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- [00:00]
A
Morning, Zoe. Got donuts.
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B
Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage?
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A
Well, I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T mobile commercial like you teach me. So Dana.
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B
Oh no, I'm not really prepared. I couldn't possibly at t mobile get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.
- [00:24]
A
Wow, impressive. Let me try. T mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.
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B
Nice. Je free.
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A
You heard them. T mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible traded in any condition. So what are we having for lunch?
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B
Dude, my work here is done.
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A
The 24 month bill credit on experience beyond for well qualified customers + tax and 35 device connection charge credit send and balance due. If you pay off earlier, Cancel Finance Agreement. IPhone 17 Pro 256 gigs 1099.99 A new line minimum 100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required. Best mobile network in the US based on analysis by Oklahoma Speed Test Intelligence Data 182025 Visit t mobile.com if you like the gist. I think you do. I think you'll also like Risky Business, a podcast hosted by Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova. You know them, they're journalists who moonlight as high stakes poker players. Though that might be misstating where their incomes primarily come from. Tickets to poker. They talk about odds, incentives and outcomes. And they talk about democracy. You know, in politics, every move is a calculation. And sometimes our leaders can make bad bets. And sometimes we as citizens suffer bad beats. Check out Risky Business, available in your favorite podcast app. It's Wednesday, October 22, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. And Ukraine's newest strategy isn't about trenches. Is it about tank battles? You can't really win a tank battle. It turns out you can't really move a trench much more than a few feet when you're going up against R. Russians can't move the Ukrainians more than a few feet at a time. So Ukraine decided to go a different route. And they embrace the Flamingo. The Flamingo is a long range cruise missile. It goes 1800 miles. Guess what? It hits the factories of the Urals. It's taking a lot of Russian oil capacity offline. And not only is the Flamingo, that long legged interloper doing its thing, so too is the beaver. The beaver is a cardboard body drone that goes 600 miles long and has a bite. Now I looked it up. Is beaver the same in Ukrainian as it is here in America or Canada? The Americas. And it is, it is the bobber, which is the beaver. But they think of beavers differently. It literally means beaver. Same animal, same buck teeth. But to Ukrainians, the bobber isn't goofy at all. It doesn't have the cartoonish qualities or what has been called the innuendo laden overtones that beaver can have. In English.
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B
Nice beaver. Thank you, I just had it stuffed.
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A
Instead, the beaver is all about the animals diligence and industriousness. It is a symbol of a hardworking creature that endures gritty persistence. And that is how the Ukrainians are going to, if not win the war, but take the fight to the Russians, through diligence, through cleverness, through cardboard drones. Because as we are witnessing the world over, however, when you do take the fight to your opponents, the opponents are much more likely to give in to some manner of your negotiations. They might not want it, they might not be eager, but that's why they have the beaver on the show today. How China's high tolerance for environmental degradation gives him sort of a leg up geopolitically. But first I shall talk to. Speaking of animals, an information animal or a chronicler there of. Alicia Wanlis is the author of the Information Animal, Humans, Technology and the Competition for Reality. And she does in this conversation and in this book, put her finger on something that had been just outside my grasp. The idea of information wars and flows and pollution. This is a way to think about so many historic periods where there was a burst, where there was a surfeit in information. What's going on now with AI, with social media, with disinformation and misinformation, it has precedence. And Alicia Wanlis is here to discuss them all. Claude is, oh, a pal, my AI assistant who has helped me with many tasks, tasks, tasks that you can see as say, a gist subscriber or a just listener. So on, on the Mike Pesca webpage, we're starting to put together these little bundles to introduce the kind of interviews I do. I've done 10 years of shows, so I don't know, I don't know about the groupings, I don't know about which were the good interviews. So I started loading information into Claude. I loaded. Luckily we have a spreadsheet that actually Claude helped make loading information in asking Claude to suggest different combinations of different categories. And it's not up yet, but it's going to get there. And it really would have taken hours more without Claude and it wouldn't have been really, really good, like I think it's going to be. So it thinks deeper about challenges than I would have. It is the sort of thing sometimes it does orthogonal thinking where I wouldn't have put this military expert and that science guy together and call it oh, thought leaders. So Claude was, I will divulge one of those services that I decided to pay for before I knew they would even advertise. And when they said, hey, you want to do an ad? I said, yeah. So I could say things like, claude code is a game changer for developers. It works directly in your terminal and understands your intention, entire code base and handles complex engineering tasks ready to tackle bigger problems. Sign up for Claude today and get 50% off Claude Pro when you use my link Claude AI slash the gist. That's Claude AI the gist right now for 50% off your first three months at Claude Pro. That includes access to all the features that I mentioned in today's episode. Claude AI the Gist. There's a lot going on right now. Mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos in the air.
