00:00 So, I keep hearing about nuclear demand, how it's affecting AI. Everyone's saying that we have energy needs. So, what's going on with nuclear? How does it affect AI and all that stuff? >> Well, we're seeing a lot more action in terms of nuclear power and probably a lot more action now than talk.
00:17 I think if you went back a few years and people were announcing a nuclear renaissance and we were getting back into the nuclear business, there was a lot of talk, but it was just that where they're worried about the environment and nuclear is good for the environment. It's good for base load power. It can deliver tons and tons of electricity that other forms of power sources can't.
00:37 But I think the difference now is, well, one, we're seeing tech get into it, right? So you see somebody like a Microsoft being connected with Three Mile Island. What the heck is that all about? Well, Microsoft didn't necessarily decide to turn on Three Mile Island again. Three Mile Island was shut down because it wasn't economic to run it.
00:58 When Microsoft went to the utility that owns it and said, "We want to contract this much power out for this many years," all of a sudden it became economic to do that again. But we are seeing the Amazons of the world, the Googles of the world actually getting right into it because we're now seeing all of these data centers requiring immense amounts of electricity and power that doesn't exist right now.
01:20 You can't just plug it into the grid. The lights would all dim. So where does this power come from? And so now it's really coming back to nuclear. Nuclear power is again, it's base load. It doesn't stop when the sun goes down or when the wind stops blowing and you get a lot of it. So that's been a lot of what has brought it back.
01:41 Plus a lot of the new technologies around SMRs, small modular reactors, we're seeing that come into play. So they can actually be deployed quicker, cheaper and that's a good thing. We're seeing micro reactors. You can literally drag them behind a truck. So you can use nuclear power in remote settings.
01:58 If you're building a mine, if it's a remote community, you could literally power this thing from a small reactor. They're getting one set to go up to the moon to power all the stuff they're going to do up there. So there is a lot of real activity happening now around building reactors, around governments getting behind it who weren't before, around extending the life of reactors that were getting ready to be shut down.
02:23 And again, all of this as it comes back to uranium is that's the fuel. And so for all this talk and all this demand that is growing and being piled on top of each other, where's the fuel coming from? Who's providing that fuel? And can it keep up with that demand? >> Elon Musk was saying, I was following him on X and he's like the biggest choke point for data centers and this whole AI boom is energy demands.
02:48 He's like people don't realize how much energy we need. I talked to you before and you're saying, remember you mentioned before, we're using more uranium than we're replenishing. There's a choke point happening there but then there's a choke point with AI and there's a real demand from all tech. What does that create? Uranium, is there opportunity? Something happening there?
03:07 >> Oh, absolutely. So, and you're right, the first choke point for the data centers is getting the power and contracting enough of it to keep things going, but as you go down the chain of command, the next thing you run into is the supply and the fuel. So when you turn on a reactor, you've got a customer for life or at least for 40 years.
03:31 And what's interesting about the demand side is it's very well understood and projected. So I know once I turn on a reactor, I know every year how much more uranium I have to turn over, what I have to put into it, and I can line that thing up. And so demand is pretty well understood moving off into the future.
03:52 The problem is the supply on the other side. So as you mentioned, I think for the last 3, 4 years or so the world's been producing about 20 to 30% less uranium than we have been consuming and that was possible because of a lot of the uranium inventory stores that were built up right after Fukushima, because at that time we saw Japan shut down about 10% of the world's nuclear fleet.
04:15 At the same time we also saw Kazakhstan pumping a lot of low-cost uranium into the market. So all of these things caused the uranium price to drop well below the price of what it cost to produce it, to mine it, and to turn it into fuel. So we weren't doing it. But you can't turn things on again that quickly.
04:33 And that's the problem. As those inventories run out, as we get to that point where we can't just rely on what's coming out of the ground, we have a gap. And I can safely say that we are right now in the middle of a structural supply gap on the uranium side.
04:53 So unlike a lot of other products where supply and demand kind of balance things out and price, when demand goes up, price goes up, supply goes up because we try and fill that hole. In this case, demand is going up. We are seeing the price of uranium going up significantly. But supply can't catch up that quickly because it takes a decade to turn a mine on from nothing.
05:15 And that's the challenge. So as uranium prices go up, more money comes into the sector for mining, for processing. But now we have to go out and find more. And so now that I have the money to find more, that may take me a few years actually to find out where it's living. And then a bunch more years again to actually start pulling it out of the ground and have it in a state that I can put it in a reactor.
