[delicate music] Gold. Born pure and immaculate in the heart of dying
stars, gold has captured the imagination of mankind since time immemorial. What enrapturing magic lies in that soft yellow
lustre? Why has gold enchanted so many for so long
with its soft, pillowy glow and warm, gentle, yet firm embrace? What mysteries lie in gold if we dare to follow
it down the forbidden path into the delicate folds of gold’s sweet Hey, is this getting weird for anyone else? [aggressive dubstep] Gold. I can’t be the only one who's getting spammed
with ads on the subject of gold, right? Whether it’s overpolished YouTube spots,
or TikTok finance guys pushing their trading courses a lot of people seem to want me, Dan
Olson specifically, to buy gold. Most ads for investments are fairly similar
and just kinda wash into the background radiation of daily life, but this one caught my attention. Idris Elba - “I’m going to tell you a
story far more incredible than I ever imagined. There’s nothing else like it. A miracle of nature. I’m talking about gold.” That is The Suicide Squad’s own Idris Elba
headlining a YouTube documentary on gold distributed by the “World Gold Council”... whoever
they are. I’m assuming they were the villains from
Captain Planet. ‘Gold: A Journey with Idris Elba’ promises
to take the viewer on an eye-pleasing, globe-spanning adventure peering into the fascinating and
complex relationship between humanity and element seventy nine, the ways gold intersects
history and technology, and the result is, well… I’m not going to bury the lede here, this
is corporate propaganda. It is not particularly good. But! Its existence is interesting. These kinds of celebrity-hosted corporate
spin pieces are a bit of a relic in this day and age, usually relegated to industry trade
shows or maybe looping on a screen in the back corner of some regional museum’s geology
exhibit. The Mineral Journey sponsored by the World
Gold Council. You know, that kind of thing. What’s unusual is how hard it’s being
pushed to a lay audience. If you even glanced at something finance related
lately, odds are you got pushed the trailer as an ad. “What is i about gold that’s got us so
hooked? There’s no sticking one in your pocket and
getting out of here is there?” Now, first of all, in the abstract a documentary
about gold is exactly the kind of thing that I’d watch. Gold is a genuinely compelling subject worthy
of exploration, especially by a documentary team with, like, a travel budget and at least
some access to the operations of a working mine. You could fill the running time of a documentary
just discussing the chemical properties of gold, its resistance to corrosion, its malleability,
and how those elemental traits, those quirks of physics and chemistry, inform its place
in culture. Gold is at once a practical and useful metal,
but also a social construct, an ideoform that connects its actual uses and various imposed
social meanings. Any comprehensive answer to the question “what
is gold?” unavoidably carries an emotional component,
and that is a complex thing to unwind. So here’s some fun facts about gold: Gold is incredibly resistant to corrosion. The main threats to things humans build and
use are oxygen, water, salt, and uv radiation, and gold is, for all intents and purposes,
immune to all of them. It neither rusts nor rots, and aside from
Instagram influencers nothing eats it. Gold is pretty rare. Of the 94 naturally occurring elements found
in Earth’s crust gold is ranked 75th, making up 4x10^-7 percent of the crust. Even though it is rare in terms of the total
mass of the earth, its global distribution is widespread, with significant deposits on
every continent. Also “relatively rare” in the context
of the mass of the earth still means warehouses full of the stuff in human terms. Despite this rarity gold has historically
been rather convenient, with nearly-pure gold nuggets being found in surface-level deposits,
rivers, and former rivers. Since it doesn’t corrode, gold exposed by
the elements stays shiny and easily identifiable. Gold is extremely malleable, to the point
it can be formed into threads a single-atom thick, and then those threads can be stretched
even further before breaking. It can be rolled into sheets so thin that
they become semi-translucent while still retaining structural integrity. It can be polished so smooth it is the material
of choice when a mirror requires maximum precision, such as those in space telescopes. Gold is hard enough to make useful household
objects out of, but soft enough to be worked with stone tools without smelting. Gold isn’t consumed by most of the things
humans use it for and can be readily recycled and repurposed simply by smelting it into
something new. St. Edward’s Crown could easily be reduced
back to a 2.23 kilo ingot of gold for a second time in history after English Parliament melted
