All righty. Thanks for having us here. Good morning. Obviously, you guys are used to these. Safe Harbor. We may make certain forward-looking statements and use non-GAAP financial measures. Please take a look at our SEC filings for more information on that. So, I'll give a quick background on MP for those of you that are newer to the story. MP is North America's only scaled producer of rare earth materials. We own and operate the Mountain Pass mine and processing facility in California. We are the second-largest producer of rare earth materials globally. We are a founder-led business with an owner-operator culture, and we've been focused on restoring the rare earth supply chain to the Western world. And we've done that in a three-stage strategy, starting with production of mixed rare earth concentrate, which is what we call Stage One of our business. We've recently transitioned into Stage Two of our business, which is refining that rare earth concentrate into separated rare earth oxides. Those rare earth oxides are the fundamental building blocks of magnetics, which I'll talk about in a moment. Stage Three is our vertical integration strategy to actually produce NdPr metal alloy and magnets in the United States, where we've made some tremendous progress on that part of our strategy as well. Why should anyone care about this? Rare earths are synonymous with industrial motion. If you think about what powers the motor in an electric vehicle, what allows the actuators on robots to create motion, what allows the transmission of wind power into energy, almost all of those things are generally done with a rare earth permanent magnet. And the way the market structure is set up today is with the dominance of Chinese producers, there is a single point of failure and a major threat to all of these industries that we're all, you know, well aware, are so critical to, you know, the electrification of our global economy. This gives a, I guess, a better graphical representation of exactly what I was talking about from a geographic perspective. You know, the West generally has been, you know, quite challenged over the last, you know, decade plus. Really, the interesting thing is Mountain Pass, our main asset, is where the rare earth industry in many ways was born. You know, we have been on this journey as MP Materials since 2017, restoring Mountain Pass to its rightful place in the rare earth space, and we've made tremendous progress, particularly recently. You know, we announced on our last earnings call, just last week that we have started production of refined rare earth materials at Mountain Pass, which has not been done in over a decade in the Western world. You know, that is a really major change, and something that we're incredibly proud of, and we'll talk a bit more about that in a moment. For those of you that have sort of, you know, know the industry and have watched our industry and the stock, you know, you've seen that over the course of 2022, you know, pricing increased quite a bit. There was a lot of focus on growth in the EV space, in particular, wind energy, things of that sort. And recently, you know, this year, we've had some very, very difficult compares as rare earth pricing has come down quite a bit, last quarter, on a year-over-year basis, down roughly 50%. We've got a lot of questions as to how that's possible, given how synonymous our commodity is with the transition to the electrified economy and electric vehicles and, and, you know, those items. The reality is, if you look at the market today, roughly three-quarters of the market is exposed still to sort of GDP-driven industries, general industrial, HVAC, you know, appliances, consumer electronics, those sorts of items, and roughly about 25% is driven by the items that, you know, despite sort of recent market sentiment, undoubtedly are experiencing secular growth, and we can talk, you know, a little bit about our view on that. So what we've seen this year is, given how dominant the Chinese industry is here, you know, north of 90% of magnets are made in China, when you have, you know, a bit of a hiccup on, you know, GDP-type growth products within our market, you know, that really gets felt given 75% of the market is in those industries right now. You know, the law of compounding would tell you, though, and again, you know, we can talk a bit about our view on, you know, the different forms of electrified transportation and sort of how we fit into that, but as you see that growth continue over the next several years into the next decade, the proportion of the market that is driven by these growth industries is going to increase. And so, you know, that that's part of what we've experienced over the last, you know, year or so. But you know, given the law of compounding, you know, we continue to be extremely bullish, you know, the backdrop of our commodity, particularly given what's required to bring incremental supply into the market, which we can talk a little bit about here. We've spoken quite a bit in the past about, you know, what's required for supply and demand to meet. You know, we have billions of dollars of invested capital at our Mountain Pass facility. You know, this industry is one where, you know, it's a commodity, but it's nothing like oil. You know, there's not a supply response quickly. It's very different than lithium. The amount of investment and time required to stand up a scaled source of these materials is tremendous. And so, you know, it puts MP Materials in a, you know, very advantageous position to take advantage of the supply-demand imbalance. But the reality is that in order for supply to meet, you know, demand projections that were probably made at the beginning of this year, you'd need something like three Mountain Passes in the United