Odd Lots - Robert Friedland on the World's Monumental Shortage of Copper

Episode Date: September 12, 2026

Copper demand is booming, with the metal surging another 15% this year. Copper demand has always been tightly linked to economic activity, but now it's in overdrive, thanks to data centers, electric cars, and the global push to reindustrialize everywhere. Copper prices are also rising because it's caught in the crossfire of trade wars and resource nationalism; the US is expected to place tariffs on the refined metal. According to today's guest, Robert Friedland, the founder and executive co-chairman of Ivanhoe Mines, we're not even close to having enough copper for what's coming. We talk to Friedland about opening and running copper mines around the world, and what he's learned in his 40-year long career in mining (which includes a cameo from Steve Jobs). See Odd Lots live in Los Angeles!Read more: Copper Steadies With Dip-Buying From Funds, Chinese Industry Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello, OddLod's listeners. I'm Joe Wisenthall. And I'm Tracy Allaway. We're the hosts of the Odd Lodd's podcast, and we've got something exciting for you. That's right. So one of the best parts of hosting our podcast is we get to actually meet and interact with our listeners, and we know we have some listeners over in Los Angeles. That's right. So if you're in L.A., we're going to be recording a live show, some live recordings at the Vermont Theater and Hollywood on September 17th. We have some really exciting guests lined up, have some really great conversations planned. So go ahead and get your tickets. You can find those over at Bloomberg.com forward slash oddlots or click the link below in the show notes and come and say hi when you're there. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts Radio.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Oil has been in the headlines a lot lately for obvious reasons. But, you know, it has gotten headlines, but another commodity that's near basically at record highs that just keeps to be going straight up for years now is copper. Yeah. So copper, I think, reached a new high of, it was something like 14,875, a total. ton earlier this week. It is down about 3% as we're recording this episode, but I think it kind of

speaks to, I guess, one of the tensions when it comes to copper, which is everyone has been saying, or a lot of people have been saying, that there is this long-term, strong demand impulse for copper because data centers use copper. We need it to electrify the grid, all of that stuff. And yet, the price has often lagged behind. And moreover, you get this volatility. that means people who actually produce copper are sometimes reluctant to increase production. And in fact, I was looking at a note from our colleagues over at BNF recently, and they were saying that this year, we might have the first decline in copper production since 2017. I mean, this is part of why so-called super cycles can happen.

And we've talked about this in so many different roles, both with the pure like sort of resource extraction industry, but even out there's sort of like manufactured goods, like if we were talking about memory, which is you can have these like periods of volatility. You don't really want to invest more during periods of volatility. Then you sort of have like a scarcity of capacity. Then it ramps up the price. And then it's like, oh, build more. But that's like, everyone remembers that.

Memories are long. Right. And we saw that in Shale as well. Memories are long. And then, you know, it's like, I guess it's human psychology. Everyone finally taps at the same time. And they're like, you know what? But we're going to massively expand mining operations, which don't happen overnight by any stretch.

And then suddenly you get gluts and your shareholders get mad at you, et cetera. Why don't you just ride this wave, et cetera? And so these things can then just persist and feed on each other for a long time. But to your point, it's a crucial, you know, there's so much interest these days in resource nationalism, infrastructure, electricity, and so forth. And copper really is at the center of it. Did you see, this is a slight tangent, but did you see the tweet from Peter Schiff? No. What do you say?

With copper at 685 per pound, the melt value of a pre-1982 penny is 4.5 cents. And he calls it, he calls melting pennies not only risk-free, but the upside potential is huge, which is kind of funny because I'm pretty sure that melting down U.S. currency is in fact illegal in the U.S. And so there might be a little bit of a risk there. I also think about, like, how much legwork and effort you would have to do to even, like, find a bunch of pre-1982 pennies and whether that would come to more than three pennies each when you think about the effort. Anyway, but yes, copper. I mean, that said, I mean, that tweet is funny for many reasons. But there is a lot of supply, copper supply, that comes from recycling.

And that is in tension with the new production as well. That's true. talk about that. And that is an important element. Anyway, we got to do a copper episode. And this time, we're going to be speaking with someone like right in it. Someone who has to like make these decisions about investment, how sustainable it is, what's optimal and how the cost to build out new capacity, how these calculations actually work. We literally have the perfect guest today. We're going to be speaking with Robert Friedland. He is the founder of Ivanhoe Mines, Ivanhoe Electric. a new startup called iPulse, which we're going to learn about.

He has been in the industry for over 40 years, literally getting his hands dirty and pulling copper out of the ground. So, Robert, thank you so much for coming on Oddlaught. It's thrilled to have you here. What a pleasure to be in the New York studios. And I just had the opportunity to meet Mike Bloomberg, which is amazing. This is great. You know, I've always said, well, I work at Bloomberg,

it's like the old ESPN commercials where you, like, walk around. It's like made all these luminaries just milling. about the office, including our boss. What do you give us a, for those who don't know, what do you give us a little bit of overview of Ivan Home Mines and just like the portfolio of things you work on? What is it all add up to and look like? Well, in life, you know, you tend to learn more and more about less and less.

We've been in the mining business for over 40 years globally. And in recent years, standard and poor as declared copper as the new oil. We used to fight wars over crude oil. I doubt we would have gone after Saddam Hussein was shocking off. There was absolutely no oil in Iraq. But today, the supply chain, which is a mystical concept of most people, is being balkanized in competing geopolitical groups. There's a war going on that's spreading, affecting the straight of our moots and other critical materials, and copper is central to everything we do.

This super high technology studio, which is enabling us to talk to the whole world, is completely dependent on copper, and more importantly on mining, because everything you touch, we either mined it or we grew it agriculturally, and the farmers are totally dependent on mine product anyway, like fertilizer or their tractors.

