From the Archives: Nicolas Niarchos Exposes the Cobalt Gold Rush

(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. Originally aired December 14, 2021 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:38Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart 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 multilingual. His name is Nicholas Niarchos. And if only he could put down his computer long enough to play the part. Niarchos 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 Niarchos Limited.

• 2:21Alec Baldwin?

  I first came across Niarchos 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, Niarchos exposed the dangerous and exploitative conditions for the workers in Congolese cobalt mines, many of whom are children, as well as those that stand to profit handsomely off the mines. In addition to being a reporter at large at The New Yorker, Niarchos's work has appeared in Time, The New York Times, and The Nation.

• 2:55Speaker 05

  I think that all the places that I try and work for require a sort of serious journalistic engagement, and that's 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 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 for a couple of weeks and then sort of moving on. And actually, I found now as a reporter, it actually enhances my reporting. It leads me down new alleys when I'm trying to verify things to the kind of hundredth percent kind of thing.

• 3:35Alec Baldwin?

  When you fact-checked, you did it for how long?

• 3:37Speaker 05

  I did it for five years, actually. Well, almost five years, four years and 11 months or something like that.

• 3:42Alec Baldwin?

  Did they confine you to fact-checking in a certain realm, or did you fact-check a lot of different things?

• 3:47Speaker 05

  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 be sort of shuffled towards...

• 3:56Alec Baldwin?

  You were the go-to fact-checker?

• 3:57Speaker 05

  Sometimes, yeah.

• 3:58Alec Baldwin?

  And when you would do the fact-checking, I mean, were there ones you enjoyed more? Like ones that were deep and intense and scientific or cultural, whatever? And 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?

• 4:14Speaker 05

  I enjoyed all of it. You know, listen, I worked on a piece on TMZ by Nick Schmittle, which was a investigative piece, and that was a kind of crazy experience. It was kind of more...

• 4:23Alec Baldwin?

  How so?

• 4:24Speaker 05

  Well, I don't know, sort of more... You know, kind of input and sort of back and forth and lawyers and whatever than most other pieces, you know, sometimes it would do pieces on Iraq and Afghanistan and so on, and they would require less, less of lawyer.

• 4:36Alec Baldwin?

  Iraq, Afghanistan, Hadafi or Harvey Levin?

• 4:38Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly.

• 4:40Alec Baldwin?

  Your backlash.

• 4:42Speaker 05

  But no, I loved working with, I mean, the writers there are great, Patrick Keefe, Sarah Stillman, Rachel Labee, I mean, these, this kind of like.

• 4:50Alec Baldwin?

  Rebecca Mead.

• 4:50Speaker 05

  Rebecca Mead, Rebecca was actually a sort of wonderful early person who I 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 Dolce and Gabbana and we just had like a lot of back and forth with Dolce and Gabbana's people and it was just, it was sort of hilarious because sometimes, 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, they realize that that's going to stick with the.

• 5:31Alec Baldwin?

  This is marketing for them.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:34Alec Baldwin?

  To a degree. Well, I mean, I'm obviously an avid reader of The New Yorker. The thing I tend to see when I, when I was thinking about your article and budgets and cost and things like that is that, you know, the magazine has obviously a menu of 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, there seems to be a limit, I would imagine, of the number of pieces that are this expansive, because it must be expansive, correct?

• 6:00Speaker 05

  You know, I started this piece reporting it for, as a book and then.

• 6:04Alec Baldwin?

  So it was a book first?

• 6:05Speaker 05

  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 the New Yorker paid me to, to, to sort of continue the reporting. But actually, you know, this was a sort of budgetless piece at the beginning.

• 6:22Alec Baldwin?

  You first became aware of this when and how?

• 6:24Speaker 05

  I first became aware of this issue around cobalt mining because of somebody called Dan Gertler. He is a mining billionaire who has sort of made his. Wealth in the DRC and he actually made a lot of money by.

• 6:39Alec Baldwin?

  He's from where originally?

