining, trucking, processing, you get Ken Ross cashed the check, and then what do you do with that money? You pay down the debt, you know, but you pay your bills, but you know, then you, now you've got money to drill up, you know, lucky shot, get that thing rolling, and you've got money to fund, you know, the deal with High Gold, which turned into Johnson Trex. And then, and now you've got an entire, you know, process that's up and running. And along comes the merger with, with Dolly Varden, which, you know, again, you know, just 1, 1 good ore body leads to another.

34:42 And there's an old saying that, you know, a bad mine or a bad ore body, you know, often doesn't get better with age. Well, you know, but but a good one can, you know, so, you know, Manchurian gets better. Lucky Shot gets better every time they drill a hole. Johnson Track gets better every time they do some more exploration. Dolly Varden, they get better every time they, you know, every time they release another couple of holes. It's like, oh man. So I guess that's the story. Super helpful. Appreciate it. And Rick, I'll throw it to you. I know we've talked about the merger quite a bit today, but I want to put it to you as cleanly as possible. That's really, if you could, for the folks in the room, I know there's a lot of people aren't current shareholders of Contango. Just walk us through the logic of the merger with Delibard. And as we talked about, you've got the gold projects in Alaska and you're combining with Silver Explorer and the Golden Triangle.

35:28 What does this company look like And why does 1 plus 1 equal 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 here?

35:34 Yeah, so as I mentioned before, it really brings silver to the precious metal portfolio. So what our what our objective is, and Sean and I are very much on the same page on this, is we now now we can now we've got the money to get the gold and the silver out of the ground. There's a lot of work to do, a lot of execution to do, but we've got the dollars to do it. We put the companies together, we'll have 100 million, over 100 million dollars of cash on hand, U.S. Dollars. We'll be generating on average about 100 million dollars of free cash flow from Macho at today's gold prices. At the end of the year, we'll be debt-free, hedge-free and being able to advance our project. So our objective is to grow that portfolio to producing 200,000oz of Gold and 4, 5, 6Moz of Silver a year.

36:31 And when you look at that company, that company is Hekla. And Hekla is a $14Bn market cap company. So we're building a rocket ship. When we combine, we'll have a little over 30 million shares outstanding. NYSE American listed Toronto TSX full board. Right now Dolly's on the junior board, but when we combine, we'll be raised The listing up to the full board, TSX, not the venture. And we've got a great portfolio of projects. We have 4 districts, 4 district scale opportunities, advanced stage exploration opportunities. Obviously, the amount of shows in production, but that's a whole district.

37:19 We're exploring there. Lucky Shot is a whole district. Johnson Tract is a whole district. And Kitsault is, I would argue, probably 3 districts. But it's a corner of the Golden Triangle. It's not a bad spot on planet Earth. And we've got a great team and we'll have a bigger, better team when we combine. It's a great opportunity to build a new, you're an investor in North America and you want safe jurisdiction, you want, I like high grade. I mean, nothing wrong with heat bleach, low grade heat bleach, but they, price of gold goes down. Those things don't make much money, and they can lose money quickly.

38:10 So grade is king in our business. It's always been king, it always will be king. So focusing on high-grade projects is what we're going to continue to be doing, and focusing on those aspects of delivering ounces with our direct shipping or model, where you compressed, you leapfrogged the Lassonde curve. The thing about the Lassonde curve, when Pierre Lassonde came up with that in the 80s, the valley of what was referred to as the valley of death after the exhilarating part of the discovery, and you had to do all the work, you know, the geotech work, the hydrology, you got to go permit, and then once you did all that, that took a few years, but then you had to build it, and there was risk in that, hope you got everything right.

38:59 And Because everybody in today's world, whether it's investors or regulators, they want things de-risked. And so what used to take 2 or 3 years now takes 10. And it's very difficult, I won't say impossible, but it's very difficult for a junior company to get through the valley of death of 10-years. And even if they do, in the process of doing that, they dilute the hell out of their shareholders. And so, yeah, you maybe get to the end goal, but the shareholder is sitting there with a piece of paper that's valued less than when he started with. So that's the reality of the world we live in and that's why we've developed this model and we're gonna focus on great.

