July 8, 2025 • 39 mins
(Recorded October 4, 2021) Journalist Nicolas Niarchos may be the grandson of a famous Greek shipping magnate, but he can be found covering challenging and dangerous subjects like conflicts, minerals, and migration in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He is a reporter at large at The New Yorker and a contributor to TIME, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Nation. Niarchos speaks with Alec about his upbringing, his journalistic path and his reporting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which exposes exploitation in the cobalt mining industry - and the importance of this crucial element in our global supply chain.
Originally aired December 14, 2021
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio. There's been a lot of talk
about who should replace Daniel Craig now that he is
retiring as James Bond, and I think I have found
the perfect person. He's handsome, charming, brilliant and multilingual. His
(00:22):
name is Nicholas Niarkos and if only he could put
down his computer long enough to play the part. Nearkos
is a journalist. His choice of unglamorous and at times
dangerous profession is all the more surprising when you learn
about his background. His grandfather, Stavros Niarkos, founded the international
shipping company Nearkos Limited. I first came across Nearkos in
(00:47):
the New Yorker magazine. His recent piece Buried Dreams covers
the exploitation of workers in the cobalt mines in Central Africa.
In his reporting, Narcos exposed the danger and exploitative conditions
for the workers in Congolese cobalt minds, many of whom
are children, as well as those that stand to profit
(01:08):
handsomely off the minds. In addition to being a reporter
at large at The New Yorker, Nearcos's work has appeared
in Time, the New York Times, and the Nation.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I think that all the places that I try and
work for require a sort of serious journalistic engagement. And
that's what I really seek for. When I look for
a publication to write for The New Yorker, I find
the fact checking process. I was a fact checker for
many years. I think that's a very engaging thing to
deal with. I like working directly with the fact checkers.
(01:40):
I liked being a fact checker, learning you know a
great deal about a subject, you know, for a couple
of weeks and then and then sort of moving on.
And actually I found now as a reporter actually enhances
my reporting. It leads me down new alleys when I'm
trying to sort of verify things to the kind of
one hundredth designs.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
When you factor you did it for how long?
Speaker 2 (02:01):
I did it for five years? Actually, well almost four
years and eleven months.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Did they confine you to fact checking in a certain
realm or did you fact check a lot of different things?
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I fact checked a lot of different things because I
speak French and Italian. Obviously, when there were stories which
required those languages, I would.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
I would be sort of fact you were the go
to fact checker sometimes, yeah, when and when you would
do the fact checking or I mean, were there ones
you enjoyed more, like ones that were like deep and
intense and scientific or culture whatever, and did you did
you didn't love, You didn't love doing the fact checking
of the profile of some actress, or you enjoyed all
of it.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
I enjoyed all of it, you know, Listen. I worked
on a piece on TMZ by Nick Schmiddle, which was
a kind of investigative piece, and that was a kind
of crazy experience. It was kind of well, I don't know,
sort of more you know, kind of input and sort
of back and forth and lawyers and whatever than most
other pieces.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
You know.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Sometimes it would do pieces on Iraq and Afghanistan and
so on, and they would require less and less.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Rod Loyal Dafi or Harvey Levin exactly exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
But no, I loved working with I mean, the writers,
they're are great, Patrick Keith, Sarah Stillman, Rachel Laviv.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
I mean, these this kind of Rebecca Meade.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Rebecca was actually a sort of wonderful early person who
I've fact checked quite quite early on in my career
there and then kind of ended up sort of doing
quite a lot with her, which was quite fun. And
we did a piece i remember on adult and Cabano,
and we just had like a lot of back and
forth with Doulty Gavan as people, and it was just
it was sort of hilarious because sometimes you know, those
(03:36):
sort of fashion stories and so on. I mean, if
you're talking with people in government and so on, they
kind of they have this attitude that, oh, well, it's
a story, it's going to go away. Whereas you know,
if it's a big fashion house and you know, this
is one of the few times that it appears in
The New Yorker, you know, this year or in the
you know, in five years or whatever, they realized that
that's going to stick with.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
The marketing for them. Yeah, exactly. I agree. Well, I
mean I'm obviously an ever reader of The New Yorker.
The thing I tend to see when I when I
was thinking about your article and budgets and costs and
things like that, is that, you know, the magazine has
obviously a menu or different articles. There might be a profile,
there might be there's obviously the shouts and murmurs and
talk of the town and so but if the body
(04:15):
of the pieces that are not criticism or art or
what have you. There seems to be a limit I
would imagine of the number of pieces that are this expansive,
because it must be expensive. Correct.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
You know, I started this piece reporting it for as
a book, and that first it started as a as
a sort of book reporting and then and then kind
of developed into New Yorker reporting.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
So actually I.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Funded some of it for my own money, and then
I used some of the New Yorker what the New
Yorker paid me to sort of continue the reporting. But actually,
you know, this was a sort of budgetless piece at
the beginning.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
You first became aware of this when and how.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
I first became aware of this issue around cobalt mining
because of somebody called Dan Getler. He is a mining
billionaire who has sort of made his wealth in the DRC,
and he actually made a lot of money. Buy he's
from Israel. Originally he came to DRC. It's a crazy story.
Came when he was about twenty three, and by the
time he was twenty six, he was in charge of
(05:11):
the Congo's entire diamond export. And then various sort of
human rights groups were like, wait, well, what's happening here.
He was very close to the ruling family and so
he was kind of booted off that and Congo said, look, listen,
look we've dealt with this problem. Suddenly it turned out
that he had a bunch of copper and cobalt mines
down in the South, which he seemed to be basically,
and this is very well documented by the Carter Center
(05:34):
and sort of Human Rights Watch and various other institutions,
basically he was selling them on for the ruling family
to finance their elections. So he'd basically flipped the mines.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
And he became aware of him.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
How I became aware of him.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
I have a very good friend of mine who works
in mining, and I was sort of casting around for stories,
you know, related to Africa, related to corruption and so on,
and he said, well, this is I mean, looks exactly good.
And also actually Patrick Keith, who's been a great sort
of inspiration to me and who I worked with actually
(06:06):
at the New Yorker, and you had Alex Gibney on
the show and you know they collaborated on the opioid story.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
To Patrick on the street the other day, by the way,
already okay, with his family down in the village and
I just said to myself, my goddo of that? I
thought the documentary was sensation, Yeah, sensation.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
So he'd done a piece on Benny Steinmetz, who was
a Israeli mining billionaire. I think he's he's currently been
arrested or he's on trial in Switzerland, and he had
basically taken control of an iron or mine called Simon Do,
which is in Guinea. And so Patrick had done that story,
and that was a kind of great inspiration. And then
I sort of went to Patrick, and Patrick said this,
(06:43):
and you should also follow this story. It's a great idea.
I've always wanted to do Gutler. And then I arrived
in Congo and I realized that the Gutler story was
very interesting, but it wasn't the whole story. And actually
what became more interested interesting to me is the lives
of these people, just the hellish existence of a cobalt
min an artisanal cobalt minor.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
I have to be preciser in the southern DRC.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Now I read the article and you become suspicious, or
you become enlightened, if you will, to the idea that
huge swaths of this continent are being exploited for these
kinds of minerals. And if I may say so, I'll
let you speak to this, not just the greatest hits
like petroleum based things, but these cobalt for lithium for
(07:27):
modern technology, chips, photovoltaic whatever they may be used for batteries,
mostly correct the lithium batteries. So was it safe to say,
you talk about Guinea, you talk about DRC. Is this
happening all over Africa where these minerals exist, I mean, American, Israeli.
It doesn't matter pirates or when they're trying to grab
as much of it as they can.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Well, it depends where Obviously some places are better regulator
than others.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Who's doing a good job of regulating if you can say.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
I think, for example, Zambia has had a better track record,
although now the sort of influx of Chinese wealth into
Zambia has sort of upended some.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Of that, if you but seeking their copper as well.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
So it's actually on the border with DRC.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
When I was reporting some of this stuff, I actually
flew to Zambia to meet a sort of renegade Congolese
politician before he was traveling back into the DRC so yeah, No,
it's known as the Copper Belt, and it's a sort
of large part.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
The scene between the two countries exactly exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
And the other big one is coltan actually, and that's
sort of been the focus of a lot of human
rights work because it is largely mined by sort of
army types and sort of warlords in the northeast of
the DRC. And coltan is used in capacitors, which are
sort of key for computers and batteries. That's also been
a big issue, and people confuse that with cobalt, and
(08:40):
actually what's happening there is slightly different from cobalt, which
is a kind of more of a mechanized, sort of
legitimized type of trade.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Well, the thing that also struck me in terms of
any store like this where there's danger, describe to me
what you had to do in advance security wise. You
don't just land at the airport and say in an
uber and say take me to you know, Cobalt town.
There must have been a lot of preparatory steps you
took and security steps you took, if I'm assuming, And
then talk about when you first got there for the
first time, what went on?
