1315: Nicolas Niarchos | The Dirty Supply Chain Behind "Clean" Energy

You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation.

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The minds are super, super unsafe, they collapse, especially during the rainy season, which runs from May, October, in the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo here. There are really situations in which these people are being essentially treated, not just as very low-paid workers, but essentially its conditions of modern-day slavery. A people aren't so little and are able to basically scrape by essentially.

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dug by somebody who probably doesn't even own a phone. Definitely isn't getting rich, and might not even make it out of the hole alive. Somehow, we've just convinced ourselves that the whole system is clean. Today we're tearing apart the fantasy of clean energy following the battery supply chain from dirt to device and asking a question that gets real uncomfortable real fast. Are we actually solving anything? Are we just upgrading the packaging and outsourcing

the damage someplace else? But this isn't just about saving the planet anymore. This is about who controls the future. Where is this technology going? It really is the same game with new resources. Here we go with Nicholas Nierkos. I'm holding my phone right now, and somewhere in the world, a guy dug, at least a part of this, out of the ground with his bare hands for, I don't know, a couple of bucks a day, and I thought electricity was supposed to be the clean energy.

“When people hear clean energy, what are we completely wrong about?”

I mean, the phone in your hand could have cobalt that comes from a clean source, cobalt is in the battery, but there's a chance that it has something that a child dug out of the ground depends how old your phone is and which company it's from and so on. But your phone has at least a 20% chance of having cobalt that was dug out by an artisanal minor. Some companies have pledged to clean up the supply chain, Apple among them. But that's actually been quite recent.

Would you set artisanal minor? Look, I lived in New York. When I hear artisanal, usually the next word is cheese or some kind of milk that comes from a thing that doesn't have nipples, it's not usually a part of a battery. So what is an artisanal minor? This is just like an entrepreneur and they use that word tongue and cheek. It's just the kid who goes out and digs in a muddy pit to try and get some of this element. That's essentially what it is an artisanal

minor as somebody going using a metal bar, sometimes a bad hand, sometimes they have bare feet, people climbed down into these pits and have very, very little, essentially doing the work.

“Maybe you remember those kind of Sebastian Salgado shots from the 1980s of gold miners in Brazil.”

I've seen that with my own eyes back in the Amazon, these people who just, they're digging holes and they go down in a nightmare scenario like a Vietnam tunnel and they're just coming up with luck and hoping that there's gold in there. That's exactly what it is, but this is a kind of much more or more industrialized thing and the mind's a super, super unsafe. They collapse, especially doing the rainy season which runs from May, talktober, we're talking about the Southern Democratic

treated not just as very low-paid workers but essentially its conditions of modern-day slavery.

“People earn so little and are able to basically scrape by essentially. Okay, but who controls the mind?”

Because if something has a billion dollars worth of valuable element under it, they're not just

letting random villagers dig in there and you said slave labor, you can't enslave yourself really. So who's going, hey, you dig a hole in here and if you don't do it, somebody else is going to do it, not give you a dollar a day. Somebody's buying Cobalt from them. They're not mailing it to Cooper Tino to sell the Apple, right? No, exactly. I mean, that's really important. There are layers and layers of different people buying them, but obviously if you go there, you realize that the biggest buyers are

the Chinese. There are these Chinese companies, Congo, Donkfangmining, which is a subsidiary of Huayou, which is an approved or was until very recently, an approved supplier of Apple. So there is a direct connection between these companies and some of the tech in our pockets, Samsung as well, it's not immune to these problems. You basically understand that this seems very far away, but actually it's right there in your pocket, in your laptop, in your cell, in your electric car.

Did you go to Congo, were you able to go to Congo and look at this stuff? The book is it's enormous. I didn't look at the sources. I just read the book, but it seems like you would have seen this. Yeah, my first trip was 2019 and I made five or six trips. That's a lot of trips to the Congo. That's a place that doesn't strike me as a safe destination to roll into as a western guy in just going to take some pictures and write about what you're doing. I found myself arrested,

“detained. I spent six days in secret police detention with no food and being interrogated on a regular”

basis, so definitely not a friendly country. Surely you thought they were going to kill you if you were there for a week with no food. I thought that they were very, very inefficient. I didn't think they were going to kill me. I was worried that I was going to be beaten up or something like that. Luckily everybody was actually ended up being quite kind and I just made lots of jokes. So they don't want to beat me up, but they did that work. It kind of did. Yeah, because the head of

the prison took me to the airport at the end and he gave this big hug and he said, "We're together. Come back and walk with me anytime here in Congo." I said, "Well, do you mean he said, the people that we normally have in this prison? They're very boring." And I really liked our chats about New York and one day if I ever come to New York. I'd love to come and visit you. I said, "Okay, fine." That just shows you how differently things are of it. Like, "Oh, you're not

taking it personally that we held you without food for six days and interrogated you and made you think you're going to die." You're not upset about that, are you pal? Anyway, I'll call you when I'm in Brooklyn. Exactly. That's exactly what it was. It was hilarious. He said, "Well, you know, I'm very interested to go to New York." That's crazy to me. Man, that's nuts. Wow. Okay, I have more questions about that, but I want to go back a little bit. We should probably

“define the basics. I think everybody knows what this is, but what is a lithium ion battery”

in plain English? Explain, like I'm five, what's inside the battery and why did this specific technology win over everything else that was available? A lithium ion battery is a type of

very powerful battery that was first created in the 1970s. Now, this battery is the foundation

for modern devices, basically. It stores power for cell phones iPods when they're around for laptops for these little oral rings that people use to measure their sleep and things like that. But these batteries are like amazing pieces of technology and the book is not about that these batteries are inherently evil, whatever it is actually. Like, as I delved into it, I was just amazed at the scientists who could produce such powerful things and it's the central to the electric

vehicle revolution, the central to the cell phone revolution. I mean, they basically have a loud modern life to be possible. And now we have a situation in which they're going to be powering more and more of the vehicles that we get around with. These are batteries that contain lots and lots of rare metals, things like cobalts, lithium, they contain nickel in some cases and various other minerals like phosphates in some other cases. And all these metals, the point to the bookers

to make you think about where things come from. And the point of the book is to say that look,

there is this rush for critical metals and it's not just batteries actually. When you think about

cobalt has a lot of military applications. It's used in armaments. I give a talk last night in Washington, D.C. And somebody came out to me and said, I'm really worried about the cobalt supply chain because I'm a doctor and it's used in stents for a brain surgery. The applications and the uses of this metal that they are legion. Okay. Now we zoom out a little bit. If I take my phone,

has probably been touched by five to ten countries. Yeah, really. So it's not just like a

