 Could you please say your full name? Greg Baden. Could you tell me how old you are? I'm 57 years old. One of the youngins, actually, in our project. That's what I'm getting told. Yeah, I don't feel young. That's not a bad thing. Where were you born? I was born in Montreal, Quebec. And what did your parents do when you were a child? My mother was a bank teller. My father worked for Cresgis, Kmart, and all those as a buyer. Buying various products for people to sell, health mediates, and stuff like that. So not at all mining or the natural resources, really? OK. What were your interests as a child? What did you spend your time doing? I spent a lot of time playing hockey. And always kind of had a fascination with things like models and building things. Where I used to build big old ships like the Cutty Sark and Santa Maria, but as big models and rigged them and all that kind of stuff. Look back on it. My mom used to accuse me of sniffing glue because I was in there gluing this plastic together all the time, but it was really about making that kind of thing. And then gradually I went to high school. And most of my years were in Toronto. So I went to high school in Toronto and ended up going to Ryerson at the time. It was called a polytechnique. So my marks were mediocre at best, more because I was working full time in a grocery store and doing all these things. I was quite a good hockey player. So I got to play at Ryerson in the University Hockey League. And then did you have any idea what you wanted to do later on? No, to be honest, I knew it was something technical. And I went into civil engineering at Ryerson and started learning about surveying and structures and all these things. And kind of realized in the second year I was going to graduate to become a foreman on a construction site or something like that. And wanted to do more, wanted to be an engineer, be the person making the decision and leaving the team. Because the team sports were always a big part of what I was doing. So a gentleman by the name of John Patterson came to recruit out of Ryerson because they were having trouble getting people into the mining industry. And so what years were these? They were like 80. I graduated 81 from Ryerson. And so and John had a big thing for hockey. So Queens had a good hockey team, the Golden Gales. And I had been playing for the three years at Ryerson and ended up going into the mining program. And it turned out that all the pros in the mining program were all big fans of the hockey team. And so I was like the cat who was able to have the academics but could play hockey at a really high level. Because playing university hockey is most of the guys who played junior and some are well capable of going and playing pro. And we end up in the starting lineup of one of those and you're doing pretty good. So then when I went to graduate, after playing hockey and stuff, there were no jobs. And I met this, my wife at the time was my girlfriend and kind of hung around the university and wanted to really do a master's degree. And I remember a buddy of mine who's passed away now was my master's prof. He kind of, I was helping him one day in the summer building his deck and he said, well, no, no, you don't have the academic smarts to do a PhD. You're just going to make it behind the master's program. I remember kind of going, oh, really? And then I finished my master's. And at that time, when I finished my master's, I ended up running into a guy at INCO. And I was on that graduate student council of the university for the mining department. And this guy and I were in this room and we just got talking about the future of the mining industry. And there were, I don't know, 10 or 15 people all there talking to him because he was on the industry advisory. And he and I hogged the conversation for about 20 or 30 minutes. And finally, in the middle of it all, he turned around and he pointed at me and he said, do you want a job? Well, that wasn't why I was having that discussion. And I remember this lady who I knew quite well, Kim was sitting beside me. And she said, were you trying to do that? And I said, no, not at all. It's amazing. And so I never really had a resume because I was in just hadn't bothered. And so literally went home and wrote a resume the same day and brought it in and handed it to him and ended up moving up here to Sudbury to start work in the research department. When I came in, they wanted me, because my background was in computer simulation, I had done kind of assembly language programming and programming with the very first networks that were in Queens even. And it started doing that kind of work where we were running a pair of simulators side by side, one simulating mining and the other simulating processing and milling. And we were transferring blocks of war across this network. So it was almost like going from the mine to the mill but just electronically. And that proved to be pretty good and graduated, got this job at INCO. And then was up here. And the project they hired me to work on was a robotically driven track. And it was quite interesting because at that time, it was 1986. And robotically driven tracks were not out of thing at all. And so I had this project to do it. And the vice president, and I guess Walter Kerluck, he must have been the vice chair of the company or an executive VP at the time. Those two were the guys that were really driving it. And they wanted me to work on it. And so I got that portfolio. And as a mining engineer with a master's degree, just started doing it. Well, it turned out that that project didn't work. Really, the guy who was in the project absconded with the funds because he needed five clients to get enough money to do the work that he had. And I think he only had two. So he realized his business model wasn't going to work. And he absconded with the money and left us holding the bag. And I remember getting sent down to Denver to try and recover the main component, which was a laser scanner. And it turned out that this laser scanner, I think, was the precursor to a lot of the laser scanners that you see today because it wasn't in the bankruptcy hearing that I was at trying to get it. And it had showed up in England or somewhere in Europe. And now all those scanners come out of a German place. And so somehow, this thing's got manipulated all the way through. But it was the key element to drive this track. And then we had a second track project, the automatic track, that was going on at the same time. And it had all the algorithms and all the things that were, it had all the same elements as the other one. The only difference was it had an overhead power track. And I remember getting asked, I got called in off of holidays to have this meeting with the vice president and a few people. And they said, we want you to go run this track project and bring it to fruition. And I remember thinking about it. It was kind of the perfect project for a young engineer because it was this big white track. And all the mining people who I would now call more tactical thinkers were like, well, it's a big white elephant. It'll never run. It'll never do anything. And you shouldn't get involved in that. And the other side was that the executive vice president, the CEO of the company, Mike Socko, a few other guys were very, very interested in it because they understood the implications of what was happening in the labor market going forward and all those things. And so I took on the project. And it was a really interesting project because if you failed, everybody would say, oh, good. Greg saw that it wasn't going to work. He shut it down. But if you made it work, you were going to make a name for yourself. And I remember going