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Okay, so yeah, the security steps.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
I mean, I've traveled to quite a lot at this
point of countries which sort of have different complicated security profiles,
places like Yeam in western Sahara, in fact, this southern
part of the DRC. You know, there is the threat
always of randomized violence, but I, you know, had looked
into it. I'd spoken to a couple of people who
(09:31):
had been there. I've spoken to a couple of journalists,
and I don't think there was a kind of threatening
or kind of looming threat we're afraid. I wasn't particularly
afraid that. You know, sometimes traveling on the road at night,
you'd be stopped at roadblocks and there would be sort
of policemen with guns and they'd be drunk, and you know,
then you get a little bit nervous, and then we
(09:53):
were sort of held up in broad daylight. So I
traveled with the local journalists called Jeff Kazadi, who's a
wonderful one of and he was a great resource. He
worked as a translator. He was incredibly sort of resourceful
as well on the ground, and he sort of knew
quite a few of the operators and he'd worked with
I believe CNN before and some other journalists who had
(10:14):
been down to do stories like this or to do
other types of stories in southern DRC. He works for
a mining trade publication, so you know, oftentimes he wanted
to sort of look further into stories, but because he
works for an industry publication, it wasn't the type of
journalism that.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
They were interested in.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
So I contacted Jeff. I also contacted another journalist, Ben Yemba,
who's based out of her and he was interested in this.
So the first time I went, I went with Jeff
and Ben. We kind of thought about the security risks
and we discussed the different types of issues along the road.
Sometimes there were bandits and so on, but usually if
you're traveling in the daytime, you're fairly safe along that road.
(10:53):
So when I first arrived in the South, i'd been
in Kinshassa for a bit, and in many ways the
South is much less hectic. In Conchasta and I arrived
on a local flight so we didn't have to deal
with customs. I stayed in a sort of very downbeat hotel,
which was an interesting experience to say the least. There
were a lot of women coming in at night and
leaving in the morning.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
But.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Afterwards everywhere, which is everywhere exactly. And then I stayed
the next two or three times. I was there in
more kind of like hotels that sort of mining execs
had made their home. It was you know, kind of
immediately there with people at the bar kind of talking
about their sort of the you know, the greatest hits
of you know, copper mines and cobalt.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Mines, some of the work some of the useful work
done there.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Yeah, and those are sort of like off the record
chats usually, but it helps you get such a good
sort of context around the stuff.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
You know.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
What else was very useful is that I visited a.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Mining conference there as well and sort of met a
lot of people in the field. It was hosted by
a South African firm, but it was kind of visited
by all the sort of local potents and so on.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
It was a sort of eye opening experience.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Because people are very aware of the problem of artisanal mining,
and you have to make the distinction between artisanal mining
and industrial mining. So artisanal mining is something somewhere between
ten and thirty percent of Congo's production every year. It
really fluctuates depending on you know, supply demand, so on
and the rest is industrial which has done much in
(12:28):
the way of large mining firms anywhere else in the world.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
And do the industrials want to put the artisanals out
of work?
Speaker 2 (12:34):
The industrials would probably prefer that the artisanals were not there,
because there are serious human rights issues with some of
the artisanal minds, which are with many of the artisanal minds.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
I would say some are led.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
By cooperatives, and those cooperatives are sort of better about
safety than other sort of non cooperative managed artisanal minds. However,
the big problem is that there's just been a huge
flux of people into that region.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
It's a gold rush.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
It's a huge gold rush, and you really feel like
just people are arriving every day, that kind of thing.
There's a train that comes down from a place called
Mambuji Mai, which is in the middle of Congo, and
that is a place in which there used to be
a huge amount of diamond mining and that's been sort
of woefully mismanaged and the industry has kind of fallen
into pieces. So a lot of people who had some
(13:23):
mining experience now sort of getting on that train which
goes through the sort of jungles and wilds of Central
Congo and comes to Lumumbashi and sort of people are
just sort of hanging off the side of that train
and it comes, you know, every two months or something
like that. Nobody really the schedule basically works on you know,
whenever it's completely full or whenever they can sort of
(13:44):
get the engine running. And so with that, you know,
people come and then the industrial minds have sort of
run by very few people, so they don't have the
capacity to observe high resolve that the labor force.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Exactly, they don't they can't hire. So yeah, I think
that they.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Will arrived to participate in artisinal mining.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
You arrived because you think you're going to get rich
and there's just like a lot of stories about it
and so on, and you arrive and there's nothing to
do apart from artisanal mining basically, and people really exploit
that they get paid nothing. I mean, it's some people
say that there have been people who made lots and
lots of money, but I actually found that quite difficult
to believe after spending two months there.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
I just so you went the one on the one
trip for two months.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
So I went on one trip for a month, then
I went on another trip for ten days, and then
I was there for about almost a month the next time,
So yeah, two months.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
So when you arrive and you are in the more
decent hotel with people who seem to be related to
the whole enterprise and you can chit chat with him.
Is the idea that when you arrive you don't go
right into the belly of the beast and go to
where the artisanal mining is at full throttle. You kind
of work your way toward that. Did you take a
(14:55):
few days before you get into the into the pits
so to speak?
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Depends actually on the different trips. On my second trip,
I went straight to the artism mining because I'd spent
a lot of time, you know, talking with seth Africans about,
you know, the benefits of copper mirning for the area.
So you know, I had all that material and I
wanted to really focus on the artisanal miners.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Who were people that sounded like they had not the
right idea, but maybe the better ideas about how this
should be handled, what should happen there for the greater
good of everybody.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
So there's a Catholic charity called Good Shepherd Calwazy and
they've been incredibly sort of outspoken and sort of quite
sort of research focused as well around some of these issues.
They've put forward this plan which says, listen, you need
to develop other types of industry because you have to
understand this as like as a cycle of which corruption
(15:44):
is only a part. There's also just the basic fact
of poverty and need. So they have suggested that agriculture
would be a way of engaging the local population. In fact,
it's a very fertile region as well, and something like
ninety center of Congo's food is imported, so there's this
kind of from other areas the region, from Zambia, from
(16:06):
from other areas of the region, So there's this kind
and import taxes are huge, and people are making money
at every step of the way and so on and
so forth, often not Congolese. So they say, listen, why
don't the Congolese grow their own food here? Why don't
people work on farms? And so I think that that's
a you know, there are large businesses that obviously invested
in this. I think that's actually something which would be
(16:28):
positive for them to do. So there are also some
other groups like the Fair Cobalt Alliance and then there's
another Chinese group. The UN doesn't have a permanent presence,
I don't think in Colway's actually a lot of what
they do in Congo is to do with rebels in
the north, and then they assisted with some war crimes
tribunals in a city which was not too far away.
(16:50):
So they do mainly kind of like armed conflict type
stuff there. I didn't see any sort of UN involvement,
but I could you know.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
They could be that, they could be.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Yeah, there could be a.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
UN office that focuses on this, but it doesn't seem
to be a main priority because they're focused on you know, some.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
What year did you go there?
Speaker 3 (17:08):
I went at twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
And right before the right before How convenient for you,
I know, yeah, how wonderful. And what is the national
government to the extent you could ascertain when you were there,
what's their position on what's going on there?
Speaker 2 (17:19):
So the national government makes kind of these overtures over
and over again saying we can't have child labor whatever,
and then the local government will say the same thing,
and they're like, we're cleaning up the minds and then
they use you know, these kind of mind clean up
activities in order to basically seize more parts of the
minds for themselves and you know, kind of co opt
local cooperatives and so on. And I document that in
(17:41):
the piece, And at the moment there's a bit of
a power struggle happening down in that region, and it's
very unclear to me what's actually happening in terms of
like who's getting pieces of the eye, But the fact
is that it still continues. Actually, I was I was
speaking to a friend of mine who's a photographer who
can sell a Cunningham who's done great, great work in
the DRC. He was there last weekend and he saw
(18:06):
basically exactly the same condition. So it's not improving.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
But I'm assuming for people who don't understand the way
these things work, it's that you have the corporate mining,
you have the industrial mining, which of course the government's
going to sanction that because they're going to make a
lot of money. I'm assuming just like the drug trade
in other parts of the world, in South America, for example,
they don't want it to go away. They can't make
it go away because there'll be just so much illegal
(18:30):
activity and violence and bloodshed. Do they sit there and say,
and they just write it off and say, well, we
have to tolerate a certain amount of artisanal mining just
to keep these people quiet and peaceful.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Yeah, I mean, I think they can make it go away. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
I think sometimes they'll say that, and sometimes they say, well,
artisanal mining can't exist. And it was funny I interviewed
the governor at the time and he basically said the same.
He said both of those things in the same interview.
So I don't think they really understood how to deal
with this problem. And it is it's a very very
complex issue, and I wouldn't say that I have I
have the answers, but I just don't think it's being
(19:03):
engaged with in a particularly robust manner. You also have
to think about that in terms of, you know, the
industrial minds which were brought many of them were brought
through this guy Getler who's now in the US sanctions.
