 Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dan Blondell from Nano-1 Materials. How are you today? Thank you very much, Tracy. I'm very good. Very good. It's been a great day today so far. And it would be a good day, Dan, especially with all the news you've had lately. Most recently, you announced that Nano-1 was granted a Taiwanese patent for your battery applications. And that sounds very exciting to me. Can you tell us a little bit more about this? Well, there's a couple of significant things about this. It's the third of our patents to be issued. We have a stream of them in international applications in the US and, of course, in many foreign jurisdictions. The Taiwanese are obviously very big in the battery space, very big battery players. So it's an important milestone for us to have an asset in Taiwan like that. Secondly, what's important about it is it's a battery application, where our technology is really in the formation of the battery materials themselves. So it's a process for making battery materials. And the way our strategy is, is that we have a core technology for making the materials. And then we have patents on the process and then on the resulting materials and then on the application. So that's where the materials get used in the battery. And so it covers the value chain. And it's really important in any kind of IP strategy to make sure you cover that full range. So that's a really another significant reason for this. And I guess the third one is that we continue to have patents coming out. And so it's showing a growing IP portfolio. OK, so let me understand this correctly. You are more of a, you're a technology, your patents and technology for the lithium ion battery market. Is that correct? Can you just give us a bit of an overview about what Nano One materials is for our investors? Yeah, so Nano One materials is a company and we're developing processing technology to make lithium ion battery materials. Just so everyone knows, and it's clear, lithium ion battery material is not just lithium. There's cobalt and nickel and manganese and aluminum and it depends on the flavor, but there's a bunch of other materials that need to be all assembled in a very, in a very precise way, very much down at the atomic level to create really nice crystal structures for the lithium ions to go in and out of. And so we're developing that processing technology to assemble those in a cost effective way and to build a better structure that leads to better battery performance. Well, I'm speaking of structuring. We were actually all online looking this up before this interview about you utilize a process called nano structuring. Can you tell us a little bit more about this and the industry overall? Well, nano is often a well used word in the industry. It's used in many different places. Maybe I should just describe kind of what we mean by it. And so it really starts with what does nano mean? Nano size, a millimeter is a thousandth of a meter, nanometers, a billionth of a meter. Human hair is 70,000 nanometers wide. So it gives you a context of it. When we're talking about nanometers or nano structuring, we're talking about the crystal structure within the material. So that's basically how the atoms are aligned. They get aligned. Think of it like a monkey bar set and really lithium ions are the kids playing in the monkey bars and they go in and out during recess and they come back out. And that's kind of your charging and discharging that's going on during during the battery process. And what you have to do is build a structure that effectively houses those lithium ions and lets them out during charge and discharge. So the so when we talk about nano, we talk about we're talking down at that scale. And perfect. Obviously, someone really appreciates that you know what you're talking about. You just received a very difficult grant to get from the SDTC two million towards your pilot plant. You tell us a little bit more about the pilot plant and what's involved with that? Well, on the SDTC front, we're certainly we're very honored to have their support. We started work on this proposal with them a year ago, and it was basically nine months of hard due diligence. And we've now kind of completed a contract. I'm quite completed a contracting phase. We're about to kick off a pilot plan. The money, the two point one million that they've allotted and approved for us on this is going towards a piloting plant, which would be the scale up of our of our technology into something that can produce maybe 10 to 10 kilograms a day. We may be able to do 100 kilogram allotments of material that we could use to test in other batteries in with third parties. So this would be pilot pilot plant type battery applications. But the the key the key part of this pilot plan is to demonstrate that the technology is scalable, but there's line of sight to manufacturing. The big players want to see three things. They want to see that they have technology that's protected. So that's the IP, the patents. They want to see that it performs, that it does something in a battery special that they can differentiate with. And they want to see that there's the scalable and cost effective. And that's really what the demonstration plan here is to do is to prove the scalability to these big players. And speaking of proving scalability, I believe I saw that your stocks have 20 percent since the new year. What should we as shareholders anticipate in the next couple of quarters, Dan? Well, we certainly we've had a lot of it's been very encouraging or the way the stock has run in the last few months. And today's been a really nice day today. We had a US fund take a position today and led to some really exciting things. So we're starting to see the engagement in the market and we're starting to see individuals take take take positions. It's very encouraging for us. So in the in the near future, in the next few months, we should probably see obviously more news about the lab and about some of the materials we're working on. We're working on we're working on what we call cutting edge materials, the stuff that's in our phones today or that's going to be in our phones next year. And we're also working on materials that's really sort of a little bit further looking out. So we're trying to get rid of costs like cobalt and various other things like that in the materials themselves and go to higher voltage materials, higher density materials. So you can expect news on that trickling out as we as we as we see things in the lab. You can start to see news about our team growing advisory team, industry engagement, certainly progress on the pilot itself. What else can I add to that? Oh, of course, we've got other patent applications out there, so there will be more patents being issued and we'll be applying for more patents. So as those come out, we'll be certainly advising our shareholders and the investment community on how we're progressing on that front. So, Dan, in lieu of what you're doing and, you know, you're obviously involved then with everything from cobalt, graphite, lithium. There's a lot going on out there in the industry. Is there any myths you'd like to correct? I know we have an engineer that writes for us from Chattanooga that's constantly trying to correct graphite myths, for instance. Is there something about cobalt that's happening out there that you just like to tell our audience about while we have you here in front of us? Well, I think I think I know what you're referring to, Tracey, and that's it really has to do with the supply chain that goes into lithium ion batteries. So there's a whole bunch of materials going there. There's copper and aluminum, which kind of carries the current back and forth. There's all the stuff in the can. But really, the active materials, the stuff that stores and moves lithium ions around is graphite on one side of the battery. And on the other side, it's going to be some mixture of cobalt, nickel, manganese, aluminum, and all of those materials have certain costs. And lithium's here to stay. I don't think we're going to see any change in that. But really, the formulation of nickel, manganese, cobalt, aluminum, whatever is over there is going to change as we go over time. And cobalt's one of those materials that's very expensive in the mix, and it's probably one of the least produced materials out in the world. And so we expect that there's going to be supply constraints on that. And the industry is definitely looking to cut costs by removing cobalt. And we see that. We talk to the big players and they that's one of the things they're looking for in the future. They want to see cobalt and those expensive materials out and probably the supply chain risks out of the material stream as well. So that's something we're certainly working on. And you can expect some news from us on that as well. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Dan. It was a real pleasure. And great. Well, thank you very much, Tracy.