Episode 19: China, Critical Minerals, and the National Security Threat in Your iPhone

We can’t do much without batteries and microchips; they power everything from smartphones to electric cars to defense systems. But the U.S. ceded control of the raw materials required to make them — to its chief rival, China. Is it possible to catch up, especially given America’s more stringent labor and environmental standards?

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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[SOUNDS OF A FILM PROJECTOR WHIRRING, EARLY AUTOMOBILE ENGINES]

Once upon a time, there lived an inventor named Charles F. Kettering. He was in charge of General Motors Research Laboratories in the 1920s, when Americans became obsessed with a shiny device called the automobile. Each year, GM rolled out new models of their Cadillacs, Buicks and Pontiacs.

One day, Kettering was approached by a banker. He’d purchased a new car, but was rattled: he wasn’t sure why he’d bought it. His old car worked just fine. “You, with all your changes and refinements,” he told Kettering, “made me dissatisfied with the old model.” Kettering typed up this exchange and published it in an article titled, “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.”

[UPBEAT MUSIC, BEEPS AND CLICKS OF ELECTRONIC DEVICES]

ARCHIVAL Steve Jobs: Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.

Maybe that dissatisfaction sounds… familiar.

ARCHIVAL Youtuber 1: Now you may ask, do I need the newest iPhone? Is my phone broken? And you know what the answer to all those questions are, no, I don't really need this, but it's Christmas.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Everybody trying to get one of those new iPhones. This is…

ARCHIVAL Youtuber 2: Hopefully they have the color that I want. I want a lavender…

ARCHIVAL Youtuber 3: Look at these obsolete things about to be replaced tomorrow. Gross.

These days it seems like there’s always something new around the corner. And with it, the newfound dissatisfaction that you don’t have a device you didn’t even know existed yesterday.

ARCHIVAL Youtuber 4: I'm going to be unboxing the best tech ever. This is the first look at these incredible products. I'm so excited!

ARCHIVAL Youtuber 5: This new Pixel Tablet plus Google Assistant, are that gateway into a smart home ecosystem…

ARCHIVAL Elon Musk: Welcome to the Cyber Truck unveil. [CROWD CHEERS]

ARCHIVAL Youtuber 6: Today’s the day we are finally taking delivery of the brand new Hummer EV. We’re talking one thousand….

Charles F. Kettering wrote “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied” a century ago. As we’re finally weaning ourselves away from the fossil fuels that powered GM’s cars, I have some unfortunate news: There’s a new price being paid for the endless quest for the next shiny thing.

[MUSIC BECOMES DARKER]

Siddharth Kara: Back in about 2016, I started to hear from some colleagues in the field 'there's something very bad happening in the Congo with cobalt mining. And cobalt is in the batteries, and you should look into this.' This was completely unknown to me. I thought cobalt was a color. I thought it was in Monet paintings and Ming Vases. I didn't know it was a metal, let alone something that was in batteries. I didn't even really know how batteries worked but I resolved to look into it.

That’s Siddharth Kara. His most recent book is Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives.

Siddharth Kara: Peter, when I got there... I had seen a lot of horror. I've been to the dredges of places like Nigeria, Albania, organ trafficking across the U.S.-Mexico border. Brothels brimming with children in South Asia and East Asia. I've seen a lot of horror, but what I saw in the Congo — the scale and severity of human degradation, the utter destruction of the environment there at the bottom of this supply chain that feeds up into companies worth trillions of dollars.

Companies that rely on critical minerals like cobalt to make the devices you depend on every day, and the technologies that’ll power a green future. Those minerals are in smartphones, laptops, electric cars, wind turbines, flat screen TVs, and much more. And the reason cobalt is used in batteries for all those things?

Siddharth Kara: It holds the most amount of charge without catching on fire.

That's a pretty good reason. I like that my iPhone doesn't just randomly burst into flames. But we need these materials for much more than just our phones, as we transition our cars away from gas guzzlers and into electric vehicles, or EVs, and power our factories with solar and wind energy stored in batteries made with critical minerals.

But Kara says there's a high cost. When it comes to cobalt, it’s paid by men, women, and children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in central Africa. Because under a 250 mile swath of that country’s soil, sits the world's greatest cobalt reserves. Kara described the cobalt mines there as apocalyptic.