Congo China USA. Oh, no, because the lithium and it probably came from Chile, the copper might have come from another part of South America or maybe from Congo itself. There are various other different parts of it that might be Congolese, Coltan that's coming through Rwanda. What I'm saying here is actually that the Congo has most of the things that can make your battery. But the fact is that supply chains are such that things come from lots of different parts of the world. Yeah,

Guy, I know he makes cars. That's a pretty vague, but he makes cars and he threw a plastic container in the garbage and I said, hey, why don't you recycle that and he goes, look, man. And I don't want to discourage people from recycling. I recycle what I can. But he goes, I send parts over to forget where it was Mexico from the US and he goes, they're covered in plastic wrap. We unwrap them.

We put them together and then we wrap that in plastic and we bring it back to the US and then

they put that on the other thing and then they wrap that in plastic and they send it back to Mexico and the other thing is done there and then they wrap that in plastic and then if they're like, we're throwing away literally tons of plastic for like a few automobiles here. I'm not worried about this bottle because it was no recycling bin in sight. So it's not like he chose the garbage. He's just like, I'm not going to carry this around and they gave him shit for it. You're

fighting it up here. But because of the supply chain thing, right? You just, yes, you could probably all make these things in one place if you decided to do that. But instead, let's do it in 15 different countries because it's just a little bit cheaper. Exactly. This is really a question just being a little bit cheaper. And I just want to answer that. There was very good tweet the other day with a picture of the Iranian oil fields on fire and they said, I have to bring my paper

shopping bag to the supermarket and this is what's happening on the other side of the world. Exactly.

“So yeah, but I think environmentalists have woken up to the fact that making people feel”

ashamed about throwing away a plastic bottle every now and then is a not going to do anything and be is counterproductive because people feel like they are oppressed by environmental regulations and it doesn't get the message across. And that it's up to us to just recycle our way out of climate change when it's like, no, maybe we need a power plant that doesn't belch hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 into the air every year. However, you know, we should maybe have a different system

for that instead, because that's a truly in plastic bottles or something like that. I don't know. I'm making these numbers up, obviously. But we're not going to recycle our way to this one. For full disclosure, I do recycle. Yeah, everyone hated you for a minute. Good thing you clarified that. I'm not that generation. Yeah, that's ingrained in us 80s kids, man. If you don't recycle, you're just a bad person. And my kids will be like, hey, dad, there's no point to this.

And I'll just die on that hill, even though I know it's nonsense. All right, what is the most important step in the battery change? Is that even a fair question? Because you're mining these different minerals and different places and then what they're melted together, are they're assembled together, someplace and made into a battery? Is that China? Yeah, they're dissolved with sulfuric acid, they're treated with chemicals over and over again, they're cooked and so on.

70 to 90% depending on which battery we're talking about happens in China itself. And there are a few places in Finland. There's one place in the U.S. that might or might not be able to do it for lithium, but very limited. This is a stage of processing. And processing has to happen before you get battery precursor metals. Now the argument has been, oh, should it not happen in

“Congo, but the factors you need to have incredible amount of investment. So bricks and water.”

And you need to have stable power supply because it's both power intensive this. And Congo just doesn't have a stable power supply because of years and years of under investment in its grid. So you have a situation in which the country is unable to sort of move up the supply chain. And that keeps it very poor, but moving up the supply chain would be very difficult. It also seems like this is one of those chicken egg questions, but there's so much

political instability over there. Do you want to build 10 billion dollar refinery in the place

where it can get seized by the next guy who decides to take control of the military or the next general that pops up or that kills the guy ahead of him and takes over the whole country. I mean, I heard some noise about Rwanda invading part of Congo and then a journalist friend of mine was like they only invaded this little part because there's mines there. And so they wanted to control these mineral resources or they invaded and then they're moving dirty Coltan whatever it is

“through to Rwanda and Rwanda says this is from Rwanda and it's I think he was doing some”

math and said there's no chance Rwanda has enough of this for all of this supply. He does not the only reason that Rwanda is invading the east of the DRC. It's obviously completely unconscionable that they've done so and they've resorted violence and so on, but actually they do have legitimate security concern when the Congolese government is arming anti-Rwanda militia.

pushed but both by the current administration and by the left in the US. It's this kind of strange situation in which everybody's blaming everybody else and they're just saying oh well it's all about the minerals. Now the minerals are very very important in continuing the conflict but I

“don't think they're the goal of the conflict specifically. I think if Kagama wanted to”

he could withdraw the president of Rwanda he could withdraw from Congo and build up a business

climate in his own country without the critical minerals but he couldn't continue an insurgency for

this long without some source of funding and the funding is provided by selling this gold this coal tan and tin tantalum and tungsten. I see so he's actually funding some of his security operations with the mineral revenue. We've just sort of done this to Africa right over the last several centuries. It just keeps on rolling. So it sounds like the choke point for lithium ion batteries which are in everything is China because if they decided to not allow us to get batteries

you said one place maybe in the US that could do it in one place in Finland maybe that could do it and I don't know if that was an incomplete list but assuming China has a lot of places that can do it because that's where we get all our batteries from. I used to disassemble a lot of stuff and I still do build things here and there with my kids and RC because I've never seen a battery that says

“made in Finland. Yeah it was very funny because last week this thing called the doughnut battery”

got written up in the Wall Street Journal and every recent look this battery doesn't have so many rare metals and it doesn't have cobalt in it and doesn't this invalidate the thesis of your book and I said how many doughnut batteries do you see in your iPhones? How many doughnut batteries do you know Tesla's? It's just not viable at the moment and of course it would be great if people could scale it up but the second part of innovation that everybody forgets about everybody loves the eureka moment

and the scientists discovering the things that just as important is the scaling. Industrial scale

is the second legabill of innovation and if you created the most amazing battery in the world

but couldn't build it at scale it will always be confined to be a curio of history like some of the electric cars that were developed in the 1970s that are going to in the book the US had an electric car very small electric car industry that it never figured out how to scale the Chinese figured out the scaling problem and the scaling problem they figured out because they had people coming in from the countryside into the city who were willing to work for peanuts and basically

assemble batteries by hand. It's amazing what we can ignore when it's far enough away like if suffering had a tracking number we just hit mark is delivered and move on. Speaking of shopping online we'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored in part by better help. Financial stress isn't always just about not having enough sometimes it's about feeling like no amount is enough it's

