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Curious Worldview
Vince Beiser | 'The Wire Of Empire' Copper, Power & the Race to Mine the Future
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“In the next 25 years, the world will need more copper than in all of human history.”
Amendment - I said 3.2 billion kg of copper in opening question, I should have said 320 million kg.
In this episode, journalist and author Vince Beiser returns to the podcast to discuss his book Power Metal, a sobering look at the metals that make modern civilization possible — and the extraordinary cost of extracting them.
We cover the story of copper — the wire of empire. Beiser reveals why humanity will need more copper in the next 25 years than we’ve used in all of history, and how that quest is reshaping geopolitics, the environment, and our very ideas of progress. From Chile’s drought-stricken Atacama mines to the e-waste yards of Lagos, Nigeria, we follow the real people and places behind our “clean-energy” future — and the dirty truths that power it.
We also unpack the rise of deep-sea mining, the billionaires behind it, and the tensions between state power, corporate ambition, and the planet’s limits. Along the way we meet Robert Friedland, Gerard Barron, Dan Gertler, and a cast of characters who prove that the world still runs on digging — and that the future will too.
If you liked The World in a Grain or stories about how our material world shapes our moral one, this conversation will hit home.
Topics: Resource wars, clean-tech paradox, deep-sea mining, copper shortage, China’s industrial strategy, EV economics, and how to reduce demand without going backwards.
Guest: Vince Beiser - author of Power Metal and The World in a Grain
Subscribe to his newsletter Power Metal Substack
Timestamps.
00:00 – Intro: Vince Beiser & Power Metal
02:00 – Chile’s Copper Boom & the Atacama Water Crisis
07:00 – Congo’s Cobalt, U.S. Retreat, and Copper Geography
10:00 – The No-Free-Lunch of the Green Transition
12:30 – Lagos E-Waste Recyclers & the Hidden Cost of Recycling
19:10 – Deep-Sea Mining and the Billionaires Behind It
23:00 – The UN vs Trump: Who Owns the Ocean Floor?
33:00 – Robert Friedland, Steve Jobs & Congo’s Mining Empire
41:00 – Corruption, Crony Capitalism & Dan Gertler
47:00 – Commodity Volatility and State Intervention
52:00 – China’s Industrial Patience vs Western Myopia
55:00 – Rethinking Cars, Cities & Demand Reduction
58:00 – The Future of Resources — and Civilization Itself
Vince Byser is a journalist who has a reporter from more than 100 countries, territories, conflict zones, or disaster zones. His work appeared in Wyatt, The Atlantic Harpers, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many, many more alongside. Vince was one of the first proper guests I ever had on this show, all the way back at the beginning of 2021. He returns today to discuss his latest book, Power Metal, which examines copper, lithium, cobalt, and the broader resource pressures of a green and global energy transition. In the next twenty five years, the world will need more copper than humanity has consumed in all of its history so far. Vince Beiser for the full hour joins me on the show. Copper is the best conductor of electricity next to silver, therefore, in a very electric world, charging cables, electric cars, phones, anything with a battery, data centers, millions of tons of this material is required, and it's filthy to extract. Mostly deposits are in countries already suffering in one way or another from the Dutch disease, and the demand for it is outstripping the supply. There's 80 kilograms of copper in an EV, and in 2024 alone, BYD produced over four million vehicles, which means for the copper in BYD alone, they needed 3.2 billion kilograms of copper. Where did it all come from?
SPEAKER_01Excellent question. Yeah, I mean, you're right. We need unbelievable amounts of copper if we're gonna pull off the energy transition. In fact, in all of human history, we've mined about 700 million tons of copper, and that's going back about 4,000 years. We're gonna need to mine that same amount again in this generation within the next 20 years. So, where's it all gonna come from? That's a great question. So the world's biggest supplier of copper uh today and has been for many years, is Chile. In uh in South America, um, they have enormous uh uh copper deposits, and yet they have the biggest copper mines in the world, which is, you know, good in a lot of ways for them. It's brought a lot of money into the country for sure. It's also brought them a lot of misery. It was back in the 70s when uh Chileans elected a socialist president, Salvador Allende, he nationalized the copper mines, which were mostly American-owned at that time. And that's one of the things that probably led to the U.S. supporting a coup that overthrew him and installed a brutal military dictatorship for many years to come. Copper was definitely part of the mix there. But, you know, beyond politics, these copper mines, the the biggest problem with them is the biggest mines, the richest concentrations of copper are up in the northern part of the country in a place called the Atacama Desert, which is already one of the driest places in the world. But these mines need huge amounts of water, right? They just need lots and lots of water to operate. So for decades, they've just been sucking up what little water there is, what little groundwater, what little aquifer water. So I spent some time up there talking to uh, you know, some of the indigenous folks who've lived there for thousands of years. And, you know, as far as they're concerned, these mines are just completely imperiling their whole livelihoods. They're drying up their streams, they're drying up their crops, making it impossible for killing off the like, you know, animals, different kinds of animals and birds that live out there. So water is a huge, huge issue. And in fact, um, several of the biggest mines have been hit with like the government has forced them to stop drawing groundwater out of the area because it's gotten so bad. So one of them now pumps up seawater from over a hundred miles away. They drop it, they've got a tube that runs a hundred miles straight up into the Andes Mountains. That's how desperate it is.
SPEAKER_00What do they need? Why are there such huge water requirements? What part of the job requires water?
SPEAKER_01Mostly so it's a bunch of things because you know, mines are huge operations. You've got a lot of people, you've got a lot of vehicles that all need water to be cleaned and kept running. But the main thing is uh for the kind of industrial operation of it. So when you when you're up when you're when you're mining something, what you're doing is you're blasting rock out of the earth, right? You're digging and you're drilling and you're exploding, and you end up with a bunch of crushed up rock, right? Which has copper or whatever in it, but it's not just, you know, it's not just sitting there on the surface. You got to smash down that rock and then separate out the copper. And the process of doing that takes a lot of water, right? Basically, you need to turn the whole thing, smash up all this rock, usually, and then kind of turn it into a slurry, right? Turn it into like mud that you can then put chemicals into and put through different separators and start to separate out the copper. So you need tons of water for that. And of course, the water along the way ends up filled with all kinds of nasty chemicals.
SPEAKER_00Totally. Yeah. It can't necessarily just be returned to the water supply after that. And then as well, I imagine bringing salt water up from the ocean has all types of effects as well in wherever the water ends up being released after it's done as well.