This actually Trump de sanctioned him for a bit, who
knows why, and then and then he got re sanctioned.
And basically you have a system that relies on this
(19:26):
corruption and those funds are not going back to the people.
And then you have a situation in which you know
the minds are sold to big Western companies, and big
Western companies, you know, maybe don't participate directly in that,
but they work with people who are certainly questionable. Actually
it's not and forgive me a big Western companies is
not entirely correct. A lot of Chinese companies.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Actually want to get to that too. What are the
Chinese doing there? And how long have they been? Obviously, well,
when I think of China, I think of a place
of this obviously a vast a region of land and
very geologically and topographically, and media realized what have you here?
I mean, it's China enormous. They don't have those resources
in their own territory.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
So something like seventy percent of the world's cobalt is
actually in DRC. It's like three point four million tons,
which is a huge, huge amount of cobot is there.
And you know, there are nickel mines in Indonesia which
also produce cobalt as a byproduct, and is interesting if
you look, one of China's biggest battery manufacturers just bought
one of the biggest nickel mines in Indonesia. So they're
(20:26):
really kind of making this resource grab and they've understood
how I think Ivan Glaisenberg, who's the head of Glencore,
one of the big or was the head of Glencore,
said this summer China Inc. Has realized how important cobolt
is and they're kind of starting to buy everything up.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
And where do western manufacturers include in the US. Where
do they get their cobolt from from the Chinese? From
the Chinese, they're not out buying their own, No, they're not.
They're not trying to develop that resource for themselves.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Yeah, BMW's is I think one of the few that
doesn't buy from the Chinese. They buy most of their
cobalt from a cobalt only mine and Morocco, but that's
where too small to supply it in Thaire.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
World journalist Nicholas Narkos. If you like hearing about the
inner workings of some of the greatest journalistic outlets of
our time, check out my interview with New Yorker editor
David Remnick.
Speaker 4 (21:18):
The magazine is not the magazine if it doesn't have
a sense of humor. You're not in business to depress
the hell out of the reader unremittingly. It's like a
band having a set list. If you do everything, it's
all sixteenth notes ferment.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
So I got a DAVIDO or.
Speaker 4 (21:35):
Will you sound like the Ramones? Although I've heard of
worse things. So you want some variation in tone, in voice,
and that's your responsibility, you feel, I feel all of
it's my responsibility.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Hear more of my conversation with David Remnick in our
archives that Here's the Thing dot org after the break
Nicholas Nearkos and I talk about his background and the
big story he nearly broke in high school. I'm Malec
(22:14):
Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Nicholas Niarkos,
who could be living a life of privilege instead can
be found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, reporting
on human rights violations. Nearkos grew up in London and
came to the United States to attend Yale. His family
helped him develop his interest in journalism.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
I grew up in the UK.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
I grew in London.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
Yeah, I was born here, but grew up in London.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
You're born here, Yeah, your father's Greek, father's Greek. You're
growing up in this famous family and your father is
obviously the son of the guy that was the big
dog there in the shipping business Stavros Niarkos. But what
was it like in your home and your family was
where you ended up going into Chrism? That was likely.
Were everybody very interested in politics and current affairs? And
(23:01):
was your dad like rabbit about that?
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah, my dad's sort of very interesting in current affairs.
And you know, my mum's family as well. My grandfather
is a writer, and my great grandparents many of them
were writers and travelers and many such things. And then
actually in high school I did this anti school newspaper
and we actually ended up very very close to blowing
(23:23):
the lid on this kind of strange story where Chinese
officials were sort of paying this intermediary character to get
their kids into the school that I went to, which
is called Harrow. It's a kind of very stiff boarding school.
So we ended up almost writing the story and the
newspaper was shut down. Two years later in the financial time,
suddenly the guy has revealed to be somehow connected with
(23:46):
m I six and like one of the governors in
China basically was sort of taken down by it. And
this was kind of she jimping, kind of flexing his
muscles for the first time we had been so close
to doing that store. You know, the only reason that
we didn't run it was because the school had basically said, like,
you're not publishing this. So yeah, I think that was
(24:07):
the first time I really like saw the power of journalism.
And it was funny because they banned that it was
hard copy and then people sort of hid it behind
their notice boards in their dorm rooms and then kind
of passed it around, and you know, by three days
after publication, even though the school had destroyed most of
the copies, you know, everybody had read it. And it
was this kind of great affirmation of the power.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Of good start, a noble start. And your mother is
Irish English, she really I went to Dublin once with
my ex wife and my daughter and we were there
it was Christmas Eve and Saint Stephen's Day and we
were staying at the Shelbourne in Dublin, I as it is,
the famous hotel, and they said to me, oh, you've
made a mistake though, come in this week because everything's closed.
(24:50):
They said, this week everything's closed, Christmas Eve and Saint
Stephen's Day, everything's close. Even the Guinness is closed. They said.
They were like, that's rare. I mean, even the Guinness
factories closed and we're like, well, my shit, what are
we going to do where we're here? So but you
you know, obviously when I saw your byline, then I
saw your name. You don't have to be my age
(25:12):
to know, you know, there are two great shipping families,
and yours just as recognizable to my generation as the
other one. But you lived in London and you first
came you were born here, grew up in London. And
when did you come back here to live? How old
were I came back here for college, go to school,
go to school, and you decided to say.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
I decided to stay.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Now why do you want to live here or not
from London? And the opposite, I want to live in
London and leave New York as soon as really. Oh
I love London.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
I love you, Yeah, you do. Listen. I feel like London.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
There's you know, there's this kind of idealized London of
my sort of teenage years, which had like a lot
of kind of relaxed hangout places, which has sort of
shut down and it's easy for you here. Well, no,
it's just it's sort of become it's become this kind
of like very I don't know, this kind of fake
version of itself in a way, and I feel like
(26:00):
it's like a lot of these Yeah, and it's a
lot of you know, like heritaging and like news.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I love these. I want to live in a castle.
I watched The Crown and like, oh God, that would
work for me. I could live there. But when you
finished school, you decided to stay here. And what were
the first jobs you got in journalism?
Speaker 3 (26:18):
So I worked at the Nation.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Describe that experience.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
It was a fact Katrina as an old friend of mine,
Katrina Katrina's well, now when.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
They're paying when you talk about budgets, so the Nation
comes out, we were saying, that looks like a college newspaper. Yeah,
on that very very less expensive paper. And so for them,
obviously they have their budgetary considerations, but they're irreplaceable in
terms of the reporting. Did you enjoy that experience.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
It was a great experience.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
I worked directly with Katrina as her fact checker and
with her late husband, Stephen Kohen. And it was the
time of the Syrian chemic chemical weapons, then Obama's Red
Line and so on, and they were you know, I
was called up on a Sunday evening. I think this
is one of my first weeks there was called up
on the Sunday evening and they were like, okay, and
you've got to be on touch, in touch with the
OPCW you know, four o'clock tomorrow morning, cut of thing.
(27:01):
And it was a fantastic experience. And also the nation
treats its in turns very well, which was something I
hadn't necessarily always seen in the UK. And you know,
you were paid minimum wage and there was a kind
of spirit of like community and activism there which was
which was really nice. And actually, by the end of
my time there, I had developed this story based on
(27:22):
a lead that I had gotten a journalism school about
this lawyer who'd been wire tapped called Robert Gottlieb and
he was representing a guy called Adis Mudungjenen and their
conversations had been wire tapped by the FBI, and that
story hadn't been reported, so I sort of reported that
out a little bit and then sort of came to
them and said, listen, I've been working on this in
my spare time, and they sort of took a chance
(27:43):
and published me. Looking back on it, I mean, that's
quite a sort of both sort of risk taking. But
I really appreciated that because that was my first sort
of big investigative type magazine story.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
When you worked for the Guardian, did you go back
to the UK?
Speaker 2 (27:57):
No, So I've written for the Guardian sort of independently
as a free lancer, and then I worked at The
Guardian as a researcher.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Like right when I graduated college.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
What period of times did you work with the Huffington Post.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
So I started writing with the Affington Post in college
and then I kind of wrote for them for a
year too afterwards.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
You know, for me finding sources, you know, sometimes I
read The Times and I think, well there's the Times again.
And then sometimes they read the Times and I said,
this is not the Times anymore, you know. I mean
I get really really worried about their priorities, you know.
But The New Yorker has been for me, you know,
over the arc of many years, the most reliable in
terms of its integrity and what they cover in stories
they tell. And you had sent me the article from
(28:38):
John le Anderson, which I think which when I as
I was reading it, I think I read this article
when it first came out. Now, that article about South America,
and I'd read other articles and books about the work
of Thunai and the uncontacted Indians and so forth. You know,
I would imagine for you that that and writers like
Anderson who write these broad and very complex pieces, there's
(28:59):
no shortage of stories for you to cover. I mean
you must be constantly having to make tough decisions as
to which ones, because when they come to you, they
don't sign, they ask you if you want to do it?
