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

Summary

The Jordan Harbinger Show — Episode 1315

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

Release Date: April 21, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Jordan Harbinger sits down with journalist and author Nicolas Niarchos to expose the grim realities behind the supply chains fueling the so-called "clean" energy revolution. The conversation takes listeners on a harrowing journey from the artisanal cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to the sleek devices in our pockets, questioning whether the price of progress is simply being outsourced to the world’s most vulnerable. The episode also investigates China's chokehold on global battery manufacturing and debates the ethical, political, and human costs baked into the gadgets and electric vehicles hailed as the future.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Illusion of "Clean" Energy

• Clean Devices, Dirty Origins

  • Many electronic devices marketed as "green" or "clean" (phones, EVs, laptops) contain cobalt and other minerals mined under hazardous, exploitative conditions.
  • Quote [03:04, Jordan]: “Somehow we’ve just convinced ourselves that the whole system is clean. Today, we’re tearing apart the fantasy of clean energy… are we actually solving anything or just upgrading the packaging and outsourcing the damage someplace else?”

• Cobalt and Child Labor

  • Cobalt is essential for lithium-ion batteries, but around 20% comes from artisanal sources—often dug by hand, sometimes, by children.
  • Quote [03:55, Niarchos]: “Your phone has at least a 20% chance of having cobalt that was dug out by an artisanal miner. Some companies have pledged to clean up their supply chain—Apple among them—but that’s actually been quite recent.”

2. The Brutal Reality of Artisanal Mining in Congo

• Definition and Conditions

  • Artisanal mining = Small-scale, manual labor, often using primitive tools, unsafe methods.
  • Quote [04:46, Niarchos]: “Sometimes they’re bare hands, sometimes they have bare feet. People climb down into these pits… have very, very little. The mines are super, super unsafe. They collapse, especially during the rainy season…”

• Modern-day Slavery and Fatalism

  • Mines often run on what amounts to slave labor; extremely hazardous, with miniscule compensation.
  • Quote [05:20, Niarchos]: “These people are being…treated not just as very low paid workers, but essentially as conditions of modern day slavery.”

3. Global Supply Chains: Complexity and Control

• Multinational Flow

  • Battery minerals pass through 5–10 countries before final assembly. The Congo has most of what’s needed, but components can be sourced globally.
  • Quote [10:40, Niarchos]: “Chances are that your battery has probably been touched by five to ten countries…”

• Chinese Dominance

  • China controls 70–90% of battery metals processing. Political instability and lack of infrastructure prevent countries like Congo from “moving up the supply chain.”
  • Quote [13:37, Niarchos]: “70 to 90%, depending on which metal you’re talking about, happens in China itself…Congo just doesn’t have a stable power supply because of years and years of underinvestment.”

• Strategic Vulnerability

  • The entire clean energy supply chain has a choke point in China; if they restrict exports, the U.S. and Europe are exposed.
  • Quote [22:50, Niarchos]: “It is really a risk…when you start buying the end battery, that makes it impossible ever to move back to producing the precursors…that’s just the logic of industry.”

4. Geopolitics and the New Resource Game

• Resource Wars and Political Leverage

  • DRC holds 70% of the world’s cobalt. Chinese corporations own stakes in African and Southeast Asian mines. This concentration gives China (and the DRC) unprecedented leverage—potentially beyond what OPEC had with oil.
  • Quote [39:27, Niarchos]: “The Democratic Republic of The Congo has 70% of the world’s cobalt…at its height, OPEC had…40%, 45% of global oil supplies…There is one country that has enormous leverage over this industry…and that country is China.”

• Conflict as Both Cause and Consequence

  • Mining profits fuel militias and corruption. Interventions (like Rwanda's involvement in eastern Congo) are partly about resource control.
  • Quote [15:22, Niarchos]: “…the funding is provided by selling this gold, this coltan, and tin, tantalum and tungsten.”

• Industrial Scale vs. Human Cost

  • Western companies (Apple, Tesla, etc.) often claim “clean” supply chains, but audits are inconsistent or superficial. True supply chain transparency remains elusive—often “out of sight, out of mind.”
  • Quote [64:55, Niarchos]: “I looked at the audits and on the audits were the companies where I had just seen child miners extracting these minerals…”

5. Environmental and Human Toll

• Devastated “Sacrifice Zones”

  • Mining contaminates land, air, and water, causing severe health problems—from birth defects to chronic respiratory illnesses—among local populations.
  • Quote [41:12, Niarchos]: “People complain about it all the time. They say they get sick during the dry season, which is when the cobalt dust is being blown off the roads…some of the studies…show the highest levels of heavy metal concentrations found anywhere in the world…”

• Children Working to Attend School

  • Child labor is widespread; mining is often the only way for families to pay for education—nominally free, but teachers go unpaid otherwise.
  • Quote [46:15, Niarchos]: “It’s the only way they’re going to go to school. They miss school in order to pay for their school.”

6. Can the West or Consumers Change the System?

• Is it Too Late?

  • The West can still catch up, but only with massive investment in domestic processing/refining, and a willingness to pay higher costs for ethical sourcing.
  • Quote [46:49, Niarchos]: “It’s never too late. The US can build up a refining capacity. Europe can build up refining capacity.”

• Are Consumers Complicit?

