A friendly shareholder of the public company Kermode Resources Ltd (TSXV:KLM) prepared a pitch deck about the company. Watch as we go through it together for my first time ever seeing it! Thanks Daniel Cook for preparing the pitch deck. Thanks Justin Deveault for working with Kermode Resources Ltd. on an ongoing basis.
Read Kermode's public filings online at this link:
https://www.sedarplus.ca/csa-party/records/document.html?id=626163ef56e3e7cd70bb1efda4633e6ae01917f79b413e8cdf0f42111b8c74a8
And thanks to friends on THE SATURDAY CALL who host a regular junior mining meetup. The regular attendees of the conference call were not part of the call today because they are getting ready for PDAC 2024.
Peter Bell: Hello, I'm Peter Bell, the CEO of Kermode Resources. I'm here with Daniel Cook, an investor who wrote a presentation deck about the company, and one of our prospecting partners, Justin Deveault. Hi Justin! Hi Daniel! Thanks so much for writing up this pitch deck, Daniel. I thought it was hilarious. I looked at the first two slides and had to stop because I was laughing so hard. I wanted to save the moment of going through it for the first time because there are so many little stories about these pictures. Before we started recording, Justin said, “I love that picture. I just used that as my profile pic on such and such social media.” Pretty cool. Watch out for forward-looking statements, and please read the cautionary language online from Kermode here.
Peter Bell: Years and years ago, Daniel and I would meet at these investment conferences, and one of our favourite questions was always to ask about the first page of the slide deck: What are we looking at? One company might say, well, that’s our mill. Or, that's our gold mine. Versus, “I don't know -- I found that online.” Night and day. Glad to see that idea from 10 years ago come back to life with a company that I'm involved in an executive leadership position. It's a small world.
Peter Bell: Fun to see things come full circle. Justin, this is Slesse Creek, right? You're up at the top of the hill around here.
Justin Deveault: That's Glacier Creek that flows into Slesse Creek. That is the location of a float sample that was 31 grams per ton of gold.
Peter Bell: Respect. Slesse Creek is one of the most gold-rich creeks in British Columbia, Canada. A famous spot! A few guys on Twitter have messaged us too about this one because they know the name. Is there even talk of carbon nanotubes used to grab gold molecules from the water? I don't know what that is, but let’s find out. Slesse is a high-grade gold play on the mainland by the US border, not on Vancouver Island.
Peter Bell: Daniel, why did you pick this for the front page slide pic?
Daniel Cook: I liked it. And it speaks to where the company is, as a corporate entity, at this. And in the next slide, we'll touch on that.
Peter Bell: I laughed so hard when I saw this one. It was a one-two-punch knockout for me. I was laughing because I had to flip back to page one -- what am I looking at? A guy in the mountains, no, it's a valley -- the market! Imagine the chart of share prices. And it’s funny to read “we won't stay there for long” because it’s like a bad joke, Daniel, even now we're lower than that number. This stuff can get outdated from a few weeks ago! Even saying “Kermode’s ascent has just begun” is controversial because we continue to downtick. And that's out of our hands -- the secondary market price.
Daniel Cook: If you pick that apart, Peter, the company differs from the stock. Price does not always reflect the work that's happening on the ground. And there there's a surprising amount of work happening on the ground. And compared to most other exploration companies, there is way more activity.
Daniel Cook: One thing that's not in the slide, but it would be cool to know, is a statistic like: What is the average number of days companies work in the field? Then, we will have an industry average to compare how many days Kermode and Justin spend in the field with his crew.
Peter Bell: Shoutout to Milosz Mielniczuk, our prospecting partner in the Monashee Mountains. There is metal to be mined all over the place. One thing I liked about this pitch deck, Daniel, was that it's just one project -- I didn't look past the first two pages, and I know that that picture is from Slesse, not Sicker, but don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. And speaking of good stories, there's a book mentioned on this slide here. Justin, do you know this book?
Justin Deveault: No, I actually haven't. T.W. Patterson is a historian.
Peter Bell: Daniel found it online. Would it be a boring history book, Daniel? Is it fun to read?
