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0:00:02 – Announcer

Wall Street Unplugged looks beyond the regular headlines heard on mainstream financial media to bring you unscripted interviews and breaking commentary direct from Wall Street right to you on Main Street.

0:00:16 – Frank Curzio

Hey guys, I got a great interview today with the one and only Luke Norman, who’s a co-founder of US Gold, which is USAU as a symbol, and I had him on a couple of months ago and since then his stock has done incredibly well, a lot of great things going on with this company. I wanted to get him back on, since there’s a lot of catalysts coming, and now we have the interview all set. He said he can come on today, which is awesome. So, Luke, thanks so much, man, thanks for joining me today. Hey, thanks for having me, Frank, I really really enjoy it. Nah, it’s good stuff.

So, listen, the last time I had you on, your stock has pretty much been on a tear. Now you’re seeing gold prices go higher, you’re seeing cop prices go higher, but I guess, before we go there since a lot of people are familiar to listen to my podcast every single week for the last 15 years but some people were getting a lot of new people to listen and sign up and subscribe Explain a little bit about your company, the project, and let’s get everyone involved here. This way we can start from scratch, because I want to get to those catalysts that are coming up, which is really exciting. I think you drive your stock a lot higher here.

0:01:15 – Luke Norman

Yeah, and look, first let’s just get matter of fact here. Stock has not been on a tear. The stock has performed well, relative, I guess, to our peer group. But God, I don’t know if anyone’s noticed 3450 Gold, and you know our stock is trading at levels that it should be at $2,100 Gold. So I think there’s a lot of upside momentum. But anyway, let’s get to the fundamentals, the meat and potatoes of US Gold Corp. So, as you mentioned, I’m a co-founder of the company. I’m the executive chairman over at US Gold Corp. So, as you mentioned, I’m a co-founder of the company, I’m the executive chairman.

Over at US Gold Corp. We have the CK Gold and Copper Project, which is 20 miles due west of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Now, for those of you who are geologically a little bit not knowing where we are in relation to that, geographically, sorry, geologically, geographically we are about a mile, sorry, an hour and a half drive due north of Denver International Airport. We’re sucked up very close to the Denver-Wyoming border and the project just sits here 20 miles due west of Cheyenne, which is the capital city of Wyoming. We’re on state ground, which is very important. We’ll touch on that. And, yeah, we’ve got critical minerals, all the right stuff in the right place and clearly, by the shape of this metals market, the right time.

0:02:40 – Frank Curzio

So let’s talk about the actual project and the location is because why is it so important about location and when I say that I’m not talking about comparing, you know, a US jurisdiction or my friendly jurisdiction to North Korea or something like that of Venezuela, but in this state particularly, why is that so important and makes your project so much, much more attractive than a lot of other ones that I see, maybe, maybe in some, in some of the states, but definitely a lot of other countries?

0:03:07 – Luke Norman

That’s a two, that’s a two kind of tier or layer answer. One location could be important, obviously relative, to take away the fact that we’re on state ground in the state of Wyoming. Let’s just look at location from a objective of trying to develop and build this mine. So we’re just off the I-80 corridor, we have major rail nearby and we have an employment hub right on the edge of the project, you know Cheyenne. Where the location really starts to kick in and be an important factor is the fact that the state of Wyoming is a resource state, so they understand the importance of exploiting their mineral wealth to advance and help the constituents of the state of Wyoming.

So, sitting on state ground, we did not have to deal with any of the especially previous administrations, federal bureaucracies. We went through a very ardent, strenuous kind of process in terms of getting our permits to mine, which I failed to mention on my introduction to the project that we are a fully permitted shovel-ready project, and the reason for that and the reason we managed to attain that within a three or four year period is we were dealing with state officials 20 miles away who really cared about whether or not this project was viable, safe and friendly Is it going to have a big impact on the local community, negative or positive? How is it going to handle? You know everything from wind movements to our plan to blast rock et cetera. So you know the state of Wyoming. They were there, they were hands on boots on ground.

So again it’s a two tiered kind of net benefit. The location of the project relative to the township of Cheyenne. But also, being in the state of Wyoming and I’ve quipped and joked with you before if this deposit was 25 miles to the south, sitting in the state of Colorado, there’d be no chance in heck that we’d ever be digging this hole. So very fortunate, isn’t that amazing.

