On The Brink with Castle Island - Kevin Anetsberger (Midwest Tungsten) on the Midwest Tungsten Story (EP.260)

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

Nic and Sean sit down with Kevin Anetsberger, General Manager at Midwest Tungsten, to cover their journey as a business and their entry into the crypto industry In this episode:  The history of Midwest Tungsten How Midwest got its start making metal steam Industrial applications of tungsten Tungsten's physical properties and how that makes it suitable for industrial applications Military applications of tungsten Where Midwest Tungsten sits in the supply chain How Tungsten is actually refined and formed, given that it's impossible to smelt The upper limits to tungsten formed objects, and where the constraints derive from Why a 14 inch cube is actually the largest size Midwest can actually make How Kevin came to work in the tungsten industry Where is tungsten mined? Have the supply chain disruptions affected Midwest Tungsten How Midwest Tungsten resisted offshoring Why Midwest Tungsten began selling collectibles Who has bought the cubes historically Was this the largest spike in demand for the tungsten cubes ever? How the company came to accept Bitcoin and make the NFT Is Midwest Tungsten holding the Bitcoin they have earned in cube sales? Is tungsten safe to handle? Where Kevin falls on the cube vs sphere debate What is the optimal cube size? Why Midwest chose to sell the cube NFT Other metals that Kevin likes What about Osmium? Sponsor notes:  This episode supported by Public.com. Start investing with as little as $1 and get a free slice of stock up to $50 when you join Public.com today. Visit public.com/onthebrink to download the app and sign up. This episode is brought to you by Withum, a top 25 accounting firm with a cutting-edge Digital Currency and Blockchain Technology practice. To learn more, visit  withum.com/crypto.

Hello and welcome to On the Brink with Castle Island. This episode is brought to you by Witham and Public.com. More about them later in the episode. So this is one of the most requested guests we've ever brought on the show. It's Kevin Anitzberger, the general manager of Midwest Tungsten, everyone's favorite industrial tungsten supplier. Many of you have purchased cubes and in some cases spheres from Midwest Tungsten. And they're synonymous with tungsten collectibles in the U.S.

And we just had to bring Kevin on the show to understand what these industrial processes are like. I mean, how do you even machine tungsten? As many of you know, it's got a very high melting temperature. So you can't actually smelt it. There's a very specific industrial process you have to use in order to manipulate the metal. So we dive into that. What industrial use cases there are for tungsten aside from novelty goods like cubes, And of course, the cube versus sphere debate.

And we learn the truth of the 14-inch cube. What is it that dictates the size of that cube? All this, in this episode with Kevin Anitzberger, Midwest Tungsten. Let's dive right in. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Hello, this is a very special episode of On the Brink. It's actually really not about crypto at all. It's about the greatest metal in the world, Tungsten, in my opinion, which is a frequent topic on this podcast. We're sitting here with one of the world experts in tungsten manufacturing, the general manager of Midwest tungsten, Kevin Anitzberger.

Kevin, thanks so much for joining us. We're very, very excited to have you with us. Well, I appreciate the invitation, and I'm real happy to be on with you. Thanks for inviting me, and thanks for your interest in tungsten. So I really just have so much I want to know about Midwest tungsten. I've obviously been a client of yours for many years, and bought cubes and spheres.

But maybe can you just tell us a little bit about the history of the firm? Because as I understand, it's sort of been around for a while, right? Yeah, yeah, it's been around since 1958. There was a gentleman named Tom Labonte who started it. And it was originally not a tungsten firm per se, but they made items out of tungsten that were used in a process called vacuum metalizing, which is a pretty interesting process too. It's the process of using tungsten to heat and boil other metals.

to make metal steam that then gets condensed out onto other surfaces to coat them. So that's kind of a wild process when you think about that. You would see it in things like auto headlamps or compact discs, things that are shiny and look metallic but might actually be plastic. That's how that metal gets on there. And because tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal, it's the perfect heater to heat other metals and boil them and evaporate them. So that was the business that he started in.

