CEO.CA Chairman's Briefing

The GAUNTLET!

Thanks to Chris Parry for the free "market awareness program"! Check out my practice session thinking about what I'd say to Chris here. 

https://twitter.com/ChrisParry/status/1500938366514184192

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mHT96Uu6jmFw1nDMeA8E8r8vpWzxUe2duYr6NbJ8fQ4/edit (this file)

2022-03-09-KLM-THE GAUNTLET Transcript 3 hours Peter Bell for Chris Parry

To: Chris Parry

From: Peter Bell

Date: Monday, March 7th, 9:30 pm.

RE: THE GAUNTLET

Chris, I'm making a recording here to give you a shout-out for some tweets you made today. You said, "I'm feeling crazy -- I got to do some promo. Who wants three months for free? Come get it. First CEO to message me on Twitter gets a new program." Very bullish thing to say!

This reminds me of something I heard you say maybe three years ago now at the PDAC conference in Toronto in March. I remember walking out of the event center for the last time that year, writing you an email about this company called Playfair Mining and how they were using CARDS data mining from what was probably called Albert Mining at the time. They had a project from EMX in Norway that's worth talking about and they had a program that was an exceptional plan. That was March 2019. In January 2020, I joined the board of directors of Kermode. This Kermode was like the "older sister" of Playfair. Kermode has been public since like 1993 and they've had it the whole time, but they took over Playfair sometime in the 2000s. Nine months after I was at PDAC and pitched Playfair to you, the team behind put me on their other shell Kermode.

That was January 2020 and it's been over two years now that I've been on the board of Kermode. The stock was halted for over six months of that time for a very simple reason based on TSXV exchange policy. Compliance! Kermode didn't have a project where they had a "majority" position, so they needed a new one. They did one with Andy Randall after I introduced them. Andy actually had an office in the same building, the Rogers Building in Vancouver. I think this was the first deal he ever did where he optioned claims to a public company. When I saw the terms, I was embarrassed, I don't want to do deals where the vendor gets a hundred thousand shares and cash of five dollars, sorry five thousand dollars, and the work program is 50 grand, and the vendor gets to do the contract work.

You can't feed a team on one program like that. If you're gonna do deals with a public company, then you have to embrace the upside. Right? That may be the standard deal, but it's a terrible deal to me. It's like, "just enough to show that you were not left out of the will," as per BETTER CALL SAUL.

A much bigger deal is a bunch of stock and a bunch of warrants. Seriously, if the property vendor gets stock and warrants, then it's a very, very bullish deal.

And I prefer to see no royalties and no work commitments.

The Newton deal basic template starts with like five or 10% of the company. Then warrants and more stock in the future. No royalties and no work commitments. A 10% future sales interest where the vendor gets paid if we ever do a deal on the property.

The thing I want to do is incentivize promoters. I want to incentivize promoters and get them something to promote. And the most important promoters for me right now are the people who give us the projects and do the work. The best project vendors become promoters for the public company.

And the best promoters give more than they take.

So when I saw you throw down the gauntlet today, it reminded me of three years ago in 2019 when I wrote to you about why Playfair Mining should get free coverage. A lot has happened since then! What is different today? What is the same?

I love to see that you are still doing the same thing, Chris. The whole "free coverage for some pub-co" thing is so bullish. It's inspiring to me. How do I give something away for free? As a public company Kermode: how do I give something away for free? I want to do the same thing you are doing here, Chris. What do I do, buy a hat and give you a hat? A site visit? Sign a promotional contract? What can I do to add value for some investors the same way?

I love to think about matching and exceeding someone else's kindness. Great business development strategy.

I want to play ball with the street. One of the things I've done to show what I'm thinking is that the first stock options that I gave out in Kermode were offset at the same time by canceling my own options. I canceled mine and gave them all to one person, who I should probably put on an advisory board. His name is Jason Libenson. He's in Toronto, and he's a real valuable shareholder. I wanted to show him respect, so I put him on with my entire option position in one go, right? And, of course, other people came to me and asked me for options, right? Oh, what fun. One person asked me for two and a half million options. I thought that was a little bold.

For the right person, I'd love to put the maximum possible allocation. The options should be in bullish hands.

And there are another one million options that will expire at the end of this month from John Fahmy, too. He was part of the takeover team in August 2021 when we had the hostile AGM. What fun that was.

So I wrote you this pitch about Playfair in 2019. Then in 2020, I joined the board of Kermode. In 2020-2021, the stock was halted, and we had the hostile takeover. Then, here we are in 2022, and we're having this conversation about free coverage from Chris Parry in the month of March. Again, like in 2019. What a bullish seasonal cycle.

Blast from the past!

And it gets better.

Somebody who knows Playfair and Windfall Geotek was actually just texting me 20 minutes ago out of the blue. The buddy was active in the past as @Q90 on CEOca. What? Yes, please let's make a deal.

I'm standing here in March 2022, and I've been CEO for over six months. August 11th was the takeover date, and here we are on March 7th, right? That's September, October, November, December, January, February, March. What have I accomplished so far? I've signed three LOIs, canceled one of them, and not much else! This is my first time running a junior mining company, and it's great. There's lots of routine stuff, and then there are lots of things that are not super obvious.

A weird organizational feature that I pointed out to people recently is that Kermode doesn't have a "company geologist." We don't have one QP; we have project-specific QP. I deal with groups where the vendor is the exploration services contractor. Many of the junior mining companies I've invested in have a single "company geologist" who is in charge of all the technical stuff.

The QP writes news releases with me and designs the programs with me. Our staff in BC hasn't generated a lot of news yet because it's kind of small-scale and academic. Our staff in Nevada is small scale too, but it's generated more news. My goal is to get as much substantial news flow out as I can the fastest way possible for the lowest cost with the highest confidence. The junior mining business is all about "buying news releases."

My basic thinking about the junior mining business is that it's a "let's make a deal" business.

The heartbeat of business is the news flow. You spend risk capital, it goes away forever, and you report on the results. You hope that the stars align and the world sees what you see. And you hope it's better than you expected.

You hope to beat your own expectations, right? If you plan for a certain level of return and you have a group of financiers who understand the risk and underwrite it on a serial basis. There is this Canadian investment ecosystem that exists like this, and the mining side of the business is pretty tight. I think the bench strength in Canada could be better. I look at my own performance, and I think it could be better. But one thing I'm proud of is the focus on principles.

There are lots of ideas that you can tap into that are at the basics of speculating in junior mining. There are strategies and playbooks that help improve the odds. You want to keep it super simple. And if you're in the mining business, you want to do mining as much as you can -- get the richest rock and find somebody who will buy the metal from you.

If you can do contract mining and toll milling as a local processing scenario, then you can sell it as a high-grade blend for an operating mine nearby. If they are in the same type of ore body, then it could work -- if their costs of mining at great depth are five times the cost of doing it at the surface. Is there an arbitrage for a small-scale "blending" scenario? The answer is yes, right? That's an example of a playbook.

There's also the story of water transportation. If you can mine high-grade at a remote location and do concentration by gravity at the site or get into fun stuff from the Mark Brazeau playbook where you start doing electrical plating from high-grade ores that you're concentrating with gravity separation at the mine site?

Mark found an example of a mine in Ontario where they were doing this a hundred years ago and were getting the electricity to run the copper recovery circuit from a water wheel at the site. Imagine that! Then you have a small furnace to melt the copper off the steel anodes, and you're able to pour copper ingots at the site. How much infrastructure investment does that require versus what kind of metal endowment and mine life could you expect? Some of this stuff can look so good on a small scale that it can work with all kinds of creative scenarios. Imagine one where the old mine is 200m above sea level at a peninsula in Newfoundland, and you go to the dumps, dig them up by hand, and put the rocks on a cart that sends them down a wire guide from the cliff to a boat? That may cost more than it's worth, but this could be a powerful way to amplify the amount of work that key people can do at the site. Whether you want to do that or not is a question of who you're working with.

If you really have outdoor education experts who can rig up amazing fieldwork, then let's see! And let's videotape it. That's asking a lot of a prospector, but those people exist in the junior

mining business. You can find some really competent people.

The three LOI that I've signed so far are meant to show stuff like that. The LOI in Australia that I canceled already was with some people who I don't really know. But it came to me through Jason Libenson, and it is a very good lead. A thousand square kilometers is an incomprehensible amount of land. It has an amazing geophysical signature. It has one of those "bullseye" geophysical targets. I look at that and think, "how many times can we chop this up? What are the fractal patterns at this system versus the other look-alike deposits?" Sounds like a scenario for CARDS data mining! Seriously, this project in Australia has tremendous potential with stuff like Goldspot or Windfall Geotek. I most wanted to use the private company OreFox from Australia to work on data mining for this project. Australia is a special place where the government has a lot of regional geophysical data covering areas with old mines and the search space for the SEAHORSE SADDLE project. The pitch deck for the private company had a look-alike scenario for this land position and another major discovery with the similar story "undercover in Western Australia." If you use those known deposits to calibrate the geophysical signature for data scoring algorithms, then you can do statistical comparison calculations on a desktop basis to refine the targeting. It's not a definitive test, but it can narrow down the search space.

Then I would go to those priority areas based on the data mining and do "passive seismic" to get a sense of the depth of cover. You build 3D models for depth of cover around each of the hot spots from the data mining and prioritize drilling at the areas with the most shallow cover. And then do "soil gas hydrocarbon" passive geochemistry before you drill to further rank the areas which are under limestone cover.

The soil gas hydrocarbons is a passive geochemistry method that has detection at the parts per trillion level. It's scientific stuff. And passive seismic was used on the moon. It's a passive geophysical method that gives a point estimate for a seismic profile. I've never seen anyone in the mining business build a 3D model from passive seismic data, but it's possible. There may be all kinds of challenges from a computational statistics perspective for all the interpolation and inference that I'm talking about here.

Just the common-sense point, "where's the shallow cover?" If you're going to blindly drill a geophysical target with no geochemistry because then depth to cover becomes really important. If it's 10 meters or it's 500 meters, then that matters. If it's 10 or it's a hundred, then it matters. How much is drilling in the middle of nowhere? Is RC $20 a metre? Maybe five years ago! Is it 200 dollars a metre this year? You can always spend more per metre if you want to buy premium drilling.

I don't know anything about drilling, and I'm gonna run a junior mining company? What the hell am I doing? How can I possibly function in this business? The answer is that I work with project geologists -- I don't have a company geologist. I don't have a lens for the geology, but I do have a playbook and a formula for the programs.

The fieldwork -- I do have a criteria for that. The criteria is old mines that you can drive to. We have that in Nevada with Robert Carrington. He had one project that was only five acres of patented claims and everyone laughed. He said, "Peter, I have this old mine and I've had it for going on 40 years since 1983. Everyone knows it is too small for a public company but I own it because it's an old silver mine in one of the richest parts of the state." I had unfinished business with Carrington from years ago because I worked with him at Newrange for almost five years.

The first time I ever went to PDAC was with Newrange in 2018. It was a treat -- the first time I ever helped set up a booth and everything. It was wild because Ivanhoe Mines had the booth opposite of us. They had a spot on the outside wall by a main door and we were there opposite them. Riverside Resources had a booth next to us, too. It's always fun to talk to people about who has a good booth location at PDAC or not and I was impressed that Newrange had a good booth like that because people will hang onto a location like that for years once they get it. It's an obscure story, but it stuck with me as a formative time at PDAC. And now we're working with him in Nevada. He's had his son and his grandson helping him at site. I don't think his dad has got involved at Rye Patch yet. I don't know if his dad knows anything about these mines, but his dad does know about the Eastgate project. His dad had some detailed production records and maps of that Eastgate but lost them in the 1980s. Mining really is a small world.

I never saw Robert Friedland at the Ivanhoe booth during PDAC, but I watched his speech at the BMO conference in Florida recently. He said something about how a bunch of these small gold mines are "uninvestable" and of no consequence. Fair enough. Compared with the biggest and best projects in the world, everything else looks small and insignificant but there is something about scale versus profit margin that interest me here. If you have a small mine that only makes $100 million dollar profit but it does that on a high torque basis, then that could be high return scenario. To me, we can get the biggest torque with the highest confidence at old mines.