0:05:24 – Frank Curzio

That’s amazing when you think about it. So I mean, look, when I look, here too, it’s. You know roads, water power, you know support contractors. I mean I’ve been doing this a long time. You’ve been doing it even longer, but there’s so many people that pitch me projects and it could be in the North Pole and you could have a billion dollars worth of gold, but it would take you 3 billion to extract it because there’s nothing there. So having everything here is a really, really big deal. It’s one of the five real big qualities where good management team, good jurisdiction, but just the infrastructure is in place right now to really get this thing going. Talk about the permitting process. How does it separate you? Everybody gets pissed junior miners, and they’re all next to some big projects. That’s producing a shitload of gold. But how? What makes yours different now that you’re permitted?

0:06:07 – Luke Norman

Just that that we are permitted. You know we look at this list. Uh, gold and copper are now headlining. Uh, part of the critical minerals in the US. Uh, the the new administration, the trump administration, are pushing hard to try and bring up a lot of. They’ve got a list of projects that are kind of caught up in what I call permitting purgatory, usually with a slew of different federal agencies. It can be a combination of all of them, you know, from Bureau of Land Management to Forestry to obviously NEPA, and now they’re trying to push forward and advance those projects.

Well, I’ve made this statement before on your podcast and to you, and we make it publicly we’re probably one of the only junior by junior, we talk about it being a smaller mining company. We’re one of the only smaller mining companies out there with a fully permitted shovel-ready project of critical minerals in the US. I mean, it’s massively unique from that regard. And look, when I say one of the only, I actually can’t sit here and list off the others. I really don’t know.

I know a couple of private projects in Nevada that are kind of geared up and ready to go, but we’re a NASDAQ-listed company with critical minerals in the US. We’re creating a solution for access to those minerals, and these permits just fast track us Like we’re ready to go. We’re just doing some final desktop engineering to complete what’s called a bankable feasibility study. That is, as I said, a desktop undertaking. We spent all the hard dollars and we spent all the hard time putting together this engineering, so now it’s just the final steps, final processes of advancing and developing and producing copper and gold in the US.

0:08:03 – Frank Curzio

You know, when I look at your stock here and I’m going to show everyone what I said it’s kind of been on a tear. You would think it would be a lot higher, but even year to date I mean when you look at your day you look at S&Ps down, bitcoin’s flat, you’re up 58% year to date, right. So I mean I love where you’re going, but the valuation of your stock here, if you’re looking at it, $120 million. I want to talk about that a little bit. So it’s 120 million dollar valuation. Could you talk about the pre-fee free bills, free, pre-feasibility? You say it for me, pre-feasibility, feasibility good, you said it for me.

So this is something that takes place to bring everyone in. That that it’s done independently, right, and they’re going to provide a value, right. So net present value, everybody gets this done because this is how you would value mining companies. And they come in and you determine okay, this is based on a discounted metals price. So metals price, whatever you’re mining for. And you had one done in December 2021 where you had gold at $1625, copper at $325. We have now gold at pushing $3,500, copper at $480, $ 48490.

Now you redid that a couple months ago and you did it at prices and I’m going to show this right here at gold at 2100. So you went from 1625 to 2100. We’re at 3500 now, when you throw in all the factors you put in that present value and you have 360, 56 million, saying the net present value should be. And you could discount that and say right, your market cap is $120. You don’t even have $3,500 here. That’s how fast gold prices have gone up. And now you look at the net present value. You look at the payback years. Talk about this part because I feel like a lot of these valuations where people are looking at are discounted prices. A 1,000-point moving gold or even a six, seven hundred point moving goal is is enormous Right when it comes to these projects. Talk about that because the value is just screaming off the charts. You’re permitted, you’re in a good jurisdiction, there’s nothing holding you back. I mean, these are really conservative, so I look at them.

0:09:58 – Luke Norman

Oh yeah, and look, talk about conservative. The inverse of such is when you do hand off to get a report like this put together by an independent, which it of course is. It’s under what’s called SK 1300, which is the reporting governing law for us. You know, this is 80 year equipment. This is going and buying brand new equipment out of Scandinavia, out of Chile, bringing it in. There’s probably a slew of equipment in the US that we could go in and source some of it secondhand. But let’s not go into the weeds here, let’s just look at it as, yeah, us building a brand-new 80-year plant.

