December 14, 2021 • 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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart 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 multi lingual.
(00:22):
His name is Nicholas ni ArkOS, and if only he
could put down his computer long enough to play the part.
Ni ArkOS 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 Niarchos, founded
the international shipping company ni ArkOS Limited. I first came
(00:45):
across ni ArkOS in The New Yorker magazine. His recent
piece Buried Dreams covers the exploitation of workers in the
cobalt mines in Central Africa. In his reporting, ni ArkOS
exposed the danger of us and exploitative conditions for the
workers in Congolese cobalt minds, many of whom are children,
(01:06):
as well as those that's down to profit handsomely off
the minds. In addition to being a reporter at large
at the New Yorker, New York coss work has appeared
in Time, the New York Times, and the Nation. I
think that all the places that I try and work
for require a sort of serious journalistic engagement. And that's
(01:27):
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 for
for many years. I think that's a very engaging thing
to deal with. I like working directly with the fact checkers.
I liked being a fact checker, learning a great deal
about a subject, you know, for a couple of weeks,
and then and then sort of moving on. And actually
(01:48):
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 hundreds of
descience kind of thing. When you when you factor you
did it for how long? I did for five years? Actually,
well almost four years and eleven months. Did they confine
you to fact checking in a certain realm or did
(02:09):
you fact check a lot of different things? 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 I would be sort of fact you were
the go to fact checker sometimes, Yeah, when you when
you would do the fact checking or I mean were
there once you enjoyed more like ones that were like
deep and intense and scientific or culture whatever, and did
(02:31):
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. 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 that was kind of so well,
I don't know, sort of more you know, kind of
input and sort of back and forth and lawyers and whatever.
(02:52):
Then most other pieces, you know, sometimes it would do
pieces on Iraq and Afghanistan and so on, and they
were quite less less lay in a stated how Darfy
or Harvey love them exactly exactly blash, But no, I
loved working with I mean the writers. They're a great
Patrick Keith, Sarah Stillman, Rachel I mean this this kind
(03:13):
of made Rebecca Mede. Rebecca was actually a sort of
wonderful early person 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 Dultri caban as people, and
it was just it was sort of hilarious because sometimes
(03:35):
you know, those 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 the marketing for them. Yeah,
(03:57):
exactly a degree. Um well, I mean, I'm obviously in
every 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 in different articles.
There might be a profile, there might be you know,
there's obviously the shouts and murmurs and talk of the
town and so. But of the body of the pieces
that are not criticism or art or what have you,
(04:18):
there seems to be a limit, I would imagine of
the number of pieces that are this expansive, because it
must be expensive. Correct. You know, I started this piece
reporting it for as a book, and the first it
started as a as a sort of book reporting and
then and then kind of developed into New Yorker reporting.
So actually I funded some of it from my own money,
and then I used some of the New Yorker what
(04:39):
the New Yorker paid me to to sort of continue
the reporting. But actually, you know, this was a sort
of budget less piece at the beginning. You first became
aware of this when and how I first became aware
of this issue around cobalt mining because of somebody called
Dan Gutler. He is a mining billionaire who has sort
of made his wealth in the DRC, and he actually
(05:01):
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 the congo's
entire diamond export and then various sort of human rights
groups groups are like, wait, well, what's happening here. He
was very close to the ruling family and so he
(05:21):
was kind of booted off that and Congo said, look, listen,
look we've dealt with this problem. And 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
and sort of human rights watching various other institutions, basically
he was selling them on for the ruling family to
finance their elections. So he had basically flipped the minds
(05:43):
and he became aware of him. How I became aware
of him. I have a very good friend of mine
who works in mining, and I was sort of casting
around for stories related to Africa, related to corruption and
so on, and he said, well, listen, I mean look,
no Risco exactly. And also actually Patrick Keith, who has
been a great sort of inspiration to me and I
(06:05):
worked with actually at the New Yorker, and you had
Alex Gibney on the show and he you know, they
collaborated on the opioid story acted to Patrick on the
street the other day with his family down in the village,
and I just said to myself, my god, I thought
they documented withal. So he'd done a piece on Bennie
stein Metz, who was a Israeli mining billionaire. I think
(06:27):
he's he's currently been arrested or he's on trial in Switzerland,
and he had basically taken control of an iron are
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, list and you should also follow the story.
It's a great idea. I've always wanted to do Gartler.
(06:47):
And then I arrived in Congo and I realized that
the Gartler 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 minor, an artisanal cobalt minor have
to be preciser in the southern DRC. Now I read
(07:08):
the article and you become suspicious. So you become enlightened,
if you will, to the idea that huge swaths of
this continent are being exploited for these kinds of minerals,
and and and if I may say so, you'll let
you speak to this, not just the greatest hits like
petroleum based things, but these cobalts for lithium for modern technology, chips,
(07:29):
photovoltaic whatever they may be used for batteries, mostly correct
the lithium battery. It was it safe to say, you
talk about Guinea, you talk about d r C. 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. Well, it depends where.
Obviously some places are better regulated than others. Who's doing
a good job of regulating if you can say, I think,
(07:51):
for example, Zambia has had a better track record, although
now the sort of influx of Chinese wealth into Zambia
has sort of up ended some of that. And what
if he was seeking their copper as well. So it's
actually on the border with d r C. When I
was reporting some of this stuff, I actually flew to
Zambia to meet sort of renegade Congolese politician before he
was traveling back into the DRC. So yeah, no, it's
(08:12):
known as the Copper Belt, and it's it's a sort
of large the scene between the two countries exactly exactly.
And the other big one is coldtan 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 war lords in the northeast
of the DRC. And coltan is used in capacitors, which
(08:33):
are sort of key for computers and batteries. That's also
been a big issue and people confuse that with cobalt,
and actually what's happening there is is slightly different from cobalt,
which is a kind of more of a mechanized, sort
of legitimized a type of trade. Well, the thing that
also struck me in terms of any story like this
with there's danger described to me what you had to
(08:56):
do in advanced security wise, you don't just land at
the airport and say in an uber and say take
me to you know, Cobal town. There must have been
a lot of preparatory steps you took and security steps took.
