There is no futures market, so what are you going to do with this? You need someone who would metallize it. You're not going to keep it in metal because it will corrode. But you're going to ship it to Vietnam to metallize it? So how do you invest in that? It's not sufficiently liquid. The ban has not been lifted. It has been suspended for 12 months. This is a crisis as it was before October. Do you think that the U.S. is in a position to adequately fight a sustained conventional war with a near-peer adversary like Russia or China? Some people may question whether we are a peer. Critical materials drive our economy, everything from phones to computers to petroleum and everything in between. So what is next for the future of materials trading, exporting of critical minerals, and what can investors expect to gain from this sector going forward? We're speaking about these themes with our next guest, Thomas Nadrovsky, Portfolio Manager at the Amphest Territin Critical Materials Fund and author of the book Mineral War, China's quest for weapons of mineral destruction. Welcome to the show, Thomas. Good to see you. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. I believe it was Deng Xiaoping that said that China's ultimate weapon is critical minerals. And this was a rather prescient quote, because right now China accounts for the majority of the world's smelting of critical materials, including copper. So before we talk about what investors should pay attention to and the current trends, just how dire is the situation that the West is facing? To the extent that the Trump administration has labeled copper a critical material, critical mineral last year in August 2025, and he's called it a matter of national security that the US divests from China as a source of critical materials. Tell us about what you found through researching your book, Mineral War. Sure. So for starters, I don't really deal that much with those larger markets. You're absolutely right. Copper is another source of concern. We tend to view critical minerals as some of those smaller markets or specialty metals, some of the better materials. But it's true that in the refining and smelting space, China is so dominant, not only in those smaller markets. You quoted Teng Xiaoping, who probably his original quote is about rare earths only. But it's true for some of the larger markets. In fact, the slow death of smelters and refiners outside of China, as some of the Chinese operators can operate without TCRCs or negative ones, that's a big concern for that market. And indeed, it looks like China is doubling down. and shandong there's a whole new uh center built for new copper smelters as if the world needed more of those definitely not the case not the case inside the chinese market and so once you have some of those some of the critical minerals will come out from those flow sheets as well such as tellurium for example and some others so it is a it is a concern um the u.s government is correct uh cautioning against this over dependence however this is something that has accumulated over three decades and it's not going to be unwound within just one electoral cycle in the united states it takes a lot more it takes a lot of incentives for the downstream business downstream manufacturers to be incentivized away from that over dependence on relatively affordable inputs from the chinese market and since most of our procurement systems and our manufacturers function as cost centers it's not that easy to do there are levers there are policy levers that could be adopted for that, but we have to be realistic. Downstream manufacturers are politically more powerful in this country than upstream miners. I want to come back to China and geopolitical angle just a bit. But before that, what do you think are the most critical, critical minerals today in terms of what you expect demand to or how demand will grow in the coming years? So it's both demand and supply and substitution risk or lack thereof. So the three issues that really drive the criticality of those. On the supply side, it's very clear because the more controlled a material is by China, usually somewhere in the middle of the value chain, but also upstream, the more critical it is, starting with gallium, which I think 99% produced out of China at the moment. Heavy rare herbs, almost the same. Spharonized graphite, not much behind this. Tungsten, which is probably the best performing metal of the last 12 months, That's about 82% controlled by China. And then we have Bismuth and Adium and Timani and Indium and several others, all similar way, about 50% controlled by China. So that's on the supply side. On the demand side, since we're talking about fairly small markets, this is not INR. This is not bauxite. These are fairly small markets. And so, small technological changes can completely transform the supply-demand relation here. I'll give you an example from one of the metals that has been over-dependent on production from three mines for a very long period of time, two of them in Brazil, one of them in Canada. That's niobium. And the reason why it's not more broadly adopted beyond, say, steel alloys and some super alloys is precisely that. There is a constraint on that development of the demand because the supply is so limited, so restricted to those several operations, the most important of which was almost acquired by Chinese parties during the great financial crisis. And then the Japanese and Korean investors came in as well, keeping this product still available to the broader market. However, if there are more mines of niobium around the world, it's possible that this material would be used as a substitution