the original mediaeval crown in 1649. We did it once before, Charles. We can do it again. As a result of all of these cosmic coincidences
humans have been using gold since prehistory and its basic industrialization has been invented
multiple times around the world. Putting all that another way, unlike basically
every other workable material at our disposal, a trinket made of gold can be sunk to the
bottom of the ocean for tens of thousands of years and be dug up functionally unchanged. The timeline of gold is the timeline of geology. This physical trait, this resilience, gives
it an allure of ‘everlasting value’. Even this little cheap little souvenir bottle
of gold wafers comes with a little card promising it is “a gift of remaining value.” There is a narrative around gold that starts
in its physical properties but balloons into its own collection of cultural signifiers,
its own mythology, and any thorough discussion about gold will inevitably intersect technology,
colonialism, war, and climate change. So when we talk of gold we’re really talking
about three distinct yet entwined things, all sharing a name: gold, the element, gold,
the narrative, and gold, the commodity, and it is this last one that is the subject of
our conversation today. Not everything is rosy for gold. Gold as a commodity faces a number of challenges
in 2023, some with roots going back decades and some more modern. Gold has, dare I say, a bit of an image problem. Gold, for a long list of reasons that are
not what this video is about, is a favourite of conspiracy theorists, preppers, and and
just, really, a whole host of weirdos. They hoard it, they accuse governments of
manipulating it, they promote it with an evangelical zeal. “Come in. How do you plan on supporting my granddaughter
young man? I’m only 17, sir. What can provide her with the brightest future? A home? Wrong! Gold! Gold? It’s never too early or late to secure your
future with gold!” For my younger viewers, this is real. This isn’t, this isn’t a Tim and Eric
sketch or a bit from The Daily Show, that’s the guy who did burglaries for Nixon sincerely
shilling gold. So safe to say nothing attracts a crank quite
like gold and that definitely impacts how the wider public thinks of gold as an investment. “Call Rosland Capital and tell them Gordon
Liddy sent you.” Alright, I want to take a second just to unwind
the facts of this. Despite the popularity of gold amongst people
who own doomsday bunkers, the rationale that they’re working from isn’t un-sound. If you were an investor back in the Netherlands
in 1635, which asset would deliver a better return over almost 400 years, tulips or gold? In the long run you can be pretty confident
that any gold you have will still be abstractly valuable in the indeterminate future. So on one hand gold as an abstract financial
instrument is unlikely to go anywhere, but on the other hand while gold is a safe bet
for your 400-year plan, it’s less of a sure thing in your 5-year portfolio. Gold doesn’t pay interest, so it didn’t
thrive in the low-inflation, low-interest climate of the bull run, but it’s also less
appealing in our current high-interest climate. And for the “sound money” gold-standard
Austrian Economics crowd, gold has seen heavy competition from cryptocurrency. The majority of the accessible gold has probably
already been mined, and after hundreds of years of panning and digging we’ve found
most of the easy stuff. New discoveries and new operations are becoming
increasingly expensive. As the documentary demonstrates with breathless
wonder, many modern mines, particularly the big, high-production mines, are thousands
of metres deep, and all mines involve displacing massive volumes of rock. “You feel stress?” “It’s that, it’s the idea that we're
going down into the, into the centre of the earth.” Mines are also under increasing scrutiny. The average consumer is more aware than ever
of the numerous impacts of gold mining. There’s both consciousness of the systemic
impacts, as well as greater access to information about working conditions. For instance, Less than two weeks before the
documentary was released, a gold mine in Zimbabwe collapsed, killing at least nine miners. So, we’re going to, for now, set aside the
question of if these mines should exist at all, whether or not the gold that they’re
digging up even needs to be dug up in the first place, and just for a moment put ourselves
in the mindset of a mine operator. We don’t need to empathise with them, but
we do need to understand their incentives. Mine operators don’t dig up and hoard gold
like they’re playing Minecraft, they dig it up and sell it. Making a profit from a gold mine requires
the company to thread a needle. Mining operations have enormous upfront costs,
and demand for gold is driven overwhelmingly by bearish sentiment elsewhere. Gold has its best days when the market is
crashing. This means that operating a gold mine can
be precarious, and the mine is extremely exposed to the price of gold. Even small increases in the value of gold