Look, these numbers are clearly, you know, way out of whack with our market cap. Again, using the baseline numbers $2,100 gold, $4.10 copper, and you brought up the NPV. Well, we would be trading generally in a normalized market at around 60% to 80% of that NPV 60% if we’re in a jurisdiction like the Bolivian mountains and 80% if we were sitting on flat ground in Wyoming or Nevada. So we don’t even meet close to that benchmark right now in evaluation or from a valuation perspective. Now, when you start looking at spot, look, I’m even comfortable imagining this at $2,500 gold, you know, you see that number, just start out, or net present value just start to increase and, just you know it, just hockey sticks from there.

So the economics on this project one of the questions around it when we went into the pre-permit phase, where we did the engineering and we wanted to look at an economic framework, was you know, how does this thing stack up, not just in a strong case scenario for gold and copper, but how does it look if the metals softened, if they went below 2100?

And that removes this variability of it being an asset that might not work in lower metal prices. It completely obviously proves itself through the whole slew, as you can see on that sensitivities table or sensitivities chart. So when we start to imagine, you know, these high metal prices holding in and let’s say, $3,400 is not, you know, a long-term sustainable metal price, which I think it is I think it’s headed higher term sustainable metal price, which I think it is I think it’s headed higher. But when we start to imagine $2,800, $2,900, if that was our new benchmark, this project is just a cash cow, which is exactly how George B described it to me when he chose to come and join us as our CEO in August of 2020.

0:12:42 – Frank Curzio

Yeah, and explain actually who George B is. Cause just again bringing people in who may not have seen the first few interviews and I’ve been covering you for a long time, you know. So talk a little bit about George B.

0:12:51 – Luke Norman

Well, look, when you go ahead and you decide you want to dig a hole in the ground and extract gold from it, the best thing you can do to validate your efforts is to bring in someone who’s dug holes and brought gold out of the ground. Your efforts is to bring in someone who’s dug holes and brought gold out of the ground. George has built some of the biggest gold mines on the planet. Okay, aside from Barrick and Kinross a number of companies he’s worked for let’s focus in on Barrick. He was brought in at around the age of 26 years old to manage Barrick’s first real flagship asset, goldstrike, which is on the Carlin trend in Nevada. So, as he likes to phrase it, he took GoldStrike from a hill to a hole. So he built what ultimately established Barrick as the leader in the gold mining space. Since then again, he moved down to South America and he built some of the biggest assets down in South America.

So I figure our project, our company under his stewardship, is a massive stamp of approval and validation that these engineering reports that we’ve put together, these estimates, these are real, hard data. This is not us just going in with guesswork. This is a man who’s built gold mines all over the planet. And, uh, you know he’s, he’s put his name to it. He’s, uh, right behind us, he’s in state. He deals with all the federal, oh sorry, all the state um, you know different uh groups that we deal with everyone, from even talking to the governor and the mayor to dealing with the Department of Environmental Qualities, all the different factors that are there. You know he’s all about social license, understanding how we best go in, harvest our copper gold mine and ultimately make it so that it works for everyone, everyone around us. And, yeah, he’s, I’d say we’re the most qualified people on the planet to do so.

0:14:49 – Frank Curzio

No, he’s great. He’s great. I met him personally when I visited your project. I want to change tunes to the aggregate part and I want you to get a little technical here. I almost never say that in interviews because you kind of lose people, but you need to get technical here.

When you look at aggregate whether it’s the rock and things like that I feel like anyone could say this. Any mining company could say oh, our aggregate, as we’re drilling this thing, you know building this mine, you know we could sell to other companies. It’s worth a lot. I feel like every company could say that and they’ll use that to say we’re risking the project because we’re not accounting that value into. You know the costs, right, we could take that off the cost, so we could sell that. Not, so we could sell that.

Not every company could say that. First, you’re right in an area where you’re next to Colorado, where you have some of the larger companies that actually take this aggregate from you, right? I don’t know if you’re in negotiations with them or whatever. I don’t know what you could say out there, but I know that there’s people in Denver that are dying for this, the major companies and you’re looking at that Colorado region, which is growing tremendously right now. Talk about what that means to your company and if you can put a price on how much it may be worth, because obviously, when you get to technicals, this is something that’s very specific to your company and not for a lot of other mining companies or what I realize and it enhances the value of the company.

