Turner Caldwell

And so if we're not innovating in the critical mineral space, we will be perpetually behind.

And the things that China does right now to accelerate... And when you say behind, you mean specifically behind China?

Specifically behind China.

But I would say also globally, we have a couple of decades of flag.

The things that we can do at the top level are accelerate permitting.

We can make project level finance more available.

But that doesn't actually solve the underlying problem, which is that we are too slow at designing, building, and ramping up new minerals capacity, even after we have licensed to operate.

And so Mariana is laser focused on that phase of project development, which is you have to get things permitted.

Yes.

But once you start building, it can take five years to get something built and then it can take three or three to five years to get something actually operating at rate.

And that's why we're laser focused on that, so that even if we kind of start to lower the burdens to play catch up with China, we actually have to go faster than China does.

Yeah.

So, you know, we focus on the full chain from mining all the way through refining.

You have to focus on the full chain.

That handoff in the middle leads to a lot of actual like market inefficiencies.

But, you know, we're making a big bet on autonomy fundamentally.

Like we're making a big bet on the fact that we can build systems that enable us to engineer things faster using large language models, accelerate the procurement lifecycle, and do autonomous shortenable control of construction operations where you're really doing resource balancing between what materials do you have on site, what's your list of tasks, and what people do you have on site.

And kind of like doing that optimization is all things that can be done algorithmically.

And then we're making big bets on autonomy and refineries where we use reinforcement learning to actually

remove humans from the loop in determining how refineries operate.