 Today, I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Jack Lifton about what's happening in the rare earth's market since the coronavirus has hit. How are you today, Jack? I'm fine, Tracy. We're all hunkered in here in the U.S., you know, you're not supposed to go anywhere, do anything, only breathe out. So speaking of that, I'm just going to get right into it. I had a very, it was a very interesting webcast this morning with energy fuels redirecting their audience's interest to what else, rare earths. So are we on to something, Jack? Everybody's going to get into rare earths. Well that's true. What's happened finally with the U.S. government is that they've recognized the supply chain problem, and that we have been too dependent on China for too many things, and the two things that are mentioned the most now today inside the federal government are pharmaceuticals and rare earths. I don't know where that combination came from, but it doesn't matter. Rare earths are very much on the radar of the U.S. federal government. In fact, one of our senators, Senator Rubio of Florida, is championing the U.S. to revive the rare earth supply chain. So this is very exciting, and quite frankly it's the biggest move in this commodity that I've seen from the U.S. government really ever. So they finally figured it out that it's a problem. Well we've all figured out, of course we're aware of the fact that it is a problem. So with the supply chain, I've heard them, you know, flip back and forth or so the media has represented it. We're going to prioritize technology, we're going to prioritize the source, and as you and I both know, we need six different stages here. We need a wide variety of solutions. As a consultant to the U.S. government, can you provide us or share with us what kind of advice you give to any of us looking at the rare earths industry as supply chain and where to start? Yes, quite frankly when I give this talk it goes like this. Look at the total rare earth supply chain. Now let's try to make that domestic in North America and or with the closest allies of the North American governments of Canada and the U.S. which would probably be Australia. All right. What is it we're looking for and how do we do it? All right. First of all the anchor of any supply chain is the mine, the source of the minerals. Well we've got several in either in North America we've got two or three that are really could be close to production. Close to production means 36 months to actual full production. This is possible two or three companies that I've identified that are developing deposits. Of course they need capital. In Australia as you know we have two in operation. We have the massive light wearer operations of the Linus Corporation and we have northern minerals which actually is in pilot operation. They've just sold 120 tons of material to a customer so that's what they're calling pilot. That sounds like serious production especially in heavy wearers. All right. The next step though is separating these materials, the mixed wearers into individual wearers that can be further processed into products that we actually use. Now the largest light wearer refinery that I know of on this planet is Linus in Malaysia. That's currently got 22,000 tons in year capacity and it's being increased to 25,000 tons. That's outside of China. There is to the best of my knowledge at this point outside of China no heavy wearer separation operation. According to U.S., several companies have come forward in a very recent U.S. Army solicitation which we're calling the cornerstone solicitation because that was the name of the Army project to actually build separation plants in North America. There have been maybe half a dozen proposals. The most prominent and well-known one was Linus saying that they would construct such a plant in Texas with their partner above blue line minerals. But there are four or five other projects which at this point I can't disclose but they're underway. How are we going to deal with this right now? A lot of the companies are telling everybody to go home. Specifically I noticed Tesla is now making ventilators. What should these rare earth companies be doing presently while everybody's at home? It's a little bit hard to source or extract or be working in laboratories during this time. What would you recommend? What I recommend is that they complete their proposals for building separation plants, metal and alloy plants and even magnet manufacturing operations. These they can do with a pencil and paper or younger people in me would say computer. The point is this is the big issue right now. What is the real cost of doing these things? That's what government needs to know. For example today, and this is the 20th of March 2020, the U.S. government just announced that a senator has put a bill into the Senate which would grant $150 million for recycling critical materials to support recycling critical materials. That's a very big step for the U.S. federal government. These bills get introduced all the time we know that, but this one's getting a lot of attention. It just happened today so you'll see it in the papers tomorrow. Let's jump to this news for today if you don't mind. For everybody out there watching Investor Intel, we're going to be rolling out the Jack report starting next week. Jack is going to be interviewing experts in the industry and really getting down into the details so that we can actually build something here. What's happening here is that the coronavirus problem will eventually abate as all such problems do. But what is, a sea change has occurred here. Finally, you cannot cover up the fact that we have, the United States and Canada have committed the first and most obvious error of procurement. They have single sourced to an unreliable vendor. Crazy, I've been in this business almost 60 years. When I started out calling on General Motors way back when, when the 57 Chevy was a hot number, they said to me, we will not add a vendor except for one purpose, one when they have good supply. We always are concerned to have an alternate vendor ready in case something happens. They lost this philosophy about 25 years ago when they decided, no, we're just, we're just going to worry about the cost and then we can get it done cheaper in China. And they completely ignored some of us who said, it's not cheaper in China. What you're doing is ignoring health and safety. And this is what the Chinese don't tell you about. Now, if you obey the rules of health and safety for North American countries, Canada and the United States, then Chinese material would be unacceptable and it has been unacceptable since the first day. But our financial people said, oh no, no, it's only price, it's only cost. Guess what? The chickens have come home to roost. They found out that was a huge mistake because now prices are so low from China because of what I call predatory pricing from China, predatory in the sense that it's not real when you add in health and safety. Our requirements in North America, Chinese materials are unacceptable. So we've ignored that. Now we can't ignore it. So I heard today a very interesting thing from a congressman. He said, we're willing to pay a premium and I said, what? You guys usually run away when somebody says, no, no, no. We'll have to pay whatever it takes to make sure we can get the material. Okay. What I'm saying to you is that when somebody sits down and works out these costs, they're going to find it's, in my opinion, cheaper to mine rare earths in Canada and process them in the United States into rare affirmative magnets than it is to do it in China. And what's the difference? How much did this coronavirus situation cost us? Would you guess? I'm going to guess two or three trillion dollars. How does that work out in your price when you add that in? So the nonsense of all this stuff about, oh, well, it's cheaper to have it done in the country where they don't care how many miners die, where they don't care how much pollution there is in the food chain, it's cheaper. That's true. I suggest that those gentlemen and ladies who have caused this problem go to China to live and let's see how they like it there. And we should, we'll mine here. We'll process here. We'll produce our products here. I'll tell you what else we're going to bring back. We don't use rare affirmative magnets and cars and appliances directly. They're part of us. They're part of motors, generators, sensors. Today I had a meeting with people from automotive and we were talking about the fact that pretty soon all cars will be drive by wires. You know that? The wheel, when you turn the wheel, you'll just be, you know, sensors will be detecting what you're doing and down the wire to rare earth permanent magnets on the wheels that will be turning the axle and the various parts of that. And so I said, well, gentlemen, what are you going to get the additional rare earth permanent magnet motors? Silence. Okay. We're going to need to rethink what we do here. We've been outsourcing everything here to save a few bucks in this and what has resulted is a multi-trillion-dollar disaster and a lot of that is due to outsourcing. You can emphasize pharmaceutical intermediates, that's fine. But start thinking about rare earths, germanium, tungsten, all the things we outsource because it's cheaper. Is it really? I don't think so. Well, Jack, I'll tell you, you know where my position is. So I totally agree with you. So as always, it's a pleasure to get an update. You're looking healthy and we'll be, we look forward to our next interview here on Monday. Thank you.