The U.S. Can’t Build AI Without These Materials

It can take more than 15 years to permit and build a new mine in the United States - yet nearly every modern technology we rely on, from smartphones to fighter jets to AI data centers, depends on a steady supply of critical minerals. In this episode, Erik Torenberg is joined in the studio by Turner Caldwell, founder of Mariana Minerals, along with American Dynamism general partner Erin Price-Wright and partner Ryan McEntush. Turner spent nearly a decade at Tesla, working his way upstream from factory design to battery materials and mining. Now, he’s building a new kind of mining and refining company - vertically integrated and software-first- designed to meet the demands of our industrial future. We get into why the industry is so broken, what it actually takes to turn rocks into usable materials, and how the U. S. can rebuild its capacity to mine, refine, and manufacture the things that matter most. Timecodes: 00:00 Introduction 00:53 The Importance of Critical Minerals 01:54 The Mining Process Explained 04:05 Challenges in the Mining Industry 05:46 Career Paths in Mining 06:40 Personal Journey and Insights 11:16 Tesla's Vertical Integration 12:47 Geopolitical & Market Dynamics 16:24 Technological Innovations in Mining 20:47 Industry Challenges & Opportunities 28:19 Mariana's Product & Thesis in Construction and Mining 29:30 Leveraging Technology in Mining 32:02 Automating Chemical Processing & Optimizing Refining Operations 35:25 Challenges in Scaling & Commissioning Refineries 36:55 Deciding What to Build & Where to Partner 38:05 Supply Chain & Commercial Deployment of New Technologies 40:20 Venture Capital & the Mining Industry 42:59 Critical Minerals & Their Importance 47:45 Permitting & Regulatory Challenges in the US 53:46 International Strategy & Future Goals 54:44 Conclusion: Rebuilding Infrastructure & Capability Resources: Find Turner on X :https://x.com/tbc415 Find Erin on X: https://x.com/espricewright Find Ryan on X: https://x.com/rmcentush Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16z Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/ Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

• 0:00Speaker 0

  Critical minerals fundamentally underpin everything that we do every day. It's in your phone, you have verse in your airpods, your screens, your laptops, everything that we use, how they're refined and how they're mined. That all happens in the background. This

• 0:13Speaker 2

  is the intersection of geopolitical urgency and tech. We need more zinc. Now we have technology that can actually go and disrupt this. Hard tech companies working in sort of dirty spaces, willing to go out in the field.

• 0:27Speaker 1

  There's not that many massive markets left that have been sort of like largely untapped by technology and mining sort of screens one of the largest markets in the world.

• 0:36Speaker 2

  So now is the time to build this company.

• 0:48Speaker 3

  So Turner, uh you're coming out of stealth with 85 million dollars raised. Why don't we get into what are critical minimum minerals and why do they matter? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

• 0:57Speaker 0

  Critical minerals fundamentally uh underpin everything that we do every day. Um that's why we're personally really excited about it. But it's not just aerospace, energy, renewable energy, battery energy storage systems, uh the massive growth in AI that's happened in the last, you know, 12, 18, 24 months. Um it's also uh in-defense, obviously. But it's also everything that we use every day, right? Like you have rare it's in your phone, you have various in your airpods, your screens, your laptops. Um so it really does it like crosses everything that we use. Um but where they're produced and um how they're refined and how they're mined, um, that all happens in the background. Um so uh it's something that really does need to be brought to the foreground, something that we need to support uh more and more of.

• 1:43Speaker 0

  You know, it's a long chain to go from digging something up to go all the way through to something that can actually be deployed in a in an end product. And so excited to talk about that.

• 1:55Speaker 3

  Well, I don't get into how do we turn rocks into batteries or magnets and why is that so important.

• 2:00Speaker 0

  Yeah. So it starts with mining, obviously. Well, it actually starts with expiration. Um but you gotta find the rocks. You gotta find the rocks in the first place, which which is hard to do. And there's a lot of awesome companies that are working on trying to condense that timeline. But once you do find them, you have to get that asset or that resource permitted to extract. You develop a mining plan, you have to mine it. Um when that rock, those rocks come to the surface, you have to separate ore from waste, um, which is something that is not as trivial as people might expect. Um and then you go through a concentration step. So the ores will come to the surface, they'll be you know less than one percent, less definitely less than five percent concentration unless you have this work world class deposit. Um you'll typically go through a concentrating step. So that can be mechanical, it can be thermal, it can be chemical, and that gives you an intermediate product.

• 2:46Speaker 0

  And those those intermediate products kind of move all over the world uh and typically go to refining refining assets. The refining operation effectively goes from anything that is like a 10% concentrate to a 50% intermediate product uh and turns into a high purity metal. Um then you go into a specialty chemical. Um, and so that's this intermediate product where you go through another chemical process to either make a metal sulfate or metal hydroxide salt. Um then you will convert that into an engineered material, um, which is the next step. Uh and that, you know, in electrochemical systems and batteries, um, you'll have cathode materials who have anode materials, and they're the morphology and the electrochemical performance in the system is really important. Um then you're ready to deploy into a battery cell, and then you'll go into a module and then you'll go into a pack and then you'll go into a car or go into an uh stationary storage product.

• 3:32Speaker 0

  Um on the magnet side of things, you know, similarly you'll get to uh a refined um a refined rare earth product. Um it's a long list of rarest, they often get bundled into like one group, but it's important to kind of like break them out. And then the common way of making uh magnets, there's a few uh flow sheets, but um you'll slurry it, you'll get the right blend of of the different rares that you're trying to put in. You'll cast that, you'll center it, um, and then you'll go through a fairly intricate and like high precision machining process to get the geometry that you want with the tolerances that you need before you can deploy that into magnet magnets uh and eventually into motors. Aaron Powell

• 4:06Speaker 2

  How specific is it for sp uh a given site uh given like concentration and other sort of waste products? Like how how dynamic is it? Like is is one rare earth wine going to be similar process to another, or is there going to be very sort of bespoke setup.

• 4:20Speaker 0

  Yeah, it's it's very bespoke. Um and it's actually part of the problem and what makes kind of the minerals industry so complicated is that the flow sheet, which is ultimately how you go from the ore all the way through to the refined metal is designed for that specific asset. You will have concentrations of impurities that you have to manage, uh the concentration obviously of the target metal is different. Um there's like a library of metallurgical unit operations uh that are kind of all sticked uh stitched together to build a refining operation or a processing operation. Um but how those are stitched together, that's bespoke for the individual unit operation and tied to the kind of chemical metallurgist process engineer that designed the circuit in the first place. So there's a lot of like human impact on what that flow sheet ultimately looks like. Um but yes. And I imagine

• 5:06Speaker 1

  very hard to change as the nature of the ore changes as you mine a site.

