Episode 021: Coffee & Donuts With Mark O'Dea & Oxygen Capital

My name is Jamie Keach and you're listening to the Resource Insider Podcast where we talk to CEOs, thought leaders and entrepreneurs in the mining and metals industry. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the Resource Insider Podcast. You know, my job is typically spent thinking about the junior mining industry and there are a lot of components to that industry. There is financing, the ability to consistently raise capital, to sell your project and your ideas, attract investors, and backers, and supporters of that story. Then there are, of course, the technical aspects. Can you find a great project? Can you get that project? Does it have the geological potential to be a mine? Does it have the value in the ground? And then there's operations, the ability to actually deliver on great ideas, the ability to push a project forward on all these levels, technical, financial, marketing, everything. And what I spend a lot of time thinking about is the fact that there are very few people in this sector that are able to handle all these components, that are able to put the systems together that are required to make any mining project work. Be it exploration, be it development or redevelopment, be it an operation. And these are the people you typically see that are ultra successful. And there is only a handful of them that are active in the sector today. And one of the people that I respect a lot and that I have followed for some time now is, of course, Mark O'Day from Oxygen Capital. Mark is a PhD geologist. He has a very, very excellent technical understanding, obviously of geology and exploration geology. He has built several companies that have sold for multiple billions of dollars. He has made a tremendous amount of money for shareholders. And he has built Oxygen Capital, which is essentially an incubator that is generating new and exciting companies. And he is putting together the teams and finding the people to be CEOs. And he's built a system around himself that is primed for discovery. And in some cases, redevelopment and rediscovery of existing assets. And we talk about that today in this conversation. This conversation took me months to put together. Mark is extremely thorough. He interviewed me twice before we were able to sit down and record this. And that, to me, was extremely impressive. And just shows the care and the intention to detail that he clearly puts into running his business and making smart decisions. This is a bit of a special podcast because we actually sat down and had breakfast in his very beautiful house in Vancouver. And I had a great time. I got to hear about what brought Mark into this space. I learned about how he makes decisions, what he looks for when starting new companies, when acquiring assets, where he sees the industry going and what he's focused on today. This podcast is going to add a lot of value to new management teams and CEOs that are finding their legs in this space and want to get a better understanding of how to put all the pieces together and to understand how to develop a system that will provide a project with the highest likelihood of success. Equally, this will be extremely valuable to investors when trying to figure out what kind of companies they should back, where they want to allocate their capital. You need to be very careful and very cognizant of the management teams that you support. And whether or not they have all the components in play to give that company a chance of success. And there are a few people that have done it better from Mark. And he very graciously sits down and spends a lot of time going through how he makes decisions and really what has led Oxygen Capital to be the success that it is today. So without further ado, let me please introduce Mark O'Day. Mark, welcome to the podcast today. Hey, thanks Jamie. So this podcast is a little unique because typically I'm either on top of a skyscraper somewhere in Vancouver or in quite a dingy office of an exploration geologist. But today we are sitting in the kitchen of your house in Deepcofe. Yeah, welcome. I'm glad it's not raining, which is very rare for Deepcofe. I know. I anticipated that today, but now we've got a pretty good view of the ocean out there. We're here to talk about what you've done in your career. Oxygen Capital and sort of the mining space in general today. And so thank you very much for sitting down and talking. Yeah, my pleasure. It's been, I think we've been putting this together for a couple months now. So I'm keen to, I've, people can't see this, but I've got a few pages of nose in front of me that I'm keen to get through. But I think it would be valuable if we started our discussion talking about exploration geology in general. What that career is, what it means and what it's actually like to do that because whilst you're a CEO and a director and a chairman of various companies now, you started as an exploration geologist. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've counted up the number of nights or years I've slept in tents along the way. And so I've kind of worked through the whole spectrum of this industry from prospecting and dirt bagging and mapping and drill programs and logging core, et cetera. So what first drew me to the life of an exploration geologist is probably what draws a lot of people originally, which is the love of the outdoors, the sort of the non-conformity of it all. You know, when I was in undergrad, like most people in undergrad, not really knowing what you're going to do, I kind of fell into this field of geology and instantly kind of felt this was my tribe and got exposure to being out in the field, loving the lifestyle out there, the freedom and kind of the creativity that goes along with it. And it's a pretty self-sufficient kind of life. And throughout my own career, as I sort of hone that craft and graduated, went to grad in school and kind of got more and more sort of refined in terms of what I focused on. The whole business side of things really opened up for me and I kind of, by virtue of those opportunities, kind of moved a little bit away from field geology, but still very much involved vicariously through all of my team and from the various companies that I've put together and have worked on and managed over the years. And I think if it, you know, there's an expression out there, I don't want to, I don't want another smart geologist, I want a lucky one. Yeah, right. And I think, you know, it sounds a bit cliché, but it's, I think it's extremely important to not underestimate the value of luck in this business and, you know, it's not blind luck by any means. The, I think the differentiator between explorationists who find deposits and those who don't comes down to a willingness to put lines on maps. That sounds trivial, right? But a lot of geologists are data collectors. Yeah. Right? And there's this belief that by collecting data some answers are going to be revealed. And that's partially true. But until, until a commitment is made to commit to an interpretation, however right or wrong that interpretation is, that can then be a framework to go test, nothing's ever going to happen. And so there's a sub-discipline of geology called structural geology, which is my discipline. And I firmly believe that