  • While individual action is limited (it’s a systemic issue), consumers can delay upgrades, support shareholder activism, and push companies/governments for reform.
  • Quote [70:06, Niarchos]: “It is an argument to use your device as long as you can and to slow down your life…to be politically engaged…to make [companies] understand that this is something they care about…”

• True Solutions

  • Scalable, ethical mining is possible—but requires paying more for devices and political will for genuine transparency and formalization in sourcing.
  • Quote [71:20, Niarchos]: “The real solution would look like us paying a little bit more for our devices and cars, and ethical and clean mining being implemented.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If suffering had a tracking number, we’d just hit ‘mark as delivered’ and move on.”

  • Jordan Harbinger, [18:21]

• “Mephistophelian bargain… it’s a pact with the devil.”

  • Niarchos explaining the trade-off we make for ‘clean’ tech, [27:06]

• On the futility of recycling as the main climate solution:

  • Doug [13:07]: “We’re not going to recycle our way out of this one.”

• On exploitation cycles:

  • Doug [16:24]: “We’ve just sort of done this to Africa…over the last several centuries. It just keeps on rolling.”

• “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.”

  • Jordan Harbinger, [34:55]

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Additional Insights & Stories

• Firsthand Reporting in Congo

  • Niarchos describes being detained by Congolese secret police and the surreal kindness shown after his release ([07:22–08:32]).
  • On occupational hazards: Niarchos now has chronic sinus issues after repeated trips to mining areas ([41:03]).

• Market Manipulation & Supply Chain Gaming

  • Chinese manipulation of cobalt prices deters Western investment ([46:45]); “there’s been a lot of manipulation behind the scenes…”

• Wild West Mining Deals

  • Anecdotes of “Mr. Briefcase” and other international fixers—the characters (and bribes) driving mineral contracts ([49:02–50:02]).

• Audit Shortcomings

  • Even when supply chains are audited, child labor and unsafe practices persist; audits can be ignored or are perfunctory ([65:58–67:08]).

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Important Segments & Timestamps

| Segment | Topic | Timestamp | |----------------------------|----------------------------------------|----------------| | Illusion of Clean Battery | Introduction to the dirty supply chain | 03:04–03:55 | | What is Artisanal Mining? | Practical definition and dangers | 04:46–05:52 | | Who Buys Cobalt? | Chinese control; Apple/Samsung links | 06:17–06:56 | | Niarchos in Congo | Detainment and surreal release | 07:22–08:32 | | Battery Tech Overview | Why lithium-ion became dominant | 08:55–10:32 | | Supply Chain Breadth | Battery involves 5–10 countries | 10:40–11:16 | | Processing in China | Choke point in manufacturing | 13:37–14:37 | | Western Government Response| U.S. awareness and delays | 24:28–25:49 | | Environmental Impact | Dust, contamination, and health | 41:03–44:51 | | Human Cost—Child Labor | Children mining to pay for school | 46:09–46:34 | | Can the West Catch Up? | Is it too late? | 46:34–47:48 | | How Audits Work | Are supply chains actually clean? | 65:22–67:08 | | Solutions & Optimism | Scalable ethical mining and activism | 71:15–73:00 | | Optimism & Pop Culture | Dua Lipa grilling Tim Cook | 72:38–73:04 |

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Final Thoughts

The episode closes by challenging listeners to reconsider the real cost of their devices, as both a human and geopolitical issue.

Quote [77:44, Jordan]: “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.”

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For anyone interested in clean energy, geopolitics, or global trade, this episode is a vital, sobering listen about the world behind your wireless life.

Transcript

[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger

[Nicholas Niarchos]

show, the mines are super, super unsafe. They collapse especially during the rainy season which runs from May to 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 as conditions of modern day slavery. People earn so little and are able to basically scrape by essentially.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of

[Doug]

amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes,

[Jordan Harbinger]

authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional scientist, drug trafficker, gold smuggler or tech luminary. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about

[Doug]

the show, and I always appreciate it

[Jordan Harbinger]

when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs now. These are collections of our favorite episodes

[Doug]

on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology

[Jordan Harbinger]

and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today on the show, your phone dies, you plug it in.

[Doug]

End of story, right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Not quite the charge you're about to get. It started in a hole in the ground halfway across the world, dug by somebody who probably doesn't even own a phone, definitely isn't getting rich, and might

[Doug]

not even make it out of the hole alive.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And 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 Niarchos. I'm holding my phone right now, and somewhere in the world, a guy dug at least a part of this out

[Doug]

of the ground with his bare hands for, I don't know, a couple of bucks a day.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And I thought electricity was supposed to be the clean energy. When people hear clean energy, what are we completely wrong about?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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. It 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 miner. Some companies have pledged to clean up their supply chain, Apple among them. But that's actually been quite recent.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You said artisanal miner.

[Doug]

Look, I lived in New York. When I hear artisanal, usually the next

[Jordan Harbinger]

word is cheese or some kind of

[Doug]

milk that comes from a thing that doesn't have nipples. It's not usually a part of a battery.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So what is an artisanal miner?

[Doug]

This is just like an entrepreneur and I use that word tongue in cheek. It's just the kid who goes out and digs in a muddy pit to try and get some of this element.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

That's essentially what it is. An artisanal miner is somebody going, using a metal bar. Sometimes they're bare hands, sometimes they have bare feet. People climb 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.

