 This is Anna Adamic in Montreal, it's named in fact in 1927, please. Could you give me your name and spelling word? My name is Robert Wehres, I was born right here in Montreal in 1957. Could you tell us about your type, what were your conflicts and your other types? Yeah, I grew up south shore, a place called Chateau Gay, raised in a fairly middle-class, standard environment, bilingual family, and as a child actually I lived outdoors, started collecting minerals when I was eight years old, and had a lot of encouragement actually from my dad who bought me books and so on. So by the time I was ten I decided I wanted to be a geologist. So your parents were taking those things out of us? Not at all. My father was a businessman and my mom was a homemaker. Could you talk about your education? High school, education, south shore, I was in Egypt and then McGill University here in Montreal. So why did you choose McGill? McGill had obviously international reputation, still has, I'm still involved with McGill at support level, and had one of the best geology departments in the country actually right here, so it was an easy choice. So you did your master's there, did you go on to do a PhD? No, I enrolled in the PhD program when I started working, but I never completed it. So you chose your career over at the Academy? Yeah, well I actually worked at McGill for a good 10 years. I left McGill in 1990, so from about 1985 to 1990 I was working there in the research institute. When did you first become interested in my first geology or academic geology? Mining, actually when I left McGill it was pretty much an academic career until when I was there, and 1990 the institute, I was 44 when bankrupt actually. So they closed the door, everybody got laid off, and that's when I decided to start a consulting company. But most of my research and academic portion of the career was still indirectly mining, it was all in economic geology, and I worked very closely with mining companies in eastern Canada. So the ties were always there? Full time or? Actually I was pretty much always a contractor, summer jobs, when I started, let's see, I started working when after recently, about 84-ish. So I spent many years working for government actually, just get training in geology, did a lot of mapping, mostly north in Canada of course. So I guess mining, actually I never had a full time job. I was a contractor for many years, traveled all over the place, went from project to project, and then that followed through after I left the institute in 1990 I started a consulting company. It was called Signis Consulting. Can you tell me about it? Well like many guys, I specialized in base metals mostly at the time, worked a lot in copper, nickel, zinc, and so on. We were just four guys really. And we did fund, pardon me? Three other Montrealers, yeah right here. Oh it does matter, they all went off, did different careers. After that, 98, I created a Cisco exploration. That was after the Briex scandal. Price of Gold was crashing, all the contracts dried up. So at that point I took funds I had and bought a small shell company, and that's how Cisco was recently born. This was with Tom Bozinski and... Not yet, no. And was like many other small exploration juniors, it was true spring budgets and pretty much starvation for the next five years. When I started the company I never imagined that the downturn would last so long. But it did and it was only 2003 when basically the market turned around, things started picking up. And it was that year that I met John and Sean through their wives actually, because I'd gone to McGill, did my bachelor's degree with John's wife, and she had become good friends with another woman who eventually married Sean. In 2003 they had come back from Africa and they were back in Canada and essentially for something to do, we're all at a crossroads which is actually pretty extraordinary. Because in 2003 I'd gone to what's called PDAC, which is the annual prospectors and developers association. It's actually still the largest mining convention in the world in Toronto, appears every March in Toronto. So I went to the PDAC to sell the Cisco as a shell, because I pretty much had it for the junior market, trying to survive on raising three, four hundred grand a year. It was very difficult to raise capital in those days. And then we met together, had lunch and we decided, hey, we should get together and do something. So Sean and John were able to get financing for the company and that's how a Cisco was launched. Could you explain to me the relationship between a Cisco exploration, a Cisco mining, or a Cisco goes another way? Sure. So a Cisco exploration was the start of junior entity and eventually we discovered Kenyan Malartic and after evaluating the deposit, making the discovery and getting significantly more financing because we were headed for a mine build essentially. Eventually that got changed to a Cisco mining because now we're building a mine. And after the hostile takeover attempt in 2014, an eventual sale of the mine to Kenyan Malartic partnership, which was a joint venture between Agnico Eagle and Yamana, we was actually mostly Sean and Brian Coates doing the created Cisco Royalties. You were also in charge with Hedley, I think, still? Hedley? No, not Hedley. No, I was involved in a lot of small companies throughout my career. Arizona Mining, I'm still involved with them. So can you maybe compare the cultures at those different companies with a Cisco? The cultures? Cultures, culture of innovation, technological cultures. Well, pretty much, well, why a Cisco for you? Why a Cisco? Oh, because I created it. Arizona, I sit on the board and so throughout my career, I sat on the board of a number of their junior explorers, contacts I made through the industry, you meet people you get along with and so on. They get involved in interesting projects. So you end up sitting on the board seats of other companies and bringing in your own expertise. In my case, of course, it's geology and exploration. In the case