• 5:10Speaker 0

  That's right. Um so you know, part of what we're working on and what we'll talk about a little bit later, I'm sure, is um how do you how do you define circuits or uh define design circuits that have a little bit more flexibility to be able to process or as it changes over uh over time as you mine through the ore body because one mine does not actually have consistent ore coming out of it. The earth is heterogeneous, the ore grades are changing, the impurity concentrations are changing, there are different ore zones that have different uh properties and how they are floated or how they're concentrated, how they perform in a leaching circuit, um, and all of those things are kind of custom built for a specific asset.

• 5:46Speaker 2

  One more question on this. Um what are the types of job titles, like backgrounds of people working in this space? I imagine for you know, at the supply chain you just described, very different types of people, very different backgrounds, but they all have to ultimately work together. But can you talk a little bit about that?

• 5:59Speaker 0

  Yeah, that's one of the big hard parts is um you have geologists, you have geophysicists, um, you'll have mining engineers, you'll have uh um uh geotechnical engineers, you'll have um process engineers, chemical engineers, chemists, metallurgists, mechanical engineers, structural engineers, civil engineers. It's the it's the whole gambit.

• 6:18Speaker 1

  Plus the long tail of you know, workers on site who are moving things from point A to point Aaron.

• 6:22Speaker 0

  That's right, which also have a super diverse skill set because you need everything from the the mining engineers and the chemical engineers and the geologists that sit around to operate the asset um in addition to uh the folks that have to kind of manage the back office, which is something that um often gets overlooked when we're thinking about successfully building and operating uh uh a complex circuit. Aaron Powell

• 6:40Speaker 1

  Did you always love rocks? Like did you always know that you were gonna start a mining company. Aaron Powell

• 6:45Speaker 0

  Yeah. So funny, funny kind of a funny story. The day that I graduated from college, the like urge that I had was to just move to Australia and try to find a job in a mine. Um I did not act on that urge and instead started at Tesla roughly 10 years ago now. Um I started out working on factory design, factory construction. Um, and actually slowly over that nine plus year period, like worked my way upstream in the value chain. So worked on factory design and construction, then started working on battery cell manufacturing, uh, spent a lot of time in Japan with Panasonic, who's our our primary battery cell manufacturing partner working on incremental improvements to their battery legacy battery cell manufacturing systems. The the like pull has always been big things for me, like large-scale infrastructure that has a large impact on the world. Um if you want to have a big impact on the world, you have to build things at scale.

• 7:34Speaker 0

  Um, that is that that's how you get to impact. Um I was working on battery cell manufacturing. Um because I was spending a lot of time in Asia, started to explore the supply chain was building some of the early technoeconomic models of how cathet materials are made, how anode materials are made, um, and the balance of the of the components that go into a battery cell. And ultimately this was just following cost. It was, you know, when I was working on factory design and construction, the most expensive thing was actually the equipment that goes inside the factory. Then when we started working on cell manufacturing, kind of realized that the expensive part of making cells is the stuff that goes inside the cells. And then as you start getting further and further upstream, you realize that the primary driver of cost is the metals that are going into the engineered materials that then go into the cells and then eventually go into the battery.

• 8:24Speaker 0

  Um so started kind of digging much deeper uh into why metals are so expensive. Um what you kind of run into is that um there's this interesting um incentive misalignment that exists between uh the customer and the producer of metals. Um like in the mining industry, more demand, this is totally different than manufacturing. More demand if you have a higher volume. The expectation is that the price goes up. Um because it's a you know constrained supply, and so the pricing dynamics are totally different than manufacturing companies, where higher volume means lower cost. And you are as you are scaling up and capturing economies of scale, you're starting to drive down uh the cost that you can then transfer to your customers. Um that expectation doesn't really exist in the mining industry. If you want more of it, it's gonna cost more. And so that that incentive misalignment was a big one that jumped out, and that only really kind of starts to come to the surface when you start to actually engage with the mining companies.

• 9:18Speaker 0

  Um but what fascinated me about the mining industry is that you are effectively solving problems at micron scale to start. You have to figure out how you extract you have a you have an ore that has 1% of a target metal. And you are trying to figure out how do you extract that 1% and get it to a hundred percent purity. Um that fundamentally starts at like, you know, the atoms. Um then you have to like take a process that you develop that is at, you know, starts at micron scale and then deploy kilometer scale infrastructure. Um, going back to the thing that was exciting, which is scale is that opportunity to work across across those scales, which is which is exciting. Aaron Powell

• 9:55Speaker 2

  So I always found interesting about Tesla, especially early days working with Panasonic, but a lot of the the know-how. The process knowledge came from Asia. Spending a lot of time in Asia, just be curious, like culturally like in just looking at scale as they sort of built out a lot of the early battery ecosystem and then farther upstream. What did you see there? Is it just more chemical engineers? Is it more support for that industry? Yeah.

• 10:19Speaker 0

  I think in the in like the battery cell world, the precision at which you need to manufacture the product, like the tolerances on the final battery cell require kind of like a level of rigor and attention into detail that does come out in like a cultural that does have like a cultural aspect to it. Like

• 10:36Speaker 1

  semiconductors. Yeah,

• 10:37Speaker 0

  exactly. Um so the um that was a big one. Um but also you know, the it's it's a it's a long-term investment, you know, in in Japanese, it's Kaizen, right? Where you're like gradually improving over time. Um and in those like super high precision, super high throughput um industries, taking big swings where you make like a radical change to one unit operation. Um that that didn't really happen in the in like those companies. It was much more of like an iterative improvement to the systems that it fundamentally eventually enabled you to get costs down. Um but yeah, the labor pool is a big piece. And and I think that's some some of it is definitely cultural.

• 11:15Speaker 1

  Your time at Tesla, like you know, Tesla famously vertically integrated very early. Um you're building a vertically integrated mining company, which we'll get into more details about later. But like what what did working at Tesla teach you about vertical integration and why it matters?

