Why would someone spend that much money on postcards and direct mail if they can take that same amount of money put it into Facebook advertising or YouTube advertising. They can make a lot more. But when I really started crunching the numbers, I realized that with postcards, you could make potentially a lot more if you do it the right way. Welcome to this training called why and how insurance agents spend $20,000 a month on direct mail and postcards and why they continue to do that every single month and still remain profitable. My guest today is Samantha from postcard mania. And what we're going to talk about is how insurance agents like yourself use direct mail, which may appear to be a very outdated marketing strategy. But to some agents, that is their best source of marketing. They've been able to grow very successful agencies purely from sending out direct mail and postcards. So we want to share some of those strategies with you so you can implement them for your business as well. Samantha, go ahead and introduce yourself. Who are you? And give us a little quick rundown of who you are. Sure. So my name is Samantha Heald. I'm the corporate sales marketing manager here at postcard mania. I've been here for the last 16 years. So I'm quite experienced. I know I look young. But yeah, postcard mania has been around for the last 22 years and we do direct mail. We do online marketing, website development and a lot more. Super cool. And you guys just celebrated your 22 year anniversary last week, the time of this recording. And you mentioned us that recently of how much postcards you guys send out as a company. Can you share that with me? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we send out currently it's about 180,000 postcards every week just promoting postcard mania. So that's what we send out to try and generate calls for our own business. But overall we're sending about three and a half million postcards for our customers as well as ourselves. Yeah, that's doing direct mail.  Why would someone spend that much money on postcards and direct mail if they can take that same amount of money put into Facebook advertising or YouTube advertising? They can make a lot more. But when I really started crunching the numbers I realized that with postcards you could make potentially a lot more if you do it the right way. So that's what we want to establish in today's call is how to market through postcards the correct way because one thing that I have learned over the last few years in doing this is that not all direct mail and not all marketing is created equally. I was talking to a, I think it was an all state agent not long ago and he said, yeah, I've tried out postcards through my company and it just hasn't worked out really well. And when you look at the type of postcards that are being sent out, they're just not really targeted. The copy isn't good. The design isn't good. It doesn't get that the same amount of call ins as some of the postcards that you will show on today's call. So that's one thing I wanted to establish first is that just because you might have tried postcards in the past and then work out for you, it doesn't mean that it won't ever work out.  Do you agree with that Samantha? 100%, 100%. Awesome. So I want to play a quick game with you where we'll do some quick math just to get people informed on what's a reasonable return on investment could look like when you spend money on postcards. So let's assume that as an agent, I'm spending $2,500 a month on postcards, $2,500 a month. How many postcards would that allow me to send approximately? I would say you could probably get out about 5,000 postcards for a budget of $2,500. Okay. About 5,000 postcards. And the typical call in rates is what percent? Usually. I would say about 1%. Okay. It's about 1%. Yeah. And if you send out more postcards to the same address and if it's very targeted around their renewal, then it could be higher than that, right? But to be conservative on this call, we're going to say 1%. That would give us 50 call-ins, right? Correct. Cool. So if someone is calling your agency and they're asking for a quote, they're calling when it's convenient for them, the likelihood of the salesperson closing that sale is really hot because this is a very interesting prospect. So most agents would say that they'll close half of those people, maybe even more than half of those people, but I want to be super conservative and say, look, let's just assume you only close one out of four people, which if you're closing only one out of four people from incoming calls, then you don't have a good sales process. So that's something I could help with is help with the close ratio. But to be very conservative, let's just say your team isn't training how to close and they only close one out of four. How many sales would that give us? If we have 50 calls that come in, we close a fourth of them. About 12. 12, yes. So 12 sales made out of the $2,500 that you spent on the direct mail. And an average commission for an agent, a lot of times about 250, 300, sometimes more, let's just take the bottom number and say 250. That would mean that you earn $3,000. I know my handwriting is weird when I'm writing sideways. You could potentially earn $3,000 in commission from the 12 sales that you made, even though you spent $2,500 on postcards. Are you getting this? Like that is, that is the exact precise reason why agents continue to spend more and more money on direct mail. So Samantha, that all state agents that I was talking to that told me that he spends $30,000 a month in direct mail. He said the biggest problem I have right now is that I just don't have enough people that work for me to take the incoming calls. That's a good problem to have. One of the best problems to have because he has people calling in. He's making a lot of sales. It's just that he can't continue to spend more money because he doesn't have enough people. He said he would want to spend over $100,000 a month of marketing if he had enough people. But really, this is what I wanted to demonstrate is that not everybody starts off by spending $20,000 a month of marketing. They start off by spending $25,000 or more depending on your budget. And then once you make your money back and you see this working, that's when agents really start to scale up. Is that what we're seeing? Yeah, absolutely. And one thing I actually wanted to mention too, it's like we do a lot of online marketing in conjunction with direct mail. And during the recession back in 2008, we actually decided to cut some of our postcard money and invest it more into the online marketing. And when we did that, we didn't notice it right away, but we tanked. We had down week after down week after down week. And one of the things that we realized is that postcards actually produce better leads and they actually produce, they close at a higher rate and actually produce a higher amount of money once we close them. So that's something to take into consideration too, is really weighing what you're actually making off those online leads compared to direct mail.  And she shared how that exact experience of what you guys went through back in 08 when the economy tanked and how you guys decided to save like $10,000 a week on on marketing and how much it affects your business. And I feel like of all the marketing messages that I read during that time and really before that was the way she broke down that math was really interesting. So I'll include that link in below this video so that people can read that article for themselves. Okay, I know you brought a few examples of postcards. Can you walk us through some of those examples? Yes, absolutely. So one of the things that we have seen working really well right now for insurance is renewals. So that's basically targeting people that have their homeowners insurance coming up for renewal. So what we do, we actually have personalized postcards which allow us to be able to add the person's first name and then promote that their homeowners insurance is expiring in July and you can even put some kind of rate sheet on there as well. And that way it's super targeted and it's something that's going to grab their attention a lot more than just doing a generic postcard. So as you can see here, zoom in nice and close. Nice. So it talks about how basically the month of the renewal and then it has the person's first name. So that's going to be something that's going to grab their attention. And then on the back side you can see it also has like their property address and where they're located. So it's just a great way for you to be able to again grab the attention. We find that personalized postcards also produce a higher amount of leads and the response rate is better. So if you're looking for ways to also try different things and increase the results, there's also lots of different options. Just as you said, not every direct mail piece is created equally. So there's different things you can try to produce better. Yeah. And it's find the people whose homeowners policies up for renewal. There are various ways to do that. You guys have your methods of that. I know a lot of agents use sales genie to capture that information. So agents can bring the list to you and you can create the postcards or you can help agents from scratch find the people's whose homeowners policies up for renewal and really take the whole process and to end. Is that right? Correct. Either way, and if you guys have your own list that is totally fine. We offer it as a service so that we are full service and it makes it easy. But if you already have your sources by all means send it to us and we can still handle everything else for you. Awesome. Cool. I do have one other postcard that I wanted to show. Let's do it. I want to see I want to see all of them if you're okay with that. Okay. Good. Absolutely. Well, the next one I'm going to show is Google Street View that we have. So this one it's special because of the fact that on Google, if you type in an address, there is a picture that comes up of the home. It's not there 100% of the time, but probably like 95% of the time. So it's a great way if you're going to be doing a homeowners insurance rate and you want to promote it, that's going to be something that's going to grab their attention. So this is a great way. This is a real estate card, but this is a great way. This is the image that was pulled right off of Google. So you can use this and promote the homeowners insurance is up for renewal and then they've got a picture of their home. It's going to be just one more way to be able to grab their attention and increase that response rate. Mind blown. Yes. Yeah. I'm hoping people recognize that that post card you might pull it up one more time. So imagine sending customized postcards where you're not just having their address on the postcard, but an actual picture of their house. Amazing. So like doesn't get more personalized than that. I know if I received a postcard with a picture of my house, I would look at it. I would consider calling in. That's pretty cool. You'd probably hang on to it just to show your friends. I'd hang it up on the fridge. That's what I know. Exactly. So we have a couple more. They're pretty generic and basic, which we have options to create anything that you want realistically, but these are just a few examples. So here's one that's just pretty basic just includes the first name in there. Yep. The backside. It has the rate sheet as well. So that's a mock quotes. It's not an actual accurate quote, but it gives people an estimate how much they could save on their homeowner's insurance, which everybody gets letters from Geico progressive and some of these big companies with estimates. They're