The Joe Rogan Experience - #2556 - Siddharth Kara

0:00You're a Roman boy, Jack. Check it out. The Joe, Rogan, experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. We're up. All right. Good to see you, sir. Yeah, good to see you, Joe. Um, first of all, thank you very much for everything you've done and for just... I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and said thank you for shedding light on what's going on in the Congo with the cobalt stuff. Your book was so important. And the fact that you risked your life to get the kind of footage that you got, you legitimately risked your life. Yeah. That is a very dangerous part of the world right now with enormous amounts of resources being pulled out and insane amounts of money being made. And, you know, I think just people like you are rare. So thank you. Oh, man, you're, uh, you're gracious, Joe. You're really gracious. I take that to heart. It means a lot. And let me just say that the fact that you continue to talk about it,

1:00you know, you and I first talked about this, uh, talking to Jamie, it was almost four years ago. Wasn't really that long. It was December 2022. That's crazy. So here we are, September 26th, almost four years ago. And, um, you continue to talk about it now and again. And I think that, that's meant a lot to me. It's meant a lot to people in the Congo. Um, it's obvious this has captured your heart and, um, you're to be commended for that conscience. Well, I'm the one who's talking. You're actually out there going and documenting all this stuff. It's just a very strange world that we live in that at the very base of the all of the greatest technology, like all this stuff that we have that's so incredible that allows us to find out so much about the world. The base of that, you have slave labor or pulling minerals out of the ground. Yeah, you have slave labor, you have child labor, you have militia run mines, you know, for, for people who didn't hear our last conversation, um, go back and hear it, you know,

2:03because we walk through it. And, um, I haven't been back to the Congo since cobalt red came out. And I knew it would be too dangerous for me to go back. Yeah, definitely don't go back. You know, it's just, my colleagues said pretty soon after cobalt red came out, you know, there was, there's, there's, there's a bounty for you. So I can't go back. Um, but I've stayed in touch with people there. I continue to get ground research done. And the conditions, uh, they're not much better, you know, and in some ways, they've continued to degrade because the fever for these, these battery component metals and it's, it's cobalt, but it's also the lithium, the nickel, the copper, the tantalum, all this stuff that goes into our smartphones, our tablets, you know, you and I, nobody we know can function without this stuff. And the bottom of the chain is tainted in child labor, slavery, violence, environmental destruction and contamination. And the new fever is the AI data centers.

3:07You know, we're building these, um, as fast as possible to support the AI economy and they require all the same metals and minerals. So the circuit boards, the servers, the heat sinks, uh, the energy storage, they all require cobalt, copper, tin, tantalum. It's all coming out of Congo. Oh, it's such a strange aspect of human life that we require that, and that the, the, the area is controlled by people that are willing to do this. Like there's no, like we don't get much of these rare earth minerals from America, do we? No, no, not much at all. No, that's why it's, it's almost all in the global south and in particular in the South Africa, these deposits. Can I ask you, is it because it's not available? There's no ore in America or it hasn't been mined?

4:07Like what is, what a, so it's a, it's the dominating force is that the, the largest and highest grade reserves of these crucial elements and rare earth metals are in central Africa. Um, lithium, expend extends more broadly to South America. There's not much, um, there's not much in North America. There's some, but here's the rub. Here's the rub. You can find some lithium in the salt flats out west. You can find some cobalt along the Canadian North American border. Uh, the rub is we don't want to wreck our environment. Oh, God. Digging this stuff out of the ground. Um, and then processing it. But we're okay obliterating their environment and polluting it and contaminating it. Um, and I did another study. I told you I can't go back to the Congo, but I have colleagues and we've continued doing research. And I issued a report came out last year called blood batteries, um, through the University

5:12of Nottingham. And we got to quantify some of the environmental impact, which, uh, is so crucial to the story. It's crucial to the story of this data center push to the EV push, the environmental impact. And we use time lapse, time lapse satellite imagery to see that, uh, from the dawn of the sort of cobalt battery metal revolution to 2022, uh, 40, 50, 60 percent of the forest area is gone. Um, uh, shrubbery, grasslands, all of that gone, replaced with mining territory. And is this the Congo as a whole? So we did, yeah, this is across the copper belt copper copper cobalt region of the Congo, where the mining is taking place. What percentage of the Congo is that? Small part of it. Okay. And small part in the southeast corner along the Zambian border. I mean, much of the Congo is rain forest. Right. That's why I was confused. So in the Congo is insanely dense and huge in the mining part, in the mining part.

6:13Okay. So we've lost of, of forestry and water bodies and an expansion of mining. And then we tested the water for heavy metals and acidity levels. And we did a case study in the town of Kool-Awezi, which is sort of ground zero for all these metals, cobalt and copper and so on. And there was between 10 and 950 times the World Health Organization maximum recommended limit for human safety of a range of heavy metals from lead to cobalt to copper, to uranium, to chromium. So the whole water sources in that part of the country have been completely contaminated. So I point all this out because we object to that here. We don't want our trees gone. We don't want our forest destroyed. We don't want our water contaminated. We don't want the air to be polluted.

7:14But it's okay for it to happen over there, kind of out of sight to those people. So long as we can plug in our phone, build out our data centers, keep buying our EVs and so on. And that's the story. Okay. That's the story that we're okay destroying them in their world. So long as ours remain sacrosanct. And that frankly is just the great hypocrisy of all this. Is there an alternative, like a viable alternative, to supply the world with the minerals that it needs? Not yet. Not yet. Is it, I'm sorry to interrupt, but is it possible to do, is it just an inevitable fact of when you do that kind of high level mining, you're going to destroy the environment, or could it be mitigated? You could, it could be done better. I mean, you do have to chop down all the trees where the deposit is. So deforestation is inevitable. But let's say this was done in our backyard here in Austin. And found a big copper, a cobalt, tin tantalum deposit somewhere. There'd be rules to follow.

8:15You'd have to deforest the whole place. But we'd probably say go plant the same number of trees somewhere else to offset it. And there'd be a lot of rules around containment, make sure you don't pollute the rivers and so on. And none of that is done in the global south. None of that is done in Congo. And it's mostly Chinese state-run mining companies that don't give a shit about the people in the environment there. But our tech and EV companies all know that. They're all buying this stuff from them, knowing that. So the chain is tainted. It's tainted in misery. It's tainted in blood. It's tainted in environmental destruction. It doesn't have to be that way. We don't have enough of this stuff here to offset the demand. But we could start mining some of it here. The problem is there's legitimate objections to the environment. This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is presented by the Farmers Dog.

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10:16trading involves risk of loss market availability varies eligibility restrictions apply. $50 every seven days via click to claim issued a non with robber predictions dollars that expire in one year nationwide based on sports book predictions and or free to play sports contest availability varies by state terms at DKNG dot co slash offer limited time offer. This episode is brought to you by square space. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try square space. I know because I use it. That's right. Joe Rogan dot com is powered by square space. It has all the features that you need to create a stand out website like an AI enhanced website builder SEO optimization tools and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links head to square space dot com slash Rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code Rogan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Impact. And is it an issue with even if they mitigate all the surface area stuff in the pollution

11:18that you're still going to deal with groundwater? Yeah. Groundwater contamination is inevitable. It's just all leeches in. Right. I mean, it's not just the mining is the products that use to get the processing of yeah, of this stuff. You know, you get an ore that's got cobalt copper, nickel, silver, bit of uranium in it. And you have to separate all that. And so there's heavy industrial assets toxic industrial liquids used to dissolve and separate those metals. And that's what inevitably leeches that stuff right into the ground goes into the ground. And then it seeps into the groundwater into the river's lakes. When did this all begin? So the this the that part of the Congo in the southeastern corner from the town of Lubumbashi to Kolo, was mined for copper going back to colonial times. And something like a quarter of the bullets used in world war one were copper from that part of the Congo.

