What do you make of where copper prices are now and where they could still be going?

Wow.

There's an old adage that if you want to lose a friend, give investment advice.

And when you're talking to a cast of thousands, you can't even see directly.

It's even more dangerous.

But when one is prognosticating the future using a crystal ball or a Ouija board or any other mystic methodology, It's very important to be right.

And so what has happened to the copper price in, say, the last 30 years of my life or 40 years of my life, 20 years of my life? When I started mining copper, we had a copper mine in what is now called Myanmar.

And I'm just curious, like, what technologies are you looking at now that you think could have the most impact on our future?

... what does the industry need to see in order to be confident in boosting production?

Let's start with the fact that if we go back to Mohenjo-daro, um, our species has mined seven hundred million metric tons of copper.

It sounds like a lot, uh, and you could recycle it and get it back.

All you have to do is tear down everything in the United States and make it look like the days of the wooly mammoths, and we'd get back about three hundred million tons, and in Europe we'd get two hundred million tons, and in Asia another two hundred million tons.

But unfortunately, we don't wanna go back to freezing in the dark.

And, um, at the rate of current global economic growth, with eight billion people on this planet, to maintain three percent GDP growth, absent the electrification of the world economy, absent electric cars, and let's not even get started on data centers We need to mine that same amount of copper that we mined in the last 10,000 years in the next 18 years.

Hmm.

No, they're both horrible, middle-aged, yeah.