Peter S. Goodman

And then the story ended.

So my job was to figure out, well, then what happens?

So I quickly figured out there's no expert to call.

There's nobody who did a dissertation on this.

There's no book.

There's no YouTube documentaries to watch for tips.

There isn't even, you know, Reddit to go get dubious, you know, tips.

I was just...

Yeah, it was just a black box.

And I started to reach out to people who worked for these trading companies.

The one I was most focused on was this company called Trafigura.

Correct.

Yeah, Trafigura's job is to buy and sell commodities.

They're the ones who are most expert in what's available, what's the price.

And so we had transactions we could see in the database where Trafigura is buying lead from these smelters we're focusing on in Nigeria and shipping it to the port of Baltimore.

But I had no idea who was buying it at that point.

And so I did a bunch of different things.

I signed up to go to trade shows, hoping I would run into people who would help tell me the story.

I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn, just mass messaging anybody who had worked at Trafigura.

And that was pretty lonely and felt fairly futile.