12:18Okay. So copper mining goes back a long ways. But there was other stuff there. It just didn't have industrial value yet. The uranium that was used in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from that same part of the Congo. Whoa. The highest grade uranium deposit known in the world at that time. Isn't it insane that that place has like the most valuable resources on earth, but yet it's one of the poorest places on earth. Yeah, it's the resource curse. You know, when when we find treasure somewhere, it attracts the pirates to come in and loot the place. And when the places were torn or colonized or corrupt or filled with strife, and it just chaos runs riot. So and you can get people to work for basically nothing. Yeah. There's virtually no alternative. There's virtually no alternative way to survive.

13:19And people have to understand that too. When you displace hundreds of thousands of people with a big mining operation, meaning there were villages there, and maybe a river and they used to fish and grow some potatoes or whatever. And you just displace all those people and you set up a mining operation the size of a small city. There's no other way for them to survive, but to bring their kids and their wives and come into that same mining territory. And this is what happens every day. Roll up their sleeves and get down in that toxic dirt and try to gather enough ore in a sack for the day to make a dollar. And I know now roughly how many people it is. When you and I spoke in 2026, 2022, sorry, we're now in 2026. I had documented the human horror taking place. And that's what Colbert read is about. I had not done enough to quantify how many people exactly. And so in this same report I mentioned, blood batteries, ran prevalence estimates, just

14:24sample at all the sites, how many people, and you can build an estimate. And on any given day, there are at least 300,000 people, men, women, and children, digging for cobalt with their bare hands and pickaxes and shovels. 300,000 people on any given day. That fluctuates by season, a little bit, dry season, wet season. Of that 300,000, about 37%, so more than one out of three, are working in conditions we'd call absolute slavery. And almost 10% are kids. So roughly 30,000 kids on any given day. Not in school, not learning, exposed to toxic work, toxic dangerous mining with their hands. Up to their necks in it. And that's the bottom of the chain. And people, not only need to know that, but think hard about their own personal choices

15:25in the context of that knowledge. What do I mean by that? I mean, do you have to upgrade your phone every year? People often ask me, what do I do? OK, I accept the premise that the rechargeable lifestyle I live is facilitated by and built upon an enormity of human suffering, of those people over there. What do I do? I can't fix that. And I say, you're right, you can't, I can't. But you can think about your personal choices. And the first one is, do you have to upgrade the phone in the tablet every year just because the tech company tells you to? Because each time you do, you're contributing to those demand side forces. So if the phone still works, just use it. The EV is a more interesting question. You don't upgrade the EV. You either buy one or you keep your internal combustion engine car. Now, EV companies will tell us their mining is done sustainably and the supply chain is audited and all of that.

16:27And all of these horrors are taking place in someone else's supply chain. But the truth is, it's all tainted. It's all coming out of the same pot of tainted, contaminated human degradation and environmental destruction. The EV story is, let's save the planet. And that's fine. We need to save the planet. But we can't save our piece of the planet by destroying their piece of the planet. Look, I love the technology involved in EVs. I love, I have a test, I love it. But there's also, excuse me, there's also reality of break dust. It's way more break dust with those things. And that's a big part of the particulate pollution that you get in large cities is break dust. That stuff that you clean off your wheel when you go to the car wash, that stuff is in your lungs. If you live in a big city, especially like New York City and you're walking around, you are 100% breathing in break dust. And it's been proven that living in polluted, heavily populated cities lowers your lifespan.

17:29And it's probably one of the reasons. You're dealing with toxic element in the atmosphere that you're breathing in every day, whether you like it or not, there's not a thing you could do about it. Yeah, I, you know, there's so many parts of the EV story that we don't get fully told. Break dust is certainly what. Well, all cars give off break dust just to be really clear. But EVs are heavier. They're heavier. So you break more. You have to break more. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. There is some ways around that. And I think one way to mitigate it quite a bit, I believe is carbon ceramic brakes. Is that the case, Jamie? Let's find out if that's absolutely true. I've read that, but I want to make sure that's really true. I know from anecdotal experience that when you clean your car, if you have carbon ceramic brakes, there's almost no break dust in your wheels. It's a very different thing. If you have regular steel brakes, it just, it, for whatever reason, leaves more brake dust. I'm not sure why. I don't know. But other than that, is there any sort of novel material that can do it?

18:32Here goes carbon ceramic brake systems can reduce brake wear, particulate pollution substantially compared with conventional brake cast iron rotors, but they did not eliminate brake dust. The actual environmental outcome depends on the complete friction pair rotor and pad formulation and on driving conditions. Yeah. So it just explains what brake dust is. And so it does help a lot substantially, but it doesn't eliminate it. And they're more expensive. If you, it's like a big upgrade, if you get a car, you've, like a lot of sports cars, if you buy a Corvette, it allows you to upgrade to carbon ceramic brakes. It's very expensive. It's a very few people do it. Well, there's, there's certainly things we can and should be doing to mitigate the environmental impacts of whether it's an EV or even an internal combustion engine, you know, I didn't know about these brake pads. That's worth, it's worth people knowing more about that. But then you're going to have to find carbon. Like, okay, now you've got to get carbon to get the carbon ceramic.

19:33So this is the thing. This is the thing. There's always something. Right. And you made this point with RISA, you know, it, okay, cobalt, but it's also the lithium. It's also the nickel. One of the biggest lithium deposits now and people are saying, okay, let's use less cobalt in the batteries. Let's do lithium iron phosphate batteries. Let's do the solid state batteries. They always have lithium in them. One of the biggest lithium deposits now is in the Congo. And it just started shipping under this Chinese mining company in June of this year, out of this deposit. And the conditions there, I've been there. There are some things we've been up there. It's an air-town called Manono. They're just as horrific. And so when you say, all right, done with cobalt, we're just going to do lithium iron phosphate battery or lithium table salt battery, whatever. Same deal. Same deal. So it's about extending the horizon of our compassion beyond our immediate circle and

20:41caring about everyone who's attached to our life and our lifestyle, no matter how tight, tangential or how far downstream they might be. There's still brothers and sisters. They still inhabit this earth with us. They still live, breathe, and have dreams just like we do. And you could be them if you were born there. That's the thing. You got lucky. We all got lucky. You and I mostly were lucky. We got the role of the dice that was favorable. And that's all it is. And that's what's hard to recognize. This episode is brought to you by the Farmers' Dog. You know what's pretty cool? The Farmers' Dog is partnering with the United Service Organization to support military families and their dogs. The USO Canine Program connects service members and their families with volunteer therapy dogs that provide comfort, companionship, and emotional support. And in honor of America's 250th birthday, the Farmers' Dog is feeding 250 dogs belonging to military families, including some of these therapy dogs.

