6ix Fireside Chat with Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse and Byron King

0:04 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you're logging in from today. I'm actually really thrilled to be joined by some genuine experts today to discuss what's going on right now in precious metals markets. I've got with me Contango Ores CEO Rick Van Nuyniza and editor of Paradigm Press Group, newsletter writer and geologist Byron King. Gentlemen, how are you today? Doing great. I'm up here in Fairbanks, Alaska, and it's finally summer. Well, I'm doing great too, but I'm down in Western Pennsylvania where It's summer for sure, that's good. Summer's good. I think winter went on a little long for everybody this year. I'll let everybody know how today is going to work for the folks in the room. It's going to be very conversational. I'm going to throw some topics at Rick and Byron and let them loose. After the questions I've got, I'm going to be taking some questions from the live audience. If they're on topic, I'm going to try to weave them directly into the conversation, but otherwise I'll tackle them at the end of today's chat. If I don't get to your questions today for whatever reason, we run out of time, et cetera, I'm going to make sure that the Contango team and Byron get them along with your email address so they can get back to you at their leisure. Last piece of housekeeping before we get into the protein today, it is being recorded and will be available for replay later in the afternoon, certainly before the end of the day Eastern time. It will pop right into your inbox.

1:14 It will also be available on Syx's YouTube channel and on the same link once the replay pops up. So I'll get right into the meat of today. I want to start with macro and monetary policy. So my first question, just

1:25 to dive right in, and Byron, I'll throw this one to you first. Central banks obviously continuing to be net buyers of gold, So we can see the stats every month in big numbers. While the governments are simultaneously managing quantitative tightening policies, for now, there are many signs that that's about to shift into easing or in some cases already has. But I'm curious, how do you reconcile this seeming contradiction? And what does it signal to you about confidence in the monetary system? Well, confidence in the current monetary system is low and getting lower, which leads to why some central banks, not all, but some are buying more and more gold. There's a de-dollarization trend in the world. There's the West, the global North, you might say, and then there's everybody else, the other 7 billion people in the world.

2:12 You can call it the global South, but actually the Global South doesn't like being called the Global South. They want a little more respect than that. But the big players of the world, countries with really big populations, India, China, and big militaries like Russia, and many, many others are buying gold to get away from the dollar, to give themselves options in the future. The U.S. Political system really shot itself in the foot with sanctions on Russia. And you can think whatever you want about the war in Ukraine, But the idea that somehow or another, $350 billion of Russian sovereign wealth got scraped away, just seized and stolen, almost banditry by the West, completely shattered that sense of trust that people had. And nothing ever happens overnight. Well, some things do, but most things take time to play out and we're watching a multi-year play out as other countries in the world accumulate gold like crazy.

3:17 And then we get into the geology later. But in a geological sense, the world is kind of at peak gold in terms of production. The global mine output the last 2, 3 years, if you added up all the ounces or whatever, called ounces, tons, whatever. It's been pretty much on a plateau. It's not going up. To the extent it's going up, it's because they're recycling gold. People are selling their junky old jewelry or things like that.

3:45 But yeah, so it's a supply-demand issue. The demand is coming from central banks that don't like what the West is doing, and the supply isn't there. And also, the gold doesn't change, okay? Gold is gold is gold. The atoms are the atoms. They were formed in a supernova billions of years ago. What changes is the perception of value of those atoms. You know, I mean, you know, this is a $20 bill from a, you know, from a ATM machine, you know, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, you know, here, this is a 100 year old gold coin, a $20 gold coin from 1924. This was $20 100 years ago, but it takes 200 of these things to buy this guy today. I mean, in terms of the price of gold, it takes 170 of these things just to buy the gold.

4:35 But in terms of what you would pay for this on eBay, you need 200 of these to buy one of those. So something has happened in the last century. Very few of us, I think, out there are 100 years old. I'm not. But to the extent that you understand the history and the cyclicality of it, we're at the end of a long run. And that US dollar from way back then, the $20 gold has just fallen to just tiny fractional, fractional

5:05 points of value. But this is the world we live in. $5 gasoline, $5 gallon of milk, million dollar houses, things like that. It's not the way it used to be. Sure. Rick, I'll get you in there on this. $12 eggs. Yeah, I'd say not a lot of confidence is being demonstrated. And I'd say, obviously, Byron's done a good job talking about the central banks and some of the reasons for, I'm sure that we got some more questions about de-dollarization and weaponization of the US dollar and with the sanctions and all. But the other thing is it's not just central banks. It's wealthy people buying gold. I mean, it's the average Joe buying gold at Costco. I mean, who'd have thought 20 years ago that that would be a thing?

5:54 And it's a big thing. Costco charges a 2% premium to buy gold. They ship it, you know, they,

6:02 you can just buy it and pick it up. So you don't have to figure out how to go buy gold with a traditional purchase. And so it's Definitely changing. I also agree with Byron's point about

6:21 sort of peak gold. I don't believe in peak anything in the certain terms of that I don't think we can continue mining gold. But what I've noticed as a geologist over the last 20 years is that we're mining gold differently now. Most of the, if you want a big, you're Barrick and Newmont,

6:39 Agnico Eagle, big company. You have to be looking at base metals and you see all the big guys transitioning to base metals. And the reason is, if you want a big Gold deposit, it's called a Porphyry Copper deposit. Those are the big billion ton type of ore deposits that contain a lot of Gold. It's a by-product or a co-product in the sense that you're really mining the deposit for, primarily for its copper, and you're going to produce a lot of gold in the process of doing that. And there's a certain class of porphyry that is a gold biased, gold rich porphyry. So I've seen that transition taking place over the last 20 years, but it does tend to indicate that there's sort of a geologic shift taking place to mine a lot of gold.

