Gold To $10,000 While This Asset Doubles: CEO On Start Of Supercycle Frenzy
Summary
Copper Market Outlook: The podcast discusses the potential for copper prices to rise significantly, possibly reaching $10, driven by increased demand from AI data centers and global infrastructure needs.
Gold and Commodities: There's speculation that gold could reach $10,000, reflecting a broader trend of rising commodity prices amidst global economic shifts and inflation fears.
Globalization and Trade: De-globalization is highlighted as a key theme, with ongoing trade wars and tariffs impacting market dynamics, particularly in the mining sector.
Investment Opportunities: The GDX index has outperformed all S&P 500 sectors, suggesting significant investment opportunities in mining stocks, although concerns about a potential bubble are noted.
Company Strategy: Copper Giant is focusing on its Makoa project, emphasizing its strategic location and potential to meet rising copper demand, while navigating geopolitical and economic shifts.
Industry Mergers: The merger between major copper producers Anglo and Tech is seen as a strategic move to secure supply chains and leverage future price increases, indicating industry consolidation.
Infrastructure and Supply Chains: The discussion highlights the critical role of copper in energy transition and AI development, with nations and companies racing to secure supply chains and smelting capacity.
Future Outlook: Despite current market volatility, the long-term fundamentals for copper and other commodities remain strong, with significant growth potential as global electrification and technological advancements continue.
Transcript
They say copper day is 450. I think it's going to go to $10. The United States is consuming 3.6 million tons. It needs to double the capacity it has in order to feed a smelter. It wouldn't be crazy for gold to go to 10,000 for copper to go to $10. It's not crazy, right? And the real feeding frenzy happens at the peak of the market, but I think we're 10 years away. [Music] Ian Harris returns. He is the CEO of Copper Giant. We've had him on the show just a couple of weeks ago. Check out our last interview. Copper prices have been on a tear up and down. Extreme volatility all summer. We'll talk about what's next for base metals, commodities, the global monetary system here at the Precious Metal Summit in Beaver Creek, one of the premier mining conferences in the around the world. Welcome back to the show, Ian. Always good to see you. Thanks, David. And and nice to be here in Beaver Creek. Copper Giant. A lot of news coming out of the Makulla project. We'll talk about some updates for our audience. Let's talk about copper itself and the global monetary shift. You were telling me offline that del globalization has been a recurring theme throughout the entirety of 2025 with the tariffs and the trade wars ongoing. Equities, however, have been on a tear. New all-time highs for stocks, new all-time highs for mining companies. The GDX is up 90%. And so, in a sense, it's kind of ironic, isn't it? it well it's it's it's it shouldn't be a surprise right uh history has a way of repeating itself um and these are secular markets where we see rotation of capital so everything is playing out that it makes sense is now is the time our previous interviews were going look at the commodities the equities haven't moved yet it's playing up what is going on uh the you know these are the most undervalued bargain prices you'll ever see right and all of a sudden when it starts flowing, it starts flowing very fast and it's hard to not point to an entire index that's up 90% and not say why are you not investing in that. So you see big money starting to flow and things really start to take off. Gold mining index, the GDX outperformed every single S&P 500 sector this year by a wide margin and people are wondering, well some people are wondering whether now is the time to exit. Are we in a bubble right now? That's kind of the sentiment. a huge 180 from last year when we were talking, oh, when are miners going to start catching up to gold and silver and copper? Remember that? Remember when the uh underlying metals were outperforming the stocks? Well, now it's the reverse. Now people are saying, whoops, maybe I missed the boat or whoops, I'm in, but it's time to take profits. Are you starting to see that sentiment shift? If people asking that question, I hope they're a day trader. Okay. Right. because obviously I am from the generation that saw the end of a big gigantic well my career started in one of the super bulls even though my executive career was at the tail end of it um and then seeing a sec a secular uh bare market for arguably 13 years. So uh you've we've seen this before. So if people start getting a little bit of nervous just hit that chart and go back uh 2 years, 5 years, 10 years max and you can see the valuations these companies have had historically, right? We are nowhere close. We are just on the teeniest of green sprout that can come out of these markets. Bubbles do not generate over 3 months. They take years and years to generate before they mature. And normally we don't see bubbles in our space. We just see a rotation of capital that happens over time. I know you're an executive in the mining space. Um, and I I want to get your perspective of your side of the story, but from an investor's perspective there, someone's probably looking at this situation and wondering what was the rising tide that lifted all boats. By all boats, I mean all assets this year. Gold, silver, Bitcoin, copper. We'll talk about stocks, mining stocks, all new all-time highs. At the same time, we're seeing policy uncertainty around tariffs. We're seeing inflation fears ticking up. the labor market in the US showing crack. So the underlying economy, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of headwinds there while all assets like I've mentioned just on a tear. There's a little bit of a disconnect, right? Do you ever wonder to yourself why? I think that there's a nervousness and it's always when the start when things start rotating, there's obviously a lot of self-doubt comes in before a true bull market is fully installed, right? So it takes time for these things to overall and and generate. But if you look at the underlying fundamentals in terms of the big mining companies, uh some of the ratios that they see, they're still incredible values. Comparisons of where we've been into the past, where we are today are still incredible values. And I think what that's why we're seeing a lot of volatility. It's kind of an in-n-out. It hasn't really settled in yet, but you know, it's moved 90% in a blink of an eye. Next thing you know, companies are sitting at 40, you know, two year, two year highs again, right? So we're starting to see all the indicators to say because there's an argument both on the precious metal side and also on the commodity side and one of one of the things you mentioned is because you're seeing a decoupling or a breakdown of the globalization and this is the one where copper plays out the biggest. Copper has always had you know everyone is it was on the cover of uh the Economist magazine. People see it they it's in their face. We need it. And guess what? It's not just energy transition and electric vehicles anymore, right? It's the power requirements and that's what copper is all about. It's why I think one of in our first interviews, what I really get excited about is AI. I did a calculation recently where you look who has the big checkbooks, who's the guys who just sat down with Trump and said we're looking to invest about $800 billion uh in the next, you know, few years inside the United States. Meta was talking about doing these massive data centers and it one the size of Manhattan in Louisiana or um I can't remember which state was in the southeast of the United States. If you do the calculations the requirement in copper just for those data centers is a million tons of copper. A million tons of copper. Today the world production is in the 20s. Yeah. So just for these data centers, you need to have percentage points of the entire copper production of the world. Just for the data centers. And why I talk about it so much is because it's a race. These guys see it's a life and death race. It's a life and death race between countries and between companies. They say whoever has the smartest computer is going to win and they don't want to lose. And those checkbooks are just going to start ripping open. Let's go move things forward. At the same time, you have a decoupling of the globalization. So you had a China dominance and now you have India raising its hand to go I want to establish smelting capacity. You have the United States going hey I'm putting a tariff and then by 2020 South and it will include refined copper all of a sudden you say it says that's a message saying I want smelting capacity. So if everybody needs smelting capacity at a time where there's already too much smelting capacity it means the underlying assets are in the driver's seat. They're the biggest smelting capacity everywhere. There was a time period where smelters in China were paying to process people's concentrate, right? The treatment chart was negative for a time period. They were paying you paying people to process their material, right? But it was about dominance of the supply chains because once you have copper, refined copper in your hand, those become electric motors, those become wires. Those become things that you can transform into what the world needs right now. And if you don't have that copper, you can't have the production chain. It's why the United came a states came out with this massive uh tariff and then took a step back and said well it doesn't count on refined because the obvious answer is I can't manufacture anything in the United States if I don't have the refined copper you need to have the beginning of the the production chain you mentioned I think China holds 60% of smelting capacity that's correct globally so the US is still a few years away from actually developing their own smelting ecosystem demand correct so what's happening now so I think today United States is consuming 3.6 million tons. Remember that number I just said about AI being 1 million by itself. 