Everything in this room requires metal.
My name is Brent Cook. I've looked at rocks and evaluated projects in about 70 countries.
If we have air conditioning, it takes metal to run the air conditioner. So the air itself! We need metal, and we're using more and more and finding less and less.
I like the exploration side because I'm out in the bush, hiking around and working with local people in the middle of nowhere. It's not the Four Seasons Hotel. You get out and see the world.
I've always early on wanted to understand how Earth worked, like the climate, the rocks, that sort of thing. I remember we used to go look for fossils in the rocks. This was early on, sixth, seventh grade.
I built my own little weather station. Every day, I would record the high, the low, precipitation, humidity.
When I went to Utah State to study geology — it's not known for its geology department, but it was very close. We knew all our professors. On Friday night, go get drinks with them, and go on trips with them.
I got a major in geology and a minor in climatology. My first job out of university was looking for uranium near Lake Powell. Then spent some time looking for copper, lead, zinc in the Pacific Northwest.
Got married. My wife Kim, she's you know — perfect. She loves traveling, and we took off across the South Pacific. And after visiting Tahiti, Fiji, New Zealand, landed in Australia flat broke during a mining boom, so got a job there looking for tin and copper and gold.
Well, probably one of the roughest places I worked was in Papua New Guinea. We were dropped off in a helicopter, and climbing around the jungle is tough. Everything sticks you or is slippery or bites you.
And then we hire local natives to help us carry stuff around and do the work and dig holes, and they got really upset because there'd been a company there before who came through and took a lot of stream samples. Well, they were convinced that these guys stole all their gold and left. They didn't understand the process.
Yeah, it leaves a hole, but mining more often than not, is a benefit to local people. Gives them money to buy shoes for their kids.
And I had my first daughter in Antigua, moved to Costa Rica, and kept looking there. Spent time looking in Brazil. The whole market crashed. We came back to the States.
Flat broke again, and we were just living out of my brother's station wagon. Kim got pregnant. All of a sudden, she decided she needed a house.
We actually started an investment newsletter when the market crashed again, and so she was my editor and ran the whole back office. And people subscribed and paid us for the information I gave out on micro cap exploration companies looking for gold and copper all over the world.
What I do is make my own interpretation of the data, and since I started that investment newsletter, I'm more involved in making financial assessment of a very early stage mineral prospect. All you got is rocks to look at and whatever data is there. Apply the economics, what the grade is, and then what it's going to cost to drill this thing out.
And the thing about geology is, there's always something to think about. What we're seeing happening now is happening over a hundred-year period, where in the past it took thousands of years. Climate change is real. The Earth is not going to be able to adjust rapidly enough to these changes.
Educate yourself, understand what's going on and act, vote, take actions.
Man's time here on Earth is going to be a layer of mud, about half meter thick, full of plastic, cell phones, and crap. And the Earth will be fine. You know, millions of years from now, what we do doesn't — isn't going to matter. But it is going to matter to my kids and grandkids.
