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23:23Ed Conway:So rare earths might not be all that rare in the Earth's crust, but building the facilities to refine them, that is a rare feat. Made harder still by the fact that the specific cocktail of rare earth ores, that's totally different depending on where in the world you're mining. Rare earth ores in California are totally different to rare earth ores from, say, China or Greenland. Oh, and there's another thing. Rare earths are relatively dirty to produce. They occur with thorium and uranium. When you process them, you end up with something called tenorms, which is technically enhanced, naturally occurring radioactive material, tenorms.

24:00Oh, wow. So you're creating radioactive waste. Enhanced radioactive waste. Technically enhanced.

24:06Ed Conway:Enhanced. So not just your vanilla radioactive waste. This is extra enhanced. I'm sure it's probably not as bad as the nuclear waste people are actually imagining. But yeah, that's the term for it. It sounds terrible. So if you're mining rare earths, you're also faced with a non-trivial question. What to do with all that technically enhanced radioactive waste? For instance, you remember that old mine in California, Mountain Pass? Mountain Pass ended up spilling some Tenorm in a national park. That spill in 2002, not the only spill by the way, essentially led to the closure of Mountain Pass. The place where rare earth mining really began in earnest went bankrupt.

24:52Ed Conway:And this brings us to the geopolitics of it all, because as America began to reduce its rare earth mining and processing, another country was stepping into the void. All eyes on whether President Trump and President Xi Jinping can hash out some sort of deal to ease export controls, particularly on those rare earth minerals that China controls so much of the global supply of that America really, really needs. Today, China produces more than 90 % of all rare earths. So, how did we get to a place where nearly all of those obscure, exotic minerals were being extracted in a single country? That's up next.

25:35Tired of surface-level scrolls and predictable soundbites? It's time for something new. Welcome to Intelligence Squared Live, where great minds meet. We bring leading authors, scientists, and thinkers off the page and straight to the stage. Join upcoming UK events with the likes of political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, foreign correspondent Lise Doucette, and many more for unhurried conversations on the ideas shaping our history, culture, and future politics. Find our upcoming live event schedule at intelligencesquared.com.

26:31Ed Conway:rare earth mine in China. And then as I went into an alley that had the entrances to rare earth refineries off of it, but I did not even enter one of these refineries. There are police checkpoints to prevent correspondence from getting there. I ended up with seven or eight police car loads of uniformed officers detaining me and they ended up putting me in the backseat of a squad car and starting to take me downtown. Just because you wanted to look at the rare earth refineries? Actually, they were mostly upset because before looking at that, I'd been looking at their four square mile toxic sludge lake of waste from the processing of rare earths and steel, which is gigantic and is slightly radioactive.

27:18And there's not a really good answer for what to do with it.

27:21Ed Conway:But that degree of scrutiny and heavy handedness, is that usual or is that way beyond what you normally encounter? That is way beyond what I usually encounter. This is Keith Bradshaw. The Beijing bureau chief for the New York Times. You must have, you know, in your career, you've been focused on rare earths for a long time. You must find there's these moments where suddenly other people are like, oh, rare earths, we need to talk about rare earths. And then it goes away and then it comes back. But this, of all of those kind of spikes in attention, this presumably in 2025 was one of the biggest.

27:56This is by far the biggest. Until 2025, even some of my own editors used to roll their eyes when I proposed yet another rare earth story because I'd been writing... Oh, really?

28:06Ed Conway:It's just Keith again with his rare earth obsession. That was exactly what they used to say. For 15 years, from 2010 all the way up until 2025. It's thanks to Keith's obsession that we can begin to understand how it is that China came to control 90 % of the production of rare earths. It didn't happen by accident, says Keith. China really got going when Deng Xiaoping, as a member of the Politburo at the time under Mao... The Politburo being the very top governing echelons of the Communist Party. ...went in 1964 to an enormous iron ore deposit near the Mongolian border of China and visited it. The mine is called Bayanobo, or Treasure Mountain, about 70 miles into the Gobi Desert.

28:50And it had not only iron ore, but they realized that there was a lot of rare earth there. In fact, it is the world's largest single deposit of rare earths. And Deng Xiaoping personally went in 1964, along with other senior Chinese officials, to inspect it, and said then that China needs to pay a lot of attention to rare earths. So very early, 62 years ago, you already had a top person in the Chinese Communist Party very interested in rare earths, at a time when probably most Western prime ministers and presidents had barely ever heard of rare earths.

