Yet Another Value Podcast - Brian Laks covers the #uranium and Nexgen bull cases $NXE

Episode Date: September 4, 2021

Brian Laks, partner at Old West Invest Management, discusses the bull case for uranium. Key topics include why this time could be different, breaking down the supply / demand curve that has him so excited, and discussing why NexGen (NXE) is such an interesting way to play uranium.Brian's twitter account: https://twitter.com/brianlaksKuppy's uranium shortage post: https://adventuresincapitalism.com/20...Chapters0:00 Intro1:30 Uranium overview2:35 What got Old West so excited about uranium?5:05 Discussing the uranium cost curve7:35 Uranium supply / demand imbalance10:15 Uranium's cycles since 200015:15 Why is the cycle happening now?19:15 What's to stop supply from coming on if prices start to rise?25:40 When and how do mothballed facilities start coming back on?30:00 The Sprott Uranium Trust40:20 Nexgen (NXE) overview46:20 Nexgen's low cost mine49:10 Nexgen's timeline to completing their mine52:55 Discussing Nexgen's uranium price assumptions56:30 Why won't this go into mine development hell?58:40 Nexgen's base case upsideSHOW LESS

All right. Hello and welcome to the yet another value podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Walker. And with me today, I'm excited to have Brian. I'm going to try and get it lakes, locks, lax. Oh, I'm so bad. We only practiced about 10 seconds ago. But Brian's a portfolio manager and partner at Old West Investment Management. Brian, how's it going? Going very well. Thanks for having me. Hey, thanks for coming on. Let me start this podcast the way I do every podcast. First, just a quick disclaimer to all of our guests. thing we talk about on this podcast is investing advice. We're going to talk commodities. We're going to talk some smaller cap developmental uranium plays. All of those come with an exit with a little bit of increased risk. So everybody just go, you consult a financial advisor. Nothing on here is investment advice. I think Brian and I might have positions in stocks we talk about today. And the second way I start this podcast is with the pitch for you, my guess. You know, you work at Old West with Joe,

Joe Boscovich, who came on and pitched. It was Thunderbird Entertainment a little bit ago, but that was a really great pitch. No, it wasn't Thunderbird. Wild Brain. I think it was Wild Brain. I always think Thunderbird and Wildbrain because there's the two Canadian. But that was a great pitch. People still talk about it. But I got interested in Uranium a few weeks ago. I started reaching out to people who might be sharp. You and I got connected. And I was just blown away by your degree of knowledge and kind of the history of the space and the different plays on it. So uranium got real popular this week because I'll link to it in the show notes. But our friend Harris Cumberman put out a thing that said this could be Bitcoin in the summer of 2020, part due. I had already

talked to you. I kind of knew some of the stuff. And I was like, our listeners would love to hear. Brian, talk about it. So I'll get out of my own way here and I'll just turn it over to you, you know, what is going on in the uranium market right now? Yeah, well, your timing couldn't be better. I mean, if you had talked to us three weeks ago, you know, the sector was kind of washed out. It was a very slow period for the summer. Stocks were down a little bit. Not a lot of interest sentiment was kind of poor, but, you know, the fundamentals have always been strong underneath. And so it just took a little something to bring people back. and to re-spark that interest. And I think, you know, as we talked about on our call,

this the Sprott fund that has been buying in the open market has really kind of lit a fire, not just the uranium price itself, but also you've seen the equities go up in sympathy. Yeah, that's great. So we'll talk the Sprot fund. That's the Sprott. It's Sprott uranium, actively managed ETF. It actually trades as a chemical uranium price. And we can talk that in a second, because I think that's a very sexy story that could add some fuels to the fire and create more short-term dynamics. But I know you guys, you specifically, in Old West and general, has been playing uranium for a long time. And you guys think the thesis is more than just kind of, you know, a one-time squeeze or something. So I guess if you could just kind of zoom out and talk to us about the uranium cycle and what got you guys so excited in this.

Yeah. So uranium is the fuel for nuclear power. And, you know, it's been in a very long, the whole industry has been in a very long downturn since 2011. That was when there was an earthquake in Japan. It took out one of their nuclear plants, and they shut all of their nuclear plants down. They had about 50 of them shut them all down. And that took a market that was fairly balanced and put it into oversupply. And so you had the price, I think it was around 70 bucks at that time.

It fell all the way down to the high teens in 2016. And so, you know, the industry really got washed out. A lot of the companies went away. A lot of the producers had to cut back production. If they didn't go, you know, some guys went bankrupt. It was just a really rough time over the last 10 years. But in that time period, you've had a lot of construction of nuclear plants. The industry is not going away, even though certain parts of the world may have different views on it.

Nuclear power is alive and well. And they're still building a lot of these plants in the developing world and the emerging markets. And so the demand is still there. but the 10-year downturn really did a number on supply. And so I think that was what got us interested was knowing that, you know, if that dynamic continued where you had demand going up and supply going down, eventually you're going to get to a tipping point where there's a shortage that developed and given where the price level was, there was not enough incentive for new supply to come online.

So when we got involved, our just general thesis was the price has to rise to give an incentive. for new supply to come online. I mean, it's actually a pretty simple bowlcase when you zoom out. It's a very complex industry. It's not the easiest one to pick up overnight. So we've spent a lot of time researching all the different facets of it. But in a nutshell, that's what it is. Supply is less than demand and the price is less than the cost.

And so if you, you know, Econ 101, that, that scenario can't last for a long time or something has to change. And in our view, it's not the demand that's going to change. We think the demand is here to stay. And so it has to be the supply that changes and the price has to go up to bring that on. So here we are today. So I think right now the price is about it's $35 per pound. It's measured in pound.

It's going up by the minute here with what we just talked about. But I think it hit 37 or 38 bucks today. So it's around a six year high. Let's call it mid-30s. And I think when I first started seeing, especially you guys and a couple other people talking about uranium, it was in the, you mentioned high teens, maybe it was in the low 20s or something, but just to put this in perspective, right? Because I say 20 and I don't know what one pound of uranium does or how much it costs. So just to put in perspective, when I see

uranium at 20 and you said supply shortage, not enough incentive to bring new supply online, like what's kind of the average cost to mine uranium out there? And what incentive, what price would kind of incentivize new supply. I know it would take a while to ramp up, but what would incentivize new supply to kind of start ramping up? Yeah, well, really, you need a high enough price where enough production makes money that you can satisfy all of the demand. And, I mean, you know, there are low-cost projects out there that are still producing. There's others that are idled now. But even with those low, if you, you know, aggregated all those low-cost projects, it's still not enough to satisfy all the demand. And so you do need

some higher cost production sources to really balance the market. You see different estimates of it. I mean, we think it probably needs to go at least north of 60 bucks a pound to really give an incentive for idle production to come back online, greenfield, brownfield production to really come back into the market. You know, there's about 180 million pounds of demand right now. Only about 120, 130 million pounds of supply or production, I should say. There's about 20, 25 million pounds of secondary supply, but there's still a big gap.