that is the discipline that forces you the most to put lines on maps. And commit to interpretations that you can then go test and prove. And structural geology is all about the shape and geometry of a rock mass. And it's all about how rocks bend and break. And that is the fundamental underlying prerequisite for figuring out our bodies. So what are the steps that someone needs to take before they're willing to put that line on a map? Do they need to be out in the field, mapping on the ground, taking samples, getting assay results? What is the work that has to be done before committing to, I guess, that thesis of what an or body looks like and what a rock mass looks like? You know, there's the old school, which is still very, very valid and vital, which is boots on the ground, right? So collecting vital information out in the field. But it's more than just that. It's also integrating it with all kinds of remotely collected data, right? So geophysics. [BLANK_AUDIO] particular, how do you integrate geophysics into structural geology and real life data on the ground. And so it's the ability to integrate multiple data sets to come up with an interpretation. Nobody wants to come up with an interpretation. I mean, this is the sad reality of where geology falls down is that people are reluctant to come up with an interpretation because then it can be criticized. And then once a line is drawn on a map, people take it as truth. And it's not. It's just a test. Yeah. So you're basically putting your name on the line on that and saying, this is what I think and this is, you know, I think maybe one of the best examples of that is David Lolle, who came up with the Loll Gilbert Porferi copper model. That's not just an interpretation. That's a meta interpretation. That is an entire, you know, the expression better than I would, but a model for these type of deposits. Totally. And people are mimicking it and repeating it over and over again without modifying it at all. I mean, it's subject to modification, but it's like it's holistically correct. And the same goes for every single deposit that we've ever worked on and had success on. There has to be a model. And that model comes from a team of people who are committed to actually drawing that model, right? The only way to know a thing truly is attempting to make it, is to attempt to make it, right? So if you can't make it, you can't draw it, then you have no idea what it is. So in your view, would the ge--so let me take a step back. In my view, the holy grail for as a geologist is discovery. That's totally. For me, what's most exciting about the mining industry in general, if I were a geologist, that would be what I would be wanting to be focused on. But very few people make a discovery. And do you think that is it the guys or ladies that are willing to put their reputation in the line and take a strong view and on interpretation and go out and test that right or wrong that are typically the people that make this sort of-- Completely. I completely agree with that. And I concur that discovery is the most exciting component in the continuum of our mining business, right? It is where it is the engine that drives the entire sector. So I have a view, and you can disagree with me on this, that the average engineer is probably worth 10 average geologists, but a great geologist worth 100 engineers. Because-- Well, an engineer is going to have nothing to work on if a geologist doesn't make the discovery. I know. The minute portion of the geologists that make these discoveries that create the entire downstream industry where I come in and other engineers-- That is true. And everybody else-- They are incredibly hard to make. I mean, there's lots of sort of insipient discoveries that get made that don't turn into anything. They don't turn into a mineral resource that's economic, and they certainly don't turn into a mine. So, you know, the probability of a discovery or a rediscovered turning into an operating mine is extremely slim, right? And our team has been able to do it repeatedly. And we've been able to do it mainly because we have been focusing on projects that have been largely de-risked, but misunderstood. So projects that have had a precursor discovery made on them, they might have been mined as a small scale mine and then abandoned, or they might have been drilled and misunderstood and abandoned. And so we've come into these projects, and we've rediscovered them. We've applied new interpretations, new lines on maps, new integrated data, and gone out and tested it. And if we're wrong, we can reshape our model and retest it. And if we're still wrong, we'll walk away. There's nothing there, right? So what we've tried to do over and over and over again is we understand the odds of this business are low, and failure is very, very high. And we have done our share of failure. And if you're going to fail, get to that point pretty quickly. So can you, you know, from my own interest, actually, walk us through what a reinterpretation looks like? Because so many of the biggest discoveries, you know, people have known something is there or has been a historic mine, or, but they haven't been able to put the pieces together to unlock the full potential. What does it look like from sort of day one? You get this data, you see what's there. How do you apply a different lens to it? And when do you know, like, okay, we're onto something here? Or, you know, what, time to kill it and go on to the next one. Well, I can give you two current examples. So oxygen has four companies. We've got pure gold, liberty gold, discovery metals, and sun metals. So I'll give you two examples. So I'll give you an example called gold strike, which is in liberty gold. So that was a, just like many projects we have at Liberty, it was a small scale past producing open pit mine in the Great Basin in the United States. This happens to be in Utah. And the, when we picked the project up, it had a history of about 200,000 ounces of past production. And like most of these projects that were produced in the 80s, they were like an iceberg, right, where 9/10 of the body of the icebergs under, under water, and all you ever see is sort of 1/10 of it sticking out of the water. The same was the case for all these small scale past producing open pit mines in the 80s, because gold was at $280 or $300 an ounce. And so they would pick the eyes out of these deposits. And they would leave 9/10 of the ore body behind. And at the time, it wasn't economically feasible to go to the end of the earth. It wasn't economically feasible. It's not exactly, it's not that they didn't know that there was more roots to the system. Of course they did. These were smart geologists. They just, it wasn't economic and they didn't put any real effort into figuring out what it might look like. So we come along and we get hold of that historical data. We look at it through the lens of $1,300 or $1,400 gold, whatever environment we're in, and apply current knowledge of the Great Basin. What are the architectural elements that make up carlin deposits? We know a lot more about them today than we did 30 years ago. So we apply those, come up with a model. And in the case of Goldstrike, we now have 1.2 million ounces of open pitable material that wasn't there two years ago. When we picked the project up, we have 1.2 