89. Adventures in Gold Mining with Christopher Gerteisen

Join Mike Cavaggioni with Christopher Gerteisen on the 89th episode of the Average Joe Finances Podcast to talk about gold mining. Christopher is the executive director and CEO of Nova Minerals, an Australian mining company. He shares the project process, from research to the actual mining.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• A brief summary of Christopher’s work
• Mineral investing: how is it carried out?
• Indicators of metal deposits in a site
• Returns from investing in mineral explorers
• Future of gold investing in relation to the pandemic
• And much more! 

About Christopher Gerteisen:
Christopher Gerteisen, as general manager, controls all aspects of the Estelle Gold project while implementing efficiencies and savings to keep the cost per discovery ounce well below the industry average. Christopher has over 20 years of experience as a professional geologist with an extensive record of managing and advancing complex and challenging resource projects across North America, Australia, and Asia.

His work experience spans Greenfields from discovery to the production stage and other projects focusing on commodities, including gold and copper. He worked as a geologist on the Carlin Trend in Nevada and on exploration in Alaska with Newmont. He has held senior positions on several projects throughout the goldfields of Western Australia.

As a research geologist with Newmont, he worked on the Batu Hijau Porhryry Cu-Au deposit in Indonesia. Most recently, through his technical contributions and management skills, Christopher played a significant role in the successful start-up, operations, and exploration, which resulted in further mine-life extending discoveries at several prominent projects in the Australasian region, including Oxiana’s Sepon and PanAust’s Phu Bia in Laos. Christopher holds a Bachelor of Geology from the University of Idaho and a Master’s Degree in Economic Geology from the Western Australia School of Mines. He is a dual USA and Australia Citizen based in Alaska and a member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists.

Find Christopher Gerteisen on:
Website: https://novaminerals.com.au/

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Transcript

Average Joe Finances: 0:00

Hey, how's it going everybody? So today's guest is Christopher Gerteisen, and Chris is the CEO of Nova minerals. That's a public company. He's an impressive Australian minerals Explorer and developer that focuses on gold and lithium projects globally. Nova minerals is also known for its flagship 6.2 million ounces, Estelle gold project, a large scale gold resource, just north Anchorage that houses an incredible 6.2 million ounces. So for their 4.7 million ounces of contained gold called Corbell Maine. So numbers wise, his site is under underpinned by 40,000 meters of new drilling with 48 diamond core holes completed since and since 2019, Corbell Maine. The site has seen an increase of over 2 million ounces, bringing Corbell Maine itself to 4.7 million ounces. But a total that he's managing here of 6.2 million ounces. So Chris, what a background you're doing some big things, stuff I don't really know too much about I want to learn more about you and what you're doing. So I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. Welcome to the show.

Christopher Gerteisen: 1:10

Absolutely Mike, great to be with you. And I'm glad to be here and educate you a bit about what I do. And uh, you know, there's, everybody knows a little bit of something and a lot about something else, and this just happens to be my forte. know, He asked about my background a little bit. I'm an economic geologists. I'm actually from Alaska, which is a, in the steel gold projects right here in my backyard. I've a. Yeah. I started my career up here working on these very large intrusive related gold systems. We call them spend a lot of time down in Nevada, Barrick, Newmont, huge bulk minable gold deposit company. Maper maker style deposits down there. And then I spent a lot of time in Australia and this is how the Australian connection comes in. You mentioned Nova minerals is actually Australia Domo style, even though our flagship project is here in Alaska. I spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia, Laos, Thailand. And and I, my specialty is really become taking resource stage projects. A project, if you think of it on a continuum, you have the early exploration greenfields, then you start to get a bit of a few results and started to find some gold. And then in that middle period on the timeline would be what we call a resource or resource development project. And then that'll move into an actual mining project or, develop a with actual production. And so we're at that resource development stage now. And so now I've come full circle. And I'm back in Alaska right here in my hometown. What a blessing is that right here with my whole extended family, after traipsing around the world, doing this for 25 years and right here in my backyard via, still go project. So you mentioned there was a lot of numbers flying around there. Let me put it let me summarize. So we really started our work in earnest here in 2019 with our first drilling program. And then with our maiden resource, we uh, defy came back above and beyond. Even what we expected. Our maiden resource was two and a half million ounces at the core bell main deposit. And so since that time, to about two years later, we've increased the core bell main resource to 4.7 million. And we've also now have an additional deposit on our 324 square kilometer claim block. And it's 20 miles along mineralized strike to the south and that's our RPM deposit and we've drilled some there now and we've defined 1.5 million ounces there. And so those two combined are global resource total for the entire project is is 6.2 million ounces. And so what are we doing? We're a gold company right now, we're on the path to production, fast tracking. The first thing to do of course is just increase these ounces this type of of a resource growth expansion in the ounces like this, this is if not unique, certainly very rare, especially in the world today. It's very rare to find very large gold deposits anymore. So that's our mission, right now. We're a year round operation. We just keep drilling, keep expanding. In fact, there's an exciting milestone coming up here in the next couple of weeks, we're going to come out with another resource update on our core bell main deposit. And we expect that 6.2 million ounces to increase again. And this is just one small to much bigger things. We think that Corbell main alone is a 10 million ounce Whopper, and that's not uncommon in our neighborhood. We're in the Totino gold province in Alaska, and this is one of the most prolific belts in recent times, over 220 million ounces of documented gold discoveries and now production in recent times. And this is where the historic gold rush is where, the things you've heard about the Klondike and all these kinds of. This is where it's at. Now. We know where all that gold came from and 10 million ounce plus projects are not uncommon. There's a numerous other ones, Keene Ross, Fort Knox up there in Fairbanks, Victoria gold on the Yukon side over there recently started production Barrack, Nova gold, just to the west of us. And that's a 40 million ounce. And yeah, it's absolutely. Our license plate is the last frontier and that's for many things, but also for very large behemoth sized gold deposits. And that's what we're onto here at Estelle.

