 We're here at PDAC 2024 and some of the world's renowned experts are here, present. Konstantin Kerenopoulos, how are you today? I'm very well Tracy, good to see you. Why are you at PDAC this year, what is your objective? Critical minerals being what they are, they seem to be at the center of what governments, investors, companies have been talking about. So there's an awful lot of buzz about rare earths, lithium, nickel, et cetera, battery and electric vehicle resources. So most of developers, miners and investors in the world gather at PDAC to talk about these things. So some of the folks that I've been working with are here. So here we are. So you're here. What is the number one thing you've heard since you've been here, that you go, wow, that is correct? Well, there's a number of important things I've heard. I haven't thought of prioritizing them, but there is a general negative sentiment in terms of the ability of small companies to raise money. Small companies in the public markets are having a really hard time with valuations. Money is very difficult to come by, but in my view, this is a temporary phenomenon. We're at close to or at the bottom of the cycle with a lot of these commodities. So if these companies can hold on until perhaps a little later in the year, early next year, I think they'll be fine. And the economy and demand for technologies that employ critical minerals and some of the bigger commodities will be back. OK, just for fun, let's do a little critical mineral speed dating. OK. So for instance, I was speaking to an automotive company and they said the two protocols that they're currently looking for are nickel and lithium. Thoughts on that? I don't know enough about nickel, other than what I read in the papers and the financial times. But for lithium, I think this is a great time to get into lithium because I go back to my years in the industry before we sold our last company. And all of our long term projections were done at $12 lithium carbonate equivalent or 12,000 a ton. So now people are complaining because lithium prices have dropped to $16 or $17 in China or $17,000 a ton, which is still higher than what three, four, five years ago the industry was projecting long term. So things are not as bad as they could be. You know, the $4 a kilo times of a decade ago. So I think lithium still is the workhorse in the battery space. You can have a battery, whether it's lithium cobalt, NMC, lithium iron phosphate, all these batteries need lithium. In the next decade, lithium will be the workhorse of the EV battery. So I'm bullish on lithium, and I'm hoping to get involved in a couple projects in the near term. And again, when commodity prices are down, this is the time to buy assets and pounds, make investments, and sort of harvest the wisdom of those investments during the peak. Of course, there's a lot of arguable confusion right now about the rare earth market in general. Any thoughts that you would like to share with our audience? Well, you will have those fits and starts in any industry that's dominated by one particular player. And the majority of production and majority of consumption in the world of rare earths is in China. So the rare earth supply demand and therefore prices are very much a function of what's going on in China. If the Chinese economy is going great guns, prices go up, supply demand tightens. Now that the Chinese economy is still growing, but not at the rates that they were hoping, supply chains have been caught with high inventories. Those inventories are being corrected. And naturally, prices have been on the way down. I do think, like I said earlier, I think this is temporary. I think we're into sort of two, three quarters of low prices, relatively speaking, at which only the good projects, the world class, high grade favorable mineralogy and so on, projects can continue to generate cash flow and profits. But later on in the year, early next year, I think prices will start getting back to levels that the industry will find a bit more palatable. There seems to be a hunch around the world for rare earths, feedstock, feedstock, technology companies, they're looking everywhere. Do you want to give them some advice on where they should start looking? Who am I to give advice to anybody on anything? But I can tell you what I'm doing. I am working with a couple of companies in Brazil. We talked about it before. I think Brazil, given its mineralogy and Sunday evening, I had dinner with a Brazilian delegation here who are saying all the right things and they're shifting the regulatory framework very much in favor of exploration and mining and development. So I like Brazil. What I have seen is very favorable mineralization, not only in hard rocks, bassinocyte, monazite containing rare earths, but also in ionic clays which they don't give you the grade but give you a very, very favorable mineralogy that under the right circumstances and under the right environmental practices could really make any project the low cost producer, especially when you're competing with China on ionic clay derived rare earths, primarily heavies. So I'm bullish on Brazil. I think over the next two, three years you will see some very, very interesting projects, make a lot of progress and perhaps shift the dynamics of where heavy rare earths are coming from. This is the heavy rare earth sources are one of the problems in the global EV rare earth magnet industry because the majority of dysprosium and terbium originates in Myanmar and very, very few countries and ESG focused customers and industries and supply chains are in good terms with Myanmar for all kinds of geopolitical and social reasons. So if countries like Brazil or Malaysia or Australia were theirs, if there is heavy rare earth mineralization being explored, could balance the sources of heavy rare earths, I think this will be good for the entire industry and the supply chains. Governments around the world are making endless announcements about the injection of capital that they plan on making in this particular sector. Where do we start there? We will need a three-hour interview or a documentary, Tracy. Where do we start? I see an awful lot of pronouncements, an awful lot of talk, but what I do see is governments investing or investing taxpayers' money in a lot of the low-hanging fruit. I think governments need to do a lot more work scratching the surface a little bit and not writing easy checks to the first lobbyists that works through their door, whether it's DC or Ottawa, and really employing knowledgeable people who can understand the pros and cons on projects. My continuing disappointment with governments, more so in North America as opposed to the Europeans who seem to get it, is the relationship between the formation of supply chains and demand and supply. As I've talked with you before and as I've talked to your partner, Jack Lifton, demand creates supply chains. But all consumers, all producers of electric vehicles need some encouragement in order to promote the creation of local and efficient and technologically adept supply chains. And that's missing so far. Well, it's been rumored on the rumor mill that the prioritization for some of this government grant money is going to things like technology, like rare earth extraction technology processes. Would you like to comment on that? Well, the supply chains have a lot of nodes that need to develop skills that they don't have. Extraction is one of them. I would say that when you build an electric vehicle or when you build a Dyson vacuum cleaner, whether it's Tesla or Mercedes-Benz or BYD, those guys buy magnets, they buy batteries, and if they're making motors or they're making magnets, they buy separated rare earth metals and alloys. And if they're making batteries, they buy refined lithium or they buy cathodes with the lithium compounds inside of them. So the skill set, I think governments need to address the lack of skills in the supply chains in North America and Europe. And let's not forget, at least I'm old enough to remember the days when the bulk of the rare earth markets came in the form of United States, Japan and Europe. Well, with the exception of Japan, those supply chains largely migrated to China and Asia. So in order for those supply chains to come back, we need a bit of a long-term horizon, a long-term strategy, and we really need to make sure that the skills that fuel that technology development exist in the countries that governments want to create technologically advanced supply chains. We're not there yet. And these are all very long-term strategies, and I think it's important for countries and governments, especially, to have industrial strategies. I don't see that yet in North America, where laissez-faire capitalism has replaced long-term industrial strategy. However, the Japanese continue to have an industrial strategy, and that's why some of the most sophisticated rare earth-related technologies come from Japan. China, of course, has had an industrial strategy for the last three decades, and that's one of the fundamental reasons why they dominate supply chains that create a lot of value added and a lot of jobs. And we need to start learning our lessons from successful examples like those. North American governments hiring you to consult on this industrial strategy, because it sounds like a really good idea to me. I did spend three years on the Board of Advisors for Natural Resources Canada. It was very enjoyable. I think our term ended last summer sometime. In the meantime, I'm advising a couple of other governments that are not in North America. Well, Telia, thank you, Konstantin, for always updates on critical minerals from one of the best in the world. It's good to see you. Thank you, Tracy. Great to see you as well. And we'll see you at PDAC next year, maybe.