05:39 So, you're talking about a 10-year gap. And I'll mention that on our website purepoint.ca, if you go to Uranium Spotlight, we have got a massive amount of content on the topic and on the subject of uranium. We've got some early primers just to give you the basics of supply demand and the uranium industry and how it works.
05:59 We've got some white papers that talk about this supply demand issue. And what we've definitely seen is that the structural deficit that we're in right now can't be repaired in the near term. Maybe over the next 10, 12 years it can be, but right now we are essentially running out of uranium and you're going to see the price of uranium go through the roof.
06:20 >> You can check out that link in the description below. That's the only reason why I know anything about uranium is because I read through all and I've listened to your podcast and everything so I know all this. We had Professor Harry Videlar on the podcast like a year ago when he was looking at tech and investing in AI.
06:36 He was investing down the chain and he was investing from energy up and he was talking about uranium, but then in uranium there's a whole other chain and it starts with exploration where you're involved all the way up to basically a layman investor for like ETFs. You want to walk me through that chain, especially the exploration side, because you just mentioned we have a 10-year lag.
06:59 We have a supply and demand issue actually. So, you're kind of relying now on the exploration side to be like, can you go find some more of this stuff? And then >> So you're talking about the investment chain really. How do I invest in this stuff from the bottom? >> Essentially. >> Yeah. And I will start from the top down actually, because as you move down that ladder, your reward, and your speculation becomes greater and greater, but it's, you have to evaluate that
07:26 investment on your own. So at the one end, if you want to literally invest in uranium itself, that's hard to do because we're not allowed to keep that under our mattress. So what you can do is there's a firm called Sprott Physical Uranium Trust or SPUT and it trades on the Toronto venture here, Toronto Stock Exchange, and what they do is all the money that they raised goes into acquiring, buying physical uranium and having it stored.
07:56 So you're looking at pretty much a pure investment in the commodity itself and it's one of the few ways you can do that. There are a number of ETFs. There's a number of broad metal ETFs you can get involved with. There's nuclear ETFs that are looking at companies right across the chain from the reactors down to the fuel stuff.
08:18 There's also mining and junior ETFs as well. So if that's your niche, those exist, as do the nuclear utility ETFs. When we get right down into the companies though that make up those baskets, next you're looking at your producers. And of course the problem in the uranium world is there's not a lot of companies.
08:41 There's not a lot of us out there. So when you're looking at producers, they're going to be the most immediately impacted by the price of uranium rising and those would be the likes of a Cameco, Kazatomprom, which trades in London, Energy Fuels down in the US, Uranium Energy Corp. So there are a number of producers but no more than a small handful and they're of course going to be directly impacted by the price of uranium.
09:06 You go down the list, now we're into the developers and these are the ones that we're relying on to fill a lot of that gap that we talk about, and these are companies that have deposits, have resources and are in the process of turning those into mines, and those are companies like Denison Mines, NextGen Energy. There's a handful but again only a handful. The next layer down, now you're looking at exploration, that's what we do, and you're going to get your most torque out of something like that because we
09:35 know we're talking about essentially small-cap exploration companies that have the potential to increase overnight by 100, a thousandfold, because we're finding this stuff. And most of those exploration companies you find do operate in northern Saskatchewan, Canada, up in the Athabasca Basin, and the reason being is that area of the world not only produces the highest grade uranium in the world but it also continues to produce the most deposits. Over the last 50 years there's been 40 deposits found there, totaling
10:07 about 2 billion pounds of uranium. 40 deposits and they're not getting smaller. They're actually going the other way. The last one that was identified was by a company called IsoEnergy and they found what's called the Hurricane deposit and it's a little less than 50 million pounds, but its average ore grade is 45%.
10:26 Which is insane. You can't get near that stuff. It doesn't come out of the ground normally that way. It is a bit of a freak show. So this is what's happening in the basin, this is why you're going to find a lot of junior exploration companies up there. And you're also going to be looking for, if you're looking at exploration, then to your point, you have to understand the timeline, because what we're finding is the exploration companies, unlike the producers, aren't necessarily lifting up
10:52 with the tide. They're not just going up based on pure commodity price and they won't, because there's nothing in the warehouse yet. So you're looking at them through a different lens. You're looking for companies that are well structured, have a good capital structure, because part of the problem with being a junior exploration company is you're continuously flushing out shares and shares and it gets very thick and heavy and after a while you run out of highway.