• 11:30Speaker 0

  Yeah, I think um as we started to scope more and more vertical integration, even like outside of the um like going further upstream in the in the supply chain. Um the the thing that's really interesting about vertical integration is you you fundamentally are thinking about the um incentive um structure that exists between kind of yourself and a partner. And so Tesla had to vertically integrate early because people just weren't making the parts that were needed. Like that was uh it was a do-or die. There was no incentive, there was no market for people to build the kind of like subcomponents that were required. Um and so ultimately Tesla had to vertically integrate um from day one. And then like the things that pushed increasing amounts of vertical integration ultimately was the incentive structure misalignment where suppliers and partners weren't uh incentivized to uh invest and scale at the rate that we wanted them to invest in scale.

• 12:17Speaker 0

  Um they weren't incentivized to innovate at the pace that we wanted them to innovate, and so you end up kind of insourcing a lot of that development that enables you to get to the product specs or the component specs that you want. Um then it takes a lot of guts because at the end of the day, when you vertically integrate, you are transferring the risk profile of your partner kind of into like your new expanded risk profile. Um and so you need to be really confident um or at least believe that you can you are better positioned to kind of like take on and manage that risk profile.

• 12:46Speaker 2

  When you were at a Tesla and and looking at and developing relationships with all these global mining companies uh as Tesla was scaling and looking for suppliers, like what were some of the key issues that you noticed in from a market perspective. And then ultimately what sort of led to to Tesla pursuing sort of like further vertical integration.

• 13:04Speaker 0

  Yeah, I think the incentive misalignment piece that between the industries and between kind of like a commodity industry or the mining industry and kind of the manufacturing industry was was the big um misalignment that existed between the industries. Um the you know, the degree to which um automation was absent um was pretty interesting. Um there's a there's a long period of time where mines make no money, right? And so the, you know, a lot of capital goes into the expiration phase, it goes into the development phase. What a lot of people don't realize is that when you start the mine, there's actually sometimes like years where you are just getting through the waste to get or drilling a shaft to get to the ore deposit. And so any additional capital intensity like associated with automation kind of oftentimes gets the capital starts to get tired.

• 13:52Speaker 0

  And that additional um automation equipment um kind of falls by the wayside. And if you have the people there that can drive the trucks or drive the excavators or run the run the drill rigs, like you'll take that. Um we're at this interesting inflection point now where those people are less and less available. Um, the mining industry has kind of been taking it on the on the head for a long time. It's not been a sexy industry that everyone wants to go into.

• 14:19Speaker 2

  Um

• 14:19Speaker 0

  and so the labor pool is contracting, it's shrinking, and it's both the trades and it's the engineering skill sets. Um and that that you know, the first things that mining companies say now is that the labor pool is one of the biggest challenges that they're trying to solve for. Um so that that was apparent. Um, and and on top of that, these these mines are not exactly in downtown Manhattan. They are they are in remote locations that where have you uh where have you gone? You've been on site before. Yeah, of course. Indonesia, Australia. Um what is it actually like? People see pictures, but like what what is actually going on? It's a lot calmer than you might expect. Like the the, you know, you're usually working a couple of faces and you know, you have excavators or um or or front-end loaders that are picking up dirt, they're taking them to the to the unit operation.

• 15:09Speaker 0

  And and it's not as uh it's not as rambunctious and crazy as as you might expect a mine to be. Um and that's in Australia and in Canada. Um like it's not this like buzzing atmosphere. Um in developing countries, it's a little different. Um there's like a different degree of um there's definitely a different degree of automation. Like, you know, obviously we've come a long way from people with picks and shovels. Um so when I say automation is absent, doesn't mean there aren't like heavy haul machinery that is driving around the sites. Um but the there's a lot more kind of people activity um when you go to uh operations that are in Indonesia or in Africa. Um so but yeah, been to most continents. Aaron Powell

• 15:50Speaker 1

  Why did you leave Tesla to build Mariana?

• 15:54Speaker 0

  You know, I I spent a long time kind of like building businesses within Tesla, you know, was early on the cell manufacturing side, was early on the um on the uh cathode manufacturing side was really on the on the refining side of things. Um what really excited me was always pushing further and further upstream. Um I I do think that we are at this critical inflection point where not only is the labor pool going in the opposite direction of demand in the mining industry. Um but uh AI and ML are getting you know to the point where and it it's not that it hasn't it hasn't been that long, right? Like the alpha go moment was kind of in 2015, 2016 um and people were using reinforcement learning to like kind of like there's a paper from 2008 on reinforcement learning for like helicopter control.

• 16:41Speaker 0

  Um but we're at this point where kind of like the compute um and machine learning reinforcement learning um do really enable enable you to go know humans in the loop and how a lot of these plants are controlled. Um and as you like build more of that large scale infrastructure and kind of like see the problems that humans have to solve on a daily basis, it becomes like pretty obvious that these are problems that humans don't aren't best positioned to solve. Like these are large multivariable optimization problems that um RL is like perfectly poised to solve. Um and then on the construction side, um, that is like an entirely different story. I think construction um there's a lot of workflow automation opportunities, and there's also tons of menial tasks um where people are fat fingering data between databases, um, the data systems are completely dis disaggregated.

• 17:32Speaker 0

  Um LLMs are presenting this opportunity where we can start to and again, this is like a two-year thing really um where and it's just gonna get better. And so the opportunity to build um kind of like from scratch, no legacy systems, um, and have some control over kind of like the destiny of the company that I'm that we're building. Um that's just an exciting opportunity. Aaron Powell

• 17:55Speaker 2

  What is just a level set? Like what is what is status quo in the industry today? Like what what what is like the BHP and the Rios of the world do for like a lot of like some of the stuff you're talking about, like the from a software perspective, like internal. They

• 18:05Speaker 1

  have digital innovation arms. They

• 18:07Speaker 2

  do

• 18:07Speaker 1

  have

• 18:07Speaker 0

  they do have digital innovation arms. I think that um, you know, the the Freeports and the Rio Tintos and the BHPs, they outsource a lot of that. You know, I think that they've like gradually started to like hire more and more folks that can do more in internal things, but you have McKinsey, you have Palantir that that basically act as consultants and they will look at the large data sets and they'll kind of provide recommendations, some percentage of those recommendations, oftentimes sub 50% are taken. And you know, what's interesting about um what you want from the ML models or the RL models is that you actually want them to tell you to do things that are counterintuitive because like humans are uh naturally going to find like a local optimal operating condition. Um and it's like it's very risky to take shots outside of something that is currently working, where there's billion dollars on the line.