[Doug]

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 muck and hoping that there's gold in there.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

That's exactly what it is. But this is a kind of much more, almost industrialized thing and the mines are super, super unsafe. They collapse, especially during the rainy season, which runs from May to October. We're talking about the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo here. And there are really situations in which these people are being essentially treated not just as very low paid workers, but essentially as conditions of modern day slavery. People earn so little and are able to basically scrape by, essentially.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay, but who controls the mine?

[Doug]

Because if something has a billion dollars worth, a 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So who's going, hey, you dig a

[Doug]

hole in here and if you don't do it, somebody else is going to do it. And I'll give you a dollar a day.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Somebody's buying cobalt from them.

[Doug]

They're not mailing it to Cupertino to sell to Apple, right?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 Dongfang Mining, which is a subsidiary of Huayo, 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Did you go to Congo?

[Doug]

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?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Yeah. My first trip was 2019, and I made five or six trips.

[Doug]

That's a lot of trips to the Congo.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's a place that doesn't strike me

[Doug]

as a safe destination to roll into as a Western guy and just go,

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm just here to take some pictures

[Doug]

and write about what you're doing.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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.

[Doug]

Surely you thought they were going to kill you if you were there for a week with no food.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 actually ended up being quite kind, and I'd just make lots of jokes so they don't want to beat me up, but there you go.

[Doug]

Did that work?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

It kind of did, yeah. Because the head of the prison took me to the airport at the end, and he gave me this big hug, and he said, we're together. Come back and work with me anytime here in Congo. I said, what 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.

[Doug]

That just shows you how differently things are over there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like, oh, you're not taking it personally

[Doug]

that we held you without food for six days and interrogated you and made you think you were gonna d. You're

[Jordan Harbinger]

not upset about that, are you, pal? Anyway, I'll call you when I'm in Brooklyn.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Exactly. That's exactly what it was. It was hilarious. He said, well, you know, I'm very interested to go to New York.

[Doug]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I think everybody knows what this is.

[Doug]

But what is a lithium ion battery? In plain English, explain, like, I'm five.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What's inside the battery?

[Doug]

And why did this specific technology win over everything else that was available?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 aura 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 they're central to the electric vehicle revolution. They're central to the cell phone revolution. I mean, they basically have allowed 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 cobalt, lithium. They contain nickel in some cases and various other minerals like phosphates in some other cases, and all these metals. The point of the book is 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 gave a talk last night in Washington, D.C. and somebody came up 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 brain surgery. The applications and the uses of this metal, that they are legion.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay, now we zoom out a little bit.

[Doug]

If I take my phone, how many countries have touched just the battery before it got to me?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Chances are that your battery has probably been touched by five to ten countries. Yeah.

[Doug]

Really? So it's not just like Congo, China, usa?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Oh, no, because the lithium in it probably came from Chile. The copper might have come from another part of South America or maybe from Congo itself. And 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.

[Doug]

A guy I know, he makes cars. That's 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? 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. I 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 this other thing and then they wrap that in plastic and they send it back to Mexico and this other thing is done there. And then they wrap that in plastic and then 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 there 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 I gave him shit for it. You're fighting an uphill. 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.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Exactly. This is really a question of just being a little bit cheaper. And I just want to add to that. There was a 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.

[Doug]

Exactly.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 B, is counterproductive because people feel like they are oppressed by environmental regulations and it doesn't get the message across and that it's

[Doug]

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 or whatever. You know, we should maybe have a different system for that Instead, because that's 8 trillion plastic bottles or something like that. I don't know. I'm making these numbers up, obviously, but

[Jordan Harbinger]

we're not going to recycle our way

[Doug]

out of this one.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Full disclosure, I do recycle.

[Doug]

Yeah, everyone hated you for a minute. Good thing you clarified that.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

I'm of that generation.

[Doug]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

All right, what is the most important

[Doug]

step in the battery chain?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Is that even a fair question? Because you're mining these different minerals in

[Doug]

different places and then what? They're melted together or they're assembled together someplace and made into a battery.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Is that China?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Yeah. They're dissolved with sulfuric acid. They're treated. They're treated with chemicals over and over again. They're cooked and so on. 70 to 90%, depending on which metal you're talking about happens in China itself. And there are a few places in Finland. There's one place in the US 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 fact is you need to have incredible amount of investment, so bricks and mortar, and you need to have stable power supply because it's very power intensive. This. And Congo just doesn't have a stable power supply because of years and years of underinvestment 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.

[Doug]

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 the $10 billion 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?

[Jordan Harbinger]

I mean, I heard some noise about

[Doug]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

mineral resources or they invaded and then

[Doug]

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.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

It is not the only reason that Rwanda is invading the east of the drc. It's obviously completely unconscionable that they've done so and that they've resorted to violence and so on. But actually they do have legitimate security concern when the Congolese government is arming anti Rwandan militia. So it's both sides. I'm afraid that there has been a very specific narrative that has been pushed 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 Kagame 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 coltan and tin, tantalum and tungsten.