7:33 And I don't wanna get into the whole permitting thing and capital allocation and things like that. But all of that plays into what kinds of deposits are we going to mine in the future? And that's definitely the trend. I mean, to buy in a high grade gold deposit, we're doing it because we're a small company, we can afford to do it. But if I'm producing a couple million ounces of gold here, I'm not replacing that, you know, 50,000 ounces at a time. That's just too much work and too much permitting and it's not a great allocation of capital

8:08 and people to keep people capital. So yeah, we're definitely in a paradigm shift here and I think that sort of plays into the rest of the conversations and questions you had for us. Sure. I'll add something to that, too. It's intuitive to think that over the last couple of hundred years, as people were really starting to look for minerals and things, You find the stuff that's near the surface, and you find the stuff that's easy to see, because maybe it's staring back at you from the bottom of the stream, or at an outcrop, or whatever. You find the high-grade stuff, and you exploit that early. I mean,

8:45 Here's a hunk of ore from Red Lake, Ontario. And you can actually see the visible gold in it. This is really super high-grade ore. This is greenstone, pre-Cambrian greenstone. But the gold is, you can see it there. And now This came from a deep mine

9:03 in Red Lake. But this is the kind of stuff that people used to mine. And then what Rick was talking about, like copper, this is a chunk of copper from the Keweenaw Peninsula of northern Michigan. And it came out of, literally, it came out of the soil. It was pulled out by the glaciers and then it's all greenish because it spent 10,000 years you know sitting in the soil at the surface. But if you put it on the grinder and then polish up a little bit, this is elemental copper. I mean in the olden days, in the 1830s and 1840s, that was the first real sort of mining boom in the United States. And it was in upper Michigan in the copper peninsula, or the Keweenaw Peninsula, for copper. They were mining this elemental copper literally out of the soil and out of the rock, you know, and the great old mines at Calumet and famous old names.

9:54 And this was the beginning of the minerals and industrial revolution in the United States. Well, today, speaking of porphyries, like Rick was doing, I mean, you're talking about companies that they're going to mine a fraction

10:10 of a percent of copper out of all this rock, you know, 99.5% of the rock becomes waste, just so they can get that 0.5, you know and get the copper So we don't have too many of these anymore. These are scientific curiosities if you find them They're they're fun and everything else, but you don't build your economy on this stuff. You know, it's just not around So so the good old days of you know are gone and the days of prospecting are gone And then we get to like what Rick's doing up in up in Alaska, you know mining of a fairly high-grade prospect that say Mancho

10:44 shipping it up to Fairbanks and Kinross, you know, we'll get into that. Oh, there you go. You're showing your rocks off there, Brian, I got to show mine. That's Moncho Ore. That's on the surface. That's 30 grams per ton. That's a high grade sample.

11:03 But that is, you know, this is unusual Moncho, it's an unusually high grade deposit, especially since it's being mined as an open pit. You could definitely mine that as a narrow underground mine, but it's not. It's an open pit. So yeah, but there was a lot of changes going on. And they're all kind of related. Sure. I want to get you guys in on interest rates just because it's an interesting change or development that I wanted to discuss. So given the kind of persistent inversion between real interest rates and gold's performance, I'm curious for your take. And Rick, I can start with you on this one. Are we witnessing what you consider a structural shift in gold's traditional negative correlation with yields? Or do you think this is just a temporary dislocation for a variety of factors and it's going to get back to normal?

11:51 I don't think anything gets back to normal. I think gold's going up in comparison to everything. Whatever currency you want to measure it against, bonds or whatever you want to measure it against.

12:05 And that's because the US is between a rock and a hard place. But it's not just the US. We're at $35, $36 trillion in debt. The world is 300 million, 300 trillion, sorry, I'm losing perspective on billions and trillions. I used to think a billion was a big number. Now we have companies like Apple that have market caps of a trillion dollars. So it's just out of control.

12:42 Doesn't matter if the Fed lowers rates, we get more inflation. If they unleash QE, we're going to get more inflation. You talked about that in the previous question. Everything is inflationary. The only thing right now that I think is a bit of a saving grace is that oil prices have been relatively stable. They're starting to creep up. So, if Iran comes to the table on fissionable uranium and Russia-Ukraine situation sorts itself out, neither of which I have a lot of hope for, frankly. But if they do, you'll get more oil and so your inflation risk stays low.

13:31 But if they don't, you've got less oil being produced. And until you get Alaska oil to market and Canadian oil pipelines built into market, that situation doesn't change. And those are those are

13:47 tough things to handle. Right now, I think a loyal price is our saving grace in terms of inflation. But bottom line, gold's going up regardless of that. I think it's going up regardless of inflation. Sure. Go for it, Byron. I'll get you in here on that one. Well, I mean, we're looking at a process. We're looking at a cycle. And we had a decade, 1 end to the other, of essentially 0 to negative interest rates because of quantitative easing. And first of all, they were low to begin with, but then the Fed was just, you know, emitting the Federal Reserve was just emitting dollars into the economy. And So we're at the end of that.

14:33 They raised the interest rates to 4-plus percent in the last couple of years. And parts of the economy just fell off a cliff. Well, what that tells you is that the economy parts that fell off a cliff should not have been at that cliff to begin with. 1 edge of 1 cliff has to do with the oil industry in the US, the fracking boom of the 2010s, which is fascinating technology. We could get into that all day, but we won't because we're here to talk about gold. But I love that stuff. I've followed it for decades.

15:05 The fracking boom was funded with super cheap money. And they drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled, they drilled all over the place. You know, I'm really simplifying it. I'm sorry. You know, I know there's people out there probably understand this.

15:18 But I'm just trying to get the point across. We drilled the heck out of it. We increased the oil production out of the United States, since we're talking about the US. And then fracking is starting to move other places in the world. But what we also did was, fracking is not really traditional oil production. Fracking is going for the source rocks, you know. And once you drill up the source rocks, you've drilled up the source rocks, okay? There's no more source rocks to the source rocks, you know. Fracking is the last gasp of oil production. People will say, oh, you know, we're just going to keep on fracking and get more. No, we're not. We're, you know, we're at peak fracking now, too, if you look at it. I mean, maybe the Permian Basin can have a little bit more, but which gets into oil, oil prices.

16:05 We're at a nice low part in the oil price cycle because we're kind of using up that stuff that we drilled in the last 10 years. Looking ahead 10 years, Where else can you go? Well, in the United States, certainly in the 48 states, you know, we've pretty much drilled everything worth drilling. There's still some prospects up in Alaska,

16:24 but as you may know, before we came on the presentation here, Rick was making a joke. He said, there've got 4 seasons in Alaska, winter, June, July, August. If you've ever been to Alaska in January or February, or if you've ever been to the North Slope even in June or July, which, man, oh man, that is a tough place to work. So enjoy the low prices while you can, oil prices, and have at it. One of the great benefits of these low oil prices is that it does benefit the mining and extraction industry because a big whack of what happens out in the field in terms of, well, the explosives have a heavily petroleum-based component to them, the equipment that moves the oil and everything, oil-based, the trucks that haul it from Moncho up to Fairbanks, diesel in the tanks.

17:20 Yeah, we certainly see, we based our estimates in the feasibility study on $100 barrel oil pricing. This 2020 when we did, or 2021, we did the feasibility study. So, we're certainly seeing a very positive contribution from that in terms of our own sustaining costs. Other costs have gone up.