11:16 So you're looking for a tight capital structure. You're looking for companies that are working more than one little project. You need to be working a lot of property and a lot of projects to increase your odds. Know that millions of dollars are typically spent before your first discovery hole is hit and you're typically drilling dozens of holes before that first good hole comes in.
11:37 So these are sort of things you have to watch. So if you want to get into the exploration end of this stuff where, like I say, your typical upside is in the hundreds to thousands times payback. NextGen, which was a $40 million company, is now worth 10 billion dollars.
11:58 I mean, that's over a matter of a short period of time. You have to keep an eye on, tick those boxes. What are the criteria you're looking for? You'd have to look at management. You have to look at properties. You've got to look at how they present the results and how often they present the results, capital structure.
12:15 As I said, another thing is partnerships. We at Purepoint, our primary projects are actually joint ventured with the likes of Cameco, Orano, IsoEnergy to mention a few. And what that does for us is it allows us to share those costs with those people. So we're getting checks written by people who have much bigger bank accounts than us who are backing those projects, who appreciate the value of those projects.
12:44 Therefore, our investors can appreciate the value of those projects. And in all cases, in our case, we're the operator. That means that we're the ones out in the field. We're the ones doing the exploration work. We're the ones suggesting the programs and they are, if you will, watching over our shoulder, make sure that we're doing things right.
13:02 But at the end of the day, we are acting as their exploration arm. And that's something that we're very proud of. So all of those things you want to keep an eye on. And again, more than one; to put all your eggs in the one basket doesn't make sense in the case of exploration companies.
13:18 And do have your checklist of things you're watching for. If they do find something and they're looking at what appears to be a discovery and they're tapping into something good, follow it closely and make sure that it is turning into something and it wasn't just a fluke and rolling back on you.
13:33 So you do have to keep a closer eye, but again, the upside is ridiculous. >> I've talked to a couple pretty notable people about exploration companies for uranium. I talked to Rick Rule. He's a commodities guy. He's into uranium exploration. I also talked to a guy named Benjamin Cohen.
13:52 He's best known for Bitcoin, but he's also a nuclear physicist. So, he's huge into uranium. Me talking to nuclear physicists. Great conversation. So he's also huge into uranium and exploration companies as well, right? So I talked to him near the end of our podcast about it and his whole thing is he has a hard time recommending them because of the risk side of it.
14:15 He's like the same as you, 100x but they're so volatile. Rick was doing the same sentiment. He's like I would talk about it but they're so volatile, but they're 100x. Obviously they're appealing to my behavior because I kind of like that sort of, people know this about me. I'll go towards something that's volatile. It's within my risk profile.
14:33 >> You were talking about partnerships. You were talking about having a list of stuff with Purepoint. Can you talk a little bit more about the partnership? Does that reduce your risk over at Purepoint when you bring on those partners? And does everyone know? Do they all know your partners, like hey we're drilling behind it on our first drill? Everyone knows the game.
14:55 They know no one's going to freak out if it's been a year. >> Yeah, absolutely. So what it provides us with, it provides us with a variety of things. First, money, right? So in the case of IsoEnergy, we have a massive land package. It's close to 100,000 hectares that we assembled.
15:14 We actually got together, put our projects on the table and wrapped them all up and now it's this big district, and that's where we've recently discovered our Nova zone where we were hitting over 8% in uranium. In that case, it's a 50/50 partnership. So we can go out and spend $3 million, which we're in the process of doing right now this summer.
15:34 I only have to come up with half of that. So that means I have to raise less money. I have to dilute myself less. So from a financial standpoint, it means I can put more money in the ground, spend more money, and it costs me less. On top of that, because we're the operator and we're the ones actually executing on the exploration programs, we get paid back a management fee.
15:55 So on that $3 million, I get $300,000 back. So it doesn't cost me a million and a half, it only costs me 1.2. So that's the kind of math. So financially that works out. And it's the same with our other projects. With Smart Lake, we own 27%. Cameco owns the other 73%. And in terms of Hook Lake, we own 21 and the rest of it is split evenly between Orano, which is a French company, huge nuclear French company, and
16:26 Cameco. So they're providing the lion's share of the financing, but we're doing the work. We're getting paid to do the work. And quite frankly, I'd rather own 27% of a deposit than 100% of some blank real estate. So that's always been our goal. And we've got more runway because of the financial backing. That's one thing we get from them.
