Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah, and this episode is all about the exploration,

for, and mining of minerals, specifically cobalt. In this conversation, I'm joined by Kurt House,

CEO and co-founder of Cobalt Metals, Professor John Thompson of Earth and Geosciences at Cornell,

and A16Z general partner on the consumer team, Connie Chan.

We explain why it is that cobalt is suddenly one of the most important and in-demand metals on

the planet and how technology is transforming how we find it and the mining industry as a whole.

Along the way, we touch on a little bit of battery tech history and science, and how entire

chapters of human civilization

are driven by the search for and mining of metals from ancient civilization's first finding

copper to the major ground shift in the 1950s with geophysics and knowledge of plate tectonics.

And finally, what kinds of new data sources, technologies, and techniques we can use to find more

cobalt today, everything from geophysical and geochemical data to agricultural information,

to old boxes collected over centuries in the basements and attics of mining companies?

All of this to satisfy the incredible new demand as we enter a new age of battery metals.

Why are we even sitting around this table talking about cobalt today? What is it that's suddenly so interesting about

cobalt? I think of it as a color, as a price, right? Well, that's actually right. And that was the very,

very first use of cobalt. The very, very first use was in dyes. And to get a particular type of blue, that was

the principal way to do it. And when was it discovered? The actual metal was first isolated as a metal,

I think, I'm pretty sure it's 1739. So if you go back 15 years or so, its principal uses were in

were in high, sort of high strength steels and things like that. So cobalt demand sort of grew

gradually, but everybody listening to this podcast and presumably listening to this podcast on their

device has, has 10 grams of cobalt in, in that device about. Some might be listening from their

...