Give me a project that has an old mine and let's talk about what we're going to do at the old mine to understand the geological system better.

In Nevada, I'm looking at an old silver mine with a guy who's owned the private land rights since the 1980s. The private land rights themselves have existed since the 1860s because they're patented claims that are different from modern fee-based mining claims. When Carrington got a chance to buy this mine in the '80s he jumped on it and has been holding tight ever since. Then 50 kilometers away, there's another old mine where we're staking modern claims and building what most junior mining investors would recognize as a reasonable land position out there. And there's potential for some big things to be happening on a regional basis here with two famous gold-silver open pit mines and a gigantic iron endowment that has been mined out to some degree. There's like a shield of iron exposure measured in the hundreds of millions of tonnes and that raises potential for some big geological ideas to be at play here like the big IOCG type deposits, which was the type of deposit we were talking about at that SEAHORSE SADDLE project in Western Australia.

There's potential to use remote sensing to map alteration at surface on a regional basis and hunt for geological signatures of big deposits. There's substantial cover in some places that will obscure the views of the satellites for this stuff, but there are useful tools to start prioritizing how to hunt for opportunity in a 500 square kilometers search space. Or even larger areas, too. The area I'm thinking about with these big open pit gold-silver mines, the iron ore mines, and these salt flats that could have lithium is on the order of 4,000 square kilometers. I can't really talk about that number publicly because it's too big for a little junior like us to think about, but it's important for the interested and engaged investors in this story to understand how deep the rabbit hole goes here.

Do the statistical analysis of the different bandwidths of light from the satellites to guess at where the metal might be located on a regional basis and then do some ground truth work to check. If you knew what you're looking for and had some kind of a sniffer, then you could cover a lot of ground. And you can always do the passive geochem where you put down sensors and come back weeks or months later to get the readings. There's a lot of no-impact work that is possible, but I'm not here to run science experiments.

The big question for me is what can you do the quickest that has the best impact with the highest confidence for the lowest cost that's repeatable.

I like to lay out these kinds of criteria because they help me figure out priorities and sizing. How do you pick the right size project? Or size of work program? The correct plan for any particular program is a huge topic for the exploration business. There are some programs where you don't get the benefit unless you go all the way and you shouldn't start if you can't finish it. Then there are other programs that give incremental gains for the understanding of the valuation of the project -- whatever that means as a jumble of junior mining buzzwords.

In Nevada, the fieldwork I like consists of going to the old mines and sampling the face. Go out there with an XRF to pre-select material and generate a composite sample of the hottest rocks we can find to put our best foot forward. It's pretty simple stuff, so we can get Robert's grandson in there with proper masks, gloves, goggles, and protection to do the dusty work. Get some electricity to run lights and fans so that it's a respectable work place. The Rye Patch mine is probably the best place to do that at the start because it's private land so you have more leeway with permitting requirements, but it's still snowed in and not accessible today. Meanwhile, the WS is clear and it has old mines where we can do the same thing. Let's see!

Apparently Carrington is going out to WS tomorrow to stake.

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It's a weird land area. There are checkerboards where the railroad was granted. Every other section is private? But they would exclude land there was evidence of mining? Apparently, you can actually go through and identify prospective areas today based on how they allocated land rights in the 1800s. Neat perspective from Robert Carrington.

You could go in there hunting for property and pick up some really valuable real estate on the private market. Imagine you take Canadian public markets money into the US private real estate space. That niche patent claim collector business is notoriously undercapitalized to my mind. To actually throw some weight around and quietly assemble some meaningful land positions would be a bullish play. Call it the small stack bully or the small ante push?

The value of private land in states like Nevada is great because you don't have federal jurisdiction of mining? You need state permitting and I don't know the details of that.

Carrington has put mines into production before and I want him to do it again with us.

It's amazing to hear his mining stories. My mandate for him is to go get high grade. Go get high grade. Go get high grade. Oh, you found some high grade? Sweet, go take more samples there, please. "I need a few hundred kilograms." Please get some more. Please get a half a ton.

How much can you get at what silver grades? How much material over forty ounce per tonne silver? How many ounces of silver can you get, confidently?

How much rock do you have to process to get a hundred ounces silver? Well, a hundred kilograms is a tenth of a tonne. At a hundred ounces silver per tonne, that is a total 10 ounces silver within 100 kilos of rock.

If you have 10 ounces of silver today then it's worth $250. Ten ounces is only 250 bucks, eh? How does this mining business turn a profit? What are we talking about? This business is about moving around the decimal point. It's not about doubling or tripling. It's about adding a zero or taking away zero.

For real.

I think about who is Chris Parry and how I tried to convince Chris to do stuff on Playfair years ago. And then the guys behind that company put me on the board of another company they were with, where they lost control and I am now CEO. Imagine that! I took it away from them? I was on the board and there were disgruntled shareholders who wanted a change. I wanted to take it over and here we are. Now what? Game on, like I've been saying. There are a lot of projects and playbooks and things to do.

What would Hunter S Thompson say about the junior mining business? He would probably tell you to Write as much paper as you can.

The Gonzo approach to the junior mining business is to write more paper than Thompson did books. I'll say that.

Do you want to talk about the gauntlet? Can you print more than Gonzo? That's bullish.

If you look at my approach, I've talked about printing as much as possible for the best deals I can find with the most strategic people at the table. And my guidance, as well, has been for a massive rollback. I've said I wanted five to 10 million shares after fixing the deal. And then you think about what that means to fix it? There's a bunch of stuff we've already done, like get the audited financials done and raise a small amount of money. I also wanted to get a new property, or three. So far, I've signed three LOIs and one of them was cancelled already. The other two? Who knows. They're not done yet.

One of them might have to extend for another month with a bunch of stuff happening there. Work in progress. And the original deal terms that we signed aren't going to be approved by the exchange as an expedited transaction, so we have to restate it anyways.

There's at least one more news release coming at the endpoint. And more, as well, because I funded work under that LOI. I wanted to show the board what I see there, so I paid Carrington to go get as much high grade as he can.

No, the first thing I said was to go map the underground at the Rye Patch. The literature says something and I want to see how big that thing might be. He went out and now we have a number for how big we think part of the mine was. It's already bigger than the historical record. And the real mine size is probably a multiple of that, maybe 10 times? I don't know. Maybe two times. In this case, it's probably not 10 times yet, but Carrington hasn't been down to the bottom.

He's had the Rye Patch mine for 40 years and he hasn't been down to the bottom of it? It's not flooded. I don't think so. It's in the mountain desert in Nevada. It's on the patented ground and it even has apex rights.

What does apex rights mean?

Does the Canadian market care about that? Does that matter? Is that a distraction? For a Canadian team, it's probably an oversight. The junior GGL cares but most Canadians pubco probably wouldn't care much. For a local operations team, it matters if you are production-focused. The thing I've told Carrington is to go to the old face and get high grade, if you can. He's done that at WS and that's good. Let's do more of it. You do it once and, okay, go get more. Go get more, go get more. This is the idea, right?

You want old mines where you can get ore simply. That's the playbook in Newfoundland as well.

I found out today that this can be a helicopter assist program. I have always said that I don't like helicopter work, but what I found out today is that the best part of the old mine at this project is on the edge of the coast. Apparently it has large amounts of ore stockpiled at the surface. I've asked them to get hundreds of kilos or thousands of kilos of +5% copper sitting at the surface. I do not know what the number is from the literature or what that number is based on. But if it's a question of us bringing back a few hundred kilograms or 500 kilos of +5% copper back from the Morris Cove mine on the little on the Springdale Peninsula. Call it the Little Bay Head. I think the Morris Cove, mine is a good name, too. There is a Morris cove out there, but I don't know where the old mine is yet. I've looked on Google Earth and I can't see an old mine. We need to send the Newfies out there. They'll probably need a couple days to even find the old mine because they have ever been out there before. They're talking about going out there in a helicopter, finding the old ore pile, digging it up and sorting it for high grade at site, then filling up a container for the helicopter to pick up the rocks and take them back to town?

What? How do you do that? Indiana Jones stuff!

There's a company called Planet X Exploration and they are associated with the vendor group on this deal in Newfoundland we call Little Bay Head copper mine. Maybe the better name for that is Morris Cove mine because we're going out to the Morris Cove at Fox Neck? It's also called Fox neck.

I don't know what kind of metal endowment might be sitting out there. What did the old-timers find? Let's go find out!

Costs add up pretty quick, but the deal I signed with them is such a large deal that the vendor group was incentivized to do some prospecting before we close the deal. They've never been to site and I want to see them do that to get the deal started.

We did that with Carrington. We paid him in stock for some of the fieldwork. So far we've paid him twenty thousand dollars in stock and sixty thousand in cash, which I paid for as a debt to the company. And then we converted the debt to shares.

The exchange has special permission to do things under five cents and I've done almost 20 million shares. We did around 10 million in debt for shares at a penny and half, and then 10 million in an equity financing at two and half cents. That's taken us from what 92 to 110 million shares out.

I'm not really concerned right now with the share price. I'm actually trying to print as many shares as I can with the most bullish deal flow that I can. I've written up over a dozen deals. Right now, the only new deals that are alive are this one in Nevada and this one in Newfoundland -- for both those deals, I've done business with the counterparties for years.

I've known the Newfies for three years and worked with them for two years. I first started working with them when I became a director of the Kermode in January 2020. I found them on Twitter. I was like, "Guys, let's do some business!" In January 2020, I told them that I wanted their entire portfolio. I told them to show me their entire collection of rocks. They had rocks in storage waiting to get assayed. I said to the Newfies, "Tell me about all those rocks! I want Kermode to pay for assays on all of those samples now so that we can get a right of first refusal on all these deals." I said to Kermode, "let's pay for this. Let's assay these guys entire inventory and then do deals with them." It didn't happen and we missed out on at least one project that is around a fifty million market cap right now. They still have rocks that need to be assayed and I'd like team up with them.

Let's do what we didn't do last time, which is a massive deal for a great property with an exceptional team. You get the best performers and you incentivize them the most you can. That's where you start from.

Then, from there, wherever it goes is unknown. When you take your shot, make it your best shot.

By virtue of me inheriting this busted little shell, I'm not precious about it. Many people have who have a shell treat like it's made out of glass. Why? I can't. I'm gonna do as many great deals as I can. I want to do deals with friendly groups.

One example of an unfriendly group was this guy online RocketRed or wildcat1911. I've known him for five years plus online. He's a guy in Alberta. And he had to block me on social media, sorry. We were talking about doing a property deal and he said, "No, I'm gonna do with somebody else."

I said, "Okay. Sorry to hear like let me know if you find anything else." I want to do deals. I've talked to other people online, like Jason White and Wilson @Newfoundland Bullit. Great people.

Out of all the guys in the province, Neal Blackmore has been the best to deal with for me so far. I think he's an absolute pro. I've learned so much from him. He has some of the best ideas that I've heard. He's on par with Mark Brazeau for me as top five all-time for me. They're leaders in Canada for me. There's a deficit of practical knowledge for what is useful in mining exploration. I don't know a single driller. Wait, I know one driller -- he lives here in Sooke and is building custom drills.

Building drill rigs from scratch for a man-portable program in Peru? Yes, please. Apparently, it is hard to find drills or even the parts to make drills, so what does that mean for the value of someone who can make a drill in 2022?

Carrington has a story about an electric drill he has for working underground. He said it was likely the most customized drill I'd ever see in Nevada. Cool! I love good drill stories. I think drill tech is investable. I believe there are things you can do with drills to make them more innovative and better. There'sThere's a lot more than just diamond drilling.

I think I'm really interested in small-scale and really fast analysis, too, because the wait times for the labs are just unbelievable in some cases. What I want is short small holes into something that you can concentrate at site and test. I want a definitive test from the drill core at the site without the assay lab. You can do that with certain mineral types like coarse gold. You can do a definitive test for coarse gold pretty simply with a rock crusher and some kind of gravity separation. A shaker table if it's wet or an air jig if it's dry. The power of discrimination is not very high, but you can still do a basic definitive test for coarse gold. In some of these desert settings, that's enough for me. There are things you can do for copper with this electroplating circuit. Crush the rock up, put it in a slightly acidic water bath with an electric anode to suck the copper out of the slurry, then melt the copper off the steel anode to pour a rough copper ingot? Can that be done safely? It's not a hundred percent extraction, but I think it's possible. And I think it works as a simple, definitive test. Maybe it's only a definitive test for high-grade copper, but that's still useful. If there's bornite in the rock, then this will get it. Okay, great! That's a helpful field test.