And so, you know, there's not the price signal today to fill that gap. And so I think that's where we get interested because we think that gap has to get filled. And, you know, how the price rises to that level is the big question. You know, we mentioned this financial player that's now in the market who's putting some pressure there to actually bring it up pretty quickly. but we think, you know, that that would have never been part of our original thesis. It was just the price is going to rise one way or another to get to the point where people start bringing on new pounds. So you mentioned, I'm just going to pull some numbers you mentioned. And, you know, obviously I've only been looking at uranium more seriously for a week or two.

So I'm way behind you. But one of the numbers you mentioned was 180 million pounds of demand annually. And you can correct me if I'm wrong. I'm guessing you would think over time that would grow because increasingly we're seeing some. kind of demand for nuclear as part of the clean solution, getting everything pulled. But 180 right now, 120 million annually of supply. So there's a 60 million pound shortage. You said there's kind of 20 or 25 million of uranium stored in bunkers or something somewhere that can come out. Yeah, a secondary supply that kind of comes out. It's a little technical, but there's some extra

supply that comes out. But so there's probably a 20 or 30 million pound gap today. And that's being satisfied by inventories or, you know, they're basically drawing down inventories. Yep. So how much, so the 20 or 30 million pound gap, how much is that 20 or 30 million? Like, how much inventory is there? How long could you sustain a, you know, supply less than demand type thing here? Well, that's, that's the big question. And, you know, the inventory picture globally is, it's difficult to get a true number on because a lot of it is in government stockpiles. It's in Russia. It's in China, the U.S. You know, you can view the inventories of the utilities in the U.S. and in Europe, they put out numbers. that talk about what they have. And then, you know, they do have inventories. I mean, I think the interesting thing about in this industry is they don't operate it in a just-in-time manner.

I mean, you know, usually they have a few years of inventory on hand. And it's because it's not like coal where you just dig it out of the ground and light it on fire. I mean, there's a really lengthy processing a number of steps once it comes out of the mine to get it ready to go into the nuclear plant. And that takes about, you know, anywhere from one to two years. So the utilities like to have some inventory. on hand, it's been drawing down to the levels that get them, you know, starting to think a little bit more about, hey, we should probably refill the hopper. So I think, you know, in general, it's around two or three years, which, you know, is kind of historically around the time when they say,

hey, let's look to go to go do some shopping. And they're, you know, the last few years have been interesting, or at least maybe the last five years, you know, there's been other ways for them to to top up that pound, whether it's going into the spot market, whether it's using some of these financial intermediaries that provide midterm deals. But typically, the way they source their pounds is through long-term contracts. And I think that's what everyone's really been waiting for to see is them coming back to the table in a big way. You know, after, if you go back 10, 15 years, there was a big contracting cycle. And you really saw them, you know, come to the market with a lot more volume than they had been doing. And I think that's what people are waiting to see again.

That's actually a great transition to my next point. So, you know, I think Koppi mentioned it in his post. I know you've mentioned it to me before, but people with a longer history on uranium can, you can zoom out on the uranium price, right? And you kind of see a lot of people are seeing this cycle will be, will parallel what happened in. I think it was like 05 to 07. And if you zoom out on the rainium price, you'll kind of see something similar to what's happening now. We're leading into 05 or 06. Uranium was kind of flat at 20 or 30. $30 per pound. And then there was this big cycle and you'll see almost an internet bubble-style peak where uranium goes all the way up to, I think it peaks around 120, 140. And then over the next couple years, it comes back down. And you talked about some of the other things that it kind of kept in the doldrums maybe for longer. But could you just talk to me about, you know, a little bit of the history of the uranium cycle, why this time could kind of rhyme with what happened, 05, 07. Yeah. Well, you know, I think it's an interesting commodity because, you know, prices, it's important, I wouldn't say it's not important, but it's less important to the buyers than other commodities because so much of the overall expenses on CAPEX versus OPX. And so they do have some flexibility in terms of what they're able to pay. And, you know, I think security of supply is really one of the primary drivers of their buying behavior. And so when you see prices start to rise,

Unlike other things, you know, where you want to kind of buy low and sell high, when the prices start to rise, you see increased activity. And so we saw the volumes pick up, you know, four or five X at much higher price levels than they were doing when they were kind of complacent in the years before that. And I think it's because, you know, these guys, they're not speculators. They don't get paid to take a view on where it's going. They just need to make sure they're kind of paying what the market is offering. But all of a sudden, when the price starts taking up, you know, maybe they get a little nervous and say, hey, we should probably make sure we have, you know, enough in the cover that the last was through the winter. So, yeah, go ahead. Oh, I was just, it's one of those things where when, when prices are really low, it's at 20.

Every is like, oh, yeah, I'll be able to contract it. But I could see how the prices start ticking up and then you're a purchasing manager, right? And you say, my whole job is to make sure there's uranium so that we can make nuclear power. And you look at it and say, price starts rising. And you say, oh, my God, if it rise a little further and a couple more contrast go out, there's not going to be any supply. So it's almost like everyone is rushing through the door at once to negotiate. It's how I've thought about it. You can tell me.

Well, and at that time, too, there were a few factors that exacerbated it. There were some floods in the mines that were being built. So, you know, I think people realize that you have this view of what things, you know, how the market is, what the availability of material is. And that can really change in an instant. And we saw that, you know, even more recently last year when COVID shut down a few of the big. mines and you saw close to half of the production in the world get kind of taken off temporarily. So people, you know, this is security of supply has definitely been on the top of the agenda here. And I think people are starting to realize, you know, it's been the case for a while.