there and there was a team of guys who were amazing. One of the guys just passed away now. But there's several of them that, like Joe Capiletti and Rocky Micolik and Mark Vashon and Ali Kerman and Richard Riech and all these guys who were really, really good, solid engineers were really excited about it. And I remember kind of coming in and running it. And after the first four weeks or so, the vice president wanted a demo. And he wanted to bring the president to the company to see the demonstration. I remember it was funny because this is a huge track. It was a 70 ton track that would haul 70 tons of material. So if you got it loaded, it was a 140 ton, automatically driven track. And we hadn't got all the control system working. But I had enough to be able to run it remotely. And I remember taking it out and showing them a little bit of the guidance system and how it would work. And then one thing we didn't have working properly was the drive system. And it was hydraulic. So there were swash plates inside that caused the flow to go from one set of wheels to the other. And he wanted that, always to match. Otherwise the truck would start having the wheels turn the opposite way around and all this stuff, right? So I was out showing them what happens but the wheels start turning the opposite way, smoke up in the air. And it was just, you would have looked at it and gone, oh, what an embarrassing thing. And I remember the vice president, Eric Kozatz, he said, he leaned over to Mike. And he said, Mike, he's only been here for four weeks. And look, the truck's moving. And I kind of went, oh, okay, well, they're really supportive. And then we got it working on surface and set up all these poles and all these things and had all the track working, made it dump, set it up for everything it had to do. And then it came to this decision. Was the truck going to go underground? Because now that it was working and Jim Ashcroft, who's also passed away now, he was one of the ones with John Kelly that said, no, no, we're going to take that underground. Could it's the future of the business? And I really think that this particular truck project set up almost everything that Anko and I have done in most of my career. Because over the next couple of years, we built and put into operation an automatic guided vehicle that ran for two and a half years nonstop in automatic guidance mode. And so to put that into context, DARPA in the United States was working on the DARPA challenge, which was Robotically Driving Vehicles. There was a guy out of Carnegie Mellon University, Red Whitaker, and Red and I knew each other, and he had built some stuff around forward econoline bands and guiding systems at the university. And I built this truck, put it into production, and by 1992, it was out of production because it had done everything it's supposed to do for those two and a half years, moving all the material and everything in automatic guidance. And I realized a couple of important things from that truck, besides the fact that it worked. One was that communication systems and control systems to run mines are going to be extremely important in the future. We were essentially in the era before we did this where it was like take a coat hanger, tie it onto the pipe, bring a radio underground, and we could listen to the hockey game. No bandwidth capacity. I felt like when I was growing up with my dad, he would ask me to hold the rabbit ears on the TV to tune in the hockey game on Saturday night. That's what was there before I started working on this. And the truck project, when I realized how important telecommunications was going to be to the mining industry, then I started to set up a project which was to bring advanced telecommunications like you'd see in the fledgling automobile manufacturing plants underground to the mines. I called the project for me for future ore manufacturing. And in saying it that way, you began to write, I set up the acronym because you wanted to have, it was going to set up with telecommunications, the ability to do supervisory control with networks, which is exactly what our foreman did without the networks. They were the link. And so now the network is going to be like the central nervous system in the mine. So I went forward and asked Eric if I could, if he would support me in doing a PhD at McGill at the same time as I was working on this project. And, sorry, it was Eric, your friend who told you, you wouldn't be able to do a PhD? No, he said, he absolutely said, what is exact words to me after all this went on, because there was a huge amount of politics in this. There was a guy who was the manager of the operation that I worked in before I became the manager. And he was like, ah, this is all BS. I don't want to do any of this. There's no need. All we have to do is read this book called In Search of Excellence and everything's going to work out. We'll just manage better. And then there were the other guys in the company that were more visionary saying, no, no, we have to actually change the technology. And one guy who asked, who said, when I told him what the other guy wanted to do, because what he wanted to do was get me to go through form and training and never ever do any of this technology work. I said, I can't do that. And so he set up the meeting with Eric and told him and then within literally an hour, Eric had set up for me to get to do my PhD on this form and project. And I had to explain to the guy who was the old school guy as he was coming to take me out to lunch to explain how I was gonna get trained as a foreman. I met him and talked for a little while until I finally said, look, it's already all sorted out. I'm gonna be doing my PhD and we're gonna be working on this project. And that's it. That guy's relationship of mine that didn't ever survive that and it got worse and worse and worse over time. But you could see it was obvious to me that it was gonna be the future of the operations. So we built this communication system jointly with a group of people at Amesworth Electric in Toronto and IBM and myself laying out what the computer network should look like. And then we began to put it in. And the first, I remember as we put it in, the one guy from Amesworth, Jack Perchess, wanted to guarantee that this was not gonna be a tele-operation project where we ran a Scoop Tram, which is an LHD, we could never do that. And I said, well, we're gonna do that. That's what we're gonna try. And so finally what we did was we got one of the guys who reported to me was a Scoop Driver and we said it all up and we put a little TV set, a black and white TV set on a remote control, on an oil drum in a little carved out space tunnel. And we hooked him to the computer network and then we had a wireless system to the 36 ton LHD. And we said to this guy Chico, his name's Gay 10, because nobody knew him as anything else but Chico. Oh, sorry. And he said, okay. So we took him down and he's standing in this room and he's away from the machine, he can't see it. It's only through cameras like you saw before. And we pressed the button and it started. And then I remember him looking on the screen and he moved it forward about 10 or 15 feet. He moved it back 10 or 15 feet. And then he shut it all off. And he turned around to me and he said, I need to take the rest of the day off. And I kind of went, walk. And he said, well, I just moved one of these LHDs from around the corner, which I didn't think would ever be possible in my lifetime. And he said, my kids are better at playing video games than I am and I have to go and think about this at home. Or go practice. Yeah. And so I said, okay, you go home and we have a few things to do and we'll come back tomorrow. So