If you have some high-speed, high-efficacy test for the presence of high-grade copper in samples, then that's useful.

It's a high-tech approach to the exploration business. I'm looking for high-confidence tests with high-discriminatory power. A lot of these tests are transferable to different projects. Can you liberate the minerals, and how do you recover them? If we're smart enough to drill holes, we should be smart enough to figure that out. The first thing I want to do is metallurgy.

Great, we found some high grade -- let's go find more. And then more! Let's get a few hundred kilos to take to the local mines in the area. Take samples to every mine in the area and give them 10 kilos or 1000 kilos as a gift that Kermode pays for. Imagine that we give you a free high grade from our mine if you want it. For anybody in the world that we can ship it to? We won't ship like thousands of tons right away, but if there are people who want rock samples, we are totally in the business of sending those things around. They're not radioactive materials. We can send them to an office in Switzerland, India, or Australia.

Take an exploration project to a metals trader?

Who is out there trading raw ores? That's a highly unlikely scenario because I've never heard of anybody doing that. The thing I have heard about is a junior who takes samples to a major -- find a geologist there who will look at the stuff and say, "we need to work on this." If he's able to champion it, then that can be a win. That just takes luck and good fortune. And bold initiative.

I don't know what really justifies talking about it, but you know, I've to do it. To see those texts with you today, Chris Parry @equitydotguru and think about this wrestling thing that Chris is into. I love it!

I don't like the fighting anymore. As a kid, I always liked the wrestling entertainment stuff. I understand that people get excited about this quote-unquote fighting. It's very high drama. I can't watch it anymore, but then again, I don't have to -- I see Dwayne The Rock Johnson on a regular basis online. And John Cena? Stone Cold Steve Austin? Think of how wrestling permeated Western culture. What does that mean about the significance of wrestling entertainment?

This is why I say Chris Parry is a visionary for doing wrestling promotion.

What's better than a circus barker is a chairman of the World Wrestling Federation. Pretty funny! Apparently, it can be pretty gripping to a lot of people. What does it look like for the business of media entertainment or investment media, or education media? What are we doing out here?

I'm an officer of a public company. I still help companies run social media. A social media consultant is pretty low value at work, but it gave me a lot of time to practice representing companies online. Thinking about and listening to what people said about them. Super valuable experience for getting dialed in. And I spent years studying what legendary investors have to say about the junior mining business. Now I build my strategy around that.

That's a character type from wrestling, too. Is that like the face or the heel? Or the nerd or what?

The wrestling thing gets my respect. I respect it big time. I do, and I want to learn more. It's not the first time I've seen it in the finance business. There'sanother guy on Twitter from the East Coast who is involved with a New Jersey wrestling league. He's a junior mining investor, too.

I hate to see people get hurt, but the entertainment value is very high for a small niche audience. That is like the junior mining business, too.

There are other similarities between the audience who invest in junior mining stocks and the audience who watches or wrestling. I think, well I think there's there's a lot of overlap there high-risk behaviours, you know.

So,

Yeah, with your wrestling exposure as it's also really cool like the business thing to like create a wrestling league and like tell me how you can't float that publicly right up. There's something where you can do spinouts with a PubCo and help them become public. I think Peter Clausi is doing this with Cobalt Inc CBLT.

So he said, you can make money with the drill bit or the pen tip and generate business, and you're not wrong, you're not wrong. He's right. I'm lucky to have him on my board of directors. He came on with like a single day's notice. And I had been talking to him for weeks or months beforehand on the hostile scenario last year, but eventually, he came on with a day's notice.

He told me prior to that that Chris Perry was interested in helping Peter Clausy with a hostile. If one ever came up because we were all taught, everyone was talking about all these other deals that have been controversial. And there is a community of people that have been like, "Hey, let's work together on other stuff and let's do better." The fact that I would have some ability to get a free coverage campaign from Chris Perry, it's super bullish.

I went back and studied the history of Seabridge Gold since Rudi Fronk took it over. It started like Kermode with like five grand in the bank account? I made a tweetstorm about it when I joined the board of Kermode.

https://twitter.com/PeterNBell/status/1212604840951480320 "My first impression on why $SEA had such big wins is part bull market, part bold management. Little things around consistent communication and nuances in deal structures stand out for me. Reminds me it's very much a "people" business. 1998-2006 so far,"

I always tell people one of the key things I noticed from studying 10 years of Seabridge news releases from when Rudi Fronk took over to when they started winning at KSM was that they got the share price above a dollar and financed at dollars rather than cents. That made a huge difference for dilution.

And that's why I say that once we get this deal fixed, I want to have five to ten million shares out. What does it mean to say "fixed"? I've said that I want to pass the audit, do a small financing, and get a project before it's fixed.

Can we get a ten million valuation in a bullish market? If we have 10 million shares, then this is a dollar per share. What does the warrant structure look like?

Right now we have a bunch of warrants at five cents. How much are we gonna roll it back? Those warrants at five are at like a five million dollar implied market cap. If we're at a ten million valuation, then those warrants would be in the money and they would be a potential drag.

The stock's current valuation is two million. For those warrants to go in the money, we have to double the valuation. We could do that with some property acquisitions. I've said that I want to do that. I'm actually trying to find the best deals. I believe I can justify huge dilution relative to what this company has done in the past. I tell the project vendors that I'm looking to pay 10% of the company for the best projects from the best groups that check all these boxes. Easier said than done but it's not impossible!

I don't think there are lots of groups like this, but there are some. The hard part is availability and funding. Those are big challenges, but money solves a lot of problems. Some of these properties and people attract money. If you start working on them on a small scale, then some of these projects attract money.

These stocks always have to be sold. Junior mining stocks are never bought.

My challenge is to try to stay coherent when covering everything.

There's a lot for me with all this stuff. It comes full circle in a lot of ways. Even the guy who was just texting me before I started this recording. It reminds me of the pace of this business, how fast things move, and how hard it is to be successful on a sustained basis. That's why there are so many features of the way I'm talking about running this deal. Whether or not the reality lives up to the hype remains to be seen, but talk is cheap so let's spend heavy! I'd rather talk than drill at this point. And I'd rather bulk sample from the mine face than drill as well.

I don't want to drill a blind target when I can go sample an old mine up and do product qualification test work with labs and other mines in the area. For every project I work at, I have a local team who can get in touch with the local miners in ways that I can't. Things I can't do on the phone, they can do in person.

They have connections and know people. Those local guides are everything. If you have got the right local guide, then you have a chance at some success. Any one. project could be good or could be bad,

Go find an old mine. Is it good today? Maybe it is, or maybe it isn't. Maybe the old-timers stopped mining because they got to a certain mineralogical composition that they didn't like. Maybe they were after a different metal? Maybe it was too skinny. You tell me why the old timer's stopped mining. Don't just say they ran out of ore. Our cutoff grades today are much different than theirs.

It's true, they could have run out of ore. A lot of these mines had all kinds of external stuff, too. The history of mining has big cycles. The silver price boom in the 1860s. Copper in Newfoundland in the 1900s. What else?

A lot of times it was commodity price that drove the boom and bust. I think the mine's in Newfoundland stopped because of commodity price. I think the silver mines in Nevada from the 1860s like Rye Patch with the Alpha Patent stopped because of commodity price. The gold mines in Nevada in the 1940s stopped because of war? Apparently the WS was an antimony mine primarily in the 1950s. Does that make sense in the 2020s at all? I don't know. Niche metals are interesting because sometimes you don't need a lot of material to have a lot of value. If there's some special metal assemblage at the WS that has some favorable features on a blend basis for other mines in the area, then that that's one angle. Or if there's a highly rare and highly valuable metal at WS then that's interesting. Or if minings is relatively low cost compared to other mines that produce this metal antimony? I don't know anything about the fundamentals of antimony market right now. I don't know if there's any primary antimony production right now in Nevada, or if it's very small scale. Is it measured in the millions of dollars a year, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions?

Carrington was saying numbers like 10, 20, 30, 40% antimony in the rock. I have a hard time understanding that. I don't know what that means.And if he's able to sample us multi-kilo silver assays then that's great, too.

Let's go back and get more of that and let's send it to the lab to see what metals we can get. Let's go.

That's a drive up program at a relatively small scale in Newfoundland where we're talking about taking a helicopter out to open and so on the coast from Gander and dropping off the crew who then go find the old workings, started digging up a bunch of old high grade and make it ready to get taken back with a helicopter, get dropped off and the town, where the guys pick it up with a truck and then drive it to the warehouse where they have their exploration business field site or or or crew side yard and stuff this, right?

So truck a few hundred kilos of high grade to their worksite, and that's where they can do the electoral plating test. Work themselves to do a discriminatory test in Newfoundland and electroplate at the Planet X exploration company headquarters? Can they do the backyard electrical plating? Maybe they already know how? I don't know. They can figure it out, anyway. And if they got a high grade from the site with a helicopter, boy, that's the first helicopter program I've ever approved of! Talk about slinging 500 kilos over 10 kilometres? Then driving it another 200 kilometres by a truck? Think of how far you'd be moving the heavy material before you put it in a bag at the site, eh.

It's 10 kilometres from the old mine to the Little Bay townsite. And then over 200 to Gander.

Can we use a helicopter to move a sampling circuit to the site? Then use that to process the stockpile +5% copper that is supposedly a site somewhere. If we find that and then process it in a gravity mill, then we can produce a "mass concentrate" that could be 30% copper or more?

Do we know where the old mine is located exactly?

Do we have a gravity mill they could take to the site? Jackhammers and rock crushers? Shovels?

I've heard of helicopters moving drill rigs, but I've never heard of one moving a rock crusher and shaker table in a shipping container. I think that's a realistic scenario for a junior mining company. I'd like to do that.

Imagine if you had a shipping container with an electroplating circuit in it, too. Find the old stockpile dig it up with jackhammers by hand. Then put it through rock crushers and a shaker table to make a gravity concentrate. Put the concentrate into a vinegar-water bath with a steel anode to plate the copper and take the copper back by helicopter. How much would that cost?

The standard junior mining playbook is to use a helicopter to drill. Neal Blackmore said we could use one to move large amounts of rocks from the stockpile at the old mine. Possible? If so, imagine the other things we can do in the future with a high-grade stockpile? Even waste rock or development material may have significant copper today. I don't know. Nobody's been out there 100 years? 40 years? 50 years? Ten years? 20? I don't know.

I do not have the answer for you on the Newfoundland project. Or the Rye Patch in Nevada.

I'll tell you Carrington had the one patent for 40 years and never did any geochem sampling site. He's never had an assays done. And even now, he still has not done assays at the Rye Patch. He did at the WS first, which is the project he staked and optioned to us. He said the Rye Patch was too small for a public company, so I said that I wanted it.

The WS can be as big as we want, basically. At this point, there there's even an entire iron belt right next to the WS. And a lithium salar?

If you want to expand WS and get a bigger land position, then we can stake hundreds of millions of tons of iron.

And then here's a salar as well.

That looks like a lithium salar.

What?

There's a trifecta of stuff right around WS. It is out of control. If those things are really the way they look, and there's room to get in on those? Dude! Send the XRF out, and he goes and tests the salt flats. Can we find lithium at the surface out there?

This one has a lot of boron on it. This is a lot of lithium here. Is that possible? I have to assume it is, and then you drive over to the old iron mine pits and drive along with the road search for outcrop. Oh, this is a big chunk of iron.

Let's go scan it. Just mmm.Interesting XRF sampling program across.What two miles by Carrington in his truck, with his grandson? What, guys, what are we talking about here? Like, he films it, too, and puts it on YouTube. People won't believe these programs. Like, these are such low, low impact old minor remediation too, the theme.