Wow, I already have so many questions about them. Absolutely fascinating. Would that be like galvanizing? Like you cover something in zinc or is that a different process? No, I mean, think about it like steam and condensing on your bathroom mirror, right? It's the same thing except the steam is metal. And that's used either for decorative purposes, you know, to make like a toy model parts or cosmetic caps or, like I said, the backup compact discs or else for functional things. Like preventing electromagnetic or radio interference in electronic devices, right?

Those things all generate noise and they have to be isolated from that. It was not a problem when all your housings were made out of metal. you could just ground to the housing, but everything's made out of plastic now. So you've got to build a cage around that to keep those radio waves in, and metalizing is how you do that. And Midwest Tunston, is that because you're located in the Midwest? Yeah, I mean, the name of the company originally was Midwest technical. And they did some other things besides working with tungsten. they manufactured equipment for decorating and assembling plastic items.

So printers and welders and things that plastic decorators and assemblers would use. And then when Mr. Labowny got to retirement age, he sold that portion of the business off and just kept the metalizing supply side, the tungsten side of it. And Midwest tungsten grew out of that. Got it. And so how did, you know, what have people used tungsten for historically? Historically, probably the biggest one would be light bulb filaments.

So incandescent light bulbs, right? That was that was the biggest use of it. And there were there were several large plants in the U.S. General Electric had one, Sylvania had one, Westinghouse had one, where they would draw tungsten wire. And when I started the business, We actually bought tungsten wire from those companies to create these metalizing filaments. And I mean, given how brittle tungsten is, how is it the case that it's also ductile?

Would that be an alloy? No, no, it's pure tungsten, but you obviously know a little bit about tungsten. Tungsten is a crystal, right? And metallically, it's a crystal. It's what they call a body centered cube. So even molecularly, it's a cube. So, but tungsten wants to fracture along the boundaries between these crystals where they meet. That's where it wants to fracture.

So it's kind of a brittle metal. But when you take it and draw it through dyes repeatedly, those crystals elongate into fibers. And those fibers, that fiber structure is what actually ends up making the wire ductal. It also makes it super strong. tungsten wire has like one of the highest tensile strengths of any metal you're going to find. I mean, a wire that's one or two thousand, so have a tensile strength of 300,000 PSI. So it can withstand a lot of force. You used to use it as invisible wire in the movies where you had before they had CGI

because you could hold heavy stuff and you couldn't see the wire. Wow. So that before they had, I don't know what they make them out of now, synthetic materials. Yeah, maybe carbon fiber or something now. Right. Yeah, back then, tungsten wire. And so, you know, light bulb films or something, tungsten carbide cutting tools, you know, are still frequently in use.

That's probably one of the biggest uses for tungsten is to make it into a carbide and use that for all your machine tools that are used in industry. Machine shops, you know, drills for drilling through rock. Those are all tungsten carbide. tips on those. Tungsten's real good radiation shielding because it's so dense, it stops x-rays and radiation real well, so it's used in medical equipment. It's used in the particle accelerators, things like that where they want to guide or direct a bean. It's used in ordinance. It's heavy, so it makes a really good penetrator or something for a missile or something like that.

or armor plate for safeguarding vehicles. It's used for that purpose as well. Welding rod, probably another big one. Tungsten welding rod, TIG welding. We sell a lot of welding rod here. Some pretty diverse client base, it sounds like. It is. You know, I mean, we deal with everybody, you know,

quite literally from NASA to NASCAR. I mean, we sell a lot of different industries. What would you say you're, the primary form factor is when, when, like, where are you in sort of the manufacturing process? Are you creating sort of the finished goods, you know, like the drill tips or are you more intermediate? Yeah, I mean, we're kind of intermediate to final. A lot of the early processing actually occurs at mine sites. So we can get into that a little bit if you want because it's kind of an interesting process. Yeah.