Peter Bell: I'm probably a quarter of the way through. It's not a real page-turner by any means. It may get better. My biggest takeaway is that the rocks stay the same. One of the aspects of this was that it was a very clean copper, which commanded a higher value at the smelters. When people really get into the copper industry and potential deposits or mines, apparently, the cleanliness of the copper is essential -- you don't want too much arsenic or whatever nasties, as they say, might be in there that you have to separate at an additional cost. At least historically, Mount Sicker had a very clean copper concentrate, and there was a lot of excitement about this area. One mistake, at least an obvious mistake, was that two companies owned what sounds like one deposit. And they didn't share or work together in any fashion -- they acted like competitors. They wasted a lot of money because they weren't working together.
Peter Bell: Do you know who got paid off that, Daniel? The outfitters. Picks and shovels. I hope you can spend some time here in Duncan and Victoria, BC, Canada. I don't know the history so well. Still, Victoria played a role in the Yukon Gold Rush, and it was an outfitter's location. It's the political capital of the province, as well. Sometimes, I wonder about some of the decisions made by the mining engineers. Many mines trade dollars, and there are technical reasons based on how they are taught. In some countries, it is illegal to mine an orebody at a head grade above the average grade of the deposit because they want to maximize metal production, not profit? If you run them differently, there is the potential for different outcomes. Win, Lose, or Draw -- it's the outfitters who get paid a lot of times. I don't know if you'll see that thread come into this book at some point, Daniel, but some fortunes in Victoria were built on outfitters. Not too many fortunes were built on mine owners. However, some outfitters' businesses are still active in downtown Victoria today. They may sell designed clothing now, but some companies go back to the 1800s locally, which is a pretty interesting living memory. Past production was from 1895 to 1908 and then from 1935 to 1953. Interesting to see output in the World War II era. I didn't know that detail. Justin, I know you’ve got all this stuff dialled in.
Justin Deveault: Wartime Metals! Eight months of production, and they were given 50% of what they got, plus their expenses were covered by the government to mine for eight months.
Peter Bell: What was that? The government paid them to mine a certain amount of copper because the government needed to deliver some contract?
Justin Deveault: No, it was zinc. Before the 1940s, all the zinc was tossed in the waste rock piles. All the sphalerite from the North ore body and any collected from the South ore body. Then, they specifically mined a bit of the North ore body during the war for zinc.
Peter Bell: Thank you. I respect how much desktop work you have put into studying this project, Justin. Well done getting the claims together, understanding the history, and then working the ground to find beautiful stuff like this.
Peter Bell: Here's what we're finding on Kermode’s Mount Sicker claims -- yes! These look like loose grabs from road build material at the 911 Showing. Or chips from outcrop.
Justin Deveault: The one on the left that looks more golden is from the 911 Showing. The other one in the center is from the 911 Showing as well. And the one on the right is not from that property. It’s from Slesse Creek again or somewhere else. No, that's from Star of the West.
Peter Bell: One of the int, sting things you can tell from looking at the two pictures is the one on the right with the green -- that's probably copper oxide. And the one in the Middle with the purple is like a copper sulphide. We want the copper sulphides. The stuff on the left with the gold-looking rock is probably a lot of pyrite. It's called Fool's Gold. There's also significant copper in rocks like that. There are a whole bunch of fun stories about what I referred to before with road build material -- long story short, there's active logging going around up there now, and that has coincided with Kermode’s interest in the property beginning. And that quote about the purple rocks -- the bornite keeps me up at night more than the gold. Yes, for sure. My experience of seeing bornite in person was way more significant for me than seeing gold. The instances where I’ve seen coarse gold as specimens from collectors or in rocks like really high-grade drill cores are pretty impressive. The chunk of nickel sulphide that Garibaldi had that was like two feet by two feet by two feet was so heavy you couldn't pick it up -- that was pretty impressive. I've seen rock so heavy I can't pick it up with Justin, too. That's been very impressive to me. Of all the visible minerals, bornite is probably my favourite of all time because of the iridescent aspects of the colour. It is pretty unusual when you see it in person in bright light. Justin, I hope someday we can set you up with high-res photography and lights so we can see these specimen samples. Thanks for all the videos showing stuff like this. The fact that Daniel can take a screenshot like this from a video where you've explained what you're doing, and he can put together this basic info without my input, is cool. The way Daniel got the sample numbers is an impressive level of detail, and, again, the fact that an independent investor can prepare a presentation deck like this from our public disclosure without us having to tell him what to put where is very important. Daniel made this entire pitch deck without any input from me. And I've never looked at these slides before. I looked at the first two slides and said this thing's so good. I want to record our session, which we're doing now! Sorry, just checking that it's recording accurately. Yes, it is. The details here are great for investors to see. Thank you, Daniel! Good work. Anything you'd say about your experience writing this slide, Daniel?