million ounces of new gold that we've drilled off. We put a PEA out. It's now an economic study that shows that it's a mine. Another example is pure gold. It's a really good example because pure gold has the Madsen Gold, the high grade Madsen Gold, mine and Red Lake Ontario. And Red Lake is a heart of high grade gold for Canada. And we picked this project up when it was effectively on its deathbed. We bought it from Claude. Claude were in bankruptcy. Paid net eight or $9 million for it. Got it really cheap. And spent four years reinterpreting the data. Four years. Four years. So was this totally on a desktop at this point? So it was, well, I'll say we've had it for four and a half years. And so two years just sort of reinterpreting and re-logging data and compiling historical data. And then another two years testing it. And so what we've ended up with is taking a deposit that had been effectively not worked on very well for 20 years. And now we've drilled off two and a half million ounces of brand new high grade gold. And pulled reserves from that. About a million ounces of nine grams. It's now the highest grade development gold project in Canada. And it's on the eve, the cusp of its final permit. And it'll be a development project, a producing gold mine within the next year. And this is a project that wasn't supposed to have any gold left. And it was an old chestnut left for dead. And so we've taken it. We've reinterpreted it. We've put 300,000 new meters of drilling into it. And Darren and his team fill and crisly, in particular, the geological sort of brains, discovery brains behind this have come up with a model that adheres to red-lake characteristics. And now we've got a sort of fully coherent model that has proven to be correct because we keep finding more gold that wasn't supposed to be there. So how do these companies that previously own this asset or others like it, how do they get into the situation where they, I guess, don't fully understand what they have on their hands? Is this just a case of not all gel just a created equal? Is it a case of it maybe being a secondary asset in a bigger company that has something else that they're focused on and they don't have the resources to devote to it? What do you, I mean, how do these things, it happens all the time? Keep happening. It happens all the time. And in the case of gold strike, it happened because the previous owner just were under capitalized. They didn't have not having the money to give yourself the runway to do the work that needs to be done is a recipe for failure. You're going to fail. So having two years of lead time to kind of go through the data quietly, you've got your head down, you're actually spending two years, you're not getting rewarded for it, and you're putting together a model based on the synthesis of everything you can find. That's two years of, not a lot of reward, right? And unless you've got finance, you're going to have to do it. years, unless you've got backers who buy into your business plan and business model, and afford you that luxury of a few years to figure these things out, you're never going to be able to, and you're forced to go back into the same old drill holes and twin them and not really take the project anywhere. What I find interesting in that, and I think this is something that a lot of investors, you know, retail investors at home don't take into account necessarily, is how important it is for a team to maintain these committed backers and really the faith of the market that is going to give them the benefit of the doubt to take the time to go through this process like this, or if they have a miss, if they don't hit something right away, recapitalize them without completely gutting the company and allowing the project to proceed. I mean, you know, as well as I do, that so many of these things don't hit on the first or second or third go. Exactly. And so backing a management team is a mantra that you hear over and over and over again. And when you actually think about what that means, what it doesn't mean is the assumption that that management team is going to succeed on the first try. By backing a management team, you're backing a team that you have faith in knowing that if this project they're working on fails, they're going to find another project that might succeed. They're not going to give up, right? So the dogged determination and the absolute commitment to finding a project that you can succeed on is why management teams get back. You know, I want to talk to you. You've obviously done a very good job of this with the creation of oxygen, but now you're in the position of backing other management teams. People come to you with their ideas and their projects and you're investing in them and helping capitalize them and taking them into the oxygen network of companies. What is it that you look for outside of geology and the validity of a given idea in a management team that perks your interest and thinks, you know, these are the kind of people that would be worth backing for more than one shot? Drive mainly. So people who are absolutely driven and committed to succeed, hungry, they're talented, they can communicate well, you know, access to capital can come, but I'm really interested in backing and mentoring up and coming CEOs who are absolutely hell bent on succeeding, right? And with a recognition, I think that success in this business, like any kind of business, really comes with sacrifice and there's a lot of things that get sacrificed in your life, okay, by having laser focus on success. So that is a perfect segue because I have right now I know it's here, what are the sacrifices one must make to succeed in this sort of role? You don't meet a lot of married geologists or at least geologists on their first wife. I tell you, there's a lot of divorce in this business for sure. But one of the things that I think have that society in general, the message is that we hear all the time is that everybody can have everything and everybody can have this perfect work life balance and it's complete BS, right? It just doesn't exist, especially when you're on the steep curve of building a business. You can't, if you're lucky, you've got a life partner that is happy to play a strong support role to allow you to go out and do what it takes and that means a lot of time away from home, that means you're missing birthdays, it means you're missing all kinds of key things and you're sacrificing a key component of your holistic life for a longer term goal, okay, that hopefully you reach. But there's some really tough years where you're not as big a part of your family as you should be, right? And the reason you aren't is because you're trying to pursue this goal. It sounds like it requires a degree of obsession, perhaps that. Totally, it's not everyone can bring to that. You know, if you start off, like nobody succeeds climbing Mount Everest with a half-ass commitment to doing it, right? Like you leave Basecamp, fully committed that you're going to go make it the whole way and failure is not an option. And I believe the same kind of attitude is needed in business. Is that something that you think people can ease off after a certain point, after they've achieved a certain degree of success? Or is it, I guess, something that always has to be there to remain relevant