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Correct, No, no, no, I was as a freelance I
pitched a place as actually.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
So you pitched, okay, so you pitched to Remnick and
his staff that you want to do the piece based
on your beginnings of your book. Yeah, but I would
imagine again with the corner copia of such stories that
are out there, you must be constantly wondering which one
you want to do or are there many ideas you
have for this kind of thing?
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Absolutely, yeah, there are many ideas. Part of it is
also sort of editorial interest. I was reading Joan Didion
on El Salvador last night, and she was talking about
when she went, which I think is nineteen eighty two,
and she talked about how it was a period in
which it was like a filin hold, so you know,
you'd fire your story and then it would be held
by editors because you know, there wasn't a huge amount
(29:51):
of interest in El Salvador. I've actually seen that quite
a lot with Yemen, funnily enough, which is a conflict
that's been going on since twenty fifteen. You know, that's
really something that's very, very difficult to get onto people's radar.
So it's actually also about getting those stories onto editors' radar.
And there's a story that I want to do about
these complicated cooperations between US forces in Africa and local
(30:14):
forces that have led to a lot of civilian casualties
and don't seem to be being authorized on the highest level.
But that's firstly a hard story to get rolling and
to get sourced up. So I'm trying to sort of
find more sources on that. So if there are any listeners,
please get in touch.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
So everywhere you go around the world, Africa, South America,
what have you see this exploitation for resources and for minerals.
And I'm just wondering if we'll ever see the day
when this country decides to come out on the right
side of that and try to prevent some of that,
Like you know what happened in Ecuador. It's just it's tragic.
It's tragical. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
I mean, I think that there's so much emphasis on
sort of labor rights here. And I listen to your
show with Lamina Gonzales and know she was talking about how,
you know, people getting the way maging California and farms
and things like that, and I think that there is
a lot of good movement on that in the States.
But somehow I feel like we've just sort of exported
(31:09):
all these issues.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
And it's become thistceter rules for us.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah, exactly, and that's kind of become the sort of
wages of globalization.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Journalist Nicholas Nearkos. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure
to subscribe to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app,
Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Nicholas Nearkos talks about some of the more challenging aspects
of his reporting in the Congo by'm Alec Baldwin and
(31:56):
this is Here's the Thing Nicholas Nearkos New Yorker article
or Buried Dreams expose the way Congolese cobalt miners are exploited.
In his reporting for the piece, he witnessed many gut
wrenching scenes.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Yeah, I think the toughest things that I saw were
around the kids. You know, you see a lot of
kids with deformities, firstly because of the radioactive nature of
the cobalt dust heavy metals poisoning. In fact, actually this
is something that one of the fact checkers on the
piece at Katti Nagrinbaden alerted me to that paternal exposure
to some of these materials is actually associated very heavily
(32:32):
with birth the effects. So that was very sad talking
to parents, to wives of people who'd been killed in
these landslides at mines. And then obviously, you know, going
to a school for sort of kids who had been
actually run by good shepherd, so kids who had been
artismal miners. And then just like chatting with his kid, Zicki,
(32:54):
who's in the piece as well. I mean he was
working in mind since he was three basically, and just
the sort of pain and suffering. And then there was
this moment where I kind of you know, showed him
my phone. I said, listen, like the new iPhone is
going for a two hundred dollars and everybody there knows
that it's going into batteries. It something like fifty percent
of the cobalt mine there. It goes into lifting my
(33:14):
own batteries. And I said to him, listen, like, how
do you feel about this? And he was just like,
I feel terrible. And I think he just had this
sort of moment of realization which I really didn't want
to prompt, but he sort of thought, you know, how
can people sort of sanction such violence against people like me.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
When Remnick was on the show, he said, the New
York Times is the weather. He wakes up in the
morning and the first thing he does is read The
Times of his whole entire media died. What's your media died?
When you're up in the morning, I.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Would say the Times as well.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
I like listening also to the BBC Today program. It's
such a good program, and it's just very good to
keep up with news from.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
The UK as well your TV news.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
No, I don't have a TV. I'm not one of
those people.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
You know.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Actually, while I was in Africa, I really you know,
reporting actually in the Sahara and so on, like most
of the places you get France Francaire, France twenty four,
you know, everyway everywhere go, and I kind of when
I'm in Africa, I watch a lot of France twenty
four and a REFI, which is Radio France Ante Nacional.
Speaker 3 (34:17):
And that's great as well.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
I mean, they're just that they're really like, I don't know,
I find that sort of French quality of journalism, maybe
sometimes influenced by French foreign policy, but actually they go
very deep into a lot of issues that I'm interested in.
The other publication that I wanted to mention is Jean Afrique,
which is a sort of I think it's France based,
(34:39):
where they cover lots of Africa, especially French speaking Africa,
in depth, and again often with a kind of French
twist or French foreign policy twist.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
What's the status of the book at the moment.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
I'm in the middle of writing it, reporting it, traveling.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
You're still working out, yeah, exactly when are you guys
got to come out?
Speaker 3 (34:57):
I hope to work on it all of next year
and then for the next.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Year basically because you're doing other things, because I'm doing
other things, and I'm also.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Just doing a lot of reporting on this as well.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
What's a story you wouldn't tell. What's a story that
people suggested to you and your thought that's not for me.
Have you ever been asked to do profiles of movie
stars and things like that to get a paycheck and
to work, and you that didn't interest you. What don't
you want to do?
Speaker 2 (35:20):
I think sort of gossip and sort of crying into
people's personal lives. I'd think probably things that you also
probably wouldn't like, so you didn't know the.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Half of it.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
Now I'm not saying this to be kind. I mean,
you're this incredibly smart guy and I loved your piece.
I can't wait for the book to come out. Do
you have any appetite for documentary film and filmmaking.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
I'd love to do documentary film and filmmaking. Actually, when
I graduated from Columbia, I went and made a mini
doc about a Roma gypsy trumpet players in Serbia and
Subbian nationalists and that was a really, really fun experience.
But you know, writing has always been my first love.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
I feel like the work you're doing, I mean, these
stories are the stories people need to hear. Where there
was injustice like this and where this this exploitation we
have a set of rules here in this country for
our own and there's things that we would never allow.
We'd be screaming from the mountaintops if we had this
radioactive situation and children being content. We and we have
(36:17):
things like that in this country now. But when it
is exposed, when it is brought to light, I'll never forget,
you know, being a New Yorker. One of the things
I love to about being a New Yorker is the
indignation and the outrage are never packed away. People carry
a little bottle of it with them. And when the
needles all washed up and all the medical waste washed
up on the shores of New Jersey years ago, it
(36:39):
was on the front page of the People went insane.
They were like the beaches of New Jersey and all
these families go there and all this contaminate. I mean,
people went nuts. And of course writing books is important,
but that medium of film is another layer that you
should really really consider.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
You know, I've written about art, I've written about I
was a restaurant review while I was a fact checker
at the New Yorker.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
So you review restaurants for the NYOKA in the city,
how old you do that?
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Two years.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
It was great and I did bars as well.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
It was fun because you know at the time, you
know they would give you a couple of hundred bucks
to go to restaurants.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
And I did Del Posto with Frank Bruney. Okay, we
went to one of his sittings and Laureene doubts it,
would you like to come with Frank and I and
a fourth person. He's going to review Del Posto, And
I said, okay, here's the rules. He orders for everybody
because he has to eat everything on the menu. So
the four of you have to have what he tells
you to eat, and they're going to pass the plates
or whatever you can all sample, but he's going to
(37:32):
do the ordering because he must eat every item on
the menu. He goes back four and five times and
blah blah blah, and and he took me through the
whole reality of Frank's life. So what was it like?
Were you going four and five times to a restaurant or.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
No, no, no, you go two times to the restaurant.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Did they eventually catch on who you were? No?
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Not really, But one of the best experience experiences doing that.
I went to a Somali restaurant in Harlem, and then
I came back after the review. I live up in Harlem,
so he kind of was trying to wrap Harlem restaurants
and I came back after the review and there were
like lines around the block.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
It was great.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
It's really fun and it's wonderful place. I stand by
my review, So that was a nice moment.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
Do you identify as Greek, Irish, British, American, a journalist
or all of the above?