3.6 million tons per year of which it imports 1.8. So it does have an existing capacity, but it's also growing dramatically. So it needs to double the capacity it has. In order to feed a smelter, you need a project, right? And there's the wire. All these assets become super valuable. And that's what we're so excited about because there's so few assets. Well, that ties into your company, which I'll talk about in a minute. Uh $4.50 is the copper price. We were at 580 early in August when we last had you on the show. Huge moves 20% down in one day on the uh uh that was the comx, right? Yeah. So, that was because there was an anticipated tariff. That tariff disappeared until 2027. But if you look at the LME price, it's been pretty steady. And so now that we've had that tariff reversal just on the comx, we've been hovering around 450 since August. Is that the fair value for you? I think that well it's always a question of who controls the price. It's normally the traders. They normally have a shorter term vision, right? But there's some long-term underlying fundamentals that say things are going to go higher. Um, and I think another proof of this is the the acquisition between Anglo and Tech. I don't know if you want to touch on that really quick, but you basically have the biggest copper biggest copper producers companies in the world going, it's too hard. There's no projects out there. It's hard to develop them. I can't see what we can do. And they start merging, right? They start saying, I think copper price is going to go through the roof. So, what we need, the best way we can leverage ourselves to that is by merging. It creates no new production. It might even arguably reduce the amount of production, right, through efficiencies. So they're tying up the production is what they're doing. At the same time, the world needs more production. So it's an indicator those guys know what they're doing. They believe that copper price absolutely is going up and they want to be in a pole position of when copper goes up and that house they're going to feed their their valuations. This is the supposedly the second largest mining merger ever. Ever. What what does that imply though? If I were a company and I know that there's a strategic future for my company that I'm going to come out on head, I wouldn't want to merge with somebody, right? Are they doing this out of scale means everything, right? When you're talking about China wants feed, India wants feed, United States wants feed, arguably Saudi Arabia wants feed. They all want to build a smelting capacity up because they know that copper is the basis of so much of the future production chains because the world is going to be based on electricity. energy and power are going to be everything and that's what they need that copper to build that infrastructure and you go I want to be in a ne I want to be in the position of where I'm negotiating that so you size and scale and who can be the big players can ne negotiate the best positions I think that is a big part of it because the only other option they have is through growth and there's no projects when two giants merge like this what typically comes next what do they do next well first of all there's obviously an efficiency But I think that they're just doing it because it's the easiest way to show we are going to grow through future price increase. They say copper day is $450. I think it's going to go to $10. The lowest risk method of doing that is to merge, right? And there might be some efficiencies that used to be the old way of doing it. But for me, it is just about acquiring size. Acquiring those copper assets, having the portfolio was a whole lot easier than discovering them. Why couldn't they? Well, I suppose that's on the agenda maybe, but wouldn't they just buy companies like yourself? Wouldn't that also help them? They are still seeing it as the lowest risk pathway is just to acquire the the production, right? Because it's in hand. It's something you can do and you can just have it on hand. But that feeding frenzy one day will end because at the end of the day, you want underlying assets. So after producing assets, it's assets that can produce in a short period of time. Yeah. What are governments around the world doing to address this supply chain bottleneck that we've been talking about? Well, it's definitely, you know, even uh so I started working in South America in 1999 and worked all over the place in South America and for the first time ever had the US embassy call me up and say, "Hey, we'd like to meet. We'd like to know more about your company." Right. Right. First time ever. Like I've talked to the Canadian embassy and bunches of times because we're a Canadian company, but never the US embassy. They're already trying to put their fingers and try to understand what the future projects look like. There it is. There is an outreach going on right now. I think step one is have the smelting capacity, but after part two of that is make sure you have the offtake. Know where the supply is coming from to feed that smelting capacity because that's what everybody needs, everybody wants. the US uh the Pentagon the defense department recently acquired um critical minerals companies in the US. People are talking about the nationalization of critical mineral companies. Is that on the uh horizon? Well, you can see as a minimum nations are playing a much more proactive role in acquiring the production chains. In the past, nationalization was different. It was about economics. It was about money. It was about controlling your national resources. In this case, I think it's all about securing production chains. If I were going to tell you that there's only one race that matters, and it's AI, and if you lose, you're dead. All right? Everyone would be going over securing everything you need to make sure you can win that race. And it's about power. And power means copper. Having the energy supply and the chip supply to be able to build that infrastructure out as fast as possible. And you're seeing it happen right in front of our face. You've compared copper in this regard to platinum uh palladium other precious metals. Why is copper and those other metals needed for the AI arms race? Just you know concrete examples. What is it? The answer is simple. Yeah. All electricity almost all of it at low voltages is transmitted on copper. Sure. All of it. Right. The only other more efficient metal at transmitting electricity is silver. But you're not going to have silver wires in your house. Right. So if you want to transmit electricity efficiently, it's through copper at lower voltages. So all the distribution of electricity is copper, right? Plus you have cooling and there's some other effects, but most of it's about getting the energy required to feed those brains in those data centers, feeding them and getting the electricity to them. It's number one and it's all about copper. We don't have the current infrastructure is not sufficient to grow the AI. Um, definitely not. No. So, you could see when I think it was Microsoft said, I want to buy the nuclear reactor at 3M Island because they said we don't have enough energy to to feed our data centers. So, it's a world race now to get in new energy supply. Yeah. Transmit that new energy supply and build up those and those. Where do you see most of the copper coming from in the next 5 years? Well, you could say that 50% of the world's largest copper mines are from Chile to Panama and one Andes region. So, the good guess is 50% of that new copper is going to be coming out of the most prolific zone in the entire world. And so, that's where we fit in. So, my my first my history was the construction of the Miridor project back in the days of Coriente. was the first industrial scale project in the history of Ecuador in the Jurassic Belt. It's why I said I want another project in that Jurassic Belt. Colombia has a more robust um mining mining sector and this can be a big big big project near surface near infrastructure, has power lines, has roads, no one's living there. I can see how this project can get into production quickly, right? And so that is the, you know, it's not a thousand meters underground. You have problem just like resolution in the United States finally maybe going forward, Trump twidding about it that you can't have lawyers getting judges getting in our way. Let's get this thing mo moving. But resolution is so deep it will be seven years before you even start producing out of it. So the projects like Makoa, I say it's a unicorn and a suit. They don't exist. size, scale, grade and getting into production near infrastructure etc. Miridor project which was me in Ecuador was one of the lowest cost if not the lowest