translates to massive profits for the mines. And in reverse, small decreases or lengthy
lulls, can be dire. Gold may be the safe pick in the long term,
but in the short term, investment in gold can lead to a lot of anxiety. Enter the World Gold Council. The WGC is one of the world’s leading authorities
on gold; and you’d hope so, given that the Council is comprised exclusively of major
gold mining companies. The organisation’s sole purpose is to push
demand for gold. That isn’t an accusation, it’s not even
a provocative statement. The World Gold Council is extremely up front
with its objective to promote the interests of its members, who are, again, big mining
companies. The organisation was founded in mid-1987 by
the most “forward-thinking mining companies”. And they were absolutely forward-thinking,
because before the end of the year gold’s value would begin a sustained decline that
would persist for the next 15 years. These sorts of lobby and marketing groups
are actually pretty common, promoting not just a specific company or brand but an entire
class of product, and they’re all technically non-profit organizations as a result. The World Gold Council exists in a weird spot
on the spectrum of propaganda. They lobby governments, they spin market trends,
and they greenwash mining activities, but their ultimate goal is to convince serious
investors to buy gold directly and to put their money into gold mines. Their clients sell literal gold, the WGC sells
the idea of gold. “You are precious, you are brilliance, you
are bold, you are gold” “Bro, I’ve been there, but gold saved
my portfolio” “A tip for you. Visit invest dot gold.” “Visit invest dot gold to see why gold is
everyone’s asset” “Stability, security, protection. You shouldn’t have to choose. Gold. Your strategic advantage. Visit goldhub dot com.” Like, this isn’t just online crank forum
stuff, these aren’t meme stocks, they don’t represent tiny “artisanal” mines that
consist of three dudes sharing the one jackhammer. Their main goal is convincing investors to
give millions of dollars to industrial operations that will move millions of tons of rock; they
can’t have a reputation for spreading disinformation. So while their job is propaganda, they are
considered a reputable source for research on gold. But that doesn’t stop the World Gold Council
from being implicated in countless conspiracy theories, typically painting it as a psy-op. “I long concluded that the World Gold Council
exists to make sure there never is a World Gold Council.” So you can try, but you’ll never escape
the cranks. “Well there’s some of us who have suspected
since GLD was put together that it is really a, it’s another mechanism in the tool of
the central bankers and their bullion banks to be able to use the public’s investment
gold to apply it to hot spots in the market to keep the price down, that it’s another
tool of gold price suppression.” So, “Gold: A Journey with Idris Elba”
is gold mining propaganda. Again, don’t take it from us, take it from
Joe Cavatoni, chief marketing strategist for the World Gold Council. “The documentary was commissioned, simply
put, to support our ambition as an organisation to help the world really understand the value
of gold, and really the experience of its transformative power, you know.” We’re going to come back to this interview
a few times. It’s… very interesting, but, yeah, then
he just lists some mining industry talking points. “Yeah I think there’s a couple of key
messages that are in the film. I’m just gonna highlight a few. The first is that, for every one job that
a gold mine produces six indirect jobs, or jobs around the community of that gold mine
get created. A lot of people don’t realise that.” It is as subtle as, a gold-plated toilet The documentary itself has a bit more of a
deft hand when it comes to smuggling the agenda in with the info but, not that deft a hand. “These things, even though they mean a lot
to the artist, but they actually carry the weight of the money that they” “100%” “Like you know it’s not like it’s ever
gonna depreciate.” “100%. It’s the same thing. Buying gold, they’re investments.” That isn’t subtext, that’s just text. The documentary allegedly features Idris Elba
supposedly going on a globe-trotting adventure to shed light on humanity’s ancient relationship
to gold. In actuality, it’s a virtual-tour of gold
mines that all belong to members of the World Gold Council, and each segment exists to either
counter a popular criticism of the gold mining industry, or pitch the mine as an investment
opportunity. Elba visits mines in Canada and South Africa,
meets the gold-bedecked Ashanti King, Otumfour Osei Tutu II in Ghana, gets a tour of a Bank
of England gold vault, hangs out with famous hip-hop jeweller Abs the Jeweller, and narrates
segments on mine clean up, gold jewellery in India, the California gold rush, and a