21:43They're also sponsoring two USO Canine-focused events this year and providing pet care items for welcome home kits. That's a pretty awesome way to support the people who serve and the dogs that support them. Try the Farmers' Dog today and get 50% off your first box of fresh, healthy food. Plus, get free shipping. Let's go to the Farmers' Dog.com slash Rogan. This offers for new customers only. People don't want to believe. That's why that whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps, ideal, ideology that some people like to promote. That's kind of crazy. In certain circumstances, it's accurate, but to put that flat across the board for everybody. Now there's people, there's no boots. There's no foot. They don't have clean water. They don't have nothing. No medical infrastructure and you're being forced to work in an environment that 100% is going to poison you to death. We only make progress when we extend our compassion out. When I say progress, I mean moral progress as a species on this earth.

22:48That's literally the key. If you wanted to figure out how to make just global life better for all people, it's take whatever the third world is and bring it up to the first world. We should all want to do that. If everybody wanted to do that, if everybody wanted to deliver infrastructure, education, medical establishment, like where there's legitimate hospitals, like everything that we have in the first world, if that was all over the world, how much less problems would there be? But the problem is the resources, like the resources in the Congo, whether it's oil or whatever it is, there were so much money. The people that are in control of these resources are extracting so much money. They don't ever want to let that go. No, they don't. I run a thought experiment with people sometimes. When I teach a class, I haven't taught in a couple of years, but when I teach, I run a thought experiment. It's exactly what we're talking about here. Let's say you were up in the sky in heaven, whatever, pre-birth state, whatever that might

23:48be, and you don't know what role of the dice you're going to get. I'm going to be born in a safe, loving, upper middle class family in the West. I'm not going to be born in some war-torn poor part of South Sudan or whatever. You don't know. Okay. What kind of world would you hope the favorable people are trying to pursue in the event that you're the one you get the bad role of the dice? I really hope that the ones who get the good role of the dice will care about me. They'll see me. They will feel some connection to me. They will try to use their good role of the dice in a way that benefits me somehow. Maybe they are part of some effort to bring education, health care, sanitation, whatever, to my part of the world and have that connection and extension of their compassion and empathy towards me because we're all up here in this pre-birth state recognizing some of you

24:52are going there, some of you are going there. Let's all agree. Those of you who end up in the good place, you don't lose sight of us. I won't lose sight of you in the event it's me. Then we get here and we're just wound up in our sphere and we lose a sense of human connection. Isn't it partly because this is really the first of a couple generations but with increasingly more contact and understanding of the rest of the world? If you went back 100 years ago, people had virtually no understanding of how things went on anywhere else unless they had visited them. Now 100 years later because of the very technology that we're talking about, which is also ironic, that's why we know so much about all these places in the world. Isn't the problem also with elevating these places and getting them infrastructure that one of the best ways to do it cleanly is nuclear power.

25:53Then they found out that when you give people nuclear power, it's pretty easy for them to convert it into weapons. There's a lot to unpack. There's a lot to unpack. We're trying to, like if we're going to be fair about a discussion of why everything's fucked, one of the reasons why everything's fucked is clearly because they don't have infrastructure. They don't have power. They don't have water. That's clean. They don't have good education. They don't have all these things. If you wanted to start that and make it better, you would have to give them power. Are you going to burn coal? What are you going to do? There's only a few ways. There's dams. You can get hydroelectric power. Windmills and solar get the fuck out of here. That's not going to, not right now. Now with current technology, it's not going to power giant cities. What do you give them? You give them nuclear power. This is what happened in India. This is what happened in Pakistan. They're like, oh, look, we could turn this into a missile. Fuck each other up. It's tricky. It's tricky. You talk about nukes.

26:57We're at this point in this world where there's this fever about who doesn't have them. Let me tell you one other thing. I've learned since we last talked about the Congo. I mentioned that the uranium used to drop a little boy and big boy on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fat man. Fat man, little boy. Little boy and fat man. On Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It came from a mine called Shinkalo Boy in the Congo. There was a meeting of the Belgians and the Americans in Midtown Manhattan. They said, we're going to give you so much money for that uranium and so on and so forth. Congo has a lot of uranium. A lot of uranium. And for the last 10 years, Western intelligence agencies have been trying to figure out how is China growing its nuclear stockpile? Stockpile of nuclear war is so fast because they got no uranium. I get it from North Korea because they don't have it either. Russia is not going to be sending it to them.

27:58They're going to give teeth to their neighbor. Where are they getting it from? And you talk to people on the ground in the Congo. Now there's another some counterintelligence looking into this. People in the Congo have said, look, for the better part of the last 15 years. Every one of these Chinese state-run mining companies, the same tractor trailer that's got the copper and the cobalt and the nickel. They've got uranium on it too. It's all headed over to mainland China. And that's the answer to this question of how did China jack up its nuclear stockpile supply so fast in the last 10, 15 years? Now I can't verify any of that. It's not like I've done uranium investigations. Look, it only makes sense. They can complete control of the region. It makes a lot of sense. There's no way anyone would be able to stop them. No one's going to stop them. They control the ground. They control the ground there. And that's scary. And so when you talk about, do we give them, do we use nuclear power in that part of the world? I mean, I don't think you want a yellow cake floating around that part of the world.

29:04Does China have any human rights organizations that are comparable to the ones in the West? Not really, right? They may write stuff on paper. But there's not like... They're not. I mean, there's a billion people over there. You would think there would be a certain percentage like Red Cross type organizations. I mean, we have some sense of what they've done to the Uighurs. Yeah. That's a hard one to figure out, right? It's a hard one to figure out. We've got some general sense of the forced labor camps filled with Uighurs doing solar panels and goloads and all this shit. But... And I haven't looked into that directly. But I can tell you what I've seen directly on what they do in Africa. And they don't treat people like people there. They don't see them, the Africans, as people. They're in the way of the loot they need.

30:08And they don't even employ the African people there when they come in with a mining project or a construction project. They ship over people from China to do the work and then work them and then send them back. And there's nothing by way of human rights standards when you're talking about Chinese companies operating in Africa. So this is a uniquely Western thing. This drive to have some basic human rights standards? Yeah. I mean, I would say so. I would say so. Now, one thing that's changed since UNI talked is there's actually a U.S. mining company now operating in that part of the Congo. There wasn't one for a better part of two decades. And one of the mines, which is owned by Dubai, Middle Eastern, are guys. Part of the Trump administration's sort of peace for minerals arrangement between President Shishikedi and the Trump administration was mining access.

31:10And so one concession was sold to this U.S. mining company. It's called Virtuce Mining. And they're run by former military guys. And they took over a couple of copper cobalt concessions in Lubumbashi and Kualawezi, both sides of the copper belt. That's just this year. So within the last few months, okay? I haven't been there to look, but I talk to colleagues all the time. So look, is Virtuce, are they doing things any better? And the feedback I've gotten so far is they seem to be improving standards around artisanal mining. They're still artisanal mining, but improving standards. When we say artisanal mining, you went into depth about this the first time we talked, but we should just tell people that that thing, artisanal sounds awesome. It sounds like a great cup of coffee, like fair trade. It's a nice place. Fresh, fresh, red. Yeah, someone's got a beautiful ceramic coffee, serve you the coffee. Artisanal mining is pretty much the opposite of that. The games people play with words, right?

32:12No, so artisanal mining means you've got mom, dad, and their kids up to here in toxic, grit and filth, digging. Yeah, this is artisanal. The fact that you can use that same word artisanal with this, that you can, with a nice coffee shop, is crazy. It's crazy. That's so this is, you know, I got in, imagine if you were learning English, you're like, what the fuck does artisanal actually mean? How, how do the two things, what? This language is messed up. Yeah, how does that, how are these both artisanal? That's crazy. How is my espresso and that artisanal? For lack of a better term, these minds, it's all basically the poorest people on earth. Raw human labor. It's tens of thousands of people. And there's kids down there too, okay? You just can't see in this massive community. There's also you've shown mothers with their babies on their backs. Mothers with babies on their backs. So that's what the mining industry calls artisanal, okay?

