Coltan Scrivner

It's like a combination mineral, right?

The unfortunate thing is if you search my name, there aren't a lot of people with my name that is spelled C-O-L-T-A-N.

The only other thing in the world that's spelled like that is this like slave mining that happens in the Congo.

Yeah, I feel like I have people like that in my life where they do something interesting, but it's so morally opaque.

And I'm like, I don't know if I can be close to you, but they're like a lens into another part of the world.

Exactly.

You don't feel warm towards them.

You know, you're curious about them, but maybe don't feel warm towards them.

Well, I thought the same thing when I first started studying this.

I thought, oh, of course people are studying this because if you talk to anyone on the street or at a bar or wherever, and you just use the phrase morbid curiosity, you ever been morbidly curious?

People give you a hundred examples of when they've done that.

Maybe they're curious about this shady guy they met at a club who works in the Congo with coal sand mining.

I think that's a form of that, right?

And so I thought surely people have studied this.

And when I started looking into it, there was just no science on this.

And this was not that long ago, maybe five, six years ago, seven at the most.

So I thought, okay, this is interesting as a grad student, right?

I found this thing that everyone knows about, but nobody has studied it.

That's a goldmine.

Yeah.