• 6:40Speaker 05

  He's from Israel originally. He came to DRC. It's a crazy story. He 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 or groups were like, wait, what's happening here? He was very close to the ruling family. And so he was kind of booted off that and Congo said, listen, look, we dealt with this problem. 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 Watch and various other institutions. Basically, he was selling them on for the ruling family to finance their elections. So he'd basically flipped the minds.

• 7:20Alec Baldwin?

  And you became aware of him how?

• 7:22Speaker 05

  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, you know, related to Africa, related to corruption and so on. And he said, well, listen, I mean, look no further than this guy. Yeah, exactly. And also actually Patrick Keefe, who's been a great sort of inspiration to me and who I worked with actually at the New Yorker. And you had Alex Gibney on the show and you know, they collaborated on the opioid story.

• 7:49Alec Baldwin?

  I ran into Patrick on the street the other day, by the way.

• 7:51Speaker 05

  Oh, really? Okay.

• 7:52Alec Baldwin?

  With his family down in the village and I just said to myself, my God, I thought the documentary was sensational, sensational.

• 7:58Speaker 05

  So he'd done a piece on Benny Steinmetz, who was an Israeli mining billionaire. I think he's currently been arrested or he's on trial in Switzerland. And he had basically taken control of an iron ore mine called Simandu, 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, listen, you should also follow this story. It's a great idea. I've always wanted to do Gattler. And then I arrived in Congo and I realized that the Gattler story was very interesting, but it wasn't the whole story. And actually. What became more interesting to me is the lives of these people, just the hellish existence of a cobalt miner, an artisanal cobalt miner, I have to be precise here, in the southern DRC.

• 8:43Alec Baldwin?

  Now, I read the article and you become suspicious or you become enlightened, if you will, to the idea that huge swaths of this continent are being exploited for these kinds of minerals. And if I may say so, I'll let you speak to this, not just the greatest hits like petroleum based things, but these cobalt for lithium for modern technology, chips, photovoltaic, whatever they may be used for, batteries mostly, correct, the lithium batteries. So was it safe to say you talk about Guinea, you talk about DRC, is this happening all over Africa where these minerals exist, I mean, American, Israeli, it doesn't matter, pirates are in there trying to grab as much of it as they can?

• 9:21Speaker 05

  Well, it depends where, obviously, some places are better regulated than others.

• 9:25Alec Baldwin?

  Who's doing a good job of regulating, if you can say?

• 9:27Speaker 05

  I think, for example, Zambia has had a better track record, although now the sort of influx of Chinese wealth into Zambia has sort of upended some of that.

• 9:36Alec Baldwin?

  And what are people seeking there?

• 9:37Speaker 05

  Copper as well, so it's actually on the border with DRC. When I was reporting some of this stuff, I actually flew to Zambia to meet a sort of renegade Congolese politician before he was traveling back into the DRC. So, yeah, no, it's known as the copper belt and it's a sort of large part of that.

• 9:52Alec Baldwin?

  The seam between the two countries.

• 9:53Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. And the other big one is Coltan, 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 warlords in the northeast of the DRC. And Coltan is used in capacitors, which 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 slightly different from cobalt, which is a kind of more of a mechanized, sort of legitimized type of trade.

• 10:25Alec Baldwin?

  Well, the thing that also struck me in terms of any store like this where there's danger, describe to me what you had to do in advance, security wise, you don't just land at the airport and say, get in an Uber and say, take me to, you know, Cobalt Town. There must have been a lot of preparatory steps you took and security steps you took, I'm assuming, and then talk about when you first got there for the first time, what went on?

• 10:47Speaker 05

  Okay, so, yeah, the security steps, I mean... I've travelled to quite a lot at this point of countries which sort of have different complicated security profiles, places like Yemen, Western Sahara. In fact, this southern part of the DRC, you know, there is the threat always of randomised violence, but I, you know, had looked into it, I'd spoken to a couple of people who'd been there, I'd spoken to a couple of journalists, and I don't think there was a kind of threatening or kind of looming threat. You weren't afraid? I wasn't particularly afraid. You know, sometimes travelling on the road at night, you'd be stopped at roadblocks and there would be sort of policemen with guns and they'd be drunk and, you know, then you get a little bit nervous. It seemed a little volatile.

