[KEYNOTE PRESENTATION]

[Dean Braunsteiner] (4:50 - 6:08)
Today, our keynote address is with Rob McEwen. And Rob, we're so excited to have you here today, given your accomplishments in the industry, both as an investor and as a CEO of mining companies since 1990, most recently as the founder and chairman of McEwen Mining. And through that success, you've been rewarded with the Order of Canada. You've been inducted into the Mining Hall of Fame in 2017, that you've been quite generous in donating over $60 million to causes to encourage excellence and innovation, health care and education. Again, thank you for the time joining us today at our America's Mining and Metals Forum. We really appreciate it.

So really, Rob, our discussion today is going to focus on four themes. So leadership, energy transition and innovation, impact on communities, and then really inspiring the next generation of mining leaders.

So if we dive right in, we'll start with leadership. And as I've talked about previously, you've had a distinguished career in the mining industry, that's really set kind of a high bar for industry leadership.

If we look at the Los Azules project being closely watched across the sector, you know, especially when it comes to environmental impacts, maybe you could talk about some of the bold and unconventional strategies that you've implemented to make, you know, this project really a benchmark for sustainability.

[Robert McEwen] (6:09 - 8:13)
Certainly. Well, as everyone knows, the mining industry doesn't have the best reputation with the general public. And so, one of the challenges is altering that perception, improving the perception of mining in the minds of the general public. And to that end, I thought we needed to bring some outside help in, outside the industry. And several years ago, I asked an architect to join the conversation, and he is considered the Steve Jobs of the green living building space. And I said, our challenge is to try to redefine and transform the public's perception of mining for several reasons.

One, just it was good for the environment. But two, and more importantly, was getting a social license, getting acceptance of mining and helping the general public understand that modern civilization is dependent on the products we produce from our mines. But that's the story not told.

So this fellow, Jason McLennan, the architect, came in and he has worked with a lot of the tech companies and a lot of the sustainability areas. And we said, well, let's create a different mine. Let's look at a mine that could be a jewel on the hillside rather than the scar and deal with the historical legacy that seems to permeate everyone's mind when they think about mining.

And when I look at it, I think, well, maybe this could be one of the models of the mine of the future and just showing what's possible and then emphasizing ... I mean, the mining industry has come a long way, and so it's about stewardship and our environmental. And I think if the mining industry shows more of the public what we're doing and show some real examples of reclamation.

[Dean Braunsteiner] (8:13 - 8:30)
And Rob, what was the reaction from the industry as you sort of, you know, headed down that kind of a path, you know, engaging with an architect, because that's very different, right. And so, and there must be, you know, trade-offs between doing that and what the traditional way of doing things might have been.

[Robert McEwen] (8:31 - 9:29)
Yes, there is, Dean, there's a price. There's a cost of doing it, but I look at it and say, well, that's the cost of gaining social license. If we continue the way the public believes we go at it, we're going to have a hard time permitting additional mines going for-, new mines going forward.

So let's make this a an attractive site. It's also, there is, when you look at the workforce, it's shrinking right now because no one's going through the schools. And so, there's going to be a great competition for talent.

So make something that looks very comfortable, a remote site that people want to be at. That's, to me, it's social license, attracting talent and leaving something that the community and the country can be proud of.

[Dean Braunsteiner] (9:30 - 9:53)
And so, if you were to give some feedback or suggestions to other leaders within the industry, looking at that type of a model, what would be kind of the key messages that you'd like them to take from the discussion and then also think about implementing in their ability to develop new projects?

[Robert McEwen] (9:54 - 10:58)
It's all about first impressions, isn't it? When you look at a house or you walk into an office or you meet someone for the first time, you do a quick generalization of, well, what's that person like? What's this company like? Is it something I like or I don't like, or it doesn't really give me any feeling at all? I remember going in, first time I went into Bloomberg's office in New York, I stepped off the elevator and people were darting around all over and everybody seemed to have purpose. There was an electricity in the air that was really compelling and saying, how do you create that in an office?

When you go to a mine site, do you look at something that's tired and old, not really taken care of or appears that it's been worn out? Does that give you a feeling that they're going to take care of the environment the same way? In other words, not take care of it.

[Dean Braunsteiner] (10:58 - 10:58)
Yeah.

[Robert McEwen] (10:59 -11:15)
How do we create some of that feeling of comfort and trust right up front? And, and I think that's what the industry is doing, but we just have to do more and expose it to a larger audience.

