 with pleasure and privilege of speaking to two of the top world experts on critical materials, Christopher Eccleston and of course, Jack Lipton. How are you both today? I'm going to start this interview by asking you both the obvious question, which is, do we have enough critical materials for the EV boom for this climate change initiatives that are out there? Christopher, do you want to go first on this one? Do you mean above ground or in the ground? We definitely have enough in the ground. There are, rare oats aren't rare, so there are lots of them out there and we have a lot of identified deposits. Some of those deposits are pretty mediocre, but they're amongst the identifiable. We have enough good deposits identified that indeed it's out there. Do we have those deposits in the hands of people who are capable and competent enough to get product out of the ground or people that project to the market an aura of confidence that the market can be confident in and give them money? No. In the very short term, we have a number of initiatives going on and you're going to match the rising demand, but then there's a gap. We do have players who claim that they can fill the gap, but as we saw from the previous boom, which was 10 years ago, some of the horses in the race are going to fall down before they get to the finishing post. How about you answer those questions that Christopher just threw out, Jack? I don't think there's sufficient rare earths that can be brought into production in the Americas to satisfy the market in the Americas. I agree with Christopher that the real issue is the gap between the talk and the reality of producing these materials. It would take tens of billions of dollars and decades to bring production up to match the, in my opinion, fanciful projections by the major banks in particular of the Western world. The only country today, the only nation self-sufficient in rare earths necessary to, let's say, transform their transportation into electric operation would be the People's Republic of China. The rest of us are far behind. In my opinion, America is much farther behind in this than Europe. Even though Europe doesn't have any deposits, it seems to have really taken notice of the need for these materials and it does have the intellectual capacity, the finance, and the processing, at least some companies that do all of the steps in the supply chain. We do not have that in North America and we're kidding ourselves to think that we're going to create it just by heating the air in Washington DC. So gentlemen, for the Investor Intel audience, can I have you both quickly identify one publicly listed company in the rare earths market that you're actually looking at today and why? Christopher, you start, please. Energy field. A dark horse in the rare earth race. It's come from the uranium side rather than the traditional stable of rare earth miners and it's reprocessing of sands, monazite sands in the US. It's totally surprising and looks like it's going to work and it's going to fill a gap, particularly the set tied up with the near performance, which is one of the largest processes in the industry. So, you know, they've ticked all the boxes and they look like they're definitely plans. On Jack, since you're going second, you have to pick a different company. Can you throw another one out for us? I'm going to throw out Appia, the Canadian company, which has, I believe, the best monazite deposit in North America. That's a very important development and it turns out that the Saskatchewan Research Council, a unit of the government of Saskatchewan, is building a crack and leach system for the material from Appia and a separation plant, a solvent extraction based rare earth separation plant, which will make Saskatchewan, along with the American state of Utah, the two places in the whole eastern world that can process monazite legally. So, I think that's an outstanding development. So, of course, the uranium market was completely enhanced by the Sprott uranium trust. There's rumors on the street that someone or some company is going to start a trust for rare earth. Jack, do you think this will fuel our sector? Yes, providing that the company that does the trust is well financed, it will help stabilize the price of rare earths outside of China. This is very important. It could do for rare earths what the uranium trust did for uranium, which is stabilize the price. Very important. And Christopher, I just have to ask you this question. Can you tell me what you think about the rare earth market right now? Are we starting a repeat of 10 years ago? Do we have another boom market? Oh, it's totally different because last time the prices were insane. We're not at an insane prices by any means in the market. I think we're more likely to end up with insane prices in stocks rather than in the actual metals because there are not extraneous players in here at the moment, like possibly an ETF. An ETF, a riverjack would stabilize the market, but can also sometimes ruin a market if it ends up buying too much product. It happened in the 10 market back in the 1980s, and it's happened in other markets as well. So it has to be not over buying, and too much money running into any ETF forces the managers of the ETF to spend the money. And if that happened to match at a time when the Chinese were restricting supply, you end up with loads of money hitting restricted supply, crazy prices. And we all know that the craziest thing of the previous boom was the prices that cerium and lanthanum, very prolific and not particularly desirable rare earths are getting at the time. And it was totally artificial, total bubble. Well, thank you both for joining us today for Critical Materials Corner. Christopher, a pleasure to see you, Jack. Thank you.