So you go to the old mines, and you want to talk about remediation at some point. It's important, and it provides permanent advantages, right? If you're you're, if you have patents too, those are a permanent advantage. Special rights special permits are easier said than done. For example, team up with the wrong local.

Imagine how bad it can be.

Pay the fees to the US government before putting up the stakes? The paperwork. It turns out wrong. We still haven't put up the paperwork on claims that. They paid to stake.

I tried to get a crew out to stake once, and they got chased away with a shotgun or something. What? The USA is wild.

The Newfies in Canada are fun. I've worked with Neal Blackmore a bunch, and he's great. Neal, John Fahmy, and I helped each other do deals with different pubco last year. John and I started by financing them. I wrote some of their early checks, and John contributed money as well. I did more, but the deals wouldn't have gone off without John being involved. He was absolutely instrumental.

Why was he part of Kermode when the hostile happened? He showed up at the annual meeting. He couldn't vote for his shares because he wasn't the registered owner. They needed a proxy filed with the transfer agent, which he didn't have. It didn't matter.

I could have taken that meeting with my own share blocks without the other people who showed up to vote, but I didn't. All I did was get a new slate of directors. Then someone else came to the meeting with a lawyer who could take the company. And that person was never mentioned in public by Kermode.

The people who voted the minute and the meeting are not really a matter of public record. The pubco doesn't really file minutes of the hostile AGM. I prepared them. Can you find them online on SEDAR? No. What does that mean? It means that there was somebody who showed up at the meeting whose name is not in the public record.

There's some of you showed up at that meeting and had his lawyer there, and they took over the company. They took control of the meeting to some degree. It followed the correct procedure, I believe. There are so many angles that it's an absolutely diamond story.

The CEO wasn't there.

That was probably the number one thing I'd say about the meeting. The CEO wasn't there.

The independent director Neil Briggs was there as Chairman. He said every other AGM had been 30 seconds. And this one was 90 minutes. No one recorded it. I didn't enjoy it, but I'm really glad to go through that experience. I'm really grateful for this opportunity to be of service. "I have been in service, and I will serve." Below the below high table, right John?

"I have served, I will be of service," some John Wick stuff. I think that action film stuff is similar to WWF and gambling or high-risk business. Where is THE MATRIX in all of this? And the stock market?

All these are like war, I think. I don't know anything about the war, but people get blown up in the junior mining business, right? And they get taken out. Some people are a hazard to the people around them. Think about how junior mining management teams can be dangerous to your investing. They're the ones who are gonna get you killed. I've heard that in documentaries before, I think. "It's the other guys around you that are the most important to keep you alive. Get home safe." I think that is relevant to my experience in the junior market.

John Fahmy was top tier all-time greatest: Best 25 year old ever seen in the junior mining business, period. Absolute killer in 2021. And 2022 years gonna be even better. He stacked them up. Watched it? Like I wanted him to be involved heavily in Kermode, but he quit. He didn't want to be corporate secretary, so that's great.

And not a filing insider anymore. We don't know what he did with his sock. I'm not really, he has some options, and they're gonna expire. We're gonna cancel them. I think at the end of March, I've said this before, I'm trying to include him in the Newfoundland deal, and we have some stuff on the table right today.

Monday, March 7th, where I talked to the movie today, they're like, we could get a helicopter on Friday if you want to go out and start sampling high grade. Peter, I said, okay, news to me before today, I didn't even think helicopter assist was necessary at this little bay project with the new fees.

And I talked the new fees about it, and they were like, we can do, they said they do some of the work for free under the LOI. And I said you stuff you can drive to. They said yes, but the stuff I really want them to get is not drive-up access, which I just found today.

The best way to get there right now. It's a helicopter as a whole thing. Imagine a video series Sammy, a professional YouTube thing with these guys. Going out in the summer on boats to little from Little Bay to the mine site is what are we're talking about. There's a deep heritage about boats here.

Right now, trying to get out there is dangerous. It's winter in the North Atlantic, and we're going out to find an old mine and bring back ores? Careful!

A crew will potentially have to go out there for more than one night if you're boating because it's too far from Gander? It is like 12 hours of travel time round trip to the site from Gander. Assuming you find the stockpile.

Six hours to get there. Then how much time does the crew get at the site? This is not Mount Everest. We don't want to get there and then turn around to get home without dying. This is a mine site. We want to get there and then go to work.

A helicopter might be three hours of travel time from Gander?

A single-rotor helicopter generally travels 40 to 50 miles every 15 minutes. It's 130 miles from Gander to Little Bay. Call it 45 minutes of flying time?

Then you can have 8 hours at the site if you're lucky? Newfoundland is getting around 12 hours of sunlight right now, apparently. That's great! Maybe nine hours at the site, which may be enough to spend six hours trying to find it in three hours.

Digging up a few hundred kilos that he loaded into the helicopter. I don't know if you can dig it up? Five hundred kilos in three hours? I don't know if you can permit dynamite or what it takes to fix that.

But assuming that you can find it and you can dig it up in a way that that's productive. We're literally talking about using helicopters right now because the winter is in play. In the summer, you can go up there in the boat is a potentially safer option, or It's actually accessible or realistic in the summer right now. It's helicopter because of the potential for nasty weather snaps and the fact that we're trying to do just a tiny program of grabbing as much of the old stockpile from the oil and old mine as we can be sort of talking about Newfoundland.

What we're talking about in Nevada. Those are the two deals that I have right now in the PUBG that are both under the LOI stage, and I have initial terms on each of them. Both those terms are subject to revision. I don't think either deal is going to go off the way they've been stated so far.

That's a whole other thing. There's a bunch of gray area information. You know that some people know, but those are the counterparties. A lot of that detailed information isn't public, right? I've publicly announced how many shares, but I haven't said to whom

With regards to the Newfoundland property, the Nevada property, I have said gold range, so the counterpart is known, but in Newfoundland, it's not. So you know there are lots of questions about how these deals get done and what level of disclosure has ever been provided to the public market, and I pay attention to that stuff really closely.

I have the obsession of a wrestling fan with some of this corporate stuff.

Suppose I can bring it full circle to say that Chris Parry with the wrestling business is bullish. Total vibe with mining for me. Classic setup with the potential to give out candy, "Free Crackerjacks!" Free coverage, too? Yes, please. As a gift, a teaser, and all these things. It's a spectacle! It creates a spectacle, right? How many of these deals get hammered out in private with a mysterious negotiation process. What happens if you do one where it starts off in public view, and it continues in public. Like, it starts as free coverage, and then the negotiation about the impact of the coverage happens in public on Twitter, say. Too much?

Can we get some "radical transparency" in here somehow?

Take that attitude and combine it with a smart view of what you want for your project profile. Can you find it? Or are you searching for something that doesn't exist? I have to believe that things exist that are better than I can imagine.

I have to believe that things exist. That is better than I can imagine.

Right? So I think the best thing I can possibly imagine is that there's something better out there I haven't seen yet. It's happened before!

I thought I knew the best junior mine deal ever, and then I found something better. And better again. Several times.

I've just added to my own understanding by seeking to do better than my old best old. Find you have some great old numbers in an old report, and let's beat them.

First question. Can we beat it? Can we get better numbers? Can we get a higher grade with more tonnage? As my first question for two years, whenever I see a grade number, what I'm looking at properties from an exploration perspective is always. Can we beat it? Can we get a bigger number in a more meaningful way?

Can we get a better number?

Is bigger always better? How do we get a bigger number? I don't always constrain myself to repeat the same program that was done before. Sometimes I'll ask, "can we get a better number doing the same thing?" But my default preference is to do something different because we have so many new techniques. They may have a great big number, but a better number may be smaller. And the better number it may be sampled differently. Drilling isn't always the right thing to do.

If you have an old mine and you have a stockpile, then going to the stockpile is the first thing to do. If you have an old mine with a grade at the face or in the walls or the back or the floor, then go there. And if you have a mine and you have an outcrop along strike, then go there at the surface, right?

If you have a mine and you see a look-alike a mile away, then go there. Go 10 miles away! What does the repetition for these systems? What kind of systems are we even talking about huge questions, right? And all kinds of situations specific details, but the basics meant to be super simple to the point that they become wrestling slogans, right?

Like, tell me Robert Friedland is not a wrestler. Tell me. Robert Friedland is not "Sting" or "The Undertaker ."Tell me Rick Rule is not Ric Flair. The Ric Flair Drip and Rick Rule Drip are the same things. I respect all those people tremendously, right? Step into a slim jim, brother.

Who is Macho Man, Randy Savage, in the junior mine business in 2022?

Are we talking global basis or Canada or what you know? These soap operas are playing out on all kinds of different scales, right?

The people that I would name as important to my business are not big names in the junior mining business or relative to what's happening in the world now. But they may prove to be very significant to me.

There's a scale thing I care about. What's local? That's what keeps you in the game or gets you out. And then you have to have this global consideration.

Having failed deals is really important.

The private deal I've done in Arizona gave me a lot of lessons. I saw even worse disasters. I saw pubco having problems in Arizona. I don't know why that place chronically underperforms relatively to the potential for me. Maybe it's changing? I keep an open mind. I see the Aussies going in there and dominating. That Eagle Mountain project is an old mine. They went to an old mine and started drilling and finding discoveries on strike. It was a modern old mine, too. That was a group that paid a few million to properly acquire and mine what I think was a serious underground mine. Great choice.

Another group did that with an open-pit mine. Their story was about copper underneath the waste dumps, and that's a great story on patented claims.

I also want to talk about some processing of the tailings at the site now. Remediation playbook?

I don't think they will mine the waste dumps, but I want them to. I don't really care if they've drilled underneath the old dump until they've worked the old tailings with new metallurgical processes.

Supposedly there was no condemnation drilling on the old dump at that mine in Arizona. It's on the patented block they bought, so it's worth checking. But I wouldn't hang my hat on that entirely. There are fundamental breakthroughs happening in metallurgy today.

And that pit scenario is a question to me. I think that basically every mine in the US today should probably be underground. If you're you're gonna build a mine in the US in the 2020s, then it should be underground.

I'll say it again.

If you want to build a big mine, then start with a small one.

I haven't said that on this recording, but it needs to be repeated a bunch of times. Go slow to move quickly.

If you want to build a big mine, then start with a small one because there are permitting advantages to incremental versus mega projects. Very few people understand that in this business. Does Carrington? Does Neal Blackmore? I think so. And I know other people who do, too. People brought me projects all over the world, and I would love to move on all of them.

I've signed all the LOI that I feel comfortable signing until we get some resolution on what's on the table. I would love to sign in dozen more. I had people tell me to do more. Like, "Hey! You should sign as many as you can right now." And my answer is yes.

I will sign more deals.

Right now, I am waiting for the resolution of the two deals I have already announced. I feel confident in my network of counterparties for more deals at this point, my ability to meet new people and vet properties are near zero. Kind of hard to understand why, and the reality is that the good things take time, right?

So these three deals that I've signed, one of them are resolved, and two of them are still a question and

Those are the ones I've I've been talking about, but whether they both come and go, we could still win. Because what's the next one look like? Like, even if I sign all three of these in kill all three of them, is that it? Are we done? No, right. We're just getting started.

"So It's showtime!"

Battle rap is important in culture today, to some degree. I think it's a global thing. I've seen battle rap and from Russian guys for years. Palestinian and Southeast Asian people too? South Americans? North Americans? It's a pretty global thing to have aggressive males yelling at each other. There are lots of women who do it, too, because there are lots of aggressive females out there too! And that has a lot of similarities and overlap with wrestling culture and also gambling culture. There are a lot of people who probably overlap between gambling culture and battle rap and wrestling.

Where does junior mining fit in all that now? I don't know of any overlap between junior mining and battle rap, other than the one time I talked to Rick Rule about it.

I talked to Rick Rule once about battle rap. I told him that I love watching battle rap, and he said, "what's battle rap?" I think I said the movie Eight Mile with Eminem, and he said he hadn't seen it. Classic. I explained it, and he said it sounded like something he would enjoy! He proceeded to tell me about a blues song that is an epic trash-talking session, "Jelly Roll Morton, The Dirty Dozen ."Oh boy!

Wild old blue song with lines like, "Yo Mammy, don't wear no drawers" or something. Imagine that in 2022.