in this period? No, I don't think so. I think that you owe it to your family to ease off. Yeah, I really do. So you've reached a certain comfort level, you've reached a certain financial achievement or whatever your goal might be. I think you owe it to yourself and your family to kind of reinvest in yourself and your family, after a point. So everyone knows what, you know, the obsessive-driven CEO looks like. And that's sort of, in theory, the peak of that hierarchy. But there are a lot of other layers to that. And there are very successful people at those layers. You know, what do you look for? I mean, what does that look like, I guess, for a geologist that's 25 years old. They're working in camps. They're, you know, what did you do, I guess, and what do you hope to see in the people that you're working with and mentoring that you think, like, that guy's serious about what he's doing? Yeah. I mean, I think it was Edison who said that a lot of people miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like hard work. Okay? Yeah. Right? And I think nothing could be more accurate in terms of the question you just asked. And there's a lot of drudgery in being out in the field. You're collecting soil samples and you're getting up early and you're hiking 20 kilometers and you're dealing with flies and all this kind of stuff. And you know, it can be pretty awful and monotonous. But the people who really work hard and seize every opportunity are going to be given more opportunities. And this is going to sound kind of glib, but you know what? When it comes right down to it, work really hard and don't be an asshole. I'll get you 90% of the way there. Exactly. I do think that's true. And the truly successful people that I've had the privilege to meet, you know, most of them are, they're all intelligent, but most of them are not geniuses. But there's a degree of obsession there that I had. You don't see with the middle-ane achiever. And I think that's almost just a, it's a numbers game. It's like, how do you compete with someone that's spending 24 hours a day thinking about something when you're only thinking about it eight hours a day? And it goes for anything. Let's say you were obsessed with guitar or opera singing or whatever. Like that's your thing. Make it your thing. Yeah. Make it your thing and dedicate the time and work into being the best you possibly can at it. So what are you obsessing about today? You know, I'm still really focused and committed to the deals that I'm involved with. I'm a big shareholder in all these deals and often the largest shareholder. But play a different kind of role now. I play a much more event-driven role. So if there's a financing coming up or if there's an M&A transaction that we're contemplating or if there's strategy shift, I'm very much involved in that. And to me, that's the fun stuff anyway. It's a lot more exciting than the day to day necessarily. So I'm not the CEO or part of the C suite of any of these companies today. I was, for the past 15 years, I was effectively running five public companies and we crystallized through the sale of those public companies, $3 billion worth of value. And that was really, really interesting at a great, great time in my life. And now I'm enjoying supporting the CEOs who are part of the next generation of the Oxygen family of companies. And I guess this is sort of a good segue to talk about enjoying other parts of my life as well. So, you know, my family's been a big, big part of my success over the last 19 years. My wife Victoria, my three kids, Lily, Holly, and Logan have been part of this great adventure and incredibly supportive. I met Victoria just after starting Frontier and she's been a big, big part of the success of this experience together with me. So I get the benefit right now of being able to enjoy a lot more time with my family and enjoying their company. I get to coach my son's little league baseball team. I get to cheer fanatically at my daughter's soccer games and basketball games and it's just a really good time in my life. You know, as someone who's spent myself the last 10 plus years in the industry, you don't meet many geologists, serious geologists in a lot of CEOs that are are still married or at least married to their first or sometimes second or sometimes third wife. It's interesting though that you met when you were kind of in one of the busiest parts of your career. So it sounds like Victoria very much knew what she was getting herself into at that point. Yeah, Victoria is a very unique individual and she has been incredibly supportive. She did know what she was getting into, I think. I don't know if either of us knew what we were getting into, but yeah, we met shortly after starting frontier and it was the beginning of a whole bunch of sort of mystery as I learned how this business works, which she's been a great partner and support over the years. Can we take a shift now and talk a little bit about when you really decided to get very serious about geology. You said you were brought to it through a love of the outdoors and sort of the adventure aspect of it and you clearly had a bit of the travel bug and you grew up in the East Coast, is that right? Yeah, I grew up in Newfoundland, yeah. But it came a time when you decided to do a PhD in geology. Is that one that really became your focus and sort of your life's work? I think it did. So I went from being a field geologist, seasonal field geologist. So I'd travel in the summer, travel in the winter and come back and work in the summer like we all did back then. And this was the bottom of the market kind of era. It was sort of early to mid-90s and quickly realized that, you know what, I better hone my craft here. If I'm going to stay in this business, I'd better get as good as I possibly can at some component of it. And so did a PhD in structural geology in Monash in Melbourne, Australia, focused up in Mount Isah up in Queensland. And really just absolutely immersed myself in mapping and figuring out rocks and how they deform and then went on to do a postdoc and got a professorship offer. And at that point, had to reflect on how I wanted to apply all this knowledge and this craft and said, you know what, I don't think academia is for me. Came back to Canada and eventually through serendipity and what have you ended up running public companies. What brought you to Australia in the first place? Well, probably to Australia was the travel bug. So I'd gone to Australia on a mountain biking journey and decided to bike around as much of Australia as I possibly could. And the trip sort of culminated in South Australia down this track called the Udna Data Track, which is a 600 kilometer long dirt road. It sounds very hot. And it was hot, hot. I remember sort of pushing my bike along this dirt road, just exhausted and dehydrated thinking that's got to be more. There's got to be more to life. But anyway, at the end of that trip ended up at Monash knocking on the door of a professor that I had read about. Were you still in a helmet in Spandex? I was emaciated with the helmet. I was all lungs and legs and broke. And as a sky, if he'd take me in as a PhD student and he kind of, we connected, we bonded and he said, yeah, sure. Go apply for the role. And six months later I was back. So it's another opportunity, right? So