1315: Nicolas Niarchos | The Dirty Supply Chain Behind "Clean" Energy
The Jordan Harbinger Show
Jordan Harbinger
4.8 • 12.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2026
⏱️ 77 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Clean energy has a dirty secret buried deep in the Congo. The Elements of Power author Nicolas Niarchos is here to pull the supply chain apart link by link.
Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1315
What We Discuss with Nicolas Niarchos:
- "Clean" energy isn't clean — the cobalt in your phone or EV may have been hand-dug in dangerous DRC mine pits by workers living under near-slavery conditions, earning barely enough to scrape by.
- China processes 70–90% of critical battery metals and owns major mines across the DRC and Indonesia, giving it a stranglehold on the global supply chain that dwarfs OPEC's peak leverage over oil.
- Supply chain audits are largely theater — documents have flagged child labor and dangerous conditions at specific mines, yet production never stopped, and conditions often worsened in the years that followed.
- Communities surrounding DRC mines face heavy metal contamination, mine collapses, and the world's highest rates of congenital birth defects — a catastrophic human toll that's invisible at the point of sale.
- You're not powerless: using your devices longer, raising concerns at shareholder meetings, and pushing elected officials to prioritize ethical sourcing are concrete steps that create real, compounding pressure for change.
- And much more...
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. |
| 0:02.7 | The mines are super, super unsafe. |
| 0:04.9 | They collapse, especially during the rainy season, which runs from May to October, in the Southern Democratic Republic of the Congo here. |
| 0:11.6 | There are really situations in which these people are being essentially treated, not just as very low-paid workers, but essentially it's conditions of modern-day slavery. |
| 0:22.1 | People earn so little and are able to basically scrape by, essentially. |
| 0:33.6 | Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, |
| 0:38.2 | secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical |
| 0:41.8 | advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help |
| 0:45.8 | you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety |
| 0:50.6 | of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional scientist, drug trafficker, gold smuggler, or tech luminary. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. Now, these are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, and geopolitics, disinformation, |
| 1:12.3 | China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. |
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| 1:17.3 | Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. |
| 1:22.3 | Today on the show, your phone dies, you plug it in, end a story, right? |
| 1:26.1 | Not quite. |
| 1:26.8 | The charge you're about to get, |
| 1:28.0 | it started in a hole in the ground halfway across the world, dug by somebody who probably |
| 1:31.8 | doesn't even own a phone, definitely isn't getting rich and might not even make it out of the |
| 1:36.4 | hole alive. And somehow, we've just convinced ourselves that the whole system is clean. |
| 1:41.0 | Today, we're tearing apart the fantasy of clean energy following the battery supply chain |
| 1:45.2 | from dirt to device and asking a question that gets real uncomfortable real fast. Are we actually |
| 1:50.7 | solving anything? Are we just upgrading the packaging and outsourcing the damage someplace else? |
... |
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