Because tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal, you can't smelt it. So you think of iron, you know, they put iron ore in a big furnace and they smelt it. And you've all, you know, you've seen the videos of these big caldrons of molten iron spilling into, you can't do that with tungsten. Because what would you melt it in? Right. Right. So it's got a higher melting point than anything you'd try to put it in. So tungsten is actually refined chemically.

So they, they dig up tungsten ore, maybe, like, like she light or wolfermite, they grind it up, and then they send it through a series of chemical reactions to extract the tungsten out. And it gets shipped around the world as this chemical called APT, which kind of looks like table salt. It's called ammonium paratongstain. And then they'll take that to a factory that then will turn it into pure tungsten powder. And that powder is what's used then to make solid forms. They put it into presses. under very high pressure, kind of make a rough form out of it, and then they put it into a furnace to start to consolidate it. It doesn't ever really melt, but when you take tungsten powder and you

put it at a high enough temperature, those little individual particles start to stick together, and eventually you get a solid out of it. So that's how you get the solid by heating up the powder. That's how it transfers from powder to... Yeah, so it's pressed in something they call an is static press, which puts pressure on from all directions, and you put enough pressure on it just to get the thing into a solid form that will hold together. You throw it in a hydrogen furnace and get it hot enough, and then they do what's called cinter it, where you actually run electricity through it to heat it. And that's kind of your final stage that really densifies it and turns it into an actual solid. Is there a limit to the size of the, I don't know what to call

them exactly, but I presume the press, you're kind of bounded by the volume that the press can take. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And the tonnage of the press, right? What it's capable of putting together in the larger the form, the harder it is to get a good uniform compaction of this stuff to make sure you end up with a solid that doesn't have voids in it or something like that. So you're absolutely right. There's definitely a size. And that's where we get into the largest size cube we could make. You're actually talking about limitations of what you can press. And so that's about as far as we can go with technology that we've currently got.

Okay. And so that 14 inch cube, that's actually just a function of the size of the press and what it can accommodate. Right. I mean, obviously there are some logistical issues with trying to move something that heavy around. But the real limitation is, hey, yeah, just how much can you actually compact? And, you know, what's the tonnage of a press that will be able to press something that big?

Wow. So, yeah, that's where those limitations come in. So we are maxed out on cube size here. Yeah, for now, for the time being, that's as big as we can go. I mean, hey, maybe there's somebody out there in the world who can do something bigger. But, you know, as far as I know, this is about as big as we can go at present. So just to rewind a little bit, how did you come to work in the tungsten industry? I mean, was it like a family business or was it something that you just found really fascinating?

You know, neither of those two things. It was kind of a series of happy accidents. So I was, I'm from the Chicago area. I studied industrial design at the University of Illinois. And when I was through with that, I enrolled in this two-year program for plastics technology. And if you remember, Mr. Labowny was making this equipment for plastics decorating an assembly and he had actually written a letter to the head of that department asking for a sales manager for his company and they recommended me for the job to Mr. Laboney. So I went in there and

interviewed with him for a sales manager position and ended up kind of specializing more on the metalizing side than on the equipment side. So that's how I got to be involved with it. And the stuff we do today, we didn't do back then. And so it's it's just something that evolved as we started getting more into the tungsten side of things, which we had to do because at some point, some of the companies in the United States just stopped manufacturing tungsten. Tunston is not mined currently in the United States at all. And so we really had to spend a lot of time developing sources worldwide. And while we were doing that, we kind of realized, hey, there's a lot more products than these wire things that we make. There's a lot of other things we could do.