straight up marketing pitch for gold prospecting in Peru. Like, just to be clear - every mine credited
in the documentary belongs to a WGC member corporation. And they play us all the hits. Gold mines foster local economies, they build
infrastructure, mining companies totally clean up after themselves, they’re even on the
front lines of battling malaria. Though… On that note… even the doc doesn’t bother
to pretend that battling malaria is an altruistic endeavour. It’s because they lose more to sick days
than the cost of R&D on new pesticides. “Out of the work force of eight thousand
employees, every month you had about six thousand eight hundred of these employees and their
dependants report into the mine hospital for malaria. So the mine decided to establish a malaria
control program.” It’s hard to overlook the fact that the
documentary’s global scope has less to do with the grandness of the subject matter,
and more a matter of cherry-picking. The documentary is unique partly because it
would be utterly banal in a different context. The film is composed of a series of four to
six minute sequences that, again, would normally be looping in the corner of a museum installation. The fact that something so insubstantial is
being pushed so hard is kinda fascinating in itself. They had Idris-Elba money, and chose to spend
it on this. “Wow, look at how hot that is.” On that note, a common discussion point about
the doc has been Idris Elba’s performance. It’s very strange. There are times when Idris is energised. “So today is the very special Ashanti Akwasidae
Festival. I’ve been honoured to be asked to be part
of the procession, and it is an honour.” There are times when he’s clearly working
hard to sell this thing. “into the… centre of the Earth.”] “I tell you what, it’s so exciting. This is so exciting. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen gold
being poured.” And in the sound booth, Idris has a very stilted
energy. It could be a deliberate choice, but it feels
kind he’s cold reading the script off a teleprompting that is slightly too far away. “But for me, and I’m pretty sure I’m
not alone here, the best thing about gold is being able to wear it.” For comparison, here is Elba’s performance
in a different doc. “To understand how club culture has become
so engrained in our modern lives, we need to go back to a scene that started on New
York’s underground. It was the 70s, and the city was suffering.” Idris has close ties to Ghana and has spent
several years working to develop a film studio in the region. During his trip where he met the Ashanti King,
he also met the President of Ghana to discuss policy - and was planning to bring an upcoming
film of his to the region. "...we could case study my film as a proof
of concept…" To what extent this influenced his decision
to do the project, we can only speculate. But it’s plainly obvious that Idris really
turns up in Ghana, and less so in Quebec. “Wow. Look at how hot that is.” What we’re left with is a very standard
piece of corporate communication with a celebrity voice actor and overly dramatic framing. For the most part, the documentary is just
boring. The doc makes boring decisions for self-interested
reasons. By way of example, India has the second highest
demand for gold after China. The two combine to make up half the world’s
demand for gold. This makes the World Gold Council very invested
in the Indian gold market. So we get a short sequence in India that alludes
to the cultural significance of gold in India. This is a big and genuinely interesting subject,
but as will be a common theme, the doc doesn’t have time to do ‘interesting’. The nuanced significance of gold in Hindu
and Ashanti cultures are flanderised into this very odd and uniform notion of “respect”. Here’s Joe specifically responding to a
question about the importance of treating gold with “spiritual respect”... whatever
that means. “We come on your program regularly, we talk
about gold demand trends, we talk about the significance of India as a market. Play close attention where Idris sees a young
couple getting married. They talk in great detail about how its significant
beyond the dowry, the wealth creation, or the passing on of that dowry, it's more about
how it fits into the society…” Okay, so, this doesn’t actually happen. For one; Idris isn’t there, he doesn’t
see anything, but besides that the documentary only focuses on the bride’s gold jewellery. The dowry isn’t acknowledged at all, likely
because it’s a complicated, thorny, topic to throw at a western audience. But this is the essence of the documentary
on the whole: by volume, it is mostly tacky but inoffensive corporate spin on a shallow
engagement with the subject matter. But there are, of course, issues that are
too big even for propaganda to just omit. The subjects of colonialism and environment
being the two major ones. The doc has a sequence in Johannesburg where