29:27Ed Conway:Even today, many of them have never heard of it. Well, they should have by now, because a lot of their businesses are panicking for lack of them. And so Deng Xiaoping oversaw a very energetic effort in making technological progress in the refining of rare earths. But that wasn't straightforward. it. They had far fewer resources than the West. It didn't have really good quality stainless steel. And the way that rare earths were being processed in the West was using an expensive kind of acid that you couldn't put into just any old container. You had to put it into stainless steel containers. China couldn't make that stainless steel for itself.

30:13And with the tremendous poverty that China still had, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, it couldn't afford to buy that stainless steel from other countries.

30:22Ed Conway:So they turned to a scientific pioneer from their own nuclear program. As well as his wife, also a scientist. They were being brought back from internal exile under very grim conditions because they were distrusted as intellectuals who had studies in the United States. They had been banished to hard labor on a farm, but they were brought back to Beijing during the Cultural Revolution and put to work on this project. In 1971, the Chinese military tasked this husband and wife team with purifying rare earths for battlefield lasers, super alloys, weapons. For years, they shut themselves away in their lab.

31:09and they figured out a new way to process rare earths. And their technique used a different kind of acid that could be put in just regular old plastic tanks. So that made it much cheaper. And even better than that, they figured out a way to do a cascade of hydrochloric baths that gradually separated it and you had different rare earths coming out at different steps in the process. So you had the beginnings of almost an assembly line for breaking apart these 17 different rare earths.

31:43Ed Conway:This brand new, cheaper, more effective refining method was put into operation. And then, when Chairman Mao died in 1976, he was succeeded by Deng Xiaoping, the man who essentially started China's rare earth program. He was now in charge. And to him, rare earths, they weren't just obscure minerals. He declared that they were the key to the future of China's economy. Saying the Middle East has oil, but China has rare earths. As they began ramping up their industrial sector, China began really trying to expand in many categories. One of them, for starters, was steel. And for some forms of steel, you need cerium.

32:27And that's exactly what they began producing in large quantities at the Bionobel mine. So China began really becoming a serious heavyweight rare earth power in the 1980s.

32:43Ed Conway:And so that decade, over a hundred rare earth mines and refineries were built across China. Well, remember, in the US there was basically still just that one, Mountain Pass. What was also important then was that rare earth magnets had been invented in the United States and Japan. But there was one problem with these new rare earth magnets. They tended to lose their magnetism if they became hot, which can easily happen in all kinds of parts of a car. And then they'd be worthless as a magnet. So these would be the neodymium magnets, those ones that are in your AirPods, also in things like cars. The solution was to add 2 or 3 % of the weight of the magnet of a kind of rare earth that, for decades and decades, could really almost exclusively be found only in south-central China.

33:36Ed Conway:Those crucial additional rare earths are terbium and dysprosium, which make the neodymium magnets resistant to extremely high heat. And that was the beginning of China's hammerlock. China became the world's biggest producer of rare earths in the late 1980s, surpassing Mountain Pass. And then it gained essentially a monopoly by the end of the 1990s. This wasn't just about geopolitics or the military. Even more, it was about economics. China saw this economic opportunity to dominate an obscure supply chain. And for a long time, they weren't really paid that much attention. Then came 2010, and everything changed.

34:23Is this the moment of maritime drama which sparked the worst political row in years between China and Japan? It was a territorial dispute in which a Chinese fishing boat tried to fish next to a Japanese-controlled island that China claims. And a Japanese Coast Guard vessel tried to wave him away. A Chinese-marked fishing vessel is ordered to stop by Japanese sailors. The Japanese voices apparently warn that the Chinese captain is turning towards them, and they brace for impact. And he persisted in fishing, and there ended up being collision between the two vessels, which made the Japanese very unhappy.

35:04Ed Conway:Japan arrested the Chinese fishermen, and in retaliation... The Chinese government halted exports of rare earths to Japan without announcing it.

35:17I heard that there was an export halt and raced my office and managed to get it into the last edition of the New York Times by calling a friend of mine. The editor was on duty, and so we had it. The Ministry of Commerce spokesman denied my story. They have never acknowledged that it was an embargo. They've said that it was a spontaneous decision by customs officers all over the country that they did not like Japan and therefore were not going to allow any more rare earths to go to Japan, which is very implausible. The reason why they've never admitted that it was an embargo was that that would be a violation of the World Trade Organization.