Average Joe Finances: 5:07

That's truly fascinating. And like I said before, before we started recording, one of the things I was really excited about talking to you about today is because I just, I don't know too much about mineral investing or, just mining for gold and things like that. So when this opportunity to interview, you came up, I was like, oh, this will be very interesting. And maybe I could learn something about what this is all about and how lucrative this could be for somebody who's interested in investing in something like this. Now you said the, I guess the way that the way it works is you start off, you said it's greenfields right then to the resourcing stage and then to actual mining. So you're still in like the resourcing stage now, how, I guess you're so does that mean this is, you're finding the deposits right now and then the next step from this is after you identify all of it, that's going to be when you start mining,

Christopher Gerteisen: 5:54

That is correct. So we're at the resource development stage. We're not, so we've already found two deposits where we actually have resources on that's the number of the 6.2 million ounces, but those are only two, we have 324 square kilometers of claims here. And so those are only two 15. Prospects across our claim block. And in addition to advancing these resource projects with drilling every year, we also do a recon exploration. It's a, in what that right there requires when you're in kind of Virgin country out, out here, it doesn't require any complex deep searching exploration techniques. It's old school putting geologists on the ground, boots on the ground kicking rocks. And every year they go out and do that. And we just. This year we made through that process, we've made two more significant discoveries, and that would be the train shoeshine prospect, which is another one of these which is another one of these very large intrusive related gold systems. And we have to drill that now, as we progress in. The Stony prospect. We discovered that this year as well, and this one's quite intranet and quite interesting and adds a whole new dimension to the Estelle gold project, because it's a polymetallic vein system. It's now gold, silver, and copper. And so it brings in a whole different kind of investor, we've been mainly focused on gold, but we're finding. Gold, silver and copper now, and the grades are just exceptional. And they're just a note on graves. I mentioned this RPM deposit that we've just started drilling this year and came out with our 1.5 million outs, maiden resource. What are your investors look at data? You'll see drill intercepts reported all the time. You'll see a drill intercept. There's a few of them in simplicity. If you're just looking at it, what are these drill intercepts mean? So there's a number of boxes you want to check. So it's basically you look at the thickness of the mineralization, right? You look at the grade of the mineralization and you look at the depth of the mineralization. So how far is it from surface? There's a lot of good intercepts in this world, but a lot of them are quite deep. And so they're difficult to get to. So with our RPM our drill intercept, our headline drill intercept, there was 132 meters at 10 grams per ton. Okay. So to put that in perspective of what does that mean for people that perhaps are looking at this for the first time? This is one of the top 10 interesting. And the last 10 years in the world, one of the top 30 intercepts in the history of the world, 132 meters at 10 grams per ton, anything, over 50 meters at you can look at it in gram meters as well. You multiply the thickness times the grade. And so any kind of gram meters that is over about 150 200, anything over that. Is just a pretty exceptional. And then from that, you look at how far it is from surface. So at RPM it's right on the surface. And if you multiply 132 by 10 that's 1300 that's 13, 1300 gram meters. So you can see how exceptional this particular result is. And being on the surface, there's a lot of costs when you come to mining. And so being on the surface, you can mine it by open pit methods rather than having to go under. And so underground is always more excited. And open pit is the preferred method. If you can, and that's what we have in all our deposits and what we're looking for right now, the is still go project, people think of gold mining, just to talk about Goldman and you see these shows on TV, like gold rush. I love that show. Our buddy Parker, SNOBAL going out there. And so what they're doing is plaster mining, right? In generally plastering. The kind of mom and pop operations or like parks, like very few public listed companies that, that are that they're not, they're usually quite small and contained. And so what plaster. It is that so we're w we're no minerals we're after a hard rock we're after the source where the gold comes from. So then that gets eroded over geologic time. And then it gets deposited in the valleys and the streams. And that's what the plaster minor goes after. And there's a bit more hit and miss involved with plaster mining. It's difficult to. To estimate exactly what you got. I There's some methods you can do some pits around and estimate, but it's more difficult because it's not in-situ anymore. You don't have the same geological controls. You just basically are looking for places where a gravity will catch it. That's why they're always looking for the bread, the bedrock, they're always looking for the bedrock. And so you just go for it and some years, some seasons, they got a great season, some seasons, they don't where as when you come in hard rock mine, you're talking about a decade of work of drilling and data collection, and then estimating and modeling using geo statistical techniques. So when you come to mine, it, it's a much bigger capital investment, hundreds of millions to, some of these projects are billions of dollars and that you want to know exactly what's there. Do you have this thing planned out? All the years. And so it's a lot more, there's a lot more time and investment, but then of course it's always the reward and the risk reward a lot more goes into it, time and money, but then the reward is much greater at the end of the day, potentially.