And so that's how we kind of got involved in other areas of tungsten manufacturing. Where in the world is it mined? So there's primarily five main sources around the world of tungsten. The U.S., Canada, Russia, China, and Bolivia. Got it. And how is, like, have you been affected by supply chain disruptions? Yeah, we have. I mean, it's, again, there's no mining that currently is going on in the U.S. or Canada,

and there really hasn't been in decades. So we're reliant on what we can get from Europe, from Russia, from China. There's not so much happening in Bolivia right now. And yeah, we have had some supply chain disruptions. We do get a lot of material by air, but some of the stuff that we get by sea has definitely been impacted. But not to the point that it's been disruptive to our business. It just means we've kind of kind of plan ahead a little bit and try to accommodate for that. It's not caused us any issues.

You know, 85% of tungsten is coming out of the ground in China right now. There's kind of no getting around that worldwide. But they're not, that's not solely where we get stuff. We do get stuff from Russia. We do get stuff from Europe. So, you know, you just have to have kind of diverse sources. And we've had them for decades now. So there are people that we have very good, long-term working relationships with.

And in terms of being a U.S.-based manufacturing company, I mean, you know, everyone talks about how everything, our manufacturing capacity was offshoreed over the last few decades. What is it about your business that's enabled you to sort of stay in the U.S., you know, stay competitive? I mean, I presume you're selling into global markets, right? Well, I think it's the same thing that would allow any company to be successful, right? I mean, there's a reason we're named Midwest Thunxton Service. We do provide a lot of additional value besides just a product. We do a lot of engineering work. We do a lot of troubleshooting for people.

We're very concerned about delivering things on time. We do a lot of inspection. you know, we're making sure that a lot of what we do goes into some very critical pieces of equipment and stuff has to be correct. And we've put a lot of effort into that. And over the years, I think we've proven to be a reliable supplier for a lot of people. And that means something. And price is one thing, but I don't think it's what keeps people up at night.

You know, what keeps people up at night is, hey, we need this and it's not here, or we got it and it doesn't work. And so we've really put a lot of emphasis into that. Kevin, when did you start selling collectibles? Like, what was the reasoning there? You know, a couple things kind of spurred that on. I don't know if either of you guys have ever heard of a gentleman named Oliver Sacks. Oliver Sacks was, there was a movie about his life.

Robin Williams played him. The movie was called Awakenings. He's written a bunch of books. He's unfortunately deceased now, but he is an interesting guy. He was a neurologist, but also a real lover of different physical disciplines. And he would write about them. And he wrote a book called Uncle Tungsten, which was about his uncle back in England, who ran a tungsten factory.

And Oliver came to visit us and just seeing how interested he was and how much joy he got out of being back in the presence of that particular material was kind of a first awakening for us, right? That, hey, people really get joy out of physically interacting with this stuff. And certainly when we have customers in and people would handle stuff, you get that kind of astonished reaction. You know, you guys certainly are aware of it. I mean, you've handled it. You get that first time where it's just sort of amazes you. And so we thought, hey, is there a way we can we can kind of allow more people to experience that? And so the cube thing was sort of a good way to do that, right? Easy to machine

for us, easily to package and transport and get in front of people. And the early reactions we got to it were very positive and that kind of encouraged us. So that's fascinating. Here I am thinking that my partner, Nick Carter, is the, you know, the original Cuber, but it sounds like we owe a great deal of gratitude to Mr. Sachs. If you ever want to read a great book, I mean, I highly recommend that book. I really, really do. Yeah, but you know what? We owe a ton to Nick. I mean, I've worked here for 35 years trying to get people to appreciate it. And I couldn't manage to do in 35 years what you were able to do with a couple tweets. So, hey, thanks very much.

I mean, it's more just the crypto community has this, you know, incredible ability to generate hype out of nothing, basically. But yeah, I mean, when did you start selling the collectibles? Somewhere around, I think, 2015. So we do the cubes, but we do some other stuff, too. The spheres as well. Yeah, yeah. And some other things beyond that. I mean, we can talk about those if you want a little bit.

got some fidget spinner weights that are absolutely killer. You want a fidget spinner to run for like five minutes. Wow. So, I mean, who were the primary buyers of the novelty products that you're producing? Do you do any market segmentation there? Yeah, I mean, you know, we haven't tried to market toward anybody in particular. We just put them out there and people sort of found them. It's not like we tried to market it to anybody in particular. We always thought they'd make great like corporate gifts or something like that because just because of their novelty and because you can sit it on your desk and you can engrave it and all the things that kind of make up a good corporate gift like that.