this comes back to seeking out and seizing opportunities. And people need to do it as much as possible, right? Even if it doesn't look like an opportunity or doesn't look like a romantic opportunity to say at the beginning, it will open up. The doors that get opened up for you that you cannot possibly predict means you need to walk through that door. And I guess at some point in your career it's any door. Any door is the right door. And I'll be picky. Any door. You know, in conjunction with this, have there been mentors throughout your career that have played a role in, you know, once you get into an opportunity helping you see the potentials there and sort of spread your wings within that realm? Absolutely. I mean, we all, none of us do this alone. None of us, right? As much as some people claim to have done it all alone, it's BS. So I've been incredibly fortunate from having like very, very supportive parents who kind of drove me to succeed and take opportunities and risks to my very first field geology summer with a guy named Derek Wilton out of Memorial University of Newfoundland who kind of introduced me to the wilds of Labrador. And I just fell in love with the place. To Gordon Lister, my PhD prof and who was a massive influence on me, to, you know, the two individuals who got me frontier development group back in 2001. They reach out to me after I won that goal court challenge. And that sort of launched my career as a pivotal moment. So Rob McHugh and played a role in my life, big role in terms of opening up a bunch of doors. Who's all kinds of individuals who change the trajectory of your life? So what I actually find to be really interesting, I guess, fork for you is you came second to the goal court challenge. That one, you know, that was sort of your first public appearance. But then these gentlemen reached out to you and brought you into the life of running a public company. What was your, I mean, coming as a very technical geological background, had you had any exposure to the public space where or are you just, I didn't even invest it in a stock, right? I knew nothing. How old were you at that point just to place us? 35 maybe. Okay. And so you, you know, you'd seen your career as a scientist at this point. Totally. And then some guys came knocking on your door and said, you want to run a company. And I said, okay, why not? Let's go do it. I said, are you going to help me? Are you going to help me? Are you going to teach me? Because if you're not going to be there to back me up and teach me what I need to know, then I can't, I don't think I can do it. But if you're going to be there, I didn't even know what a financial statement was. I didn't know what a balance sheet was. I didn't know anything. And so these guys kind of took me under their wings and mentored me. And I mean, not being afraid to ask questions is the key, right? Just ask away, ask every single question. So anyway, these guys came in, gave me this opportunity. It was a million dollars in the bank, no projects. I didn't know anything about public company obligations or anything. Yep. And so we had good lawyers and mentors around me. I built my team and, you know, 10 years later that was from to your goal that got sold to Newmont for $2.5 billion. So that was a pretty good million dollar investment on their part of the year? That was a great million dollar investment. And it also kind of goes to show that there is no such thing as an overnight success, even though it looks like it happened overnight. Like, there's usually 10 or 15 years before that, you know, we're, we're drudgery. Do you think you would have found your way to the public markets one way or the other? I don't think I would have. I think I, I shouldn't say that. I don't think I would have found my way to a CEO role as quickly as I did. Mm-hmm. I might have ended up as an exploration geo within a public company. That was happening. Yeah. And I was already doing that. I was consulting to public companies. I'd set up a consulting practice and I was consulting to majors around the world. But running one, you know, unless that door opened for me, it would have been very hard for me to break down that door. So I've, I've taken upon myself right now. I think a big part of my responsibility at this stage in my career is presenting these doors in front of people who I think have the talent to walk through them and succeed. I think what you've described just now and then what also what happened to you, there are going to be a lot of younger geologists listening to this who that is their, their dream scenario. Maybe they even have a specific idea that they want to back, they want backing forward, they have an idea behind. Now, point of fact, I would say a lot of geologists have actually had that opportunity to start a company and have backers and pursue their idea. And very, very few of those ideas go on to be any sort of success, let alone a multi, you know, billion dollar takeout. So my question is, what advice do you have for young geologists who are either trying to put together their first deal or maybe they've already found their self in a position where they're running it to build up the business capital markets, financial acumen that you need to do to perform in that role. And the reason I asked that is because there, geologists have a reputation for not being the best public company CEOs. And you see a lot of them in the secondary role, maybe the VP exploration one, not within accountant or someone as the CEO. But they're the people most intimately familiar with these projects and creating the true value in the company. So how can they level up their skills to be the head of this? I mean, I actually think that the best CEOs, intrinsically the best CEOs who ought to, who ought to be the best CEO. ought to be the best CEOs, I should say, our geologists, right? Not lawyers, not accountants. It's never made any sense to me to see a lawyer or an accountant be the CEO of a major company. It doesn't make any sense to me. It means those people are 100% beholden to trusting the caliber of the people who are bringing them ideas and investment decisions without the ability to actually interrogate them themselves through the lens of somebody who knows what they're talking about. Yes. And that's risky. So having a CEO who's a geologist who knows the craft is exactly the person that you want to have in there making the investment decisions. And those geologists just need to hone their communication skills and the ability to translate complex ideas into sound bites or investment ideas that people can get behind without thinking that you're going to get rewarded for some great scientific idea. You have to frame the idea properly so that people are going to want to back you. But the other layer that's more intangible is timing. It's really difficult, doesn't matter how seasoned a CEO you are, if you get the timing wrong of your new venture, you're hooped. It's going nowhere. And so if you look at the last six years of this cycle, we've been in this incredibly flat doll atrophied bear market. For six years, gold's kind of peaked in 2012 at 18 something and then just fell off a cliff. And it's been 12 to 1,300 flatlined for six years right now. We've been in this bear market really tough, unless you've got a really strong track record