PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
Lithium 101 with Joe Lowry: Brines, Pegmatites, DLE, and the Smackover
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What happens when a finance guy who's never heard of lithium takes a job in a small North Carolina town because it's near where his favorite author lived?Joe Lowry is the founder of Global Lithium LLC, host of the Global Lithium Podcast (239 episodes and counting), and author of the new memoir Lithium Confidential: Confessions of a Corporate Misfit. He spent 35 years in the industry — including years in Japan and China — and for a stretch in the 1990s he personally controlled essentially all of the lithium supply going into the world's first commercial lithium-ion batteries.This is a longer, less traditional episode for us, and it's worth every minute. Joe walks through the entire lithium cycle from rock to cathode, explains why the industry started as a hydrogen bomb program, and gives an unusually blunt read on where the industry is headed — including his line that there's no Smackover lithium without direct lithium extraction, and why he thinks the first real success there lands around 2029.There's also plenty here for students and early-career geologists: Joe's argument that you should learn the industry, not just deploy your geology skills, and his advice on what actually makes a career durable.Some things we get into:
- Why lithium was in Post-it Notes, blue jeans, and grease long before batteries
- The full flow sheet: spodumene → calcine → lithium sulfate → carbonate → hydroxide, and why the "midstream" means cathode, not chemicals
- Hard rock vs. Atacama brine vs. sedimentary (Thacker Pass) vs. Smackover oilfield brine
- Why grade matters: 600 ppm Smackover vs. sub-100 ppm produced water (sorry, Marcellus)
- How the market went from 300,000 tonnes LCE in 2020 to nearly 2 million today
- The 2022 spike to $80,000/t and what happened after
- Why Joe called BS on the high-nickel/hydroxide narrative and was right about LFP
- Sodium-ion: real use cases, or a CATL press release every time lithium ticks up?
- What "crappy brine" means, and the fraud problem in African spodumene
- Commodity or specialty chemical? Why fungibility is the whole argument
- Getting fired as the best thing that ever happened to him
Timestamps
- 00:00 – Intro
- 01:30 – Welcome, and the strange experience of being recognized by voice
- 03:10 – How Joe got into lithium: oil, corporate raiders, a gold mine, and a small town near Asheville
- 06:00 – Lithium before batteries: glass, grease, and the dye in Post-it Notes
- 08:30 – Japan, China, and being the only person who thought batteries would matter
- 12:30 – What the "midstream" actually is, and why battery plants without cathode plants don't solve anything
- 13:30 – The hydrogen bomb origin story: DOE, Lithium Corp of America, Foote Mineral
- 14:20 – Hard rock processing, start to finish
- 15:45 – Enter brine: Silver Peak, then the Atacama
- 17:20 – Sodium sulfate, the glass industry, and putting the blue in blue jeans
- 18:50 – SQM arrives and the price goes from $2/lb to 68 cents
- 21:20 – Greenbushes: a tantalum mine that happened to have lithium
- 23:00 – China's assets, lepidolite, and how CATL became a third of the market
- 25:20 – 300,000 tonnes to 2 million: "what's grown that fast that's not software?"
- 26:40 – Thacker Pass: wrong flow sheet, right rock, and a $2.3B DOE loan
- 29:40 – "Soft rock," the McDermitt caldera, and Tom Benson
- 30:20 – The Smackover, bromine wells, and why you can't build ponds in Arkansas
- 31:30 – DLE: what counts, what's actually working, and what's still a declared victory
- 33:15 – What makes a brine "crappy"
- 33:40 – Grades, produced water, and why Pennsylvania shouldn't get too excited
- 34:20 – Arkansas is all-in; Exxon is slow-walking it
- 37:50 – Garbage spodumene, African supply, and lithium that showed up in China with no lithium in it
- 38:50 – The four-minute mile: why 2029 is the year to watch
- 40:40 – Recycling and the circular economy reality check
- 42:50 – Is it still the lithium decade?
- 43:20 – China controls processing — and depends on everyone else for supply
- 44:40 – LFP vs. NMC/NCA, and the call Joe got right
- 46:30 – What's actually in your iPhone
- 48:00 – Sodium-ion: niches, not a replacement
- 50:00 – BESS, aging grids, and a prediction Joe made in 2010
- 51:55 – Advice for students and young geologists entering lithium
- 53:40 – On AI, and bulletproofing what you do
- 54:00 – Starting the Global Lithium Podcast: Tim Ferriss, a LinkedIn post, and a studio in Buenos Aires
- 55:20 – Downloaded in every country on Earth except Bhutan
- 57:10 – The Korean listeners who finally explained themselves
- 1:00:10 – The real value of a podcast is what's said before and after the record button
- 1:02:30 – Australia 34%, US 30%, and why resource economies listen
- 1:05:10 – Which lithium conference should a student actually go to?
- 1:09:00 – Writing Lithium Confidential: five life goals from January 1, 1982, and a granddaughter
- 1:11:30 – Why the book has exactly 100 chapters
- 1:16:20 – Commodity or specialty chemical? The fungibility argument
- 1:18:20 – Specs, secret sauce, and selling the same product twice
- 1:20:00 – The freedom that comes with getting fired
- 1:20:25 – Joe's best day in the lithium business
- 1:23:30 – Best deposits he's ever visited: Pilgangoora's vision, Liontown's build
Links
- Lithium Confidential: Confessions of a Corporate Misfit — available in print and Kindle
- globallithium.net
- The Global Lithium Podcast — wherever you get podcasts
- Joe on LinkedIn: Joe Lowry | On X/Twitter: @GlobalLithium (note the handle — not the Australian company)
- CampGeo mobile app — pegmatites, mineral basics, and all our back catalog
- planetgeocast.com | @planetgeocast
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Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you. Hey folks, today we have a really special one, an interview that I have been excited about for a very long time. It's a little bit non-traditional for us as well, but we have Joe Lowry, uh owner operator of Global Lithium LLC. He's a lithium expert. He's been in the industry for a very long time, and he's also the main host of one of my favorite, uh actually the favorite podcast about lithium, the Global Lithium Podcast. You can find that on all your podcast feeds. He's a really interesting guy with a lot of deep insight into the lithium industry, which is a really big deal in geosciences right now, and it has been for the last decade or so. A lot of geologists focused on this, and I think probably a really good industry for future employment. For those of you students listening or people considering a career change. Joe just released his memoir, a book called Lithium Confidential. It's an awesome read. I ripped through it in a couple days. It was excellent, kind of a really interesting life perspective on the expat lifestyle in Japan and China, and really an excellent underlying lesson on the history of the lithium industry. I found it fascinating. I got it on the ebook version on my Kindle. You can buy a print version. It's lithium confidential, and you can find Joe on global lithium.net. That's his website, the Global Lithium Podcast, and he's on LinkedIn and Twitter as well. Hope you enjoy this interview. It's a bit of a longer one, but interesting all the way through. Joe Lowry coming at you. Joe Lowry, welcome to uh welcome to the podcast. Very excited to talk to you. After listening to you for many, many episodes of your podcast and reading your book, uh Lithium Confidential. I'm really excited to talk to you. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for making the time.
SPEAKER_01Well, thanks for having me. My podcast is audio. I have a face for audio, so uh this is one of my rare video appearances.
SPEAKER_00Rare video. Well, I think audio still dominates our listenership. If there's the the YouTube audience is growing, but still uh dominated by audio. So you feel comfortable about that. I listen to you, your podcast, the Global Lithium Podcast, frequently. I mean, I there's probably how many episodes a year do you release, do you think?
SPEAKER_01I started in 2017. I recorded 239 yesterday. I'll edit it when we get off this recording. Perfect.
SPEAKER_00239. All right. Yeah. So the math there, whatever it is. It's about two a month. Two a month. Okay, yeah, yeah. In the last like two years, there's very few that I've missed, I would say, since discovering your podcast. And it's we'll get into this a little bit later, but it's a super interesting thing. So I feel I have this parasocial relationship with you because I've listened to your voice so much that like listeners have with me, you know. So I I'm excited to talk to you because I've listened to you so much, I think.
SPEAKER_01You know, that's an interesting point. I have been recognized by voice.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because it's an on podcast in Singapore, in Melbourne, in Perth, where somebody will hear me talking and then they'll ask, Are you the podcast guy? Which is it was weird.
SPEAKER_00Is that you? That's amazing. That's so good. I love that. That's just amazing. So we're gonna focus the conversation on lithium, and your book has just come out, Lithium Confidential. I gave it a read. It's an awesome book, but how did you get into lithium? We usually ask how did you find your passion in geology? But for you, you tell this great story. Like you didn't start in lithium. When did you really get the passion for lithium? When did you say it flipped to a passion for you in the industry?
SPEAKER_01Well, that's that's a great question. After grad school, I started out in the oil business. Yeah. And then the company I worked for was broken up by this was the 80s, that's how old I am. It's corporate raiders. Company got broken up. I got recruited by a number of companies, and FMC had offered me six jobs before I took one.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so they were after you for a while.
SPEAKER_01A lot of the businesses they had didn't interest me, but they had a gold company. They had found the second lowest cost gold mine ever been found in North America, Paradise Peak. Really a silver mine, 7 million ounces of silver, 300,000 ounces of gold a year. And they said, Well, they separately listed this so they can pay you more like an oil company than a chemical company. So I went out, interviewed, took the job, but FMC's policy was when they hired MBAs and I had just gotten an MBA that they wanted you to rotate.