17:43 Labor's gone up for sure. And we'll, with a limited season here, as Byron was pointing out, you know, you need to get a lot of work done in the summertime. And so your labor costs to do that tend to be on the high side of the scale. So, you know, things balance themselves out. But we're definitely producing gold at a lower cost, partially because of the oil prices that we have now. That makes sense. One last question on monetary policy before I do get into de-dollarization kind of in earnest. I'm curious, Barno, how sustainable do you think the gold demand from emerging market central banks is? And what do you think, if any, are the implications for price discovery mechanisms there?

18:29 I think that the demand from central banks is steady and sturdy. And it is a movement. They are building positions. They're not just trading in and out. And then Rick alluded to this. Backing up the central banks are other big sources of wealth, you know, both corporate wealth, banking wealth, you know, wealthy families, you know, you know, all the way down to, you know, Joe and Susie and Tommy going down to the coin shop and buying coins and things like that. And actually, that kind of retail hasn't exploded yet. It will, but

19:09 the coin dealers will tell you that right now they've got a lot of people coming in selling their coins because They just need the cash to live and pay their bills, you know. But in terms of how sustainable is it, I think it's very sustainable. We are in the early innings of this. And you say, well, gee, how come? Could it get better?

19:28 I mean, if we solve the war in Ukraine or if the Middle East calms down, would it get better? Well, that would be nice, that would help and everything. But really, if you're a foreign banker, a central banker, a big banker or whatever, and you look at the United States of America, whose dollar you are using, who's the reserve currency of the world. You look at that and you say, you know, fiscally, the United States is a mess. I mean, you know, $36 trillion in debt, $1.7 trillion, trillion with a T, dollars of interest every year. It's bigger than the defense budget.

20:00 You know, it's right off the top. You know, when when when American taxpayers like me, when we send in our checks to the government, you know, it goes to the Treasury. The first thing they do with that money is they pay interest on that debt, whether that's before they buy 1 destroyer for the Navy or before they, you know, do. And then you've got all the entitlements, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, you know, and politically, it's just not under control. I mean, the big beautiful bill isn't really going to solve the deficit or anything. So don't don't count on that. So if I'm a foreign banker, from a central banker, or,

20:32 you know, a foreign bank, just in general, or whatever, I don't want to open my vault 1 morning and see pallets of $20 bills, or I don't even want to look on my computer and see, oh, I own all these treasury bills and bonds from Washington, D.C. I don't wanna see that. I wanna, if I'm a banker, I wanna see gold ingots. There's a 5 ounce gold ingot, which American banks used to keep in the vault. This one, it's hard to see, But this one is actually the old Republic National Bank. And banks, American banks, used to keep

21:07 real live gold in the vaults because that was their reserve requirement. You know, if you walked into a bank today and said, you know, let me see your gold, They'd look at you like you're crazy.

21:18 We got our bank here in Fairbanks has a nice display of of plaster gold and some actually they have some gold bars that report during that time period, the turn of the century, the last century.

21:32 But I'll just add that. I mean, I think this this kind of gets to de-dollarization discussion a bit and and it's happening. It won't happen. I don't see anything dramatic changing. I think these changes are meaningful but they're, you know, they don't happen overnight. Using the dollar as a reserve currency is here for a while But it is a trend that is a change. It's a paradigm shift. And right now, since 2000, there's been about 10% more international transactions taking place in non-dollar currencies,

22:18 which is 10%. It's not a huge number. But 20 years before that, there were hardly any transactions taking place, foreign transactions, buying oil and stuff like this, all these commodity things that happen. So it's a shift in its so you know, when I think this time is different argument is, is correct. I don't think we go backwards when they're hardly societies never go backwards very often. If they do, it's really bad.

22:51 More like Afghanistan. We don't want to be going there. But I think probably in your next question, we can explore that a bit more with, because basically, central banks have our own less gold, sorry, less dollars than they did in the previous 20 years. But it's meaningful, It's about 10%. It's not dramatic. They're not just dumping the dollar. But they're buying less, and they're not acquiring bonds, and they're not acquiring as much debt. As Byron pointed out, the big beautiful bill just adds to the deficit. I mean, Trump's built his empire on debt and he's proud of saying that. So I don't see a significant change taking place there in the next 4 years. So, yeah, I imagine we're not about to see some major deficit hocking at any point in the near future. At least there's been no signals with that regard. But I do want to get into the crystal ball gazing of de-dollarization, because I know as long as I've been financially aware, it's been talked about.

24:05 People previously described it as a Russian or Chinese fever dream, but now more and more serious analysts are talking about it and when rather than if. So I'm curious, I'm eager to have you guys crystal ballgaze a little bit. How quickly do you think we're going to see meaningful shifts in gold's role as a reserve asset versus thinking of it as just a speculative commodity?

24:26 And generally, how close do you think we are to significant de-dollarization? I'll throw it to whoever's got an answer first. Yeah, I'll just start.

24:34 I think the analysis done by Ron Stouffer is with at Incrementum. He's the managing partner at Incrementum. Just brilliant work. And so he's my go-to person when I want to look at cool charts and just good solid information, solid research on it. And, you know, it's I say the shift is happening, like I said before, it's not going to be, we're not going to see any dumping of the dollar and it's going to be slow and over time. As I said, there are 10% fewer transactions are taking place in dollars than say 20 years ago.

25:22 And you can just go measure this. I mean, the reserve banks are starting to increase the gold level, but we're not back to the pre-1980s levels. Remember the last time gold spiked big, well, big time on the most relative basis would be in the peak to 1980 with gold going, what, $800 or so. It went back down, but then it settled down at 400-ish, 400 to 500, traded in that range. But that was off a base of basically 35 when we went off the gold standard, when Nixon closed the gold window in 19, was that 71, I think it was, 72, somewhere in there. 71. Yeah, so those are these other big shifts that take place. And

26:14 life doesn't dramatically change overnight. You still go to the grocery store, you still go buy gas, you still go to work. But when Byron's holding up a $20 bill and a and a 20 a $20 gold piece

26:31 That's That's what we're talking about. You need 100, what did you say, how many? 170 of those to buy one of those? Just for the gold in this, you need 170 of these, of these guys right here. Yeah, I mean, the guy on the builder hasn't changed in 100 years. But so, where can this go? Where does gold go from here? And again, I'm relying on largely work done by Incrementum. And when you look at some of the charts, and

27:07 his work is available online, so you can take a look at it. So I'm just, this isn't my work, it's definitely his. But you just look at, you know, what, how do you compare? You know, What do you look at to see where the gold's going? And when you look at the stock market is like seriously overvalued. And if you look at that comparison of and you talk about sort of things always go out of whack. They go too high and then they'll settle down. But you're talking about 4 or 5000 dollar gold. Not hard to imagine at all. And that's just, you know, does the does the stock market come down? Does the gold price go up? There's the balancing act there. But that's not at all unreasonable in the next year or 2 in terms of where do we go from here?

