Speaker 1This interview is sponsored by Visionary Metals. Please do your own due diligence before making any investment decision. This is the Commodity Culture Podcast, where we interview prominent investors, fund managers, analysts, and company CEOs to give you an edge when it comes to investing in the commodity space. Hello, everybody. Welcome into Commodity Culture. My name is Jesse Day. Today is August 11th, 2026, and my guest is the CEO of Visionary Metals, an exploration company advancing two nickel and copper sulfide projects in Wyoming and exploring a copper-gold porphyry project in Utah. It's Wesley Adams. Great to have you on the show.
Speaker 2Thanks, Jesse. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Great to dive into what Visionary is doing. In Wyoming and Utah, and why we're excited about our upcoming drill program.
Speaker 1Yeah, I cannot wait to dive into that. Before we do, I want to start with a high-level overview of the critical minerals and metals space, because there's obviously a lot going on geopolitically. We were talking about it off-camera before we began recording, but the supply chain is changing around the world at this point in time. How are you thinking about the growing recognition of the importance of critical minerals worldwide and the strain on supply chains currently underway?
Speaker 2Well, I think, I mean, we're seeing the U.S. make a big push to fund critical metals projects, and especially domestic ones. Copper is really dominating the conversation right now. We're seeing genuine strain on supply, tight concentrate sales, Chinese smelting bottlenecks, and then interruptions that keep showing up in the market. Some of those are geopolitical, and some of them are supply chain oriented, right? Nickel is a smaller market, but it's just as sensitive to those kind of disruptions. And we saw that, you know, during the beginning of the Ukraine contract when it spiked to 100,000 a ton for a day. There's an important distinction with nickel that doesn't get talked about enough. North American sulfide deposits produce, you know, higher quality product with significantly lower environmental footprint than some of the larger laterite operations. And so they're really two different type of mining techniques, two different type of ores, obviously much cleaner on the sulfide side. The U.S. government is putting some real funding in policy support. So there's the FAST-41 permitting process, which is available for critical metals development, speeds up permitting, and then also funding from Department of War and Department of Energy. So, you know, there's a lot of different types of mining, but, you know, if you can find critical metals assets in the U.S. right now, you're in a great position. And so, you know, for a junior like Visionary with two critical metals projects in the U.S. in, you know, tier one jurisdictions, right, Wyoming and Utah, really puts us in a great position for growth. And I think, you know, this is really a great time to be involved with the
Speaker 1company. Well, let's talk about copper. Let's home in on that for a moment, because it's hit new all-time highs four times this year so far, I believe. A lot of other commodities under pressure since the war in Iran began, especially precious metals, but copper looking very resilient here. Why do you think that is? And what is your outlook for the copper space moving forward?
Speaker 2I mean, I'm extremely bullish on copper. You know, my brother is a concentrate trader that worked at Glencore for a long time. So I talked to him about, you know, what's going on on the supply side, what's going on in the demand side, what's going on in the demand side. And I think I like to simplify things, right? If you look at the big long life mines that have been, you know, underpinning the market for decades, Bingham Canyon, Grasberg, these have been producing for a long time and there's simply not enough major new discoveries to replace them. So there are discoveries in place, you know, in places like Argentina and Chile, but infrastructure, water availability, permitting can push development timelines years into the future. So there aren't that many near-term opportunities to replace these large producing assets. So I think that's going to be great for the copper prices. And, you know, what it says about exploration also is to replace something of that type of scale, you need to be looking for large deposits and you need, you know, it needs to be in places where there's infrastructure, jurisdictions where you actually can permit and build. And so that's why we're targeting what we think are some of the best opportunities. And I think that's going to be great for the best spots in the Western United States. So Wyoming, where we made the first nickel sulfide discovery, and then Utah, where we've got a system that we think has a lot of similarities geologically to the Bingham Canyon camp. So it puts us in a great position and I think it's a big opportunity to make a new discovery in the U.S. And if we do that this year, we'll be rewarded.
Speaker 1Yeah, some great points. Certainly jurisdiction being very important and the ability to bring, you know, to get those permits is not easy around the world. And then when you go to the, you know, developing countries, you can run into other issues too with local governments and other jurisdictional risk as well. Now let's shift to nickel for a moment because you mentioned that crazy spike in the nickel price. How are you feeling about the nickel market today? And where do you see the metal headed as we enter the second half of 2026 here?