SPEAKER_00Ah, okay, between the different entities that the parent company owned. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I was loving the gold business, and then they came, offered me a job, I turned down, and then it was kind of like you can't like turn down every job and stay here because that's that's not the program you're on. And so I I researched, and I'm from a small town. I wanted to be in a small town environment. They had this lithium business, and I literally didn't know what lithium was. I didn't have any manic depressive relatives, so I lithium was not on my radar. So I did some research, and the town was called Gastonia, and it wasn't very far from Asheville, North Carolina, where my favorite author lived. And I'd made a pilgrimage there at 17. Who's the author that lives in Asheville? Thomas Wolf. Look homeward Angel. You can't go home again. Awesome, awesome.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01And so, I mean, that's how weird life is. So I I made the conscious decision. I would go, I would talk to them, and I like the culture, tiny business. But what gave me the passion for it? First of all, I was in finance, and it's hard to be passionate about that. And I had at the oil company, I had worked my way out of kind of drudgery numbers into commercial role. So I told them early on, I was happy to do this finance job, but I wanted it to be a gateway to commercial. They told me to forget it, and the guy who told me to forget it was gone in a couple years, and I was in a commercial job, but that's if you're interested in the story, you can read the book. But it was such a cool business because this was before lithium-ion battery. That's how far back this is. There were lithium batteries for cameras that were non-rechargeable. We were in glass, we were in grease, we were in post-it notes in two places. Post-it notes.
SPEAKER_00What is lithium used for in post-it notes?
SPEAKER_01The dye is actually made with lithium chemistry. Tacky, tacky dye, and the yellow post-it notes, the fiber reactive dye is made with lithium hydroxide.
unknownWow.
SPEAKER_01And so I got exposure to all these businesses, and a lot of them were kind of small family owned, like 3M's not small family owned, and Exxon and Mobile weren't small family owned, and now they're married. So I got to deal with a mix of big companies, small family-owned businesses, diverse businesses, aluminum smelters. And so it was just cool walking in because there were only two lithium companies at the time. And you didn't have to be a genius because most of these most of these companies had dual sourcing programs. You know, they had to buy from two companies at least, and there were only two companies.
SPEAKER_00Just to avoid the risk of like one company going under or one deposit going bad or something like that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So most customers had dual sourcing, and I was smart enough to know you didn't have to be very smart to succeed in a small business like that. Now, the lithium industries, and we can get into it, much different landscape now, and yeah, virtually um, you know, a Chinese market now. And you know, I I lived in China, I saw that whole transition. But I loved the travel. I got to travel all over. I at a young age got global responsibility. Those were kind of the things that if you work for a big company, it was like you might work seven years and then get a different job that led you to more interesting things. Lithium was like quick to put you in a position where you know you're going to Japan, you're going to Korea, you're going to Buenos Aires, you're going to a lot of different places. And the early hook was travel more than lithium, but lithium was a cool thing because it was like the old BASF commercial. You know, it's you've never heard of us, but we're in everything. And yeah, lithium was in a lot of things. I would get on a plane and somebody would ask me what I did, and I'd say lithium, their eyes would just glass over because literally, if they didn't have a manic depressive relative, they had nothing to do with the thing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they didn't know what it was. That's really interesting. It's such a shift to today. So, in okay, the book, I love the book. It's a tour de force of the lithium industry and the growth of the lithium industry, but that could be considered pretty dry content. So your book is kept interesting by your personal stories and like the personal history and moving to Japan and the expat life, all that personal stuff keeps it really interesting, I think, because you know, frankly, lithium carbonate and hydroxide discussions can be a little a little dry at times. But I loved reading the book and I was never bored. And it described really the explosion of this industry. So, at what point you said travel was kind of the original hook. You lived in Japan for a long time, then you lived in China, moved the whole family there both times, and then you left FMC, and we can get out if you want to. We don't need to. No, I got fired. That's what let's just call it spade a spade. You got fired, but very successfully, I would say, at the end afterwards.
SPEAKER_01Well, I got blessed, more than fired.
SPEAKER_00Okay, there we go. Good one. But you're at that transition point, you're clearly extremely passionate about the industry of lithium. Like it's not just about travel anymore. So when did that shift of like, hey, I love this thing, this industry, when did that happen? It wasn't always just the paycheck. It wasn't ever maybe just a paycheck.
SPEAKER_01Really, because I was working for a company who thought organometallics and pharmaceutical synthesis were the future of lithium, and they didn't really care about the carbonate and hydroxide anymore. In fact, at the time they quit making carbonate for a brief period, and that's all in the book. And I was going to Japan every six weeks when the lithium-ion batteries business started because that was changing so fast. And had I been better thought of in the company, they would have given me a job in the other part of the business. This is kind of like, how bad can he screw this up? And I'm meeting with the top guys at Sony who started the battery business, and they're treating me with deference and respect because they know there's only two lithium suppliers and they can't qualify the other guy's product yet. So I was very important to them, even though I was kind of a misfit, and that's the you know subtitle of the book, Confessions of a Corporate Misfit. And so I got very interested in the Japanese in the 90s, they were buying new cell phones every six months because they were getting better and the batteries were changing, and we were still using nickel metal hydride batteries over here. I mean, lithium, I couldn't communicate the importance I was seeing on the other side of the world to my management. Their Nokia phone did not have a lithium battery at the time.
SPEAKER_00I see. Okay, so it just didn't have the impact here. Yeah, you you saw it happening before it happened here in the US.
SPEAKER_01I became a true believer when my guys, my management thought this battery thing is never going anywhere. In fact, they turned down manufacturing cathode material for the lithium-ion batteries with our joint venture partner in Japan because they just didn't think it was a business. Okay. And so I almost got like defensive. This became almost like evangelical. This battery thing's really gonna happen. You guys should pay attention.
SPEAKER_00And they were like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then lo and behold, it did happen, and we all know about it now.
SPEAKER_01But it took them 10 years to change, it took them literally the whole time I lived in Asia to finally, but it wasn't just them. There was another lithium company, and then a company called SQM that had entered in the late 90s, and none of them believed in this battery thing either. They supplied it, but they just didn't think it was the future.
SPEAKER_00It was the future, yeah, yeah. No, fair enough. So maybe this is a good time to I want to get into a little bit of the different deposits of lithium, the different types. It's a really interesting element for me, a geologist, and like our field of geology, all the researchers, all the academics, all the exploration people, it's a brave new world because lithium is such a weird element. It's kind of everywhere. It doesn't follow, it's not like gold, it just you know is in two deposit types or something like that. There's a huge range of processes that concentrate it. But maybe it'd be useful to focus on the lithium cycle first. Could you I get I frankly get lost in the lithium carbonate, lithium hydroxide, all these different things. Could you get me from lithium in the ground somewhere to like lithium in a battery? How does that process work? Because it seems like it's a fairly complicated midstream. Would you call it midstream? Like the steps involved to get there. Like how does it work today? And or what are the generalized steps?
SPEAKER_01If you're in the lithium industry, you wouldn't call that the midstream because the midstream to the lithium industry is the cathodic materials you need to go into a battery. That's where the lithium goes. Oh, okay. And one of the weaknesses in what the US has done over the last few years, I mean, the Biden administration wanted to build all these battery plants, but if you build battery plants without building cathode plants, you still got to go to China or Korea or Japan to get the feedstock to put in the battery.
SPEAKER_00So get me to understanding what a cathode plant is. Like start from the ground where lithium is in.
SPEAKER_01Let's go back to the beginning.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Perfect.
SPEAKER_01The lithium industry started to get the trigger for the hydrogen bomb. The Department of Energy put three companies in the business of producing lithium hydroxide. The company I worked for, which by then was called FMC Lithium, but originally lithium corporation of America, and then what's now Abelmarl, which has gone through a multiple name changes, but it was Foot Mineral Company, ironically, FMC, also, which is a whole other story.
SPEAKER_00Okay, before it was Ebermar, Abomarrow.
SPEAKER_01And then U.S. Borax. And they they quit early. It wound up being two suppliers. They supplied not quite 100,000 pounds of lithium hydroxide over the years. That was a huge contract because lithium was just a tiny business. And then the defense department says, hey, we don't need this stuff anymore.
SPEAKER_00Okay. So that at that point in time, was it all hard rock? They're mining spodgy mine.
SPEAKER_01At the beginning, it was it was hard. Both deposits are less than an hour from where I'm sitting right now.
SPEAKER_00Right. Okay, in North Carolina, yeah.
SPEAKER_01In North Carolina.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and so so they're taking the lithium or the spodgamine.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so it's conventional hard rock mining. Okay. Our grade was pretty low. Our grade was like 1.1, 1.2 lithium oxide. So you're you're blowing up rock. You got huge trucks, you're it's just like any conventional a gold mine, same kind of thing. And then you calcine it, you know, well over a thousand degrees, roast it with sulfuric acid, pop to change it its state from alpha to beta, pop it open so it's amenable to becoming lithium. Our process was we took spogamine, calcined it, then made lithium sulfate. And then from lithium sulfate, we hit it with soda ash, and it became lithium carbonate. And in our process, we took the lithium carbonate and made lithium hydroxide. The Chinese don't do that anymore. They go directly from so it actually, our competitor originally didn't go through the carbonate route, but our product was better because it was we're making a chemical from a chemical you've got these chemical engineering steps that help purify the lithium. Yes, and there's a fair amount of steps. The world then changed to brine. Our competitor went to Chile. Well, they opened a small operation in Silver Peak, Nevada that still operates, you know, over 50 years ago, and that's tiny, but it was a big deal at the time. And then they went to Chile in the 80s, the Atacama Desert, the best lithium asset in the world from a grade, and it's just okay.
SPEAKER_00So describe what that is as a resource. What does it look like? When you say brine, that's brine lithium. What's happening?
SPEAKER_01You're in a salt lake, it's got a hard crust, you don't have to drill very deep. You know, it's not like drilling a 10,000-foot oil well or a 20,000-foot oil well. It's yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very, very limited drilling. You pump up the brine, put it into huge concentration ponds, and that's why the Anacama is so successful. It's the driest place on earth. So evaporation, it was solar before solar was cool. Yeah. I mean, it basically it's powered by the sun. But then in the process, you have different ponds, you drop out, it concentrates, but you're also putting in materials to drop out impurities, whether it's magnesium, calcium, yada yada yada.
SPEAKER_00So that distillation, that processing step is all happening on the surface in these ponds, basically. And then at the end stage. At the end, you have a lithium chloride solution. Chloride, okay.
SPEAKER_01You put lithium chloride into your plant, you react it with soda ash, which is carbonates at the sodium carbonate, and you make lithium carbonate from that.
SPEAKER_00Okay, gotcha. Okay.