Speaker 3 (38:16):
Well, all of the above.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
But I think that my Greek roots are very very
important to me, and I feel very strongly that, you know,
Greece is a troubled place but also somewhere where one
can do it a lot of good. I like the
spirit of Greeks and Greeks abroad and this kind of
journeying spirit. There's a poem by cossadinoska Vafis called Ithaca,
which is probably the most famous modern Greek poem, and
(38:39):
he talks about like hope as you set out for Ithaca,
so you're sort of setting out for coming back home
as Odysseus. You hope that your journey is a long one,
so you hope that you have this kind of like journey,
which is full of adventures and cyclops and Lystragonians and
so on. So I like that sort of aspect, and
I think I probably sort of see myself in that
(39:00):
mold as well.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
I suppose journalist Nicholas Narkos. This episode was produced by
Kathleen Russo, Carrie Donahue, Maureen Hoben, and Zach MacNeice. Our
engineer is Frank Imperial. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing
is brought to you by iHeart Radio
I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio. There's been a lot of talk
about who should replace Daniel Craig now that he is
retiring as James Bond, and I think I have found
the perfect person. He's handsome, charming, brilliant and multilingual. His
(00:22):
name is Nicholas Niarkos and if only he could put
down his computer long enough to play the part. Nearkos
is a journalist. His choice of unglamorous and at times
dangerous profession is all the more surprising when you learn
about his background. His grandfather, Stavros Niarkos, founded the international
shipping company Nearkos Limited. I first came across Nearkos in
(00:47):
the New Yorker magazine. His recent piece Buried Dreams covers
the exploitation of workers in the cobalt mines in Central Africa.
In his reporting, Narcos exposed the danger and exploitative conditions
for the workers in Congolese cobalt minds, many of whom
are children, as well as those that stand to profit
(01:08):
handsomely off the minds. In addition to being a reporter
at large at The New Yorker, Nearcos's work has appeared
in Time, the New York Times, and the Nation.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I think that all the places that I try and
work for require a sort of serious journalistic engagement. And
that's what I really seek for. When I look for
a publication to write for The New Yorker, I find
the fact checking process. I was a fact checker for
many years. I think that's a very engaging thing to
deal with. I like working directly with the fact checkers.
(01:40):
I liked being a fact checker, learning you know a
great deal about a subject, you know, for a couple
of weeks and then and then sort of moving on.
And actually I found now as a reporter actually enhances
my reporting. It leads me down new alleys when I'm
trying to sort of verify things to the kind of
one hundredth designs.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
When you factor you did it for how long?
Speaker 2 (02:01):
I did it for five years? Actually, well almost four
years and eleven months.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Did they confine you to fact checking in a certain
realm or did you fact check a lot of different things?
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I fact checked a lot of different things because I
speak French and Italian. Obviously, when there were stories which
required those languages, I would.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
I would be sort of fact you were the go
to fact checker sometimes, yeah, when and when you would
do the fact checking or I mean, were there ones
you enjoyed more, like ones that were like deep and
intense and scientific or culture whatever, and did you did
you didn't love, You didn't love doing the fact checking
of the profile of some actress, or you enjoyed all
of it.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
I enjoyed all of it, you know, Listen. I worked
on a piece on TMZ by Nick Schmiddle, which was
a kind of investigative piece, and that was a kind
of crazy experience. It was kind of well, I don't know,
sort of more you know, kind of input and sort
of back and forth and lawyers and whatever than most
other pieces.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
You know.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Sometimes it would do pieces on Iraq and Afghanistan and
so on, and they would require less and less.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Rod Loyal Dafi or Harvey Levin exactly exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
But no, I loved working with I mean, the writers,
they're are great, Patrick Keith, Sarah Stillman, Rachel Laviv.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
I mean, these this kind of Rebecca Meade.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Rebecca was actually a sort of wonderful early person who
I've fact checked quite quite early on in my career
there and then kind of ended up sort of doing
quite a lot with her, which was quite fun. And
we did a piece i remember on adult and Cabano,
and we just had like a lot of back and
forth with Doulty Gavan as people, and it was just
it was sort of hilarious because sometimes you know, those
(03:36):
sort of fashion stories and so on. I mean, if
you're talking with people in government and so on, they
kind of they have this attitude that, oh, well, it's
a story, it's going to go away. Whereas you know,
if it's a big fashion house and you know, this
is one of the few times that it appears in
The New Yorker, you know, this year or in the
you know, in five years or whatever, they realized that
that's going to stick with.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
The marketing for them. Yeah, exactly. I agree. Well, I
mean I'm obviously an ever reader of The New Yorker.
The thing I tend to see when I when I
was thinking about your article and budgets and costs and
things like that, is that, you know, the magazine has
obviously a menu or different articles. There might be a profile,
there might be there's obviously the shouts and murmurs and
talk of the town and so but if the body
(04:15):
of the pieces that are not criticism or art or
what have you. There seems to be a limit I
would imagine of the number of pieces that are this expansive,
because it must be expensive. Correct.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
You know, I started this piece reporting it for as
a book, and that first it started as a as
a sort of book reporting and then and then kind
of developed into New Yorker reporting.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
So actually I.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Funded some of it for my own money, and then
I used some of the New Yorker what the New
Yorker paid me to sort of continue the reporting. But actually,
you know, this was a sort of budgetless piece at
the beginning.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
You first became aware of this when and how.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
I first became aware of this issue around cobalt mining
because of somebody called Dan Getler. He is a mining
billionaire who has sort of made his wealth in the DRC,
and he actually made a lot of money. Buy he's
from Israel. Originally he came to DRC. It's a crazy story.
Came when he was about twenty three, and by the
time he was twenty six, he was in charge of
(05:11):
the Congo's entire diamond export. And then various sort of
human rights groups were like, wait, well, what's happening here.
He was very close to the ruling family and so
he was kind of booted off that and Congo said, look, listen,
look we've dealt with this problem. Suddenly it turned out
that he had a bunch of copper and cobalt mines
down in the South, which he seemed to be basically,
and this is very well documented by the Carter Center
(05:34):
and sort of Human Rights Watch and various other institutions,
basically he was selling them on for the ruling family
to finance their elections. So he'd basically flipped the mines.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
And he became aware of him.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
How I became aware of him.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
I have a very good friend of mine who works
in mining, and I was sort of casting around for stories,
you know, related to Africa, related to corruption and so on,
and he said, well, this is I mean, looks exactly good.
And also actually Patrick Keith, who's been a great sort
of inspiration to me and who I worked with actually
(06:06):
at the New Yorker, and you had Alex Gibney on
the show and you know they collaborated on the opioid story.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
To Patrick on the street the other day, by the way,
already okay, with his family down in the village and
I just said to myself, my goddo of that? I
thought the documentary was sensation, Yeah, sensation.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
So he'd done a piece on Benny Steinmetz, who was
a Israeli mining billionaire. I think he's he's currently been
arrested or he's on trial in Switzerland, and he had
basically taken control of an iron or mine called Simon Do,
which is in Guinea. And so Patrick had done that story,
and that was a kind of great inspiration. And then
I sort of went to Patrick, and Patrick said this,
(06:43):
and you should also follow this story. It's a great idea.
I've always wanted to do Gutler. And then I arrived
in Congo and I realized that the Gutler story was
very interesting, but it wasn't the whole story. And actually
what became more interested interesting to me is the lives
of these people, just the hellish existence of a cobalt
min an artisanal cobalt minor.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
I have to be preciser in the southern DRC.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Now I read the article and you become suspicious, or
you become enlightened, if you will, to the idea that
huge swaths of this continent are being exploited for these
kinds of minerals. And if I may say so, I'll
let you speak to this, not just the greatest hits
like petroleum based things, but these cobalt for lithium for
(07:27):
modern technology, chips, photovoltaic whatever they may be used for batteries,
mostly correct the lithium batteries. So was it safe to say,
you talk about Guinea, you talk about DRC. Is this
happening all over Africa where these minerals exist, I mean, American, Israeli.
It doesn't matter pirates or when they're trying to grab
as much of it as they can.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Well, it depends where Obviously some places are better regulator
than others.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Who's doing a good job of regulating if you can say.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
I think, for example, Zambia has had a better track record,
although now the sort of influx of Chinese wealth into
Zambia has sort of upended some.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Of that, if you but seeking their copper as well.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
So it's actually on the border with DRC.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
When I was reporting some of this stuff, I actually
flew to Zambia to meet a sort of renegade Congolese
politician before he was traveling back into the DRC so yeah, No,
it's known as the Copper Belt, and it's a sort
of large part.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
The scene between the two countries exactly exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
And the other big one is coltan actually, and that's
sort of been the focus of a lot of human
rights work because it is largely mined by sort of
army types and sort of warlords in the northeast of
the DRC. And coltan is used in capacitors, which are
sort of key for computers and batteries. That's also been
a big issue, and people confuse that with cobalt, and
(08:40):
actually what's happening there is slightly different from cobalt, which
is a kind of more of a mechanized, sort of
legitimized type of trade.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Well, the thing that also struck me in terms of
any store like this where there's danger, describe to me
what you had to do in advance security wise. You
don't just land at the airport and say in an
uber and say take me to you know, Cobalt town.
There must have been a lot of preparatory steps you
took and security steps you took, if I'm assuming, And
then talk about when you first got there for the
first time, what went on?
