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A treason charge in Tanzania could soon show up in your iPhone's price tag. The African country recently arrested several opposition leaders for treason under a British colonial penal code originally designed to punish sedition against the crown. To most of the world, this is just another headline from a faraway country. However, zoom out and the implications stretch from African ports to Silicon Valley boardrooms.

Tanzania's largest city, Dar es Salaam, operates the port that moves 90% of Zambia's copper and nearly 70% of the world's cobalt - the metals that power every Tesla and iPhone battery. Much of this cargo travels along the TAZARA Railway, a 1,860-kilometre Cold War-era line built by China in the 1970s to give landlocked Zambia an export route independent of apartheid South Africa. That geopolitical project has become a single point of failure for the 21st-century energy transition. Together, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia produce 15% of global copper and most of its cobalt. Nearly all of it flows through this single corridor.

So what happens when the country running this chokepoint becomes politically unstable?President Samia Suluhu Hassan reported winning "98%" of the vote in October’s election. However, before voting even began opposition leaders were jailed and over a thousand people were reportedly killed. Behind the soft PR lies brutal authoritarianism now controlling the supply chain for the green energy revolution. A few weeks of political unrest or port disruption could block exports, spike battery prices, and stall clean energy production worldwide. The U.S. is pushing for alternate supply routes, but for now, nearly all roads run through Tanzania. A courtroom in Dar es Salaam might sound far from Wall Street, yet this treason trial could soon appear in Tesla's earnings report.

In 1975, Pol Pot, a former schoolteacher turned communist revolutionary, seized control of Cambodia after years of guerrilla warfare against a U.S.-backed government. Marching into Phnom Penh at the head of the Khmer Rouge, he declared "Year Zero." His goal wasn't just to change Cambodia but to erase it. Cities were emptied overnight, money was abolished and millions were forced into rural labor camps in a radical attempt to build a self-sufficient agrarian utopia.

Anyone who could read, wore glasses, or spoke a foreign language was marked for death as an "enemy of the people." Within four years, an estimated two million Cambodians, nearly a quarter of the population, were dead from execution or disease. Pol Pot's vision drew from Maoist China. He believed true equality required destruction, schools were closed, religion was banned and children were even taught to spy on their parents. The regime's slogans read like instructions for annihilation "To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss." In one of the most chilling ironies of the 20th century, intellectuals were executed in classrooms that had been turned into torture chambers.

When Vietnam invaded in 1979, the nightmare collapsed almost as suddenly as it began. Yet for years, Pol Pot's forces continued fighting from jungle hideouts, even retaining Cambodia's UN seat into the 1990s. Pol Pot died in 1998, unrepentant and untried. His story remains one of history's darkest lessons.

In 1945, American engineer Percy Spencer was testing radar equipment when he noticed something strange. A chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Most people would have dismissed this, but Spencer was naturally curious. He placed popcorn kernels near the device, and they began to pop and dance across the room. Then he cracked an egg, which exploded in the face of a curious colleague. Within moments, he realized he had stumbled upon a new form of energy, one that could cook food faster than fire itself.

Spencer’s breakthrough came not from intention but observation. The magnetron, designed for wartime radar, emitted microwaves that vibrated water molecules at astonishing speed, creating heat from the inside out. Within two years, the first commercial microwave oven was produced under the name Radarange. It stood six feet tall, weighed over 300 kilograms, and cost as much as a new car. At first it was used in restaurant kitchens and aboard ships. However as technology shrank and prices fell, the microwave found its way into homes. By the 1970s its low hum was as familiar as the ticking of a kitchen clock.

The invention transformed how people thought about food, work, and time itself. Dinner no longer demanded hours in the kitchen and leftovers became lunch. Percy Spencer never set out to change the world, but his curiosity did what intention could not. A moment of melted chocolate revealed a simple truth about discovery, progress often begins with those who notice the small things others overlook.

We hope you enjoyed this edition as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Until next time…. - A Little Wiser Team

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