35:53Ed Conway:This was a big problem for Japan. Think back to how much of our modern technology, tiny speakers, motors, super alloys, as well as simple things like flints, enlighters. All of that is totally dependent on rare earths. So Japan starts stockpiling rare earths to future-proof themselves. But nobody else really did so. Everybody else talked about concern about it and then did nothing. And 2010, that fishing dispute, was in hindsight a watershed moment. Because China was using rare earths as a form of leverage. By cutting off supplies, China realised it could strangle the economies of its rivals. That, once again, brings us to 2025.

36:40Ed Conway:We're going to go to China. The authorities there are further tightening export rules for crucial rare earths. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce releasing a couple of announcements this Thursday outlining new rules. In addition to always requiring government permission to export rare earths and rare earth technologies, overseas exporters using Chinese rare earth tech or products will also need to obtain a license from the Commerce Ministry. In the face of Donald Trump's tariffs, China pushed the rare earths button again, imposing restrictions on what could leave the country. Across the world, production at car plants, which need rare earths for everything from their electric circuitry to the motors powering electric windows, they were frozen.

37:22Ed Conway:Rare earths, that obscure topic no one was very obsessed with, apart from Keith and a few other people, myself included, was suddenly front page news. And for good reason. What would you say is at stake if we don't have easy access to rare earths? Ah, the West has to have rare earths. We can't function without them? No. There are so many products that require them. This is why the IMF found that there would be a real hit to the entire global economy if there were a sudden cutoff. And it would in some ways even ripple back to China because there are some things that China imports that need heavy rare earths in the components.

38:04For example, if it were a very abrupt cutoff, you would shut down the global auto industry totally, except for cars made in China.

38:12Ed Conway:That is cataclysmic for basically all manufacturing. I guess what's fascinating about this is just the way that we've arranged the world is such that we have assumed in the US and Europe that it's okay to offshore everything because you'll be able to get stuff in future and probably it'll be cheaper. And part of that is we've had this windfall of, disinflation for decades and decades has benefited us. But maybe we're just in this different paradigm now, where stuff comes from actually matters once again. For a long time, we ran the world focused mostly on keeping prices low. We offshored loads of our industrial production, especially the really dirty stuff like making steel or refining rare earths.

38:58Ed Conway:Sometimes the way this saga is depicted, you might have thought it was all about China stealing the rare earth market from the West. But actually, might that be getting it all upside down? What if, in practice, we were just as much a willing party in what happened? I think the history would surprise a lot of people because, you know, the US did kind of invent this industry. But also, around the 70s, the US and a lot of the world started the environmental movement. And so the US was kind of looking at their mining industry like, do we really need to be doing this domestically? And China was kind of really excited to take up that mantle.

39:38I think a lot of Eastern Asia did, right? They started taking up a lot of the industries with the US and a lot of other countries were trying to shed as they moved more towards tech.

39:46Ed Conway:We offshored manufacturing, we offshored rare earth production, and we offshored all the pollution that went alongside them. And since all this stuff was happening on the other side of the planet. We didn't have to be confronted by the consequences and the compromises, the pollution, the radioactive waste. We gave up making rare earths in return for cheap products, cheap magnets, cheap earbuds. It was a Faustian pact. It doesn't have to be dirty, but it's not cheap to make it clean. So to the extent that the West has strict environmental standards, that's more expensive. And for a long time, the West's solution was go buy cheap rare earths from China and pretend not to know about the environmental consequences instead of spending the money to do it in a cleaner way in the West.

40:43Ed Conway:But perhaps the biggest challenge here is that even if the West wanted to rebuild its rare earth supply chain, the chances are it would struggle to make its money back. Partly because China is so hard to compete with, but partly because of something even simpler. The market's hugely smaller than most people realise. Just think back to the amount of scandium Tim says he was trading, 50 % of the global supply, which sounds like a lot, doesn't it? But the annual global production of scandium is only about 90 tonnes, which, to give you an idea, is about 0.0004 % the size of, say, the copper market.

41:24Ed Conway:Now, admittedly, scandium is one of the less used rare earths. But the point is, for most companies, it's simply not worth the investment. China does have a big advantage. Just consider the scale of Chinese university programs focused on rare earths and compare it to the top schools in the West, like the Colorado School of Mines, where Jordan Calderon works. We do have professors, mining professors here, metallurgy professors, right? A lot of very famous professors. And they go to China because they like partnership with Chinese universities and like they tour universities. Most of them that I've spoken to have been very explicit that we're getting blown out of the water, that they have thousands of students studying this, excited about this.

