Cliff's Notes

Cliff sits down with Markus Ewecker, who leads Tungco GmbH and Tungco's HSS Recycling division, for a conversation about 30 years in the scrap business and 11 years building something from almost nothing.

Markus started as a trainee at ELG in 1996 after his mom spotted the opening at the family breakfast table, and he never left the industry.

They talk about the wildest stretch the tungsten market has seen in years (Markus calls it a hurricane), why he believes you start with the foundation and never the roof, what is actually inside a high speed steel M2 (including about 6% tungsten), and whether tungsten substitution will push business from carbide toward HSS.

Plus: Famous Harvey, the sweetest dog on earth, and the Toronto “yes” that started it all. 

Hosted by Cliff Nance of Tungco — where hard work meets honest talk about leadership, innovation, and what it takes to build something that lasts.

Tungco CEO Cliff Nance sits down with Dr. Hady Seyeda, CEO of HC Starck — one of the world's leading tungsten processors — recorded live at the ITIA conference in Berlin.

Dr. Hady Seyeda has a PhD in solid state chemistry, joined HC Starck in R&D in 1998, and has worked his way to the top of one of the most technically demanding businesses in the tungsten supply chain. In this episode they cover HC Starck's 50 million euro recycling expansion in Goslar, why China's new dual-use classification has cut tungsten export volumes by more than 50%, the US tungsten scrap export ban and what it signals to the rest of the world, a frank reality check on Western mining timelines, and two emerging tungsten demand stories most people haven't connected yet: fusion reactors and AI semiconductor chips.

Plus a BMW M5 cold open and a solid state chemistry lesson nobody asked for but everyone needed. Tags 

Hosted by Cliff Nance of Tungco — where hard work meets honest talk about leadership, innovation, and what it takes to build something that lasts.

Recorded live at Churchill Downs during Scrap Expo in Louisville, Cliff sits down with Jerilyn Bristow, executive director of MI2 — the Metals Industry Innovation Initiative of Kentucky.

Here's a number that should stop you in your tracks: Kentucky's metals industry is three times the size of its bourbon industry. Three times. And almost nobody outside the industry knows it. Jerilyn breaks down what MI2 is doing to change that, from the Million Cans Project tackling Kentucky's 15% aluminum recycling rate to the InnoSearch contest connecting industry problems with real solutions.

Plus: Project 74, tungsten in every chip you own, and what a 15% boost to the domestic defense industrial base actually means. Bourbon and cigars to close, naturally. 

Hosted by Cliff Nance of Tungco — where hard work meets honest talk about leadership, innovation, and what it takes to build something that lasts.

Tungco CEO Cliff Nance turns the mic on his son Evan Nance, recorded live at the ITIA conference in Berlin — Evan's first.

Fresh out of Belmont University with a finance degree, he’s moved out fo the house, owns his own place with two roommates paying rent, and now working full time at Tungco.

In this episode they cover what it actually feels like to go from the classroom to the real world, why Mike Rowe's 'work smarter not harder' takedown at a defense conference landed so hard, and — most importantly — how the zinc reclaim process at Project 74 actually works, explained by the guy running it day to day. A six-hour runway delay, a motorcycle story, and a closing that'll remind you to call your kid. 

Hosted by Cliff Nance of Tungco — where hard work meets honest talk about leadership, innovation, and what it takes to build something that lasts.

Season 4 opens in Berlin, recorded live at the ITIA conference — which sold out for the first time in its history, turning people away at the door.

Cliff sits down with Ioannis Kallinikos, a Greek-born metals veteran now based in Dubai, who heads tungsten trading at Traxys — one of the world's largest tungsten concentrate traders. Ioannis Kallinikos has 20 years in the metals industry and over 12 in tungsten specifically, and he gives one of the most globally informed assessments of where the market stands: tungsten is having its day in the sun, but the growing price gap between China and the West is quietly creating a demand substitution problem that nobody in the industry can afford to ignore. 

