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 [Music] I'm Charlotte McLoud with investing news.com and here today with me is Chris Taylor formerly of Great Bear resources just been announced as CEO of aquatan metals really good to have you here uh thanks Charlotte thanks for the introduction I appreciate it yeah really really good to have you here as I said and I think we we've got a lot of interesting directions that we can go on as I said just in the little intro here I think many investors certainly many members of our audience will be familiar

with you from your work at Great Bear which was acquired by Ken rold all the way back in 2022 but maybe people won't be as familiar with what you've been doing over the last couple of years so maybe we start there and hear hear what you've been up to yeah well generally speaking uh I bought a ranch uh that was very exciting uh so got me out of the city for a while and let me do a lot of reflective thinking and then I went down the rabbit hole on H Twitter learning all about geopolitics so I did not

become the well-rounded uh accomplished person that I thought uh that an early retirement would bring and that led me basically to um look for a great project to get back into the industry with and of course I'm on some boards and I help out where I can uh with a few good projects but I was looking for something uh big you know um and you do hate to say it but Great Bear was a great success story and I wanted to get involved if I was going to charge back into uh the fry and sit in the CEO chair

again I wanted to have something that was be that would be significant right like a significant project of size something with clear tier one potential uh and it took a long time like you you got to kiss a lot of frogs um until you kiss the prince although I'm not sure that's the analogy I would typically use so um you know but yeah this project it really checked a lot of boxes for me and and uh it is the best uh potential gold project that I've seen in a very very long time if not ever wow okay so let's

talk a little bit more about that because as I was getting ready for this conversation I was thinking you know after gra air of course for something to draw you back in to start this whole process all the way from the beginning it would have to be something pretty interesting so tell me how you came to start looking at aquatine metals and maybe we learn a little bit more about the project as well well you know the the project came together uh because there's some French geologists and engineers and other people that really

uh have a vision and the vision reminds me of my former partner at Great Bear Bob Singh uh Bob Singh and Perry English were really the ones that had the vision to bring that project forward and I remember Bob uh basically threatening me at one point he's like if you don't do a deal on this project I'm going to do a deal on this project and uh these are the guys so the new French team uh they have that vision and um you know really brilliant young guy uh Tom Pino uh he's a PhD geologist he's worked in the

Pyrenees before but he's from an area near the middle of France and turns out right near where he comes from his parents are farmers uh in this area is the largest uh historic gold mining District in the country uh which makes it a very significant gold uh gold district and nobody really knows about it so um you know local French people they obvious know about it there's a mining Museum there uh there's a lot of people that used to work at the mines the last one closed down in 2002 so this

is not uh stuff that closed down a century ago it closed down like 20 years ago and they were uh they were the ones that put it together uh got the ball rolling on permitting everything with the government and started looking for Capital markets and exploration experience which uh was the discovery group and eventually me okay okay so we'll talk a little bit more about the project in a moment but I want to take a step back and just you mentioned it's in France and when I was reading the press

release this morning getting ready for this interview I I realized I don't really know very much about France as a mining jurisdiction so maybe you can talk a little bit about the the history there and attitudes toward mining in the country because I'm guessing many people might also not know yeah well France was a major uh it was a major mining country for many many years and uh over the latter half of the 20th century this was just being like the it was was declining and rolling black back and like you know

France uh they operate a huge amount of their power grid with nuclear right which in Hite has been an excellent move uh so it's led to a stable lower cost power supply than many of their European neighbors and uh they used to mine a lot of their own uranium and they were actually mining uranium in country uh and then they began mining uranium in Africa and some of their postcolonial territories and these other places but gradually what's happened with the geopolitics is during that time when

France had access to all these resources in their formal Colonial possessions they were basically having very little incentive to do mining in country and they began wrapping up a lot of those mining activities iron ore uranium coal it was all being pulled back and uh you know the district that we're working on here with aquatan Metals was the last one standing on the gold side highest grade biggest sort of district and uh basically it was being used uh as a way to let some of these French miners from

other deposits work instead of just being retired early so instead of just laying them off and paying them Severance or whatever the case would have been they actually let them work up to retirement age and that meant over the course of time the project although they kept finding more gold actually was shrinking in terms of production and they were producing gold at like almost half an ounce per ton and they're basically uh reducing the scale of the operations as the mining Workforce was retiring so there's no real current