[Doug]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So it sounds like the choke point

[Doug]

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, and one place in Finland maybe that could do it. And I don't know if that was an incomplete list, but I'm assuming China has a lot of places that can do it because that's where we get all our batteries from.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I used to disassemble a lot of

[Doug]

stuff, and I still do build things here and there with my kids and RC cars. I've never seen a battery that says made in Finland.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Yeah, it was very funny because last week this thing called the donut battery got written up in the Wall Street Journal and everybody said, 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 donut batteries do you see in your iPhones? How many donut batteries do you see in your Teslas? 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. But just as important is the scaling. Industrial scale is the second leg 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 I go into 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Doug]

It's comparison pressure and that voice in your head telling you that you should be further along by now.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That stuff can wear on you even when from the outside everything looks fine. Even I fall victim to that. I look what I built. Instead of thinking like this is great,

[Doug]

my brain goes to yeah, well why didn't you build something even bigger, Jordan? Why isn't the show 10 times larger?

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's the trap. And therapy can help you sort through that. Not because it's gonna tell you how to make more money, but because it'll help you deal with the stress and anxiety that come from tying your value to achievement. BetterHelp matches you with a licensed therapist

[Doug]

based on a short questionnaire. And if the fit is not right,

[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Doug]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

They've helped more than 6 million people worldwide, and live sessions have an average of 4.9 out of 5 based on over 1.7 million client reviews. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can definitely help. Sign up and get 10% [e-mail] Jordan that's betterhelp.com Jordan this episode is also sponsored by ButcherBox. ButcherBox is one of those modern conveniences

[Doug]

that genuinely makes our lives easier and I'm very grateful for it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

When things get busy, having high quality

[Doug]

protein ready to go is a big part of keeping dinner on track.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

We always keep Butcherbox stocked in the freezer.

[Doug]

Every morning, Jen pulls out something to defrost in the fridge and that usually becomes dinner that night.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Maybe it's roasted chicken thighs, ground beef

[Doug]

with sweet potatoes, rib eye steaks for the family. It just takes a lot of the guesswork out at dinner. And having delicious high quality protein on

[Jordan Harbinger]

hand every month makes eating well a whole lot easier.

[Sponsor Voice 3]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

Don't forget about our newsletter Wee Bit Wiser. It is a bite sized gem from us to you with a principle from the show.

[Doug]

Usually that's a past episode of the show.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 Niarchos.

[Doug]

It's funny, I had a Chinese lesson this morning and we're talking about this, about how there's all these people that live in villages in China and on farms and their life is not that good. And during the opening up revolution, they

[Jordan Harbinger]

said, hey, let's improve all the cities.

[Doug]

And so everyone went, wait, I want to live there. I'm 15, 20 years old. I don't want to live here on the farm digging holes with sticks and having an ox plow my field. So they go to the city and the city goes, okay, we're going to

[Jordan Harbinger]

give you a job.

[Doug]

You're going to make five bucks a day and it's a little bit hazardous, but you don't have to live on this farm.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And it's still like that in some places.

[Doug]

So you're assembling batteries by hand and you have millions of people doing it. We're not going to be able to do that here in the States. It's not a thing that we'd be willing to do.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

I would say that assembling batteries by hand basically been 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, Argonne National Lab in Illinois, and she said to me, I went to China for the first time in 10 years to 15 years or whatever it was, and I was shocked at 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 and D investment, the research and development investment is key to this. And the US has underinvested over years. They have under invested in mining, in processing, in the science. And so now China is out ahead on this front.

[Doug]

Yeah. This is crazy. Look, people are worried about an armed conflict, but really right now they don't even need to do that. They could just say, no more batteries for you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Is that something China could do? It seems like they could.

[Doug]

Right? They could just say, you can't buy batteries.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Yeah. And they did some Rare Earth's export controls last year, which sent the market into a bit of a tizzy fit. The price of cobalt 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.

[Doug]

I see. So it almost seems like batteries are another pull. I won't say they're replacing oil as 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Doug]

And if there was an oil shock, it affected everything and it's still like that. But it seems like there could just as easily be a battery shock.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

There 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 primacy. 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Ok, that's a relief because it sure

[Doug]

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, whatever, that's a problem for the next administration, I don't know.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So at least people in Washington are

[Doug]

paying attention and care about this.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 Virtus, which is a new US Company founded by sort of ex CIA guys or something like that, has secured the lease for a big Congo cobalt processor called Shemaf. And it's a major win for the Trump administration in the Wall Street Journal headline. And somebody who was a sort of Republican person said, we're talking about a good play in the first inning, basically.

[Doug]

Yeah, I see. 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 microprocessors and batteries in them because you need millions of them to fight a conflict.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Or especially if you're in a war with Iran, where you are 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 earths 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 US And Europe is becoming more and more dependent on China.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You use the phrase Mephistophelian bargain.

[Doug]

Did I get that right?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Got it perfectly last time.

[Doug]

Okay, that's heavy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I don't know what that means, and

[Doug]

I'm probably not alone, so I'm going to have to have you explain that

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Mephistopheles was the demon with whom Dr. Faustus sold his soul away for Riches and power and wealth and so on. So Mephistophelian. It's a pact with the devil.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see.

[Doug]

So is the same thing as Faustian bargain?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Faustian pact. Exactly.

[Doug]

I've never heard this version of it. Maybe that's more common in the uk. That's funny.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You learn something new every day.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

I studied Faustian in college, and that was in the States. So Mephistophelian was always. I like it as a word.