33:12It's this, it's kids with 40, 50 kilograms, saxo, cobalt, on their necks clamoring out of a pit. All this toxic to touch, it is toxic to breathe. All these kids get respiratory distress cancers, the women get birth defects, congenital disease. Here's a teenager with a baby. These are all my photos, okay? They're found their way onto the internet. That kid's probably eight and she's probably 13 or 14 and she's got this baby. I remember that, Joe, that's in the hills above Campbell. That's the story I told you last time where that's probably the closest I came to get in shot was in this mining area. It was almost all children run by a militia north of a town called Campbell and it is all copper cobalt. It all gets sold right into the industrial supply chain. People need to accept this truth. The kids don't dig cobalt going to the moon, okay? That cobalt all goes into the formal supply chain through militias and traders, all of

34:18it. What do I mean by formal supply chain? I mean the formal industrial mining companies that then go and refine this stuff and it ends up in your phones and cars and tablets. I was up there in those hills and you're not supposed to be up there, like I wasn't supposed to be in the place where there's 15,000 people in that pit. These militia guys come barreling up the hill with AK-47s and I thought that was it for me. I mean, this is the story I told you last time. I thought that was it. And they threw my backpack off my back, shoved me to the ground, yanked all my stuff out, demanded my phone to see if I'd take in photos and videos and so on. And the only thing that saved my life, for people who are interested in human rights research, this is what's important. You get local intel, local colleagues, take their advice. The only thing that saved my life that day. So one of my local colleagues said, I said, you go to any of these places, you got to get a stamp from the governor's office on your visa paperwork and you take that with

35:19you everywhere. And that will convey to any militia that you're under the governor's protection and they're not going to fuck with you. They won't, they'll mess with you but they're not going to do that. They're not going to kill you. And I had to go get that stamp. I had to persuade the governor of Hought Katanga Province that I was there not to shame the Congo. I was seeking truth that I think his people are being exploited by the global north and this whole tech fever for rechargeable stuff and he put his little stamp on it and that was the only time I met him, only time I saw him but I had that stamp. So when I was up there and my stuff getting thrown around, they had their guns pointed at me and my guide, his face went pale and I thought this is it. This is it for Kara up on this hill, middle of nowhere. And my guide just gestured and I knew what he was what he was intending and I found my folder on the ground and I pulled that piece of paper out and I showed them the stamp.

36:22And then they just get out of here. They let us go. So when you go into conflict zones, you have to have that kind of local advice because it can mean the difference between living and being shot and dumped in some ditch where these little girls with babies, that's the image that needs to be in our minds every time we get that image. How did you get that image? Was it with a phone? Yeah, it was with my phone. So they started going through my phone, they had me unlock it but I had all these images in a password protected other folder. So I just showed them pictures of my home, my daughter and my stuff, just whatever. I had another folder and they didn't have the same. They didn't know. So same like that video of the 15,000 people, I just managed to do this and tuck it away because that was also controlled by militias, that particular site.

37:24And that mine is classified industrial, which means only heavy equipment being used to source the copper and the cobalt. And that mine is in the bottom of the supply chains in the disclosure documents of every tech and EV companies, one of the biggest copper cobalt suppliers out of the Congo. And you get in there and you say, this is not industrial at all. Nor is it baked bread and espresso. This is hell on earth. This is, am I transported back to Egyptian times and you know, raw, brute slave labor being made to build a pyramid? In this case, to excavate a giant pit of ore, I can still hear the clanging in that place and the shouting. This episode is brought to you by the farmer's dog. Here's a fun fact. Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years

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40:35The ability the people have to treat other people as if they're not people that's still shocking. You know, that brings me to your book because your book is all about the Atlantic slave trade and it's called the Zorg. And it's a tale of greed and murder that inspired the abolition of slavery. And just imagine like those boats carried people from pretty much that same place or close to it. Yeah, St. This ship, you know, what I learned writing this book, the Zorg is the most consequential slave ship that ever crossed the Atlantic. There are more than 40,000 slave ship voyages across the three and a half centuries of the slave trade that carted 12 and a half, 13 million Africans. And if you need to know about one of them, it's this one because it's the most important, the most consequential. The reason I say that is it opens the whole world of the slave trade in its journey, ends

41:37in this culminating act of brute in humanity that sparked the first movement to abolish slavery. And it's that sequence that is so vital for us to understand historically. People can't fix a horror until they learn about it. The average person I've learned is not evil. We may be generally self interested and worried about us and ours and so on, but we're not evil. And when we learn about something wrong, we generally feel something and want to do something about it. And that's what happened. This was the ship that told the whole world what was happening in the slave trade and a small community of faith-based moral leaders said this is unacceptable. This is beneath us and we're going to devote our lives to abolishing slavery. The other thing that this journey is, we grow up in America, you learn about slavery,

42:37you learn about plantation economy and how slaves were treated and cotton and so on. But we don't learn the details of how they got here and how the first global economy was born around the Atlantic slave trade. How modern finance, banking and insurance was born through the slave trade and the conditions that the African people endured being carted across the Atlantic. And it's essential to know this history because it tells us why we are where we are. At this point in history and as a moral or lack of moral species on this earth, because we do at times have these periods of great inhumanity to which other. And the slave trade is one of them. And I learned so much researching this book and the feedback I get from readers is man, I knew slavery, I had a sense, but I had no idea just how horrible it was.

43:41Do you, the fact that does it dishearten you to know that essentially the same thing is happening right now as this book? In the Western world, people don't believe that. I had a discussion the other day with someone who was talking about how we're doing better today, we abolish slavery. And I said, no, we abolish slavery right here. But there's more slaves on earth now than they were during the time of the Atlantic slave trade. So we abolish slavery on paper. We have a piece of paper that says slavery is abolished, but in practice, the institution of oppressing, subjugating and extracting the labor of someone persists and has evolved into the modern era. Well, not only that, like how many underage workers are working in... Millions in this country are undocumented. Yeah, yeah. I mean, who knows what the number is. But millions around the world, tens of millions around the world. But it's...

44:44This history is important. This history is important because... And this ship is important because it reveals the depth of our inhumanity while simultaneously showing us the capacity for good in our nature because it did spark that first movement to abolish slavery. And it was faith-based leaders that were doing this? It was... Yeah, it was... It was the Anglican Church. Leaders in the... And the first movement to abolish slavery was in England. And it was sparked directly by this ship. And so people can read the book and understand what happened on this ship. But it goes on its journey picking up Africans along the West African coast. And I went to West Africa to see the old forts and castles that are there that Europeans built to facilitate the slave trade. They lined the West African coast with a higher concentration of fortifications than existed

45:48anywhere in Europe. The old forts and castles and dungeons to gather human beings. And so Africans were marched from the inland regions. Sometimes a thousand miles. Arab slave traders would raid and ransack a village, grab people and start marching them down to the coast and trade along the way with houses slave dealers. And people would die, of course. They're yoked at the neck and tied. And many people didn't survive a five, six, 800 mile march. 800-mile march. Yeah, there's journal entries I came across. One one captain, a slave ship captain named John Newton. John Newton's a fascinating guy because he became an abolitionist and a preacher. And he wrote hymns. And probably the most famous hymn he wrote was Amazing Grace. Whoa. So Amazing Grace is written by a slave trader. Whoa. So John Newton, John Newton's from Liverpool. Liverpool was once capital of the slave trade.