• 11:30Speaker 05

  And then we were sort of held up in broad daylight. So I travelled with a local journalist called Jeff Kazadi, who's a wonderful, wonderful guy, and he was a great resource. He worked as a translator. He was incredibly sort of resourceful as well on the ground. And he sort of knew quite a few of the operators and he'd worked with, I believe, CNN before and some other journalists who had been down to do stories like this 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 Niamba, who's based out

• 12:14Speaker 05

  of there, and he was interested 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 travelling in the daytime, you're fairly safe along that road. So when I first arrived in the south, I'd been in Kinshasa for a bit, and in many ways, the south is much less hectic than Kinshasa. 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- That's everywhere. Which is everywhere. Exactly. And then I stayed the next two or-

• 12:59Speaker 05

  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. Is some of the work, is some of the useful work done there? Yeah, and those are sort of like off the record chats usually, but it helps you get such a good sort of context around this stuff. You know what else was very 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 the sort of local potentates and so on.

• 13:42Speaker 05

  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 10 and 30% of Congo's production every year. It really fluctuates depending on, you know, supply, demand, so on. And the rest is industrial, which is done much in the way of large mining firms anywhere else in the world. And. 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 mines, which with many of the artisanal mines, I would say.

• 14:22Speaker 05

  Some are led by cooperatives and those cooperatives are sort of better about safety than other sort of non cooperative managed artisanal mines. However, the big problem is that there's just been a huge influx of people into that region. Like 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 Mabujimai, 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 to pieces. So a lot of people who had some mining experience now sort of getting on that train, which goes through the sort of jungles and wilds of central Congo and comes to Lumumbashi.

• 15:09Speaker 05

  And sort of people 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 schedule basically works on, you know, whenever it's completely full or 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 absorb that labor force. Exactly. They don't, they can't hire. So, yeah, I think that-

• 15:35Alec Baldwin?

  You arrive to participate in artisanal mining.

• 15:38Speaker 05

  Exactly. You arrive 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 there have been people who, who made lots and lots of money, but I actually found that quite difficult to believe after spending two months there. I just, I-

• 16:01Alec Baldwin?

  So you went the one, on the one trip for two months?

• 16:04Speaker 05

  So I went on one trip for a month, then I went on another trip for 10 days and then I was there for about almost a month the next time. So yeah, two months.

• 16:12Alec Baldwin?

  So when you arrive and you are in the more decent hotel with people who seem to be related to the whole enterprise and you can chit chat with them, 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, at full, at full throttle, you kind of work your way toward that? Does it take a few days before you get into the, into the pits, so to speak?

• 16:35Speaker 05

  Depends actually on, on the different trips. On my second trip, I went straight to the artisanal mining because I'd spent a lot of time, you know, talking with Seth Effrigans about, you know, the benefits of copper mining for the area. So, you know, I had all that material and, and I wanted to really focus on the, the artisanal miners.

• 16:52Alec Baldwin?

  Who are people that sounded like they had not the right idea, but maybe the better ideas about how this should be handled? What should happen there for the greater good of everybody?

• 17:00Speaker 05

  So there's a Catholic charity called Good Shepherd Colwezy, and they've been incredibly outspoken and quite 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 understand this as a cycle, of which corruption is only a part. There's also just the basic fact of poverty 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 90% of Congo's food is imported. So there's this kind of-

• 17:40Alec Baldwin?

  From other areas in the region?

• 17:42Speaker 05

  From Zambia, yeah, from other areas of the region. So there's this kind of- and import taxes are huge and people are making money at 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 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 UN doesn't have a permanent presence, I don't think, in Colwezy. Actually, a lot of what they do in Congo is to do with rebels in the north. And then they assisted with some war crimes tribunals in a city which was not too far away.