I mean, this is not, this is really nothing new. It's a very slow moving industry. But in general, you can see what the utilities need. And if you go out a few years, the amount that they need that, is covered under contract, begins to drop off, or the amount that it expands, the amount that they need expands. And so they're going to have to come at some point to contract for that. They've been able to kind of kick the can down the road because of various factors, some of which we mentioned, but there's going to come a day where they say, hey, look, it's

time to sign our next contracts. And I think what that actual motivating mechanism is, whether it is this rise in the spot price or it's just them continuing to draw down inventories or some sort of fear of a shortage in the future. That's really what the industry watchers are looking for is that returned to long-term contracting. And this movement in the spot price may very well be what triggers that. We'll see. I think you've already seen some commentary from the large producers that contracting discussions have been happening behind the scenes. So it's happening. It's just slow. I think, you know, a lot of people wish it would happen a lot faster, but it's happening. And so I think, you know, that's constructive. And I think you're really

seeing the equity start to price that in. You know, they've had a very strong move in the last year, even in advance of a big price movement. So I think they're realizing what has to happen and you're seeing the price now start to move as well. Perfect. I have just a few more questions on uranium, more on the downside here, and then we can turn it over to next gen. So just uranium. You know, I have heard about, I feel like I've heard a little bit about this supply, demand, imbalance for uranium and a coming uranium super cycle. I feel like I first started hearing about it in 2017, 2018. And a lot of the people who are bulls now or the same people who were bulls then, which makes sense, a good thesis. And sometimes it takes longer to play out.

But, you know, I'm always a little hesitant where I say, oh, this macro supply thesis, it's been out there. There's going to be uranium shortage for four years. And as you said, COVID, because you can't go mine uranium underground during COVID, because that's a super spreader event waiting to happen. COVID even shut down production for a while. And we still didn't really see uranium really peaking until the past couple weeks, I'd say, right? So why is, why is this time different? Why was the, you know, why was 2017-18 not the time, but now is? Or why shouldn't I be worried that this is kind of the boy who called, cried wolf, we're always saying super cycle coming and it just never kind of shows up.

Yeah, well, I think in 2017 and 2018, people saw what had to happen. And it was just a question of when it would happen. But the fundamental underpinnings were there. And so a lot of the people that built funds around it and really started targeting the space, I think you saw that early mid-2018 is when a lot of them came in. You know, obviously it was early. But I think when people looked out, you know, this is a very long-term industry. It's been a 10-year downturn.

So I think you can't really just plant a flag in the sand and say, today is the day it's going to change. I mean, you can see what's coming on the horizon. You know, there were a few things that happened that kind of slowed it down. There was an investigation in the U.S. for national security, whether, you know, we should be importing uranium or not. that kind of threw the brakes on some of the contracting activity, you know, and that dragged on for a few years. And so various things happened. The utilities still were able to tap into some of those alternative sources of supply. And so, you know, this thing could have happened faster. It didn't, but it's happening now. And I think that's really, that's really the thing to focus on is, you know,

our view was, look, even if this thing takes three years, four years, five years, the magnitude of the upside is such that it's fine. I mean, the IRR will still be extraordinary. So, you know, I think finding opportunities like this allows you to be more patient. And so, yeah, I mean, and also, I guess the benefit was, you know, when we raised the fund, we didn't, we knew that we weren't necessarily going to call the bottom, you know, that there might still be time left. And so we just, we didn't, you know, raise a bunch and then launch. We kind of ceded it with a very small amount and then raised over time, which turned out to be the right strategy because the equities, you know, continued to fall in 2018 and 2019 to some agree. So we were able to, you know, raise money

over that time and really, you know, lower our cost bases because the ultimate goal was really what we were looking for and that was a normalized market and normalized valuations for these equities. But so, yeah, I think it, you know, most of the people that, you know, are invested in the space, they probably were early to it. Look, I don't know. Some guys may have have had good timing. Like you said, you came to it three weeks ago. That was a pretty good timing. I mean, well, I wish I had bought a heck of a lot more because, you know, I take time to do work and I barely bought any. And it's incredibly volatile. And I'm sure, you know, you're going to have periods where the stocks go down again to. And nothing moves in a straight line. And so, you know, everyone always says,

you know, did we miss it? Did we not miss it? I think if you kind of ground yourself and, you know, what these things should be valued at in a variety of pricing scenarios, I don't think we've missed anything. I mean, the price is still well below it in incentive pricing and where it needs to go. And, you know, if you think that eventually gets there, well, then these things still have a tremendous upside. And so, you know, we still have, you know, very large core positions in a lot of the sector. Let me ask the second bear case that I've been thinking about. And, you know, this is just me as I'm coming to an industry thinking, but I look at this and we're going to talk about next gen. There are a couple other developers I've started to research and all of them say,

hey, they've got the same thesis that you're kind of laying out, right? There's going to be a shortage of supply if you look at the demand, and we're going to bring on a mine that's going to be lower cost and average, next gen, probably a lot lower cost than average if it works out. But, you know, all these guys are saying, we've got low cost supply, we're going to build this mine out. It's going to come online right when the, maybe not spike, but right when the uranium market starts pricing the fundamentals correctly, and when it does that, this mine is going

to deliver outstanding economics. And the two worries I have there are, A, you know, anytime you. you talk about lots of supply coming on and it's a little bit coming on kind of on the come because I don't think anybody's doing it thinking if uranium's out at 30 we're going to make boat loads of money right so lots of supply coming on worries me and then be I do have in the back of my mind I don't know how much you follow like lumber but you know in March and April lumber went through this shoe that was yep it went through this huge spike and everybody said it takes 10 years to grow a tree right to this spike there's nothing you can that was a

saw a shortage of mills, right? It wasn't necessarily a shortage of trees or maybe it was both. I didn't follow that closely, but I remember seeing that it was a pretty crazy spike. So yeah. Yeah, yeah. But a lot of it, you know, it spiked up and people were saying, yeah, maybe some of it comes off, but we're in a sustainably higher place because of all these dynamics and exactly what you're saying. Mills came online. People started really rejiggering supply chains and stuff and lumber is kind of back at the 10-year average now. So my two questions, I understand there are complicated questions, but, you know, what do you worry about all the supply coming on? And when we start talking Spike, why do you worry that supply plus a little bit of bullishness

doesn't just result in the prices never really go to where you think they need to go? Yeah, I think we're less worried about supply, a flood of supply than we are about something damaging the demand side. I think, you know, this is a supply demand scenario or a supply demand thesis. One side of the other of it has to give in order for the bare case to play out. I think, you know, yes, there is supply that can come on at higher prices, I think, but we need higher prices for it to come on. And so I think, you know, that is going to be something that does happen. It's not like if the price were to go to, you know, 80 tomorrow that they're not going to start building these things. I think that's different. You know, a lot of people think,

oh, there's no uranium. There's plenty of uranium out there. It's just what price does it need to get dug out of the ground? And so, yes, there are low-cost sources of supply. And, you know, you mentioned a couple of them. We own those. It's not enough. I think even if they were to build it, remember, this is not just purely additive because this is mining. I mean, the current production is depleting. So not only do you need to fill the gap in supply and demand, but you need to replenish whatever you've been producing. So, you know, the 120 or 130 million pounds we talked about, that's stuff that's being dug out of the ground and that's no longer available. And so, you know, these mines don't live forever. They have finite lives. And I think you really need