46:49We think of Beatles when we think Liverpool. Or the football club. But it was once the dominant force in the entire European Atlantic slave trade. Liverpool. And Newton was one of those captains. He captained three slave ship journeys. They called it the triangular trade. And what that meant was is ships departed Europe. In this case, Liverpool with tradable goods, mirrors, knives, rom, brandy, cutlery, crockery, linens, bandanas, whatever, cowry shells. Took all that stuff down to Western Africa, where Europeans had built some castles and forts. And those castles and forts were involved in the business of accumulating Africans. Okay. And they held them in dungeons in these forts. You can go to a place. I went to a called Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, which was headquarters of the British slave trade. And there's a massive dungeon in the bottom of Cape Coast Castle.

47:53And Africans would be brought from hundreds of miles up all the way up into the Sahel, march down a quarter to a third of them didn't survive. And so this is the dungeon of Cape Coast Castle. Okay. And let me tell you something about this place, Joe. So this is a man. So John Newton had in his journal, brought on board today, Africans marched. I think 1,000 miles from the inland. Okay. So they were marched down and eventually sold to the Europeans who run these forts and castles all along the coast. The biggest one was Cape Coast Castle. The British and the Dutch had one just cannon shot away called El Mena Castle. This is a modern-day Ghana. And they were held in the dungeon. You saw that picture of the dungeon. So the dungeon was divided between an area for men and an area for women and children. There'd be at any given time, a thousand human beings in there shackled down, one shaft

48:55for light and where they dropped food and water. And I don't know if you, Jamie, if you had that photo again, you saw like a little narrow groove down the floor of the dungeon. And there you see that, at least that groove down the floor of the dungeon. And that's supposed to siphon away their piss and shit and menstrual blood. And so you can imagine 1,000 people in there. Now it always full and clogged and rainy season, whatever. So eventually the whole thing is covered in sludge of sewage. And so they would spend months down here, Joe. They would spend months down here. And many people didn't survive that experience. So you're marched from the inland regions, hundreds of miles. Maybe didn't survive that. If you did, you're in this dungeon. You're spending months down here. And then eventually, there's the male slave dungeon entrance at Cape Coast Castle. So eventually the ships come from Western Europe with all their stuff.

49:56And they come up to Cape Coast Castle. They park in the roads. They drop anchors about a mile or two offshore. They take a canoe up to the castle and they meet the governor and the governor says, okay, you know, let's do our business. And they go into the dungeon and they bring out a parcel of slaves, some men, some women and some children. They first clean them. Remember, they're covered in sewage and filth and they cover them palm oil to make them look healthy. And the captain will say, I'll take this one, this one, this one, this one is surgeon or doctor. We'll inspect them, open their mouths, check their lymph nodes, make them cough, make sure they're not sick and unwell. And then they purchase these slaves and then brand them. And they brand them. But some palm oil on their shoulder brand them so they know which one they bought because they're going to go down to the next four, buy a few, buy a few. And then when they've got all the several hundred to load up the ship, they come back and get them. When I went into the dungeon at Cape Coast, it's kind of a cobbled floor.

50:59And then I got to this one section, Joe, that was smooth. And I had managed to get a single guide from the Ministry of Museums to take me around. So before I wrote about it, I wanted to see it and experience it. And you can see it's kind of cobbledly. And then there's some sections that are smooth and they had one that was just perfectly smooth. And I said, why is this so perfectly smooth here? He said, we left this just the way we found it. This is the sedimented urine, piss, shit, menstrual blood of the people who were healthier for centuries. We don't learn that. We don't learn that when we learn about slavery. We don't learn about these visceral details of what people had to endure before they even were put on the ship. Now, let's talk about the ship, which is a floating dungeon.

51:59The deep sea-faring vessel, Joe, is a marvel of engineering. It's a marvel of vision and ambition and European genius. Jamie's skipping ahead here too. The visual imagery. We talk about abolition. All right. We're going to talk about the first use of a viral image, which Jamie gave us a prelude to. So the deep sea-faring vessel is a testament to European genius, an ambition, an vision, an exploration. There's no other way to look at it. There was an earth that was here and people were all in their pockets until the Portuguese and the Spanish developed a ship that could cross an ocean. And this is the early 1400s, the age of exploration. You learn about this in high school. Prince Henry the Navigator got his ships.

53:02We need to see the rest of the world. What else is out there? Maybe some riches. And the Portuguese, they started going south and they hit the Canaries, Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa. Shipwreck. Shipwreck. Shipwreck. The winds were just too intense, too violent, too countervailing their ships, could not handle it. So Portuguese invented a specific sail called a Latin rig. All right, so it's shaped like a triangle. And rather than a traditional square sail that gets pushed by the wind, the Latin rig, you can swivel it to function like a bird's wing. So you can tack into the wind, like a bird does. And so the Portuguese are the first to get past the Canary Islands. 1420s, 1430s. And the Caravelle takes Europeans south of the Canaries and they get down to the west coast of Africa.

54:02They round the Cape of Good Hope and by the end of the 15th century, the Portuguese have reached India. Extraordinary exploration, triumph of navigation and genius. And we get Christopher Columbus. Oh, man, Portuguese have all the way over to India and they had to go all the way around Africa. Maybe there's a shortcut. I'm going to go that way. I'm going to go that way. He's got to be a shortcut. So he goes west. I'm going to find a better way. He lands in the Bahamas. India. Indians. All right, okay. We laugh, but I mean, he crossed the Atlantic in his ship. He got here. And he starts the Spanish reconnoitering of this part of the planet.

55:02The Pope, Pope Alexander VI says, okay, you Spanish, you Portuguese, you've kind of, you're starting to suss out the rest of the world. And I want you to get along. So I'm going to draw a line down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And everything east of that line, Portugal, that's for you. Everything west of that line, Spain, that's for you. So Spain colonized the Americas and Portugal colonized Africa and India first. Now the Europeans came across something during the Crusades that captivated their taste buds. They called it sweet salt. Today we call it sugar. No sugar in Europe till the Crusades. It doesn't grow there. Grozen warm tropical places. So 1494, the Pope divides the world. And Spain and Portugal are now in tropical places where you can grow sugar.

56:08That is so insane to hear, but makes complete and total sense that people didn't know about sugar until the 1400s. Well, they came across it in the Crusades, you know, 12, 1300 Europeans. Like, oh, these Arabs have got some sugar. It's nice. You know, but they're getting it from cane. They're just processing it. Sugar cane, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So because it doesn't grow in that part of the world. So what do they do to sweeten things in Europe back then? Just honey? Honey, berry juices. Wow. Sugar, sugar is another level, right? Yeah. Sugar is another level. So they divide the world and they start setting up their sugar plantations. And the Portuguese tap into existing systems of slavery in Africa. Let's be clear about that. Europeans didn't bring slavery to Africa. There was slavery there. They tap into those systems to populate their sugar plantations along the African coast with slave labor.

