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- [00:00]
A
And we've got a special guest today, Kevin Bamberrow. We'll have him give a little introduction for himself, but he's an author, the former CEO of Sprott, and a huge investor in one of the stocks that we recommended in the crisis investing portfolio. Kevin, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate it.
- [00:19]
B
Pleasure to be on this podcast with you, Matt and Doug. It's always good to catch up with you.
- [00:26]
A
I gave a little introduction to your background, but I didn't really do it much justice. Could you just tell us, tell the audience a little bit about yourself?
- [00:32]
B
Sure. I like to always sort of point out I'm, you know, in my book, I covered it as well. I, I dropped out of university. It was a difficult time for me. My father died when I was at an early age and I ended up going into computers instead of, you know, the Internet was just starting. So I took off rolling out computers, building up networks, worked my way up to the banks. And then I took my computer skills and started researching stocks. And I did a deep dive. I predicted that we were going into the nasdaq, sort of the bubble. I predicted that there was going to be a crash in Y2K, excess capacity of everything. Earnings were going to disappoint. And so I started preparing myself not just for the run up, but for the short, decided to become a full time investor then on my own, with my own capital, basically like a day trader, but doing a combination of short term trades, long term investments, and the deep dive I did. I just decided to basically study all I could about all the different styles of investing and tried to combine my own style, like by bringing all these different parts together and saying if I can find stocks that, you know, Warren Buffett would like, but it also has good technicals and, you know, Peter lynch would like, and it fits all these different patterns, then I'm going to be truly finding incredible investments and it's just a matter of helping to get those stories moved along. And then I ended up, after a few years of investing and having good success on my own, I got introduced to Eric Sprott, joined Sprott when he was just leaving the brokerage world and starting an asset management company. And with that firm, I started as a technical analyst. He wanted me for my trading ability and looking at technical charts and trying to maximize returns on the, on the core positions in the portfolio. And I fought my way to become a research analyst, a market strategist, the president of Sprott Inc. I created a private equity division, was the CEO of that, we grew it to over a billion in assets. I had a five year track record. The market was down about 90%. My benchmark through the 2008 crisis, I was up about 28% compounded. So it was like a 20 fold, 25 fold outperformance. And then in 2013, as the bear market was sort of getting started, really digging in for commodities, I decided to step away from Sprott with some different disagreements about the direction of the firm and basically been managing my own capital but since then, and then started doing deep research into, you know, not just commodities, but all types. I went back to sort of the tech and got into the physics, the chemistry, the biology and how all things came together. And that's what brought me to hydrograph and graphene.
- [03:20]
A
Well, there's so much hype in tech right now. It's all, and it's all on AI and I think some of it with good measure. But Doug has been this forever nanotech bull and that's where, and the word hydrograph is fundamentally, it's, it's something real that starts to take advantage of these nanotech possibilities. So as soon as it got on Doug's radar, he was extremely excited about it. He's like, is it real, though? Is it real? I, I've been waiting for the real thing. So you've done more, more work on this company than I been probably anybody alive. And you know, I mean, what. Don't just kind of tell us what you saw at first and, you know, what you discovered along the way and what your thoughts are at this point.
- [04:03]
B
Yeah, it's, it's kind of a funny story in a way because I had finished my first book, which is the Energetic Investor, and I hired my son who had been working with Power One. I think you guys know Pat DiCapo and Power One. And he, my son had done a couple of summer jobs. He was a summer student or, you know, he was in university still, but he was working with Pat for a couple of summers. And then I said, why don't you come work with me this summer? This was last summer. And I said, we're going to work on a book and we'll look at stocks to invest and keep doing. What I was doing with, started to do with energetic media was just find good investments and talk about them and, you know, share what I find. And when I started asking him what he wanted to work on, he had mentioned that he was very excited about this Hydrograph company that, that Pat had been, had been the seed financer of with Power One and the guys from Haywood and the graphene sector. And it sort of fit in with this idea for this next book, which was father teaching his son how to invest. And basically, you know, what have you learned in school? I get to teach you how the real world works now because he's taking a combination of commerce, you know, economics and then also geology. And I wanted to sort of teach him this idea of cyclicality and, you know, how to play commodities for the long term. And. And I said, well, this is perfect because I didn't do that deep of a dive in the past into graphene. And I thought, why not go with him and take my son and sort of say, this is how you go about approaching a new sector. And it'd been a while for me to do that. And you kind of, you kind of get a bit lazy. That's one of the things I've been writing about is the bias. You know, like Hydrograph got lost because it was trading on the CSE amongst mining stocks. And everybody went in the wrong direction at first with graphene, which was what I found out as I did the research. And it's because graphene was found with that initial Scotch tape method where they took graphite and they did this and then they looked at the particles and said, oh look, these are interesting little single atom particles under electron microscope. And then everyone's like, well, we got to mine graphite, graphite and try to harvest those particles and separate them and treat them and all different methods. And what ended up happening with the bulk of those companies is they found that they. It was very expensive and difficult to get a concentrate of pure graph graphene from the graphite and that it would clump and stack together and it wouldn't disperse. Well, in things like polymers when you try to make a new plastic with it.
- [06:34]
A
Well, I gotta say, I think it's funny that your son brought you this stock and you used it as a teaching vehicle for him and how incredible of a teaching vehicle it's been for you.
- [06:46]
B
Well, it's not only that. What's ironic about it is when I first approached the sector with my own bias, I'm like, you know, I'm doing really well. I've got these big positions in uranium and silver and gold and, you know, copper and molybdenum and tungsten and, you know, it's like, I don't need to do this. This isn't for me. I'm not that excited about it. And I basically was sort of using the bias that everyone would have is saying, like, you know, I'm going to look at the sector and they're probably going to be a whole bunch of crappy companies that burn cash and it's going to be very competitive and hard for any of them to make a real margin. And that's sort of like, you know, the old saying with the mining industry. You know, it's like a mine's a hole in the ground with a liar on top and these companies just continually raise capital and burn cash. And I was just shocked as I went through the sector and started looking at all the different types and then realizing how special fractal or turbostratic fractal graphene aggregates were. And that was one of the big things that set off for me is why Hydrograph is so unique.
- [07:46]
A
Okay, so why does graphene matter? Why were people going through all this effort to mine graphite and try and harvest the graphene from it? What's the prize?