• 18:57Speaker 0

  Um and that culture of like trusting the counterintuitive recommendation from the model is one that we want to try to build. And it's hard to build that within like large companies. I think the um on the construction side when they build new projects, you know, they're building five, 10 billion dollar projects. Um so they are always bringing in an EPC and kind of like throwing that over the fence to the EPC. Um in the in the mining industry where, you know, it is a bespoke plant, like it is custom and you kind of need to think about the refinery and the mine and the processing facility as the product. Um and when you outsource that, you know, you lose a lot of control of what you eventually are going to inherit and and and operate. Um and then EPCs, um, you know, that that model has shifted away a little bit from kind of like a turnkey, uh like we'll deliver you a project.

• 19:46Speaker 0

  It's it's kind of move towards um selling hours and um and like selling man hours um and and selling reports, especially in the mining industry, where it's like they'll do a prefeasibility study, they'll do a feasibility study. Um And so there's a lot of over the fence and outsourcing that happens in in the large companies. And some of that comes from like the talent acquisition challenge that the mining industry has faced over the last 20 years. Again, the mining street industry has not been this magnet for talent. And what that means is that even if they are able to hire kind of like the best in class machine learning engineers and the best in class software engineers, they're not going to stay. They're going to like run into the bureau the wall of bureaucracy and they're going to have higher paying opportunities in SaaS, FinTech, ad tech, and they're going to go chase that.

• 20:35Speaker 0

  And so it's not just attracting talent, it's retaining talent that has been a big challenge in the mining industry. And that forces kind of like a an outsourcing of a lot of the core thing, things that should be core today.

• 20:47Speaker 1

  I mean, and we've seen this from the from the investor side. Like we've, you know, there are a lot of really exciting new technologies being developed for mining and a lot of incredibly impressive startups that are building for various pieces of the mining lifecycle journey, whether it's autonomous vehicles or drilling or other various software and hardware tools for mining. But the challenge seems to be like how do you get these kind of calcified large incumbents who operate in a very decentralized way, have very low risk appetite and not a strong internal culture or affinity for tech. Like how do you get them to adopt them quickly? Like you're kind of if you're a young startup, you're sort of at the back end call of this behemoth and you have very little control over your own destiny, which I think has made it really hard for tech to kind of penetrate this market up until now.

• 21:37Speaker 1

  That's at least what we've observed on the VC side.

• 21:40Speaker 0

  Calcified is a good word. I think the the way that it's this is this construction companies and mining companies and really all a lot of big companies is that the way that they'll identify and evaluate risk is fixing the status quo or making like a step change improvement in the status quo kind of requires doing like a thousand things. Um but you'll evaluate risk on each individual thing of that thousand things. And the downside of each individual thousand things is that the plant goes down, which is a multimillion dollar event. Um so you're really not incentivized to change things. Like even small changes could result in multi-million dollars of loss. Um and you you need to kind of like approach it of like how do I do the thousand things all at once so that I'm not stacking incremental returns on innovation with the same risk every single time.

• 22:28Speaker 0

  Um that's where kind of like spot technical solutions are challenging to sell into the mining industry. And they'll do pilots, they'll definitely do a pilot. Um there's no skin off their back to do kind of like a pilot. Um but you'll end up doing a lot of pilots. Um because they don't build enough plants um kind of sequentially, like they'll build one big mine every five years if that and the like there aren't just there just aren't a lot of opportunities to get into a commercial scale uh application. And if you don't time it perfectly where like your pilot plant was five years before the commercial scale plant was planned for, um like you're not gonna be in that one, so you'll be in the next one, which is five years later. And so the just like the pace at which the industry moves um in terms of like deploying commercial scale infrastructure means that there just isn't a lot of opportunity to get new tech into commercial scale applications.

• 23:21Speaker 0

  Um so there's a lot of folks that are doing like SaaS SaaS products to which is kind of the lowest cost way to get into like generate uplift in a in a in a mining project or a minerals refinery. Um the the like barrier there is ultimately um how do you get the get the operators to trust um the recommendations from the like this the SaaS tool from this small company that is trying to kind of tell you how to run a plant um and you know the culture is typically like don't touch my things, don't touch my cash register, and like what do you what do you all know about running a mine? Um and it it it does it does stack up and it makes you know I've been calling it a death spiral for a lot of the the folks that are trying to sell into the the mining industry because it it's hard.

• 24:05Speaker 2

  Just to like step back a little bit on the geopolitical context, like you know, uh the the stuff you're describing I think very obviously true of a lot of the Western companies, but at the same time, a lot of Chinese companies that have sprouted over the last 20, 30 years have grown rapidly. Um curious why do you think that is?

• 24:23Speaker 0

  Yeah. I mean, I think that there's like a lot of top-down um and and early recognition that critical minerals were going to be critical and needed to be supported. And so like shouldn't um kind of like the everything around policy and everything around kind of like supporting companies to go and deploy both infrastructure domestically and infrastructure internationally to kind of like secure critical minerals, build infrastructure that secures a position, like that is definitely happened. Um but I think that what people often don't talk about enough is that the talent pool is insane. Like it is not just a large talent pool, it is a large, skilled, experienced talent pool. I was in Indonesia um in February and was kind of visiting one of the uh recent Chinese nickel um refining operations.

• 25:10Speaker 0

  And so they buy or they also have some mining operations. Um but they they had 13,000 people on site um during c uh construction and commissioning. And you know, if we were building a refinery in in the US, which we did, um it's hard to mobilize you know a tenth of that

• 25:26Speaker 3

  realistically.

• 25:27Speaker 0

  Um when you have it's not just about the number of people, it's about being able to iterate on every individual workfront as fast as humanly possible. Um we just don't have that label.

• 25:38Speaker 3

  15 years ago or 20 years ago, would the the same companies that were big now have been big big then? Like what what is kind of the evolution of the of the space event?

• 25:46Speaker 0

  Um yeah, I think that um there's been like a clear splintering on kind of who does the exploration and who does the development. Like right now, the industry is set up where junior mining companies, which don't mind, they explore um go and they kind of, you know, they they sometimes get uh they'll get maybe a resource from a major mining company that's like held it in their portfolio for a long time. Um but the it's like a different risk reward profile than what the mining industry is ultimately, like the the mining majors are ultimately looking for. And so you have this junior mining ecosystem that uh sometimes is well funded and sometimes is competing with for capital with like the cannabis industry in Canada.