16:44 The other thing we do get is validation on these projects. They wouldn't be writing checks for projects that they didn't think had the potential to deliver a tier one asset. So we're out there looking for 100 to 150 million pounds of uranium. If it's something short of that, they can't gear themselves up for that.
17:05 And we've had that situation with Hook. We did find a deposit called Spitfire. And once we had done enough work on it to identify the fact that it was maybe 10, 15, 20 million pounds tops, we moved on because we can't add a zero to that number. So they actually keep us honest, right? We're not just going to keep drilling the heck out of that thing and putting out great big silly numbers.
17:29 Meanwhile, we're drilling into something that we know will never be mined. They keep us honest and they wouldn't be cutting checks on any of these projects if their technical people hadn't told them this is where we should be spending our money. So in very few juniors do you have to stand up and justify your programs to a major.
17:51 So it validates for the investors who haven't got the ability to actually dig in on the geological side and determine whether they're putting holes in the right place. All of our work is validated by our partners. >> One reason I focus on the Saskatchewan Athabasca Basin, especially for exploration, is actually talking to you when you explained the purity levels and the difference between what you get there.
18:17 Can you explain that for a layman? Also, another reason is because it's so hard to get, I'll just say permitting, setting everything up in different regions. If you go to Kazakhstan, you're dealing with their government. You're going to all these different areas. There's enough stuff that can get in your way.
18:33 Dealing in Canada seems like it would just be easier. Nothing's easy, but easier than doing it somewhere else in a different country. And then the purity level. Can you talk about that? Because those are the two things I like about exploration in Saskatchewan. >> Well, on the Saskatchewan side, Saskatchewan has consistently for the last 10 years been ranked either the top or one of the top mining jurisdictions on the planet because we do have very mature permitting, very mature regulatory laws and
19:02 relationships with communities and First Nations, etc. It's a very mine-friendly, exploration-friendly place to work unlike a lot of other places, and so absolutely working in Saskatchewan is a blessing. In terms of the ore grade, as you mentioned, typically uranium around the world is, and understand that Canada provides about 20 to 25% of the world's uranium, 40% comes out of Kazakhstan and then we start chipping away at it after that.
19:34 Canada in this particular area, the Athabasca Basin, has ridiculously high ore grade, and when I say ore grade, when I pull a rock out of the ground, how much of that rock is actually the mineral I'm looking for, right? If you're looking for copper it might be 4% or 0.8% or something. Uranium is typically mined around the world at about 0.
19:58 5% and it's processed out of that. The two biggest operating mines right now in northern Saskatchewan have ore grades of 20%. That's insane. >> I guess you don't pull any commodity out of the ground at 20% purity, but that's what's going on here. As I mentioned before, the Hurricane zone, which is owned by IsoEnergy, 45%.
20:18 That's the average, which is crazy. So, like I say, over the 50 years there have been 40 different deposits identified and either mined or waiting to be, and they are all for the most part north of 1%. Anything over 1% is considered high grade, but the average over the years is like 10.
20:39 So it's highly prolific. It keeps coming up with more and the ore grade is ridiculous. And so where that matters when you're mining is I could mine at 2% or I can mine at 20%. Well, if I'm mining at 2% that means I have to process 10 times as much rock to get the same amount of uranium out of it.
21:00 And what's more, I'm going to create 10 times more tailings that I have to be permitted for. So yeah, that's where it comes into play. And when you hear exploration companies running around going, "Well, we're in the middle of the Athabasca Basin and there's all kinds of infrastructure up here and there's three or four mills."
21:18 Well, don't think for a minute those mills have got all kinds of capacity waiting for your rock to show up, and if you're finding a deposit, drilling off a deposit at half a percent, which is decent ore grade, you can't just truck that rock up to McClean Lake and put it in their mill because it's not set up for that.
21:38 So it's a high-grade district, and it's always going to be high-grade or nothing up there. >> Okay. I got questions for myself. I got questions for viewers of the channel. So, anyone watching, I own spot uranium. I own exploration companies. I have shares of Purepoint Uranium. So this is relevant to me, just for transparency.
