Title: Frank Giustra: This Is a Forever War. Own Gold and Copper Show: Mining Network (recorded at the Rapallo mining event, Italian Riviera) Guest: Frank Giustra (CEO, Fiore Group; board member and former chair, International Crisis Group) Date: 2026-09-15 URL: https://youtu.be/NF4r9k34F5Y Length: 37:49 Note: YouTube auto-transcript pasted by Stephen. Fillers (um/uh) and stutters removed; auto-caption names corrected (Gustra -> Giustra, Fiori Group -> Fiore Group, Rapalo -> Rapallo, Ovietto -> Orvieto, Crisis Or -> International Crisis Group, Yelson -> Yeltsin, straight of horses/straight horm/straight armor moves -> Strait of Hormuz, Mbridge -> mBridge, Koala Lumpur -> Kuala Lumpur, Riyad -> Riyadh, escandido -> Escondida, Makoa -> Mocoa, Saraphino Yako -> Serafino Iacono, Molly -> moly (molybdenum), Traffigura -> Trafigura, Aerys/Nerys -> Aris, Siggoia -> Segovia, Bessant -> Bessent, pea/PE -> PEA, Yemenes -> Yemenis). "Daenerys" before Iacono's name at 26:04 kept as spoken (unresolved). The 20:52-22:40 segment is a SPONSOR READ for Outcrop Silver (TSX: OCG) inserted by the channel — not Giustra's view; marked [Sponsor read]. Wording otherwise verbatim. Giustra discloses he controls Copper Giant (Mocoa) and co-founded Aris Mining.
00:07 Frank Giustra, CEO of Fiore Group. Mate, thanks for coming to Rapallo. I've been trying to persuade you of coming for a while. I know you've got your olive oil business down in Orvieto. I'd love to go and do a harvest with you there, but is this your first time in the Italian Riviera? >> It is, and it's beautiful.
00:22 When I was flying in today, I was going, "My god, this place is really, really pretty." >> Yeah. You know what? We get people here that say, you know, this is a nice place. I hear it's a bit of a zoo in the summer, though. >> July and August is nuts. Yeah, we actually think the best time of year is now, September and June, cuz the weather's nice, but you haven't got like boatloads of tourists piling in all the time.
00:39 >> It's great. No, I want to have a tour tomorrow and have a look. >> Yeah, we're going to treat you to some fantastic Italian food tonight. >> Well, you know, I love Italian food. >> I know you. >> I should have brought my olive oil. >> Yeah, well, exactly. Next time. I forgot. Come back next time.
00:53 >> Yeah. We've got Koko, who's a Michelin star pastry chef. She works at Il Convivio Michelin star down in Rome. And Vera runs a fish truck. Has this whole community around her over near Venice and she's the best fish. >> I'm looking forward to tonight.
01:10 I love Italian food. >> Yeah, >> I grew up with it. >> I'm Italian. So, >> so Frank, look, I know you're in the mining business. We're here at the Rapallo event, which is about financing mines with good people. But maybe we can start with geopolitics. I know you've recently stepped down as the chair of International Crisis Group, which is about stopping wars, not letting wars go by, and there's a lot of wars in the world right now.
01:36 What insights do you get on geopolitics and where these wars are going and maybe we can end up at mining? >> Yeah. Well, we'll definitely end up at mining because it's all relevant to metals and metals is relevant to mining. >> So, yeah. Now, it's called the International Crisis Group. Okay. And it's based in Brussels.
01:52 We have analysts all over the world in all of the hot spots all over the world. We're on the ground and our analysts are talking to everybody. We try and talk to all sides. So we'll talk to Iran, we'll talk to Hezbollah, you know, we'll talk to both sides of the Sudan civil war.
02:09 You know, what we're trying to do is find that common ground. So we have our people on the ground. We do our reports from the ground. Off of those reports we develop policies and from those policies we go out and advocate for whatever we feel the solutions might be to avoid deadly conflict. So I've been doing this for 21 years.
02:28 I spent the last six years as chair. I just stepped down as chair. I'm still on the board and it is an incredible organization for learning. I mean what I've learned in 21 years. I thought I knew geopolitics. I knew nothing. And what you read in the newspapers and hear on TV is not what's really happening on the ground.