SPEAKER_01In the hard rock process, the way it works is on a two-to-one ratio, our biggest product was sodium sulfate from that reaction. We were taking lithium sulfate and sodium carbonate and making lithium carbonate and sodium sulfate. And just serendipitously, we had a lot of demand in the glass industry, and sodium sulfate helped put the blue and blue jeans, and North Carolina was a textile state. So it was a virtuous circle. Our sodium sulfate's customers' biggest complaints were that it was still too hot when we got it to them because it was still in North Carolina. We were loading in dump trucks and shipping it, and sometimes they say, Hey, you know, we can't take the stuff this hot. And it was like, okay, then let the truck sit there and it'll cool off, you know. Cool down for a little bit.
SPEAKER_00That's funny. So, okay, so the the history you described in the book of the, like you just said, the initial start is hard rock or spodgamine mainly, or then the brine starts, and this is all kind of attacama brines, mostly, right? Or dominantly. Is that starting the 80s or 90s?
SPEAKER_01It was Atacama from the 80s until we started our we being FMC Lithium when I was working for them, started our the second brine opera or the third, because Silver Peak was also working, but Silver Peak wasn't a really great asset. It was an okay brine asset, but the Anacama was significantly cheaper to make lithium carbonate than hard rock. Less than half.
SPEAKER_00Oh, really? Wow, that much. So the competitor there was Abrahamarl. What is now Evermarl?
SPEAKER_01Well, it's what's now Abomarl.
SPEAKER_00Oh, Abrammarl, okay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And then I write in the book the Anacama's a big asset. SQM is a Chilean company. They were a pot ash producer. They could produce lithium as a byproduct. In fact, they were going to pay the royalty for the lithium, whether they produce it or not. They actually tried to get FMC to take it off their hands.
SPEAKER_00FMC foolishly said no. Said no. Okay, yes. You described this nicely in the book. Yeah, allowing a third competitor into the mix.
SPEAKER_01And a game changer, because they viewed everything in their process up to the carbonate plant as free because they were going to do it anyway.
SPEAKER_00Okay, right.
SPEAKER_01So they behaved that way. They took the price down. For example, I was selling lithium carbonate for a little over two bucks a pound, and I made the transition to kilograms when I moved to Asia. But you know, back then we talked about pounds, and they took the price down from we were selling over for over two bucks down to 68 cents. I mean, in steps, because nobody wanted their product. It was funny. The industry wanted a competitor, but they only wanted the competitor to leverage the guys they knew on price. Because they didn't really trust these. You know, when a guy comes in and says, Hey, I can sell it to you for less than half of what these get, they're like, must be something wrong with it.
SPEAKER_00Right, sure. Okay. We went through that. So you went through that cycle, and that was 80s, 90s, early 20th. Brian was the dominant player.
SPEAKER_01Well, when I entered, Brian was bigger than hard rock because the company that became Abel Marl shut down their mine in North Carolina in the 80s when they went when they went to Chile. So if you look at the world then, but what happened is when the battery industry started, they looked at everything available because there was Chinese were making it from hard rock, it just wasn't very good because they had a nuclear program in Russia. The same. Everybody that had a nuclear program had some level of lithium production. But our hard rock from North Carolina got picked by Sony. Okay. And then the Japanese being the Japanese, they don't like change. So, and I go through that whole thing of the book where they were gonna have to change anyway because our mind was getting played out. We were going to brine. I tell the story of how I I was not very popular with the Japanese when our management decided to make some of the decisions they made.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. No, I totally understand that. But then I think in the book you describe a second wave of hard rock coming online with some of the Australian, the big Archean uh or the old uh green bushes.
SPEAKER_01Well, green bushes was always there in Greenbushes market. When I started, there was a whole mineral use of lithium that never became chemicals.
SPEAKER_00Okay, got it.
SPEAKER_01It just was used as minerals, and you could use it, and I won't get into the whole market, but when you're you're making steel, lithium is actually a lubricant. When the steel comes down the tundish when it's hot and flowing, it sucks impurities out. You didn't have to use a chemical, you could use the mineral, some of Ceramics, you could use it as a mineral. So Greenbush and Greenbushes was a tantalum mine, actually. I mean, that's what their real lithium was a byproduct until the relatively recent past because that is a huge asset. It's been operating for decades. That hard rock stayed operating. And then the Chinese, when they started to get into this, they started to buy spodamine from greenbushes, by far the best spodamine mine in the world. Yeah. And less so now because of time and grade declines.
SPEAKER_00But okay, because so that was just crush up the rock, separate out the spodgamine, or concentrate the spodgamine a little bit and then put in a tank of the colour. Yeah, they sold to China, basically.
SPEAKER_016% lithium oxide was their main product. So the Chinese started to buy it. Another aside is Greenbush was owned by a company called Sun Sigualia back then. And they also had gold mining, it was the Lawler brothers. They got into a gold trading problem. They went into bankruptcy.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01And so Greenbushes went into receivership. At the moment I was moving to China in 2005 from Japan.
SPEAKER_002005. Okay. So that was okay. I hadn't appreciated that that was that late then 2005 when Green Bushes was a very good thing. This was a problem.
SPEAKER_01Moved to Shanghai in 2005, just at the time when China was really getting, they had their own hard rock, but it was crap. It still is. I mean, they they're the high cost guys from an asset, from a resource perspective.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so why is that? There's lapidolite, right? That they're tapping.
SPEAKER_01Well, they no, they have spodjamin too, but it's they do, okay. It's low grade. I mean, you have to talk about assets on an asset-by-asset basis, but if you wanted to distill it to a simplifying assumption, they got lower grade, they got more impurities, they got higher stripping ratios, and sometimes it's it like I was asked to go into an underground mine at 4,000 meters, and I looked inside and didn't look like I might be able to walk out, so I I declined to go in. Yeah, but they were really small assets, and now they have, I mean, obviously, if you follow it, CATL's got this big lipidolite mine, and it's like 0.29 grade, and it's got all sorts of crap in it, environmentally hazardous, but because CATL has become the biggest battery producer in the world by far, CATL alone is about a third of the whole lithium market now.
SPEAKER_00Wow, okay.
SPEAKER_01They did not exist in 2012.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's just an amazing pace of growth. And your book really conveys this. I really it was such a interesting look into this market and the evolution of it and then sort of where we are now. So at the moment, right now, there's expensive assets like Lapidolite, these Chinese ones, the lower grade, harder to get the lithium out, i.e., more expensive, that are sitting there maybe waiting to be turned on if the price gets to a certain level.
SPEAKER_01That's what tipped the spike in the market in 2022 when the spot price in China went up briefly to 80,000. From most of my career, it was less than 6,000 a ton. Went up to 80. And these guys, these are dummies. Undersupply and oversupply in lithium was a pretty small one guy coming online could tip it. Easily back. It's not really true now because of if you go back, let's frame it, in 2020, the global lithium market was 300,000 tons of lithium carbonate equivalents. 300,000. This year it'll be about a little less than two million. Okay. Wow. I mean, and that's if you're talking about iron ore or a lot of other things, that's tiny. But if you're talking about lithium and put it in context and perspective, what's grown that fast that's not software?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's amazing growth. It's just incredible. So that, okay, a couple questions, I guess. On this sort of asset. So we've described the spogamine lipidolite, those are pegmatite minerals that are forming in these enriched pegmatites. We've got the brine that's high elevation, dry environment. It's just like an enriching, uh, volcanic enriching thing.
SPEAKER_01Let's reframe brine too. Perfect.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, please.
SPEAKER_01The smack over.
SPEAKER_00Ah, okay, this is where I was going.
SPEAKER_01In Arkansas and Texas. Well, it's I don't want to make Mississippi feel bad or Alabama. It's just nobody's doing anything with lithium there. But you know, the smack over Smack Over is there, yeah. Is in multiple states, Louisiana too, sorry, Louisiana.
SPEAKER_00So those two, okay. So I've heard on your podcast, you touch on it a bit in the book for sure, but on your podcast specifically, you've been very, I think, hopeful, maybe is the right word, about Smack Over and about Thacker Pass as well, which are two deposits that don't fit into our construct of high atacanama, high desert brines and pegmatite deposits. So, like, what do you think? What's going on? Why is this very exciting? Why has it attracted your interest? And let's say ExxonMobil's putting hundreds of millions of dollars into you know SmackOver in Arkansas too and other companies as well. But the big boys have kind of arrived on the scene here. What's going on? I'm just curious your thoughts.
SPEAKER_01First of all, what they call clay, which is better framed to sedimentary lithium, which Thacker Pass is, that is attacoma size.
SPEAKER_00Yes. You mean deposit. This the deposit.
SPEAKER_01They'll do phase one, phase two, phase three. You know, and John Evans, who's my former boss, who's the CEO of Lithium America, likes to frame it this way that when that project first came out, it was held by a company called Western Lithium. They were trying to do a conventional hard rock flow sheet. The industry wasn't that big. This goes back into the 2008-ish, that kind of time frame, when the market was still pretty small. EVs weren't a thing yet. Lithium ion battery was, but it was mostly for phones and tablets. So they had the wrong flow sheet for that asset. They didn't have the finance.
SPEAKER_00Real quick, Joe, just so that everybody's on board, the flow sheet is what happens after you get it out of the ground, how you process it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the flow sheet is, you know, how are we going to take this material and turn it into lithium chemicals that you can use in a battery? And so Thacker Pass Western Lithium merged with Lithium Americas, and it was kind of a Trojan horse thing in a way that Lithium Americas took it over. They had people that I had worked with, John Evans had been my boss at FMC Lithium. Renee Leblanc's one of the most seasoned lithium chemicals guys in the world. They adapted the flower.
SPEAKER_00Spectacular geologist. Tom Benson, I've spoken to. I mean, spectacular geologists.
SPEAKER_01The doctor of volcanoes. He's been on my podcast many times.
SPEAKER_00And it's just an amazing deposit. It's so cool. How many people have degrees from Harvard, Stanford, and MIT? I know. Ridiculous, right? Ridiculous. Unbelievable. But I will say for the listener that you had a recent interview with John Evans that was awesome. So go to the Global Lithium Podcast and look at that. That was a great interview discussing a bit about Thacker Pass.