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Okay, so yeah, the security steps.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
I mean, I've traveled to quite a lot at this
point of countries which sort of have different complicated security profiles,
places like Yeam in western Sahara, in fact, this southern
part of the DRC. You know, there is the threat
always of randomized violence, but I, you know, had looked
into it. I'd spoken to a couple of people who
(09:31):
had been there. I've spoken to a couple of journalists,
and I don't think there was a kind of threatening
or kind of looming threat we're afraid. I wasn't particularly
afraid that. You know, sometimes traveling on the road at night,
you'd be stopped at roadblocks and there would be sort
of policemen with guns and they'd be drunk, and you know,
then you get a little bit nervous, and then we
(09:53):
were sort of held up in broad daylight. So I
traveled with the local journalists called Jeff Kazadi, who's a
wonderful one of and he was a great resource. He
worked as a translator. He was incredibly sort of resourceful
as well on the ground, and he sort of knew
quite a few of the operators and he'd worked with
I believe CNN before and some other journalists who had
(10:14):
been down to do stories like this or to do
other types of stories in southern DRC. He works for
a mining trade publication, so you know, oftentimes he wanted
to sort of look further into stories, but because he
works for an industry publication, it wasn't the type of
journalism that.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
They were interested in.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
So I contacted Jeff. I also contacted another journalist, Ben Yemba,
who's based out of her and he was interested in this.
So the first time I went, I went with Jeff
and Ben. We kind of thought about the security risks
and we discussed the different types of issues along the road.
Sometimes there were bandits and so on, but usually if
you're traveling in the daytime, you're fairly safe along that road.
(10:53):
So when I first arrived in the South, i'd been
in Kinshassa for a bit, and in many ways the
South is much less hectic. In Conchasta and I arrived
on a local flight so we didn't have to deal
with customs. I stayed in a sort of very downbeat hotel,
which was an interesting experience to say the least. There
were a lot of women coming in at night and
leaving in the morning.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
But.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Afterwards everywhere, which is everywhere exactly. And then I stayed
the next two or three times. I was there in
more kind of like hotels that sort of mining execs
had made their home. It was you know, kind of
immediately there with people at the bar kind of talking
about their sort of the you know, the greatest hits
of you know, copper mines and cobalt.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Mines, some of the work some of the useful work
done there.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Yeah, and those are sort of like off the record
chats usually, but it helps you get such a good
sort of context around the stuff.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
You know.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
What else was very useful is that I visited a.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Mining conference there as well and sort of met a
lot of people in the field. It was hosted by
a South African firm, but it was kind of visited
by all the sort of local potents and so on.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
It was a sort of eye opening experience.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Because people are very aware of the problem of artisanal mining,
and you have to make the distinction between artisanal mining
and industrial mining. So artisanal mining is something somewhere between
ten and thirty percent of Congo's production every year. It
really fluctuates depending on you know, supply demand, so on
and the rest is industrial which has done much in
(12:28):
the way of large mining firms anywhere else in the world.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
And do the industrials want to put the artisanals out
of work?
Speaker 2 (12:34):
The industrials would probably prefer that the artisanals were not there,
because there are serious human rights issues with some of
the artisanal minds, which are with many of the artisanal minds.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
I would say some are led.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
By cooperatives, and those cooperatives are sort of better about
safety than other sort of non cooperative managed artisanal minds. However,
the big problem is that there's just been a huge
flux of people into that region.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
It's a gold rush.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
It's a huge gold rush, and you really feel like
just people are arriving every day, that kind of thing.
There's a train that comes down from a place called
Mambuji Mai, which is in the middle of Congo, and
that is a place in which there used to be
a huge amount of diamond mining and that's been sort
of woefully mismanaged and the industry has kind of fallen
into pieces. So a lot of people who had some
(13:23):
mining experience now sort of getting on that train which
goes through the sort of jungles and wilds of Central
Congo and comes to Lumumbashi and sort of people are
just sort of hanging off the side of that train
and it comes, you know, every two months or something
like that. Nobody really the schedule basically works on you know,
whenever it's completely full or whenever they can sort of
(13:44):
get the engine running. And so with that, you know,
people come and then the industrial minds have sort of
run by very few people, so they don't have the
capacity to observe high resolve that the labor force.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Exactly, they don't they can't hire. So yeah, I think
that they.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Will arrived to participate in artisinal mining.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
You arrived because you think you're going to get rich
and there's just like a lot of stories about it
and so on, and you arrive and there's nothing to
do apart from artisanal mining basically, and people really exploit
that they get paid nothing. I mean, it's some people
say that there have been people who made lots and
lots of money, but I actually found that quite difficult
to believe after spending two months there.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
I just so you went the one on the one
trip for two months.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
So I went on one trip for a month, then
I went on another trip for ten days, and then
I was there for about almost a month the next time,
So yeah, two months.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
So when you arrive and you are in the more
decent hotel with people who seem to be related to
the whole enterprise and you can chit chat with him.
Is the idea that when you arrive you don't go
right into the belly of the beast and go to
where the artisanal mining is at full throttle. You kind
of work your way toward that. Did you take a
(14:55):
few days before you get into the into the pits
so to speak?
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Depends actually on the different trips. On my second trip,
I went straight to the artism mining because I'd spent
a lot of time, you know, talking with seth Africans about,
you know, the benefits of copper mirning for the area.
So you know, I had all that material and I
wanted to really focus on the artisanal miners.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Who were people that sounded like they had not the
right idea, but maybe the better ideas about how this
should be handled, what should happen there for the greater
good of everybody.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
So there's a Catholic charity called Good Shepherd Calwazy and
they've been incredibly sort of outspoken and sort of quite
sort of research focused as well around some of these issues.
They've put forward this plan which says, listen, you need
to develop other types of industry because you have to
understand this as like as a cycle of which corruption
(15:44):
is only a part. There's also just the basic fact
of poverty and need. So they have suggested that agriculture
would be a way of engaging the local population. In fact,
it's a very fertile region as well, and something like
ninety center of Congo's food is imported, so there's this
kind of from other areas the region, from Zambia, from
(16:06):
from other areas of the region, So there's this kind
and import taxes are huge, and people are making money
at every step of the way and so on and
so forth, often not Congolese. So they say, listen, why
don't the Congolese grow their own food here? Why don't
people work on farms? And so I think that that's
a you know, there are large businesses that obviously invested
in this. I think that's actually something which would be
(16:28):
positive for them to do. So there are also some
other groups like the Fair Cobalt Alliance and then there's
another Chinese group. The UN doesn't have a permanent presence,
I don't think in Colway's actually a lot of what
they do in Congo is to do with rebels in
the north, and then they assisted with some war crimes
tribunals in a city which was not too far away.
(16:50):
So they do mainly kind of like armed conflict type
stuff there. I didn't see any sort of UN involvement,
but I could you know.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
They could be that, they could be.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Yeah, there could be a.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
UN office that focuses on this, but it doesn't seem
to be a main priority because they're focused on you know, some.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
What year did you go there?
Speaker 3 (17:08):
I went at twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
And right before the right before How convenient for you,
I know, yeah, how wonderful. And what is the national
government to the extent you could ascertain when you were there,
what's their position on what's going on there?
Speaker 2 (17:19):
So the national government makes kind of these overtures over
and over again saying we can't have child labor whatever,
and then the local government will say the same thing,
and they're like, we're cleaning up the minds and then
they use you know, these kind of mind clean up
activities in order to basically seize more parts of the
minds for themselves and you know, kind of co opt
local cooperatives and so on. And I document that in
(17:41):
the piece, And at the moment there's a bit of
a power struggle happening down in that region, and it's
very unclear to me what's actually happening in terms of
like who's getting pieces of the eye, But the fact
is that it still continues. Actually, I was I was
speaking to a friend of mine who's a photographer who
can sell a Cunningham who's done great, great work in
the DRC. He was there last weekend and he saw
(18:06):
basically exactly the same condition. So it's not improving.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
But I'm assuming for people who don't understand the way
these things work, it's that you have the corporate mining,
you have the industrial mining, which of course the government's
going to sanction that because they're going to make a
lot of money. I'm assuming just like the drug trade
in other parts of the world, in South America, for example,
they don't want it to go away. They can't make
it go away because there'll be just so much illegal
(18:30):
activity and violence and bloodshed. Do they sit there and say,
and they just write it off and say, well, we
have to tolerate a certain amount of artisanal mining just
to keep these people quiet and peaceful.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Yeah, I mean, I think they can make it go away. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
I think sometimes they'll say that, and sometimes they say, well,
artisanal mining can't exist. And it was funny I interviewed
the governor at the time and he basically said the same.
He said both of those things in the same interview.
So I don't think they really understood how to deal
with this problem. And it is it's a very very
complex issue, and I wouldn't say that I have I
have the answers, but I just don't think it's being
(19:03):
engaged with in a particularly robust manner. You also have
to think about that in terms of, you know, the
industrial minds which were brought many of them were brought
through this guy Getler who's now in the US sanctions.
This actually Trump de sanctioned him for a bit, who
knows why, and then and then he got re sanctioned.
And basically you have a system that relies on this
(19:26):
corruption and those funds are not going back to the people.