mining industry in France uh but it's something the government like President macron other members of the government the EU is very eager to get going again because of the some some of the recent geopolitical changes okay really really interesting and I I feel a little bit less bad about not knowing too much about France if if currently there's not a whole lot going on but sounds like they're heading in that direction and sounds like so the project is in quite a historical area and sounds like also

you're going to be working with quite a lot of older older data but also planning a a drill program so maybe tell me what the the plans are there and what we should be expecting from that drill program what you hope to accomplish well we when when the project was acquired there was over $400 Million worth of data here so hundreds of thousands of meters of drilling uh many kilometers of underground mining all the production you know face assays all the sampling all the historical work the French

government began flying like highresolution liar surveys and arom magag over the project like two or three years ago because they're very serious about Reviving the mining industry here and that was data that we didn't have to pay for they paid for it they flew it and they gave us the data for free you can't imagine that even happening in a place like Canada it's it's impossible so they're very serious about this and what we need to do is uh right now we have all these records all these these

millions and millions of dollars worth of Records but there's uh basically no confirmation drilling right now so we're going to go in we're going to drill areas where we know like if you think about it this way um at Great Bear kin Ross came out with an initial in resource of 6.1 million ounces or this was in their pa 6.1 million ounces of three grams per ton roughly in the open pit and about 4.9 grams per ton in the underground if you look at the French mining data from this site all of that

would be waste all of it Great Bear which is one of the most valuable projects to be sold in the industry for like a decade would have been waste and unmined at the cut off grades that the French were mining at as recently as 2002 the scale of the gold system there is enormous it's many it's like an order of magnitude larger than the system we were dealing with with Great Bear it's a much bigger Target if we take that to reasonable cutoff grades you know and we look at that system as a whole the

potential is much larger so what we need to do is drill to confirm some of the work that was already done in areas where Kojima the French company they would go in and they drill several meters of seven or eight grams right in the near surface and walk away from it because it didn't hit their cut off grades we have these drill results and we need to confirm them and there's extensions on these really high grade gold or bodies that were already exploited and they're undrilled unconfirmed or drilled but uh you know

we don't have uh we don't have that original drill core so the drill program that we're going to go in here will show uh continuity of gold mineralization between areas of past Mining and it's going to follow up on drill holes that we already know are mineralized at high grade so it should be a very interesting program to show us the quality and correlation to the old data and the total scope of the potential at this target it's huge okay and I believe that's starting in in February so very

imminent I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the financing situation right now so I believe if I'm correct the company is currently private right now I can't I can't imagine that you would have difficulty for for your next venture getting funding behind it but can you talk a little bit about that well you know it is a private company and right now uh it's quite difficult for a lot of public companies out there in the marketplace they they are not getting the valuations that they should

be getting and it seems like this is a structural issue in the mineral exploration space you know you have uh companies that are in Tech Ventures um which are getting like many many times their multiples of their values and then in mining companies are getting discounts so it makes uh the space um a lot less appealing to General investors when they can go ahead and you know get momentum investing and other sort of uh multipliers in other Industries and part of this is just education like uh the

younger Generations uh that have come through recently they're not really ke feed into where materials come from what their potential value is they don't know about the mining cycle so a lot of this we've got to reach out we've got to do some of this work on on on our part uh to get the message out there and returns like what we saw with great beer they are possible this is generating real wealth right um you know I think uh between when we started great beer and when we sold it it was like a 30,000 per

return for our investors like you know so this is comparable or better than a lot of the tech mining uh investment well we need to see though is an education that these kind of things can happen so let's do that uh but on the private company side uh you know the directors of the company myself included are all making significant personal investments in this and there are a number of like European and French government level uh funding um you know aspects or potential uh sources that are available for us so I think uh what

we're going to do is uh make sure that we uh keep this uh tight keep get the message out there uh try to access some of these like strategic sort of funding initiatives and then uh once you've got all our ducks in a row we also want to expand the area that we're going to be drilling in uh to like this full uh 300 square kilometer area that we have exclusivity on and that might be a good time for us to go public in the meantime uh we have pretty strong resources internally and uh we really want to

benefit our shareholders okay really really interesting to get that perspective from you and and maybe we talk a little bit more about the health of the Junior sector in general I'm just back from going to VC in in Vancouver of course there's a lot of Junior companies and financing lack of interest from generalist investors from young people is such a hot topic of conversation and and not really very happy conversation topics so what are your thoughts on on how the sector is doing as a whole for