- [07:59]
B
Well, the prize is that first of all, I guess there's a couple things that I got to sort of deal with on a high level. First of all, there's chemistry and physics. And I now look at chemistry and physics as being one. It shouldn't be two separate subjects because you basically have to, to work with nanomaterials and be a nano engineer, you need to have both. And you know, Dr. Sorensen chats with, this is the inventor for Hydrograph, chats with this guy named, I'll butcher his name so I won't say it, but he chats with, you know, other chemists and physicists and they bring all these people together. And that's one of the things he's talked about is this Bell Labs model of bringing scientists together to really build the products of the future. And so the reason why that's happening is that we've now, in the last couple decades, we've developed all the knowledge around quantum physics and quantum mechanics and the idea of bonding, of things bonding together. It's not just about this chemical bond. Sort of basic idea of sharing an electron, which made no sense to me as a non physics chemistry guy. It's what, what I like to describe is what carbon does and why it's the hardest and best material in the world. It's like something like a quarter of the world. The universe's material is tied to carbon. It's like the universe was created to make carbon and carbon is in like 10,000, sorry, 10 million different things. And there's only like a million things outside of that, that don't have carbon. So it's like this material that is connected and can bond with everything. Connected it with everything. And how it does is at the atomic level, you've got the nucleus and then you've got some electrons that. People think of electrons as being these little balls going around it. That's the way I was taught in school. But now we realize it's. They're everywhere at once. And it's actually like this sort of fuzzy quantum field. It's. It might as well. You know, we try to simplify by things by putting names on them like covalent bonding and things like this or van der Waals forces. You might as well call it, you know, Wonder Woman's magic lasso. You know, it doesn't matter. It's a force that we identify and we don't fully understand it, but these electrons are just there and they're creating this force shield. And with carbon, you end up with two nucleuses are strongly attracted together. It's like they want to hang out with their buddies. And then there's some electrons that are creating forces that keep them from getting too close. But they can only get this close. And because they're so close and bonded together. Sorry. Attracted to each other. They have these sort of wandering electrons or this a field that. Because they're so close together, this. I think it can't go in between them anymore. So it goes around them. And so it's like if you and I were the nucleuses of carbon, we'd get as close as we could because we're super attracted to each other. Right. And then there's just gonna be this electron field that goes around both of us and holds us in position. We can't get too close. Cause we're also repelled by each other. But we each have an electron that's creating a field that keeps us and say, let's hang out together. And then when you get six of us together, we. We form a hexagon shape and the electrons are flying around all of us. And then when you start getting more together, it's like you're looking to your left and I've got a group of six with you here that I'm sharing. And then there's a group of six here that I share with you as well. And then I've got another group of six buddies over here. And this is what hydrograph makes is. And then what you could get a graphene sheet that's single atom layer. But what hydrographs little particles are, they're like little wafers And Sorensen told me there's probably about a thousand atoms on average in one of their little flakes, right? Like this little graphene sheet. And unlike graphene, that comes from graphite that it wants to restack. So you can picture the crackers all restacking and then you can't get anything in between them and you just have the edges of the graphene. Well, with hydrographs, graphene, it's turbostratic, which means the layers are slightly more apart, they're twisted and they're on angles like this, different angles, and then they all form together and stick together. So now you're creating space everywhere. And in those spaces as it forms and it grows out, like I like to say, it's like a snowflake and they grow, it grows in a fractal, so it's open like a Snowflake, but it's 3D and it's like this and it's creating all these spaces so that particles like from a polymer or whatever can get in there and grab them. And another analogy I use before you
- [12:33]
A
go to explain the science work, why does anyone care about graphene?
- [12:37]
B
Oh, sorry. I keep, I keep, I keep going a little bit ahead on that. So it's, you know, at that atomic layer, when it bonds like that, it's the strongest bond of any particles we know in the universe. So it's, you know, they say it's 200 times stronger than steel and it's harder than a diamond. And it's got, they've now figured out, they call it Dirac fluid. And it's basically like a room temperature superconductor, which is another way of saying. I created an interesting video the other day to help explain it to me with Google Gemini, but basically it's like forming, you can get particles to move, like electron particles to move through. Say, like with a copper wire, they're normally sort of bouncing around. And that's why the wire burns up at some point, you know, with the heat. If you put, try to put too much current through a copper wire because of all the bouncing into things, little particles, the impurities in the copper, it, it creates heat. It's just like rubbing your hands together, you create heat. And so when these little electrons are bouncing off things, it's generating heat resistance and loses power. If you could do it with graphene, it's like all the electrons flow perfectly like a river. And it's, you know, it's like a
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A
hundred times more conductive than copper, right? Something like that.
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B
If you could get it to that Dirac fluid point which they're starting to figure out how. But in order to do that it has to be completely pure and you need. And then you have to go beyond just that single atom layer. You really need to make it happen in a 3D particle, like in a 3D material. And that's where Hydrograph comes in. Because the other graphenes typically are. Have impurities and they're not that SP2 bonding which is dealing with the electrons again in order to that force shield effect and bonding them all together and having the electrons all flow around through material in a three dimensional space that requires them all. Every particle has to be 100% sp2 bonding. Otherwise the electrons don't reach out and connect in group. And the example there is diamond is sp3 and graphene is sp2. So in a diamond it's like this. And I like to use the analogy of snow again and say if you go to a ski hill and it's like ice crystals that were made, you know, it's manmade snow that's kind of icy and chunky. You try to make a snowball and you throw it, it'll just break apart. It doesn't stick, it doesn't form like a perfect bond like the perfect snow does. A perfect powder day, you know, it all sticks together. And that's what Hydrograph has figured out how to do with this explosion. Synthesis is, is literally. It's the same principle as making snow where there's an evaporation of water and then it falls and it cools rapidly and it starts crystallizing and forms those fractals.
- [15:34]
A
Right. So this is. So that's the Hydrograph technology which is what makes it really unique. But the promise is something like it's, it makes, it's for. For conducting electricity for, you know, for, for,
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C
for.
- [15:52]
A
Gosh, I can't think of the word.
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B
For some reason it's super material, right?
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A
Yeah. It makes things, makes everything stronger. Makes it last for basically ever. I mean it does. It looks lighter. It's. Right, it's sci fi material.
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B
Yeah, totally. And I keep, I'm at the point now where I keep slipping away from saying that because it just, it's so obvious to me now as I've done all this work is. But it's. Yeah. If you want to make something really strong last longer you want to make it, you can do it either way. You can make it very conductive or you can make it shielding. So EMF shielding because you, you. When you create a mesh with this, the Turbostratic fractal graphene into a polymer. There's the electrons are all buzzing around like I said. And then if an EMF wave, right. Some type of electric frequency comes at the, like a radio frequency comes out the material, it will, it'll just disintegrate like it will bounce off, it'll absorb and knock back the, the electron particles.
- [16:50]
A
So like if I, if I was wanted to get into, if I wanted to have one of those skiff rooms that they bring all the CIA people in and I had some paint, theoretically with some graphene and I could paint the walls with this.
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B
You might have to put a few coatings with the paint, but we, we've
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A
actually blocked all signals coming in or out.
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B
Yeah, you probably would instead put it into a wallboard, which some things I've been working on are things like flooring material and wallboards for condos so that you can EMF shield your house or your condo, both for safety, but not sharing WI FI signals. But also just some people want to have less signals hitting their bodies. So why not shield your room completely?
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A
Right.
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B
You'll be able to do it with glass too, I expect.
- [17:35]
A
Oh really? Okay. And this same kind of thing, you could put it in a tire and the tire is going to get, you know, X times more lifespan, for instance. Yeah, right.
- [17:45]
B
Yeah. And you could also. We've got some designs I've been working on for dispersing heat in tires so that you could run them like mining tires. You can run them faster, longer. Especially with robotic mining, you know, you have longer shifts and you don't really need to stop. And with the heat in a lot of different places, if the tires get too hot, you have to slow down your mining vehicles so it can disperse that heat. Yeah. And, and you could, there's all. It's literally a never ending sci fi of potential inventions that you could do where you could take this graphene and you're like, I want to make a new coating for boats. And I've, you know, I've come up with some designs for that as well with my team that we've been working on. Things like all, like we've got six different types of coatings for boats. And it just depends. Is it epoxy, is it fiberglass, is it aluminum? You could functionalize the graphene to bond perfectly with different materials depending on what you're targeting. And you want it to be hydrophobic so that water just, it's like, like frictionless. Do you want to be able to put a current through it, you know, and heat, heat things with a coating, do you want to shield the emf? Do you want to absorb radar? It's just, it's truly is a wonder material.
- [18:56]
A
And you start to have really thin, bulletproof stuff.
- [19:01]
B
Yeah, potentially. There's all different ways.
- [19:04]
A
Yeah, I'm just, I'm just sci fi. Ing it just to people. Just try and get people perspective.
- [19:09]
B
The funny thing is, is you have to do multiple materials sometimes and multiple layers to get the properties that you, that you want. Because, for example, people always say, well, why don't you make like a spider silk suit that's graphene and you know, it's bulletproof. Well, the problem is, is that if you made some material that is super thin and bulletproof, it'll just get pushed inside your body and it'll still.
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A
Exactly right. Yeah.
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B
You know, like, so there has to be this idea of this, you know, layers in between so that, you know, it has a cushioning effect as well. And then you're like, okay, well let's say if we're going to make a cushioning effect, can we make it so it's as light as possible and not. And it also disperses your body heat so you're not sweating buckets. I was just, I was just chatting today, this morning with a friend of mine who's a firefighter and we're like, let's work on making all types of stuff better for firefighters, including a mask that won't melt. You know, he's got pictures of the firefighters where they. At a thousand degrees, when you get into a really hot blast of heat in a fire, it'll just, it'll just melt the face shield.