And then you have a situation in which you know
the minds are sold to big Western companies, and big
Western companies, you know, maybe don't participate directly in that,
but they work with people who are certainly questionable. Actually
it's not and forgive me a big Western companies is
not entirely correct. A lot of Chinese companies.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Actually want to get to that too. What are the
Chinese doing there? And how long have they been? Obviously, well,
when I think of China, I think of a place
of this obviously a vast a region of land and
very geologically and topographically, and media realized what have you here?
I mean, it's China enormous. They don't have those resources
in their own territory.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
So something like seventy percent of the world's cobalt is
actually in DRC. It's like three point four million tons,
which is a huge, huge amount of cobot is there.
And you know, there are nickel mines in Indonesia which
also produce cobalt as a byproduct, and is interesting if
you look, one of China's biggest battery manufacturers just bought
one of the biggest nickel mines in Indonesia. So they're
(20:26):
really kind of making this resource grab and they've understood
how I think Ivan Glaisenberg, who's the head of Glencore,
one of the big or was the head of Glencore,
said this summer China Inc. Has realized how important cobolt
is and they're kind of starting to buy everything up.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
And where do western manufacturers include in the US. Where
do they get their cobolt from from the Chinese? From
the Chinese, they're not out buying their own, No, they're not.
They're not trying to develop that resource for themselves.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Yeah, BMW's is I think one of the few that
doesn't buy from the Chinese. They buy most of their
cobalt from a cobalt only mine and Morocco, but that's
where too small to supply it in Thaire.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
World journalist Nicholas Narkos. If you like hearing about the
inner workings of some of the greatest journalistic outlets of
our time, check out my interview with New Yorker editor
David Remnick.
Speaker 4 (21:18):
The magazine is not the magazine if it doesn't have
a sense of humor. You're not in business to depress
the hell out of the reader unremittingly. It's like a
band having a set list. If you do everything, it's
all sixteenth notes ferment.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
So I got a DAVIDO or.
Speaker 4 (21:35):
Will you sound like the Ramones? Although I've heard of
worse things. So you want some variation in tone, in voice,
and that's your responsibility, you feel, I feel all of
it's my responsibility.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Hear more of my conversation with David Remnick in our
archives that Here's the Thing dot org after the break
Nicholas Nearkos and I talk about his background and the
big story he nearly broke in high school. I'm Malec
(22:14):
Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Nicholas Niarkos,
who could be living a life of privilege instead can
be found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, reporting
on human rights violations. Nearkos grew up in London and
came to the United States to attend Yale. His family
helped him develop his interest in journalism.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
I grew up in the UK.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
I grew in London.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
Yeah, I was born here, but grew up in London.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
You're born here, Yeah, your father's Greek, father's Greek. You're
growing up in this famous family and your father is
obviously the son of the guy that was the big
dog there in the shipping business Stavros Niarkos. But what
was it like in your home and your family was
where you ended up going into Chrism? That was likely.
Were everybody very interested in politics and current affairs? And
(23:01):
was your dad like rabbit about that?
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah, my dad's sort of very interesting in current affairs.
And you know, my mum's family as well. My grandfather
is a writer, and my great grandparents many of them
were writers and travelers and many such things. And then
actually in high school I did this anti school newspaper
and we actually ended up very very close to blowing
(23:23):
the lid on this kind of strange story where Chinese
officials were sort of paying this intermediary character to get
their kids into the school that I went to, which
is called Harrow. It's a kind of very stiff boarding school.
So we ended up almost writing the story and the
newspaper was shut down. Two years later in the financial time,
suddenly the guy has revealed to be somehow connected with
(23:46):
m I six and like one of the governors in
China basically was sort of taken down by it. And
this was kind of she jimping, kind of flexing his
muscles for the first time we had been so close
to doing that store. You know, the only reason that
we didn't run it was because the school had basically said, like,
you're not publishing this. So yeah, I think that was
(24:07):
the first time I really like saw the power of journalism.
And it was funny because they banned that it was
hard copy and then people sort of hid it behind
their notice boards in their dorm rooms and then kind
of passed it around, and you know, by three days
after publication, even though the school had destroyed most of
the copies, you know, everybody had read it. And it
was this kind of great affirmation of the power.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Of good start, a noble start. And your mother is
Irish English, she really I went to Dublin once with
my ex wife and my daughter and we were there
it was Christmas Eve and Saint Stephen's Day and we
were staying at the Shelbourne in Dublin, I as it is,
the famous hotel, and they said to me, oh, you've
made a mistake though, come in this week because everything's closed.
(24:50):
They said, this week everything's closed, Christmas Eve and Saint
Stephen's Day, everything's close. Even the Guinness is closed. They said.
They were like, that's rare. I mean, even the Guinness
factories closed and we're like, well, my shit, what are
we going to do where we're here? So but you
you know, obviously when I saw your byline, then I
saw your name. You don't have to be my age
(25:12):
to know, you know, there are two great shipping families,
and yours just as recognizable to my generation as the
other one. But you lived in London and you first
came you were born here, grew up in London. And
when did you come back here to live? How old
were I came back here for college, go to school,
go to school, and you decided to say.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
I decided to stay.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Now why do you want to live here or not
from London? And the opposite, I want to live in
London and leave New York as soon as really. Oh
I love London.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
I love you, Yeah, you do. Listen. I feel like London.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
There's you know, there's this kind of idealized London of
my sort of teenage years, which had like a lot
of kind of relaxed hangout places, which has sort of
shut down and it's easy for you here. Well, no,
it's just it's sort of become it's become this kind
of like very I don't know, this kind of fake
version of itself in a way, and I feel like
(26:00):
it's like a lot of these Yeah, and it's a
lot of you know, like heritaging and like news.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I love these. I want to live in a castle.
I watched The Crown and like, oh God, that would
work for me. I could live there. But when you
finished school, you decided to stay here. And what were
the first jobs you got in journalism?
Speaker 3 (26:18):
So I worked at the Nation.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Describe that experience.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
It was a fact Katrina as an old friend of mine,
Katrina Katrina's well, now when.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
They're paying when you talk about budgets, so the Nation
comes out, we were saying, that looks like a college newspaper. Yeah,
on that very very less expensive paper. And so for them,
obviously they have their budgetary considerations, but they're irreplaceable in
terms of the reporting. Did you enjoy that experience.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
It was a great experience.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
I worked directly with Katrina as her fact checker and
with her late husband, Stephen Kohen. And it was the
time of the Syrian chemic chemical weapons, then Obama's Red
Line and so on, and they were you know, I
was called up on a Sunday evening. I think this
is one of my first weeks there was called up
on the Sunday evening and they were like, okay, and
you've got to be on touch, in touch with the
OPCW you know, four o'clock tomorrow morning, cut of thing.
(27:01):
And it was a fantastic experience. And also the nation
treats its in turns very well, which was something I
hadn't necessarily always seen in the UK. And you know,
you were paid minimum wage and there was a kind
of spirit of like community and activism there which was
which was really nice. And actually, by the end of
my time there, I had developed this story based on
(27:22):
a lead that I had gotten a journalism school about
this lawyer who'd been wire tapped called Robert Gottlieb and
he was representing a guy called Adis Mudungjenen and their
conversations had been wire tapped by the FBI, and that
story hadn't been reported, so I sort of reported that
out a little bit and then sort of came to
them and said, listen, I've been working on this in
my spare time, and they sort of took a chance
(27:43):
and published me. Looking back on it, I mean, that's
quite a sort of both sort of risk taking. But
I really appreciated that because that was my first sort
of big investigative type magazine story.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
When you worked for the Guardian, did you go back
to the UK?
Speaker 2 (27:57):
No, So I've written for the Guardian sort of independently
as a free lancer, and then I worked at The
Guardian as a researcher.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Like right when I graduated college.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
What period of times did you work with the Huffington Post.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
So I started writing with the Affington Post in college
and then I kind of wrote for them for a
year too afterwards.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
You know, for me finding sources, you know, sometimes I
read The Times and I think, well there's the Times again.
And then sometimes they read the Times and I said,
this is not the Times anymore, you know. I mean
I get really really worried about their priorities, you know.
But The New Yorker has been for me, you know,
over the arc of many years, the most reliable in
terms of its integrity and what they cover in stories
they tell. And you had sent me the article from
(28:38):
John le Anderson, which I think which when I as
I was reading it, I think I read this article
when it first came out. Now, that article about South America,
and I'd read other articles and books about the work
of Thunai and the uncontacted Indians and so forth. You know,
I would imagine for you that that and writers like
Anderson who write these broad and very complex pieces, there's
(28:59):
no shortage of stories for you to cover. I mean
you must be constantly having to make tough decisions as
to which ones, because when they come to you, they
don't sign, they ask you if you want to do it?
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Correct, No, no, no, I was as a freelance I
pitched a place as actually.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
So you pitched, okay, so you pitched to Remnick and
his staff that you want to do the piece based
on your beginnings of your book. Yeah, but I would
imagine again with the corner copia of such stories that
are out there, you must be constantly wondering which one
you want to do or are there many ideas you
have for this kind of thing?