the next day he came back and what we did was we moved all the controls to the other side of the network on the top of the mine and left the scoop tram 3,200 feet underground. And we brought them in. I said to him, you don't have to change into your mining clothes. We're just going to start the machine from up here. I remember him going, we're going to do what? I said, yeah, I want to see if you can drive this machine from 3,200 feet away. And he said, well, this is going to be a problem. It's 3,200 feet to the machine. And I said, no, well. And he said, well, you've got a huge path to get there. And I never did tell him that the thing he had done the day before was actually harder because we started underground and all the signals had to go up to surface to a head and then all the way back down to the scoop. So it was actually more difficult what he'd done the day before. And he ran the machine and then we started doing it and all the people from the mine came to look and they, because nobody could believe that this had been done. And so we continued to perfect it. Word got around inside the company that we were able to accomplish this. And as we accomplished it, then the senior guys on the board of directors of INCO who were, you know, these were very powerful men. It turned out that they would come and visit once every five years. And the scoop we were working on and the stuff we were doing was set up to be demonstrated for them. And so we moved, and as time went on, the control system got more sophisticated. They looked like a, you know, like a teleconference center and TVs and joysticks and pretty sleek looking. And I remember setting up in the conference room of the mine, knowing that all these guys were coming and to set up the demo. And so remember coming in and the CEO of the company, Mike Sovko, Mike could be pretty hard known sometimes. And so we sat down and got all these guys and he's introducing me to the entire board of the company. And, you know, as a superintendent at the time, you don't get to meet the board of directors of Inco, like that's like moving into the stratosphere, right, in comparison to where you are working up here. And I remember I sat down in front of Mike and he tapped me on the shoulder and he said, it's all gonna work, right? And I said, yeah. And so we ran it for the board of directors. And at that point, you could see that there was this momentum towards this, but there was a cultural obstacle inside of the mining operation itself. But you could see this board of directors and the CEO and all these people who went, no, no, I understand the implications of this. So a lot of this carried on. And then predecessor to Jean Vavric was the guy by the name of Ivan Jacques. And so I got this call one day because word had gotten out that we had done this. And what they wanted to do was could we run the same demonstration from Toronto for the, I think it was the 1998, sorry, it was one of those 1998, 1994 CIMs. And it would be a demonstration that would start the move in all of mining in Canada towards technology. So I kind of, yeah, we've done it. Can you do it? Yeah, we could do it. Well, later on that night, I was out with this guy, John Kelly, we curled together for a while. So they got this call today and they want me to do a demonstration of running the scoops from Toronto, not just one, but two this time. And so I remember John just, his reaction was, he says, we've ever talked to some people before you actually agreed to this. So the next thing that happened was the next morning I got a call from President Jim Ashcroft. Come up to my office. Most of we went to Jim's office, we're pretty nervous. Yeah. So I came walking in and Jim said, John told me that the CIM had called you about doing this demonstration. And I said, yeah, they called and he said, can you do it? I said, yeah, no, we can do it. It's not that hard. I've already checked all that out. We'll have to rent some time from Bell and put other than that, everything we have is up and running and it's working. Okay, he says, well, I'll call Mike. Mike Safko is the CEO. I kind of went, oh, okay. So the next thing I'm taking off back to my office and I get a call like five minutes after I'm back in my office and he says, you have to go to Toronto tomorrow to talk to Mike. So now it's like, I gotta get on a plane and go down tomorrow morning to see the CEO of all the Vinco about this demonstration. So Mike brings me into his office and kind of asks me a bunch of questions and he's like, the same as Jim, like, can you do it? I said, yeah. He says, you're not concerned about it at all? And I said, well, we've already accomplished this. Like, it's not that big a deal. And he says, well, he says, I'll tell you what, I'm not gonna agree to it today, but he said, you set up a demonstration of running this from Aurora in Toronto at Ainsworth site and he says, it invite me up two months before the CIM and I'll look at it and we'll decide then. But he said, for now you can say preliminarily we're gonna do it, but you want the option to be able to pull out. Okay. So the next few months was getting this all set up for the CIM and I remember running the scoop tram on underground in Sudbury from Aurora. And Aurora was one of these things again, harder than doing it at the actual CIM because the CIM was at the John Bassett Theater. So you had to go down to Bell's main switches in Toronto at the CIM Tower and then bring it back up to Aurora and do all this. So I remember calling Mike thinking, oh great, Mike's gonna come and see it. So I called him and I said, so whenever you want you can come up to Aurora and I'll show you the demo and on the phone he just said, does it work? And I said, no, it works just like, okay, tell me you can do it. So I call up CIM and say, we can do it. Here's what we need. And I remember them saying, well you only have like overnight to move in and we had to get all this technology set up on the stage of the John Bassett Theater. And so I went down to Toronto on the night before and we drove the control center down and it was a wicked snowstorm and I didn't want anybody else to do it. So I drove it with the trailer behind me through Perry Sound, which was a whiteout and all this stuff. And I get it to Toronto and we got cranes and we lifted up on the stage and we're standing there and the other two guys that were helping me on it was the guy named Miles Bruce and another guy, Edward Anderson. And so I called out them when we were talking and they were getting all this stuff ready for the next morning's demonstration. And the one thing that nobody ever knew, which I'll tell you because now it's history, I remember standing there and I talked to Miles and Everett who were in two different mines, which are on two different levels. And they said, well, we have good news and bad news. And I said, what's that? He said, well, all the links between the John Bassett Theater and the mine are all set up and they all work. We went down to look at the equipment and both pieces of machinery are broken. The transmission is out of one and the flat tire is out of the other, but worse is that the automatic guidance track has been ripped down by the mine. And this is at 11 o'clock on the night for the demonstration. Sabotage? I don't know for sure, possibly. And so I remember Everett and Miles said to me, look, we can get this all together by tomorrow morning. You just go up to the room and have a good sleep and rest. Right. You're gonna stand in front of 1,700 people and the CEO of Inco, the head of the steel workers' union, Leo Gerard, Alex Balo, who was the head of Narendra at that time, Ivan Jacques, who's the head of CIM. And there was another lady there