SPEAKER_01The point about Thacker Pass is that this industry was still so small, people didn't want to take a risk. Oh, it's never been done before. Every unit operation involved in that has been done with something else. It's not rocket science. Got a $2.3 billion DOE loan. It's being built by Bechtel and the largest engineering companies in the world. It's happening.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. So it's taking Lego pieces and putting them together. It's not reinventing the Lego pieces.
SPEAKER_01Well, and they they had a tech center in Reno that did every unit operation at commercial scale for the naysayers. So when they come online in the next two years, because it's a big build, these projects take a long time. Then it'll be hard rock, probably be called soft rock by the cool kids and Brian.
SPEAKER_00The people in the know. Okay, perfect. All right, great. That's it. I love that how oversimplify it. But basically, this is one of the ancient Yellowstone volcanoes, the Yellowstone hotspot track. If you go back, it's one of the ancient ones where there's this lithium-rich clay in one of the McTermott Caldera Thacker Pass deposit, right?
SPEAKER_01I have multiple episodes with Tom Benson, but he goes through the whole thing chapter and verse. I probably did that one. I did it in maybe 2019. I don't know. It's been out there for a while.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but it's a cool, cool geology out there, but distinctly different from the spodamine or the pegmatite and the brine that we've talked about so far.
SPEAKER_01And now we're talking about taking the smack over brine.
SPEAKER_00Yes, okay. So this is a it's an oil field, so this is a deep brine from you gotta drill legitimate wells to get this. Yeah, yeah, it's seriously deep.
SPEAKER_01But a lot of them are drilled. The first projects are based on bromine, which is coming out of, I think, 8,000 foot deep wells. But those bromine operations in Arkansas have been running for a long time, decades. And then you run it through the bromine process and you take the same stream and then you strip the lithium off it and you uh put it back in the ground.
SPEAKER_00How different is that from the Atacama, not like the work, but the deposit type? Like, how many extra concerns are there with smack over brines or any oil field produced water brine source? You gotta be careful. You gotta be very careful here. Like, how new is it, I guess? How worried are you?
SPEAKER_01Produced water is a whole different game. It's very low grade, and yeah, it's produced, but it might be 80 ppm, not 600. The smack over is much higher grade, and there's a lot of it. What it didn't have was a process. You can't build ponds in Arkansas and Texas because it rains too much. So direct lithium extract. You know, I always say on my podcast, no DLE, no smack over lithium.
SPEAKER_00This is a great point. I'm very curious your thoughts on this. DLE, direct lithium extraction. I think it's pretty simple. To imagine you got a you know, water coming out of a pipe, you're putting it through some process to separate the lithium and then put it back in the ground, effectively, right? Oversimplification, but okay. Okay. Yeah, okay. Good enough. All right. So instead of like putting it in ponds and letting it evaporate and distilling it throughout that process, you're just extracting it with chemistry. I've heard about this for a long time, especially in the academic sphere, but to my knowledge, it's not actively in use. Is that wrong? Let's parse that because Yeah, okay, please. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01People will say what FMC's done in Argentina for years is DLE. It really isn't pure DLE because they also use ponds. But they do have they have columns that with an absorbent that strips the lithium off, and that's one of the several different ways to try to do DLE, and probably the preeminent way to try to do DLE. Aramet in Argentina now, French company, has a pure DLE. It's working, but we'll see how good it is. I mean, it's too early to tell. I mean, they've declared victory. I'm okay. I don't I haven't said bullshit, but I'm saying, yes, your plants operating, but where are all the exports that we're not seeing? You know, you've you've made some. Let's let's see, can you take it to a 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 ton plant that operates consistently, that makes battery quality? Even if it just made technical grade quality, that would still be a victory. And it's done at small scale in Qinghai province, China. They got a very crappy brine there. A lot of it.
SPEAKER_00What does crappy mean to you, Joe? What does a crappy brine mean to you?
SPEAKER_01High impurities, low grade. I worked with them. Uh, you know, I started going to Qinghai 25 years ago. I watched that whole process. They spent billions of dollars, got very little out of it for a long time. Now it it produces a reasonable amount, but yeah, crappy's not really a technical term except for two.
SPEAKER_00No, no, of course not. But what is it's what is the it's high, yeah.
SPEAKER_01A lot of times it's high mag, that's hard to separate, low grade, a lot of other impurities.
SPEAKER_00It's low grade. So Smack Over, you said 600. That's kind of what I've heard about.
SPEAKER_01That's kind of what everything but the Anacama 600 is a good number. 400 is a reasonable number. It's just when you start going below, when you start talking about produced water, you're usually talking about less than 100.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Well, there's you know, up here up in Pennsylvania, we get ex everybody's gets a little excited because the Marcellus produced water is like 100, 120, maybe, and there's a there's not a lot of water, but I get emails from everybody that might have some access to produced water.
SPEAKER_01What we haven't seen, let's take a step back and talk about the smack over. And I had Sarah Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas, was on my podcast. Oh, amazing. It was shocking how well informed she was about it. Because you know, Exxon's there, Chevron's there, standard lithium. I mean, Equinor's there with Standard. Well, they're partners. Standard's really been the standard bearer for this. They started it. Abel Marl talked about it a long time ago from their bromine, but it was always too small and the market was too small. This this goes back before Abelmarle actually bought Rockwood and bought the lithium company. This was just when they were trying to do it from bromine. So you've got a situation now where Exxon comes in, and I've had Patrick from Exxon, who's just kind of cycled out of lithium and a new guy's running it. But when he was on my podcast, and I was surprised Exxon agreed to have somebody on my podcast. Because a lot of times those big companies don't want that. It was great, but they were much more optimistic then because it's you have, you know, Exxon's an oil company. Lithium's not going to move the needle. If they own the whole lithium industry, it doesn't really move the needle for them. So they've kind of, I mean, they're still active, but I would say, and I'd say it to their face, Exxon, you're slow walking it. Let's get on with it. But yeah, yeah, interesting. You will see this happen. This will happen. When standards play.
SPEAKER_00You mean the SmackOver will be producing lithium.
SPEAKER_01And I actually, the podcast I recorded yesterday, we talk about that because AquaTech is very much involved with Vacker Pass, they're very much involved with some of the uh SmackOver projects.
SPEAKER_00Cool. Oh, that's exciting.
SPEAKER_01It's a water treatment exercise.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting. I appreciate this perspective because we hear the academic excitement, you know, and there's like a lot of people focusing on, you know, DLE new methods for DLE, the chemical engineers are involved, the mining engineers are involved, the geologists are looking around, and it just it's a lot of excitement in the space, but it's that's not market information. That's not people with market knowledge necessarily to know, hey, this is actually gonna work. And also the academics are thinking on the 15 to 20 year horizon of like what's the technology that'll you know be the problem solved for later, a decade from now, not like in two years.
SPEAKER_01That's a problem with to me, the oil guys being in this is a 15-year field development's not a long thing for them. We don't have time to wait for that. I mean, so that mentality, you really need the Chinese mentality here. Let's just start doing it and fix the mistakes along the way. Let's not let perfection get in the way of progress.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, totally understand. I know some of the uh geologists who were sort of in the early days of the Smack Over and thinking about the geology, and it's such an interesting geological problem.
SPEAKER_01This water brine, uh, where is lithium and produced water is the great thing about say Arkansas is Arkansas really wants this to happen. Arkansas's got great infrastructure. This isn't like being in the Argentina Puna, where there's still not a paved road to FMC's plant that was built in 1997.
SPEAKER_00Wow, really? That's amazing.
SPEAKER_01Part of the way it's paved, but yeah, that's amazing. Yes, and I love Argentina, Argentina's gonna succeed. That's no negative to Argentina, but capital's gonna be higher with DLE projects. In Argentina, the wells are a few hundred feet. In Arkansas, they're gonna be like oil wells, capital's gonna be higher, it just costs more to do stuff here, but the opex will be favorable and much better than all this garbage spodgyamine that that came out during the last spike. They were digging up all over Africa anything that sniffed of lithium and just shipping it to China.
SPEAKER_00Anything white, a bunch of feldspar that looks white.
SPEAKER_01Well, well, no, a lot that it sounds funny, but a lot of lithium showed up in China with no lithium in it.
SPEAKER_00Really?
SPEAKER_01That had been paid for it.
SPEAKER_00Okay, interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's just like I mean, in fairness, there are some minerals that look like spodgy being that are hard to distinguish in a big feldspar, but you gotta check it out. Yeah, there's a lot of fraud, yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_01Let's shout out to Tom Benson. He is now CEO of Lithium Africa, and that's where he's focused now is finding the best stuff in Africa. And there are really good assets in Africa, but there's a lot of crap in Africa too. And you also have you had seven-year-olds looking at rocks, you know, being told, yeah, throw it in the truck and we'll ship it to the port of Shanghai.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Okay, so what what would you five years from now, what needs to happen for the Smack Over, for instance? It sounds like the Thacker Pass is you're more confident in that, but for Smack Over to be a real big thing, what needs to happen?
SPEAKER_01I had this exact discussion with Vanky Sharma, who's the executive chairman of Aqua Tech yesterday, and we're really talking you have to have the first success, which I think we'll have by 2029, because the Southwest Arkansas Project Standard, it has to have a final investment decision. It's going to be a multi-year build and a year ramp up. So you're really talking probably 29-ish before we see it. I always draw the analogy and I show my age when I do because I was a kid. I mean, I you know this was a story I heard as a kid. When Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, for years, people, you know, they'd get 401 or 40, they just couldn't do it. Once he did it, the next 10 years, it was like, okay, another guy ran a four-minute mile. Yeah, I think that's the story of the smackover.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01Once that happens, DLE is bespoke. Direct lithium extraction has to be customized for the type of brine. The smack over is not completely homogeneous. I think the variations are more dial-in changes than significant changes. And I'm not a chemical engineer, I don't play one on TV, but I talk to a lot of them.