So it is time to talk about copper's role as a paradigm for a suite of critical metals without which we're really going to have severe problems. Can you give us your sort of origin story? How did you get into mining? Why were you interested in the space? This is a strange and bizarre story, but Steve Jobs and I had a partnership that goes way, way, way back. Our partnership agreement was stolen and has been sold on this. secondary market to a movie producer, but Steve and I were 50-50 partners where I was the general partner, and he was the limited partner, and we financed it by a loan from the Bank of America on his Apple shares. Wow. What year are we talking about here? Oh, it would have been in the 1980s. Okay. And we went out and started buying Timberland because we thought we were going to be rich hippies

and trees grow about 6% a year, just leave them alone. Douglas fir trees. He thought we'd just live in a tepee and get rich. That's the dream. Being a rich hippie, I got to say. Yeah, and what happened was some of this Timmerland we bought in Oregon. There was an old gold mine that had been closed down in 1942. I don't know if you're aware, under executive order L208, Franklin D. Roosevelt shut all the gold mines to force the miners to mine lead and mainly copper and zinc for the war effort. And in fact, during the war, for three years, we made our pennies out of zinc rather than copper, because copper was so critical to World War II.

In World War I, the price of copper went to the moon. William Randolph Hurst owned the Butte-Montana copper mine, and with that, he bought up all the media in the United States and built the Hurst Castle. So he was sort of the Jeff Bezos of his day. And in World War II, copper was so scarce. We had to mine zinc to make our pennies. And today, as you just said, a copper penny is worth about four or five cents. And that's a good sort of indication of where we're headed. So there was a mine.

What happened from there? Okay. Yeah, keep going. Keep going. Well, you know, it was. If you want to just spend an hour telling Steve Jobs and mining stories, I'm very happy to just talk about. I just want to hear mining stories. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, well, we could spend days on Steve Jobs stories. but, you know, one thing leads to another, and I spent years in India studying yoga and meditation and never dreamed in my wildest dreams that by my age I would learn everything there is to know about almost nothing, which is how to find minds and how to develop them in countries around the world. And we've done that probably more than anybody,

and we've found more critical copper minds and other types of minds than any other group in the world. So we've developed sort of a love, hate relationship with mining. We've tasted failure and we've tasted success, and success tastes a lot better. And now I've been spending more time with our government, both the Biden administration and the Trump administration, as the walls start squeezing in on us. If you think about Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,

and the walls are coming in to squeeze you, and there's this giant ball coming down a ramp to crush you, and you have to dive underneath a trapdoor that's coming down. We are really looking at the weaponization of certain critical raw materials in the supply chain. And it's really a profound national security interest, and it comes at the same time that a lot of humanity is still worried about anthropomorphic global warming. I know it's not as fashionable during the Trump administration, to worry about how hot it is out there, but actually last year was the hottest year in 132 years

since temperatures were recorded. And the metals we need to do something about that are the same metals that are needed for drone warfare or the defense from drone warfare. And so we're seeing a sort of perfect storm in a balkanized world economy where demand for certain critical metals is going to infinity. Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything.

The Bloomberg this weekend podcast, news, politics, and the lighter side of Bloomberg. Human skin is the weirdest new ingredient in the K beauty boom. Oh, yes, it is. So it's a skin booster treatment derived from donated human tissue. Okay. Popular in Souls Beauty Clinics. One doctor says it's made from dead people. It would be weirder from live people.

Yeah, yeah. Just want to pause it. The Bloomberg This Weekend podcast. Subscribe today on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You know, I used to be a hippie, too. I was... Used to be? Well, you know, like, I was raised by vegetarian parents, used to meditate.

And then when I was in college, I lived in a vegan co-op and stuff like that. But now I work in a big office building in New York City. And occasionally, I even have to put on a suit and tie. And I, like, think about, like, what is my 20, what was my 22-year-old self of thought? Whatever. Do you have those thoughts? Do you ever, like, think about where you are today? And then the 20-year-old, the 25-year-old version of you and, like, think, is this continuity?

Would that person have been happy with me the way it was? because I think about these things. Yeah, well, I'll deny the use of the word hippie. We'll say it was plain living and high thinking. Okay. We went through the psychedelic era before I was 20 years of age in the late 1960s, and it was sort of tune on, tune in, drop out, and then crawl back, and then we got into yoga and meditation, went to India,

and did all that stuff for years, and then fell into sort of the reality. distortion field of trying to dream up a business and make a difference. And now I've passed the age of 76. I'm sort of worried about our country's national security. I'm worried about the United States versus China. I think a lot of people are selling the idea that the Chinese people are the mortal enemy of the Americans. That's not true. It's not true. But our systems are in conflict, and the world is balkanized into opposing groups, and we're going away from crude oil being critical. We have plenty of crude oil in the United States, although we don't have much refining capacity. The crack spreads on diesel are at an all-time high, but these high diesel prices

and the crisis around the Strait of our moots are going to lead to some really crazy, implicit consequences, and we sit in the middle of that storm in the mining industry, and particularly in copper, and that's something I'm very happy to talk to your people about. So I'm tempted to ask more about your psychedelics era, but I won't. I stick to the topic, copper. So we seem to have some consensus that demand for copper is going up. There's this need to electrify. There's the data center story. There's all of that. There's also the national security interest angle, which you just described, and yet production has lagged. We don't see a lot of new mines started. And I'm just wondering, with copper at $15,000 or almost $15,000 a ton, what does the

industry need to see in order to be confident in boosting production? Let's start with the fact that if we go back to Mahindra Daro, our species has mined 700 million metric tons of copper. It sounds like a lot. And you could recycle it and get it back. All you have to do is tear down everything in the United States and make it look like the days of the woolly mammoths. And we'd get back about 300 million tons. And in Europe, we'd get 200 million tons and in Asia and other 200 million tons.

But unfortunately, we don't want to go back to freezing in the dark. And at the rate of current global economic growth with 8 billion people on this planet, we don't to maintain 3% GDP growth, absent the electrification of the world economy, absent electric cars, and let's not even get started on data centers. We need to mine that same amount of copper that we mined in the last 10,000 years in the next 18 years. And those of us that are in the industry don't see that as being possible, because, as you know, there's the old adage where it's 50,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea.