• 26:22Speaker 2

  Um

• 26:25Speaker 0

  they're taking shots in the dark, basically trying to and there's a lot of work that's going into trying to make that expiration activity more intelligent, uh, streamline it, drill less expiration holes while still being able to like interpolate or extrapolate what is in between those those drill holes. Um but it's a you're you know, you're you're uh going out in kind of the middle of nowhere, either it's really far north um in like the Arctic Circle or the Yukon, um, or it is uh or it's overseas in Africa and you're doing expiration or it's in Southeast Asia or in or in South America. Um those folks like they have one job, which is to define a resource and pump up its value sufficiently to flip it to a major. Um there's a lot of companies that aren't able to discover a resource that is either large enough because the the big mining companies, like they want to deploy large amounts of capital.

• 27:12Speaker 0

  We're talking about like multi-multi-billion dollar investments. And so they won't really look at projects that don't have the scale that kind of enable them to underwrite their own inefficiency. Like they they want to build l really large infrastructure that enables them to capture the economies of scale. Um so the there's a whole bunch of there's actually a really long tail of mining projects that don't have the scale that would justify getting acquired at a major premium. Um so they'll go into this kind of orphan period uh is what it's called in the industry. Um it's hard for them to break out of that orphan period. And that's kind of where we see our ability to kind of step in as a more efficient building like builder and operator is kind of take these what you know, the industry calls subscale assets, but we see metal there and come in and like bring those into production as we kind of are building the platform and then eventually scale into the same scale that the big mining companies are operating at.

• 28:06Speaker 1

  Your thesis being that you can get the metal out and process it into a product that you can sell m more efficiently than the majors, such that it's economically viable. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

• 28:17Speaker 0

  To offset the scale advantage. Yeah. Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 1

  Well, maybe then I I think this might be a a good opportunity then to talk a little bit more about like what is Mariana's product. Like you you said a few minutes ago, you're not a you're not a SaaS product. You know, what does it mean to be a diversified metal and minerals company, technology-enabled mining company? Like give us a take us in a little bit more detail.

• 28:41Speaker 0

  Yeah. Um we're a vertically integrated software-first minerals project developer and operator. And so we focus on the back end of the minerals value chain, which is actually doing the detailed engineering, getting through the permitting, um, building building the asset, commissioning the asset and then operating the asset. And um going back to some of what we were talking about around the labor pool, um, like those labor pool shortages exist in construction and they exist in mining. Like they're they're hard, they're felt very, very intensely. Um our fundamental thesis is that the um with a contracting labor pool, um, you know, you have to start with an awesome team. The table stakes is that you build an awesome team. Um, but how do you enable 200 people to do what 10,000 people are needed to do today, um, at least on the on the like parent parent co side of things.

• 29:29Speaker 0

  Um and that comes from uh leveraging the recent advances, advances in LLMs to automate workflows in the construction side of things and the engineering side of things and the procurement side of things, which take an insane amount of time. Like it's uh you're you make a lot of lists and you fat finger a lot of data between databases. Um that is all about reducing churn in construction. I think that there's churn churn and latency. Um latency is one thing that I think um people sometimes don't appreciate. From like status quo construction, like large-scale mega projects is that what's happening in the field and what the like the back office kind of sees or what the executive team sees or what the project director sees. Um there's like a three-week lag generally for like really large construction projects where you are trying to aggregate data from all the different contractors, all of the different um and all the different parts of the facility into a consolidated integrated schedule, which you can then make decisions off of of like how do I prioritize what I'm doing today.

• 30:29Speaker 0

  Um the way you run from on those, like in between those three weeks is people stand in circles every morning and they say, what are you doing today? What are you doing today? What are you doing today? And they go off and they do the thing, and they'll send like a very brief kind of uh progress report back. Um it takes a long time to then take those progress reports and actually measure progress so that you can reevaluate priorities and understand kind of like how the project is trending. Um so we're really trying to accelerate and democratize access to data fundamentally and run construction projects like manufacturing facilities. Um it starts there. And the reason construction and mining are so kind of integrated, and some people might disagree with me, but like a mining project is a big civil construction project.

• 31:14Speaker 0

  It just never ends. And it's more

• 31:16Speaker 1

  like a deconstruction project.

• 31:17Speaker 0

  Yeah, that's fair. You are you are well, you do you do when you're I guess you have to make piles. And you're building piles and the uh but the there's actually a lot of similarities in kind of like just moving the dirt for like site prep. Um the the same kind of like software stack that is enabling you to get feedback from the field live is the same thing that the mining industry struggles with. Um, there are uh mining companies will lose equipment, um, like especially in underground mines that are like these like deep mazes and you know, the industry is getting better at having like actual location uh sensing on like where the equipment is. Um but losing equipment in a mine is like used to be a super common thing. Now we start with construction and then and then we start to get into the you know, the second core uh software stack is what we're calling plant OS.

• 32:06Speaker 0

  Um the construction stack is Capital Project OS. Um and Plant OS is really aimed at removing humans from the loop and deciding how the chemical processing operations and the refining operations work. Um these are like uh big refineries are effectively big robots. You have the sensing and telemetry, you have the actuators to control how the plant operates. And um, you know, they're you know imagine like teleoperating uh humanoid robots like forever. Like that is what the refining industry and the processing industry has been. Um there's obviously like uh PID control loops that kind of like maintain set points so you can maintain temperature automatically, maintain pH automatically. Um but the thing that really matters is that the feed material to the processing facilities is constantly changing because the mine uh like the ore body is changing every time.

• 32:53Speaker 0

  Um so the way that the industry manages that today is they will blend the feedstock to minimize variability that's going into the processing facilities, and that enables them to minimize the amount of change that has to happen on a processing facility. So we're trying to flip that and say, okay, if we build a hyper dynamic and highly flexible refining circuit, ideally without adding a whole bunch of cost. Um what does that do to like optimizing the global operation from the mine to the refinery? Um but it's first aimed at reducing reagent consumption, reducing energy consumption. Um, Google kind of proved this. They they bought DeepMind in 2016, 2017. Um, throw the deep mine team at automating uh and optimizing the data center thermal systems. So air handler, chiller, cooling tower. Um, that's not a super complex system.