Speaker 2Well, I think, you know, we're seeing production, Indonesian production be curved, right? And that's 60% of global nickel supply. So when you have mines that are curving production because they're operating at a loss, that's a positive sign for the underlying commodity price. And there's really, you know, people don't understand this, but there's two distinct types of nickel ores, right? There's laterites that currently dominate the nickel market, and there's laterites that currently dominate the nickel market. And there's laterites that currently dominate the nickel market. Global supply, and they mostly come out of Indonesia, the Philippines, you know, where they're basically strip mining, you know, laterite clays, and it makes a huge environmental footprint. Sulfide deposits, on the other hand, produce a high purity concentrate. It's preferred for battery metals, suitable for stainless steel and electronics as well. And typically, these sulfide deposits carry a much better environmental profile. Especially in North America, where we've got some of the, you know, strictest environmental regulations. So, you know, that's why we're exploring in the U.S. You know, we're targeting magmatic nickel sulfides in Wyoming. In the near term, we're seeing supply constraints with the higher costs coming out of Indonesia. Longer term, there really just haven't been enough new significant discoveries. A lot of, you know, much like copper, right? A lot of the, you know, the supergiant deposits that we've seen in the past, Boise's Bay, Ragland, Nickel Camp, Western Australia, Perseverance, Cambalda, Mount Keith, all of those are kind of ending the, you know, their useful life. So it really creates an opportunity for us to be, you know, building on a new discovery, especially with a major partner involved like tech.
Speaker 1Let's talk about gold for a moment. Since the war in Iran kicked off, we've seen gold struggling. It's difficult to really break out after hitting new all-time highs and correcting pretty significantly. Where do you see the gold market headed from here? Because it does appear to be breaking out. Perhaps we're going to see much higher prices ahead. I think over the long term, we're going to see the price go to the upper right of the screen. But at this moment, we're in right now. How are you feeling about the gold space?
Speaker 2I feel great about it. I mean, I think it's been quite resilient, even after, you know, a huge runoff. But I think, you know, the obvious places to run to are precious metals, right? That's what people tend to do in uncertain times, especially when you've got inflation playing a major role. So both metals have already had, you know, substantial runs. Nickel has lagged. But, you know, it tends to be more counter cyclical. So, yeah. 2012, you know, when we were starting to see the end of the bull market in gold and silver, that's when nickel really started to get legs and have its last bull market. So I think we could be entering kind of a similar scenario. I don't want to call the end of the gold bull market yet. But it sets nickel up, I think, for, you know, a potential future run. And, you know, typically, as we see these conflicts unwind, right, or deescalate. that could could be a selling point for gold investors. But I think we're going to see sustained higher prices for a lot longer this time, just because of the inflationary environment that we're in.
Speaker 1Yeah, great thoughts. Visionary Metals is involved in all of the metals we've discussed so far. Why don't you start by giving us an overview of the company? You've alluded to some of your projects, would love to hear more and lay out your long-term game plan for us.
Speaker 2Yeah, so our goal is to really make tier one discoveries in tier one jurisdictions. So we're focused on commodities that are big enough for the biggest companies. So nickel, copper, copper, gold, porphyry projects. And I think that's what's attracted. We've got tech in as a 14% shareholder and a strategic alliance partner in white. So they're hands on working with us to make new discoveries here. And I think what attracted them was the scale of the targets that we have identified there. We've spent the last five years doing grassroots exploration in Wyoming. And that's led us to an initial discovery. We've proven that there's a fertile magmatic nickel sulfide system here. And having tech in as a partner, it gives us the tools that really most juniors wouldn't have access to. So we flew some big regional airborne electromagnetic surveys. That's basically, you know, like a metal detector hanging from the bottom of a helicopter, right? So it can detect massive sulfide mineralization down to about 300 meters. And we had several areas that lit up, you know, kind of consistent with where we thought they would. And so I think, you know, the work that we had done to date, combined with the fact that, you know, we started our initial campaign with tech last summer, we identified several targets in areas that, you know, my chief geologist, Michael Page, kind of predicted they would be in. And Michael is, you know, he was director of exploration for Norilsk at one point in his career. So that's the largest producer of nickel in the world. He spearheaded exploration programs for BHP, for Ivanhoe, for Goldfields. So he's one of the better known nickel geologists worldwide and just has seen so much. So we were able to kind of set the geologic model up. And then when we got the targets that we were looking for, these massive conductive bodies, that was a strong indication, you know, that we have a good chance to hit some massive nickel sulfide. And so, you know, what the electromagnetic surveys have done for discoveries at Talon, at Eagle, right? I mean, the intercept that Talon hit the other day was just massive. And so we're hoping to make, you know, a discovery on par with that, right? And I think we've got a great chance to do it with this year's drill program.