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B
I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's on the Media.
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A
Want to understand the reasons and the.
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B
Meanings of the narratives that led us here and maybe how to head them.
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A
Off at the past?
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B
That's on the Media specialty.
- [07:18]
A
Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts. We're living with technology, invasive, pervasive technology, the likes of which we've never seen before. That's true. But you know which factor in our use of technology is the same? It's the hour. We're human beings, we're animals, and we're in a information ecosystem. The name of Alicia Wanlass's new book, the Information Animal Humans, Technology and the Competition for Reality says it much. But what says it all is. Let me. I don't usually do this, but let me read her bio on the inside cover. Notice two words that are prominent. Alicia Wanlass is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she runs the Information Environment Project, combining ecology and strategic theory in a new approach to understanding conflict within in the information environment. First of all, welcome to the gist. And second of all, are you a technologist or an ecologist?
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B
Thank you for having me, Mike. I'd say I'm a generalist, but more recently I would refer to myself as an information ecologist.
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A
Yeah. So why is it more than an analogy I mean, I read the book and I know your answer, but it's a good answer. I mean, it's a good analogy. We use the analogy of the ecology of ecology or the environment for a lot of things, but why is it particularly apt when it comes to information?
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B
I think the first thing is we should move beyond analogies. And I think that we can. That we can borrow methods from physical ecology, which has given us ways to understand very complex physical systems in a similar way to understanding the information environment and ecosystems within it. And basically that's a way of giving us a systemic understanding that bridges together different disciplines in an organized way.
- [09:07]
A
Yeah. So it is true that when we're using an app or when we're obsessed with even a social media site, the analogy of we're in an ecosystem does seem appropriate because it's not exactly reality. We're reacting to different people within this system who really only exist, and are they even people? So that's all true, but you go beyond that and you use analogies to things in the environment, like figuring out exactly how DDT was harmful to apex predators, to talk a little bit about our information. I don't want to make you dance, monkey, but it was. It was a great lesson. Could you give us the thumbnail version of it?
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B
Right. So basically my argument, especially in that particular chapter, is that we can't possibly understand cause and effect in a complex system if we don't know how the system works. And there's a great story from Physical Ecology coming to prove that DDT was in fact causing egg thinning in birds of prey that I think is really instructive for everybody who's trying to prove that social media is causing whatever, whether that's polarization or other issues. And that is, social media is one way in which we're getting information. It's one way in which we engage with other people. It is not all of the ways that this happens, and it's not all the experiences that go into that, much like food chains, maybe complicate or inform how animals experience different pollutants in the physical environment. So way back when, in the 50s, 60s, some very big bird followers started finding out that falcon eggs in particular had become thin to the point where the birds were not reproducing, they were losing about 4/5 or something of the birds. It was quite significant. And so scientists immediately tried to prove that, because DDT had just come out, that it was the cause. And so they did lab experiments where they fed DDT directly to the falcons. But it didn't lead to egg thinning, because that's not how they experience it. They're birds of prey. They get it further down the food chain than that. And one researcher who happened to be a toxicologist and a lover of birds put that together and was able to replicate it with a byproduct called dde.