Average Joe Finances: 10:46

Right on. There's so much to take away. I got some notes here because this is a lot of stuff. So when you say that you have found 15 prospects so a prospect is an area that you've identified that has potential resource in it, like a mineral resource. Is that right? Or is just, it has the potential to have it.

Christopher Gerteisen: 11:04

Yeah. So the pit potential is the operative word there. Basically the geologists have been on the ground. They see the right geologic features, be it, veining, the right type of mineralogy are a lot of our gold is associated with a mineral called arsenal pirate or different sulfide type minerals, pyrite fool's gold as they call it. Certain mineralogy, certain type of minerals and faulting and fracturing and structural features in the rock of the geologist goes We need to get back here and we need to check this out again, prospect and they've brought, and they've taken some samples and we fit those to the lab and we're getting anomalous gold. But you don't actually have a resource as such until you drill it. And you have a kind of a grid pattern or several drill holes that you can then estimate some type of resource, like your tons. And, you can get a volume of BA based on the cause the surface, if you're just doing exploration, it's just on the. You don't know how deep it would go. Whereas when you drill, then you have another dimension there, right? And so you can calculate a volume and then use your data, your assay data to estimate the grade inside that volume. And so now you have your tons and your grade, which you can then, which then calculates your ounces. So that's how you get a resource generally requires drilling.

Average Joe Finances: 12:13

So I think I'm putting two and two together here on, on how that works, at least on the surface. Cause I know, you can go so much more in depth into this and it's almost like a play on words to you right? Cause here I am scratching the surface, but you need to go a little more in depth to, to hit the goals.

Christopher Gerteisen: 12:26

Don't get me started, can't shut me up. It's all good. 15 known prospects. Those are the ones we have to know, and we've been on the ground. And in addition to that, as you fly from Corbell right up to the, on the north of our claims down to RPM, to the south 20 mile mineralized strike length, it's like a mineralized intrusive corridor through there. And as you fly over that area, not much vegetation. You can look down and there's just numerous color anomalies, like big red zones where the sulfides are like, rust, rusty zones have rusted that are just screaming back at you. These are like unnamed, unknown prospects. We've never been on the ground in those spots. And so those are. It's just littered with those. It's like a kid in the candy store out there, Mike.

Average Joe Finances: 13:04

Yeah. So the ground that's oxidized like that. So it's got the rust on the top. That's like a telltale sign, that, there's metal here, right? So that's an area that you would want to prospect and check out

Christopher Gerteisen: 13:13

good early indicator. It makes sense. Visual indicator, right? That's the first thing. Absolutely.

Average Joe Finances: 13:19

Yeah. Just like in, in any type of investment, you're looking for those different indicators, as you're going into it. Now, you said the Stony prospect that you guys found, that this had, it was like the trifecta, right? It had gold, silver and copper. And that's not something that you w you were strictly focused on gold, but now finding a prospect that has silver and copper, what does that change for you when it comes to like how you're going to, I guess mine it in the future.