To me, that is like a battle rap song. A total disrespect track. Or like some guys calling each other out? The WWF slapping match is the musical equivalent of this song from the blues era?

And please don't think that this is all just low-brow culture! The "Dirty Dozen" song was recorded in 1938 by Alan Lomax, an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. I've listened to hours of Alan Lomax recordings, and this inspires me to go listen to more. I told him that battle rap is a really interesting cultural phenomenon.

This archetype will be a theme that comes up. These are important in metals and mining because they say prostitute was the first profession then no, it's the sell-sword—the mercenary. The better answer is it was the gold miner because you needed something to pay both of them with!

Money is a tie that binds us. It is a token of community or something to be part of. What is the economy? The Greek word for home care or something, right? Tell me money isn't integral to the community. And then another part of the community is us-versus-them. Having outsiders or tension or fights is an important dynamic for making a group more cohesive. That's everything in wrestling entertainment. Again, I come back to that because I do think it's relevant. It's totally absurd that these things would all be connected in this way. I've never seen a scenario where all these factors come together.

And then I love the generosity piece, too. I've tried to be generous throughout my career. The ability to see somebody else being generous to you and then to take accept it is important too. To honour it and to use it to amplify and add more value for everyone? Yes, please. And that's a type of competition of who can help the other person more?

Great! Lots to say. Fun to put me out there in a lot of ways. Working hard with smart people is what I'm doing. The reality is that it's an open door right now. There are a lot of people who I respect that I'm working to do new things with coming at me all the time. To see my friend ping me about a free program from Chris Parry and then to get it? Yes, please! Thank you.

Thank you for the alley-oop, Jay. Great assist. I hope he talked about it beforehand with Chris and planned it out. And tell me that that's not another wrestling thing, too, right? The alley-oop is the stage manager. The undertaker and the caretaker? The team thing is classic. Ric Flair and his girls or whoever he's got with him? All these entourage factors come into play and show off the possible networks. The bigger, the better "unless there are a bunch of candy asses on your team," says The Rock? How is the smack talk?

I've seen the junior mining pitch battles and heard of that at conferences, but I don't know how widely that is done or what those look like. But tell me that you don't have a 30 second smack talk session on a panel of companies? Or do a competition about who can say the best thing about the other companies?

In battle rap, there is a "compliment battle." Imagine the junior mining conferences start doing battle rap sessions at conferences where the companies do compliment battles? That would be very Canadian, eh.

Will we ever see Bristow and Friedland on stage together? Where do they factor into all this? They affect each other. They're not direct competitors or anything, but the mining business is pretty small. The list of billionaires who have influence in mining is a pretty closed set. And then think of the people who have public profiles and make public statements? I'm talking about a subset of that.

I'd say Bristow and Friedland are very public figures. What they say is taken off against each other to some degree.

I didn't hear Bristow speak at the BMO conference when they did the deal with Newmont. I did hear Friedland speak at the BMO conference this year. It's great to hear him giving the organizers a hard time because the BMO only gave out one scholarship in Africa to women. The need for quality people in the mining business is everything. I think he said he's given out hundreds of scholarships to people in Africa so let's see what's next!

Friedland was literally trash-talking BMO at their own event, and he is right to do it. We can all do better. And that's how we do it by challenging each other. And he didn't stop there, either. He called out the small un-investable gold mines out there. He said some gold companies are un-investable, and he's right.

Did he call a bunch of the companies exhibiting at the BMO event un-investable? Or did he say there are generally a bunch of companies that don't deserve to be invested in? Maybe the BMO roster is better than everybody else, but I don't know if he qualified it that way. Does it matter? I think he threw the water on all of us.

Imagine being the keynote and trashing all the other people at the industry conference.

There is an audience of investors, but it's exclusive. For example, Jeb Handwerge is an independent newsletter writer and junior mining business guy, and he couldn't get into the conference at BMO this year. He posted online about it. That was a bad look for the event. Although if you're not vaccinated, and you're, you're not gonna wear a mask, then it's up for debate, apparently. Couldn't he even go to the bar for a drink? Meanwhile, Robert Friedland is on the main stage talking trash! Handwerger and Friedland are working the door and the stage, and they're both negative? Wild. Those two guys made this year's BMO conference memorable for me.

I listened to Friedland's speech this morning, and I saw Jeb's post on Twitter whenever it happened a few days ago. And that's a whole other topic: the value of Twitter is unbelievable.

I remember one time when a guy got killed by the police in the US, and the first person I saw retweet it was Chris Parry.

Or was it Craig Perry? No, Craig is Australian, but he was CEO of IsoEnergy.

Anyway, I didn't watch the video when you retweeted it, Chris because you said the guy died in it. I'm 35, and it's 2022, which means I grew up with the internet. As a young teenager, we got internet as it was rolling out over the world. Growing up with Napster was a pretty unusual experience. As a young person with access to this unfolding information set, it's a lot to process, and you get exposed to a lot of stuff too. Whether from other children you're around or the unsupervised access to the internet. What? I think that video Chris retweeted was one of the first times a lot of people saw the same footage of somebody dying in a terrible way online. I think that was a historic moment for society. The pace of history is accelerating.

I'm focused on the point of exclusion. I have a shortlist with a long memory.

It's 11:11 pm now. The gauntlet has been thrown down, right?

That's the first thing when I saw your tweet a few weeks ago about THE GAUNTLET. "Oh no, here we go again, the same thing that we've we've been doing since way back then!" I love these interview things.

Fun to make my own tapes too. Just me talking is a little much when the quality is poor outdoors with no fact checks and no reference materials or anything like that. My main goal here is actually the transcript because I study my own pitch by editing the text of it.

Talking about all this stuff off the dome outside walking around is a different skill set that I haven't perfected yet. I never will, but I super enjoy it! And the thing for me with it is to have somebody I'm speaking to. I like to talk to someone in particular with my notes like this. I'm missing the talk-back part with the other person, but this is the practice to run THE GAUNTLET.

Two hours of prep time, we are just talking about random things. Is that useful? It helps me to map it all out and then go into the conversation and forget it all. Just say, where are we at the moment, and how do we make this the most interesting way we can?

I don't know how many interviews I've done of CEOs of junior mining companies? Now that I am one try to interview me! That's why I do the two-hour prep so I can make the two-minute sprints.

And then, if you make the two-hour prep available for people who want the deep dive on the background, then it's there. What I'm talking about here is just public information. There are no details in anything I've said that is material inside information.

I'm not here talking about the material inside information. Everything's public and strategic, right? There are so many conversations we can have just strategy-wise for junior mining. And my goal is to get as much mileage as we can out of the hypotheticals that we can be the rocket guidance system we use when we're flying through. We want to know which path we're on and how to correct it. Flight management system?

How do we fly the rocket ship? The stock chart emoji?

Question: How do you manage a flying stock?Answer: Light touch.

I say light touch because it's not in your control. Don't think that you can force it to do this or that. Do your best to ride it, but don't let it ride you? At least that's the story. Is it the best story? You tell me! Does it potentially work? Oh, for sure. Is there potential for high impact, low cost, high confidence results at high speed? Yes, and is it repeatable? Yes. Do we know people who can do the work? Yes. Okay, what are we waiting for? How do we get it started?

How do we kick it to the next level?

I remember once talking to you, Chris, about Hunter S Thompson. You told me a story about Hunter S Thompson. You said, "Hunter, you're the reason I became a writer." To which Dr. Thompson said, "Don't blame me for your mistakes!" Wow.

I can imagine his voice, "Fuck, Chris! Don't blame me for your mistakes! What is wrong with you. You must be truly gonzo to want to be a writer." Imagine that.

Gonzo junior mining.

Hunter S Thompson would say, "With the internet, everyone is a writer. We're all writers. We all have something burning inside, ashes of the fire to keep warm." I don't know, would he say all that?

Or did you just swear and shoot guns, drinking Chivas?

Chris Parry, I want to know more about your story with Hunter S Thompson. I've heard that little bit from you, "don't blame me for mistakes" line is a classic. One night with Hunter S Thompson would be pretty wild. I wonder if it's like watching a marathon of all the WWF highlights from all time?

Where the wild things are!

Danger! Entertaining? Exhilarating, inspiring, even traumatizing? Take those same words and tell me if they apply to WWF? Would the people who are really into the WWF describe it?

Use those words to describe their experience at it. Yes. Probably would other people use some of those words. Probably some of the words yeah, probably not inspiring. You probably need a fan to say It's inspiring, but if you say the word, Not exciting something, There's an element of disgust as well too.

And there are certain people who are not fans. It would be discussed by it in the same way.

There are people who discuss "wrestling entertainment" as others talk about junior mining stocks. Investing in junior mining companies is some high-risk speculating. Gambling!

There's a certain amount of disgust for the battle rap and certain types of music as well. A disgust from the mainstream?

There are characters in all this. There's Mr. Clean.

There's the heel. And there's the face.

That's the story. You get into these archetype conversations about heel and face, good and bad, winning and losing. A lot of that is junior mining! Is he going to fleece the lamb? The bull eats. The bear eats. The lamb gets eaten. Happens a lot.

A lot of junior mining companies go to zero. Who's getting paid? Where is the money going? He was winning and losing at the table.

I had the opportunity to earn +10% of the company now for less than a quarter-million dollars. $150,000 for 10% of the company? Yes, please. I'm glad about that. How long will I be able to keep it before I get deluded down too much for debate? Depends on what kind of dilution we do. So far, we've done a de minimus amount of Cash and debt financing. I want to do big property deals. That might put me at five percent of the company, down from my current ten percent. I am willing to accept the risk of that dilution, knowing that the market may give me an opportunity to maintain my position in the company by investing more and taking compensation in stock. Let's make a deal!

And then I want to do a rollback.

I don't want to come out the other gate out of the gate with a gate million shares. I want to have 10% of 8 million shares or 10% of 10 million shares in a shell that is cashed up with projects and people to work them. And 10 million shares, where are the warrants? Where are the options? How heavy is the stock?

Run the numbers again and again. Mmm. in the same way, these guys fight it out in the ring? Fist to fist, right?

We fight it out the numbers and with the stories, right?

The Friedland concept.

Think of the WWF when you watch his speech at the BMO 2022 conference. Seriously, he trash talks about small uninvestable gold companies. Imagine that!

Did he trash all the exhibitors at the conference? Did he call out the conference organizer for not doing more scholarships in Africa?

Anything's possible.

I can go to old mines and get locals to sample them for me and press release results. Then take samples and send them to local mines that are operating in the area? That's repeatable, right? And if that's your thing? Your costume? Your junior mining deals costume is old mines, and your secret move is "working the old mine"? Do we drill? We go sample first. The old mine is like our superpower, finishing move.

Are we a face or a heel?

Does it matter? What battle are we? Who's our opponent? Did we win? Do we lose? Did we have to cheat, right? Did somebody help us? Does the crowd like us, right? All those questions apply to junior mining companies.

Anything's possible.

Are we a face or a heel? Does it matter? What battle are we? Who's our opponent? Did we win? Do we lose? Did we have to cheat? Did somebody help us? Does the crowd like us? All those questions apply to junior mining companies. If they apply to wrestlers, they apply to us! Do you know what I mean? Think about the different ways of promoting junior mining companies. I thought about it, again and again, every day for the last five years or whatever it's been since I first saw that speech by you, Chris Parry, talking about "dear junior mining company, your investors are dying. " Wow!

Remember that?

Remember that speech? It does haunt me every day. I faced that when I took over this company. The guys who had it 30 years since it went public in 1993 or so. Thirty years as a public company, starting on the Alberta Stock Exchange. Why? What has it accomplished?

The total accumulated deficit from 30 years is 10 million dollars. Wow. If I'm lucky, then we will spend 10 million in the first three years. If I'm really lucky, then we will spend 10 million in the first two years. Imagine the Newfie project is something we're talking about with helicopter mining as something that generates enough news to justify it on an ongoing basis. What can actually "work" is pretty hard to believe. It's possible.

Tell me that doesn't work. I've never heard of it working. But then, again, I've seen companies who put pictures of helicopters carrying people to do biogeochem programs—literally using a helicopter to go clip pieces off trees. Imagine that. I told this to a guy recently, and he's a great promoter with a bunch of deal flow. He said he'd seen it twice. I said, wow. He beat me.