• 18:27Speaker 05

  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, there could be-

• 18:35Alec Baldwin?

  In that immediate area?

• 18:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, there 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, some of-

• 18:43Alec Baldwin?

  What year did you go there?

• 18:45Speaker 05

  I went in 2019.

• 18:46Alec Baldwin?

  And right before the outbreak?

• 18:47Speaker 05

  Right before.

• 18:48Alec Baldwin?

  How convenient for you.

• 18:49Speaker 05

  I know.

• 18:49Alec Baldwin?

  Wonderful. And what is the national government, to the extent you could ascertain when you were there? What's their position on what's going on there?

• 18:56Speaker 05

  So the national government makes kind of these overtures over and over again, saying we can't have child labour, whatever. And then the local government will say the same thing, and they're like, we're cleaning up the mines. And then they use, you know, these kind of mine clean-up activities in order to basically seize more parts of the mines for themselves and- You know, kind of co-op local cooperatives 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 actually happening in terms of like, who's getting pieces of the pie. But the fact is that it still continues, actually. I was, I was speaking to a friend of mine who's a photographer, Hugh Consella Cunningham, who's done great, great work in, in the DRC.

• 19:39Speaker 05

  He was there last weekend and he saw basically exactly the same condition. So it's not improving.

• 19:45Alec Baldwin?

  But I'm assuming for people who don't understand the way these things work, it's that you have the corporate mining, you have the, the industrial mining, which of course the government's going to sanction that because they're going to make a lot of money. I'm assuming just like the drug trade in other parts of the world and, and South America, for example, they don't want it to go away. They, they can't make it go away because there'll be just so much illegal activity and violence and bloodshed. Do they sit there and 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?

• 20:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think-

• 20:17Alec Baldwin?

  They can't make it go away.

• 20:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think sometimes they'll say that and sometimes they say, well, artisanal 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've really understood how to deal with this problem. And, and it is, it's a very, very complex issue and I, 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 it in terms of, you know, the, the industrial mines which were bought, many of them were, were bought through this guy Gertler, who's now on the US sanctions list. Actually, Trump de-sanctioned him for a bit. Who knows why? And then, and then he got re-sanctioned. And basically you have a system that relies on this corruption.

• 21:04Speaker 05

  And those funds are not going back to the people. And then you have a situation in which, you know, the mines 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, it's not, and forgive me, big Western companies is not entirely correct. A lot of Chinese companies, actually.

• 21:23Alec Baldwin?

  Well, I want to get to that too. But what are the Chinese doing there? And how long have they been, obviously, when I think of China, I think of a place that is obviously a vast, a region of land and varied geologically and topographically and meteorologically, what have you. I mean, China's enormous. They don't have those resources in their own territory?

• 21:41Speaker 05

  So something like 70% of the world's cobalt is actually in DRC. It's like 3.4 million tonnes, which is a huge, huge amount of cobalt.

• 21:51Alec Baldwin?

  It's there.

• 21:51Speaker 05

  Is there. And, you know, there are nickel mines in Indonesia, which also produce 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 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, or was the head of Glencore, said this summer, China Inc. has realized how important cobalt is and that they're kind of starting to buy everything up.

• 22:18Alec Baldwin?

  And where do Western manufacturers, including the US, where do they get their cobalt from?

• 22:21Speaker 05

  From the Chinese.

• 22:22Alec Baldwin?

  From the Chinese. They're not out buying their own?

• 22:24Speaker 05

  No, they're not out buying.

• 22:24Alec Baldwin?

  They're not trying to develop that resource for themselves?

• 22:26Speaker 05

  Yeah. BMW 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 way too small to supply the entire world.

• 22:42Alec Baldwin?

  Journalist Nicolas Niarchos. 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 Rednick.