28:01 Where do we go from here doesn't solve the fund metal problem. Because back in 1980, when gold peaked at $800 an ounce, and you probably only needed a hundred of those to buy that ounce of gold.

28:17 We didn't have $36 trillion of debt in the world wasn't in $3,300 trillion of debt. So we got a ways to go and people talk about $25,000 gold. That's a good thing for us mining gold, but it's not a good thing for people. And it's not a good thing for society because that means the average person's wealth has just been evaporated. But just like the paper building that Byron shows there, That's where we go. And that's why we got our own gold. That's what I often say to my friends is when my industry is doing well, you shouldn't be happy. That's just generally my view. Byron, I'll throw it to you on crystal ball gazing on de-dollarization.

29:03 Well, de-dollarization is happening at its own rate and in its own way. China has made numerous bilateral agreements across the world of many countries to trade yuan for, you know, in their local currency, Brazilian reales or Saudi, you know, they do all sorts of bilateral trading that cuts the dollar out of the pattern in that regard. I work with at Paradigm Press Group, where I'm, as you can see on the little editor of Paradigm Press, ParadigmPressGroup.com. I work with Jim Rickards, who's a macro economist, and he's had about, I don't know, 10 New York Times bestseller books on gold and various other things. And we, you know, we publish a bunch of different newsletters. And he, they plagiarize him shamelessly at places like 0 hedge and various others. And you can look them up on YouTube or whatever.

30:00 Jim likes to point out that, you know, the dollar, it's not that the dollar is getting stronger, it's not that the dollar is getting healthier, it's not that the dollar is getting better. There's no Lazarus dollar. Not only can we heal the sick, we can raise the dead. No, That's not the point. The point of the dollar is that it's the global credit, it's the foundation of global credit system. And there is nothing out there to replace that. China has a huge economy. I mean, in a macro sense, China's is the biggest economy in the world, in terms of how much electricity they produce, how much steel, how much shipbuilding, how many cars, how many, you name it. They're big. And we're finding this out now in our so-called trade war with China that, yikes, they shut us off on certain things, on critical materials, antimony, tungsten,

30:52 technology metals, gallium, germanium, rare earth metal, and we are, we're in a heap of trouble. So they have a really big economy and they use Yuan. When people buy ships from China shipbuilding, they buy them in yuan or when they buy steel from China, you buy them in yuan. Oh, they'll take your dollars, you know, but the thing is that the global credit system is based on dollars. And until you have something that replaces that, you can't replace something with nothing, no matter how sick or how problematic the dollar is. And so we're sort of in a quandary here. We know the dollar has problems, and We know people want to get away from it. They don't like to be under the thumb of the US Treasury or US sanctions, things like that. I get that. Everybody, you know, it's not hard to understand.

31:40 At the same time, you know, the world still needs the credit system for global trade and for, you know, for global commerce. So we will just have to watch as things evolve. It's the middle of 2025 right now. I could easily imagine $4,000 gold by the end of the year. I could easily imagine, you know, $5,000 gold within say 2 years And I'm just being I'm kind of pulling my punch on that We want to be really careful about living in that, you know, $5,000 world Dollar, I'm sorry we want to be careful about living in that $5,000 an ounce world, because the price of gasoline, the price of milk, the price of bacon, that's all going up too. And worse than $5,000 gold is $10,000 gold or $25,000.

32:30 That world is going to be a world that you won't recognize. That's going to be the difference between $20 in 1924 and $20 today, that $170 factor between the 2 of them. Jim Rickards likes to say that if you take all of the dollars in the world, you know, that are floating around M1, M2, M3, you put them in a big category and you back them with 40% gold, you know, you need something near $30,000 an ounce. Now, again, that's going to be a very difficult world to live in. And I'm not saying we're going to get there, you know, certainly not tomorrow, not next week, not soon. The only thing that could really, you know, crash the dollar in a hurry would be a major war, the US versus, pick one, the usual suspects, but a pure adversary, China, Russia.

33:31 And that would really rip the bandaid off of every problem that we have. You need money to fight wars, but you don't fight wars with money. And we are finding out now that the US industrial system, the whole industrial complex, just can't deliver on at least running an internal economy. I mean, if we shut off trade, life as we know it goes away fairly quickly. Even with tariffs, it just becomes a little more expensive. But if you shut off trade, life as we know it will end. To a degree, we're undoing the globalization trend that's happened over the last 40, 50 years, depending on where you want to start, but certainly post-World War II, that's been the trend since then, which we're going on, what, 60 years plus now. So, you know, We probably overshot on the globalization too much, too soon, too quick, and not taking care of things at home.

34:38 We don't produce a lot of things here at home, and Trump's whole agenda is to change that.

34:46 And the terror things, you can see it every day that goes by. There's, we're coming to resolutions with China on certain things. They're temporary, they're not permanent. Nothing is, not in trade. But it's typical Trump style, reach way out there and then come back 2 thirds of the way or whatever it is. But he's getting stuff done. And there are changes that had to be made. Byron said several times, ripping the bandaid off, this is gonna be painful. This is not gonna be easy. But if we don't produce more things here, if our GDP growth is based on more government jobs, that's just a, we're auguring in big time. And so We have to change that trend. And I think those are gonna be positive things, certainly positive for mining.

35:53 Trump has a sweet spot in his heart for Alaska for a variety of reasons. We were just on a panel round table discussion with 3, well, 2 secretaries, Bergen from Interior and Wilson from, or sorry, Wright from Energy. And then the head of the EPA were up here And we were 1 of 4 companies that were invited from the mining space to talk about, what are our issues in getting things done up here? So we definitely had this administration focused on helping resource development and specifically resource development in Alaska. So if we can't get it done this time, it's our own damn fault. Mining is the true creation of wealth. You know, it's one thing to flip houses or something. I don't mean to offend anybody who flips houses for a living. One thing, take a house, paint it a different color, and put a new for sale sign out front. And OK, that's great. Good for you.