I'm astounded by the goofiness in this business. The ability to do better is so tremendous, and to some degree that it involves beating other people. Like, can we get better newsflow than other companies?

Can we have better price action? Can we have a better trading volume? Can we do better investor relations? Mining is a competitive business.

Can we have one of the best minds in the world for its size and metal?

We have one of the most profitable news, small mines, or can we have something that becomes a significant deposit that somebody else wants through. You know, these are questions you can ask at all mines because typically significant discoveries happen over mines. So I'm past the two-hour mark, I should probably shut up, but that's it.

It's old mines. When you're at an old mine, you have some help with your story. The questions are not. Is there anything there? The questions are more about. What is still there? And it doesn't matter. You can't answer those questions how to hand, and the way you answer them is different from the way you find and/or body in most scenarios.

So you need to be a different character on the stage in the ring. You need to have a different story. You need to have a different.

Different accomplishments. Different approach.

Different goals, different constraints.

And you got to know what you're doing. It's okay to figure it out as you go. Mistakes are necessary, but you want to have some concept in mind of what you're trying to accomplish as with any high-risk business.

When you sit down at the table, don't get eaten.

You can't be bullied by the table when you are gambling. Don't let the dealer bully you. Don't let the wheel bully you. Don't bully yourself! There are so many ways of gambling that you can make sense out of dollars. Or cents out of dollars.

It's okay to make mistakes. Don't go on tilt. How do you handle your losses? How do you handle your drink? You've got to be safe.

Risk can really put you off your game. So when you're winning, you want to get bigger into something. And when you're losing, you want to get smaller? That's how you protect yourself from the downside and capture more of your upside. Great story. How do you implement that in the details?

It's a very complicated conversation, very situation-specific. The basic principles seem clear to me now. One of the factors in this scenario is that I don't think of this public company in the same way as most people who have a shell. Most people who have a shell build it with a lot of time, effort, and expense. I think it's more precious to them than me because I didn't build Kermode Resources Ltd.

I joined the board when they needed a warm body. How many days' notice? Did they give me ten days? Notice in December, "Hey, Peter, can you join on January 1st?" That came to me in December. Maybe December 20th? Or December 10th? Really guys? Yes, of course!

What did I say? Yes.

Then what happened? It was a busted shell. It didn't deserve to be public? I didn't buy stock in the market when I joined, but I should have. It was a half-penny bid on 65 million shares out. Less than a million-dollar market cap for a shell? Yes, please. I bought 5% of the company in financing at a 1 million valuation, which was like 3x higher than the market cap when I joined. Now I have +10% at a $2M valuation. How's that for an accretive transaction? I've talked about these other stories at length elsewhere, so I won't go into it but compare it to WWF wrestling.

Imagine doing a "boardroom brawl" on a wrestling league with Chris Parry and Peter Bell.

Those stories have some elements of reprehensible disgust from a mainstream perspective. A hostile takeover is like a good cocktail party story. There's a reason we call them a "story stock."

Is there room for a contrarian in all this? It's not about being difficult. Being a contrarian is not about being angry. It's not unhappy. It is ambitious. I would use the word ambitious to describe all this stuff more so than unhappy or unsatisfied, excited, angry, or whatever. These are just words. Who cares?

Just words until you become the CEO, and then it's the power of the pen.

I wanted to do business with you, Chris Parry, at Kermode during the hostile takeover, but I didn't do so. I'm sorry about that, I regret it. I'd like to fix it. We can add a Director to Kermode at any time with a "board resolution ."I have not asked Peter Clausi about creating a fourth seat on the Board of Directors and then appointing you to it, but I guess he'd support it. He told me that he wants to do business with you.

There was talk about me you on the day that I took over the company, but that didn't happen. Sorry. Trying to do too much, and it is my first time doing a hostile takeover. I've talked about that story a little bit elsewhere, and I'll say as much as Robert Friedland gives BMO a hard time for only giving out one scholarship to women in mining in Africa at the 2022 conference, and Jeb Handwerger couldn't get in the building, I will give them a hard time too.

I went to the BMO downtown location after the hostile meeting on August 11th, 2022 and said, "Please help me. We just took over a public company and needed to lock the bank accounts. " The guy said, "oh, email this person. " Email this person. They reply, "we can't do that. We have to hear from the company before we lock the accounts. "

Then Peter Clausi wrote that they've been notified of legal action and that BMO is liable for losses. They locked the accounts, and this was maybe three days later?

It turns out the former team had been active in the account the day after the meeting where they lost the company. They put like a hundred grand into the Kermode bank account and took out like twenty? Wild.

I tried to reconstruct what they did, and it was spectacular. The stock ticker KLM is the initials of the wife of the CEO. Beautiful!

If money had been taken out of the accounts, then what? How much money is "material" anyway?

What were these guys doing? I don't have an answer for that.

We've been through the audit now, and that's fine. I was not part of the company when they were running it, really. They didn't do much that I was able to help with, but I had a big impact from the time I joined the board.

I joined the board in January 2020, and we signed the initial deal with Andy Randell for the VIDETTE project a few months later. The Independent Director Neil Briggs picked it. The land position needed to be completed with an infill position that cost like ten grand? I did not like VIDETTE at the time as much as I liked another one Andy had with an old mine. I always want an old mine.

They didn't include me in the negotiation of the deal with Andy at all, either. I wasn't part of it, and I'm haunted by that deal now. It's part of why I've designed my deals so differently.

I can barely afford to have Andy's deals right now. If I had three LOI like I've published for Kermode so far, then I can afford it. But I couldn't afford three of Andy's deals right now because of the work commitments.

I could afford three of my deals the way I'm designing them now. The only work commitment I want to have is to keep the claims in good standing.

Playfair Mining is the sister company of Kermode. Playfair still has claims they've had for going 20 years or so? They pay annual fees to the government in Newfoundland. And when you hold onto something that long, the cost of it becomes much greater. It's a few cells, and it might be 20 grand now or more? Is that a significant amount for a public company? Over five years, that's a hundred grand. If the market cap is one million, like Kermode when I first financed it, then that is a 10% dilution of claim fees versus market cap. On a rolling five-year total claim spend. Is that a useful statistic? Or is it just twenty grand per year against a ten million market cap for a 0. 2% dilution rate? Who cares about a property that you're not working? That's one end of the spectrum.

I'm thinking about new claims in the US where you just have the annual fee. We're keeping our land position small there. I also want to hunt for some more private land.

And then the Newfoundland ground.

We have like 50 square kilometres? What's the minimum work coming on that per year? 50 grand? Are we gonna spend 50 grand this year? Look, if we take an old mine that has an old stockpile on our ground that we can sample, then what? Say, 50 tonnes of plus 5% copper at the surface. Even if it's five tons of five percent copper, then that's great.

If we can't spend 50 grand in response to numbers like that, then we're doing something wrong.

It may cost 50 grand to go sample all the old dump stockpile working, whatever material and take that back, get assays of it done.

And then do concentrate process, testing and recovery testing, and, and, and then make shipments like a sample testing program where you send out free samples, that's right. How much is that? Can you do that for 50 grand? You may not be able to do the entire dump. If there are 10 tons, you may only be able to do two tons to start, but that's 2,000 kilos. Two thousand kilograms of high-grade potential versus how many holes can you drill for that price?

And then in Newfoundland, we're talking about a helicopter assist program. Drilling? No, sampling the old mine. That can actually be a low-cost program, which is very contrarian.

Yes, I'm not a geologist. So when a prospector tells me that this is the best thing that they can think of to do. I listen to them. And I say, whether I agree or not by virtue of not having a company geologist, I have to go find the best people that I can work with and then I have to listen to them and tell them what I want them to do.

And then fight with them about what's gonna

happen? And monitoring them is a huge challenge and getting accurate information out of them is not easy because even Carrington, who is CEO of a public company. He doesn't know how to explain all aspects of everything.

Like, there are blind spots that are problematic to her our planning. They're not very material at this point from what I've seen with him. The new fees, I've had more surprises from them because they like, for example, this helicopter assist. I didn't know about that till today, and normally I'd hate helicopter assist programs, but when you tell me it's a helicopter assist, we're going to sling all samples from stockpiles at a remote location that have never been tested.

We have intestine 40 years; I say these are a few of my favourite things because Peter Clause says, in school mining. If you know where the grade is, go get it. If you know where the high grade is, go get it. Don't spend more money drilling off more. Go get it.

Okay, cool.

That's this program in Newfoundland using like and by hooker crook normally you think doing it by hand? Yeah, we can do it by hand in the summer and rig up different creative ways to get it done. You know, I've gone through all that in detail or at least alluded to it briefly.

And right now, with Atlantic winter, there is potential for winds that could change at any moment and become dangerous. It's not safe to be moving rocks by boat right now unless you're serious. We'll get the barge out there soon enough, but not right now. So there's a seasonality to the work program. You can be doing helicopter year around.

Who cares? Is that realistic? I don't know.

For us to start helicopter in the winter now and then do a barge in the summer? Can we do a scale program for summer 2022? We don't have the money now, but do we have the runway? What if we had five million dollars to spend in Newfoundland in 2022? Could we do it with Neal Blackmore? We may be able to do it.

If there's anybody who could do it, then it would be him as far as people that I know. What can he permit and execute? Do we care about 10 tons? Could we get 10 tons on a boat? I say yes.

I have to believe it's possible. I have to believe. And if not this year, the next year, then that's not the end of the world. I want it now, but it's more important that we do it right. We're able to get some substantial announcements in the meantime to do testing all kinds of things. Man, it's good to have plans on plans.

And then what do we do? Keep it moving. That's why we have a few irons in the fire. We can go and do stuff in Nevada that will complement it. Who cares about silver-antimony? Do we have 20% antimony in the historical production records? Was this an old antimony mine? What is 10% antimony worth today? What is an economic cutoff grade, historically for antimony mines in Nevada? What is antimony?

All these discussions have so many layers. You can peel back the layers of the onion until you cry. I don't have all the answers, but I work with the people who have more answers than I do! I asked them questions, and we could get some action for the public company. Kermode doesn't have a "company geologist" right now. We have a director named Francine Long, who is a geologist? She gives some perspective on what's appropriate, but I'm the CEO, and I'm running the company how I want at this point. The board is giving me pretty strict oversight, mainly from Peter Clausi because he's done two dozen hostile scenarios. He's able to tell me what kind of things to avoid and give me perspective on what works.

I often do what I want, and a few times, I've made questionable decisions and regretted things that I've done. One example was when I cancelled my stock options. Peter Clausi mentioned this could raise questions. The auditors asked some questions about it, and I told them my story about cancelling my options and giving them out to the person who brought us the project in Australia, Jason Libenson. He is a winner.

I regretted cancelling my options briefly, but I don't regret it now. The fact that I'm able to say that I cancelled my options and gave them all to someone else is a statement that I stand by. It wasn't necessary because we still have another six million options we can give out.

But we actually have another batch of one million stock options that will be getting cancelled in a few weeks after John Fahmy's options are cancelled. John quit in December 2021, and his options expire three months later. He had a million options, and I want to give his options to a bullish promoter. Maybe to Neal Blackmore? Neal has brought us good projects already and has access to more. When John's options expire, I would like to move them over entirely to Neal. Imagine the team-building move that could come from that.

There are a lot of people to who I want to give the options. But the first priority goes to the people who have made the best effort towards the benefit of the company. Lots of people are here for themselves, but a few are here for the company, and those people deserve to be incentivized.

There are a few guys I want to put on an advisory board in a press release. That may look like noise to the market, but it is a win to me. Bullish news flow, that's what I want to do. I've said it online, "make a lane and then bring your people with you. " Just me? I thought that's what this was all about. That's another wrestling thing again, too. Teams and wrestling crews are always trying to team up with other people. Then they flip on each other and betray? Or do people quit? Or they're not with it one place, but they move somewhere else, and they thrive and do better? All kinds of drama go back and forth with this stuff too. And we take that playbook with the social drama for the entertainment value.

Serious. Entertainment potential.