42:05Even our mining department is kind of just a couple floors. Maybe we have a couple hundred grad students researching areas tangential to this, but China potentially has thousands and tens of thousands of students studying specifically metallurgical processing, mineral processing, mining, excavation technologies.

42:20Ed Conway:In pretty much every dimension, China holds basically all of the cards. And they're not afraid to play their hands. All of which is why rare earths, they're not just a powerful tool upgrading our technology. They've also helped usher in an era of economic war. That's coming up in a bit. Tired of surface-level scrolls and predictable soundbites? It's time for something new. Welcome to Intelligence Squared Live, where great minds meet. We bring leading authors, scientists, and thinkers off the page and straight to the stage. Join upcoming UK events with the likes of political philosopher Francis Kukiyama, foreign correspondent Lise Doucette, and many more for unhurried conversations on the ideas shaping our history, culture, and future politics.

43:08Find our upcoming live event schedule at intelligencesquared.com.

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44:18Right, that's enough of me. Back to Ed. After two days of trade talks in London, President Trump says the US and China have reached the framework of a deal. The full details aren't out, but at its core, expanded US access to China's rare earth minerals

44:32Ed Conway:and a possible rollback of some restrictions on tech exports to China. It might just go down as the most important moment in the great trade war of Donald Trump's second presidency. In the face of a Chinese threat to restrict many of its rare earth exports, in June 2025, the White House made a deal with China to cap its tariffs. Though the president didn't put it this way, it was a climb down. For Henry Farrell, it was also something else, a glimpse of the future. We're in a genuinely new world in which everybody is circling warily around each other and nobody is quite sure what to do, how to go further.

45:21Ed Conway:Henry is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University in America. And together with Abe Newman, the author of an excellent book, Underground Empire, How America Weaponised the World Economy. Available at all good bookstores. That'd be clear. That rollercoaster with China and America over rare earths was sort of an early test case for this new imperial age they were writing about. I think that the China deal was the first moment at which the United States recognised that it was not the only game in town, that other actors could use these tools against it, and that sometimes, perhaps, these tools might be used in ways which could not be anticipated in advance.

46:04Ed Conway:The point being that sometimes, things like rare earths, and other exports as well, they can be used as a tool, or, to put it another way, a sort of economic weapon. Bring our tariffs down or we'll starve you of the rare earths you need. And Henry's point is that this isn't just an aberration. This might just be the way diplomacy works in the future. a kind of template. And that's because the quid pro quo of globalisation, where most of the stuff you buy comes from the other side of the world, is interdependence. The grand era of globalisation from the late 1990s through the 2000s, this was a highly interdependent world in which everybody thought that interdependence was awesome.

46:50So you had people like Thomas Friedman, for example.

46:52Ed Conway:An American journalist who wrote a famous book about all of this called The World is Flat. Making the argument that if you're Germany and you have machinery tools that you're getting from Italy, you do not want to invade Italy because effectively you're cutting off your own nose to spite your face. You are effectively damaging your own economy by so doing. And so really what Abe Newman and I did was we tried to start talking about how all of these really boring seeming systems of the world, systems like the ways in which money goes from point A to point B, the technical details of the internet, supply chains for semiconductors, all of these really boring systems turned out to be very easily weaponizable, which is that they were made up of networks where there were key nodes in the networks.

47:42And if you took control of those nodes, you could turn them into choke points.

47:47Ed Conway:In other words, places or supply chains could literally choke the global economy. A little like the Strait of Hormuz, made famous during the war in Iran just this year, 2026. By controlling those choke points, says Henry, you can turn economic relationships into weapons. And so years ago, long before the Strait of Humas was closed, long before Russia invaded Ukraine, Henry and Abe started talking about this notion that they called weaponised interdependence. It was utterly unfashionable. I won't say that we were the only people to see this, but it went radically against the conventional mythologies of the time.

48:28Ed Conway:That mythology being the kind of thing that Tom Friedman wrote about in The World is Flat, that the more interdependent we all were, the less likely we were to go to war with each other. They didn't really realise that geopolitics was sneaking in through the back door. So take something very few people spent much time thinking about, the plumbing of the global financial system. We really got interested in SWIFT, which is an incredibly dull-seaming system that allows for financial messaging to pass backwards and forth between banks about which payments have been made. We started realising that this provided this choke point, and then we came up with this catchy term, weaponised interdependence.