for others, which are extremely constrained. And in the case of niobium, that could be anode. Anode AAM for batteries replacing graphite, potentially, because these technologies exist. Toshiba worked on this many years ago. What just happens is there's just not enough production. But it's slowly changing. There are projects in Australia and Western Australia, which are very promising, that could transform the supply structure of that material. It will still be critical, but the supply-demand differential would look very different from now. Let's go back to China for a minute. Currently, the Chinese, like you mentioned, control a lot of the command system when it comes to refining and processing. Do you think the West is focusing on the wrong thing by simply just expanding mineral exploration? Should the West be investing and refining and onshore-ing some of that process? How long would that take? Okay, two things. So first, I define the West not in cultural terms, but institutional terms. Okay. So it's not just the Occident, Europe, and North America, but also Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. So countries that are institutionally Western. And so in these terms, especially those three Asian countries, they do have manufacturing capacity and refining capacity, luckily enough. Why? Because I think we understand now exactly what you said, but it's just not enough to back explorers or developers in Brazil or Africa or somewhere because at the end of the day, they have to sell it somewhere. we invest this way at ambesterad and we invest by looking at the entire value chain and you know we're interested in the quality of the drill holes and the quality of the team but at the end of the day who are you going to sell it to if we have a bifurcated market so that's very important and by the end of last year i think our government here in u.s understood this and the best example this is the deal with korea zinc in tennessee to build a massive smelter uh in brownfields development used to be owned by Nerstar, but it's sort of on its last legs under the former owner. And Korea Zinc will produce not just zinc and other base metals, but also a whole range of other byproducts. As you might know, you can have indium or germanium out of zinc, gallium out of bauxite, tellurium out of copper. These are often sort of those byproducts that are absolutely critical, but you need to have a full service smelter for that. So I think there is understanding of this. I think Australia is trying to save some of the smelters. Their private operators will more happily close at the current Chinese prices. So there is a recognition that we need this physical market in the West. We cannot just completely relinquish that middle of the value chain to China. Before we continue with the video, let's talk about one of the most critical minerals of our economy, copper. Now, copper grades are declining globally. The majors are struggling to keep their mills fed, which brings me to today's sponsor, Algor Grande Copper Corp, ticker ALGR, and their Adelita project in Sonora, Mexico. Sonora is one of the most established copper-producing regions in the world. Adelita sits inside it as a high-grade copper deposit, a type that's increasingly rare and increasingly strategic. Phase 1 drilling has already returned strong results, including 18.2 meters at 1.8% copper equivalent. But this isn't a single whole story. The company has identified multiple high-grade systems along a 6-kilometer corridor, with geological work pointing to potential large-scale copper at depth. Phase 2 drill targets are already being defined. The technical team includes Peter Migal of MagSilver and Raymond Janus of Atex Resources, both with proven track records in this type of geology. Ticker is ALGR. Scan the QR code here or go to the link in the description down below to learn more. I like to show this on the screen. This is from the White House. Adjusting imports of process critical minerals and their derivative products into the United States dated January 2026. This is a proclamation. So the Secretary of Commerce transmitted to me on a report his investigation into the effects of imports of process critical minerals and the derivative products, PCMDPs, on the national security of the United States under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. Now importantly this addresses the risks of the supply chain What do you think the U is going to do to fix the issues that we talked about so far ultimately which is that it been heavily dependent on foreign supply chains, especially for processing and magnets? Yeah, so this is not something that can be changed overnight, unfortunately. However, there are a couple of things that need to be done. First, in order to incentivize investment within broader West, and especially in the United States, You really have to establish a different price structure because we're over-dependent on the so-called Chinese price, for which the demand curve is much more elastic in China, given the overcapacity, overproduction, than it is in the West. We have a much more inelastic demand curve, and therefore, the price should not reflect the Chinese market, especially if it's quasi-monopolized in some of these materials by China. And therefore, this price floor for different materials would have to be protected with tariffs, Section 301 tariffs, so specific to specific HS codes. But once you have that, you have to incentivize the downstream business to move slowly, gradually away from the Chinese product. And so you can use the revenue generated by those tariffs to provide subsidies. And that is possible if you build the three things. So