who was, I can't remember her, but, so the same deal we get there and Chico's there as the things on stage. We have this all kind of laid out so that people understand that this has happened. So the first step in the demo was supposed to be that a scoop tram that we're running from the stage of the John Bassett Theater will drive by the superintendent of the mine in the morning, who's holding up that morning's Globe and Mail underground so there's a date and time log to it so that everybody sees that this is real. Well, that's the demo and then Chico's gonna run one scoop and then he's gonna run the second scoop, put the first scoop in automatic to take the bucket down and then run the other scoop so he's now not just running it, he's running one machine, he's running two. So he's getting a productivity gain of a very significant amount from the stage of the John Bassett Theater. So I go in in the morning knowing that that's the script, knowing that the transmission hasn't been on and all the stuff sitting there and I get the word that everything's okay but you're still really nervous. And of course, Mike did the same thing, I came in and I'm sitting beside and there's a big thing about logos and like CEOs fighting, right? Because Alex Ballo wanted Miranda's logo up and Mike wanted his logo up and anyways, Mike was doing all that fight and then he just looked at me and he goes, it's gonna work, right? And I was just like, yeah, absolutely Mike, it's gonna work. Absolutely. And so Mike had written this speech and not Mike, but he had left this hook in that if something went wrong, there was a way to kind of escape from his point of view. Probably blame me, but that's okay. And what happened at that point was Mike did a little talk about the future of mining and Inko was in a bit of trouble at the time and as he did the talk, he then introduced me to come out and these are the really unforgettable moments. So I get up and this is the largest speech I've ever done in my career. I remember walking along, going up to meet Mike and Leo Gerard leaned back in his chair and just kind of looked at me and he said, I guess your job's on the line today, eh? I've never forgotten that comment. And if I was more confident, if that hadn't of that whole situation of the night before Edna happened, I probably would have responded, but I didn't. And so I got up there and Mike shook my hand and he said, whatever happens, he says, I have all the confidence in the world in you. I remember going up to the stage, up to the podium and introducing Chico and Chico went up, came in in a suit and got in the chair and we had to have it so that cameras would look down so they could see that he was moving it as the screens were moving to make it believable. And so there were all these cameras and cameraman around Chico as he did this. And so I said to him, you know, I turned on the first scoop and he did and he drove by the superintendent. And it worked. And it worked and then you could see the empty seat and the globe and mail and then it went in and took a bucket and it drove back in automatic guidance and he got the other machine and did all that. I remember when he first turned it on and went by, you could hear a pin drop in the John Basset Theater, right? And there were like these two old guys and the muffets in the background and the one guy said to the other, oh, I don't believe it. They're doing this with videotape and mirrors or something, right? And you could hear it vividly, like in this huge auditorium and I'm on stage going, oh, God. So then Chico, when he turned on the second machine and started working, all I remember was the other guy going, no, they're not. They're actually doing this and they're getting a productivity game from Toronto. And the whole demo went off absolutely flawlessly to the point where we had rented like the screens and all the stuff for just that event. And Ivan Jacques came and said, well, there was only 1700 people here and people have heard what you've done and they wanna see it again. And I went, well, Ivan, I can't do this again. Like all the stuff's going back, like the AV guys are picking up their gear and he said, well, can we do something? And I remember saying to him, well, we moved the, what we did was we moved the control station to the edge of the stage and all these people in the mining industry filed by it. I mean, it was kind of like viewing the pope, but he died, right? They were all going by just to see Chico run the machine and then we talked to them for a couple of minutes. And it was really a remarkable moment that even today, this happened like 19, I can't remember if it was 94, 96 or 98. It's one of those. And it was actually 94. I'll show you the clipping in my office of the thing. And people today, like I'm still out in a conference and we'll say, I remember the day that you did that. It's that turned the whole industry into a different place. And I remember graduating with my PhD around the same time because you couldn't do this without all the networking technology that I built in my PhD. And I remember Malcolm Scobal, who was my prof. He said, you know, Craig, before you dream this out, there was nobody even talking about networks for mining and driving robots around and getting productivity gains doing all this until you got that problem solved. The communication system for this foreman project and then the pieces of the individual robots and software control systems at a time where it really wasn't even, like today to do it would be, it's still hard. So you can imagine trying to do this nearly 20 years ago. It was really hard. And it was as hard as putting a man on the moon. And, you know, after that, what happened was that I came back, I got promoted. Sorry, I was now the manager of FINE's research. And that meant I did all the research and development for INCO globally from that place, from here in Sudbury and around mining, not processing and product research, but around mining. And I remember Walter Kerlach wrote me a note when I got promoted and he said, if I paraphrase it, he said, in my opinion, the only way the Ontario division regains its prominence in the corporation is if you're successful at implementing this technology over the next five to 10 years. I then sat on the board of directors of an organization called Precarn, which was a group that of Ottawa to do pre-confidentive research in robotics and artificial intelligence. And we put together a proposal for what next technologies were gonna be required. And it was a $22 million proposal over five years. And I remember I brought it forward and there was a guy in the corporation who said, well, you know, we don't wanna do this. He said that we don't wanna get involved in a public organization doing this. And he says, and it's way too much money. And I was getting all this money from government sources plus our money and matching it up and it turned out that he said, I want you to go and forget about that proposal and I want you to write me a proposal to do this for real in a mine. And so I wrote this proposal to mine the $175 or a body at Incor. By the time I finished the numbers, the numbers were even bigger than the original proposal. And I thought that was the reason why we weren't doing it. And I went in and I said, here it is, this is all the stuff that, you know, it's a lot more expensive than the one I was proposing with the government. And he said, it doesn't matter. This is what we're gonna do. And so after that demo with the Scoop Tram, and so you went from the truck to the Scoop Tram operation from Surface at the same time my PhD, and then to this project which he called the Mining Automation Project. And it was the premiere Mining