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principle from the show usually that's a past episode of the show it's always about a two minute

“read or less just about every Wednesday jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it now back to”

Nicholas near our coast. It's funny how to Chinese lesson this morning and we're talking about this but how there's all these people that live in villages and china and on farms and their life is not that good and during the opening up revolution they said hey let's improve all the cities and so everyone went wait I want to live there 15 20 years old I don't want to live here in the farm digging holes with sticks and having an ox plowed my field so they go to the city and the city

goes okay we're gonna give you a job you're gonna make five bucks a day and it's a little bit hazardous but you don't have to live on this farm and it's still like that in some places so you're assembling batteries by hand and you have millions of people doing it we're not gonna be able to do that here in the States it's not a thing that would be willing to do. I would say that assembling

batteries by hand basically being obviated by just the success of Chinese battery companies which

have in the last decade or so invested heavily into robotics invested into factories and so they have these state of the art facilities I spoke to a top scientist at organ national lab in Illinois and she said to me I went to China for the first time in 10 years 15 years whatever it was and I

“was shocked just how advanced how many PhDs I think BYD has 180,000 researchers which is more”

than the entire country of Germany working on batteries or working on many things of which a big portion of that is batteries so the R&D investment the research and development investment is key to this and the U.S. has under invested over years they have under invested in mining in processing in the science and so now China is out ahead on this front yeah this is crazy look people are worried about an arm conflict but really right now they don't even need to do

that they could just say no more batteries for you is that something trying to could do it seems like they could right they could just say you can't buy batteries yeah and they did some rare earth export controls last year which sent the market into a bit of a tizzy fit in the price of cobble has jumped that's to do also with export controls from Congo but it is really

“a risk and the fact is when you start buying the end product when you start buying the end battery”

that makes it impossible ever to move back to producing the precursors and so on that's just the logic of industry I see so it almost seems like batteries are another pull I won't say they're replacing oil is the center of power but it certainly seems like they are another strong pillar of power I guess back in the day it was whoever controlled the oil right and if there was an oil shock it affected everything and it's still like that but it seems like they could just as easily be a battery

shock their could easily be a battery shock as well I mean you could have a situation in which your phone could go up in price quite considerably because of Chinese controller battery cells the fact is that at the moment that hasn't happened and it's a weapon that they have kept in their arsenal but it certainly could happen now they don't want to do that because they're still worried about losing privacy but the fact on the other side is that the US is very aware of this

I spent the morning speaking with people at the state department they are very aware of this okay that's a relief because it sure to a lot of us seems like we slept on this for 20 30 years and now it's hey this is going to be a problem and everyone goes ah whatever but that's the problem for the next administration I don't know so at least people in Washington are

paying attention and care about this absolutely people have been paying attention since the first

Trump administration and really actually Biden pushed this into top gear some of the solutions that they proposed were not particularly effective the current administration is working very closely with and trusting the Congolese government I have a question as to whether that is really a solution because the Congolese government is ridden with corruption it relies on falsified elections and yet at least they're doing something I mean the lack of knowledge on this subject was palpable

when I started in 2018 I spoke to people who just didn't know anything about this now there is a significant team of people working on this there's a brain bank that's starting to be developed so at least that now I don't know if I trust that they have all the solutions so we shouldn't feel in any way we're out of the weeds it was funny because two days ago the Wall Street Journal reported that a virus which is a new US company founded by sort of

XCA guys or something like that has secured the lease for a big Congol co-bolts processor called Shemath and it's a major win for the Trump administration in the Wall Street Journal headline and

name basically yeah I say hey look I'll take any sort of win where we can I suppose because

it really sounds like we don't have the minerals okay we don't have the capacity to refine the minerals not good we don't have the capacity to turn the minerals into batteries not good we don't have the capacity to manufacture the things that need the batteries and then ship them that is not good

“especially if we end up in a drone warfare situation where you need to make lots of small gadgets”

that have micro processors and batteries in them because you need millions of them to fight a conflict or especially if you're a neighborhood with a runway you're quickly depleting your stocks of Tomahawk missiles which are full of copper or you need to build a Virginia class submarine which I can't I forget how many rare rats it has in it the dependence on China has increased thanks to this administration's wars so it is a problem that is becoming worse and worse by the day

with every day that the war in Iran continues we are becoming more and more dependent and I say we I mean the U.S. and Europe is becoming more and more dependent on China you'd use the phrase "mafistophilian bargain" did I get that right got it perfectly well okay that's heavy I don't know what that means and I'm probably not alone so I'm gonna have to have you explain that

“"Methystophilies was the demon with whom Dr. Faustus sold his solar way for riches and power and”

wealth and so on so "Methystophilian it's a pact with the devil" I see so is the same thing as Faustian

bargain "Fastian but pact" exactly I've never heard this version of it maybe that's more common

in the UK that's funny you learn something new every day I studied Faustian in college and that was in the States so "Methystophilian was always I like it as a word" yeah that's funny you've been waiting years to use this like finally I get to use "Methystophilian bargain" and something non-academic that's great okay so what is the Faustian because that's easier for me to say bargain that we have made here what are we trading the bargain is about packing more and more power and having these magical

almost batteries in our pockets and exporting the suffering and the pain and the environmental impacts to Africa to Asia to other places and the other part of the Faustian bargain is that we have also handed the keys to China China has all the cards on this one it's not to say that we can't get it back so we're not as screwed as Dr. Faustus but we could definitely find ourselves in very difficult straits in not too long yeah I did a show that was more in the weeds on the mining it was with

Sidharth Kar up that was episode 807 it was basically how the blood of Congo powers all of our

devices so rather than getting into the human cost of this and the environmental cost which is horrifying I'll let people go to that episode I'll talk with you more about this system itself and the power the China has and how this could escalate into something quite serious geopolitically so our whole system runs on batteries how fragile is the system I know that's kind of a strange word with supply chains but it seems like China's got a pretty robust setup it's just that there's