specific incentivize for the prices, not for the operating margin, but for the capital intensity that is necessary to put back a facility and a specific node of the value chain of a giving element. and then protect it with tariffs and use this revenue in order for the downstream to wean themselves, as I said, gradually, because it's not going to happen overnight, from the dependence on Chinese products. So it's a multi-step process. It's perfectly possible to do it. The second thing that needs to be done is, of course, to reduce the cost of capital for these investors, both on the equity side and on the debt side. And that could be done by tweaking the IR codes accordingly. Right now, we just don't see this. For now, we're seeing mostly very large operators be invited to cooperate with DFC or Ex-Im Bank, or sometimes just taxpayers' money being redistributed. When the U.S. faced an OPEC oil embargo in the 1970s, the U.S. responded in a few ways. One, they set up a strategic oil petroleum reserve. And number two, the fracking boom that followed in the following decades presented an opportunity for the U.S. to become the world's largest oil producer. do you think that the u.s is facing an inflection similar inflection point today with critical minerals is this the opec moment for critical minerals such that the u.s will one day reinvent its entire priorities and become a large supplier of critical minerals globally so there are two two moments in history you mentioned one is the opec 73 and the other one is the fracking which is late 90s early 2000s uh so it took a while now back to my point it's a gradual process. Fracking, of course, was such an amazing breakthrough that we had a capital market system that fit the requirements of this relatively small footprint, very flexible operations between, you know, one day the investors want a dividend, another day they want money to be put back into the ground. We don't have that flexibility in mining because of just the nature of mineral exploration development and production. Fracking had fast depletion, heavy capex, and short duration. So the capital market was ready for this. We have nothing quite like this in mining. And as you know, it's over-dependent on equity markets, public equity markets, and most of them overseas equity markets in Australia, Canada, UK to a lesser extent, much less so in the United States. However, if you bring up OPEC, which is really interesting because it seems to be fracturing right now um you know that led to a much more important move that is the introduction of the petrodollar system by william simon who went in 1974 to saudi arabia and convinced the saudis to swap their security for uh use of dollars not just in bilateral trade with the united states but trades with any other party that would require oil crude oil from the middle east that of course forced a lot of economies to seek the dollars to pay exactly for that. But this was a time where that sort of dislocation in the Middle East was much more important for the global economy, which was $5 trillion at the time, something like that. Right now, we are at $115 trillion, so it's a smaller impact. Having said that, when I look at the leverage that, for example, rare earth magnets have on our electrical grid and generally anything electric, anything that produces some electricity flow probably affects about 47 48 percent of any of that then the leverage is similar so the urgency should be there whether we have financial tool that would address it i'm not sure some of the moves that we have made with the drc exporting security or at least promising to export security to the eastern drc in exchange for access to cobalt from that country shows that maybe that idea from 1974 is not that far. But these are smaller economies, smaller players, it's much more dispersed, it's going to be multi region. And so it's really difficult to compare it to the Persian Gulf developments back in 1973, 74. Well, let's bring it forward to today. If the Chinese decides to tighten their critical minerals exports controls even more from rare earth to beyond and really choke the united states and its allies on supply what does the west per your definition have in terms of options today so this already happened um last year so china so let's step back in 2020 china introduced export control law, which gave them sort of this opening to introduce regulatory restrictions on flows, not only of the materials per se, but also related to technology, IP, and equipment related to both the processing and sometimes even extraction of some of these materials. And over the subsequent five years, from October 2020 to October 2025, when Xi Jinping met with trump and busan and south korea we count 24 different restrictions most of those affecting the entire world this is not a u.s china issue there are certain that affect just the united states or just japan more recently but most are uh applicable for for the entire world two of these were really important one in april of last year uh that uh slept constraints on seven rare earth elements and then in an escalation prior to the meeting with trump there were five more in october the reaction that we heard from oems was that if we cannot obtain those permanent magnets to produce electric motors to produce our cars then let's just move our production of electric motors to china and so this is a perfect illustration of this you know the dual circulation that works for the chinese communist party that is to make the entire world dependent on the Chinese economy increasingly make the Chinese economy independent of the outside world. That worked very well. However, like with any weapon, we