Give I'm assuming, and then talk about when you first
got there for the first time. What went on? Okay,
so yeah, the security steps. I mean, I've traveled to
quite a lot at this point of countries which sort
(09:16):
of have different complicated security profiles, At places like Yamen,
Western Sahara, in fact, this southern part of the d
r C. You know, there is the threat always of
randomized violence, but I, you know, had looked into it.
I've spoken to a couple of people who had been there.
I've spoken to a couple of journalists, and I don't
(09:36):
think there was a kind of threatening or kind of
looming threat. 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'll be drunk, and you know, then you get
a little bit nervous, and then we were sort of
held up in broad daylight. So I traveled with the
(09:57):
local journalist called Jeff Kazadi, who's a who's a wonderful
one a guy, and he's he's he was a great resource.
He worked as a translator. He was incredibly sort of
resourceful as well on on the ground, and he sort
of knew quite a few of the operators, and he
had worked with I believe CNN before and some other
journalists who had been down to do stories like this
(10:17):
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 they were interested in. So
I contacted Jeff. I also contacted another journalist, ben Nyemba,
who who's based out of there, and he was interested
(10:39):
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 and you're
fairly safe along that road. So when I first arrived
in the South, I've been in Conshassa for a bit
and in many ways the South is much less hectic
(11:00):
lincl Chassa 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,
but afterwards everywhere, which is everywhere exactly. And then I
(11:20):
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 mines, some
of the work that some of the useful work done there. Yeah,
(11:41):
and those are sort of like off the record chats usually,
but it helps you get get such a good sort
of context around this up. You know what else was
very useful useful is that I visited a 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
(12:03):
the sort of local potents and so on. It was
a sort of eye opening experience 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 demands so on. And the rest
(12:25):
is industrial, which has done much in the way of
large mining firms anywhere else in the world. And do
the industrials want to put the artisanals out of work?
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 with many of the artismal minds,
I would say some are led by cooperatives, and those
(12:49):
co operatives are sort of better about safety than other
sort of non coatrial co operative managed artisanal minds. However,
the big problem is that there's just been a huge
flux of people into that region. It's a gold rush.
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
(13:10):
Mbuji 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
mining experience and 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
(13:34):
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 the schedule basically works
on you know, whenever it's completely full, whenever they can
sort of get the engine running. And so with that,
you know, people come. And then the industrial mines are
sort of run by very few people, so they don't
have the capacity to observe resolve that labor force exactly.
(13:55):
They don't they can't hire. So yeah, I think they
arrived to participate in artisanal mining. Exactly. 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 it's some people say that
(14:16):
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, I just so you went the
one on the one trip for two months. 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
two months. So when you arrive and you are in
(14:39):
the more decent hotel with people who seem to be
related to the whole enterprise, and you can church out
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 at
full throttle. You kind of work your way towards that is,
did you take a few days before you get into
the into the pits so to speak? Depends actually on
(15:00):
the different trips. On my second trip, I went straight
to the artisman mining because I spent a lot of time,
you know, talking with Seth Effricans about, you know, the
benefits of copper mining for the area. So you know,
I had all that material and I wanted to really
focus on the the artisanal miners, who were people that
sounded like they had not the right idea, but maybe
the better ideas about how this should be handled, what
(15:21):
should happen there for the greater good of everybody. So
there's a Catholic charity called Good Shepherd, called Ways, 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
(15:41):
understand this as like a as a cycle of which
corruption is only a part. There's also just the basic
fact of poverty and 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 cent of Congo's food is imported, so
(16:02):
there's this kind of from other areas, from from Zambia,
from from other areas of the region. So there's this
kind and and import taxes are huge, and people are
making money 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
(16:25):
invested in this. I think that's actually something which would
be 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 u N doesn't have a
permanent presence, I don't think in con ways. Actually, a
lot of what they do in Congo is to do
with rebels in the north, and then they assisted with
(16:46):
war crimes tribunals in a city which was not too
far away. 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, they could that
they could, Yeah, they could. They could be a UN
office that focuses on this, but it doesn't seem to
be a main priority because they're focused on, you know something,
(17:07):
what what year did you go there? I went and
right before the right before? How convenient for you? Wonderful?
And what is the national government? To the extent you
could you could ascertain when you're there, what's their position
of what's going on there? 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
(17:28):
up the minds and then they used you know, these
kind of mind clean up activities in order to basically
sees more parts of the minds for themselves and you know,
kind of co opt local co operatives and so on.
And I document that in 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
(17:49):
actually happening in terms of like who's getting pieces of
the pie, But the fact is that it still continues. Actually,
I was speaking to a friend of mine who's a photographer,
Hugh can Sell a Cunningham who's done great, great work
and in the DRC. He was there last weekend and
he saw basically exactly the same condition. So it's not improving.
But I'm assuming for people who don't understand the way
(18:11):
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 gonna make a lot
of money. I'm assuming, just like the drug trade and
other parts of the world and South America for example,
they don't want it to go away. They can't make
a go away Beau. There'll be just so much illegal
activity and violence and bloodshed. Do they sit there and
(18:33):
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. Yeah, I mean,
I think I can make it go away. Yeah, I think.
Sometimes I'll say that, and sometimes they say, well, artismal
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
(18:56):
with this problem. And 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 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 Gutler who's now in the U S. Actions.
There's actually Trump d sanctioned him for a bit who
(19:19):
knows why, and then and then he got re sanctioned.
And basically you have a system that relies on this
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
(19:42):
it's not and forgive me a big Western companies has
not entirely correct a lot of Chinese companies. Actually, what
are the Chinese doing there? And how long have them in? Obviously, well,
when I think of China, I think of a place
that's obviously a vast a region of land and very
geologically and topographically and media at atically. What have you here?
I mean, it's a China sit enormous. They don't have
(20:03):
those resources in their own territory. So something like seventy
of the world's cobalt is actually in DRC. It's like
three point four million tons, which a huge, huge amount
of is that, And you know there are nickel mines
in Indonesia which also produced a cobalt as a byproduct.