39:45 And Again, we've got a good team and we can execute the plan. There's a lot of work to do and there's still risk left. It's the mining business. It wouldn't be the mining business without risk. But it's a good focus plan. We've got the dollars and the team to do it. Great. I'm excited. I'd add to that the one thing that impressed me about Contango all along was the tight share structure. Rick mentioned the dilution or the non-dilution of Contango versus so many other companies. The idea that they've gotten this far with such a small number of shares outstanding, I mean, which is, and it's, you know, I think it was a $29 share this morning when I looked at it, and I mean, a year ago it was a $10 share, you know, so I mean, it's tripled in a year.

40:34 But in terms of, they got through the process of building themselves out to production and cash flow without having to dilute the shareholders. And now that they've got the cash flow, they can self-fund, they can internally fund and grow. And again, I'm not speaking for Rick, I don't know what Rick's going to do here, but it doesn't look like he has to raise a whole lot of money to do what he wants to do. There may be a time when you can do that. But in terms of the cash flow that you've got, you can do other things besides issue shares. You can do a lending agreement, what have you. There's many, many ways to do what you want to do without diluting the shareholders. And that's what's really important. And Barron, jumping in, I want to get your take on what this merger signals about where we're at in the mining cycle. So the Contango Dali 1, do you think we're gonna see more consolidation among juniors and importantly for the folks in the room, is that healthy for investors? Should they be looking forward to M&A or afraid of it?

41:34 Oh yeah, I think absolutely. There's going to be more mergers. I think it's generally good for the industry. There are a lot of really nice projects out there, really good in geology, good management teams, good geologists who know what they're doing. And they've worked up something really, really good. I could list you 15 companies just off the top of my head that I'm totally impressed with what I've seen out there. But then the next question is, where do you guys go? Because A, you need more money to do what you want to do. And for what you want to do in terms of the permits and the timing, what have you, If you want to try to do it kind of organically on your own, good luck. I mean, permitting takes forever.

42:23 So many road barriers along the way, just so many impediments. And whereas if you can get merged or folded in, if you get bought out, if you sell the project, or you joint venture the project in with another company, a larger company, It can move things along in such a good way. And then we're at a stage where the larger companies that have been mining, mining, mining, And they're producing and they're selling and they're impressing Wall Street with their earnings. And as we mentioned earlier, they're going to impress Wall Street even more with their blowout earnings. But then the other question Wall Street's going to ask is like, OK, guys, you mined down a couple of million ounces of your resource in the last 2 years, what are you going to replace it with? Well, it's one thing to replace your resources at $1,500 gold. It's another thing to replace your resources at $4,500 gold. And it's kind of like you guys are putting a big hole in your resource number by mining it all and not replacing it. And so 1 relatively, I don't wanna say cheap, 1 low cost way to replace your resource numbers or your reserve numbers is to go out and buy a compatible company or merge with a compatible company where they can fit their numbers and their accounting system in with yours. And boom, just add water, you've got instant ounces on there. And I can think of innumerable companies out there. You know, I deal a lot with the Yukon companies and BC companies, you know, back east

43:56 in Quebec and Ontario. I can think of a whole lot of companies right off the top of my head that have a lot of ounces, and they would be very, very accretive to the big usual names, the Barricks and the Newmonts and the Agnicos of the world, but as well as even within the intermediate stage. I can think of a lot of that. So I was answering your question. Yes, it's very healthy. Yes, I think we're in an M&A cycle. And then also, as I mentioned at the very beginning, there's a capital rotation out of like the rest of the market, all that, you know, all that, all those big, you know, trillion dollar companies for, you know, for that make chips and make apples and make software and all this kind of stuff. If you just took a little bit of that money off of the table while it's there, before the market crashes for those guys, if you take a little bit of that money off the table and you move it into the mining sector, there are not enough companies to buy, quite frankly.

44:49 And then we can look at explosive upsides to a lot of solid companies that have done good exploration, advanced stage exploration, early stage development. Again, I can think of 15 off the top of my head. I mean, this isn't really a, you know, giveaway the names kind of a kind of a car here. But, you know, but, but yeah, Rick knows, Rick knows him too. I mean, you know, we don't have to go very far at all. You know, we see them all at the conferences, we see them all in Whitehorse and Yukon and you know, just, you know, you know, you know, XYZ Gold. I mean, there's a bunch of them out there. Awesome. One question I've got, and this is, I'll start with Rick, but Byron, you're going to get you in on this one too. And that's, Rick, now that you're a producer, you've got tons of free cash flow. I often say you've got like Scrooge McDuck money at this point just coming in. It's my framing.