0:16:00 – Luke Norman

Yeah, and look. First, I just want to highlight again that none of the benefits from this aggregate is built into any of the economics of this project. So the headline numbers that you and I were just speaking to previously on the pre-feasibility study, that’s all the assumption that we take our leftover material what’s referred to actually as waste rock in our pre-feasibility study, and we reclaim that we put that either back in the pit or we cover it with soil and we turn it back into topography. Well, during our permit and engineering phase, we very quickly recognised that we have Martin Marietta materials two and a half miles to our south, harvesting a very similar granite diorite, just purely for its rock component, and they’re selling it into the Colorado Front Range and beyond by way of a Union Pacific Rail Line. So we needed just simply we needed source material for our own construction.

So we put it through a full myriad of tests that you have to to make sure it doesn’t leach acids and that would be then ultimately, you know, captured in drainages and poison the surrounds. So we ran all these different tests and as we looked at it closer, you know, just through our reserve report alone, there’s 40 million tons of this material sitting for free on the edges of our mining operation. Well, that’s $20 to $25 a ton. That’s the value of that rock, if you then crush it a little further and send it off site, either as a rail ballast or a roading base, or ultimately ground up and use in concretes all sorts of them again a slew of different uses for it. So now we’re looking at this and wondering hmm, 40 million tons of, let’s say, $20 rock, that’s $800 million worth of untapped, untouched, unvalued material sitting on site. But also, you know, this deposit is encapsulated with a vast array of that same rock outside of the traditional mining operation. So we see, you know, collectively, probably somewhere in the realm of 200 million tons of $20 rock, and we can all do that math. You know it’s $4 billion worth of rock which is set aside completely outside of the copper gold component. So yeah, it’s not sensitive discussion.

We are actively engaged and continuing conversations with materials companies, construction companies, companies. We’ve been approached by a huge rail company in the US who have given us a letter of intent to acquire minimum 400,000 tons of that a year. Should we start to enter into selling that material? Well, obviously we’re on state ground, under our state ground and best usage of said state ground. It would be sold and it would generate a royalty to the state, to the community and further taxation. So you know that’s what we’re doing. Part of our optimisation right now is you know it would be hugely impactful for our mining operation. It would bring down mining costs significantly, plus be a profit margin above and beyond our copper and gold production. So you know these are numbers that we’re going to start to build towards and talk to and be a news generator coming up in the near future as we move closer to our final production.

0:19:43 – Frank Curzio

Now that’s great to point. So you’re saying 400,000 of this at whatever, if it’s $20 or so, 400,000.

0:19:53 – Luke Norman

So Union Pacific sorry, the other rail company, the larger rail company has come to us. They want 400,000 tons minimum of that waste material a year just for source use as a rail ballast. And rail ballast is actually the highest spec aggregate, one of the highest spec aggregates out there, because you can’t have tens of thousands of miles of rail lines sitting on a crushed up rock base that starts leaching acids or retains too much moisture and gets too heavy and contorts and distorts, and you can’t also have it break down too soon. It’s got to be able to handle, you know, tens of years of heavy rail running over top of it. So all those tests have been conducted at more than met all the thresholds. And, yeah, it is future. In its future it will be a rail ballast and it will be part of the aggregate flow into not just Colorado but beyond, you know, even California and Oregon. You can’t dig a hole.

Another part of your question sorry, Frank was there must be a lot of mines out there that imply that their waste material could also be used as aggregate, and that’s very true. But generally they’re in just not in great locations like this where it’s ultimately trying to, you know, move it and get it to a marketplace makes it uneconomic. In our case, again, it’s it’s the first 40 million tons is mined for free. Clearly that is a huge advantage from market perspective and our location means that it would be a consistent source of aggregate for years past our mine life. That’s amazing. Decades excuse me.

0:21:35 – Frank Curzio

I mean, just put in perspective. You’re looking at a market cap of $120 million with you’re talking about just aggregate of whatever price you want to put on it. Say, it’s not $800 million, You’ve got to get a paid state, whatever tax or whatever, but you’re looking at several hundred million dollars more than your market cap, just in aggregate, which is really and then the expanse of it.

