Select S2 E80: Why America Only Graduates 200 Mining Engineers a Year S2 E80: Why America Only Graduates 200 Mining Engineers a Year

So to kind of start us off, Aaron, you've described rare earth elements.

You've likened it to like cinnamon and nutmeg, ingredients in a cake, a really nice cake.

But you don't really appreciate it until they're missing.

It's almost like, almost salt too.

You don't have salt in the food, you don't appreciate it until it's not there.

And so I like that comparison that you have of how embedded simple things are in a normal thing in life, and you don't realize it's gone, or you don't realize it's missing until it's gone.

So can you just explain a bit more and help people understand that? I guess

the importance of reverse.

No, that's a great question, Dustin.

And fundamentally at heart, I am a teacher, right? As a professor, I like to think I'm a teacher.

And as that, I like to take, you know, one of the principles in teaching is if you can take a concept and make it memorable, Right.

Then that's how you build some robust knowledge in the people that you're teaching.

And in this rare earth landscape, I feel a need to teach the public.

Right.

There's a lot that people don't know.

There's a lot of ambiguity.

And so anytime you get an opportunity to take this and kind of break it down in a way that's understandable and memorable and relevant.

I like to do that.

And through the years, I kind of came up with this cake analogy.

And I initially heard it from another professor at another university, so I can't take credit for the original idea.

But I do think in one of the talks I gave before, it certainly had the best artistic depiction, right? They actually had a nice cake put up on the screen while I was talking, which was really fun to watch.

And also, I personally don't like desserts.

It's hard.

I use this analogy, but I'm not a fan of desserts.

But if you take, you know, material needs in society and the way that kind of analogy works out, you imagine what the material needs and our mind resource needs and you envision that being a cake, right? The bulk of the cake is, are not the spices, right? It's the nut or it's the flour, the eggs, the milk.