And the answer is a good start. Nobody has built anything near anybody in the United States as we have deindustrialized our country. We haven't built a copper smelder or nuclear power plants in this country, nor high-speed trains. I think we've been trying to build high-speed trains between Los Angeles and San Francisco for 30 years. But the Chinese can build everything. They can build oil refineries, nuclear power plants, and high-speed rail. but we outsourced all that. In the last decade, when you went to Walmart,

everything you saw said made in China. In fact, one of the best restaurants in Beijing in the Grand Hyde Hotel took that as a label. It was called Made in China. It was a great Chinese restaurant. But now we're waking up to the fact that we've de-industrialized our country, and we need copper metal,

if you believe in greening the world economy, if you want electric cars, air conditioners, microwave ovens. We need copper meddle. It's very copper intensive. We also need copper in sophisticated armaments in those kinds of missiles like patriots that are interceptors against weaponry that are suddenly being used against civilians in conflict that we haven't seen since World War II. And this is at a time that most of the great copper mines in Latin America are little old ladies laying in bed waiting to die. And this is something I need to explain. And this is something I need to explain to you guys. So what started all this was originally the biggest producer of copper in the

world was the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It used to belong to King Leopold of Belgium. He owned the people, the elephants, the ivory, and they might copper there for centuries. But around the turn of the century, America dug the Panama Canal with big steam shovels. A lot of people died of malaria digging that canal. But when the canal was finished, there were these giant steam shovels that were left over. And the Guggenheim family, who were in the rag trade here in New York, bought those shovels for pennies on the dollar and took them down to Chile to use them to start digging for copper metal, because we were getting into the first industrial revolution, 1910, 1920, President Polk. And they went to a place called Chuky Kamada in

Chile, and the grade of the copper was 3%. They took those old steam shovels, and their company was called Asarko, which was affectionately known as the American Smelding and Robbing Company. And the Guggenheim family made so much money. They left the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art here in New York on Fifth Avenue, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Now, there were two other great American mining companies that rose out of our industrial renaissance. There was Anaconda and Kennecott, but all of them were nationalized by a leftist president

in Chile named Allende. Ayende took them away, took them for the Chilean state, and America responded by killing him. The United States CIA murdered Ayende, and he was replaced by a right-wing general named Pinochet. And Pinochet said, I need these copper mines. He didn't give them back to the United States. In fact, he kept them. They're called Cadalco today.

And he said, 10% of the copper produced will come off the top. to finance the Chilean army. And that was sort of the beginning of the wave of nationalization of resources. You know, Aramco was originally found by an American oil company, and then Saudi Arabia took the oil back. And today, most of the oil in the world belongs to sovereign oil companies. And America was left without a great copper champion. And when I was younger, during, say, the Clinton era,

we started embracing China. I was very early into China. I first went into China in the early 1980s. George Schultz introduced me to China. I was in fact the first American to go mining in China, in Western China, in Xinjiang. And, you know, I watched the incredible rise of the Chinese people. No one has uplifted their economy that far that fast in human history.

And we thought, by birth, bringing China into the WTO, we were going to turn the Chinese into Americans. We thought all the girls wanted Manolo Blonick shoes and Birkenbags. All the guys wanted Porsches. And they did an incredible job of uplifting their society. But things haven't worked out exactly as we thought between our respective societies. Now, most of the mining fell to junior mining companies, existed in Australia or Canada for decades. These companies were registered in Canada, like ships are registered in Liberia. Legislation was friendlier up there for the risks with mining.

Thousands of these little juniors would go around looking for mining. And the big mining companies became more and more brain dead. They became like giant donut-shaped law firms with mediocre operating companies in the middle. For example, Exxon doesn't really drill for oil today. It's a big law firm, but they hire people like Schlumbergerjay or Baker Hughes to do their work, and they just sort of move on. And if you look at the food chain when I was young, I grew up in the 1950s, the United States government made a little pyramid, food pyramid for us,

and it said, you're supposed to drink four glasses of cows milk every day, and a certain amount of milk and cheese and eggs and ham, and at the top of that food pyramid was steak, meat. And when I was in school, you know, we were given that food pyramid. And when I was a kid, you know, I'm remembering this vividly at the age of eight, they made us get under the desk to practice for nuclear war in the event of a nuclear bomb. And I was the kid that told my teacher, this is crazy. We're all going to get vaporized if there's a nuclear war.

So there's always a rebel, always sort of getting in trouble. Now, nobody that I know of in California eats out of that food pyramid anymore. people go to Arawan and, you know, they're, you know, maybe wheatgrass juice and sunlight and some Pilates, but there's nobody eating that stuff anymore. But I want you to know the Pentagon

also had a food pyramid. And they got that all wrong. And what modern warfare requires is none of the stuff in that food pyramid. And so now I get to get on odd lots and try to explain the magic of mining to you guys. Amazing, amazing. You know, just again, not to keep belaboring the point as hippies, but as someone who grew up in the presence of a lot of wheatgrass, once again, it feels like history comes back and I was well prepared for this moment.

All right, let's talk about that pyramid then. You know, let's just say the politics suddenly changed such that, like, you didn't need a lot of lawyers, such that people didn't complain if they lived in the presence of a mine or something. I don't know, miraculous things that could never happen. And why don't you just talk about, I guess, the math and the engineering in terms of like the deficit that you foresee between demand, supply and what it would take, I guess, from an engineering standpoint or a money standpoint, to build out the supply that we need for whatever are the key rungs of that pyramid? That's a brilliant question and opens up an amazing can of worms for your audience. So the largest copper mine in the world is La Escondida, it's in Chile, and we need to look at that clinically to try to understand the existential dilemma we face. When it was first found a generation ago, the grade was close to 2% copper. They've been digging deeper, deeper, deeper, and today it's 0.8 of 1%.

It belongs to Rio Tinto and BHP, the largest mining companies in the world in the Western world. but within two years, the grade is going to drop to 0.4 of 1%. So the grade is going down. And as that grade declines, the rock deeper in the pit is getting harder and harder to crush and grind. And you need to take rock and reduce it to talcum powder to get the metal out. The way we get the metal out of rock is we make talcum powder out of it. And about 4 to 5% of all the energy produced on planet Earth is, utilized in the crushing and grinding of rock, which is a huge number when we're worried about

the generation of global warming gas. Now, that mine sits at 12,000 feet elevation in the Andes, and it hasn't rained in the Atacama Desert in 30,000 years. And you need two cubic meters of water to crush one cubic meter of rock. So as the grade of that rock is declining in copper, you need to crush and grind more and more rock to get less and less metal. And since you're generating the electricity and she led by burning primarily coal, they have some solar, but the sun only shines six hours a day. You need 24-hour-day power in the mining industry. The global warming gas generated by crushing and grinding that copper is going up and up and

up. And to further confuse you, they built a $4 billion de-celonization plant, at sea level. They take ocean water, get the salt out of it. That's using a million dollars a day of electricity because you have to pump that water from sea level up to 12,000 feet, and the water consumption is going up, the energy to generate and pump that clean water uphill is going up, and the metallurgical recovery is going down. And so they're modeling 10, 12 billion of investment just to make that mine go down in production, and that is what's happened to our industry.