to see a lot of money being spent to do more exploration, to prolong the lives, to find new deposits. And then you need the right price environment for that to happen. So a lot of people say, oh my gosh, well, if the price goes to 80, you know, that's so much, you know, so many of these projects are viable. Well, great. If the price goes to 80, do you know what the, the valuations on these things will probably change because the price is $35 or $38 today? So I think, yeah, I mean, we don't really view a flood of supply as a big bear case. It's definitely going to, you know, temper the rise. Obviously, when, you know, some of the idled minds get announced that they're coming back online. We'll see what the market reaction to that is. But we're going to need

all this material. If you look at really the forecast for demand, you know, I think, you know, it's easy to kind of just really be narrowly focused on this year or next year. But I mean, we take a 10, 20 year view at this thing. And there's going to be a lot of uranium that's needed. I think they're going to need all of the low cost sources of supply and probably some of the higher cost sources of supply too. So it's not really a supply that we worry about. It's more something like a Fukushima where, you know, depending on where it happens, how severe it is, what is the response to it. I mean, that's something that really is, I think, the bigger bear case. One of my friends said, he's a uranium bull as well. And I think one of the things he said was,

we need no Fukushima and we need there not to be a Chernobyl, too, that series on HBO, because he said, you know, I wonder if that a little bit tamped down some of the enthusiasm for nuclear just because people watch that. Policymakers watch that. We're like, no, no, we're not going nuclear. And thankfully, a lot of the growth in the industry is happening in places that aren't as affected by public opinion, I think to put it mildly. So yes. And look, to be fair, Chernobyl was an old design. I don't really want to go down that road. But there's a lot of reasons why, I mean, look, you can really count on one hand the things that have happened in this industry. I think that's actually an incredible safety record if you really look at it for the amount of electricity that's been generated.

So, you know, in our view, it's one of the safest forms. And I think a lot of people are realizing that as this whole push towards climate awareness and, you know, mitigating climate change causes people to revisit some of these technologies and realizing that a lot of the, you know, sort of stigma of the past 40 years might not be appropriate. and that these are actually really valuable tools to deal with those issues. And I think, you know, certain areas are further ahead than others. And we don't necessarily need to see a renaissance happen in some of the areas or some of the places that have more negative views. But you're starting to see sentiment change. And I think that's just extra. You know, I mean, for us, I think just given the current demand and, you know, you see a deficit.

it. I think with the forecasted increase, I mean, it's just going to grow. And you're really going to need to see higher prices for that to even be chiseled away at all. You mentioned idle facilities before, some idle uranium mines and everything. I call mothballed, idle, whatever you want to call them. What price would uranium need to hit for some of those facilities to kind of start coming back online? And how long would it take to get a mothballed or idle facility to come back online? It varies, depending on the facility itself. I think the biggest one that people are watching is MacArthur River up in Canada. That's Camaco's mine.

It's Camico, I was well to ask. Yep. Yeah, biggest, highest grade mine in the world, or very high grade mine. You know, they've said that if the price gets above 40, they'll start contracting to fill it up. And then probably going to take 12 to 18 months to ramp it completely. So, you know, that's 18 million pounds. It's a big chunk of supply. you know, it's going to be difficult because they got to find a lot of skilled labor.

You know, I mean, the things have shut down for a few years now. It's not the easiest thing to turn these things on and off. But I think, you know, they've made some comments on their recent calls that they have been doing some contracting at acceptable pricing levels. So I wouldn't be surprised to hear them, you know, the next year or two say, hey, you know, it's time to go for that. So that's the, go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, so I was just going to summarize. So that's the mind everybody kind of looks at one of the biggest in the world and just summarize the numbers that you gave me because I've heard of it, but I hadn't dug into it. Again, no expert here, but it would be 18 million pounds annually.

So that's about 10% of the world's demand annually. It takes 12 months to ramp up and they would start thinking about doing it at $40, at $40 uranium. Right now, as we're having this conversation, even after this big run uranium's gone on, it hasn't hit 40 yet. So we're not even to the place where the biggest mine in the world. Given the pace, this could be in the next few days. But no, I think it's not, they're not really watching the spot price. They're looking at, you know, they're trying to contract it on long-term contracts.

And so, you know, they've said they're kind of cagey about it, but in the 40s. So I think anywhere from 40 to 50, they'd start signing contracts for that. You know, but yeah, that one probably takes a little longer. There's some projects in Africa, maybe that they're a little quicker to ramp up. And it depends whether it's a hard rock mine or whether it's a hard rock mine or whether it's ISR, there is production that's sitting there waiting to come online. So, you know, I want to temper people's enthusiasm a little bit. But like I said, I mean, if you're taking a long-term view on this, it's just not enough.

You're going to need some, you're going to need more projects to come online. And, you know, we're happy to sit and wait and own some of these things. Perfect. Look, I think you've done, I want to move over to next gen, but I want to make sure we wrap up uranium properly. We've talked some bear cases. We've talked the bull case. Is there anything else, any particular bear case that you think kind of, kills this that you worry about or you've been thinking about?

I think the nuclear accident is probably one of the biggest ones. And whether that's, you know, caused organically with some sort of malfunction at the facility or whether, you know, I think the big risk now is, you know, cyber attack or terrorism. You know, these are targets. You know, there's been a big effort since Fukushima to really beef up the security of these things and the safety of them. And now with this push to small modular reactors, which people are saying is going to be the future of these plants, you know, a lot of these things are designed with safety as the first priority. So I think, you know, the view, the outlook is more positive in terms of, you know, mitigating the risk of these things, but you can never say never.

And so I think that's probably the biggest risk that we see to the thesis. And then like I said, I mean, it doesn't necessarily. it won't necessarily derail the whole thing. What will matter is, you know, where is it? How severe? Is it? What's the response? You know, do people shut down all the nuclear plants?

Do they stop building them? I mean, that's, you know, so we'd have to see if that were to happen. But, you know, I think, you know, even though Japan shut down all their reactors, I mean, the rest of the industry still continue to operate. Some other countries followed suit. But in general, we, you know, we saw it just kind of keep going along. And so, yeah, if that were to happen, we would see what the response would be. Perfect.

I want to quickly talk, you know, I think one of the thing that, as my friend Thomas Brazil likes to say, one of the thing that brought the sizzle to the stake that you've already presented, but it really made this little sex here, is the Sprott's uranium ETF up in Canada. You know, I'll link to Cuppie's piece in the show notes. People can see that? But can you just walk through, you know, people think, what is Sprott's doing and why does this kind of maybe change or catalyze the thesis a little bit more? So Sprott runs a commodity stockpiling fund.