of creating value. Very, very tough to get a new deal launched as a new CEO because there's no backers out there right now. No new backers. What it is a really good time to do right now is accumulate projects cheaply. So as companies suffer more and more balance sheet stress, they're more and more willing to do deals cheaply. And so accumulating, building-- this is the time to build-- building your portfolio and your pipeline right now, not spending a lot of money on it, but building it so that you can vault out of this bear market with the best highest quality portfolio you possibly could and you accumulated it very, very cheaply. So I have two follow-up questions to that. The first is from an investor's perspective. If I'm not a professional fund manager, I'm not a professional mining investor. But I like the space. I have a bit of money to play within it. How do I position myself to take advantage of this in your view? Do I get these high potential exploration projects or redevelopment projects? Is now the time really to be buying undervalued producers? From an investor's perspective, where do you think it's a smart place to be looking? I actually think-- we talked touched on this at the beginning, but I actually think and have huge conviction on the discovery end of the spectrum. So if you can get your risk capital into the highest discovery probability portfolio, that's trading for the cheapest. So there's a few of them out there. There's not a lot out there right now, because there's a lot of low quality projects out there as well. But if you look at the projects that are not just momentum plays, but you look at the projects that are deep, deep value, because they have real projects backing them up-- these companies. And knowing that sooner or later, those are the projects that are going to have exponential growth because society needs them. Mid-tier's and majors need them to grow. So who's going to fill the pipeline? Forget momentum for a second. You can always make money on momentum, whether it's cannabis or blockchain or some drill hole here and there. But if you look at the dearth of growth out there amongst the mid-tier and the majors, all of their growth reserve profiles are falling off a cliff five years from now. They're 20 or 30% lower than they are today at these gold prices. So unless gold just rockets up and that fixes everything, they're going to need to-- they really are going to need to replenish their reserve base and where's it going to come from? So find those companies that are going to serve up those projects like pure gold, like Liberty Gold. They have real mining projects that could make a material difference to any producer in terms of their production profile. Is there a commodity that you're particularly interested at the moment? I know you've got a very strong background in gold, obviously. Is that going to remain your focus going forward? Or are you-- in the companies within So Liberty and Pure Gold are gold-focused sun metals, which I haven't really touched on yet. Sun metals and discovery metals are both polymetallic. So we're focused on high grade gold, silver, copper, and zinc. So they're sort of a whole consortium of metals within these deposits. Ultimately, they kind of get pigeoned hold into either a copper or a precious metal type of square. I'm also part of a new group. I got invited into a new group backed by a really interesting, well-heeled group of individuals. So William Lam's, a CEO, Zimmy Meekah, is one of the directors-- From Osanko. From Osanko. Simon Smurlek from Osanko, myself, and Michael Simpson from Haywood and with Tog Netty's backing. So this is a private company called NDH. It's not part of oxygen. It's a separate vehicle. And we've just raised a bunch of money privately. And William is hell-bent and driven on building a copper business. So for those who don't know, William Lam was previously the CEO of Lucara Diamonds. Thank you. And now he's focused on copper. What was-- why did William want to shift commodities? Or from diamonds to a commodity? And why did you decide to back them? Well, we all decided to work together. And sort of the glue amongst all of us was Michael. Michael was the rallying point. He brought this network he had of individual relationships. And he kind of got us all together and said, hey, guys, let's work together. And William had just left Lucara. He was hungry and driven to kind of get another home run. And so we've all happily banded together and are working together to bring a project in. Any idea when that's going to be something that investors at home can start investing in or are looking at harder? It's happening right now. So we've bid on a few projects. Haven't won them because you've got to stay disciplined in terms of what you're willing to pay. But we're actively looking and shopping right now. So on that note, my other question, which was a little while back, was if you'd said that now is the time to acquire assets, which it sounds like you go here in the process of doing. But if you are one of these new CEOs and you don't have maybe the bank account or the reputation to get the backing to start acquiring assets, is there a way to do it for relatively cheaply? And maybe this is not a focus on known assets. But grassroots exploration, for example, where you can stake these prospective ground for relatively cheap. There are efficient ways of doing it. If you want to put an area play together, there are tried and true formulas for that. You can put together staking syndicates, for example, where you get-- doesn't cost any money to stake ground, really. But you could get a group of guys together and everyone throws in 10 grand. And you go out and you stake an area. And with a little bit of compilation work, you come up with a thesis. And then you go out and farm that out to a mid-tier or major saying, look, hey, I think we just put this area of the Yukon together. We think it's got potential for whatever carland deposits and coming back us. So you can do that relatively cheaply. And you do these being a property entrepreneur or a joint venture model type company. And you can start those overnight. You just have to have enough geological angle to come up with an investment thesis for somebody earning in. You know, how do you think about your early career with this? So I was speaking about this to a friend of mine who's-- he's in his 60s now. He's a very successful lawyer turned venture capitalist. And he's done very well. And he's helped create some great companies. And he said to me, he's like, you know, Jamie, if I did it all again, I wouldn't spend so much time as a lawyer. I wouldn't have gotten a nice house. I would have lived in a shitty old apartment and focused on building companies earlier. And I wouldn't have gone so much of the corporate route, I guess. Do you have any advice for people who are thinking about that? I mean, this is something I've thought about a lot. At this point, we'll wear to allocate your personal capital for the longest returns in the long run. Now, I will say if I'd bought a house 10 years ago in Vancouver, that probably would have been a better investment than any kind of project. It's kind of easy for this, I don't know who you're referring to, but it's easy for him to in hindsight look back and say he would have taken on more