SPEAKER_00So I don't play one on TV. That's good. I mean, is there I'm curious if Thacker pass, like this sort of so what do you call it, a soft rock?
SPEAKER_01Soft rock, sedimentary. It's just everybody wants to say rock.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, but it okay, whatever it's a claystone, it's a soft rock. The soft rock deposit, the smack over, let's say, oil field waters, deep, deep brines, let's say, maybe. I don't know what the tur what the nomenclature is for that. Are those one-offs or are there other types of deposits like that that are interesting that people are pursuing at the moment, or are those just kind of one-off geological anomalies?
SPEAKER_01I think you'll see there are other people trying to mimic what Lithuum Americas is doing at Thacker. I think Thacker is the onocama of soft rock. But that doesn't preclude the real question when you look long term on this is how ubiquitous does battery energy storage become generating more demand than EVs or electric transportation does for lithium chemicals. And how long does it take when recycling is part of the supply? How big does it become? And what's the cost profile of that? And you're talking now 10, 20 years out, because you know, it's like the EU legislated they wanted X percent of the content to be from recycled materials by 2030. They can't get out of their own way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the the Chinese have legit recycling now, but it isn't 10 years ago I would go to presentations and the I won't call them eggheads, but I would say they were kind of the true believers, you know, that oh, by 2035, we won't even need to mine anymore because we're just gonna it's just gonna be a virtuous slide. It's easy to do that on a whiteboard or a PowerPoint slide, but it's look at look at the big recycling. How much has JB Straubel struggled with what he's tried to do? I mean, it was a great idea at the beginning. I mean, new gigawatt gigafactories sometimes have 50% rejects at the beginning. So recycling that makes perfect economic sense. You gotta you kind of have to do it. But to talk about a circular economy that may happen when I'm on the other side of the ground, you might be on the other side of the ground by the time. Yeah, no, I agree. I was just thinking that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think I might be actually. Yeah, I mean it it's hopeful, it's wishful thinking in a way, though. So, okay, this is a good time to maybe to say, you know, you you've called the 2020s the lithium decade or the decade of lithium. Lithium decade, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01The lithium decade. I did a podcast as the decade started called the lithium decade, and I've done presentations all over the world about the lithium decade. And it was easier to do that in 2022 when the market was booming than it was in 2024 when we were yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well huge bus cycle, but that's commodi. I mean, it's not commodities, that's a different question. But that that's materials industries. We just as geologists, we know this. We go through boom and bus cycles, yeah.
SPEAKER_01China has done, you know, you say manipulate and it it makes it sound a certain way. And and it's and sometimes it's intended to, and sometimes it's not. But China has taken control of the processing of lithium. But the story, the the full story that and what's really missed is they're dependent on supply. They depend on Western Australia, they depend on South America, and they to some extent they depend on Africa. Because you take what's inside their borders, CATL and BYD are two companies are 50% of the market, roughly.
SPEAKER_00Real quick, Joe, on that BYD is the EV car company that we've heard a lot about.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but they were a battery company because. Before they bought before they became I started doing business with BYD in 2000.
SPEAKER_00All right, perfect. And and CATL is mostly batteries? It's yeah, it's batteries. Batteries, okay.
SPEAKER_01The technology came from Japan. It was the original company was ATL. ATL still exists. They were when the iPod came out, they made the battery for the iPod.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. Okay.
SPEAKER_01Robin Zung, then they formed contemporary Ampere X Limited. It was Ampere X Limited and Contemporary. I was in their one gigawatt hour gigafactory in 2014 in Qinghai. And a friend of mine was running their cathode supplier. And we never did kind of go back to the cathode piece of this, but yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Actually, we probably should to get from where do we end? We ended at carbonate.
SPEAKER_01When you did carbonate or hydroxide, and now because of LFP becoming the preeminent cathode, and if I ever made one really good call in the past seven or eight years, when Abel Marl, when all the analysts were saying, Oh, you're gonna have to have high nickel with hydroxide, and hydroxide's gonna take over. You can go back on my LinkedIn page, and I wrote BS, I called BS on that all the way through.
SPEAKER_00Frame it as far as nickel. This is two different lithium battery types, right? It's a cathode. Okay, right, right.
SPEAKER_01And so they were always saying that Americans are gonna demand, you know, everybody frame this from America's perspective, which was the wrong lens to start off with. And as somebody who had grown up in the Asian battery business, I was uniquely positioned to call BS on this because everybody thought, well, nobody's gonna sign up to buy an EV that doesn't go 400 miles on a charge or whatever, you know, pick your number. And lithium iron phosphate, the cheapest cathode at the time, LFP, yeah, LFP. Couldn't get it, it's improved a lot. But when Elon decided to put it in the Model 3, that changed everything.
SPEAKER_00Because the argument here is sorry, this is lithium iron phosphate is the the cathodic material in the battery, and the other dominant one is is lithium iron.
SPEAKER_01Well, it's NMC or NCA when yeah, nickel cobalt aluminum or nickel cob, you know, nickel Elon's first cars were NCA. The roadster, the Model S, because I had all the hydroxide supplied to that.
SPEAKER_00So even though the name is nickel magnesialt or a nickel metal hydroxide, there is lithium in this thing still.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they really that that's the irony of the whole thing, and that confuses people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_01I just want to double set that L NCA or L and N C A.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. These are all lithium batteries. So what's in my iPhone? Which one's in my iPhone? Neither. Neither. Okay, okay. Lithium cobalt oxide. Okay, all right, all right, there we go.
SPEAKER_01Well, that was the original, that was the original cathode. Portable electronics were LCO. That's not a blank. Somebody's gonna write you and say, that guy's an idiot because I got a battery that's not there's a continuum. It's you know, you can't, you can't, it's very hard to make definitive sweeping statements about any of this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_01And to the listener, take my context is I'm talking about the vast majority. Of course. It doesn't mean 100%.
SPEAKER_00Okay, perfect. Yeah, that's helpful from me. So then the LFP, is that the battery type? I think I have one of these. I bought a big battery bank, I forget the company name. Yeah, it's probably LFP. Yeah, we could go camping. Ecoflowers.
SPEAKER_01If you got any one of those Patriot batteries with the little solar. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. It's that type of thing, right?
SPEAKER_01Where we're, you know, we go camping in Appalachia and we're like, if you go to Home Depot and buy lights that have the little solar thing on it, or like my canary cameras that are outside have the little solar deal, those are LFP batteries.
SPEAKER_00Or the little, you know, the cobalt screwdrivers now that you know all the all the electric tools that you have. Yeah, I mean, that was always the thing.
SPEAKER_01The power tools were high nickel because they're more powerful. Now you're seeing the better LFP because it's the cost is lower.
SPEAKER_00Okay, this is a good time. So we're in summer 2026. We're recording this. Do you still think this is the lithium decade? And to get even more confusing with the battery, I hear a lot about sodium ion batteries, which is a replacement of lithium. What are your thoughts on sodium ion? Because you hear these things where it's like this is going to be.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Sodium ion will have niches. Sodium ion is not ready for prime time.
SPEAKER_00Isn't CATL building cars with it? Like with no lithium in the battery right now.
SPEAKER_01You go find a model that sells that's purely a sodium ion battery.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Fair enough. Okay.
SPEAKER_01Okay. No, but what CATL is smart. So every time lithium price starts to go up, they make an announcement that they're going whole hog on sodium ion. And then the Western investors say, Well, my God, I'm not going to invest in lithium because sodium is so much cheaper. Look at the sodium ion battery performance, and somebody says, Well, it's better in cold weather. Well, you can't take one characteristic and extrapolate. Sodium ion will be out there. There's use cases for it. The point I would make to you is it's not in the next two decades. Well, let's just say the next decade, because it's hard to predict. Another big factor here is once you build capital to do a certain thing, you get the sunk cost mentality too. So you can't just take the raw material cost and say, if you've got plants and a whole system designed around lithium, you will have use cases where sodium replaces it. You will have use cases where sodium's preferable. But when you look at the broad picture of best, you look at cost performance. CATL makes these announcements every time the lithium price ticks up to 25 bucks. You're gonna you know you're gonna get a sodium ion announcement, and they're gonna announce the restart. The restart of the month. I mean, ask ChatGP to like chronicle. Chronicle that that's that's a funny one.
SPEAKER_00Whatever your preferred AI is. That's a good exercise. Okay, so you mentioned BES. In the end of your book, there's a nice sort of forward-looking discussion at the end, and battery energy storage systems, BES, right? Battery energy storage systems. Yeah, those are sitting on the grid, those are sitting at people's houses, those are all of the above, all of the above. Okay, all of the above the above.
SPEAKER_01And you know, you'll have, I mean, when you get into energy storage, you got all sorts of competitors.
SPEAKER_00Totally. Pumped hydro, blah, blah, blah. And I'm guessing when you know the Strait of Hormuz is closed and oil spikes, battery energy storage is one of the solutions to plug into this system.
SPEAKER_01Well, and and also EV sales were spiking for a time because you know, I mean, would you go buy a car because the Strait of Hormuz was closed? I mean, would you make yourself? It's but there's there's a whole group of people that make those kind of decisions. To get back to your point, when I look at the industry in 2010, when I was still at FMC, before EVs were even really a thing because the leaf had been released and it didn't really get traction. Elon was making the roadster by hand, or Elon and JB and a few other guys. But I was promoting the idea to FMC that EVs would be a big thing. But I said, I believe that it's EVs first, but by 2025, and I was wrong, I said battery energy storage will be bigger than EVs. But I was thinking, I was making a prediction 15 years out, and so maybe it doesn't happen until 22 years out, but I still believe battery energy storage system because you got aging grids, that's one use. You got just off pure storage in remote locations, you got all sorts of use cases. And look at we grew more than China did on a percentage basis in best last year.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, amazing.
SPEAKER_01You can't make that call on EVs.
SPEAKER_00So is there advice to uh we we had a short conversation before we hit record here about you know the the expertise needed in the lithium market and the sort of where that demand of expertise is going. We have a lot of student listeners, a lot of young geologists practicing. Any advice on the lithium industry? Like, you know, good to be in, future-looking young people thoughts.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I um I'm not a geologist either. Well, fair enough, yeah, of course.