Christopher Gerteisen: 13:46

Yeah. So it's a pretty exciting prospect, we there, the main Stony vein, we can trace over four kilometers 300 meters in vertical extent through the Hills there. And we see it up to 10 to 12 meters thick in certain spots. And then on either side in parallel, we see more of these veins sticking up through the cover. So it looks like a polymetallic stacked vein system and the way it differs is so the processing to extract polymetallic would be different, right? So when we produce gold and these intrusive related gold system, basically the process would produce gold bars or bow or Dora bars, like impure gold bars that you then send to a refinery and have them purify it to 9, 9, 9, 9 to four, nine gold and things like that. And, I'd have it have a little bit of a silver, a little bit of copper, a little, a few impurities in it. But although our oars pretty clean there at Corbell in RPM, but when you're dealing with. Poly metallics generally, when you're not just focused on gold and you have these other co-products they're not just byproducts you. So basically a by-product you don't really care if it comes at the end. Great. I got it. But you're not concentrating the processing. The flow sheet is not designed to capture it necessarily, but when you're dealing with significant amounts of gold, copper and silver, and you want to try to capture it. This is a co-product it's it's, you economically model to be able to capture that. And generally what you do in those situations is you produce a concentrate. So you don't go all the way down to the bars and to produce a concentrate. The process will be different. It'll be a different type of plant, a bit different type of factory to process it. That's how it differs. That it'll be a totally different plant. You won't process it through the same plant. So now you're talking almost a different like a standalone project, right? So it's a kind it'll go off on its own kind of path to, to look at that project as its own standalone project now. But you see how lucrative copper is right now? I think it's. Four bucks 30 a pound or something like that. That's pretty good. We're very close by to us. Just adjacent to us, there's a very large porphyry. called a porphyry copper gold, a project. It's another company. And so we know there's copper in the area, so we might actually start. Find more of the more of these things.

Average Joe Finances: 15:53

Awesome. You were explaining earlier about the thickness and the grade, right? So with these drill intercepts, so I guess, it's pretty cut and dry. Like when you say drill intercept that's where you drill, where you intercept the actual mineral, and then it's graded based on the well, or I guess the qualities based or not the quality, but the project itself, you work on it based off the thickness, grade, and depth. So how far down do you have to go before you're hitting this resource and you're saying that some of the ones that you've found recently, like you don't even have to go that far down. But what's the difference between this underground versus open pit? You were describing it, but like what, what is open pit like underground? Self-explanatory I understand that's underground. But what's open pit,

Christopher Gerteisen: 16:35

So it'll be right on the surface. It'll be very close to the surface anyway. And so you basically just, might've been holding the ground.

Average Joe Finances: 16:43

So you don't even have to drill. You're just digging at that point.

Christopher Gerteisen: 16:46

There's a process, so you've drilled it out. You've you've done your resource drilling, you have a resource model there. And then when you come to mine, it, generally what they do in this type of a deposit is you'd go because it's hard rock, you'd go to, you. You'd have to blast it. And so you, so as you're mining, you'll have a blast patterns, blast areas and you'll generally sample those blast holes because those blast holes might only be, I don't know, two to five meters apart, depending on the rock, how well the rock breaks up two to five meters apart and and you'll sample those. And so you'll get much more higher resolution on the. You can sample those, get things on those. You'd have an onsite assay lab at that stage. And then based on that data, you can block out, okay, this is high grade. This is a high grade block inside here, and there's some low grade and this is maybe some waste over here. And then you blast. And then the surveyors would come and mark that out. What you call and high grade, based on the blast hole data, and then either the excavators come in and to start digging it up, putting in trucks and taking it to the correct. The high grade would go straight to the middle of the low grade might go to a stockpile at that stage waste would go to either a waste dump or if you're still construction, constructing roads and different things. You use it as construction material. And so it's basically, you're just digging a hole from the surface into the ground. And you just look at it from the surface, it's just a big hole in the ground now underground. You actually, so a lot of projects actually start open pit, and then they'll at the end, the pit will stop, but the the gold will still keep going at depth, but it's not economic to open the pit up further. Cause you don't want to make the pit bigger because you'll be taking out way too much waste to get down there at some point what's called a strip ratio. It's a very important parameter in, in mining. It's the waste to, ore ratio. And so if you're just starting to mine way too much waste just to get down to that, that that gold at the bottom, at some point it becomes uneconomic. And so a lot of bits, if the gold keeps going at good grades, you put it in. So you just put your, let's put a, a tunnel, you'll start tunneling down on it, you'll start tunneling down. So you're not minding everything you just tunneling down, get to the end. There's different mining methods, whether different words you might hear open scope and things like that. Those are just different block caving, different mining methods, and you just got a tunnel and it's got a spiral around you. Get that. The orebody mine as much as you can, and then you go down and yeah. So you just keep going. You're tunneling down into the ground basically, and it's a much more expensive way to mind, because you have to have ventilation and it's much more dangerous and this, the safety aspects of it. And it's just, and you don't have as much flexibility as you do in an open pit, an open pit. You can just move here, move there when you're underground, it's very costly to start tunneling. Like that, you got to put all your stabilization into your tunnels and all these kinda things. So it's a different kind of mining, but what we're looking at, I don't know what the underground will be in the future. What we're looking at with our deposits, they're very large deposits. You're not really trace chasing around one particular vein. The entire intrusive is mineralized. So the geometry is such that it's like a big blob sitting in. Like a big ellipsoidal Zeplin shape. And what that makes is ideally economics, so that your strip ratio is very low approaching zero. So basically everything you dig up is some kind of pay dirt, whether it be high grade, low grade, and that makes for ideal economics and these types of deposits. If you look at our peers, it allows you to mine in a very low cutoff grade and still make money. Because it's right on the surface, decades of mine life. 20, 30 year mine life on some of these things. So very long mine life. So that's just a one deposit Corbell that we see and we'll be out there for a, 50, 60 years probably once the RPM comes online and some of these other ones.