Automation Project in the world. I was involved in it at first in creating the concept. They wanted me to go and do some other work inside Vinco and leave that into the hands of some other people. And then they set up for me to come back and run it. We ran it, it was a 20, it was a $28 million collaborative effort between the Canadian government, Tamrock out of Finland, Taino Nobel out of Sweden, and Inco out of Canada. And so that was a five year project. And we put in this research mine and all the research we had inside of mine's research. The other people involved in the project put in what they could but we had to leave it. So we started that in about 1995, 96. And we demonstrated at our production, at a pilot plant scale, every single piece of mining equipment in the unit process running from a surface control room. That culminated after five years in a kind of a party where everybody was invited to the party from all the different mining companies in 1999, 2000. And we did our first blast from the surface. We watched it on camera, we ran jumbo drills, we ran long old drills, shock-creating machines, LHDs, diamond drills, every piece of equipment. And we had a surface control room built at the mine. Everything worked and then we did a benchmarking comparison between how you mind that they were mining in the day and what it would mean to the financial change for mining this way in the future. And the numbers were amazing, like almost unbelievable because it was like the difference between manufacturing a car with thousands of people and old technologies to now mining them with the assembly line where nobody got in until they were being test driven. That's how big a monumental shift. And then I think the critical thing happened that stalled everything. Walter Curlick retired, Mike Sofko retired, Claudia Prasadi retired, Jim Ashcroft retired, John Kelly retired. And we were left in the hands of what I would call MBA managers. No vision for the future. Would run the company into the ground if they were allowed to and almost did, but actually they did to the point where it got sold. That way. That way. And I remember that I thought it was so sad that we had all the technology to be able to solve the problem if the capital that was in the business got redeployed. But there were too many cultural obstacles. And interestingly enough, none of them were the union. They were all senior middle managers. They were all guys that just, they tried these visionary managers that were running it tried to change these middle senior level managers to get the vision and they couldn't. They were too stuck on Tom Peters new book about managing better or to all those things. And they just then systematically dismantled everything that we had done. I think it was one of the greatest crimes in the history of Canada. Because it was akin to the knocking out of the Avro arrow. Because we had the technology to have Enco become bigger than Rio Tinto or BHP Billiton or any of those operations. Because we had the technology that could fundamentally change the dynamics of what you could call an orbiting. And I mean, from my perspective as a person, nothing happened to me because I laughed at company. Is that why you left? Yeah, yeah. Because well, I got offered a Canadian research chair. And I think the NBA managers never really, well, there's one event just before I laughed that is important to talk about because these NBA managers that started taking over, they were at the time that Boise Bay started to happen. And so, because the head of kind of mining R&D I was involved in what the future of Boise Bay would be because there was an open pit in Boise Bay that was amazing grade. But then there was another mine that was low grade and the premier of the province, Brian Tobin, wanted to ensure that Enco would mine in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador for 25 years. So there would be a smelter in processing facilities. And in doing that, I was asked to do a presentation on the future of mining for Enco. And the NBA managers were left out of the discussion because at that point it's a strategic discussion between the CEO of the company and the president and his kind of senior R&D strategic staff of which I was included in. But I continued to work in the division for these NBA managers. And I think in the corporation that was a mistake that I now realize that you can't leave strategic people reporting to tactical operations people and expect the result to be good. So what happened was Mike Sopko, Scott Hand, all these guys dipped down in the organization and they asked me to put together the presentation for what the future of Boise Bay would look like. I was asked to go to, I don't know, a half a dozen or a dozen meetings where I did the presentation over and over and over again. And then finally I was flown with a team of us down to New York to do the presentations for Premier Tobin at the time. And we did them all and he was very on side with how, and that to me was one of the reasons we got the ability to mine. But these NBA managers absolutely despised the fact that I was doing that for the corporation. And so we ended up in a position where it was just untenable. And because they didn't believe in the future, then I was about the future and all the visionary guys who got it all through all retired and so it wasn't feasible to stay. And so that's when I left, went to the university and started this business. Okay. You are a founder of Penguin? Yeah, one of them. One of, okay. There were two of us that founded it. My other partner unfortunately has passed away but he and I would talk for almost, talk for almost two years before I left him. He used to say to me that what you're doing is too far ahead of what the others can accept. You're absolutely right that it needs to be done but it's more than they can absorb. And so Paul and I gradually started the company. What I found interesting was the name comes out of all those issues. So why Penguin? Yeah. I was going to ask that why Penguin? Yeah. So Paul and I were sitting down and we were talking about what we wanted the business to be. And he said, the problem is that you're too far ahead of your time. And he said, it's just like this group of penguins that I used to go watch when I worked in Australia. And I said, what are you talking about? And he said, well, every day these penguins leave their nest and they go into the water and they hunt for small fish. And every night they come out of the water at this one specific point where there's bleachers set up for all the people to watch. And he said, what happens is one penguin starts across the beach, then they go into the water and they go into the water and they hunt for small fish. Then two, then four, and eventually there's several hundred. But as they get closer to the nest like halfway in, the predators of the beach are wild dogs. And he said, those predators want to eat a penguin because it's full of fish. And so the closer they get to the center of the halfway point, the more the penguins in the back bail out into the water. And send this one sacrificial penguin to the center. And then it's not penguins decision, which is a life or death decision to go to the nest or to go back to the water. And he said, usually it happens two or three times before that lone penguin will make the decision to go to the nest. But he said, once that one penguin makes a decision, all the rest of these ones come out of the water and go to the nest because they realize it's safe. And he said, the technology you're working on for the mining industry, it's just like that. And he said, our job in penguin is to get the first mine done with this technology. Because if we