Our global production of copper this year is down, even though prices are up. And that's amazing because I just told you, we need to mine as much copper in the next 18 years as we did in the last 10,000 years just to maintain global 3% GDP growth without the electrification of the world economy. Now, when you look at,

data centers, it really gets, if you want to use our earlier term, psychedelic. Because the hyperscalers have incredible market capitalizations. And they had a beautiful viral technology. And in fact, in the last 30 years, all the capital on Wall Street went into sexy technology like the internet and broadband and Netflix and wireless. And all the kids went into that and the Bloomberg studios were built. But when all the money goes in that, you know, direction. We didn't put money into basic raw materials, which are the foundation on which everything sits. In fact, we stopped mining things in the United States, and we sort of push this all to China. We said, well, let's let the Chinese build everything at Walmart.

You go to Walmart, everything said made in China. So all the pollution was over there in China, and we thought, this is a good deal. We can be a consumer society. We'll drink our lattes here and complain about global warming and just let the Chinese do all the work. And this model is no longer viable. And now we're waking up in finding that there really is a critical raw material supply chain. In the Biden administration, when he used to work with Amos Hochstein, who was in charge of the energy transition, and was all about global warming.

And you remember that world as we came out of COVID? We saw that it was getting hotter and hotter, and we started thinking, for solar power, you need copper. For wind, you need copper. The way we generate electrical energy, the way we transmit it, this studio is ludicrously copper intensive and energy intensive. And there is nothing, and I mean nothing, about the Internet that is inherently green.

Let me give you an example. When you do a Google search, and all of us are guilty of having done a Google search, you push that key. You're using the amount of electrical. energy that it takes to run a 100 watt light bulb for about 12 seconds, which doesn't sound like a lot, but there are hundreds of billions of Google searches. And that electricity is not free. You think it's free when you do that Google search, but it's paid for by advertising. Now, when you do an AI search,

and I use Chad GPT4, and we're using Clod, and you do an AI search, you're using 30 times more electrical energy. Using the power it takes around a 100 watt bulb for two minutes or three minutes. And every single kid in the world, a five-year-old with an iPad, is going to be using AI searches. And so the electrical demand for AI literally goes to infinity. Now, here's our problem. Here is our dilemma. A.I. is at its roots of military technology. And I want to explain why. Do you want to hear this? Please. So we have a genius, a polymath named Elon Musk.

You know, his brain is beyond most people's comprehension. It reminds me a lot of Stephen jobs. But he's developed a series of low-earth-orbiting satellites where the latency, when we send a signal up to outer space, is 27 millionth of a second, going up and coming down. Now, if I'm sending a drone to keep, kill you, Joe. It knows what you look like, even though you've grown your beer a little longer. They can identify you. To hide from drones. You know, a little microdron. They could be a mother drone.

It releases baby drones. And this drone is looking for you. And going back to the hippie era, all it has to do is attach itself to your third eye. Boom, and you're gone. Now, this is a military technology. Dron technology is so efficacious that the leopard tanks and the, the, the, the, the Abrams tanks we were giving to Ukraine are parked and no longer used because a $12 drone can find them from the heat signature from the tailpipe and just kill them. So a drone warfare depends on AI because there's an AI identification of the target. Up it goes to the satellite. It comes back down, wipes out the target. And if my satellite system has a millionth of a second less latency than yours, you die. I don't.

So AI first goes to military application. And later on, it goes to a beautiful, sexy doll to make love with. They're selling those beautiful robots right now in China. And those humanoid robots also will utilize astronomical amounts of these same critical raw materials. And maybe those robots will be a Terminator, or maybe they'll make a great lover, you know, very sympathetic chatting to you. But all of these technologies are insanely consumptive of electrical energy.

Your AI girlfriend is actually created by servers. And a server in a server farm uses 20 critical metals that are the new oil. And you don't even know that you need niobium and tantalum and pladium and rhodium. Or, for example, if you're Jensen Wong and you've gotten a video, you need gallium nitride. Or if you want to improve memory and chips, you need scandium nitride. And so instead of the food pyramid that the Army, Navy, and Air Force relied on, in those days, there was stuff like coal and oil.

And, yeah, they had a little bit of copper in the old food pyramid. Today it's what we call critical raw materials. AI girlfriends and boyfriends, please. Yes, thank you. Equal opportunity for parasycial relationships. We agree. If you want Arnold Schwarzenegger-style male robot, they're coming and they're opening soon at a theater near you. And the actuators, the electrical motors, these things are going to go and plug themselves into the grid to recharge are incredibly dependent on AI.

And this whole unbelievable machine we're building that requires the metals that I'm talking to, about right now. I didn't expect this conversation to be the moment where I sort of reveal one of my takes, but while we're here. It's not on sex robots, is it? It's not on sex robots per se, but kind of in the sense that I think that like the boomer generation had to sort of get comfortable with the fact that their children might be gay. The millennial, the Gen X generation had to get comfortable that their children might have trans partners. And the millennial generation is going to be the one that has to get comfortable when someone brings back their AI robot or girlfriend and they're going to get mad at their parents when they don't respect it. Anyway, keep going. Thank you for that

image, Joe. Back to copper. Does technology solve any of the mining constraints that we've had? Because there must have been technological developments in the industry over the course of your career. And of course, we all know about the Shale Revolution and what happened there. Do you see tech, advancing in such a way that maybe production does increase? Well, now that we've unleashed AI, and I hope as a card-carrying humanoid, that we can control it. You're human, right? That's an open question. I want to tell you, I'm not a robot.