“a choke point in that they can say no more batteries for you exactly I think the system is fragile”

in that things are being shipped all around the world and when global shipping is limited or when fuel prices go up and so on again sorry to come back to the war but it will push up prices and we will see probably prices for these minerals rise what breaks first if supply chains get disrupted I buy an iPhone once a year if a cost fifty dollars hundred dollars more I think some people will notice most people won't they'll just assume apples getting greedy the end but what sort of

problem does the every man see on a daily basis if these supply chains get disrupted because there's batteries and things you don't even think about it's not just your fancy once every two years purchase I think you're completely right the batteries and everything so you'll see the price of many things go up and I think what's very interesting about this as well is that going to sit at the car as book which is sort of expensive some of the artisanal mining which again

reminding people it means exploitative hand-binding the large tech companies could invest in mining and invest in clean mining and invest in companies that do things the right way it would be a bit more expensive and maybe they would pass some of those costs on to the consumer but we're not talking about five hundred dollars more for an iPhone we're not even really talking about hundred dollars more we're talking about thirty dollars more or twenty dollars more in some cases that's

depressing that it's it's so cheap to just not have child slaves dying in horrific conditions and yet it's not what I do in that we're not doing that and it's to do with inertia and laziness

come from in the first place that's one question what are the people left with who originally took out those metals it's another question but at the same time I guess it is better than directly buying things feeding the supply chain the factors that the cat is out of the bag and there are so many other companies buying this stuff that don't really care about where it's coming from and also the other thing is the apple has continued to put companies like why you're

co-bolts that we spoke about at the beginning of this show into their supply chain so they've taken them out when it's politically unpalatable and then they slowly crack back in and then they've

“to be taken out come back in it says it's a sort of whack em all you have to keep pointing it out”

not to mention maybe people maybe apple has a big spotlight on them because it's apple and everybody has an iPhone and they're pocket but I don't know I've got this thing here that vibrates it's like a exercise thing it's not a major brand no one's gonna know if that company uses sustainable batteries that were mind-differently fair trade mining even the company that makes this vibrating device doesn't know where their battery comes from they don't care they just

probably bought the cheapest ones that don't explode spontaneously so they can legally sell them

in the United States it's amazing that you say that because by the way I had a conversation with a

European electric bike manufacturer and that is exactly what he told me he said we were looking for the cheapest batteries possible I said but did you even think about where the code book was got oh no we don't think about that yeah of course the euros are supposed to be the ones that actually care about this stuff right it's us over here in the States it's supposed to be the heart was bastards wow and you're gonna be able to compete on price look if you're just looking

for the cheapest batteries and you need a million of them and something costs you $10,000 or $15,000 more but it's fair trade and sustainable but no one is ever going to give you a pat on the back for that you're just gonna buy the cheaper one you're just gonna do it the Europeans have

“started this thing called the battery passport which is first coming I think later this year or”

early next year so you're gonna be able to see where your battery came from and it would be like a two hour code on the back of your phone or something like that that's amazing let's see how that works out again there are questions around how things are traceable and can you rely on the data but obviously it's a step forward yeah that is a step forward people will try to counterfeit that stuff

but that's always been that way this is probably a really tough one to answer because there might

not be an answer but are we more dependent now on batteries than we were in the oil era? No I would say we're still very dependent on oil yeah of course I just wonder if we have a higher dependence on battery tech no battery tech changed the peak of the oil era whenever that was the 1980s say battery tech completely changed those batteries were made they were led acid batteries they didn't have the supply chain issues nickel cadmium as well didn't have the same supply

chain issues and also there's not forget until the 1970s there was a lot of mining in the US there was a lot of mining in Europe and that mining has for very good reasons because it was also being done in unsafe ways in many cases was regulated and the mining industry went through this period of contraction in the 1990s and 2000s because people understood that this was a very polluting industry and it had to go through this and I actually think that has been good

for the mining industry in the end of the day but now there needs to be a period of investment there are very few people on the left or the right who are saying mining in Congo is better than

doing mining at home the US has a small cobalt belt matches fairly large cobalt belt it's never

going to be able to replace Congo but it will go some way towards making the US less dependent on China the problem is that that cobalt is very difficult to refine it has a lot of arsenic in it there's a big issue around the environmental effects of processing and that's something that has to be resolved at this point the most honest phone ad would just say now with 12% more battery life and 100% plausible deniability cool love that for us quick break we'll be right back

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make this show possible all of the deals discount codes and ways to support the show or searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger dot com slash deals if you can't remember the name of a sponsor you can't find the code please do email us jordan at jordanharbinger dot com happy to surface codes for it it really is that important that you support those who support the show now back to knicklers nearkos back in the let's say the seventies yet opac and they could just say

no we're not giving you oil or we're raising our prices and it's just tough luck that made us completely dependent on these oil producing countries now we've got the shell revolution we can refine and at least some of our own oil we get oil from Canada more now we produce domestic oil but we can't do that with

“batteries so i think instead of dependent i'm asking more along the lines of are there more dramatic”

choke points and levers that other countries have now with batteries then they did when we were dealing with oil completely the democratic republic of the Congo has 70% of the world's cobalt

which is a critical mineral and that it's height opac and i don't know 40% 45% of global oil

supplies and this is when they were able to form cartels and so on and we've seen this we know the Congo it has imposed export restrictions and that has already made the price of copper and cobalt shoot up there's a lot of control that that country has by itself now when you factor in Chinese processing and the fact that many of the minds are owned by China not just in Congo but also in Indonesia the world's second largest producer of cobalt you get to a point where you realise that

there is one country that has enormous leverage over this industry enormous leverage over critical minerals enormous leverage over rare earths rare earth magnets which are important for everything from cars to weapons to planes whatever it is and that country is China yeah wow and if you're

“scared of China or the rise of China then that's bad news and i think a lot of us are probably in”

that boat or at least nervous about it i want to talk more about that in a little bit i would like to touch a little bit on the human element here you mentioned that these guys are waking up maybe they don't even get anything to eat during the day i don't know they walk to the mine they climb in a hole you said they're using a metal bar to pry some of the rocks and soil out you've seen this with your own eyes in fact got arrested looking at it or trying to write about it what's the

get there paint this for us see might have just had me claim my threat i have an issue with my