49:05Ed Conway:Now, I realise this probably doesn't sound like it has much to do with AirPods, but this is the key thing. Swift was another choke point. It's an economic service that pretty much everyone needs. And so if you can control Swift, you can potentially weaponise it. And that's precisely what America started to do in the war on terror. Using SWIFT to tackle terrorists. And then a few years later they used it to clamp down on Iran and to try to stop them from developing a nuclear weapon. The point being, when times are good, globalisation, interdependence, whatever you want to call it, it helps lift all boats.

49:43Ed Conway:Everyone gets cheaper stuff, whether it's financial services or rare earth magnets. But when times are bad, then, well, the tools of economic prosperity can get turned into the tools of economic war. That's exactly right. The more that you're connected into these global networks that underpin your prosperity, the more that you are at risk of really terrible things happening to your economy as these networks suddenly become choked up. But here's where things get a bit curious, because while Henry and Abe think they're just making this chewy academic point, a warning about the future, there are some people in the Trump administration, the first one, who see it as something different.

50:28Ed Conway:In 2022, Henry opens a book by Chris Miller called Chip War about semiconductors. And I get to this place where he describes Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman. And I'm thinking, where in the name of God is this actually going? and it turns out he has a conversation with a senior Trump administration policymaker, who he does not name, who has read this and who has decided, quote, that weaponized interdependence is beautiful, unquote, and has taken this as part of the manual which they use to try and go after Huawei in more effective ways than they had in the past. Huawei being the Chinese tech manufacturer accused by the US of spying and sanctioned in the first Trump presidency.

51:13Ed Conway:What did that make you think? It made me feel very nervous. The reason that ideas take off is because people find them useful for their own purposes. And sometimes it turns out that these purposes are not the purposes that you yourself had envisaged.

51:34Ed Conway:We're thinking about rare earths and the fact that they are, you know, in a lot of people's lives without them even knowing that they're there in your kind of AirPods or maybe in your smartphone and they could be used as a tool of weaponiser to dependence? We're in a world where these are absolutely essential to all sorts of parts of our lives. So it is again, yes, if it's a little bit like the financial system, it's something you don't pay attention to because it seems so boring, so mundane, so completely to be taken for granted until suddenly you realise you can't take it for granted anymore.

52:08and that probably is the moment at which it is too late and all hell has already broken out.

52:13Ed Conway:All of which brings us back, for the final time now, to June 2025 and the Rare Earth standoff, when China weaponised its economic dominance to achieve geopolitical goals against the United States. The United States had effectively given China a kind of a playbook. And the slightly scary thing here is that this wasn't a spur-of-the-moment decision. China had seen this coming. As they built up their grip over rare earths, they were also preparing administrative tools to weaponise them. The legal tools that China developed so that they were able to apply this chokehold systematically, they really copy very, very closely the architecture of the US legal tools that the US had developed, including, of course, this tool that had been developed against Huawei by my unknown friend in the first Trump administration who thought that weaponized interdependence was a beautiful thing.

53:12Suddenly, it turns out, maybe if being applied to you rather than vice versa, it may not be quite as attractive and as delicious.

53:23Ed Conway:So the weapon, you know, this tool, this dangerous tool that you, to some extent, helped at least define, maybe invent, was used by the Trump administration, and then the Chinese used precisely the same tool on the Trump administration. Precisely. And so we have seen a kind of a proliferation of use of chokeholds, very often in ways that are built upon the US model or that are perhaps also inspired by a US overreach in one way or another. As everyone knows now, we're all living in a world of choke points. Chief among them, as we record this in May 2026, the Strait of Hormuz, weaponised by Iran after it was attacked by Israel and the US.

54:13Ed Conway:Closed. And having embraced Henry's theories, using them as the justification for tariffs in the first term, the Trump White House suddenly finds itself having to defend itself against them. I think this is the real downside of weaponised interdependence as an approach. It assumes that the world is going to stay static in response to increased US use of imperial power. And of course, the world is not going to stay static. Other countries are going to respond. They're going to respond to US military adventures like in Iran. And they're also going to respond to US economic pressure, as with many other tools that the United States is using.

54:56Ed Conway:Rare Earths. They're just the tip of an iceberg of weaponized interdependence. There's a lot of talk these days, lots of paranoia about Chinese interference, spyware on our devices, surveillance tools. But maybe, maybe the real threat in the future is the way countries can use their control of these minerals and services and choke points to hold the rest of the world hostage. How do we confront this moment? Do countries try to bring back manufacturing, even if it means everything from cars to services to our earbuds are going to get more expensive? Or do we hope that we can squeeze this economic Pandora back inside the box?

55:38Ed Conway:The short answer is no one really knows.