• 33:39Speaker 0

  You have weather, which is a factor, you have loads within the building, which is a factor, but you ultimately have like nine control variables between air airflow, uh like airflow rate, supplier temperature, uh the cooling water temperatures and flow rates, uh, both in the chiller system and in the cooling tower system. Um the that just in that relatively simple system, they were able to reduce energy consumption by 30%. Yeah, it was like 40%. Yeah. Um it happened relatively quickly. Um so that's the opportunity when you remove humans from making the decisions on how kind of like these these process systems operate. Um that's the opportunity. Um then when we when we look at kind of refining and processing facilities, that's like a thousand control variables. And it's no longer single pass. Because what's really interesting about minerals refining is that you never want to lose the metal, right?

• 34:29Speaker 0

  Every every piece of metal that you or every atom that you lose kind of in the processing facility is another atom that you have to mine. Um so recovery in the ro in the in the refinery is actually like the biggest lever when it comes to cost. Um so what that means is that the upstream unit operations, think of a refinery as like 20 unit operations kind of all in series in a in a relatively simple refinery. Um the upstream operations.

• 34:54Speaker 1

  Relatively simple. Yeah,

• 34:55Speaker 0

  right. Um the upstream operations uh obviously impact the downstream operations because if you're changing the process conditions in the upstream operation, that changes what the downstream operation is seeing. Um but the downstream operations will recycle the like reject stream back into the upstream operations. And so it's this big interconnected web where if you make a change in one part of the circuit, and and it's a high latency web also, where the if you make a change in one part of the circuit, you may not see that change cascade for another 24 or 48 hours. And the when we're commissioning refineries like the world, um the that like latency ends up being a major driver of kind of the time it takes to bring a refining operation uh to spec and then eventually ramp it to throughput.

• 35:39Speaker 1

  So how long does it take to bring a refining to commission a refinery today?

• 35:44Speaker 0

  I mean, there are some refineries that were built recently that are still not commissioned. Um like the two like four three years ago. Um but the it's like the it's you know the Chinese companies are doing it in like six months. Um and a lot of Western companies are it takes two to four years. Um that stacks up where we need to build like an insane number of mines and refineries. And if you are kind of four times longer or five times longer every time you build a refinement, at

• 36:12Speaker 1

  every step of the process. Yeah.

• 36:14Speaker 0

  And so we're trying to bring down the cot the time that it takes to to bring the refinery to spec, basically, throughput and and hitting the kind of like output requirements of the product that you're making. Um then ultimately you start the this like historically very long haul of gradually bringing down the cost over time. Um that's something that we think that reinforcement learning is going to do quickly, much, much faster, kind of like in line with what in line with what Google demonstrated with the uh the thermal systems and data centers is achieve global optimal operating conditions on an order of magnitude faster time scale timescale. Aaron Powell

• 36:55Speaker 1

  So how do you think about like you're building a company that mines and refines a product? There's a lot of tech that you can interject at essentially every step of that process. Like how are you deciding what to build, where to partner, you know, what what are you developing in-house versus where are you going to market?

• 37:16Speaker 0

  Yeah, I think we're we're at the beginning, we're focused on how do we take kind of commercially demonstrated unit operations and be a better integrator and a better um like operator of that integrated circuit. And so focus on the software systems that enable you to kind of control the plant more optimally. Um that's generally what project level financing parties want to see also. Like it's hard to get project finance on a first-of-a-kind facility where you're demonstrating a new unit operation for the first time. Um so we think that as we're kind of entering the market, the right place to start is take commercially demonstrated individual unit operations that operate globally and try to achieve try go go after the uplift that's available just by being a better integrated operator. Um there's a whole bunch of bottlenecks in building these facilities that we will need to solve.

• 38:06Speaker 0

  I mean, the like industrial supply base just for like manufacturing tanks is broken, like the kind of there's specialty. That's a

• 38:13Speaker 1

  new one. It's

• 38:14Speaker 0

  it's it's just like every like things that we kind of take for granted um just take a really long time if you want to kind of not go to China for sourcing those uh that equipment. Um that has a big impact on the operating side of things too, where the supply chain for like a new pump um in Australia could take 30 weeks um and getting that exact same pump um but with a mine in China, it shows up in you know a week or three days. Um so like that entire industrial like equipment supply base we're gonna have to look at at some point. Um that's obviously a much bigger uh bigger bite uh to go after like commodity equipment manufacturing. Trevor Burrus

• 38:52Speaker 1

  You're not gonna you're not gonna vertically integrate to be a mining equipment manufacturing.

• 38:56Speaker 0

  Manufacturing company. I I don't think so. Um I hope not. You'll let me know. This is the, yeah, that's right. Well, this is the this is the kind of like what is the incentive structure of the partners and the suppliers and like is it required or not. Um I think that the there's a whole bunch of companies that are working on awesome like novel process technologies that have not quite gotten over the hump um trying to sell to the big mining companies. And we want to be the customer that helps accelerate commercial deployment and the partner that helps accelerate commercial deployment. And one of the big issues that is that um that comes up when you're kind of like deploying new processing technologies is that part of the reason why it takes a long time for it to get to the point where it's commercially viable, other than all the headwinds from the industry being conservative and process driven and all those things is that they like humans have actually never operated that process chemistry at scale before.

• 39:45Speaker 0

  And so you have all the you'll learn a bunch of things at pilot scale, but pilot doesn't really tell you what's happening at the same time. And you need to train

• 39:53Speaker 1

  people. You have to train the

• 39:54Speaker 0

  people to operate it. You have to, it's like new environmental things that might come up depending on the chemical that you're using. Um And the that like scale jump is actually something that we think that RL and and will enable with like a pretty meaningful like pace adjustment where you don't need the humans to kind of like fine-tune the process conditions around a new process chemistry because the you know plant OS is doing it.

• 40:20Speaker 3

  Ryan and Aaron, how did we approach this this industry? Is this a space that we spent a lot of time thinking about or thinking about opportunities in the space or how how did we uh how did we approach it?

• 40:29Speaker 1

  Yeah, we've we've uh we've wanted to do a mining investment for a long time. You know, when you think about venture capital, um, we care about massive markets. And you know, there's there's not that many massive markets left that have been sort of like largely untapped by technology and mining sort of screams, one of the largest markets in the world. Um very little adoption of technology. So you know, I it over many cycles we've gone out and spent a lot of time meeting companies. And you know, as I mentioned before, the challenge is how do you sell a point solution or a point piece of technology into this industry that is has very little incentive to adopt it and is also like has a very complicated geopolitical dynamic where you have a very large global player with their hand on the scale.