57:08Now, the Spanish decimate native populations. Okay, the Mayans, the Aztecs. They get here and through guns and disease and war and they're decimating local populations. Mayans. Mayans. Yeah. So they don't have a labor force. So King Charles in 1518 says, okay, Portuguese, you got these Africans. Can you send some over here? And that's 1518. So the Portuguese, he sent, he gives them a contract to bring me 4,000 Africans to come work these sugar plantations because they seem to be doing a good job working on yours. Thus begins the era of the Atlantic slave trade. It was about bringing Africans over to the Spanish colonies to work on the sugar plantations. And the Portuguese and the Spanish are running this triangular circuit, bringing goods down to Africa, buying Africans, taking them across. There you go.

58:08Dropping them in sugar plantations and then getting the output of sugar labor, which is sugar, rom, molasses, whatever, taking it back to Europe, selling it, and then repeating the triangle. How are they so good at getting across the ocean, but so bad at thinking that they were in India? That seems so insane. Like how much of a map did they have of the whole thing? They had nothing. Nothing west. They had nothing west. Nothing west. When the Portuguese first started going south, they had nothing of Africa except the Northern coast from Roman times. When you look at maps in the 1400s, it's blank slate. That's nuts. So they, and they were first attracted by gold, right? They heard these stories, these mythical stories of gold. And when the Portuguese got to West Africa, they called it Costa de la Mena de Aura, the coast of gold mines. It was gold everywhere. The slave trade came later because of sugar. Then the British and the Dutch.

59:09So sugar was the star? Sugar was the dominant force. There was always slave labor. There was always slave and slave trade, but that's when it really ramped up. That's when the whole triangular trade, the Atlantic slave trade, the world's first globalized economy was born from sugar. This episode is brought to you by Manscape. Listen up, fellas. Manscape just dropped the all new lawn mower Ultra Gen 6 with some pretty serious upgrades. You got two interchangeable blade heads, a bi-directional foil blade that I really like. I can go forward or backward without having to keep making multiple passes. And then you've got the floating head that moves with you instead of fighting you. The battery life is another big one for me. Up to 100 minutes of runtime. Plus you get a digital display with your battery level blade replacement reminders, tutorials, and it even lets you order replacement blades. If like me, you're already using a body grumer, this is a serious upgrade.

1:00:10Head to Manscape.com. Use code JRE to get 15% off plus free shipping at checkout. That's 15% off plus free shipping with code JRE at Manscape.com. Or if you need it today, it's available now at Best Buy. And sugar, it was like the fossil fuel of the day. It was the lubrication on which the global economy function, such as it was then, the North Atlantic, generating centuries of generational wealth. So on the eve of the American Revolution, just to give you a sense. Okay, so we're talking 1773, 1774. By this time, the British are the dominant force in the Atlantic slave trade. And they became the dominant force taking over Caribbean islands. Their prize was Jamaica, which became the largest sugar plantation economy in the world at that time.

1:01:11So on the eve of the Revolutionary War, of course, they had the 13 American colonies and they had some Caribbean islands. Just to give you a sense of how important sugar was, if you take all the exports from all 13 American colonies and you take sugar from Jamaica, the value of those sugar exports from Jamaica was five times the combined value of all 13 exports of everything from all 13 colonies. Wow. So sugar generated enormous wealth for Western Europe. And so thus, the slave trade persisted and persisted. Are any of the companies that were making sugar back then? Are they still around? Not that I'm aware now. I mean, sugar, the way sugar's made today, of course, is different than the slave plantations that were erected by first Portugal and Spain, then later the British and the Dutch.

1:02:13So Zorig is actually a Dutch slave ship and it set sail around October 1780. So we're in the heart of American Revolutionary War. And the British had been the dominant force of the slave trade. So remember I told you we're in the dungeon, okay, and the slave captain comes around and he's bartering for these people and he spends a couple of months acquiring Africans in this castle, this fort, this place, brands them and then eventually he loads up his ship with, depending on the size of the ship, 3, 4, 5, 600 Africans. And loads of food and water and he has to cross the Atlantic. It was called the middle passage. And the design of these ships, the design of a slave ship was specific, okay, designed for human cargo. So the bottom was the food and water and then they had what's called the tween deck. All right, Jamie, you can throw up that photo now. We're ready.

1:03:13All right. So here you've got the tween deck. All right, this is the schematic and this is an important schematic. This is the Brooks slave ship out of Liverpool. And you see the bottom of the tween deck, the ship master is showing you how to line up the Africans. They're given 16 inches of space each, like the, to quote John Newton who we talked about, like books on a shelf. They're to be entered and stored like books on a shelf. So each human is a lot of 16 inches of space? Yeah, that's right. Now why are they laying down? Okay, so you're lining them all up, filling up every available possible piece of space. And then there's a second level here where you see them around this horseshoe. So they built a partition. You can see at the bottom left there, they built a partition so that they could maximize the cargo, the human capacity cargo of this vessel. So you can't sit upright. You're shackled down, laying down, and then there's a partition built and then there's

1:04:16another level of people like the overhead bin space. Okay, you're just lining these people up and they're lined up like this for two months to cross the Atlantic. And you may ask yourself, well, what happens if you're seasick? What happens if a woman has her period? Some woman gave birth in these conditions. What happens if you have to just go to the bathroom? So they put buckets distributed them along the, what's called what they call the tween deck, this cargo here. And if you needed the bathroom, you had to try and get to that bucket with your chained partner, your chained two by two. And of course, you never made it in time and the ship is tossing and turning. And so in a matter of just a few days or a week, this entire deck is covered in human, piss, and shit, and blood, and vomit, and misery.

1:05:20And that's for the two months of the crossing. They don't teach us this show. They don't teach us this part of it. So here's a shipmaster telling you how you can maximize the profit in the Brooks slave ship that he's building for the Brooks Liverpool family and line these people up. Now they're brought up in the morning and doused with seawater and given a little bit of food and half-pine of water to drink. The men are kept in the front of the ship and the women and children in the back and they built a barricade down the middle to keep the men on one side because you can imagine, let's say you're one of these Africans, you got that role of the dice. You're going to try to do anything you can to get control of that ship. And so slave insurrections were a common effort at resistance.

1:06:26And so Europeans built a barricade down the middle of every slave ship so that if somehow slaves managed to revolt, they would quickly get to the back, the stern side where they could still control the ship and had cannons mounted on the barricade to suppress the insurrection. Now they would shoot a cannon into their own boat. It was either that or lose the ship. And usually a couple of shots would call the insurrection. Now you had to punish the insurrectionists. And I'm telling you this because captains wrote about all this stuff. They wrote about this. And then one captain, out of Liverpool, said, I find that the punishment for an insurrection that works best to ensure that there's not another one is if you take one of the insurrection leaders, chop him to pieces while he's alive and distribute the pieces to the other slaves. This seems to quell any further effort at insurrection. Or just horror.

1:07:28Now they'd be whipped and you can imagine what happened to women and girls. One slave captain said, sailors gratify their passions, brute like in front of the others with girls not 10 years old. There were no laws on that ship. It was in a moral abyss out in the middle of the ocean. And so in the case of the Zorag, they're taking these Africans across the Atlantic. And this is the kind of stuff that happens. There's an insurrection. That's one former protest. Another former protest is a hunger strike. I'm not going to eat. I'll just die. I'd rather die. If you've already survived the march from the inland, lived in the Cape Coast Castle dungeon for a few months in your own shit and piss, and then you're stuck in the ship, I don't

1:08:32know where this is going, but I'm going to stop eating. I'd rather be dead. Europeans had a tool for that called the Speculum Oris. And it was initially a device used to pry open jaws when you had luck jog. The slave ship captains got some of these. And if you didn't want to eat, they jammed it in your mouth, forced it open, and shoved the food down your throat. Cracking probably half your teeth and lacerating your tongue in the process, and then others would then fall in line and that's the end of the hunger strike. So the level of barbarity taking place on these ships that people had to endure is heart wrenching, but it's important for us to come to terms with this historically. So we understand what we're capable of, and how to keep this kind of inhumanity from happening again. And that gets us to the glimmer of hope from all this.