States to come to pass over the next decade. That's not reasonable. And so, you know, what we've seen, I think, over time is a very, you know, healthy dynamic of, you know, maybe those demand projections in the next two, three years are gonna be a little bit lower than what everyone thought. But this is what you see with these secular trends all the time is, you know, maybe an overappreciation for what happens right in front of you and an underappreciation of the long term. And so, you know, fundamentally, what we see here is, you know, this imbalance continues to get worse as we go further out. And, you know, I think MP is in an incredible position to capitalize on that. We talked a bit on our last earnings call about our strategy to grow our upstream Stage One production by 50% over the next four years. And that's something that obviously we think is going to be a major building block to driving us meeting some of this imbalance that we see here. Just to give, you know, a bit more detail on the three stages of the business plan, and then, you know, pretty quickly, we can hop into questions. But the Stage One concentrate business, we have about a 15% global market share. You know, we're the largest ex-China producer of these materials. Going to Stage Two, the separation of that concentrate into separated rare earth oxides, we are targeting our run rate production levels of over 6,000 tons of NdPr oxide. We'll also produce lanthanum, cerium, and an SEG+ product. We're also investing in a heavy rare earth separation facility to power some of the downstream that I'll talk about in a moment, which is our Stage Three, our production of rare earth permanent magnets. There, we have a greenfield facility that we built in Fort Worth, Texas. The original design basis is 1,000 metric tons of finished magnet. We had some pretty exciting progress over the last couple of weeks. We actually moved in on the office portion you see in the very front there. We moved our team of about 50 into that facility. General Motors is our, our main foundational customer of this facility. And we're targeting delivering an intermediate product on our way to delivering magnets at the end of 2025. And turn it over to you, Ben, for, for questions. You guys can raise your hand, or email session5@rwbaird.com. But just to get started, maybe just because of the announcement last week, on the upstream strategy, could you just discuss it? Could you discuss, you know, kind of the timeline around it, and then- Sure. I think that there was some kind of misconception that it shortened the mine life, but could you just talk through how it doesn't? Sure. Yeah, I think the very exciting thing about this strategy is, you know, while our focus is and remains ramping the separation facility and getting to, you know, targeted throughput levels, we've been working behind the scenes for the last several years, and we're sort of now at the point where we've got, frankly, multiple different pathways to achieve what we laid out as our target of 50% growth, on the upstream side, on REO and concentrate. You know, we announced that that would take place over four years. I do not expect it to be linear. You know, to my point where there are a lot of different smaller projects underpinning this growth and, you know, maybe one or two medium-sized. Yeah. But we laid out, you know, a very modest amount of capital required to get there, about $200 million of total spend across all these initiatives to get to that 50% growth. And I think the important thing in this strategy is, you know, hopefully, it underscores the incredible built-in platform and asset value at Mountain Pass. And to your point on mine life, you know, this is one of those things where we are, you know, one of the largest scale producers. If you think about what comes out in our tailings stream, we've always sort of joked, well, that's, you know, our, our tailings impoundment is probably the second-best rare earth mine in the Western world. And, you know, I think it is, and we're about to take advantage of that. And so the way I'd explain how I expect Upstream 60K to come to pass over the next couple of years is there are existing investments that we're making in our existing milling and flotation circuits, that are pretty modest capital investments and quicker time to achievement, where we're focused on a screening process and improving our grinding circuit, where if you think about, you know, when we take the materials and grind it to the proper size to go through froth flotation, there are different recovery percentages across different sizes of particles. And so what we're really trying to do is force more of our product into the sweet spot of recovery and drive some incremental recovery out of our existing assets. And so, you know, I would hope that that would come to pass in the nearer term. Some of the longer-term opportunities. Well, mind you, just to put a pin in that, recovery is pure drop through, you know, to earnings at the end of the time. So that is always something that we're very, very focused on and something that we're, you know, very excited about. In terms of looking at other ways to grow and reach that 50% growth target, one of the big pieces of this strategy is using, to your point, it's called alternative sources of feedstock, not just, you know, run-of-mine sources of feedstock. So we can incorporate reprocessing of tailings, we believe is gonna be part of this strategy. Something is... Seemingly simple as, you know, as we mine, you know, given the richness of our ore body and the way we've, you know, we've modeled this, our technical cutoff grade is 2.5%. If you think about the typical rare earth mine in China and almost any of the, you know, the growth projects that you hear out