Lance Glinn:
From Lake Las Vegas here in Nevada, welcome in to another episode of the Inside the ICE House podcast. Now, today's guest is Alberto Rosende. He is the CEO of M2i Global. Alberto, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Alberto Rosende:
It's a pleasure, and thanks for having me, Lance.
Lance Glinn:
Absolutely.
Alberto Rosende:
I really appreciate the invitation.
Lance Glinn:
Absolutely. Pleasure to have you here. So M2i is operating in a space that most people don't even realize is really undergoing massive change right now and is really of the utmost importance to a lot of different things that impact our daily lives. So as we start our conversation, take us through M2i Global at its core, the objective you're working to advance and the mission that the company is taking on.
Alberto Rosende:
Yeah. The focus of M2i Global is to create a responsible, resilient, and transparent critical mineral supply chain for the U.S., its allies, and its partners for the purposes of national security and economic security. So at the end of the day, most folks, like you say, don't really understand that critical minerals really are at the forefront of everything that we do. We live in a modern society that depends on innovation and continued growth of the energy grid. We are all focused on the appliances that we have, either in our hand as our cell phone or at home. All of our appliances are smart appliances.
So even when they weren't smart, they still required an awful lot of stuff, things like copper and other alloys, let alone now that they're smart and they're into the digital age so they're connected. So that means that they need all of those advanced chips and so forth. And if you remember and you go back to COVID, we remember that many automobile lines actually stopped-
Lance Glinn:
Yeah.
Alberto Rosende:
... running because they didn't have the chips for it. And I know we did an analysis and people would say, "Well, how many chips are actually in an aircraft right now?" Well, I know the F-35 has like 2,000 chips, but something like the BMW 7 series, since it's so engineered, it has something like five or 6,000 chips.
Lance Glinn:
Wow.
Alberto Rosende:
So you can imagine the demand that we have for-
Lance Glinn:
Yeah.
Alberto Rosende:
... those critical minerals that make up all of those different form factors that allow us to live in the society that we live in now and to look towards the future. And the thing is that we now demand that of ourselves. We can't stand in front of a machine that's still analog.
Lance Glinn:
True.
Alberto Rosende:
We want it to be smart. We want it to drive us. We want it to do all those things. And so all of the satellites that help run those GPS systems that allow those autonomous vehicles for operating, whether it's the vehicle that's driving you to school or to your office or on an agricultural site with autonomous agricultural equipment running without anybody in them or on a mine or a construction site, same thing. So we live in an environment that demands everything to be smart, and the only way these items become smart is to be connected. The only way to be connected is to have the critical minerals to be able to develop the infrastructure that allows them to be that way.
Lance Glinn:
Yeah. And I think you really hit the nail on the head right there because you said throughout the course of your answer. All of these different use cases for critical minerals that the average person like myself who isn't involved in the space don't really think about. I would say that the average person, in fact, critical minerals rarely, if ever, crosses their mind. Maybe it crosses their mind if they're watching the news and they hear about it.
Alberto Rosende:
Absolutely. At one point in time, if you go back to, let's say, when I was a kid, the only thing that we worried about as far as a critical mineral thing was being able to turn on the light so you had enough wire-
Lance Glinn:
Sure, sure.
Alberto Rosende:
... to connect everything. But if you think about it now, you go into a home, you turn on your lights with Alexa or Siri or whatever platform you're using, and it's all connected; it's all wired, and it's all smart.
Lance Glinn:
And so, like I said, we hear this phrase as the average person, "Don't really think too much about it." It is still abstract. Sure, if we think about it, we do think about it in the sense of national security more than anything else. We don't think about it as it relates to our iPhone or as it relates to the car we're driving or anything that we're doing. But why do these, and on the topic of national security, because again, that's, I feel like how most
Alberto Rosende:
Sure.
Lance Glinn:
... people think about it. Why do these minerals matter so much right now to that?
Alberto Rosende:
Well, there's several applications if you look at, first of all, when you're using a chip in your cell phone or in your TV, it doesn't have to withstand all of the pressures and the stresses of multiple levels of gravity as a satellite does or as a rocket does or as a missile does or as a supersonic aircraft does. So you can imagine that those chips need to be resilient. They need to be durable and so you need different types of materials for them. So even though when you look at on the grand scheme of things and you look at what percentage of our economy is really devoted to our national defense versus everything else, it's really small if you think about it. I mean, we were talking about a missile the other day; a missile might cost a million or $2 million, and the amount of gallium that's in the mineral is probably the equivalent of, let's say, $500.