SPEAKER_00But I would say more valuable advice, maybe, than if you're not a geologist.
SPEAKER_01In any rapidly growing industry, there's a talent war. And I think lithium's growth, and you know, if you're a geologist, you may grow into something else, but I would say don't look at it just from deploying your geology skills, but learn the industry. And I'm a perfect example of this. I wasn't suited to do anything, and I made a very lucrative career out of it just by seizing opportunities as they started. But I think geologists are absolutely a necessity, but I think one of the things young people have a tendency to do is to, you know, feel like I put my stake in the grounds, and you know, you might have 15 jobs in your career, and the first three might be in geology, the next one might be geology adjacent, and the fifth one might be something completely different. So I I would keep an open mind, but I think lithium and lithium-related careers are a growth thing. And this is totally unrelated advice. But if you're really good at what you do, I wouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about AI replacing me. I would try to bulletproof what I do. And yeah, could somebody create a global lithium podcast or write a book with AI? Sure, but it wouldn't be what I've done.
SPEAKER_00It's not the same thing. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, on the note of the podcast. Origin of the Global Lithium Podcast. What was the starting point? How's it been going?
SPEAKER_01I read Tim Ferris' book in 2008 or whenever it came out, the first one. I've read all of Ferris's books, but I I started listening to his podcast, and I started listening. If it wasn't UFC, I would listen to Rogan's podcast. I liked podcasts. Simple as that. I thought, well, you know, why don't I try to do a lithium podcast? Now I legitimately didn't think anybody would listen to it. I didn't even think my wife would listen to it, but I wanted to give it a try. So I wrote a thing on LinkedIn and said, hey, anybody know how to do a podcast? Because I know nothing about this world. And I think I wrote that maybe in July of 17, and I recorded the first podcast in Buenos Aires in a studio. I did the first 50 podcasts in studios on five continents.
SPEAKER_00Wow. Okay. So you're renting studio space.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we we get, I mean, I did one with my family in Las Vegas where Ozzie Osborne did a lot of his stuff.
SPEAKER_00That's awesome. So cool. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_01So, you know, and we talked about expat life, that kind of thing. So it was, but it shocked me. I thought I would do 12 and that'd be it. Because who who needs more than 12 lithium podcasts? But I have been downloaded on every country on earth except for Bhutan, I believe. And they have a happiness index, so maybe that says something. But even North Korea, when I saw North Korea pop up in the Spotify stats, I said, I've arrived.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's incredible. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_01Like I say, I've been I've my voice has been recognized all over the place because of the podcast, and it's a niche. I had one episode that had over 100,000 downloads. Wow. And I don't expect that was at Wano Betran, and when it was all the battle with Corfo and all that stuff, and maybe he's got a lot of relatives. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Wow, that's incre incredible.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but you know, I never looked at it as I have to have this many listeners. I never was gonna try to make money on it, and then I got a sponsor, and then I got another sponsor, and I've got you know, and didn't put it behind a paywall, did it as a hobby. I still, you know, I say that in the book. I still consider that a hobby. I've made a lot of money off of it, not just from sponsors, but people that have listened that then have turned into clients or whatever. But I did that to educate people on the lithium industry as giving back.
SPEAKER_00Well, I think there's a you know, like you, I love podcasts. I'm an avid consumer of your podcast and several others. I love the space. And I think you know, that genuineness and interest comes across. Like you just can't, it's really hard to act on audio. Like, I think it's easy to detect BS when you're just listening to somebody's voice. I mean, you kind of get a really deep, honest take. And I think, you know, you tell some stories in your book about interactions with listeners and things like that, which are really uh really endearing and really nice. And we get a little bit of that with our podcast too. Like, I go to a conference and there's a bunch of undergrads who know me from the podcast, right? It's it's great, it's really cool. I mean, it's amazing to see it being useful to people, I think.
SPEAKER_01And I'm sure you probably feel like a story in the book about the Korean guys that called me to task for wondering if they had it somehow translated. And yeah, yeah, it's just like it's it's not because we don't speak English, it's because you're so old we have to respect you, and then we get tongue-tied.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's so funny. Yeah, that was a great story. Tell that one real quick. That was that was a great one. I really appreciated that one.
SPEAKER_01I go to a lot of conferences, and I've inevitably a lot of the people from Korea will come up to me and very they just have a hard time getting it out in English. So want to talk about thank you for the podcast. They're very, very kind. I'm very complimented. But I said on an episode shortly before a trip to Korea that I said, okay, I Korean listeners, just do you guys have like super, you guys are the high-tech guys. I mean, do you have like translations? Are you listening to me in English or Korean? Or is it just like Korean subtitles? And I was in a meeting with one of the large battery producers in Korea, and this so much changed. When I started, those guys were all like my age-ish now when I would meet them when I was in my 30s, and they were always very dour and very serious, and very always in the soup. These guys are wearing Nikes, some of them don't have socks on, and and the kid looks at me across the conference room table and says, Mr. Laura, I'm gonna answer your question. And I said, I didn't ask one. He goes, Yeah, you did on your podcast. You wanted to know, and and he said, Let me answer it. And then everybody's nodding. So, like, there's like six young people that are on the table at the table leaning in to let's straighten this guy out. And he says, You know, this is a Confucian society. I said, Yeah, I'm familiar. And he says, So we respect elders. I said, Oh, we're going down that road, are we? Yeah, he said, so it's like the older you are, the harder it is. The older I am, the harder it is for you to talk. And he said, Well, not exactly, but yeah, it's kind of oh, that's interesting.
SPEAKER_00So their ingl, so their English wasn't coming across as they were listening in English.
SPEAKER_01He goes, No, we go, we understand you, we listen, but sometimes that's funny. We're in a when in a setting like that, when we're talking, you know, it's I'm not a famous guy, but to them, I'm a you know, a personality. They've listened to you for hundreds of hours. Exactly. They think they know me, and they do know me. I talk about you know, my dog's right here.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And are you it's so good? Oh, there we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, having a great time, having a good old nap.
SPEAKER_01And well, no, yesterday she's always at my feet when I record. I started recording during COVID. I started doing it on Zoom, and sometimes I'll, if I'm traveling, I'll do it with a travel mic, blah, blah, blah. But I don't, you know, I've done some events where I have equipment, but normally it's done on Zoom. And my dog is usually within three feet of me when I record.
SPEAKER_00That's right. When I do some of these at home at night, same thing. Dogs right there, hanging out. So, what has been one of the biggest benefit to you for the podcast? I mean, I think you described some economic value of it, but what's the been the biggest benefit and what's the biggest learning throughout this process that you've had?
SPEAKER_01Well, I I do say this in the book that when I stopped being a big player in the industry in terms of I really controlled the hydroxide market for a large number of years. And when you were working at FMC. Yeah, when I was working at FMC. And I have access, I know most of the big players in this industry, and they've been very generous with their time. And the big benefit of the podcast to me isn't what I say on the podcast or they say on the podcast, it's what we say before we record and what we say after we record. Because I get a lot of intelligence just in those kind of conversations. And the podcast keeps me very active that way. But it's also, I have had people from all over the world send me wine, send me swag. That's not the point. What I've also had is people say, I know you say you don't give financial advice, but I listen to your podcast, I made this investment, my kids I paid for my house, or my kid put through college. And you know, the last couple of years I didn't have it. Hopefully, it'll happen again. But in between when I first started it in the rise, I have all sorts of people that that thanked me, you know, and then when I go places, I you know, I say in the book, I've met people all over the world that I will put on Twitter, hey, I'm gonna be in X-town if you want to DM me and meet for coffee and you know, yada yada yada. It's but you know, it's like 55-year-old school teachers and coaches and airline pilots, and you know, it's just like, and I say in the book, I'm in Sydney, and this guy he turns out he's a Hasidic Jew and he wants me to get his picture taken with him in front of the great. You know, so good. They're you know, I'm a Catholic, and you know, he's like, Hey, you might go over to our synagogue and have him doing a picture, and I said, sure.
SPEAKER_00That's so cool. I mean, it's so cool. So you said Australia is a big listenership. Is I'm guessing because it's like a resource economy, there's people who are paying attention to the exploration markets and things. Is Canada the same? Do you have a lot of Canadian listenership because of the same vibe?
SPEAKER_01The way it shakes out, though, it's funny with 203 countries slash however Spotify parses a few things into multiple countries. Australia is 34% of that.
SPEAKER_00Oh wow, okay, yeah, United States is 30%.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so you got 64% of that is two countries, so it drops off really fast. It has to, obviously. So then it goes to Canada's like six or seven, Germany, oddly enough, is in the top five.
SPEAKER_00Really? Yeah, that's is is surprising. Wow, interesting.
SPEAKER_01Then it, you know, top five, UK, Canada, and then everything else is obviously less than one percent because that's the way the math works.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, wow, interesting. I mean, ours is a geology focused one. So the United I mean the United States is dominant because we talk a lot about US geology topics, but Canada and Australia, I definitely stand head and shoulders above the other countries in that list. In large part, I think because of their resource in their resource economy. The geology matters. You like I did my PhD in Canada and I remember moving there from Michigan. I grew up in rural Michigan, and like I said I was gonna be a geologist, everybody was like, what? Well, you go to Canada and it's like I'm a geologist. Like, okay, yeah, cool. There's a cure for that. Yes, yes, exactly. I think if you ask some of my family, that's what they would think. Uh, there's a problem with you. But yeah, just because they're resource-driven economies, lots of exploration companies. I'm guessing lots of lithium exploration going on for pegmatites, etc.
SPEAKER_01Look at what goes on in the US. A lot of them are ASX listed companies. If you look at some of the juniors that are out there, they're ASX and TSX. In Canada, I'm actually surprised it's not more in Canada because they do have a lot of lithium projects, but they don't have the they still don't have the culture like Western Australia has. And then, you know, when I go to Melbourne and Sydney, there's just so many people that are interested in lithium.
SPEAKER_00It's yeah, it's really interesting because you know they have some large pegmatite deposits in Ontario. They do.