02:49 Whether you're watching it in North America or you're watching in another part of the world, you're going to get a biased view of what's actually going on on the ground. And so we get a pretty truthful view of the situation. So in the world today, we have a few hot spots. Yes. You have Ukraine, Russia or NATO, Russia.
03:10 >> Yeah. You've got Iran, US or US, Israel, Iran and then all the Gulf players in that region and you've got the biggest one of all which is I think the biggest cockfight in the whole geopolitical landscape which is US China rivalry which is going to be the longer term conflict. There's a competition which might turn into a conflict, we don't know, but certainly everybody's gearing up thinking that there will be a conflict at the end of the day with China and the US. And again, that's not guaranteed. It
03:43 may or may not happen, but you have to be prepared with what may happen. Okay? So, let's start with Ukraine. Ukraine and NATO, Russia. What most people don't understand, this is because if you don't understand what the other guy is thinking, why did Putin invade Ukraine? You'll hear the western perspective as to you know he missed the old Soviet Union.
04:13 It was the biggest tragedy of the 20th century was the fall of the Soviet Union. All the things that Putin once said >> but that's not the reason he invaded Ukraine. The reason he invaded Ukraine goes back to the end of the Cold War where Yeltsin told Clinton back then that he thought NATO expansion was a mistake and a problem and he said especially if you get to the Ukraine.
04:41 Okay, so that was said and James Baker the secretary of state back then basically promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand one inch eastward. Okay. Since then, NATO has done the exact opposite. They've incorporated 60 more countries into NATO since the end of the cold war to a total of 32 countries and crouching right on the borders of Russia.
05:04 And you have to think about this from the perspective of, you remember the Cuban missile crisis. Okay. So when the Soviet Union was placing missiles in Cuba, the US did not put up with that and that almost caused World War II back then. So from Putin's perspective, he basically said Ukraine was the last straw in terms of advancing.
05:26 So when there was talk about Ukraine joining NATO after the 2014 election in Ukraine where the Russian candidate was ousted with the help of the CIA and others and MI6. And Putin made a decision then to invade Crimea because he had his whole Black Sea fleet stationed in Crimea and he thought if I lose Ukraine to the West politically I might eventually lose.
05:59 So that was what motivated his invasion of Crimea and then obviously you know things built up and he invaded Ukraine. So what does Putin want and how is this war going to ever end? Well, Putin has demands and the West, NATO and Ukraine don't want to meet those demands because they include guarantees about further NATO expansion, about Ukraine staying neutral, much like Austria stayed neutral, about the amount of military spending and defense infrastructure that Ukraine can have because it's concerned about the
06:34 West creeping up to Russian borders >> and obviously the West is not wanting to do that right now. NATO is definitely and so what's happened instead is you've got NATO now, partially because Trump has now abandoned the support of NATO in a sense that NATO is having to increase their military spending.
07:00 And so there's an objective of 5% of GDP by the NATO countries by 2035. Whether they meet that or not, it's still a lot of money and they're all gearing because now the rhetoric between Russia and the European countries has started to heat up. You know, they're making incredible threats against each other and there's, you know, >> alleged incursions, you know, Russia sending drones into Poland and whatever.
07:26 So, the rhetoric is heating up. So NATO is now wanting to do this buildup and it's going to spend a lot of money doing this buildup because they know that the US is not going to protect them to the extent that they did before and if you look at it for the next 10 years, if they meet those percent of GDP numbers they have to spend about $2 trillion dollars in defense spending >> right >> where does that go? What do you do when you're building defense: tanks, planes, missiles, drones, you name it.
07:58 Everything that requires metals. Okay? So there's going to be an incredible demand by Europe for metals and Europe as you know has very few metals. They have to get them from somewhere else. The irony is that Russia has all these metals and they're the adversary. You had access to all this stuff before and now they don't. Yes.
08:17 So even though we're going to come to a point, and I think that this Ukraine Russia war will grind on quite a bit longer but eventually it's going to end. You're going to have to find a diplomatic solution to the Russia Ukraine thing. But that's not going to change the NATO Russia confrontation.