Now it's been two hours plus and going on to midnight, so I should shut up at some point here. I'm really cautious about a lot of this stuff because you can make a lot of impressions on people for the first time. You can't un-ring that bell. There's lots of stuff that I wish I could do better. I feel like there's stuff I'm not doing good enough. That's frustrating because I like to be excellent, but I'm finding it.

It's hard to be excellent in a lot of ways with a public company. Running a public company has been a lot simpler and more effective than running a private one for me. The people I do have around me in public are very good. I'm gonna let go and let God! I'm happy to let Jesus take the wheel here.

Is there an element of kamikaze in this? The divine wind blowing away your opponents? Don't go out there and get buried by that wild wind, yourself.

Think of the whole Kermode deal. I called it a hostile takeover, but I was not hostile to the board. I was already on the board! I was friendly to a group of shareholders who were hostile to the old management, though.

I had talked about calling a special shareholders meeting and trying to vote out the team, but I never had a +50% majority of the stock. We had a majority who showed up to the 2021 AGM, and there were no "advance notice provisions," so the majority at the meeting took over the company. Imagine that.

Without an advanced notice provision, somebody can show up at the AGM and make a motion to vote on which is what happened. The people who did that are not publicly named. Maybe they should have been named in the results of the AGM news release? Maybe the news release with the AGM results should have named the people who showed up with proxies to vote, or maybe the people who filed the motion?

Somebody made a special motion at the meeting that resulted in the election of new directors. That was a change in management from a voting block that was only 10-20% of the company. A news release announcing a change of control probably should name the person who put forward the motion and caused the change, eh? I don't think it was me. I think that I seconded it, but I did not put forward the motion because I didn't understand the nuances of the meeting! The boardroom brawl.

They could have done the takeover without me, but they didn't. I don't know if the hostile group had a new board of directors and management ready without me or not, but I think not.

And Kermode had not held their annual meeting in three years, so they still hadn't voted on the advance notice provision? Imagine that. Maybe they held off on holding the AGM for so long because they knew that they didn't have advanced notice provision, and the guy was going to show up at the meeting to vote them out because they knew he had more shares? Imagine that he told them three years ago exactly what was going to happen at the next AGM, how he's going to show up, table a motion, and vote him out. They told Neil Briggs wasn't expecting the hostile takeover. I never talked to them after to reconcile or understand what they understood if they were expecting the new group to come in and vote them out. I guess they were surprised that I did.

We had a meeting a few days before it happened. We talked about it, and I told him I had concerns. We talked about it, and they asked me if it was fixed or not. They didn't ask me what I was going to do at the annual meeting a few days later. I showed up on the day. The former CEO, Don Moore, didn't show up at the meeting. I showed up in the meeting, and he didn't, and then after the meeting, I was CEO, and he wasn't. The things that can happen in a corporate boardroom are kind of mind-boggling. And all these minutiae about the rules for how things happen are fascinating details. I love all that kind of nuance and detail on deal terms.

A lot of it is like wrestling again. I'd say lawyers are like professional fighters, using rules and words rather than their fists—ideas and emotions rather than punches and kicks. The legal aspects of what happened in the Kermode boardroom are akin to World Wrestling Federation. "But, guys, it's the stock market. It's boring. . . " Or not?

It's not boring. It was the most friendly hostile takeover I'd ever heard of, or the company lawyer had ever seen. I described it as winning a battle without firing a shot. It was like winning about battle without fighting. No one got upset. They didn't try and change it. They didn't try any maneuvers to stop the meeting. They let me take charge. Can we work together with the people who led the hostile takeover?

The hostile shareholder group talked about working with me. They offered some projects to look at. We still have some shared interests at Eastgate. I've found some really good people to work with, and I'm bullish on more action.

I would like to work with the people who helped me take over this shell. But I'm also used to going against the grain and doing unconventional things.

The good news is the people that we are working on within Kermode are people that I've known for years. I mentioned the two that I've known, the Nevada and the Newfie guy, but I've also known Andy Randell for years, and he's played a huge role in my life. Not directly, but as a friend and a teacher. I'm a Ph.D. dropout, and I think Andy Randell has a Ph.D. He has taught at a college in recent years. He's still doing academic stuff, and his whole consulting business is built around hiring young people and academic learning and teaching. I respect the hell out of that because the academic-industrial theme has been my career since 2007.

More power to him. I want to work with him! I've known him since 2016.

I've known Carrington since 2017. And I've known Neal Blackmore from 2019-to 2020. Those are the three guys I'm doing business with right now in Kermode. Andy Randell was the first deal we signed, then Carrington was the second, and Neal Blackmore was the third deal. I've done them in order of how long I've known them. All three of those deals are alive. One of them is a signed definitive agreement from a couple of years ago now. Then the other two are at the LOI stage. And as I've said before, we're gonna have to change the terms on those again. I've told both vendors that I want to give them as much stock as I can. I want them to be heavily incentivized in a stock position as they work as exploration service contractors.

I want them to be so bullish on the deal that they're willing to put up with me.

I'm not going to be difficult for them, but I do want to do the work the way I want to do the work. And I need them to do the work because they both know the work to do better than I do.

I don't know what to do in Newfoundland and Nevada. I just know how to work with Carrington. The biggest challenge for me right now is working with Andy Randall because I didn't negotiate the deal with him, so he has a different idea in his head about how the deal looks for him. If I negotiated the deal, then I would hope to have a much clear consensus from the start between us for what I want to accomplish at Andy's project as it is. I would have picked a different one that he had in his portfolio, but I wasn't involved in picking the projects or setting the terms with him. I've inherited that deal. I can work with him and colour inside the lines with him, but I don't know the picture is as good as it could be.

I want to expand the land package, but we may need to renegotiate to do that. And if we do that, then the exchange gets involved because of the change of terms. There are big challenges on the compliance side with the TSXV for how we can structure the deal that you don't even want to hear about but are absolutely essential to understand.

The TSXV exchange rules totally affect how I run the business and do deals. The one thing I can do is print shares, but I can only do that within the rules!

And then there's the market size of the deal. If the deal translates into huge dumping by punishing sellers, then we got a problem if the results aren't good enough. From Carrington, I'm confident that his selling will be less damaging than the fieldwork and the news releases and the videos and the projects that he brings to the table.

The Newfies are up for debate. I say they can add value to Kermode. And Andy Randall is playing an important role for Kermode now. He's given us a listing property. We are a "trading shell" now because of Andy's properties. Thank you, Andy! We keep it moving and keep it super simple. Understand that you can go to the nth-degree with any of these things. And you basically have to for great success. Go round for round. Not the inertia, but the stamina.

If there's one thing about the wrestling culture, it's the stamina.

And I find that's probably one of the biggest crossovers for me with junior mining, gambling, investing culture and wrestling culture is the stamina. The way the conferences just go on and on. Everybody's been standing and talking for days. We do that online the same way. Why I would be there 20 minutes after you, Chris Parry, first tweeted to say, "Hey, somebody come get this free coverage program. First CEO to send me a DM. . . " And I was the first one? Johnny on the spot? Pistol Pete? Peter Newton Bell. Let's go!

I've talked to you a few times online about Vancouver culture, too. You posted something about being surprised that I knew about BC rap? You bet! Battle Axe Warriors, please and thank you.

I like to talk about street culture. Music, dance, art, and fashion? What does the stock market have to do with street culture? Why am I standing out here for two and a half hours recording an audio note about some stuff that probably doesn't hold together for most people? Well, let's get ready for The Gauntlet! That's really what this is.

I did something like this back in November 2021, around four months ago. It's March 2022 now. In November, I did like three hours answering Rick Rule's eight questions for junior mining CEOs. I spent like two hours answering one of the questions, then spent an hour answering the other seven. Some of the questions were like 30 seconds. That was a really useful exercise.

That three-hour recording in November was to practice for an interview with a buddy a few days later. His friend edited it down to 15 minutes. It probably should have been quicker, as I missed some of my spots. There was one that I about, "How are you gonna make me money on this deal? And when will I make it?" The answer is something like "slowly, then all at once. " Imagine that!

Are you're gonna make it or both new slow? The devil is in the details.

The same classic line about, how do you go bankrupt? Slowly and then all at once. How are you gonna make me money in this deal? Slowly, and then all at once. That was one of the jokes I came up with in my three-hour thing from November, but I forgot to drop it in the interview. Whoops!

It's a great question from Rick Rule on junior mining speculation.

The definition of bullishness is pretty simple. I am fighting it out here the last couple of hours to make a base from which you can build a story? I'll say the job of the CEO is to give to get promoters properly incentivized and then give them something to promote!

The job of a junior mining CEO is to get promoters properly incentivized and then give them something to promote.

I'll keep going. CEO. CA on Twitter is a great place for more of this stuff. They tweeted, "the more you pay for an asset, the more it's worth. " That's true on an accounting basis. You may not like the sound of it, but that's a fact.

The more you pay for an asset, the more it's worth. It's true on a street sense and a perception basis, hypothetically, and it's true on an accounting basis. It's just a factual accounting basis where the carrying value for an asset is related to the purchase price if it's capitalized. If it's expensed, different story. We are capitalizing on these exploration projects, so their carrying value is based on the acquisition price.

The more you play, the more it's carried on the balance sheet. Whether you spend cash or issue shares to get it. And whether you impair it or add to it later, that's all just accounting. Who cares?

There's another one from the guy who said the more you pay for it, the more it's worth. Another one I love is that you should try and print as much stock as you can after you've had a successful deal while the street is hungry for you, you have a premium on your paper, and you can still get premium deal flow. I thought it was really, really bullish.

I replied to that tweet, and this CEO account replied to me. They were like, "oh, Peter, I thought you were still on the first step?" Meaning they have a successful deal part. That I hadn't completed a successful deal to point to yet, I replied that I only read the first part of the sentence that said, "PRINT AS MANY SHARES AS YOU CAN ."I said that I figure that's exactly my goal, to print as many shares as I can on the most bullish deals I can find. Easier said than done.

Funny to think about how the CEOca Twitter account would think about success versus how I'd do it. How would I define success?

A year ago in April, I was making notes like this trying to figure out how to scheme on a takeover of Kermode in April 2021. Now I'm the CEO. And we've got work on a property in Nevada going. And we may get one in Newfoundland going next. There's also the one in BC that may get work done too. We could potentially have three programs going on in April 2022, whereas in 2021, I was just talking about a hostile takeover that wouldn't work just based on the mathematics.

How are we gonna fund that with our tiny treasury? A lot of goodwill and a little bit of luck with carefully designed, small programs. Tell me that I'm not having success from a year ago to where I am now? I was spinning my wheels, trying to do a hostile that wouldn't work and look at me now.

I say that I want to get more properties. I want to do spin-outs or whatever things people want to do with us. Let's play ball like that quote from CEO ca. After you've had a successful deal, you should print as much paper as you can.

They don't say what success looks like. There's demand for my paper in some circles, I think. On the project vendor side, I think there are people who want it right now, especially when I come to them with deals that are a factor of 10 times larger than the best deal they had ever seen before.

If you can bring vendors deals that they otherwise wouldn't get, then you have a chance to build something special. I don't have the budget to go hunting for projects globally, so I'm using my network. I'm just one person, but look at the three live deals we have in Kermode. One of them is confirmed, and two are LOI. All three of them are people that I've known for years. All three come with exploration service contractors and a QP. I don't have a single company geologist. I have project geologists. It bears repeating.

I have to keep saying it because there are a bunch of different ways to say it. And it's not clear people really understand what it means or why I'm saying it. One of the things it means is that we don't have company spending overhead in Vancouver. We've got project spending with different partners. It's different, and our opportunity is a function of the quality of who we work with.

I think I can find three people who are better than one person. I bet that one of one or more of Andy Randall, Neal Blackmore, and Robert Carrington will prove better than any geologist I can find. And how do I get the geologist to a site after I find them? Do we have to fly them in from somewhere? Where do they live? If they're in Victoria, then I want to hear about a project on Vancouver Island. Can they drive to the project, and is there an old mine? That's our priority checklist.

What about if I'm flying somebody to Peru? What is that? You gotta work with locals. I'm not sending anyone to Nevada. I can't send Mark Brazeau there yet. He doesn't have a passport.