Average Joe Finances: 20:18

Wow. That's very interesting, very intriguing stuff, never thought I'd be talking about this. It's really neat. Especially when you talk about, when you find these deposits, especially the ones that, that you found, right? You said it's pretty much all right there. So as you're digging, each piece that, that you're pulling up is. Potentially profitable, versus, being underground and, chasing it, I guess it's similar to a, chasing any type of investment. You don't want to sit here and chase after it. You want it to work for you. Yeah that's a really good find from a novice's perspective, like somebody that doesn't know too much about this, that's pretty obvious. That's a really good find. Now. How long have you been doing this? When did you get started.

Christopher Gerteisen: 20:56

Oh, I've been doing this for almost 30 years. I've been doing this almost 30 years. I would, I, like I said, I would have started working up here as a young geologist in Alaska up there near Fairbanks. And it would've been early nineties right. Early nineties. And then I went to Australia and I got, like I said, I've been all around. And I finally managed to come home, which is great, cause this is this is where I want to raise my kids. This is where I want to be. So it's been just a fantastic experience, when I was going to school to be when I first took my first geology course I remember my professor there geology 1 0 1, he was like, all right, welcome to geology. 1 0 1. This is your passport to the world. And it certainly has been me. I've been, I'm just been off the beaten. I've been in places where there is no path. For your listeners that perhaps are. Are looking for a career path or they have kids or whatever, have a look at that. There's some very exciting trades, we can't find diesel mechanics in the business, call them, all the oh, what was that guy? Mike Rowe, right? The dirty jobs, man. We've got those kinds of jobs galore, entry-level a hundred grand a year. Just can't find people, can't find people. And then for the, the more professional jobs like geologists engine, mining, engineers, metallurgists process engineers, these are great. These are great professions. And you might like. Your your kids are that it's a great profession because there's a good inside, outside component, especially in the economic geology business. On the rainy cold day, there's always plenty of of office work to be done in modeling and analyzing the data and on the beautiful days that there's no shortage of work to be done in the field. And so if you like that kind of mix and. Choose your own adventure. I just gotta throw that out there that people should really look at the mining business for a career path. And, don't think mining's that, a lot of people go oh, I'm from New York. We don't use too much mining here. It's like, where do you think all this stuff goes? All this stuff goes there. And with this whole green energy revolution that. How are you going to do that? You need silvers for solar panels. You need lithium copper cobalt. And what else for these EV cars? The mining's only going to increase. So these are the type of jobs that are very highly sought after. Not a lot of people go for them because they just don't know. They don't appreciate them. And it's definitely I've had a wonderful. Career just to seeing the world and I recommend it to anybody.

Average Joe Finances: 23:00

Yeah. That's fantastic. Just what, especially 30 years of doing this so you've been doing this for awhile, right? So it, being in this trade, what is something that you've learned that you wish you knew when you first started

Christopher Gerteisen: 23:12

Something that I've learned that I wished I knew when I first started. I wished I appreciated more. We were talking about investing. I wish I had appreciated the monetary aspect of gold. I've been mainly focused on gold and copper. I didn't educate myself about the monetary metals of gold before. I was just a young geologist. I was investing in the stock market and this and that. It was a.com boom, back in those days. And it's funny how all the goldbugs are the old guys, we've all been all. They've all been. And I wished I would have appreciated the monetary aspect and how it's real money much more back then. I kinda knew it, but I didn't appreciate it. And I would have been stacking. I would have been stacking golden and silver a lot earlier. That's for sure, because I was around it all the time and I would have been stacking rather than getting burned in the market over and over through a dot coms and GS GCs or whatever.

Average Joe Finances: 24:04

Yeah. So speaking of gold as an investment, so how do you feel about like investing in mineral explorers, right in general? Do you feel like that's a safe bet and what kind of returns do you do investors normally see?