Daniel Cook: That's part of the challenge here. We talked about earlier how there are so many anomalies. It's a large property -- just like any other exploration effort, you want to try to narrow things down and keep getting to your best of the best of the best. At this point, I understand that the 911 Showing is the most prominent. It really stands out in this picture how easily this stuff gets covered up, as well, with some of the moss and time. But you don't have to dig very deep to find signs of what you're looking for.
Peter Bell: You may not be able to see it clearly, but that's a truck up there. That's Justin's truck. So, Daniel, I've driven up to this spot and stood where the car is parked and looked down this hill, but I've never walked down to the spot where this photo was taken. Justin -- you and I stayed up on the road cut where the loggers exposed all the new rock, which you can see across a significant area. You did a channel chip that was +80 metres, continuous?
Justin Deveault: Yes, and it was 89 meters. You can see it in this slide. As Daniel has it written, it's 55 meters from the spot where this photo was taken to the 911 Showing.
Peter Bell: The level of detail you've been able to get into this is impressive, Daniel.
Daniel Cook: And as the first bullet point shows, the dimensions of the VMS deposits globally fit into this size range. With what you're looking at in that image, you're getting close to 100 meters. And you mentioned previous channel samples have shown it’s off to a good start.
Peter Bell: It's amazing that Justin will tell you about all the mine adits, old workings, bulldozer trenches, and more -- but one thing I'll say is that I'm looking forward to seeing drone videos of this area over time. Justin, I've seen you lose the drone down a canyon where line of sight was a problem, and I think this place will be easier. It has a gentle topography here. You can't really see it from any of the videos or the pictures yet, but from my experience standing and walking there, it’s clear that parts of the area are steep, but it's a very favourable kind of area with good sight lines. And maybe more so after they remove a bunch of trees! The potential for good drone work or LiDAR scans with an iPad around here is very helpful in understanding scale. Those may be the typical dimensions for a particular VMS deposit of 100-500 meters strike, but there are things called fat tails and power law distribution statistics regarding size and grade. People talk about supergiant deposits. And some deposits are super-rich, as well! Ultra high-grade copper concentrate. Words like this are important to me. Sorry, Justin, were you going to say something?
Justin Deveault: I'll mention that 89 m is actually the width of what is exposed on the road, not the total dimensions. From the spot where it says 2.07% Cu, if you go from that spot to the start of the road behind the truck where mineralization is exposed, that's 300 meters. And then, if you walk down farther on this Old Road, you hit mineralization. Another 50 meters farther, there's another adit there. And then you go another 50 meters on that, and there's more mineralization. A drill hole was done there in the 1970s that intersected mineralization. This showing is more in-depth than just 100 meters.
Peter Bell: Justin, that's why I say the word supergiant. And I'll say it again -- supergiant. For example, this week, we released results, and they were from four and a half kilometres away at a spot called Copper Canyon. As you zoom out from this spot, there’s a whole conversation beyond what we can discuss today. Justin, I don't know if you've spent much time looking at company pitch decks from the junior mining industry, but I have. This is probably one of my favourite slides because it looks nice and simple, but there's so much more to it. When you peel off the layers of the onion, it's a little bit unusual, which I love because another unusual thing that we do is backpack drilling exclusively. There are a few other public companies that have done it on a one-off basis to demonstrate they can do it, but I haven’t seen anyone else using it like we have. One of the limiting factors with the backpack drill is that it's a lot of work hauling the water around. Now, Justin has outfitted his truck again with bigger water storage gear, and he's prepared to do drilling in a really simple way. I was impressed that we were getting 10-meter holes in December 2023 when we were drilling at the 911 Showing. And we talked about a “30-hole goal”. I think that the 30-hole goal is still in play for sure. The productivity and the quality of the results are impressive. And I keep talking about the next stages -- jaw crusher, hammer mill, shaker table, electrolytic circuit, and cleaning up with zeolite to absorb any nasty heavy metals in waste rocks. I'm talking about processing because that's what excites me most about where we're going and what skill sets we don't currently have in-house. Many of my challenges as a CEO are: what are our goals, and how do we accomplish them? And that's driven by people. The people we've assembled so far have relevant skills and incentives to get involved, leading to all these great things. But there's so much more coming. I love stuff like this -- nice, simple slides, Daniel. A slide with only a few words is good -- they say that the bigger the image, the fewer the words. If you think about billboards versus magazine advertisements. Thank you, Daniel, for writing such good slides.