36:56 Glad you're great. But it's another thing to go to a brown stain on a hillside and turn that into a working mine. And at the end of the day, you've created gold. Gold is money. Gold is wealth. And it's not like the good old days where you could just sort of pull copper out of the moss in the Keweenaw Peninsula or something. I mean, mining, mining a porphyry is very, very difficult work, but you are creating wealth. You're creating money and it's foundational to everything else. If you don't have the metals and you don't have the materials that you need, it's hard to build everything else, you know, whether it's skyscrapers downtown or ships at the shipyard or airplanes at Boeing, or you know, go down the list, you know.

37:42 So that's where we are. Actually eager to get into the economics of producing gold and just mining dynamics in the current environment. So I know with all in sustaining costs rising across the sector, though you're doing better than most Rick at Contango, and higher grade deposits are becoming increasingly scarce. How do you guys evaluate the sustainability of current mining economics. Where do you think we go from here in the next not just 6 months, but 5 years? Rick, I'll throw it to you first on that one. I think, you know, from our, you know, from Contango's standpoint, I think, you know, we mentioned this before, the oil price not spiking. And I think we're going to be OK here for the next 5 years in terms of oil production, unless something dramatic bad happens.

38:30 But I I think if there's a de-escalation of efforts, of the war effort in Russia-Ukraine situation, if there's resolution on the uranium situation in Iran, those are gonna be both very positive because you'll get more oil produced and more oil out to the general market. So I think those are very positives for the mining industry. I see the mining industry, we're going to continue to develop our DSO model, our direct shipping or model focus on smaller, higher grade deposits. We want to buy a mill. So that's, you know, we, you know, we have a good relationship with Kinross and utilizing their mill for our Montreux ore. But we do pay a fair bit of money for that. So if we can control the hub, if we control the mill, we can focus on deposits that are high-grade, not the biggest in the world.

39:30 We found the Donlan project 25 years ago and it's still not developed. And that's one of the biggest, highest quality gold projects in the world, literally in terms of grade and tons. But it is in the middle of nowhere. So we're not going to we're not going to focus on that model. But I do think that is where the big companies, they have to focus on that. And as I mentioned earlier, they have to focus on big porphyries. I've always called Donald a freak of nature because it is a porphyry scale gold deposit, Gold only deposit. And there aren't many of those in the world. There are a few, but there are few and far between. And so geologically, as I said earlier, the big companies are going to shift and you can see them shifting Barrick and Newmont already. Newmont acquired Newcrest because they're a big Copper Gold producer.

40:22 Barrick is spending a lot of capital expanding their Lumana project in the Congo. It is mainly a Copper producer. You're seeing this shift. We at Kintanga, we're not going in that direction. We're going to focus on the scraps. I don't know. They're high-grade scraps. So I don't mind picking up high-grade scraps. Things like bacon. I like bacon. These are smaller deposits that the big boys aren't interested in. A million ounce deposit is not something that Newmont and Barrick and Agnico Eagle pay any attention to, unless they think it's the tip of an iceberg. And we may have some of those too, right? And so our Johnson Track project, I do think is the tip of the iceberg, but if we find the rest of the iceberg and they wanna take over the company, we're happy to turn it over to them. So I think that's where we go as a business and I'll let Byron weigh in.

41:25 Well, I absolutely agree with everything Rick just said. I think I'd add the point that the world in general, except for maybe Antarctica, has been what they call prospected. Somebody, somewhere, sometime, someplace has walked that ground. It could be US, Britain, China, Russia. Somebody, somewhere has walked the ground and eyeballed everything. And they've mapped it, at least in a gross geological sense. And all the easy stuff, we kind of know where it is. I mean, there might be something in the Himalayas or wherever. It's scientific curiosity. But all the easy stuff has been pretty much located. And so the prospectors have done their thing. Thank you very much. Doesn't mean that we don't need prospectors again. We do.

42:11 But what we really need now is exploration. Because You can't see what's 1 inch under the soil. The high grades that might be economic for a small mining company, the high grade came from someplace. It didn't just fall out of the sky. It's not just some asteroid landed and, oh, look, the gold is there. No. Sudbury, Ontario, that's where the nickel is. But, you know, there's always an exception. But that high grade came from someplace. And by mining it, even if it's just a relatively short mind life, relatively short term, you've learned something and there is the prospect that you're going to open it up into something else. You're going to chase those veins, chase that system, and you're going to find something else. And so The prospectors have given way to the explorers. The explorers are looking everywhere. The big companies are so big, they're big and they have a lot of money, but they're very bureaucratic.

43:11 And they don't have much in the way of exploration departments. Big company exploration departments are offices where they sit around and review what the medium and the small companies are doing. And they say, oh, show us your data room. Let's take a field trip. Let's look at your drilling, your core logs and your drilling system here. And the smaller companies, I mean, they're staffed with geologists, many of whom are refugees from big mining. And one after another, after another, after another will tell you that we're working up this project to a barrack standard or to a BHP standard or to a Rio Tinto standard. And because if they wanna show it to the BHPs and the Rio Tintos of the world, ideally, they'll get bought out. And Rio or BHP, they'll put it in the portfolio.

44:00 But there's an entire ecosystem there and everybody has a role to play. Rick and Contango right now are playing a particular role. And I don't know if I'm allowed to say this. I mean, you are feeding ore to Ken Ross up at the Fort Knox project. And it is of such high grade that they have now the luxury of blending this ore with other ore and to optimize the output. I mean, they keep track of what goes in, what goes out so that they can pay you what they owe you. But a smaller company like Contango is absolutely important to a company like Kinross. Ken Ross, Alaska has never looked so good.

44:45 I'm sorry? Ken Ross, Alaska has never looked so good. And they said it in their own annual report. So I mean, glad to help out. Just doing a solid there. I don't want to get into, like as we talked about, concentration of gold production in those geopolitically sensitive regions continues to increase. See it in West Africa, Central Asia, obviously China's a significant gold producer. So here's my question to you guys. There's several hundred investors in the room right now. How should they be assessing jurisdiction risk when they're looking at projects versus resource quality? And Byron, I can throw it to you first there actually. Well, you know, there's jurisdictional risk even in the United States. I mean, do you want to be in Nevada or do you want to be right across the line in California?

