Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner, and we are slipping into your feed with this bonus episode.

It is an update of an episode we made last year about commodity traders, and it suddenly feels even more relevant now.

The war in Iran has already scrambled the global oil markets.

In January, after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro,

President Trump immediately moved to take control of the Venezuelan oil economy. Among the industry

leaders he invited to the White House were senior executives from two major commodity traders,

Vital and Traficiora. And it's not just oil. American soybeans and rare earth metals

have become bargaining chips in the ongoing trade war with China. And behind just about every

headline is a commodity trade. That's what this episode is about. We have updated facts and

figures when necessary. As always, thanks for listening.

For the past couple of years, I've been letting a very good book collect dust on my shelf.

A friend had told me about the book, and I did read the introduction, a wild introduction, about the CEO of a British company who flies his private jet

into the middle of the Libyan Civil War to make an oil deal with the rebel army,

an army which happened to have the covert support of the governments of Britain, Qatar,

and the U.S. So, yeah, I probably should have kept reading, but I had 30 other

books I wanted to take a look at. A dirty little secret about me, there are a lot of books

where I read only the introduction or a couple chapters, even books I like. This may strike

some people as a wasteful practice, but I recommend it. Anyway, as fascinating as I found that introduction about the oil trader in Libya,

the book didn't seem relevant at that moment, but last year, as the U.S. was signing a mineral deal with Ukraine,

and Donald Trump was expressing his appetite for the natural resources in

Greenland, in Canada, even at the bottom of the ocean. And, of course, in the middle of an on-again,

off-again trade war with China, the book started to seem very relevant. It's called The World

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