08:35 So I think this fear of Russia, this paranoia is going to fuel defense spending in Europe to a very large extent for many many years because now we're in a different world. So that's Russia Ukraine. The Iran thing is even more complicated because >> first of all this was a stupid war, should have never happened in the first place. It's very unpopular.
09:02 There was no real, you know, I think the idea was that Israel had convinced Trump that the regime would collapse within a matter of days once they took out the Ayatollah and all his top people. They didn't understand. Anybody that understands Iran and the history of the last 47 years knew that was never going to happen.
09:23 As a matter of fact, all the intelligence services told Trump that this was a bad idea. Okay? Because you're not going to succeed. There's no way. And everybody knew, including us, that the Strait of Hormuz was the issue >> right >> what we didn't guess was how much reach Iran would have against all the military bases in the region in Saudi Arabia with their missiles and their drones, that was not calculated, but certainly the Strait of Hormuz, everybody knew that they could shut down the Strait of Hormuz and
09:50 that's exactly what they did and now Iran's figured out that they have asymmetrical advantage over the US and in their minds they have the upper hand. Okay. Now they're getting dangerously close to overplaying that hand but they don't feel they have any choice because as far as they're concerned Israel and the US wants a regime change and obviously this is an existential issue for them and they're not going to give up.
10:19 As a matter of fact, what they've done instead is they've realized that because they have the upper hand, they can up the stakes and go on the offensive, which is what they've done. They know Trump's got a problem in the midterms, you know, because this is an unpopular war and inflation, the gas prices, all the things that are going up. This is not working.
10:39 So, what Trump is trying to do is to lower the temperature on this conflict until the end of the midterms, right? And then we're all convinced that he's going to really escalate. >> Oh, after the midterms. >> After. Iran seem to be front running that because they know what's going to happen. So they're thinking, well, who's going to run out the clock first.
11:03 So >> the US is trying to degrade Iran's military capabilities. At the same time, Iran is going, "Okay, before that happens, we want to make sure we cause enough damage to the global economy to put a lot of pressure on Trump to back off and come to a deal." The problem is that the demands on both sides are so extreme, there's no deal to be done at the moment. There isn't.
11:23 So, that's why I believe that we're in a forever war right now. And I actually believe that come the end of the midterms, >> whatever happens, Trump, Republicans, win or lose, doesn't matter. Trump is just going to escalate and Iran knowing that and anticipating that might trigger an offensive prior to the midterms and the US knows that as well.
11:48 So we may have an escalation before the midterms because everybody knows what everybody else is up to. >> Wow. >> And so I see, you know, Iran has destroyed most of the bases in the Gulf countries. They're destroyed. America will not admit it >> because you don't read about that and the press will not tell you that but we have access to information. A lot of those bases will never be used again and I think that the US quietly wants to withdraw from the region militarily okay but because of Israel and the relationship
12:18 with Israel they're not going to let go of the Iran issue itself so I think that what's going to happen is that Trump may pull a Hail Mary after the midterms and even deploy ground troops which would be the biggest disaster of all time. It would be a suicide mission, in my opinion, in our opinion.
12:37 >> Why is that? >> Because Iran has been preparing this for years. It's a country of 92 million people. >> Yeah. >> It's a massive country. It's the size of Western Europe. You cannot occupy Iran unless you deploy 1.5 million soldiers. And the US doesn't have, I think the active members in the military are like 400,000. Okay.
13:03 To invade Iran and succeed, as opposed to doing it like we did in Vietnam or Afghanistan, you have to deploy a lot and that's just not going to happen. >> Didn't work in >> it didn't work and it's not going to work again. So I think that what we're seeing here is a forever war. Okay. Much like we saw in Afghanistan. This is going to be something where occasionally the US and/or Israel will go in and bomb facilities, do this, that, try and degrade them militarily, degrade them economically and keep them at bay without succeeding in regime change. Okay. So, what does
13:39 that mean? That means that the Strait of Hormuz is going to still be a problem. And now yesterday they attacked the east-to-west Saudi pipeline. And so they had to shut, that's 7 million barrels a day that they got shut down. The Yemenis, the Houthis have taken over the strait going into the Red Sea now and they've taken over the whole, they beat the government-backed army which is Saudi Arabia backed.