0:21:52 – Luke Norman

Beyond that, just there’s so much more granodiorite that could be harvested out of that. That could be harvested out of that. And look, I don’t want to get everyone too confused, but our reserve calculation, our 1.58 million ounces that we have in our permit to mine that resource, is only constrained by the amount of drilling we did. The mineralization continues below the pit, continues to depth and it continues laterally. So the expectation by us that this mineral deposit is a lot larger than what’s reflected in those economics is very real. And of course, when you do that you’re digging a bigger hole, you’re creating more waste material. That’s just going to be more aggregate. So it’s a really compelling economic bonus that is not present yet in any of our value metrics. So I think that is a lot of upside to prospective investors too.

0:22:47 – Frank Curzio

Yeah, that’s incredible. That’s incredible. So you may have something very special coming up. And I’ve known you for a long time, so I’ve seen your journey with this stock and I’ve seen your journey with so many people in this industry and it’s been a shit show, right. I mean it’s been for such a long time and I have so many good friends, I mean it’s nice for me. I cover all sectors. But if you’re strictly in the mining industry, it hasn’t been good until like the last year. 2017 is okay, but overall it hasn’t been great, right for a while. Uh, and you guys just been risking this project. Just, you know, George B’s done a great job.

You have just been humming along the whole time and keep your head down doing what you have to do, and now you’re at the point where you have over $100 million market cap and on April, at the end of this month, on the 30th, there’s a shot, a pretty good shot, that you could graduate into the Russell 2000. What does that mean for you personally? Because right now and I studied this stuff and they rebalance once a year the Russell 2000. So they rebalance once a year the Russell 2000. So they rebalance once a year. It doesn’t matter what your market cap is. You can go in there at $150 million, be $27 billion right now. You’re going to be in there until they rebalance and it’s in June, but the cutoff date is the 30th of April and you guys are pretty much in there. What would it mean to you to get into the Russell? Because to me, I mean that has to be something on your checklist. That’s a pretty big deal, isn’t it?

0:24:00 – Luke Norman

Oh for sure. I mean, aside from, obviously, the further validation of our efforts, our combined efforts and what we’ve managed as a junior public company listed on a big exchange like NASDAQ and being able to finally garner some market attention. But there’s the obvious benefits to it too, which is the buy-in that occurs in June by BlackRock and Vanguard into that Russell 2000, some of the other mirror funds and such that follow the Russell 2000. It would have a very marked effect on, obviously, a buy-in on our float. It would also have a very big effect, clearly, on daily trading volumes, which again opens up our doors to even more institutional eyeballs and ultimately, institutional buying. Institutional buying, uh, so it’s, it’s, uh, it’s a whole layer of positive effects that that will, can occur with that uh, recognition and joining of that now it’s really cool stuff, man.

0:25:10 – Frank Curzio

That’s cool because I’ve seen this journey too. I mean just getting from you start off the tsf venture, right, the tsx venture. And then you got to the nasdaq, which is awesome, right, so more liquidity, right, us exchanges and stuff. And then just get to the NASDAQ, which is awesome, right. So more liquidity, right, us exchanges and stuff. And then you get to the rest of 2000. I mean, a lot of money flows into those stocks.

So it’s not the June date that everybody focuses on, it’s really like the end of this month, which you know. Once you’re in, you’re in, right. There’s just qualifications that you have to meet and you’re in there going to result in probably more money flowing into your stock, obviously from the Russell 2000 with that rebalance. But that’s certainly a short-term catalyst. We talked about other catalysts. What are some of the other things that you see going forward where you guys great with your balance sheet right $9 million in treasury, no debt and also you recently had a big investor come in. It’s been an investor, Eric Sprott, one of the biggest names in the entire industry when it comes to financing, someone I know and I met. He’s great and worked with Rick Rule for a long time. But what are some of the catalysts that you see that investors can look forward to over the next six months and into maybe a year or two years from now?