of Arizona, it's just one of many companies run by a domestic group out of Vancouver. I first met Richard Wark, who runs that group way back in the 90s when he was doing nickel exploration in Eastern Canada. And so I first started working as a consultant during that period of my career through seeing this consulting. And eventually, yeah, I joined some of his boards and Arizona stories shorter one, a certain extent, by the first start of the company called Wildcat Silver, developing a silver manganese project in Southern Arizona. And that led to the discovery of a much larger, more significant financing, silver project, which is currently still being drilled off and evaluated. You are credited with the discovery of the technologies that Yeah. So could you tell me about the process you applied? I know that was a new way that you... Well, I was new, yes and no. The idea had actually been thrown around in the past. It's basically the initial concept, but geological model is called a porphy gold. It was developed by other scientists and geologists mostly in South America. And a lot of people argue that what we discovered really wasn't a porphy gold, but I could debate that all day by essentially I was convinced that it was certainly an older equivalent because the King and Shield is much, the Roxxon King and Shield is much older than Roxxon in South America, for example, or at least in the Andes. So by applying a modified model, we were able to convince ourselves, or at least I was convinced myself, that the model was applicable to to the Canadian Shield in Northern, mostly North and Quebec in Ontario. That's very simple. There's a lot of debate as the gold is introduced into the crust. And the origins of gold actually was fascinating. There was an article just last week how there was two neutron stars colliding in the galaxy. And if you saw this galaxy 130 million light years away for the first time, gold, the spectral gold was detected as a result of this massive explosion. It's a very significant astronomical event, but for the gold bugs, it was evidence of how gold is actually formed in the universe. So anyways, I digress, I guess. In terms of how gold is introduced into the crust and makes ore deposits, one of the models is that you have magmas of granitory compositions that come up through the crust, and these magmas become saturated water. And when they release their water, the hot fluids, which we call hydrothermal fluids, migrate to the crust and carry metals. It's a very well-established model for pofite copper deposits, for example, in many parts of the world, including the Andes. But a variation on that is pofite gold in which those same magmas rather than bring copper or copper gold in certain conditions, they only bring gold. And I believe that process applies or did apply in the Canadian Shield in very old locks, which are about 2.7 billion years old. So by applying geophysical, geochemical techniques that are used in a more modern, actual logical environment to the Canadian Shield, and compiling information we're able to deduce that the Canadian Malartic camp wasn't your standard Abitibi vein type deposit, it was in fact more of a porphyry system. And again, it wasn't an original idea. It had been suggested before in the literature, but the idea never really caught on. What also didn't caught on, the major implication of applying that kind of model, is that you're shooting for a mining method, which essentially aims to mine a very large tentage, very low grade. The culture in Abitibi has always been one in which you go chasing after smaller, high grade veins through underground operations. When I say high grade, I say upwards of six, maybe six grams per ton, you have to keep in mind that the gold mining industry is a bit insane to the extent that you're mining a whole ton of rock just to extract a few grams of gold. But of course, gold is precious, so economically it makes it worthwhile. So the whole idea was, can we mine as low as one gram of gold in Abitibi? And most of my colleagues, at least way back then, in the early 2000s, they thought the idea was ridiculous. Playing gravel runs a gram of gold, and why would you want to mine a gram? The inspiration for me was a mine called Fort Knox in Alaska, run by Kinross, and I visited that mine, and when I came back I said, Jesus, if they could mine 0.8 grams per ton in Alaska, why can't we do it in Abitibi? Especially since these operations are very energy intensive and electricity is very cheap in the back, it runs four or four and a half cents a kilowatt hour. So I saw absolutely no reason at that point from the mining method why we can build large open pits and mine these deposits. So we had the technology, we had the mining method, we had the economic context at the time which was favorable for gold because gold was out of the doldrums of the late 90s and early 2000s, the price of gold was climbing. That was a bit of a leap of faith, of course. If gold hasn't kept rising through the development of our project we probably, we probably never would have been able to develop it. So as they say all the planets were aligned, it was a huge social challenge came in the Arctic because if the positive had been three more kilometers to the south, we wouldn't have had to move the southern portion of the town. So that was a huge challenge, convincing the town of the Arctic to accept this huge project, moving the southern portion and so on, which is something of course nobody had ever attempted before either. So on many levels from a sociological point of view and geological and mining point of view, model Arctic was a huge, huge challenge, but we just forged ahead and we succeeded in doing it and today still it's Canada's largest online in terms of production. So that's a bit of a history. It was applying a known model in modern geological environments and applying it to the Canadian Shield and it worked out very well, of course, and other companies and followed through and variations on the concept and several other large-tenage