Plus: flying concentrate across the world, conflict minerals compliance, Dubai vs. Singapore, and why Emirates wins hands down. 

Learn more at www.tungco.com

Hosted by Cliff Nance of Tungco — where hard work meets honest talk about leadership, innovation, and what it takes to build something that lasts.

Cliff sits down with the man who started it all — his father, Steve Nance, founder of Tungco. It's one of the most personal and wide-ranging conversations on the podcast: the story of how Steve met his wife Nan at Tungco's trade show booth in 2005 (a wine glass full of tungsten pellets, a borrowed business card, and a fished-out entry), the early days of building Tungco from nothing, and a frank look at what decades of experience in the tungsten industry says about where the critical metals race between the US and China is really headed. Plus: an F1 car in the booth, a tire-changing competition, and a closing that'll make you reach for the phone to call your own dad.

Hosted by Cliff Nance of Tungco — where hard work meets honest talk about leadership, innovation, and what it takes to build something that lasts.

Cliff sits down with Phil Rafle of 21st Century Programming — makers of ROM, the Recycling Operations Manager software that Tungco has relied on for over 20 years. Phil has been with the company for 22 of its 26 years, and this episode is equal parts software deep-dive and long-term partnership retrospective.

They cover how Tungco went from running on Excel to a full ROM implementation signed nervously at an ISRI convention, what ROM Infinite brings to the next generation of scrap operations, how GPS geofencing and AI are already changing how recyclers run their yards, and why the honest answer about AI grading material is: it only sees the top of the pile. Plus a very raspy Phil who sounds, as Cliff puts it, soft and buttery. 

Hosted by Cliff Nance of Tungco — where hard work meets honest talk about leadership, innovation, and what it takes to build something that lasts.

Cliff sits down with Niki Spies of Stainless Steel Midwest — a longtime industry friend and 19-year veteran of the stainless and nickel alloys space — for a conversation that puts two very different metals businesses side by side.

SSM moves about 16,000 tons of bulk steel a month. The entire global tungsten industry produces about 140,000 to 150,000 tons a year. Niki breaks down how stainless grades work, why nickel pricing affects everything from aerospace to your kitchen refrigerator, how tariffs are hitting the scrap business (or not), and what ReMA has meant for keeping operators informed in a fast-moving policy environment.

Two Kentuckians, 19 years of shared history, and a Derby invitation at the close. 

Hosted by Cliff Nance of Tungco — where hard work meets honest talk about leadership, innovation, and what it takes to build something that lasts.

Cliff sits down with Tungco's COO Debbie West for an inside look at what it means to step into one of the most demanding seats in a nearly 60-year-old business.

Debbie has almost three decades in the tungsten industry and she breaks down the difference between being a director of operations and being a COO, why Project 74 has gone from concept to reality, what the zinc reclaim process actually looks like, and why standing up an APT plant is not as simple as the internet would have you believe.

Plus: the chemistry behind sodium tungstate vs. APT — explained without a PhD.

Hosted by Cliff Nance of Tungco — where hard work meets honest talk about leadership, innovation, and what it takes to build something that lasts.

Cliff sits down with a longtime friend and one of the most respected names in the scrap recycling industry — Phil Rosenberg, Senior Executive and commercial director of the metals and alloy division at ICD Group.

Phil is fifth generation in a family scrap business that traces back to the late 1800s, when his great-great-grandfather arrived in Chicago with nothing and started a rags business that grew into one of the city's largest non-ferrous scrapyards.

Phil opens up about his son Jason joining the industry as the sixth generation, the LLC name that made an entire room of family tear up, and decades of buying scrap the old-fashioned way — driving I-95 from Maine to Miami, ripping pages out of the Yellow Pages, and building relationships that still define how he does business today. 

Plus: ICD's niche, high-dollar world of nickel, cobalt, tungsten, molybdenum, and titanium alloys for aerospace. 

Hosted by Cliff Nance of Tungco — where hard work meets honest talk about leadership, innovation, and what it takes to build something that lasts.