cost new copper supply green fields project in the world. In my opinion Makoa is even better because we had to build a power supply. We had to bring in power lines. We had to build uh power uh power generation run of river power projects. We had to build the warehouse at the port. We don't have to do any of that at Makoa. And so I see it as being the perfect project. And on top of it, Colombia is a non- major NATO non major non-NATO ally of the United States. Same level as Japan, same level as Australia. So, it's already within that working relationship with the United States. It's a perfect location to have a new copper project. There's a presidential election in Colombia where Makoa is based next year. How do you expect policy shifts to impact your operations? We see a shift overall going on in South America going back to the right you have Colombia by itself 50% of its exports are oil and coal right they are not the soup dour of what everybody was looking for going into the future so as a minimum they're industries that will be shrinking based on policy or just based on uh demand right so they need to develop new economic impulses for the country so I think just logically we're going to see a shift where we're going to see more emphasis and that's a part of my strategy. There's only been about five or six big copper projects built in the last 10 years and I would argue every single one of them was an underdog story. I think as a majority of the time market misses it. They don't get it right. They love the Pascal Lamas in the world that never got built right. They hated Cobra Panama was never going to get built. It got built. Another one I like is Las Bombas. Never going to get built got built. Miridor never gonna get built got built. Even the projects in Africa that got built, they were never going to get built. Yeah. There's the ones that get built by groups that know how to navigate through that. I see in a window opening up because we have new presidential elections. You're going to have presidents going to come. I want to see investment. I want to see big projects and we want to be ready with Makoa saying this is a project that can bring in billions of dollars of investment into Colombia and a time it needs it and get it through the window. Well, you you said Makoa is a unicorn. Uh that's what you said earlier. So, you know, with all due respect, Dean, I hear that a lot at trade shows like this, what makes Makoa different? I think in copper, first of all, there's very few unconnected projects that are not connected already to a major of the size and scale that Makoa has and the demonstration we've been able to say this is the potential it has. Two, it's near to the surface. Most other projects are deep underground. Three, it's near infrastructure. So it's a near to power lines and near to road. It can get to ports. It can get anything that normally it's not necessarily the cost of the mine, but it's the cost of the infrastructure you have to put in to get it there. Right. And uh I would say third would be a fourth would be grade. It has good good solid grades that would be economic and and even at today I don't need $9 copper to make an economic project. It's a project that would look attractive right now. And there is very very you know I talked to a lot of mining companies that like you have built their own power lines their own grid. It occurs to me that you could almost be your own utility company. Has that has that ever occurred to you? Well many of the times you were becoming your own private power producer. I mean that does happen. Yeah. Can't you supply power to the you know local? It's about risk. Remember there was a time because of globalization in the past you look at Anaconda. Anaconda used to say it was like copper to your door or something like that. So they managed the entire production stream. They had the mines, they had the smelters, they had the refineries, they produced the copper products and they sold you the copper door knob that went to your day and and the copper wire that went to your house, right? But as co projects became more complex, you don't want to say, I need a smelter and a mine both to be successful. If one fails, the whole project dies. So you started decoupling all these additional risks. Yeah. Right. So permitting a mine is difficult. Permitting a mine and a hydroelectric project even more difficult. A hydroelectric project and a smelter and a mine extremely difficult because you're multiplying those risks. Even if each one is 90% 90* 90* 90 you start to get to the 70% probability ranges. It it it multiplies your risk uh risk of a project. So that's why it's been decoupled and that's why you don't want to have to do it because you don't want to have to permit something additional like a power line. Speaking of permitting, what suggestions would you give North American governments in particular uh to perhaps expedite the process or make it easier for companies? Well, I think the politicians at the end of the day only care about votes, right? So it doesn't matter what you tell them, right? My message would be to the executives if you want to build a project that's successful what did what worked in Cobra Pona because Ernie is a a a director right I was in uh Ecuador and Miridor and I call it the triangle of strength you start with massively strong relationships locally from the very beginning from the very beginning you start with amazing relationships not not do they like you or not right don't create oh we built a lot of did look at all these nice pictures we took creating real relationships. It's why I live in Colombia. I'm fluent in Spanish. It's why I go down to the project because those relationships need to be built and they need to be real where people feel they're part of a project. So then what happens is and second is reputation. So the big thing that happened to us this year is the second year in a row and the reputation index we were voted 12th 13th this year, 12th last year and by the way we were the only expiration company on the list in terms of reputation. All the rest were producers. So we've built a reputation early even though we're just an explorer within the country. We built a national reputation. How did you do that? Well, through the good work that we've done and people just see it and they hear about it and through reputationally you start building a solid reputation. It also helps that I do interviews and I'm on TV and I can do etc etc. It helps because I speak the language. What what what does a company with a bad reputation look like just to give perspective to the audience? You normally doesn't see it until the time and a point where they want to do something. Yeah. And then there's protests, there's problems, they can't solve them. Now listen, every single problem, every single project normally is going to face those types of problems. It's how they address them and how they manage them is what's most important. So if you build a reputation, a relationship locally, and you start to build a reputation nationally, what does it build? It builds political will, right? Then politicians want your project to go forward because they want to be associated with good projects. They want people to be seen that I'm supporting what people already like. So it's more in our hands. I think that we have more that we can do than people think we could. So let's say copper goes to $10. All right, let's just suppose and then everything doubles in price because copper is in everything. And then everyone is complaining about inflation and then politicians want to control the inflation. They do all sorts of things to the money supply. What do you say to the governments then? Well, I think it's going to happen naturally. Yeah, I don't think I need to tell them anything. They're going to do it anyways, right? But they normally react too late. These projects on historically take, you know, in the United States it's like 20 years to permit a project. So, you a you need to have projects that are further enough advance they're in the permitting stage anyways, but they're there and then they could just fasttrack the permits. But we really need the help, you know, over a longer extended period of time. So, we have to do that ourselves. What are industries doing to I guess not just not manage the price per se, but try to control the price so that it's steady and not out of control? I mean, if I I I I mean, if I were Samsung, I I don't want $10 copper, right? I don't think that it's the highest thing on their list, right? It might get there, but right now they're fighting enough fires and the number one fire is who's going to win the AI race. Yeah. I think that is the number one priority of the majority of tech tech companies, right? Because you would look at in the past of the AI bubble or sorry the internet bubble and you were saying Walmart didn't say ah internet is kind of a nice way to sell another 10% more products and they didn't know that this company called Amazon was going to come along but I think people now realize that this next evolution is uh you know life or death right that that you must have AI otherwise you're not going to survive right they see it that way do you see minds where deposits like yours on the balance sheets of tech companies I think as yes it might not be as direct it might be as an offtake agreement it might be in some sort of other vehicle but you can see that when it when Microsoft or it might have been Google whoever was on 3M island