not actual quotes. So this would be something similar, right? Exactly. And honestly, it doesn't have to have a rate on there. If you don't want to do that, I mean, you can still have the person's first name and the property address. It doesn't have to be the rate on there. It's just one more way to make it more personalized. I mean, even if you wanted to and just take their home value and say we could base a quote off of your estimated home value of blah now, you know, there's so many different options available and it's just whatever data that we actually have in the mailing list. Got it. Yeah. We have one more here, which again is very generic, but this is just another way that you can do it. It looks a little bit more like a government issued type piece. So I wouldn't call that generic. I would call that good advertising because it really does look official. It does. It does. It looks like a government official piece. Yeah. It doesn't look like a marketing piece. So if nothing else, it'll get someone to at least read the the mailer. I received a letter yesterday. My wife took a picture of it said to me. She didn't actually read the letter, but she because she forwards a lot of the mail to me and I looked at it and my first five seconds was the first five seconds of reading that piece of mail that go crap. Like, did I forget to make my mortgage payment? What's happening? Because it said, urgence respond within five days. Like otherwise there'll be consequences type of thing. And I read through the entire letter and it said, basically it was an option to refinance the home. Right. But they made it look so official. They had a bald eagle at the top. So and it was all black and white just because it was it looked so official. It looked like a government piece. It made my wife take a picture and send it to me. So I think that exactly. So those are just some ideas, but honestly, like we custom design everything for you. All of our design services that we do, it's unlimited changes back and forth. You're not being charged by the hour or anything like that. So it's like, we really want to make sure you're a hundred percent happy before we send anything to print and we even have a flexibility to like when you're placing your order with us. If you wanted to bolt order for a couple of months worth of marketing, we can obviously change that design up a little bit more to for every piece that we send out, but most cases we want to keep it very consistent so that people get used to seeing those ads again and again and it kind of creates that brain in the fact. Awesome. You have to tell us about the way you guys track your calls because I think that's really neat because a lot of agents have no idea where their business is coming from. Their phone is ringing and they don't know if it's coming from Google referrals. You guys have a really cool tracking mechanism and I hope you can walk us through that. Yeah, so we have a program called everywhere small business and it integrates direct mail with online marketing and what we do is we actually tie in Google and Facebook marketing with the program. So we create online ads that look just like the postcard mailing and when somebody goes to your website, let's say they get your postcard in the mail and they say, Oh, great.  They go to the website because they want to check you out when they leave that website. Let's say they don't take any action. They're interested, but they're like, I'll do a quote later while they leave and then all of a sudden these ads start following them around the Internet.  There's all sorts of different areas on the side and everything that promote that same postcard design. So the intention is trying to get them to see that ad click on it, go back to the website to actually finish doing that quote. So then you're actually taking action and generating a lead and we do something similar on Facebook too, where we can start showing ads to the exact same people that we're mailing the postcards to. We do. It's called social matching. So we're able to take that data and find those profiles and then promote those ads to those individuals. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Like that is super powerful because let's say someone never sell the postcard for whatever reason. They're going to see the Facebook ad or they might pick up a postcard and they considered calling in but then they lost it.  They can call in straight from the ad. So now they have multiple touches of the same message. That's super powerful. Now, when someone calls in, you guys have a trackable phone number that you provide that not only records the call but gives the agency owner a dashboard that tells you how many calls you receive and the actual recording, right? Talk to me about that. Yeah, definitely. So that's part of the program as well. And the great thing is, you know, if you have multiple agents under you, you know, let's say that you want to double check and make sure they're handling the calls properly or you really just want to make sure that you're getting enough calls and that every single call is tracked and logged. So then that way you know to invest more into direct mail than the whole point is that if you can listen to those calls to it's just a great training purpose and then also you're able to tell great on this mailing. We got X number of calls and we can actually tell if things are increasing, decreasing if we need to change something or if it's working perfectly. So yeah, super cool. A lot of agents, if they just go back and listen to the calls that the team members make, they'll learn so much about why they're making sales or they're not making sales. A lot of times it's not the marketing that's ineffective. It's the sales conversation that kills the deal. So this will give the agents an opportunity to know which what is the problem or what barriers to overcome or things to work on. It's I mean, we do training all the time and I know it's super important and we listen to calls and it's different when you're listening to a real call you had versus training and drilling a fake scenario. So I do think that it is important to listen to those to be able to do a better job. Yeah, for sure. Well, cool. If I want to reach out to you and speak to someone in your team, Samantha, and get set up with postcards, say an agent watching this video wants to do that. How do they go about doing that? I know we'll include a link below the video, but what happens afterwards once they opt in? So basically once a lead comes through, you're going to work with one of my marketing consultants that are on my team and that's either going to be Allison or Kristen. So they are actually going to do a consultation with you, so they're going to go over everything about your business, find out what kind of growth you're looking for, you know, what are the best services for you, whether you need less services or not. They're going to do all the pricing, figure out what makes sense for you and then we can actually start the process. So it's pretty simple, but we do have even just opting in. We do have some free stuff that we're going to send out. We're going to send out a marketing article that basically has a bunch of our case studies and results and different card examples. We do also have this free marketing kit.  So we'll do all of this when you opt in online. Wow, you guys really have it dialed in. So anybody who opts in and set up a campaign, you made a special offer where you could give away a thousand free postcards. If they, in their first order, is that right? Can you talk to me about that? So we can do a thousand free postcards for every 5,000 cards ordered or we could even do 5% off the entire order. So whichever makes more sense, whichever is going to give you a bigger discount, we're going to make sure that we apply that. So we do have it set up so that we can tell whether you're coming from insurance sales lab. So we'll know to make sure that we give you that special offer. Yeah. So if you watch this video and you opt in from the link that we will include below this video, it'll be easy for everybody to track. But if you do call in just by visiting the postcard media website, make sure you mention the insurance sales lab so you get that 5% discount or the the thousand free postcards. So I guess my last question would be is turn around time for the whole process. Let's say I call in today to get the ball rolling. We get the design set up. How long will it take to get the postcards sent out? It's pretty quick. I mean, generally we say two to three weeks because we want to have time to actually be able to design everything, get the list figured out, set up the online marketing. If we're going to go that route, but we have some some timelines that we can speed it up. If you need something out within a week, then we can still make that happen. Super cool. Okay. So I'm hoping the next time we connect through a call like this, Samantha, we'll have maybe one or two agents hop on the call and share some of the results that they have gotten from sending out these postcards. So we'll give it a couple of months and then revisit this conversation and have agents share some of the results that they have gotten. So I'm excited to do that. Any last final thoughts or things that you want insurance agents to know about postcard media? Um, I mean, we've been here for 22 years. We have over 90,000 customers that we've worked with and insurance is one of our top industries that we work with. So the experience that we have, I mean, it's just like you wouldn't get it anywhere else. If you're going to another company and they're just printing postcards, they probably don't catalog the results and really see what's working. And that is one thing that makes us different is that we have a whole results department. So anytime that we see something's working well, we're educating everybody in our team to make sure that we're doing the right actions to make sure that your campaign is successful. Yeah, I think that's the bottom line is if what you did wasn't successful and it didn't work, people wouldn't come back. That's just how business works. And I can tell you from personal experience with talking to a lot of agents that the one marketing source that agents are always deadly afraid of turning off is direct mail. If they're okay with turning Facebook off YouTube ads, they're okay with stopping buying internet leads. But when it comes to direct mail agents don't ever once they start using it and they see results from it. They hardly ever turn that off just because why wouldn't you turn something off that is producing good results and it's tracked and measured. And one thing I do want to mention is because a lot of insurance agents that will be watching this video, they do have other businesses. They might be a real estate agent, loan officer, they might be a house flipper, they might have a tax or accounting firm that you could help with that as well, right? Yeah, we've worked with over 300 different industries. So insurance isn't definitely the only one. So if you're looking for any other type of marketing, really any business can qualify and we can work with them. Yeah, awesome. Cool. Thanks so much for helping this call Samantha and for everyone who's watching this video. If you have additional questions that you would like to ask about this entire process or anything that we've covered, make sure you follow the link right below this video and you'll go to Postcard Mania's website. You can reach out to them, talk to one of the consultants and they do a really good job with making the whole process very seamless and easy for you to get started. So again, thanks so much, Samantha. We'll talk again soon.