SPEAKER_01So they actually they desalinate it because they can't use salt water, so they have to desalinate it down by the shore, which uses a which is a very energy process. So there's a lot of carbon emissions that go with it. There's also a lot of concerns about so you take this seawater, you run it through a filter, a membrane, which pulls out most of the salt, and then you send the fresh water on up the mountain. What do you do with all that salt that you've got left over? You just mostly dump it back in the ocean, which can then be really bad for marine life living there because all of a sudden the ocean is too salty. So there's concerns around that as well.
SPEAKER_00It's just consequential the whole way down. There isn't really any clean solution. You mentioned Chile there, but broadly, if you just look to a map of the world, where is all of this copper at the moment coming from?
SPEAKER_01So, like I say, Chile is the world's number one supplier. I think the second biggest one at the moment is the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is smack in the middle of Africa. It's that place is really famous for cobalt. That's where we get 70% of our cobalt, which is a critical ingredient for batteries, you know, the batteries in all of our laptops and cell phones, and also your cordless drill and your electric toothbrush, everything else. It's all got cobalt. But also, it turns out they have loads and loads of copper, which they've only recently begun to really massively exploit. So, again, you know, on the upside, this is good for the Congo because it's one of the poorest countries in the world. They can certainly use the money, they can certainly use the jobs, but you know, nothing comes without consequences. And certainly mining has a lot of environmental downsides that uh that they're also having to deal with there. Those are probably the the world's two biggest ones. And then the United States used to be for many, many years, was the world's top copper supplier. And they've sort of backed out of it because basically they got tired of all the mess. You know, Americans just decided like, ugh, we don't want all these toxic tailings and leftovers and like destroying our mountainsides for copper. Let it go happen somewhere else. Let it go happen in Chile, and then we'll just buy it. All that said, there is still quite a bit of copper mining in the US and in Canada where I live. And because of because there's so much demand, like you said, right? Because of the energy transition and electric vehicles, because we need so much copper, there's a big push on right now to ramp up mining in the United States. And that's something that President Trump is really big on.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Do you think there's an appetite for that in the US?
SPEAKER_01I mean, there's a lot of copper there. There's a lot of money to be made from it. So, you know, there are some folks who stand to benefit certainly have the appetite for it. Who doesn't have the appetite for it is anybody who lives near a copper mine, and including the indigenous folks, you know, who are usually who are very often the hardest hit by these things. So, like, so that's and that's what's been holding it up all these years. Like there's a mine in Arizona, or there's a there's an area in Arizona, it's called Oak Flat, which is uh one of the richest copper deposits in North America. Loads and loads of copper. And uh companies have been trying to get at it for something like 20, 25 years, but they've been blocked and blocked and blocked and blocked by environmental groups, by locals protesting, and by the local uh Apache tribes who keep filing lawsuits and staging protests and basically saying, like, we don't want this thing. We don't want our sacred lands turned into a gigantic hole in the ground.
SPEAKER_00How deep, how deep do you need to go before you can hit copper? And do they just appear as tiny little chunky rocks?
SPEAKER_01It all depends, right? There's all kinds of different copper deposits. I mean, copper's found in many, many places in the world, and it's really it's different everywhere, right? Sometimes it's really up close to the top, sometimes it's way down deep. And this is one of the reasons why human beings have been digging up copper for 4,000 years. Is sometimes it's basically right up on the surface, and you can see it, and you can chip it out with a stone axe and go, oh, look at that. It's so pretty, you know. Like I'm gonna make it into a little amulet or something, which we've found, right? We've found amulets and copper jewelry and tools going back thousands and thousands of years. Often, though, it's it's way down deeper. Like, so in Chile, one of the big problems they have is the amount of copper, the percentage of copper, what they call the grade, is going down. So they're digging deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper holes. Like the biggest mine in the world is something like a mile deep now. You took the Empire State Building, you could drop the whole state building in there and it wouldn't even clear the top. But the copper they're getting from the bottom there is really low grade. It's like half of one, half of one percent of the rock they pull up is actually copper.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this is one of the reasons why they're moving to Congo, because Congo has much richer deposits, easier to get out.
SPEAKER_00They're getting more expensive, more damaging to the environment, but less quality in the product that they actually end up extracting. Compounded with the idea that, and this is a line from your book, in the next 25 years, the world will need more copper than humanity has consumed in all of history so far. So, in many respects, it's kind of an insurmountable problem if we're just gonna push the negative externality to other developing nations for the extraction of all of this material. Even that might not meet the demands, assuming that we're gonna properly electrify the economy.
SPEAKER_01So, yeah, I mean, listen, this is a point that I really try to make in the book is there is no free lunch, right? There's no way we're gonna pull off this energy transition without doing some harm. Always some costs. And we have to recognize that. We have to get past this idea of like, oh, we can find a solution that's perfect, that's perfectly clean, and that doesn't hurt anybody and that doesn't that solution does not exist. Okay. We we have to switch over to renewable energy, we have to switch over to electric vehicles, and there are gonna be costs with that. So there's no point in trying to look for a zero cost solution. What we have to look for is better solutions, things that cause less damage, less harm. And that's that's the best we can hope for. But uh it's something a lot of people don't want to necessarily hear that, but it's just the truth, right? We're human beings. We we wreck stuff, we consume, we damage, there's no getting around it.
SPEAKER_00And for you, is a big part of that solution a much more efficient recycling mechanism and system. I think you spent two chapters in different sort of aspects of the recycling that's currently happening.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, for sure. I mean, basically, you know, we need to find better ways of getting these metals than just digging them all out of the ground, even though we're gonna have to dig some of them out of the ground. And recycling is the most obvious one, right? You know, we already do recycle a fair bit of metal. It really depends on which metal you're talking about, but we could be doing much more, we should be doing much, much more. That said, I mean, again, so you know, when I started in on this book, that was my first thought, right? Is I was like, okay, I know mining's bad, but we need these metals, so what's the solution? Ah, recycling. And I thought, yeah, recycling. Recycling's great, right? It's just nothing but good. Well, no. Turns out, I came to find out, you know, recycling is better. It's less harmful for people in the planet than digging up raw metal and building new stuff. Yes. But it also has its costs. Recycling is also really polluting, generates lots of pollution, uses lots of energies, emits lots of carbon, and very often it's done on the backs of the poorest people in the world. So, you know, so there's two chapters where I where I really go into it, where I really sort of dive into the whole supply chain of like what happens to your old laptop or your old iPhone when you chuck it in a recycling bin. It doesn't magically get turned into new clean metal. No, it ends up getting put on a truck, and that truck gets driven to a port, and in that port, it's loaded up on a diesel-burning cargo ship and sent thousands of miles overseas to somewhere like Lagos, Nigeria, where I went for the book, where it's gonna end up in the hands of some guy who's gonna crack it open with a hammer, like a like a clamshell, and just pull out the little bits of valuable metals and and get that back into the recycling stream.