Peter Bell: Again, here it is. I stand by this quality of stuff, and I'd even double down on this to point out that when this drilling was happening, I was online posting on CEOca and Twitter and Linkedin -- communicating with investors about what we were doing in a real-time basis and why. Some other executives asked why we didn't do a press release that we were drilling? My answer was that it’s fairly routine. Sorry, but that kind of drilling is routine for us. Not every week, but in my first year as CEO of this company, we drilled holes like this. Maybe not as rich as this, maybe not as good core recovery as this, and maybe not as many meters -- but we drilled in my first year on the job, and I think that's a significant accomplishment. This is really what our business is about. How many people have told me that those surface grabs don't matter? Or chips and channels don't matter? They say, “Call us when you get drilling.” And then we’re stuck in this chicken-egg problem: how do we pay for a multi-million dollar drill program without drill results? I hear from investors that you can't spend less than five million a year. If you're spending less than five million a year, then what are you doing being public -- you're a waste of time. I don't know the answers to anything like that. I'm just here to drill high grade.
Peter Bell: This is what it is- watch us explore it in near real-time on YouTube. Yes, and that's Richmond/Surrey on the map. I love how you cut Vancouver -- you can't quite see it. You can see a little bit of Victoria at the bottom. A funny thing about this slide, Daniel, is the “Hello Peter Newton Bell” video from July 2022. That was just a day trip where I drove up to spend time with Justin. We spent an hour talking in a parking lot and then drove up to the site to briefly look around. I'm not a field guy, and I don't know what I'm looking at, but we shot a video then because it was like a time stamp. I want to be out there again in July 2024! And maybe actually do more videos where I spend time at the site. When I stood at the 911 Showing, I never had the same feeling of standing on something that could be significant like that ever before. I haven't done a lot of site visits, but that one was special and made an impression on me in terms of what could be there. To stand at a spot with copper like that and think we could have more copper like this down 500 meters or 1,000 meters? Wow.
Daniel Cook: To your point of millions and millions of dollars of expenditures, oftentimes, shareholders ask -- what is the result? It could be three months later or six months later, and you finally get one press release that explains some of the answers. The odds are against you in this business, so, typically, the millions of dollars spent are not a good investment. It ends up being wasted if you don't get the best results. There's a bit of a question mark on how the money is being spent and what kind of work is being done, so what is a bit unique about Kermode is that you can see these guys working and documenting just about everything they're doing in the field. We talk about radical transparency, and for people who want to know what's going on, if you're a shareholder and you want to be involved, then this is the kind of company that caters to that.
Peter Bell: And that's on purpose, Daniel, because I was a shareholder, and I did want to get involved! And now, somehow, I find myself in a leadership position in a public company where I want to invite all that smoke. It's not just the fieldwork, Daniel. It's also me as CEO -- you can find me online! We’ve hijacked this little community call that we do every Saturday -- the other guys aren't on because it's PDAC, and they're in Toronto. This is a great opportunity for us to do this “unboxing” video we talked about two or three weeks ago. I told Daniel I had only read the first two slides and laughed so hard I had to stop reading it. Daniel said to do an unboxing! Actually, doing this now on THE SATURDAY CALL is just great. Who knows -- somebody else may call back in. I think there was one person who knows we're doing this and may drop in at the end. Sorry, it's going so long, but thanks for your time!