there, you know, they're sub 2% as their life of mine head grade. So undoubtedly, within even our overburden stockpile, we've got significant amounts of REO within that stockpile. and so that's something else that we're looking at targeting as well, is bringing in, you know, are there simple technologies that we can bring to bear, and we feel confident that we can, or sorting things of that, of that sort, where we can take the overburden, get the highest grade portions of it, do a, a pre-processing stage. And, you know, our goal is to build really almost a dedicated low-grade, processing facility and be able to leverage those types of feedstocks as well. And so, you know, there are a lot of different, moving parts here, but I think the really exciting thing is this is not just a pull forward of production, to your point. There is going to be some of that, but, you know, we also have not found the, you know, the extent of the ore body. But layering in these other sources of feed, I think, you know, over time, we expect there to be many, many, many incremental decades on the Mountain Pass ore body and be able to bring to bear, you know, significant growth in production in sort of the short, medium term, which we're very excited about. You highlighted the volatility of pricing recently. Could you just talk to how, you know, you guys are deciding whether or not to, you know, your offtake strategy- Mm-hmm. If that has changed at all? Maybe if you could just tell us, you know, kind of historically your viewpoint and if that's changed. Sure. Yeah, look, generally, the way, you know, we think about this is we expect the volatility and the leverage to be in the commodity price and not on our balance sheet. And we set up our balance sheet specifically the way that it is for that reason. We've got $1.1 billion of cash on the balance sheet, and, you know, our view is that it would be kind of crazy for us to sit here and tell you how bullish we are on our market and our commodity, and then go and sign a bunch of, you know, fixed price deals at, you know, lower prices. Certainly, you know, when prices go up, you know, you look a lot smarter, and when prices come down, you know, it's the opposite. But I think fundamentally, this is exactly what we were prepared for and exactly what we were positioned for. Certainly, we don't like it, but, you know, it that is the nature of being in a commodity business. And so I think generally the way, you know, we think about our portfolio is it will be a portfolio. There will be, you know, certain customers where there are, you know, there may be portions that are either on, you know, lags or, you know, other, other forms of different contractual mechanisms. But in general, you know, given that chart we showed on the supply, demand, and balance, we continue to be very bullish, you know, the medium long term of our commodity. Certainly, in the short term, commodities can do all sorts of things. And, you know, it'd be a fool's errand to try to predict that. But, you know, I think that certainly there's incremental focus on this, given, you know, it feels like in this moment in the market, some of the air has come out of, you know, the excitement for the electric vehicle transition and wind power and things like that. And I think, you know, as I mentioned in my, you know, my comments a minute ago, that's sort of perfectly predictable, right? In terms of how these transitions tend to go, you know, with estimates of the short term versus estimates of the long term. But I think the important thing to keep in mind is if you look at what's going on in the U.S., you know, take... I think Toyota just announced another $8 billion investment into their facilities here to be able to do plug-in hybrid, conventional hybrid, EV, and be able to switch between all three. All of that is bullish for us. If you think about, you know, plug-in hybrids have two-thirds of the uplift. If you think about going from an ICE vehicle to a BEV, plug-in hybrids are two-thirds of that uplift. And so again, getting back to supply and demand need to meet somewhere, I'm, you know, not necessarily confident that we're getting three Mountain Passes that are going to come to pass, and so, you know, there's going to be sort of a healthy balance there of what happens to the demand projections. And then certainly, you know, we expect to play a role in helping those supply projections. But, you know, this all, to us, seems like a pretty healthy market, all things considered. And, you know, the one last comment I'll make on that is, given what I mentioned on a significant portion of the market today being levered to the general industrial economy, you know, given where we are and where the data you're seeing out of China, you know, particularly a few months ago, you know, I feel like you could have looked at our commodity six months ago, and we could have told you what was going on in China very clearly. And so given the fact that we've sort of bounced off of these levels from a pricing perspective now a couple of times, I think is actually quite bullish, given how bad things really are in the industrial economy over there. And so, you know, that's sort of our overall view. Can you talk a little bit more just about Stage Two and, you know, how you took it over and, you know, built it out? Sure. Where you are at in the ramp of it? Yep. Then, I think the expectation is that you use all of your own capacity for it, but can you talk about if there's, you know, additional capacity that you can use from outside to run through Stage Two? Sure. So, one of the major changes that we made when, you know, we purchased these assets and embarked on our investment plan was to reintroduce a part of the process flow that had been in place at Mountain Pass for