risk. But we all have our own risk appetite and depending on your personal situation, some people have a new family, they've got small kids, they need some kind of financial security. So you're not going to go risk it all, that's for sure. And if there are points in your career when you are able to take more risk and I was certainly able to take more risk when I started frontier because I didn't have a family. And it was like, hey, this is new and exciting, I got nothing to lose at all. And the fallback position is if it does fail, if this is really not for me, I still have my academic background and I can have a career. Yeah, it's a few months on your parents' couch and then back out into the world. Totally. So I think this is a good time that we actually talk about setbacks, which will be the majority of every geologist career. Even the most successful groups winning is the exception. So how do great teams respond to setbacks while still giving themselves taking the risk to have these big wins, but finding a way to control the downside? Is there a way that you've learned to approach this over your career? That's a good question. The setbacks or failures are just part of this business. Everybody has, everybody hears about the good things, but nobody hears about the hundred things that fail leading up to that one thing that's succeeded. And we all have this huge litany of sort of carcasses behind us of projects that have not worked for one reason or another. So I mean, the two real tangible examples that were sort of gut-wrenching, not failures, but obstacles for me personally. Most recently, I was executive chairman and co-founder of True Gold Mining, which we merged with Riverstone, Form True Gold, and we had the Karma project in Brachina Faso. And it was a great, simple, open-pid heap leach project in a decent part of the world. And we halfway through our construction, so we drilled it off, we permitted it, we funded it, and we got into construction all within about three years, two and a half years. It was incredibly accelerated. And this was at the bottom of the market. This was 2014, 2015. Really, really, really tough time to raise money. I think it's even tougher than right now, actually, in some ways. And anyway, halfway through the construction, there was a coup in the country. And Blaise Cumpore, who was the dictator of Brachina Faso, got ousted. There was civil unrest, it became militant as well, and he got evicted from the country, and all hell broke loose. And there was uprising, civil uprising, there was uprisings from artisanal miners, and all this corruption and discontent sort of bubbled up to the surface. And mining projects around the country got hit hard. And ours in particular got hit hard. And we ended up getting Molotov cocktails thrown over our fence, and a bunch of our equipment burned, our leach pad liner caught fire. And there was like four or five million dollars worth of damage, and it was absolutely gut wrenching, and all of our financiers were kind of waiting in the wings just with their jaws open thinking, "Oh my God, am I going to lose everything?" And this was a binary moment in time, and we basically said, "Okay, like this either goes to zero, or we kind of work our way through it." And we all kind of banded together, and I sort of spearheaded a recovery program with the help of a bunch of really, really seasoned, politically savvy consultants out of South Africa. Okay. And we put this SWAT team together to bring peace and stability back into a lawless country at the time, because there was no government, there was an interim government. And we brought peace and stability just to our region, and we ended up signing a stability agreement, and getting consent to restart work, the money flowed again, and we finished the mine, construction, we poured gold, and we sold the company to endeavor like a month later. But this was, and during the process, the entire C-suite was fired. Okay. So I assumed the role of CEO, and we went on a search, and we hired a new CEO, we hired a new CFO, we hired a new COO, we hired a new country manager, we rebuilt the entire team from the ashes of that crisis. And we said, "Okay, look, we're now in a different world, we need new skills to succeed." And so we went out and we found them, and we brought in Christian as CEO from, he was the CFO of endeavor, and we brought him in, and he set him up as the CEO, and he proceeded to build a team around him, and got the mine finished, and we ended up selling it. So that was a very gut-wrenching year. Yeah, I am familiar with that story, because Christian was my old boss, actually. At Equinox Gold. And I heard a bit of it from his side, but I hadn't heard the whole thing before. When, you know, what went through your mind to make that decision to clear out the old team, renew it, to tackle these new challenges, that can't be an easy thing to go through for any leader in any organization. How do you go through that in terms of making that decision and coming to the conclusion that, you know, this is the right thing to do for the company, for the shareholders, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah, we just looked at the new landscape in the country and thought we needed a different skill set, because this is just going to happen again. So we needed a new skill set, and the remainder of the team, so Alex Holmes was a big part of this with me, so a bunch of us, you know, basically filled in where needed to keep this company running and communicating to shareholders about what we were doing, and you know, started this search, and, you know, we succeeded, but it could have gone the other way. Yeah, right? It was all hands on deck, and complete another laser focus on not failing. Yeah, I'm getting a little into the weeds on this, but it's, I guess, my own personal interest, but so, I mean, from what it sounds like, the technical aspects of the mining that was handled, it was the challenge was the surrounding area in the community. How does, in a country, going through this state of change, how do you, how do you build relationships of the community and calm things down to a degree where work can get done, where something has the chance to succeed? We instigated what was called a stability agreement, so we created with the help of a guy named Francois Baird, who was a seasoned political advisor out of South Africa. We brought in help from the Canadian government, we brought in help from other African nations in terms of government influence, and we set up what was called a stability agreement with the head of the communities of religious leaders and the civil leaders, and we all basically forced each other to agree that the best thing here is to bring stability to this region and have this mine finish its construction, get up and running, so a thousand people could be employed again. And so there was a bunch of political pressure, but it was fabricated, it was created, right? It wasn't, we imposed it, and through the help of the consultants that we had brought in who were incredibly savvy. And then, you know, started our own grassroots movement with Christian and those guys once they got in to build up community support again, because that's the, that's the thing about what we call a community support. Like nothing really changed from our perspective, we