Josh Goldman
Co-Founder and President, KoBold Metals · 1 appearance on the record.
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Josh Goldman is the co-founder and president of KoBold Metals, an exploration company using AI to discover critical energy-transition minerals. He previously worked in upstream oil and gas private equity and at McKinsey & Company after earning a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University.
25statements → 7claims → 2claims resolved → 4.04/5average certainty → 1.92/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
1 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not yet assessed 3 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 6 assertions · 13 insights · 5 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, 2 are not yet assessed, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Josh argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
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…”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Josh Goldman on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Josh Goldman said on No Priors that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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: 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: 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: $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: 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: AI and battery transition requires unprecedented copper mining over 25 years
“To build, you know, to build a future that is powered by batteries and AI, by mid-century, we will need to mine, over the next 25 years, more copper than has been mined so far in all of human history.”
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: 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: 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 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: 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: High battery penetration requires tenfold increase in lithium production
“To, you know, to get to a high penetration of battery powered devices that we need a tenfold increase in lithium production relative to today.”
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: 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: 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.”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| No Priors Ep. 111 | With KoBold Metals Co-Founder and President Josh Goldman | Apr 17, 2025 | 31m |