I'm a grandfather. You're asking some very, very important questions. We cannot, as an industry, find and responsibly mind the cost. copper that we need for an energy transition with yesterday's technology. It's just impossible. We can't mine more copper in the next 18 years with yesterday's technology without generating the same global warming gas that we were worried about in the first place. Because the energy requirement, I'm just talking about diesel. The diesel price skyrocket. Let's talk about that. Yeah. The straight-door moots remains closed largely today.

global hydrocarbon coming to the market is down at least 10 percent, and the tertiary implications are terrifying sulfuric acid. About 25 percent of the copper that we recover in the world requires sulfuric acid to leach it, and it comes out of the Middle East from natural gas in places like Qatar. So without that, sulfuric acid, we've seen prices in the last eight months go from $150 a ton to well over $1,000 a ton for sulfuric acid. It's also used to make fertilizer or food or to make semiconductors. Sulfuric acid is the king of chemicals, but it's a funny byproduct of the closure of the straight that the price of sulfuric acid is skyrocketing. And in the Congo, we heap leach copper, about 25% of the production needs that very same

sulfuric acid. Now, I'm fortunate in that our company built the largest copper smelter on the African continent. It's the most modern copper smelter built in the world, and we produce sulfuric acid as a byproduct of our copper mines, and we sell that sulfuric acid to our brother copper miners in the Congo at higher and higher prices. But there is a worldwide shortage of sulfuric acid. Russia and China have now banned the export of sulfuric acid, and if we don't have more of it. Food prices are going to rise globally. And we are seeing insipient inflation arising through the supply chain as our beautiful, integrated, just in time world economy breaks down into a just-in-case economy. And now what do I mean by just-in-case? So every country

in the world is looking to their own supply chain. Japan is building up its military. North and South Korea are building up their respective militaries. They don't like each other. Taiwan is trying to turn into a big porcupine. And in fact, if Taiwan goes to Chinese control, TSM, their semiconductor company and MSL, who make the lithograph machines, to make semiconductors, are rigged to be exploded

in the event of falling into Chinese hands. China has a massive military buildup. India and Pakistan fought a war a little over a year ago. Could have gone nuclear. They're both increasing their military budgets. Europe is waking up and going to a 3% GDP military budget, worried about Russian drones and non-conventional warfare. And you know the Trump administration is proposing a $1.5 trillion budget next year. Up 50% for defense.

And all of these modern systems are copper intensive. And what happens as these countries start to look at copper as a proxy on money, let's just explain that in the last year or two, we've seen the dollar price of copper go from $4 to $6 or $7. But if you live in Japan, it was only 50, 60, 70, end of the dollar. As I went to 160 end of the dollar, it just took so much more yen to buy copper. It looks twice as expensive in Japan. And in fact, as Scott Besson, our Treasury Secretary, is trying to prevent the yen from melting down. It's so good for the carry trade for all your hedge fund listeners. But if the yen collapses, Mrs. Watanabe might not buy our treasuries. And then rates go even higher, and that wouldn't be good for the midterm elections of the 2028 elections.

So we've come to a point where push has come to shove. and we just haven't had enough capital or technology in the mining industry. So we're getting back to your question. Can we use Yankee ingenuity and innovate our way out of the fact that the walls are crushing in on us, that, you know, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? You definitely have a way with metaphors. Can I just say that? Well, no, we're, you know, those of us in the mining industry scratch our heads and wonder,

don't these people on Wall Street understand how. hard it is to build a mind. The resolution copper project in Arizona has been trying to get a permit for 35 years. So the banana principle is built absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody. And, you know, we just, you know, the old adage was, what's 50,000 lawyers at the bottom of the scene? And the answer was a good start. How does Japan work with only 2,000 lawyers? We have millions. So we need to re-perceive copper as a good. And in the Biden administration, we finally got copper added to one of the lists as a critical raw material. But the Democratic Party under the Biden administration couldn't bring themselves to putting a good housekeeping seal of approval

on a mine. They were sort of warming up to the idea that we need mining. Otherwise, you have to burn coal or oil. And they were moving in the right direction. I worked. worked with Amos. He was in charge of the energy transition, and they were recognizing that solar is good, wind is good, but the wind doesn't blow all the time, the sun doesn't shine on the time, you need grid-scale batteries. My obsession is with geothermal power, and my obsession is with a cleaner and greener way to liberate these metals. And the good news is that there is disruptive technology available that we are working on. We've had the support of a lot of major tech investors and a number of governments, Japanese, French, and the United States government.

And we do think it is with great difficulty possible to innovate our way out of this mess, but it's going to be very tough and it's going to be a very closely fought thing. Get Bell, Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month, price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year. term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Now, Bloomberg.com subscribers can shape the conversation on Bloomberg Radio. We got a weak and smart question. Can be part of the conversation. Submit questions for experts and guests you hear on air. Visit Bloomberg.com slash ask radio to send questions to our hosts.

You may just hear them asked on the air. Exclusively for Bloomberg.com subscribers. Get answers on today's headlines. Breaking earnings news. make market moves. Visit Bloomberg.com slash ask radio to join the conversation right here on Bloomberg Radio. You know, I recognize that you, you know, when we talk about your actual operational footprint, you know, we're talking about Africa. We've also talked about South America. In this world now where everybody is trying to, we call it Balkanization or resource nationalism or so forth. Earlier this week, I know that it's not where you like, where you're digging stuff out of the ground, but where you're,

you have kind of a base in Canada. There was news of the government investing $405 million on a new highway project, build out the transportation infrastructure and parts of the country, a country that is endowed with quite a bit of important materials. Do you think like there is a big opportunity there if there, you know, the current government actually seems quite serious about resource investment in a way that perhaps prior liberal governments in Canada that hadn't been. Are you optimistic or do you see a prospect for there is a lot there if we

invest in the infrastructure to drive out and get it? So I need you to understand that we are in the low foothills, not the Rocky Mountains. We're in the low foothills of the Himalayas in the metal demand we face if we want to green the world economy because the Bloomberg organization has a lot of good work done on global ecological issues. And yet we face the incipient and viral war that has broken out in Ukraine, in the Middle East, Iran, Hormuz, and we have balkanized ourselves into two giant opposing groups. We have Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran closely cooperating. Iran now has hypersonic missiles. Iran now has hypersonic missiles, which, by the way, we don't have yet that are steerable, that are incredibly amazing