- [11:24]
A
Right. So we might say, it might be very simple to conclude, oh, social media is angry. Some sites more than others. Look at all these angry people. The world's gotten angry. Cause and effect. Social media made the world angry. But that's not how you look at it, right?
- [11:42]
B
Well, sometimes. What the challenge here is that we do experiments. Right. So different types of researchers might do them. They might be psychology researchers or computational data science. They do things where they try to test in a, let's say in a lab kind of environment to see whether people's perspectives might change. There are a few issues. One is that these studies are often not very replicable. One study will come out and say, yes, this proves that social media causes polarization. And then another study comes out and it refutes that. And that leaves us in this gray area that's really easy for tech companies to then manipulate, which is exactly the same situation that happened with DDT companies. And people who were supportive of DDT would point to those experiments using the DDT and say, look, it didn't cause the egg thinning. It's clearly not the problem. So it's that sowing of doubt problem that we're sitting in, that I think if we were to get to a better understanding of how ecosystems work, we may be able to get to a point where we can concretely prove causation.
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A
Yeah. And thinking about the birds and the eggs, I mean, what really happened was it was the animals that the falcons ate that were exposed to the DDT that polluted their diets, by the way. Is that right?
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B
Essentially, that is that is it. Yeah. So they were getting dde, which is a byproduct of ddt, and that was caused by, like, worms would be the first immediate ones who would consume ddt. And this would go up into other animals and smaller birds that the falcons ate. So it became something else by the time the falcons ate it. And that's the same thing I. I think with social media is that people have had an education, they're experiencing society. A child is going to school and exposed to other kids. There's other types of entertainment, and all of these things are happening. Social media is one aspect of it. Now, how and what that experience is by that point in time may affect its role in that ecosystem. But the problem is we just don't really know because we don't look at it in that kind of systemic way. We're just looking at parts.
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A
Right. So there are some better ways to look at how causations can occur, right? There is in the case to analogize to the Falcons, it was a causation, but it was indirect. So maybe a researcher would say social media is causing polarization. No, you got the experiment wrong. Oh, it wasn't causing polarization. It was causing another phenomenon and that causes polarization. A phenomenon like users, I don't know, taking time away from things that are inoculations against anger, let's say, okay, that's one, another one is the correlation causation fallacy. So these two things are going on at the same time, but one doesn't cause another and another one is the reverse causation. And I think some of that is going on, but you know, maybe we could talk about it, which is that is social media causing us to be angry or is the anger that's happening for a whole lot of other reasons in the ecosystem driving us making social media popular, Making certain forms of social media popular seems hard to disentangle. How do you try to do it?
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B
Well, I guess my approach would be not to try to disentangle it yet. How do we actually build this more systemic understanding that is capable of taking all of those things into consideration. And if we can get that kind of a thousand mile view, perhaps then we can begin to find ways to isolate particular causes. I would say my hypothesis would be off the top that in any complex system the odds of the odds of major problems being caused by one single thing alone are probably not high. At the same time, it's possible that something like social media could be very much aggravating pre existing situations and it could very much be causing new problems. I would just say that if we want to get to a point where we can concretely prove that so that we could agree upon legislation. Which is the real challenge in countries that are democratic, is that you need to have consensus in order to roll out regulation of something, then we need to have a more systemic approach to facilitate that kind of scientific research to prove causation.
- [15:44]
A
Yeah, it's hard not to think of ecology and ecological causes for contamination or poisoning because these are the words that are used with our technology and social media. And sometimes there can be many interacting causes of phenomenon, but sometimes that one, well in the center of London is essentially poisoned. And that's. Then we could trace the typhoid, I think it was epidemic, back to that. But it's hard to know, you know, and it's easy to look for the root cause, or at least it's tempting to trace it. And then you layer on to that the motivations of the people who are pointing to the infected well might not just be to save the populace. Right. It might be to. Some of the cases you write about are not as simple as people getting sick. They're competing ideologies, they're competing religions, they're competing colonialist occupiers and native populations. So I don't know who the. So it's not exactly. All we're doing is trying to exhibit some civic hygiene. You want to talk about a couple of the historical examples, all of which I found pretty interesting.