Well congratulations on your graduation. We're delighted for you and really proud of your achievement You've been an important part of the Griffith Business School community while you've been studying with us And now you've reached an important milestone in your personal journey One way you move into the next exciting phase of your life And as you do so we hope that we've equipped you with the skills the knowledge and other Attributes that enable you to meet your potential and fulfill your ambitions for yourself and your community And as you move through that journey, there are a couple of other things that I'd like to ask of you First when people asked about you and what made you the success that I know you surely will be Tell them proudly you went to Griffith and the second be sure to stay connected with Griffith And with that in mind, I hope to see you at an alumni event in the not too distant future So together with my colleagues from the Griffith Business School I once again congratulate you all on this wonderful achievement your graduation. Thank you


Yeah, we're going to learn how to make generic applications in the HIS too. Just going to quickly mention that, yeah, what we're going to cover. So for the first part, I'll start off by giving a quick overview of what makes a good generic application. And then I'll talk about what the requirements are. And then I'll briefly mention some of the approaches that you can take as you're developing your application. And then after the break, like I said earlier, Austin will expand on this introduction and talk more about how to actually use these tools that are available to you to be able to build a generic application. So you'll see how to use the Datastore and how to support translations in your application. Yeah, okay. So first of all, why are generic applications important or what does it mean to be generic? So if you have a generic application, it means that it can be used across different instances and use cases. So basically, applications that are flexible and generic are useful for a large audience and can help many DHS2 users and the DHS2 community in general. So that's why this is an important topic. So these are the three most important criteria that are required to have a generic DHS2 application. It should work on all supported DHS2 versions. It can work on any given DHS2 instance and it should support translations. I will talk more about these three points in my next slides. Yeah, version support. Okay, so you have to make sure that the app works in all supported versions. So this means that your users might not be on the same DHS2 version as in your application or as, yeah, they might not be on the same version that you're using. So you will need to test all supported versions to see if it still works. So the current version is supported, of course, and the last three versions before that as well. The current one was released last week. So just recently, which is version 2.36. And the previous ones that are supported are 2.35, 2.34, and 2.33. And you can check more information about this. Just I'm going to quickly show you where you can find.  This is under court DHS2 software, this is where you can find the release notes and see which versions are supported and which ones are not. You will see that these versions are not. And if you check the release notes, then you can see if there are any breaking changes or any relevant things that could affect your application. So there are notes that you can read on how to upgrade to later versions. So then how do you do that? So if you want to make a generic application that supports all these versions, then you would, of course, start by testing against these versions and see if your application works as expected. And if you do encounter any discrepancies in the API, for example, or features that are not supported in an earlier version, but are supported in a later version. So then you could handle these discrepancies in the code base itself. This means that you keep one single code base for your application. So for example, you have a master branch and you can handle the differences between DHS2 and the application code itself. For example, if there's a particular feature that is not supported in an earlier version, then you could conditionally render this particular feature depending on the version that supports this particular feature. So the advisable thing to do here would be to handle all these differences within a single code base instead of having to maintain three or four different code bases for each version. I hope this was clear. Okay. So like I said before, a generic application should be able to work on any given instance. And here we have some of the best practices and approaches that you can take in order to do that. Maybe not everything, but yeah, I'm just going to touch upon some of them. We will talk more about application configuration after the break, but these are basically some of the dos and don'ts. So like it says there on the left, each instance is backed by its own database and ID, which means that if you hard-code the ID for your instance, this may work for you from your own instance, but it may not work on any other instances. So this is not recommended. As you can see here on the left, it says don't hard-code IDs. And what's recommended or the current best practice is to configure this information programmatically in your application when the application first loads. And this is when the DHS2 data store comes into play. So you can basically use the data store to store your data and configure those metadata IDs for a specific instance. Again, also we'll talk more about this in the second part. In addition to an instance having its own database, it can also have its own individual configuration. For example, one instance might have support for some features and another instance might not support the same features. So it could be great to check whether the instance that the app is currently running on, whether it has the correct configuration in place when the application runs. So yeah, it's better not to assume that things will work. So it will be best to let the user know something is not working on this current instance or allow them to request additional configuration if it's needed. So for an application to be generic, it must have or it must support translations of the interface in your application. And of course, this is a very important aspect of having a generic application as you would want your users to be able to use your application in different languages. And you can do that through the D2I18N package. And this stands for internationalization. This is a difficult word to pronounce and maybe that's why they abbreviate it. So what this tool does is that you can use it to translate strings or all the text in your application from English, for example, to different languages. And this package can also be used to translate dates and numbers into different localities. In the next session, you will learn more about how this package works under hood and more importantly how you can include this package or import it and use it in your application. Second small point here is just a small recommendation when using translations is that the name field is not translated for metadata only display name. So for example, if you use the field name in your metadata like org units, it won't be translated if you have translation set up. Yeah. Okay, I think this is my, yeah, I have two more slides and then I'll be done. So generic applications, they live in the app hub. I can actually show you quickly, but this is, yeah, okay, so the app hub is this is going to change the interface, there will be major improvements. So this is how it looks like today, but you will learn more about the app hub this Friday and what are the, yeah, the new updates and new things. So it's, yeah, you should look forward to it. Yeah, okay, so back to my presentation. So what is the app hub actually? So it's a collection of applications that are generic and that have been published by the DHS2 community. So you can find applications that were submitted by other developers, organizations and the core team as well. So this is where you can go and find applications that you might find useful and also submit your applications, of course. And these applications are reviewed every week with the DHS2 core team. But again, you know more about this and the app hub guidelines and all these things on Friday. Okay, so this is just to introduce some of the tools that we will see the second part. First we have the data store, sorry, yeah, the data store. So as I briefly mentioned, you can configure your application information using the data store endpoint to store specific JSON data for all users. So for example, if you have application, sorry, for example, if your application offers some kind of user preferences, then that would be the ideal place to store that information. And then the user data store endpoint is would allow you to store user specific data for the current user. You can find more information on the DHS2 web API documentation to learn more about this endpoints and things like namespaces, keys and values. And I think, yep, this is just an introduction again. But then there's also the app service data store package that is available to you to interact with both this endpoints. And you will learn how to install it, how to include this in your application later on. And then in addition to this, we have the data store management application, which you can use as well to configure this data using this app, which can be very, very convenient, very handy. And then lastly, I briefly mentioned earlier about the D2I18N package that you can use to support translations. So you can use this library to do that. One thing to note about this tool is that if you have initialized your application using the application platform, or if you started your application using the app platform, then we saw this in the first workshop, then this tool is already included in your application. So if you use D2Obscripts init, the command from your terminal to create a new application, then when you run YarnStart from your terminal, then you will see a folder with the name, a folder that's called I18N in your project that's generated automatically for you when you initialize your application. So you don't need to stall this separately or set this up. It's done for you. Yeah, but you'll be able to see these folders and what's generated when you do that. There's a template that's generated and you will see how to do that during the exercises. And I think this is, yeah, this is all I have.


I lost my son in October of 2020 a week before his due date. Can you do his initials JJL? Of course I can. First of all, I'm sorry to hear about your son. I'm sure he's smiling from head. Let's make him a tribute piece. We got J, J, I'm gonna mask that with some light blue. JJL. This one's going out to your son, smiling from heaven. Let's get it. Sorry to hear about your son. I'm sure he's smiling from heaven.