But at the price point, you know, it was hard to get somebody interested. Oh, yeah, you know, we give out pens and we give out bottle openers. You know, this is a whole different level. And so it's kind of hard really to just generate interest in that space for us. So we decided to put them on Amazon and maybe somebody would come across them. Let's take a quick break to talk about our sponsors. Now, on this show, we only really like to work with sponsors that we actually know and can recommend. And both sponsors today are great examples of that.

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It's subject to account approval. See public.com slash disclosures. This is not investment advice. And so you've had sort of spikes in demand for the for the cubes before, right? They would catch on in a specific community. We have. You know, nothing that compares to this one really, but we have. We've had some spikes based on either like a physics blog post or something in, you know, like combinator's hacker news or something like that. So then, you know, those are typically little

nice little blips last a week or so and then kind of fade away. This is the first time we've had anything that's really kind of had this much legs underneath it. Well, that Australian YouTuber account, how ridiculous they did a show with your cube. Several. Yeah. Was that like a partnership or did they just seize upon the idea?

That was not a partnership. And actually we really can't do that just kind of for liability purposes. We can't endorse somebody dropping this thing off of a. I mean, they probably did the safest one I've seen because they've got a tower that's specifically built for that and it's limited access. And so that's great. But we really can't promote dropping this thing for. meters down but it's fun to watch yeah I mean they're the pros of dropping

heavy objects from large yeah and I think my favorite video there's actually the second one where they tried dropping stuff onto the cube to destroy it and they they put it on a big iron plate and dropped I think a 600 pound steel fist onto it and basically just just drove the cube right through this steel plate Didn't really bother the cube too much. Of course. I kind of like that one. There's also a couple out there where they set a cube out and they start shooting different calibers of ordnance at it to see what they can do.

Yeah. Demolition Ranch. Yeah, I think I've seen all the cube-related content on YouTube. There's that one, I think a turflater mouse one too. And I think he was kind of the first one to do it. And that one was kind of interesting, too. Yeah, just watching that. And all the slow-mo takes they have.

this stuff. It's just fun to see. Yeah. And I in the demolition ranch one, I mean, he had a very hard time denting the cube with even like medium calibers, which I guess vindicates these as like armor plating. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right. It's it's why they, it's why they use it. Kevin, when did when did the company first come to realize there was this growing rabid online fan base that was coming kind of from the crypto world? Um, you know, we, we kind of heard about it. Um, one of our, uh, colleagues, John got, I think, uh, either a phone call or a, um, an online chat message that said, hey, you guys need to be looking at what's going on over in the, in the crypto space. Um, yeah, and that was maybe like mid-October, maybe the, the, 12th, 13th of October, somewhere in there. And so we checked it out.

And we'd never really been in Twitter space, and the whole crypto thing was completely foreign to us. So we had to kind of try to figure out what's going on here. So what was your first reaction like, okay, this is interesting? Or like, we have to get, we have to figure this out. We have to get involved. Well, the first thing was to try to figure out, hey, was there some logical reason that this happened?

And then we sort of dismissed that. I mean, there was a reason, but was it logical? Well, not so much, maybe. But then, yeah, we started, orders started coming in, and we thought, hey, we got to get out ahead of this thing. Because it looks like it's going to be, I think at first we didn't think that so much. We kind of figured it'd be like kind of some of the little spikes we had in the past. But once we started seeing the way the orders were coming in and we were starting to get phone calls from media outlets, and stuff, hey, we really have to kind of ramp up here or we're going to not be able to

to handle this. And like I said before, we really work hard on trying to meet expectations. So we didn't want to be getting orders that we couldn't fill and having people be disappointed. If people were interested, we wanted it to be in their hands within a day or two. So we pulled some staff from other areas. We put in, I think, a Saturday or two, packing and shipping stuff. I just wanted to make sure that we could get the stuff out promptly. Did you, because I saw that the cubes were selling out on Amazon. Were you able to keep that inventory running? We've done our best there.