14:04 They took that whole coast to the entrance. Now they beat them all back. Now if the Yemeni government gets it back, but I don't think that's going to happen. The Houthis just did an incredible fast move and took over that whole region. So now they can control the entrance to the Red Sea.
14:21 The Iranians control the entrance to the strait. They're bombing the pipelines which were taking the excess capacity out of Saudi Arabia with the pipeline. So you're going to see continued elevated costs in energy and food which means inflation which means currency debasement which means gold. Okay. So one of the many reasons why you want to own gold is because of this Iran war.
14:49 There are other reasons which I can talk about. You know, Russia, obviously the seizing of the Russian reserves by the West >> basically told every country in the world you can be sanctioned as well. So everybody's trying to move away from a US dollar system and China is leading the charge with the BRICS to create a parallel system that sits outside the US dollar system for everything: settlements, payments, insurance, currency swaps.
15:20 It's an exact mirror system of what the West has created and it's backed by gold. So, China's been buying a lot of gold as everybody's seen, but they have a lot more gold than what they've disclosed. And I've been saying this for seven or eight years now, you just have to look at the physical gold flows into China to say that 2,300 tons, which is what they officially disclose, is not even close.
15:42 Even Goldman Sachs says it's probably 10 times that amount. And I wouldn't be surprised if it's 20,000 tons, 10,000, 20,000. So they're going to use that gold as a backing for the currency, but not in the traditional way that gold used to back currencies. So I came up with this theory six years ago and I started connecting the dots and I said here's what I think is happening.
16:04 You're seeing all this gold being purchased not just by China but by all the BRICS countries. They're buying gold like crazy. Everybody except the West is buying gold in the entire world. At the same time they launched the mBridge project. mBridge is a digital currency settlement between central banks that uses local currencies between China and say Saudi Arabia, China, Thailand, China, whoever's in there.
16:33 >> And the way that I predicted it was going to work was that at the end of every trading period, you're going to have deficits and surpluses. And what everybody was always worried about with respect to the Chinese yuan was: who wants to hold on to yuans? You've got a surplus of yuans.
16:50 Let's say you're Saudi Arabia and you're selling oil to China and buying some goods from China, but you end up with a surplus of yuans. The criticism was always, well, what are you going to do with those yuans? They're not as liquid as dollars. You have currency controls. You know, you got all these things that don't make it an appealing reserve currency.
17:09 And I said, "Well, that's why they're buying the gold." Because what they're going to do is, let's say there's a period, let's say it's a one-year period, Saudi Arabia ends up with a ton of yuans it doesn't want. It can now go to the Shanghai Gold Exchange and exchange those yuans for physical gold.
17:28 And now this fourth step was that China created vaults. The first one's in Hong Kong. There's going to be one in Singapore, one in Dubai, one in Riyadh, one in Switzerland, and one in Kuala Lumpur. I think that's what they have, and the gold will be physically sitting there, China's gold will be sitting there. So that if there's a currency settlement trade for trade, convert your yuans into gold, there's your gold.
17:54 And we have all the gold in the world to be able to do that. That's why I think they have a lot more than >> Yes. So the China US relationship is becoming very awkward. China knows that the US is not friendly, that the US is antagonistic. They've tried the tariffs. They've tried all sorts of things.
18:12 And China's attitude is you know we're not going to be bullied. We're just too strong to be bullied. And they basically gave the West the middle finger. They gave the US the middle finger and said, you know, you put on tariffs. Okay. We'll restrict the export of rare earths and critical minerals.
18:30 So they've got the West by the balls in a sense and so I think that's going to be an ongoing issue and I think that again it just means that gold is going to be becoming a very important part of the monetary architecture of the BRICS led by China. Yes. Okay. >> So you have all of these things and then the last thing is copper. Okay.
18:55 So copper after gold, because gold is my favorite. Everybody knows I've been talking about gold for 25 years. I've been writing about it, I've been speaking about it. I've not been wrong. I started writing about it in 2001. I've said how this was going to play out, the reasons why gold was going higher and I've not been wrong.
19:11 And because of my theory about why gold is going up, I think gold's got a long way to go and I think that the US is in deep doo-doo with respect to their fiscal situation and there's no turning back now, they passed that point of no return a long time ago. I said back in 2009 that they had created an inescapable trap >> yes >> by printing all that money they were never going to be able to unwind that Fed balance sheet and even after COVID in 2020, all the money they printed, they're beyond repair.
