So, uh, what are you, what are you looking to do in the near term with that drilling program?

Right.

So right now we're, uh, maybe about a third or a quarter to a third of the way through our program.

Uh, no results back yet.

Uh, we have thirty-five hundred meters in total.

Fifteen hundred meters of that is diamond, uh, core drilling, mostly within the Norby's per-- mining permit.

Um, the remaining two thousand is RC drilling, which will be used mostly on regional targets to prove out the, uh, the scalability of this project.

So what were the capabilities you were specifically looking to add, and what does that tell us about where Lithium Africa is going?

i'm sure you're tired of the smell test already and probably everybody listening is thinking when is the boring stuff gonna stop so um yeah talk to me about about the work that's been done on your flagship project since you picked it up um but but also before so historically i know it was active in in the 40s and so on and so forth so yeah what is uh what what has been done here

yeah so it's uh This is my favorite project.

I know I'm not supposed to have favorite children, but the Springbok project is my favorite of the six that we have, six countries.

And the reason that is, is because the rock is exposed on the surface of the Earth.

It is in a desert, arid region in the Northern Cape along the Namibian border.

And I bring that up, the exposure up, because a lot of people think of Africa, you think of the tropics, it's jungle, there's soil, there's weathering profiles.

That is not the case here.

What's the goal of this program? What unanswered question is this program going to answer, and how are you going to answer it? What exactly are you drilling? I know it's 3,500 meters, but how many holes? How deep? Talk to me more about the program as a whole.

side set up for lithium? Is current mine supply enough to meet the demand we've been discussing? And where does the next generation of lithium supply come from?

That's a great question.

I think currently there's a lot of folks out there who predict, oh, there's a surplus, there's a deficit.

What I see is...

The demand for lithium is not going down.

It's only going up, especially all these, everything we use, every electronic, every time you type something in the chat GPT, you need lithium, whether it's on the device or for the energy to run that command on chat GPT or anthropic or what have you.

And so the demand is going up, robots being built, robot dogs, all of it, Roombas, they all have lithium batteries.

And also, could you walk us through the infrastructure in place, milestones achieved so far, and any other factors that you think are important?

All right, open your Bibles, if you would, to the book of 1 Chronicles, chapter 12.

1 Chronicles, chapter number 12.

How's your joy tonight? I hope it's good.

That's what we're going to be looking at here.

1 Chronicles, chapter 12.

Look at verse number 40.

don't

know if that makes sense to you.

But, but is that true? Like, do they actually get less efficient at making energy as we age?

They absolutely do.

However, the problem is that that's because the m- primarily, the main reason they get less efficient is because the mitochondrial DNA is actually beginning to get what I call sector errors.

It's like, think of a hard disk getting bad sectors, right, uh, o- over time.

And so the mitochondrial DNA acquire deletions, and there is no way to fix it because that kind of...

There's nothing better than that.

The mitochondrial DNA is the source of truth, and so the body is struggling, trying to...

It's, it's a, it's a theory, and yet you do have old mice climbing up the walls of their cages.

So what, so what happens, like, i- if someone experiences mitochondrial dysfunction, what can that look like?

Well, first of all, we all experience mitochondrial dysfunction eventually because, uh, we are born with a set of mitochondria.

Actually, our egg, the egg cell when it's first fertilized has about somewhere between, between 300,000 and 500,000 mitochondria in it.

I should say mitochondrial DNA.

Each mitochondria has three or four copies or five copies of a tiny little ring of DNA that's just the control system for the, for the furnace, right? It's like a little, a tiny little ring of DNA, teeny weeny, just controls the engine.

And we're born with those pretty much perfect.

So think of yourself at when you're born of having 100% perfectly functioning mitochondria, and according to what we've seen in recent research, that declines slowly at the beginning.

... got hit harder and ended up with long COVID and didn't know what to do with it