And it's interesting if you look, one of China's biggest
battery manufacturers just bought one of the biggest nickel mines
(20:24):
in Indonesia. So they're really kind of making this resource
grab and they've understood how I think Ivan Glazenberg, who's
the head of Glencore, one of the big was the
head of Glencore, said this summer China Inc. Has realized
how important cobalt is and and they're they're kind of
starting to buy everything up. And where do Western manufacturers,
including the U S. Where do they get their cobalt from?
(20:45):
From the Chinese? From the Chinese, they're not buying their own, No,
they're not. They're not trying to develop that resource for themselves. Yeah,
BMW is 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 in Morocco, but that's
where too small to supply the entire world. Journalist Nicolas
(21:06):
ni Arcos. 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.
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
(21:28):
band having a set list. If you do everything, it's
all sixteenth notes from mentioning. So you got a divido
or will you sound like the Ramones? Although I've heard
of worse things. So you want some variation in tone, invoice,
and that's your responsibility, you feel, I feel all of
it's my responsibility. Here more of my conversation with David
(21:51):
Remnick in our archives that Here's the Thing dot org
after the break, Nicholas ni Archos and I talked about
his background and the big story he nearly broke in
high school. I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to
(22:16):
Here's the Thing. Nicholas ni Arcos, who could be living
a life of privilege instead can be found in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo reporting on human rights violations.
Ni Arcos grew up in London and came to the
United States to attend Yale. His family helped him develop
his interest in journalism. I grew up in the UK, London.
(22:38):
I was born in hand but we're born here. Your
father's Greek 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 Niarchos. But what was it like in your home
and your family was where you ended up going into charism?
That was likely where everybody very interested in politic exce
(23:00):
and current affairs. And was your dad like rabid about that? Yeah,
my dad's sort of very interesting in current affairs. And
you know, my mom'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
(23:20):
we actually ended up very very close to blowing 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 the financial time.
(23:42):
Suddenly the guy has revealed to be somehow connected with
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 worry. You know, the only reason that
we didn't didn't run it was because the school had
(24:03):
basically said, like, you're not publishing this. So yeah, I
think that was the first time I really like saw
the power of journalism. And it was funny because they
banned that it was hard copying, and 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
(24:25):
it and it was this kind of great Athama at
the bar of journal star, a noble star. 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 St. Stephen's Day
and we were staying at the Shelburne in because it
is the famous hotel. And they said to me, oh,
(24:47):
you've made a mistake now coming this week because everything's closed.
They said, this week everything's closed. Christmas Eve and Send
Stephen's Day, everything's closed, 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 ship, what are
we going to do when we're here? So but you
(25:07):
you know, obviously when I saw your byline, then I
saw your name. You don't have to be my age
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 when you were born here. I 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,
(25:28):
to go to school, and you decided to say, I
decided to stay. Why do you want to live here
and not from London? And the opposite, I want to
live in London and leave New York as soon as
I love London, I love New Yordon. You do, listen,
I feel like London. There's a 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 is sort of shut down and it's easier for
(25:50):
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 it's like a yeah, and it's
a lot of you know, like heritaging and like I
love these I want to live in a castle. I
watched The Crown and like, oh God, that would work
(26:11):
for me. I could live there. But when you finished
school you decided to stay here. And what were the
first job as you got in journalism? Um, so I
worked at the Nation. Described that experience. It was a
factory as an old friend of mine Katrina Katrina as well,
when when you talk about budgets, so the so the
Nation comes out, we were saying, that looks like a
college newspaper. Yeah, and that very very less expensive paper.
(26:31):
And so for the obviously they have their budgetary considerations,
but they're irreplaceable in terms of the reporting. Did you
enjoy that experience. It was a great experience. I worked
directly with Katrina as her fact checker and with her
late husband, Stephen Kern. And it was the time of
the Syrian chemical weapons and Obama's redline and so on,
and they were you know, I was called up on
(26:52):
a Sunday evening. I think this is one of my
first weeks there is caught up on a Sunday evening
and they were like, okay, you've got to be in
touch with the pc W, you know, four o'clock tomorrow
morning kind of thing. It was a fantastic experience. And
also the nation treats its interns 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
(27:13):
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 a lead that I had gotten at journalism
school about this lawyer who had been wiretapped called Robert
Gottlieb and he was representing a guy called Addis mc
dungeon in and their conversations had been wiretapped by the FBI,
(27:34):
and that story hadn't been reported. So I sort of
reported that that out a little bit and then sort
of came to them and said list and I've been
working on this in my spare time, and they said
it sort of took a chance and published. Me. Looking
back on it, I mean, that's that's quite a sort
of bulls sort of risk taking. But I really appreciate
that because that was my first sort of big investigative
type magazine story. When you worked for the Guardian, did
(27:55):
you go back to the UK? 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,
Like right when I graduated college. What period of time
did you work with the Huffington Post. So I started
writing with the Afternoon Post in college and then I
kind of wrote for them for a year two ofterwards,
you know, for me finding sources, you know, sometimes I
(28:19):
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 ark 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
John the Anderson, which I think which when I as
(28:40):
I was reading, I think I read this article when
when it first came out. Now, that article about South
America and I'd read other articles and books about the
work of the Nie 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 no shortage of stories for you to cover. I
(29:02):
mean you must be constantly having to make tough decisions
as to which ones you because when they come to you,
they don't sign, they ask you if you want to
do it? Correct, No, no, no, I was as a
freelance ipe pitch to place. Actually you pitched, okay, so
you you pitched to Remnick and his staff that you
want to do the piece based on your beginnings of
your book. But I would imagine again with the corner
(29:23):
copia of such stories that are out there, you must
be constantly wondering which one you want to do. Are
there are the many ideas you have for this kind
of thing? Absolutely, yeah, there there there are many ideas.
Part of it is also sort of editorial interest. I
was reading John Didion on Al Salvador last night, and
she was talking about when She Went, which I think
is two, and she talked about how it was a
(29:44):
period in which it was like phil and Hold and
so you know you'd value your story and then it
would be held by editors because you know, there wasn't
a huge amount of interest in Al Salvador. I've actually
seen that quite a lot with Yamen funny enough, which
is a conflict that's been going on since 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
(30:05):
onto editors radar. And there's a story that I want
to do about these complicated co operations between US forces
in Africa and local 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 like get rolling and to get sourced up.