55:45Ed Conway:Only one thing is for sure. Rare Earths are only going to become more and more important. What are we expecting? Are we still in the early stages when it comes to Rare Earths? Are we expecting more demand in the coming years? The way you kind of figure out mineral demand for a lot of these is you look out to 2050 and you look at what technologies we might be using. So particularly for energy, you know, most combustion vehicles got replaced by EVs and 30 % of the global energy comes from wind turbines and 80 % of those use rare earth magnets. You kind of back calculate. You start with kind of energy and future uses and you back calculate.

56:24that, yeah, we're very early on, I think, in the demand of what we could actually potentially need. Thousands of percents increases in demand potentially from... Thousands? Yeah, it depends on who you ask and what technologies they like and how much do you believe EVs are going to take over, right? It's all predictions. Almost all demand estimates agree it's going to rocket. That peak demand usually is about 20-50 for most critical minerals that we look at. And that's just from growing energy demand in particular. So not only is demand for minerals going to increase, it increases because we potentially double the amount of energy we need as a planet.

57:01So it depends. How much do you believe that we're going to decarbonize? How much do you believe that people are going to pick up EVs? And how much are these different industries going to grow?

57:11Ed Conway:And the more of these minerals we need, either the more reliant we'll be on China or the more we'll have to pay to rebuild our own supply chains. In fact, our subscriber-exclusive bonus episode is all about what the West can do in the future, including a fresh interview with leading critical minerals expert Gracelyn Baskaran. Anyway, as part of this shift, in order to create more processing capacity in the West, that shuttered mine in California, Mountain Pass... It's gone bankrupt, I think, five times from five different companies. It's now back, under new ownership, and in 2025, it's secured a deal from the US government, which, a bit like China, is now keeping its rare earth sector in business.

57:57Ed Conway:They're doing great now. I think their stock's gone up like 600 % or something insane. But even so, it's still entirely plausible that after this latest flurry of excitement about rare earths, eventually it just dies down. And as Jordan hints, we just sort of forget about it all over again. the U.S. is and sorry I keep talking about the U.S. I write so much about U.S. policy but they have one foot in one foot out half the time. We're going to commit to mining and then it's like okay well maybe not. We're going to commit to processing but never mind it's too dirty now. We love EVs. We hate EVs.

58:35We love renewables. We hate renewables. Actually we're going all in on oil again. We want to revive the coal industry and it's you know that back and forth makes it really difficult for investors. We're stuttering a little bit. I think we're still trying to figure out the US and UK and Europe are interested in this, but they don't know how to do it cleanly or well or responsibly. We have a lot of work to do. And I think, yeah, the more people realize how important this is and how important these technologies are, and that minerals can be done responsibly, that they don't have to be this, you know, technologically enhanced, naturally occurring radioactive material.

59:07Technologically enhanced to radioactive waste is terrifying. None of us wants that, right? We do love AirPods, so we need to figure this out.

59:17Ed Conway:Can I do it one more time? Just one more.

59:26Ed Conway:On the next episode of Stuff Matters, we dive headfirst into the world of bananas. You might think the world's favorite fruit is funny, But no, beneath that yellow skin lurk intensely serious stories of politics, global trade and the perversity and wonder of the way the modern world works. It was picked weeks ago on the other side of the world and it arrives into your supermarkets in perfect condition. Just going from that kind of slightly green, not quite ready to eat, but tomorrow it'll be ready to eat. Not many products are that perfect. Also, without wishing to scare you, did you know there's a non-trivial chance the world's predominant species of bananas might go extinct?

1:00:13Ed Conway:If you haven't subscribed yet, make sure to become a Sky News Insider to get that episode ad-free and a week ahead of everyone else. In other words, right now. The link to join, it's in the show notes.

1:00:35Ed Conway:Stuff Matters is presented by me, Ed Conway, and the series producer is Jake Otayevich. The production team includes assistant producer Valeria Rocca, specialist producer Aoife Yorel, and video producer Charlie Bell. Our bonus episodes are produced by Soyla Aparicio. Our editor is Philly Beaumont, and the Sky News commissioning editor is Paul Stanworth. Sound design and mixing by Luke Hatton. Original music composed by Klong and Ed Conway. Thanks for listening and don't forget, if you want to hear exclusive bonus content and get early access to new episodes, become a Sky News insider and join our club, More Stuff Matters.

1:01:14Ed Conway:Just go to skynews.com forward slash stuff matters.

1:01:30Ed Conway:How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.