I'm sorry I'm missing the who it was right when they're going I'm willing to buy a nuclear power plant so they're obviously don't care what they people are going to say about the assets they own right all they care about is the ability to continue to grow Yeah, I think Tesla was floating the idea of buying lithium deposits. I I had an old theory that said one of the reasons that Elon Musk bought bought X, one of the reasons was I need to eventually uh buy mines and I need to now a marketing department that convinces people that it's okay because every time he wanted to go into it, right, he's got a trillion dollar market cap. You're losing 1%. You lose 10 billion dollars, right? So you need to be ahead of it and have this marketing arm that convinces people this is okay and this is normal. I think he was a little bit of visionary. I don't think that was the reason he did it, but it might have been on his his top five reasons to do it. So gold and silver new alltime highs. Silver $40 an ounce. That's high we haven't seen since 2011. How is that impacting the copper industry? So there's a mix, right? You have the people that have always been in the sector and everything shifts to gold and silver and so it pulls away from some of the other commodities. But I think we're also seeing new money coming in. I hear conversations now of institutions that are generalist institutions that now want to invest now are looking at projects to invest in. So you're starting to see a transition. The other thing as as things start floating market caps start becoming bigger. You have companies that used to be worth 50 million now or 150 million and now they're be making passing through thresholds that start seeing more institutional investment coming into them. So you're seeing new money flow in and that that's why and they normally say gold leads all bull equity gold markets in the mining space right because they pull money everywhere institutions family offices period anywhere right are you seeing the shareholder structure of your company change at all in the last year I watch we do have a service where we reconciliate all anonymous trading and we're seeing about 30% of our volume coming in from the United States right now so we're seeing a much bigger uptick and that is definitely more generalist institutions, small family offices, everything else pulling money into the sector. So we see that flow happen. Well, I know it's still day one of the conference, but have you been, you know, meeting with investors? What kind of questions have they been asking you? It's still very, very early, right? There's I think everyone is, everybody is asking for opinions. Definitely everybody's trying to figure out what's going on, but there's the FOMO has changed, right? or FOMO has started to take place, right? You in the past it was I remember the old days. Oh my god, it's terrible. It's absolutely awful. 2022 for it's absolutely awful. Like it can't get any worse, can it? Oh, it can get worse, right? There was that dread that things could get even worse, right? Then I remember maybe like 2024, last year was this is definitely a bottom, guys. This is awesome. We survived. Things are going to get better, right? There was a pure confidence that things are going to get better. Now there is a pure fear that people are going to miss out on huge opportunities cuz you could argue you already missed out. A lot of people already missed out on 90% gain, right? That should have been blatantly obvious. If we look back and say why it's pretty well, how did we miss that one? Right? Um besides the Anglo and tech merger, people here well people everywhere are waiting for mergers with the midtier sector mid-tier scale, junior scale. Think you're seeing it. I think people they want more and more to convince but there's some early adopters and late adopters right you've seen a consolidation now there used to be 13 produ big silver producers now there's only 10 there's already consolidation going on well there wasn't a big buyout rush last year when gold was at $2,000 there wasn't a big buyout rush at 3,000 now we're at 3600 gold you see it's still again but it's still in e mergers still it's mostly producers uh joining together forces again because I still think CEOs see this as the lowest path to the least risk, right? But once that frenzy is over, right, the underlying assets are what are most valuable. I mean, look, the I I'm not saying that's what they should have done, but I'm just saying if I were the executive of Newmont or some other big company, Bareric, I'm thinking to myself, I could have bought some deposits when gold was at 2,000, those would have been up n 50% by now. you know surely they're yeah doing some rec you know rec they have a tendency always to buy assets when commodities prices are absolutely at their peak well how do you evaluate that I mean at what point is it too expensive to get back in at what point is it like okay now we have to make a move right I think that if you look at the last bulls you could argue that people are shocked yeah that gold has gone to 3,000 right broken way past 3,000 silver has busted through $40 that copper is $4.50 really is mindblowing when you think about it. But if you look at the last super cycles, it wouldn't be crazy for gold to go to 10,000 for copper to go to $10. It's not crazy, right? And the real feeding frenzy happens at the peak of the market, but I think we're 10 years away. There's no substitute for there's no substitute for copper Ian. I mean, once it gets to $10, wouldn't Peter There's absolutely substitution. Yeah. Right. But you uh you have two options. Aluminum Mhm. which is less efficient which is big and big big big big problem and inefficiency means heat so you're saying I'm willing to accept a problem also it oxidizes and can burn up right so it's the reason why you do not want aluminum wiring in your house there is a time it's one of the you know when the inspector comes in he's one of the things you're supposed to check because aluminum wire means your house is going to burn down so you don't want aluminum wiring right so there's some things that just cannot not give and there's so much growth that I don't think it's very important. On top of it, you have entire production chains that are built around it and it's really hard to transfer to aluminum. The other alternative is silver, but it's $40 an ounce. Yeah, it it's it's it's a not even a pound an ounce. It's a curious thing because the equities have run up so much while copper often seen as a barometer for global growth because copper coincides with demand for construction, new housing and whatnot. that's gone up a lot this year, but it's still relatively flat compared to, you know, tech stocks. The last gigantic bull in copper was China, right? The growth of China, right? And I think most people would be shocked that 95% of all copper still goes to traditional uses, which means electrification of the planet. and the other place to take to take India from where it is today to the world average of copper use per person right I think is 3.5 million tons of copper so India the whole world now is going through that transition both in terms of electrical needs and the whole world is converting its economies to electricity and power generation wondering if copper is indirectly signaling that the S&P is perhaps overvalued because like I said it's not running up as much as some of the other sectors. It's a barometer for growth. Growth isn't catching up with valuations. I think you could say that the I you know there's some a lot of people say follow the money right when you have peak overvaluations in the overall stock markets money will start looking at other places to rotate. And when you see other places that are doing well, such as the DGX, there's a place that money can flow into, right? And the underlying fundamentals of copper are undeniable. You've seen massive investments into exploration, no discoveries. You haven't really seen any new projects. There's no new green fields projects coming online. You see a consolidation within the space because people are production at any costs kind of thing. And it's a kind of a perfect setup of what it looks like and where it should go. So it makes sense. It's imagine it's a question of when when will that when will that movement really start to happen? But I don't think there's much question of if. So finally, what's next for uh Copper Giant and Makoa? Well, for me, we've done so much. We've drisked the project, got it restarted, put in the infrastructure. Uh we're in the Fury Group, Frank Jer really supporting the project. We brought in Mark Gibson who is worldrenowned uh geologist that came came out of um Ivanho Electric but also has experience uh in in in Colombia. It's attracting the best talent because people I think realize the quality of project uh that we have. For me, I think we've already hit so many catalysts. We're just waiting for a little bit of momentum within the copper space to accelerate. My goal is to make sure that we have a pea done by the time we have a new president in Colombia so that I have a legitimate project that could say this is what you need to put your attention to, Mr. President. This is a project you can get your back behind and bringing significant investment into your country. Okay, great. Well, follow the uh story link down below to stay up to date with Copper Giant. Thanks so much, Ian. Appreciate it. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe.