• 41:18Speaker 1

  We put out a piece uh a couple weeks ago around our thesis in mining and why we think a vertical mining company is the answer because you actually we actually do believe you have to control every single piece of the entire journey, the entire life cycle of you know an atom of metal end to end to actually be able to build a tech company here. This is not about you know a point solution for one particular part of the process in order to actually capture the gains in efficiency and build a a feasible business. You really have to own the entire process end to end.

• 41:53Speaker 2

  The only thing I'd add there is that this is the intersection of geopolitical urgency and tech. Like stuff's turned in talking about is like now we have technology that can actually go and disrupt this. There also is a talent base, people coming from companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Android, other sort of hard tech companies working in sort of dirty spaces, willing to go out in the field, roll up their sleeves. Yeah, roll up their sleeves, go out in the middle of the desert and work on this stuff. Uh so now's the time to build this company.

• 42:18Speaker 1

  And the and the political and the political tailwinds are there. There is um, you know, e even my you know, my my conservationist mother, who I think if like we had had this conversation five years ago, she would have clutched her pearls. She doesn't wear pearls, but she would have clutched her pearls at the idea of uh domestic US onshore mining. Um, I think broadly speaking, the the American public and certainly the government has come around to the idea that metals are in every single thing we use as consumers. Our supply chains are highly reliant on China. It's a huge problem. We have to figure out how to address it. Um that means investing in mining in the US again.

• 42:57Speaker 2

  We talked a little bit about, we mentioned like rare Earth, you mentioned lithium and things like that. But like there are many different critical minerals. Um you talked about a little about in the very beginning. But specifically like what what are the interesting ones for you? How does that how does that map to sort of the what people see on the headlines and and what are the business opportunities are I mean,

• 43:16Speaker 0

  we you know, the when we look at what needs to happen in the next 10 years and you know, forecast to demand will only materialize if the supply is there. So we'll see if that forecast to demand materializes. The metals that actually need to grow the most by like mass flow rate are the are like the big metals. Like we need a lot of aluminum, we need an insane amount of copper. Um we need more iron, we need more zinc. Um

• 43:38Speaker 2

  what what are some of the things that these metals are?

• 43:40Speaker 0

  Yeah.

• 43:41Speaker 2

  I mean, like iron

• 43:42Speaker 0

  goes in everything that is infrastructure. We

• 43:43Speaker 1

  got iron.

• 43:45Speaker 0

  Zinc is zinc is one that people sleep on because you actually have to galvanize a lot of that steel. Um so zinc oftentimes kind of pops up every once in a while as being something that we really do need to continue to focus on. Um copper is the is the workhorse of you know this push to electrify everything and and to just grow the grid to be able to supply AI to be able to enable uh accelerated renewable penetration, for EV penetration to happen, like you're gonna need a lot of copper. Um aluminum is one that I think is underestimated it's uh people underestimate kind of its importance. It's actually like the number one most consumed metal in defense applications. Uh like the grid is, you know, people talk a lot about copper, but uh there's a lot of aluminum like conductors in the transmission lines that are that are critical to actually growing the grid, the grid capacity.

• 44:35Speaker 0

  Um and an automotive, obviously aluminum is big. Um magnesium has a whole bunch of defense applications potentially could get more into uh automotive applications and like for lightweight, lightweight uh metals. Lithium you know needs to forex in the next in terms of production capacity in the next 10 years, roughly, in order for the uh batteries that we want to build to be built.

• 44:57Speaker 1

  Well, we're all we're all about batteries. So

• 45:00Speaker 0

  nickel is uh is a big one. I think that um what has happened in in nickel in the last five years is Indonesian kind of like uh production capacity has scaled to the point where it's now something like 70 percent of global nickel comes out of Indonesia. And a lot of that was on the back of like meaningful investment from China to be able to um kind of expand production capacity in in Indonesia and then also do more of the downstream processing in Indonesia. Um nickel goes into everything that is specialty alloys, anything that needs high temperature or corrosion resistance, um, and also is like kind of the unsung hero of high-energy um batteries where these these lithiated transition metal oxides, which are high nickel. Umganese is important. Manganese goes into a lot of alloys and also goes into batteries.

• 45:45Speaker 0

  Um the uranium, if if fission is going to continue to grow and we're gonna continue to like deploy more nuclear capacity. Is going to be needed. Um it's a long list. And the you know, the rare earths, you know, they they're important, obviously. They they are omnipresent in like everything that we use. Um but they show up as like a relatively small kind of like in on a volume basis when you look at kind of the stack of metals that we need to mine. Um where you know the definitely we need a ton of um like process innovation in uh how rare so refined solvent extraction circuits are kind of like the status quo. Um they you know, the chemical intensity is high and the recoveries are relatively low. And the know-how is kind of like highly penetrated and or highly concentrated in in China. Um but we're it's uh it is a it is a little bit of a frothy market right now.

• 46:33Speaker 0

  And so we're you know, being diverse being a diversified minerals company kind of enables us to pick our spots in areas where it makes sense. Like these things still do mo move on commodity cycles and and you actually want to be building infrastructure at the bottom of commodity cycles, not at the top of commodity cycles. Um, it's the Warren Buffett quote of, you know, invest when there's blood in the water. Um you want to be coming into metals when they are at the at like this trough really, where no one is investing in them. They still have like a macro long-term critical point. Lithium is like exactly in this position right now. Um that's why we're focused on lithium. Copper, um, copper just has this like macro trend that is like pretty uh uh hard to ignore. Um we're just gonna need an insane amount of copper.

• 47:19Speaker 0

  Copper grids are going down globally, and which means that um our ability to extract copper from those ores um is gonna get it's gonna get harder and harder to extract copper from those ores. Um and that's where you know the plant OS side of things, we have like a high degree of um of confidence that we'll be able to step in and kind of like optimize the refining circuits to still be able to extract copper from these lower grade

• 47:43Speaker 2

  ores

• 47:43Speaker 0

  without seeing meaningful kind of cost increases.

• 47:45Speaker 2

  Aaron Powell So everyone knows, you know, i people here it takes forever to get a mine started. I don't know how many new greenfield mines we've developed in the United States in the last decade. Um not many. Yeah. So like it and I know Australia and Canada ha have been able to do this faster, which is which is interesting. Uh you know, you don't know Canada for for moving quickly. What are some of the like the bottlenecks there? What why what what does America need to do to accelerate this as one of these companies trying to not only mine but also refine in the United States, like what needs to be done.