low-grade deposits were discovered, another one of which went into production, which is Detour Lake in Ontario and one of which will soon go into production, Rainy River also in Ontario. So it works and I think companies the future of gold mining certainly in Canada will still aim to find other such deposits. Now an open pit deposit, of course, has a much stronger environmental impact and that has to be mitigated and so on. Yeah, this is something I wanted to ask you about. What are your thoughts on that environmental impact? Well today rules are changed of course. Companies can't go in and rape and pillage the land and leave a mess behind. So I think it's well managed by government especially. For example now they, here in Quebec, you have to put up an environmental bomb. You have to put up the money up front for the eventual cleanup. It's set up as a bomb of government holes for the lifetime of the mine and so when the company leaves, even if the project goes bankrupt in between and that's been another problem. In the past a lot of companies have put mines into production, price of the commodity goes down, company goes under and then government's left with a mess and eventually taxpayer has to pay. So that's the legacy of the past and there's still a lot of old mine sites that need to be cleaned up. But again, that is a phenomenon of the past because now you can't open a mine without putting up the money for the eventual cleanup. And the remediation processes is a whole other area of expertise. In most cases there are no issues. You replant, you smooth out the land. In the case of an open pit in Canada, give it 15 years it'll just fill up with water. Now in some cases depending on what you mine, there is a danger that the water in the pit will be contaminated. So then it ends up having to be contained. But in the case it came to Lardake is actually there are no contaminants. So eventually when 25 years from now it's going to be a lake. Ironically it's going to be probably the deepest lake in Quebec because the pit's going to reach a depth of 400 meters. And what can be done with that lake after that? Well it's a choice. A lot of the environmental activists argue that the pit should be filled. I find that's a completely absurd idea. First of all, if you're talking about 600, 700 million tons of rock that have to be plowed back into the hole. You mount a diesel lead pollution that you have to burn in order to accomplish this. It's really a lot of big CO2 footprint. And for what? To fill up a hole with rock that's going to fill up with water. I mean I find the whole concept absolutely pointless. As long as the tens piles are remediated, essentially become part land or return to being forest land. And the pit goes with water. To me that represents a complete environmental success. It takes time and it doesn't happen in 10 years. You have to give nature time to reclaim. And the engineers the time to do their job. So remediation is usually I would say a 15 to 20 year process. I just want to go back for a moment to Canada and Malartic. So you are also starting this project when there are economic problems, the crisis in the U.S. Did you have any problems finding financing for the project project? For Kingdom of Malartic? Well once again the price of gold was on a continuous rise. After the crash of 2008, honestly we thought we were pretty much dead ducks. The price of our shares went down to I think was $1.40. And well it just wasn't, not just the whole world was wondering what was going on and how much damage it was going to be. But in fact the stock market bounced right back and we had completed a feasibility then. So in the spring of 2009 we were able to do a first large financing of $460 million to finance the project. And there was a lot of appetite on the party investors to invest in this new mine. The whole community was convinced that it was going to be an economic project. Price of gold was going very well and it's going to be robust and it will work out. And of course they were right. It did work out. Can you tell about your investors? They're mostly, let's see at the time, actually a lot of participation from Canadian pension funds, including here in Quebec, some private equity, but also gold funds. There's a few gold funds especially in the US. They're very supportive of good gold projects. For most of us it was probably the worst moment of our careers. And at that point we're 10 years into the project we start with nothing. As far as I'm concerned hostile takeovers are an aberration of the capitalistic system and I wish the government would make them illegal. The only people who profit are a handful of investors and hedge fund managers and speculators. It's terrible for the economy. Always results in lost jobs. In this case loss of the head office and so on. I mean I've never seen anything good come out of the hostile takeover except for a handful of greedy investors. But unfortunately it's something we all have to live with in Canada. The target companies are completely unprotected. It's a bit different in the States. Companies can defend themselves better in the state than Canada. It basically goes to vote and by the time it goes to vote your entire investor base has changed. Everybody's bailed out and its hedge funds and speculators have taken over your stock base and your toast. Once you're put into place it's already game over. Well when you're under attack and it really is you're basically at war and you try to survive your job is to try to get a better deal for your own investors. And so that's what we did. We were able to get to convince Yamana and Agnico to bend together and make a better offer against the Gold Cup. Well mostly right now in the areas that we're working on we have indirectly one project in BC projects and Abitibi projects in James Bay. So we deal where we don't have any projects really. Well we have one grassroots project in Labrador trough so that's territory but for the most part it's pre-territory. So yeah right now everywhere in Canada