They're actually pretty well known for, they have some gold, pretty big company. They have a number of other ones, precious metals, platinum, palladium. So people are probably or maybe familiar with them for that reason. And basically the idea is they just buy material and store it in a vault and give you, you know, a ticket for however much, you know, you own. I mean, they're basically trust units. And you get to participate in the price movement of the commodity. And so that's their business. They've done very well with it.

They have a few billion dollars in each of these funds. And they about four or five months ago came out and said, look, there's a uranium fund that does that. We'd like to take it over and restructure it, streamline it to make it a little bit more efficient, less passive. And you're really seeing the effect of that just in the last few weeks. So, you know, the deal finalized in mid-July, and then they put in a at-the-market financing an ATM, which just went live about two weeks ago, a little over two weeks ago. And it's already had a huge impact. And I think the main difference is the previous iteration had a corporate structure. They had to wait until there was a really big premium, and they go out and, you know, raise a big chunk of money.

And, I mean, it was kind of clunky the way that they were operating. You know, and the guy and the company that was managing it was a uranium development company. So I'm sure their highest priority. But anyways, Broad took it over and said, look, we can run this thing better. You know, if we put the ATM in place, we can really raise small amounts of money on a daily basis and just be interacting with the physical spot market much more frequently. And I think you've really seen the impact there because the spot market is not very, it's very thinly traded. It's not very liquid.

And so the money that has flown in, the money that has come in has turned around and been buying pounds. I mean, they've already bought close to four million pounds. You've really seen the spot price respond to that. And so it's gone from, you know, 30, 31 bucks to, I mean, I probably should look at it right now. I mean, it was 38 earlier today. And, you know, it just seems to tick up every day and just highlights the very illiquid nature

of the physical market, you know, it's almost going to be difficult for them to put all this cash to work. I think you mentioned that article that came out. I mean, there is a real chance of a positive feedback loop here where people just flood into this thing and the physical market just can't accommodate that. And that article, it related to what happened with the gray scale Bitcoin ETF where it didn't corner the market, but it really, it kind of was buying Bitcoins and then it was permanently retiring them. And I'll just make this, you know, you're the one who told this to me. So I'll give you full credit for explaining to me.

But what I was worried about when I saw, oh, it's an ETF that's buying a commodity. You know, I was worried about something like what happened with U.S. oil last year where they're buying spot and they end up having to take delivery and they can't and things go wonky or something. And you tell me if I'm wrong, but what Sprott is actually doing is they're buying uranium and they're actually taking delivery. They are. They're stashing it in a vault or something somewhere.

So you don't have something where they're spent. speculating on spot. They are literally buying it. And that's why it's so similar to GBTC, where they're going to buying stuff and taking the supply out of the market. Oh, and the real interesting thing is that they're price insensitive. I mean, if their trust trades at a premium, they're going to, they're going to issue units and they're going to go buy it, you know, whatever the prevailing price is. You've already seen the market react in one way, people have been raising their asking price. I think they realize that they'll pay whatever the market has to bear. And so I think that's why you've really seen the spot price just tick up steadily. And the amount of money it's been flowing in. I mean, I guess it's still small from an overall kind of investment perspective. But for this market, it's actually quite large. And yeah, they've been having some trouble spending at all. I think even today, I mean, you know, people were marveling about the volume yesterday. And, you know, I think they surpassed that. And, you know, I think they surpassed that. And, you know, a few hours today. So we'll see. You know, I think the other good thing about it is they report

daily what they're doing, whereas the other, the other previous iteration would do it on a monthly basis. So you didn't really have the transparency. You do now. And, you know, I think strength, forget strength. I mean, people are seeing this. You're seeing a lot more eyes on it. People are kind of waking up. Whoa, what's going on over here? You've seen, you know, a few big generalists that talk about that of big followings have been talking about it. So that's great for us, because we've always felt that the fundamentals were not the issue here. It was always just a lack of awareness. And so anything that really brings awareness to the fundamental setup, I think is good for the valuation of the equities. And yeah, this was not necessarily, not really necessary

for this to happen. I mean, I think, you know, the fire had already really been lit. That was the fundamental setup. This is just gasoline that's being poured on it. And it remains to be seen how much more is going to happen. A lot of people were waiting for a U.S. listing thinking that that would be the thing that really triggered this. But, you know, it's listed only in Canada and it's still just pulling in money, hand over fist. And so it's, it's pretty interesting. I mean, this has been a pretty remarkable run over the last couple of weeks, how much they've raised and how much physical they've bought doesn't really seem to be letting up. I guess my one question, and I don't know the answer to this. But, you know, they buy however, at some point there's, maybe they've

squeezed the market and there's like no physical uranium left for them to buy or, you know, they've got 80 million pounds stashed in vault somewhere. Like, what's kind of the end game? Are they just going to keep 80 million pounds of uranium stored in a vault? Or, you know, just what's the end game for that fund is kind of a weird question to think about? Well, their goal is just to grow as big as possible and give people the chance to participate in it. You know, I think they don't really have a redemption mechanism. Excuse me. They manage their cash and pay expenses. So I think it's just to be a stockpile and grow as big as well. You know, they earn fees on the net asset value. So, you know, they get, they do well by either, you know, buying more material or having

the material be worth more. And so I think it's just the plan is just to grow. And, you know, to give people the ability to participate. You know, the uranium market doesn't have a very active futures market. It's not like other commodities where you can kind of go, you know, you can't really take delivery of it, right? I mean, you can set up an account at one of the converters. You want to have your own storage, but that's kind of a specialist thing. Not a lot of people do that.

And that's actually one of the target audiences for this vehicle is for people, you know, like family offices that might want to buy, you know, a million pounds of uranium, rather than go store and go through all the hoops of getting a contract to store it, just do it through this. And you get the price appreciation. There is the wrinkle that you can't redeem it for physical. And so I think that's going to be one of the topics that comes up when they do go for this US listing. Because their precious metals funds do allow that.

If you bought gold coins, they can send an armored card to wherever your secret hiding places. But for uranium, it doesn't work the same way. It would be funny if I called on it. Yeah, I own three shares. I'd like you to deliver my uranium, please. Yeah, I guess they could bring it with a little spoon, but it doesn't. So that's a good thing because I think people were worried that, oh, you know, when it trades at a premium, they're going to issue shares and buy physical. But if it trades at a discount, they're going to, you know, dump physical into the market and buy back shares to bring it back to now. That's not the case. So I'll just let it sit at a discount, which I think makes the timing of this important as they see that the cycle has really begun to turn. So this would be an interesting experiment, you know, five years ago, you know, if the price was still falling because it might just sit at a persistent discount. But now it seems like, you know, people are kind of excited about it. It coincides with a lot of the enthusiasm for the uranium. It's the overall uranium case.