many, many decades before the last operator, which is an oxidizing roast. You know, it's. We jokingly call it. It's a big oven. It's a little more complicated than that, but, you know, no chemicals, a true oxidizing roast of our existing concentrate product, which goes through that process. We made several other upgrades to the facilities as well. But what that allows us to do is reject as much of the lower value rare earths upfront as possible, namely, in this instance, cerium. It changes the state of cerium when you go through the roasting process and go into leach, where we can physically separate off a majority of the cerium that otherwise would get carried through the rest of the separations processes, which are much more variable cost-intensive, energy, chemical reagents, et cetera. And so that change has allowed us to take our very, very strong cost position that we've built in Stage One and maintain that low-cost position as we go through separation and produce separated rare earth oxides, namely NdPr oxide. And so that is one of the critical investments that we made. Some of the other things that were part of the Stage Two investment process and investment plan were investments in our finishing circuits. Given the scale of production that we've brought to bear out of these assets, you know, we're producing nearly four times the amount of upstream product that has ever been produced out of these assets or at Mountain Pass. You know, we needed incremental finishing capacity to be able to support that volume of finished product. In addition, when we made those investments, we tried to be very, very thoughtful about how we spend capital to ensure lower operating costs over time. Ensuring that we have the right infrastructure and technology in place for sort of, you know, in-line testing to be able to know exactly, you know, the NdPr ratio before we go through the finishing process. You know, X-ray Vis, things like that. We've implemented other technologies in the finishing circuits to ensure greater first pass on spec production, so we don't need to send product back through the finishing circuits multiple times, which again adds significant variable costs. And so these are some of the things that we've brought to bear to take, you know, what is fundamentally one of the best rare earth assets in the world and build modern technologies on top of it to be able to continue to leverage that cost advantage that we start with with the ore body. And so that's you know been a very very exciting part of the Stage Two story, and we're seeing those investments really, you know, pay off and really being brought to bear most recently. So in terms of your question on where we are, you know, we announced on our call last week, that we had produced 50 tons of NdPr oxide last quarter. You know, that's obviously just as we've started production. We've talked about producing, multiples of that this quarter, and over the next several quarters, really beginning to hit our stride and move towards our targeted throughput, capacities. You know, one of the questions I get a lot in circling back to the Upstream 60K topic, you know, the incremental upstream production is, you know, are you sized to then separate that incremental 20,000 tons of REO into more separated products? And, you know, our answer to that is, we wanna deliver you the 6,000 tons we've talked about first. You know, certainly, the capital intensity in terms of investing in upstream versus downstream or midstream is different. But you know, our view on that is, certainly when we designed our upgrades to the Stage Two circuits and process flow, there's significant engineering factor, there's significant assumptions around uptime, a lot of things that, you know, hopefully, make our throughput assumptions prove conservative over time. But our goal is let's get there first and deliver on that. Let's deliver on the upstream piece, and then we'll talk about exactly how we marry those together. Got it. Can you talk about your Fort Worth and then you know how that improves volatility in your earnings and your revenue? Sure. And then also, I think on the call, you kind of alluded to, you know, expansion there- Mm-hmm. in the past. Mm-hmm. How you're thinking about that? Sure. Yeah, I mean, the fundamental difference, obviously, it's a, you know, doing vertical integration and moving into magnetics, it's a different business. It's not a commodity, right? A magnet is a highly engineered, customized product. And, you know, that's a whole different ballgame. The reason we entered the magnetics business is because we had significant demand from customers asking us to be in this business. You know, I think the interesting thing that we've seen is if you rewind, you know, four or five years ago, automotive OEMs, wind OEMs, robotics OEMs, you name it, were not thinking about where their magnets came from, let alone what was in the magnets. And so that whole paradigm has completely shifted, whereas we, you know, were preparing for Stage Two production, we started having, you know, significant conversations with the OEMs, where otherwise we might just be talking to magnet makers. Those OEMs then sort of, you know, really indicated, "Hey, it's great you're gonna be producing, you know, this really critical commodity in the Western world. We still have to send it to Asia." So we haven't solved the single point of failure problem, and we haven't really localized supply of the critical piece of the supply chain, and that is where sort of the Stage Three concept was born. You know, the commercial structure that we've embarked on in Stage Three is one where we... Like, we understand that we are standing up a business from scratch. We have no illusions about that. And so from a commercial