45:38 How does having that cash flow change the conversation when you're sitting across the table from institutional investors at a conference or in a banker meeting? What's different now than it was, let's say, a couple of years ago for how those chats go? Well, the way capitalism works is when you need money, it's not there. And when you don't need money, it's there. So that's just the way the world works. And so, yeah, when you're when you're when you don't need money, you get a lot of people knocking at your door and with all sorts of ideas, some of them, some of them good, some of them not so good. So it definitely changes the conversation. And obviously, you know, we look at things and you know, we've talked about our low share count.

46:24 And we've done that on purpose, because we're shareholders, I have a significant amount of my wealth in Contango. And so I'm very focused on the share count. And I want whatever we want, Whatever we do, if we do issue shares, we want to do that with an accretive transaction or an accretive value to be added there. That's why we need it. If we're going to take money, we're going to do it because we can see growth. What we've talked about, the next stage for us, I think, is buying a mill. That's going to take some dollars or it's going to take some shares in some form.

47:15 But once we have a mill, now I can take my Johnson Track ore and my Kitsault ore and my Lucky Shot ore and I don't have to pay a toll to Fort Knox, to Kinross to process my ore. And we love our partners at Kinross, they're great. They've done a great job. They've been very good to us and we have a good working relationship, but it's business and they're making a lot of money on the toll. Selfishly, for my shareholders, I'm like, well, let's see if we can figure out how to skim this capital differently. So that's, you know, like I said, that's it is, it's a frustration with with capitalism. But when you need the money, it's, you're gonna, you know, you're, you're a, you're a beggar, you're, When you don't need the money, you're not a beggar. So you can take the money, you can choose to take the money. But again, if we're going to do that, it's got to be something that's truly accretive.

48:16 Fair enough. In the interest of time, I want to get into jurisdiction for a bit because I know we've talked a lot. You're operating in Alaska, now adding British Columbia. Byron, as a fan of your writing, I know you write about geopolitical risk fairly frequently. And I'm curious, how important is the friendly jurisdiction story when there's global uncertainty around mining permits, resource nationalism is now more important than ever for you know to be one of those called first-tier jurisdictions. Absolutely geopolitical risk and just jurisdictional risk are just top-shelf items as far as I'm concerned. There's a lot of geology in the world from the North Pole to the South Pole. You can go anywhere you want, and that's the issue. Where do you want to go? Where do you want to be? Do you want to be on the other side of the planet? Well, OK, but that's the other side of the planet. Do you want to be, which continent do you want to be? North America, South America? Well, things in South America are getting a little bit better.

49:12 But I've been burned a few times in a couple of ideas down there. But things are opening up. That's great. North America, I mean, do you want to be in the U.S.? Do you want to be in Canada? Where in the U.S.? You know, these are all the questions that you have to ask yourself. Alaska is very, very mining friendly. I mean, They, you know, the state, the federal, the local political actors are all, they all understand the mining industry. You've got security of, I guess the Australians call it security of tenement up there. You know, the Alaskan Native Corporation situation is absolutely, you know, it's nailed down. I mean, there's a few little issues here and there, but I mean, you don't have the kind of issues there that you have, let's say, other places, you know.

50:00 And then when you get into Canada, the Canadian jurisdictions, you know, one of the first questions you have on anything is, you know, First Nation, you know, First Nation agreements. You know, otherwise it's just an interesting science experiment. But Dolly Varden, where they are in that corner of Northwest British Columbia, things are working pretty well up there in terms of just how everybody gets along. Can we all play in the same sandbox? Yeah, you can. The environmental issues, those are critical. Other issues, you know, road access, water access, electric power, the ability to move materials back and forth, you know, whether it's explosives, whether it's the diesel fuel that you need. All of those things are really important. I mean, I love the Yukon, except that the Yukon is its own electric power grid. They don't, you know, they need about 200 kilometers of high tension electric power wire to connect to the BC grid, you know, or otherwise one of the big constraints in the Yukon right now is just how much electric power is there.