Gold To $10,000 While This Asset Doubles: CEO On Start Of Supercycle Frenzy
Summary
Transcript
They say copper day is 450. I think it's going to go to $10. The United States is consuming 3.6 million tons. It needs to double the capacity it has in order to feed a smelter. It wouldn't be crazy for gold to go to 10,000 for copper to go to $10. It's not crazy, right? And the real feeding frenzy happens at the peak of the market, but I think we're 10 years away. [Music] Ian Harris returns. He is the CEO of Copper Giant. We've had him on the show just a couple of weeks ago. Check out our last interview. Copper prices have been on a tear up and down. Extreme volatility all summer. We'll talk about what's next for base metals, commodities, the global monetary system here at the Precious Metal Summit in Beaver Creek, one of the premier mining conferences in the around the world. Welcome back to the show, Ian. Always good to see you. Thanks, David. And and nice to be here in Beaver Creek. Copper Giant. A lot of news coming out of the Makulla project. We'll talk about some updates for our audience. Let's talk about copper itself and the global monetary shift. You were telling me offline that del globalization has been a recurring theme throughout the entirety of 2025 with the tariffs and the trade wars ongoing. Equities, however, have been on a tear. New all-time highs for stocks, new all-time highs for mining companies. The GDX is up 90%. And so, in a sense, it's kind of ironic, isn't it? it well it's it's it's it shouldn't be a surprise right uh history has a way of repeating itself um and these are secular markets where we see rotation of capital so everything is playing out that it makes sense is now is the time our previous interviews were going look at the commodities the equities haven't moved yet it's playing up what is going on uh the you know these are the most undervalued bargain prices you'll ever see right and all of a sudden when it starts flowing, it starts flowing very fast and it's hard to not point to an entire index that's up 90% and not say why are you not investing in that. So you see big money starting to flow and things really start to take off. Gold mining index, the GDX outperformed every single S&P 500 sector this year by a wide margin and people are wondering, well some people are wondering whether now is the time to exit. Are we in a bubble right now? That's kind of the sentiment. a huge 180 from last year when we were talking, oh, when are miners going to start catching up to gold and silver and copper? Remember that? Remember when the uh underlying metals were outperforming the stocks? Well, now it's the reverse. Now people are saying, whoops, maybe I missed the boat or whoops, I'm in, but it's time to take profits. Are you starting to see that sentiment shift? If people asking that question, I hope they're a day trader. Okay. Right. because obviously I am from the generation that saw the end of a big gigantic well my career started in one of the super bulls even though my executive career was at the tail end of it um and then seeing a sec a secular uh bare market for arguably 13 years. So uh you've we've seen this before. So if people start getting a little bit of nervous just hit that chart and go back uh 2 years, 5 years, 10 years max and you can see the valuations these companies have had historically, right? We are nowhere close. We are just on the teeniest of green sprout that can come out of these markets. Bubbles do not generate over 3 months. They take years and years to generate before they mature. And normally we don't see bubbles in our space. We just see a rotation of capital that happens over time. I know you're an executive in the mining space. Um, and I I want to get your perspective of your side of the story, but from an investor's perspective there, someone's probably looking at this situation and wondering what was the rising tide that lifted all boats. By all boats, I mean all assets this year. Gold, silver, Bitcoin, copper. We'll talk about stocks, mining stocks, all new all-time highs. At the same time, we're seeing policy uncertainty around tariffs. We're seeing inflation fears ticking up. the labor market in the US showing crack. So the underlying economy, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of headwinds there while all assets like I've mentioned just on a tear. There's a little bit of a disconnect, right? Do you ever wonder to yourself why? I think that there's a nervousness and it's always when the start when things start rotating, there's obviously a lot of self-doubt comes in before a true bull market is fully installed, right? So it takes time for these things to overall and and generate. But if you look at the underlying fundamentals in terms of the big mining companies, uh some of the ratios that they see, they're still incredible values. Comparisons of where we've been into the past, where we are today are still incredible values. And I think what that's why we're seeing a lot of volatility. It's kind of an in-n-out. It hasn't really settled in yet, but you know, it's moved 90% in a blink of an eye. Next thing you know, companies are sitting at 40, you know, two year, two year highs again, right? So we're starting to see all the indicators to say because there's an argument both on the precious metal side and also on the commodity side and one of one of the things you mentioned is because you're seeing a decoupling or a breakdown of the globalization and this is the one where copper plays out the biggest. Copper has always had you know everyone is it was on the cover of uh the Economist magazine. People see it they it's in their face. We need it. And guess what? It's not just energy transition and electric vehicles anymore, right? It's the power requirements and that's what copper is all about. It's why I think one of in our first interviews, what I really get excited about is AI. I did a calculation recently where you look who has the big checkbooks, who's the guys who just sat down with Trump and said we're looking to invest about $800 billion uh in the next, you know, few years inside the United States. Meta was talking about doing these massive data centers and it one the size of Manhattan in Louisiana or um I can't remember which state was in the southeast of the United States. If you do the calculations the requirement in copper just for those data centers is a million tons of copper. A million tons of copper. Today the world production is in the 20s. Yeah. So just for these data centers, you need to have percentage points of the entire copper production of the world. Just for the data centers. And why I talk about it so much is because it's a race. These guys see it's a life and death race. It's a life and death race between countries and between companies. They say whoever has the smartest computer is going to win and they don't want to lose. And those checkbooks are just going to start ripping open. Let's go move things forward. At the same time, you have a decoupling of the globalization. So you had a China dominance and now you have India raising its hand to go I want to establish smelting capacity. You have the United States going hey I'm putting a tariff and then by 2020 South and it will include refined copper all of a sudden you say it says that's a message saying I want smelting capacity. So if everybody needs smelting capacity at a time where there's already too much smelting capacity it means the underlying assets are in the driver's seat. They're the biggest smelting capacity everywhere. There was a time period where smelters in China were paying to process people's concentrate, right? The treatment chart was negative for a time period. They were paying you paying people to process their material, right? But it was about dominance of the supply chains because once you have copper, refined copper in your hand, those become electric motors, those become wires. Those become things that you can transform into what the world needs right now. And if you don't have that copper, you can't have the production chain. It's why the United came a states came out with this massive uh tariff and then took a step back and said well it doesn't count on refined because the obvious answer is I can't manufacture anything in the United States if I don't have the refined copper you need to have the beginning of the the production chain you mentioned I think China holds 60% of smelting capacity that's correct globally so the US is still a few years away from actually developing their own smelting ecosystem demand correct so what's happening now so I think today United States is consuming 3.6 million tons. Remember that number I just said about AI being 1 million by itself. 