So I'm trying to sort of bind more sources on that.
(30:27):
So if there any listeners, please get in touch. So
everywhere you go around the world, Africa, South America, whatever,
you see this exploitation for resources and from 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 it. Like
we know what happened in in Equator. Just it's tragic.
It's tragic. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's there's
(30:50):
so much emphasis on sort of labor rights here. And
I listened to your show with Lumina Gonzalez and and
she know, she was talking about how, you know, people
getting the wave raging 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 all these issues and
(31:10):
and it's become this is a set of rules for us,
or a set of rules, Yeah, exactly, and that's kind
of become the sort of wages of globalization. Journalist Nicolas
ni Arcos. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to
subscribe to Here's the Thing on the I Heart Radio app,
Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
(31:33):
Nicholas ni Arcos talks about some of the more challenging
aspects of his reporting in The Congo by Malic Baldwin,
(31:55):
and this is Here's the Thing Nicolas ni Arcos New
Yorker article or Buried Dreams exposed the way Cargolese cobalt
miners are exploited. In his reporting for the piece, he
witnessed many gut wrenching scenes. Yeah, I think the toughest
things that I saw were around the kids. You know
that you see a lot of kids with the former teas,
(32:16):
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, Katie nud
Jim Badden, alerted me to the paternal exposure to some
of these materials is actually associated very heavily with birthday effects.
So that was very sad talking to parents, to wives
(32:37):
of people who had been killed in these landslides at mines.
And then obviously, you know, going to a school for
sort of kids who had been not actually run by
good shepherd, so kids who had been artisanal miners. And
then just like chatting with this kid Zicki, who's in
the piece as well. I mean he was working in
(32:57):
mind since he was three basically, and 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 thousand, two
hundred dollars and everybody there knows that it's going into batteries.
Something like fifty of the cobalt mine there just goes
into letting my own batteries. And I said to him, listen, like,
how do you feel about this? And he was just like,
(33:19):
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.
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 to read
the time of his whole entire media died. What's your
(33:41):
media died? When you're up in the morning, I would
say the Times as well. I like listening also to
the BBC Today program. That's such a good program, and
it's just very good to keep up with news from
the UK as well. No TV news, No, I don't
have a TV and I'm not one of those people,
you know. Actually, while I was in Africa, I really
you know, reporting actually in the Sahara and so on,
(34:03):
like most of the places you get France, fanc, France
twenty four, you know, everywhere, everywhere ago and I kind
of when I'm in Africa, I watched a lot of
France twenty four and r F which is Ra franc
at n and that's great as well. 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
(34:26):
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 jeanne Frique,
which is a sort of I think it's France based,
where they cover lots of Africa, especially French speaking Africa,
in depth, and again often with a kind of French
(34:46):
twist or French foreign policy twist. What's the status of
the book at the moment. I'm in the middle of
writing it, reporting it, traveling. Yeah, exactly, when you come out.
I hope to work on it all of next year
and then the next year basically because you're doing other things,
because I'm doing other things and I'm also just doing
a lot of reporting on this as well. What's a
(35:07):
story you wouldn't tell what's a story that that people
suggested to you and your thought that's not from me?
If if you have, you've been asked to do profiles
of movie stars and things like that to get a
paycheck into work, and you that didn't interest you. What
don't you want to do? I think sort of gossip
and sort of crying into people's personal lives. I think
probably things that you also probably wouldn't like, so you
(35:28):
didn't know the half of it. Yeah. Now I'm not
saying this to be kind. And when 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. I'd love to do
documentary film and filmmaking. Um. Actually, when I graduated from Columbia,
I went and made a mini doc about Roma gypsy
trumpet players in Serbia and Serbian nationals and that was
(35:52):
really a really, really fun experience. But you know, writing
has always been my first love. 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 there this exploitation. We have a set
of rules here in this country for our own and
there's things that we would never allowed. We'd be screaming
from the mountaintops if we had this radioactive situation and
(36:15):
children being contamn we and we have things like that
in this country now. But 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 loved
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
(36:36):
shores of New Jersey years ago, it was on the
front page of People Went insane. They're like the beaches
of New Jersey and all these families go there and
all this contamnity. I mean, people went nuts. And of
course writing books is is important, but that medium of
film is another layer that you should really really consider.
You know, I've written about aunt, I've written a boy.
I was a restaurant review while I was a fat
(36:58):
checker in the New Yorker. So I've did you review
restaurants for the Yoka in the city. How old you
do that two years. It was great and I did
Buzz as well. It was fun because you know at
the time, you know they would give you a couple
of hundred bucks to get to restaurants. And I did
Del Posto with Frank Bruney. Okay, we went to one
of his sittings and Marine doubts that would you like
to come with Frank and I and a fourth person.
(37:20):
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 do the order
because he must eat every item on the menu. He
goes back four and five times and baba ba and
and he he took me through the whole reality of
Frank's life. So what was it like, were you going
(37:42):
four and five times to a restaurant or no, no, no,
you go two times to the restaurant. Did they eventually
catch on who you were? No? Not ready, but one
of the best experienced experiences doing that. I went to
SMILEI Restaurant in Harlem, and then I came back after
the review. I live up in Harlem, so it kind
of was trying to rap Harlem restaurants. And I came
back after the review and there were like lines around
(38:02):
the block. It was great. It's really fun and it's
a wonderful place. I stand by my review. So that
was a nice moment. Do you identify as Greek, Irish, British, American,
a journalist or all of the above? All of the above,
But I I think that my Greek roots are very
very important to me, and I feel very very strongly that,
(38:23):
you know, Greece is a troubled place but also somewhere
where one can do a lot of good. I like
the spirit of Greeks and Greeks abroad and this kind
of journeying spirit. There's a poem by corsadovaf Is called Ithaca,
which is probably the most famous modern Greek poem, and
he talks about like hope as you set out for Ithaca,
so you're sort of setting out for coming back home
(38:45):
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 like
dragonians and so on. So I like that sort of aspect,
and I think I probably sort of see myself in
Mold as well. I suppose journalist Nicholas ni ArkOS. This
(39:07):
episode was produced by Kathleen Russo, Carrie Donohue, Maureen Hoban,
and Zach McNeice. 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 My Heart 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 multi lingual.