Francine Long is a US citizen. Francine is a director of Kermode.

These people are very active online with social media, which is pretty unusual. I don't know any other junior mining companies where all the directors are active on Twitter every day.

Say what you will about any of us, but we're out there! And they are serious people. They came through with me and a major way at a big moment.

Now it's a question of what next. The answer is that it remains to be seen. The ability to link up with other people who are doing big things like Chris Parry means a lot to me. I'll yell at my phone here for going on three hours just to tell you all the things that I think about what you're doing and do it in a way where it's public. I actually plan to make this entire recording public and maybe even go through and do a transcript of it. My phone will generate a text transcript of this, but it's not an edited transcript. That's what I did back in November. I did the three-hour transcript and then edited the text, so I could do that again. Or I can pay somebody out of Fiverr to go through and edit the text to make it read properly. Editing each hour of text can take as much as eight hours?

I've done it for years. I've done all kinds of interviews and transcripts of the interviews. I learned so much from going through the text of what people said, word by word. It gave me a great reservoir of phrases and contacts, and ideas that I understood in a very active way because listening to a recording is one thing but editing a transcript is another. When you're editing a transcript, you basically have to rewrite the text in a lot of cases. Most people don't speak clearly enough, so a raw transcript of what they're saying makes any sense. You have to go through and add a lot of punctuation, move sentences around, and stuff like that.

I got a lot of practice at doing that and seeing where people have mistakes in how they speak. I learned a lot about how I speak how it's hard to follow. I haven't solved all my problems yet. But I've got become a lot more skilled at adjusting my pacing and focus. I really like to listen to music while I'm speaking too. I listen to some chopped and screwed version of Drake's new album by The Chop God. The chopped and screwed remix style is really slow and heavy. It's good for a night when I'm outside walking on the street where it's so quiet.

I hope I'm not disruptive to people, but this is one of the places where I can get some time as a stay-at-home dad primary caregiver for a two-year-old. Thank God for grandparents! I am a full-time daytime family guy, which entails some challenges in terms of running a normal junior mining company. For example, one of the things that I suffer is my quote-unquote promotion. I don't call a lot of brokers, and that is a problem, apparently. One of the guys in our financing was asking me today, where's the bid? What are you doing to get a bid in Kermode? He said, what's up with the Kermode share price and I laughed.

Then he told me that the guys wanted a break fee for the Australian deal that I cancelled. I said the cheque was in the mail?

Not trying to be difficult here, but I did not know about the half a million-dollar work commitment when I signed the LOI on that deal. I don't know if I would have signed it if I had known the deal terms, but I did sign the LOI, and I would sign it again. When I announced the deal, it had a zero-dollar work commitment, not half a million Australian. We were not on the same page exactly at the start. It would have been bold to give one guy nine million shares and nine million warrants. The exchange flagged that as a problem for doing it as an expedited transaction.

I was willing to do that deal because that crew of people behind the scenes is bullish. I want to be a service to them. Now, I wish I could do a better job following up with them and chasing another way to get into their deal or finding a way to swing that first one in a different way because I'm not having success with that.

And I hope that deals stay alive long enough for me to be able to come back to it in the future because I think there's something for that relationship. The problem now is that my plate is full. I can't sign another five LOIs without getting a reputation. And I got these other two that need to be renegotiated.

I want to tell the street what I'm doing. This is my attempt at an introductory call, and it's two hours and 47 minutes. No good, Peter. That's not going to cut it.

I like to think that soon enough, the news releases will do the talking. But that never happens. Who reads a news release? Especially one written by me. I don't have the technical skill to be able to adequately explain to most mining people in geologists or engineers what we're doing and why?

Hopefully, the different people doing the work can be promoters with me. Neal Blackmore can be a promoter with me, for sure. He can. Robert Carrington can, for sure. Even Andy Randell is a great promoter. I've seen him speak at conferences, and no, he can be a promoter too. Andy is talking about being a public company executive in the future now. I believe he can be a promoter too.

Each of the projects I have for Kermode now also comes with promoters. And if I tell them, hey guys, I have some budget for you to buy some camera equipment, and I need you to bring somebody with you to run all the gear, and we need lights for the underground mine, then that's a great promotional push. Each crew is capable of doing quality work in parallel. I don't think they're gonna make a stink about not wanting to do it because it's a waste of time for them. I don't think they are arrogant like that. The challenge is probably at the corporate level with my ability to manage all the different work programs. How do we fund and promote them all?

I think that how we convince the market of the merits of what we're doing is by showing the market.

And that's very much in tune with who I am and who I have been for long years with the social media business development stuff. And I think it's a leadership position using some of these new media platforms to show that you don't have to have Netflix production quality for the market to benefit from it.

Comprehensive and current information about what you're doing on a technical basis is of high value. It is ultra-high value if it's brought forward by someone who is a reputable messenger. For example, Andy Randell is a reputable messenger. Can he make fun are videos about Vidette for a YouTube channel? Can he put his own stuff on Twitter and promote our projects? I want him to be incentivized enough that he wants to post about these deals online. I want him to own enough stocks so that he feels compelled to. But I also want the projects to be good enough that he feels proud to tell other people what he's doing.

For example, Andy has a page about the Vidette deal on his company website. Please! Thank you, Andy. He's got a better website than I do for Kermode. I don't have a website; all I've got is a linktree and a bunch of content on Google Drive. I put a link to his Vidette page on the Kermode linktree, and it has Andy's pitch as he gave to Neil Briggs in 2020. How many juniors let their project vendor put up the main webpage for the project? His website tells the story in a classy way.

Look how far I'm taking this. Not only do I have a company with no company geologist, but we also don't have a company website either! We point to the website from our contractors, at least at the BC project.

In Newfoundland, we may well do the same thing. Our partner there has the capabilities to build a better website than I can do right now. They have people who can do video production with drone cameras, and they can do website production. Let's use them for that!

Imagine the same guys who sold us the property are running the project website. Are that best practices for the junior mining business in 2022? Probably not. We would need to supervise everything on it closely.

I wouldn't want Carrington running a website for the Nevada projects, but maybe his grandson or someone else in Nevada can do it. Someone local can help, or we can use Fiverr.

Imagine that each project comes with its own web service, and you just have a linktree that points to all the different places. All these different project websites are run by the project vendors. Who does that? Show me where it says you can't do that? I've read the Corporations Act and the TSX policy to look for details on stuff like this.

We need a website so that we can get an email server. Or do we?

The old Kermode email addresses were never used. The former team used their private management company's email addresses instead of the Kermode ones. Does that matter? Hillary Clinton or Dick Cheney political playbook? That's probably overstating it.

We're not dealing with state secrets here. I don't think that the information is that sensitive at this point. Maybe at some point, we'll be dealing with some stuff like that, but I don't think that's best practices anyways. The best practice is to have a real company database for emails and communications and publications and stuff.

You should have a reference set of all the published company materials for compliance. All the web pages, pitch decks, and interviews with everything in one place. Even the project partner websites. If people are publishing things on behalf of the company, there should be some way for the public to find all that stuff in one place under the company's presence.

Here's our March version of the pitch deck. And here's our June 2021 version. Oh, and here's October 2023. You want to collect those over time and have those things easily available for reference. The Aussies do that, but the Canadians typically don't. They just replace their guidance, and they don't provide the old stuff. I like to provide all the old stuff. It makes it totally overwhelming for new audiences with too much content, but it helps people who really want to study how a story stock tracks over time. It's necessary.

I want to be able to do a management scorecard on myself. To do that, I need objective reference points. What did I say that I was going to do, and then what did I do? Remember when I told you in November 2021 that I wanted to roll it back, so we had five to ten million shares out after I fixed the deal, which meant getting through the audit, doing small financing, and getting some properties.

Here we are six months later, and we've done all those things. We still have work to do on the properties, but we've got two active LOI now. How many times do I want to repeat that? Until it sinks in, sorry! Really sorry to do it for three hours, but that's what it is.

The hard part for me is keeping it on track. I've already thrown a lot of stuff at the wall, and a lot of it hasn't worked. There's a lot of adversity to come even with this stuff that I've picked. Things can go sideways in a second. The more I try and do, the less likely I'm able to accomplish any of it.

I can't fill my plate too much, but I have to have enough irons in the fire. There are backups to the backup plan. That's the word: plan. Talk is cheap. Ideas are easy, and execution is difficult, but planning is everything. Running scenarios and hypotheticals is helpful. I've been talking about five-dollar copper for years, and then we had this historic moment on Monday, March 7th, where it traded above five bucks on the Sunday night open. That was a big move.

And then it traded down. Many of the junior mining stocks followed it down on the day. Classic stuff that reminded me of the financial crisis in 2008 when I was at a prop desk with a front-row seat as a day trader. What an experience. I wish I was able to see more market action in the time since then, but I am grateful for the years of university time—lots of researching, thinking, and modelling. I spent a lot of time coming up with toy models and conceptual exercises to illustrate things. I wrote a paper called something like exploration as a game of chance. I was saying that exploration economics looks good in a game theory model. Cool, but my model doesn't look like any other model in the literature. Of course not. Fun exercise and very numerical-oriented. Statistical simulations rather than Greek letters for answers. Distributions that I calculated based on assumptions about behaviour. Thinking about distributions of returns is helpful for gambling and investing.

And planning exploration programs is similar to thinking about distributions of possible outcomes. A lot of thinking about uncertainty: when I've been involved in planning and executing property deals and exploration programs, uncertainty has been my main focus. There's technical uncertainty in terms of our deposit and where the mine might be, but then there's also deal uncertainty and making sure compliance is correct. The legal stuff is sometimes the bigger issue. If you don't get the basic business stuff right, then it doesn't matter. If you find a mine, you'll get yourself in trouble! Lots more to say about that.

I mentioned it in the past, but the private deals give me a lot of perspectives. The wins I've had in Newfoundland with Neal Blackmore and his crew are bullish. This thing in Arizona I'm working on is looking like a long shot, and it gives me a cautionary lesson about doing business in the US. At this point, I would have a hard time spending more money in Arizona like that. Maybe if I get Carrington involved, then it could change, but my plate is full with him in Nevada. He's valuable for Kermode because he's been a CEO of a pubco before, so he knows Canadian stuff and US compliance law in ways that the other guys don't. Finding people who have all the skills that I'm looking for and who have properties that are near old mines that we can drive to is a bit of a Cinderella story. Call it one in a million, but I've already got three of them with Andy Randell, Neal Blackmore, and Robert Carrington. Those are three situations where we have turnkey solutions with projects, exploration services with a QP, and promotional media support working on projects with an old mine that we can drive to.

Negotiating with everybody is complicated. We have to be really careful with Andy's deal because the exchange already approved it, and we can't go around changing it. If we change the payment schedule or work commitments, then we need exchange approval, and that can entail a halt on the stock or a new technical report.

There may be 50% copper on the surface, but if getting that ground into the property deal with Andy entails halting the stock and getting a new technical report, then that complicates things. The Vidette deal with Andy Randell caused Kermode Resources to be halted for almost a year, from April 2020 to May 2021. That halt took so long because Kermode didn't have the right kind of technical report when we started the deal. We had a 43-101 by the project vendor Andy Randell, but we needed one by an independent geologist. It took months to scramble to get one done and approved by the exchange. This problem occurred because Kermode didn't have a definitive answer from the exchange as to what exactly was required. The TSXV doesn't give you a definitive answer on how they view a deal until you pay the initial fee for the transaction. To think that undue stock halted could have been mitigated by spending $500 and submitting the paperwork earlier than later? Imagine that.

We've already expanded the land deal with Andy once and did not change the terms. There's a conversation that is yet to be had here. I've got lots to say about the philosophy of deal-making in the junior mining business. I have had the pleasure to be involved in maybe half a dozen deals already, and it's not enough. I want to be involved in dozens more! I really like good deals, and I find that I keep seeing good deals with similar people, and some of those deals may look expensive. I want to pay the premium price for a premium product, and then I want to work with the best people I can. If we can have a shell at a nano-cap valuation and then put premium fuel into it and put the hammer down, then it's a case of "light touch" to fly the rocket ship.

Let's go! Thanks for your time. Sorry for being so long. Goodbye!