• 22:54Speaker 06

  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 band having a set list. If you do everything, it's all 16th notes from. It's all Anagata Davida. Or, well, you sound like the Ramones, although I've heard of worse things. So you want some variation in tone, in voice. And that's your responsibility, you feel? I feel all of it's my responsibility.

• 23:25Alec Baldwin?

  Hear more of my conversation with David Remnick in our archives at here's the thing.org. After the break, Nicholas Niarchos and I talk about his background and the big story he nearly broke in high school.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Ledge. How does music actually enter your mind?

• 24:11Speaker 07

  I'm not sure why or how the music comes to me, but I think people who love music and write music, our brains are just filled with music.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:21Speaker 07

  Like, we have listened to so much music, we've been a part of so much music. I think of the story that I want to tell, the mood that I want to create with the music, start playing chords, see where they lead me.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Sometimes I'm just not even thinking about music, right? And I hear this little thing and I go, oh, that could be this.

• 24:42Speaker 07

  You know, you just have to be ready for when the inspiration hits.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  And it comes.

• 24:46Alec Baldwin?

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 26:05Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Nicholas Niarchos, who could be living a life of privilege, instead can be found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, reporting on human rights violations. Niarchos grew up in London and came to the United States to attend Yale. His family helped him develop his interest in journalism.

• 26:27Speaker 05

  I grew up in the UK.

• 26:28Alec Baldwin?

  You grew up in London?

• 26:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was born here but grew up in London.

• 26:30Alec Baldwin?

  You were born here?

• 26:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:32Alec Baldwin?

  Your father's Greek?

• 26:33Speaker 05

  Father's Greek.

• 26:33Alec Baldwin?

  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 career something that was likely? Were everybody very interested in politics and current affairs? And was your dad like a rabbit about that?

• 26:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, my dad's sort of very interested in current affairs. And you know, my mom's family as well. My grandfather is a writer, and my great-grandparents, many of them are writers and travelers and many such things. And then actually, in high school, I did this anti-school newspaper. And 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 was called Harrow. It's a kind of very stiff boarding school. So we ended up almost writing this story, and the newspaper was shut down. Two years later, the Financial Times, suddenly, the guy is revealed to be somehow connected with MI6.

• 27:38Speaker 05

  And like, one of the governors in China basically was sort of taken down by it. And this was kind of Xi Jinping kind of flexing his muscles for the first time. We had been so close to doing that story. You know, the only reason that we didn't run it was because the school had 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 and it was funny because they banned the it was hard copy and then 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 it it was this kind of great affirmation of the power of journalism.

• 28:19Alec Baldwin?

  Good start, a noble start and your mother is?

• 28:22Speaker 05

  Irish English.

• 28:23Alec Baldwin?

  Is she really?

• 28:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:25Alec Baldwin?

  I went to Dublin once with my ex-wife and my daughter and we were there it was Christmas, Eve and Saint Stephen's Day and we were staying at the Shelburne in Dublin I guess it is, the famous hotel and they said to me, oh, you've made a mistake now coming this week because everything's closed. They said this week everything's closed, Christmas Eve and Saint Stephen's Day, everything's closed, even the Guinness is closed, they said. They were like, that's rare. I mean, even the Guinness factory is closed. And we're like, well, shit, what are we gonna do when we're here? So but 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, the two

• 29:05Alec Baldwin?

  great shipping families and yours just as recognizable to my generation as the other one. But you lived in London and you first came, you were born here, grew up in London, and when did you come back here to live? How old were you?

• 29:17Speaker 05

  I came back here for college.

• 29:18Alec Baldwin?

  To go to school, to go to school. And you decided to stay?

• 29:20Speaker 05

  I decided to stay.

• 29:22Alec Baldwin?

  Now, why do you want to live here and not from London? I'm the opposite. I want to live in London and leave New York as soon as possible.

• 29:26Speaker 05

  Really?

• 29:27Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, I love London.

• 29:28Speaker 05

  I love New York.

• 29:29Alec Baldwin?

  You do, you do.

• 29:30Speaker 05

  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 has sort of shut down and and.