0:26:08 – Luke Norman

Well, again, just we’re doing this final engineering report, which is just really a due process, just the final step in advancing this into production. Due process, just the final step in advancing this into production. We’ve had some very, a lot of interest in funding this mining operation. So traditionally, you know, the company and our investors will be thinking oh geez, now they’re going to finance this thing, they’re going to go raise $277 million to build it, and everyone immediately just assumes that you’re going to go do that by way of equity and dilute the heck out of everyone. It’s just simply not the case anymore. The marketplace has changed so much. Then we have that huge gap between baseline metal prices that we’ve used in engineering reports to current metal prices, which I’ll take my hand off the screen for that.

We are getting offered all sorts of non-traditional sources of capital right now, and most of them are just debt, which is what you want to see in a mining operation like this. We don’t want to look. We’re all you know, you’re aware and I’ll just, you know, restate this we’re all, as management, we’re all investors in this company. You know the real benefit to us is a higher share price. So we’re aligned with our shareholders. We’re not sitting here to take a salary and you know, float around and go marketing and all the niceties. Well, we’re not that much of a nicety anymore. But you know this is not a lifestyle kind of employment situation. For us this is make the most out of this company, get the market cap as high as we can get it and, hey look, we can look at other mining ventures. Then we can build and grow our company and add to our development production by picking up other assets. So we’re all about getting the share price higher and minimizing dilution and we are looking like we’re in about getting the share price higher and minimising dilution and we are looking like we’re in a very strong position where we could get this thing funded for minimal, minimal dilution. You know vast majority of it debt and build and grow on it from there. So I think you know news pertaining to how we’re going to fund this project in the coming months would be certainly a catalyst.

Clearly, this aggregate component to the project that we’re now exploring in greater depth and by exploring I mean we’ve already conducted all the tests, all the reports we very much understand it’s a bulk commodity, it’s outside of our direct wheelhouse. You know we’re not going to try and become a materials company or compete with the big aggregate companies. That would be a full scale from our perspective. You know, Martin Marietta, to our south, is probably pushing a $50 billion market cap. But what we can do is align ourselves with a big construction or a big, you know, materials company. We’ve already had an alignment with a very large rail company in the US.

So how do we use that? How do we use these net benefits? To really just simplify it, just bring down our production costs. Lower, lower, lower our production costs.

One of the headline numbers that we didn’t touch upon when we looked at the latest pre-feasibility study is our very low, you know, approximately $950 all-in sustaining costs. So what that means is costing us. Based on all our economic modeling, it’s going to cost us about $950 an ounce all-in. So that’s servicing debt and doing all the different things that you know we have to pay contract miners, everything, taxes are all in sustaining costs is $950 approximate dollars per ounce. So when you’re staring down the barrel of $3,400 gold, the rest is, as we call, as we term it, gravy. So what we’re going to do is make that gravy even richer.

Let’s bring down that ASIC by bringing in a competent partner who knows how to market and sell and move this bulk commodity of aggregate. And heck again, if it just brought that $9.50 down by a couple of hundred dollars an ounce, it would be massively impactful for you and I, the shareholders this company. Massively impactful for the stock. Um, it would. It would even more bring down the amount of equity dilution that we would need to face. You know we’re already seeing term sheets, which are pure debt, by the way. So, um, these are all net benefits that are coming in real time. You’re going to start seeing news out of our company in the coming months about these very, very big tectonic shifts in terms of the additional value to the project.

0:30:50 – Frank Curzio

Yeah, it’s amazing. Just to go over the numbers, what I like to do too, which is why I love talking to you, Luke, and I love what you did with this company you were doing $2,100. Now you’re doing $3,000. We’re not even at $3,500, but at $3,000,. You’re looking at MPV at $745. You have your low oil and sustainable costs. We’re not even talking about, say, if it’s not $800 million or if it’s $200 million. It puts it close to a billion dollars of a project that your market cap is $120 million right now.

Your stock has outperformed significantly over the past year. I know it’s been crazy before that and it’s come down, but you know, the last year you gained this momentum. You got the permitting. You’re doing everything right. It just seems like everything’s really aligned for you. You got the Rust 2000, you know, coming up, hopefully, which looks really good for you guys. It just seems like you know everything’s really aligned here and I know how much work you put into this and I see a lot of people, you know, again talking to you and seeing you almost every single year for the past 10 years or so, and just you know.

