The Wisdom Wall

“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”

“It is much, 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?”

“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, uh, have lots of suitors of people who want to buy them. Uh, the problem is there just aren't very many great projects.”

“With a few million dollars of capital, you can create a hundred to a thousand times return.”

“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 airborne, uh, airborne geophysical surveys and modern satellite…”

“the scarce resource is not lithium or copper metal in the ground. It's actually information. The scarce resource are, are not the ore deposits. And the scarce resource is the information about where the ore deposits are located.”

“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 operate. If we haven't invested in the relationships with the…”

“And so the, uh, 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. Uh, so potential for big breakthroughs.”

“The reason that rare earths get, get noise besides the, the name rare, and is that at a concentration of downstream processing capacity in China.”

“If a Chinese party is willing to buy, 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, uh, it's had a, you know, deterring effect on just private commercial actors Willing to put the…”

“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 you collect some data and you, and you figure out how to…”

“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 times the grade, it means you are producing 10 times less rock,…”

“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.”