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B
Is there anyone that you prefer over the others?
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A
I like King Charles. That was good, because I think I knew about Athens. And then we'll get to Vietnam.
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B
Right. So I think the case studies, I mean, my first aim of these was the primary research question was could we actually apply methods from physical ecology, and in that, can we actually look at ecosystems and what kinds of factors and conditions could we look at over centuries, essentially such that we could start to find patterns or make comparisons? And in that regard, it was supposed to be an inductive process, but it did look at a period before the outbreak of Civil War, because I came from war studies, but also after a new tool was introduced that changed how people communicated or processed information rather. And there were a few things that I found throughout all of the case studies, including, including the one on King Charles the first and in England and the Civil War there in the early 1600s. But one was that a new means that was introduced into the ecosystem changed how people processed information. In this case, it was printed. And in particular, this produced a new output called pamphlets. And these pamphlets, which were short, basically like newspaper like things, were created en masse. So there was an increase in volume, but there was also an increase in the ability to spread them because a new postal system came. There were canals that had been built. And so information was being produced at greater rates in a new format and moving faster than ever. The second thing is that more people were able to engage than ever before. So what we have in that period is an increase in literacy rates. You start to have all of these tradespeople and apprentices are now able to read because of a different thing that happened, which was the Reformation and the Connection between being able to read the Bible. There's a bunch of factors that ended up changing the education system at this time in England. And then what follows is a new idea emerges that challenges an old one. In addition to the Reformation challenging the Catholic Church in advance of this period, you also have new ideas around the public sphere. And there was a group of politicians, parliamentarians, who wanted more control from the King, who was very authoritarian and totally disregarded what even his aristocrats or a new group of merchants wanted. So this began the information competition between these two sides, between the King and those supporting him, and people who wanted greater power for the Parliament.
- [19:31]
A
And information competitions often lead to floods and often lead to pollution.
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B
Yes, there are many things that seem to repeat over history in this kind of scenario, but yes. So what happens is the information flood. So this increase of a particular output related to a specific idea tends to follow both with the introduction of new technology, because it inherently increases the volume of outputs around something. But people, people who have an idea that they want to proselytize or push will use these tools and so they will introduce more about this particular idea into the information ecosystem.
- [20:10]
A
So the idea in this case is the Protestant Reformation.
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B
Well, it's a few things. One, it's tied up with the Protestant Reformation in that there are many. There's much information pollution and fear that the King Charles is going to be returning England to the papacy because we've already had a break with the Church with Henry, and there are consistent fears that it's going to be coming back. And it's all tied up with this millenary and apocalyptic view of the world and the 30 years war happening in Europe. So one, people are very fearful of this. The godly, who are really a big part of this group of parliamentarians, are hardcore Protestants.
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A
Good branding, by the way, how they get that one? Good branding, the godly, How'd they get that one leg up?
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B
It was actually a pejorative at the time. They were being mocked for being Puritans, essentially.
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A
And then they took it. Right. Like Obama. Sure. Call it Obamacare. Obamacares.
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B
That's a good question. I don't know whether they took it, but they certainly fit the brand. And so they were putting this stuff out there. And so it was a mix of like flooding the information space with fears about that in order to push their agenda as well as pushing ideas about, you know, the King should be sharing more power.
- [21:33]
A
So some hard stats about the rise of information. If you want to say this is an explosion of information that's why we're having these fights. And you just pointed out. And that was a lot of other things. But in terms of the explosion of information, there was the weekly postal service, which Charles introduced in 1635. And then the copying of books increased throughout Europe about 90% each century. So we had 700,000 some odd in the 12th century to 5 the 15th, and then 151% increase for the second half of the 15th century. By the 16th century, 216 million print books had been produced, which was, you know, compared to a fifth, no, a twentieth of that before. So someone at the time might say, all this information, it's just overloading us. But it's a lot of other things. But what I wanted to ask you is do these information competitions typically occur at times of great dislocation? Otherwise, I mean, there's a cause and effect question there. Right. But for the periods that you talk about, during periods of calm, are there sometimes information competitions?