that Iran can target missiles so precisely with technology that must have come from Russia or China. And we have a countervailing pressure. And if you look at our president, he told Mr. Zelensky in Ukraine, I will help you. If you give me critical raw materials, it's become very mercantile. You never saw an American president say, help you only if we have critical raw materials. If you'll give me five minutes, I want to talk to you about World War II and the current situation. Tracy and I are both middle-aged dads who love World War II. Perverbial Middle-Age. Most of your listeners are too young, so I really need to explain this to you

by analogy. The Japanese thought it was a good idea for some reason to bomb Pearl Harbor. They had an idea in their mind, and they did it. And Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was a Democrat, was president of the United States, and he was an isolationist. He did not want to get involved in World War II, but in England, you had Chamberlain, and you had Churchill. And Churchill was obsessed with the Nazis, and he came to Franklin D. Roosevelt begging for help. And ultimately, in 1940, 41, Churchill grudgingly said, I got a message from Roosevelt, I will lend you and I will lease you what you need for the war effort. I won't give you anything for free, but I'll lend you coal, I'll lend you oil, I'll lend you copper,

I'll lend you tin, I'll send it over on my merchant shipping with American boys, and later on you pay me back with interest because he was an isolationist. He didn't want to get in the war. The Germans invented these incredible little U-boats, a little needle submarines, and they started sinking our merchant shipping, interrupting the supply chain between the United States and Great Britain during the war. Fortunately, a group of mathematicians in England broke the Enigma Code. And had that not happened, everybody in England today would be speaking German.

It was a very closely fought thing. The Germans were working on heavy water reactors and nuclear weapons. ultimately we dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was a uranium bomb, and then our second bomb we dropped was a plutonium bomb. It was a science experiment. Truman authorized a second bomb to be dropped, and America came out on top of the world. Now, today, the supply chain is being interrupted, and none of those commodities that we needed in World War II are relevant.

Without gallium, there is no Navidia. No Navidia chips, without scandium, renium, dysprosium, niobium, tantalum. These are metals you don't even know about. We can't build this studio. We can't develop AI as fast as the Chinese. And our hyperscalers are getting in debt. They're borrowing money to pour concrete and steel. Their heads are in the clouds, but their feet are of clay.

They're sitting on the earth. And there's a shortage of electrical capacity. our country to run these data centers. In fact, there's a backlash against data centers in the U.S. because voters are seeing the price of electricity go up. And so this is a very strange, weird thing unfolding here that China has more than twice the electrical energy it needs to run its society, and we don't. You know, there was a power failure here in New York. I think it was in 1970s or 1980s. Our power here in New York comes from a hydropower in Quebec. It comes down from hydroelectric dams that you could never build today.

A bunch of hippies would lay in front of the bulldozers to rent those lakes from being developed. But when the power went out here in New York, a lot of babies got made. Nine months later, there was a big bump of babies because there was nothing else to do. It was dark out. People stayed at home. They were worried about looting.

But today, if you want everything Elon's doing, if you want GROC, if you want AI, You want humanoid robots. You want electric cars. You want microwave ovens and washing machines. You want to clean the environment and you want to defend yourself against drones coming to get you. You need ultra-sophisticated critical metals. And unfortunately, all of them are developed by China.

They're not found here in the United States. And the Chinese are very rationalized and very critical, you know, in an intelligent way, saying, we're not going to sell them to you unless we agree. In fact, if you're a U.S. manufacturer, you now have to give your plans to the China Military Commission and say, why I want one of these metals. And then they study it. They look at your blueprints, and they can refuse the supply of those metals for any reason or no reason. Now, we're ahead as a society on chips, and they're ahead on critical raw materials. And maybe there's some big trade to be made here when Scott Bessent negotiates, and in fact, President Xi Jinping is due in the United

States, September 24th, and this could go two ways. We could play the game with each other, like on a level playing field, with a game of rules like rugby, where I break your collarbone and you break mine, but we don't kill each other, or this could spin out of control, because Chinese AI is coming, it's as good as ours, it's 99% as good as ours, and they're going open source. They're going to give it to American Enterprise for free while the hyperscalers are betting the farm on astronomically large capital investments, but they can't find the electricity in the United States and the critical raw materials to develop these things. And that's why I told Bloomberg recently as a minor, I'm being approached by unconventional interest out of Silicon Valley. And we're

talking to the big hyperscalers just saying, my God, we got a problem now. What exactly do they want to do here? Are they talking about like investing equity or owning some sort of facility? Well, you know, nobody that's in technology wants to get their hands dirty mining because, you know, a telling them can collapse, there could be an environmental issue in mining. And we like to think that technology exists in a parallel universe where we never get our hands dirty. But it's the technology that's drawing. all this electricity that is generating global warming gas. In other words, it would be neat if Microsoft could run all of their power off of nuclear power plants. In fact, they went after

three-mile island to reopen it to provide the electricity for these data centers. But actually, currently they're going to natural gas, and that's not really that green. And there's a seven-year weight to get a gas turbine to power a natural gas power plant. Ergo Bloom Energy, their stock is gone up because they have solid oxide fuel cells as an alternative to generate electrical energy for a data center. A data center needs uninterruptible power. It can't work on solar because the sun doesn't shine all the time. Can't work on wind. The wind doesn't blow all the time. And so to build a solid oxide fuel cell, you need scandium metal. Can't build it without it. Or to build a natural gas turbine, you need renium metal in the core of the core of.

the turbine. And so we're really bumping up against critical materials to enable this kind of thing that we're doing today to exist at scale. And the problem for us is that the response to this question has to be at the scale of the American economy. If we're a little country like Honduras, we wouldn't need very much. But we're big. And in order to keep growing and going to AI, suddenly the miners become the key, and we can't go on mining the way we used to mine, or we're going to destroy this planet. We're going to, instead of mining oil and gas and coal, we're going to rip up every mountainside on the planet trying to find enough copper to have an energy transition.

