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Welcome to Tech Stuff. This is the story. This week, I want to talk about batteries, from the supply chain to the geostrategic consequences of growing demand, in everything from drones to data centers to EV and of course, humanoid robots.

My guest today has reported on it all.

Nicholas Niarcos is the author of a new book, The Elements of Power,

a story of war, technology, and the dirtiest supply chain on Earth.

Now, that last phrase caught some people by surprise.

After all, batteries power electric vehicles, reducing the world's dependence on fossil fuels,

a.k.a. cleaner energy. At least in theory.

Here's Nicholas defending the book's title.

This is the Dutch supply chain in earth because in many ways, this is the most brutal of the energy supply chains, because you don't have children going out to dig oil wells.

You don't have pregnant women being forced to scrub oil.

I don't even know what that would look like.

But you just, at a very, very basic human level, down the supply chain, there are some terrible things that are going on.

And of course, oil has these terrible geopolitical effects. Of course it has environmental effects.

But I think that, you know, the point that I'm trying

to submit to make with a dirty supply chain on Earth is that it just has all these other human

rights things. And these are things that we can solve. Again, that's the whole point of the book,

is that we're trying to solve for those things, rather than just accepting them.

And not everyone is just accepting them. There are moves towards different types of battery

technology that demand fewer critical metals, and there are people attempting to clean up the supply

chain. But just in case you're in any doubt about what a big story this is, batteries and the

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