• 29:40Alec Baldwin?

  It's easier for you here?

• 29:41Speaker 05

  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 lot of.

• 29:53Alec Baldwin?

  Londoners.

• 29:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it's a lot of, you know, like heritaging and like new companies.

• 29:57Alec Baldwin?

  I love that. I want to live in a castle. I watched The Crown and like, oh, God, that would work for me. I could live there. But when you finished school, you decided to stay here. And what were the first jobs you got in journalism?

• 30:09Speaker 05

  So I worked at The Nation.

• 30:10Alec Baldwin?

  Describe that experience.

• 30:12Speaker 05

  I was a fact checker.

• 30:12Alec Baldwin?

  Katrina is an old friend of mine.

• 30:13Speaker 05

  Katrina, Katrina's wonderful.

• 30:15Alec Baldwin?

  Now, when they're, no, you, you talk about budgets, so the, so the Nation comes out. We were saying, that looks like a college newspaper.

• 30:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:20Alec Baldwin?

  On that very, very less expensive paper and so forth. Obviously, they, they, they have their budgetary considerations, but they're irreplaceable in terms of the reporting. Did you enjoy that experience with them?

• 30:30Speaker 05

  It was a great experience. I worked directly with Katrina as her fact checker and, and with her late husband, Stephen Coen, and it was a time of the Syrian chemical, chemical weapons, then Obama's Red Line and so on, and they were, you know, I was called up on a Sunday evening. I think this was one of my first weeks there, I was called up on a Sunday evening and they were like, okay, you've got to be in touch with the OPCW at, 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, and there was 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

• 31:14Speaker 05

  that I'd gotten at journalism school about this lawyer who'd been wiretapped called Robert Gottlieb, and he was representing a guy called Addis Madunjanin. And their conversations had been wiretapped by the FBI 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, listen, 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 bull's sort of risk-taking, but I really appreciated that because that was my first sort of big investigative type magazine story.

• 31:45Alec Baldwin?

  When you worked for The Guardian, did you go back to the UK?

• 31:48Speaker 05

  No, so I've written for The Guardian sort of independently as a freelancer and then I worked at The Guardian as a researcher, like right when I graduated college.

• 31:55Alec Baldwin?

  What period of time did you work with The Huffington Post?

• 31:57Speaker 05

  So I started writing for The Huffington Post in college and then I kind of wrote for them for

• 32:05Speaker 05

  A year, two afterwards.

• 32:06Alec Baldwin?

  You know, for me, finding sources, you know, sometimes I read the Times and I think, well, there's the Times again. And then sometimes I 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 arc of many years, the most reliable in terms of its integrity and what they cover and stories they tell. And you had sent me the article from John Lee Anderson, which I think, which, when I, as I was reading it, I think I read this article when it first came out. Now, that article about South America, and I'd read other articles and books about the work of Thunai and the Uncontacted Indians and so forth, you know, I would imagine for you, that, and writers like Anderson who write these broad and very complex pieces, there's

• 32:51Alec Baldwin?

  no shortage of stories for you to cover. I 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?

• 33:00Speaker 05

  No, no, no. I was, as a freelancer, I pitched to places, actually.

• 33:03Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, you pitched to them?

• 33:04Speaker 05

  I'm always pitching.

• 33:05Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, I understand. Okay. So you pitched to Remnick and his staff that you want to do the piece based on your beginnings of your book?

• 33:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:11Alec Baldwin?

  But I would imagine, again, with the cornucopia of such stories that are out there, you must be constantly wondering which one you want to do. Are there many ideas you have for this kind of thing?

• 33:21Speaker 05

  Absolutely, yeah. There are many ideas. Part of it is also sort of editorial interest. I was reading Joan Didion on El Salvador last night, and she was talking about when she went, which I think is 1982. And she talked about how it was a period in which it was like a filing hold. And so, you know, you'd file your story and then it would be held by editors because, you know, there wasn't a huge amount of interest in El Salvador. I've actually seen that quite a lot with Yemen, funnily enough, which is a conflict that's been going on since 2015. 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 onto editors' radar. And there's a story that I want to do about these complicated

• 34:01Speaker 05

  cooperations 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 find more sources on that. So if there are any listeners, please get in touch.