These practices are really the orientation of them is around caring, like deeply caring for yourself as opposed to improving yourself. And there's a distinction between that. Am I doing this to improve myself or am I doing this to because I actually care for myself? And when we care for ourselves, I'm a mom, when I care for me, I will show up in a more caring space for my kids and for my partner. In our family, it's like, mom is not well, nobody's well. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. So that ego driven striving of setting outcomes simply to fulfill yourself without looking beyond into those intrinsic values is that slippery slope that leads us to burnout that leads us to checking those boxes, but still not feeling content, happy or fulfilled with life. Yes. And we live in environments that overstimulate that.  So I studied, I study Paul Gilbert, who is one of the researchers out of the UK that has started something called the Compassionate Mind Foundation. And Paul Gilbert has this sort of rough layout of the human brain and the human brain system that we have these three systems. We have a threat system that detects threat. And when we are engaged in threat, we're fight, flight, freeze. We have a drive system that's all about dopamine and going and getting resources. And for many of us that are strivers, when our threat system is activated, we go into drive. At least that's when I talk with strivers, they see the relationship between those two brain systems, right? I'm threatened, so I go into drive, or I'm threatened. And so I shut down. I procrastinate. I can't do, I can't apply for that job. I can't put myself out there in that relationship. I like do the anti-striving. But there's also a third system. And this is what I've gotten really interested in and what Debbie and I spend a whole first chapter of our book on, which is the Compassionate Mind. And what's interesting about the Compassionate Mind is that it can down-regulate our threatened drive. And actually, we can use compassion and the parts of us that are connected to a larger whole that are connected to a greater good that are about, not competition, but collaboration, to not only soothe our own nervous system, but then orient our behavior towards a more prosocial behavior that benefits all. And that's what I, you know, that's what I see. When I look at psychologists that are doing, like they're doing amazing things. They're out there in the world. People like Jud Brewer, you know, that are like major producers, they're, they're striving, I guess, but they're doing more of a compassionate striving, more of a conscious striving. And that's what I'm really interested in helping people engage in, getting into different habit loops where the, the cue may be the same, but the behavior is values and the reinforcement is intrinsic. And I think in this context, compassion makes sense towards others, but many of us may be struggling with that self-compassion, right? We've realized that if we keep striving, we attain external success, recognition, attention, approval, and acceptance. And we may feel comfortable being compassionate towards others, but not towards ourselves when we're not meeting those goals, when we're not getting that attention, approval, and acceptance that we look for. And I love that you touch on this because self-compassion is so key in all of this. And many of us don't even have a daily practice around it. We've heard meditation, we've heard eating, right, or exercising, but there are things we could do in our daily lives to practice self-compassion to unlock that healthier form of striving. Do you have a daily self-compassion exercise that you could recommend to our audience to try? Well, I think self-compassion is, when you boil it down, is, is how you're relating to yourself, right? So I teach a Tuesday night, during COVID, I started teaching this free evening group once a week, mainly because my practice was so full and I just wanted to help a lot of people. And I also needed it for myself. And one of the things that we'll do is just place our hand on our heart and a hand on our belly, and we will slow our breath down. So the first part of self-compassion is getting your nervous system down-regulated. Getting your nervous system into more of a compassionate place where you are engaging in, engaging your vagal tone. So hand on heart, hand on belly. And actually, Kristin Neff, who I interviewed for psychologists off the clock, it's going to be coming out. She talks a lot about hands on the body. So the first part is self-compassion.  Sometimes I'll be in a session with a client and I'll just keep my hand on my heart or a hand on my belly. The next part of compassion and self-compassion is really about the languaging that you are using towards yourself. And so in my 20s, part of my recovery was also studying with Thich Nhat Hanh, who's a Zen master and he had a monastery in France where he was in exile from Vietnam. And so when I went to go study with him at Plum Village, one of the things that he talks about is watering seeds, that your mind is constantly producing those thoughts, right? And then which seeds are you going to water? Which seeds are you going to cultivate in your mind? And if you're cultivating and watering and fertilizing the seeds of compassion, you're cultivating an inner coach that is encouraging, warm, that is on your own side. And actually how the research pans out is that when you do that, when you practice self-compassion, you are actually more effective. You actually perform better. There's a tremendous amount of research on self-compassion, on everything from performance to telomer length, right? So if you need the buy-in, Google self-compassion, and there's decades of research now just demonstrating the effectiveness of this. But for me, it's just the buy-in is the practice of when I have a thought that is critical, judgmental, which I guarantee you, I'll have them all day long, I also will turn my mind to the thoughts that are helpful and align with my values and that help me in that moment as a way to water those seeds in my brain, which actually turns out to be neuroplasticity, right? The more you pay attention to things, the more that things get water. They know that Tignan was on to something many years ago around changing our brains and the connections in our brains. So those would be the two practices I would recommend. And it's not like I wake up in the morning and do a self-compassion practice. It's more like, whoa, I am feeling really threatened here. I am feeling my drive is on overdrive. How do I slow down my breathing? How do I put my hand in my body? Or, whoa, my critic is out of control, which it will be after this interview. It'll say all sorts of things about how much I talked and I talked too much and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'll turn my mind to what's an encouraging voice here. What's a helpful voice? I think that analogy of seeds to water and recognizing that you don't have to let the garden become full of weeds and negative thoughts and that inner critic drive you to a place that's unhealthy, that doesn't allow you to really stay connected to not only who you are, but others. And it impacts all of our relationships, the harsher we are on ourselves. And it's interesting because so many of us think about, okay, I have to have this massive morning routine and this crazy evening routine just to be successful because that's what I see on social media. And really what we're saying is just get more in tune with how you're feeling and your body and recognize these signals. And when these signals are pointing to, you know, I should take better care of myself. I should be a bit more compassionate to the way I'm feeling or thinking about myself in this moment. It has such incredible impacts on how we show up, how we relate to others and how we relate to ourselves. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. You know, it's interesting. There's two things I want to respond to there that I think are important. One is that I'm talking about watering seeds and not about pulling weeds. So you could spend, I have a garden. I have a little homestead here. I'm in Santa Barbara and we have chickens and we're beekeepers and we grow a lot of our own vegetables and a lot of our own food and we homeschool. We're like the, this, you know, the homeschooler family, homestead family. But I could spend all day long pulling weeds in that garden and get nowhere, right? And the same is true with our minds that actually we could spend all day long trying to restructure our thoughts and change our thoughts. And the research suggests that the more you do that, the more that they tend to get, you know, rebound, right? But it's about watering seeds and that the watering of the seeds happens in our daily lives and that there's one of my real concerns that I see in the folks that I work with that is this sort of self-improvement deal that is what Pema Chodron actually has written about is sort of the subtle aggression of self-improvement that has an aggressive quality to it. It has a striving quality to it, which is I'm not, I'm never quite there. And I would say you are already there. You were, you were born whole. You are whole. You belong. And these practices are really the orientation of them is around caring, like deeply caring for yourself as opposed to improving yourself. And there's a distinction between that. Am I doing this to improve myself or am I doing this to, because I actually care for myself? And when we care for ourselves, I'm a mom. When I care for me, I will show up in a more caring space for my kids and for my partner in our family. It's like, mom is not well, nobody's well. My partner does all sorts of things to help, you know, because when we care for ourselves, we can do better in caring for others in that flow of compassion. Again, it becomes very important of where you're putting that attention.  