[Doug]

Yeah. That's funny. You've been waiting years to use this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like, finally I get to use Mephistophelian bargain.

[Doug]

And something non academic. That's great.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay, so what is the Faustian?

[Doug]

Because that's easier for me to say. Bargain that we have made here. What are we trading?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 fascian 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 certainly find ourselves in very difficult straits in not too long.

[Doug]

Yeah, I did a show that was more in the weeds on the mining. It was with Siddharth Kara. 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 that China has and how this could escalate into something quite serious geopolitically.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So if our whole system runs on batteries, how fragile is the system?

[Doug]

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.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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.

[Doug]

What breaks first if supply chains get disrupted? I buy an iPhone once a year. If it costs $50, $100 more. I think some people will notice. Most people won't. They'll just assume Apple's getting greedy at the end.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But what sort of problem does the

[Doug]

Everyman 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.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 Siddharth Khara's book, which is sort of expose of some of the artisanal mining, which again, reminding people it means exploitative hand mining, 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 $500 more for an iPhone. We're not even really talking about $100 more. We're talking about $30 more or $20 more in some cases.

[Doug]

That's depressing. That is, it's so cheap to just not have child slaves dying in horrific conditions. And yet it's not. We're not doing that.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

We're not doing that. And it's to do with inertia and laziness and greed at the end of the day. Again, Apple is using recycled metals. Now, where did those metals 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 fact is 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 that Apple has continued to put companies like huayukobalt 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 crept back in and then they've been taken out and come back in. So it's a sort of whack a mole. You have to keep pointing it out.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Not to mention maybe people, maybe Apple

[Doug]

has a big spotlight on them because it's Apple and everybody has an iPhone in their pocket.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But I don't know.

[Doug]

I've got this thing here that vibrates. It's like a exercise thing. It's not a major brand.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No one's going to know if that company uses sustainable batteries that were mined fairly fair trade mining. Even the company that makes this vibrating

[Doug]

device doesn't know where that battery comes from. They don't care. They just probably bought the cheapest ones that don't explode spontaneously so that they can legally sell them. And in the United States.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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. And he said, but did you even think about whether cobalt was going? Oh, no, no, we don't think about that.

[Doug]

Yeah, of course the Euros are supposed to be the ones that actually care about this stuff. Right. Us over here in the States are supposed to be the heartless bastards.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Wow. And you're going to be able to compete on price. Look, if you're just looking for the cheapest batteries and you need a million

[Doug]

of them and something costs you 10,000 or 15,000 dol 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 going to buy the cheaper one. You're just going to do that.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

The Europeans have started this thing called the battery passport, which is supposed to come in, I think later this year or early next year. So you're going to be able to see where your battery came from and it'll be like a QR code on the back of your phone or something like that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's amazing.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Agree?

[Doug]

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?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

No, I would say we're still very dependent on oil.

[Doug]

Yeah, of course. I just wonder if we have a higher dependence on battery tech.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

No, Battery tech changed the peak of the oil era, whenever that was in the 1980s, battery tech completely changed. Those batteries were made. They were lead acid batteries. They didn't have the supply chain issues. Nickel, cadmium as well, didn't have the same supply chain issues. And also, let'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 90s 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. Actually, it's a 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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. This episode is sponsored in part by Deleteme. Deleteme makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online.

[Doug]

At a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone

[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Doug]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Doug]

I did, and I was surprised by how much personal information was out there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sure, you could try to remove it yourself, but who has the time to

[Doug]

chase down hundreds of sites and keep doing it over and over again? It's basically a game of whack a mole.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Doug]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do. Take a moment and support the amazing sponsors who make this show possible. All of the deals, discount codes and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable on the [e-mail] deals if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, please do email us jordanordanharbinger.com Happy to surface codes for you. It really is that important that you support those who support the show. Now back to Nicholas Niarchos.

[Doug]

Back in, let's say the 70s, you had OPEC 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Now we've got the shale revolution.

[Doug]

We can refine 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 than they did when we were dealing with oil completely?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

The Democratic Republic of The Congo has 70% of the world's cobalt, which is a critical mineral. And at its height, OPEC had, I don't know, 40%, 45% of global oil supplies. And this was when they were able to form cartels and so on. And we've seen this. We know the Congo 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 mines 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 realize 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.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Wow.

[Doug]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I want to talk more about that

[Doug]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You've seen this with your own eyes,

[Doug]

in fact, got arrested looking at it or trying to write about it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What's the air like?

[Doug]

Does it smell?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Are there burning things?

[Doug]

Is it toxic? What do you notice immediately when you get there? Paint this for us.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

So you might have just heard me clear my throat. I have an issue with my sinuses that I never had before I started this reporting. I always wonder whether I had to have a surgery the other day.

[Doug]

Really? Oh, you got a little cobalt dust back there? Maybe.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 is being blown off the roads. And it's not just cobalt, it's just dust from the mines. Some of it is mildly radioactive. Some of the studies of pregnant mothers and expectant fathers show the highest levels of heavy metal concentrations found anywhere in the world in their blood is pretty stark.