SPEAKER_00Talk a little bit more about that experience you had in Lagos. I forget the man's name now, but you sort of come across a fella who ran his own little uh business. And at one point he's sort of holding a bag in his hand full of circuit boards, it's worth $35,000.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But the intricacies in which they went into deconstructing all of these old electronic equipments and separating them for parts to resell back to China or back to America.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's absolutely amazing. Like it's so much more, the whole process is just so much more complicated and intricate than I had any idea. So the guy you're talking about, his name's Tijani Abu Bakr, and he runs a pretty sizable business, actually, a multi-million dollar business that he started up from scratch, basically turning our old junk into money and selling it right, selling it right back to us. Basically taking our old e-waste, our old phones, laptops, and then breaking them apart for into parts and selling them right back to us. So it starts with cell phones. He specializes in cell phones and he's got hundreds of guys who are just sitting around all day, every day with old junked phones, right? Phones that people have thrown out, like I said, cracking them open with hammers or with screwdrivers and just pulling out the little bits of the circuit boards that are inside of them, which have a little bits of copper, gold, silver, other valuable metals. Okay, so you can sell those circuit boards. He bundles them all up, sorts them out by type of phone, by how much copper they've got on them, and then sells those to e-waste scrappers that are all in the rich world. Some of them are in Europe, some of them are in China, none of them are in Nigeria. But it goes deeper than that, right? So they the circuit boards are the easiest part, but he also on your circuit board, usually there will be some computer chips, right? The little chips that run the memory on your phone on all the different computer functions. His guys snap those chips off and sort them out. There's teeny, tiny little serial numbers on every single one of them. And you can sell those chips separately a la carte. There's a whole thousands and thousands of different sizes and shapes. Tajani's got it all wired. He sorts them all out, different bags. He's got different buyers for different types of chips, and also all the other components, the camera on your phone, you know, just that teeny little lens on the back of your phone that takes pictures. They break that thing out, they pull it out. It's just a little lens with a little strip of foil. Uh, and then you can sell those as well. So he separates it all out into these different fractions. Yeah, and like you say, you know, when you get the good stuff, you know, the really valuable chips or a bag of phones with like a lunch bag full of this stuff is worth tens of thousands of dollars. So just a lot of money to be made. So it was really like it was just amazing watching these guys work and just seeing how how resourceful and ingenious they are at, you know, really like recovering like every dollar was worth of valuable anything from these phones. So that was great. You know, that was really I that just kind of blew my mind. And it was really, I thought it was really, you know, impressive and also really good for the world, right? These guys are really doing a service, you know, they're diverting trash from the landfill. That's that's cell phones that are not going to end up in garbage heaps. They are getting metal back into the recycling stream that would have otherwise just gone to rot. And they're creating jobs, right? Lots and lots of jobs in places like Nigeria that really need them. But there's a downside, because Ryan, there's always a downside, right? And the downside is basically what happens to the rest of it. So these guys are pulling out the chips and the cameras and the metal and like the bits that they can sell. What happens to the rest? What happens to the plastic casing and to the wires and the cables and the other bits? Mostly they get junked and burned in these big open pit fires where that just send out the nastiest, most, you know, toxic toxic smoke you can imagine. It's getting breathed in by the guys burning it and also everybody who's living nearby.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Hung out with some of those guys as well. And yeah, it's it's pretty ugly.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there was a funny anecdote from the book where you asked someone who lived in the area, you know, aren't you worried about all these fumes? And he goes, Don't worry about it. We only light the fire at night, so everyone's sleeping anyway.
SPEAKER_01Right. As though what, like people don't breathe when there's Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00No, that's what happens when you sleep, didn't you know? You just stop breathing for 12 hours. That's why you fall asleep.
SPEAKER_01Now it all makes sense.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. It's local knowledge. Yeah, so it is an incredible anecdote, or vignette rather, into Lagos and this fella Abu Bakar, who's not only running a really, really good business, but employing lots of people and, you know, presumably doing a service as well in in the supply chain of recycling. But if you're going to be really hard-nosed about it, what percentage of the scrapped material can they really be re-entering into the supply chain just from phones alone? When isn't the vast majority of copper in our grid system in electric vehicles in much larger, in much larger vehicles or things that require electricity to be transmitted along them?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, for sure. I mean, uh uh, you know, e-waste, it's a big category. It's you know, tens of billions of dollars worth of metal is locked up in in e-waste, electronic waste, but it's small, it's tiny, it's dwarfed by the amount that goes into industrial facilities, right? It's basically like you said, our whole electric grid runs on copper, right? Almost all the power lines you see, that's thousands and thousands of miles of thick copper cable and all the equipment in the generators and the switching stations, copper, copper, copper, copper, copper all the way along. That's where most of it goes. So, this is one of the shortcomings of recycling, right? Is because a lot of the copper that's in use, we don't want to recycle. We want it to stay right where it is, you know. It's not like it's not like a bottle or a beer can or something. Those are things that you buy them, you use them once, you drink the drink, you read the magazine, whatever, and then you can chuck them in a recycling bin.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But a power line, you put up a power line or you build a switching station or a generator or something, you want that thing to stay put for 20, 30, 50 years. So a lot of that copper is, you know, it's basically sort of off the table. It's taken out of circulation. So recycling is only going to get us so far. And that's that's why we're gonna need to do some mining.
SPEAKER_00There's just there's no avoiding it. So need to do some mining. You refer to a couple of big mining magnates in the book. There's this great Australian fellow, Jared Barron. I started looking into him a little bit more. It doesn't look like he's actually really producing that much as of yet, but yeah, give us a sense for this fella, the Australian billionaire deep sea miner.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, he's not a billionaire yet. He's hoping to be. He's trying really hard to become an aspiring billionaire. Yeah, he's a multimillionaire. Anyway, uh, Gerard Barron is a guy, he's an Australian entrepreneur. Long about like 20, 25 years ago, he got turned on to the idea of deep sea mining. And the idea here is in the ocean, the ocean holds loads of these metals that we need, particularly um in these the bottom of the Pacific, in this area at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, about four miles beneath the surface. There's billions of these little rocks called polymetallic nodules that are full of copper, cobalt, manganese, a bunch of the metals that we need, right? So he finds out about this, teams up with some other business partners, and they start a they uh launch a business to try to start digging these things up and making big money from it. Well, that first business was called Deep Green, and uh it wound up going bankrupt without ever having produced any metal, but did cost its investors and the state of Papua New Guinea that they had teamed up with something like a half a billion dollars. So that was his first foray. Now he's back with a new company called the Metals Company, not the most original title, but point across.