45:31 You know, a question kind of answers itself. Do you want to be in the Yukon? Do you want to be in British Columbia? Do you want to be in Quebec? Alaska is friendly and getting friendlier. I mean, Alaska's problem was never Alaska. Alaska's problem has long been Washington, DC. And this sort of Alaskan mythology that Americans in the lower 48 have, they have these visions of what I call a cruise ship Alaska, where they sail along the coast from Seattle or Vancouver up to Anchorage. And then they ride the train up to Denali, and they see the bears and all that good stuff. That's the lower 48 image of Alaska. The reality of Alaska, and I've been there. Rick, you live there. You're the Alaska expert.

46:20 It is vast. It's hard to get anywhere. You have to have an airplane to go to any place. And getting things there by ship or by riverboat or whatever up the Yukon River, It is a real logistical challenge. You mentioned Donlan Creek. It's 30-some years, and they're still trying to get the project working, not because it's not a great project in terms of ore deposit. It's just It's hard to work up there. And you look at some projects that have been highly successful, the Red Dogs, Inc. Up north. And boy, that took a lot of work to get done. Or you look at another of Rick's past projects in the Ambler District, which is now Trilogy Metals, working with South 32. I mean, one of the great ore deposits in North America is the Ambler District. I mean, I've been there.

47:12 I was there with Rick. I think it was right before COVID or something. And what fabulous ore bodies, what fabulous mineralogy they've got. And they need a road from the Alaska Highway, the Dalton Highway, over along the south side of the Brooks Range. They need a road to get there. And the last 4 years made it very, very difficult on that road. So Alaska's problem is not Alaska, it's Washington, DC. So jurisdictionally, US, Canada, Alaska, places to go, but you need to understand, you know, kind of where you are. Other places, Mexico is a fabulous mineralogical area, fabulous geological. You just want to be really careful what what state of Mexico you're in and you know what company, where are they working, things like that. And we get into South America and whatnot, you're getting into country picking on that one. You know, do you wanna be in Columbia right now?

48:07 You know, Ecuador has, you know, the country of the future and it always has been and always will be kind of like Brazil, you know. Although there's great things happening in Brazil, Argentina is really blossoming right now under Javier Mele. Peru and Chile have had to revamp a lot of what they're doing. And when you get into other, and we could get on the list of, you know, another 50 countries in the world, but you get the picture. You really, as an investor, you really need to pay attention to where is the deposit and are you comfortable working in Central Africa, Southern Africa, South Africa? It's, you gotta do your own due diligence and you really have to, don't feel bad about writing off entire regions of the world, because there are plenty of other opportunities elsewhere.

49:00 Yeah, I just agree with a lot of what Byron's saying. I'd say that, look, I mean, there's political risk everywhere. And as Byron points out, Alaska is a great place for NGOs to raise money because they can take nice, pretty pictures of something that's 300 miles away from your project. And they don't have the same disclosure obligations that we do as a public company. But I'd say in general for investors, you definitely have to weigh the political risk. And you look at what's going on in say Africa and barracks basically lost control of one of its major producing mines in Mali. It's actually 2 mines. And Guinea has been a good place to work.

49:47 Rio has spent a huge amount of time and effort, like 20 years worth of time and effort, and gone through a couple of CEOs for their questionable dealings with the Guinean government at different points in time. And yet, here we are, and the government's canceling contracts. And I don't know whether, I'm not looking down in the details of this but you just you know you kind of read the headlines and read the first couple of paragraphs of the article and it's It's not a good trend when you're a company like Rio And you're developing one of the largest and highest quality iron ore deposits in the world.

50:36 And you're on shaky ground. And they've had a history of shaky ground in Mongolia with the Oyo-Tolgoy project. And Entrez has this little piece of the Oyo-Tolgai deposit deep, it's a hucodermic deep, but it's the next phase of mining. And guess what? The Mongolian government saying, well, that transfer from here to here that was agreed to, way the hell back when, that's probably gonna cost you something. Right? So whenever you need something from the government, it's never for free. So just those are the political risks that you have to pay attention to. And I think as an investor, you just have to realize you're not gonna be the first to know. You're gonna be, you know, down the line. So after the decisions have already been made, you're gonna read about it in the paper and you're going to go, oh, shit.

51:34 So we're always a step behind the makers and shakers, I guess. I got one question. So I'm jumping ahead a bit. I consider this a bit of a pivot, but I want to get to it. I'm going to use the B word and talk about Bitcoin very briefly. So I know with growing institutionalization of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin specifically as a store value asset. I'm curious just for both of your takes on if you think this will be a structural demand displacement for gold or do you think these markets honestly are just serving totally different functions, people with totally different risk appetites. Where do you think that relationship goes? Byron, I'll throw it to you first. Bitcoin has definitely soaked up a lot of cash, you know, just people, investor money over the past several years. Go back as far as you want in terms of, you know, 5 years, 8 years, 10 years, 12 years, you know.

52:23 And it has created its own ecosystem of investors. There are people who do both at hard assets like gold, silver, copper, oil, etc. And Bitcoin and other cryptos. There are people who have legs on both camps, you might say. I'll just tell you what we found at Paradigm Press. I mean, we have a whole crypto side of our publishing empire, and we have a hard asset in other parts. We do have communication back and forth. We have many of the same readers for both types of newsletters or whatever, but it is not, it is not a, it's not a broad acceptance that if you, you know, you do gold and silver and such, and you're into Bitcoin, or you're into Bitcoin and you'll do gold and silver.

53:18 It's there's a real there's a real divergence in the readership and the subscription base on those types of things. So that's sort of telling you what the market tells us. And we have hundreds of thousands of subscribers so we have a statistically significant base on which to make this generalization. Bitcoin, is Bitcoin the future? Well a lot of people use it and I'm not going to say, you know, never say never and never say no. But, you know, no, you know, sometimes no is a way of getting to yes. But as long as the electricity works fine, you know, you're, you're all right with Bitcoin, you know, whereas I mean, I, you know, Duquesne Light could, you know, take up, knock out my power and, you know, what the heck, I still have the gold, you know, so.

54:07 And there's different risk alliances there. Go for it, Rick. Yeah, I just think, you know, and I'm not an expert on Bitcoin or anything by a long shot, But what I see is it trades more like a tech stock sector type of stock trade and more from an investment style. And it may be generational. I think we certainly see that Gen X and millennials are much more focused on Bitcoin than, say, gold. What I have read is that young people who've made a lot of money in cryptos, Bitcoin and other cryptos, once they make a bunch of money, they go, well, maybe I should invest some of that in gold.