And so you have this really perfect storm of all this, of all these factors coming together. And then, you know, like I said, I think the financial firepower that can be. thrown at this. I don't think the uranium market is ready for it. We'll see. I mean, if, you know, if it goes up to 40, 45 in short order, I mean, does that smoke out some more pounds that come to the market, you know, that remains to be seen. I think if anything, it kind of just wakes people up and gets a lot more eyes looking at this sector. And we'll see. I mean, you got, there's some guys talking about some pretty silly, silly prices if this thing were, you know, I mean, it creates, what, $30, $40 million in a day?

You know, that's nothing compared to some of the crazy things that have gone on in the last, you know, six months or a year. So if real money started to come in here, I don't know what. And guys are already talking about, you know, people step in to shut this thing down. I mean, if they just, I mean, it's, you know, quartering the market, really. So I don't know. I mean, we're kind of interested observers, obviously, you know, we own, we do own it. And we own some of the, you know, the mining companies. But look, I think some people are worried that, you know, this thing drives the price up too far, too fast, and what does that do?

You know, I think we've been in the sector for a while. If some financial players want to come in and accelerate the upside that we see and shrink the time horizon, we're fine with that. You know, go for it. How about it? So, yeah, so we're just kind of interested observers. And it's pretty fascinating what's happened the last few weeks. Perfect. Well, hey, we've only got probably 15 or 20 minutes left. I want to turn to next gen. Probably 15 or 20 minutes isn't enough to quite do justice to a developing mindset. But I think we can do a nice job. I'll just give some quick back around next gen Canadian company, but it does trade in the U.S. under NXE. This is probably one of the company, my smartest friends were pinging me on the most. Hey, look at it. It's a uranium miner. They're developing a mine. So there's all sorts of risk. But they were saying that the risk reward is super skewed, especially if you believe in this uranium place. I reached out to you, talk to you, and you said, hey, we're actually a major holder of next gen to give everyone to disclosure, but we know it super well. We're a major holder. So I thought this was a perfect one for us to talk about. So I'll flip it over to you. Why are you guys major holders in next gen? What's so exciting about the next gen story? Yeah, well, you know, I think when people look and they come across the uranium story, you know, one of the first things they ask is, you know, how do we play it? How do we position ourselves? There's a few different ways to go about it. You can buy the producers. You can buy it.

developers, you can buy explorers, there's service companies. And so how do you position yourself? You know, we've always been of the view that some of the development stage projects are probably going to see some of the best returns. Just if you would go back a few years, the valuations were incredibly distressed. And if you ran any sort of normalized uranium price, you get pretty big upside. You know, NextGen just has a tremendous project. It's incredibly large. It's incredibly high grade. You know, this is a commodity business. And so costs at the end of the day is everything. I mean, these guys aren't selling differentiated products. They're selling, you know, pounds in a can. The guys who can dig it up the cheapest,

I think, are going to win in the long term. And so we like the fact that, you know, this is probably going to be the project of this uranium cycle. And it was incredibly cheap when we started buying. We still think it's incredibly cheap. I mean, I think now, you know, the stocks have run a bit. And so, you know, the real question is what price do you want to run? What price do you want to run? I mean, but it's just, it's an incredibly profitable project, even at current prices. You know, they run their numbers at 50. If you think it gets there, it's just a great project. And I mean, you know, given that what's going on in the market today, we think 50 might be a conservative, a conservative price.

We're going to talk about them running their numbers at 50 in a second because that was the first thing that jumped out when I was kind of reading their investor day and looking at their assumption and everything. But let's just take a step back. You said this is a super low cost mine. Could you put how much is it going to cost to, you know, develop uranium and get it to a nuclear producer or something? Put it in perspective for next gen versus, you know, an average mine or just anything. Because I've seen the slides. I know how low cost they say, but I think that's a great place to start listeners off. Yeah, well, you know, I'm trying to remember.

I think they've said it was like $5 or $10 a pound, which is just incredibly cheap. You know, you look on the average, I don't know, you'd probably say maybe $40, $50 is what the costs are today. You know, you'd probably need a little bit higher for certain areas. But so, yeah, they're definitely on the low end of the cost curve. And I think what's even more important is just the size of it. I mean, they're going to be producing close to 30 million pounds a year for the first few years of the mine. and so it's just incredibly large i mean that's going to be you know almost double the size of the current largest mine today um so it's it's going to be incredibly impactful uh and the fact

that they're doing at such a low cost i think it just puts it head and shoulders above a lot of the projects that are out there you know there's other i mean look canada's not the easiest place to do business i mean it's it's a nice mining jurisdiction but these things usually take time and so it's probably a little longer lead time than some of the other stuff namely you know in Africa. There's some development projects that, you know, they might be higher cost. I mean, some of them might need 40 or 60 or maybe even 80. We see some of these numbers that are put out there. But I guess that, you know, they can be built relatively quickly. Some of them have more friendly permitting regimes or less environmental red tape. So we just like the fact that you can get, you know,

kind of the largest, one of the largest lowest cost assets. You know, we think that it's hard to do wrong there. And, you know, they have a defined mine life. It's going to be, you know, massive. I think it's 10 or 11 years. They're going to produce a couple hundred million pounds, but they have a huge, huge land package around that. And so they've just only really started talking about, you know, potentially exploring around that to try to find more material to potentially prolong that mine life or build another mine. I think that's really the thing that interests us is that, you know, it looks attractive on current numbers. This thing's probably going to be producing for much longer than their proposed mine life

just because of how much material they have in their land. I'll pull the numbers. I can't remember this slide exactly, but they say what you're saying, right? They say, hey, we ran all of these assumptions and everything. It assumes $50 uranium, which we can talk about that assumption a second, but they said ran it with like a 10-year mine life. But if you really think about this, this mine will probably be producing for 30 years. And with 10 years, it's like an ROE of 20 or 25% or maybe even higher.