3.6 million tons per year of which it imports 1.8. So it does have an existing capacity, but it's also growing dramatically. So it needs to double the capacity it has. In order to feed a smelter, you need a project, right? And there's the wire. All these assets become super valuable. And that's what we're so excited about because there's so few assets. Well, that ties into your company, which I'll talk about in a minute. Uh $4.50 is the copper price. We were at 580 early in August when we last had you on the show. Huge moves 20% down in one day on the uh uh that was the comx, right? Yeah. So, that was because there was an anticipated tariff. That tariff disappeared until 2027. But if you look at the LME price, it's been pretty steady. And so now that we've had that tariff reversal just on the comx, we've been hovering around 450 since August. Is that the fair value for you? I think that well it's always a question of who controls the price. It's normally the traders. They normally have a shorter term vision, right? But there's some long-term underlying fundamentals that say things are going to go higher. Um, and I think another proof of this is the the acquisition between Anglo and Tech. I don't know if you want to touch on that really quick, but you basically have the biggest copper biggest copper producers companies in the world going, it's too hard. There's no projects out there. It's hard to develop them. I can't see what we can do. And they start merging, right? They start saying, I think copper price is going to go through the roof. So, what we need, the best way we can leverage ourselves to that is by merging. It creates no new production. It might even arguably reduce the amount of production, right, through efficiencies. So they're tying up the production is what they're doing. At the same time, the world needs more production. So it's an indicator those guys know what they're doing. They believe that copper price absolutely is going up and they want to be in a pole position of when copper goes up and that house they're going to feed their their valuations. This is the supposedly the second largest mining merger ever. Ever. What what does that imply though? If I were a company and I know that there's a strategic future for my company that I'm going to come out on head, I wouldn't want to merge with somebody, right? Are they doing this out of scale means everything, right? When you're talking about China wants feed, India wants feed, United States wants feed, arguably Saudi Arabia wants feed. They all want to build a smelting capacity up because they know that copper is the basis of so much of the future production chains because the world is going to be based on electricity. energy and power are going to be everything and that's what they need that copper to build that infrastructure and you go I want to be in a ne I want to be in the position of where I'm negotiating that so you size and scale and who can be the big players can ne negotiate the best positions I think that is a big part of it because the only other option they have is through growth and there's no projects when two giants merge like this what typically comes next what do they do next well first of all there's obviously an efficiency But I think that they're just doing it because it's the easiest way to show we are going to grow through future price increase. They say copper day is $450. I think it's going to go to $10. The lowest risk method of doing that is to merge, right? And there might be some efficiencies that used to be the old way of doing it. But for me, it is just about acquiring size. Acquiring those copper assets, having the portfolio was a whole lot easier than discovering them. Why couldn't they? Well, I suppose that's on the agenda maybe, but wouldn't they just buy companies like yourself? Wouldn't that also help them? They are still seeing it as the lowest risk pathway is just to acquire the the production, right? Because it's in hand. It's something you can do and you can just have it on hand. But that feeding frenzy one day will end because at the end of the day, you want underlying assets. So after producing assets, it's assets that can produce in a short period of time. Yeah. What are governments around the world doing to address this supply chain bottleneck that we've been talking about? Well, it's definitely, you know, even uh so I started working in South America in 1999 and worked all over the place in South America and for the first time ever had the US embassy call me up and say, "Hey, we'd like to meet. We'd like to know more about your company." Right. Right. First time ever. Like I've talked to the Canadian embassy and bunches of times because we're a Canadian company, but never the US embassy. They're already trying to put their fingers and try to understand what the future projects look like. There it is. There is an outreach going on right now. I think step one is have the smelting capacity, but after part two of that is make sure you have the offtake. Know where the supply is coming from to feed that smelting capacity because that's what everybody needs, everybody wants. the US uh the Pentagon the defense department recently acquired um critical minerals companies in the US. People are talking about the nationalization of critical mineral companies. Is that on the uh horizon? Well, you can see as a minimum nations are playing a much more proactive role in acquiring the production chains. In the past, nationalization was different. It was about economics. It was about money. It was about controlling your national resources. In this case, I think it's all about securing production chains. If I were going to tell you that there's only one race that matters, and it's AI, and if you lose, you're dead. All right? Everyone would be going over securing everything you need to make sure you can win that race. And it's about power. And power means copper. Having the energy supply and the chip supply to be able to build that infrastructure out as fast as possible. And you're seeing it happen right in front of our face. You've compared copper in this regard to platinum uh palladium other precious metals. Why is copper and those other metals needed for the AI arms race? Just you know concrete examples. What is it? The answer is simple. Yeah. All electricity almost all of it at low voltages is transmitted on copper. Sure. All of it. Right. The only other more efficient metal at transmitting electricity is silver. But you're not going to have silver wires in your house. Right. So if you want to transmit electricity efficiently, it's through copper at lower voltages. So all the distribution of electricity is copper, right? Plus you have cooling and there's some other effects, but most of it's about getting the energy required to feed those brains in those data centers, feeding them and getting the electricity to them. It's number one and it's all about copper. We don't have the current infrastructure is not sufficient to grow the AI. Um, definitely not. No. So, you could see when I think it was Microsoft said, I want to buy the nuclear reactor at 3M Island because they said we don't have enough energy to to feed our data centers. So, it's a world race now to get in new energy supply. Yeah. Transmit that new energy supply and build up those and those. Where do you see most of the copper coming from in the next 5 years? Well, you could say that 50% of the world's largest copper mines are from Chile to Panama and one Andes region. So, the good guess is 50% of that new copper is going to be coming out of the most prolific zone in the entire world. And so, that's where we fit in. So, my my first my history was the construction of the Miridor project back in the days of Coriente. was the first industrial scale project in the history of Ecuador in the Jurassic Belt. It's why I said I want another project in that Jurassic Belt. Colombia has a more robust um mining mining sector and this can be a big big big project near surface near infrastructure, has power lines, has roads, no one's living there. I can see how this project can get into production quickly, right? And so that is the, you know, it's not a thousand meters underground. You have problem just like resolution in the United States finally maybe going forward, Trump twidding about it that you can't have lawyers getting judges getting in our way. Let's get this thing mo moving. But resolution is so deep it will be seven years before you even start producing out of it. So the projects like Makoa, I say it's a unicorn and a suit. They don't exist. size, scale, grade and getting into production near infrastructure etc. Miridor project which was me in Ecuador was one of the lowest cost if not the lowest cost new copper supply green fields project in the world. In my opinion Makoa is even better because we had to build a power supply. We had to bring in power lines. We had to build uh power uh power generation run of river power projects. We had to build the warehouse at the port. We don't have to do any of that at Makoa. And so I see it as being the perfect project. And on top of it, Colombia is a non- major NATO non major non-NATO ally of the United States. Same level as Japan, same level as Australia. So, it's already within that working relationship with the United States. It's a perfect location to have a new copper project. There's a presidential election in Colombia where Makoa is based next year. How do you expect policy shifts to impact your operations? We see a shift