SPEAKER_01Well, Quebec, they do too, but in Quebec as well, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I know I did a lot of my work in the Northwest Territories, my graduate school work, and there's some big lithium project, I mean exploration targets up there. Is Lyft in the Yeah, Lyft is outside of yellow knife there? I've walked across those pegmatites.
SPEAKER_01The chairman's a friend of mine, and oh, is that right? Okay, I met like their project leader at the recent lithium conference in Las Vegas, very likable guy. Shout out to uh Lyft.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Lyft is up there.
SPEAKER_01Shout out to Tom Benson.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. So, okay, on that note, well again, maybe for the students. If students are like listening to this, like, hey, lithium sounds interesting, I like this field. What's one conference? If you could only go to one conference in a year, which one would you go to? Or not you personally, but what would you recommend people go to to meet the people, to hear the talks, to listen, to learn?
SPEAKER_01The problem is the big lithium conference here is expensive.
SPEAKER_00Ah, okay. Like an industry, an industry one.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they did they have it every year, fast markets.
SPEAKER_00It's usually that's a lithium conference.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, it's they've expanded. I mean, it's like the supply chain, but the lithium players are all there. Except for, I mean, now it's become such a Chinese business. There, I mean, there were Chinese guys there. The one I like the most because there is a huge population of students, is Panorama Minero. I've been speaking, it's in Argentina. Argentina, it alternates between the three lithium triangle producing provinces. And they, I think students have to pay something, but it's like nothing. They encourage it's actually 1900 people, I think, went last year. So it's it's not small.
SPEAKER_00So sizable, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I mean, unless you're on a gap year and you want to take a trip to Argentina, you might consider that.
SPEAKER_00Consider going that. Okay, no, that's it.
SPEAKER_01If you speak Spanish, it's even better. And and I don't, I speak Japanese and to a lesser extent Chinese. The Spanish I used to be able to kind of get by in has departed my brain when I try to learn the Asian languages. But most of people, most of the people there speak English in that conference. I mean, a very large number because I always tell a joke, because I I don't like to be simultaneously translated in lithium because there's too many technical terms and too much nuance. And so I used to have a Spanish-speaking friend translate for me. And then if I'm speaking for an hour, that's really only a half an hour. So they finally, people from the audience came and said, just speak English. You don't need to translate her. We almost almost the other guys, 15% of don't speak any English, they can listen to the simultaneous translator. But we'd rather have you speak for an hour. And um, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh uh again, another reason it's interesting.
SPEAKER_01Let me let me hold if if Arkansas, I don't know if they're gonna do it every year, but they've had the last two years, they've had an event that isn't that expensive, and everybody goes there too.
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay. Is this the Arkansas Innov Innovation Summit or something?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I've I've spoken there the last couple years, and that's like I say I had Sarah Huckabee was gracious, Governor Huckabee was gracious enough to be on the podcast, and I had dinner at the governor's mansion, and they're all in on lithium, but she's a Kansas City Chiefs fan.
SPEAKER_00Ah, you can't tolerate that. You must be a man. When you're a Bills fan, man, it's okay. I mean, we live kind of state colleges, the nexus between Eagles fans, Steelers fans, oil.
SPEAKER_01I drive through that area. I have a house in Virginia, and we spend time in my hometown of Western New York, so I go right up through Tyrone and blah blah blah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Tyrone. Oh, yeah, beautiful country up here. Okay, so what's the future of the podcast? We got any goals left in the podcast space, or is it just like, hey, I want to keep talking to interesting people and keep it going?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's that's pretty much. I mean, I I've been pushed to get on YouTube and do video, and it's a hobby for me. I do it myself. I didn't, I used to pay an editor, I used to pay for studio, and it just got to be, I can knock out a you know, it's a like a four-hour round trip. I know most of the people I talk to, so I don't have to do that much research because I know the industry pretty well. And recording, you know, maybe an hour and 20 minutes for an hour, talk a little before you talk a little after, and then two hours to edit it and put it up, and the software's free, it's it's all good. I probably will keep doing the podcast for it's just not that hard.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, right. And you know, I mean, the the thing for me in the last year was writing the book. Yeah, so tell me the origin of that. I mean, in the book you go into this a bit detail, it's always kind of a life goal for us to write a book. Lithium confidential. There we go. Yeah, I got the the uh not audible ebook, Kindle. Kindle, I got the Kindle version. Is there an audible audio one?
SPEAKER_01People wanted me to read it, and I said, you know, we'll we'll see how that goes, but oh, you totally should.
SPEAKER_00I mean, you got a voice for it for sure. Uh uh it'd be great. And you got a voice for podcasts, you could probably rip it out pretty easily.
SPEAKER_01When I started looking at it, it said that the upload that can get finicky about Oh, really? Well, and and I've got a daughter that's both of my daughters are writers, and my elder daughter's sold several hundred thousand books. So, I mean, she's a real she's a real writer. Okay, yeah, she writes about personal finance, a little bit bigger market than lithium. And my younger daughter has sold scripts to major studios and produced for Netflix. So Wow, amazing. They helped me. I mean, I was never gonna be on Twitter, you know, they talked me into Twitter. I said, why the hell do I want to be on Twitter? And you know, now I'm on Twitter just about every day. There you go. So I, you know, the book on January 1st, 1982, I wrote down five life goals. And the only one I hadn't completed was writing the book. And I didn't write the book to be a book about lithium. I knew it would be about lithium because a lot of my life was about lithium. But my dad went over in the D-Day Invasion, and my uncle had one of the first Landy Crafts in at Iwo Jima, and I always regretted that they didn't write down. They passed before I was a podcaster. So had I been podcasting, I would have sat in a room with them and gotten their life stories. And then I had a granddaughter two years ago, and I thought, you know what? I don't want that kid to wonder what grandpa was up to all those years. So oh, that's awesome. That was the push. And yeah, I mean, good part of my life's lithium, but that book is not just about lithium.
SPEAKER_00No, it's definitely not. I mean, the expat stories, the sort of trials and tribulations of of moving your family around the world. It's an amazing, I really loved it. I was a great book. I think I ripped through it in like three or four days of between, you know, reading in the evenings and reading before bed and stuff like that. It's a great read. And I I'm interested in lithium, so you know, I took away a lot about the lithium industry too. It's I think it's a passive people.
SPEAKER_01A passive lithium education. Yeah, and I wrote it to be entertaining, and I I said this at the I spoke about it at the fast markets conference. I said, you know, I wrote a hundred chapters for a reason because I said put it in your bathroom. And when you go in the morning to get your business done, you're sitting there. It's depending on how long it takes, it's about a chapter. And I said, Yeah, if you go in twice a day in 50 days, you're through the book.
SPEAKER_00That's good. No, that's a good one. I I didn't follow that advice, but that's I like that. That's a good one. I mean, yeah, people should definitely read this book. It's a passive textbook about the lithium industry. You don't know that you're learning about the lithium industry as you're reading it because it's entertaining, it's about your life, it's the family. I mean, there's all these stuff.
SPEAKER_01Let me ask you a couple questions. Did you know about the DOE stockpile?
SPEAKER_00No, I didn't know. I mean, I didn't know the vast majority of the stuff in here, but yeah, the DOE stockpile.
SPEAKER_01Did you know about the minsaw project that was became the biggest lithium production site? Yeah. I mean, no, there's all this stuff. People that, you know, analysts and people that think they know the industry, they don't know a lot of that stuff. And people say, well, that's just history. Well, look, when people now say, well, China just controls lithium, end of story. I said, Well, I started in a world where two little companies in North Carolina controlled the lithium industry completely, and that changed.
SPEAKER_00Dramatic change, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Things change. The lithium-ion battery wasn't a commercial thing when I entered the industry.
SPEAKER_00Okay, if you're willing to entertain this random question off the top of my head.
SPEAKER_01Will your people tolerate an hour and a half?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they'll be whatever. They'll deal with it. Absolutely. It's interesting. They'll handle. We've had a uh a couple that are like two hours long, and it's it's goes fine. Goes fine. Is there your equivalent in other this whole critical minerals push? I used to think it was kind of like a one-off thing. It's just like, okay, whatever. But it's not, it's real, I think, at least. Uh I'd curious your thoughts on on that. But the focus on the supply chain now, and a lot of that is resources. Are there your equivalents, equivalents of you in the rare earth element market or in the cobalt market, or in the, you know, pick your favorite rhenium market or something? Like, are those similar stories where it's a tiny little niche market and then all of a sudden, boom, it's a we got to pay attention to it now? Or is lithium different from that?
SPEAKER_01I think if you look at those businesses structurally, I just fell into this and it was a very unique set of circumstances. And at the time, you know, the lithium-ion battery, you had to have, you know, you can make a lithium-ion battery without cobalt, without nickel, without those other things. Yeah, you can't make it without lithium. And because of the way, like I had a colleague I write about in the book Katano-san, who was I was on a Japanese national TV show with, and he spent 30 days in jail over rare earths because his other thing was rare earths. That show was about lithium and rare earths. Interesting. And that was in 2010, if you remember, there was all this kerfuffle between China and Japan, and they arrested him, put him in a detention hotel with a guy with a gun in the room with them 24 hours a day. And it took him 18 days to check him out well enough to know he was fluent in Chinese and he wasn't speaking Chinese to him. But I mean, my point being that he was involved in rare earths, but it was a whole different, it was very fragmented, and it was not there, wasn't like a guy who was the supplier, and I had 100% of this lithium supply into this industry for the first few years it existed. And I say I, my the company I work for, FMC Lithium, but to the Japanese, I was the company because the guys I was working for didn't really believe in the whole battery thing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you were the point person and you were living there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was living there, and it was through a joint venture. And I tell some interesting stories about working with adventures.
SPEAKER_00I appreciate all those stories. There's a little cultural lessons in the book as well, in the lithium confidential. So I'd encourage everybody to read that. That's a useful perspective, just because we tend to lump critical minerals into I mean, who the heck knows what that definition means? It's changing every year, what the government's defining it as, but there are essential minerals and elements of society, and that has shifted over the last decade. And so, you know, I could imagine neodymium and the rare earths being in some ways too.