Peter Bell: For me, it's really simple: people think mining exploration is about the rocks. The rocks are the outcome. The input is the people. And the process is money spending. There's important stuff to say about me as an executive being active online and available, then about how this company Kermode invests in me and how I invest in it. Then, our prospecting partners are investing in Kermode, and Kermode is investing in them -- there's a whole bunch of back and forth. Call it teamwork or business development or collaboration, but that's been a priority since day one of my taking over the public company. Daniel, it’s interesting for me to hear about the guys at the old Sicker mines not working together and then experience some of that today in the junior mining business as a young executive trying to figure out what's going on. I don't see a lot of collaboration with other executives. I've pitched all kinds of deals to all kinds of people, and nothing gets off the ground. Then, I go and do deals with guys like Justin, J2, and their crew- it keeps growing and improving. I do stuff with Milo in the mountains up there and it just keeps growing and getting better, too. I'd say I'm in the people business more than anything else now because that's how you build a public company. Normally, this corporate building process happens privately, and the public doesn’t see it happening. And if a company gets public, it seems like many of our peers don’t really abandon projects. I think we took impairment charges of $300-400,000 this year. Our market cap is $300-400,000 this year. Check the details because that’s important. It’s not just us -- if you look at the big companies, you will see they take big impairments. BHP is taking a huge write-down on their nickel book in Western Australia. Other companies are taking huge impairment charges. Gold companies are selling assets. This is a really important moment in markets, and it's fun to do some of those big-boy things at our little-boy company. Many other exploration companies I've invested in don’t write down projects -- they'd work on a project. Even if the results weren’t great, they would say they would keep working on it so the auditors wouldn't impair it and the accountants wouldn't take a write-down charge on it. Even if the drilling was a bust. I've seen situations where guys spend millions and millions of dollars on property payments and millions more on exploration work, then walk away with nothing because they didn't want to maintain the option. And when they didn’t even have a real relationship with the people who sold the property in the first place because that was only a transaction, not a relationship? I'm in the investment business, and this stuff is an ultra-high-risk speculative investment, but it's an investment nonetheless. And investment is all about people -- people and capital. I respect the track record of guys like Justin and J2. When I can go back and look at pictures of them in the field from 2020 videos and before then, I consider that inspiring. It’s a show of commitment and determination. I think about where I was then and what I was doing in 2020, and I'm glad we're working together now! I can't believe that we all got connected and that these opportunities were in my backyard.
Daniel Cook: It’s worth noting here, again, that part of the reason cost can stay low and so much time can be spent on the property is because Kermode is working with local prospectors that live very close to these properties. That just makes a lot of sense to me. You don't have to get on a helicopter or an airplane and fly somewhere far away. It's literally staying close to home. It makes a lot of sense, especially when you do have a history- they say the best place to make a mineral discovery is near an old mine. That is the case here. It's not that they're looking here just because it's convenient. Obviously, it warrants further exploration.
Peter Bell: We sometimes joke about buying the ground after they log in and building some facilities. Maybe a drill core storage shack. Maybe solar power panels for electricity -- the future of mining is exciting to me! And these are real global issues, Daniel, because I believe someone will mine the copper somewhere in the world. The zinc is going to get mined somewhere in the world by someone. These are essential base metals that will be mined just because of the necessity of demand. The question to me is: who will mine it, and under what conditions? One of my concerns is that this metal that needs to be mined in the next 50 years of my lifetime, knock-on-wood, will come from nasty places where it is being mined by people subjugated to nasty working conditions. The mining industry has a long history of treating people poorly and creating many problems. Part of investing locally, Daniel, is owning the impacts of what we're doing. You can debate the finer points on that or say it's just politicking -- I don't know. But I do know these guys are careful. And I'm careful on the corporate side. We have that alignment and ownership- this is not something we're doing halfway around the world with people we don't know. And with our presence online, I think there's a paradigm shift happening in the world, so I am grateful to be involved in it. And look at this slide -- look at that guy in the bottom right picture. He's not smiling, but he's glad to have a job. He’s happy to be working.
Justin Deveault: Two bucks a day! That was a good good wage back then.