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B
I mean, I wish I knew. The case studies I took were obviously associated with conflict. And so there is a need to look at places that maybe we thought might have been at risk and didn't fall into that trap. I think especially in war studies, it's not very sexy to look at places that don't have a war going on. But I do think that that is an area of future research that's required. I would add one thing.
- [23:11]
A
Just the kind of person who wants to go to the Institute of Peace, they're a different kind of cat than the person who does war studies, and maybe they shouldn't be. They need to talk.
- [23:19]
B
Well, I kind of bridged that divide, being at an endowment with peace in its name.
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A
So do they come to you and say, look, we just know about the peace, we just know about the truces. We need to talk to you about war.
- [23:32]
B
Well, to be fair, give me a.
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A
Trigger warning, but lay it on us, Alicia.
- [23:36]
B
The institution was created in the spirit of having international organizations or international institutions be able to prevent, not maybe prevent it, but like, how do we have international accord and stuff that decreases the likelihood that we go into, especially world wars? But I wanted to say, coming back to the new tools, right? So, yeah, we had more books, we had this. But it also follows on a prior change that happened that felt like a big shift in terms of information processing. And that's paper after paper is introduced into Europe. There is this massive increase in letter writing that. That some scholars argue spawned the Renaissance, and it was necessary then for the evolution of printing. And so what we see is that information ecosystems, far from being how they're often talked about today, which is like, somehow completely different than everything that happened in the past, are progressions. Each new technology adds a new layer and they often interrelate with each other.
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A
Yeah. So I have two more questions. They may have sub questions. One is disinformation. I have grown increasingly. I just think the word has become almost useless to me, to us. I think first of all, that was because of a degradation of the word and people who didn't want to admit that there was some disinformation going on. But when someone is identified as a disinformation expert, I'm really skeptical. And then when I scratch the surface, a lot of times their expertise is just promulgating the kind of information that they'd prefer. It also add to that, when. When government seeks to intervene in disinformation, you have to ask very, very tough questions like, is this information you don't like? Or information that is purposefully put out there to mislead? It's so tempting to use the government tools at their disposal to try to quash disinformation. Do you have any thoughts on how we think about disinformation or where we are with the. Oh, yeah. And the last big thing is the things we call disinformation. It's just a pejorative. Mostly it's misinformation, which can be worse. But it is misinformation. It's not nefariously trying, specifically trying to mislead you. Anyway, that's a morass. Could you pick up something from or tell me your thoughts on disinformation and what you're thinking about it now?
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B
Yeah. So it's one of those concepts that definitely, definitionally, is maybe satisfying for an academic, but really had problems being implemented in policy. And it is in part because of it being very much related to misinformation as well. And the distinction between the two of them is that one is intentional and the other is not. Otherwise they're both false and misleading information or misleading information. I think the biggest challenge with disinformation is that for it to actually exist as an example, to look at, it must be a narrative. It must already be some sort of an idea that is expressed within an ecosystem. There's no other way to identify it if it doesn't exist. It's just a kind of concept. And so once that is there in an ecosystem, it's really difficult to eradicate because people hold a belief, they hold an idea, and the minute that you try to police or do anything about opens up the potential for it to become a political issue. Because if there's enough people who believe this thing, inevitably there will be some self serving politicians who will either whether they believe it or not, will cater to that group to try to protect them. And so it becomes an impossible problem to fix. At the same time, it's obviously something that occurs at least misinformation naturally we've had it throughout time. It's present in ancient Greece, it's present today. And so in that paradigm is it that we should be worried about trying to tackle it directly or is it a symptom of a wider problem with other factors and conditions that make people more susceptible to it? I would argue this ladder.