[Doug]

Are they using mercury in the mining process, or is it just that? Is the cobalt itself a heavy metal? I actually don't know what cobalt is. Is it a metal?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

It's not just cobalt. It's copper. It's other contaminants. It's plenty of other metals. One of the big contaminants is uranium. So it doesn't necessarily come from the refining. The refining basically leaks into water supplies like rivers, and sulfuric acid is used in the refining. So you imagine what happens to your drinking water supply when a mine next to your house and the water that you both bathe in, 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 places that are not next to mines and it's actually an incredibly beautiful country. And you think, God, what are we doing in our scramble for clean energy?

[Doug]

Have you seen these mining accidents and things like that? Have you been around the danger as well?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 a sort of deadly moment.

[Doug]

Surely if you've been around a collapse, people start yelling and panicking and, I don't know, digging to try to get

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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. In French, they're called, eh, boulement. And everybody starts saying, ebulle mor, this big Edward Mortal. And we walk into the deputy Mining Minister's office in this region and we have an interview scheduled 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 there had just been a cave in an ebolmont. And so he looks up and he says, 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.

[Doug]

It's not just a risky job. Any given day, you just might not come home from doing something like this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What does the dust do to your body?

[Doug]

What kinds of illnesses are common?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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.

[Doug]

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?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Because surely if you work in this

[Doug]

area, maybe you just know a lot of sick people, but they don't have a choice.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

There's just a kind of fatalism, I guess, to living there and working there. And for most of these people, the only life that they know. Yeah, they don't have a choice.

[Doug]

This is almost a silly question after all that, but do they have any

[Jordan Harbinger]

sort of protective equipment or is it

[Doug]

really just bare hands? Bare feet, using a stick, dig it out with your hands and throw it in a bucket.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

So the Congolese state, insofar as it exists, is 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 in streams and doing all kinds of things that were just not safe at all. So yes, there is formalization, but it just hasn't gone very far.

[Doug]

And there's kids there because it's the only income opportunity for the family. It's absolutely crazy to me.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

It's the only way they're going to go to school. They miss school in order to pay for their school. There's supposed to be free schooling in Congo, but the 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 their kids to the school to pay teachers. And that is basically the situation that people are in.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Can the west catch up at all or are we just too late?

[Doug]

I mean, you mentioned they have a bunch of refineries. We have maybe one. They've invested a ton. We've underinvested.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Is it too late now or is it like now?

[Doug]

We could have a rough 10 or 15 years, or is it just not possible?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

It's never too late. And remember that it's not an all or 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 stockpile the metal. Basically what will happen is that there's an investor who comes and they say, okay, we want to build this mine, assuming that prices for cobalt will remain steady at X over the next five years or whatever it is. And then suddenly they see the price of cobalt crash because Chinese have flooded the market with their stockpile or whatever it is and say, ah, well, actually it 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.

[Doug]

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?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 junior miners. And Mark Twain has a funny phrase for these people. It says a miner is defined as a liar standing next to a hole in the ground or something like that. That's basically the junior miners in this case. So these people will be cut in and sometimes it's a 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 Huayu, which at that time was a very small company. Basically the huge Chinese mining company, state owned mining company, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo's 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.

[Doug]

Mr. 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, or they're in mineral mining, gold mining.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They've always got stories of these Chinese businessmen and I'm like, oh, does he

[Doug]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But then you have these sort of hangers on that maybe they even grew up in Africa.

[Doug]

They're Diaspora or they're from China, Depends.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And they don't work for the company, they don't work for the state.

[Doug]

They're not spies.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But they got their, like, fixers.

[Doug]

They got their hands in things. They always have nicknames like Mr. Briefcase or Polo, because they only wear that. Their nickname will be something really sort of unoriginal, like Lao Ban or basically loafers or something. And they.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's like always based on what they

[Doug]

look like or how they're dressed or something like that, or the brand of cigarettes that they smoke. And it's.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What does this guy do? Nobody in the whole deal actually understands

[Doug]

what this person's job is, other than showing up to every meeting and somehow having an idea or an input.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's something out of a movie.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 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 starting to put cobalt into 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 he fell out with the president. He fled to Malta. And it was interesting following that guy. And 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. He just finished military service, maybe even early 20s. He would say it's like 23, 24. And Gertler arrives in the DRC, the Civil War in which the dictator Mobutu Sestaseko has been unseated. And suddenly this very rich country is basically open for the plunder has just ended. There is smoke rising over Kinshasa. And this guy goes, I just fell in love with the country. I love the people. He 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 their political campaigns or. Or Their palaces in Dubai or whatever it is. There's a very interesting history of that in Congo.

[Doug]

Jeez. Well, how directly are these minerals tied to, say, violence? Are people literally fighting over specific minds? Or how kind of directly can we draw this line?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

It's sometimes been drawn too 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 extracted from those mines has been used to fund the war.

[Doug]

Yeah, I've got a buddy who was a coltan miner in Sierra Leone. I asked him how he got that job. He said, oh, I'm friends with the President. First red flag.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, actually, the first red flag was

[Doug]

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, oh, I just flew in. And I always carry this with me at all times when I'm in Sierra Leone. And I asked why? And he's like, you never know when you're gonna have to leave, and you definitely can't use paper money in a revolution.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And I was like, this is crazy to me.