54:55 Because it's not Bitcoin. It's not, you know, some new Dogecoin or whatever the heck. I have to add something to that, that every year, Rick Rule hosts the Rick Rule Investment Symposium. This year, it's down in Boca Raton, a couple of weeks in the first, second week of July, I guess. And I was there last year. And there were a whole lot of like young younger people there because a lot of people who go to the hard asset conferences Or you know kind of white hair and what have you, you know gold bugs and I was talking with the younger people I was like what what brings you to a conference like this, you know filled with gold miners and silver miners and copper miners and what have you. And they're like, well, I made a lot of money in crypto and I took a bunch of it off the table. I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. And I'm gonna go buy some gold, you know?

55:42 Okay, so you make your money over here but you preserve your wealth over there. You know what I mean? And that's exactly the point. And that's the role that gold has played for what, 4,000 years or whatever it is. It's a store of wealth. And you know, The old, I can't remember who quoted this, but a nice toga would cost you an ounce of gold. And you wanna buy a nice Versace suit, you're probably looking at at least an ounce of gold. So it is the store of wealth. And, you know, young people apparently are finding that out as well. They make money in crypto, but they're looking to gold to invest in gold to preserve their wealth. Yeah, It's the old line of gold helps you stay rich, which I think young people are figuring out too. So there you go. Are you guys actually okay with going just 5, 10 minutes over? Because there's a couple other things I wanted to get to if you've got an extra 10 minutes. Byron, you got an extra 5, 10?

56:42 Sure, absolutely. I want to answer some questions from the viewers. Yeah, So there were a number of questions that came in on email, so I did want to get to a bunch of those that popped in. But one thing before I jump into those, I always like sticking people to numbers of some kind. So I'd love to know, given the current technical setup, seasonal patterns, the macroeconomic backdrop, everything we've talked about today, What are your highest conviction views on gold's trajectory and the kind of key levels that investors should monitor? Rick, I'll throw it to you first on this one. Yeah, I think we're going to stay here in the 3000, you know, this 3300 sort of level for a while. And I don't know how long a while is. I think, you know, Trump is a master of creating volatility.

57:31 Yeah, I wish I wish I had a ran a hedge fund with a fly on the wall in the Oval Office. But so we're going to see volatility. I think gold is going to be relatively stable here for the summer, I think. That's my expectation. And it's typically the summer doldrums as well. But I think we could see $4,000 gold by the end of the year. And I think we could see $5,000 gold by the end of the Trump administration. Great, love direct numbers. I think that's awesome. Byron, go for it. Give us your numbers. Well, I'm in the same boat as Rick. I mentioned this earlier. The summer tends to be the doldrums. I mean, we'll probably have a bit of a sell-off in August, early September.

58:22 It just kind of happens every year. But as the fall kicks in, you know, after Labor Day or into October, I think we're going to have more volatility in the world than people want to deal with. It's going to drive more people to go. The central banks aren't stopping their buying. They're not trading in and out. They have a way. If they have a certain amount of dollars that they want to keep just to you know to have their cash account but with the extra stuff they're not leaving it in the vault there they want to turn it into something real and so there's that buying I also think that that that other big money big institutional money is just now starting to get in. They are positioning, they're not trading, they are positioning.

59:09 And then retail, as we mentioned earlier, I mean, down, you know, to go buy a gold buffalo or an Indian head down at the coin shop. I mean, that's not driving the price of gold. But when people start to realize, gee, something's wrong here, that could bring the retail in as well. So I would not be surprised. I said this earlier in our discussion here, that 4,000 by the end of the year and I could see 5,000 within the next 18 months. Silver as well has a slingshot effect. I mean, it was over $36 this morning. It was this close to $37 the other day. Silver has done beautifully. And it's a monetary metal, but it's an industrial metal. And industrially, the demand is there, electronics and everything.

1:00:01 Solar panels are a thing globally. It has a monetary angle in the sense that China, Russia, India are all buying it at state levels. So if you're in the gold-silver space you're doing well. Platinum is starting to move. I think if you haven't gotten into platinum yet, it's definitely time to climb on board that car on the train. It hasn't left the station yet, but when it does, it's gonna be a nice ride. So- I'll just point out too that I'm looking back at an incremental, incrementum chart. So back in the, in the, you know, 70s, pre 80s period, central banks had about 25% of their wealth in gold, or their holdings in gold.

1:00:50 And today it's somewhere between 5 and 10. So you can use that, look at that math and see where does gold go. I think That's another place to look. As of last year, I've become one of these retail people looking at Costco website to see where the best where they have the best supply. So I've become one of these people we're talking about. One question from the audience, Byron, and, you know, tough question. Answer the best your ability. But from Goss Capital, He asks, what is Byron King's target price for Contango 1 year out and in 2030? Oh my goodness. For Contango. You take that one. Well, yeah, Rick, you're not allowed to answer that question. I think I'm going to have to go visit you in some federal facility there. So well, I'll tell you this. Back in about, I think it was April, it was all of like, what, a month and a half, 2 months ago, we at Paradigm, we had a conference and somebody said, what's your number 1 stock to buy right now? And I said, contango, because you were selling it at something like 12 bucks a share. And I said, I said, it's kind of like, you're going to pick up a $20 bill off the ground, except it's only going to cost you $12.

1:02:00 And, and now you're what's your share price today? I didn't look, it's like over 20. We were low 20s when I looked the last. Yeah, so Contango has done very, very well. My observation of Contango and what I understand, The business model is moving along very, very nicely. There was that sell-off was unjustified, but it's just created opportunities for buyers. There is still upside to Contango. If it's in the low 20s now, I can definitely envision it being at least a $30 share. And again, Rick is right here, and I'm not trying to embarrass anybody or anything. You're getting all red there. But I can say that the price of gold is going to do well. We don't have much downside risk for the price of gold. I think that the price of diesel fuel for those trucks that you have to haul up to Fairbanks, it is what it is but it's not going to get outrageous on us. And you've got your issues under control in terms of weight limits on the bridges in Alaska and in terms of political support from Alaska and the US government.

1:03:22 And so a company like Contango, just on the basis of what they're doing now, has solid upside. And then we get into what they're doing at the Johnson site down southwest of Anchorage. And it used to be high gold, and now it's part of your Contango empire. There's some beautiful, beautiful exploration upside on that alone. So if that answers the question. No, it does. That's perfect. I got another one for you, Byron. Somebody asked, and you've already touched on this briefly, but I'll let it to you for a more fulsome answer. Somebody asked, look, is the party over for platinum? What are the best time to get into platinum calls? I don't think the party's over.