were all doing the same thing, what changed were exogenous forces, right? There was a coup, there was, all of a sudden, the government, the country went from having a sort of benevolent dictator who was promining to having nobody, and all of a sudden sort of evil forces start to emerge out and bubble up from the ground that were suppressed prior. And so all of a sudden, the landscapes changed. I mean, we still had the same community support we had before, but now we had some evil influences that were prevalent that needed to get dealt with. Do you know of another example that a company's had to deal with a situation like that, and it's gone this, that's smoothly, all things considered? I don't know. I think a lot of companies, frankly, go through things like this and just don't talk about it. Yeah. We had to talk about it because it became a big part of the media. Yeah. Reporters showed up and it became front and center, so we had to deal with it in the front and center kind of way, but I think a lot of companies working all over the world deal with this kind of stuff all the time. In hindsight, do you think that's the superior approach now to be as transparent as one can about this sort of thing, or is there an advantage to handling it quietly on the ground if that is an option. - I think it's always preferable to contain things, right? To handle it in your own universe. I mean, you're not withholding information. I don't condone that at all. But if you can handle a problem at site, handle it. - Yes, I suppose when you're bringing in media and all this outside attention, it gives-- - And it creates a side story. - Yeah. So we're coming up on an hour now. I want to sort of finish off by talking about two things, which maybe seem a little different. Creativity and organization. In preparation for this podcast, something I've noticed about you is you're one of the best prepared people I've had the opportunity to speak to. You've got pages of your own notes here. You actually interviewed me twice before you let me interview you. And you clearly put a lot of thought into the questions that I sent you in advance. And what I found myself wondering this was this, is this a natural inclination of yours to be very well organized and to be very prepared for everything you do? Or is it something that you learned through the course of a scientist, and a business person, and a CEO, and everything you've done since then? - I think if there's one mantra for running a company, it's no surprises. And it's not that you don't want mother nature to give you a surprise. That's something you can't control. But if your VPX comes up to you one day and says, we're out of money, or we're something that was unforeseen, and you weren't prepared for it. Like everybody should be in a position where they know the possible outcomes, and there's no surprises. - And there's a contingency in place for any-- - Yeah, there really shouldn't be any surprises here. We know what business we're in, we know how this works. Let's make sure we got enough communication so that no one's blindsided. That's what it means. - There's no chance you were a boy scout, is there, Martin? But why I find this interesting is because in my view, the really great geologists require a degree of creativity that few people actually have. And I think that few people appreciate that it's not much different than being a great writer or artist or whatnot. And so far as you have to really look at the world and something that everybody else has seen and see it very differently and see the opportunities there where other people might see nothing. And I think this is the problem often in this sector is how do you manage both of these and how do you find people that can do both? - Yeah, and by saying no surprises, that doesn't mean I want to stime your creativity. By any means, I want to let my talent run, right? And so, Moira, for example, who's a VPX at Liberty Gold, I want, she's got latitude to go out and do whatever she wants in terms of testing targets or what tools to use or what budget she wants to put forward and that kind of thing, right? So use all your creativity, go for it. So one of the things that we've, I think we've been successful at the nine companies that we've created over the last 19 years has been our ability to let our geologists follow their nose, right, and fail. Make mistakes, fail, it's okay. It's tougher in a bear market because money's tighter, but in a bull market, I mean, Frontier never had any less than a hundred million bucks in the bank, right? We had 50 or 60,000 meters of drilling a year, right? And, you know, at some years, we had 14 rigs going, right, like we, it was massive. It's like half the exploration industry right now. It is, yeah. And it was a different time and our geologists were just in heaven because they could go test things, they could go, you know, they could go fail and they obviously succeed. Are there any books or resources that you found have added a lot of value to your life and your business life or personal, and that you might recommend for other people who are looking to expand like themselves? - You know, there's never been a, like a business book necessarily that has stood out. All of the sort of the big leaps I've felt I made were driven by human interaction, asking questions. Like I much prefer to sit down with somebody and just grow them with every stupid question I can think of and just learn that way as opposed to reading from a book about a case study or something. And then the other books that I tend to gravitate towards as ironically are more kind of philosophy type stuff. You know, some of the old Stoics and things I find, there's a lot of modern day lessons to learn about life. - Yeah, Stoicism is an interesting one. So like Santa Cun and Marcus are really us. So I guess sort of the concept, if I as a geologist I can see that being very appealing of taking life as it comes and maintaining, don't fall in love with expectations. I guess a big part of that. Well, Mark, I want to be very cognizant of your time and we're at about an hour now, but is there anything else that listeners should know or you'd like them to know about oxygen or the company you guys are involved with or what's going on today? - So maybe I'll end with a quote from Miles Davis on this where he said, "Time isn't the main thing, it's the only thing." And obviously Miles Davis was famous jazz musician. He's referring to time and timing and jazz music. But I want to emphasize to people the importance of timing in this business. And we talked on it a little bit earlier, but for new geologists and new upcoming CEOs, don't get discouraged by getting the timing wrong or starting your career at the wrong time. It might seem like the wrong time in the cycle because this is a cyclical business. But stick to your craft and continue to look for opportunities and when the market does turn, be there for it. - All right, thank you very much. And on that note, thank you for giving us a bit of your time today. - Thanks, James. It was pleasure. - Thanks for listening to another episode of the Resource Insider Podcast. If you're interested in getting access to the biggest deals and best opportunities in the mining and metals industry, go to capitalistsxploits.at and sign up for resource insider now.