The Elements of Power: Supply Chains, Technology, and Energy with Nicolas Niarchos

Yeah.

So I've been a journalist most of my professional life, basically all of my professional life.

Um, I started as a fact-checker, and then I left fact-checking, and I was very, very keen on reporting on stories that had to do with corruption.

One of the things that I had done while I was at The New Yorker was report where I could during holidays and time around work and so on, on the migration and refugee issues surrounding, surrounding people coming to Europe.

And that had really started in Greece, and my family is from Greece.

I'm, I'm from Greece.

And so I saw the beginning of that in the islands in the, in the east of Greece, in Lesbos, in Samos, and so on.

And, and then I started going deeper into issues that were actually affecting the countries that the people were coming from.

So I started looking at conflicts.

I started looking at economic issues, and I went down a rabbit hole on Congolese corruption, and I found out that the country has some of the minerals that are s- that are, you know, super important for building batteries, cell phones, electric cars, and it's one of the wealthiest countries in the world in terms of underground resources, and yet it is still one of the poorest places in the world.

So I think that that was what brought me to Congo.

There was a specific, uh, story of corruption around a man named Dan Gertler, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury, Treasury Department in twenty seventeen, um, and he was a kind of-- his story was something that I wanted to go and write about, and then I went down there.

I realized it was so much bigger than this one story.

And, um, I guess I sort of went on Amazon and I looked and I said, "Is there a cobalt book?" And in, you know, in twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, there was not.

You know, there have been some books that have, have treated certain aspects of this, this, this issue.

But, uh, what I kept feeling as, you know, as I was writing my book and I saw these other books coming out around it was actually that this story deserved a greater land and it, it lends an expanded worldview, a, a look at what was happening in China, a look at what was happening in Indonesia, a look at what was happening in the Western Sahara, and not just focusing on one aspect of, of the supply chain.

So, you know, luckily, I had a wonderful team at Penguin who were very supportive of that, and that was kind of-You know, we said we set out to write a global history of this very, very complicated [laughs] supply chain, I guess