And part of the problem is it takes a while for Amazon to get stuff back into their system, right? And we can ship it out and they may not receive it and have it available for sale for a week or two. Amazon's had some real issues lately. They've, uh, and I get it with the supply chain stuff. They're dealing with people who have, you know, inventory. They're trying to get rid of or manage. So Amazon's been really cranking down the amount of stuff they allow you to send in at any one time. So we're looking at, hey, how do we keep all categories and all materials stocked according to what they have to do?

So we're doing lots of little shipments to them instead of big shipments that we'd like to do. So, I mean, even at the peak of the cube enthusiasm, which is probably a week or two ago now, the collectibles were still kind of like a mind. share of your business, like not the bulk of it by any means, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's always been a minority of what we do. But, you know, during that, during that peak time, it was, I wouldn't say it surpassed what we, we do normally, but it was becoming a more significant portion of it, certainly. What did Mr. Labonte think of this crypto bump?

You know, he, he unfortunately is not with us any longer. But you know what? he would have loved it because he was he was one of those kind of larger than life characters kind of bombastic and um he would have thought this was just great what you guys decided to accept bitcoin what was that process like i mean using the the payment processors and things like that it's i mean it's it's worked fine we had to obviously put a little bit of uh uh research into doing that because it's not something that we'd ever done before and frankly it's something we didn't know that much about. It's been, I mean, for us personally, it's, it's been fascinating for us to learn about

the crypto thing and NFTs and all these things that we just had no real idea what they were. So it's been a learning process for us. There was, there was suggestions to us. Hey, you ought to accept crypto for these things. And we agreed with that. We thought, hey, these guys are doing something for us. We ought to at least try to play in their sandbox, right? And we had, I think, during the height of the surge, we might have been getting 20% of our orders paid with Bitcoin. That's awesome. That's, that's, that's, that's tapered off a little bit now, but it was, it was significant enough that, that it was, it registered. And, I mean, did you liquidate it for a fiat or are you holding it on your balance sheet oh that's awesome the crypto the crypto bump is it

safe to say the crypto bump here has has created some bitcoins inside the midwest tungsten headquarters um hey certainly as a company um it's it's something that we're we're kind of into i don't know if anybody as an individual has gone all in on crypto yet um i mean i i i i certainly am giving it a lot, a lot more scrutiny than I had before. I just sort of, before, I just sort of dismissed it as this thing. I didn't really get. I didn't really understand it. But I've enjoyed researching it. And I can see, I can see doing some of it myself. So was this, when, when the press started calling, I think I saw, I mean, I know the WSJ did an article and certain other press outlets. I know Bloomberg covered.

it when you started getting these calls was this the first time midwest tungson had appeared in the financial press or had there been other other tungsten related stories that you'd featured in um you know the only time we've ever been featured anything was just maybe something minor as some background research for some we'd never been we'd never been the focus of any stories before so this was very new to us and did you because my my view is that sort of the journalists were being a little playful to pick up the story because I mean I don't know how newsworthy it is that you know people were buying a lot of cubes but yeah I mean what what was your attitude to that was it just entertainment or was it like you know cool to to get your name in print things like that

you know I think I think our attitude about the entire thing not just the press coverage but the entire thing has been sort of a fun thing, right? We look at it, obviously, it's business for us, but we understand sort of the tongue-in-cheek thing that's going on here, right? We understand this is a light-hearted thing, and people are enthusiastic about it, but we're not really solving any major world problems here, right? So we get that part of it, and we get the sort of the press interest in it.