(00:22):
His name is Nicholas ni ArkOS, and if only he
could put down his computer long enough to play the part.
Ni ArkOS 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 Niarchos, founded
the international shipping company ni ArkOS Limited. I first came
(00:45):
across ni ArkOS in The New Yorker magazine. His recent
piece Buried Dreams covers the exploitation of workers in the
cobalt mines in Central Africa. In his reporting, ni ArkOS
exposed the danger of us and exploitative conditions for the
workers in Congolese cobalt minds, many of whom are children,
(01:06):
as well as those that's down to profit handsomely off
the minds. In addition to being a reporter at large
at the New Yorker, New York coss work has appeared
in Time, the New York Times, and the Nation. I
think that all the places that I try and work
for require a sort of serious journalistic engagement. And that's
(01:27):
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 for
for many years. I think that's a very engaging thing
to deal with. I like working directly with the fact checkers.
I liked being a fact checker, learning a great deal
about a subject, you know, for a couple of weeks,
and then and then sort of moving on. And actually
(01:48):
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 hundreds of
descience kind of thing. When you when you factor you
did it for how long? I did for five years? Actually,
well almost four years and eleven months. Did they confine
you to fact checking in a certain realm or did
(02:09):
you fact check a lot of different things? 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 I would be sort of fact you were
the go to fact checker sometimes, Yeah, when you when
you would do the fact checking or I mean were
there once you enjoyed more like ones that were like
deep and intense and scientific or culture whatever, and did
(02:31):
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. 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 that was kind of so well,
I don't know, sort of more you know, kind of
input and sort of back and forth and lawyers and whatever.
(02:52):
Then most other pieces, you know, sometimes it would do
pieces on Iraq and Afghanistan and so on, and they
were quite less less lay in a stated how Darfy
or Harvey love them exactly exactly blash, But no, I
loved working with I mean the writers. They're a great
Patrick Keith, Sarah Stillman, Rachel I mean this this kind
(03:13):
of made Rebecca Mede. Rebecca was actually a sort of
wonderful early person 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 Dultri caban as people, and
it was just it was sort of hilarious because sometimes
(03:35):
you know, those 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 the marketing for them. Yeah,
(03:57):
exactly a degree. Um well, I mean, I'm obviously in
every 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 in different articles.
There might be a profile, there might be you know,
there's obviously the shouts and murmurs and talk of the
town and so. But of the body of the pieces
that are not criticism or art or what have you,
(04:18):
there seems to be a limit, I would imagine of
the number of pieces that are this expansive, because it
must be expensive. Correct. You know, I started this piece
reporting it for as a book, and the first it
started as a as a sort of book reporting and
then and then kind of developed into New Yorker reporting.
So actually I funded some of it from my own money,
and then I used some of the New Yorker what
(04:39):
the New Yorker paid me to to sort of continue
the reporting. But actually, you know, this was a sort
of budget less piece at the beginning. You first became
aware of this when and how I first became aware
of this issue around cobalt mining because of somebody called
Dan Gutler. He is a mining billionaire who has sort
of made his wealth in the DRC, and he actually
(05:01):
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 the congo's
entire diamond export and then various sort of human rights
groups groups are like, wait, well, what's happening here. He
was very close to the ruling family and so he
(05:21):
was kind of booted off that and Congo said, look, listen,
look we've dealt with this problem. And 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
and sort of human rights watching various other institutions, basically
he was selling them on for the ruling family to
finance their elections. So he had basically flipped the minds
(05:43):
and he became aware of him. How I became aware
of him. I have a very good friend of mine
who works in mining, and I was sort of casting
around for stories related to Africa, related to corruption and
so on, and he said, well, listen, I mean look,
no Risco exactly. And also actually Patrick Keith, who has
been a great sort of inspiration to me and I
(06:05):
worked with actually at the New Yorker, and you had
Alex Gibney on the show and he you know, they
collaborated on the opioid story acted to Patrick on the
street the other day with his family down in the village,
and I just said to myself, my god, I thought
they documented withal. So he'd done a piece on Bennie
stein Metz, who was a Israeli mining billionaire. I think
(06:27):
he's he's currently been arrested or he's on trial in Switzerland,
and he had basically taken control of an iron are
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, list and you should also follow the story.
It's a great idea. I've always wanted to do Gartler.
(06:47):
And then I arrived in Congo and I realized that
the Gartler 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 minor, an artisanal cobalt minor have
to be preciser in the southern DRC. Now I read
(07:08):
the article and you become suspicious. So you become enlightened,
if you will, to the idea that huge swaths of
this continent are being exploited for these kinds of minerals,
and and and if I may say so, you'll let
you speak to this, not just the greatest hits like
petroleum based things, but these cobalts for lithium for modern technology, chips,
(07:29):
photovoltaic whatever they may be used for batteries, mostly correct
the lithium battery. It was it safe to say, you
talk about Guinea, you talk about d r C. 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. Well, it depends where.
Obviously some places are better regulated than others. Who's doing
a good job of regulating if you can say, I think,
(07:51):
for example, Zambia has had a better track record, although
now the sort of influx of Chinese wealth into Zambia
has sort of up ended some of that. And what
if he was seeking their copper as well. So it's
actually on the border with d r C. When I
was reporting some of this stuff, I actually flew to
Zambia to meet sort of renegade Congolese politician before he
was traveling back into the DRC. So yeah, no, it's
(08:12):
known as the Copper Belt, and it's it's a sort
of large the scene between the two countries exactly exactly.
And the other big one is coldtan 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 war lords in the northeast
of the DRC. And coltan is used in capacitors, which
(08:33):
are sort of key for computers and batteries. That's also
been a big issue and people confuse that with cobalt,
and actually what's happening there is is slightly different from cobalt,
which is a kind of more of a mechanized, sort
of legitimized a type of trade. Well, the thing that
also struck me in terms of any story like this
with there's danger described to me what you had to
(08:56):
do in advanced security wise, you don't just land at
the airport and say in an uber and say take
me to you know, Cobal town. There must have been
a lot of preparatory steps you took and security steps took.