But if he's talked about 30 years, like, that's all just great at that point versus exactly. Well, and I mean, they, you know, they're going to be generating a lot of cash flow, even at modest uranium prices. So they're going to have to decide what to do with that. Do they want to pay a big dividend? Do they want to buy back their stock? You know, I'm sure they'll spend some of it on exploration, trying to find more material.

it's just an incredibly rich province, uranium province that they're in. I wouldn't be surprised if they have some success with the drill bit, and they're going to have a lot of cash to be throwing at it. So, you know, we're very excited about that one. I think it actually might be our biggest position, though. And that's actually what you said is what I, when I, again, I'm a uranium novice. I'm one of those generalists who got excited by the sizzle that you talked about. But when I started looking, that's one of the things I liked where obviously they need to finance

and they're going to build, but you're buying the lowest. cost player. And yes, you can probably make more money buying higher cost players if you're really right on the uranium cycle and uranium super spikes. That's where the real torque is. But I just love the downside protection of assuming they can get it built, buying pretty much the lowest cost mine in the world. Like it's hard to, yes, the returns aren't going to be great if uranium's at 20 or 25. But, you know, if it's there, everyone else is going bankrupt. And this thing is kind of pit on. Let's talk about that, though. The big risk here is there's financing risk, right? it's going to cost billions to get this mine going.

They've raised some money already, but there's financing for us. And then there's just kind of timing, getting the mine developed. So can you walk us through? What does the timeline look for getting this mine online? And where do they kind of really need to start doing the financing? Yeah. Well, I mean, the financing, the good thing about having such a high-grade mine and such a large mine is that, you know, it's only going to be about a year or two of cash flow to pay

for the whole thing, right? So they'll probably be able to use a large debt component. I think a lot of people, you know, a lot of times are worried about big capex numbers, you know, and big dilution to get into production. But that's not necessarily going to be the case here. I think they could probably project finance the majority of it. And the margins are so high. I mean, they can pay down that debt fairly quickly.

So, you know, we're not that as concerned about the financing risk. I think probably the big thing. this is just with Canada in general is the time horizon, right? I mean, they have a lot of environmental stuff they have to go through, you know, in permitting timeline. You never really know. I mean, you can pass off the documents to the government. And, you know, it might take a couple of years and you don't know whether they're going to come back with some pushback. I think NextGen has done a very good job of working with those key decision makers the whole way through. So while they were doing their testing, while they were doing kind of a lot of that stuff was done

concurrently as they were developing it so that they didn't really kind of hit the you know having to have to start it right when they decided to submit everything i think um a lot of they've been good about engaging the stakeholders along the way and so we think it'll actually be a fairly smooth um a smooth process uh and that you know i i think um it's going to be one of the uh the the province itself will be happy to get this thing up and running because it's going to generate a lot of, you know, obviously cash in terms of royalties for the government, but also it's just going to provide a lot of jobs. It's going to be good for the local population. So we don't really expect too many problems in the development.

Perfect. And just to the development, it runs for the next couple of years. And when are they kind of planning on, you know, the mine actually starts shipping uranium and we're going full speed ahead? Oh, well, that's the, that's the good question, right? Everyone's going to have a different take on that but you know they seem to think if they get their their docs submitted kind of end of this year early next year and then it starts the permitting clock that's a couple years so you can kind of do the math on that i mean you know we're always a little conservative i think these things tend to you know hit delays i don't think we're really expecting it to you know we're fine if it takes you know three years i mean there's a construction time period as well it probably takes a year or two

to build the thing. So, you know, it's, it's going to be about four or five years. But for us, that's fine because I think we will probably be in a very different uranium price environment by the time this thing starts producing. And I think the real interesting thing will be when do they start the contracting discussions. You know, the timing seemed to be perfect when uranium was ticking up. And now that it's getting a little bit of pressure on it, who knows. That might change the discussions. That's what I was going to ask you. You know, if uranium went to 80 tomorrow and the world was in a super shortage or something, I believe they could de-risk the project by saying, going to producers saying, hey, we've got

this big mine coming on. We can give you some of our capacity. It'll be five years from now, but we can give you some more capacity. We lock it up. Spots 80. We'll do it at 70. And then we can go to banks, raise financing. We've got all that. So they could de-risk the project like that if you if uranium really spiked might yeah i mean i think that's going to you know they haven't really quite crossed that bridge yet of let's get uranium to 80 and then we can talk about contracting at 70 right and things are happening really fast now so i mean that that that can obviously change pretty quickly but yeah i think that's what we really like about this is they have such a low cost that you know yeah they could lock in 50 if they wanted i mean i don't think

they will um given what's going on in the market i i i think think, you know, some of these companies probably want to have some leverage to the spot price. They want to have some fixed component just to protect their downside. But you don't only have to protect a lot of downside when your cost is five bucks or whatever, 10 bucks. I mean, it's, you know, I think the guys that are, you know, higher costs, you know, low grade, maybe some of the African stuff, you know, that need a high price to really justify an IRA. They'll probably be looking to lock in more material just because they need it. I think, you know, some of the lower cost guys, you know, the Cazlocks have come out

and said that, they're not really interested in locking in prices. They'll lock in volumes, but, you know, they want to see the price go. And they have a good idea of where it's going to go. And they want that. They are not as concerned about it falling low because, you know, when you're a low cost producer, you're kind of last guy standing. And so you can still hang on for your life while other guys are not able to produce. Let me turn to my two. Look, again, I'm going to remind everyone this is a developmental stage company. I think it's got great assets. Brian's pitching a great story, but everyone should remember nothing here is investing vice. And this is developmental, right? So there's huge risk. The mine could just sink under or something. But, you know, when they project it, they say, hey, this mine's going to be fantastic. We already talked about on a 10 year life. They're going to get great returns on equity. They say at $50 per pound, at $50 pound uranium, our payback period is under one year.

once this mine gets going, right? So those are incredible stuff. So the two things I want to talk about. Let's start with the first. We've alluded to it a few times. Let's talk about it. They're saying $50 per pound uranium. You and I've already talked about we spent the first 45 minutes of the five talking about why we think uranium can go up, why it's in shortage. But the fact is right now uranium's at 35, 38. If we had talked three weeks ago, uranium would have been under 30, right? So when you look at their slides, actually the lowest price that they talk about contracting is 50. And then they've got what happens if they talk about it, Bob. And my first thing when I was looking at this, as a journalist, I said, uranium spot is 30 or 35, and the lowest they're basing their

models on is 50, and that's kind of base case. That is very strange. So tell me why it's not a unreasonable assumption to base this on $50 uranium. Well, that goes back to the supply demand discussion that we have, is that, you know, there are low-cost projects out there, but there's not enough of them to fill the gap. And so, you know, the price gets set at the, you know, who is the marginal producer that can satisfy that last pound demand? And if you pull up a cost curve, that's not $50. That's, it's higher than $50.

And so they are going to benefit by that fact that we need higher cost projects to, you know, in addition to theirs to fill that gap. And so that's the good thing is that, you know, prices might go up and, you know, you an RV may even overshoot what, what would you consider an equilibrium price just because there is lead times and these things don't always happen very smoothly. But, yeah, I think when they run a $50 number, they think, look, that's a conservative way to balance the market. It's probably too conservative.