19:48 There's nothing they can do to salvage it. As Bessent was saying, you know, we can grow out of this. He knows it's [expletive]. That's just an absolute lie. It's impossible to grow out of a $40 trillion debt pile. Well, you're piling on $2 trillion a year, which is going to go higher.
20:07 Now, their rates are 5% on the 10-year. You know that the average interest that the US government pays is 3.6%. >> Yes. On their current stock of debt. You put that at 5% now you've got $2 trillion a year of interest costs. I mean the numbers are becoming so insane now that there's no repair. >> So you've got that problem.
20:24 You've got, as I said, a laundry list of black swan events brewing in the background whether it's the private equity markets, whether it's yen carry trade, but it all boils down to: the world has a huge problem. I call it a double D huge problem. Debt and derivatives and it's opaque and it's global and it has to unwind.
20:52 Okay, it's going to unwind and it's going to be really ugly. [Sponsor read — Outcrop Silver, inserted by the channel; not Giustra's view:] The silver market is in its sixth consecutive year of structural deficit. Industrial demand from solar, electric vehicles, electronics, and AI continues to rise. This is now amplified by increased monetary demand. As faith in fiat currencies erodes and government debt continues to balloon, investors are actively diversifying away from traditional debt holdings and into silver and gold.
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22:46 Okay. Every financial paper asset is going to get destroyed one way or another, either through inflation or through a collapse or something. It's all going to come to an end. And it happens every 80 to 100 years. This is nothing new, by the way. We think because we never lived 80 to 100 years ago that this is brand new.
23:04 It's all happened before. And anybody that thinks that this time is different, you know, those are the kind of bets that bookies love to take. That this time is different. It's not different. It's the same mistakes, the same level of debt, the same overspending, the same stupidity. And eventually the fiats will get debased and eventually collapse.
23:24 And we're going to have to start again. There's going to be a rebirth, a new monetary system at some point. I don't know when, but between now and then, there's going to be a lot of chaos and paper assets are quickly going to get destroyed and you have to own things that are tangible. So, gold is the primary tangible asset that's also a currency.
23:47 It's the only one that's a currency and a hard asset. You know, you can make money by just taking it out of paper and putting it into scarce real estate, rare art, whatever. Anything that has scarcity, >> right, >> is going to go up in price. Copper, this is again, I was saying gold is my favorite thing. Copper is my next favorite thing.
24:11 And it's very simple. We have a supply deficit shock coming together at the same time there's a demand shock for copper. So where's the supply shock coming from? You've got basically that we've underinvested for the last 30 years. There are no new mines, we just haven't invested.
24:34 It's just lack of investment. All the big mines, Escondida, whatever, dropping grade, dropping output. I think Escondida dropped its output by 3%. It's the first year now in many years that global copper output actually went down. Even at these copper prices output went down because there's been underinvestment.
24:52 You have lower grade, you have more dirt. It requires more energy. It's more expensive. There's been an underinvestment and then you have the global hoarding of critical minerals, because the world order as we know it is as dead as the dodo. It just doesn't exist anymore. All these countries, mostly in the West, because they're behind the eight ball.
25:19 China's been preparing for this for 25 years. The West didn't. And they're playing catch-up. So they're trying to hoard access to as much critical mineral supply chain as they possibly can, in a friendly way, in an unfriendly way, in any way they possibly can.
25:39 But as we all know, the lead time for copper mines, >> oh my god, >> it's a long, you know, it's not a switch you can say, "Okay, tomorrow we're going to have..." And I'm a big investor in a copper project in Colombia, which is one of the >> that's Copper Giant, >> Copper Giant, which I'm controlling shareholder in, and between myself and Daenerys, Serafino Iacono, we control 30% of the company.
26:04 We agreed that we're going to lock our shares up. We're going to see this thing through. There's only less than a handful of 1-billion-plus-ton copper deposits that are near surface, high-grade, and near infrastructure. Okay, there's lots of copper deposits, but some of them are very remote, some of them are very deep, some of them are low grade.