51:09 The Northwest part of British Columbia, they have their own electric power issues too. But Dolly's right in there. They're working on that. They've got that wrapped up. And so these are really important things. I mean, you know, elsewhere in Canada, I mean, I talk to people, you know, where they, oh yeah, my mine is in, you know, just north of, you know, Thunder Bay, we're right on the Trans-Canada, we're right on the railroad, we're right on the power line. All of that is good stuff. All of that is really nice to know. Because again, it's not just, you found this really wonderful ore body out in the middle of South Succotash or something. Is there a road? Is there a power line? There's so many developmental issues. And all of these things, again, they take a lot of time and a lot of permits and a lot of money.

51:58 And if you can eliminate those sort of things, I mean, Rick mentioned buy a mill. Buy a mill. He didn't say build a mill. He said buy a mill. Yeah, that means you have a mill. It's already there. It's got a footprint. It's got permits. It's got a power line. It has a workforce. So these are all the things that go into the thinking process of, you know, what companies do it's when I say do I like what companies do I want to present to readers and you know, just not as just sort of these vaporware speculations or something more like, you know, this is something that is really going somewhere and can turn into something. I'll just, if I can jump in here for a second, just literally before we get on the call here, I was reading an article on the DRC Congo.

52:46 And the title was, we're not giving our metals away. And they're sending a message. Sure. China has been investing huge, huge dollars in building infrastructure in the DRC. And, and obviously, the US has been in discussions as well. So that's a piece of it, because that's where infrastructure meets politics. You can't develop a mine. Byron, you had a great article on your guns, guns, gold and Greenland. I really enjoyed reading that because I've heard this mantra of, oh, Trump wants Greenland for the minerals. It's like, no he doesn't. That's like decades away. Greenland has its 90%, 95% covered with ice in the summertime.

53:42 And then the rest of the year it's freezing freaking cold. So yeah, that's not, no, that's 100 percent strategic. And so this is where politics and infrastructure and all this comes together because, you know, if you look, DRC has got amazing geology. Sure. I work there and it's a fantastic place for a geologist to go to, but man, it ain't easy. And it's not easy at a lot of different levels. And it's, you know, when you don't have infrastructure, somebody has got to build it, somebody has got to finance it. And then when boots on the ground, when you're trying to build something, it's this tribe and that tribe, and who's got the bigger piece of pie?

54:31 And none of that happens easily. Now, Greenland, that might happen easily because there's only what, 80,000 people that live there. So it'll be an interesting dynamic to watch, and as what's been referred to as the Don Roe doctrine to take after the Monroe doctrine, which was, you know, that's the new version of America first. So, but it's all about missile defense, is what it's all about. Yeah, and the opposite of the DRC, where politics meets infrastructure in Alaska, is basically Trump wearing a Captain Alaska coat and saying, drill, baby, drill. So different environment there for sure. He's obviously a fan. Rick, I got one question for you before I get into, unfortunately, just a couple short questions from the audience, because we're running out of time. But I want you to dream a little here in the last one. If everything breaks right over the next 3 to 5 years, what does the combined company, Contango or Dolly Varden, look like? What's the vision you're building towards with this merger? I think we're a $10 billion market cap company. I think that's what we're building. We're another North American precious metals-focused producing company that obviously is going to have a much larger market cap than we do now. As I said earlier, lots of execution work to do, still risk on the table.

55:50 No question about that. We're still talking about mining, but we've got the assets, we've got the team, we've got dollars, we've got access to capital. That's what I said earlier. When you need the money, you're begging on the street. There's maybe a few nice people that come up, but it's not that much. And So I think we're in a really good spot to build a premier go-to stock for precious metals in North America, safe jurisdiction in North America. I think the Don Rowe doctrine will keep North America safe. There you go. Good notes. A couple of quick questions from the audience and I really apologize. I'm definitely not going to get to all of them, but I will make sure that the appropriate teams, I know some are directed directly to Byron, some are directed to Contango. I'll make sure both get them so they can get back to you at their leisure. But Rick, a couple questions. 1 right off the bat, right at the beginning of the hour, so I want to get to it. How much Gold has Contango mined as far as guidance that's already been released at Moncho?

56:51 We'll actually come out with our wrap-up for 2025 in a week or so. And then We'll give guidance for 2026 and then 2027. We're gonna do two-year guidance. In terms of ounces, we set out to produce 60,000 ounces and that's basically what we've done. And in terms of cash flow, we set out to produce US$100M of free cash flow and we produced 102. So I think we're on target. I think Kinross is giving us good guidance and we'll be slightly above, but I think pretty much right on. Obviously, we've got a lot of plans to bring in. We're doing about 70,000m of drilling this year between Kitsault and our own projects at Lucky Shot and Johnson Track.