the subjects of race and working conditions are quarantined. The film cedes some ground on this, acknowledging
that historically gold mining maybe… briefly… intersected with racism. Elba interviews Frans Baleni, who worked in
apartheid-era gold mines and was a leader of a key miner’s strike. During that interview, the two don’t pull
any punches. They are carrying no water for the mines. “we were not really looked after. We were almost like slaves, because what they
needed is your labour, nothing else.” However, this film was commissioned by mining
companies. So… “There’s no hiding from the fact No hiding, yeah “that gold mining played a major part” Uh huh “in shaping South African society during
the apartheid years.” Yeah?! “But with gold” [Airhorn noises] The doc then very awkwardly frames gold as
a liberating force for black miners. “But with gold comes power, and those gold
miners, they knew that.” Because you see… gold, by being so useful,
gave the miners a bargaining chip. By withholding their labour, and denying the
country access to the gold… really, the black community was empowered. It’s a subtle reframing of a labour strike
not as the withholding of labour, but as the withholding of product. An inert mineral is stealing the valour of
labour unions. It’s very weird. We’re then abruptly moved to South Deep,
an active mine in the region that is making use of remote vehicles operated from the surface. This is an interesting novelty, and genuinely
represents an improvement in working conditions for at least some stuff, but it doesn’t
really seem to follow the heavy discussion of Apartheid. But as they talk about mechanization, they
talk about how it has done at least something for gender equality amongst the workers, and
then this segment’s purpose comes into focus. “There are ladies who are miners, crew leaders,
and then production supervisors” Its purpose in the Text is to absolve the
industry. By saying ‘here is what happened then, and
here is what is happening now’, the text argues that mining companies have fixed the
problem. “Chu chu chu” That’s already wild on its face, but even
within the doc it’s absurd. One is a serious, politically charged conversation
dealing with the subject of race and systemic exploitation; the other is about the quirks
of driving a $5 million RC truck for a day job. The argument does not land at all, but the
documentary just moves on with an entirely undeserved confidence that it has tackled
the subject of race in the global mining sector. Then there’s the subject of the environment. Obviously there is no nuanced discussion of
the environmental impacts of mining where the companies come out of it looking good. So the mandate is simple: say as little as
possible to omit issues, while playing up successes. So, that explains why the New Zealand segment
is the way it is. But it just sucks. It sucks so bad. The topic is specifically on the closure and
restoration of sites; mining companies ‘tidying up’ after themselves. The segment focuses on the reclamation of
Reefton Mine, located on the south island of New Zealand. The entire sequence is four minutes long,
of which there’s maybe 90 seconds of footage of the mine. We see that the main pit has been filled with
water, and we’re shown the process used to plant seeds from a helicopter. We’re then treated to a CG render of what
the site is expected to look like at some unstated point in the future. We close on some B-roll of wildlife, and we’re
done with New Zealand. Here is the totality of material on the pit. “When the mine closed in 2016, their first
task was to fill the main pit, to turn it into a lake. It’s nice, but it still looks like a mine
to me” If I held stock in Oceana Gold I would be
furious. Anyone with any general knowledge of mining
is going to come away from this doc certain that this is a pit lake - the same toxic,
corrosive hellholes that you find in a Tom Scott video. “It is a mile wide and so deep you could
fit the new One World Trade Center standing upright in it. Or at least you could if the pit wasn’t
halfway filled with toxic, dilute acid.” “It looks inviting, but you wouldn’t want
to swim in there. That is dark, lonely water. It looks toxically blue, and it is. It’s alkaline, it’s got a pH above 11,
it would be like swimming in dilute bleach.” “Tell you what that water’s nice and blue
to me.” But the Reefton pit is not like those pit
lakes, and this site is notable for precisely that reason - that’s why we’re here. Okay, just to back up for a sec. We all know about abandoned mines. A company would work a mine until either the
mine or the company went bust, and then they would just walk away. In the case of open-cut mines like Reefton,
the pits often fill with rainwater over time to create artificial bodies of water. Pit lakes, or quarry lakes, are exceptionally
dangerous places for a whole host of reasons that we’ll just put up on screen here for
a moment. The majority of fatalities at abandoned mines
