 Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Jack Lipton about the good old USA and sustainability and rare earths. How are you today, Jack? I'm great. Crazy. Thank you. It's lovely to see you. And so why don't we just start right there with US and China trade wars? What's happening to the rare earth market in the United States? The rare earth market in the United States is definitely hot, so to speak. We have a directive. The President of the United States is the chief executive. He's not the king or dictator. So he has given a directive to the Department of Defense. This is unusual for address specifically telling them that the Department of Defense must become independent of all other nations in its necessary supplies of rare earths. To say this has caused consternation is to really undervalue what happened. They have a plan, the Defense Department, and they have broken the supply chain down into segments like they have a plan on looking at mines, resources, and recycling, and extracting rare earths from coal is a very hot topic in the United States. And I know many of your audience will say, oh my God, that can't be economic. It's foolish. It's political. It can be economic. And believe me, there are a couple of projects in the U.S. that look pretty damn good for extracting critical rare earths from coal. And there are more sources than coal. We also have in the United States, as you know, fertilizer mining and phosphoric acid producers, two or three of majors. These companies have significant rare earths in their minerals, and they obviously don't recover them. To be honest with you, here's the interesting thing. The company Southern Ionix in Florida, which is now owned by DuPont, produces Zircon materials for the market. They shipped them to the Western U.S. where we have ceramic makers, makes your colonial products. And it's monazite. The monazite that they take out to get removed from the Zircon goes to ship to China directly from Florida. And so the radioactivity that throw him in that goes out of the boat. Bye-bye. But this has been going on for years. In fact, that material was the source for the Roan-Palanck-Slash-Salve separation plant that was in Texas until 20 years ago. So to say that we only have to worry about hard rock mining in the United States is not true. We have rare earths from mineral sands in Florida, a business which has been on for decades. We're now looking at rare earth extraction from coal. The U.S. Department of Energy has a huge program on that. And now the Department of Defense is looking at the mining. Now, as your listeners probably know, we have Texas mineral resources is under development. And MP, a finance group, bought the Mali Corp mine and the processing plant. The mine is now operating at full blast. They say they will be able to do the, revive the processing operation out there. That would be a very large operation, the former Project Phoenix. I don't know if that will happen or not. And rare element resources is definitely active. And quite frankly, in my opinion, it's an outstanding value. I think it's the best worth deposit in the United States for rapid development. That's my opinion. I'm not involved with the resources. I have to stop you right there because I'm not sure I heard that properly. Are you saying that your favorite pick for two wards, rapid development, is rare element resources? I just want to confirm I heard that correct. Of the existing hard rock mines in the United States, my pick is rare element resources for rapid development. That's perfect. Thank you. Forgive me for interrupting you, but I'm sure our listeners are leaning forward. They've got their notebooks open. They're like, Jack's talking. We got to find out what Jack's saying. Okay. And so, you know, you're kind of going through the list here. I did send you a note prior to this interview saying, you know, a lot of Canadian publicly listed rare earth companies or companies that espouse to have rare earths in them are getting very excited by the increased interest by the U.S. government in sustainability directives. Now, in this particular case, I wanted to know whether or not I know you have a lot of high level discussions. Are they actually, will they actually entertain Canadian sources as achieving their sustainability goals? Absolutely. The question, I was at a meeting, the vice president's office building that's on the White House ground. So, you can say in a bar that I was at the White House, you know, that is technically correct. Okay. So, and there were people there from a very high level in the executive department. And I asked directly, I said, hey, you know, we're talking about Canada, Australia, New Zealand, et cetera. And the gentleman who had the most important man in the room said, look, he said, as far as we're concerned, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, any NATO or CETO ally that can assist us in this program, we consider that to be as if they were in domestic resource. So he said, and he emphasized that Canada was definitely okay as a supplier. So people keep, I