do, everybody else will have to do it. Because you'll change fundamentally the cost structure and then fundamentally you'll make the mining industry profitable and all the ones that don't do it will fall off the cost curve. That's why, you know, I was so entrained in the ankle side of it, but that's why that external voice and why leaving because the external voice could see what all the NBA managers couldn't see. And so we started the business. And in general, we're still on the quest to do the mine. But all the technologies we've worked on have now resulted in safety systems. And I really believe that the safety systems will be the way to introduce the technology into the mines, because you can't argue. If you're making somebody safer. Of course, yeah, saving a life. Saving a life, how do you argue? And eventually what will happen, and I don't know yet if it'll be in my lifetime, I'm hoping it will, that the light bulb will go on with some people and they'll say, we really need to do this. Now, why do I think that it was such a huge crime? The mineral industry's impact on the Canadian economy is gigantic. Imagine if the profitability of every mine in Canada with that technology changed by several hundred percent, what it would mean to our country overall. And imagine if we had a Canadian company that was building all the technology to not only run the mines, but supply all the equipment to everybody in the world. What would that mean to our economy? Now, what do I do? I work on with mines today, in my opinion. The most innovative mine in the world that I've seen in mining company is Kedalco. Not Rio Tinto, not all those others, because Kedalco has- It's in Chile, right? Yeah. Kedalco has the need to put this in place to continue to be in the copper business. I also think that mine operations that can't put people in them are prime candidates for payment. Subsea mining ventures, like Nautilus and Neptune and some of those others. Mining off the planet for water and all those kinds of things. Because as you work on those, you're developing the technologies to improve the terrestrial base. And if you can do that, then it may be as time goes on, I'm the one who buys the mines. And I do both the equipment and the mine, which is part of what Penguin's about. And I think, whether it's me or whether it's my sons or the people around me that we can do that. You know, we've been as a business in business now for 16 years. And we've done projects like the Hangup Robot Project where it's about saving lives. We've worked on projects with cooperative robotics to dismantle extremely dangerous situations with blasting and other things where the mines have got themselves into trouble and they call us. We've worked on surveying systems to be able to go into all the banded mines and try and help people make decisions about how to improve and not have the mine collapse and get things cleaned up. Those are all extremely lucrative because when people have a problem, they have to do things. But the dream is to have the mine. Yeah, and do all these things without the problems. Right, because, you know, a robot, if you look today, right, we have a, the Occupational Health and Safety Act. That entire act is about looking after people underground and in open pit mines. If people are running robots from the control room, that little green book isn't required because there's nobody there, except maybe in the shop doing maintenance. So, you know, I continue to work and as I'm older doing this, I can pick and choose what I want to work on. The space mining art intrigues me. It's not, I'm not naive to think that that's going to happen in the next five years. But I do believe that as we push the envelope towards those things, that they'll generate results that can be used in terrestrial mining. I have to tell you a bit of a funny story. I was asked to do a presentation at NASA for all the space mining companies and NASA scientists. And I was to be the expert who'd done the robotic mine, but the realist who knows what mining is. So I started off my talk by saying, I'd like everybody to know today that I'm a recovering asteroid miner because the Sudbury Basin is an asteroid that hit the earth and we've been mining it for nearly 130 years. NASA even came here for the moon launch? For the moon launch. And so now I want to give you some facts that you guys need to know. One, you'll never compete with the transportation networks we have on earth to bring minerals back to earth. Matter of fact, there's only a couple of things that I could see that would be of any value to bring back to earth. And I said, and I don't know if they exist. And I said, the first thing is, I know there's somebody on the planet that would pay a ridiculous amount of money to give their new girlfriend or future wife a diamond from the moon or from Mars. But that guy is in probably Saudi Arabia or somewhere else where he has an unlimited budget. And I said, the other thing is that if you could find a resource we don't have on earth, like an anti-gravity mineral, then we would be leaving the earth together. But after that, everything you mine in space will have to be used in space. You'll never, because I did a presentation at the Canadian Embassy where they were talking about space mining. And one of the guys in those companies have this kind of flippant response. He went through an entire presentation and there were generals from the US and Canadian military in the room. And they were all awestruck by his presentation of going to mine asteroids. And I put up my hand to ask one simple question. Said, that was a great presentation. But in that entire presentation you haven't told me what you're gonna mine. And he flippantly said, well, we're gonna go and get a platinum asteroid and bring it back to earth. And so I just kind of listened and didn't say anything. But when I got asked to do the meeting at NASA Ames I knew he would be there. And so I said, I put up a slide and I showed an asteroid that was made out of 50% platinum. And I said, you know, we'll just assume that it's, I think it was 300 meters by 300 meters by 300 meters. And we'll assume that it's 50% platinum. And I said, if you bring that back to earth you're gonna have 675 years of platinum production in one shot come on to the earth. And I said, if you do that, the price of platinum that you're gonna use to finance your space venture is gonna be worth a fraction of a cent, not thousands of dollars. And so you guys are gonna have to think about not mining, which is everything you have here and that you're talking about at NASA Ames. But I need to know I'm here over this workshop. Who are the new colonists? Who's gonna colonize the moon? Who's gonna colonize Mars? Who's gonna colonize wherever else we go? Because they're the people that are gonna use the minerals that you mine off the planet. And so if you think that you're in this business to bring valuable resources back to earth, the answer is you better have a very good case for doing it like anti-gravity or something that small doesn't cost anything to bring back. Otherwise you'll never do it. So that's the realistic side of it. Now, I say that at the same time, I'm on a technical board with a company called Shackleton Energy. Shackleton Energy has the mission and mandate to put a gas station on orbit. A gas station on orbit means you need hydrogen and oxygen. The Saturn V rockets that took astronauts to the moon, if you think about them had this much for the command module and the people and this much for fuel. It costs $5,000 a kilo to put any mass on orbit. It'll cost you $50,000 if you wanna travel to the moon for the fuel. If you can mine water on the moon, which they've found through NASA