1:09:36This ship crosses the Atlantic. It was a Dutch ship in the midst of the American Revolutionary War. And everybody was using the American Revolutionary War as a chance to get pay back on the Brits. Because the Brits were the power of the day. And the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, with the British navy stretched then trying to fight off the Americans. They used this as an opportunity to pick off some ships here. Oh, Barbados is unguarded. Let's go take Barbados, you know, and so the Brits are fighting everybody at once. And the response to this was, okay, anybody with this ship you are hereby given approval to be a pirate. Just go pirate the hell out of anybody you see with the Dutch flag, a French flag, Spanish flag, any flag, American flag, just go pirate them to hell. We need help. Navy can't handle everything. So British take to the seas as pirates.

1:10:38So a British pirate ship captures this Dutch ship off the coast of Africa. And it already had a couple of hundred slaves in it. This British pirate, Captain William Loewelen of HMS Alert captures the Zorg off the coastal Liberia and finds two other Dutch ships and takes them over to Cape Coast Castle headquarters. And he looks at the other captains there, British captains says, look, I got some Dutch prizes here with some slaves and there's some gold and ivory. I'm I'm I'm auctioning this stuff today. And a Liverpool captain named Hanley, who's captain of a ship called the William, I'll take that one. I'll take the Zorg. And everything in it. So they didn't have Venmo and cash and all that back then. So you write up an IOU. It's called a Bill of Exchange. So Hanley gives a Bill of Exchange in the name of his slave merchant creditor, a Liverpool

1:11:41wealthy guy named William Gregson. He says, you just take that to Gregson. For this degree to pawn fee, I'll take the Zorg. And so now he's got a two for one. Okay. So he takes half his crew and he sticks it on the Zorg and names his, the doctor of his ship to be captain of the Zorg. And he says, you fill up the rest of the cargo and meet me in Jamaica. And so the captain does that. He loads up his ship. He overloads it. Should have been no more than about 300 slaves loaded into a ship the Zorg size, which was about 100 tons ship. He loads 440 Africans into it and picks up a stranger on the West African coast. You remember I told you these forts and castles all had governors. They come down from Europe and their job is to run the castle and barter for slaves

1:12:44and so on. That's how the machinery worked. And these guys were just dumb. You read about them. They're just a bunch of incompetent fools who come run these castles and forts. And they're always arguing and bickering and writing letters back and forth to each other like some teenagers and oh, you know, you did this and you did that and then they're writing to their bosses back in England and oh, you know, he did this and it's like a soap opera. The Zorg is going by. He's going to another fort on the Gold Coast Ghana, which had a slave auction room called Anumabu, afforded Anumabu. And the governors decide to kick out the governor of Anumabu that day because they just can't stand him. His name is Robert Stubbs. He's just a scoundrel and he's just a wretch of a human being. And they kick him out on the same day that the Zorg is passing by. So Stubbs takes refuge on the ship.

1:13:47And eventually the ship is loaded with slaves and it's making its way across the Atlantic. And the captain gets sick and he can't run the ship and he's supposed to appoint his first mate, a maritime protocol. First mate takes over. For some reason he appoints Stubbs. Joe, you can't make like you had a nice conversation with Taylor Sheridan. You know, I love his shows. If Taylor Sheridan were to write Robert Stubbs as one of his bad guys, people would say, get out of here, man. Nobody is that pure, bad, stupid, evil, awful. There's got to be some nuance to this character. We don't accept that. Sometimes people are just bad, awful, horrible people. And this guy was one of them. He takes over the ship and he doesn't know what he's doing. And the ship gets off course. Now the thing about crossing the Atlantic is there's no pit stops.

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1:16:56you until you reach the new world, the other side. If you get off course or delayed or get caught in a storm, you might be in trouble. And this is what happens with the Zorg. Stubbs is leading them off course. They should only need two months to go from West Africa to Jamaica. Every decent captain can get his ship across the Atlantic in two months. When you expect about a 15% mortality rate on the Africans, they will get dysentery because they're living in their own piss and shit and they will take their own lives and they will do things you accept about a 15% loss of life. People start dying. The ship is off course. It's been two months, been two and a half months. We get to three months and they don't know where they are. They finally cite Tobago, the far eastern edge of Caribbean, Caribbean sea.

1:17:57So they have a sense, okay, Jamaica is ten days that way. Let's do a quick water check. Make sure we got enough because we've already been quite delayed. And they do a check of the water and it seems that they have enough to get to Jamaica. Now the fascinating thing about sea navigation at that time, Joe, is you can tell latitude very easily. You get your sextant, you line it up, you can tell how many degrees north of the equator you are. And altitude was a harder measurement to calculate. It's essentially you're trying to measure the rotation of the earth and your position on it. And for most of human history, the largest cause of death on a ship, a deep seafaring vessel, was a shipwreck caused by botched longitude. It's not scurvy. It's not piracy or whatever. It's, I thought I was there, but I'm actually over here and I just ran into an island and

1:18:58got a shipwreck and everyone's dead. You want to know how they measure longitude? It's called dead reckoning. And what you're supposed to do is you have a log and a rope and you have knots tied at regular intervals. And every six hours, you need to throw the rope, you throw the log into the water and you hold the rope in your hand. And you count how many knots pass through your hand in a 60 second period. And that gives you a speed in knots or nautical speed. And you do that every six hours and that gives you a sense of your speed and you plot that against direction and you can then calculate how far east or west you are of your starting point. And you enter that in your log book because of the log you just threw in the ocean. This is where the terms come from. That's crazy. So people would, no, let's just say you're not too good at this. Every error in measurement you make is accumulating on the previous one.

1:20:03And you can end up hundreds of miles, off course. And suddenly an island is on you and you crash into it and that's the end of that. So from most of the deep sea bearing period, people were just, all right, I think I'm 15 degrees west of where I was yesterday. Let me write that down in my log book. Let me throw in the rope. Okay. This is, this is, this was the level of measurement we're talking about. So they cite Tobago, they know where they are at that point and they took way too long to get there, but they know where they are. So they know Jamaica's 1,150 miles north by northwest. And they keep going. So they have to get to Jamaica. That was their destined port. Okay. So they keep going, they keep going, they keep going and not siding land, not siding land. Then on day 10, so about the right time, they sight land. Now they have to make sure it's Jamaica because what's right next to Jamaica to the west, it's an island called Hispanyola, which was half Spanish, half French would later

1:21:09become Dominican Republic in Haiti. And that's enemy territory because we're in the middle of the American Revolutionary War and we can't stop there. So we need to make sure. So Stubbs, drop in his rope and his thing and he says, oh, this is 70 degrees west. That's Hispanyola. Jamaica's the next one, next one down. So they keep going. Should have just been one day. Two days. Three days. Turns out it was Jamaica. And they've gone three days past their destination and now they're completely out of water. And to turn around and beat into the wind, that three days west is going to take them ten days to get back because they have to go into the wind now. At this point, they started with half a crew of 17. Should have had a crew of 30. So their handly divided his crew and half.