don't know what they're thinking, why there's some issue there. There is not. The issue is this, the first two that lightwears from Linus, heavywears from Northern, the first two producing where companies in the alliance are Australian. Okay. The United States would welcome Canadian companies. You know, the logistics are a lot better from Quebec or Saskatchewan or then. Okay. And with you having such an extensive background with all the rare earth companies, you know, I'm sure you recall Avalon Advanced Materials. Sure. And of course, you core is Canadian listed, but is in Alaska, America, you know, and we have of course, Great Western, strange, strange lake from quest. And I believe Peter Cashens moved some of those properties into Imperial. But do you remember in particular anything that you'd like to point out from Canada, a property that you particularly liked? I don't want to, at this point in time, pick any, any favorite. But what I can tell you is that the general consensus that I heard was that they like what's going on in Quebec because Quebec is so loaded with companies that have as well as lightwears, heavywears. Please remember the deficit in this world is in heavywears. The Chinese, believe it or not, are importing ore from Myanmar for most of their heavywears today. So this is the critical thing. And quite frankly, my experience in the Canadian market is that there are a lot of deposits in Quebec that favor the heavywears. So that's what I do. I'm not saying there's anything negative about anybody else, but the Quebec government seems to be interested in, more interested in promoting the Quebec-based mining than other provinces that, as I see, that's what I'm hearing. And of course, I saw on BNN recently, they did an interview when the media attention has of course increased on rare earths. And one of the so-called experts was explaining how rare earths got their name because they're rare. Now as the founder of the term technology metals, you coined that term, and of course we ran with it. I don't know, that must have been seven or eight years ago. It was 12 years ago. Can you tell us, was that 12 years ago? Could you please give our audience just briefly an overview of rare earths, and then we're going to try and get you on as often as we can to keep an update on this market. Rare earths is a term coined in the 18th century for unusual oxides. In other words, in that time, at the very beginning of chemistry, they thought these rare materials were unusual and rare because they had no way of determining what was in those minerals. And there weren't very many of them. They came from Sweden at that time. There's a foolish meme going on in the academic world called Earth Abundant. So if you look at the Earth's crust, you say, my God, neodymium, the rare earth metal, is more common than lead. So how hard can it be to produce this? All this stuff is silly. That is assininely stupid because we can only mine deposits that can be economically concentrated, separated, et cetera. And where are most of those deposits in North America? They're in Canada. I would say of the perhaps 100 deposits in North America that are subject of development ideas, 90 are in Canada, at least 90. So are they rare? No. Are they rare in mineable concentrations? Yes. Okay. And there's no way of telling where these concentrations are without going out in the outback, as they say in Australia or Canada perhaps, with a pick and with an eye for these correct minerals and a case of scotch because you need something to do in the outback. Okay. So this exploration has done more in Canada than any other nation that I know. And Canada is loaded with developable deposits. The issue is money. What's the problem in Canada? I'll tell you right now. It's the same problem in every nation on this planet. There's no downstream market. So you may recall from step version one, everybody was going to produce a mixed con and I said this is the biggest con of all at the time because there's what do you do with it? You sell it to China. What are the Chinese? Oh, yes. Well, the Chinese will pay us a basket price of 65, 85%. The Chinese were paying 40% of the contained and they all knew it, but they had a lot of fancy nonsense balance sheets and income statements and all nonsense. Okay. Right now, if you can produce rare earths as separated oxides and then if we redevelop metal and alloy making in North America, which I think is going to happen, then there's a whole market. Now, this is the time for Canadian rare earth companies to get off, you know what, start seriously submitting plans for developing their projects to produce concentrated ores. That's what they can do. Stop talking about, they're going to make metals and alloys and recycling. There's all nonsense because their job is to produce mineral concentrates and there's so many of them, something's going to pop in Canada because there's a lot of good. I note that Avalon has an Australian investor. Very good sign. Very good. Well, Jack, thank you so much for joining us today. As always, we appreciate the update.