26:30 And what we've got at Mocoa, which is Copper Giant's mine in Colombia, is a perfect ore body. It's currently 1.1 billion tons which I suspect by the time the PEA comes out at the end of the year is going to grow substantially just because of how we're growing the size of the deposit. It's right at surface.
26:49 It's really lovely grade. It's copper-moly. It's the second largest undeveloped moly deposit in the world. And it sits near infrastructure, roads, power. It's at low elevation. It's got a friendly community that wants this mine to be built. >> Have you got a view on moly? Is that important? >> Well, yeah.
27:09 Yeah, moly is important and moly's obviously done very well recently, as all critical minerals have. Do I have a specific view on moly? No, I don't because it's quite volatile. You know, moly goes up and down like a yo-yo. But copper, >> copper is what it's all about. So, I think that with all of that coupled with the fact that we just had an election in Colombia and we have a very pro-business, pro-development, pro-mining, pro-oil-and-gas president who we happen to know, we've known him for a long time. He's
27:45 probably the closest thing you've got to Trump in Latin America in terms of his ideology. >> Oh, no. >> And so you probably saw Marco Rubio went the other day and signed a deal with Colombia. Colombia has always been America's closest ally in South America. And they have already made it very clear that critical minerals, copper, are very important to the national security of Colombia.
28:13 So, they're going to streamline the permitting, and you'll see all of this unfold over the next few months, I think, and you'll see how aggressively Colombia wants to build deposits like Mocoa and put them into production. >> You want to become a copper miner? >> Well, I don't know. So, here's how this is going to play out, one of two ways, okay? And like you and I, we've been in this business a long time, right? You have an ownership in one of these things that requires a couple billion dollars to build because they're not cheap, these massive mines, porphyries.
28:42 So you have two choices: either you bring in strategic partners and build it with them >> which is a possibility, or you sell when somebody offers you a stupid price. The fact that Trafigura just gave us $30 million with an offtake agreement without a PEA tells me that people are getting very desperate to secure these deposits before they get taken away from them by somebody else.
29:10 It's very competitive. So, I suspect that when we put the PEA out at the end of the year, it'll show a value to the thing, and we're moving. We've got four rigs on the property now. We've got 50 million in the bank and we're drilling it and we're going to drill other areas because we have 1,300 square kilometers.
29:28 It's a massive land package and there's other targets there. This is on the same Andean belt as Chile and Argentina. It just has been underexplored. So, as I like to tell people, Colombia has always been known for the hottest Miss Universe contestants, but now Colombia is going to be known for the hottest mineral project opportunities.
29:51 I really think the next four years are going to be insane for Colombia. Really, and we're seeing it now because we're also involved in the oil and gas business, you know, I've been involved in all sorts of businesses. So, I see what they're trying to do and they're going to be courting foreign capital. They're going to need about $4 billion in the next 5 years just to build the kind of mines they want to build in copper and tungsten and cobalt and other things, but mainly copper. It's mainly copper. That's what
30:19 you've got there. So, again, with copper, you've got the supply shock and you've got the demand shock. The demand shock is AI data centers, increased military spending by the US, Europe and almost everybody else, all of these things require copper, all of them.
30:41 The US electrical grid, which was designed in the 60s and the 70s, is not functioning anymore. It needs to be refurbished. You're going to start to get blackouts there. So that's going to cost $5 trillion dollars between now and 2050 to refurbish the US electrical grid.
31:00 What's the US electrical grid? Copper and iron. I mean, that's your grid, right? >> And so you've got all of these demand shocks coming at the same time that there's a supply shock. And what does that mean? That copper is going to go higher. And, you know, copper is around six and a half a pound right now. I think it's going to go higher.
31:20 I think there's no choice. I was talking to the chairman of Rio Tinto, someone I happen to know, last year and we were on a panel together and he said we, Rio Tinto, have no idea where this copper supply is going to come from. Because as you know you can't just put it online. It takes years and years.
31:41 So there's all of this demand. There's reduced supply and what happens? The price has to go up. So, I think for the junior miners, just to summarize all of this, >> you've got to own >> gold. I love gold. You have to own gold because gold's going to go to the moon eventually. I don't know when it's going to do it.