“sinuses that i never had before i started this reporting i always wonder whether it's um i had”

episode three the other day really oh you get a little cobalt dust back there maybe i have no idea but people complain about it all the time they say they get sick during the dry season which is when the cobalt dust has been blown off the roads and it's not just cobalt it's just dust from the mines the some of it is mild the radioactive some of the studies of pregnant mothers and expect fathers show the highest levels of heavy metal concentrations found anywhere in the world in

that blood it's pretty stark are they using mercury in the mining process or is it just that is it the cobalt itself a heavy metal i actually don't know what cobalt is is it a metal it's not just cobalt it's copper it's other contaminants plenty of other metals one of the big contaminants is uranium so it's it doesn't necessarily come from the refining the refining

basically leaks into water supplies like rivers and sulfuric acid is using the refining so you

imagine what happens to you're drinking water supply when a mine next to your house and the water that you both bay then drink and also wash your clothes and stuff in is suddenly flooded with sulfuric acid and sulfuric acid into which copper and cobalt and whatever has been leached and has been disposed of incorrectly you see what is known as sacrifice zones and these are places that are being sacrificed for clean energy at home it's depressing it's shocking and you look

around and you look at the places that are not next to mines and there's actually incredibly beautiful country and you think God what are we doing in our scramble for clean energy if you've seen these mining accidents and things like that if you've been around the danger as well I've been to the pits many times I've been to people's houses where they have children who've fallen down the pits at

night and things like that I've seen people with injuries the hospitals but no I've never been

in a mine when it collapses because it's the sort of deadly moment surely if you've been around a collapse people start yelling and panicking and I don't know digging to try to get people out

“you do not want to be there but one of the anecdotes that I tell I think toward the end of the book”

is cabins is the English word the in French they called Abulmore and everybody starts saying Abulmore and we walk into the deputy mining ministers office in this region and we have an interview schedule with him he said oh two minutes two minutes and then he's sitting there he's speaking in French with the governor and he's saying oh yes you know excellency we don't have enough to pay the families they've all died and they're just being a cave in and Abulmore and so he looks

up and he said oh let's have this interview and I speak back to him in French and he realizes what he's done and he's sort of a bit sheepish about it so you have a situation again in which these people are trying to cover up what's happening because it is just so brutal and so dangerous it's not just a risky job any given day you just might have come home from doing something like this

“what does the dust do to your body what kinds of illnesses are common look for men I think it's very”

bad for your sperm I think for women it's very bad if you're pregnant there are lots of cases of congenital malformation children with these kind of swollen heads and these horrible illnesses that many doctors there will say comes directly from exposure to dust and is most concentrated in places where there are mine sites next door and that dust gets blown into the homes however it's not just the doctors there who are saying it there have been studies in the Lancet

and other respectable scientific journals that have confirmed this issue and these are obviously long-term damage do people who are working in this area do they know any of this or is it just something they realize later because surely if you work in this area maybe you just know a lot of sick people but they don't have a choice there's just a kind of fatalism I guess to living there and working there and for most of these people they only like that they know yeah they don't have a choice

this is almost a silly question after all that but do they have any sort of protective equipment or is it really just bare hands bare feet using a stick dig it out your hands that they're on the bucket so the Congolese state and so far as it exists it's supposed to formalize mining and inaugurate formalization projects since I've been away they've made more and more noise about doing that with varying levels of success so formalization includes getting protective equipment

getting helmets getting pickaxes and what have you for the artisanal miners for the people who are mining by hand however in many many places and or even in the audits of places which have undergone formalization people regularly found people without shoes and washing minerals and

but it just hasn't gone very far and there's kids there because it's the only income opportunity for the family and it's absolutely crazy to me because the only way they're going to go to school they miss school in order to pay for their school they're supposed to be free school in in Congo but this state has crumbled to such an extent that there is no free schooling or at least teachers don't get paid so it's up to the families that send the kids to the school

to pay teachers and that is basically the situation that people are in can the West catch up at all

or are we just too late I mean you mentioned they have a bunch of refineries we have maybe one they've invested a ton we've under invested is it too late now or is it like now we could have a

“rough ten or fifteen years or is it just not possible it's never too late and remember that it's”

not an all-on-nothing thing in the end of the day the US can build up a refining capacity Europe can build up refining capacity Congo could perhaps even build up refining capacity and the burden could be shared and in an ideal world there would be a supply chain that was distinct for all different places now of course the people who are benefiting from the supply chain at the moment the trainees will not want that to happen and have been able to manipulate in the past prices

because they stop pile the metal basically what will happen is that there's an investor who comes and it's okay we want to build this mine assuming that prices for cobalt will remain steadier x over the next five years or whatever it is and then suddenly they see the price of cobalt crash because the trainees have flooded the market with their stockpile or whatever it is and say ah well actually couldn't be profitable and they can't get the funding or the loans or whatever it is

“so there has been a lot of manipulation behind the scenes I see okay walk me through a modern”

mineral deal so who's at the table Congo China anyone else who's at the table for this big multinational mining corporations or Chinese state-owned enterprises or smaller enterprises that are trying to basically find greenfield sites and develop them into mines these are known as junio miners and Mark Twain has a funny phrase for these people it says miners defined as a liar standing next to a hole in the ground or something like that that's basically the junio miners in this case

so these people will be cut in and sometimes it's combination of these people so the big Chinese Congolese mining deals that were struck in the late 2000s what was known as the deal of the century those deals were basically attended by who are you which are that time is a very small company basically the huge Chinese mining company state-owned mining company and the Democratic Republic of the Congress government and the Chinese government so it's

a lot of different actors but the Chinese are very good at working in lockstep and then also like weird Chinese businessmen who got in on the action including this guy Simon Kong who's known as

Mr. briefcase they always have weird nicknames like that isn't that a thing I've got a lot of

friends that do business in weird places like Sierra Leone or whatever they're in mineral mining gold mining they've always got stories of these Chinese businessmen and I'm like oh does he work for a big company so there's the big companies and they have their reps that come in from Beijing or Shanghai or whatever shenzhen but then you have these sort of hangers on that maybe they even grew up in Africa their diaspora or they're from China depends and they don't work for

the company they don't work for the state they're not spies but they got they're like fixtures they got their hands and things they always have nicknames like Mr. briefcase or polo because they only wear that their nicknames will be something really sort of unoriginal like Lao Ban or basically

loafers or something and they they always based on what they look like or how they're dressed or