[AMBIENT ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF THE MINES FEATURING CLINKING, SHOUTING, CROWD NOISES]

Siddharth Kara: Hundreds of thousands of people, including tens of thousands of children, caked in toxic filth, digging the earth with their bare hands, strips of rebar, shovels. Toxic effluence being dumped in the air, earth, and water. The earth has been destroyed, upturned and spoiled. There are no birds in the sky. The largest mining concession in that part of the Congo is the size of London. So you imagine a city-sized swath of countryside just utterly obliterated.

[EERIE MUSIC]

Siddharth Kara: There's this acrid scent across that part of the Congo. It's bitter. I can still smell it. I can taste it. It gets in your mouth and your throat, it burns your eyes. Clanking mallets against rebar, against stone. You hear these shouts, the hammering, the wailing, there could be 10,000 human beings in there crammed together, with some cargo truck driving around the rim of the pit picking up the latest batch of sacks that's been carted out of that pit. And it's, it's just overwhelming, honestly. You wanna scream with your hands on your face and say, this is too much.It's too much… [AMBIENT SOUNDS OF THE MINE FADE]… for anyone to witness, let alone to experience.

Kara says the conditions in the Congo are so bad because the mines are controlled by China, a country with a poor record on human rights and environmental abuses — and unmistakable ambitions to control global access to the raw materials that we need for our technology.

Siddharth Kara: It's an environmental apocalypse, and yet it's at the bottom of the supply chain of the global EV industry, which is meant to support a green transition.

The U.S. has a shorthand for these materials: critical minerals. You probably know many of them by their names, like the nickel in your pocket or the aluminum foil in your kitchen. Cobalt is one of these minerals, and so is lithium. Both are used to make powerful batteries. And semiconductor chips, which are in just about all of our tech today, use gallium and germanium. And another vital subset of these “critical minerals” are the 17 so-called rare earths, which have much less familiar names like neodymium and praseodymium. Cobalt is key to making the batteries that power our technology and rare earths are vital for magnets — extremely powerful magnets that are one of the main components in engines for electric cars.

[SOUND OF A CAR ENGINE, MUSIC DROPS]

I’m a national security expert, not an engineer, and to be honest the exact mechanics of those magnets and their role in electric car engines goes a little over my head. So today, we’re going to talk about something I know a little bit more about: why it matters that China dominates both the mining and refining of the minerals we need to make all those batteries and magnets.

Think about their dominance this way: Imagine you’re running a pizzeria, but your sworn rival has locked down the market on milk, and they also control the processing of that milk into cheese. For now they’re selling you the cheese you need to make your pizza. But what if they threaten to cut off your supply?

The stakes are oh-so-slightly higher when it comes to critical minerals. We need them for the guided missiles & fighter jets that keep us safe. For the smartphones and electrical vehicles that power our economy. And for the green technology that promises to deliver our future. All of that dependence makes China’s dominance of critical minerals a real national security issue for the United States.

[THEME MUSIC STARTS]

So, how did the U.S. allow its global rival to completely take over the market that's fueling our collective tomorrow? How is China's dominance of a mine in the Congo impacting your security? And can one of the solutions in this predicament be found… in California's Mojave Desert? I'm Peter Bergen, welcome to In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

Big tech companies claim to source their raw materials responsibly. Here’s Elon Musk making that very explicit earlier this year about the manufacture of Teslas:

ARCHIVAL Elon Musk: Even for the small amount of cobalt that we do use, we will make sure, six ways to Sunday, that no child labor is being exploited.

But companies like Tesla and Apple have been saying this kind of thing for a long time. This is Apple CEO Tim Cook at a conference all the way back in 2012:

ARCHIVAL Tim Cook: Whether workers are in Europe or in Asia or in the United States, we care about every worker.

When it comes to cobalt, some of its extraction is regulated and done by machine. But as much as 30% is unregulated, mined by hand under deadly conditions. When Kara went to the Congo, he saw with his own eyes that cobalt mined by children is just dumped into the cobalt supply chain through third party buyers. So companies can’t reasonably claim to know that their cobalt wasn’t mined by kids. Chinese owned mines don’t seem to do much to keep children from working in these dangerous conditions. So how did the U.S. let China take over this supply chain in the first place?