are attributed to drowning in pit lakes. You may also be familiar with famous sites
like the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montanna. Berkeley’s pit lake is so contaminated by
copper that for about a decade copper was “mined” directly from the lake water. This makes the water toxic, and if the pit
lake fills beyond a certain point, the forbidden gatorade will spill into the general water
supply, which is considered generally undesirable. In response the US Environmental Protection
Agency has mandated that the lake must never reach that critical level, so the water must
be actively pumped out in perpetuity, but even with that over the years they’ve had
to just keep making the thing bigger because it’s really hard to keep water from getting
into an existing lake. The Berkeley Pit is a particularly high profile
example, but there are thousands of pit lakes out there, each with their own risk factors. Believe it or not Tom Scott hasn’t even
visited half of them! This is not a minor problem, this is one of
the fundamental byproducts of the process: the thing you are doing at an elemental level
is digging a huge hole. Until very recently it was considered progressive
to enforce what is called a ‘lock and leave’ policy. Mining companies can leave behind a pit that
will fill with toxic water, but they at least need to put up a fence. Needless to say this doesn’t do much to
mitigate the harm of these pits. Once a pit lake is established, it’s incredibly
difficult to unwind, because now you’re dealing with massive volumes of water, which
is both very heavy in its own right and does not much care for where you do and do not
want it to go. So the solution is simple, don’t let mining
companies leave sites in a state that will produce a toxic pit. That is a complex, multi-disciplinary process. So, that brings us back to Reefton. In 2004, OceanaGold received approval to operate
the Reefton Mine. As part of this, they were subject to heavy
obligations to restore the site upon closure of the mine- which included the posting of
a performance bond that, like a rental bond, was money set aside to cover the restoration
of the land in the event Oceana went bust. An operations director for the Department
of Conservation praised the company’s work, describing it as “world class”. Unlike mining operators in the past, OceanaGold
prepared for the closing of the mine years ahead of time. They’re one of the first to make use of
a new water treatment system conceptualised at Cardiff University. “By oxygenating the water before it enters
the Vertical Flow Reactor the iron within the water comes out of solution, turning it
a reddish-brown colour. The iron particulate then gently settles on
a gravel bed at the bottom of the ponds. Iron naturally attracts other metals, and
so is able to capture free-floating arsenic from the water. The water continues its gravity fed course
through the gravel bed and exits the system into Devils Creek. Extensive testing has proven that the Vertical
Flow Reactor reliably removes excess arsenic and iron from the water. Over time, the metals will be exhausted from
the leachable area of the surrounding rock and the pods will continue to naturally spill
into Devils Creek” I’m sorry, why wasn’t any of this in the
documentary? The helicopter is not what makes Reefton interesting. It’s the ecological restoration that, literally,
gets into the weeds. “The wooding material that we’ve placed
around the restoration sites also provide little micro-climates for other species that
we wouldn’t have planted ourselves, such as these ferns.” Reefton may be the best example of reclamation
on the planet. The World Gold Council must think so, otherwise
we wouldn’t be here. But the doc doesn’t want to dig into the
subject of restoration in any detail because to celebrate what makes Reefton noteworthy
would require admitting that it is exceptional. ‘Hey, these guys have almost cracked the
toxic pit problem.’ ‘Wait, what toxic pit problem?’ It’s also hard to overlook the fact that
vertical flow reactors are being implemented in New Zealand, South Korea, and the USA. You know, wealthy nations. It’s one thing for New Zealand to strong-arm
OceanaGold into restoring a site adjacent to a national park, but what about countries
in the global south? Human rights organizations have repeatedly
found OceanaGold in violation of indigenous rights around their Didipio mine dating back
to 2007, accusations including illegal evictions and arson, and have repeatedly recommended
that their licence to mine be revoked. It was not. And the UN has denounced the “unnecessary
and disproportionate” use of force against local residents as recently as 2020. Can Filipino residents expect OceanaGold to
implement world class restoration techniques to restore their land? Odds aren’t great! The work being done at Reefton is interesting
and important - it is exceptional in every sense of the word. The documentary went to New Zealand to cherry