all companies especially the mining industry not so much other industries but mining industry deals with, has to familiarize itself with the local First Nations communities and basically cut a deal make sure that they're involved make sure that they're going if there is ever a production they're called impact benefits agreements or IDAs and they've become commonplace now and the idea is to is to share the development of the resources with the First Nations communities. Some of the communities are very well organized they're open for business they've got their own private corporations that supply services to the mining industries others much less so certain communities in my opinion need a better job to get themselves internally organized to be able to deal with this new reality. From the mining point of view and there are a lot of conflicting land claims in North and Canada from a miners point of view the last thing you want to do is have to come into an area and cut four different deals right what you really want to do is is eventually sign one IVA and hope that the different communities that they are involved in that one particular area will a little band together and form one group but that's not always the case sometimes the different First Nations communities actually compete with each other which doesn't well it's not very healthy actually it's far more efficient and beneficial to all if they come together and form one united group so there's still some work to be done at that level but when you're dealing with one First Nations community then it sits much easier. Actually I've never had to deal with it thank God. Unions have their place in the world of course but I find unions today to become not governments but organizations that promote a lot of self-interest not always I think in the interest of their own workers. You'd bureaucracies in many cases but I came to the Arctic there was no union the the workers formed their own internal group and many attempts were made by the big unions to infiltrate if you like and unionize them but they refused and the partnership still came like mine still has no union run by the partnership and they're doing fine so I think we live in the world now where workers have to really because they all have to pay their dues they have to wonder whether unions are the best solution for them. You worked all around the world, so could you talk about your projects abroad? Most of the projects actually most of the work I did abroad was on a consulting basis I never actually had we had very little we did some exploration abroad mostly in Latin America I never worked really got involved in any serious project in Asia or Europe or Australia mostly in other words this side of the hemisphere and while I mean you can't generalize I'm still involved in one project in West Africa every country is different every culture is different every country and culture presents different challenges you just have to adapt yourself but you also have to choose your country carefully and I would certainly advise that some countries should be avoided all together so it's uh you can't generalize it's it varies many countries if you don't have inroads you can have solid contacts if you basically don't know what you're doing don't even try for example I would never attempt to go to Russia the few attempts at companies I know have tried to Russia has been trainwrecks for them and I know I have no contacts I know nothing about what their rules are on operations and the rules of the game are in Russia so I wouldn't even attempt it I'm fairly familiar with a lot of countries on this side of the hemisphere but even even here and well for example even in the states some states are hostile to mining you know Wyoming comes to mind Wisconsin you wouldn't even give us a thought it's like forget it a tax structure is about adequate the population is anti-mining and so on I mean there are a lot of places in the world considered mining an evil it's a bit hypocritical because everyone likes to consume on a daily basis the products of mining and and yet they take it for granted all the metals all the concrete all the glass everything they use on a daily basis it's fine but it's it's we call it the NIMBY syndrome not in my backyard and it's a big problem for miners actually most of population feel that many countries that mining should not even be seen or heard and yet the world can't do without it totally yeah exactly especially in there have been areas obviously when you go to rural areas and in the far north people are more familiar with mining they might have grown up in the mining environment like they do when you have a tibbey but certainly in most of the protests we've I've noticed and the anti-mining sentiment comes from NGOs or in urban areas there was mostly opposition to malartic king right here from Montreal never came from really familiar to me what was the most difficult project in your career difficult came malartic the minefield yeah I'm a geologist my job my contribution to the companies is to find the gold and define the ore deposits after that it becomes more of an engineer and environmental and social what challenge but I was here with the country throughout the entire mine build and contribute what I could at that level but that was certainly far more challenging than drilling off an ore deposit and the contribution that you are yeah discovery came already it's interesting it's the most challenging for you oh yeah yeah well the bigger the better and the harder really but the I guess the experience the most satisfying experience I came malartic is becoming where that and that's what actually mining is all about it's it's true wealth creation you start with something which is absolutely worthless that nobody wants and you turn it into a five six billion dollar enterprise and it's real money it's it's not fictitious you're actually creating wealth it translates into wealth at several levels new jobs manufacturing of the equipment that you need all the people get involved