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A
Okay, so what we're talking about fundamentally is total sci fi stuff. Yeah, total sci fi technology.
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B
You can imagine it, it, it probably is going to get made and it's going to have graphene in it.
- [20:28]
A
And, and, and, and I think in a way so we can get it get into Hydrograph. The promise of Hydrograph's particular graphene is that it, it makes these things actually technically possible. Not necessarily. They're easy problems to solve still, but you've got the raw material to solve it. Is that right?
- [20:47]
B
I think that what we're going to find because of this convergence of AI and robotics and new manufacturing equipment being innovated as well, that it's going to be a lot easier to work with this material than people think. And it's going to develop at a rate that people are going to be shocked at the speed at which people can Engineer and innovate. I've partnered with a gentleman named Adam Kill out of Perth, who's an amazing data scientist AI guy. And we've built an engine that is looking at and we've trained it on fractal graphene. And the amazing thing, what really excites me more than anything else is that there's, as a Hydrograph shareholder is that there's a lot of things that you could only do with fractal graphene. It's very clear when you look at the science and the deep physics and chemistry and even biology, when you want to combine graphene with organic materials. It's a very unique and special material because of its ability to disperse in a product. The particles are typically 6 to 9 atomic layers thick, these little tiny microscopic particles. And because they're open like that, it really grabs a hold of everything. And another analogy that I like to use is if you think about a fence post, if you just put it in the ground, once the ground hardens and dries, you could kind of just give it a shake and slide it out. And that's because it has smooth edges. But you could take that same wood, if you could and use the exact same amount of wood that's in the ground, but have it branch out gradually like a tree and open up into all little root systems. And now you can never pull that post out because it's going to take. It's got a huge root ball with it. It's grabbing on to all of the ground. And that's the difference with hydrographs, graphene is that because it's fractal, it's literally like a root system that is all weave together and so the polymers all get mixed in or whatever you're connecting it with and then it just. And it's the strongest bond, right. The strongest bond that we know of in the universe. So for me, it's just like this, this level, you're like every. I want to make everything better. Other people are going to think exactly like me and go, let's make everything better with this graphene. Let's include it into our manufacturing process at the right place and time so that every component of everything we make and everything we make it with gets better.
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A
Who else makes graphene like this?
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B
No one else makes fractal graphene. And that's amazing.
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A
That's why you're the largest shareholder of.
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B
Yeah, I mean, when you think about it. And I tried to come up with like a big part of investing. Right. Is pattern. Pattern recognition. Right. And you're trying to look for. Okay, well, here's a stock story. What boxes does it check? Who would like this story? Is it going to be this earnings giant? It's nanotech. Oh, it's good for the environment. It's got a defense element to it. On and on and on, all these different things. And everyone will connect with the story because there's things like, oh, you can make better pots and pans, or you can make better, you know, I don't care. You're a firefighter. Well, you. We can make better stuff. Oh, you're a painter. We can give you better paint. So I tried to come up with a. With an idea of what pattern, like what. What stock story does this even resemble? And, you know, I had to go back to, like, the South Sea Company and the, you know, these, these trading companies when they first discovered a new continent. And everyone thought that they're going to be staking all this ground and getting royalties on all the materials that are coming from the new world. Or, you know, we've talked about. I know Doug's talked about the idea of it being like plastics, and other people have talked about it being like super capacitors and, you know, in the Internet. And when you start looking at it, you're like, well, yeah, carbon can literally go into everything. It can, you know, you can bond with pretty much anything you want to make. You can make it better with fractal graphene. And currently they have a monopoly on it. And they're not. It's not just the material. They're the ones who have figured this out, and they're the only ones playing with it. And so every time they figure something out with it, they patent it. Like graphene ink for, like, you could picture, like, writing on a circuit board with, like, a little tiny strip of graphene ink to connect chips together or even just send power to something. So they've got a graphene ink patent. They've got graphene actuators, which is like a little. You think of them like little mini pistons to make things move and have mechanical properties inside things. Nanospheres and super capacitors. They're just. They keep coming up with more. And each one of these things, you start going, well, where's it all going? Like, who all is going to use this? Who's going to license that patent to use not just their graphene, but the graphene ink? So even if somebody else ever comes up with a. Another way to make fractal graphene, they've still got all these patents on top of that, and they're going to keep filing them, they're going to keep figuring out different ways to work with the material. And, and, and that's just a moat that puts them at this huge advantage. And I, I compared it to a Google where you're like, well, Google started as a search engine, but became cloud computing and a media company and, you know, making phones and, you know, and it's like, well, where's, where's, where's Hydrograph going to go? As they keep hiring scientists and keep developing technology and they know how to work with this material better than anyone else, and they just keep that advantage. And no one else can, you know, like other companies. If they want the material from them, they have to, you know, sign like a licensing agreement on how they're going to work with it, because the technology is going to be either shared or owned by Hydrograph when it, you know, at a certain layer, meaning, like the basic functionalization of the material.
- [26:42]
A
Well, this story, you know, a year ago, it's up, what, 2500% in a year?
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B
25X.
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A
Yeah, the stock is just totally exploded. And because you mentioned, you know, the South Seas, those South Sea companies, you know, people might look at how much this thing has gone up and go, is this a bubble? Is this the top? Is this, is, you know, is there
- [27:11]
B
something that's the total. One of the nastiest tricks almost of investing is it's like a friend of mine was telling me yesterday, he's like, he reminded me of Don Cox's quote, you know, the people who know it the best like it the least. And so people who studied graphene and, you know, then they see the stock take off and they're like, oh, I missed it. No point in doing any work on it. No point in trying to figure out this puzzle, you know, like, is it truly. They just assume it's gone up so much and they're not actually doing the math and going, well, how much graphene can this company sell? How much, how quickly can it ramp up and produce? What are these other patents going to be worth? You know, and it's almost like everyone would be better off and would do the work if it was a private company. And there was, you know, an investment banker saying, I'm going to be doing a raise for this company in the next while. All the big boys would look at it, but because the chart has done what it's done, people just think, oh, it's, it's, it's risky now, right? And meanwhile, I'm sitting There looking at it going, wow, this company can make billions and billions of dollars. And with that South Sea example, you know, it's like having a royalty on the future of all the greatest products we're going to make. Like that's, it's, it's, it's hard to even put a number on it. And I know, I've watched Doug's interviews where he struggled with saying, I don't really want to say this, but this could be a thousand fold gainer, it could be $1,000 stock. And I'm like, this could become one of the most valuable companies in the world. Like, if I had to just say own Nvidia or own this company for the next, I think not only will this company is a much better owned than these big cap tech companies today, but I think it could surpass it. I don't see why not. Because at the core of robotics, AI and everything is nanomaterial engineering. You want to make AI chips better, you need to get the heat down. You need to get.
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A
That's what I was going to say. This will make semiconductors better. No doubt about it.
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B
It makes everything better. I mean, it's incredible what it's going to do and it's so massive. And most people don't want to do the work, one, because they think it's too complicated to understand and two, they just think they missed it. And I keep telling people, you know, I don't care what you're doing. This is one of those, where are you? Where were you when? Moments. Because we're entering the nanomaterial age that Doug's been predicting for ages. It's finally ready to launch because we have that core building block. And with AI and the AI innovation, like what we're doing is we're looking at these graphene particles and going, what fits in here? Right out of all the, all the particles that are known to us, we. What fits in and bonds with this? And how can we layer up and build things and, and then how do we end up with the properties we want to make the world's best? You name it, we're going to make it kind of thing. And it's not necessarily us, but someone's going to. And you can see how excited I am. I'm literally, it's like a kid at Christmas. Every day I'm on my computer and I'm playing with this team of AI scientists and we're, you know, the stuff that we can innovate. Like you dream of something and you start cooking up a patent. And then you start looking at, you know, how could we market it and who should we partner with it and the materials that we could produce. It's like, literally, it's, it's like, it reminds me of my father having a civil engineering company with like, you know, I think he had about 50, 60 people. And they take years to do a design for like a water treatment plant here in Ontario, Canada. And it's like having, with these AI tools. It's like I have a team of a thousand scientists and they're doing work that would normally take a couple of years and I'm doing it in a few hours. It's, it's that dramatic. And so the speed is going to be unparalleled.