SPEAKER_00It's on the nose.
SPEAKER_01It's on right on the nose. Anyway, so they are uh one of several companies. They're the most aggressive of a bunch of companies that are trying to get permission to start digging up these nodules from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, basically strip mine the ocean floor. What could go wrong, right? So they've been going ahead, they've been working on this for quite a few years right now, and they've come a long way. They've got, they've figured out the technology. They've they've built a robot, a thing like the size of a small house that they have lowered to the bottom of the Pacific, and it trundles along the ocean floor and sucks these things up and shoots them up a pipe, basically four miles up to a ship. So they've proved they can do that. They have the technology. They have yeah, and they have agreements in place with a couple of other companies to do the processing and so on. The only thing that is stopping them at this point is that under international law, it's up to the UN, to a particular agency of the United Nations, to say, yes, C mining is okay, or no, C mining is not okay.
SPEAKER_00Oh my God. Interesting. I didn't know they'd gotten that far. So it's literally. All in the hands of a lobbying effort from the metals company to get the UN to say yep.
SPEAKER_01That's even weirder than that. So that's been stuck there for the last couple of years. Basically, this this little agency, it's called the International Seabed Authority. That was that. Yeah. Well, they're the ones. They're this tiny little agency that barely anybody's heard of, but they have this enormous power.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because when they were set up, long story, but basically when they were when this agency was created, nobody was really thinking about seabed mining. This is goes back to the 80s, and it's really there for, you know, sort of scientific cooperation, coordinating, and blah, blah, blah. Nobody, nobody really thought at the time, like, oh, that sea like mining the seabed would be a multi-billion dollar industry. Yeah. So they just kind of got given this authority uh that they still have. Anyway, long story short, uh Gerard Barron and his friends and and allies have been pushing and pushing and pushing for the for this seabed authority to give them the green light. And the Seabed Authority has kept saying, no, we need to do more research, because who knows, right? We don't know what's going to happen. I mean, basically any ocean scientist that you talk to will tell you this is a crazy idea, if only because we just don't know what the impacts will be, right?
SPEAKER_00The damage of the oceans are huge, right? Yeah. I suppose, I mean, Jared obviously, I looked at his website. I became very interested in that particular one, maybe just because it's an Australian. Fair enough. Couple of red flags off the top. You know, he lives in Dubai. Right. If it even though it's a Canadian company. And when I looked through the website, I noticed how many people on his team were, in one way or another, some type of lobbying effort to show look how much work we've done to really make sure that we're going to be environmentally friendly. I think half the people were some type of researcher or reporter or scientist. And maybe I should be less cynical about it. I also, to be honest, I think it's a great idea. If we're gonna take if we're gonna take for granted that in the next 25 years we need more copper than we've ever consumed in all of history, then potentially we might have to extract it from the deep oceans or open up a copper mine in where was it, Atlanta or something like that in America. You know, we're we're gonna we're gonna decide what we're prepared to to trade off.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So this is exactly their argument, Ryan, is that like is that deep sea mining will be easier, it's it'll be safer, it'll be less harmful, right? There's you're not gonna displace any local communities, you don't have to tear up the rainforest like they're doing in Indonesia, etc. etc. That's their argument, is that it will be safer. And it might be that might turn out to be the case, but the thing is we just don't know. You know, there's so little research that's been done. We don't even know what's what all is living on the bottom of the ocean. There's been very little exploration done there. And the thing is, if we if we mess up the oceans as badly as we've messed up the the atmosphere, we're sunk, man. We I mean, we need the oceans for food, we need the oceans for carbon, we need the oceans for oxygen. Yeah, don't forget, the oceans are already stressed from climate change, from overfishing, from pollution. Like the oceans are already kind of on shaky ground.
SPEAKER_00Totally. I mean, it's a mess the whole way down. Presumably, if it's just as simple, this might be a super naive way to think about it, but if it's just as simple as sending down a machine and probably disturbing the surface quite a lot, but then that's it. It might be worth the trade-off. Who knows? So they're waiting on this one UN authority. What uh what does the UN authority really, really need to see before Gerard gets to you know start mining the oceans?
SPEAKER_01So here's the thing. So I'll tell you what the UN authority needs to see, and then I'll tell you there's actually been a further twist just in the last couple of months. So basically, the like there's this tension between, you know, on the one hand, we need metals, we want to make money, and but the oceans, but the oceans. So that's they've been sort of arguing about this back and forth, and they've, you know, and there has been a lot of research done, and the metals company has has been required to pay for a lot of that research. But the bottom line at this point is the overwhelming majority of scientific authorities still say it's too soon. We don't know enough. Like if we if we rush into this, we risk totally destabilizing the oceans and we need to do more research. So basically they keep they've been saying for years we need to do more research. We need to do more research, we need to do more research. And this is a position, again, this is backed up by hundreds of ocean scientists. The EU, a whole about 20, 30 countries have also called for a moratorium on sea mining. Several of the companies that might buy these metals have also said, like Mercedes Benz has said, we're not going to buy any metals that come from ocean mining because we're so worried about it. So it's not just Greenpeace, you know. Lots and lots of people. Anyway, so that's how why it's stuck at the ISA. Now, back to our friend Gerard Barron. Well, what happened back, you know, come January, all of a sudden there's a new guy in the White House, Donald Trump. Donald Trump loves mining, he loves the idea, right? Of, you know, if you tell him there's billions of dollars of metal sitting on the bottom of the ocean, that gets his attention. So Barron actually went to the Trump administration and got the Trump administration to say, we will give you permission to mine in international waters. We think it like we give you permission. Even though it is not American territory, the US has no authority to do this, but they've gone ahead and said, we're doing it. And so the metals company's position now is like, we don't even care what the UN says anymore. The United States says it's okay. So uh we're it's being held up right now in there's some regulatory hearings and court cases, but they really like it's possible that they may start very, very soon, even without the CBET authority giving them the code.
SPEAKER_00That's so fascinating. Like real politics where does where does power actually lie if the UN can't actually what's the word?