Peter Bell: Seriously! And that's a thing with mines -- sometimes the workers come out ahead. The unions factor in. And there are all kinds of conversations about the mining business that get complicated quickly. I don't know the mining business per se -- I'm in the exploration business, which is more of a promotional business. And there's an educational aspect to the exploration business. And there's also an entertainment aspect. And that's where the energy comes from, as you mentioned in your slide, Daniel. I think the fact that we approach this as an educational and an entrepreneurial or entertaining activity -- I don't want to bore you guys! These are not going to be news releases written by geologists for geologists. I'm a mathematics guy who studies statistics and economics. At UBC, I finished a master's degree in math. Then, after about five years, I dropped out of a Ph.D. in economics. I accomplished my goals in the PhD program, believe it or not. Getting the PhD was not the primary goal. I wanted to be there for project development, and that’s what I did. I was studying financial investment in farmland and got some related scholarships. I was involved in some lobbyist-type work because that was a live issue in Canada when the CPP bought a farmland investment fund. I was also involved in investing in farmland, so there were all these different things going on at the same time for me that were all tied together with my motivations to keep doing grad school. Then, it became clear that I was going to have to change my approach and I would have to get my articles published to finish the PhD. When I started sending articles to the journals, they sent me comments from the peer review guys. I was not interested in addressing their criticisms. I don't think you have it on this slide, Daniel, but one thing I would put is my RePEc Research Publications in Economics page -- I've got almost 50 working papers that I've posted there since 2010 when I started doing it. I realized that the work I was doing wasn't going to be seen by anybody, ever, anywhere, and I liked it, so I wanted people to see it. I found out that the physics guys would publish working papers when they did breakthrough work -- they would publish it online immediately, permanently, on Open Access sites like arXiv for free. And the RePEc was the equivalent of that in economics. I was actually a volunteer editor for that site, RePEc, for a while. It's all community-based, volunteer, Wiki-type stuff. I was an editor for about two years during my master's and Ph.D. That was a fun experience that was useful early in my academic career to be an editor and peer-review other people's work because when I got to the end of the Ph.D., I understood more about academic publishing. They told me, “Peter, if you want to take that line, then you’ve got to be so good that you can get published on your own.” I wasn't, and I couldn't. And I knew what the peer review process was like, so I was happy to move on and get into junior mining full-time. That was around 2015, when I was 30 years old. I've been around the junior mining business since I was 17-19, and I'm attending my first conferences at the World Outlooks in Vancouver. The energy that I got from that community on day one was great. I remember one of the first conferences I attended, where I heard Jim Dines talk about how he invented technical analysis! Daniel, how could anybody say something like that? I thought it was a bold claim for a guy from California in the 1960s. Still, it showed me the type of characters around this mining promotions business, and I was always interested in that. That's some of my background and motivation and why you see the energy you mentioned, Daniel.
Peter Bell: There are serious disclaimers to be made here. Please understand that I try to make accurate and appropriate forward-looking statements. I also take 43-101 disclosure laws very seriously. All the videos we post entail significant amounts of supervision from a geologist supervising what work Justin and J2 are doing. I would like to shout out to our independent, Qualified Person, Jacques Houle, who lives here on Vancouver Island. He’s had a working relationship with Justin for years and is very confident in the quality of Justin’s work. Jacque is a well-known and respected former government geologist in BC focused on Vancouver Island, so he's an expert in the area. I understand he's very impressed with what Justin's been finding. And not only that, but the quality of the prospecting is very high. Jacques may disagree with my decisions as a CEO. Still, Jacques believes Justin’s work in the field is very high quality, which is very important to me as a CEO. If we pay for an independent referee, I want to know that we're passing that test. That line of discussion ties into our work with our financial auditors; there’s a whole bunch of stuff we could talk about in the recent Management’s Discussion & Analysis document we published last week that I don't want to get into. Still, I would invite people interested to read the level of detail I could get into our MD&A this year. A year ago, the BCSC contacted us because our MD&A documents didn't have enough detail; they asked us to restate one to show we could do it right, and then please do it that way going forward. That's what this latest one was all about. Those MD&A documents are normally fairly short and standardized because most junior mining companies don't seem to do much from quarter to quarter! Well, we had a lot to talk about in our annual letter for 2023 because this was the first year that we'd ever done shares-for-services on the prospecting side with Justin Deveault and Milo Mielniczuk. And that allowed us to do much more work than you would expect from a company that raised less than $100,00 equity in the year. Normally, you'd think a company like that didn't do anything, but we did, and that’s why we're talking here for so long about the details. And we haven’t even gotten into the full highlight reel of all the projects -- this is all just about one project with one crew. I'm trying to run Kermode to get guys like Justin who have their heads in the game and turn them loose, then do it again. In the junior mining business, there's something called the Prospect Generator Business Model where you have a guy like Justin Deveault inside the company who'll stake stuff for the company. These companies can get 50, 100, or more than 200 projects on their books! Usually, those companies don't do too much to advance their projects, in my opinion. Maybe geophysics. Maybe geochem. But not the kind of work that I care about, which is what Justin does and is called prospecting. We are a little different from them because we don't have the same financial backing and position the typical prospect generator has behind them. A lot of them have a lot of cash and a lot of shares in other companies. We didn't pursue that because we couldn't afford it. I find it better to have the talent for generating projects living outside the company rather than inside because it creates better incentives and risk management factors. There are big questions about how we've structured our deals, and suffice it to say it's my first time as a CEO of a public company. I would be grateful for any help.