Give I'm assuming, and then talk about when you first
got there for the first time. What went on? Okay,
so yeah, the security steps. I mean, I've traveled to
quite a lot at this point of countries which sort
(09:16):
of have different complicated security profiles, At places like Yamen,
Western Sahara, in fact, this southern part of the d
r C. You know, there is the threat always of
randomized violence, but I, you know, had looked into it.
I've spoken to a couple of people who had been there.
I've spoken to a couple of journalists, and I don't
(09:36):
think there was a kind of threatening or kind of
looming threat. 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'll be drunk, and you know, then you get
a little bit nervous, and then we were sort of
held up in broad daylight. So I traveled with the
(09:57):
local journalist called Jeff Kazadi, who's a who's a wonderful
one a guy, and he's he's he was a great resource.
He worked as a translator. He was incredibly sort of
resourceful as well on on the ground, and he sort
of knew quite a few of the operators, and he
had worked with I believe CNN before and some other
journalists who had been down to do stories like this
(10:17):
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 they were interested in. So
I contacted Jeff. I also contacted another journalist, ben Nyemba,
who who's based out of there, and he was interested
(10:39):
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 and you're
fairly safe along that road. So when I first arrived
in the South, I've been in Conshassa for a bit
and in many ways the South is much less hectic
(11:00):
lincl Chassa 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,
but afterwards everywhere, which is everywhere exactly. And then I
(11:20):
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 mines, some
of the work that some of the useful work done there. Yeah,
(11:41):
and those are sort of like off the record chats usually,
but it helps you get get such a good sort
of context around this up. You know what else was
very useful useful is that I visited a 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
(12:03):
the sort of local potents and so on. It was
a sort of eye opening experience 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 demands so on. And the rest
(12:25):
is industrial, which has done much in the way of
large mining firms anywhere else in the world. And do
the industrials want to put the artisanals out of work?
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 with many of the artismal minds,
I would say some are led by cooperatives, and those
(12:49):
co operatives are sort of better about safety than other
sort of non coatrial co operative managed artisanal minds. However,
the big problem is that there's just been a huge
flux of people into that region. It's a gold rush.
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
(13:10):
Mbuji 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
mining experience and 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
(13:34):
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 the schedule basically works
on you know, whenever it's completely full, whenever they can
sort of get the engine running. And so with that,
you know, people come. And then the industrial mines are
sort of run by very few people, so they don't
have the capacity to observe resolve that labor force exactly.
(13:55):
They don't they can't hire. So yeah, I think they
arrived to participate in artisanal mining. Exactly. 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 it's some people say that
(14:16):
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, I just so you went the
one on the one trip for two months. 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
two months. So when you arrive and you are in
(14:39):
the more decent hotel with people who seem to be
related to the whole enterprise, and you can church out
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 at
full throttle. You kind of work your way towards that is,
did you take a few days before you get into
the into the pits so to speak? Depends actually on
(15:00):
the different trips. On my second trip, I went straight
to the artisman mining because I spent a lot of time,
you know, talking with Seth Effricans about, you know, the
benefits of copper mining for the area. So you know,
I had all that material and I wanted to really
focus on the the artisanal miners, who were people that
sounded like they had not the right idea, but maybe
the better ideas about how this should be handled, what
(15:21):
should happen there for the greater good of everybody. So
there's a Catholic charity called Good Shepherd, called Ways, 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
(15:41):
understand this as like a as a cycle of which
corruption is only a part. There's also just the basic
fact of poverty and 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 cent of Congo's food is imported, so
(16:02):
there's this kind of from other areas, from from Zambia,
from from other areas of the region. So there's this
kind and and import taxes are huge, and people are
making money 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
(16:25):
invested in this. I think that's actually something which would
be 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 u N doesn't have a
permanent presence, I don't think in con ways. Actually, a
lot of what they do in Congo is to do
with rebels in the north, and then they assisted with
(16:46):
war crimes tribunals in a city which was not too
far away. 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, they could that
they could, Yeah, they could. They could be a UN
office that focuses on this, but it doesn't seem to
be a main priority because they're focused on, you know something,
(17:07):
what what year did you go there? I went and
right before the right before? How convenient for you? Wonderful?
And what is the national government? To the extent you
could you could ascertain when you're there, what's their position
of what's going on there? 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
(17:28):
up the minds and then they used you know, these
kind of mind clean up activities in order to basically
sees more parts of the minds for themselves and you know,
kind of co opt local co operatives and so on.
And I document that in 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
(17:49):
actually happening in terms of like who's getting pieces of
the pie, But the fact is that it still continues. Actually,
I was speaking to a friend of mine who's a photographer,
Hugh can Sell a Cunningham who's done great, great work
and in the DRC. He was there last weekend and
he saw basically exactly the same condition. So it's not improving.
But I'm assuming for people who don't understand the way
(18:11):
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 gonna make a lot
of money. I'm assuming, just like the drug trade and
other parts of the world and South America for example,
they don't want it to go away. They can't make
a go away Beau. There'll be just so much illegal
activity and violence and bloodshed. Do they sit there and
(18:33):
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. Yeah, I mean,
I think I can make it go away. Yeah, I think.
Sometimes I'll say that, and sometimes they say, well, artismal
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
(18:56):
with this problem. And 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 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 Gutler who's now in the U S. Actions.
There's actually Trump d sanctioned him for a bit who
(19:19):
knows why, and then and then he got re sanctioned.
And basically you have a system that relies on this
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
(19:42):
it's not and forgive me a big Western companies has
not entirely correct a lot of Chinese companies. Actually, what
are the Chinese doing there? And how long have them in? Obviously, well,
when I think of China, I think of a place
that's obviously a vast a region of land and very
geologically and topographically and media at atically. What have you here?
I mean, it's a China sit enormous. They don't have
(20:03):
those resources in their own territory. So something like seventy
of the world's cobalt is actually in DRC. It's like
three point four million tons, which a huge, huge amount
of is that, And you know there are nickel mines
in Indonesia which also produced a cobalt as a byproduct.