SPEAKER_01Enforce they can't enforce it. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00If if the UN can't enforce their authority and the US can supersede it, does that UN body have any power? That's super fascinating. So in that case, where is the metals company going to start their work? I saw online their partners with Tonga and Nauru.
SPEAKER_01Right. So the way that it works, well, the way that it works under the UN framework is private companies have to team up with the country, with a UN member state. So the metals company has deals with Nauru, Tonga, and Kiribati, these teeny, teeny, tiny little islands that you've you might have heard about them a bit more because Australia has a nasty history with some of them. Nauru is where uh I think until pretty recently Australia was sending refugees, people that showed up wanting to get asylum in Australia, and Australia's like, nah, you're gonna throw a prison camp on this little island instead. Anyway, um so he has deals with them, and that's going through the uh you need that to to request permission from the Seabed Authority. With this Trump situation, this America situation, though, you don't need any of that. It's just we're a company, we want to just go for it.
SPEAKER_00What the fuck? Just go for it. There seems to there needs to be a little bit more handrails than that. Well then if if Barron I mean, you've interviewed him several times. If Barron is now confident that he is not gonna have any law enforcement on his back, where does he go? What what's the first place that they've spotted out where there's gonna be maximum yield?
SPEAKER_01So the place they've really been focusing on is is called the Clarion Clipperton zone, and it's about halfway between Hawaii and Mexico. Okay, it's the Pacific Ocean, right on the bottom. You can picture that. There are other areas, but that's where they've that's where they've really been focusing their efforts. They've done a lot of research in there, they know where the nodules are. That's where they trialed their their prototype robot, that's where they're gonna hit first.
SPEAKER_00So if it's in international waters, who are they paying royalties to?
SPEAKER_01Great question.
SPEAKER_00Could this just yeah, could this just become the most singularly profitable company of all time? Because they can just go around picking up billions of dollars off the floor, and the only expenses they have to incur is the cost of extraction. Because for all these Australian companies and Rio Tinto and the presumably even Toxic Bobs companies in in the DRC, the biggest expense is actually the royalties that you need to slap on to whatever the state is that you're taking it from, as some acknowledgement of we're actually taking from your land here. Here is here is a small check for your for your time.
SPEAKER_01Right. Yeah, I mean, that's totally unclear, right? This is why, like under the UN, this is why you have to team up, or this is one of the reasons why you have to team up with another country, right? So if the metals company started mining under the UN rules with Nauru, then Nauru would get some kind of cut. They'd get some kind of loyalties. But if it's just Trump saying, go ahead, who knows? You know, uh, I wouldn't, I'm sure the the Trump re-election fund would get a nice big uh check. Beyond that, I don't know.
SPEAKER_00Oh my god.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, there's no there's no rules, right? There are no rules. What he's what he's proposing to do is just something for which there are no regulations, there are no rules, and the real question is like, who's gonna stop him?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Why why has there been such a drastic slip back into a type of crony capitalism in the United States? You know, and and people just seemingly not caring.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I don't know, man. I think a big part of it is, you know, and this is just me kind of riffing off the top of my head, but I you know, the United States has been the world's dominant power for, you know, quite a time now, 70, 80 years, more maybe, depending on how you measure it. And it is clearly starting to slip. The American empire is crumbling and China is is rising, and Americans know that and they can feel it, and they don't like it. You know, and this is part of this is the whole make America great again slogan, right? It's like, you know, if you're my age, if you're in your 50s, your sixties, like when you were growing up, like America was king, no doubt about it. The richest, the most powerful, place where everyone wanted to go, everybody wanted to be like Americans. And now, like, people hate us all over the world. We've got like, you know, China is kicking our ass in practically everything, in clean energy and robotics and AI, you name it, definitely in manufacturing and every kind of industry. And uh, you know, and life is sort of slowly getting worse for lots and lots of people. You know, there's homelessness and there's fentanyl, and housing's totally unaffordable, and it's just not, it's not nearly as, you know, things ain't like they used to be. They're really not. And so, so along comes a guy like Trump who's just like, I'm gonna make you all rich again, you know. All you have to do is say yes to whatever I propose. And a lot of people go, Hell yeah. You know, let's do it. Let's mine the seafloor, let's mine the national parks, you know. So who knows? That's that's a topic for a whole nother podcast.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it definitely is. Um, are there any competition to the metals company?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so they're like I say, they're by far the most aggressive. They've really been out front, pushing, pushing, pushing. But there are a couple of other, a couple of few other companies out there. Lockheed Martin, which is a defense contractor. They have a um, they have a sea mining subsidiary. There's also a Belgian company, a big shipbuilding company that has uh that also has a sea mining outfit. I I talk about them some in the book. And they've also built a prototype that they've also trialed. And then there are a lot of governments, right? The Chinese government, uh, the Indian government, Japanese government, they're all building, they're all doing research into this stuff. They're building prototypes. China has what did they just do? They haven't quite sent. I think the metals company's robot went the deepest, but China recently sent sent one down that got almost as deep.
SPEAKER_00That must be threatening to Barron.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's part of why they're like, let's make this happen now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01All right, so what the other thing about his company, all the other companies that are involved in it are either backed, they're parts of major corporations, like Deme, the Belgian chipbuilders, or Lockheed Martin, or they're directly financed by a national government. The metals company is the only pure venture capital. Right? It's all just him going around the world and talking people into giving him money in the hopes that they'll get some money back. And that he's been talking that talk for quite a few years. They have made zero profits, they have produced zero metals, they've done nothing but burn through hundreds of millions of dollars so far. So they're in they're in a hurry.
SPEAKER_00Oh, the stress, the stress, it's stressed to me out just thinking about it. But you can only imagine, like it is such a compelling pitch, though, because you can point to exactly what the roadblocks are, and then after that, certainty is pretty, pretty, pretty clearly lit. But apart from Mr. Barron, Robert Friedland gets a shout-out in your book as well. This really incredibly interesting figure for so many reasons. I was just in Singapore and I was looking for him when I was walking around. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no he lives there. No, I didn't get him. I I've been wanting to interview him for such a long time. You know, and I'll let you take it from here, but you know, he features in Steve Jobs' life and then he features in pretty much some of the major mining projects all around the world.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, he's a wild character. Uh I mean, where to begin? He was, you know, he was an acid gobbling hippie back in the 60s, you know. And uh he and Steve Jaw, he he uh he got, I forget which university he was going to, but he got he was arrested and uh spent did a little prison time for dealing acid LSD. And then later on he turns up in Oregon working on a on a commune. Um it was a they made cider there, apple cider. It was an apple orchard, and they made cider communally, and they would all everybody live together and they'd have communal meals and they'd dance and they'd drum and and Steve Jobs was part of it. He came out, you know, hung out there. He and Friedland were good friends. And uh apparently, according to Steve Jobs, according to his biography, he left. Jobs left because he thought that Friedland was too materialistic, which is pretty hilarious coming from Steve Jobs. But I guess that's how he felt at the time. Anyway, Friedland went on from there to like, you know, went on from being a hippie acid head cider maker to starting to dabble in mining. Uh, he's from Canada, like me, which is a big mining country, like us probably second only to Australia. Yeah, and he got lucky early on. He discovered this huge nickel mine here in Canada, sort of made his bones there. And ever since he's like he's gone all around the world and he's just become this gigantic mining magnet with this whole network of companies all over the world, all over the world. And the biggest ones, like you said, are now in uh Congo. He was one of the first guys to get into a Democratic Republic of Congo after the Civil War calmed down there enough that it was you could go in there and do business again. So he's now running a huge, he just recently, like in the last year or two, they opened up an enormous copper mine, one of the biggest in the world. And I believe they've got another one coming online there. He's also got a huge copper mine in Mongolia, like all over the world, like many, many billions of dollars worth of mines and metals flowing through this guy's hands.
SPEAKER_00Have you gotten a chance to interview him?
SPEAKER_01No, I tried. I've gone nowhere. Yeah, he doesn't he's he he's really he likes to talk. He shows up at a lot of the big conferences and gives speeches, but he doesn't give very many interviews.
SPEAKER_00There's a fella called Eric Townsend who runs a podcast called Macro Voices, and he's um featured Robert Friedland as a guest several times.
SPEAKER_01Macro Voices.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So it's kind of a finance podcast, but macroeconomics, so big general themes. That's the idea. But anyway, he had Rod Robert Friedel a few times and and I as well have interviewed him Eric Townsend, and I said to him, Look, man, I'm going to Singapore. I want to talk to Robert Friedland. You know, if for no other reason, Robert has a sort of speculative company in geothermal drilling technology, which is a big interest of mine. And I was like, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of reasons here. Maybe he might be interested in either doing a podcast interview or potentially just hanging out. Anyway, it didn't go anywhere. But I got his email and he was writing, I was writing to him and following up, and then Eric said, Look, sometimes he's in the mood, and then you'll just never hear from him. But if he's in the mood, he'll show up and he'll want to talk. Obviously, there is darkness to him, and I'd love to know how do you secure these projects in the Congo or in Mongolia? You know, are you just a really good salesperson, right? Or are you prepared to show why you should be the person that gets these types of jobs? If you know what I mean. If you're not, I'm sort of getting at. If you look at any type of foreign direct investment in the Congo, it's it's extremely corrupt, and it has been for the last 30, 40 years.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01I mean, that's a really open secret. I'm sure he paid tons of bribes to the right people. I mean, the whole story of mining in Congo is a story of bribery and corruption. I I also talk about that some in the book. There's this one particular guy, uh blanking on his name, Gertler.
SPEAKER_00Yes, he's the he's the Jewish guy. Yeah. Let me let me just quickly have a look. Me too. See who gets there first. Well, I got the internet. Dan Dan Gertler.
SPEAKER_01Dan Gertler, that's it. Anyway, yeah, he's this Israeli uh go-between that um got himself stuck into the Congo back in the Civil War days and sort of made friends with all the right people, including Laurent Kabila, who later became the president. And then there he became so then this Gertler guy, Dan Gertler, basically like, you know, was the gatekeeper. Like, if you want to get a mining concession, you want to open a mine in Congo, come to Dan Gertler and he will tell you who to bribe and he will take a nice cut himself. Yeah, he's been uh yeah, he's been indicted in many different courts around the world. And that's but it's you know, it's really an open secret that uh that's how uh how business gets done, not only in Congo, but in lots of places.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And actually it's not even it's not even illegal in a lot of places. Like one of the things that Trump has done is re-legalize bribery. So it used to be illegal if you're an American company, not allowed to pay a bribe to do business in a foreign country. Now you can again.
SPEAKER_00Just because culturally it's become more acceptable, legally, nothing's changed.
SPEAKER_01Because Trump uh scuttled, because Trump repealed the law that made it illegal.
SPEAKER_00Right. So legally something actually has changed. Okay, crazy. I got a couple of sort of out-of-the-box questions here for you, Vince, but I wonder if there was, say, anything that we haven't touched on that you think is necessary, really?
SPEAKER_01No, I mean, I always like to put in a plug for like the most effective way to most effective thing we can do is to not drive cars.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01I don't know if that's coming up in your questions, or if you want, I can just give you the much deal.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'd love to hear it, but maybe leave it to the end. What about the yeah? So how do the financials and commodities market impact our ability to extract and consume copper? So, for instance, how much of a steeper curve does it make the difficulty of the renewable energy transition?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, short answer is a lot, right? Metal prices are really volatile. They go up, they go down all the time. And um, so that makes it really hard for businesses, right? Like it's a really, it's a very risky industry. So I mean, I'm amazed sometimes that anybody does it at all, to be honest with you. It's like there's so many risks, there's so many X factors, there's so many unknowns. And the price of the metal is one of the biggest ones, right? So, like often you'll have a situation where, you know, you'll like get the right to open up a mine for copper. And at the time, copper is selling for, you know, whatever, four dollars a pound, and you're like, great, that means I can make it's gonna cost me this much to dig it up. I can sell it for $4 a pound. I'm gonna make this much. By the time you've done all the permits and all the engineering and everything, and you've actually got copper coming out of the ground, maybe copper is now two dollars a pound, and all of a sudden it's not profitable at all. So that mine actually just gets shut down in its tracks, and this happens all the time where people just stop production because it's just not profitable. So, you know, it makes it it makes it hard to attract capital because there's you know, there's only so many investors that are willing to take on that kind of risk. And it makes it really hard to plan, right? Because your, you know, your revenues are very fluctuate a lot.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and uh and it's mostly crazy type of business.
SPEAKER_01It really is, man. Like I say, I'm I'm kind of amazed that anybody does it. But but some, you know, when you when you hit it, if you do hit it, you can hit it really, really big. I think that's sort of the bottom line. Do you see? A lot of mining, of course, is done by these giant globe-spanning corporations. So, like if one mine isn't panning out at any given moment, it's okay because the rest of their portfolio is doing well and they can sort of spread the risk around that way.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Do you think that because copper is playing a role in the energy transition, which many countries around the world have come into agreement for is a moral good outcome for our society, that there might be room for some type of state fixed price on certain key key materials, whether it be copper or whether it be sand, and therefore totally running in the antithesis of whatever the free market price of a certain metal might be. But at least you would ensure more manufacturing and maybe even allow for more extraction of these materials.
SPEAKER_01Maybe. I mean, generally speaking, I do think I think there needs to be some kind. Of government support for critical metals and renewable energy. Because a lot of these, it's it's often like the free market's not going to do it all by itself. And China, and this is exactly how China operates, right? They just decide right, this industry is important to us, this industry is important to us, this industry is important to us. If they make money, great. If they don't, we'll just give them money. We'll subsidize them one way or another, whether it's a guaranteed price, whether it's a tax credit, whether it's direct investment. You know, there's many different ways you can do it. But the bottom line is the Chinese government says we need to build solar panels, make it happen one way or another. And that's how they've become the world's number one maker of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and critical metals. But we don't actually do that, right? Like when we decide that there's something that's really that is crucially crucial to the national interest, we just pay for it. We just make it happen, right? There was no free market that developed the COVID vaccine. Right? That was just the you know, we decide like we need this goddamn thing. Let's just pour billions and billions and billions of government money dollars into it until we get it, and then you know, handle the problem. And you know, same thing with, you know, you know, if we if we decide that fighting a war in Afghanistan is important, we just go ahead and bankroll the war in Afghanistan. There's no market upside to the war in Afghanistan.
SPEAKER_00Exactly.
SPEAKER_01So, you know, I really think that for for a lot of things, and this is not like some crazy Marxist idea either, right? We do this in the United States. The government already subsidizes oil and gas, they subsidize biofuels, they subsidize a lot of agriculture, you know, which I don't think is a terrible thing. I mean, I don't think we should be subsidizing oil and gas, but the principle that, like, we, you know, we decide, you know, there are certain industries that are just that we just need, and therefore we will help fund them. I think that's fine. And it's the only way to go, in fact.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, especially if you are thinking about competing with a nation as big and powerful and strong and multi-generationally minded, as China.
SPEAKER_01Exactly, right? They're doing it, and you keep hearing like, you know, Western, you know, business people complaining like the only reason they can do it is because the government subsidizes them. Well, okay, that's true. So your solution is just to complain? No, your solution should be get your government to subsidize you.
SPEAKER_00It's not necessarily all bad that the state might be intervening a little bit on a certain thing. I'm sure you've seen this book called Apple in China by Pat McGee.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I haven't read it, but I've heard a lot about it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I would I'd suggest you you read that because it's kind of overwhelming. Like how the multi-generational patients from the Chinese state, where for all intents and purposes, the same people are in power for decades, one after another, can just maximally extract all the know-how, all the knowledge, all the financial plumbing, and turn around and create something like BYD that overnight can replace Tesla, which is due to Tesla, but also Apple. You know, Apple have a huge, huge hand in that success as well. You've got Robert Friedman, Jared Barron, the CCP, Chane Populists, African Warlords. This is also regarding the sandbook as well. You know, ideas of where a different idea for where power actually lies. So rather than the states, but the individuals responsible for these raw ingredients that much of our world is built upon. Is there a book for how these characters sort of shape modern civilization? And if there isn't, doesn't that sound like something that would there'd be an audience for? Are you pitching me? I'm I'm pitching myself here. I just want to see if it's out there.
SPEAKER_01I don't know. I feel like uh, you know, there's there's a few books, some which I read for my research. There's a good one called uh it just came out like a year or two ago. Let me see if it's it's something like the like the secret powers that run the world.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01About commodity traders.
SPEAKER_00Well, the commodities one was the world for sale. Yeah. And yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's the one I'm thinking of. So I thought that was a really good one that gets into, you know, yeah, the world for sale. Yeah, and then there's you know, there's somebody there was a biography of Robert Friedland that came out, but I think back in the 20 years ago or so. You know, there's a lot of there's a lot of folks trying and writing these books. But but hey, what more do you need than my book, Ryan?
SPEAKER_00All right, yeah, I didn't realize the the answer was already in the question. Fantastic. You wanted to mention how we don't need to drive cars anymore. As an American, that sounds completely a sacrilegious thing for you to say. So could you try and justify yourself?
SPEAKER_01Yes. Absolutely. Now I know this sounds like a real screeching, sudden left turn out of nowhere, but bear with me. Here's how it all connects. Um the most, the most effective way that we can reduce the harms associated with all with our need for critical metals is to reduce the demand for them, is to use fewer of them in the first place, right? Recycling's good, but recycling only gets you so far. Better is to just not dig up that metal in the first place, not build those things in the first place. And the number one thing of all the technologies we're talking about, it's electric vehicles that are consuming the most critical metals. That's where most of the demand is. Okay. So it's really EVs that are driving most of these problems that we're talking about. Whether it's, you know, child miners, kids mining cobalt in in Congo or the desert being dried out in Chile, it's EVs that are really driving a lot of that. So, in other words, if we swap, if we just go ahead and build, if we swap all the 1.2 billion gas-powered cars that we've got on the roads today, if we swap all those for 1.2 billion EVs, we're just going to swap one set of problems for another. Yeah, better for the climate, but also terrible for, you know, a hundred other reasons. So much better is, if at all possible, if you can, don't buy a car at all. Not even an electric one. And I'm not saying everybody who owns a car is bad. I'm not saying cars are bad. I'm not saying, you know, like that nobody should own cars, not at all. I own a car myself. But what I am saying is if you like the number one thing that we as individuals can do to try to limit this damage is, if possible, to try to live our lives or get our cities built in such a way that we don't need a car to get around. So I I don't know exactly where you are in Australia, but probably it's somewhere where you need a car to get around, right?
SPEAKER_00I actually don't own a car, but it's hey, there you go. Great totally coincidental. Everyone in Sydney owns a car.
SPEAKER_01Everyone in Sydney owns a car.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Of course, because like you know, in and in most of the United States, in most of Canada where I live now, you don't have a choice because the way the whole world is set up, if you don't have a car, you can't get anywhere, right? Yeah. But it doesn't have to be that way, right? What I'm all about is giving people the freedom to choose whether to own a car. So that means doing things like putting in more public transportation, riding bicycles, subsidizing bikes, electric bikes. Man, I just got an electric bike last week, and that is a life-changing invention. It really is. And the best thing about it is like I can do so much on it that I used to need a car to do. Right. So my point being, reduce demand. How do you reduce demand? By not buying a car in the first place. If you can, you know, if you can encourage the building of bike lanes, if you can encourage, you know, neighborhood planning so that your neighborhood is more walkable so that you can choose whether you want to own a car or not. If we can reduce the number of cars that are out there, that will do more than anything else to help with this problem, the problems of critical metals. It's reducing the demand that's creating all those supply problems. That's how it connects.
SPEAKER_00I imagine that for many people in the developing world who may be, and this is the story of the last 15, 20 years, who have their incomes rising year after year, and therefore their tastes sort of follow alongside behind that. A lot of people will go from I've never owned a car before to I really want to own a car. Sure. You know, and the same incentive for them eating consuming more meats or maybe taking more holidays or buying a bigger house will just follow in suit. They might end up buying a car. But at least in a lot of capital cities in Europe, or suppose that's really it, in capital cities in America, everyone still owns a car, right?
SPEAKER_01Well, they are, but I'll tell you, things that actually really are changing. Like Vancouver, where I live now, is a really good example. So, like I used to live in Los Angeles with my wife, two kids, dog, you know, pretty standard setup. We had two cars, of course, because we needed them, right? To get the kids to school, to get our groceries, all that. Had to have mom, dad, we each needed a car. We moved to Vancouver about five years ago, immediately got rid of one of those cars, not because we'd suddenly become, you know, environmental angels, but just because we didn't need it. Because Vancouver has reconfigured itself. Like the city planners have put in enough public transport and enough protected bike lanes and other things, so that now instead of me driving my son to school every morning, he rides his bike because there's a safe protected bike pathway to his school. Same with my wife to her job. She rides her bike to her job now instead of that's nice. Yeah. Yeah. Man, and I'll tell you, like, you know, yeah, it's better for the environment and everything. It soothes my liberal soul, but also that's one more car. I don't have to insure it, I don't have to, you know, maintain it. It's way cheaper. I don't have to worry about it. It's a big quality of life upgrade.
SPEAKER_00Totally. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I really think you mentioned the developing world, and I really think that's where the biggest hope is. Because, like for a lot of the developing world, it's too late, right? LA, Houston, Phoenix, it's too late for those places. Those are car-dependent cities. But where most of the world's growth is happening is in the developing world. It's in Lagos and Jakarta and Saigon. These are cities that are being built right now, and we have a great opportunity to build them better, to build them rather than build them with freeways and far-flung shopping malls. We can build them in ways that are more human-centric, which we know how to do by now.
SPEAKER_00So that's my last question for you, Vince. I don't know if you recall the country that you said last time when I asked you this question, but I said, What is a country if you look into the next say a few decades you're most bullish on?
SPEAKER_01Uh-huh. I probably said China last time, right? No. All right, let me let me make my guess and then you can tell me. Country that I'm the most bullish on, that's a good one.
SPEAKER_00This would have been in 2021.
unknownReally?
SPEAKER_01I mean, listen, obviously, China, like I said, China is, you know, is the cunning superpower. I think they're on their way up and they're gonna be the world's most powerful country very soon if they're not already, which by many measures they are.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But you know, which one's gonna make the biggest leap?
SPEAKER_00Not yeah, just that you're most bullish on, you're most excited for. Doesn't necessarily have to be the country that will win necessarily, but yeah, someone you're particularly bullish on and a reason why.
SPEAKER_01Going around the world in my brain right now. Let me say I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say, how am I gonna say? India. Did I say India last time?
SPEAKER_00No, Canada last time.
SPEAKER_01Well, good for me. Yay, Canada. Well, I'm still very big on Canada. Yeah, but I do think I think India's coming up fast, and they've got a whole lot going for them, and and uh I think they're gonna become a much bigger player in in the decades to come.
SPEAKER_00Are there still sand wars happening there from what you've seen?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. It's unbelievable. I mean, I still get Google alerts every you know couple, three days. Same same shit still going on. Yeah, it's unbelievable.
SPEAKER_00So you've done sand, copper. Do you feel like there's more raw materials that you can base entire books around?
SPEAKER_01I mean, for sure there are. Do I want to write another book about raw materials? I don't really think so. Um, but yeah, man, I mean it's when you start looking at the world through that lens, you realize just how fascinating like so many different materials are, right? Like I picked up a book a while ago, I haven't read it yet, but it's the story of wood, right? And you think about oh yeah, wood. Wood's the original building material, the ships that carried the explorers of the oceans with wood. So much stuff going on with wood. Plastic, of course, is another one. There's been a few books about that. But yeah, I mean, really, you look at just about anything that we use in in our modern world, and you can bet there's a s there's a story behind it. An interesting story.
SPEAKER_00So, what do you want to write that next story about? Do you know?
SPEAKER_01I don't know. I'm thinking about scavengers. I got really fascinated while I was in Lagos hanging out with those these e-waste recyclers. Just like I said, I was so blown away with how ingenious they are and how hardworking they are and how how many of them they are. Because it's not just in Lagos, right? That happens all over the developing world. That people are basically making money out of what the rest of us are throwing away. Right. And just that concept of like, you know, literally one man's trash is another man's treasure, like it's very true all over the world and on a multi, multi-billion dollar scale. There's so many people who are, you know, salvaging whether it's e-waste, whether it's plastic, whether it's textiles, you know, all kinds of things. I was just this morning, I was uh interviewing a researcher here at the University of British Columbia who is working on working on ways to extract chemical, like useful chemicals from mine waste and from wood pulp waste. And so when you smash down trees to make paper, there's all this gross acidic waste that comes out of it that usually just gets dumped somewhere. And he's coming up with these microbes that can like turn it into like different kinds of acids that you can then sell to industries as as raw materials. Like it's just that kind of real circularity. It really just kind of gets my brain going.
SPEAKER_00Nice. Well, Vince, thank you so much for joining me again. Absolute pleasure to speak with you. And yeah, both of your books I've thoroughly enjoyed. So I'm keen to see whatever the next one is.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. And if I can get in one last plug if anybody who's interested in this stuff, I've also got a weekly newsletter, also called Power Metal, where I'm like, you know, the book kind of gives you the big broad picture, and this newsletter is more like, you know, sort of the latest news that's happening in this whole about all these issues we've been talking about.
SPEAKER_00So nice. Yeah, I'll put the substack link towards the top of the podcast description.
SPEAKER_01Beautiful. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00Brilliant, Vince. All right, mate. See you later.
SPEAKER_01Thanks a lot, Ryan. Let me know when it goes up.