And then also something to go along with that. We had Stephen Hayes on the show and he discussed how our brains work like a calculator with no subtraction and no delete. So again, we can't pull out all of these weeds. However, we can certainly focus our attention on what we want to grow more, right? The beautiful flowers or the weeds and our direction of where we're looking, if we're looking forward, that we're going to move forward, if we're continuously ruminating and looking at our past and our mistakes, we're going to get stuck there. Absolutely. And I would add that ruminating is an experiential avoidance strategy. And that blows people's mind. Like what? I'm not avoiding anything by ruminating. Oh, yeah, you are. Absolutely. You are avoiding the discomfort of feeling sad, disappointed, anxious. So what if you had sad, disappointed, anxious, and instead of ruminating about it, which is just a problem solving technique, like if I think about it hard enough, then maybe I can fix it. I feel like I'm doing something about it, right? If I go rehearse over and over again, that relationship or that moment where I said something that I wish I hadn't said, what if instead you turn towards those feelings and you practice some of these processes. So I, you know, I think it's important when we're talking about psychological flexibility, some of those processes may be acceptance, which is opening and allowing for that discomfort. And you can do that in an embodied way. You can do that. Can I make space for the anxiety or sadness in my body? If it were a shape, what shape would it be? If it were moving, how would it be moving? Can I make more space for it? Can I allow it to be there while engaging in another process? My values by taking committed action, even though this painful thing has happened, instead of ruminating in my head about it, what am I going to do in my life today that matters to me, that aligns with the type of person that I want to be in the world, right? So we have acceptance. We have values. We have not getting stuck in our heads, which is cognitive diffusion. We have perspective taking, which is our ability to zoom out and look at a bigger picture and look at ourselves as transcendent beings over time. There's me in this moment or me, you know, whatever yesterday that I'm ruminating about. But there's also like me that's interconnected to just being like human that makes mistakes. All humans make mistakes. And also there's like me that travels way back in time and we'll travel and continue forward in time, right? In the timeline of our lives. So what's important, like I think that some of the self-analysis in act that's kind of helpful is to start to look at our hiding holes and the ways in which we are just kind of like avoiding the discomfort and living that's keeping us in a roundabout of suffering. And Debbie and I, when we talk about experiential avoidance in the book, we use this metaphor of a roundabout. And it really came from in California, you probably relate to this AJ, they just started plopping roundabouts in places. And when you plop a roundabout in California down, like the Californians freak out. We don't know what to do about it. It freaks us out. We don't know how to get around this thing. And the worst part is the exiting it and the entering it, right? And so when you are caught in a roundabout of avoidance, it feels better sometimes just to stay in it, just go around. It's like Chevy Chase's European vacation. You just, I'm just going to stay in this thing over and over again, whether that's a addiction that I'm stuck in, or it's a, I'm not going to like exit this job that I really hate, or I'm not going to exit this relationship that I really hate, because to exit the roundabout requires you have to go through something, that discomfort of moving a lane over and like leaving it, right? And so we avoid, we experientially avoid the discomfort of the exit or of the moving towards the thing that's outside of our comfort zone.  And that's what psychological flexibility is about, is the freedom to move fully in your life towards the things that you personally and chosen by you care about. What streets do you want to go on? It's not about the roundabout, it's about what you care about and what matters to you.


Hi, I'm Zooming with Kent Flieger, South Dakota's soil health specialist just to talk about a series of videos that Kent shot in May 2020. Kent, we have eight videos we'd like for folks to see and I wondered if you could give us a little bit of context of why you were in the field shooting these videos. Sure, so like you mentioned Buzz the 2019 really the whole calendar year was very wet in South Dakota. Most places had twice their annual precipitation a lot of prevent plant and we went into winter freeze up really still quite wet. A lot of rivers were still in flood stage and it's going into winter so this spring there was quite a bit of anxiety on whether we were going to kind of have the same disaster we did last year since we had so much moisture already in the soil profile and so what we were looking to do is show some of these fields and conditions and then we're really looking to show producers that have been practicing soil health practices for some for a couple decades and some a little shorter term and just to see how they were handling all that excess moisture from the previous year and if they were having any success with planting or what some of the challenges that they were facing. All right thanks Kent that gives us an idea of what to expect. Hey I hope these videos are going to be useful to producers especially as they start thinking about 2021.


gapping why I didn't like it if we have time. In fact, I'll quickly do that now. I think that the lesson for some of you is you're still not used to getting into a habit of not trading when there isn't anything good and it's something you got it you got it you got to get good at. You have to get good at knowing when there's something good and you don't have to get good at knowing when there isn't anything good. I mean they definitely go hand in hand but I think some of you realize when we have good trades and then you still think there are good trades when there aren't. So you know yeah and if you're still in the CCL put then those are the options that are that looks great. So the market is going to be wild today. It's been wild all week. Up, down, circling around. Don't expect anything different today. Don't expect anything different today. Just don't. And Howard, I don't know why I get out of Nike. Nike looks good. Nike the chart looks good and I don't know why I get out of it. So it's probably going to go next week. This looks like it's going to go next week but WFC isn't going to work unless the market rallies. Nice. PRGS is not good at all. CCL is not a day trade. If you're in the put you're in it. And BJs is not good. And CTRP is not good. And ATRAs aren't going to go anywhere. In fact I'll look up when we're done today exactly. I'll give you the exact date that our running season starts. So you're going to write it on your calendar and star triple double star it. I haven't changed anything with my volume. If you can't hear me I guess turn your volume up. I haven't touched any buttons or done anything. And I did delete a lot of stuff on my computer to try to save with the with the comm issues. Don't probably delete more stuff today. So pretty much over 46. I'm not going to do it. It's right at 46 now but I'll sit here and watch it. It's worth watching. If it goes it's going to go big.  This looked a lot better last night. It's kind of a bummer. Last night I was like oh we have a good one.   Wow. All right stop's going to be I'm like utterly shocked but don't do it yet. Stop's going to be 46 20. 46 20 and I don't have the entry yet. 46 20 is going to be the stop but I don't have the entry yet. We may get lucky here today. It's the only thing I liked and I said we got to watch it. Don't have the entry yet. Stop's 46 20 and I don't have the entry yet. Okay 19 by 20. 19 by 20 mu. And this could flip so don't jump the gun. 19 by 20 mu. Do it. Do it right now. It's going to hit. Put the stop in at 20. Man we're going to get lucky here today because this may not have worked. Here I'm in it but I did it stop. Did it go? No 20. Well you could be in it. We have the stop at the right place. Just look at the market quick. I thought that was going to hit it didn't. Man this market is so tricky. It looks like along here today but I don't I'm telling you it's probably not going to rally and that's insane. All right here we go. I jumped the gun like by a couple pennies but it's not a big deal. 19. 19 if it didn't do it. Stop is 20 mu short and we're getting lucky here today. No piggy targets in anything at all and to be honest with you 45 is a number we have to watch. I'm not saying it bounces at 45 but I'm saying you'd have to watch 45 and we're not worrying about risk reward in a week like this. We have to just get trades. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Mu. Mu. Mu. Mu. Mu. Mu. Mu. Mu. Here. Here. Here. Mu. You give something a chance but I wasn't leaning on my keyboard so here we go. 86. Next number we're going to watch and we're going to say 4460, 4450. Let's see but you could have literally just taken that guy right out just to say whatever. Here. Mu. Because the market's going to be tricky today. We'll talk about that when we're done. We didn't talk about it yesterday and you could have literally gotten out of that there. You just could have gotten out. It's a very tricky market. People think it's going to rally on the 20 and the 8 period moving average here in the spy and I'm not convinced because no matter what it does it's going to be insane. If it rallies it'll fall. If it falls it'll rally. This market is wild. All right. Here we go. Mu. One more drop up for Mu and I'm done. Done for the day and done for the week and a beautiful weekend in New York. Here we go. 95. 