But without that $500 spent, that $2 million missile won't run, it won't fly, and it won't get anywhere because we want it to be a smart missile. We want it to be a precise missile, right? We're not just dropping gravity bombs any more like we did in World War II. So that's why those critical minerals become fundamental to our ability to continue to innovate and move forward our national defense systems. We don't tolerate mistakes, and we need to be able to intercept missiles. We need to be able to understand what's going on. We want to be able to have the intelligence, whether it's surveillance or reconnaissance well out in front of our frontline. And so in order to be able to do that and to see far and to interpret far, we need to be able to have those chips and all of those other types of materials available to us so that we can really have the best national defense that we can have.
Lance Glinn:
And so much critical mineral supply is abroad. Why is it so important to have a strategic reserve here in the U.S.?
Alberto Rosende:
Well, I think that one of the important things that we can think about is we know that if adversaries control the flow of critical minerals, they can cut it off at any point in time. I know that you're too young and you don't remember this, but you can go back to the oil crisis in the '70s. What happened then? Well, our oil was cut off. You probably don't remember whether you were odd or even licensed tag or whether you were in a line...
Lance Glinn:
I don't. I can tell you that.
Alberto Rosende:
Where you were in line.
Lance Glinn:
Let me tell you this. I'm not even 30 yet, so that-
Alberto Rosende:
I know, I know.
Lance Glinn:
... just puts into perspective what-
Alberto Rosende:
So you're younger than both of my kids.
Lance Glinn:
... I do and don't remember.
Alberto Rosende:
So anyway, but I remember those days where you were in line for a long, long time just trying to get gas. And so in order to prevent other people controlling our future and our destiny, we need to be able to have that resilient and responsible and dependable supply chain of critical minerals. Now we know that everything is supply and demand and other things can happen. We could have another pandemic where even if we controlled it, there might be a disruption in the flow.
Lance Glinn:
Sure.
Alberto Rosende:
And so what you want to do is you want to even those out, such as we have the strategic petroleum reserve that the government runs, and they're getting ready to tap into it now, right? Where they can then introduce that petroleum to help kind of flatten out some of those peaks and valleys of the actual commodity. Same thing with critical minerals. When you look at what happened during COVID where a lot of auto line manufacturing lines actually had to stop functioning because they didn't have the chips. Well, we don't want to do that because we know that that's extremely costly, not only in the fact that they won't have the goods on time to sell, but it's costly in every single way. When you shut down a line and start it back up, that's expensive.
Lance Glinn:
Sure.
Alberto Rosende:
When people are put out of work, that's expensive because they don't have the flow of cash and then somebody has to support them. So it all gets disrupted, and it really is. It's kind of like a... I think of those things when all the dominoes fall.
Lance Glinn:
It's a domino effect, yeah.
Alberto Rosende:
It's a domino effect.
Lance Glinn:
One impacts the other.
Alberto Rosende:
And so in order to prevent those, you want to have those types of supplies. And I know that we all have gone through the economics of a just-in-time type of supplies, but that's when you have a free-flowing and uncontrolled supply chain that you can focus in on. But when those are limited and they're being controlled by an adversary, they can turn off the spigot very, very easily, and then we're in a heap of trouble, especially if our national defense depends on it or some of our key economic focus. If you look at what some of the other underdeveloped nations are suffering through in their energy grid with blackouts, well, we suffer blackouts in the States too when we have issues with our grid, and all of us depend on the free flow of energy.
I remember the difference between my two deployments, one in 2005, one in 2008, and the demand for energy was so different where soldiers were staying because they didn't have their Xbox with them. They didn't have computers, everybody, and so forth. But in just three short years, the demand probably quadrupled in the amount of energy that you needed to provide. So our generators had to be able to provide that. And it's the same thing that we're seeing in the States now with our manufacturing and innovation really kicking up, data centers growing up everywhere because of demand from artificial intelligence and large language models and so forth. We need to be able to support not only the existing grid to maintain it but be able to expand it. So that's why free flow and controlled critical mineral supply that's under our control is really paramount.
Lance Glinn:
And so you say "under our control," and one thing I find super interesting regarding M2i Global is this focus on transparency, right?
Alberto Rosende:
Yes.
Lance Glinn:
The ability to track and trace these critical minerals so you know exactly what you're getting, essentially. Dive into that for us.