I think you're probably going to need higher than 50, but they, you know, they don't want to be, I mean, I've seen some, you know, technical reports they run it at 75 or even higher. So, yes, certain projects need higher prices to justify, you know, to put up the nice IRR to get people to invest in them. But, you know, this just says, hey, we can make a good buck at $50. It's probably going to go higher than that. And so, you know, I would encourage, you know, the guys listening to this is you can find their economic model and their technical reports. You can build it in Excel and you can run whatever price you want and see what this thing is. going to be valued at. And then, you know, take your understanding of the macro and what you think

needs to happen. And, you know, so the way we do, I mean, that's how we approach all of these things. But, you know, you don't, you don't just pick one number and say, this is it. This is the price. I mean, you know, you run kind of a range. I mean, what's it looked like at 50? What's it looked like at 30? What's it looked like at 80? What's it look at 180? I mean, I don't know where this thing is going to ultimately shake out. But I think, you know, that'll give you the, that'll give you sort of a range of outcomes that you can underwrite. Then you compare that to where it's trading today and see if that risk reward makes sense to you. Brian, I've got one more question, actually two more questions, but I'm just going to let you know, you know how you know

you're a good podcast guest because I'm angry at you because this is the third time I've had a good follow-up question. You've beaten me to it by answering it before I can ask it. So that's how you know you're a good podcast. Let me just ask. So another thing on the downside, you know, Again, I encourage all the listeners, as Brian said, go look at their website. I believe they have the transcript from their February investor day, which is what I really got my knowledge of the company from, not that it's great, but that was great. They've got the technical reports, which I'm still digging through. So you can see all their assumptions.

But anybody who's invested in an explorer before, no, they always come out and say, this mine's going to cost a billion dollars. And then two years later, they say, all right, it's running over. It's going to cost another billion dollars. And the recent. I'm going to take three more years. So what gives you, you know, you said y'all are a little conservative. and how you guys talk about this coming online and stuff, but, you know, there's

conservative saying, oh, maybe it comes on six months or a year later, and that probably doesn't change it, but then there's the three more years, a billion more dollars type thing. What gives you the guys confidence that this project, this management team, is going to get done kind of in line with your base case? Well, one, I think the geology is helpful there. You know, parts of that region are kind of, you know, swampy or you know waterlogged or I mean some of the projects are underwater uh this one's actually just hosted in the in the crystal and basement rock so it's good it's a pretty straightforward mine design it's it's small I mean it's not a lot of it's not like a very large earth moving

operation because it's so high grade and so I think that's not going to be that's not going to be the big challenge but you know going back to the whole the whole modeling thing I think a lot people will go into those technical reports, pull the economic analysis, and just, you know, rebuild it and run the price deck. Hey, if you want, you know, bump up the cost a little bit, bump up the CAPEX, you know, if you can really play with a lot of the numbers, I mean, you know, they put out their feasibility study earlier this year. That's a pretty advanced document that's, you know, essentially what they take to the bank. So you can, you can pull whatever lever you want, you know, run the timing on it, run whatever debt levels you want to put on it.

but yeah i think that it's a fairly straightforward mining project it's very small you know it's not like a big you know open pit copper mine in the andes i mean this is just a tiny little earth moving operation so you know i i think the bigger concern is you know does they hit permitting snags you know is there you know some problem with the with the local populate you know that kind of stuff um and so you know i think once they get the green light to actually build this thing it's probably going to be pretty straightforward And when last question, then I'll let you wrap it up with final thoughts. When you run the numbers, you know, we talked about they pitch $50 as the uranium base case.

Let's just use 50 as a nice round number. When you run the numbers, if they get this thing built, reasonable cost budget, reasonably on time, $50, you know, as we talk, I think NXC was, I think it was $5.50. I don't know. It was up all uranium was squeezing today. But, you know, NXC is at 550 right now. what is the kind of base case upside if all of this plays out as we've talked about as they're laying out? Well, I mean, you can look at the numbers they give. They use an 8% MPV.

I think it's around 3.5 billion Canadian, which is kind of where it's trading today. I mean, so you've seen a lot of the prices run up. So the real question is, do you only want to give them credit for getting $50 and do you only want to give them credit for an 11-year mine life? If you believe the price is going to be higher than that or they're able to find some more material in their massive, massive land package, then you might want to, you know, tweak that a little bit. And if you run it at 80, I mean, obviously it's much higher. You know, we don't want to give our exact price target out because we have a big position. So, you know, if it gets near there,

we might be, you know, we scale into these projects. We will probably start scaling out of them. But like I said, it's a pretty straightforward exercise. Anyone that's run at DCF, I mean, if this is a value podcast, I'm sure the listeners are probably familiar with that, run it yourself, to see what you find. You know, we've done that, and we're very happy with owning it today at today's prize. Cool. Well, Brian, I always want to give my listeners the last words.

We've talked a lot about uranium. We've talked a lot about NextGen. Obviously, these are, I think we actually did a pretty good job of covering them from a lot angles, but obviously there's a lot more we could talk about. But is there any lingering bear case, any lingering bull case, just any lingering thoughts that you kind of wish we had covered that we didn't cover? No, you know, we did a pretty good job of covering it. I think the real thing to watch.

at least in the near term is what happens with this Sprott vehicle. I mean, it really has, I don't know if I, maybe surprise is the right word. I think we weren't really certain how it was going to do. I mean, we had a feeling it was going to have an impact. The magnitude of it, it's been pretty impressive. And it seems to be continuing, you know, it'll probably, it might not go up every day or maybe it will. I don't know. But that's, I think, one of the things for people to keep.

an eye on because the spot price keeps ticking up every day, that's going to really kind of wake people up to what's going on in this sector. And so, you know, how that plays out when they get their and then they're going for their U.S. listing, you know, the first happen next year. It's a really interesting time to be looking at the uranium space. And so, yeah, like I said, it's a very good timing on your part that Joe made the introduction. And, you know, we're always happy to chat. So I'm sure we'll catch up or if your listeners are interested, they can always reach out. I mean, we're, we love talking about this stuff. So we're happy to yeah. Well, I've been appreciative of Fowell Jenner. You were with your time both talking to me

privately and talking on this podcast. I'm sure my listener is going to see why I was so excited when they listen to this podcast. But Brian, I'm going to include a link to his Twitter in the show notes. So anybody who wants to follow up with him, should go follow him to follow some uranium advice, follow up with him, you can message him directly. Brian, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on and talking an emergency uranium podcast on the Friday before Labor Day. So I really appreciate it and have a great Labor Day, man. All right. Thanks, Andrew, you too.