Rare Earth Talent Scramble Lures 86-Year-Old From Retirement

**Carol Massar** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Carol Massar** (0:14)
This is a story we really wanted to bring to you. It's a great read, it's among the most read. We know the US is really trying to rebuild its domestic supply chain for rare earth elements. We know rare earth plants are complicated, they're expensive to build, especially in the US. It's different from what we see in some other parts of the world. In the US, you've got permitting timelines far longer than mining-friendly countries that you see over in Asia and South America.

**Lisa Mateo** (0:40)
Yeah, and this is an interesting story because finding talent to run those. This is 86-year-old former retiree Jack Lifton. They're bringing him out of retirement to do this. So we want to go to Bloomberg's Jason Lorinc. You're Bloomberg News, North American Metals Mining Reporter. You spoke to him for this story on Bloomberg. I have to ask you, first off, how did you find him?

**Jacob Lorinc** (1:01)
Well, so interestingly, I mean, I speak to a lot of people in the rare earths business and a few of them had mentioned to me that there's an interesting trend going on, which is that companies are pulling people out of retirement to help on the engineering side. And there are actually a few firms that have employed people who are over 75, some of them over 80, like this guy Jack, who are now working. They've got plenty to do. And so I was asking around, I was like, can you put me in touch with one of them? And eventually that led me to this guy.

**Carol Massar** (1:28)
Tell us about Jack Lifton. He sounds like a character.

**Jacob Lorinc** (1:30)
So Jack Lifton is 86 years old. He started his career in 1962 We had not yet put Men on the Moon. And at the time, he was helping process and separate Europium, which is a very specific niche type of rare earth element that was used for color television. It made television no longer black and white. That was like his first job. He worked out of California. He moved to Michigan. He worked in the auto sector for a little bit. He was really there at the birth of the rare earth industry globally. It was at a time when consumer electronics were really taking off, and they needed these people to do this kind of stuff. And he was like literally one of the first people there.

**Carol Massar** (2:09)
So when did he go out of retirement, or when did he actually retire?

**Jacob Lorinc** (2:13)
So he retires. It's funny. His career basically paces like the peaks and valleys of the American rare earths industry. So he retires in 1999, around the time that the rare earths business in the US is starting to crumble. You know, China is becoming a big power player in critical minerals. A lot of the stuff is going overseas. His pension is looking good. He's made enough money.
He calls it a day.

**Lisa Mateo** (2:34)
That's bad. So why is it so hard to find, Tell me, where are these engineers? Are there no more coming up in the pipeline? Is this not the cool thing to study in school anymore?

**Jacob Lorinc** (2:44)
I mean, that's really it. In part, it's not the cool thing to study in school anymore. People don't study mining engineering, and Jack had a lot of colorful and unprintable things to say about that.
But I mean, really, if you just take a 40,000 foot view of this, the US outsourced this business decades ago, and that means that along with the actual mines and the processing plants, they also outsourced the talent.

**Carol Massar** (3:10)
It's such a bigger shift in terms of our country. I think about my dad was an engineer, worked on the space program. My team gets tired of me saying it, but everybody was an engineer. If you go back to a certain generation, there were so many having said that, okay, where are all the engineers? Where do we find them globally? Are they in China? Are they over? Where are they?

**Jacob Lorinc** (3:31)
Predominantly China. Today, really the biggest employer of rare earth engineers in the world, it's the People's Republic of China.
I mean, they have spent decades really building out a humongous workforce for this stuff to the point that in China today, you can go to school, like there are schools specifically for rare earth engineering. That's not something that there is anywhere else in the world. You can't find that in the US. I think there are maybe about a dozen accredited mining schools in the US. But there, not only do they have mining schools, they have schools that have huge specialty programs specifically for rare earths. And so to this day, that's where they all are.