Siddharth Kara: For better or worse, they saw the future was going to be a battery driven future. They saw that all the cobalt was in the Congo and they locked it down. So in 2009, before anyone else really saw what was happening, they signed a deal with the Congo. $6 billion in loans and infrastructure projects in exchange for access to cobalt mines. And that opened the door for other Chinese companies to move in. And one after another, they gobbled up the mining concessions, bought new mining concessions. They now control 15 of the 19 major cobalt industrial mining concessions in the Congo. About 70 to 80% of ground production of cobalt ore gets exported primarily to China for commercial grade refining. And then the refined cobalt is used in the manufacture of the batteries.

Chinese companies produced about half of the world's rechargeable batteries last year. So they've vertically integrated that supply chain. They've locked it down, they control it. There's not a single U.S. mining company operating in the Congo. And so it's gonna be a tall order for the U.S. and its allies to play catch up to China right now.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Liza Tobin: It's not acceptable to be almost entirely dependent on a strategic rival for something that is so dependent to so many parts of our economy and our defense establishment.

That's Liza Tobin. Before moving to a think tank, Tobin spent more than a decade in the U.S. government as a China specialist, including on the National Security Council staff as China Director during the Trump and Biden administrations. She first traveled to China as a student and returned again and again. At first, she imagined herself working in a U.S.-China educational exchange program.

Liza Tobin: I'd be one of these Americans that was working with China to develop. And life really took a different turn. And I ended up working in the national security establishment. And the rest is, is history. Kind of the trajectory of China's relationship with the world, and the world discovering that in fact, China is not transforming to be a responsible stakeholder in the liberal order as we hoped back in the early 2000s, and which I myself hoped as a young graduate student. But in fact they have their own goals and their own ambitions.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

When I first contacted Tobin I knew she could help explain China's ambitions and how the country flexes its diplomatic muscles. But I wasn’t sure how much she would know about the niche focus of minerals. It turns out, you can't really be a China specialist worth your salt these days without having a mastery of that subject as well.

Liza Tobin: It goes all the way back almost to the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. So in the 1950s, they were building facilities, they were recognizing the importance of these things. And then, moving along, their strategic attention to this increased in the era of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster: China has ended its isolation and plans to spend $600 billion in the next seven years to buy complete factories and complex equipment overseas.

Liza Tobin: There's that famous quote where Deng says that the Middle East has oil, but China has rare earths.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Liza Tobin: It's the processing of these things that's really strategically important. That’s this very complex system that involves a lot of advanced technology and engineering skill and — incidentally — is very environmentally harmful.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Rare earth processing in China is a messy, dangerous, polluting business. It uses toxic chemicals. The workers have little or no protection.

[FAST-PACED MUSIC PICKS UP]

Liza Tobin: It produces a lot of radioactive waste. This processing is where China leads. Critical minerals and rare earths fit into this broader Chinese technology and economic strategy that I refer to by the term brute force economics.

Brute force economics, a term Tobin defines as the aggressive, evolving, and often opaque web of policies and tactics that Beijing uses to gain advantage for its major national companies and seize a dominant global market share in strategic sectors. In other words, everything they're doing to further their national goals and gain an economic advantage over other countries. That includes,

Liza Tobin: Commercial espionage, so: stealing technology and trade secrets. Restricting market access to strategic sectors in China so that while Chinese companies can sell into our markets, we are blocked or limited in our ability to sell into theirs. It's forced technology transfer, so having to turn over technology and IP in exchange for access to the Chinese market, and then enormous subsidies. And of course many countries, including the U.S., use subsidies for our domestic industry. But in China's case, the scale is orders of magnitude ahead of other countries.

And of course locking down the market on the raw materials we need for today’s technology. China has already demonstrated willingness to flex its muscles and cut off access to critical minerals to its rivals.

ARCHIVALNewscaster: …an incident at sea in 2010.

Liza Tobin: It was a warning shot to Japan and to the rest of the world.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: A Chinese fishing trawler rammed a Japanese Coast Guard ship in a territorial dispute. The Japanese seized the boat’s captain, and two weeks later, China stopped shipping rare earths to Japan.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF JAPANESE COAST GUARD SHOUTING, SIRENS]

Liza Tobin: This was before this idea of weaponization of supply chains or economic warfare, economic coercion. That really wasn't in the zeitgeist in the discussions of D.C. back then, but the conversation started. There was a silver lining in that incident because it signaled to Japan and to the rest of the world that the Chinese Communist Party knows it has this leverage and it is willing to use it, in certain situations. So the silver lining was that since then, Japan has actually done a lot to reduce its dependence on China for rare earths.