57:50 There will be a lot of new slow coming out. We're drilling right now at Lucky Shot. We're underground drilling. We'll probably have a news release out on that towards the end of the month, beginning of February. I don't want to inundate everybody with putting out a drill hole at a time sort of stuff. We'd rather just kind of do it in batches and tell a bit of a story of what 10 or 15 or 20 holes means. Lots of news flow. Great. Last question I'll throw you. This is an interesting question because Contango obviously has had a great year in markets. I think I saw a high today was $29.69, which is always nice to see. Someone in the chat asks, why with prices where they're at, do you think we're just now, Contango's coming back to its height from 2022, 2023. So the question is why? Yes, why is it just now getting back to those heights?

58:40 Because there's all that execution risk. I mean, We've lowered the execution risk by not building mills and tailings facilities and permitting those things, but there's still execution risk. And as we saw a year ago, I was a little over a year ago now, the Biden administration didn't approve the transportation plan for the state of Alaska for the first time ever. And that precipitated reduction that were weight restrictions on bridges because the state didn't have the money, the federal money to have a plan to fix the bridges. And so they had to go out and say, okay, we got better put bridge weight restrictions on because we don't know when we're going to be able to repair the bridges until we get the money from the Biden administration, which when Trump came along, he authorized, that's one of the first things he did was just settle that because that was completely a political decision. Just it was pushback on our governor who was a very strong Trump supporter.

59:40 But that, so that came out of the blue. That's not something we had any control over, Kinross had any control over, but that resulted in reduced truck weights, which means you're delivering less ore to the mill than planned. And so that hit our share price hard. We were cut in half. So, okay, now you've got to fix that and we fixed that and people were worried about different out what is that what are the implications of that the following implications are can you deliver into your hedge book and you can't deliver in your hedge book you're pretty much screwed. But we fixed all that. But until you fix all that, those are all those risk things that are still out there. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know if that's called a black swan event, but it's, you know, it was something else. It was something like that because It came out of the blue.

1:00:31 It was the first time the federal government had not approved a state transportation plan. Sure. Now, I know the stock's up 5% today, so it's lovely to see. Byron, I'm going to give you the last word here on metals markets just before we jump. I know we're at the end of the hour. Any last thoughts? I know there's hundreds of people in the room. Last thoughts about metals markets before we jump for the day. Well, I appreciate everybody that has endured us so long for the last hour. Thank you for being here. You're in the right spot. I mean, this is not a flash in the pan sort of a thing. If you are new to the metals markets, there's a lot of unfamiliar terms you might be hearing and geologic terms or, we are not tech, we are not vaporware, We're not computer chips and all that kind of stuff. Although there is a lot of high tech in the mining industry, I absolutely assure you, there is like advanced chemistry, advanced physics, there's a lot of number crunching, AI and everything else.

1:01:28 But the metals industry, mining industry in general, has been long neglected by the markets, it has been starved for capital for years, under explored, and if you don't explore, you don't find, under capitalized for development, and if you don't develop, you don't have, and underdeveloped means you aren't underproducing, And again, underproducing, it's not there. And so why do you think, why? Gee, metal prices are going up. Yeah, because there's not enough of it. And that's not a problem that can be fixed on, you know, an Apple computer cycle of, you know, 6 months for software and 18 months for a new iPhone or something. No, this is a generational problem. And you are looking at years ahead of us now of capital flowing in to the resource industry to build what they didn't build before. The wolf came to the door, the wolf was knocking at the door saying, you guys underinvested for 25 years and now it's payback time, guys. And so give me the money. That's why you got $90 silver. That's why you got $4,500 gold, $2,400 platinum, $6 copper.

1:02:33 And unless there's a total global absolute crash meltdown and everything else, those numbers are just going to keep moving up. So you're in the right place. Awesome. Well on that, Byron and Rick, this is even more fun than last time. Thank you so much for sharing insights. Appreciate it so much. Everybody in the room, I know there are a lot of you. I always say when the audience is this big, thank you for behaving. I appreciate it very much. If you enjoyed the video, please do share it once it replays through in an hour. But gentlemen, thank you so much. This was a great chat.