21:59 Also, a lot of viewers on our channel after your first podcast appearance, they became shareholders of Purepoint and stuff. So this is purely for me as an investor and other investors watching. What's going on with you guys? What's happening? Have you had all that drilling stuff that was going on this year? Can you just give me, in layman's terms, explain it to me in normal terms what's happening with all the drilling stuff you're doing and what are you guys doing over summer? What can I expect from you guys so
22:23 I don't have to read a press release and stuff, what's going on? >> Yeah, we do. We've got a lot of things going on and so I'll focus on one and explain that to you. For instance, the area that we put together with IsoEnergy, if you look at it on the map, if this is the basin, there is a mine trend that runs up the eastern edge of it and that's where all the mines, right now operating mines, exist. At the very north
22:51 end of that, in the shallow area, we have now put together about 100,000 hectares of property that are adjacent to this 45% ore grade deposit that sits up there. By doing that, we actually put together all these small projects and you can stand back and get a better look at the geology.
23:09 I mean, this stuff is huge. So we've got trends and structure. This is what we look for. When you're looking for uranium, you're looking for structure somewhere that the uranium could have deposited itself. Uranium is mobilized through a lot of heat, a lot of oxygen, not in my lifetime, but back in the day when it was moving, and as it finds a place to rest or deposit, that's where it goes.
23:36 When it's moving at that great heat, it's also altering the rock that it's running into. And that's another indicator. So when I talk about structure, we're not looking for faults so much as we're looking for areas of soft rock like graphite where it might have done something like that instead of just fracturing when it moves.
24:02 So that's the clues we're looking for, and again, we're dealing with a lot of geophysics. So from the air, from the surface, we're trying to figure out what's underneath us. We're looking for structure. We're looking for where different types of rocks are coming together. We're looking for graphite which is prevalent throughout the basin and it's easily picked up with geophysics.
24:23 And then when we start poking holes in this stuff, obviously we're looking for uranium, but we're also looking for that alteration, that halo around a deposit that would indicate that there was a mineralization event moved through the area. And of course, like I say, you're looking for uranium.
24:40 And you may find uranium in these structures and then start to chase it to figure out where it came from or where it went. So it is really a hunting exercise with a lot of science behind it. And like I say, millions of dollars are spent before you even put a drill in the ground. We've been at this long enough that all of that preliminary information, we now have.
25:00 And again, when we did this consolidation of projects with IsoEnergy, it allowed us to accumulate all of that science that's been done and all those surveys and create a master map, which has been quite interesting to go back to now. So we're at a stage now where 90% of what we're doing is drilling, and that's of course the more exciting aspect; you don't really know what's down there till you poke a hole in it.
25:23 So last year we started testing a number of targets we had in the region and we came upon what we're now calling the Nova zone and it was an area of high uranium mineralization. Like I say, it got up to 8%, which is exciting. It had all the other indications we look for and now we're trying to follow it and chase it up.
25:44 In that particular case, I'm just storytelling, but in that case, the problem we had, we drilled four holes there and it was in the summer and there was a bog right beside us where we wanted to keep drilling and we can't plant a drill in the middle of a bog. So we had to wait till winter and so it's all frozen and we can drag a drill out there and we're safe to go again.
26:04 So we were back there this past winter. We drilled another nine holes. We moved away as far as close to a kilometer away and started working back, and we're identifying mineralization all along that structure. So we're now creating a map of the area underground where we understand where this mineralization's come from and where it might be forming in a much bigger, more mineable, if you will, manner.
26:29 And that's what we're back to now. So we are back up there as of this week, and it's a helicopter project, which is never fun because it's twice as expensive to drag a drill around by helicopter, but that's what we're doing. We're going to be going back to that Nova zone again, trying to figure out where all this uranium is coming from.
26:49 And if all works in our favor, we're the next big deposit. We'll see what happens. >> When you're drilling and you're going out like a kilometer, here's an arbitrary number. 10 is a lot of uranium. 10 is a good reading. One is a low reading. You go out a kilometer, you get a two, you come in half a kilometer, you get a four.
27:09 You go to the left, you get a three. Is it like Battleship, where you're getting closer and closer to where? >> A lot more scientific than that, but yes. See, so what we would do, because based on the initial drilling, we understood where we thought the structure went. So you draw a line and you go up to the other end of it and hope you can hit that same structure. That's where it in fact was.
27:31 We did find it and then you can start following it back with some granularity. It's Battleship if you want to play that. But I will tell you that most drill holes in the basin come up with absolutely no uranium. That's the game. And typically anything north of 0.