And it's interesting if you look, one of China's biggest
battery manufacturers just bought one of the biggest nickel mines
(20:24):
in Indonesia. So they're really kind of making this resource
grab and they've understood how I think Ivan Glazenberg, who's
the head of Glencore, one of the big was the
head of Glencore, said this summer China Inc. Has realized
how important cobalt is and and they're they're kind of
starting to buy everything up. And where do Western manufacturers,
including the U S. Where do they get their cobalt from?
(20:45):
From the Chinese? From the Chinese, they're not buying their own, No,
they're not. They're not trying to develop that resource for themselves. Yeah,
BMW is 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 in Morocco, but that's
where too small to supply the entire world. Journalist Nicolas
(21:06):
ni Arcos. 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.
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
(21:28):
band having a set list. If you do everything, it's
all sixteenth notes from mentioning. So you got a divido
or will you sound like the Ramones? Although I've heard
of worse things. So you want some variation in tone, invoice,
and that's your responsibility, you feel, I feel all of
it's my responsibility. Here more of my conversation with David
(21:51):
Remnick in our archives that Here's the Thing dot org
after the break, Nicholas ni Archos and I talked about
his background and the big story he nearly broke in
high school. I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to
(22:16):
Here's the Thing. Nicholas ni Arcos, who could be living
a life of privilege instead can be found in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo reporting on human rights violations.
Ni Arcos grew up in London and came to the
United States to attend Yale. His family helped him develop
his interest in journalism. I grew up in the UK, London.
(22:38):
I was born in hand but we're born here. Your
father's Greek 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 Niarchos. But what was it like in your home
and your family was where you ended up going into charism?
That was likely where everybody very interested in politic exce
(23:00):
and current affairs. And was your dad like rabid about that? Yeah,
my dad's sort of very interesting in current affairs. And
you know, my mom'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
(23:20):
we actually ended up very very close to blowing 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 the financial time.
(23:42):
Suddenly the guy has revealed to be somehow connected with
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 worry. You know, the only reason that
we didn't didn't run it was because the school had
(24:03):
basically said, like, you're not publishing this. So yeah, I
think that was the first time I really like saw
the power of journalism. And it was funny because they
banned that it was hard copying, and 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
(24:25):
it and it was this kind of great Athama at
the bar of journal star, a noble star. 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 St. Stephen's Day
and we were staying at the Shelburne in because it
is the famous hotel. And they said to me, oh,
(24:47):
you've made a mistake now coming this week because everything's closed.
They said, this week everything's closed. Christmas Eve and Send
Stephen's Day, everything's closed, 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 ship, what are
we going to do when we're here? So but you
(25:07):
you know, obviously when I saw your byline, then I
saw your name. You don't have to be my age
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 when you were born here. I 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,
(25:28):
to go to school, and you decided to say, I
decided to stay. Why do you want to live here
and not from London? And the opposite, I want to
live in London and leave New York as soon as
I love London, I love New Yordon. You do, listen,
I feel like London. There's a 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 is sort of shut down and it's easier for
(25:50):
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 it's like a yeah, and it's
a lot of you know, like heritaging and like I
love these I want to live in a castle. I
watched The Crown and like, oh God, that would work
(26:11):
for me. I could live there. But when you finished
school you decided to stay here. And what were the
first job as you got in journalism? Um, so I
worked at the Nation. Described that experience. It was a
factory as an old friend of mine Katrina Katrina as well,
when when you talk about budgets, so the so the
Nation comes out, we were saying, that looks like a
college newspaper. Yeah, and that very very less expensive paper.
(26:31):
And so for the obviously they have their budgetary considerations,
but they're irreplaceable in terms of the reporting. Did you
enjoy that experience. It was a great experience. I worked
directly with Katrina as her fact checker and with her
late husband, Stephen Kern. And it was the time of
the Syrian chemical weapons and Obama's redline and so on,
and they were you know, I was called up on
(26:52):
a Sunday evening. I think this is one of my
first weeks there is caught up on a Sunday evening
and they were like, okay, you've got to be in
touch with the pc W, you know, four o'clock tomorrow
morning kind of thing. It was a fantastic experience. And
also the nation treats its interns 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
(27:13):
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 a lead that I had gotten at journalism
school about this lawyer who had been wiretapped called Robert
Gottlieb and he was representing a guy called Addis mc
dungeon in and their conversations had been wiretapped by the FBI,
(27:34):
and that story hadn't been reported. So I sort of
reported that that out a little bit and then sort
of came to them and said list and I've been
working on this in my spare time, and they said
it sort of took a chance and published. Me. Looking
back on it, I mean, that's that's quite a sort
of bulls sort of risk taking. But I really appreciate
that because that was my first sort of big investigative
type magazine story. When you worked for the Guardian, did
(27:55):
you go back to the UK? 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,
Like right when I graduated college. What period of time
did you work with the Huffington Post. So I started
writing with the Afternoon Post in college and then I
kind of wrote for them for a year two ofterwards,
you know, for me finding sources, you know, sometimes I
(28:19):
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 ark 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
John the Anderson, which I think which when I as
(28:40):
I was reading, I think I read this article when
when it first came out. Now, that article about South
America and I'd read other articles and books about the
work of the Nie 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 no shortage of stories for you to cover. I
(29:02):
mean you must be constantly having to make tough decisions
as to which ones you because when they come to you,
they don't sign, they ask you if you want to
do it? Correct, No, no, no, I was as a
freelance ipe pitch to place. Actually you pitched, okay, so
you you pitched to Remnick and his staff that you
want to do the piece based on your beginnings of
your book. But I would imagine again with the corner
(29:23):
copia of such stories that are out there, you must
be constantly wondering which one you want to do. Are
there are the many ideas you have for this kind
of thing? Absolutely, yeah, there there there are many ideas.
Part of it is also sort of editorial interest. I
was reading John Didion on Al Salvador last night, and
she was talking about when She Went, which I think
is two, and she talked about how it was a
(29:44):
period in which it was like phil and Hold and
so you know you'd value your story and then it
would be held by editors because you know, there wasn't
a huge amount of interest in Al Salvador. I've actually
seen that quite a lot with Yamen funny enough, which
is a conflict that's been going on since 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
(30:05):
onto editors radar. And there's a story that I want
to do about these complicated co operations between US forces
in Africa and local 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 like get rolling and to get sourced up.
So I'm trying to sort of bind more sources on that.