- [30:59]
A
How many hours have you spent studying this stock and how does that compare with some of your other big winners in the past?
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B
Well, when I first got into uranium, was, was one of my big winners and one of my biggest winners was Paladin back in the early 2000s. And I, I actually played that the uranium sector again just in the, in the 2020, like 2020 period. Like during COVID I loaded up again and had a nice run there. But I, I decided, and that's something that I was telling my son for this book too, is you have to not, you know, and I, I've talked with a few people my son's age that are struggling in school and you know, it's a real tough time for kids today.
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A
You know, in university I have a 20 year old.
- [31:43]
B
Yeah. And they're like, you know, it's like the pace, they're not excited by school. They're sort of forced to pick a program and they're like, they kind of want to go everywhere. They're just not challenged enough. They sit around and wait to do the assignment and I'm like, look, stop waiting. Stop waiting for other people to challenge you. Learn to challenge yourself and realize that especially now with today's tools. Like, I was excited at the dawn of the Internet age and when I first got my first Bloomberg, I'm like, wow, this is amazing tool that I'm going to start doing all this work and using these API calls to pull stuff out of Bloomberg and into Excel spreadsheets. And, you know, and it made. That's why I rose at Sprott is my ability to pull in data, analyze it and hunt and search for things. So I did that deep dive in uranium. But I've tried to tell kids, and I tell my son is like, you could become an absolute world Expert at something. And in the span of, you know, I mean, you've been very complimentary in saying that there's probably not many people that know more than me about graphene. And I would say yes. In the financial world. Yes. The team at, you know, the Sorensen and his team.
- [32:49]
A
Yeah.
- [32:51]
B
Stuff about graphene and how it all actually works. I've got a pretty good understanding, but I. But I've got. I see. I use my pattern recognition system to say, how is this going to spread? How is this, you know, who is going to adopt it and at what speed and what's going to happen with the valuation? And it's all that knowledge that you bring together. And to answer your question, because I've been retired and because I've, you know, in my book that I wrote is about getting into the flow state in the zone. I am a completely. I've always been an extremely addictive person. And I realized a few years ago that being in the zone or the flow state, that's what all your neurochemical energies, you know, all the neurochemicals are flowing. It's dopamine, adrenaline. And you just get super charged up when you're super excited. And Sorensen, when I talk with Dr. Sorensen, he always slows me down and says, oh, you've got the inventing bug. Like it's an addiction. You want to just invent and cook stuff up and come out and conceive of ideas and try to make it, you know, bring them to life. And because I don't work for anyone and I have the freedom to. To dig in, I literally just would, like, clear my desk, lighten up my other positions. As I'm just like, I'm going, I want to know everything about this position. And as I. The more work I did, usually you start finding flaws in investments. Like, you get excited, you buy a bit, it goes up, you buy a bit more, and then you start. The more work you're doing, well, there's this risk. There's that risk. The more work I did, the deeper I wanted to go into Hydrograph and then became a whole decision, like, when do I sell? When? Like, so to make that decision, I'm
- [34:33]
A
like, yeah, because you made a ton of money on this thing, you know, because you saw it way, way before other people did.
- [34:40]
B
Yeah.
- [34:40]
A
So you've made a ton of money. So. Yeah, so that is a good question.
- [34:44]
B
Yeah. And so for me, I'm like, no, that decision needs to be made by truly understanding. I. Another thing that I always tell people about is your stock portfolio. The stocks you own don't care if you want to buy a car. They don't care if you want a net worth of a certain round number. Stop bringing that stuff in your life into your investment decisions. But people do at some point say, oh, well, it's good enough. I could retire. Well, I did that years ago. I don't need any of this damn money. And I'm like, what I want to do is I want to make enough so that I can do all these charitable things. And I've got this idea for which we could talk about another time. But, you know, I want to make amazing products and really help people all over the world if I can.
- [35:31]
A
But I've been hogging your attention. Let me see. Doug, do you have anything you want to do? You want to jump in here?
- [35:38]
C
Yeah. I agree with everything Kevin said. I mean, the potential for carbon structures is to make buildings that obviate the use of steel. You won't need steel if you can make a building out of carbon. It'll be much, much lighter, much, much stronger. You won't need copper because it's much more conductive and has many advantages over copper. I mean, it's truly a magic material. And when it comes to the technical details of the Hydrograph product, how many different types of graphene are there, Kevin, that are out there saying, look at me, I'm the type of graphene you want? Are you. Can you put your finger on that?
- [36:40]
B
I don't know. There's probably, it's hard to say. Like, even Hydrograph has multiple types of graphene that they're developing now, right? Where they take the graphene and they're functional and working it with it. But probably the main types, I'm just off the cuff, like maybe six or seven main types. And it's, you know, it's some that come from graphene, but other plasma, joule and, you know, chemical vapor deposition or whatever. I can't remember the word CVD is the, the acronym. But these, these other types, they don't have the, the same. They can't produce the 100% Sp2 bonding, 100% crystalline, and it's not fractal. And that's the big difference. That's the separator. And to your point about construction, it's one thing to sit there and say, yes, we're going to do these amazing new buildings or make amazing new products, but the market still doesn't think like you and I would as an investor about the other super added benefit of incorporating graphene is curing time. So yes, you could use 30% less concrete and then people start valuing, well, what's it cost to add the graphene? And we're going to use this less concrete and it's going to be a better building. And then you can make rebar instead of out of steel. You can use graphene and polymers to make better rebar that will bond better and will last forever, never rust and start having problems and it'll be a little bit more flexible in earthquake. All those properties are great. But what about the fact that, that we could build buildings probably at least twice as fast? What's the value of completing a building in one year versus two? You know, like that means you've got rent for the whole next year earlier and it means you're using all your equipment less. So the capex goes way down because you're using equipment faster, longer to complete the job. You don't have it to sit there. So if you're 3D printing, say with a machine and if you can have that machine running longer because it can print higher and keep going and building and you don't have to sit and wait for the concrete to cure so you can build the next floor, that's going to accelerate the timeline. The same thing for building bridges. And I've got another example is polymers. So as I was looking at adding graphene to, you know, just say basic things that, you know, you could, you picture anything in your mind that's made out of plastic that you would buy for your home or you know, for personal use, like a consumer good, and you start doing the math and you're like, well yes, we could use 30% less plastic and it's going to have all these improved strength properties, UV protected, smoother. So if it's, you know, something like I don't want to give away stuff I'm working on, but smoother so it, you know, it's less friction when you're using it or whatever, whatever properties you want. Those are all great. But not only are you using the 30% less material, but your current machinery is going to be able to spit out maybe 30% more per eight hour shift because of the curing time. So you make, you know, you got molded plastics. The time that it has to sit in the mold is going to be reduced by 30%. So you think about what that ROI does to the factory when you're producing. Instead of producing 9x, you know, nine of these clogs per unit, you're producing six clogs clogs per unit. You're producing maybe nine, eight or nine. And that's, it's like. And because you're using less material, it's like now you've just produced, you know, two or three more for free, basically.
- [40:08]
C
Well, let's talk about how you make the, the graphene, the machine that makes it. Basically you inject acetylene gas and set
- [40:20]
B
off an explosion and oxygen Y.
- [40:23]
C
Right. And so the graphene materializes and what does it look like? I've never seen it. It's a powder, I guess.
- [40:33]
B
Yeah. Let me try to, let me see if I can share this. Can, can I share that with you guys?
- [40:42]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we see it.
- [40:44]
B
Yeah. You see my mouse?
- [40:46]
A
Yep.
- [40:47]
B
So, so you got to understand first of all, when you look at this hexagon part and this by the way, this isn't perfect and I haven't got soreness in the sign off on it, but it's the best I can do so far with, with Google Gemini. So these are the, these are the individual sheets that it makes. And you won't see these. You have to use the right like electron microscope to sort of get a sense of the hexagon to see the hexagon because the little lines are really just like electric fields. And then the, the nucleus kind of lights up under the right. I don't know what you call it, like a, whatever the device is like the spectrometer or whatever. Anyway, so those are the little sheets that get made first and it's basically the gas explodes and then you. And I like to refer to it as being a combustion like a car instead of talking about explosion. Because I, I said to the team at Hydr, I'm like, you know, you talk explosion and people start picturing a factory blowing up, right. And it scares them. I said let's talk combustion engine. And what that, what that machine is doing is it's basically it's doing about four to five cycles currently. The current version, which they refer to as being like a model T Ford, the speed it takes to flush it, make it a vacuum, put in the acetylene and oxygen, cause the combustion to occur. Let it cool slightly. It can do about four to five cycles per minute versus a car that does 6,000 RPMs, you know, like. So it's a very slow fill, spark, detonate, exhaust, capture the graphene fill, repeat.
- [42:26]
A
Right.
- [42:27]
B
And the heat rises slowly. So anyway, when that, when it's, it spikes in temperature because there's no moving parts inside, like a piston, it spikes in temperature to like over 3,000 degrees. And then it cools incredibly rapidly inside that chamber. And that's when it's like snow, like water falling from the clouds. It starts crystallizing and bonding. Those little atoms start getting attracted to each other like it described, and they start forming these sheets. And so these sheets are sort of. You could picture them. Sorensen says it's like a cracker, right? They're a little longer, a little bit more rectangular. And as they're falling and forming together, they, they form. What's down here is this layer of, we're showing them on different angles. Instead of stacking together tight, they're forming little layers, which is key because then you can get polymers to go in there. And then on top of that they start forming these fractal aggregates. And this is the, this is. You should really be able to see the little platelets all in here, all irregularly turbo statically stacked. But I, I couldn't get the AI yet to really draw that detail. Like I could do a little, another little picture of it zoomed in to show you. It'll, it would look like this along these branches and it, and then you can. And then again it creates all this space that you can then get the, the polybers or whatever you're working with to get in there and bond. Just like a root ball system, you know, we talked about with the trees.
- [44:00]
C
So what's the current market price of a pound of this material that result from combustion?
- [44:08]
B
That's the amazing thing is. And one of the things I had to get my head around when I was doing that initial research is I was like, well, why?
- [44:14]
C
What?
- [44:14]
B
There's all these different people quoting prices for graphene, all those different types of graphene in the world and the incredible difference. And, and one thing I had to grab grasp is how come Hydrograph is saying that their base product that comes out of the, the chamber is they. The raw product out of the initial design. They call it fractal Graphene Aggregates number one. And they say FGA one and they say they're going to sell that for $250,000 a ton, which sounds really expensive, but a kilogram, it's 250 bucks. And then a gram is 25 cents. And it turns out that you take four grams of it and you add it to a lead acid battery and it improves the charge time by 47%. And that battery was already costing maybe 200 US and so I was like, wow, right away that battery is not going to sell. For a dollar more, what are they going to sell it for when they make it? You know, it'll be $50 more, $100 more, so you can start seeing the value for use. And then I started saying, well, what about these other graphene companies? You know, and there's talk of some trying to get the price down to say, you know, like $50 a kilogram? And I'm like, well, that's. How's Hydrograph going to be able to sell theirs for 250 if others can do it for 50? And it turns out that at first, when they started, and this is. I got a sample here of the fractal graphene. I was at the Geek in Manchester and they explained to me, I don't have a pet bottle here. But you don't like your little water bottles that you make? Yeah, yeah. When you, when you, if you hold that one up, is that a hard. Is that carbonated? It is, yeah. So it's a. It's a thick plastic because it's carbonated. The reason why is because the thin plastic ones will leak the air out. Right? The air, it's so thin that even like you think of it, it holds water. But at that nanomaterial level, the little carbon air or whatever, the, the carbonated air, I guess it is, it moves through the material, and it will. And that's why you don't have things like beer as well in plastic bottles typically.
- [46:26]
A
Right.
- [46:28]
B
So with graphene, you can make stronger bottles with that mesh. The graphene will make like a mesh in there that will prevent gas flows in and out, but it'll also make things bond better together and make it very strong and not leech so that you're going to. The more perfect you can make that surface and make the bonding, which you need pure graphene to do. Pure carbon, pure crystal fractal graphene. You can make the absolute perfect surface that holds on to everything so that little particles don't end up in your water, you don't end up drinking them as much as humanly possible. We can make far better bottles.
- [47:03]
A
Yeah.
- [47:04]
B
And when they first started to try to do this at the Geek, this is the Graphene Engineering and Innovation center in Manchester. The first experiments, it was what Sorensen calls shake and bake, where they just kind of go, okay, let's take competitor one's graphene, dump it into the polymer mix, see what happens. We're going to take the same amount of this graphene, same amount of that graphene, mix it up, see what happens. Hydrograph didn't perform well. And the team, Hydrograph's team, tried to figure out why and did some science, chemistry, some calculations, some work, and did some more testing and got them to use 1/10 the amount of graphene of other competitors. And then they started going, well, what if we use 1/100 the amount? Because what they were shocked about is they found is that at this extreme low loading, because of the purity, it outperformed the other company's graphene at less than 110 the amount of graphene, which is, that's what blew my mind. And it's because it's fractal, it's because it's super bonding. It's because it actually, it doesn't clump. It clicks together, it grabs the polymers. It's like the perfect packing snow that you can build what you want to build with.
- [48:16]
C
So you've got one machine working now, right, Kevin?
- [48:19]
B
Yep. But, but let me finish on that.
- [48:21]
C
The price, how much is it going to make this year? One machine?
- [48:27]
B
Let me just finish that price bit because it's so key to understand that at the $250,000 a ton, if you can, if your graphene is only needed at 1/10 the loading of your competitors, it's like you're selling it for $25,000 a ton or $25 a kilogram on a per use basis. So. So it's like they could price their graphene that cheap and it's like 50% off their competitors and it outperforms. So that's why I feel like, if anything, the price could go up, especially in certain use cases. I think it could go up a lot and they're going to probably capture that through the licensing model of the patents that they have for downstream, how to work with the material. Now, as far as the, the revenue and the idea of making 10 tons with one machine today, I decided early on that you have to look multiple years ahead and go, well, what about this machine? How much does it cost to make? And it's under half a million dollars to make a machine that does 10 tons. And I started to ask, and that generates a huge amount of revenue. It actually has a payback period of like somewhere around 45 days or something like that. I figured out at one point, maybe 48 days. Either way, it's ridiculous Capex payback like you've never seen in any other commodity business. And it's modular and then the. Which means you could just keep making the same machine and you're going to be able. They've been saying that they could start making them soon, 10 at a time and they'll take two to three months to make 10. So that means you're going to be able to scale up and make. Have a hundred. Sorry. Or have 10. 100, sorry, 10. 10 ton machines doing 100 tons. But in my conversations with their chief engineer, you know, I was looking at, you know, how much does it produce? How much could you produce this in a given day if you ran it? Maximum amount of time per day. And that's something that I've always done. I went to, you know, I invested in a coal mine and they tell me what their output is and everyone's looking at this coal mine and saying it produces 2 million tons a year. And no one's really thinking about the fact that they're only doing an eight hour shift. And we're like, well if the price was higher, would you add another shift? Like yes, we'd hire more people and we'd have another shift on this coal mine. Well, the same thing goes for hydrographs unit. Even though they say 10 tons, you could start running it probably 20 hours a day. And they need four hours of maintenance, switching out and cleaning little ball valves and things like that that will get fouled from graphene powder building up in it. But you start going okay, well what about 20 tons? Can it do 20 tons a year? And then I started saying, well, what other things are you going to be able to do quite quickly do you think? Once you're partnering with a major gas plant down in Texas and one of the big bottlenecks that they have right now is the speed at which gas flows into the chamber. So if they have higher pressure pipeline gas instead of an acetylene cylinder hooked up to the machine, they're going to be able to fill that chamber quicker. Which means add another RPM or two. Right? Or not rpm, but cycles, right, Cycles per minute. Now you can maybe start theorizing that you're going to get up to maybe, you know, 28 tons out of one unit. And then the numbers just keep getting better and, and the crazy thing is we don't need them to get better. We just need them to keep scaling up and cranking out these machines and having hundreds of machines so that they can do thousands of tons.
- [52:00]
C
Now the question is who's going to buy all of the graphene? Everybody sees the advantages potentially and they're working on more. But where are you going to make your first sales? How many and to who?
- [52:14]
B
Well that's, you know, that's something that Hydrograph would have to answer and they're going to answer it in time. But They've got over 75 companies they're working with today. And an example would be that excites me is, you know, Kirsten has said in interviews that they are working with a top 10 auto manufacturer. Right. It is a, you know, a huge global manufacturer of autos. And most of these auto companies also do a lot more than just autos. Right. If you look at almost every one of them, they have other divisions that do all types of things. And they said that they came to them hoping for a 5% improvement in plastics for going in cars. Like everything that's plastic in a car, 5% improvement. She said they've delivered a 25% improvement, which is crazy. Like, so that means you're going to use 25% less material, you're going to make the parts quicker, but you're also going to reduce the weight by 25% of everything plastic in the car. And that's just plastic. And so yes, they're going to put an order in at some point. I think that right now, because Hydrograph is still in the scale up phase, I think a lot of the companies they're working with them are thinking, are very forward thinking and are working on looking at all the different things they want to patent and develop that they could work with. And then they're going to sort of slowly leak out what they've patented. If they even want to leak it out, they want to keep it. It's, it's a very big advantage for a major auto company to be able to reduce the weight of their vehicle. Like imagine you start going through all the parts, you're like, I'm going to reduce the weight of my vehicle by so many pounds and I'm going to improve the battery and I'm going to improve, you know, the lubrication and all the parts and I'm going to make this, my vehicle is going to be far superior to other companies. And I equated this pattern that jumps in my head was years ago, Hyundai came out with a 10 year body paint, you know, rust protection warranty. And within two years every automaker offered the same thing. They had to. Otherwise people are like, well, I'm going to buy a Honda because a Hyundai because it's give me a 10 year paint. Why don't you give a 10 year paint warranty and rust protection? And that same type of thing is going to make it just go to all the companies, all the auto companies are going to want to work. And if it works for auto companies, it's going to work for airplanes, it's going to work for all vehicles. It's going to work for anything you want to lightweight and make stronger. So it's hard to predict who's going to be the first mover and who's going to start putting in big orders. But Kirsten said that she's already. This was last summer. She said she got six to seven companies. Each would put in over a thousand tons if they, you know, once the process is completed and they've completed their R and D. But you don't make an overnight decision to swap out all your plastic in a car without vigorous testing. And, you know, it's, it's.
- [54:48]
A
They're also thinking a cycle three to five years ahead in product, too.
- [54:52]
B
Yeah, but it's just, you know, the orders are going to come and you start. I start just playing with numbers and go, well, 5,000 tons alone is like a billion dollars of profit. And once the market just sees that they've got 5,000 tons of orders a few years out, I think that they put like a 50 multiple that's just on the graphene. Forget everything else and the huge growth. I think you get like a forward 50 multiple on that. And it's a $50 billion company just on the belief that they're going to get that they have 5,000 tons of orders and they're going to move to. Is it going to be 10,000 tons, 20,000 tons for plastics? For when I start playing with the numbers and go, well, how big could this get for just plastics? For polymers, you start coming with numbers in the 20 to 50,000 tons, no problem. When you start looking at 10 years and imagining all these different plastics in a reasonable market penetration, and then you start going, well, what about bioplastics? What about concrete? What about coatings? What about, you know, and then you start thinking about all the military applications and they said they're working with the military and all the different fibers and you mentioned things like bulletproof. Well, yeah, they're going to make Kevlar better, they're going to make nylon better, they're going to make everything better. And they might just come up with some entirely new materials, you know, that we haven't even thought of yet. Like, that's the amazing thing. And you start going, 10 tons, you know, 20 ton, 20,000 tons. Like I should be saying, in thousands of tons. I'm sorry if I've been saying 10, 20, and this gas plant deal that they Said they're very close to announcing in Texas, which a lot of the people in the market have been speculating. It's in Belleville because they've seen job postings for a plant manager in Belleville where there's some massive gas plant, one of the biggest in the world. You know, she's already spoken, Kirsten spoken in interviews about wanting to replicate that model and she's got approvals to produce in Europe and the UK already. So, you know, you start pulling up, you know, I sent them a year ago, you know, basically like as if I was a director and offering advice on how to grow this business. And I said, you know, you should be working with Air Liquid in, in France and Lincorp in the UK and other parts of the world and BASF in Germany and you know, there's big, big acetylene producers and you know, even in Poland. And then you start thinking, well, what's this partnership model that they're putting together in Texas is huge because the gas plant's going to provide the facility. They just have to put the, the hyperions in there. They're hooked up to the acetylene plant and you start saying, well, how quickly could they grow in Texas? And so as I go through those numbers, I'm like, well, you know, a reasonable size acetylene plant, if you were to put an addition on it to try to really ramp up. According to the estimates that I get using AI, they're saying you could add enough acetylene capacity in a place like Texas where you could add enough acetylene capacity to make 20 to 50,000 tons of graphene in a matter of just a couple of years. And that's just Texas. Well, what if they do the same model in multiple countries and start going, okay, we're going to ramp up. First of all, there's enough capacity today to get to 10,000 tons, say. But yeah, we're going to ramp up. You start getting numbers that are so massive and ridiculous. And that's why I've said is it's kind of funny, you know, people like really attacked me at first for being super promotional and you know, accused me of pump and dump and all this crap. And it's because I said things like, I think this could be one of the most valuable companies in the world. I see it being becoming, it has the opportunity, it's positioned to become a trillion dollar company and like the fastest to ever become a trillion dollar company because of the acceleration of things like AI and robotics making the adoption of this material so fast. And so, yeah, there's always risks, but there's just such a massive reward here and I just can't help it. I just call it like I see it and I say I'm holding on for dear life. And I decided to build this downstream company so that I could be, I want to be involved in lab experiments because as soon as I see, wow, this works, I could then go, that's another three to five years from now. There's another 10,000, 20,000 tons of demand for this application in the marketplace for these consumer products.
- [59:16]
C
And that what scares you, what scares you, Kevin? What's the big thing that you see that could go wrong that could blow this up?
- [59:26]
B
I think a lot about that. And I thought about does somebody make a better mousetrap? You know, can somebody infringe on their patents to make it? You know, and people often bring up, you know, oh, China is just going to steal the technology and start making it. Well, you know, we're going to be able to figure out when those products come out of China that they've been improved with graphene and there'll be lawsuits and whatever. And yeah, that's that type of competition from people that want to steal the technology and replicate it. Yeah, that's going to be competition. But at the same time, I look at the answer to that is the US and other nations being desperate for critical minerals, for supply, to be able to be self reliant and to be able to produce graphene in huge quantities in Texas, it just seems like something the US Government and the US Military is going to get behind. And even as Kirsten says, even just the US military orders alone will make this a massive company like. And she didn't put a number on it, but I put a number on it. If they get, they could do so much for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines that you're talking. I can't remember the estimate, but it's something like 50,000 tons a year would go to, to supply all the things that you'd want to make better. And there's no doubt in the world, there's no doubt in any of our minds that when it comes to the military, you need to make the very best everything. If you're going to make stuff, you want it to be the very best. So you have that slight competitive edge in a war scenario. So it's that, that's, that's, I guess one of the risks. Do you have any in mind?
- [61:11]
C
That's a big one. Of course. It's that somebody can knock off the technology and compete that way, maybe somebody can improve the technology.
- [61:24]
B
I think it's very difficult right now because their main patent is about, you know, and they've got the ignition systems patented down, and it's basically all hydro carbons exploding in a chamber. And I don't think you can make fractal graphene without that process. It's that idea of the pressure, the shock wave, the quick temperature spike in the rapid cooling that makes that crystallization and their material, it's so perfect and it's so elegant. Like, the funny thing is that it was discovered with this simple experiment of blowing up some gas in a chamber. And it's something that it seems so obvious looking back. Like, as people look at it in the history books, they're like, why didn't they think of that earlier? And it's because acetylene is expensive and hydrogen is pretty cheap. If you wanted to make hydrogen, you would use the. What do you call it, the electrolysis to separate water to make hydrogen or other ways of making hydrogen. You'd make pure hydrogen cheap. So you would never take acetylene and just burn it in a chamber, because the instinct would be, is I'm going to end up with hydrogen. Which they do get, which is a byproduct. They don't use much energy in this process. And then it ends up being pure carbon. And that's the graphene. And so unless you knew that that soot was going to be graphene and you theorized that, like in. Sorensen suspected it would be a special particle that he could do something amazing with because he was looking at things like carbon black and, you know, other materials. And he's a specialist in what they call aerogels. But unless you knew it, you would never do that experiment. And it's just, it's so simple and elegant, and it already uses way less energy and dramatically less capex than. Than every other graphene process by a landslide. And they've got the first mover advantage. And then when you start looking at the loading, right, it's already, say 70% less energy per ton of graphene than competitors with like a fraction of the capex. But because of that low loading, meaning that you could use one tenth of the graphene of the competitors, it's like 90% less energy to produce this than the competitors. It's massive. It's probably 95% than most less energy per ton of material that goes into a product.
- [63:38]
A
To me, it seems like the big risk just comes down to execution risk. If you Got the technology, it's there. The benefit it provides ultimately in products is I think undeniable. And so the only question is, can the team that's there execute effectively, take advantage of this, you know, home run opportunity they've got in front of them?
- [64:02]
B
Yeah, and, and, and you know, one thing that I've given advice to Kirsten is early on and, and you know, the whole team is incredibly bright thing. I don't want to say for a second that I, you know, she's taken my advice, but this is just how I think and what I said early on is the scale of this business, the speed that you could grow and the advantage of being a first mover. I said get big quick. That's one of the goals. But you can have the setbacks but don't feel like you need to do everything yourself. And so part of my advice was, look, you're, you're talking to a top 10 automaker, you're talking to serious m. You're going to be talking and, and working with a robotics manufacturer. Right. Well, maybe have them work with you and partner with you to make the next generation of Hyperions. Right. Their, their detonation system to make the graphene. Like maybe, maybe work with some other companies to actually build you the frames as quickly and as best possible so that you don't feel like you're sitting there. I got to hire all these people and assemble and you know, and build these things. You want to get, you know, work with top companies and top people and yeah, they're going to hire, obviously they're going to hire people and they're, they're perfecting their build out and scaling up. But you know, you hear things like they're going to be able to produce 10 in parallel, 10 at the same time and take two to three months to do 10. Or. Well, I'm like, well why not work with a major, like a major manufacturer that could assemble these things for you and get them to help you scale up with, with their team. Yeah, and produce hundreds, produce hundreds of them in parallel and then thousands of them in parallel.
- [65:37]
A
Well, and there's also the, you know, the, the I know all the energy you put into thinking of the use applications of this like how it can be done. It seems to me they need like a dream team of super smart business development guys.
- [65:53]
B
Yeah, they're building that out. I mean part of it was getting to this point. You got to remember the companies are just going to start flocking now like their R D teams when Hydrograph was still Small, small market cap and not scaling up. The CEOs of major companies just didn't pay attention. Like, I've reached out to tons of different manufacturers, like many major manufacturers in different industries over the last couple months, because I, and I hear the same thing. Oh, we worked. We looked at graphene a few years ago. We actually have some patents and. But it didn't work. And I'm like, oh, did it? Was it because of clumping and this and that? They're like, yeah. And I'm like, oh, by the way, your patents are no good because they use graphene oxide or cvd. And by the way, what we're. This graphene is special and it doesn't clump and the loadings are low. And then they're just like, wow. And they're like, we got to work on this, right? And you could just see the body language, the excitement. They know, they knew about all those properties that they were hoping to get as they were doing R D years ago, and they gave up because of the clumping issue and they couldn't get that pure graphene. And they're all going to come back in droves. And I've been saying to everybody who wants to listen that this is like an extinction level event. It's evolve or die. And so you, for a CEO of a company, you're like, should I be experimenting with, with this graphene and seeing how I can make my products the very best? Yes, you should. Because if you don't, your competitor is going to do it and they're going to have a step up on you and you're going to be making the junky stuff, right? And it's like, you remember years ago, the way things evolved, right? You go, the pattern recognition kicks in again. Japan, right? When I was a young boy in my, in the 70s, people were like, japanese cars are crap. America first. And then a few years later, Japanese are making the best cars in the world.
- [67:43]
A
Best cars in the world.
- [67:43]
B
Yeah.
- [67:44]
A
And then Chinese cars now, and they're great.
- [67:48]
B
It went to, it went to Korea and then now Chinese cars are amazing and it's going to be the same thing. You know, you don't want to be the guys making the junk. You want to have the high margin and graphene. The amazing thing is it's going to give you margin improvement by less material, but also a higher selling price if you want. So you're going to be able to expand your margin. There's a bit of fear in going there as well, because things might last Two times longer, three times longer. But the aggressive companies that see it's coming are going to be like, all right, we're going to have to do it. We have to do it. Like, who cares if you make a battery that lasts the entire life of a car? We have to do it or else people aren't going to buy our battery. You know, that's right.
- [68:27]
C
Of course, it's like the radial tire is better and tires lasted 30, 40% longer once they have steel belts in the same thing.
- [68:36]
B
Yeah. And so, so the adoption rate is going to be, I think it's going to be, it's going to be a forced thing where, you know, it's like you got people that want to start innovating because they're greedy, and then you're going to have people that the desperate careful.
- [68:51]
A
Well, what do you think? What would make you, what would you have to see to make you because you own a lot of the stock? What would have to happen before you would be willing to lighten up on the stock that you own?
- [69:02]
B
Well, is there anything I said when I did one of my first posts, and by the way, when I started posting on X, the whole thing was for me to communicate to like, my friends and everything, sort of on a level playing field of saying, hey, I'm just going to throw my ideas out here, I'll tell you what I'm doing and you could do it or not do it, I don't care. I'm not giving advice and whatever. It's just, this is just what I'm doing. And when I first shared my views on Hydrograph with, you know, it was to my friends, I said, look, here's the plan right now. I said, we don't, we don't know for sure when these things are going to happen. But I said, I believe they're going to get EPA approval and that's going to be, that's going to be a big thing. I said, they say they're going to go on the nasdaq. Is that hard to do? No, it's not hard to do. They're going to get the right market cap, the cash on the balance sheet and the share price, and they've got it. So that's going to happen. But I predicted a year ago that that will happen and that'll be a catalyst for excitement.
- [69:57]
A
Right. So the EPA thing did happen, and they also got European approval for that.
- [70:02]
B
And then the next, we got a bonus on top. I didn't expect EU and UK approval for both production and sale at the same time. So that was, I think that's part of the reason the stock took off that much is that's a really big deal now they're licensed to produce and sell in all of the uk, Europe and the USA at the same time. That's a big damn deal. Better than expected. It took a few months longer than expected, but because of the government shutdown and just bureaucracy and bs, right. So anyway, epa.
- [70:35]
A
But the next major catalyst is nasdaq.
- [70:37]
B
Well, NASDAQ is a catalyst and it's going to basically a lot of companies, a lot of big funds. It's just not on the radar. You know, the team will be at ringing the bell at nasdaq. They'll be going on cnbc. You know, I think that at some point, whether they, you know, she goes on Joe Rogan or Lex Freeman or you know, the guys that are really into science and technology and there's like all different angles. You could look at this from the military hardware side, like the excitement around this becoming a mainstream nanomaterial, nanotechnology thing. It's going to be massive. So that's, that's one of the catalysts as well as that comes with the NASDAQ and big funds, big investors being able to buy and taking it seriously. Higher stricter reporting requirements. It just gives people more confidence when it's on the, not on the, you know, over the counter, right in trading in the usa. But then there's the gas plant. So you know, assuming that they announced that soon you're going to be like, wow, there's this huge gas plant deal. It's with maybe one of the top, or maybe the top producer of acetylene in the world. And this is a cookie cutter. Just like, just like the Hyperions, it's a cookie cutter. We could do the same deal with other major acetylene producers around the world. Start imagining the tons that will come in, the speed of the ramp up that starts getting other companies interested. Wow, this is how like everybody who's making things like Teslas and you know, SpaceX and you know, they're in Texas, like everybody's going to be going, wow, this is being made right here in Texas. What can we do with this? Wow, this looks like a real company. It's got actual market cap, it's got patents. We've got to play around with this and start looking how to incorporate it. And then the rush starts and that momentum just piles on itself. And the higher the share price goes, the more it attracts attention. That's the whole Thing I wrote about in my book, it's this idea of energy and attention and focus. People want to make money. People want to join the herd of investors that are like, you know, let's go hydrograph, because of all the great things it's going to do. And then you've got the contracts that are going to start coming, and they've already said they're working with the US military. If they start knocking off deals with the US military and other NATO countries, you know, it's like it changes.
- [72:52]
A
It changes everything.
- [72:53]
B
Look, every. It's not just the fibers that will be in, you know, Kevlar or nylon or cotton, things that the military uses. It's going to be. This sports company goes, you know, under Armour buy our shirts. They're made with hydrographs, graphene, just like the US Military. Like, that's going to be the story. And it's like, you got to have it. Why wouldn't you have that? Let's have the hockey stick that doesn't break, that's made with graphene. Like, it just. The popularity makes it more popular.
- [73:26]
A
It's safe to say you're still extremely enthusiastic about the company. I think that's safe to say, ridiculously.
- [73:34]
B
It's actually like a problem. It's an addiction. I admit it. I can't stop reading about it. I can't stop thinking about the innovations. And it's because, yeah, I've made a lot of money and I'm sitting there going, am I going to make a billion? Am I going to make many billions? Right. Like, it's scary to even think that sometimes you're like, jesus, I'm gonna have to grow a Jack Dorsey beard and wear a hat and glasses. Like, I don't want. You know, do I have to get security at some point? Like, you don't. There's all these unintended consequences that you don't want to deal with. But at the same time, I'm still.
- [74:04]
C
It's pretty clear that one girl is going to tell another, tell another. And the amount of this stuff that can be used and the ways it's. It's going to be hyperbolic. And once it starts, couldn't start within six months or a year. The hyperbolic curve of selling. And it's not unreasonable.
- [74:26]
B
Yeah, every. Everyone I talk to and I explain what the graphene can do. And, you know, we always teach. We try to teach with analogy. And analogy is best when it's something that relates to the person that you're talking to. So if they're if they're a chef, you start talking about what I could do in the kitchen if they're a, if they're a hockey player. And I've got a good friend of mine, say 18 year vet Scott Thornton's a big shareholder in Hydrograph and he's thinking about all the stuff you could do in hockey equipment and sporting, you know, and helmets and on and on and on to make them safer and better and lighter. And you know, he's super excited. Everybody gets excited. And then the Companies, once the CEOs are looking at it, they know this is a big deal, like you have to work on this and that's what's going to create the fury. And it's almost like I related to buying Hydrograph shares is being like, you know, it's almost like disaster insurance for your business, you know, like a hedge. Yeah, it's a hedge because it's like what Bezos says, you know, your margin is my opportunity. Yeah, I'm like, there is a lot of margin to be had. There's a lot of companies that are going to struggle and go bankrupt because they're making crap and there's going to be emerging winners because they're making the best stuff. And ideally they also have patents that they can license to competitors. So then you're making money off your competitors, which means in time you end up owning your competitors because you're making more money than them. You've got a higher market multiple, you can buy them.
- [76:00]
A
Right. We've taken, we've kept you longer than we expected. Doug, any last question for Kevin?
- [76:06]
C
No. Listen, I like this story when I first heard it for lots of reasons. It's got a billion and a half US market cap now, but I can see how it can go a lot, a lot higher. And I like it because the idiots of the world have come to think of carbon the basis of all life and the most flexible of all atoms of the 92. I mean this is, carbon's our friend, not our enemy. And Hydrocraft is going to make it. There's a good chance this is going to be real, just like Kevin's saying. So okay, I own a bunch, but I'm going to buy a bunch more.
- [76:47]
A
I think I'm, I'm listening to this. I like, I, I, you know this. In fact, I think I'm going to buy some more too. I was looking it up while we were talking. I, I often you get a chance
- [76:57]
C
to, to make a long ball home run because almost nobody knows about nanotech
- [77:07]
B
or yeah, it's that? We're so early. We're still so freaking early. You know, it's amazing.
- [77:13]
A
Yeah, I know.
- [77:13]
B
You know, you know, Buffett always talks about the fat pitch, right? Well, I, I joke that this is like, you know, I feel like I'm a, you know, the, the ballpark's a kiddie pool and I'm, and I've, I've got a beach ball coming at me that I can hit out of the park here. Like it's a joke, you know?
- [77:29]
A
Yeah. You know, I mean, it feels late. If you look at the one year chart, if you listen to what you're saying, it feels early.
- [77:37]
B
Yeah. That's the one thing that, and all I tell people is do your own due diligence, do your work, understand? Do some numbers, play with AI, ask it questions. The idea is, is it real? Well, we've seen the tests, we see the test results of how it performs in polymers, PET bottles, lead acid, batteries, you know, coatings. We've seen the results. It's just about scale. The scale's cookie cutter and away you go. And if, you know it can do these things, we know it can do a lot more. One last point I want to make is that for a lot of companies this is another huge advantage. You know, I, I, we were a big shareholder in Taser that became Axon Enterprises or whatever. You know, they, they make all the
- [78:20]
A
non lethal body cam now too, right?
- [78:22]
B
Yeah, body cams. And they've got problems with, they always have challenges like heat, you know, that the stuff will turn off if it's too hot, it won't record, you know, battery life, etc. Etc. Weight. I sit there and I say, wow, you know, I've actually started to reach out. I'm going to try to get a hold of them and see if they want to work with us because I've got a bunch of ideas for them. Because you could literally take every one of their patents and it's like you're making a new version of what they already make and it's allowing them to re up. It's like refresh your patents for another 20 years. Yeah.
- [78:59]
A
Force an upgrade cycle.
- [79:00]
B
Yeah, but it's not just the force of the upgrade cycle, it's let's renew. So any company could do it. It's like you have a patent, it's at 15 years, you got five years left. Well, let's work with this graphene material and see if you could innovate the next generation of your, whatever you make so that you've got a new patent that runs another 20 years and that's that value to billion, multi billion dollar companies, you know, and I think Axon's like 45 billion dollar company. It's like if they announced that they were basically innovated to upgrade all their patents for another 20 years, does the stock go up 10? Of course it does. It goes up 20%.
- [79:37]
A
Right.
- [79:37]
B
That would be like a 10 billion dollar market cap lift like that from just saying we were putting graphene and it's like, what happened to all these companies? Said, oh, by the way, we're working with AI now. That's gonna be a big trend next year. Oh, by the way, we're working with nanomaterials and we're, we're reinventing everything we do and it's gonna, we're gonna make the world's best. It's the world's best with nanomaterials. And if you're not using that, you can't say you're doing it. You don't have the patents, you don't have the designs. You're a dinosaur. You're going extinct.
- [80:07]
A
Yeah. Kevin, thank you so much for joining us. It was awesome. Very entertaining and very informative. So we really appreciate it and I'm sure viewers will as well.
- [80:16]
B
Thank you very much.
- [80:18]
C
Thanks, Kevin.
- [80:19]
B
Great pleasure.