can learn ourselves from slapping financial sanctions on different countries. If you just abuse it, then the other party eventually adjusts. And if there is a real absolute embargo on the entire world, it will probably be the last be the last time that china can use it so it's probably more in their interest to threaten rather than actually apply a full embargo on the production of these not to mention of course a lot of their own producers would just die in the process by not being able to sell it whether they care or not it's a different story they definitely care about the state-owned ones that they control fully so i would expect that a lot of foundational research or applied research some of the more advanced demo plant stage developments would advance a lot faster in this case. So you'll have incentive to actually really build up and you wouldn't have to subsidize the downstream producers anymore because they wouldn't be so chained to the Chinese supply chain, pun intended. And therefore, it will be in some ways easier to transfer throughout the process of massive dislocation and the transition would take much less long. Now, of course, if something like this were to happen, then unfortunately, if you were geostrategically realistic, that would also possibly mean that there are some other plans of non-commercial nature to ratchet up that conflict with the West. One more question, and we'll go back to the markets. It does raise the question as to why the US government has been relatively non-supportive of the mining industry in terms of allocating capital in the past. The US government has supported shipbuilding. They've supported farming, AI defense, as you know. Why is so little attention paid on... Car making, banking, pharmaceuticals. Exactly. All these big state-sponsored almost industries. Mining has gained so little attention until now. Why? It's been really a forgotten corner of the US capital market. so it's you know the largest mining companies are not in this country they've been either uk listed australian listed canadian listed before before they were taken out by others um there's very little activity and therefore very little lobbying in favor of that of this industry and then you have the permitting uh issue basically since 1960s it's become extremely difficult to permit a mine i think in the first 23 years of this century there are only three new mines that were permitted in the United States. So it's not just a question of capital allocation. I think the capital patience for such long timelines, going into a decade and a half longer is just simply not there And so there was no political pressure because there was no capital interest for something like this We need a permitting reform It was almost pushed through in late 2024 The party that swept all the levers of the government right before decided that in 2025 they probably pull off a better reform It didn happen We still waiting for that and so this and also courtroom legal challenges they're constantly plaguing this industry now this is not a benign industry i agree there are certain places where you should not mine and build a massive open pit mine but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't mine at all and therefore i think right now there is a recognition that yes there's a lot more focus definitely our government right now focuses on just two industries, AI and critical minerals. But it's difficult to take it off the ground from nowhere. And there's a lot of regulatory changes that contributed to killing this industry. Just in the case of Rare Herbs, it was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the early 80s that basically made everything that 0.05% radioactive class 7 material, boosting the costs for operating these mines and therefore basically pushing this industry out of the country and predictably into China at the time. So dealing with externalities, massive overhaul reform, but in the meantime, we cannot wait and we have to piggyback on the existing successful mining industry in other countries, and that is Australia, Canada, UK. I always repeat, that's actually not so bad because these are Defense Production Act Title III countries. So material coming from those countries counts as our domestic material for national security. So right now, there's a few forces at play when it comes to demand. We talked about the supply side a lot. AI, data centers is one corner, and on the other corner, defense, munitions, and then of course, battery technology is an ongoing demand force. Which of these forces do you think is strongest for an investor? I think everything that moves around the tiniest piece of widgets, there is the semiconductors, There's both civilian data centers and military. We just wasted a lot of material in the Middle East. There's going to be a lot of stockpiling going into this to just accelerate replenishing of this inventory. So suddenly, historically, civilian market was 95% of all demand for most of these things, if not more. But it's changing in the current circumstances. Let's call it this way. Not just in the United States. Look at all the military budgets from India to Germany, Japan, Australia, you name it, United States currently on the table as well. So that obviously matters, but a lot of this passes through tiny pieces of either logic chips in Taiwan or memory chips in Korea. And it's over dependent on that supply chain. very complex because these companies have as you know like supply roots going into thousands of subcontractors and isml is no different in the netherlands but they all depend on these materials compounds made from elements that are sourced from materials in the