96. Come on. Low is 86 I think. Didn't make sense to call put in this so I didn't and I wasn't going to tell if it was going to work until he opened so I wasn't going to send out a trade next week Ulta. That's next week. All right. Mu. Mu. Mu. All right. Let me look and see what the data is at today because I didn't even check on that. I was spending so much time trying to scan. Time of the day is 9.33. Time of the day and again you could be out of this. Time of the day. 9.45. Still crazy slow. 10 o'clock. One number 10 o'clock. Everything else is out. Everything else is out. Let me see what next week is. Big number next week next Friday. No fed stuff next week. A couple of things next week. Costco's the big one next week. I'm looking up just to see exactly when our any season starts and this is pushing back. Just make sure to stop him but I'm pretty certain it's holds. We get another entry in this. We could add. We are going to have to be patient angels. Our any season does not start next week. Let's continue. The week of the 14th. Week of the 14th. So we're going to have to be angels for two more weeks and that's what it is people. Week of the 14th. Two more weeks. Trump tweets about Iran. So basically we might take a little more here. Let's see. Let's play it by ear. Who's in this? Who got out? Who's doing what? You can retake this if you get out of it right here. Put the stop at the same place 4620. I think I have enough of this. I'm just going to leave it. There's no reason me aggressive on Friday but if you didn't get out you can retake it. Jaira got out. Shire singers in it. Jackie's in it. Let's take a look at all the things in the world. We looked at apple in a day. Okay here we go. Pay attention everyone through the little one drop off and we're out. Here we go. We're getting it. Nice trade. Nice trade. Nice trade. Everything seems to be looking good. Everything seems to be situating itself. I think Altos isn't going to be next week. The longer it takes the better it is. So that's today and noon. Okay Mew. Again you can take more Mew here if you got out of it. Stops the same place. Looks fine.  Today is what the 27th next week's October. This year has just flown by. Absolutely flown. We should be clear once we get under 4520. Rapenny's away. Every penny counts. Every penny is sacred. So not next week but the following week. US administration meets with the Chinese people again. I don't see anything next week that's like critical for the market but in this environment who knows. The impeachment thing you never know something could happen. Tomorrow something could happen today. Here we go. Mew under 20. Here we go. Nice close out to the week. Slow week but I couldn't have done anything any better than I did. Mew, Mew, Mew. So maybe we can get this down to 4450. That would be nice. You could have added. I didn't want to be aggressive. Friday is not today to get crazy. Something else I forgot what it was. 940. BA is up and I don't know why. It's the only thing. Amazon looks great. Zen trader are you in there? Did you get out? Are you in it or did you get out of it? Howard killed Nike even though it looks fine.  Okay, we're in Mew and we're waiting.  Okay, let Amazon drop. Let it drop, drop, drop, drop, drop. This looks great. Okay, we're in Mew and we're waiting and I'm not going to wait long. It's 941, 945, 950. This has got to get going back down to the low. No ifs ands or buts. Market's red. Time of the day is 942 and I don't have a lot of time to waste for this. The market could fall today. It could fall. It's trying to fall. I thought it might try to rally first then fall, but maybe it's just going to fall. I mean, the market feels heavy. It's been feeling heavy. It's never not felt heavy back last time I said the market. Last time I called a call in the market was May. April? I have to look it up. May, June, July, August, September. Wow. Five months was the last time that I called any lungs in the market. That's crazy. I'm actually going to look it up. I'm going to look it up myself. Okay, we're stuck in this Mew and I could have gotten out. It looked really like it was going to drop immediately and now we got to wait.  It's really annoying. Anybody have any questions? Well, yeah, it makes yesterday sweeter. Do we have to wait? I don't know what you mean. Yesterday was quick and it was great and I wish that was every day and we will get back to that once the rainy season starts. We got two more weeks. Two more weeks to be on our tippy toes and one of those days I have jury duty. Gerard's going to have to do the room just so you know. I can't believe I never got called in all the years I've lived here but I got called. You get one pushback which I did when they called me like when I got the thing a couple six months ago so I can't push back anymore and even though I only own business I thought well I can try to get out of it but I two days I called. I was in the phone. I just sat here doing work. I was in hold for like four hours. I said forget it. I'm just going to go.  Gerard's going to do the one room one day and then once I go it's done like I won't get called for another eight years but I got to go so not next week but the following week. You got to call a number the day before though so maybe I'll get off of it but I'm not too optimistic. Just it's all the way downtown. It's such a pain in the butt and it's the whole day. 40 bucks a day you get to go. 40 dollars. 40 dollars isn't even going to pay my cab fare downtown. 40 dollars a day. Who makes 40 dollars a day? Well I guess companies pay for people to go to jury duty. They pay but when you work for yourself you don't make any money. Oh yeah if it was parking no it would be more than than that for the parking. Actually let's look at that one. That gyro light. Did that do anything? PRGS? No. Let's look at Wells Fargo. Oh this did move looks like 50 cents. If anybody did that I would get out. And Nike's going to go when Howard killed it. It was almost like you could guarantee him for sure that because Howard killed it that Nike was going to go. But Zen Traders in it. Poor Howard. Oh okay I took the best cookie in Mew. No one I'm in the mood for. First of all I don't cook because I don't have time to cook. Here we go. I used to cook. I used to be a good cook but I don't have time to cook. Anyways I'm into watching all the food network shows now because it's the holidays. Like it's fun to watch them. Like I don't watch them any other time but pretty much from now until the end of the year. I'm like watching food network all the time. Even though I don't cook. It's fun to watch people to think that I might cook someday. I might cook again someday. Well that looks good. But then I never do. 84 was a low. Crap. Hands on the button in this Mew. I still think it continues but this is the end of the rope for me. 947. I definitely don't cook pumpkin lattes. I don't like one of those machines. Oh my gosh I saw a really good recipe for a drink. I'm not really a big hard liquor person but it was like vodka, pumpkin spice. It was like a white Russian but it was like a pumpkin Russian and it was like heavy cream, pumpkin latte, vodka and something else. I don't know but it would really make you loopy. Here we go. Here we go. 83. With this it probably breaks 80. I don't have the patience anymore. Out. 948. But definitely this looks okay. Probably continues. It depends how patient you can be. I think that was a good exit. Any exit with a 4.8 in front of it I think was an excellent exit here. Pumpkin smasher. I never heard of that. What's in that? You know what looks good? I love Williams Sonoma. I go there like every week. I love it so much. Just want to buy everything. Trish Yearwood has a whole collection now of drink mixes. Like they had the Fall ones out. They're probably like way too sugary, way too sweet but she has like this whole mixers that you put in with different things. It's probably way too sweet but they looked good. That's another cooking show I watch and I'll never make anything. I'll never cook anything that she makes but it's fun to dream that I might someday. Maybe when I have a family. All right let's see what the market's doing here. Good day people. As good as we could have made it we did it. All right let's go back and look and see. Is anyone still in the Mew? Man I think there was a good exit for the morning. Not that it doesn't contain it because of the market falls as it will. EO to testify August no October 30th in front of Congress. Let's see if there's any tweets we missed. Durable goods upside. Let's look at what's out for Monday. Last day of the month of Monday. We do have two things for the morning. Calm and though. Thor. Let's look at it calm. Two thin. Two thin. All right how's everyone doing? We had as good of a week as we could have. It was slow. There was not much I can do about the slowness. We were very careful. We did everything right. And that's all that we can do. And uh looks okay. I'm gonna look at this again around noon. Any questions from anyone about anything at all? Oh here goes the Mew again. Is anyone still in Mew? Wow this looks nice here. 82. 82. Under 80. Should drop and fall. At least get in the 70s. Here it goes Mew. I think there was a good exit but if we're still in it and it's going. Is anyone still in Mew? Here it is at the low. Jackie got out. Is anyone still in the Mew? Nice little trade in here. All right listen have a wonderful weekend. Have a fabulous weekend. Enjoy the fall. Nice weather. Fabulous weather. And I will see you all back on Monday morning. Okeydoke? All right have a good day. You're welcome.


Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Nick Erner from Alcane Resources. How are you today, Nick? I'm very well. Thanks, Tracy. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for joining us, because many of us, actually everybody at Investor Intel is well aware of Alcane's Dubbo project and being one of the leaders in critical materials in the world. So why don't we just start with an update on Dubbo, please? Yeah. Thank you, Tracy. Yeah, our project stands ready to execute. We continue to look for market off-take, strategic investment in Australia, government support as well, and we wait, and we wait, and we watch prices rise around for all of the commodities that we're in. And we think that it's approaching a trigger where some of the customers must have to act and secure their supply chains. And of course, in your critical material food chain, we've got what, zirconium, hafnium, rare earths, and niobium. Did I get the highlights or am I missing any? You did get the highlights. Thank you. Okay. And of course, we've all been watching the geopolitical tensions caused between the United States and China. And I was reading a little bit more about what's happening specifically with the niobium and the ferrovenium steel, and how this is actually affected by this. Can you talk to this a little bit more? Yeah, I can. Look, you know, with increased use in vanadium in particular, niobium is a key substitute for vanadium. And so we're seeing both high strength, low alloy steels rising in their use, but as well as that, we're seeing vanadium flow batteries starting to emerge. And so vanadium itself is taking off, and it's dragging niobium with it as a substitution.  It's into the plus $40 range, which is really, really, really interesting. And so as well as that, we also have the fact that CBMM, based in Brazil, single largest producer, 85% of the market is out there. And so all of those things are combining. People are a little bit worried about that as a shortage. They're looking for alternate supply. They're looking for substitutes for vanadium. And there's a lot of price pressure with not many new supply options out there. OK, so in addition to that, of course, you know, we've had a couple of the rare earths leaders saying, OK, they're back. Rare earths are back. But, you know, I'm not seeing the rise or the lift in the share prices yet, but we are watching and we are noticing an increase in people going to the rare earth columns and reading about them and sending us emails. Can you talk to us about rare earths and their demand right now? Yeah, yeah. So fundamental demand continues to rise, you know, CGRs of 6% generally. A lot of it driven by renewable energy and the rise of electric vehicles. A lot of the forecast in the future are almost all driven by electric vehicles and the rise of renewables and higher efficiency domestic devices. But, you know, we're right to see that interest is rising. So people are saying, oh, hang on a minute, particularly like we talked before about the tensions between China and the US. There's been tariffs go two ways on rare earths and different variants of it, magnets, metals and the tariffs have come and gone. And but most importantly, people are saying, OK, well, if I want manufacturing jobs to be in the US and China was to stop sending me magnets, I just couldn't do any electric motor devices over here in the States or over there in the States. Sorry. And and that's that's of great concern. But as yet, we haven't yet. People start to put real cash down to secure those supply chains. So I think a lot of people are watching to wait and see as they are with many of things in the Trump administration, they're looking to wait and see and they're looking to see confirmed price trends upward. One of our writers wrote about the US Defense ban on rare earths directs attention on alkane resources. Specifically, he wrote, you're the most advanced polymetallic project of its kind outside of China. The double project stands to become a strategic and significant role producer of these critical materials. Can you confirm that his his analysis is correct? And can you tell us a little bit more about the timeline to production? Yeah, his analysis is correct. You know, we are one of the most advanced because we have the things that normally hold up mining projects, pilot plants. We've been running ours for over a decade. Securing in the land, we own all the land that we're on, and particularly government approvals. We have all of our government approvals, all the major ones in place. So we are the most developed with, you know, advanced engineering done by Hatch, which international name people recognize. So we are ready to execute. And talking on our construction timeline, our biggest hurdle is securing our financing. And that's both a debt and equity package. We look for customer offtakes to trigger that originally. And once we get that, our timeline is 27 months. And that's when we commission. And then we have a four year ramp up from there, you know, with 65% production the first year. So it's similar to any other rare earth project that you talk to. They divided into two camps. One camp has probably Chinese shareholding base and they're making it concentrate, which could be a carbonate or a mineral concentrate, and they're sending it to China. So it's not a solution to the, you know, John McCain Defense Act or anything like that. There's no solution there. Or there's people like us who have a higher capital cost and they do all the separation. They're looking for Western customers. Everybody has the same timeline as we do. So if someone said to me today, oh, Nick, wow, it's a crisis. I need rare earths. I'll say, yep, give me the money and I'll pump some to you in two and a half years. OK, so arguably we do have a crisis. I mean, I'm reading the news and it says here the United States has imposed tariffs. This is further to the tariff comment. A Chinese zirconium chemicals and powders. I don't think we talked about your zirconium. Can you talk to us a little bit about that and how much of a crisis? Where are we in the crisis level here, Nick, with zirconium, for instance? With zirconium are much more than people realize. So zirconium is just an industrial mineral. I mean, the average listener, if they walk into their bathroom and look at the tiles and run to why they're white and shiny, that's because there's a zirconium layer on top of zirconium. And so it's an industrial mineral, but it's seen a lot of advanced ceramics. It's in faked teeth. It's in, you know, the, you know, the catalyst of exhausts in a lot of catalysts that are used around the world. It's in the milling media for pharmaceuticals. So it's a very widely used industrial chemical. It's in deodorants. Yeah, so that everybody's heard about the pollution within China and Chinese government acting to reduce pollution. And one of the things that happens is China doesn't have its own sources of zirconium, so particular zircon from mineral sands or a hard rock alternative like we have. And so they, it buys mineral sands and converts it in China like so many other things are. But those mineral sands contain uranium and thorium and they need chemical heat chemical process, which contain water and water air and soil emissions. And the Chinese government said, well, hang on a minute, we don't want to be the world conversion of this. And if we do, it's going to follow these regulations and it's going to be in these areas. So lots of producers are being forced to relocate or being shut down. And as a result, yeah, we're seeing that effect on zirconium. And even worse than that in this area, mineral sands in general is running lower in supply. And you have the whole really interesting conundrum with Rio Tinto and Richards Bay in South Africa and do or don't they expand that? There's an incredible amount of tension in the zirconium market. It is fascinating. Well, it is fascinating. And I've got to be honest, Nick, we've been watching this since 2008 here at Investor Intel, the geopolitical issues, the Japan, China, US. And again, is it just me or we continue to see 90% of the world supply of rare earth controlled by China? Yeah, it is. Yeah, Linus produces just under 20% of the rare earth oxides and four magnets. And it's the major or virtually only Western supplier of those oxides. But then some of that material goes into China. So China produces between 85% and 90% of the world's magnets. So yes, it's Chinese dominated. Almost all zirconium conversion is Chinese. It occurs within China. Almost all niobium comes out of a single mine in Brazil. And hafnium is coupled to the nuclear industry produced by the primarily ATI in the States or Fremontomia used to be a river in France. That's it. It's an incredibly concentrated industry. Well, Nick, we have to have you on more regularly to monitor what's happening in the critical material market globally. So thank you so much for joining us this evening. Thank you, Trace. I appreciate your time.