Speaker 1So dive a little bit deeper into the details of your two flagship projects. And how are you allocating resources between both of them between Wyoming and Utah? Is there a priority on one over the other in terms of where you see most potential in the short term? We'd love to hear your strategy there.
Speaker 2We've, we've got a separate team of, you know, porphyry experts that are quietly pushing slipstream ahead. Now that's our Utah copper gold porphyry system. That's going to be a project for 2027. We're 100% focused on drill bit is going to start turning here in about a week, 10 days. So, you know, I think what's exciting about this year's program in Wyoming is that so little background. So 2022, we made a nickel sulfide discovery, we hit like, you know, 20 meters at 0.4% nickel in our third core hole ever in at the King Solomon project. And, and then, you know, we kind of took a step back and started doing more regional exploration, we figured if we're making a new discovery, we should probably identify, you know, what else is in this district, right, and really kind of cover a lot of ground to make sure that we've, that we're understanding the system, that we're identifying more targets. And so we identified those targets in 23, started talking to tech in 24, and, and signed a deal with them last August, and have hit the ground running since then. So a lot of that early stage work that, that you have to carry out when you're doing grassroots exploration is behind us now. And now we've got, you know, targets that we can model in 3D, there's eight of them. And, you know, three at King Solomon, three conductive bodies we've identified there, kind of in the vicinity where we hit our initial discovery hole. And then at Tin Cup, which is about 10 kilometers to the west, we have five separate, conductive bodies. Some of those are up to a kilometer in length, and several hundred meters wide. So, you know, we're seeing all the things that you would look for in a magmatic nickel sulfide system at this stage. And so that success has led to an initial or additional investment from tech, and then, you know, allowed us to go out and raise seven and a half million dollars this past month. Could you dive a little
Speaker 1deeper as well into that relationship? Relationship with tech resources, how much leverage that kind of provides you in terms of on the operational side of things. And as you advance your projects, is there an option there for tech to take a larger stake and perhaps become more hands-on in the future?
Speaker 2Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think for a junior company, resources are always finite, especially when you're, when you're conducting greenfields exploration, right? And we self-funded a lot of that. You know, participated in every financing that we've done. We've got kind of a core group of about 20 guys that have, you know, that have participated in all the financings that we've done. And so that's kind of allowed us to, you know, to create the groundwork that led to tech's investment, right? And what tech gives us is access to, you know, all the tools that a, what's soon to be a, you know, top five copper producer, globally after the merger with Anglo. So it's technical expertise, you know, great geophysics team, right? So we have a full-time geophysicist on the project. We have two full-time geologists and a senior geologist that's overseeing the project. So, you know, really allows us to do a lot more than we could just as a junior. It would have been tough for us to raise money to do, you know, a million acre airborne EM survey, and, you know, get a top-notch team to do the ground EM survey afterward. And so we've gotten both equity financing and non-dilutive funding. Tech does reserve the right to earn up to 70% in our two flagship assets. So King Solomon and Tin Cup, and they, you know, to do that, they have to exercise an option and spend an additional $6 million on top of what we've already spent to date per project. So, you know, if we make a discovery this year, I would imagine that there's a very good chance that tech would exercise. And then, you know, we get into a development scenario where there is 70% and we're 30%, but we've already got, you know, 6 million toward development drilling on each project. So I think it's a good place to be. You know, I look at the recent transaction, actually, between Talon and Lundin Mining on the Eagle deposit, right? And so, you know, people forget not too long ago, Talon was a sub $50 million company, right? And that was just kind of the value of the Tamarack asset that they had and stuff in Michigan as well. But, you know, really having the team in place, you know, the backing of a major, I think can really add value in a discovery and development scenario. And so that's what we've seen, you know, today, Talon's an $850 million company, and they continue to grow their asset base, right? And so we hope that we're just kind of at an earlier stage, right? Visionary is at 15 million market cap right now. So there's a value proposition there. And I think with tech's involvement in an active drill program with eight separate targets that we're drilling this year, really puts us in a nice position to have a chance to make a difference. And I think that's a good place to be. More discoveries and really kind of grow our asset base and justify re-rating in the market.