Alberto Rosende:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if we can go back a few years, the traceability of critical minerals, or I should say the traceability of your own supply chain within your manufacturing process, was important, not only to understand where it could fail, because if you're in the supply chain business, you just need to make sure that you have the right metal or element to be able to go into the manufacturing of the widget that you provide. So if you don't have that level of understanding and be able to see deeply through your supply chain, you don't know where the vulnerabilities exist. So we started to look at the traceability of your supply chain, knowing every single junction from, like, if you were to look at agriculture from farm to table, where are all the points that that supply chain could fail? Well, in terms of having that traceability, we need to understand where it comes from.
There's other factors that feed into responsibly mining or responsibly fulfilling a supply chain, and that means that we're not using forced labor or child labor. We're not abusing the environment; we're taking care of the environment. And if we know where something comes from, then we can attribute the process that it took to bring that to the table, if you will, or bring that into the supply chain to that particular organization. We need to be responsible in the way that we manage our water supply. Communities are impacted nonstop, all of the time, by irresponsible manufacturing and industrial processes that aren't taking care of the water table and the water supply. So we realize that all of those are very limited. I mean, we don't have a free-flow supply of freshwater for everybody to use, so we need to be able to manage it. Same thing with our land.
We need to be able to manage our land in a way that allows it to be there for the posterity sake. But there's also other requirements because when we look at the irresponsible processing of material, that's one that we want to make sure that we track to the source so we know that that's not happening, but we also need to understand that there are regulatory requirements in understanding that we cannot buy from a particular country for whatever reason. I mean, we look at the tariffs that President Trump invoked when he took over in January and he started to go through the process. It became very, very difficult to determine what a final good was and what the source was of that particular good. So you needed to be able to understand it and be transparent about where the parts and pieces came from. The other thing is if we're building national defense systems, we need to understand where the vulnerability lies because not only are we trying to defend ourselves from a potential aggressor, but we're also trying to ensure that we are controlling everything that makes up that national defense system.
Lance Glinn:
Sure.
Alberto Rosende:
And without knowing where it comes from, there might be a vulnerability that exists. So our technology is really focused on being able to capture all of the change of custody of that particular element from the time it comes out of the ground all the way comes into industry, and it's also capturing it physically. We're working with several technology companies to integrate into our digital capture process to be able to place physical tag-ins when and where we need to so that you can measure not only that that's the original material that came out of the ground, but that it hasn't been tampered with or combined with material from somewhere else. Because at the end of the day, those kinds of processes can occur as that's transiting; you can expand the amount that's transiting by adding material from somewhere else that wasn't allowed to come into the supply chain to begin with.
So it's very important to be transparent. And if we look at some of the other governments, you look at the EU and you look at the UK and even ourselves, we have specific rules for certain material that comes from certain places to ensure that it was actually obtained in a responsible way and not using unfair labor practices and the like.
Lance Glinn:
And what does private and public collaboration look like? Like the private sector, public sector, what does collaboration look like? You're working with the federal government, right? What does that look like to make sure that one, the transparency is there, but two, also that the mission of M2i Global is being achieved?
Alberto Rosende:
Sure. We can look at, if we want to, a couple of the examples that were just established in the critical mineral process. And we know that there's an awful lot of energy and attention to this because really the future of our nation and its economy depends on it. But if you look at the two projects that were just put in place, Project Vault and then FORGE, FORGE is a private-public partnership with other nations to be able to provide critical minerals in a responsible way, but also establishes a methodology that allows us to liberate ourselves, if you will, from the overall control that some of the other nations have, and you know which ones I'm talking about now, where they can crash markets and they-
Lance Glinn:
Sure.
Alberto Rosende:
... can dump material in at a whim to really drop the eventual return that then forces other companies to go out of business the what kind of companies that we need for them to stay in business. So these two projects working hand in hand with private manufacturing companies, the original equipment manufacturers, where they can really project out where they need that supply to be at a certain point in the future and then be able to support the funding of a privately funded mechanism to establish that supply for them in the future. And then they pay as they go; they pull the material out, they pay it back, and so forth.
And so I think that that's the only way that we can really look forward to moving. We need to be able to work hand in hand with the government, both with the actions that they take, the policies that they implement, and whatever regulatory environment they decide is appropriate with what we can do on the manufacturing side, and as a supply company and a technology tracking company, we need to be able to work together to make it happen. We all have the same goals at the end of the day. We want to make sure that our economy continues to be strong. We want to make sure that we have a strong national defense, and we want to make sure that we can really provide the kind of posterity for our nation that we all really want to enjoy in the future.
Lance Glinn:
So your resume is incredibly eclectic. You spent years in payments at various NYC-listed companies, I should mention too.
Alberto Rosende:
Right.
Lance Glinn:
Visa, American Express. You also obviously spent years serving our country for the U.S. Army. You talked about your two deployments earlier. What sparked your interest just in critical minerals specifically coming from that background?