Peter Bell: There are four people on the Board of Directors. Maxime Lepine and I are non-independent directors, which means we're both executives. Maxime is the corporate secretary, and I'm the CEO. Then there are two independent directors: a guy named Tek Manhas in Duncan, a local politician and businessman, and there's a guy named Roger Lewis, who's a Squamish First Nation member. None of those guys are on the boards of other public companies. None of them have ever been on the boards of other public companies. None of them are Executives in other public companies. Roger and Max are both around my age -- they're young guys and are both natural resource entrepreneurs. Tek Manhas is older. He's been a sales guy in various things over his life and an investor in different things. I don't know all the details of his career, but he's also a municipal counsellor at Duncan. He's from Duncan -- I think his father immigrated from India, and I think Tek went back to India for the first time in his life last year. He is an interesting guy, and I’m glad to have him involved because he's a pro-business political person in Duncan, locally, which I think is important. I don't want much to do with politics if I can avoid it, but it's part of the business. I don't know all the things Tek knows -- he spent his life living and working around here, and he's got a lot more experience than I do! He's somebody I would like to learn a lot more from in terms of what he's seen around the South Island over time. The fact that he wants to get involved with Kermode is encouraging because he knows the potential for development in this area. I’d like to shout out to Tyler Ruks, who did a detailed video interview with me years ago where we went through the Leap Frog 3D model for one of the projects in the public company where he is CEO. It was impressive to see his ability to model a project. Tyler did a PhD on this Mount Sicker ground, and what we call the 911 Showing today is something that he actually identified as an area with a high probability of a VMS deposit! I contacted him recently and asked if he wanted to come see it, but he said no! He said it’s too close to Salt Spring Island. The whole “not in my backyard” thing is real, but I don't know about all that. I'm here. I live here. Justin lives in Duncan. Tyler lives in Vancouver -- we're all in the Pacific Northwest or the south coast of BC. He may have a better perspective on these issues than I do because he is focused on projects on the north end of Vancouver Island, but I'm willing to take the risk around “Community Support” because I focus on exploration risk -- does it exist or does it not exist? I focus on exploration risk because I can handle that.
Peter Bell: There are a whole bunch of risks that come after discovery, and I'm not really an expert in any of them. I try to be realistic about what we can accomplish in terms of derisking or proving a concept or hypothesis. The hypothesis for the 911 Showing is that, as Tyler Ruks said, there's something there! And then Justin comes along 5 or 10 years after Tyler does his Ph.D. and puts in the fieldwork to start proving it on YouTube. Prove it -- what does that mean, and to whom? Well, let's find a bigger company to come in and commit to spending some serious money to move it forward. Or let's go on an adventure ourselves as a microp company and climb out of this valley like your first slide, Daniel. Those are the questions we're facing and dealing with on a day-to-day basis running this deal. That's it! Daniel, anything else to say?
Daniel Cook: No.
Peter Bell: Justin?
Justin Deveault: Let's keep finding finds!
Peter Bell: I'm with you! Good work, Justin. And good work, Daniel, on the pitch deck. I had a lot of fun going through this with you both. Thank you for doing this with me! This has been Peter Bell, CEO of Kermode Resources. Thanks, goodbye.