Speaker 1Can you shed some more light on the team behind Visionary Metals and how you plan to leverage their expertise? And we'll start with your own background and why you're the right CEO to be leading the helm.
Speaker 2For one, I mean, I have a long history in Wyoming. You know, I come from a family that's been three generations in the mining industry. So, you know, it's a long history. And I think that's a good It started with uranium in Wyoming with some of the first producers. And then, you know, we've been in coal. I started my career in Guyana working on a big gold discovery down there called Turaparu. And that's, I think, a 7.1 million ounce M&I resource now that ARIS is pushing forward. You know, I brought on Michael Page as director of exploration. I was surprised that he joined. But one of the things that he said was, look, I need to come to site and actually see what you've got there, you know, first. And so he came out, you know, as a consultant, you know, really liked what he saw in the geology, kind of reminded him of some of the geology you see in Western Australia, where you have these super giant deposits like Perseverance and Camp Alda. And, you know, so my background was in kind of Greenstone Gold in Guyana. Mike's background has been in, you know, nickel, but, you know, nickel of all types. And he has especially expertise in the Archean nickel systems that are similar in age to what we have here in Wyoming. So, you know, I think from a technical perspective, we've got a really strong team. We try to run a tight ship. You know, all the money that we raise typically goes into the ground, you know, or has at least to this point. and doing a bit more marketing now, because I think that we're at a really exciting point in the company's history, you know, where we really have the opportunity to grow our shareholder base, grow our market cap on the heels of a big discovery here. So it's an exciting time to be an investor in Visionary. And I think, you know, with the share structure, you know, tightened up, it's really has room to run now. Let's talk about
Speaker 1cash on the balance sheet. How much cash is on hand right now? How much runway does that give you? And what are the plans for raising more capital as needed moving forward?
Speaker 2Yeah. So we just raised seven and a half million dollars in our last financing. That's going to give us solid runway for the next 12 months. It was a great deal. We had over 150 investors in that financing. So we're going to be able to do a lot of things. We're going to be able to do a lot of things. So really trying to work on creating liquidity for our shareholders, creating some price appreciation with news flow, and then being aggressive with our expiration plans. So we've got the runway in place. I think when it comes to financing, we're opportunistic. We don't need cash right now after our recent financing. But if we see opportunities to raise prices that we think allow us to push projects forward at a higher rate, take advantage of the great copper markets that we're in, for instance, we'll always look at those opportunities and consider them. What
Speaker 1would you say are the main catalysts that shareholders of Visionary Metals should be looking forward to in terms of news flow, future milestones for the company that could provide a re-rating on the share price?
Speaker 2We're starting a drill program in about a week. We've got eight different targets. The targets are very large. Drilling is typically where you see the most value creation in the mining space. So it's discovery in building on those discoveries. And so King Solomon, we're building on 2022 hit and trying to define some higher grade zones in that system that could really expand and put us kind of on the track of an initial resource, right? At Tin Cup, that's an asset that's never been drilled. We see all the things that we hope to see when you're looking for magmatic nickel sulfide systems. So we see the ultramafic rocks. We see big conductive bodies of rock associated with surface nickel and copper mineralization. So these are big targets that we're going to be drilling this year. So there's going to be a lot of news flow. And I think it's a value opportunity. The nickel commodity price has been depressed for the last couple of years. Guys like Rick Rule and Eric Sprott are now talking about nickel and saying, hey, there's some real value in nickel explorers, especially nickel sulfide in North America. So I think we've got a nice chance to get a re-rating. And if I look back at my career, I'm also an investor, right? I mean, I've never made a return on a $100 million company. It's always the ones that are 10 to 20 million valuation that on a new discovery can go to 100, 200 million pretty quick. And so I like our chances with this year's drill program. And we're excited to start proving ourselves right on the exploration work that we've done and creating some real value for shareholders with the drill program.
Speaker 1Great. Well, I'm going to put a link in the description below to Visionary Metal's website, as well as social media for people who want to follow along with the company. Wes, fantastic conversation. Really appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks a lot, Jesse. Commodity Culture is a podcast that covers investing in commodities and natural resources. If you'd like to hear more, be sure to subscribe so you are always alerted of the latest episodes. you
PodcastTranscript AI