All You Need to Know About Diggers 2026

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
And how good are these Diggers & Dealers all the way from Mexico City?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:06)
It's not bad at all. I've actually had a good time watching through, getting in the loop with a heap of different companies.
Nothing crazy like jumping out. There's not too many news stories. It's more a refresh of plenty of the stories that we've had. A couple of sprinkles of exploration, and a few bits and pieces of going on around there. What did you make of watching a bunch of the presentations?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:31)
I think that I'm going to try and summarize it in 30 minutes. Like this is Diggers & Dealers in 30 minutes for the Money Miners.
We're going to, you know, JD and I, we watch the presentations so you don't have to. And we've, I mean, we watch them at two times speed. And if we're being completely honest, we watch half of them. And we didn't watch all of them. We watched about half of them. But some big takeaways.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:54)
1.5 times speed. Two times speed is what I used to do. I just can't hack it anymore. 1.5.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:59)
You've changed, mate.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:00)
I've gotten soft.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:01)
You've gotten soft. You've gone to Mexico and you've gotten soft.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:05)
One thing that hasn't changed, mate, is the ever enduring growingness of the brand Sandvik ground support. Sandvik, they were sponsoring Diggers & Dealers as well. Like you said to me, mate, they're everywhere.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:17)
Sandvik ground, Sandvik is everywhere. Sandvik ground support is everywhere. And as it should be, mate, I'm pretty sure that it'll be in every continent of the world. You know why, mate?
Because where there's mining, there's Sandvik and where there's underground mining, there's Sandvik ground support.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:31)
Sandvik, get your order in, download the app today in the show notes.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:33)
Who would you call?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:34)
Would it be Derek Heard?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:35)
It would be Derek.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:37)
Derek Heard, the only name to know.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:39)
Go Derek.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:43)
I'll chuck up a fun one with you to start, mate. I was looking through the all-time Diggers & Dealers highest viewed episodes.
Did you know out of the 12 highest viewed, 10 of them are Lithium companies? Does that surprise you in the slightest?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:59)
It doesn't. I think it doesn't surprise me. I do think in general, Diggers is a big event. People go there, they watch it in person. Some people tune on the live stream. I watched a few things on the live stream throughout the days because I wasn't in town.
But I was surprised to see, it's always interesting to see which companies get the most views, which ones don't. And it's an indicator of some description. And I think nothing can compare to the lithium mania that there was. And the interest in the retail stocks back in 2023, 2022

**SPEAKER_2** (2:38)
100%. So of the 10 of 12 that were super highly viewed, core lithium is three of them.
Three of them over three different years, and then PLS and Linetown make up the remaining seven between them. So you can draw on that what you will.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:58)
That's crazy. What did you think? Just high level, right? Like you sat down for a bunch of hours, you watched them. Just like Zoom out, what did you actually take away from having watched a whole bunch of different companies?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:16)
I felt like maybe uninspired is a bit harsh. I mean, so many of the projects that we're talking about that are getting fleshed up are projects that economics are looking much better, purely because of the fact of the commodity price moves. I mean, like gold is off 20-odd percent from what it was. Had a great week coming out the back of Diggers, but it's still astoundingly high. Copper, like if you're not making money at these prices, something's seriously wrong with the project.
Going through with that lens, there wasn't too much new. I wonder if you felt the same, but maybe Solstice is one of the few where there's a bit of a discovery type feel to it. There's something a bit fresh, that's something that's happened in the last year. Other than that, a lot of familiar faces, a lot of updates, and that's not a bad thing, people updating on the strategy, what they've executed over the past year, whether it's been good, bad, and ugly in some cases, and going from there. What was your high level views?

**SPEAKER_1** (4:12)
Yeah, I do somewhat resonate with the sentiment that it wasn't like this feeling of new excitement.
These are largely old stories, not necessarily in a bad way, some of them are on their own journeys of development, and there's certainly a new cohort of companies who are developing projects, either in construction or in construction, they've experienced some transformative M&A and then now newly relevant. There's a whole suite of companies like that, but even with that, I think I just wanted a bit more comic relief watching the presentations. That's what I was craving more than anything with some character. And we've both watched maybe like 10 hours of content, and we're going to struggle to make 30 minutes of comic relief out of it, but we'll do our best.