“something like that of the brand of cigarettes that they smoke and it's what does this guy do?”

nobody in the whole deal actually understands what this person's job is other than showing up to every meeting and somehow having an idea or an input it's something out of a movie yeah he's called Mr. briefcase for a very specific reason because when he comes along to a deal there is a briefcase full of cash that comes along with him but the book has a numerous characters like this one of my favorite is this kind of Lebanese entrepreneur businessman character who

goes beyond the realm of that but his dad came over during the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s to Congo to work as a judo instructor in the south and then he lost his job at the university or he left the university and became a cloth trader in the interior of Congo and his sons were like geniuses and they came and this was just about the time that people were selling cook co-bots and cell phones and they realized that they can make a lot of money off this and they

built these mines basically from scratch and finally that he fell out with the president he fled to Malta and it was interesting following that guy I couldn't get in touch with him in the end then there's another character called Dan Gertler who's an Israeli guy who came to Congo when he was like in his mid-20s just finished military service maybe even early 20s would say it's like 2324

unseated and suddenly this very rich country is basically open for the plunder has just ended there is smoke rising over conchassa and this guy goes I just fell in love with the country I just I'd love the people you also got very rich because he basically became the go-to guy for the government to flip these mines and essentially he would sell the mines and then money would go back to the government and they would be able to fund the political campaigns or their policies in Dubai or

whatever it is there's a very interesting history of battle in Congo. Chase well how directly are these minerals tied to say violence are people literally fighting over specific mines or how kind of directly can we draw this line? It's sometimes been drawn to directly by advocates because they want people to really care about this and I understand why they do it with cobalt it's slightly indirect there are some data points to suggest that third hand some

“money can get into the hands of some violent militias and whatever it is I think that's quite”

difficult to really draw that straight of a line the connection with child abuse and child labor and human rights abuse is much clearer is much clearer now when you get to a mineral like coltan that's a whole different story because those mines as we said earlier have been used to fund a war now they may not be the reason for the war as some people will say but the rent extractor from those mines has been used to fund the war. Yeah I've got a buddy who was a coltan minor in

Sierra Leone I asked him how he got that job he said oh I'm friends with the president first red flag well actually the first red flag was we were at a bar and he was limping and I said did you injure yourself and he said no I have $30,000 worth of gold strapped to my leg with an elastic band and I

said why and he goes I just flew in and I always carry this with me at all times when I'm in Sierra Leone

“and I ask why and he's like you never know when you're going to have to leave and you definitely”

can't use paper money in a revolution and I was like this is crazy to me so I made him show me the gold it was definitely real and attached to his body and then he showed me photos later because I was like I got to know more about this and it's just like him in a little grass hut looking thing on a hammock and a bunch of dudes with machine guns hanging out in a truck nearby and then there's a bunch of people in the background and like waste high water and he said the rest of the

guys were in the mine and so he was really doing this exact thing and to this day I mean

other than talking with people like you I've never really heard it I wouldn't believe him if I hadn't

seen these photos of this exact thing and of course the gold strapped to him was kind of a credibility builder I guess you could say the image he painted for me was that anything could pop off at any time and he would need men with machine guns to drive him somewhere in that truck pay them and whatever border guards were keeping him in and not letting him out in actual gold and then be able to get home with the rest of it I guess that's the strategy isn't it but you've always

got to look for the gold for proof don't you that's right yeah go you limping now I have 30 grand worth of gold strapped to my liking different coins and there were like some of it was just nuggets like unprocessed nuggets and I thought okay this is something you got from the ground this

“is not something you bought anywhere dirty nugget of gold you have to be very careful doing that”

because they look for minerals on you when you're leaving these places I guess if you are friends with the president it doesn't matter and you probably don't go through whatever Sierra Leone and TSA

on your way out of the place yeah yeah I don't know about Sierra Leone but I was always told don't

take anything that looks like a rock because they're gonna say this is a mineral and like you're stealing the national patrimony and I don't know what anything to get a bribe companies will tell you their supply chain is fully audited which usually means they checked everything except the parts they didn't want to find will be right back don't forget you can join us on the Jordan Harbinger subreddit if you want to complain to me about me about the show or ideally get into

discussions about show topics and guests Gabriel and I are both in there over on the Jordan Harbinger subreddit how organized is the violence in these areas I've heard whispers that Wagner the Russian paramilitary group is operating in the area is that true or is that sort of like no so look the Wagner connection is this basically what happened is that about four or five years ago Wagner thought the Congo was a place that they could do business they sent some emissaries basically

to figure out situations on the ground they were staying with Maranite Lebanese and I think

be paid and also the US embassy got wind of this and because nothing in Congo stay secret for

“very long and they went to the Congolese government and they were like you can absolutely”

not have Wagner in this country and you're gonna have a big problem and the Congolese government listened to them at that point but what they wanted in return was a mastery company that would be all used to them the solution was what was essentially a French company called Ezimira that used Romanian mercenaries under a guy called Harishu Potra who was the friends with I don't know if you were over the Romanian election last year this kind of strange criminal supposed to

figure out a number of his name but I know who you're talking about yeah Potra was kind of the strange character and Jimiro were fairly effective in keeping the M23 rebels away from the main towns places like Goma and Sakia and then the government was like okay well we're just going to do what we do to everybody else we're going to screw them and they were like okay we're

“not going to pay you for this month and then they didn't pay for the next month and then at that”

point the Romanian mercenaries withdrew and that's when you saw the big moments of the M23 advances

happening culminating in January of 2024 in which the Romanian mercenaries were basically completely

betrayed by the Congolese army they were shot at by troops that they were supporting and this is not been reported widely actually the troops that they were supporting wanted to prove to the Rwanda and back rebels that they were also on their side so they shot their own allies in the back and at that point Andrew Meris had f**k this we are not doing this anymore and there was a prisoner release and they were sent across the border to Rwanda they were given a stern lecture and put on the

plane and they left now the replacement for that has been a combination of it's really military trainers Eric Prince is sorry not no longer a backwater. Eric Prince is guys they academy black water