overall going on in South America going back to the right you have Colombia by itself 50% of its exports are oil and coal right they are not the soup dour of what everybody was looking for going into the future so as a minimum they're industries that will be shrinking based on policy or just based on uh demand right so they need to develop new economic impulses for the country so I think just logically we're going to see a shift where we're going to see more emphasis and that's a part of my strategy. There's only been about five or six big copper projects built in the last 10 years and I would argue every single one of them was an underdog story. I think as a majority of the time market misses it. They don't get it right. They love the Pascal Lamas in the world that never got built right. They hated Cobra Panama was never going to get built. It got built. Another one I like is Las Bombas. Never going to get built got built. Miridor never gonna get built got built. Even the projects in Africa that got built, they were never going to get built. Yeah. There's the ones that get built by groups that know how to navigate through that. I see in a window opening up because we have new presidential elections. You're going to have presidents going to come. I want to see investment. I want to see big projects and we want to be ready with Makoa saying this is a project that can bring in billions of dollars of investment into Colombia and a time it needs it and get it through the window. Well, you you said Makoa is a unicorn. Uh that's what you said earlier. So, you know, with all due respect, Dean, I hear that a lot at trade shows like this, what makes Makoa different? I think in copper, first of all, there's very few unconnected projects that are not connected already to a major of the size and scale that Makoa has and the demonstration we've been able to say this is the potential it has. Two, it's near to the surface. Most other projects are deep underground. Three, it's near infrastructure. So it's a near to power lines and near to road. It can get to ports. It can get anything that normally it's not necessarily the cost of the mine, but it's the cost of the infrastructure you have to put in to get it there. Right. And uh I would say third would be a fourth would be grade. It has good good solid grades that would be economic and and even at today I don't need $9 copper to make an economic project. It's a project that would look attractive right now. And there is very very you know I talked to a lot of mining companies that like you have built their own power lines their own grid. It occurs to me that you could almost be your own utility company. Has that has that ever occurred to you? Well many of the times you were becoming your own private power producer. I mean that does happen. Yeah. Can't you supply power to the you know local? It's about risk. Remember there was a time because of globalization in the past you look at Anaconda. Anaconda used to say it was like copper to your door or something like that. So they managed the entire production stream. They had the mines, they had the smelters, they had the refineries, they produced the copper products and they sold you the copper door knob that went to your day and and the copper wire that went to your house, right? But as co projects became more complex, you don't want to say, I need a smelter and a mine both to be successful. If one fails, the whole project dies. So you started decoupling all these additional risks. Yeah. Right. So permitting a mine is difficult. Permitting a mine and a hydroelectric project even more difficult. A hydroelectric project and a smelter and a mine extremely difficult because you're multiplying those risks. Even if each one is 90% 90* 90* 90 you start to get to the 70% probability ranges. It it it multiplies your risk uh risk of a project. So that's why it's been decoupled and that's why you don't want to have to do it because you don't want to have to permit something additional like a power line. Speaking of permitting, what suggestions would you give North American governments in particular uh to perhaps expedite the process or make it easier for companies? Well, I think the politicians at the end of the day only care about votes, right? So it doesn't matter what you tell them, right? My message would be to the executives if you want to build a project that's successful what did what worked in Cobra Pona because Ernie is a a a director right I was in uh Ecuador and Miridor and I call it the triangle of strength you start with massively strong relationships locally from the very beginning from the very beginning you start with amazing relationships not not do they like you or not right don't create oh we built a lot of did look at all these nice pictures we took creating real relationships. It's why I live in Colombia. I'm fluent in Spanish. It's why I go down to the project because those relationships need to be built and they need to be real where people feel they're part of a project. So then what happens is and second is reputation. So the big thing that happened to us this year is the second year in a row and the reputation index we were voted 12th 13th this year, 12th last year and by the way we were the only expiration company on the list in terms of reputation. All the rest were producers. So we've built a reputation early even though we're just an explorer within the country. We built a national reputation. How did you do that? Well, through the good work that we've done and people just see it and they hear about it and through reputationally you start building a solid reputation. It also helps that I do interviews and I'm on TV and I can do etc etc. It helps because I speak the language. What what what does a company with a bad reputation look like just to give perspective to the audience? You normally doesn't see it until the time and a point where they want to do something. Yeah. And then there's protests, there's problems, they can't solve them. Now listen, every single problem, every single project normally is going to face those types of problems. It's how they address them and how they manage them is what's most important. So if you build a reputation, a relationship locally, and you start to build a reputation nationally, what does it build? It builds political will, right? Then politicians want your project to go forward because they want to be associated with good projects. They want people to be seen that I'm supporting what people already like. So it's more in our hands. I think that we have more that we can do than people think we could. So let's say copper goes to $10. All right, let's just suppose and then everything doubles in price because copper is in everything. And then everyone is complaining about inflation and then politicians want to control the inflation. They do all sorts of things to the money supply. What do you say to the governments then? Well, I think it's going to happen naturally. Yeah, I don't think I need to tell them anything. They're going to do it anyways, right? But they normally react too late. These projects on historically take, you know, in the United States it's like 20 years to permit a project. So, you a you need to have projects that are further enough advance they're in the permitting stage anyways, but they're there and then they could just fasttrack the permits. But we really need the help, you know, over a longer extended period of time. So, we have to do that ourselves. What are industries doing to I guess not just not manage the price per se, but try to control the price so that it's steady and not out of control? I mean, if I I I I mean, if I were Samsung, I I don't want $10 copper, right? I don't think that it's the highest thing on their list, right? It might get there, but right now they're fighting enough fires and the number one fire is who's going to win the AI race. Yeah. I think that is the number one priority of the majority of tech tech companies, right? Because you would look at in the past of the AI bubble or sorry the internet bubble and you were saying Walmart didn't say ah internet is kind of a nice way to sell another 10% more products and they didn't know that this company called Amazon was going to come along but I think people now realize that this next evolution is uh you know life or death right that that you must have AI otherwise you're not going to survive right they see it that way do you see minds where deposits like yours on the balance sheets of tech companies I think as yes it might not be as direct it might be as an offtake agreement it might be in some sort of other vehicle but you can see that when it when Microsoft or it might have been Google whoever was on 3M island I'm sorry I'm missing the who it was right when they're going I'm willing to buy a nuclear power plant so they're obviously don't care what they people are going to say about the assets they own right all they care about is the ability to continue to grow Yeah, I think Tesla was floating the idea of buying lithium deposits. I I had an old theory that said one of the reasons that Elon Musk