[Dean Braunsteiner](11:16 - 11:29)
So if you look over the time period, you know, when you started at, let's say Goldcorp to now at Los Azules, like what are some of the key differences in some of the practices that you are employing as, as you're developing and building new mines?

[Robert McEwen] (11:30 - 16:42)
At Goldcorp, we were a small to, maybe coming up to maybe an intermediate size, small/intermediate producer. And I thought, well, if we try to emulate the seniors, maybe by the time we get to where we want to go, it's changed. And I'm eating their dust all the time and I don't like eating dust. So let's just step out of line and shoot for it. And I have found over time when I've done that, I've gotten to where I wanted to go faster than if I stood in line. I'm not always sure I can see where I'm going because there's a lot of up and down in that process, but it's there and I'm more satisfied when I get there.

The other is differentiating yourself from the major and trying to say, well, let's make rules the majors have to follow. Let's have behavior that the majors say, oh, we should be doing that too.

At Goldcorp, I was, I call myself an anti-hedger and all the seniors were hedging. And I thought these guys are talking about the future goal, goal going higher, but they're hedging their production. And I said, their, their base, their actions are basically saying they don't believe it's going higher. And so we, we didn't hedge and, and then we started, we had low costs after we made a discovery a mile below surface. And I went one day, my largest expense is income tax. How do I stop paying income tax for a while? And I thought, well, why don't we just withhold our gold from sale? And we started withholding 10% of what we produced annually, and ultimately held back 30% of what we were producing. Now the accounting profession went, no, how are you going to value that? And we had a bit of, with another firm, not your firm, had quite a few discussions about how do we say, well, here's our cost of production, but the market value is very different. It's much higher. How do you reflect that? And, we, I guess we would have been considered in a way, a quasi early gold ETF. At the end of the day, we had over 200,000 ounces in the vaults of the CIBC.

So that was something the industry wasn't doing. And it was basically saying, I can liquidate my gold in two days. I can borrow, on a pre-tax basis. I've increased my financial assets by the reciprocal of my tax rate. And we just kept growing that way. And at that time, the provincial government was over a period of four years lowering the tax rate. And I felt the gold was going higher and both of those things happened and it worked.

Also, just something called the Goldcorp challenge. I had enrolled in a course at MIT down in Boston, went there and asked, and I wanted to know something about IT and thinking that maybe the mining industry could use that. Because I had come from the investment industry into the mining industry. And I found myself at times, it was like both my feet, I just stepped into a vat of quick-drying cement and I couldn't make changes quickly. So I went, thought, well, maybe IT is going to help us. And when I got down there, I hadn't been thinking about the discovery we'd just made other than I wanted to put it out in the world. And the second day, right after lunch, they started talking about Linux and open-source code. And that was sort of the eureka moment for me. Light bulb flashed off and I said, ah, I'm going to run back to Toronto when this course is over. And we're going to take all of our geological data, throw it up on the web, offer half a million dollars for people to tell us where we might find the next 6 million ounces of gold in our mine. And it turned out to be a very successful enterprise, but everybody went, how can you give away your geological data? That's, you know, it's like Coke giving away their formula. They said, well, we've got a greenstone belt and there's, where our deposit is, and there are greenstone belts on all the continents. And maybe there's expertise there that looks at the problem statement differently.

And we ended up having 1,500 people from 50 countries take down a 400-megabyte file and we found over $3 billion worth of gold. So you realize that the biggest gold mine, or at least I did at the time, is between everybody's ears. And how do you tap into that?

[Dean Braunsteiner] (16:42 - 17:12)
Yeah, well, it's a good kind of segue into the next topic, just around energy transition and innovation, which is kind of what you've talked about. And there's certainly a lot of political pressure to energy transition and there's a role for the mining industry. You've talked a little bit about educating the public on the importance of it.

How as, you know, the CEO, do you sort of navigate through these discussions and turbulent times about the need for mining, yet there is the perception of mining?

[Robert McEwen] (17:13 - 19:55)
Well, I think you saw that presentation I did in New York, entitled, Become a Nudist, Stop Mining. I just think, since from kindergarten on, everybody's been told that mining is bad for the environment, it degrades it. But the other side of the story isn't being told about how dependent modern civilization is on the products that come out of the ground.

And as I believe the mining industry has to look and find more friends. And you've responded with this conference in response, well, you probably already wanted to do it, but I felt that mining companies should be asking their accounting firms, their legal firms, their investment bankers and all of the people that derive revenue from mining companies to help carry the message forward that mining has improved and it is important to everyone's modern day life. We just need more support. So that's one side.