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Absolutely, yeah, there are many ideas. Part of it is
also sort of editorial interest. I was reading Joan Didion
on El Salvador last night, and she was talking about
when she went, which I think is nineteen eighty two,
and she talked about how it was a period in
which it was like a filin hold, so you know,
you'd fire your story and then it would be held
by editors because you know, there wasn't a huge amount
(29:51):
of interest in El Salvador. I've actually seen that quite
a lot with Yemen, funnily enough, which is a conflict
that's been going on since twenty fifteen. You know, that's
really something that's very, very difficult to get onto people's radar.
So it's actually also about getting those stories onto editors' radar.
And there's a story that I want to do about
these complicated cooperations between US forces in Africa and local
(30:14):
forces that have led to a lot of civilian casualties
and don't seem to be being authorized on the highest level.
But that's firstly a hard story to get rolling and
to get sourced up. So I'm trying to sort of
find more sources on that. So if there are any listeners,
please get in touch.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
So everywhere you go around the world, Africa, South America,
what have you see this exploitation for resources and for minerals.
And I'm just wondering if we'll ever see the day
when this country decides to come out on the right
side of that and try to prevent some of that,
Like you know what happened in Ecuador. It's just it's tragic.
It's tragical. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
I mean, I think that there's so much emphasis on
sort of labor rights here. And I listen to your
show with Lamina Gonzales and know she was talking about how,
you know, people getting the way maging California and farms
and things like that, and I think that there is
a lot of good movement on that in the States.
But somehow I feel like we've just sort of exported
(31:09):
all these issues.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
And it's become thistceter rules for us.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah, exactly, and that's kind of become the sort of
wages of globalization.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Journalist Nicholas Nearkos. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure
to subscribe to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app,
Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Nicholas Nearkos talks about some of the more challenging aspects
of his reporting in the Congo by'm Alec Baldwin and
(31:56):
this is Here's the Thing Nicholas Nearkos New Yorker article
or Buried Dreams expose the way Congolese cobalt miners are exploited.
In his reporting for the piece, he witnessed many gut
wrenching scenes.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Yeah, I think the toughest things that I saw were
around the kids. You know, you see a lot of
kids with deformities, firstly because of the radioactive nature of
the cobalt dust heavy metals poisoning. In fact, actually this
is something that one of the fact checkers on the
piece at Katti Nagrinbaden alerted me to that paternal exposure
to some of these materials is actually associated very heavily
(32:32):
with birth the effects. So that was very sad talking
to parents, to wives of people who'd been killed in
these landslides at mines. And then obviously, you know, going
to a school for sort of kids who had been
actually run by good shepherd, so kids who had been
artismal miners. And then just like chatting with his kid, Zicki,
(32:54):
who's in the piece as well. I mean he was
working in mind since he was three basically, and just
the sort of pain and suffering. And then there was
this moment where I kind of you know, showed him
my phone. I said, listen, like the new iPhone is
going for a two hundred dollars and everybody there knows
that it's going into batteries. It something like fifty percent
of the cobalt mine there. It goes into lifting my
(33:14):
own batteries. And I said to him, listen, like, how
do you feel about this? And he was just like,
I feel terrible. And I think he just had this
sort of moment of realization which I really didn't want
to prompt, but he sort of thought, you know, how
can people sort of sanction such violence against people like me.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
When Remnick was on the show, he said, the New
York Times is the weather. He wakes up in the
morning and the first thing he does is read The
Times of his whole entire media died. What's your media died?
When you're up in the morning, I.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Would say the Times as well.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
I like listening also to the BBC Today program. It's
such a good program, and it's just very good to
keep up with news from.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
The UK as well your TV news.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
No, I don't have a TV. I'm not one of
those people.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
You know.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Actually, while I was in Africa, I really you know,
reporting actually in the Sahara and so on, like most
of the places you get France Francaire, France twenty four,
you know, everyway everywhere go, and I kind of when
I'm in Africa, I watch a lot of France twenty
four and a REFI, which is Radio France Ante Nacional.
Speaker 3 (34:17):
And that's great as well.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
I mean, they're just that they're really like, I don't know,
I find that sort of French quality of journalism, maybe
sometimes influenced by French foreign policy, but actually they go
very deep into a lot of issues that I'm interested in.
The other publication that I wanted to mention is Jean Afrique,
which is a sort of I think it's France based,
(34:39):
where they cover lots of Africa, especially French speaking Africa,
in depth, and again often with a kind of French
twist or French foreign policy twist.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
What's the status of the book at the moment.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
I'm in the middle of writing it, reporting it, traveling.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
You're still working out, yeah, exactly when are you guys
got to come out?
Speaker 3 (34:57):
I hope to work on it all of next year
and then for the next.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Year basically because you're doing other things, because I'm doing
other things, and I'm also.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Just doing a lot of reporting on this as well.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
What's a story you wouldn't tell. What's a story that
people suggested to you and your thought that's not for me.
Have you ever been asked to do profiles of movie
stars and things like that to get a paycheck and
to work, and you that didn't interest you. What don't
you want to do?
Speaker 2 (35:20):
I think sort of gossip and sort of crying into
people's personal lives. I'd think probably things that you also
probably wouldn't like, so you didn't know the.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Half of it.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
Now I'm not saying this to be kind. I mean,
you're this incredibly smart guy and I loved your piece.
I can't wait for the book to come out. Do
you have any appetite for documentary film and filmmaking.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
I'd love to do documentary film and filmmaking. Actually, when
I graduated from Columbia, I went and made a mini
doc about a Roma gypsy trumpet players in Serbia and
Subbian nationalists and that was a really, really fun experience.
But you know, writing has always been my first love.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
I feel like the work you're doing, I mean, these
stories are the stories people need to hear. Where there
was injustice like this and where this this exploitation we
have a set of rules here in this country for
our own and there's things that we would never allow.
We'd be screaming from the mountaintops if we had this
radioactive situation and children being content. We and we have
(36:17):
things like that in this country now. But when it
is exposed, when it is brought to light, I'll never forget,
you know, being a New Yorker. One of the things
I love to about being a New Yorker is the
indignation and the outrage are never packed away. People carry
a little bottle of it with them. And when the
needles all washed up and all the medical waste washed
up on the shores of New Jersey years ago, it
(36:39):
was on the front page of the People went insane.
They were like the beaches of New Jersey and all
these families go there and all this contaminate. I mean,
people went nuts. And of course writing books is important,
but that medium of film is another layer that you
should really really consider.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
You know, I've written about art, I've written about I
was a restaurant review while I was a fact checker
at the New Yorker.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
So you review restaurants for the NYOKA in the city,
how old you do that?
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Two years.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
It was great and I did bars as well.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
It was fun because you know at the time, you
know they would give you a couple of hundred bucks
to go to restaurants.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
And I did Del Posto with Frank Bruney. Okay, we
went to one of his sittings and Laureene doubts it,
would you like to come with Frank and I and
a fourth person. He's going to review Del Posto, And
I said, okay, here's the rules. He orders for everybody
because he has to eat everything on the menu. So
the four of you have to have what he tells
you to eat, and they're going to pass the plates
or whatever you can all sample, but he's going to
(37:32):
do the ordering because he must eat every item on
the menu. He goes back four and five times and
blah blah blah, and and he took me through the
whole reality of Frank's life. So what was it like?
Were you going four and five times to a restaurant or.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
No, no, no, you go two times to the restaurant.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Did they eventually catch on who you were? No?
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Not really, But one of the best experience experiences doing that.
I went to a Somali restaurant in Harlem, and then
I came back after the review. I live up in Harlem,
so he kind of was trying to wrap Harlem restaurants
and I came back after the review and there were
like lines around the block.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
It was great.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
It's really fun and it's wonderful place. I stand by
my review, So that was a nice moment.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
Do you identify as Greek, Irish, British, American, a journalist
or all of the above?
Speaker 3 (38:16):
Well, all of the above.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
But I think that my Greek roots are very very
important to me, and I feel very strongly that, you know,
Greece is a troubled place but also somewhere where one
can do it a lot of good. I like the
spirit of Greeks and Greeks abroad and this kind of
journeying spirit. There's a poem by cossadinoska Vafis called Ithaca,
which is probably the most famous modern Greek poem, and
(38:39):
he talks about like hope as you set out for Ithaca,
so you're sort of setting out for coming back home
as Odysseus. You hope that your journey is a long one,
so you hope that you have this kind of like journey,
which is full of adventures and cyclops and Lystragonians and
so on. So I like that sort of aspect, and
I think I probably sort of see myself in that
(39:00):
mold as well.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
I suppose journalist Nicholas Narkos. This episode was produced by
Kathleen Russo, Carrie Donahue, Maureen Hoben, and Zach MacNeice. Our
engineer is Frank Imperial. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing
is brought to you by iHeart Radio
Host
Alec Baldwin
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