And so we are dependent on becoming technologically savvy and a technological revolution. It's not going to be easy, but I'm working on it and allow people I know are. Just real quickly, you mentioned the long wait for natural gas turbines right now. For you placing orders for equipment, just the standard run-of-the-mill equipment, things that dig stuff out of the ground. Are there, like, constraints these days the likes you wouldn't have faced 10 years ago to buy the same thing? It's beyond, it's so bad that it's beyond your Wallace imagination. When we built the, you know, we went up to Mongolia in the Gobi Desert, and we just the Oia Tolgoate copper and gold mine, which today is ranking about number four in the

world in copper and has the world's second or third largest gold resource. And we're in the Gobi Desert. And we invested about $7 billion to discover this thing to start to build it. But we didn't have the water. We didn't have enough water around the mine. So we had to go out looking for water. And if we couldn't find the water, we would have had a $7 billion modern art sculpture out there in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Today, about 20, billion of capital has gone into that mine. Rio Tinto bought the company, and it's in production. And it runs on imported electricity from China on a $100 million extension cord, and the Chinese can just unplug it. But they sell all of that copper into the Chinese economy, so it's in China's

interest to allow that mine to operate. So, you know, there's an example of going somewhere to find something that's very energy intensive. Now, repeat your question. I just mean you want to buy a big shovel. A big like, like, what's the backlog for that? I want to tell you about that mine.

So when we were building that mine, I built the phase one mine. We had the world's largest electrical motors. They're like giant washing machines. And there's rocks and steel balls. You tumble the rocks. And slowly the rocks bash against each other with these steel balls.

And with a huge amount of electrical energy, you grind it down to talcum powder to liberate the copper. And the ring gear around those giant motors, these motors are 40 feet in diameter approximately. It was a four and a half year weight to get the ring gear. In other words, you order the motor, four and a half years later, Siemens or ABB could build it. Today it would be an eight or ten year wave, if ever, you know.

And the hyperscalers are trying to get a gas turbine today. Because we have a lot of natural gas in the United States. You're generating global warming gas for your AI, but it's about a six or seven or eight year weight. And today, when you read the fine print in those supply contracts, they say, well, there's a force Missouri clause. If we can't get one of the metals, we just won't deliver it. No, I'll give you an example.

We had a temporary problem at one of our copper mines in the Congo. We had a flood due to a seismic event, and we needed to pump the water out of the mine. And, you know, the mine's about the depth of the height of the Eiffel Tower, or a little, maybe two Eiffel Tower's deep. And the pumps we needed pump 1,000 liters per second three times the height of the Eiffel Tower. So these are very sophisticated pumps. And we called the Americans. They said, sorry, we can't build them. We called the Germans.

No deal. We called all over the planet. we said why not? And they said we can't get the samarium cobalt magnets for the electric motors because these pumps are like a rocket ship. They're almost three meters in diameter. They're eight or ten. There's 80, 90 feet long. We lowered them down these shafts. Only the Chinese could build those pumps. Fortunately, the Chinese were buying our copper. And so they built the pumps in 30 days. And we got the mine pumped out. When we were flooded, we're losing about $15 million a day. revenue. It wasn't a money question. It was just who's going to sell us a pump. Yeah. So,

you know, there's a great song by Bob Dylan. You know, you're both too young to remember it. It was the first real rap song. It was called Subterranean Homestake Blues. And you should play it because it's early rap. But there's two great lines in that song from Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan. one was you don't need a weatherman to know the way the wind is blowing and the final line in the song it ends with the pump won't work because the vandals took the handle and what's happening now is that it's recognized that by withdrawing certain critical raw materials you can you can bring our economy to a halt. If you look at a Boeing 747 on the runway, it's got four million parts, but if one part is missing, it doesn't take off. And so as our systems get more complex,

we're in a position to blackmail each other. And right now, we could tell China, I'll give you an example. I was talking to our Treasury Secretary. He's an amazing person, Scott Besson. And I was asking about our discussion with the Chinese, and he said, I sat down with the Chinese, and they said, you bastards haven't delivered the Boeing, the General Electric engines for our Boeing airplanes, you promised us. And he said, well, you haven't given us the critical metals. We need to build those engines. And so we're starting to point a gun at each other's temple. And there's this giant chess game going on. And we used to get this over crude oil. And now it's moving towards a suite of critical metals that you don't talk about enough on odd lots.

Well, we're fixing that now. So related to this, one of the reasons that copper is falling this morning, and we're recording this on September 10th, but there's a report out saying that the White House hasn't made a decision yet on refined copper tariffs. Do tariffs help boost production in the U.S. if the constraint is, you know, geological and legal and bureaucracy? So Ernie called me from Reuters yesterday, and I told him I didn't want to comment on it because I've been wearing out my shoe leather going into the Biden administration and Trump administration.

But I could argue both sides of the proposition for you without telling you where I stand personally. Smart. You know, in the old days, terrorists was the principal way that governments collected revenue in the British Empire when the Sunday. never set on the British Empire, and we had ships. The British Crown authorized piracy. You know, you're a privateer. You go out and kill somebody, and as long as 12.5% went to the crown, or they had tariffs. And we didn't invent income taxes until the 1930s or so. And the problem is that if I go to the Congo, the grade of the copper there is 3, 4, 5, 6%. It's unbelievably rich. And there's 100 million people in the Congo.

The median age, do you know what the median age of a person is in the Congo? 18.7. So it's a very young population, Generation Z. And they don't remember the days of the Civil War. They want to work. And I can get a brilliant software engineer that's Congolese who knows AI or who can run automated equipment for $800 or $1,000 or $1,000 a month. If I want to mine copper in the United States, the United Steelworkers of America want over $100 an hour to go underground.

And we have environmental legislation and legal constraints that make it much more expensive to mine in the United States. But this is a paradigm if you want to build a nuclear power plant in the United States or you want to put it in a data center in the United States. It takes big, big money. So mining tended to go around the world where the resources are higher grade, or lower cost. But what happened was the financial system invented the net present value model. It was originally made for oil and gas. The mining companies started NPV models. All the mining companies were valued on NPV,

and it's a stupid idea because mines cannot be modeled to NPV. Oil fields can, but not mines. Oil fields decline very fast if you don't put money into them. They just, the energy in the reservoir depletes. But a mine with 100 years of reserves doesn't deplete like an oil field. So the NPV model suppressed the valuation of mining companies. In fact, today mining companies in the aggregate only have the value of less than 1% of the S&P 500, which is an all-time low for mining. Now, the Chinese saw this and they said, my God, we got 1.3 billion people to feed forever.