[Doug]

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 gotta know more about this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And it's just like him in a

[Doug]

little grass hut looking thing on a

[Jordan Harbinger]

hammock and a bunch of dudes with

[Doug]

machine guns hanging out in a truck nearby. And then there's a bunch of people in the background in like waist high water. And he said the rest of the guys were in the mine. And so he was really doing this exact thing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And to this day, I mean, other

[Doug]

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 strap to him was kind of a credibility builder.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I Guess you could say the image

[Doug]

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.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

I guess that's a strategy, isn't it? But you've always got to look for the gold for proof, don't you?

[Doug]

That's right, yeah. Are you limping now? I have 30 grand worth of gold strapped to my leg and different coins and there were like.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Some of it was just nuggets, like unprocessed nuggets. And I thought, okay, this is something you got from the ground.

[Doug]

This is not something you bought anywhere. Dirty nugget of gold.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

You have to be very careful doing that because they look for minerals on you when you're leaving these places.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I guess if you are friends with the president, it doesn't matter.

[Doug]

And you probably don't go through whatever Sierra Leonean TSA on your way out of the place.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 going to say this is a mineral and like you're stealing the national patrimony. And I don't know what.

[Doug]

Yeah, anything to get a bribe.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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. Well, be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by LinkedIn. Running a small business means every hire matters. A bad hire can cost you time, money and momentum. A good hire that can help you grow your business. This gives me flashbacks to a nightmare

[Doug]

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[Doug]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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,

[Doug]

how organized is the violence in these areas? I've heard whispers that Wagner, the Russian paramilitary group, is operating in the area.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Is that true or is that sort of like.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 Maronite, Lebanese, and I think to their credit, they both figured out that Congo was the type of place where their bills would not be paid. And also the US Embassy got wind of this and because nothing in Congo stays 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 were going to have a big problem. And the Congolese government listened to them at that point. But what they wanted in return was a mercenary company that would be of use to them. The solution was what was essentially a French company called Azimira that used Romanian mercenaries under a guy called Horisu. Potra, who was friends with, I don't know if you remember the Romanian election last year, this kind of strange Kremlin supported figure.

[Doug]

Yeah, I don't remember his name, but I know who you're talking about.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Yeah, Potra was kind of a strange character. Ajamira were fairly effective in keeping the M23 rebels away from the main towns, places like Goma and Sake. 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 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 has not been reported widely. Actually, the troops that they were supporting wanted to prove to the Rwandan backed rebels that they were also on their side. So they shot their own allies in the back. And at that point Ajamera said, 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 Israeli military trainers, Erik Prince's sorry, no longer Brackwater, who knows what it's called.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Erik Prince's guys, yeah, Zay Academy, Blackwater,

[Doug]

whatever the name is.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Now they were keen on getting involved and actually for the moment they've been involved more in 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 rangers who were killed in a national park called Opemba. But these are people who are quite old fashioned. Most of them 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 secede because we don't get any of the profits.

[Doug]

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. Moved in to guard the assets. And I can't imagine that this is

[Jordan Harbinger]

that much more stable than what they had before.

[Doug]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Are we heading toward actual resource wars? Because what happens if demand doubles or more for batteries?

[Doug]

Because it's not like we're going to use less of these things.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

We could be. The one big factor is 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 to their great credit in many ways. Since the 1960s, they have not been arming nasty groups and horrid dictators and things like that. And the fact is 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 Luba kingdoms and the fights with the Yeke, 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.

[Doug]

Why not 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?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

How much of it is true is a really difficult thing to judge.

[Doug]

Okay, you have a guess.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Let's just take them at their word and say that what they're saying is true.

[Doug]

Okay.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

They are claiming only recently that they're only using recycled materials. They being Apple in this case. Again, this does not account for all the materials that have gone into iPhones for the last 20 years. How long have iPhones been out?

[Doug]

Since 2006 or something like that. 2000? Yeah. So I don't know, 20 years.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

It doesn't account in Tesla's case. Tesla has a bit of a better argument. Tesla says we only buy from industrial mines 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 mine are 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 happening far away and very much down the supply chain and it's not really our responsibility. So it's a kind of out of sight, 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 say 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.

[Doug]

Like we audit our supply chain at least until it gets to Shenzhen. Before that, I don't know what are we going to do? We don't know where our suppliers get their supplies.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 looked at 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.

[Doug]

Exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So how do these audits actually work?

[Doug]

What does it mean to audit your supply chain?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Because look, people listening to this right

[Doug]

now, myself included, they think it's like

[Jordan Harbinger]

sending a Nicholas Niarchos out there and

[Doug]

going, hey man, I want you to

[Jordan Harbinger]

go to the mine, I want you to see who's digging this out. I want you to take photos, I

[Doug]

want you to see if they're old, if they have ppe, if they're too

[Jordan Harbinger]

young, if they've got shoes on and hard hats and then follow those minerals and get in a 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, go into the refinery and see who's working in there. That's what we think an audit is but the more you're talking, the more I'm thinking they just get a spreadsheet

[Doug]

as an email attachment and they go, ah, this seems legit.

[Jordan Harbinger]

All right, what's for lunch?

[Doug]

That's kind of what the audit is now starting to sound like to me.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 are 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 order 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 for lunch? Yeah, yeah.

[Doug]

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?

[Jordan Harbinger]

And I'd love to hear why you think that.