27:49 05% you need to follow up. Anything a half a percent or above, that's a significant discovery. That's a find that again, now you need to spend a lot of time figuring out where the hell that came from, because it could be sitting on the edge of something that is 10%, not 0.5. >> How large is one of these drill holes in comparison to the entire property? Is this literally like a needle in a haystack when you first start doing this and now you've triangulated it? >> Yes. I did this once and somebody said,
28:20 "Don't ever tell that story again." A typical deposit is about the size of the Statue of Liberty. >> Okay. Yeah. >> Sitting on a project that is roughly the size of >> and buried half a mile underground. >> Okay. That changes it. That's wild. I feel like this is the closest thing we have to old-school gold rush prospecting with modern science, right? You're using everything you possibly can.
28:51 You have a helicopter out there. You have all these smart scientists. You're just looking at all the overlays. I get it. But still, it's crazy how you still have to get in there, have to drill, have to take samples. And then that just kicks off a decade-long process from the moment you even find something to the time it's in an actual reactor.
29:07 And that's kind of what brings us full circle back to supply and demand. We started this with, hey, AI needs energy. And you're saying, "Yeah, by the way, we have to dig a hole and find this stuff underground. It doesn't just come out of nowhere."
29:23 I think that helps people get the full picture of what's really going on here. That's where it starts. >> And you're right about the analysts, about Rick Rule, about these folks, that it's hard for them to cover exploration because of that, because the odds are they're going to be wrong and that's not good for their business.
29:41 >> Yeah. >> So they kind of have to stay away from it. But the fact is this is where you turn a $100 investment into a $10,000 game. And that's the game we play. But you have to be a little more diligent and watch it a little more carefully.
30:00 But I also don't want people walking away thinking that we're throwing darts at a map. >> Yeah. >> We can take a Long Island and we can immediately, through a lot of geophysics, eliminate 90% of it as being prospective for uranium, and then you're doing a lot of work and there's a lot of science around narrowing things down to proper targets, and once you've identified your targets and you put them
30:30 in order, you drill the top one, and before you drill another hole you reprioritize things constantly. So there's a constant prioritization going on and that's what we do, that's the business. >> Do you feel like when you're dealing with your partners, you have me, the investors, once we have confirmed, okay, we got good management, we got good partners, we got a good plot of land, we've triangulated within an area that there could be something here.
30:58 It's now really up to yourself, me, the investor, your partner to be like, let's just chill now. Let's just go through the process, drill some holes, be patient, and just follow the steps. Let's not just get excited over whatever. Let's not get discouraged. That's just, this is essentially the best we can do in these circumstances.
31:14 We all know the game we're playing here with exploration, but we're doing everything the right way where we have real data backing up that we found. We look like something promising here now. It's just up to everyone to stay calm and all the boring >> That is it. I mean, you don't stay calm to the point of stupidity.
31:32 But >> yeah, >> there is an element of, it's geology. This molten ball called Earth at some point hardened up and left stuff here, there, and everywhere. So if there is no uranium on my project, then I'll never find it, no matter how promising it looks.
31:50 And that's the thing that we can't control. But what you can control is improving your odds, right? Don't just focus on one thing, and if that dies out, you're dead. You're gone. You need to better your odds. You need to put a lot of science into it. You need to spend a lot of time; you drill some holes, spend a lot of time digesting that data, that information, before you drill some more holes to figure out what direction you should be going into.
32:15 This thing is a swirling mass under there. And it's not always easy to figure out where this thing went, where it's going, where it came from. Is it up? Is it down? Is it left? You have to spend a lot of time understanding it, and with people that have seen it before.
32:31 That's the other thing. We're going back to holes that we drilled 20, 25 years ago where we were looking at a rock going, I have no clue what the heck that is. Now we do, because we've seen it 40 more times elsewhere. So experience also has a lot to do with this, and understanding what the rock looks like and what it means to look at something and know, okay, wait a minute, that's highly altered, whatever, and that's indicative of this, that and the other thing. So it's a
33:00 process. It's a process and yes, I think investors need to stay on top of it. They need to know when the jig is up. They need to know when the press releases are getting more promotional than actually informational, and that happens too.
33:19 I'll tell you something else we did recently and maybe this is of interest, but because we've been doing podcasts now every week for a bunch of years, we do a monthly newsletter with everybody's press releases in it. We've got more data and content on this industry than we even care to know.
