Hello, America. Dave Hodges here, host of the Common Sense Show. We are the show that is

Freeing America, one enslaved-minded time. Thank you so much for joining us. Really, really good to be

with you. We're covering a topic today that I have talked to quite a bit about in the past. It's a big

concern for me, and I don't know that there's any really quick answer, and we've got an expert on to talk about it. And that's a rare earth minerals issue with Joshua Ballard. We're going to get to Joshua in just a second. I'll let you know. We're brought to you by Noble Gold. Hey, been a customer for seven and a half going on eight years, been an advertiser for almost nine

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you a free information packet. Well, Josh Ballard, our guest, is the CEO of USA Rare Earth.

He's an accomplished leader with more than 20 years of experience as a senior level

finance and operations executive and technology and manufacturing firms in the public service.

Prior to joining USA Rare Earth in December of 24, he led the financial arm of Energy Recovery,

Inc. And that's listed on the NASDAQ. And I got to tell you, I'm looking at

the background here. This is fantastic. And I don't want to go through a whole lot of detail here

because we have an expert. We want to maximize our time. And you've heard me say this many,

many times with the Chinese economy and the difficulty that they're in right now, and especially since we're squeezing them on the tariff issue, even though that's been put off, we are in a very vulnerable position, and Joshua's here to break it down. Hey, thanks for joining us. First-time guest on the Common Sense Show. Great to have you on. Thanks, Dave. Appreciate it. Good good to be here well i let me just start with

this one point i covered a few months ago the lithium deposits in northern nevada that have been

discovered and it looks like it's just a relative gold mine so to speak of, rare earth mineral that's needed, AI applications.

But I read also that really developing this and making it usable and bypassing the Chinese,

that's a difficult problem.

And is that a standard problem across the board that we're going to have?

Yeah, rare earths are, what's difficult about them is they're actually not all that rare. You can, if you go out and stick your hand in the dirt, you're probably going to pull up a bunch of rare earths in your fist. But the challenge with them when you're mining and trying to process the rare earths is that they're dispersed throughout the rock. So it's not like

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