1:04:10 I think I think I think the party is just just just beginning. You know, the initial kind of what are you going to say? The initial surge in platinum, I think, has to do with just the fact that, you know, Trump came in and they're going to change the rules on EVs. I mean, you know, talking about peak things, peak EV is around. You know, I mean, there are people and there are places and there are times when an EV is just absolutely fine. You don't have a problem with it as long as it doesn't catch fire in your garage or something like that. Speaking of Alaska, we have a ship offshore Alaska with 3,000 cars on it and something like 800 of them are EVs. And one of the EVs exploded in the hold and caught the ship on fire. And as I heard, the Coast Guard is trying to tow the ship to some sort of safe harbor.

1:05:00 It's burning out of control right now. So EVs have problems. But that points out that in terms of consumer acceptance, EVs have a certain level of consumer acceptance. What does that leave you with? Internal combustion engines. And what's the use? Where does platinum come into that? Well, that's going to go into the catalytic converters. So I think there's upside in the platinum space, both as metal goes, metal futures. And then there are a few really sweet, I won't get into naming small names But there are some pretty pretty sweet companies out there that are in the platinum and palladium space 2 different metals, but similar But there's upside there too as well. Great.

1:05:45 I appreciate the context there I reckon these don't work very well in Alaska in the wintertime at 40 below, not in Fairbanks at least. It's not a Fairbanks purchase, that makes sense. Rick, I got a couple questions for you just specific to Contango that just came in an email a couple seconds ago. So a shareholder from New York asked if there's any stock buyback coming in the near future, if that's something you're planning for? Yeah, short answer is no, not in the near future. The main objectives, as I think we've said several times, is to pay off the debt and to deliver into the hedges and get rid of the hedges as quickly as possible. So that's the focus of the company. I think we didn't hedge because we were trying to be smart on Gold. We had because the bankers made us hedge back when Gold was 1800 and we needed to borrow $60 million. The equity markets just weren't there. And so, you know, to get this mine up and running in the timeframe that we did, we made the decisions we had to make at the time we made them.

1:06:45 And now that we're up and running and making in the neighborhood of $100 million of free cashflow for the year, we wanna get these hedges delivered into. And we believe in the upside of gold price. We were just talking about that. So, it all fits, that's what fits with our model. Down the road, once we're generating good, strong, free cash flows that, you know, beyond what we need to advance Lucky Shot and Johnson Track, we get my five-year plan is to get those 2 projects into production and would be producing in the neighborhood of 200,000 ounces of gold a year Then we can talk about distributions to shareholders or share buybacks and things that are Truly value-aggreed for for shareholders.

1:07:33 Yeah, so that's that's the direction great Fellow name is Steve Roden Rick this one's for you as well, saying he's looking to get into Contango in the near future. When's the next news at Johnson Tract likely? Johnson Tract is on a permitting timeline now, so there'll be intermittent news flow on that. We're applying in short order for the, the discharge permit from the state of Alaska. We've already had the road permitted. So I would say, you know, permitting is, I always call it the boring part of the Lassonde curve because, you know, you're not drilling holes and finding more ore. And, But that is the Johnson Track project for right now.

1:08:19 Now, stay tuned for advances on our Lucky Shot project in the near future. But I'd say for the next 2 years, Johnson Track is focused on permitting. We wanna get that thing permitted while the Trump administration is in place. We have strong support from the current administration for mining and for resource development in Alaska. We want to take advantage of that. Lucky Shot is fully permitted so that's probably the next place we'll see significant drilling. We just finished our second campaign for 2025. We batch processed the ore from Moncho, so we just finished that up. So there'll be some news on that here in the next week or so.

1:09:08 They finalized the batch here, I think, over the weekend. So we'll get some final numbers out to people, I'd say in fairly short order. I don't think it'll be this week, maybe next week. So we'll have news flow, but steady, slow and steady is kind of the pace we're at right now. We're making money and paying down debt and delivering the hedges. That's the main course of action right now. Nope, appreciate that. I do want, I know we're already over time and I want to give you guys an opportunity to pitch shamelessly. I know as a Canadian, I always like to tell you to pitch as shamelessly as possible, but I want to throw a lot from the chat. Paul says, absolutely the best goal talk he's said in a very long time. So credit to both of you. Thank you very much for joining me today, sharing your expertise. But Byron, I'll throw it to you first. Where can people follow you?

1:09:56 Well, thank you very much, everybody who has taken the time to watch. I truly appreciate it. I'm a geologist. I'm a real-life geologist. I actually have done this stuff in the past, but doing it for, I'll say, 52 years. And I know I don't look it, but I started young. But I've been doing this stuff for a long time. Time out to be in the Navy and other things like that. I work right now with a group called Paradigm Press Group. Paradigm Press Group, ParadigmPressGroup.com. Go there and that site will navigate you to a place where you can start with the introductory newsletter. You can read Jim Rickards. You can read my musings. Periodically, we have a bunch of other things that when you sign up, we send you the daily reckoning. We send you the rude awakening.

1:10:45 You'll get a lot of fun things, a lot of interesting things, and you can take it from there. But paradigmpressgroup.com, we would appreciate it if you gave us a look. And again, thank you for taking the time to watch our presentation today. Awesome, Byron, thanks so much. And Rick, I'll throw it to you to close off today. Why should the investors in the room consider Contango? And if they own it, why should they buy more? Yeah, I'll just, first I just wanna, I enjoy reading Byron's musings. They're just entertainment and they're a variety of topics and they're always fun to read. So just a little plug for Byron there. I really enjoy his stuff. For Contango, if you want exposure to gold, take a look at Contango because on a per share basis, we only have a little over 12 million shares outstanding trading in the market.

1:11:32 And it's actually about 5 of those are held by insiders, so they don't trade. So we had 7 million shares out there trading. If you want exposure and leverage to gold on a per share basis, I don't think you'll find a better levered gold company on a per share basis, whether it's ounces in the ground or it's cash flow per share based on gold. So that to me is the reason you want to own a gold stock, is to have leverage to gold on a per share basis. And we don't have a billion, we're not an Australian company and you're not a respectable Australian company unless you have a billion shares outstanding. At least we're at the opposite end of the spectrum there. And and so that's that's my that would be my pitch. You know, business at the ContangoOr.com website.

1:12:22 Take a look at our press releases. We use the 6 platform a lot for these type of presentations. And If you have any questions, get a hold of us at info at contango.com. Thanks again for hosting this. Romeo, it was a great job. Thanks everybody for participating today. Rick Byron, thanks so much particularly for going over. I think this is a great conversation. I really appreciate both of you sharing your expertise. I hope you have a great afternoon as with everybody in the room. Thank you very much.