But the U.S. has been slower to do the same.

Siddharth Kara: And now the United States and its Western allies have kind of woken up from this stupor to say, wait, what happened?

The simple answer is: the U.S. just sort of… lost interest. From the 1980s onward, new regulations and foreign competition made mining some critical minerals in the United States harder and more expensive. At the same time, the Chinese state was putting tons of money toward mining its own deposits of critical minerals like rare earths.

When the importance of cobalt became clear, as Kara said, China hurried to invest in Congolese mines. One U.S. company actually already had a foothold in the industry in the Congo. Remember that mining concession the size of London? A U.S. company owned that. But when the company ran into financial trouble, they started talking to Chinese buyers about offloading the mine. A U.S. diplomat raised concerns about what the loss of the mine would mean for American interests, but officials were… agnostic. In 2016, the mine was sold to a Chinese company, and that American foothold in the Congo was gone.

Siddharth Kara: We need those metals. We are initiating all of these mandates around transition to electric vehicles. No more gas powered sales by 2030 or 2035. But all those metals are flowing through our primary global adversary. And so there's this scramble to try to secure alternate battery metal supply chains.

The ideas for how we might secure these materials can sound a little wild.

ARCHIVAL Scientist 1: My particular technology is using bacteria to extract rare earth metals and other metals…

ARCHIVAL Metals Company speaker: The process will begin with our collector, designed to pick up nodules from the seafloor with minimal disturbance.

ARCHIVAL Scientist 2: Made the molten salt mixture, ran the electrochemistry, the graph popped perfectly.

ARCHIVAL Phoenix Tailings speaker: … way to actually process and harvest metal from tailings, from waste material in the mining sector.

ARCHIVAL TransAstra speaker: There's enough resources in the asteroids to support a thriving population of a trillion people spread throughout the solar system.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Or there might be a partial solution, right here in the U.S. The United States could revive the rare-earth mining industry that looked like it had a bright future back in the 1950s, when a very promising mine was first put into production.

James Litinsky: I often say that if it were oil, it would be Saudi Arabia. You know, it's an incredible asset.

James Litinsky is the CEO of MP Materials. His company bought a rare earths mine called Mountain Pass in California's Mojave Desert. He picked up the mine after it had gone bankrupt in 2015.

James Litinsky: The predecessor had spent nearly $2 billion building out a state-of-the-art refining facility on the site of Mountain Pass, which is a world class rare earth resource. But the scale of capital assets that are needed to do this economically can be a challenge. And the Chinese had taken over the industry in the prior years. And so there was a perception that the site could not be economic. And when it was in free fall in bankruptcy, no one wanted to take over the site.

The mine had a spotty track record. It had closed in 2002, after a series of toxic waste spills, and a previous attempt at restarting operations bankrupted the company that tried it.. But Litinsky still saw some potential.

After all, this wasn’t just any mine: the purity of the ore at Mountain Pass equals, or even exceeds the deposits that power China’s rare earths empire. But getting the rare earths out of the ground isn’t enough — that’s why Litinsky’s company is building a new facility in Texas.

James Litinsky: That factory will take the refined rare earths from Mountain Pass. So not to get too technical, but we will metalize it, turn it into an alloy, and then turn that alloy into a magnet. And those magnets will go be sold to GM and other great companies. So we'll have a complete domestic solution. There'll be a, you know, an American solution from mine all the way through the magnet.

Making those magnets — the ones that are so critical to electric vehicle production — is incredibly complex, and China dominates that process. MP Materials is attempting to do the same thing — to own the whole process, from mine to magnet — while staying economically competitive, and sticking to much more stringent environmental standards. That California standard of environmental regulation is among the strictest in the world.

James Litinsky: And we're proud of that. We have this dry tailings process, which is more expensive and challenging, but makes for a much friendlier process to the environment.

Tailings are the silty materials left over after the rare earths are extracted. They get wet during the extraction processes, and Chinese mines have mostly just dumped the toxic sludge nearby.Litinsky’s operation dries that residue out for safe storage.