all the subcontractors the taxes I mean it all comes out literally of the gold that you're pulling out of the ground and selling so when you consider a project like that to me the simplest way of evaluating well how much real wealth did we create well if you take a ballpark figure and say okay long-term price of gold is $1,500 an ounce and we've found 11 million ounces so multiply 1500 by 11 you're looking at 16 17 billion dollars as well that's created from the ground which was originally worth absolutely zero so you know mining that's the level of which mining really contributes to the economy is by creating wealth out of the ground that is essentially worthless if you don't do the work and that of course applies to any resource extracting you're creating wealth out of nothing but it in terms of mining the the impact of mining is particularly strong because at the end of the day the surface and environmental impact of mining operations in Canada in terms of the whole surface area of Canada is just 0.0001 percent the the footprint in other words is very small compared to other industries such as forestry or especially farming I think it's seven percent of Canada that's that's impacted by farming and make no mistake farming pollutes a lot pesticides herbicides fertilizer goes into waterways etc etc but of course farming industry is is food and nobody questions really are very few people question the environmental impact of farming it's easy to target the mining industry because it's dusty it's noisy or moving rock and making holes and so on but at the end of the day the the relative impact of mining in terms of the wealth created is it's very small and you're talking about as I mentioned creating billions of dollars with the wealth and it goes into the pockets eventually of all Canadians what are your thoughts on the culture of innovation of innovation that comes from the mining industry in Canada today I actually can as a leader a lot of innovation certainly the mining level also a level of my my industry which is exploration GPS technology for example is completely revolutionized the way we work the way we mine the way we survey the ground it's in the 90s I remember buying my first GPS which was a big box and you knew more or less where you were within 100 meters and today you can go buy a handheld $200 garment in an entire and you'll get a three meter anywhere anywhere in the world really you'll get three meter precision in your position so it's fantastic that that kind of technology has made a huge change computing power GIS data processing and last certainly life span of my career it's been revolutionary changes and the innovation continues a lot of innovation and mining methods these days processing war environmental remediation a lot of research goes into it so it's a lot of population things and mining industry is being a primitive industry but it's it's anything but that and just I was amazed I came Malartic when it was built and some of the newer technology was put into place again with GPS technology every bucket full of ore that was extracted from the pit could be located in GPS space and XYNZ all right so basically you could locate in the model overall model of the pit in your deposit you could locate every scoop and know exactly where it came from down to I think it was half a meter position precision so when you're trying to control your mining operation and your grade control a big challenge in the pit like that that mines 50 000 tons of ore a day is obviously to make sure that there are no mistakes made and you're not throwing waste rock into the mill or that kind of technology which allows you to position each scoop very precisely just revolutionizes your whole operation that makes it far far more efficient and that's something that amazed me today in some mines the the trucks are there are no truck drivers everything's automated you have guys sitting in offices in front of the screen with these joysticks a thousand miles away and they're controlling a truck and then an open pit mine in which there's hardly any personnel so that reduces a lot of risk for the workers for the workers no more dangers of open pits collapsing or underground blast and so on there's a lot of automation going into mining operations so that's that's one field I think which is going to evolve very rapidly I can't imagine a mine being entirely run by remote operations but maybe that's what we'll reach one day there'll be no actual humans going underground what is the direction that you want to take for a Cisco well there are actually three assist goes now so there's royalties which is focused on acquiring royalties and building a long-term sustainable income base based on the gold royalty model a Cisco mining we're back to what the original Cisco mining was which is finding gold deposits developing them and eventually putting on the production and their flagship project is called Windfall Lake in northern Quebec and we just recently created Cisco metals which is going to be focused on base metals and specifically specifically zinc we believe we're headed for a long-term supply crunch global supply crunch and zinc and and uh it's it's time to start focusing on that particular base metal well something else you have to keep in mind is that the world takes metals for granted the entire industry governments everybody always assumes that there's always going to be iron there's always going to be copper there's always going to be tin molybdenum there's always going to be a safe stable supply of metals and it's a fallacy actually uh you can't assume on a global basis that all metals will always be available all time even it's been that case in the past but the reality is globally we're slowly running out of resources and it's normal discovery rates are dropping the easy deposits have been found becoming far more challenging to find new art deposits and the population isn't shrinking and consumption is going up china's growth rate is is astounding are huge consumers of resources and uh feeding