33:35 Well, we're all playing with AI these days and stuff. So we pointed it at all of our data and we said, "Okay, here's 5 years' worth of press releases on 40 uranium companies in the basin and here's five years of their daily stock prices. Look at these press releases and tell me what impact they had on their stock price and how we would look at it."
33:57 And it was rather interesting. See, the problem we have in this business is we've kind of mucked things up. We haven't, but I think others have, because we'll use terms like it's off scale. We've hit uranium and it's off scale, which means our scintillometer is just going 99999. Yeah.
34:16 So maybe that's a good thing and it probably is a good thing, but when you read carefully, you realize that the instrument they're using goes well beyond 99999. They just defined anything over 500, we're going to call it off scale, or it's peak: we waved this thing around till we got the highest possible number and that's the one we're going to put in our press release. Or composite mineralization is another one we love, where okay, I hit half a meter here and down about 100 meters I hit another
34:43 three meters of this and then one meter, and they add it all up together and they call it composite mineralization, and so it's like, oh, we hit 10 meters, whatever. Well, you can't mine that with a tweezer. So that's not going to work. Anyways, back to my story.
35:03 We said, "Okay, when we put out these press releases, what is the effect?" How badly are we fooling the market with all the fancy words we try to use and the promotion that we try and do? And what came back was rather interesting. There were a few things. First of all, when juniors put out exciting news and their volumes go up, a lot of that volume is people getting out; they're using that volume and that excitement to exit. >> Right. >> So we saw that clearly in the numbers. And
35:34 what would happen is the stock could go back up. If it was really good news, day one the stock could go up and then day three it comes back down. Day five, it's gone back up to where it should be. So the message there is when the news comes out and it excites you, yeah,
35:49 give it a day. [laughter] >> Yeah. >> We found that 60% of the companies that were releasing counts per second, "we've got mineralization up to 350 counts per second" (is that good, Gary? Would you know?) >> I don't even know. >> I don't. Well, 60% of those types of press releases never put out the assays associated with those counts per second, because they probably came in at something so embarrassing it wasn't worth a press release, things like that. So, but what
36:21 we did see was that the market was efficient about it. So when you looked at the 650 press releases that it was evaluating, half of them were drill results. So a drill result can be a technical success, which means I didn't find anything, or it could be I found some mineralization, or I found great big counts per second, or I found some assay, some grade, good grade, great grade, whatever.
36:44 No matter how you dance up the press release, no matter what adjectives you use, how you try and make it sound like you've hit god knows what, you'll create whatever noise you do on day one, by day three it's all lost, and by day five it's actually where it's supposed to be. That was the interesting part, that the market was far more efficient than we've been giving it credit for, because we agonized way too long over every word in our press release.
37:11 The market just wants the facts. Give me the facts. Give me the numbers. Tell me what you did. Tell me what you've done. We'll digest it and we'll tell you what you're worth. So that was an interesting exercise. And so people should also be watching the press releases and taking their time and determining for themselves what they think that means.
37:30 And if it doesn't mean anything to them, it probably is nothing. >> That's super interesting. Now I'm going to be thinking about that every single time. I'll read it now. I'm going to be watching obviously the stock prices and stuff the first 24 hours, but even then it's like how you said, the market is really efficient.
37:48 It does a good job of digesting it over the course of one business week, a couple days, and being like, "All right, what is actually going on here?" And then it gets priced fairly. That's encouraging in a lot of ways. That's like, "Okay, good." And then you as a CEO can be like, "Great.
38:02 I can just give people the facts. I don't have to pretty it up too much. I don't have to do all this other song and dance. Here's what's going on." >> Well, one of the reasons we did it is because we've always tended to be that way. We've always tended to put out our press releases as very factual. Of course, we present it in the most positive way humanly possible, in an explainable way and whatever, but we do get criticized a lot because, why didn't you put your handheld, or why didn't you put that
38:25 table in there? Why didn't you call it this and why didn't you do that? And that's why we went back and looked to see maybe we were missing the boat here. It was quite fascinating to realize that no, the market's smarter than we are. >> Well, that's super interesting. All right, I think we covered everything.
38:41 I now know how AI and uranium are tied. I think everybody understands the problem that we have ahead of us. Just not enough uranium to go around. It takes forever. The purpose and how exploration companies tie into all of this. Chris, I really appreciate you jumping on the podcast again. >> Absolutely. Oxin.