Alberto Rosende:
Well, I could tell you that; I always say I had two careers in the army because of 9/11 and post-9/11. Before 9/11, I was the typical Army reserve or reserve component soldier: one week in a month, two weeks a year, and a couple of weeks every three years or so to go back to the schoolhouse to continue to progress. Once 9/11 hit, then my career shifted because I spent the last 20 years in uniform; I spent 10 on active duty in various capacities. My final couple of jobs were on active duty. One of them was as the chief of staff of the Army Reserve staff. So really I looked at everything that had to be procured and so forth. I was the guy signing the contracts and all of that kind of stuff. That led then to my last job as the commanding general of the 63rd Readiness Division, where we basically cut up the country in four.
There's one for each of those. Mine was in California, and I was responsible for all the states from Arkansas to California with three major pillars of responsibility. One was all of the human resources support, support of soldiers and their families. The second piece was all of the maintenance support for all of that equipment, and we did it at different levels. One was a general kind of support over the organic mechanics that units had, and one was really just to kind of care for maintenance of equipment that didn't fit basically in the small space that Army Reserve centers had. And so that required not only overseeing maintenance of equipment, but everything else that supports that maintenance of equipment, whether it's the tools that they use, whether it's the facilities that they're housed in, and then all of the supplies that go into maintaining vehicles and the like weapons, and whether it's rolling stock or non-rolling stock.
So I had a very logistic kind of a view of how that went. The third one was facilities in and of themselves. So any Army reserve facility, any real property in any of those states were part of my responsibility to maintain, sustain, and project in the future where we had to acquire and build something new. And so that gave me a really broad view of the logistical support and an understanding of that supply chain that allows you to actually deliver on your mission. And as a combat engineer, we're responsible for an awful lot of equipment that we use as tools of the trade in the combat engineer environment. And we always were the ones focused on all of those supply chains, if you will, in providing the fuel and all of the other fluids and liquids, the hydraulic fluids and all of that kind of stuff, including all of the spare parts because our equipment needed to stay up.
So all of that gave me a really broad view of that logistics. And when I was approached about coming to work for M2i Global, it just was a very natural connection to understand that everything in our country depends on the initial supply chain that provides for that manufacturing process.
Lance Glinn:
Yeah. So I was going to ask, right? So clearly as a combat engineer, that introduced you to really, I would say, a lot of the supply chain vulnerabilities that we see and the need to be prepared and the real strategic stakes of the critical minerals industry.
Alberto Rosende:
Absolutely. In both of the theaters that I was in, both in Afghanistan and Iraq as engineers, we were always managing basically the lumberyard, if you call it that in civilian terms. So not only all of the plywood and so forth that we use to do our construction, but everything else that we use, whether it was concrete or aggregate or sand or whatever. So we were always focused on projecting out to the future, understanding where we needed to acquire those goods, what was the length of time it took us to get the main country to be able to execute on our mission set. So that was definitely a very firm foundation that I had for my entire career in the Army.
Lance Glinn:
So Alberto, as we begin to wrap up our conversation, if we were to fast-forward a few years, what will success look like for you and M2i Global? Paint us a picture of where you hope the company goes and the impact that you want it to have.
Alberto Rosende:
Yeah. The way I see it is we're always taught that leaders need to be able to look into the future. But there was one key point that in a book that I read where you actually go into the future and then you look back from the future to chart the path to get there.
Lance Glinn:
Okay.
Alberto Rosende:
And so the way I see it is looking into the future, M2i Global has to be successful in the technology that it develops to be able to track, trace, and be able to account for our critical mineral supply. I don't see that as just something that M2i will use, but it's a technology that will support the supply chain writ large. We also know that if I look into the future, 10 to 15 years, I'll see what those top 12 critical minerals are, and we'll have a free flow of critical mineral supplies, whether they're domestically produced or through our allies that will allow us to process and refine those critical minerals and bring to the marketplace.
I see M2i Global having a very firm hand in those top 10 or 12 critical minerals to be able to provide those to the field. So I would say that we have a truly established critical mineral supply chain that's transparent, responsible, and resilient. We'll have the refineries and processors in place to be able to turn the critical mineral into the form factor that's required for its use and introduction into industry, and that we'll have that supported reserve, if you will, or repository of critical minerals that will help the United States be able to surpass any kind of disruption of that critical mineral flow.
Lance Glinn:
Well, Alberto, I really appreciate the fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining us Inside the ICE House here in Las Vegas.
Alberto Rosende:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Lance.
Lance Glinn:
Absolutely.
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