Apr 17, 2025 · 40m · no-priors
No Priors Ep. 111 | With KoBold Metals Co-Founder and President Josh Goldman
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of No Priors, KoBold Metals co-founder and president Josh Goldman explains how the company integrates artificial intelligence, multi-modal geoscience data, and epistemic scientific rigor to discover the critical minerals essential for electrification and AI infrastructure.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 15% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 4.5 Guest teaching 5.9 Guest disagreement 1.4 The hosts pushing back 1.4
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 19:34 Josh rejects silver bullet technology narratives
Josh dismisses the premise of looking for a single crucial tool or dataset for discovery, emphasizing that exploration is inherently high-dimensional and incremental.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 8:47 Elad pushes regulatory bottleneck over physical discoveryElad challenges the core exploration thesis by arguing that jurisdictions like the US have ample mineral deposits but face strict regulatory refusal to permit mining.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 6:40 Josh explains geological concentration and information scarcityJosh systematically breaks down what an ore deposit actually is, demonstrating that crustal metal is abundant everywhere and the real scarce resource is actionable spatial information.
The host holds their own ▶ 28:22 Elad identifies rare earth narrative misconceptionsElad demonstrates domain literacy regarding mineral geopolitics by pointing out that rare earth mineral scarcity is widely overstated in public discourse.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The High-Return Economics and Challenges of Exploration | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Elad asks whether KoBold focuses purely on discovery or operational mining. Josh explains the asymmetric return economics of exploration and why concealed subterranean deposits necessitate technological differentiation. | |
| Geoscience Data Across Length Scales and Archival Mapping | 3 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Elad inquires about the data inputs used to locate deposits. Josh educates the hosts on multiscale data integration, highlighting archival century-old linen maps found in Zambian state drawers used to train machine learning models. | |
| Exploration as an Information Problem and Ore Formation | 3 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Sarah asks how exploration firms search for lithium. Josh reframes the discussion around how geological processes concentrate crustal elements and defines exploration fundamentally as an information problem rather than a physical scarcity problem. | |
| Navigating Regulatory Governance and Hyperlocal Social Licenses | 6 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Elad pushes on the regulatory versus scarcity thesis, arguing that jurisdictions like the US have abundant deposits but lack regulatory willingness to permit mining. Josh clarifies that broad priors are necessary and highlights hyperlocal social licenses. | |
| Global Project Portfolio and the Mingomba Copper Discovery | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Sarah asks for an overview of KoBold's global asset footprint. Josh explains the Mingomba deposit in Zambia, detailing how a 5% copper grade compared to the 0.6% industry average drastically lowers waste, plant footprint, and capital intensity. | |
| Full-Stack Tech: Custom Sensors, Data Aggregation, and Field ML | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Elad asks about model architectures and technical systems, while Sarah clarifies field hypothesis loops. Josh outlines active learning field operations, retraining predictive models daily based on geoscientist ground sampling and custom hyperspectral airborne sensors. | |
| The Myth of the Silver Bullet in High-Dimensional Discovery | 5 | 6 | 3 | 2 | Josh firmly rejects Elad's prompt looking for a single critical breakthrough data set, stating that discovery requires high-dimensional data integration rather than silver bullets. Sarah explores discounted cash flow modeling for mineral reserves, prompting Josh to joke about SaaS unpredictability. | |
| Industry Discovery Drought vs. KoBold's Capital Efficiency Target | 6 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Sarah asks about industry success rates, and Josh details how industry capital efficiency fell 10x over 30 years to over $1 billion per economic discovery. Elad tests whether ESG-driven capital flight created this drought, which Josh counters by noting tier-one assets always secure capital. | |
| Demystifying Rare Earths and Chinese Downstream Smelting Dominance | 6 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Elad brings up rare earths as an overstated scarcity commodity. Josh validates this point, explaining that the true bottleneck is Chinese state subsidies and downstream smelting/refining capacity dominance rather than crustal scarcity. | |
| Epistemology in Action: Scientific Culture and Falsifiable Hypotheses | 5 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Sarah prompts Josh on KoBold's philosophical framework. Josh articulates KoBold's epistemic operating system, requiring teams to register explicit falsifiable hypotheses before drilling to combat confirmation bias, supported by an in-house epistemologist. | |
| Founder Journey and First-Principles Energy Demands (Batteries & AI) | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Sarah inquires about Josh's transition from quantum physics and private equity to mining. Josh computes macro supply deficits from first principles, noting the world must mine more copper in 25 years than in all human history to power data centers and electrification. |
Statements from this episode (25)
Goldman: KoBold focuses on mineral exploration for value creation and tech leverage
“So we, our business is focused on exploration, and it's focused on exploration for a couple of reasons. One is because there's way more value to be created there, and the second is that's where technology can be really differentiating.”
Goldman: Mineral exploration yields 1,000x returns on a few million dollars
“With a few million dollars of capital, you can create a hundred to a thousand times return.”
Goldman: All surface minerals discoverable by eye have already been found
“Anything you can find by traipsing across the ground with your eyes has been found by now, and we need more intelligent ways of looking for minerals in places that are concealed.”