After hearing the sounds that Kara recorded in the Congo, I wanted to ask Litinsky what the Mountain Pass mine sounds like.

[AMBIENT ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF MACHINERY AT THE MOUNTAIN PASS MINE]

James Litinsky: You would hear trucks. You would hear blasts with respect to, you know loosening up the ore to be gathered. As that ore then goes into our mill, you would hear a low running machine sound. If you were standing around our site outside one of these buildings, you probably wouldn’t hear too much.

After hearing the mine in the Congo, which sounded like a chorus of human voices, I was struck that at Mountain Pass there were only the varying buzzes, cracks, and whirs of machines.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF MACHINERY AT THE MOUNTAIN PASS MINE FADE]

I still didn’t feel satisfied with the explanation that the U.S. just twiddled its thumbs as China took over this critical resource. I asked Litinsky if something more could have been done. His answer goes back to the essential differences between the U.S. and China:

James Litinsky: I think it's really hard for a free-market capitalist economy to make a collective strategic decision on behalf of a specific industry in the absence of a crisis. And I think what has happened is the Chinese, again very intelligently made a strategic decision to dominate certain important industries. That's a very hard calculus for a free-market economy to do collectively. I don't necessarily think it's something critical on our government per se that we should have done more 10 or 20 years ago. I do think now though, post COVID, when we've seen what happened with certain health equipment or semiconductors, I think that there has still not been enough of a recognition between our government actors as well as some of our great companies.

There are household name companies that we all look up to and appreciate and they make American industry powerful. But they are, in some cases, beholden to the supply chain in China. And I think it's just a very difficult question for our companies and our country to figure out how we can strategically evolve in light of these supply chain issues. And the challenge is sort of who pays the bill and where, how, and why. It's hard to ask one company to pay the bill if their competitor won't. And so we do need sort of a collective process on this front to think about strategically, how an economy competes in an era like this.

In other words, how do we compete in an era of brute force economics? For Mountain Pass, getting the Biden Administration to financially support the project as an issue of strategic importance in its competition with China, has been a real boost.

ARCHIVAL Joe Biden: We're investing $35 million in MP Materials, currently America's only rare earth mining and processing operation, to help create a fully domestic supply chain for the magnets that power electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, and so much more.

It’s part of a bigger push by the Biden administration to support a green transition.

James Litinsky: That was a $35 million investment from the Department of Defense. We committed to invest $700 million.

Peter Bergen: So what's the advantage of having some U.S. government spending at all, if it's so relatively small?

James Litinsky: I think that the signal value is extremely important. There's a lot of doubt, whether it's government or the private sector as to whether or not we can actually take back some of these supply chains. There needs to be staying power in the supply chain. Because if you don't have it all, you don't have it all.

That’s because, until MP Materials cuts the ribbon on its Texas factory and starts selling finished magnets to GM, they don’t have it all. They’ve had to sell the critical minerals from the Mountain Pass mine to Chinese companies, the ones that can currently make these magnets.

James Litinsky: But I think that that signal value from the government is extraordinarily important so that people understand that the public sector and the private sector are committed to getting some of these supply chains back.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

So what is the U.S. government doing about this? In addition to giving some money to MP Materials, they’ve given millions of dollars to fund studies in North Dakota and West Virginia to see if they can create new, environmentally sensitive rare earths mining operations in the U.S. They’ve also given billions in grants to companies that are trying to bring these supply chains back to U.S. soil.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Mountain Pass offers a way to source these materials domestically. But Mountain Pass only represents around 15 percent of the global market of rare earths production. And the politics of opening new mines in the United States are… a minefield. From protected lands, to the checkered history of pollution from coal mining, even if there are resources to extract lithium or cobalt in the U.S., doing this in a sustainable way will be complex and costly.

So, what about recycling the critical minerals in our old phones and computers and cars to put those materials into our new devices, without resorting to mining new materials? Those solutions are on the way, but since our need for these materials goes up dramatically by the year, recycling existing devices won’t yet cover our needs.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

And China is all too eager to satiate the global appetite for these materials. The Chinese are even doing business with the Taliban to mine lithium in Afghanistan. This partnership promises to further Chinese control of the market for critical minerals, just as it enriches the brutal Taliban regime. It’s hard to see how the marriage of these two forces is anything but a lose-lose for the U.S.