bought bought X, one of the reasons was I need to eventually uh buy mines and I need to now a marketing department that convinces people that it's okay because every time he wanted to go into it, right, he's got a trillion dollar market cap. You're losing 1%. You lose 10 billion dollars, right? So you need to be ahead of it and have this marketing arm that convinces people this is okay and this is normal. I think he was a little bit of visionary. I don't think that was the reason he did it, but it might have been on his his top five reasons to do it. So gold and silver new alltime highs. Silver $40 an ounce. That's high we haven't seen since 2011. How is that impacting the copper industry? So there's a mix, right? You have the people that have always been in the sector and everything shifts to gold and silver and so it pulls away from some of the other commodities. But I think we're also seeing new money coming in. I hear conversations now of institutions that are generalist institutions that now want to invest now are looking at projects to invest in. So you're starting to see a transition. The other thing as as things start floating market caps start becoming bigger. You have companies that used to be worth 50 million now or 150 million and now they're be making passing through thresholds that start seeing more institutional investment coming into them. So you're seeing new money flow in and that that's why and they normally say gold leads all bull equity gold markets in the mining space right because they pull money everywhere institutions family offices period anywhere right are you seeing the shareholder structure of your company change at all in the last year I watch we do have a service where we reconciliate all anonymous trading and we're seeing about 30% of our volume coming in from the United States right now so we're seeing a much bigger uptick and that is definitely more generalist institutions, small family offices, everything else pulling money into the sector. So we see that flow happen. Well, I know it's still day one of the conference, but have you been, you know, meeting with investors? What kind of questions have they been asking you? It's still very, very early, right? There's I think everyone is, everybody is asking for opinions. Definitely everybody's trying to figure out what's going on, but there's the FOMO has changed, right? or FOMO has started to take place, right? You in the past it was I remember the old days. Oh my god, it's terrible. It's absolutely awful. 2022 for it's absolutely awful. Like it can't get any worse, can it? Oh, it can get worse, right? There was that dread that things could get even worse, right? Then I remember maybe like 2024, last year was this is definitely a bottom, guys. This is awesome. We survived. Things are going to get better, right? There was a pure confidence that things are going to get better. Now there is a pure fear that people are going to miss out on huge opportunities cuz you could argue you already missed out. A lot of people already missed out on 90% gain, right? That should have been blatantly obvious. If we look back and say why it's pretty well, how did we miss that one? Right? Um besides the Anglo and tech merger, people here well people everywhere are waiting for mergers with the midtier sector mid-tier scale, junior scale. Think you're seeing it. I think people they want more and more to convince but there's some early adopters and late adopters right you've seen a consolidation now there used to be 13 produ big silver producers now there's only 10 there's already consolidation going on well there wasn't a big buyout rush last year when gold was at $2,000 there wasn't a big buyout rush at 3,000 now we're at 3600 gold you see it's still again but it's still in e mergers still it's mostly producers uh joining together forces again because I still think CEOs see this as the lowest path to the least risk, right? But once that frenzy is over, right, the underlying assets are what are most valuable. I mean, look, the I I'm not saying that's what they should have done, but I'm just saying if I were the executive of Newmont or some other big company, Bareric, I'm thinking to myself, I could have bought some deposits when gold was at 2,000, those would have been up n 50% by now. you know surely they're yeah doing some rec you know rec they have a tendency always to buy assets when commodities prices are absolutely at their peak well how do you evaluate that I mean at what point is it too expensive to get back in at what point is it like okay now we have to make a move right I think that if you look at the last bulls you could argue that people are shocked yeah that gold has gone to 3,000 right broken way past 3,000 silver has busted through $40 that copper is $4.50 really is mindblowing when you think about it. But if you look at the last super cycles, it wouldn't be crazy for gold to go to 10,000 for copper to go to $10. It's not crazy, right? And the real feeding frenzy happens at the peak of the market, but I think we're 10 years away. There's no substitute for there's no substitute for copper Ian. I mean, once it gets to $10, wouldn't Peter There's absolutely substitution. Yeah. Right. But you uh you have two options. Aluminum Mhm. which is less efficient which is big and big big big big problem and inefficiency means heat so you're saying I'm willing to accept a problem also it oxidizes and can burn up right so it's the reason why you do not want aluminum wiring in your house there is a time it's one of the you know when the inspector comes in he's one of the things you're supposed to check because aluminum wire means your house is going to burn down so you don't want aluminum wiring right so there's some things that just cannot not give and there's so much growth that I don't think it's very important. On top of it, you have entire production chains that are built around it and it's really hard to transfer to aluminum. The other alternative is silver, but it's $40 an ounce. Yeah, it it's it's it's a not even a pound an ounce. It's a curious thing because the equities have run up so much while copper often seen as a barometer for global growth because copper coincides with demand for construction, new housing and whatnot. that's gone up a lot this year, but it's still relatively flat compared to, you know, tech stocks. The last gigantic bull in copper was China, right? The growth of China, right? And I think most people would be shocked that 95% of all copper still goes to traditional uses, which means electrification of the planet. and the other place to take to take India from where it is today to the world average of copper use per person right I think is 3.5 million tons of copper so India the whole world now is going through that transition both in terms of electrical needs and the whole world is converting its economies to electricity and power generation wondering if copper is indirectly signaling that the S&P is perhaps overvalued because like I said it's not running up as much as some of the other sectors. It's a barometer for growth. Growth isn't catching up with valuations. I think you could say that the I you know there's some a lot of people say follow the money right when you have peak overvaluations in the overall stock markets money will start looking at other places to rotate. And when you see other places that are doing well, such as the DGX, there's a place that money can flow into, right? And the underlying fundamentals of copper are undeniable. You've seen massive investments into exploration, no discoveries. You haven't really seen any new projects. There's no new green fields projects coming online. You see a consolidation within the space because people are production at any costs kind of thing. And it's a kind of a perfect setup of what it looks like and where it should go. So it makes sense. It's imagine it's a question of when when will that when will that movement really start to happen? But I don't think there's much question of if. So finally, what's next for uh Copper Giant and Makoa? Well, for me, we've done so much. We've drisked the project, got it restarted, put in the infrastructure. Uh we're in the Fury Group, Frank Jer really supporting the project. We brought in Mark Gibson who is worldrenowned uh geologist that came came out of um Ivanho Electric but also has experience uh in in in Colombia. It's attracting the best talent because people I think realize the quality of project uh that we have. For me, I think we've already hit so many catalysts. We're just waiting for a little bit of momentum within the copper space to accelerate. My goal is to make sure that we have a pea done by the time we have a new president in Colombia so that I have a legitimate project that could say this is what you need to put your attention to, Mr. President. This is a project you can get your back behind and bringing significant investment into your country. Okay, great. Well, follow the uh story link down below to stay up to date with Copper Giant. Thanks so much, Ian. Appreciate it. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe.