February 4, 2026 • 31 mins
If the 20th century was defined by oil, journalist and author Nicolas Niarchos bets that the 21st century will be defined by batteries. In his book, The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth, Niarchos unpacks the hidden costs behind the world’s battery boom. In this episode, he and Oz trace how the race for cobalt and other critical metals is reshaping global power—why China dominates refining and battery innovation, what the U.S. would actually have to build to compete, and whether trade deals can realistically “clean up” the system.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Welcome to tech stuff. This is the story this week.
I want to talk about batteries, from the supply chain
to the geostrategic consequences of growing demand in everything from
drones to data centers, to evs and of course humanoid robots.
My guest today has reported on it all. Nicholas Narcos
(00:37):
is the author of a new book, The Elements of Power,
A Story of war, technology and the dirtiest supply chain
on Earth. Now that last phrase caught some people by surprise.
After all, batteries power electric vehicles, reducing the world's dependence
on fossil fuels aka cleaner energy, at least in theory.
(01:02):
Here's Nicholas defending the book's title.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
This is the duty supply chain on Earth because in
many ways this is the most brutal of the energy
supply chains. Because you don't have children going out to
dig oil wells. You don't have you know, pregnant women
being forced to scrub oil. I don't even know what
that would look like. But you just, at a very
(01:26):
very basic human level down the supply chain, there are
some terrible things that are going on, and of course
oil has these terrible geopolitical effects of course it has
environmental effects, but I think that you know, the point
that I'm trying to submit them to make with a
duty supply chain on Earth is that it just has
all these other human rights things and these are things
that we can solve. Again, that's the whole point of
(01:48):
the book, is that we're trying to solve for those
things rather than just accepting them.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
And not everyone is just accepting them. There are moves
towards different types of battery technology that demand you of
critical metals, and there are people attempting to clean up
the supply chain. But just in case you're in any
doubt about what a big story this is, batteries and
the supplied chain of the rare earth metals needed to
(02:13):
build them loom over President Trump's designs on greenland and
the trade war with China. This is a story about
who pays the price when technology and geopolitics collide. Here's
my conversation with Nicholas Niakos. Nick, Welcome to Textuff. Congratulations
on your book.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Thank you very much for having me back on.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
That's your third appearance on an ODDS podcast. I know
it's a great honor. The first one was in twenty
twenty When were you doing your nyorkerpiece.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
It was twenty twenty one, Yeah, just before I actually
pitched the book.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
And now it's a printed book.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Now it's a printed book.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
The Elements of Power, a story of war, technology and
the dirtiest supply chain on Earth. Why is it worth reading?
Speaker 2 (03:00):
It's worth reading because I would say it is the
most comprehensive look at a massive subject. But what is
really interesting is that this has become a hot button
political issue, and you know, the White House is involved
in it, the Chinese are involved in it, and really
the race for critical metals is on.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
You've written the search for oil defined the twentieth century,
The scramble for critical metals may well define the twenty
first Why are these critical metals critical?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
So these critical metals are critical because that's basically where
we get our energy from, how our devices are powered,
how our devices run. It depends which metal we're talking about.
But you know, cobalt, which I focus on a lot
in the book, is used to create cathodes for electric
devices and some electric cars. Cathodes are the positive electrode
(03:57):
of the battery. It basically allows you to push pack
a huge amount of power into these very small devices.
But cobalt is used in military applications, it's used for metals,
it's used for cleaning oil and so on and so forth.
So it's really an important industrial metal beyond just batteries.
I just focus on batteries because batteries have become central
(04:19):
to the way that we live our lives every day.
We wouldn't have cell phones, we wouldn't have long range
electric cars, we wouldn't have laptops, we wouldn't have aura rings.
We wouldn't have all these things without being able to
access a supply of these metals.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Right. I remember growing up and batteries were branded durro cell,
and they went into game boys and remote control cars
and fire alarms. They were like small things that allowed
you to do other things. But it feels like in
(04:53):
the last two or three years, batteries have become like
the central preoccupation of our time. The storage of power
i e. Batteries become so much more important than the
last ten years.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
I think it didn't become more important. I think that
the move away from internnel combustion engines towards electro vehicles,
which really did you know? Again, when I was starting
the book, there were very you know, very few of
us had been in a tesla. I think in tesla once.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Basically this was five years ago.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
This was five years ago, and now every other uber
in New York City is a tesla. And people, I
think were only really became aware of lithium ion batteries
when the Samsung Galaxy S seven was catching fire on planes.
That was sort of the moment when people like, wait
a second, what are these batteries? So why has it
become such a focus now? I think it's just a
(05:40):
confluence of all these different things. And I think on
a sort of political level, the US has become self
sufficient with oil as well, and because of fracking and
so on, so there's much less of a fear around
access to Middle East oil and these things that really
defined the oil wars of the seventies and sixties.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
But I mean, if you look at the last twelve
months of geopolitics, You've had Trump's designs on Greenland at
front and center. Trump's recent peace deal in Congo quite
interesting for critical metals, China's export controls on critical metals
that you mentioned, but then also Venezuela. In this preoccupation
with oil. So, coming back to that quote about you know,
(06:22):
the search for oil defining the twentieth century, in the
twenty first century being defined by critical metals, how do
those things coexist.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
I mean, I think oil is still very, very valuable.
I think it's just Trump sees oil and he sees dollars.
I think that's the more basic thing there. I think
critical metals also have the same effect on him, but
it's a little bit more difficult to explain. I think,
you know, for that generation, you grow up thinking, Okay,
(06:50):
we need as much oil as possible. And he's certainly
not moving away from oil. That's definitely not his aim.
But at the same time, I think he looks around
and he sees companies like Dasler, He sees you know,
tech companies, which are the backbone of the US economy basically,
and he says, look, this is this is an important thing,
(07:12):
and we're also going to fight for them, knowing.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Over the years you've said to me in one one
way or another many times, China more or less has
a lock on DRC's critical minerals, in particular cobalt and lithium.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Lithium, they had a lock on it until this US
company now got involved. Let's see, let's see what happens.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Yeah, and that basically exporting these minerals from Congo and
refining them in China was the key driver, alongside the
kind of technological advances of China dominance of this very
important supply chain. Fast forward to this year, earlier or
(07:54):
late last year, and Trump gets involved in a very
underreported i would say, peace deal between Congo, the DLC,
and Rwanda and its proxies, the M twenty three in
return for basically Congo saying we will make these minerals
available to you rather than to China. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
I think that's how the Americans want that deal to
be going. I think Chisicadi has come under a lot
of criticism in Congo itself for what people say is
mortgaging the resources of Congo in order for him to
stay in power, because I think there's also a question
(08:37):
about his own legitimacy as president. I think the Americans
are happy to work with him, but the question is,
well they follow through on the deal. And then the
second part of the question that you are asking is,
you know, refining in China still ninety percent of the
refining of these metals happens in China. So even if
the US gets a hold of the raw supply of
(08:59):
these things through some kind of chicanery and weird deal
in which the Congles agreed to dispossess the Chinese of
the minds that they've been given and so on and
so forth, you would have a situation in which either
the US would have to invest very, very heavily in
building battery refineries in the US or in an allied
country or something like that, or they would be shipping
(09:22):
the metals to China, which is the most economical thing
to do. So it's either Trump follows up this deal
with saying, Okay, I'm going to do ten pilot projects
and give them all like twenty billion dollars to you know,
build up these factories and be the most you know,
developed battery factories in the world. But do people in
the US want to do that. I imagine there are some yes,
(09:44):
but I'm not sure whether the capacity is that it is.
It is absolutely shocking how far behind the US and
Europe is in terms of research, in terms of the
amount of researchers. I mean, BYD one hundred and eighty
thousand researchers.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
BYD began as a battery manufacturer and became the largest
EV manufacturer in the world.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Yes, exactly, and they have one hundred and eighty thousand researchers,
which is more than the entire country of Germany. In fact,
COTL has eighteen thousand battery PhD worker like workers, so
it's just a thousand battery PhD. It's just it's absolutely
insane the amount of people who are working on this.
It's absolutely amount of insane, the amount of investment that
they put in their technologies. I spoke to Shirley Meng,
(10:27):
who is a really top battery scientist for this book
at ar Gone National Lab and she was just like,
we don't have anything like this in the US, and
ARGON is kind of the premiere US lab where a
lot of these technologies are actually developed and a lot
of the jumps forward in the technology have come from
the US and from Europe and Japan. But in the
(10:47):
future that might might not be the case because there
are just so many more people working on this because
it has been such a focus by the Chinese Communist
Party for the last twenty years.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
But your point, if you were brought into a battery
adviser the Trump administration would be it's all well and
good to control the supply chains, but until you have
an ecosystem in the US of battery innovation and battery
refinement doesn't really get you that much.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Absolutely, that's exactly what I would say, and you should
probably you should probably do that because you can.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
You can battery advisor to the Trump administration.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
I read next book, but the but no, I mean, look,
what was really interesting with this book as well, was
you know when I started thinking about reporting on this
stuff in twenty nineteen. I remember I met somebody who
had used to work for Glencore and he said to me, ah,
you want to write about cobalt. Cobalt is going to
(11:44):
be like, you know, it's going to be the old story,
like don't focus on cobalt, like they're going to innovate
away from cobalt. Fast forward to twenty twenty five and
twenty twenty six. You know, Trump is doing deals with
with the Congolese president. I imagine that, like, this is
the Congoes. It's not like they get a lot of
bad time in Washington. The Congolese, you know, the Congleates
(12:06):
have a cobalt cartel. They are artificially raising prices and
putting in quotas, and this has become a key and
central part of the narrative. So I really think that
this is going to be something that continues and will
not just go away because of innovation or so on.
(12:26):
And yes, if you were the Trump administration and you
were interested in long term thinking, which is there's a
question about whether that's you know, the way that they're operating,
you would say, look, I want to develop not only
just these mines in Congo, but these refineries and these
factories and these batterym manufacturers and you know, car factories
in the US. But again, is US business ready to
(12:48):
do that? How do the Republicans, you know, justify subsidies
to these industries?
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Well, I mean Elon left Doge partly over this issue.
The falling out was over subsidies to evs, right.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, I mean I think he left those because you
had to as well.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
But I mean, Tesla's two years in a row of
declining sales byd dramatic slowdown in growth, still growing, but
dramatics slow down in sales growth last year. Do you
think the EV transition is inevitable? Do you think in
twenty years time, every car will be an EV or
do you think it's possible that this may the momentum
(13:30):
may shift in the other direction. That's may be seen
as a historical aberration. It's not the first time that
EV's have been popular.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yeah, no, I think I think you're totally right. I
think there is so much momentum behind it. Look, there
were popular evs around the town of the nineteenth twentieth centuries.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Just explain that because it's such a bizarre idea.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
It is very weird. But you know, some of the
first cars were electric cars. I mean, the internal combustion
ENGINET came in fairly late, and the electric starter. You know,
you had to crank internal combustion engine cars at the beginning,
and the crank could break your hand basically, so only
men would drive internal combustion engine cars, and electric cars
(14:09):
were seen as kind of more efficient, not green, because
that wasn't people concerned at that point point.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
They had batteries in the early twenty cent.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah, they had batteries.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
They had lad acid batteries, and they were women's cars.
I actually don't know, I have no idea, but they
were women's cars and they were, but they were seen
as women's cars, but they were they were legitimate competitive
products combustion and yeah, one hundred years.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Yeah, there were more electric cars on the road one
hundred and twenty years ago than internal combustion engine cars
in the US. And then in the seventies there was
this kind of like electric car fever because people weren't
worried about where oil was going and so on. But
you didn't have these kind of like behemoth companies like
Tesla or BYD at that point. I mean, I think
that the real difference now is scale.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
After the break, what it might mean practically to clean
up the supply chain, and what role the US could play.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Stay with us.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
When we first talked about this story, and you just
got back from a number of reporting trips to DRC
and we're pitching the book, I feel like your real
focus was on the extractive conditions of taking Cobel out
of the ground, the horrible human toll it's caused in
one of the poorest countries in the world, and that's
(15:51):
part of the book. But what you sort of layered
on and you're later reporting as it moved from being
a magazine story to a book, was really this focus
on how China not just controlled the supply chain for Cobolt,
but also built the battery innovation technology to take advantage
of its supply chain. And it's a very interesting story
that also takes us into Japan and to Shinsen. Can
(16:14):
you kind of lay out that history.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
So the lifting Marion battery, you know, was developed in
the US by Exon originally, which is fascinating company was,
you know, this oil major was looking for a way
of powering vehicles when oil ran out. They were already
thinking about this in the nineteen sixty nineteen seventies. And
(16:38):
then in at the University of Oxford you're alma mater,
then there was an American scientist in Britain put cobalt
into the battery, so it made them sort of more
stable and more powerful, and then it was kind of
tossed to one side. Oxford didn't want to license the technology.
Nobody really thought it was useful or would be of profit.
(16:59):
Whittingham went off to work on oil rigs and the
batteries kind of got sidelined. But in Japan they had
this kind of laser sharp focus on small electronic devices
and they needed to have something that packed enough power
also that was less polluting when you disposed of it.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
This is when it's in the nineties. This was in
the eighties and the mid eighties. This is consumer text exactly.
It was, you know, it was really on the back
of the walkman. So Sony was looking for it and
another company called Asahi Kasai, and there was a scientist
called Akira Yoshino, and he found his He found this
paper by John Goodenough, the Oxford scientist, sitting in a
pile of papers, and it was New Year's Eve and
(17:40):
he's throwing away these papers on his desk and he
finally found this pape. He was like, wait, what's this
and he had ignored.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
It, and then he realized that he should make a
battery out of cobalt, and he basically spurred this kind
of innovation which led to Sony's dominance. And then what
happens is that Sony says, okay, where can I make
my batteries more cheaply? And they build plants in China
(18:07):
and suddenly the Chinese are building batteries as well. And
what's very interesting about BYD which is the big electric
car company, is that they started without a factory as
we would imagine it. It was literally it's found a
wang chun fu called a human chain, and it was
(18:29):
essentially just people putting together these batteries by hand in
this workshop in Shenzhen. And they are very much willing
to stomach battery fires and to stomach accidents and to
you know, continue pioneering because this is seen as a
national priority, in national objective. It's not just something that's
(18:49):
making value for shareholders. It's not just something that's you know,
it's almost like a patriotic duty.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
But what why does BYD need one hundred and ten
thousand battery scientists? So as if I look at the world,
I see, okay, we've got evs which have you know,
six hundred kilometers plus range. We've got you know, iPhones
that you know, endlessly rechargeable and where the battery doesn't
really degrade that much. Like what is the dream breakthrough
(19:16):
in battery technology that one hundred and ten thousand scientists
are working towards.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
There are all kinds of dreams of different types of batteries.
There's you know, so do my own batteries, there's so
do umself for batteries. There are lots of interesting new
developments around solid state batteries that just can hold a
huge amount more power. And I think the idea is
to make things that are cheaper hold more power less
environmentally degrading, I would say, I hope. I mean, these
(19:41):
people are working on these kind of infantestline in these
small types of you know, advances, but when they make breakthroughs,
they can be quite important to our lives.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
So when you publish a second, the paperback edition, the
third paperback edition of this book in ten years time,
what perceptibly will have changed if all this battery innovation
goes where Chinese battery scientists think it may well.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
I think that the sodium ion space is really a
place to look.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
The idea here being that you don't need any extractive
mining in Africa.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
You're still working with some quite nasty chemicals, but you're
basically not dealing with these minerals in Africa. But the
question is, we know that cobalt works. We know that
a lithium cobalt oxide cathode, for example, works for a
cell phone. We know that a empcy cathode is probably
the best for an electric car or.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Whatever it is.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Why can't we just sort out the supply chain. That
would seem to be the easier thing to do. Why
don't we create a supply chain that can benefit local communities.
Why don't we create a supply chain that can actually work?
And why why can't we create a supply chain in
which people work together across the world and it brings
people closer rather than separating each other and making them
(20:58):
into these kind of like warring competitive factions. I think
that's the easier thing to do than come up with
these like magical new batteries that you know, hopefully they'll
be able to come up with, but we don't know
that there are necessarily masters of amounts of increments and change.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
But what does that look like? Does that look like
the US Soviet arms controlled treaties like Start or New
Solo they were called, wherein like two superpowers say, you know,
it's so important that we regulate nuclear proliferation that despite
our strategic competition, we're willing to accept certain constraints, like
(21:35):
what would it mean to clean the supply chain? How
would that work practically?
Speaker 2 (21:39):
I think it's just trade deals.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Actually.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
I think that's that's the kind of easier way of
looking at it. And if you know, China can you know,
sit down around the table with the US and they
can agree to you know, quotas and tarifs and things
like that that that will go a long way. Why
because they can say, look, we're going to be we're
going to be selling you this X amount of batteries
(22:01):
and we're going to be buying it from Congo, and
Congo should be also looped into these deals. And also
it will allow for trans more and more transparency along
the supply chain. Also, another thing that I think is
really important is that companies at the end of the
supply chain go back to the beginning and try and
improve things at the beginning of the supply chain and
(22:23):
don't just use you know, China was used for a
very long time as a way of just insulating themselves
from criticism.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
So they said they being Apple, they being Tesla being Apple.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Tesla had a slightly different situation because quite early on
they were buying only from Glencore, from an industrial a
big industrial mind, industrial mind as a mind which doesn't
have these kind of human rights abuses and such bad
ecological abuses. But still, you know, you're dealing with these
metals in a very very removed way, you're just kind
(22:55):
of buying it from people and not really asking where
they come from. And you know, down the supply chain
there's a huge amount of corruption, fraud, and human rights abuses, children, mining,
women washing, radioactive war and.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
So on beyond human rights. Why would the US and
China be motivated to strike such a deal? Has there
been any framework, any proposal, Like, what's the closest thing
you've seen to an agreement that might mitigate some of
the issues you write about in your book?
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Well, you know, the agreement that Trump made on the
fourth of December, on the face of it, this is
the deal with Congo was quite a good deal in
its own way. I don't know if the Congolese are
ready to do any of that, and you know, if
they were able to implement it would be great implemented
in what sense, well in getting rid of human rights
abuses and supply chain. There are some clauses about stockpiling
(23:49):
critical metals, but anybody who's done business or has worked
in the DRC can tell you that that is a
very very long way off. And also I think the
spirit of that deal was very much So let's take
it away from China and I think, you know, that's
also what people in Washington will tell you. And I
think that if that is the spirit, the Chinese are
(24:11):
going to be also saying, let's take it away from
the US. You know, they made these deals with Congo,
similar deals or actually much bigger deals in the two thousands,
and you get to a situation in which the Chinese
are saying, Okay, what can we do to recover our assets?
(24:31):
You know, are they throwing a lot of money around?
In CONTRASTSA, are they going to make sure that the
Congoles don't honor their deals with the US? I think
everything's on the table, you know, for that. But the
other very interesting piece of legislation is the European battery
passport legislation that's coming in I think at the end
of this year beginning of next year, and that will
(24:53):
hopefully put some supply chain transparency and you'll be able
to check where your battery came from, which mine it
came from, whether there was artism on mining or so
on and so forth involved down the supply chain. But again,
that data is only as good as the people who
input it. So as we've seen in the East of
(25:14):
the d r C, those those kind of monitoring schemes
says that have actually been used to fuel corruption. People
are like selling tags and you know, you know, signing
things saying it's from clean sources, when when it's not in.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Return for bribes and so on.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
So there's some very innovative people thinking about how to
give sovereignty back to data. I think that's the way
that that it was put.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
To me sovereignty back to data or like or give
give people back there sort of data sovereignty so that
they would be able to control the data and then
basically sell it and that would be a commodity almost
for them, which would give you some kind of idea
of solidifying.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
The level, you know, not not having so much corruption
in the system. And it will be an interesting it
will be an interesting experiment.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
I think it's really important to note that the human
rights issues that you're surfacing and not things that you've
studied by reading un reports or scanning social media. I mean,
you have spent a great deal of time in these communities.
You recently lost somebody of a friend who you met
(26:27):
in the course of your work, who's our age in
his mid thirties, perhaps to an illness developed because of
working in artisanal mining was the experience of the dirtiest
supply chain on Earth. I mean, what is the human cost?
Speaker 2 (26:43):
I mean, the human cost is so vital Komungu, who
is my friend who you're talking about. He was a
guy who was a child miner, and then when he
was in his early twenties, decided that he would focus
on getting children out of the mind and getting them
an education and working for first of Christian Charity and
(27:05):
then another charity called Bom Pasta, and then another charity
called Still I Rise, both of which do amazing work
getting children out of the minds. And he started this
school called Pamoja. And yeah, a lot of people who
live in those areas and work in those areas are
being poisoned because this stuff is vaguely radioactive and prolonged
(27:28):
exposure can really be very dangerous. So that's number one.
And then you just see I mean look when you
go and you see children who are stick thin with
these huge sacks of oree on their back, clambering out
of holes. I mean, it's pretty it's pretty shocking. And
I think that that's the thing that made me want
(27:48):
to write this. I remember calling you and I remember
I said, how can the green energy future be based
on this? I mean, it really is shocking to see that,
and I think that people just don't Again, this is
the sort of myth of the product that you were
talking about, the myth of how the commodity for myth
(28:08):
of the commodity form that you were talking about is that,
you know, people think that their iPhones sort of dropped
from heaven.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
Or something like that.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
They don't understand that there's this brutal, brutal thing that's
happening at the bottom of the supply chain. And of course,
you know, if we were talking about coal mining fifty
years ago, we probably would, but that was fifty years ago,
and that's and you know today this is this is
happening today. This is happening right now in the DRC.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
But this is a topic where there's plenty of vested
interests in making sure the truth doesn't come to light.
So just to close, I mean, what truth have you
brought to light in this book that you really want,
if nothing else, people to take away.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
I think the truth that I hope that people will
take away is that batteries great technology. It's an amazing
technology and even these kind of very old Hi Cobal
batteries or whatever it is. These technologies can be used
to make our world greener, and they can also be
(29:13):
used to reduce emissions. And I think that the point
is that the supply chain is at the moment very dirty,
but it can be fixed pretty easily. I think that's
what I want people to take away is that actually,
there's no real reason for this to be like this.
There's no real reason for children to be going into minds,
(29:34):
there's no real reason for Indonesia to be pumping coal
into the air as it has this dirty nickel supply it.
So I think that, yeah, the truth is that this
is a dirty supply chain, but that it can be improved.
And I think that that will take work, and that
will take effort, and hopefully this book will interest people
(29:56):
and inspire them to do that, and at the very
least will interest and inspire people to do reporting on
a lesson build more consciousness.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
That the elements of power.
Speaker 4 (30:15):
Nicholas Nelkos, thank you, Thank you us.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
That's it for this week for tech stuff. I'm os Vlocan.
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
It was Executive produced by me Karra Price, Julia Nutter,
and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts.
Jack Insley makes this episod Toad and Kyle Murdoch wrote
our theme song. Please do rate and review the show
(31:04):
wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Welcome to tech stuff. This is the story this week.
I want to talk about batteries, from the supply chain
to the geostrategic consequences of growing demand in everything from
drones to data centers, to evs and of course humanoid robots.
My guest today has reported on it all. Nicholas Narcos
(00:37):
is the author of a new book, The Elements of Power,
A Story of war, technology and the dirtiest supply chain
on Earth. Now that last phrase caught some people by surprise.
After all, batteries power electric vehicles, reducing the world's dependence
on fossil fuels aka cleaner energy, at least in theory.
(01:02):
Here's Nicholas defending the book's title.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
This is the duty supply chain on Earth because in
many ways this is the most brutal of the energy
supply chains. Because you don't have children going out to
dig oil wells. You don't have you know, pregnant women
being forced to scrub oil. I don't even know what
that would look like. But you just, at a very
(01:26):
very basic human level down the supply chain, there are
some terrible things that are going on, and of course
oil has these terrible geopolitical effects of course it has
environmental effects, but I think that you know, the point
that I'm trying to submit them to make with a
duty supply chain on Earth is that it just has
all these other human rights things and these are things
that we can solve. Again, that's the whole point of
(01:48):
the book, is that we're trying to solve for those
things rather than just accepting them.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
And not everyone is just accepting them. There are moves
towards different types of battery technology that demand you of
critical metals, and there are people attempting to clean up
the supply chain. But just in case you're in any
doubt about what a big story this is, batteries and
the supplied chain of the rare earth metals needed to
(02:13):
build them loom over President Trump's designs on greenland and
the trade war with China. This is a story about
who pays the price when technology and geopolitics collide. Here's
my conversation with Nicholas Niakos. Nick, Welcome to Textuff. Congratulations
on your book.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Thank you very much for having me back on.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
That's your third appearance on an ODDS podcast. I know
it's a great honor. The first one was in twenty
twenty When were you doing your nyorkerpiece.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
It was twenty twenty one, Yeah, just before I actually
pitched the book.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
And now it's a printed book.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Now it's a printed book.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
The Elements of Power, a story of war, technology and
the dirtiest supply chain on Earth. Why is it worth reading?
Speaker 2 (03:00):
It's worth reading because I would say it is the
most comprehensive look at a massive subject. But what is
really interesting is that this has become a hot button
political issue, and you know, the White House is involved
in it, the Chinese are involved in it, and really
the race for critical metals is on.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
You've written the search for oil defined the twentieth century,
The scramble for critical metals may well define the twenty
first Why are these critical metals critical?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
So these critical metals are critical because that's basically where
we get our energy from, how our devices are powered,
how our devices run. It depends which metal we're talking about.
But you know, cobalt, which I focus on a lot
in the book, is used to create cathodes for electric
devices and some electric cars. Cathodes are the positive electrode
(03:57):
of the battery. It basically allows you to push pack
a huge amount of power into these very small devices.
But cobalt is used in military applications, it's used for metals,
it's used for cleaning oil and so on and so forth.
So it's really an important industrial metal beyond just batteries.
I just focus on batteries because batteries have become central
(04:19):
to the way that we live our lives every day.
We wouldn't have cell phones, we wouldn't have long range
electric cars, we wouldn't have laptops, we wouldn't have aura rings.
We wouldn't have all these things without being able to
access a supply of these metals.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Right. I remember growing up and batteries were branded durro cell,
and they went into game boys and remote control cars
and fire alarms. They were like small things that allowed
you to do other things. But it feels like in
(04:53):
the last two or three years, batteries have become like
the central preoccupation of our time. The storage of power
i e. Batteries become so much more important than the
last ten years.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
I think it didn't become more important. I think that
the move away from internnel combustion engines towards electro vehicles,
which really did you know? Again, when I was starting
the book, there were very you know, very few of
us had been in a tesla. I think in tesla once.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Basically this was five years ago.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
This was five years ago, and now every other uber
in New York City is a tesla. And people, I
think were only really became aware of lithium ion batteries
when the Samsung Galaxy S seven was catching fire on planes.
That was sort of the moment when people like, wait
a second, what are these batteries? So why has it
become such a focus now? I think it's just a
(05:40):
confluence of all these different things. And I think on
a sort of political level, the US has become self
sufficient with oil as well, and because of fracking and
so on, so there's much less of a fear around
access to Middle East oil and these things that really
defined the oil wars of the seventies and sixties.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
But I mean, if you look at the last twelve
months of geopolitics, You've had Trump's designs on Greenland at
front and center. Trump's recent peace deal in Congo quite
interesting for critical metals, China's export controls on critical metals
that you mentioned, but then also Venezuela. In this preoccupation
with oil. So, coming back to that quote about you know,
(06:22):
the search for oil defining the twentieth century, in the
twenty first century being defined by critical metals, how do
those things coexist.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
I mean, I think oil is still very, very valuable.
I think it's just Trump sees oil and he sees dollars.
I think that's the more basic thing there. I think
critical metals also have the same effect on him, but
it's a little bit more difficult to explain. I think,
you know, for that generation, you grow up thinking, Okay,
(06:50):
we need as much oil as possible. And he's certainly
not moving away from oil. That's definitely not his aim.
But at the same time, I think he looks around
and he sees companies like Dasler, He sees you know,
tech companies, which are the backbone of the US economy basically,
and he says, look, this is this is an important thing,
(07:12):
and we're also going to fight for them, knowing.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Over the years you've said to me in one one
way or another many times, China more or less has
a lock on DRC's critical minerals, in particular cobalt and lithium.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Lithium, they had a lock on it until this US
company now got involved. Let's see, let's see what happens.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Yeah, and that basically exporting these minerals from Congo and
refining them in China was the key driver, alongside the
kind of technological advances of China dominance of this very
important supply chain. Fast forward to this year, earlier or
(07:54):
late last year, and Trump gets involved in a very
underreported i would say, peace deal between Congo, the DLC,
and Rwanda and its proxies, the M twenty three in
return for basically Congo saying we will make these minerals
available to you rather than to China. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
I think that's how the Americans want that deal to
be going. I think Chisicadi has come under a lot
of criticism in Congo itself for what people say is
mortgaging the resources of Congo in order for him to
stay in power, because I think there's also a question
(08:37):
about his own legitimacy as president. I think the Americans
are happy to work with him, but the question is,
well they follow through on the deal. And then the
second part of the question that you are asking is,
you know, refining in China still ninety percent of the
refining of these metals happens in China. So even if
the US gets a hold of the raw supply of
(08:59):
these things through some kind of chicanery and weird deal
in which the Congles agreed to dispossess the Chinese of
the minds that they've been given and so on and
so forth, you would have a situation in which either
the US would have to invest very, very heavily in
building battery refineries in the US or in an allied
country or something like that, or they would be shipping
(09:22):
the metals to China, which is the most economical thing
to do. So it's either Trump follows up this deal
with saying, Okay, I'm going to do ten pilot projects
and give them all like twenty billion dollars to you know,
build up these factories and be the most you know,
developed battery factories in the world. But do people in
the US want to do that. I imagine there are some yes,
(09:44):
but I'm not sure whether the capacity is that it is.
It is absolutely shocking how far behind the US and
Europe is in terms of research, in terms of the
amount of researchers. I mean, BYD one hundred and eighty
thousand researchers.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
BYD began as a battery manufacturer and became the largest
EV manufacturer in the world.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Yes, exactly, and they have one hundred and eighty thousand researchers,
which is more than the entire country of Germany. In fact,
COTL has eighteen thousand battery PhD worker like workers, so
it's just a thousand battery PhD. It's just it's absolutely
insane the amount of people who are working on this.
It's absolutely amount of insane, the amount of investment that
they put in their technologies. I spoke to Shirley Meng,
(10:27):
who is a really top battery scientist for this book
at ar Gone National Lab and she was just like,
we don't have anything like this in the US, and
ARGON is kind of the premiere US lab where a
lot of these technologies are actually developed and a lot
of the jumps forward in the technology have come from
the US and from Europe and Japan. But in the
(10:47):
future that might might not be the case because there
are just so many more people working on this because
it has been such a focus by the Chinese Communist
Party for the last twenty years.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
But your point, if you were brought into a battery
adviser the Trump administration would be it's all well and
good to control the supply chains, but until you have
an ecosystem in the US of battery innovation and battery
refinement doesn't really get you that much.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Absolutely, that's exactly what I would say, and you should
probably you should probably do that because you can.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
You can battery advisor to the Trump administration.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
I read next book, but the but no, I mean, look,
what was really interesting with this book as well, was
you know when I started thinking about reporting on this
stuff in twenty nineteen. I remember I met somebody who
had used to work for Glencore and he said to me, ah,
you want to write about cobalt. Cobalt is going to
(11:44):
be like, you know, it's going to be the old story,
like don't focus on cobalt, like they're going to innovate
away from cobalt. Fast forward to twenty twenty five and
twenty twenty six. You know, Trump is doing deals with
with the Congolese president. I imagine that, like, this is
the Congoes. It's not like they get a lot of
bad time in Washington. The Congolese, you know, the Congleates
(12:06):
have a cobalt cartel. They are artificially raising prices and
putting in quotas, and this has become a key and
central part of the narrative. So I really think that
this is going to be something that continues and will
not just go away because of innovation or so on.
(12:26):
And yes, if you were the Trump administration and you
were interested in long term thinking, which is there's a
question about whether that's you know, the way that they're operating,
you would say, look, I want to develop not only
just these mines in Congo, but these refineries and these
factories and these batterym manufacturers and you know, car factories
in the US. But again, is US business ready to
(12:48):
do that? How do the Republicans, you know, justify subsidies
to these industries?
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Well, I mean Elon left Doge partly over this issue.
The falling out was over subsidies to evs, right.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, I mean I think he left those because you
had to as well.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
But I mean, Tesla's two years in a row of
declining sales byd dramatic slowdown in growth, still growing, but
dramatics slow down in sales growth last year. Do you
think the EV transition is inevitable? Do you think in
twenty years time, every car will be an EV or
do you think it's possible that this may the momentum
(13:30):
may shift in the other direction. That's may be seen
as a historical aberration. It's not the first time that
EV's have been popular.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yeah, no, I think I think you're totally right. I
think there is so much momentum behind it. Look, there
were popular evs around the town of the nineteenth twentieth centuries.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Just explain that because it's such a bizarre idea.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
It is very weird. But you know, some of the
first cars were electric cars. I mean, the internal combustion
ENGINET came in fairly late, and the electric starter. You know,
you had to crank internal combustion engine cars at the beginning,
and the crank could break your hand basically, so only
men would drive internal combustion engine cars, and electric cars
(14:09):
were seen as kind of more efficient, not green, because
that wasn't people concerned at that point point.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
They had batteries in the early twenty cent.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah, they had batteries.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
They had lad acid batteries, and they were women's cars.
I actually don't know, I have no idea, but they
were women's cars and they were, but they were seen
as women's cars, but they were they were legitimate competitive
products combustion and yeah, one hundred years.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Yeah, there were more electric cars on the road one
hundred and twenty years ago than internal combustion engine cars
in the US. And then in the seventies there was
this kind of like electric car fever because people weren't
worried about where oil was going and so on. But
you didn't have these kind of like behemoth companies like
Tesla or BYD at that point. I mean, I think
that the real difference now is scale.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
After the break, what it might mean practically to clean
up the supply chain, and what role the US could play.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Stay with us.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
When we first talked about this story, and you just
got back from a number of reporting trips to DRC
and we're pitching the book, I feel like your real
focus was on the extractive conditions of taking Cobel out
of the ground, the horrible human toll it's caused in
one of the poorest countries in the world, and that's
(15:51):
part of the book. But what you sort of layered
on and you're later reporting as it moved from being
a magazine story to a book, was really this focus
on how China not just controlled the supply chain for Cobolt,
but also built the battery innovation technology to take advantage
of its supply chain. And it's a very interesting story
that also takes us into Japan and to Shinsen. Can
(16:14):
you kind of lay out that history.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
So the lifting Marion battery, you know, was developed in
the US by Exon originally, which is fascinating company was,
you know, this oil major was looking for a way
of powering vehicles when oil ran out. They were already
thinking about this in the nineteen sixty nineteen seventies. And
(16:38):
then in at the University of Oxford you're alma mater,
then there was an American scientist in Britain put cobalt
into the battery, so it made them sort of more
stable and more powerful, and then it was kind of
tossed to one side. Oxford didn't want to license the technology.
Nobody really thought it was useful or would be of profit.
(16:59):
Whittingham went off to work on oil rigs and the
batteries kind of got sidelined. But in Japan they had
this kind of laser sharp focus on small electronic devices
and they needed to have something that packed enough power
also that was less polluting when you disposed of it.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
This is when it's in the nineties. This was in
the eighties and the mid eighties. This is consumer text exactly.
It was, you know, it was really on the back
of the walkman. So Sony was looking for it and
another company called Asahi Kasai, and there was a scientist
called Akira Yoshino, and he found his He found this
paper by John Goodenough, the Oxford scientist, sitting in a
pile of papers, and it was New Year's Eve and
(17:40):
he's throwing away these papers on his desk and he
finally found this pape. He was like, wait, what's this
and he had ignored.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
It, and then he realized that he should make a
battery out of cobalt, and he basically spurred this kind
of innovation which led to Sony's dominance. And then what
happens is that Sony says, okay, where can I make
my batteries more cheaply? And they build plants in China
(18:07):
and suddenly the Chinese are building batteries as well. And
what's very interesting about BYD which is the big electric
car company, is that they started without a factory as
we would imagine it. It was literally it's found a
wang chun fu called a human chain, and it was
(18:29):
essentially just people putting together these batteries by hand in
this workshop in Shenzhen. And they are very much willing
to stomach battery fires and to stomach accidents and to
you know, continue pioneering because this is seen as a
national priority, in national objective. It's not just something that's
(18:49):
making value for shareholders. It's not just something that's you know,
it's almost like a patriotic duty.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
But what why does BYD need one hundred and ten
thousand battery scientists? So as if I look at the world,
I see, okay, we've got evs which have you know,
six hundred kilometers plus range. We've got you know, iPhones
that you know, endlessly rechargeable and where the battery doesn't
really degrade that much. Like what is the dream breakthrough
(19:16):
in battery technology that one hundred and ten thousand scientists
are working towards.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
There are all kinds of dreams of different types of batteries.
There's you know, so do my own batteries, there's so
do umself for batteries. There are lots of interesting new
developments around solid state batteries that just can hold a
huge amount more power. And I think the idea is
to make things that are cheaper hold more power less
environmentally degrading, I would say, I hope. I mean, these
(19:41):
people are working on these kind of infantestline in these
small types of you know, advances, but when they make breakthroughs,
they can be quite important to our lives.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
So when you publish a second, the paperback edition, the
third paperback edition of this book in ten years time,
what perceptibly will have changed if all this battery innovation
goes where Chinese battery scientists think it may well.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
I think that the sodium ion space is really a
place to look.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
The idea here being that you don't need any extractive
mining in Africa.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
You're still working with some quite nasty chemicals, but you're
basically not dealing with these minerals in Africa. But the
question is, we know that cobalt works. We know that
a lithium cobalt oxide cathode, for example, works for a
cell phone. We know that a empcy cathode is probably
the best for an electric car or.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Whatever it is.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Why can't we just sort out the supply chain. That
would seem to be the easier thing to do. Why
don't we create a supply chain that can benefit local communities.
Why don't we create a supply chain that can actually work?
And why why can't we create a supply chain in
which people work together across the world and it brings
people closer rather than separating each other and making them
(20:58):
into these kind of like warring competitive factions. I think
that's the easier thing to do than come up with
these like magical new batteries that you know, hopefully they'll
be able to come up with, but we don't know
that there are necessarily masters of amounts of increments and change.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
But what does that look like? Does that look like
the US Soviet arms controlled treaties like Start or New
Solo they were called, wherein like two superpowers say, you know,
it's so important that we regulate nuclear proliferation that despite
our strategic competition, we're willing to accept certain constraints, like
(21:35):
what would it mean to clean the supply chain? How
would that work practically?
Speaker 2 (21:39):
I think it's just trade deals.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Actually.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
I think that's that's the kind of easier way of
looking at it. And if you know, China can you know,
sit down around the table with the US and they
can agree to you know, quotas and tarifs and things
like that that that will go a long way. Why
because they can say, look, we're going to be we're
going to be selling you this X amount of batteries
(22:01):
and we're going to be buying it from Congo, and
Congo should be also looped into these deals. And also
it will allow for trans more and more transparency along
the supply chain. Also, another thing that I think is
really important is that companies at the end of the
supply chain go back to the beginning and try and
improve things at the beginning of the supply chain and
(22:23):
don't just use you know, China was used for a
very long time as a way of just insulating themselves
from criticism.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
So they said they being Apple, they being Tesla being Apple.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Tesla had a slightly different situation because quite early on
they were buying only from Glencore, from an industrial a
big industrial mind, industrial mind as a mind which doesn't
have these kind of human rights abuses and such bad
ecological abuses. But still, you know, you're dealing with these
metals in a very very removed way, you're just kind
(22:55):
of buying it from people and not really asking where
they come from. And you know, down the supply chain
there's a huge amount of corruption, fraud, and human rights abuses, children, mining,
women washing, radioactive war and.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
So on beyond human rights. Why would the US and
China be motivated to strike such a deal? Has there
been any framework, any proposal, Like, what's the closest thing
you've seen to an agreement that might mitigate some of
the issues you write about in your book?
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Well, you know, the agreement that Trump made on the
fourth of December, on the face of it, this is
the deal with Congo was quite a good deal in
its own way. I don't know if the Congolese are
ready to do any of that, and you know, if
they were able to implement it would be great implemented
in what sense, well in getting rid of human rights
abuses and supply chain. There are some clauses about stockpiling
(23:49):
critical metals, but anybody who's done business or has worked
in the DRC can tell you that that is a
very very long way off. And also I think the
spirit of that deal was very much So let's take
it away from China and I think, you know, that's
also what people in Washington will tell you. And I
think that if that is the spirit, the Chinese are
(24:11):
going to be also saying, let's take it away from
the US. You know, they made these deals with Congo,
similar deals or actually much bigger deals in the two thousands,
and you get to a situation in which the Chinese
are saying, Okay, what can we do to recover our assets?
(24:31):
You know, are they throwing a lot of money around?
In CONTRASTSA, are they going to make sure that the
Congoles don't honor their deals with the US? I think
everything's on the table, you know, for that. But the
other very interesting piece of legislation is the European battery
passport legislation that's coming in I think at the end
of this year beginning of next year, and that will
(24:53):
hopefully put some supply chain transparency and you'll be able
to check where your battery came from, which mine it
came from, whether there was artism on mining or so
on and so forth involved down the supply chain. But again,
that data is only as good as the people who
input it. So as we've seen in the East of
(25:14):
the d r C, those those kind of monitoring schemes
says that have actually been used to fuel corruption. People
are like selling tags and you know, you know, signing
things saying it's from clean sources, when when it's not in.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Return for bribes and so on.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
So there's some very innovative people thinking about how to
give sovereignty back to data. I think that's the way
that that it was put.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
To me sovereignty back to data or like or give
give people back there sort of data sovereignty so that
they would be able to control the data and then
basically sell it and that would be a commodity almost
for them, which would give you some kind of idea
of solidifying.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
The level, you know, not not having so much corruption
in the system. And it will be an interesting it
will be an interesting experiment.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
I think it's really important to note that the human
rights issues that you're surfacing and not things that you've
studied by reading un reports or scanning social media. I mean,
you have spent a great deal of time in these communities.
You recently lost somebody of a friend who you met
(26:27):
in the course of your work, who's our age in
his mid thirties, perhaps to an illness developed because of
working in artisanal mining was the experience of the dirtiest
supply chain on Earth. I mean, what is the human cost?
Speaker 2 (26:43):
I mean, the human cost is so vital Komungu, who
is my friend who you're talking about. He was a
guy who was a child miner, and then when he
was in his early twenties, decided that he would focus
on getting children out of the mind and getting them
an education and working for first of Christian Charity and
(27:05):
then another charity called Bom Pasta, and then another charity
called Still I Rise, both of which do amazing work
getting children out of the minds. And he started this
school called Pamoja. And yeah, a lot of people who
live in those areas and work in those areas are
being poisoned because this stuff is vaguely radioactive and prolonged
(27:28):
exposure can really be very dangerous. So that's number one.
And then you just see I mean look when you
go and you see children who are stick thin with
these huge sacks of oree on their back, clambering out
of holes. I mean, it's pretty it's pretty shocking. And
I think that that's the thing that made me want
(27:48):
to write this. I remember calling you and I remember
I said, how can the green energy future be based
on this? I mean, it really is shocking to see that,
and I think that people just don't Again, this is
the sort of myth of the product that you were
talking about, the myth of how the commodity for myth
(28:08):
of the commodity form that you were talking about is that,
you know, people think that their iPhones sort of dropped
from heaven.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
Or something like that.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
They don't understand that there's this brutal, brutal thing that's
happening at the bottom of the supply chain. And of course,
you know, if we were talking about coal mining fifty
years ago, we probably would, but that was fifty years ago,
and that's and you know today this is this is
happening today. This is happening right now in the DRC.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
But this is a topic where there's plenty of vested
interests in making sure the truth doesn't come to light.
So just to close, I mean, what truth have you
brought to light in this book that you really want,
if nothing else, people to take away.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
I think the truth that I hope that people will
take away is that batteries great technology. It's an amazing
technology and even these kind of very old Hi Cobal
batteries or whatever it is. These technologies can be used
to make our world greener, and they can also be
(29:13):
used to reduce emissions. And I think that the point
is that the supply chain is at the moment very dirty,
but it can be fixed pretty easily. I think that's
what I want people to take away is that actually,
there's no real reason for this to be like this.
There's no real reason for children to be going into minds,
(29:34):
there's no real reason for Indonesia to be pumping coal
into the air as it has this dirty nickel supply it.
So I think that, yeah, the truth is that this
is a dirty supply chain, but that it can be improved.
And I think that that will take work, and that
will take effort, and hopefully this book will interest people
(29:56):
and inspire them to do that, and at the very
least will interest and inspire people to do reporting on
a lesson build more consciousness.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
That the elements of power.
Speaker 4 (30:15):
Nicholas Nelkos, thank you, Thank you us.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
That's it for this week for tech stuff. I'm os Vlocan.
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
It was Executive produced by me Karra Price, Julia Nutter,
and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts.
Jack Insley makes this episod Toad and Kyle Murdoch wrote
our theme song. Please do rate and review the show
(31:04):
wherever you listen to your podcasts.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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