those smaller companies it's it's amazing like I've I've uh I've been working now I graduated my undergrad I finished it in the year 2000 so it's very easy to do the math it's been 25 years and um when I think about that time all that I've seen in my career is government moving away from uh support for the mining and mineral exploration industry it gets harder and harder there's more roadblocks in place even if you have people talking a nice game on the one side on the other side they'll

be putting more regulations in place that make it harder for us to do our jobs and I think this is this is a bit of a societal issue is that in the west we've exported a lot of our material production to second in third world countries uh that are more Loosely regulated and that is a process that's coming to bite Us in the backside right now the reason being say that you're in uh a country and it's a place in Africa place in South America wherever it may be you have a choice between two

companies that you want to work with one of them is a North American listed company with a lot of ESG requirements and other accounting requirements another one might be originated in a different jurisdiction and they will not have any of those same uh dealing requirements against moneya laundering or environmental regulations in a lot of cases unfortunately you're going to choose to partner with the company that has less regulatory red tape and that's not necessarily a good thing what it

does mean if you look at the dominant trading partner for most of the world now in the year 2000 it was like 80% of the map was a dominant trading partner with the west and with the United States right now if you look at the world map 80% of the dominant trade partner of the countries in the world is China right so what this means is that kind of civilization uh the West has given away uh control of these resources and Manufacturing and other Industries to hyper concentration in East Asia and that's difficult because we no longer

have material Independence on a lot of the Strategic Commodities that we need to get by as a society and unfortunately when it comes to things like critical Metals uh countries like China not only uh end up directly or indirectly producing a lot of the stuff but they refine it as well they make the manufactured products and they're way ahead in things like drone technology the mil militarization of AI and other stuff and it's very difficult because things like antimony um which uh is an

accessory mineral in our project in France it used to be just a waste mineral now the Chinese because they control almost all the global Supply are clamping down on exports of this because it's militarily very important strategically very important for controlling the world and um you know we need to get with the program educate our populace that these are important critical Commodities that the West also needs to produce and be able to manufacture and make the end products from and that's something that the

governments are now realizing and that's why things like the EU they have a critical materials mandate where they need to produce 10% of these critical minerals in the EU itself and the reason is that security of Supply so there's a lot that we need to do to sort of get uh the West back on board and get General mining interest but strategically as well the work that we're doing is important it ensures our security and Financial Security in the case of gold mines but often these have accessory

minerals like antimony at our project which have other critical importance yeah I think I've definitely in the last six months to a year or so seen a lot more companies highlighting that that antimon or other critical minerals component where before you know you care about just just gold and now it's all these addition so do you think that helps do you think we're going to see more of that and do you think that gives companies an edge in in getting ahead I think it does you know like frankly um these are things

that just didn't have a lot of previous value look at antimony for instance I think it's probably worth about 1,200 bucks us a ton so it's it's it's not bad it's like double the value of copper actually if I think about it but compared to something like gold like gold is worth like what high 80 million 90 million a ton so one of the best way ways that you can produce these Commodities is as part of if they're an accessory mineral as part of a gold system so you get a high-grade gold mine

that's also producing these is a lot that makes a lot more sense economically than a standalone like antimony mine just based on the value of the commodity so yeah I think you're going to see a lot more of this going forward companies will realize that they have these minerals in in in in the ground uh with their other uh dominant uh products but um you just have to be careful because like the standalone economics on something like antimony is nothing like it is on something like on a onetoone

basis yeah yeah good good reminder to be careful and you know just because you mentioned you were going down the geopolitics rabbit hole on Twitter I I have to ask you know we're heading into a very different environment in the US certainly and probably in in Canada in the months to come do you see any do you think that we're going to get that deregulation the the uh speeding up of the permitting things like that are we gonna see a real change over here in North America or or not so much uh the