These stupid Americans are willing to sell all this. And they just came in over the top. and they intelligently just bought the entire supply chain. They bought everything that wasn't bolted down. And so, you know, the problem is that the Chinese did something very intelligent for the Chinese people. And today, we don't own these assets anymore because all of our money went into Netflix. You know, this really has to be, somebody has to tell the truth about all this, because basically we got caught with our pants down.

Now, can I tell you about my interviews with American billionaires? So, you know, every time Bloomberg writes about me, they say billionaire Robert Friedland. I kind of get tired of that phrase. I've now interviewed 50 male and female billionaires. And I've asked them, do you kind of sit down and put your pants on one leg at a time? Or do you hold your pants up in front of you and jump in with both legs? simultaneously. And I haven't found one billionaire who claims that he or she jumps into their pants both legs at a time. And so this whole thing is overrated. It's just paper money. What I'm worried

about is my grandkids. I'm worried about the sustainability. How do we provide food and water and clean air to eight billion inhabitants without warring groups? We used to fight over crude oil. Most of the wars the last century was over crude oil. And now we might start fighting related to AI and the critical raw materials to support that AI. And that's why I think this should be a series. This should be like Breaking Bad, not a one-off movie where we peel this onion and go deeper into the core of this issue.

And, you know, I know a lot of your guests have been starting to talk about this. But this is a subject that is not going to go away for the next 10 or 20. years. This is like a permanent subject. For example, I remember the 1987 crash. Rates were 12% and the stock market crashed in Volcker cut rates and the bond market went up for 35 years. Right now, this is not an ephemeral short-term thing. That article that came out on Reuters today that spooked the copper market a little bit is talking about tariffs. You ask me what I

think about tariffs. Well, if you want to mine in the United States, if you want to be self-sufficient, tariffs are a great idea. Because if copper is six bucks, you put on a 30% tariff, 30% of six bucks is $1.80, you'd have $7.80. copper.

I could afford to hire a mine worker at the United States of the United States. It would make it more viable to do that here. However, the other side of the equation is it'll create domestic inflation, rates will otherwise go up. We have the midterm elections coming. So there's a political

issue. Do you want to re-industrialize America or do you not want to re-industrialize America? If you can't build a nuclear power plant, if you can't build a ship, you lose your sovereignty. Last year, America built about eight ships and China built a thousand. And so this is a very big question. Do you really want to replace the entire system of crude oil and replace it with huge data centers run by clean energy or don't you? And I want to tell you this country is well endowed by the creator in all manner of good things. We have water, we have amber waves of grain. 10% of the copper of her mind in the world came from the great state of Arizona. The California license plate used to say the golden state because we discovered gold.

in California. And the Arizona license plate said the copper state. And people were proud of it, you know. And, you know, listen to Bruce Springsteen. I mean, we used to do stuff in this country. You know, we used to have blast furnaces and steel mills. And we lost all that because we thought we could outsource all this to China. And everything at Walmart said made in China, whether there's a microwave oven or a washing machine. And this is part of the big debate is if you want to re-industrialize America, let's do it in a better way. Let's try to figure out a more sustainable way to do it. But if we don't do it, we have lost our sovereignty. And I think that you're discovering this in Europe, and this is being discovered globally. And that's

why we're beginning the age of hoarding. What's happening is that governments are buying copper metal as a proxy on money. And they're not reporting it. And nobody can calculate the supply demand balance on any of these medals because why would you? Like we're seeing the statistics that China's buying gold of a sudden. And they're not buying our treasuries. They're selling our treasuries. And some people think Bitcoin is an alternative asset for the United States dollar. There's a great disbasement trade starting.

Hedge funds borrow the end and rely on the end a week and not to have to pay the money back. But we're at an inflection point now, where this is all being exposed and everything is becoming naked and available to global scrutiny. And we're seeing that demand has come against push. And we're getting into a more sophisticated understanding that, do you want AI to what good? Do you want to make all of our kids get brainwashed on TikTok or Facebook? Do you really want to get our kids? We're turning into two rival tribes here in the United States with the way social media is working. And it's all driven by AI.

And AI can make it even more dangerous. You know, I've got a grandson. You know, when I took my grandson's iPad away, just freak out, right? You know? So, yeah, I'm a baby boomer. Yeah. I admit it. You know, I admit it.

Well, Robert, really looking forward to having you back tomorrow for part two. and then the next day for part three of this discussion. But no, really appreciate you coming on odd lots. That was fantastic. We should talk again. Yeah, you know, to be continued. I wasn't expected to talk about sex robots. I was going to say.

But when we're thinking about future sources of demand for copper, for energy. I suppose, I suppose that's one. Yeah, got to plug in your significant other. You got to build it in. You got to keep it plugged in. Well, as far as baby boomer conversations go, that was a fun one.

Yeah, for sure. I didn't hear a lot of solutions to the problem, which I guess is why we're talking about this at all. There are obvious solutions, but I think before you can even talk about solutions, you have to identify the problems. And I think one of the problems that we face is that at every step of the chain, there are constraints, right? So let's say you make the decision to, we really want to make a big advantage.

investment in a new copper mine somewhere. Well, there's a years-long wait to get the equipment, to get the earth-moving equipment or the engines that you need to do that. And the builders, someone says, okay, we want to build a lot more engines because there are people who want to build a lot more mines. Well, I guess then we need more gallium or whatever critical resource it is. And so I think one of the things that's very helpful is to say like, oh, just build more minds, just build more memory, but in each leg of the chain, one level up, you know, higher up river, et cetera, they have their own backlogs. And it's still not clear that the market will actually reward you for increasing production

because you still have the volatility and super cycle supply problem. Yeah. Seems hard. I think he said plenty. It's like almost I don't have anything to add to it, you know? Yeah. All right. Shall we leave it there?

Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wise. all. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our producers, Kerman Radhiel Bennett at Dashop,

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