I know it’s difficult in this industry, but just to see what you do with this company when times are shitty, when times are really good. It’s going to be really exciting for you. You got it well positioned here and I think it’s going to be exciting for investors and that’s why you’re seeing your stock go higher. So stock go higher. So you know I love having you on, I love talking about it. I love the journey. Like people want to appreciate you know you want to sell your stock, you want to sell your company and make a lot of money. I think people sometimes don’t appreciate the journey and that’s what you learn the most, because it really kicks your ass and it shows character, shows who you are and you really have showed who you are through this’m wishing you the best of luck and I love where the stock is right now. I think it’s going to go a lot higher for me in the years ahead.

0:32:26 – Luke Norman

No thanks, Frank, for all the ongoing support and truly we all appreciate your positivity and understanding. Yeah, this journey, you know we’ve done a remarkable. You know and I say we I’m going to hand off the banner there or the baton, sorry to George B and his team and what they’ve done in state, with the state alongside of the state of Wyoming. You know the timeframes that we managed to achieve this. You know, you’ve got to remember, Frank, and you know very well it was a pretty, it was an enticing story, but it wasn’t a really exciting story. When I would come on your podcast or I would talk to prospective investors and funds and say, hey, we’re just doing engineering and we’re going into permitting right now, it’s like, well, who wants to take on that permitting risk? Who wants to risk their engineering report, whether it’s going to be positive or negative, that’s all done. Going to be positive or negative, that’s all done.

And the other big thing that’s really key here is the dollars to get us to that point, to this point in time excuse me have been spent. Upwards of 47 million US worth of dilution has been taken on the chin by our longstanding shareholders to pay for this permit process, to pay for all the engineering reports that say you know how it goes drilling, and all the niceties that go with it. That dilution has been and gone. We’re not staring down the barrel of another $47 million to get to the next stage of a permit or any of that. Carry on. It’s done. We’ve got this strong treasury $9 million US, as you mentioned. We’ve also got zero debt and now we’re looking at a very smart move into some sort of debt placement for building a mine in a very robust metals market. Yeah, thank you. We’re excited.

0:34:16 – Frank Curzio

Is there a different conversation now, because you attend a lot of conferences? I’m going to see you in May at one of the conferences that you’re attending at the Fort Lauderdale in a few weeks. Is there a different conversation among the big guys that come to you that you know, now that you’re permitted, now that you have a clear runway, now you know you separate yourself from juniors? Again, I don’t know if you could say it or not, but is there like a different conversation you’re having with some of I don’t know if there’s majors out there or other companies? Are they taking it more serious? Do you feel a different conversation, level of conversation today than it was, like you know, maybe a year and a half, two years ago, before you got permitted, before everything really started coming together? I would think that more companies have to be, you know, interested in saying hey, you know no-transcript.

0:35:24 – Luke Norman

and now we’re not under the radar. Now we’re out here and we’re kind of banging our chests and saying this is who we are and this is what we’ve achieved, and the incoming has been really quite substantial.

0:35:39 – Frank Curzio

No, that’s really great stuff. Well, Luke, thank you so much. I wanted to give everyone an update. I like updating, especially with these companies, as more news comes out, which I do, and I have more people on interviews every few months. I really appreciate the update. I think people are going to be excited. I’m hoping the best again to the Russell. I think it’s going to do very well for your stock price. If you do Right now, I think you’re in. Based on what I see, what the qualifications are in the market cap, You’re pretty much above that, but it’s really exciting times for you and I’m just glad we’ve been along for this ride. It’s really really cool. I appreciate it, man. Thanks.

0:36:05 – Luke Norman

Thank you. And just in closing, yeah, the current market cap at 120 is a third 30% of that low-end NPV, and that low-end NPV is low-end metals. Our upside is massive and I just wanted to reiterate that.

0:36:23 – Frank Curzio

No, that’s great stuff, that’s great stuff. So thanks again for coming on, man, and yeah, I’ll talk to you soon.

0:36:28 – Luke Norman

Yeah, thank you, Frank.

0:36:32 – Announcer

Wall Street Unplugged is produced by Curzio Research, one of the most respected financial media companies in the industry. The information presented on Wall Street Unplugged is the opinion of its host and guests. You should not base your investment decisions solely on this broadcast. Remember, it’s your money and your responsibility.