“whatever the name is now they were keen on getting involved and actually for the moment they've been”

involved more in like guarding the strategic assets in the south things like cobalt mining again I just want to emphasize that these cobalt mines are very far away from where the fighting with the M23 is happening there is a separate low boil rebellion that is happening in the south you might have seen recently there were some park ranges who were killed in a national park called a pember but these are people who are quite old fashioned most of them own are armed

with bows and arrows and not even proper guns but it is a very strong tendency into the south to think we are the richest part of Congo and we should succeed because we don't get any of the profits. Okay understandable so they had French Romanian mercenaries helping out to guard things the government of Congo screwed them over the government of Congo troops started shooting at them they left American mercenaries and Israeli trainers moved into guard the assets and I can't imagine that this

is that much more stable than what they had before it just sounds like a giant mess and I'm sure there's a million details we just don't even have time to get into but it's just a total cluster are we heading toward actual resource wars because what happens if demand doubles or more for batteries because it's not like we're going to use less of these things we could be the one big

factors that China has not shown any willingness to fight for these resources they have always been

a mercantile power in that sense they have always wanted to do deals and that's a great credit in many ways since the 1960s they have not been arming nasty groups and horror dictators and things like that and the factors that Europe and the West has been the Russians have been as well but look at Sudan to some extent it's a war over resources it's a war over food it's a war over gold these things do exist and I do think that if prices increase to such an extent there is an

incentive to attack and to take and that is an incentive that is as old as time and has been very much the story of Katanga since pre-colonial days Katanga being the southern part of the democratic Republic of the Congo if you look at the Lubak kingdoms and the fights with the Yekai who were these people who came from Tanzania in the 19th century those wars were over resources they were over copper they were over slaves they were over ivory and gold and so on so there were definitely already

wars happening even before the arrival of colonial powers I want to talk about the Western companies that claim their supply chains are clean actually what do these companies like Apple and Tesla what do they actually claim and how much of it is true how much of it is true is a really difficult to judge okay you have a guess let's just take them at their word and say that

recycled materials they being Apple in this case again this is not account for all the

materials that have gone into iPhones for the last 20 years how long have I been out since 2006 or something like that 2000 yeah so I don't know 20 years it doesn't account in Tesla's case Tesla has a bit of a better argument Tesla says we only bring away from industrial minds and they did this because they wanted long-term contracts it does not account for the corruption around that there are all kinds of questions around corruption now does that mean that Tesla is responsible

for the fact that the taxes paid on that minus stolen by a government minister absolutely not and

“I think it would be absurd to argue that but at the same time you have a situation in which”

these resources are being plundered and the companies that buy them are saying well that's

having far away and very much down the supply chain it's not really our responsibility so it's a

kind of outside out of mind type thing and I wonder whether they even know that's to me what's really interesting it's I've spoken to people at different companies lots of people want to speak to me off the record so I'm not going to stay for which companies some of them are literally believe that they are clean and then you ask them a couple of questions for example the European battery bicycle manufacturer and they just say yeah we buy off China and it's their problem

and you're like that's the problem like we ordered our supply chain at least until it gets to Shen Jen before that I don't know what are we going to do we don't know where our suppliers get their supplies the other crazy thing they say they ordered apple has a great deal of look through it they probably have the best supply chain audits they're very accessible and so on but I look to the audits and on the audits were the companies where I had just seen child miners

extracting these minerals that's not a clean supply chain that's just you noting down the companies and hoping that nobody looks into it more I guess exactly so how do these audits actually work what does it mean to audit your supply chain because look people listening to this right now myself included they think it's like sending a Nicholas Niarcos out there and going hey man I want you to go to the mine and want you to seize digging this out I want you to take photos

I want you to see if they're old if they have PPE if they're too young if they've got shoes on and hard hats and then follow those minerals and get into pickup truck and follow that other truck and go to the place where they ship it out then fly to China go to the refinery watch the minerals come off the boat and go into the refinery and see who's working in there

“that's what we think and audit is but the more you're talking the more I'm thinking they just”

get a spreadsheet as an email attachment and they go "ah that seems legit" all right what's for lunch that's kind of what the audit is now starting to sound like to me I think there are some audits where they do that the rationale for these audits is often and the way in which the process of these audits is not often made public I managed to get some of these audit documents for a mine that I was looking at and I realized very quickly that they had done an in-depth job and that they had said

look guys this is not a clean mine there are children and there are people without shoes and whatever there were people without helmets and the mines are too deep and so on and there was no stop in production there was no point at which that mine was made safer and I had gone to it I think a year after that audit had come through a year or two after that audit had come through and conditions were even worse than what they were talking about it's also ignoring the audits that's another

“big factor of this so yes I think there are plenty of different audits that pass the sniff test”

but I do also think that there's a culture of okay what's next for lunch what's to lunch yeah

yeah the question is what are they incentivized to ignore and I suppose the answer is

anything inconvenient that might interrupt production there was a moment where Elon said something like hey why don't we just install cameras to make sure that kids aren't working in the mines and I'd love to hear why you think that first of all that's one of the most out-of-touch things I think anybody's said about any of this but first of all why can't we do that and what is this reveal about how detached leadership is when it comes to these minerals well if you've been there

to understand that there are thousands and pump thousands if not tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of holes at a lot of weapons and people are very good about getting around things that I find very difficult to understand how that would work and what's more he didn't seem to understand Tesla's own supply chain which comes from an industrial mine so they don't have the issue of child labor directly in their later vehicles because they bought this long-term supply

now the system that keeps the industrial mines alive and this is an argument they're making the book

government they have said you do not have access to the wealth of these like 70 to 80 percent of

“industrial mines these are the big mines in DRC so you can have the scraps which is the 20 percent”

of artisanal mines and this basically creates employment for that part of the citizenry because industrial mines at comparatively employ very few people there are millions of people who depend on that isn't money and banning it straight off the bat is definitely not a good idea because if you did that if you stopped it you would have mass poverty hunger and so on I wish I'd started with this particular question but why is Congo so resource rich did they just win the geological lottery

because it seems like they have everything there yeah so i uh jude corne who was a Belgian geologist in 1891 who led a series of expeditions wrote back to the king and said this is a geological scandal on scondagier logic yeah they did win the lottery I was having a conversation with another journalist who covers this the other day and she turned around to me and said even if we managed to innovate away from cobalt and batteries which we have done to some extent chances are Congo will have

that thing that we're looking for it is just so rich in resources and it's to do with this ancient sea that was dried and the salts that were dried on this ancient sea in the way that the sea

was compressed by different African plates banging into each other so yes they have an incredible amount

of metals and resources including the perhaps the world's largest deposit of lithium that's still not properly working at this point where does that leave us if we buy phones or we complicit is there any ethical option or is this just a systemic thing that we have to figure out you could buy a fair phone which buys from accredited mines and things like that that's an interesting project but that's not available to everybody I would say

that this is not an argument to stop buying cell phones entirely or so on I would say it's probably an argument to not buy a Tesla and then every three years replace it which is the average for an