SPEAKER_01And there may be, I mean, there may be an esoteric rare earth where there's a guy who's just the the guy. Who knows it?
SPEAKER_00Sure. You didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Are the industries comparable, do you think? Like is the the neodymium industry it's so small and then all of a sudden it's bigger now, it's not comparable to lithium in the same scale.
SPEAKER_01No, because I just don't. I've always resisted very aggressively sometimes because, like in Australia, they'll say, Well, lithium's just like iron ore. And I said, lithium's nothing like iron ore.
SPEAKER_00You know, and it's a great actually, wait, you had a great phrase in the book. What was the debate? Is it a commodity or is it a specialty chemical? Yeah, okay, all right, give give the pitch. Yeah, I love that section of the book, that discussion. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, I mean, that's the whole world wants to talk about all these things from a commodity lens. But commodity has a definition, and fungibility is part of that definition. I said the battery industry could make lithium a commodity, but they're the only ones who can. Because they, if they agreed on spec, but all the battery guys want to think they have a secret sauce.
SPEAKER_00And spec means with the lithium carbonate, the impurity levels, the whatever I mean. Okay, right. So you're making a slightly different recipe for all of them.
SPEAKER_01A lot of times it was that was also easy to fool them too. I mean, I okay, you know, a lot of times we I say, okay, yeah, you know, we we we can do that. Well, the published spec was not the best we could do. Okay, yeah, gotcha. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I but it was also legally very important because there was a time when I had my prices were more than you know, I mean, some people were paying more than double.
SPEAKER_00Right. Okay. Because they had a different spec.
SPEAKER_01Because I would well, our lawyers would say, Well, you know, you you gotta be careful, you can't. I said, blah blah blah, I get it, you know. So I would do a spec sheet for that product. It was 99% of the time, probably exactly what we were shipping to the other guy, but it went out under a different spec.
SPEAKER_00I see. Okay, gotcha.
SPEAKER_01But sometimes I I was literally making the company twice as much, actually, more than incrementally more than twice as much money.
SPEAKER_00That's what in your mind changes it from a commodity to a specialty chemical.
SPEAKER_01Then it becomes more aligned with the definition of a commodity.
SPEAKER_00Okay, okay, got it.
SPEAKER_01You have a lot of faking going on in China, you know, the narrative about well, the the inventory in the warehouse, uh, GFEX or whatever. There's probably not. You know, they're probably selling the same, quote unquote selling the same stuff 15 times. Plus, you can't sell just because it's in that warehouse as battery quality lithium carbonate, if somebody has a different spec, they're not going to take it. I do believe the next presentation I make will probably a LinkedIn post. I do believe that lithium will become a commodity, but it's a long road. And it, you know, and it drives me crazy when analysts from big banks bump it all into the commodity frame because they have no idea what actually goes on in the industry. They've never bought or sold it, and you know, it's just easier to do clickbait headlines about commodity prices.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate that about following you on LinkedIn is the call, some of the calling a spade a spade in some of those discussions is super, super important. And what makes you different and what makes it interesting to follow you?
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, I mean, that getting fired gives you a certain freedom. And you know, that was I the first decision I made after I got whacked was I'm not gonna be an employee again. And actually, I technically was an employee for another lithium company for a time, but I had their board agree that I could do all the consulting I wanted to without getting anything cleared by them. So to me, I was still I wasn't beholden to any one entity.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, awesome. We're running way beyond the time here, Joe. I want to be cognizant of this. Maybe I'll close with our last question. What has been your best day in the lithium industry?
SPEAKER_01I think when you've been in a business for 35 years, it's hard to distill it to a best single day. Lithium has given me many good days. A few of them, if I go back in the early 90s, I signed a $10 million lithium contract, and I was a finance guy that actually had to take a it was technically a demotion to get in the commercial field, but I knew there was a lot more upside in the commercial area. And a lot of people kind of wanted me to fail because I didn't have the pedigree. I wasn't a chemical engineer, I wasn't a chemistry major, blah, blah, blah. I went out and took a different approach. I got this big contract, and I thought maybe I can make a go of this. And you know, I had imposter syndrome, and I write about my hands sweat a lot for the first meeting people. I was very shy. That doesn't really seem plausible now to most people, but yeah, and but another really great day was the day that I took Lithium Americas to China and did the deal to finance Kanchari, which is now Lithium Argentina, because the company split into two pieces. But being able to have two clients, both of them were paying me retainers. It was disclosed that you know, I'm this is what we're doing. But having the that level of trust by people that I had worked with and making seven figures in the process on one in one day, it was that was a good day.
SPEAKER_00That's a good day, yeah, yeah. No, I that story you tell, and I love that part of the book. You tell that and many other stories in the book, uh like this. So I yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I would say one that's kind of counterintuitive. The day I I got fired, I drive home, and my wife has a completely different spin on this than I do, because I'm like, what the hell am I gonna do now? And she's like, This is a Christmas present. You know, we're walking around the golf course we live on with a dog, a different dog, actually. We didn't have Fiona then because this was 2012, and she named Global Lithium. She she got me hats. I mean, it was like you can do this. And being married to somebody who doesn't say, Oh my god, you got fired. Yeah, it says, Hey, Christmas present, let's go.
SPEAKER_00Let's go do let's go do the next thing. Yeah, that's amazing. What's the best mine or deposit you've ever seen?
SPEAKER_01Or coolest, I don't know, whatever the word is that cool, that that's a different, you know.
SPEAKER_00I mean, there's some that have great views, there's some that okay, all right. What's the one you got there and you're like, holy cow, this is awesome. I mean, or whatever, for whatever reason. Impressive, cool, fun, I don't know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You've just been to so many places. I mean, from rural China to Australia out and then I will tell you two stories.
SPEAKER_01There's one that when Pilgangora, Pilbur, PLS's asset was I went up there when it was not even there was a construction shack, there was this, and a guy named John Holmes took me on a tour of the place, and it wasn't what I was seeing that was impressive, it was the vision that the people had about what it could be. Oh, amazing, and they communicated it.
SPEAKER_00And then I'll tell you that's very cool.
SPEAKER_01Another story. I'm at a conference and I am walking down a hall, because it's like speed dating. They have this section where there's all these little rooms, and you have 25-minute meetings, and you know, then there's five minutes to get to your next room, and you got a list, blah, blah, blah. So I'm just walking down the hall talking to somebody, and this guy walks out of the room and he goes, Joe? And I have no idea who this guy is. And then the guy's behind him, and I know who the guy behind him is. I'd never met him, but he'd been on my podcast and I'd seen him on the Zoom screen, and it was Lion Town. And oh wow, the guy was Tim Goiter, who's a billionaire, and I had no idea who he was. I knew Tony Otaviano, who is the CEO, and I said, Hi, Tony, and he's Tim. He Tim comes out and he says, Hey Joe, I love your Twitter feed. And I looked at him, I said, That's awesome. Seriously, you you read my Twitter feed, and he was so nice. And then he says, Okay, next time you're in Australia, I want you to come to the project. And so I took him up on it. So I couldn't come on the, I get the person, I couldn't come on the day that their plane goes back and forth. So they had to get me on another company's plane. The guys picked me up, I had the best tour. Everybody there seemed to be a podcast listener, and it was just so cool because it's like you're in a project being built. This was before they were operating, but they were well on their way. But it was the build was impressive. It wasn't like Pilboro when I went was the vision, and I had met the geologist who founded that when they were first raising money, so I had heard his spiel, the Neil Biddle. But Lion Town was well underway. The people there were just so gracious, and I'm like, I'm nobody here, guys. I mean, you know, you're building this thing, I'm just a talking head. But you really then realized, and then the next day I went to their office and recorded an episode with Tony. But yeah, it was it's just uh those people were so committed, and I really couldn't say enough about what lithium has given me in terms of the connections because Tim Quitter never met me. He didn't know me from he was from Twitter. I don't even know if he listened to the podcast. And you know, Tony, Tony and Taviano had been on the podcast, but the day I got fired, and I'm walking out of that building with two kids in college, you know, stressful. Well, actually, no, my older daughter had yeah, had graduated. It was my younger daughter, but my younger daughter was going to film school at Southern Cal, and that was over 60k a year back then. So I was like, you don't feel good about yourself, but lithium just kept giving back to me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. Well, I'm happy you're doing it, Joe. I listen to nearly every episode of your podcast as you release it. It's been a great source of information. Love the book, lithium confidential. People can read it there. I'm guessing people can find you on LinkedIn at Joe Lowry. What's your Twitter handle? At Global Lithium. At Global Lithium, okay. People can follow you there as well.
SPEAKER_01There's a company in Australia, a lithium company, that's Global Lithium Resources, but they don't even get what you know. You know, I've I threatened to sue them a couple of times, I'm jokingly.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because their original CEO is a good friend of mine. But they they continuously will tweet and forget that there's an underscore because I had global lithium first. And they'll say, that's fine. I will then tweet back and say, hey, it's me, not you. It's me.
SPEAKER_00Put the right handle in there. Okay, so on Twitter, get the right global lithium. Yeah. That's funny. Awesome. Well, thank you very much for the time. I really appreciate it. It's been super informative and I love the conversation.
SPEAKER_01I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00Hey folks, hope you enjoyed that one. Really interesting interview with Joe Lowry. You can find him at global lithium.net or Joe Lowry on LinkedIn. You can follow his podcast, the Global Lithium Podcast, and read the book, Lithium Confidential. It's a great read. I've done it. Awesome, really informative. Learned a ton about the lithium industry, where it's going, where it's been. If you have questions, thoughts, comments, please leave us a review or hit us up on all the social medias. We're at Planet GeoCast. If you want to learn the basics of geology, think about pegmatites, what is a pegmatite? We have that kind of content on our Camp Joe mobile app. First link in the show notes, all the basics, plus a bunch of our back recordings. Our podcast episodes are available there as well. If you want to send us an email, there's a contact us link on our website, planetgeocast.com. Hope you enjoyed it.