Inside the ICE House x Las Vegas: M2i Global President & CEO Alberto Rosende

**Lance** (0:12)
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** (0:24)
It's a pleasure, and thanks for having me, Lance. I really appreciate the invitation.

**Lance** (0:27)
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, can you 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** (0:49)
Yeah, the focus of M2i Global is to create a responsible, resilient and transparent critical mineral supply chain for the US, 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. If you remember and you go back to COVID, we remember that many automobile lines actually stopped running because they didn't have the chips for it.
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.
So you can imagine the demand that we have for 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, right? We can't stand in front of a machine that's still analog. 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. And 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** (2:58)
Again, 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** (3:18)
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 lights so you had enough wire 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** (3:39)
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 people think about it, right? Why do these minerals matter so much right now to that?