• 34:21Alec Baldwin?

  So everywhere you go around the world, Africa, South America, whatever, you see this exploitation for resources and for 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 that, like, you know, what happened in Ecuador is just, it's tragic, it's tragic.

• 34:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think that there's so much emphasis on sort of labor rights here. And I listened to your show with Lina Gonzalez and she was talking about how, you know, people getting minimum wage in California on 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 it's become this.

• 35:02Alec Baldwin?

  It's a set of rules for us and a set of rules for them.

• 35:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of become the sort of wages of globalization.

• 35:11Alec Baldwin?

  Journalist Nicolas Niarchos. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Nicholas Niarchos talks about some of the more challenging aspects of his reporting in the Congo.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel.

• 36:02Speaker 09

  Man, I'm a Black and Mexican kid from San Pedro, and I grew up in Inglewood as well. I never liked to be boxed in. Both of my parents colored outside of the line. I mean, even them being together at the time in L.A. was just not typical. And so I think that has always been a part of my DNA. There's a defiant something in me that feels like. What we get to do with with what we're given that's greater than us is to maybe connect people to ideas that they wouldn't naturally, you know, connect to. That's really me. I'm just kind of like defiant with love, though.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Experience before the moment. A Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 36:47Speaker 00

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• 37:18Speaker 10

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• 37:58Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. Nicholas Niarchos, New Yorker article "Buried Dreams" exposed the way Congolese cobalt miners are exploited. In his reporting for the piece, he witnessed many gut-wrenching scenes.

• 38:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think the toughest things that I saw were around the kids. You know, you see a lot of kids with deformities 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, Kati Nodjimbadan, alerted me to. The paternal exposure to some of these materials is actually associated very heavily with birth defects. So that was very sad. Talking to parents, to wives of people who'd been killed in these landslides at mines, and then, obviously, you know, going to a school for sort of kids who... Had been actually run by Good Shepherd. So kids who had been artisanal miners. And then just like chatting with this kid, Ziggy, who's in the piece as well.

• 38:59Speaker 05

  I mean, he was working in mines since he was three, basically. And just 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 $1,200. And everybody there knows it's going into batteries. Something like 50% of the cobalt mine there just goes into lithium ion batteries. And I said to him, listen, like, how do you feel about this? And he was just like, 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?

• 39:37Alec Baldwin?

  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 read the Times. Of his whole entire media diet. What's your media diet when you're up in the morning?

• 39:47Speaker 05

  I would say the Times as well. I like listening also to the BBC Today program. It's such a good program and it's just very good to keep up with news from the UK as well.

• 39:56Alec Baldwin?

  No TV news?

• 39:58Speaker 05

  No, I don't have a TV. I'm one of those people.

• 40:02Speaker 05

  You know, actually, while I was in Africa, I really, you know, reporting actually in the Sahara and so on. Like, most of the places you get France 24, you know, everywhere, everywhere you go. And I kind of, when I'm in Africa, I watch a lot of France 24. And RFE, which is Radio France Internationale. And that's great as well. I mean, they're just, they're really like, I don't know. I find that sort of French quality of journalism, maybe sometimes influenced 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 Jeune Afrique, which is a sort of a... I think it's France-based, where they cover lots of Africa, especially French-speaking

• 40:46Speaker 05

  Africa in depth. And again, often with a kind of French twist or a French foreign policy twist.

• 40:53Alec Baldwin?

  What's the status of the book?

• 40:54Speaker 05

  At the moment, I'm in the middle of writing it, reporting it, travelling.

• 40:58Alec Baldwin?

  You're still working on it?

• 40:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 40:59Alec Baldwin?

  When are you guys gonna come out?

• 41:01Speaker 05

  I hope to work on it all of next year and then finish it the next year, basically.