On the energy side, we're fortunate with our copper project that the province we're in in Argentina has a very high solar radiation level. So it's very good for generating energy, electrical electricity from solar cells, is also a windy place, so they have wind turbines and they have hydro, so very low cost. And one of the major power companies down there, YPF, has given us an MOU to provide 100% energy, electrical energy, and it's all renewable. We're looking at the trucks and the machineries, the processing, trying to electrify as much as possible on our, on our site.

In Ontario, it's a little harder. Energy costs are higher. And I'd have to say it's much easier to plan for something that's more environmentally friendly and energy efficient and emitting less carbon when you're designing new, rather than trying to retrofit an old one, because I'd say we're a little behind on what we do in Timmins and in Nevada. But we'll get Argentina going and attack those places next.

[Dean Braunsteiner] (19:56 - 20:14)
And so, Rob, like through the technologies that you've seen to kind of drive that energy transition and innovation, is there anything that you would consider to be like a real game changer at this point that mining companies should focus on, or is it still very early days and it's more of the same?

[Robert McEwen] (20:17 - 21:36)
Well, I believe, you know, with the advent of AI, we're going to see process controls that make us more efficient in the use of energy. I think we should be looking with the acute labor shortage we're starting to see develop, we should be thinking more automation. We should be thinking robotics. I just feel that we'll be able to go into areas that we don't want to put a person into because of the dangerous, but you can put a machine in there and could probably drive down your costs more.

So I see that coming. I've always thought that you could turn an old mine into a hydroelectric plant, just pumping up water when your electrical rates are cheap and then pushing it down and having a turbine at the bottom. I mean, the type of head would be bigger than Niagara Falls, most old mine shafts. So you could generate your power there. I'm just pointing out to everyone working on site how we could improve it. Just little increments, but they all add up.

[Dean Braunsteiner] (21:37 - 22:11)
No, for sure. And it sort of brings me to kind of the next topic is just around local communities. And we talk about innovation and using more technology, but oftentimes communities rely on the jobs that are provided by the mining companies. And so I would imagine there must be a balance, and I understand the safety angle, but not to automate out of jobs for those local communities. And if you think of what you're doing in Argentina, at Los Azules, like how have you kind of been balancing that? And then also thinking about how do you protect, you know, the local community as a key stakeholder in the environment?

[Robert McEwen] (22:13 - 25:04)
Well, that is going to be attention somewhere in the future as the automation comes along. But then there's just upgrading the skills of the people in the community. If you had a lot of robots, you have to repair them. If you have a lot of automation, you need some systems engineers or technicians.

Today, when mining first started, you didn't have environmentalists on staff. Now you have them. And so there's a large diversity of talent required to run a mine today. We set up an office in the nearest community to Los Azules. We've done training there for driller's helpers and drillers. There was a shortage of good drills in Argentina when we first started our campaign. And so we bought six or eight drills. And then we started training people on how to use them properly to get better efficiencies, training the helpers.

We employ about or provide income to through various jobs to about 20% of the community in the county of Calingasta. So, and it's just also just being very transparent. But I can look at a lot of mining companies and they're very active in the local communities, providing, you know, we help with the schools. We put in streetlights in the community and you just, there's always an endless need in a lot of these communities where we've also looked at just saying their agricultural practices are primitive in some ways, the irrigation in particular. And in this part of the country, it's a rain shadow. So water is precious. So we've looked at, well, how do we reduce water consumption at our site? And we're looking at, that's a concern, so the process, we're planning a heat bleach process. We'll use one quarter the amount of water of a comparable size conventional copper processing plant.

So that's, so we're looking at how do we reduce our saving, our water consumption. But at the same time, how can we provide input to the agricultural community and improving their canals, cutting down on the irrigation. They do flood irrigation where they just open up a ditch and just flood a whole field. It's a very inefficient way of irrigating. So if we can help them acquire skills to use less water, then our water consumption is less.

[Dean Braunsteiner] (25:04 - 25:30)
And finally, if we turn to the next topic, which is really, you know, how do we inspire that next generation, and Rob, as someone who's consistently broken new ground in the sector, and you know, what are some of the key lessons that you've learned that you can help inspire and guide that next generation and kind of what qualities and skills should that emerging professional group develop to drive meaningful change within the industry?

[Robert McEwen] (25:33 - 27:40)
It's a big issue. I think when you look at the enrollment, the declining enrollment in schools related to mining, it's been a very sharp decline since the 70s. And that's contributing to a big problem because we're losing the youth. We're losing the new talent. We're losing the passion. So it's competing with businesses that are viewed as more sexy.

So how do we make mining sexy? As I mentioned earlier on, that electric feeling that I felt when I walked into Bloomberg's office and the first impressions. When someone comes to the site, what's the first thing you see? I remember going up to the oil sands and going to Suncor's operations and being very impressed by how they, their work camps, wonderful cafeteria open almost 24 hours a day, great food, recreational facilities. And then, you go into their monitoring facilities where it's like a big bond trading room down on Wall Street, these huge computer screens. So how do you make it look like I want to work there?

It's, there's a lot of technology to be applied to the industry. And I think if we keep adding it, we'll see a renewed interest. In the mining industry, I don't believe there's a lot of competition. So, and there's a lot of people approaching retirement. So for a young person who says, I'd like to have a chance of getting to the C-suite, I think you can get there much faster in a mining company than you could in many other industries, so.

[Dean Braunsteiner] (27:41 - 27:55)
And to make that transition to the C-suite, I guess, what would your advice be to that up and coming generation who are in the mining industry already? Like, what can they do to kind of demonstrate they're thinking differently?

[Robert McEwen] (27:55 - 29:55)
I was always influenced by science fiction. I was an avid reader of science fiction in my youth. I still read it because it's all about what most people think is impossible, but it becomes possible.

And so having a fairly broad interest, taking in information from many different sources will give you the opportunity, I believe, to see alternatives that might not be apparent to someone who's continued in a very narrow path. I think, I can think of myself when I went up and Red Lake at Goldcorp, it was more, I went from a world that moved very quickly to a world that seemed to move slowly.

And you go, why are we doing this? Well, we've always done it, as I said before. Well, why have you always done it? Is there an alternative? Well, you need to back that alternative and dig it up. So having many sources of input of information, looking across a number of industries and saying, could we apply that there? And then probably taking a sales course, because you're going to have to sell your boss on that. Public speaking skills are very important, very valuable. Maybe pick up, talk to your friendly accountants and say, tell me more about how I can understand these statements, because that's a very important role if you want to get into the C-suite of understanding the financial statement.

Just an open mind and a lot of varied approaches, I think.

[Dean Braunsteiner] (29:56 - 30:23)
No, that's great, Rob. And I know we could probably continue on for a longer discussion, but just conscious of time and there's the rest of the day to tend to. So thanks very much for sharing your insights and perspectives.

As I said, you've had an extraordinary career and have challenged the status quo throughout the mining industry that we really appreciate your time today. And I know those tuning in have really enjoyed hearing from you. So thank you.

[Robert McEwen] (30:24 - 30:57)
Thank you very much, Dean. I think one thing I didn't say is the mining industry has been very generous to society. And I don't think we've played that up.

I mean, if you go up University Avenue, you go into the various universities around the country, you'll find people who've been in the mining industry and contributed to society, to the betterment of society. I know for me, that's a very big thing. But there are all sorts of mentors I've had that have shown the way to share what comes out of the bounty that comes out of the ground.

[Dean Braunsteiner] (30:59 - 31:18)
Rob, before we wrap up this enlightening discussion, you know, we'd love to hear from the audience. And so, we're going to do just a quick poll. So the poll is, what is the most important leadership focus for driving sustainable progress in the mining sector?

Please take a moment, select the option that's most reasonable to you.

[Robert McEwen] (31:19 - 31:26)
So thank you for the opportunity to sit with you at this fireside chat. That's great. I appreciate it.

Thank you. Cheers.

[Theo Yameogo] (31:27 - 32:04)
Today's keynote highlighted that true leadership in mining means challenging the status quo to find innovative solutions that not only will enhance profitability for shareholders, but also prioritize communities, the environment, and most importantly, a sustainable society. It was great to hear Rob talk about all these topics and, Kaki, you know, when we think about sustainability and leadership, what's your view on how emerging leaders can best develop the strategic thinking and adaptability needed for these challenges?

[Kaki Giauque] (32:04 - 32:58)
Yeah, thanks, Theo. You know, emerging mining leaders must break away from conventional thinking. They need to review resources as national assets, prioritize creating lasting value for host communities, and build fair, equitable partnerships.

By focusing on local first sustainability and addressing poverty directly, these leaders can drive sustainable operations that benefit both the industry and the communities they serve. As we transition to our next session, we'll be delving into a crucial discussion on critical minerals, navigating end-to-end supply chain challenges and opportunities. This insightful panel will be moderated by Greg Matlock, EY Global Energy and Resources Industry Tax Leader, who will guide us through the complexities and emerging trends in this vital area.