US you will see changes right in the relative near future um we've already seen changes and I won't name any names but just uh because Trump is getting into power and Trudeau is coming out of power in Canada I've already seen uh permitting Pathways uh accelerate on certain projects but it's jurisdictionally based and I would say like you know places like British Columbia where I'm sitting right now are probably not going to benefit from that that in the near- term uh other jurisdictions I would imagine Ontario

would be a better one Quebec would be a better one if you're sitting in Canada I'll just I I won't get too much into the Weeds on that but having the political will it's amazing jurisdiction after jurisdiction place after place if the political will is there and the recognition of the importance of uh mineral uh self-sufficiency is there then uh these projects happen yeah I think it's something and it's it's very early days to be to looking at these things play out so definitely something

to keep an eye on so we've covered kind of the critical minerals angle here but of course we we've got to talk about gold as well we're in pretty exciting gold price environment right now which I I am surprised that it hasn't gotten more people interested in in the metal and in the sector what is your outlook for for gold heading forward into 2025 what factors are you watching there the macros on gold are still very very good um you know there was a some of the headwinds were taken out with

cryptocurrencies obviously over the last kind of 10e period uh some of that has Abad although it it es and flows um there's a replacement cost to Gold uh which Rises every year so inflation when you see these inflation numbers hitting again and again um basically that's going to eat into what it cost to produce an ounce of gold out of the ground so the base of what gold can go down to gets higher and higher year after year as Fiat currencies continue to devalue right so that's the bottom

line there so um I don't really have an informed opinion to get into until like bricks uh alternative currencies or any of these scenarios like I don't know more about it than the next person but I can see that there's a lot of appetite for physical gold traditionally in a lot of Asian countries and uh you know you got to look at what people do uh France for instance has a huge gold reserve and they add to that gold Reserve all the time so um a lot of countries are in that boat where they're actually adding

gold reserves at their central banks and that's telling you something that's telling you something about what they think about the future of uh you know unbacked currencies and uh they're obviously not making a very solid vote of confidence in in that favor so I think long-term the valuation prospects for gold are quite good yeah well and I think that one area where hopefully you probably do have have a opinion here is we've seen a lot of m&a activity in the gold space over the past year when you

look at those deals are they making sense to you do you like what you're seeing there and and do you think we'll see more of it in 2025 uh I'm G to hedge that answer a little bit and I think I think a lot of the time to do the m&a uh is when gold is uh actually under price pressure I think right now what you're looking at with gold price is uh the high tide is floating a lot of boats and uh projects that are uh really quite marginal are actually doing quite well but you got to

think about that long long-term Vision gold prices always will fluctuate you know even if they're higher over time and the m&a and the business it needs to happen but it never does happen in these sort of like increasing gold price environments not typically so the m&a activity is sort of subdued and uh it's like people politically they don't make changes unless they have to and it's the same thing with a lot of these companies so over the long term it needs to happen is it happening at a pace that I think

it it should happen at no it's not happening quickly enough yeah yeah very interesting to to look at that as well are there any other factors in the f space or Junior exploration space that you are thinking about right now that you think investors should be aware of uh I think that critical metal angle coming on uh on is going to be very important for people I do think they need to think about those economics though um it can be important uh opening permitting doors and you have these things associated with the project um

and just keep an eye on those politics like we've seen uh an ongoing development of sort of an exit of Western Mining Company dominance in a number of jurisdictions but of course other opportunities open up so um I always look personally when I look look to make an investment in a company I look at the management I look at their incentives are they being incentivized something people don't think about is if you go to the m&a documents from a company that you're interested in a producer for instance um they'll have in

those documents whether the CEO has has m&a as one of his uh remuneration Clauses uh for the year so if his uh kpis uh or are based on uh having to go through one of these events that's a good sign that they're actually seriously looking and I think people don't look at that information often enough so I certainly did when we were going through the Great Bear uh sale process and it was pretty Illuminating so I would suggest other people uh do that as well yeah I mean that's a point

that I don't I don't think that's been brought up to me in you know that you should look at when you're doing your due diligence so that's very helpful all right well I will I will let you go unless you had any any final thoughts that you wanted to add no I just look forward to getting some news out we will be drilling on aquatine by the end of next month so I think that'll be very exciting if you like high grade gold it'll be exciting anyway and uh that gives us uh the ability to talk to more

people uh we continue building relationships in that jurisdiction and I think uh within you know if we were having this conversation a year from now I think a lot more people would have heard about this project and this as an area that hosts a major gold district okay well certainly it sounds like there's a lot to look forward to I think many people do like high-r gold so I think that that's going to be exciting thank you so much for for coming on to go over what you're doing right now and

hopefully we check back with you once there's been some results okay thanks thanks Char I I appreciate the time thanks very much of course and and once again I'm Charlotte McLoud with investing news.com and this is Chris Taylor thank you for watching if you like this video make sure you hit the like button and subscribe to our Channel we'd also love to hear your thoughts so leave us a comment below [Music]