Goldman: KoBold Uses Century-Old Hand-Painted Zambian Linen Maps
“One of my favorite data sets that we use around the world a set of maps from Zambia from almost a hundred years ago, the originals are hand painted on linen. And we got a tip from an elderly geologist on which drawer in the state archives to look in that had t…”
Josh Goldman: Century-Old Geological Data Has No Expiration Date for ML
“These observations were made by skilled geologists, and the rocks haven't moved, so there's no expiration date on the data, and so you can take data sets like this that provide ground truth and use it for training machine learning models based on modern airbor…”
Goldman: Mineral exploration is constrained by information, not metal abundance
“The scarce resource is not lithium or copper metal in the ground. It's actually information. The scarce resource are not the ore deposits. And the scarce resource is the information about where the ore deposits are located.”
Goldman: Technical mineral discovery is useless without local social license
“Technical success is, is not very helpful. Success is you find something that is really economic to develop, that either we can develop or we can sell to somebody who can develop it, and so if we don't actually have The, you know, so-called social license to o…”
Goldman: Mingomba is the highest-grade undeveloped large copper deposit globally
“It is the highest highest grade large copper deposit that is not yet a mine. The average of operating copper mines today is that the concentration of copper in the ore is, is about 0.6%. So if you mine a thousand kilograms of ore, not including the non-ore roc…”
Goldman: 10x ore grade reduces rock processing and capital intensity tenfold
“That means the economics are much better, because if you compare a high-grade and a low-grade deposit, a five percent and a 0.5% deposit, if they're producing the same amount of copper, they have the same revenue, But the high grade deposit, if you have 10 tim…”
Goldman: KoBold Retrains Exploration AI Models Daily From Field Observations
“When our team gets on the ground every day that they're in the field, they are collecting new training data. And they're not just going to places where we have high confidence in what the rocks are, because we're not going to learn anything. We're going to pla…”
Goldman: KoBold Built Proprietary Airborne Hyperspectral Sensor in Under a Year
“We built our own hyper spectral imaging system in less than a year, we had it flying on a light aircraft and we're surveying areas that we're interested in and we're using it for getting data in 600 colors at dramatically lower cost of acquisition and much, mu…”
Goldman: AI cannot be isolated from human intelligence in discovery
“There is no way to isolate the AI from the HI. There's no way to isolate one piece of data that's uniquely powerful, and that's one of the reasons that I think is limited innovation as well”
Goldman: Forecasting mine production 20 years out is easier than SaaS sales
“It is much easier to know what a mine is going to produce 20 years from now than it is to know what a SaaS company's sales volume is going to be 20 years from now and how it's going to be priced, right?”
Goldman: Mines underwritten for 20 years often operate for 50-70 years
“You underwrite an investment based on the first 20 years, and then actually many of these mines operate for decades, especially many decades longer, 50, 6070 years, because the resource keeps going, and you can keep adding to it as you go.”
Goldman: $1B in exploration yields less than one deposit discovery today
“If you take a portfolio of exploration projects that cost some money, say a billion dollars industry-wide, how many successes will you have? And then you know, industry-wide, a billion successes will have hundreds of failures, but eight discoveries as of 30 ye…”
Goldman: KoBold targets $50M to $100M cost per mineral discovery
“So Kobold, we target 50 to a hundred million dollars per discovery. That's the goal. That is how, that's how well we want to do.”
Goldman: Scarcity of high-quality deposits, not capital, bottlenecks mining
“I think that the real scarcity is good quality or deposits. Like great projects don't have problems getting funded. Whoever owns them. Great, great projects have lots of suitors of people who want to buy them. The problem is there just aren't very many great p…”
Goldman: Major active hard-rock lithium deposits were discovered targeting tantalum
“You know, the big lithium deposits in production today, at least the hard rock lithium deposits were found like people looking for tantalum, for capacitors, for the electronics industry, you know, in the 19 eighties.”
Goldman: Incipient science of lithium formation creates massive breakthrough potential
“And so the science of how lithium ore deposits form is incipient. That's really exciting because a little bit of increased scientific understanding can be a really potent differentiator. So potential for big breakthroughs.”
Goldman: Rare earth concerns stem from Chinese processing, not scarcity
“The reason that rare earths get, get noise besides the name rare, and is that at a concentration of downstream processing capacity in China.”
Goldman: Chinese margin tolerance deters private investment in mineral smelting
“If a Chinese party is willing to buy it for more than you because they will accept less margin, that makes it much harder. It's much harder to underwrite a project like that. And so that has, it has it's had a, you know, deterring effect on just private commer…”
Goldman: Pre-registered falsifiable hypotheses prevent confirmation bias in exploration
“You have to go on record before you collect the data about what could you observe that would cause you to abandon this hypothesis. This is how we avoid confirmation bias, which is very, very susceptible to it in this business. You come up with an idea and then…”
Goldman: KoBold Metals employs philosopher Michael Strevens as chief philosopher
“Oddly, we have a chief philosopher who is an epistemologist. This is Michael Trevins. He wrote a wonderful book called The Knowledge Machine about what is science and how it is different from other ways of knowing.”