Christopher Gerteisen: 24:18

I think we're going back to real money here, Mike. I think we're going back to real things. Let's just call it in terms of investments. We just stopped talking about the markets and stuff. It's crazy out there. They're just printing this thing into oblivion. We're over here, they're talking about on that side of the pond over there and China, they're talking about what's the thing ever grand real estate collapses over here. They're talking about debt ceilings that, that you know I've chosen that at this. Ah, I'm getting out of all that. I'm going back to real stuff. I'm talking about gold, silver, that's an insurance policy, and so you should look at golden silver as an insurance policy. It's I think it's time to hunker down. It's a, it's not a get rich, quick scheme necessarily. I think there will be a bit of a bonus on top of that on top of the actual being able to preserve your wealth through gold and silver, but other real assets. I'm talking about land. I'm talking about anything real I'm talking about, everybody's a prepper now, Mike, everybody's a prepper now, right? So real things, you have a generator, you got some spare food, this kind of stuff. And so in terms of an investment one way to leverage yourself against gold. So when I say get gold and silver, what I mean is the first thing you want to do to ensure yourself is actually gold and silver that's allocated, or that you hold. At buried to your backyard. Yes. I said that underneath your mattress, something that you hold, there is no third party a risk to it. And I'm not talking about ETFs and these unallocated things, this stuff has all been hypothecated and re hypothecated. Nobody knows whose it is. It's like a musical chairs game, right? When that whole house of cards comes down, you won't get your piece. So that'd be the first thing now to leverage. Again, scold, you could definitely look at the mineral sector. We're talking there's different minerals, like I said, we also have any lithium project that we just spun that company off on the on the NASDAQ. That's called snow lake resources. LITM on the NASDAQ, but in the gold space. Absolutely. You can leverage yourself and there's different ways to do it. One, you've heard a bit of the story of Nova minerals have a look and the leverage with Nova minerals is we're very undervalued right now. And so it's a growth story. And so there's a rerate coming. Like I said, the. The milestones or the data points that are coming out, new resource update. Now here in the weeks to come for that 6.2 million ounces to increase. Also there'll be a scoping study released early next year. That's the kind of the first level of study to then go onto our feasibility study. So we're looking to be able to produce out here. We'd like to be digging up the first. PR the first gold round 20 25, 20 26. And so this is the big growth run-up period in, in, in these types of stocks before production, the excitement is still there. The anticipation's there, but as speculation in the market at times when we start up drill programs, especially in RPM, when we go back there. So it's a growth story, there's it's very undervalued compared to what we actually have in the ground. So there's an opportunity. The intrinsic value of low, no, as much larger, but there's also some speculation with ongoing drilling programs. So if you want to if you're into that Nova mineral, definitely have a look at us now in the longer term, if you're looking for dividends. Yes. I think Nova minerals, not at the production stage yet, so we don't have the cashflow from production, but other there's other, mining companies and we're, if you want to go and keep, stay with us on our journey, all the way to that point and get your gains through growth now in value. We have a look at us, but there's mining stocks out there. know, You got your new, your barracks that these will be solid dividend. These would be solid dividend producers and, nobody talks about dividends anymore. It was like, oh, they don't need to, nobody needs to make any profit. Why does a company you need to make a profit? I think that's okay when it's happening, but I think we're coming to an end when things are going to go, things are going to go back to true fundamentals, dividends, actual real assets and things like that. So the gold space, that's what I know about the gold space. I The middle sector is huge. It was copper base metals, industrial mills. All kinds of things like that, but, I'll just keep it to in the interest of time I was keeping to the gold space.

Average Joe Finances: 28:08

Yeah, for sure. No, I like that though. Especially with cause when it comes to me I call stocks and things like that. Paper assets. So when it comes to paper assets for me I like dividends. I like dividend paying stocks. I feel like that's a super important because it's something that, that is now like a passive cash flow. For me, it was something that I've invested in that can grow. And they have been growing, but at the same time it's paying me, monthly bimonthly or quarterly, depending on when they pay out. So stuff like that is super important. One of the key things that you're talking about here that I really like is you're talking about, you want to have something tangible. You want to have a, when you're talking about where these real assets, when you're talking about gold and silver, lithium, all these different minerals that you're talking about, but even like you said, land, and that's why I like real estate a lot too. Not so much for the fact that yeah, you have rental properties and everything like that, but it's also the land, that land, you own that piece of land. So it's just, it's super awesome. When you talk about some type of real asset and it's something tangible, something you can touch right now. So as we go into this actually there's something else I want to ask you about just cause you, you had mentioned about printing money and everything with how we're going and just some of the things that, that causes right. With inflation. So the way we've been doing it, I think I just saw something yesterday that we're up to 6.8% this month, which is absolutely insane. What's being publicly admitted to, so basically we're saying, Hey. Getting at least a 6.8% return on your investment. You're losing money. That's just the way things are right now. So when you look at that, and then you look at, something real like gold that has that value, that you can hedge against inflation. It's you know, that's those are the kinds of things that we're talking about. But with that being said, there's been so much that's happened over the past years, that affects us, the pandemic being one of those things. So what do you think the future of gold investing is? What have the effects of the pandemic? What have they had on the industry itself?