missions that are called LCROSS, what they did was fire a missile in the Shackleton crater and they found billions of tons of water. Well, if you remember back, that little lunar module that was up there, it took off from the moon's surface with a tiny little rocket. So you could bring water back to a gas station from the moon for $250 a kilo, not for $5,000. That's the kind of venture that will make money for mining off the planet. And that's why I wanna make sure that those kinds of things get a proper hearing because people in the mining industry who are those quote MBA managers, they'll go, oh, we'll never mine off the planet. That's crazy. And I go, maybe. But the one quote I remember that somebody sent to me was, if you think someone's crazy, then it's up to you to find out which one of you is because if you don't, it's very important that you understand who is. And our society has not moved forward by people that won't take risks and won't look at those kinds of entrepreneurial ventures. But I just, I don't see yet people doing that in our mining of today. That was a long story. Yeah, that was good. That was quite interesting. We can, I can switch it up a bit. Yeah. A few different questions. I'll ask you a few social questions. And the first one being, do you think there's a disconnect between the mining industry or the natural resource industry and the general public? And if so, why? Well, there is. And I mean, I grew up in Toronto in a family that knew nothing about mining. And I find that it's not just about mining. It's about agriculture, forestry, anything having to do with living off the land. People take for granted the things they get. And they don't understand in general that for me to wear this shirt, there needed to be a stainless steel needle that allowed it to be wool. For me to have a leather belt, there had to be a knife to cut a hide to make leather. For me to eat, I need a knife and fork or a similar whatever to do that. For me to drive a car, for me to do all those things. But what I find is that people think that a car comes from a dealership and they don't understand the whole cycle backwards in general. Now, there are people that are very knowledgeable about it and there are people that aren't. But those same people are the people that don't understand where beef comes from because it comes from a grocery store, right? You just pick it up. It's in a cellophane wrap and it's got this on it. But the one saying that sounds kind of trite, but it's so true is that if you can't grow it, you're gonna have to mine it. It's funny, you're not the first one to say that. And it's a good saying. It's a very accurate saying. Yeah, but it's so true. Like I mean, I go around and I can't have wood products without axes, I can't have glasses without. Everything that your glasses is mined. Yeah, like I can't have a watch, I can't have anything. Now, are the materials varied? Yeah, the materials are varying all over. Rare earth minerals are becoming really important. There are only little bits of it, but I remember seeing a presentation done by General Motors in China and the guy put up a really interesting view graph of what was in a car in 1940 versus what's in a car today or what they're projecting the car today would look like. And then they did it by material they needed. And it was fascinating to see, there in 1940 there was wood. There's no wood in any cars today. Were there a lot more to today? I mean, there was so many more to see. A lot more. And so that whole thing was, to me, it epitomizes it, but the problem is is that the mining industry is talking to the mining industry. They never talk to people. And, you know, it's still today, and I remember coming back to the demonstration, we did an exit poll on the way out of that demonstration of running the scoops from the John Bassett Theater, two scoops and all these things. And the exit poll asked the question, did you believe a man landed on the moon? And in that room, 30% of the people didn't believe it, which I found amazing. Like, I thought, yeah, maybe a tier two or 3%, not 30. Like a third of the audience didn't believe that. From a science world. Exactly, exactly. So I found that whole thing kind of funny, right? But people just didn't get it. But it was, I wish people would understand that. You know, I can tell you, I never did. When I grew up, I grew up in the beaches in Toronto, and I had no idea of any of this. But now, I mean, the mining industry has been one of the best industries that I could have ever hoped to work in as a career. You know, yes, there were people that were visionary and people that weren't, but in general, the mining industry, from my experience, is full of the nicest people that I've ever met. What bothered me more about the people that weren't visionary was how much they were messing with the people who were in the middle. Because they were causing the mine to be shut down and sold and moved out. And, you know, I've even had to try and explain to politicians. I had one time I went down on the House of Commons, not on the floor, but in the back areas. And this particular guy, I won't need his name, but he was there and he was a lawyer, right? And he was on about the work we were doing well, why would we want to fund any of that work? And I remember saying to him, well, did you notice what the Parliament buildings are made out of? They're made out of rock. And they're made out of rock for a reason, because it lasts. They're not made out of particle board. They're not made out of any of those things. They used to be made out of a lot of wood, but that burned down. I see. But you have to realize that all the institutions that are of significance to our society are made out of rock. You know, you go to university campuses. The newer ones I get upset with because they make them out of concrete and they fail. But the Parliament buildings are made out of rock. The legislators are made out of rock. The museums are made out of rock. All those things that have longevity are made out of rock. And so you can't run the House of Commons floor and tell me that the technologies that we're working on to mine rock and to make rock aren't important. They are. And you know, at the time we were talking about Bell, what was it, Nortel. And I said to this guy, Nortel has been a huge industry for Canada. There's no doubt in my mind. But I said it's been a two, three, four billion dollar industry for 20 years. And I said I come from an industry where it's a several hundred billion dollar industry that's been going since Canada started. You put no R&D money into mining, but you'll sink huge amounts of money into telecom or into this or into that. And I said we need to get better at cutting and making rock. And I said like, why can't you see that? What is the problem? And he couldn't answer. You know, Fraser Mustard was one of the guys who wrote a letter of recommendation for me to get a Canadian research chair. Because getting tier one Canadian research chairs are very difficult. And Fraser wrote this note and I remember what he wrote in it was he said, as you focus on robotic mining, he said I want you to never forget to focus on robotic construction in underground facilities. He said it's a crime today to go to Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and see warehouses 20 feet high built on the best farmland in the world because people say it's too expensive to go and mine down below the ground. What are we going to do and run out of all that fertile land? It's not going to do us any good to have houses up there and warehouses up there if we can't feed everybody. And he said you have to in your career, Craig, focus on getting good at making underground