ground mostly in the ground sometimes recycled but there is often a question of quality for recycled materials so fresh oxides fresh material from the ground is almost necessary for everything and that includes the sintered magnets you know otherwise a pretty old technology that's been around for for over 40 years on the battery material side right now you know definitive leadership is with the chinese producers on the lfp side and increasingly maybe sodium ion as a potential replacement for lithium ion depending on the prices of lithium carbonate equivalent this is is going to be very difficult for other players in the west to wrench that um leadership away from china and the question is whether it needs to be done really this way um and whether the consumer will decide ultimately what happens so i guess you know all of these all of these that you mentioned are are the biggest drivers for what are ultimately not a very not very large markets but they are growing because the complexification of technologies is advancing so fast i think i i write it in my book when i started using the first you know cpu computer uh i think intel used about 16 different metals uh by now you're you know you know tiny gpus and your smartphone that's almost 10 times more so it's just amazing how complexified our technologies have become in terms of the different inputs that go into do you think that lithium will be the next oil different structure of supply uh different uh so depends probably on the development on the bss side uh right now it's still early i think on the transportation on the transportation side there will be compromises there will be compromises with hybrids plug-in hybrids and so on not everything will be evs because there's just too much um dominance by the by the chinese producers and that comes with other strings attached not least the fact that these vehicles are software enabled and therefore they send data somewhere which gets accumulated and for many countries this is considered a national security threat or at least a question mark and many places in the world are sufficiently unstable to worry about it so i guess uh it's gonna come as it has in the last 10 years with busts and booms and back again. Partly also because on this high cost end of the curve, on the cost curve, reaction cost curve, there's a lot of elasticity of supply, giving the vertical integration of the dominant players there in the Pido Light in Jiangxi province. And therefore, it's a slightly different structure. And therefore, I don't expect cartelization as some of the leftist South American presidents dreamed of about three years ago. Do you expect the Pentagon to be more actively involved in minerals companies in the US and abroad in the form of either investing or just outright buying them? So I'm not sure about outright buying them, but the Department of War is one of the parties that is heavily involved in generating different deals with different parties, in addition to DFC, DOE, Axiom, DLA, of course, on its own right, and Department of Commerce recently as well, interestingly enough. So it's one of many parties. Whether really buying equity stakes by government entities is a good idea, I'm actually not a big supporter of this. I think we have a capital market that's sufficiently deep, liquid, and efficient to pull it off if it's properly incentivized, and that requires some tax changes. What do you think are the biggest opportunities for investors right now? I know you mentioned a bunch of different drivers, but for most investors, a lot of these critical minerals are probably in very opaque markets. What are some ways to be exposed to some of the biggest trends? so the only way to really be exposed to most of them is for equity because you're not going to start stockpiling some of the things not only because it's tough to lay your hands on that but also it's the cost of building and maintaining this inventory could be just exorbitant you know some of these things can oxidize very quickly or pulverize or whatever you need to really keep them in specific conditions and therefore you have to just leave it to those experts you know i mean you have this problem with many base metals as well right you have to constantly replenish the uh the stockpile this is more acute in some of those um those compounds in which you would keep it and if you do keep it in something that's stable like rare earth oxides what are you going to do with this you need someone who would metalize it you're not going to keep it in metal metal because it will corrode but you're going to ship it to vietnam to metalize it so how do you invest in that it's not sufficiently liquid there is no futures market so you're down to equity and equity means if you want to avoid china then for most of the opportunity you're going to be in still in pre-production with few exceptions with pre-production equity so you have to be comfortable with the duration of your portfolio given how high the interest rates are That's not for everybody's liking. And on market impacts here, this is the price of silver on my screen you're about to see. How much of silver's rise in the early part of 2026 was due to China's limiting of silver exports? That was in the news late last year in December 2025. I wonder if it's actually had a significant impact on the price. What do you think? I don't believe it. I don't believe it. There's about 34 refineries in China making silver, but there's 89 in the world. This is not gallium, okay? So I would leave it to Jeffrey Christian maybe to comment on silver, one from my side, my sort of memory of precious metals. What's interesting in this chart is where it settled