Christopher Gerteisen: 29:59

I just want to, I just want to comment first on some of that stuff you said there were very interesting for sure. 6.8% inflation that they admit to, and that they're now about to recalculate, how they calculate the inflation number again. And there's an interesting guy out, it's a John Williams shadow stats and he actually takes how you can. We used to calculate it back in the eighties and 6.8%, it's actually, if you use it the way we used to calculate it back in the eighties, it's actually twice that. It's actually twice that or more in, at the, of the state use your intuition, you know what you know, on the shelves th they'll report these numbers, but you see what you see all era all around you. That's the intuition trust, your trustworthy, trust, your light to trust your eyes, right? Trust your eyes and what you actually see with that type of stuff. So now with with with COVID, so Alaska's been hasn't the main way it's affected. Is the supply chain disruptions is just getting worse and worse. That's the main thing in terms of work stoppages? No, Alaska. I don't know, call it the Swedish model called the Florida model. We don't really, we haven't really done that here. I've looked around and read the news about some of the other places and all he's shut down. Is this crazy? We're naturally about six miles apart anyway, up here. So the six puts a a bit of a joke, but we haven't had any of that up here. Work's been going non spot a little bit in the beginning, like early spring, 2020 when everybody's looking around, didn't know what was going on, but yeah, we haven't had any kind of lockdowns. Restrictions on movement or they can try it, but I don't know if it'll work around here. But so yeah, so that hasn't, interestingly, the first time we've ever had guys ha have some additions stay home and not go out to work is ever since this. They started to give people started taking the shot right before that nobody had a problem at all. I don't know that I was throwing it out there. It's been strange. It hasn't really affected us and it's full steam ahead. The main thing is supply chain issues. We use all kinds of consumables back, anything from bags to Sol blades. To a lumber. That's been another one, lumber the pricing on lumber and going up, I can see the inflation on lumber. You can tell me 6.8%. I look at lumber. It's much more than that. I can tell you

Average Joe Finances: 31:59

that. Yeah. That's been hitting everybody hard, especially in real estate. That's kinda where my forte is in bread and butter. So the supply chain shortages have been detrimental to just about every industry out there. So yeah, definitely feeling that

Christopher Gerteisen: 32:13

you just got to plan way ahead. I've ordered things now. That are nine to 12 months out, usually you just call it in two or three weeks. They put it on the, you buy the, put it on the barge from wherever it's coming down, down south than it is here in two or three weeks, but now nine to 12 months. So we're having to think ahead going you know this part, oh, this machine starting to wear down, I'd better get another one. Cause it might not get here in a year. And if I don't have one, it's going to shut me down. So there's a lot of that kind of a forward planning required. I think. Mike, the times of the just in time supply system is over that's game over. I think, that was nice while it lasted, but I think just in time is kinda, kinda over and people got to start having inventory in place. You gotta have parts inventory and start doing it the way they used to do it, pre 1960 or 70 or whatever that just in time came in. Cause supply chains are breaking down and. It's it's just takes some adjusting. We'll get there and we start making some more things closer to home.

Average Joe Finances: 33:10

Yeah. It's, I feel like it's been like a long time coming with the supply chain issue. It wasn't COVID that did it. COVID just what pushed it over the edge. it's been leading up to this for, at least two decades now at this point. And when you think about. The fact that you pretty much had to change your thought process on how you're, ordering your supplies and just everything. So you changed your mindset around it, which is fantastic. That's, that is the right way to look at things. No matter what industry you're in is that to be able to think ahead and get ahead of the problem, that's how you win, right? That's how you either beat out your competitors or that's how you continue to be able to do what you're doing and not lose your own business. With you being a business owner, with everything that you're doing you're doing some huge things, man. And it's just really awesome. Do you have a favorite business related book or podcasts that you listened to?

Christopher Gerteisen: 34:01

Oh, I, all these kinds of things that we talk about, the podcasts that I listened to personally. Oh the here's some people I like to listen to and I think I make a lot of sense. People like Peter Schiff, people like Rob Kirby ho I'm sorry, I'm missing some of my favorites here. People like David Morgan, people like David Morgan. People like people like that, in terms of, this is a a finance show, a investment show. And so those are the kind of people that I list do that make it, that make make a lot of sense to me. The, those guys. Yeah, for sure. And as if Chris Martenson those type of. Those types of people. There's another one recently that I heard a guy named John Perez. It's a new, money's got a new on my radar, John. Yeah.