pick the most radical project it could find, but still managed to stuff it up. The documentary is only willing to engage
with the superficial elements of ecological restoration - specifically the tree planting. “It’s really just gardening. But supersized.” In its brief runtime, the documentary focuses
exclusively on aesthetics, which is explicitly not what the restoration project is about. “So we’re not trying to hide the fact
that we mined here, but we’re just trying our best to put it back.” The community doesn’t need the mine’s
existence obscured - they need the company to clean up their crap and avoid poisoning
the groundwater; which is what they’re doing. But the documentary would leave viewers believing
that the project is greenwashing - simply planting trees around an inevitable hazard. The documentary manages to misrepresent both
angles of the subject. It omits the actual reason why closed mines
are so dangerous, and the meaningful ecological restoration being carried out at the site. The result is that the environmental activists
are pissed off, the company’s shareholders are pissed off, and you, the viewer, are bored. This sucks. Once the doc is satisfied that it has addressed
all your concerns, and made its case for gold as a thing, it’s happy to drop the pretense
and fixate on the financials for the last 15 minutes. Idris is given a tour of the Bank of England. “I’ve got an appointment with the bank’s
chief cashier. One of the very few people with access to
its vaults. Sarah John.” Anyway, Idris gawks at gold bullion for a
bit, before taking a very brief aside to tastelessly discuss the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. “On the 26th of December, 2004, there was
a massive tsunami in the Indian Ocean.” The Boxing Day tsunami is the deadliest natural
disaster of the 21st century, with over 130,000 confirmed deaths in Indonesia alone, mostly
concentrated in the province of Aceh. “But in Aceh, there was something unusual
about the community that helped it recover. You see, most people didn’t have saving
accounts. Instead, they had gold ingots and jewellery,
which meant they could quickly use it as collateral and start putting their lives back together.” So we get that little gold nugget, before
immediately moving on to hang out with a celebrity jeweller. “Abtin Abbasi, or Abs for short, is part
of a new wave in jewelry that began with Hip Hop. “Like you know it’s not like it’s ever
gonna depreciate.” “100%. It’s the same thing. Buying gold, they’re investments.” The final segment is functionally an ad for
Newmont’s operations in Peru, which are still in their speculative stages before the
doc wraps up. “So, the story of gold. To me, it’s really a love story. Like all romances, it’s had its up and downs.” What downs Idris? What downs? What do you think the downs might be? Here, here, I’ve got my notes ready to go,
I can help make a list, what are the downs? “They’re all part of our relationship
with this beautiful seductive metal” Hey, is this getting weird for anyone else? The core audience for the documentary has
received it one of two ways. Your standard Goldbugs have lovebombed the
doc. Like crypto bros and Apes, there is a vested
interest in the documentary’s success as a tool of propaganda, leading to the same
types of astroturf techniques. On the complete other end of the spectrum,
the crackpot breed of goldbug has responded to the film with outright hostility. Framing it as a deliberate misinformation
to distract from the truth about gold… whatever that may be. “I’m willing to bet your coming WGC gold
documentary will be more like a childlike cartoon. You won’t dare to try to choke down some
of these ongoing spicy facts regarding the current day canard of modern day gold price
discovery” But for us, the documentary’s cardinal sin
is that it’s boring. A documentary on gold could be interesting,
should be interesting. But this is what you get when filmmakers try
to tell a human story through the filter of industry. The potential is there, but the documentary
is tethered to corporate interests from which it cannot stray. Gold is so culturally significant in India
that it’s a pillar of the global gold industry. That’s fascinating, but if you really dug
into it you’d need to talk about the whole dowry thing, and your American investors might
find that a bit uncomfortable - best just not say anything, just talk about how pretty
it is. If we praise Reefton’s water quality, then
potential investors might learn about the toxic pit lakes that we normally leave behind “Wait, what toxic pit problem?” So better to just focus on the trees. Corporate interests smother the compelling
material, grinding it down to its shallowest form. Essential material is absent, and what material
is there is inexplicably boring. Funny thing is that this isn’t even the
WGC’s first crack at this particular concept. In 2021 they released a miniseries called
