Fox Meyer

People have been doing that for a long time.

What's tricky is then taking those grains of sand and turning them into something usable or refining them down into the pure form of what we need to be able to build electronics with it.

That capability is in short supply globally.

China is very good at this.

A lot of other countries are playing catch up.

We are playing catch up with that.

If you do all the sorting really well, you still just have a very valuable sandbox.

You know, you don't have a battery.

Turning that into a battery is a whole other ballgame.

And it's something that is going to take a lot of time and money and investment to get up and running.

Well, it might be because putting it on that list gives it some sort of legislative boon.

You know, maybe you can say, well, I'm trying to open a new mine here for a critical mineral.

Aggregate is also on here, which is extremely important for making stuff like concrete.

But I think this is where we get into a bit of distinction between things that are very important to mine for economic or industrial reasons and things that are very important to mine specifically for this very targeted electronic sector, which is what these critical minerals are.

I'm not trying to make an argument about which one of these is more important.

I'm just saying that lumping them together is where we end up in confusing situations like this.

Gold, at least, as I said earlier, is useful because when you're mining gold, odds are you are also accidentally mining a critical mineral.

And if you can add in a step in your processing of that gold to also strip out the critical mineral, that's just money that's being left on the table, essentially.

And I think that's what people are trying to do here.

We have to be cautious of volatility.