- [27:34]
A
Yeah, Thucydides worrying God, people will believe anything about Sparta. That's so resonant. So last question I wanted to ask you about was. I did ask you, is there a through line on how to win or have success in an information competition? There isn't. What about I picked up from the examples in the book and what you talk about that is a decent rule of thumb. The suppressor of technology or information loses. I can't think of too many who won. Am I missing something or is that just the those battles that you studied?
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B
I mean I think you might argue that Ho Chi Minh there was some winning on their side and they still controlled the means of communication.
- [28:22]
A
Right. But I looked at that whole story as the French colonialists were the one trying to control and suppress the information. And then there was a populist uprising.
- [28:32]
B
Yeah, I would agree with the majority. And I mean you still see some attempts to control the information ecosystem in Ukraine. Russia had less control of it. But it doesn't really lead to a great ending. Both the control of the means of processing information and the outputs.
- [28:51]
A
Yeah. So is there any example? I think in most of the examples some are neutral, but some I had sympathy for the underdog or I thought there was a righteousness to the protesters in Ukraine in 2014 and I'm not going to say a righteousness to the North Vietnamese. But this is the classic colonialist story and we're told and there's a lot of accuracy and validity to looking at colonialism as an oppressive force, all that. But is there great examples of a suppressor of information and means of dissemination of information that also are that both one and are aligned with what we think of now or thought of then as the truth? That seems hard. That seems like a tough combo. Like we're going to suppress information. The truth is on our side. We're going to win this battle or this information competition and then we'll be validated by history and not a postmodern who knows what's true version.
- [29:55]
B
I think the challenge is that in societies that valued or put truth first, they tend to be democracies. And in democracies it's counterintuitive to control information. The whole idea is that there should be a free flow of information and that people should have access to a free and independent press. Different question on the quality of the press and who owns it and things like this. But there is this idea that this is a fundamental aspect of democracy. So it's really hard, I think, to have a system that purports to value the truth and then tries to control information such that it would be a victor. Like you're asking.
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A
I knew that this would only be very cheery and lead me to optimistic conclusions. The name of the name of the book is the Information Animal, Humans, Technology and the Competition for Reality. There is no as of now, we're getting a grade of incomplete on that score. Alicia Wanless is the author. Thank you so much.
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B
Thank you.
- [31:09]
A
Morning Zoe. Got donuts.
- [31:11]
B
Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage?
- [31:14]
A
Well, I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T Mobile commercial like you. Teach me Saldana.
- [31:21]
B
Oh no, I'm not really prepared. I couldn't possibly at T Mobile we'll get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.
- [31:32]
A
Wow, impressive. Let me try. T Mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.
- [31:40]
B
Nice. Jeffrey, you heard them.
- [31:42]
A
T Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro Pro on us with eligible traded in any condition. So what are we having for lunch?
- [31:50]
B
Dude, my work here is done.
- [31:52]
A
The 24 month bill credits on experience beyond for well qualified customers plus tax and 35 device connection charge credit send and balance due if you pay off earlier, Cancel Finance agreement. IPhone 17 Pro 256 gigs 1099.99 and new line minimum 100 plus a month plan with auto paypal taxes and fees required. Best mobile network in the US based on analysis by Oklahoma speed test intelligence data 1H 2025 visit t mobile.com and now the spiel. Rare earths. Not rare, but of the earth. Sometimes they are paired with critical minerals. That was the point of Donald Trump, the man who usually says rare earths but didn't in this clip as he announced a deal alongside the Australian Prime Minister.
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B
In about a year from now, we'll.
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A
Have so much critical mineral and rare.
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B
Earths that you won't know what to do with them.
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A
They'll be worth about $2. $2. The price right now is a little over $10,000 for lithium, but you won't see it it denominated in dollars. No. Lithium is expressed in the Chinese currency, the renminbi, at 73,000 renminbi, a cubic ton. That is a ton of lithium, literally. Why give the Chinese price for lithium not just in good old dollars? Because China has a huge hand in the lithium production process. A big, big hand. To find out why, let's check in on the FT's Unhedged podcast.