after this spike. So it didn't go back down on two occasions before, well, remembered by some. And that means that there is some tension between the investment market and the physical demand. And of course, the physical market is mostly in China, because as my mentor in the past, Kelvin Williams, the late Kelvin Williams of Anglo-American, used to say, in precious metals, you have the driver and the floor under the price. And the floor under the price is that industrial demand most of the time. The driver is the investment demand. And so, industrial demand, of course, is tightened. And this, we see it now because the market, silver market, didn't settle back to what it was before that spike. That's positive overall for the silver market going forward. Yes. on, you mentioned gallium, gallium, germanium, and antimony were banned by China in late 2024 for export. China has lifted this ban late last year as part of a de-escalation in trade tensions. Suppose they didn't lift this ban. Would the US military be in danger of running out of munitions given that these minerals are reportedly used in the manufacturing of ammunition? okay so let me just correct if i may one thing sure the ban the ban has not been lifted it has been suspended for 12 months until november okay so it a suspension and therefore because we have this timeline the situation I mean this is a crisis as it was before October right So a couple of things happened in terms of gallium. I deal with Alcoa, who's a refinery in Australia. We'll start producing it rather than sending the material to China for separation of gallium. There's another smaller deal in the U.S. with Atalco. wouldn't take long for us to settle our differences with canada so that rio tinto and quebec can also produce some so there are sources but we're coming from you know low end one percent of non-chinese production now this is not about ammunition per se gallium is used for two things gallium arsenide and optoelectronics with very very heavy electron mobility electron volatility and gallium nitrite which has a much higher band band gap which therefore has you know more applications for high thermal power electronics this one yes you'll find it you'll find it in some of precision munition um but optoelectronics products for optoelectronics take longer uh for purified material to be vetted for the production so it's not an overnight thing that you just find someone who will produce it and and sell it there are probably two producers in the west listed. We happily invested in one of them, and the chart shows that the market's waking up to this. Germanium is a little different. It's infrared optics. It's also absolutely critical for solar panels that go through the stratosphere, atmosphere up there, because, of course, the number of low-orbit satellites and those panels, they require germanium. But germanium can be more easily stockpiled and our DLA has been doing this for a while. Antimony, I'm more optimistic in terms of rebuilding antimony production line also because it's often associated with gold and therefore bankers don't have the problem backing these projects as much as for the others. They can basically translate everything into gold equivalent as by the way the Australian regulators would force you to. You cannot present an antimony equivalent for some reason but gold equivalent and bankers will be able to run their rv screens and then decide you know whether they have appetite for this project or not so it's probably we're still coming from a low base but i think within five years from now we will probably largely solve the antimony problem okay well going back to the munitions issue this is from cnn dated april 21st u.s at risk of running out of missiles if another war breaks out according to reports over the last seven weeks of the war the u.s military has expended at least 45% of its stockpile of precision strike missiles, at least half of its inventory of THAAD missiles, which are designed to intercept ballistic missiles, and nearly 50% of its stockpile of Patriot air defense interceptive missiles. This happened in just a span of a few weeks. Now, when articles like this present to you stats that are seemingly just, in my opinion, just frightening. Is it because of a lack of munitions? Sorry, a lack of critical materials in inventory? Or is it due to a lack of, I guess, production capability that that the reports say that the US is probably going to run out of munitions if this continues? Okay, let me just correct the numbers there. So on the offensive weapons, Tomahawk, we wasted about 27% of the inventory for jasms 23 for prsm 78 and on defense ones the sm3 61 the sm6 32 fads 81 believe it or not and three raiders are gone and patriot 61 so it's scary already we don't need another war for a wake-up call cis i think calculated that we need between four or five sometimes six years for some of these to rebuild those inventories. So, and I'm not sure to what extent these numbers actually reflect the fact that we might not have all that much gadolinium, for example, for the electromagnetic warfare to protect the tomahawks that will be built. Right now, I remember Japan had about an order for 400 tomahawks for next year. I'm not sure they're going to get it. So it's already a problem. We don't have to wait for the next kinetic conflict for this to be a red alert. So this red alert, going back to the question, is it a production issue or is it a minerals supply issue? It's going to be sourcing and production. Production has to be boosted by a long stretch. Luckily enough, there are some other products that our allies built, whether in Germany, Japan, Taiwan, or elsewhere. So