American family it is an argument to use your devices long as you can and to slow down your life

“I know that my life is impossible to slow down so I understand how hard that is for people”

but it is an argument more to be politically engaged to be involved to write to congressman if you have the weather with all to go and lobby the companies to if you're a shareholder and apple which many people are through therefore on k's or whatever to make them understand that this is something they care about you can do this at shareholder meetings you can raise questions and to shine the spotlight on this because I think that's the thing that engaged citizens can do

in the US and in Europe and countries where the batteries are being used what would a real solution look like here is ethical mining scalable you think? Absolutely the real solution would look like us paying a little bit more for our devices and cars and ethical and clean mining being implemented and when you talk to mining people they want to do it as well that's the interesting thing about it even when they're totally off the record and they've had a couple of

drinks or whatever it is they will tell you they're like we obviously there are other people that are just like they don't care like I'm going to make my money and unfortunately those people can be very effective at some points but most mining people don't want to be the bad guys most mining peoples here is a way of providing to humanity in maybe not a noble way but in definitely useful way yeah I kind of put miners up their like farmers right you've got many

that grow food they love the animals they take care of at least they love providing a service to humanity and then you have people that I don't know run essentially a human trafficking operation where they have slave laborers that are from Venezuela or something like that that are here illegally and they work them to the bone and they pinch every penny that they can and there's a lot of in between right but most farmers are not out there being sociopaths just like most

miners probably aren't I'm surprised because it sounds like after everything you've seen you

“you sound a little bit optimistic am I misreading you here I think I'm optimistic because this”

issue has gotten traction not just through sedath car as a book although that was very important but through social media through jewellie per asking Tim Cook questions and button holding him on the issue sorry I laugh about that but that it it was an important moment actually in this stuff do I leave a doing hardcore journalism for the rest of us exactly I'm she got that access and good on her I think that the awareness of this issue in the holes of power as I was saying

I was chatting with state department people today and it is front and centre now obviously that is

angle but one thing that does come along with it including in the agreements that were signed by Trump and the president of Congo the president of Rwanda was they want to implement formalization and safety policies and so on so help these countries so at least the language is there at least there is some sort of push toward that I just hope that we have a situation in which this is taken seriously because if it's just window dressing we are condemning yes another generation

of people to incredibly crushing situation yeah and handing China just much that much more leverage I would assume absolutely I don't know why are you scared to go back to Congo I mean you did

“get arrested by the secret police last time you went and were held in the prison oh I'm not allowed”

to go back so this guy let me get this straight this guy thinks he's going to come hang out with you in New York but you can't go back and visit him after that little prison term yeah that's basically

how it goes how do they tell you you can't come back was he like hey man never come back here I'll

call you when I'm in America or was it you get a letter how do they notify you no no no no I was interrogated by the head of the secret police so imagine the head of the CIA twice just shouting at me in front of the US console all like raising his voice at me and then getting me to copy out this statement saying I Nick this New Yorkers will never approach the borders of the Democratic Republic of the Congo nor will I write about the Democratic Republic of the Congo and so on that

did not work out for them obviously there was completely unimpossible and insane as well and I

“would just say that I don't think I'll be able to go back in this administration hopefully when the”

next administration comes in it will be more liberal and it will be interested in not just stealing

as much resources possible which is I was looking into that basically that was one of the reasons

that I was arrested and I hope that they will be able to say look this guy wants to like look at the supply chain and look at ways of making it better not oh this guy's going to cut into a bottom line for like our family and I'm not going to do my kind of corrupt business whatever it is. Nicholas New Yorkers thank you for coming on the show man fascinating subjects hope your lungs in sinuses end up being okay and stay safe out there and thank you once again for coming on the show

and telling us all about this absolutely crazy. Thank you so much for having me on Jordan is real pleasure. You're about to hear a preview of a story that sounds unbelievable but Avaloru and her daughter

“Kyle lived it for 12 years. Dear Mr. Capucho that's how they're addressed please pass this letter”

onto your wife who I would like to rape and kill and dismember love Freddy Kruger I mean I knew it a certain age that it was bad that it was you know rape, mutilation, killing, dismembering I knew that in a general sense at that point you feel safe nowhere because it's this amorphous threat doesn't have a face or a name or it's just feels like it's coming from everywhere so my hair started falling out I broke out in hives like for a month and a half almost two months

I was like a shell I didn't know how to protect my kid I didn't know how to protect myself it doesn't matter how much security you have at your house for a while there when CSI ended I thought oh thank god like maybe he'll just be off of it and for about six months we were enjoying no letters at all and then all of a sudden they started again like fast and furious because after 12 years I just I had stopped hoping that he'd ever be caught of all the women that were murdered in the

United States last year 86% of them were stalked first we will never not be hyper vigilant

and he's out so how do we just go oh he's fine now I'm sure he's totally sane because people go from insane to sane I'm sure it fades with time and I don't know for us as long as this guy is alive I don't know that it will really be able to fade for us there is no before there's only going to be an after and I don't know what that looks like to learn how they survived it and how the case was finally solved check out episode 1283 of the Jordan Harbinger show so the next time your phone

lights up you're probably not going to think about where that energy came from that's kind of the point the system works because you don't have to see it but now you've seen a little more of it and once you see it it's a lot harder to pretend that it's simple we like to believe progress is inevitable we like to believe it's good but progress isn't free it just sends the bill somewhere else all things Nicholas Nearcos will be in the show notes at Jordanharbinger.com advertisers deals

discount codes ways to support the show all at Jordanharbinger.com/deals please consider supporting those who support the show don't forget about six minute networking as well over at six minute networking.com it's our free course no shenanigans I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and

one my team is Jen Harbinger Jason Sanderson Robert Fogretty, Tata Sadlaskas Ian Beard and Gabriel

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