The Golden Thread. Wait, sorry, not a miniseries, a “landmark
immersive documentary series showcasing gold’s impact on humanity’s past, present and future.” The hook for this one was that they found
experts in fields that use gold in some form or another, aerospace and the like, and then
have them talk about their projects. “Gold is critically important to make MOXY
work for a number of reasons” But it’s all the same problem, there are
specific interests being served, you can’t just tell a story where gold is a thematic
connector between all these other interesting subjects, you need gold to be the main character. So the whole thing turns into a parade of
scientists and engineers talking about their projects as though the most important thing
about it is that gold is involved. Like, sure, we detected gravitational waves,
that’s cool and all, but let’s talk about how colliding neutron stars generate a lot
of value. “What scientists saw that day was gold being
created in space! The gold created in this collision will cycle
through the cosmos and perhaps one day will form part of another planet” The impression isn’t that gold is a kinda
unique material with useful and interesting physical properties, but literally magic. And when I say “there are interests being
served” and all that, I’m not extrapolating, these people are very explicit. It’s in the press release! “The purpose of the documentary is to increase
the relevance and consideration of gold in the minds of investors and consumers alike.” It’s kinda maddening, I get so used to dealing
with covert propagandists who are trying to smuggle in some ulterior agenda and the World
Gold Council just does my job for me. “Guard it with gold. So when the unexpected happens and the world
is in turmoil, you’re protected.” So, the thing that I find compelling here
is the existence of these corporate propaganda pieces, because the fact that someone decided
this was a good project to make, that this was worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars
that it would have cost even outside of whatever Idris Elba was paid, that in and of itself
is an indicator. The World Gold Council doesn’t just decide
to hire a celebrity spokesperson and plaster his face across the internet because they’re
bored. They don’t make a documentary about how
cool gold is because they’re just, like, they think it’s neat. They do it because there’s something that
they think they need to convince us of. It ends up so weird and stilted because they’re
trying to talk about narrative and meaning but those ideas are completely foreign to
the people who produced this. I want to go back to that interview with Joe
Cavatoni because it really helps illustrate that these guys are just living in an alternate
universe. So, there’s this phrase we’re all familiar
with at this point: selling shovels during a gold rush, the best way to get rich in a
gold rush isn’t to dig for gold, it’s to sell shovels. It’s kinda a dark phrase, isn’t it? Like, at a basic level it speaks to some grimmer
human instincts: opportunism, exploitation, delusion. It’s a phrase about crass pragmatism in
the face of irrationality. You would think that a guy who represents
the interests of the guys buying shovels would maybe find the phrase a bit distasteful, but
these are capitalists, in the purest sense of the word. “You know a lot of people fail to remember
that the California gold rush produced a very successful and very wealthy man, and that
was Levi Strauss. There’s a bit in the story about it” “No, that was a great part of this movie.” “Yeah it’s a fun story to understand and
you see how it’s not just about gold and mining, but it’s about everything in the
ecosystem around it that brings it to life.” “Yeah, it’s not just about selling shovels,
it’s about selling jeans, for example, to those that are using the picks and the axes” There’s no sentimentality here. There’s money to be made. And the thing is that Joe is ultimately a
kind of shovel salesman himself. Like, okay, on one hand Joe represents companies
who dig up gold, companies who literally buy shovels. But the people digging up literal gold aren’t
the metaphorical gold rush here, mines aren’t panic-buying machine parts. The entire thesis of the World Gold Council
is that gold, the asset, is a safe harbour in a turbulent market. It’s not just a thing for cranks and weirdos
with five years of canned beans in their booby trapped shed, gold is for slick, elegant,
savvy people. Ordinary, yet classy. The WGC wants you to know that this could
be you. “Gold is everyone’s asset.” We live in turbulent times, and the market
has been socially elevated as the one real path for building wealth. That’s the gold rush, and Joe, with his
slick looking celebrity documentary and calming social media ads is trying to sell you a shovel. [Dubstep] [Idris Elba auto-tuned repeating “Gold”
over and over and over]