Average Joe Finances: 34:46

Yeah, no, all great recommendations. Definitely appreciate that. Now we've talked. It's still a foreign language to me, but I think I learned a lot having this conversation with you. I definitely got a whole page of awesome notes here and for my listeners that are listening and they're interested in, Hey I want to maybe potentially invest in. The gold mining industry right now. Cause that's what you do, right? It's not necessarily investing in gold itself, but investing in the gold mining industry. But you also said to, Hey, buy these real assets, right buy actual pieces of gold that you can bury in your backyard, which is pretty cool. Where can people find more information about you and Nova minerals and the projects that you're working on? Like Estelle gold camp and different things like that. So where can people find you? Can you share your website with us, social media, anything like that?

Christopher Gerteisen: 35:35

So yeah our website that would be the one-stop shop. Novaminerals.com.eu. So Australian domain name we're on, I don't personally do the my other fellow director does the Twitter, but he had Nova minerals on Twitter. I think he's doing a yeah, Twitter. Twitter's the main one. And you can go and you set up on our mail list and everything on the website also. There's if you go to YouTube and type in Nova minerals, I've I've done some, not interesting shows like this, but more like just five minute kind of news shows, we give updates. On kind of financial news shows that are just like five, eight minutes, as long as it's got to get the latest update. There's a lot of that going on there. We're listed in the ASX. Oh, so we have several listings. Our primary listing is the Australian stock exchange, the ASX under the ticker code NVA, but we're also a for your audience, probably more importantly on the OTC right now. And the ticker code there is envy, a F N V a F on the OTC. And and then for any European listeners, we're also in Frankfurt as Q M three is the code Q M three and Frankfurt. And yeah, so we're a publicly traded company. You can get us in all the, on all those exchanges and come join us on our journey. Like I said, there's a major rerate happening. I think. That gold itself is going to do big things. I think if you look, just as a final note, if you see what Bitcoin's done, we were talking about crypto earlier, before we started. If you see what big Bitcoin is done, I think that reflects what gold should be doing if it wasn't so manipulated by these paper markets, there's a lot of futures contracts and they trade way more paper gold, and there actually exists physical, gold, that's a whole show in itself we could talk about, but if a gold wasn't manipulated, but it's like a spring, right? The more you twist it up and push it down, eventually this thing's going to blow and you want to be on the right side of that of that of that trade holding your physical portion as well as some other leverage assets like your stocks and things like that. Yeah, so that's how you can. Look, I think there's going to be a rewrite in the gold price as well as in Nova minerals is a good company to put on your radar to consider for what I believe is coming and and either way exciting things ahead with all our drilling and as we push these projects forward on our path to.

Average Joe Finances: 37:47

Yeah, that's fantastic. And I liked the analogy too, of the spring. You want to be on the right side of that thing. Cause when it takes off, it's going to launch, so you want to make sure you're going up with it. So a really awesome stuff, Chris, and I really feel like I learned a lot here. I, like I said, I got some really good notes. This conversation was awesome informative. And for, somebody that's looking at this, they can hopefully, after listening to this, make a pretty educated decision on before going into. Investing in something like into this industry they probably can get a better understanding. So we'll make sure we have your links in the show notes and people, Hey, go check out Chris. And what Nova minerals is doing? Go look them up on YouTube, go check out their website, go sign up for their mailing list and get more information. Because like I said, this is right here. We're just scratching the surface here. You want to get down in that pit, like we were talking about and see all the the gold that's all around you. Yeah, I'm going to do a play on words there too. So

Christopher Gerteisen: 38:37

were just getting started here, the best is yet to come.

Average Joe Finances: 38:39

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's been a pleasure and I really appreciate you taking some time on a Saturday chat with me and fun fact here for my listeners that, I'm in Hawaii and he's in Alaska buddy where he's at in Alaska. He's only one hour ahead of me. So this has been one of the closer time zones that I've been able to do an interview with. So it's pretty awesome to do that. So it's not.

Christopher Gerteisen: 39:00

Mike Hawaii is our that's our holiday destination in Alaska. They got special deals go to Hawaii, four nights, five nights or whatever for 300 bucks.

Average Joe Finances: 39:08

It's crazy. Absolutely. Hey, if you ever come out here, it hit me up for sure. We'll go out and grab a coffee or grab a beer or something and talk a little bit more in depth about this stuff. It's definitely very fascinating. You gave some great recommendations to, for people to look at different podcasts. All in all just a great wealth of information. And I, like I said, I really appreciate you taking time today and chatting with me.

Christopher Gerteisen: 39:28

Thanks for having us, Mike. And I look forward to doing this again.

Average Joe Finances: 39:32

Yeah, for sure. Aloha.