You know, the press coverage, I think they look for interesting or unique angles, right? How do we get in? And maybe even for them, it's been helpful, right? Maybe they think, hey, how do I get the average Joe interested in crypto, right? What's an angle that somebody who's not into crypto can sort of relate to? Well, you know, here's this physical object and here's this kind of pet rock thing and people understand that. So maybe it's a segue into people understanding and being a little more interested in crypto. And I think it's kind of accomplished that. And it's that kind of odd quirky story that, you know, is a break from the normal heavy news that goes on that I think they like to put out there. So this is an important thing I have to ask because, you know, I read some articles about tungsten. And it turns out like, you know, you probably don't want to ingest it.

in like really any quantity, I think. I could have told you that, Nick. So technically speaking, it's not like a metal, but humans. It's like, well, it's what, toxic to humans, right? No, not really. You know, actually you require a little bit of it as a mineral. You're not going to, it's not going to cause you any harm handling it. It's not toxic in that way.

It's not like if you touch it and put your hand in your mouth. that's going to hurt you in any way. You know, really the only way you could hurt yourself with it would be to breathe in tungsten dust. Right? They considered that to be carcinogenic, but hey, almost any dust you breathe in, you know, sand like silica dust is carcinogenic, right?

And yet, you know, you go to the beach. So there's... Okay, so there's no health risks associated with handling the cube. Not at all. At least I hope not because I've been here on it for 35 years. You would know. I'm open. I'm okay.

But you guys deal with the dust, right? Or are you getting it and it's kind of powdery form, right? Yeah, well, I mean, obviously you take precautions about that, right? So nobody handles any tungsten powder that doesn't have respiratory equipment or anything like that. Once it's in solid form, it poses no threat to anybody, you know, unless you drop it on your foot. So when it comes to the cube versus sphere debate, there's been a robot. debate around that. I'm personally,

I see the merits in both shapes. Team Cube for what it's worth. I mean, the cube is less likely to roll off your desk and break your toe. So do you have a stance on that, Kevin? Hey, personally, I like the spheres. It's got a great hand feel to it. Wow. But I take your points, right?

And so, you know, maybe you have to do both. Maybe you don't be controversial. the meme more focuses on the cubes and I get that I like the spheres too I get that I wouldn't you're not going to catch me running down cubes at all what is the optimal cube size do you think for I'm holding the one my one inch cube in my hand right now but do you think there's an optimal size that really you know lets you really fully understand the density? Yeah, I mean, I think there's, there's, when you get to either extreme, either like really

small or really large, doesn't do as much good for you, right? Really large, you can't even pick the thing up. And really small, it's really not enough to kind of. Yeah. So I mean, I would say maybe like two, two and a half inch kind of the optimal size, right? You really get a feel for just how heavy this stuff is and you can start to imagine what it would be like if it was a larger piece. But yet you can still pick it up and manipulate it. And it's a size that you can hold in your hand. In terms of the NFT, how long, because the NFT stuff is, I would say,

a little more complex maybe than just accepting Bitcoin. So what was it like to, how did you kind of settle on the idea of doing this sort of cube redeemable NFT? We had a lot of inquiries about larger cubes. Right. So the largest we had we had offered was four inch. And we had some people inquire about five, six, and seven, which we were able to do. But by the time you're at a seven inch cube, that's 232 pounds. So that, you know, right there, you go from a four inch cube that's 42 pounds to a seven inch cube is 232. I mean, this stuff's getting heavy real quick. But yet people were still kind of interested in, hey, what's the biggest cube we can you can make for us what's the biggest you know good people just want to have bragging rights

so we we came up with that and then you know we told them how heavy it was and then there was just all kinds of logistical issues with actually delivering something that's that small and that heavy and the people who were interested were kind of at that point well gosh i'm really interested but there's i'd have no way of handling that i had no way of receiving it i have no way of doing that so So that was kind of the genesis of the NFT idea, right? It was something we could still create and that someone could still own in a sense, but they wouldn't have to deal with the hassle of actually physically taking possession of it. Tungsten Dow won the auction.