facilities like that. And you know the mining industry, I would say one of the things that I wish there was more of a tie is the mining industry and the civil industry around getting those kinds of infrastructures in place. Because they're not good. And you know mining is a branch of civil but at the end of the day if you go into NSERC in some of these places there's no money for mining. I watch all the mining professors try to do stuff and they can't get any money to do more research. And then the mining industry kind of it goes from feast to famine and there's never any money for R&D because when you're making money you got to keep on making money to have enough money for when the famine comes, right? It's how it works. Another question is the one about women. Throughout your career have you seen a change in the presence or absence of women in the workplace? Yeah, I have. I mean, I guess I'll say it this way. When I was the manager and co and even today I tend to look at skills I never look at gender I never look at orientation I never look at any of that stuff because if people have the skills there's they'll fit and you know like when I first started at Incoar I remember a young lady and she came up to me because I mean, I've been like this all my life and she was upset because she was getting very poorly treated and I tried to figure a way to get her involved in the research department and I couldn't, she left the company because of it. She got poorly treated because she was a woman? Yeah, and when I was manager I promoted Samantha Espley Helen Francis they were all the most capable women who are now all gender managers at Incoar but I promoted them not because they were women I promoted them because they were capable and I think that all women all anybody who's got to be an ethnic or or orientation that good people will just hire good people for being good people I don't have any qualms about any of it and that I would say contrast the beginning of my career where I actually saw things like it was a superstition was not to have women go and do it, right? It was crazy but it was the superstition and the other thing that I find I worked with a lot of women when I worked at West because the coal mines, they were driving trucks and raiders and I was friends with a number of them, one friend in particular and she was one of the best operators we had and I remember women that have this really interesting ability that I find some guys it's not fair to say it, but some men and women just don't look after things but I find more often in a lot of mines men don't look after things that women do and I watch that happen many times in my career and the same is in the work they do in the engineering side like Helen and Samantha were more intellectually and personally biased about the work they were doing, they were more involved they were more committed, there were more of those things that's not to say there weren't men as committed as they were but they set an example that was better than anybody else we had and so it was the right thing to do and I just from my perspective I hope that that example is just carried on inside of it, ballet and others because that's what I want to do here in this business I'll finish with a couple questions one is what are you proudest of in your professional career that's an interesting question I read it it could be a couple it could be a general or broader well I think the one thing is that I'm proudest of the people that I've worked with who've been able to go on and accomplish you know I'm an owner of a company I've been a general manager but I've also been a professor and I want all the people to succeed and I want the industry I'm around to succeed and it only does that if the people around are good people and you know if I've had any part in getting some of those people that are younger than I or older than I to get better and get motivated or get whatever then that's pretty important you know in the one side I would say I wish I'd had a greater impact on the technological evolution in the mining industry and on the other side I'm proudest of the fact that I've had a major contribution to getting that to happen because it just wasn't it wasn't there at the same level as it is today when I started and you know if I played a little part in that I think some of the projects I got fortunate enough to be given to work on made some of those changes those are important for our society to evolve and for all those things and I also think that the projects that I've worked on that from a historic perspective will keep on going those to me are really important I guess for me now I mean it's not about I mean it's about making money but at the end of the day it's really about getting the ideas to carry on past what I've done and I want that to happen yeah I mean I you know every time we work on something in here like I said before I don't have to work on anything I don't want to and this company doesn't have to and you know we choose to work on safety things because I refuse to have an industry or society that allows people to pass away going to work it's crazy and if this robot you know I'm proud of it I'm proud of the robots that we've built to drive tracks and proud of the people that we're able to accomplish to get them to happen you know there's people that have gone on to amazing things that I've worked with which I find great I'm no longer needing to be the guy at the front unfortunately sometimes I have to be I get some of the skills I have but I'd rather other people would take it on last question and that's if you were looking at someone much younger like a student for example what would be the most important life lesson or piece of advice to give them going forward don't be limited to your mind what I find is that the young people I've been around will say things like no I can't do that I'm not allowed to do that I need permission to do that I need all those things and to me the barrier for them is their head putting up those blocks I've seen it so many times that people will say to them this is how it has to be and then they go well I can't do it any other way because I was told this is how it has to be and the reality is is that what they need to do is think independently and critically don't be crazy about it but do things because if you don't do things then nothing will get that and you have to do things in my own career I've never sat back and said somebody will give me something to do I've had to grow to make it happen and every young person needs to realize that they need to make it happen and you know guys like me who run businesses or used to be general managers and the problem is that people won't do things you say to them like do that it was interesting and it was funny because the drilling he came in the other day with a dull drill bit and he said well look at this it's been drilling and he said yeah and I said ok and he said well I think we should try this and I said ok and he said well did you say we had to do this bit and I said no he said well can we do that and I said I never said you had to do anything and I said what we have to do is drill a hole fast and so now after he's gone out and got three bits and I said now put together a little report and tell me so that we don't lose that when we find another bit so we can compare it but I find that young people are waiting too long to fire up they need to fire up on their own nobody's going to tell you what to do the fellow got waited for somebody to give him instructions on how to do it you know in this business do you think I waited for somebody to say the world really needs a mining robotics company no you got to go and do that stuff well thank you