So, if we can’t ensure through domestic mining that our phones are ethically sourced, and recycling the materials we need isn’t yet possible, and we don’t want to depend on China’s good will for the integrity of our supply chain, what can be done? Kara, for one, hopes that exposing the human rights and environmental abuses of the cobalt industry can put pressure on companies to demand and finally create true oversight.

Siddharth Kara: It might catalyze a little bit of attention from the consumer facing tech and EV companies to say, okay, now we need to apply our market power, right? Because, ultimately they're the big consumers of all this cobalt. And state run Chinese mining companies are only making money, selling all this cobalt to the likes of Apple, Tesla, and the rest of them. And if they as a peer group say, ‘We're not gonna buy this stuff until we are satisfied, not just on like a one day flyby audit, but that we're that we're satisfied that we can have teams on the ground ensuring standards are maintained. Otherwise, don't count us as a customer. That would require some courage.

Peter Bergen: I mean this has definitely happened before. The whole fashion industry had to sort of wake up to the fact that the conditions in which some of these clothes were being manufactured in a number of Asian countries was unacceptable. And I think certainly there's been a sea change in the way the fashion industry does business.

Siddharth Kara: Absolutely. It's happened before. It's certainly not the case that all the garment sector conditions in Bangladesh are perfect, but there have been substantial and enduring improvements, and the same across the bottom of the fast fashion supply chain and the big brand supply chains for apparel. They're not perfect, but there have been substantial and enduring improvements once the child labor conditions and the sweatshop conditions were brought to the attention of the world. Because, just like you and I don't wanna plug in Congolese misery, when we plug in our batteries, we don't wanna put on clothes made by young girls who instead of going to school, are having to sew buttons for 50 cents a day, 15 hours a day.

We have to make a stand on what kind of global economic order we stand for. Is it going to be the China model or is it going to be the Western model? Is it going to be a model devoid of concern and preservation of the dignity of the people across the global south?

Kara also says there's something relatively simple that consumers can do: stop upgrading our devices so often.

Siddharth Kara: We've been marketed this idea that we have to upgrade our gadgets every year. Oh, you know, the, the phone has another two megapixels this year and you know, the processor's a little faster, so you've gotta get the new one. You've gotta get the new one. And of course, that just creates more demand for cobalt at the bottom of the chain. And I think maybe we adjust a little bit our consumption habits to think, well, I can get by with my phone for a few more years, or I can get by with my tablet for a few more years so that we're not constantly placing new and growing demand on cobalt supply chains.

Peter Bergen: You dedicate the book to your daughter. Why did you do that?

Siddharth Kara: Oh man, you've asked a hard… that's a harder question than you realize. Um… [KARA PAUSES, SIGHS] All those kids, Peter, that I saw, you know? My daughter was two and a half when I took my first trip to the Congo. And so I was a father for the first time taking an intense research trip. And when I saw those six year olds and seven year olds and five year olds…

[SOMBER MUSIC STARTS]

Siddharth Kara: You know, I'd seen children being degraded, desecrated, and abused. And it hurt. It hurt bad, but I didn't know what parental love felt like until that first trip to the Congo. And then I knew what their parents were suffering watching their kids. And you see the torment on a mother's face and a father's face standing beside their eight year old kid. And realizing their lives are gonna be no better than, than theirs were. They're gonna actually be worse. They'll never go to school. They may not make it to the age of 20 or 30 or whatever it is, that their lives, they're already over. And when I saw that as a father… it just really hit hard. All I could think about was what we do as parents for our children, the sacrifices we make, the hope we have.

Don't we all have some duty to those children too? I mean, it may not be my blood child, but they're still children of this earth, and I'm linked to them. They're in my pocket every day. You know, I tap the keys thanks to them, every day. And so, I dedicated it to my daughter because I, I can imagine it. That if, my daughter were in their condition, and I was that helpless father, how it would just eat me up. So it's, to her, it's all those kids, all of them, they deserve so much better from us.

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If you’re interested in learning more about the issues we discuss in this episode, we recommend Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara, Kevin Rudd’s The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict between the US and Xi Jinping's China, and Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to go Green by Henry Sanderson. All three titles are available on Audible.

And if you enjoyed this episode of In The Room with Peter Bergen, please tell a friend and rate and review our show wherever you listen to podcasts.

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