The latest market university law school poll has been released and we're joined today by professor Charles Franklin the director of the poll Charles the presidential race coming down to the wire Wisconsin still thought to be an important state What did we have for our final poll pre-election poll? Yeah, our last pre-election poll President Obama has retaken a lead to 51 to 43 recovering from that bad first debate performance that really hurt him here to come back to a Significant lead. Let's talk about the Senate race another very competitive race important to which party controls the majority and in Washington What did we find there? their Representative Tammy Baldwin has taken a slim lead by 47 to 43 over former governor Tommy Thompson that race was tied two weeks ago as well Charles We're seeing some movement in numbers again With the president's numbers we saw him earlier this summer having a pretty solid lead over Mitt Romney that tightened especially Obviously in our last poll he's now got a larger lead Does that have to do with what happened during the three debates? I think it clearly does if you look at the course of the campaign Obama went from a mid to upper single-digit lead and then fell dramatically To just a one-point lead following the first debate Now recovering from that. We're seeing a real effect in our data for Wisconsin voters 58% saw him as the winner of the third presidential debate that final debate only 31% saw Mitt Romney winning that debate This election like all elections comes down to turnout and and and we have data that suggests that the turnout is Especially especially key and in what comes what takes place in Wisconsin Tuesday here We see some really striking differences depending on whether all Likely voters get to the polls or whether only the most energized and interested likely voters do that eight point Obama lead drops to just a two-point lead 48 46 among those likely voters who are Absolutely the most engaged Likewise in the Senate race it falls to just a one-point Baldwin lead among those most engaged voters So this issue of turnout is not only turning out your likely voters But turning out those likely voters who say that for sure they're going to vote But haven't been paying as much attention or not as engaged by the election and both parties say they have great Get out the vote operations republicans say we build a we built some great infrastructure with the recall election Democrats say we still got a campaign in place from four years ago We're ready to go and we see that in the data more than two-thirds of voters say they've been contacted by one or the other party In the last week And that's a very high percentage in just a short period of time there The phones are ringing off the hooks Charles Franklin is the director of the Marquette Law School poll. Thanks very much Thank you


Larry, maybe thanks for your time. We might start by having you tell us a little bit about your background. Well, my background. I'm Canadian by birth. I grew up in Canada, educated in Canada, and joined the military out of university. I spent 20 years in the Canadian military in a variety of roles, finishing off as a legal officer in the Canadian military before transferring down to take a position up in the New Zealand Defence Force, where I spent seven years doing a variety of positions as well, legal positions in the Defence Force, before joining the International Committee of the Red Cross, the ICRC, in 2004, about six and a half years ago. That's quite a fork in the road almost, Larry. What prompted the decision? Well, it's interesting. I'd always wanted to go to law school, but I joined the military in an operational capacity as an Armour Corps officer. When the opportunity presented itself to be funded to go back to school, I seized the opportunity and went back. And of course, after getting into the military legal business, I really took to it. I enjoyed it, so I was doing a variety of things. You talk about Forks in the Road. When it came time to leave the Canadian forces, I had the option of going into a private law practice when the opportunity came up to go to New Zealand and I just couldn't see myself doing that. So I decided to come to New Zealand and carry on with the military side of things. As I further specialised in international law and sort of for overseas deployments for the military, I lost any real desire to go into a private practice and billable hours and chase ambulances and that kind of thing. So you get quite specialised. So yeah, that was sort of the decision-making process. So it would be fair to say, Larry, that you're a people person and not a numbers man. It never really has been about numbers. I would have left this business a long time ago if it had been about making money. So I enjoy the work. It's exciting work. I'm not an office person really, so I enjoy the adventure. Having been involved in peacekeeping, operations of different types, I enjoy that type of work. Maybe it's part of my Canadian heritage, but I really enjoy the perception of what peacekeepers are supposed to be doing when they go into a difficult context, a difficult country. And I enjoyed being part of that. I enjoyed participating in the planning and the deployments of those operations. The transition from being in the Defence Forces to the Red Cross, was that a difficult one? It really wasn't difficult. The more I specialised in the military in international and sort of international law issues and specifically conflict-related issues, I began to look maybe beyond into an international career in that area. So when I looked at my options, there aren't many organisations that you can actually practice this type of law. And with my military and legal background, the ICRC seemed like a perfect fit because of their mandate to work in conflict situations, their specialty in laws of war which coincided with my experience, my background and my training. So how have you found your time with the Red Cross so far? Look, I've found it immensely rewarding. I've had the opportunity to have different missions in some difficult contexts and a variety of roles in South Asia, working in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, then subsequently in Iraq and then in Israel and the occupied territories, and now in this region. And it's a constant challenge. But look, it's work that's really good and it's work that you can feel good about because of the purely humanitarian sort of focus of the organisation. The work is similar to what I was doing before. The focus is obviously different. But it was a surprisingly easy transition into the ICRC. The transition was easy, but you say there are challenges once you're there. What would you explain as the key challenges? Well, I think as a military officer you're programmed to accomplish a mission in a finite period of time and with certain constraints. But things are more defined. In the ICRC, because of the nature of the work, you're into areas and regions that conflicts have been going on and there's been a lot of suffering caused by these conflicts. And I guess the frustrations that I would experience is not being able to make a big enough difference and having frustrations not being able to accomplish maybe in a defined time frame an improvement of those conditions for sort of victims of conflict in those areas. So are you ever in a situation where you feel effectively like your hamstrung? Look, when you go into prisons in Iraq and in Israel and Afghanistan, our delegates are often faced with the frustrations of those prisoners or the populations who are the subject or caught up in these conflicts. And they always ask, why can't you do more? Can't you do enough? And the old hands in the ICRC explain it like this. We try to make a difference in the long term. It's an incremental difference. It's an evolutionary process. But we don't measure it in terms of days, months or years. So we have to look at it like that. And as we often say to people, would the situation be better off or worse off if we weren't there? And I think if you look at it like that, you can more easily justify a longer term view of things and remaining in a difficult context. So are there some long term key messages in regards to organizations like yours? Well, I think for a humanitarian organization where unfortunately there's no shortage of work around the world, I think you have to take a long term view. You have to do what you can. And you have to try to force other governments and other organizations to do their part and to fulfill their obligations in those contexts. So I think it's important work that needs to be done. Your ex-military now working for the Red Cross, are there any conflicts of interest? Well, my current role is to develop relations with the military and countries in the region on behalf of the ICRC. I see it as a sort of a dual role. One is to educate the military about the organization and our work to allow us to work and do our work in operational contexts like Afghanistan and Iraq and Sudan and Congo and others. The other half is to educate the organization about the military. And look, I have the greatest respect for the military and the time I spent in it. And I think that they do a good job. They're following the direction of their political masters. And I think genuinely their motivation is good. Sure, their shortcomings. But they're fine people in the military. And I think that the more that we can have interaction with them and we can understand each other's roles and maybe some constraints, I think the better it's going to be for everybody. From a personal perspective, Larry, are there any mantras which you live by that help you deal in difficult times? Well, that's a difficult question. I don't really think about it. I don't worry about my own safety. To be perfectly honest, I'm not in dangerous situations very much if at all, given my role. I do have the utmost admiration of the ICRC delegates are actually in the front lines and working on the other sides of conflicts when the conflicts are ongoing. So I don't know if I can really say that I have a mantra. I just try to keep focused on the work and the reasons for the work. What are the reasons for the ICRC work? Well, the reasons for the work are, as the organization says in its materials, it's to preserve the dignity of civilians and other victims of armed conflict, to protect them from the effects of armed conflict which they're caught up in through no fault of their own. And I think that if you keep the focus on that and not any sort of overriding or overlying political or military sort of reasons and don't try to overthink it, I think that keeps you focused. How do you train personnel to deal with difficult situations? Well, there are several difficulties. There's a difficulty of managing expectations of people that you're there to help. They always are demanding more. Oftentimes the ICRC delegates are the only people they get to see, so they often vent their frustrations generally at the ICRC and they inevitably want their lives and situations to be improved. So that's a very frustrating thing, whether it's a detainee that's in a jail in Iraq or Afghanistan or whether it's somebody in Gaza who's just gone through a horrendous experience as a result of conflict there. So those managing expectations, I think that's a big one. I think there's also a psychological tool that delegates have to pay. It's immensely stressful for them. They're often in situations where their lives may be at risk. They could be in danger of kidnapping or being caught up in the wrong place and caught up in the conflict and they really have nothing to protect themselves except their negotiating skills, the Red Cross, the emblem and the reputation of the organization. So I think it takes a psychological toll on a lot of delegates when they're in those situations. Now that's not all context, but in mid to high intensity sort of conflict situations, that is a psychological price that every delegate has to pay. How much can an organization prepare its people for deployment? Look, I don't think you really can. You know, our delegates, when they come in, some of the general delegates are 25 years old, that's the minimum age, and they're screened. They go through an integration course in Geneva and in the field where they go through scenario training and there is a bit of psychological preparedness that is part of that, but they really won't know how they'll react until they get into the field. The organization does have some tools for psychological debriefing and counseling, but you never really know how someone's going to react until they get in the situation. So I think delegates will quickly decide whether they want to be operationally focused in those situations or whether they want to go into some of the more technical sides of the organization. So I think the culture of the organization also helps. The fact that everybody is so mission focused and having 150 years of history also helps because there are methods of operation that are developed that are standard any way you work and I think having experience from more senior delegates and being in a culture where it does this and has a rich history and tradition, I think it really prepares people a little better. Just like in the military, training and previous experience, there's no substitute for that. Larry Mayby, thanks so much for your time.