• 48:15Speaker 0

  Yeah, I think one thing that um folks don't always see is actually the permitting requirements for exploration. So there is like if you are exploring over on federal land, if you're exploring over more than a five-acre parcel, you have to submit like a plan of record or plan of operations that uh needs to be approved by the BLM before you can start to expand, like expand and explore over a larger piece of uh of land. And so the like bringing down the permitting thresholds and the permitting burden associated with exploring. Like that is why we have such a small, like relatively small rare earth resource. It's like it's not because there isn't like the US has tons of natural resources. And the like the the kind of like USGS estimate for US, like the US reserve on rare earth just picking on that. Um that is tied to lack of expiration activity, not necessarily fundamentally like a lack of kind of like geo geological presence.

• 49:05Speaker 0

  Yeah, we haven't either looked for it or it's yeah. Well, it's hard it's hard to find in like high concentrations that are mineable, which we're trying to kind of like drop the percentage requirement that makes something economical. Um but it's also there's just a lot of like kind of like permitting burden to be able to actually go and deploy drill rigs to go and actually explore. Um then um there's definitely a we we c the the government currently is doing a good job of kind of highlighting the importance of the minerals industry, and you're definitely seeing like a little bit of a tone shift over the last 20 years that is much more supportive. There's way more tailwinds when it comes to kind of like making mining um be viewed in a more positive light in a critical light. Um and that that will help to solve some of the talent pool problem where people people that are you know awesome, they they want to go build things.

• 49:56Speaker 0

  They don't want to go and like work on a Project that kind of sits around for five years and maybe gets permitted and maybe doesn't. Like they want to go work on hard problems that where they can see the like the impact of the work that they're doing. And so if we're getting in the way of enabling projects to get built, like that is actually a major deterrent for talent because they won't actually see what they're like the the like output of their of their of their work. And then I you know I think the permitting requirements broadly for going from a discovery to uh to an operating asset. There's a there's a big there should be a big focus on kind of efficiency in reviewing environmental permits. There should be a big focus on kind of like streamlining those workflows and the back and forth between kind of like field offices and state offices from the BLM just focusing on the federal side of things.

• 50:45Speaker 0

  Um the way that projects get permitted right now is you'll throw a you'll throw like your environmental assessment over the over the table, and then they'll go and they'll divvy it up between a whole bunch of experts that they are like kind of consultants that they bring in to review the permit. Um they'll get back to you eventually at some point. Um but there isn't a lot of visibility into like how they are progressing with reviewing the permit applications. Um and and discussions are getting more bilateral, like the and again, there's been a little uh uh definitely a change with the new administration where there's a little more accountability on the like the permitting offices. Um but there's tons of room for making those reviews more efficient. Um again, LLMs will make make it more efficient. We just need to kind of like penetrate that side of the federal bureaucracy and like enable people to review things faster.

• 51:35Speaker 1

  What what else, aside from kind of permitting efficiency? Um what are other things that if you you know if you could send a list of recommendations to the government for what they should do to support the US mining industry, what would be your top three?

• 51:48Speaker 0

  Yeah, I think supporting the demand side is probably like the biggest lever. Um if you want to mobilize kind of private capital into the sector, having some level of support on the demand side is major. Um so that's off-take agreements with floor pricing, and you know, they did this just now with MP materials. Um that you know ideally provide some stability on the revenue side of things so that investors like the there's trillions of dollars of capital, kind of like dry powder just sitting around waiting to be deployed. It has historically kind of avoided the mining industry because of the um market price uncertainty. And so as soon as you commodities, it's a commodity cycle, and like what if you're building at the wrong time and you know the infrastructure funds are not the ones that are here to play like be intelligent about the commodity price cycle, like they they're looking for annuity-type returns.

• 52:39Speaker 0

  Um the um those folks um would mobilize if there were more demand side support from the government, either providing price floors or fixed pricing for critical minerals that you know you're trying to incentivize more production of in the US. Um, participating in the capital stack is is important. I think lowering the hooks or the um uh you know the extra burden that comes in with receiving government funds um is important and like some government agencies probably have more leeway to do that, like the DoD obviously again just did this big deal with MP materials and and actually like went all the way to kind of participating in the cap table or as an equity holder. Um but when you receive federal funds from the DOE or if you receive federal funds from like a you know the the on the debt side of things from XM you it it comes with some like additional burden sometimes.

• 53:28Speaker 0

  Like if you are building on state land and you just need a state permit and then you bring in federal funds, you now bump your permitting requirement to a federal level permit. Um that's the NEPA process, which you know, again, the NEPA process wouldn't be as burdensome if there was some

• 53:44Speaker 2

  more efficiency on the permitting side of things. Don't obey borders. Like is there a broader international strategy here? I mean, I would love to think we can mine and refine everything in the United States, but but obviously there's a lot, Australia, Canada, Latin America, curious sort of what Africa under underwater, uh seafloor, like like what what is the overall strategy in your mind?

• 54:07Speaker 0

  Yeah, we're we're starting in the US because it's closer to home and we're focused on developing a platform that we can scale off of. Um but at no point have we told ourselves that the US is kind of like the the only sole focus. Um you have to be able to um like bolster the company to be able to operate internationally if you want to be able to scale beyond kind of like the resource base that the US has like available today. And so more exploration is going to happen in the US, we'll probably discover more resources and like that pool will grow over time of projects that we can build in the US. Um yes, we are absolutely going to expand overseas and underwater maybe.

• 54:44Speaker 3

  When we look back a decade from now, what's the single clearest indicator that Marion has achieved what it set out to do?

• 54:49Speaker 0

  We won't be as worried about our ability to secure the critical minerals that we want to secure because we will have kind of rebuilt um and established like an entity ideally that is able to go across borders to your point and build these projects cost effectively, time effectively and responsibly ultimately. Um the reason that we are so panicked about it right now is because we have fundamentally lost the ability to build large-scale infrastructure and we have lost the ability to like operate complex um minerals plants. Like that's what we have lost. Um we need to build that back. You know, we we want to build 10 projects in 10 years. Those projects will be an increasing scale over time, um, but the work will not be done in 10 years. What I think uh will have demonstrated that the you know the 10-year mission will have been accomplished, um, other than building those 10 plants uh is that we will no longer be as worried about like our fundamental capability to go and build this complex complex infrastructure, um, like we will have unlocked it.