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B
These rare earths that it turns out, are not very rare at all. You can pretty much just drill a hole anywhere in the world and get these rare earths. But the thing is, China has this incredible advantage in not only mining these rare earths, but also processing them. Because basically, as the west bolstered up their environmental regulations, China took a more relaxed approach.
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A
Say, I think I get what she's saying, but as they say at many a rare earth facility. Let's drill down. Here's the Washington Post's Megan McCardell talking about the filthy process of refining rare earths in a bit cleaner manner on the Dispatch podcast. Now, it is important to note that.
- [33:51]
B
These earths are not actually rare.
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A
What they are is disgusting to produce the. When you leach these things out of the soil, you spew carcinogens into the air. They're really bad for the environment. If you look at what lithium mining looks like, it's really nasty stuff.
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B
Stuff. It's stuff that the United States has.
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A
Not wanted on its shores.
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B
It's not that we couldn't do this, it's that it's hard to persuade people.
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A
That they want to live near it. So America has lithium. Chile has a ton of lithium, actually 9 million tons. Then in the rankings of lithium deposits, there's Australia, then China. Bolivia, by the way, is thought to have the largest lithium reserves in the world. But it is untapped. It is under a very pretty looking salt flat and it is briny. That said, I would like to say more often than I do, Bolivian lithium. Bolivian lithium. In fact, those Australian rare earths. And it's not just lithium we're talking about, but it is lithium being mined in Australia. Those rare earths are being sent to China for refining because as Megan said it is just disgusting to refine lithium. It is smelly, it is deadly to local flora and fauna. So when tech car companies and all the world's markets quake after China announced they're capping the exports of rare earths and crit mins, I'm trying to get that one going. What's really happening is China saying we are the only country willing to get our hands dirty. And as such we have an advantage that we're now going to press because we're willing to do the dirty work, literally. Also, we're the only ones who care so little for our workers and the environment that we're willing to do this. You know, that does seem like a power play to some, but really when you think about it, it's quite a condemnation of the nation that's taking those risks. Even Donald Trump. Global warming is a hoax. Windmills are ugly eagle murderers. Donald Trump knows you can't put a lithium refinery in the U.S. well, maybe in a blue state. But I do have to think as I learn more about this subject and as technology marches on and as these minerals become more valuable and more central to geopolitics and as the rest of the world grows more weary of China's control of them, do you have to think that there's a chance we'd try to get a cleaner technology? China, what they do is they use sludge lagoons. That's one way. I mean, they've got an entire province called Inner Mongolia that they don't care if they ruin. And that's what's going on on sludge lagoons. It's really quite filthy if the name didn't convey that. But you know what, why not some? I don't know, let's brainstorm here. Seaweed derived gels, graphene oxide membranes, maybe supercritical CO2 plus ionic liquids. Hey, ever hear of a closed loop recovery system? Yeah, I hadn't either before I went on ChatGPT and started researching better, cleaner ways to refine rare earths. They're out there. There they're out there. And I'm not saying they're out there on the near horizon, but you know, maybe this is the sort of green revolution Donald Trump could get behind. You can't call it a green revolution. Gotta call it, you know, a gold revolution. And then maybe sell them on the idea that like seacot prison, we're not going to implement it stateside. You sell it to the Bolivians. Bolivian lithium. Bolivian lithium. So it does seem like maybe there are some solutions out there. Certainly not short term, but doable better solutions than being beholden to China and allowing China to warp the market and abuse the land. Because while rare earths might not actually be in short supply, the earth itself is a non fungible quantity made slightly bearable through the use of lithium dependent cell phones, which we can use to glimpse pictures of beautiful unspoiled Bolivian salt flats. And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the gist, Ashley Kahn's our production coordinator, Jeff Craig runs our socials, and Michelle Pesca runs around doing it all. And thanks for listening. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsync ads, go to libsynads. Com. That's L, I B S Y N Ads. Com. Today.