[Doug]

First of all, that's one of the most out of touch things I think anybody's said about any of this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But first of all, why can't we do that?

[Doug]

And what does this reveal about how detached leadership is when it comes to these minerals?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Well, if he'd been there, he'd understand that there are thousands upon thousands, if not tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of holes. He had a lot of webcams. 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 that I Make in the book is sustained by the fact that there are artisanal miners. This is a political decision by the government. They have said, you do not have access to the wealth of these 70 to 80% of industrial mines. These are the big mines in DRC, so you can have the scraps, which is the 20% of artisanal mines. And this basically creates employment for that part of the citizenry, because industrial mines comparatively employ very few people. There are millions of people who depend on artisanal mining. 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.

[Doug]

I wish I'd started with this particular

[Jordan Harbinger]

question, but why is Congo so resource rich?

[Doug]

Did they just win the geological lottery? Because it seems like they have everything there.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Yeah. So Jules Corneille, 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 Skanda Geologique. 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 these salts that were dried on this ancient sea, and 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 perhaps the world's largest deposit of lithium that's still not properly working at this point.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Where does that leave us? If we buy phones, are we complicit? Is there any ethical option, or is

[Doug]

this just a systemic thing that we have to figure out?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 device as 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 a congressman if you have the Wherewithal to go and lobby the companies. If you're a shareholder in Apple, which many people are, through their 401s 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 in countries where the batteries are being used.

[Doug]

What would a real solution look like here? Is ethical mining scalable, you think?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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

[Sponsor Voice 2]

you, they're like we.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Obviously there are other people who are just like them. I don't care. 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 people see it as a way of providing to humanity in maybe not in a noble way, but in definitely a useful way.

[Doug]

Yeah, I kind of put miners up there, 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And then you have people that, I

[Doug]

don't know, run essentially a human trafficking operation where they have slave laborers that are from Venezuela or something like that

[Jordan Harbinger]

that are here illegally and they work them to the bone and they pinch

[Doug]

every penny that they can, and there's

[Jordan Harbinger]

a lot of in between.

[Doug]

Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But most farmers are not out there

[Doug]

being sociopaths, just like most miners probably aren't.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm surprised because it sounds like after everything you've seen, you sound a little bit optimistic. Am I misreading you here?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

I think I'm optimistic because this issue has gotten traction not just through Siddharth Kara's book, although that was very important, but through social media, through Dua Lipa asking Tim Cook questions and buttonholing him on the su. Sorry, I laugh about that, but it was an important moment actually in this stuff.

[Doug]

Dua Lipa doing hardcore journalism for the rest of us.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Exactly. She got that access and good on her. I think that the awareness of this issue in the halls of power, as I was saying, I was chatting with State Department people today and it is front and center now, obviously that is from an America first perspective, which is very different from a sort of purely altruistic humanitarian 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 yet another generation of people to incredibly crushing situation.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Doug]

And handing China just that much more leverage, I would assume.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Absolutely.

[Doug]

I don't know.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Are you scared to go back to Congo? I mean, you did get arrested by

[Doug]

the secret police last time. You went and were held in the prison.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Oh, I'm not allowed to go back.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So this guy. Let me get this straight. This guy thinks he's gonna come hang

[Doug]

out with you in New York, but you can't go back and visit him after that little prison term?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Yeah, that's basically how it goes.

[Doug]

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, do you get a letter?

[Jordan Harbinger]

How do they notify you?

[Nicholas Niarchos]

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 Consul, or, like, raising his voice at me and then getting me to copy out this statement saying, I, Nicholas Niarchos, 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.

[Doug]

That did not work out for them, obviously.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

That was completely unenforceable 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 resource as 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 look at the supply chain and look at ways of making it better. Not, oh, this guy's going to cut into our bottom line for our family, and I'm not going to do my kind of corrupt business or whatever it is.

[Doug]

Nicholas Niarchos, thank you for coming on the show, man. Fascinating subject. Hope your lungs and 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.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Thank you so much for having me on, Jordan. It was a real pleasure.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You're about to hear a preview of a story that sounds unbelievable, but Ava Larue and her daughter Kaya lived it for 12 years.

[Ava Larue]

Dear Mr. Capucho, that's how they're addressed. Please pass this letter on to your wife, who I would like to rape and kill and dismember. Love, Freddy Krueger. I mean, I knew at 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 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. 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. The women that were murdered in the United states last year, 86% of them were stalked first. We will never not be hypervigilant. 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'll 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Doug]

about where that energy came from.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 Niarchos will be in the show. [e-mail], advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, [e-mail] deals Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about six minute networking as well. Over at sixminutenetworking.com, it's our free course. No shenanigans. I'm ordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and hey. The show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in clean energy, battery technology, global trade, geopolitics, or just a little bit of human rights in the supply chain, definitely share

[Doug]

this episode with them.

[Jordan Harbinger]

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

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[Doug]

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first day?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, no.

[Sponsor Voice 2]

We help people customize and save on

[Doug]

car insurance with Liberty Mutual together.

[Jordan Harbinger]

We're married.

[Doug]

Me to a human, him to a bird.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.

[Doug]

Anyways, get a'@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Liberty. Liberty.

[Doug]

Liberty.

[Nicholas Niarchos]

Liberty.

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