(30:27):
So if there any listeners, please get in touch. So
everywhere you go around the world, Africa, South America, whatever,
you see this exploitation for resources and from 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 it. Like
we know what happened in in Equator. Just it's tragic.
It's tragic. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's there's
(30:50):
so much emphasis on sort of labor rights here. And
I listened to your show with Lumina Gonzalez and and
she know, she was talking about how, you know, people
getting the wave raging 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 all these issues and
(31:10):
and it's become this is a set of rules for us,
or a set of rules, Yeah, exactly, and that's kind
of become the sort of wages of globalization. Journalist Nicolas
ni Arcos. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to
subscribe to Here's the Thing on the I Heart Radio app,
Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
(31:33):
Nicholas ni Arcos talks about some of the more challenging
aspects of his reporting in The Congo by Malic Baldwin,
(31:55):
and this is Here's the Thing Nicolas ni Arcos New
Yorker article or Buried Dreams exposed the way Cargolese cobalt
miners are exploited. In his reporting for the piece, he
witnessed many gut wrenching scenes. Yeah, I think the toughest
things that I saw were around the kids. You know
that you see a lot of kids with the former teas,
(32:16):
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, Katie nud
Jim Badden, alerted me to the paternal exposure to some
of these materials is actually associated very heavily with birthday effects.
So that was very sad talking to parents, to wives
(32:37):
of people who had been killed in these landslides at mines.
And then obviously, you know, going to a school for
sort of kids who had been not actually run by
good shepherd, so kids who had been artisanal miners. And
then just like chatting with this kid Zicki, who's in
the piece as well. I mean he was working in
(32:57):
mind since he was three basically, and 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 thousand, two
hundred dollars and everybody there knows that it's going into batteries.
Something like fifty of the cobalt mine there just goes
into letting my own batteries. And I said to him, listen, like,
how do you feel about this? And he was just like,
(33:19):
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.
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 to read
the time of his whole entire media died. What's your
(33:41):
media died? When you're up in the morning, I would
say the Times as well. I like listening also to
the BBC Today program. That's such a good program, and
it's just very good to keep up with news from
the UK as well. No TV news, No, I don't
have a TV and I'm not one of those people,
you know. Actually, while I was in Africa, I really
you know, reporting actually in the Sahara and so on,
(34:03):
like most of the places you get France, fanc, France
twenty four, you know, everywhere, everywhere ago and I kind
of when I'm in Africa, I watched a lot of
France twenty four and r F which is Ra franc
at n and that's great as well. 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
(34:26):
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 jeanne Frique,
which is a sort of I think it's France based,
where they cover lots of Africa, especially French speaking Africa,
in depth, and again often with a kind of French
(34:46):
twist or French foreign policy twist. What's the status of
the book at the moment. I'm in the middle of
writing it, reporting it, traveling. Yeah, exactly, when you come out.
I hope to work on it all of next year
and then the next year basically because you're doing other things,
because I'm doing other things and I'm also just doing
a lot of reporting on this as well. What's a
(35:07):
story you wouldn't tell what's a story that that people
suggested to you and your thought that's not from me?
If if you have, you've been asked to do profiles
of movie stars and things like that to get a
paycheck into work, and you that didn't interest you. What
don't you want to do? I think sort of gossip
and sort of crying into people's personal lives. I think
probably things that you also probably wouldn't like, so you
(35:28):
didn't know the half of it. Yeah. Now I'm not
saying this to be kind. And when 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. I'd love to do
documentary film and filmmaking. Um. Actually, when I graduated from Columbia,
I went and made a mini doc about Roma gypsy
trumpet players in Serbia and Serbian nationals and that was
(35:52):
really a really, really fun experience. But you know, writing
has always been my first love. 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 there this exploitation. We have a set
of rules here in this country for our own and
there's things that we would never allowed. We'd be screaming
from the mountaintops if we had this radioactive situation and
(36:15):
children being contamn we and we have things like that
in this country now. But 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 loved
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
(36:36):
shores of New Jersey years ago, it was on the
front page of People Went insane. They're like the beaches
of New Jersey and all these families go there and
all this contamnity. I mean, people went nuts. And of
course writing books is is important, but that medium of
film is another layer that you should really really consider.
You know, I've written about aunt, I've written a boy.
I was a restaurant review while I was a fat
(36:58):
checker in the New Yorker. So I've did you review
restaurants for the Yoka in the city. How old you
do that two years. It was great and I did
Buzz as well. It was fun because you know at
the time, you know they would give you a couple
of hundred bucks to get to restaurants. And I did
Del Posto with Frank Bruney. Okay, we went to one
of his sittings and Marine doubts that would you like
to come with Frank and I and a fourth person.
(37:20):
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 do the order
because he must eat every item on the menu. He
goes back four and five times and baba ba and
and he he took me through the whole reality of
Frank's life. So what was it like, were you going
(37:42):
four and five times to a restaurant or no, no, no,
you go two times to the restaurant. Did they eventually
catch on who you were? No? Not ready, but one
of the best experienced experiences doing that. I went to
SMILEI Restaurant in Harlem, and then I came back after
the review. I live up in Harlem, so it kind
of was trying to rap Harlem restaurants. And I came
back after the review and there were like lines around
(38:02):
the block. It was great. It's really fun and it's
a wonderful place. I stand by my review. So that
was a nice moment. Do you identify as Greek, Irish, British, American,
a journalist or all of the above? All of the above,
But I I think that my Greek roots are very
very important to me, and I feel very very strongly that,
(38:23):
you know, Greece is a troubled place but also somewhere
where one can do a lot of good. I like
the spirit of Greeks and Greeks abroad and this kind
of journeying spirit. There's a poem by corsadovaf Is called Ithaca,
which is probably the most famous modern Greek poem, and
he talks about like hope as you set out for Ithaca,
so you're sort of setting out for coming back home
(38:45):
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 like
dragonians and so on. So I like that sort of aspect,
and I think I probably sort of see myself in
Mold as well. I suppose journalist Nicholas ni ArkOS. This
(39:07):
episode was produced by Kathleen Russo, Carrie Donohue, Maureen Hoban,
and Zach McNeice. 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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