32:01 I've never predicted the gold price. I've always said it's just going to go higher and I haven't been wrong. That's for monetary, geopolitical reasons. The copper stuff is a whole different game, different dynamics that are affecting the copper price and I think it's going to go a lot higher. So if you're a junior or you're an investor, which is I think your audience, if you're an investor, you've got to buy things.
32:26 Size matters, grade matters, location matters. You've got to look at all the things that matter. Buy those things that have size, grade, right location, right politics, and hold on. Hold on for dear life because copper companies are going to get gobbled up like crazy. Just think about it: we only know of five copper deposits such as I just described, near surface, high-grade.
32:57 There's about four or five of them that we're aware of that are not owned by majors. So the majors have no choice, whether it's your Freeport, your Rio, your BHP, whoever you are, you're going to have no choice but to buy some juniors. You have to buy them. So buy assets. Again, I love grade and I love size.
33:16 Because you can't go wrong when you have grade and size. So, I buy early. I buy large and I just hang on and be patient. And that's the only recommendation I can give. Pick what you like, but make sure it has those elements to it and then just go for it. >> So Frank, maybe I can be as bold as to try and sum up what I think you just said very eloquently. We started with wars and unfortunately this Iran war, which is super important to the world's supply of oil and fertilizer >> and sulfur >> and sulfur, which is super important for
33:47 making copper. >> Unfortunately it's going to go on for as far as you can see. >> Putin's going to continue to be posturing against NATO because he's annoyed that NATO is there in his backyard. So Ukraine may gradually peter out but unfortunately that conflict in Europe is also not going away.
34:04 Implication for critical minerals and for energy metals and maybe all commodities, which is why we see the Bloomberg commodity index look on the verge of a breakout, diesel fuel record highs and crack spreads, is most of the commodities are going to go a lot higher because we have to get the prices up and because we've got restricted supply. And to keep it simple for investors, and you've got a great track record in investing in mining companies Frank and giving them capital and management, you think choose a copper asset which has
34:32 size, location and grade, stick with it because copper price can go anywhere, and choose a gold asset which has also got size, location and grade with a capable management team and enough money and hang on for the ride. >> Yeah. Which is like even in gold what I'm doing in Colombia. I've got my company in Colombia, Aris, which is the second largest gold miner in Colombia after the Chinese and will soon be the biggest gold producer in Colombia.
34:55 Size and grade, you know, we have 20-year mine lives. We have the Segovia mine in Colombia. Aris is the second highest grade operating mine in the world, you know, mining 11 grams a ton. So if you've got a long mine life and you've got grade you're going to be just fine, okay, and that's why I helped create it six, seven years ago and I'm just holding on. It's gone from $3 to $30 but I suspect it's going to produce half a million
35:28 ounces this year run rate and it's going to go to a million ounces with the other two mines we're going to put in production over the next four or five years. Why trade? Just own that and just watch the value go up, you know? It's just >> hang on for the ride. So Frank, in closing, it's now September 2026.
35:49 How far through the cycle are we? How many years do we have to hang on for? >> It's a wild guess, right? You know, you don't know. All I know is that I started this business in 1978. >> And I've seen several markets in our sector. Okay. And some last 18 months and some last 10 years. Okay.
36:08 The last one was 10 years, the cycle of 2001-2011. Okay. Which was the best time of my life. Really was. It was unbelievable. This one's going to be bigger and I don't know if it's going to be longer but it's going to be bigger than the last one. Okay, because of the nature of the geopolitics, the competition, the hoarding, the panic buying that's taking place to secure these metals.
36:37 So does it last three years, 5 years, 10 years? I don't know because in that period of time you could also have an implosion of the global economy. It could happen and that would have an impact on critical minerals. It would probably have a positive impact on gold but it would have a negative impact on critical minerals because the state of the economy has an impact on the value of things like copper.
37:04 So if we don't get a global depression I think critical minerals will continue to go higher. If we do get a global depression or collapse, then gold is going to go through the roof and everything else is going to not. >> Gotcha. >> So, but I think we've got five years. I think we've got four or five years before things really potentially implode with respect to the global situation.
37:33 So, you know, projecting past five years is a fool's game anyway. So, listen, we'll all be dead >> at some point. So >> Frank, thank you very much for coming to Rapallo. Let's enjoy some good food, maybe some nice olive oil and some nice wine. >> Yeah. Cheers. Thank you.