perspective, we've been focused on risk-adjusted returns on invested capital in moving into this business. And so, you know, what we've been focused on there is partnering with customers that value what we bring to the table. And so since, you know, we started on this, we've got a team of almost 50 people, primarily, you know, engineering staff, that's been focused on you know, the design, engineering, and implementation of the strategy. As I mentioned, we're pretty excited to have moved you know, them into the beginnings of the facility. You know, we built a 240,000 sq ft plant, state-of-the-art plant. And our goal is to bring to bear the capability in the Western world. You know, again, we've been very clear about this is not us trying to compete on price with China. What we're trying to bring to bear is seed the capability and then add scale and come down the cost curve over time. And so how are we doing that to begin with? Well, firstly, as I mentioned, magnets are highly engineered custom products. A focus on the right mix, number of SKUs, you know, number of pieces, you know, the type of microstructure, et cetera, et cetera. We're being very, very thoughtful and focused on what types of customers do we take on in order to ensure our success. That has been part of the strategy as well, is, you know, thinking through how we set up the business in the short and medium term to ensure we execute on our promises to our customers. One of the things that at least I don't ask often, or maybe never, is on the heavies- Mm-hmm. and the work with DoD. Mm-hmm. So maybe could you talk a little bit about that? Because NdPr gets all the attention. Sure. Yeah, certainly, you know, depending on, on the magnet grade, heavies can be a, you know, a big part of the story, or they can be a smaller part of the story, depending on the use case of the magnet. But in terms of our capabilities at Mountain Pass, I think first and foremost, with our Stage Two coming online, we've begun production of on-spec scaled SEG+ production. SEG+ is samarium, europium, gadolinium plus, so dysprosium, terbium, don't make me name all of them, but, you know, they're all contained within that product, which is obviously, you know, the fundamental building block to getting towards heavy production. You know, we've talked about our, our heavy facility coming online, you know, hopefully in line with our, our downstream strategy as well to support that, and also that we'd be designing that facility to accept third-party feedstock. And so, you know, that is something that also can grow the addressable market for us. And if you think about the position that, you know, many players are in, where, you know, maybe it makes sense to, economically have, you know, an upstream product, a concentrate product or a carbonate product, but they don't have the scale of an operation to justify the investment in separation, we can play a role and, and be the separator of choice. You know, as it relates to your question on the Department of Defense, obviously, you know, they're, they're, a, a stakeholder here. You know, our CEO, Jim, made comments, I think, on the last call or call before that, that you know, we've seen incremental, you know, dollars available in this space. And certainly, our expectation is that over time, you know, we avail ourselves of further opportunities with the Department of Defense to have a level playing field with, you know, our heavies project. One question that I'm asking all of our companies is just ability to retain talent, attract talent- Mm-hmm. especially when you're moving into Stage Three Yep. which, like you said, building from the ground up. So could you just walk us through that, please? Sure. You know, we've done a lot of hiring over the last year, getting ready for Stage Two production at Mountain Pass. And, you know, I think the thing that's been great is our story and our mission really resonates, and so we found, you know, a lot of talented folks that are very mission-oriented. We're a very mission-oriented business. That's helped. If you think about also the reality of where we sit, you know, 45-minute drive from Las Vegas, you know, and when you look at other mining and processing operations, it's actually, you know, we're not very remote. So from that perspective, being able to attract talent, it's a whole lot easier than being in the middle of, you know, middle of nowhere. So that's been a big plus. Certainly, I think we go through stages of, you know, needing to focus our talent acquisition in different parts of our, you know, our operation. We've invested significantly in process and product engineering as we brought Stage Two online. We've had a lot of success there. You know, then it becomes: Okay, we need to invest more in maintenance, and we've done that. You know, and then similarly, in Stage Three, part of the reason we're located where we are is, you know, the university system that's close by allows us to attract, you know, the highly skilled and trained talent. And then, frankly, the you know, community college system is incredible in Texas, and so as we bring, you know, more operators and things like that, to bear in the facility, we've got a real pool and source of talent. You know, I'd say that the other thing is we are, as a management team, completely aligned with our shareholders and completely aligned with our employees. Our CEO and founder is the largest individual shareholder of this business. Almost every single one of our employees is a shareholder in this company, and so we are all focused on creating sustainable value, and alignment of interests, and so that's helped quite a bit in terms of retention, and so. Great. We're going to leave it there. Cool. Thank you very much, Ryan. Thanks. Appreciate it. Take care.