the world with metals into the 21st century is going to be a huge challenge and i think society and governments at large have to stop stop taking the availability of resources and the mining industry for granted it's it's not it's no longer going to be a nice safe stable environment for many communities yeah i don't really believe in that yeah extremely difficult i think is potentially extremely damaging to to the seafloor environment and it's also extremely expensive i just don't i don't think in this century uh i think we're going to have to run out of ground base to cause us before we consider that looking at commercializing deep sea deep sea mining how do you consider your mentors uh my mentors essentially older geologists that taught me everything they knew or at least their expertise uh certainly uh yeah my thesis advisor miguel uh he's still not retired his name uh anthony wonning jones and he's uh 72ish 73 still very active still has a lot of my grad students and so on he's he's really been the premier economic geology at miguel geologists in miguel now for well over what 30 years uh worked very closely uh when i was doing the research work in labor trough and so on worked very closely with tom clark who's an excellent geologist who's also retired now so uh yeah there are a number of people that you come across in your career that uh very knowledgeable very experienced and uh it's it's uh actually a privilege to work with these people on the business side uh i started too late obviously my career to be exposed to some of the leaders who were the mine builders and the mine company builders in this country didn't really have the chance to interact with them though uh who would you like to connect with who i think oh so again some of the guys are marty industry uh careless on uh he he was a mining engineer actually but ended up creating franco divata based on he was the first one along with seymour shulig to create a gold royalty model and they were very very successful as they are and uh as i said the list goes on and on guys are all listed in the hauling line of fame norman kiebel just published a book uh essentially on the history of tech i haven't read it yet but looking forward to it tech is is one of the great successes of mining industry in canada and fortunately they weren't taken out there's some other companies that have survived because they were smart enough to keep a controlling interest to kiebel family kept a controlling interest of the company and that's another thing we've lost a lot of them great mining companies in this country due to uh i think something to foreign interests or hostile takeovers and uh it's been a tragedy i think uh there are no narandas the falcon bridge and so on uh they're all gone a lot of them yeah yeah and that's another tragedy when when yourself mining assets and head office ends up being in xeric or london it's a big loss the when the head office is not in your own country and you've probably seen this yourself all the funding that goes into innovation research uh scholarships all disappears geology well there are a lot of options you can go into environmental geology you can still work for government to become a government geologist which entails largely doing geological studies and mapping of canada depends what you want uh if you don't want an in environmental geology you'll tend to be closer to urban centers if you're doing government mapping well you may end up one year in baffin island and the next year in the northwest territories and another year in bc you spend a lot of time away from home makes it uh makes it far more difficult obviously to to raise a family when you're you're gone all summer uh in exploration same thing to a certain extent uh you travel a lot you might be might be assigned to projects all over the world so uh i think anyone who wants to become a geologist and start a career in geology has to be ready to be extremely mobile and spend a lot of time away from home certainly in the first 15 15 years of career eventually you move up the food chain and you end up in management so you travel less but certainly in the early years it's it's tough uh i used to take off what four or five months of the year that's changed so they know what it called them the kids of course they're not kids but they're all young geologists in the 20s and 30s they they all do rotations now they're out i can't send a young geologist up for three months in the bush they won't do it so they they go out two weeks and they come back home one week and they go out two weeks in my time i was unheard of but today it's become the standard so times have changed again makes it far more expensive to run an exploration program for the companies i think to rotate all this personnel and managing and so on but it's really become the new norm and i would say socially it's probably you know much better certainly for uh young families they're trying to you know raise their kids and so on what are you the therapist of in life in life well career-wise certainly uh getting lardic and having uh created the assist goes and you know what we got taken out everybody thought that was it it was the end we're all gonna pack up and retire and go do something else but we all came back so still a passion for most of us certainly uh well you know the three three egos as we call ourselves so and uh we're i tried retiring for six months and gotten bored really fast after the takeover there's a more question i just needed a break so but now we're back at it and we're very proud of what we do and uh yeah again it's about mindbuilding it's about well creation and uh it's good for us great for the country great for the economy um no as i said we love the industry i think we're proud of it uh a lot of criticism uh critics out there who who are always uh taking pokes at us we listen patiently try to improve ourselves it's an ongoing process but pretty much everyone who works here i think is uh is impassioned by the industry and uh very proud of what they do okay thank you