it's not a loss, but that was a particularly wasteful campaign from this perspective. If it's going to take years to potentially, potentially years to rebuild the stockpile, do you think the US military is going to shift its focus on building other types of perhaps even cheaper munitions and thus require different kinds of critical minerals? It's not just munitions. Did you see AWACS, which was splintered in two? This is two years after Ukraine sent its spiderweb drone attack on the Siberian base deep into Russia when it basically obliterated a big chunk of strategic bomber fleet of its number one adversary. everybody seemed to have learned from that since they're certainly the russians certainly the chinese i don't i know that certainly taiwanese as well somehow we haven't this is more important than you know expanding all these patriots is just hardening your defense putting hangars strong hangars around this russians have been building it since that debacle against ukraine two years ago why haven't we even the middle east okay so you think there's an you think there's a bigger problem the military. There's a bigger problem. There's a bigger problem of adjusting to the new reality. The situation on the ground, the asymmetry of these conflicts as shown by the Ukrainians on the Baltic Sea or in the frontline and with the drone technology that changes every six weeks and with this Delta AI system that feeds the data back. Someone said a while ago that they didn't have cards. Well, maybe we don't have, maybe we should be learning a little more from our allies and friends so given what we've learned so far about munitions expenditures and how the war has progressed from the iran war do you think that the u.s is in a position to adequately fight sustained conventional war with a near-peer adversary like russia or china if it were to happen tomorrow some people may question whether we are a peer adversary with china uh giving that they can build 232 vessels per year and we can build one so uh you know this is uh it goes probably beyond the usual topic of your of your podcast but naturally with so much dependence for our future our digital future in the western pacific western pacific remains our core interest and the stability in western pacific uh a lot depends on that uh in terms of our future lives. And therefore, what does it mean that we're conventionally inferior? It means exactly the same thing as during the first Cold War. During the first Cold War in the European theater, the USSR had a massive conventional superiority. And that meant that the threshold for nuclear response was very low. And we're going back to that world now. So what's going to happen the next five years? Oh, I hope we'll do very well in our fund investing in this space. Already the restockpiling of all these critical minerals to just replace what's been wasted on the Iranian plains and mountains. That's going to accelerate the demand. So it's a fantastic time to be in critical minerals. And how do you think the US government and militaries will respond to what we just talked about in the next five years? And would you adjust your portfolio to that trend? Yeah, so we always look for opportunities across various materials. We have exposure to about 25 different, let's call them commodities, even though they're not widely traded, but different elements. And that counts for Earths as one. So there's a lot to choose from depending on the technological changes and the tightness and the scarcity value that we perceive in the West. right now the pecking order is fairly simple in some of these markets one can actually question why they giving the monopolization and then weaponization of that monopoly by china why the west hasn't moved faster and i think spharonized graphite is a case in point here i hear posco building the facility now but this was you know the constraints the restrictions on that was slapped in october of 23 so almost three years ago so in some cases the the western response has been just slower than you would expect. But if the kinetic conflicts multiply and those proxy wars proliferate, not only are we expanding a lot of material, but we also have to expand a little more gray matter and think about this differently. And that requires probably more rather than less cooperation of the allies. And, you know, to the credit of the administration, they've gone down that route since at least the middle of the last year with a multiple, great number of different bilateral deals with different countries with different strengths, whether in mining or in processing and refining. Awesome. All right. Thanks very much. We appreciate it, Thomas. Tell us where we can find out more information about your work and read about your fund. So we can be found at amvesteraden.com. Amvesteraden, T-E-R-A-D-E-N. Teraden means, so terra, of course, earth, and den in Japanese means earth, or dian in Chinese, so electricity from the earth. Amvesteraden.com. You can find everything about us, what we do. We publish on a weekly basis some commentary about different developments in the market, supply chain, geopolitical insights, and so on. You can also find the book, Middle War, on Amazon. Most jurisdictions where Amazon exist are even in a local bookstore. If you don't have it on the shelf, they can order it from Ingram Sparks. That's how it works. Sorry, I was going to say, we'll put the links down below. so make sure to follow Thomas and the fund and his book there thank you very much Thomas it was great to meet you welcome to the show and I hope to speak with you again soon take care for now thank you David thank you for watching don't forget to like subscribe