• 41:05Alec Baldwin?

  Right, because you're doing other things.

• 41:06Speaker 05

  Because I'm doing other things and I'm also just doing a lot of reporting on this as well.

• 41:10Alec Baldwin?

  What's a story you wouldn't tell? What's a story that people suggested to you and you thought, that's not for me? Have you ever been asked to do profiles of movie stars and things like that to get a paycheck and to work and that didn't interest you? What don't you want to do?

• 41:24Speaker 05

  I think sort of gossip and sort of prying into people's personal lives, I think probably things that you also probably wouldn't like, so.

• 41:32Alec Baldwin?

  You don't know the half of it.

• 41:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:34Alec Baldwin?

  Now, I'm not saying this to be kind, I mean, 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?

• 41:43Speaker 05

  I'd love to do documentary film and filmmaking. Actually, when I graduated from Columbia, I went and made a mini-doc about Roma gypsy trumpet players in Serbia and Serbian nationalists. And that was a really, really fun experience, but, you know, writing has always been my first love.

• 42:00Alec Baldwin?

  I feel like the work you're doing, I mean, these stories are the stories people need to hear. Where there is injustice like this and where there's this exploitation, we have a set of rules here in this country for our own, and there's things that we would never allow. We'd be screaming from the mountaintops if we had this radioactive situation and children being contaminated. And we have things like that in this country now. 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 love 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 shores of New Jersey years ago, it was on the front page of the paper. People went insane.

• 42:45Alec Baldwin?

  They were like, the beaches of New Jersey and all these families go there and all this contaminative, I mean, people went nuts. And of course... Writing books is important, but that medium of film is another layer that you should really, really consider.

• 42:58Speaker 05

  You know, I've written about art, I've written about, I was a restaurant reviewer while I was a fact checker at The New Yorker, so I've.

• 43:03Alec Baldwin?

  Where'd you review restaurants?

• 43:05Speaker 05

  For The New Yorker.

• 43:05Alec Baldwin?

  In the city?

• 43:06Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 43:06Alec Baldwin?

  How long did you do that?

• 43:08Speaker 05

  Two years, it was great. And I did bars as well. It was fun because, you know, at the time, you know, they would give you a couple of hundred bucks to go to restaurants and.

• 43:15Alec Baldwin?

  I did Del Posto with Frank Bruni.

• 43:18Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 43:18Alec Baldwin?

  And we went to one of his sittings and Maureen doubted, said, would you like to come with Frank and I and a fourth person, he's going to review Del Posto. And I said, okay. She said, well, 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 ordering because he must eat every item on the menu. He goes back four and five times and blah, blah, blah. And he took me through the whole reality of Frank's life. So what was it like? Were you going four and five times to a restaurant or not?

• 43:47Speaker 05

  No, no, no, you go two times to the restaurant.

• 43:50Alec Baldwin?

  Did they eventually catch on who you were?

• 43:51Speaker 05

  No, not really. But one of the best experiences doing that, I went to a Somali restaurant in Harlem and then I came back after the review. I live up in Harlem, so I kind of was trying to rep Harlem restaurants. And I came back after the review and there were like lines around the block. It was great. It was really fun. And it's a wonderful place. I stand by my reviews. So that was a nice moment.

• 44:12Alec Baldwin?

  Do you identify as Greek, Irish, British, American, a journalist, or all of the above?

• 44:20Speaker 05

  Well, all of the above, but I think that my Greek roots are very, very important to me. And I feel very strongly that, 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 Cosatinos Cavakis 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 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 Lysdragonians and so on. So I like that sort of aspect. And I think I probably sort of see myself in that mold as well, I suppose.

• 45:08Alec Baldwin?

  Journalist Nicholas Niarcos. This episode was produced by Kathleen Russo, Kerry Donahue, Maureen Hoban and Zach McNeese. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.

• 45:51Speaker 11

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• 46:49Speaker 12

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• 47:51Speaker 00

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