Have they made any statements as to whether they plan on redeeming the NFT for the, for the cube? or do you think they're just going to hold the NFT? Well, as far as I'm aware, up to this point, it seems as if they're going to hold the NFT. And, you know, what I don't understand about NFTs would fill a book, right? So, you know, I'm maybe not the person to ask about that. But it seems to me that it might have more value for them as an NFT than it would as an actual object. Yeah, I mean, I was just going to say, I think maybe I wasn't aware of this in the marketing of the NFT. But I think the value of that NFT has to be going up knowing that 14 inches is kind of where we're maxing out from a

manufacturing capability perspective. Well, we'd have to see trades in an, you know, and the NFC doesn't circulate. So we wouldn't know if the value went up unless they fractionalized it. And I wouldn't be surprised if that would occur. But we don't have any insight into that. They've not shared their plans with us. So have you physically. made the cube at this point? Yeah, we're working on it. Something of that magnitude takes a while

to plan for and put together. But it's in process. So we've had you for a long time here. You've been generous with your time. My last question is simply, are there other metals that you really like aside from tungsten? Yeah. I mean, look, I'm not a metal freak by any means, right? I don't spend a lot of time thinking about this. But I think there's a couple other interesting metals out there. I kind of like Bismuth. It makes some really great crystals. I don't know if you ever seen crystal in Bismith before,

but really unique kind of otherworldly sort of structures, right? It looks like something out of the board or something. Kind of, kind of neat. I like mercury, just because it's the only metal that's liquid at room temperature. That's kind of cool. And then there's this metal called gallium, which is actually a solid at room temperature, but has a real low melting point. They actually, there's been kind of a, you can probably find it on YouTube where they make spoons out of gallium and they melt when you stir your coffee with them. Right.

What about osmium? People keep bringing up osmium and saying it's heavier than tungsten. It's more dense than tungsten. Yeah, you know, it's true, right? I mean, tungsten is not the most dense metal out there. It's up there, but, you know, it's just ever so slightly less dense than gold. It's less dense than, you know, osmium would be your depleted uranium or platinum or something like that. But tungsten is the one that you could actually afford and isn't going to kill you if you handle it.

So there's some to be something for that. Yeah, yeah, right? You don't want your hobby to be done. or too expensive, right? I mean, the coolest thing to me is thinking about how the physical and atomic properties of these things cause them to be, to have industrial applications or monetary applications. Because tungsten of gold, same density, but gold is shinier. I'll give gold credit for that.

And it's more malleable and it's just more manipulable. So it's suitable as monetary good. However, Tynxton, on the other hand, totally opposite industrial qualities. And so then it gets all these industrial use cases and it has no monetary premium. Yeah, you know, it doesn't exist as a pure metal in nature, right? So gold obviously discovered and used much earlier because it was very easy to refine and it stood out because of its coloration and stuff. So early adoption, right, gave it this place.

And it's easy to turn into jewelry and all those fun little things that people like to have. So I certainly see the value in gold and I wouldn't, I wouldn't think to imply that tungsten has equal value. But it is important. I mean, it's, it's in a lot of things that, you know, you just don't know about. Do you happen to know what the quote-unquote market cap of tungsten would be if you took the above-ground stock and multiplied it by the value per ounce? No, I really don't. I really don't. I'll have to figure that out. Well, that wraps it from us, I think. This has been very informative. I feel like I know so much about Tungsen now. Obviously, we're fans of your product. So thank you for creating those. Sure. I'm also glad to hear that it's not toxic because I thought it might be.

You're safe. You're good to go. And hey, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciated it. And thanks for everything you've done for the company and just for bringing awareness to the metal. Appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, credit is due to tungsten at the end of the day. It's just great metal, great properties, blows all the other metals out of the water, in my opinion.