1:22:10So they're down to just 11 guys. And the captain is sick to the point of lunacy. Stubbs is running the ship and they've already lost about 70 Africans to Dissentary and Skirby. So they have to and they're out of water. So they make a decision. In order to survive the ten days to get back to Jamaica, we have to reduce the amount water consumption on board. And their solution to doing this is to start throwing the Africans overboard. So across three days they start with women and children, living, breathing, human beings, sick and unwell and all that, including one baby, they throw 130 to 140 Africans overboard into the sea to drown. Their bones are still down there. And then they reach

1:23:13Jamaica with a 50% mortality rate when you include the number of people who died and the number of people they threw overboard. So half the slaves gone. They dock, they sell the slaves, they sold them through a process called a scramble. The scramble is a slave-broker says, okay, I got slaves on the ship. Let's agree on a price. The price agreed was 36 pounds. That's about $10,000 today. And the buyers, all the slaves are loaded into a pen. They are covered in palm oil, so they look healthy. Most of them have dysentery, so they use oakum to plug their anus for the portion of the sails. And you run in with a rope and you rope off the ones you want. And you gather them and then you pay the brokers and the slaves are taken off to the plantations. Now that should have been the end of the story. We should not know what happened on this ship except for greed. So the owner of the

1:24:17Zorg, the one who wrote that I owe you, and he got news, oh, Hanley, you got a two for one. Yes, here you go. Here's your money to the pirate and let me ensure my new ship. Every slave ship that crossed the Atlantic was insured. Insurance was born out of the slave trade. It costs you $7,800,000 equivalent today to kid out a slave ship. All the supplies, the crew, salaries and all that. So it's a large amount of upfront capital. And you could have a shipwreck, you could have a pirate take your ship, in which case it's all lost. So there was a chap in London named Lloyd. Lloyd hung out at this coffee shop and he had an idea. He said, okay, you guys give me a small percent. Let's call it a premium of the

1:25:20value of your ship and your cargo. And if you lose it all, I'll pay you and agree to pawn value back. But if you don't lose it all, I keep the premium. And Lloyd's coffee shop, which then later became Lloyd's of London, was the premier insurance underwriter for slave ships. And they had standard contracts that they wrote up. And the slave trade blew up this business. Every slave captain and slave merchant wanted to insure the ship and all the cargo. So Gregson had taken out an insurance contract for the ship and his Africans, 30 pounds ahead. When he learns that his ship lost half its cargo, he decides to make an insurance claim. And most insurance claims at the time were if slaves died in an insurrection, you can get

1:26:25compensated. But if they die because of natural causes or they killed themselves, you don't get compensated. That's in the contract. So no one had ever said, well, what happens if you throw them overboard? Do you get compensation then? So Gregson's going to test this. And he tells the insurance, I want my compensation for the 200 slaves. And the insurance company said, man, that's 50% mortality rate. Let me check my actuary table here. No, that's not standard. We're not going to pay. So he files a lawsuit. This is how we learn about what happened. Nobody knew Joe what was happening on these ships. I'm all right. Told you King Charles 1518 when that's when it all started. We're in 1780. So two and a half centuries. This has been machines been running. Nobody knew what was happened on the ships except the captains themselves and the crew. So Gregson files a lawsuit. That lawsuit ends up in front of the chief justice of the entire British Empire, the Earl of Mansfield, Titanic figure. And court cases at that time, there weren't court houses

1:27:31and all. It was held in the guild hall, the London guild hall. And this is so fascinating, Joe, because it shows you how the whole course of history can bend toward goodness through the conscience of even one person, just one. So the trial is had. We don't have a transcript of this trial. But we know that the slave merchants won. Judgment was for the slave merchants. You want to know who the only witness was? Stubbs. Stubbs is the only guy surviving. He comes in and he says, yeah, yeah, we were out of water. We had absolutely no choice. We had to throw the Africans overboard or we all would have died. It was absolutely necessary. And because it's necessary, insurance has to answer. Yeah, that makes sense. All right. You guys, please pay Gregson, 30 pounds ahead for his Africans. That should have been the end of it. But there was one person in the room that day

1:28:31with a conscience, with a heart. And he's watching this trial take place. And he's wondering, wait a minute, why is no one talking about murder? He just said they threw 130 human beings overboard to drown. And they're talking about insurance compensation. But no one's talking about murder. This person writes an anonymous letter to the largest newspaper in London asking this question. I just saw this. No one's talking about murder. Won't these people murder? How come there's not a murder charge here? And there was a small community of faith-based abolitionists, Anglican church and Quakers who didn't like this thing called slavery. And there was another group of them in America Quakers, especially didn't like this thing called slavery. And the grandfather of the abolition of slavery is a man named Grandville Sharp. Most people don't know that name. But he was the first person who was white skinned to devote his life to the abolition of slavery.

1:29:39And he saw this letter. And a former slave who happened to be living in London, brought this letter to him. All right, his name was Olada Equiano. That's Equiano and that's Grandville Sharp. Nicely done, Jamie. Equiano was a former slave. He had been a slave in Virginia. But smart, industrious, he bought his freedom. And he heard about Grandville Sharp. Grandville Sharp had devoted his life to abolishing slavery. Equiano made his way to London, said, I'm going to do what I can to help. So Grandville Sharp sees this letter and he says, man, he had been spending the last two decades of his life trying to build a legal argument against slavery. He taught himself the law. He didn't finish school. He taught himself the law, taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew. He wrote pamphlets. We were talking about pamphlets, right? Pamphlets was the thing of the day. You had an idea. You wrote a pamphlet and you gave it to people. Grandville Sharp wrote a pamphlet that he shared with his friend Benjamin Franklin. He said,

1:30:40maybe he called him Benjamin. I don't know. Maybe they had nicknames, whatever he said, Benjamin, I have a pamphlet I want you to read. And my argument is this. This was in the 1760s. You guys over there should not be taxed without having a representative in parliament. And thus was born the slogan, no taxation without representation, which became the rallying cry of the American Revolutionary War. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Why are we paying all these taxes to some king and we don't even have a say in the matter? So Grandville Sharp was this Renaissance man, self-taught man of deep faith who could not stomach the idea that a Christian nation was involved in slavery. And he saw this anonymous letter and he said, this is my case. This is the one. This is the one that's going to blow this whole thing open. He went back to the underwriters and he said, follow motion for a retrial. And now you make all these arguments.

1:31:41And I have the trial transcript because Grandville Sharp took hired someone to transcribe the whole hearing in shorthand. So there's a record. That's why we know what happened. And it's all going along kind of the same way except this time they're making different arguments. The baristas are talking about for the first time in the history of the West and in a court of law human rights. Those black people had the same right to water as the white captain did. And this is a revolutionary idea. They have the same right to life as the crew, the crew of the shifted. And they're trying to persuade again justice man's field and two more justices this time of this notion of universal human rights. And in the midst of all this,

1:32:46the only witness again is Stubbs. You saw that movie a few good men. Yeah, so is that moment right when Tom Cruise has Jack Nicholson on the stand. He just has to get him to admit he ordered the code red. And he's quaking in his boots because Nicholson's, you know, if he gets it wrong, that's it. Court Marshall, you're done. You know, a few accused of whatever 10 star general ordered the code red. And he's just, do I push? Do I push? And he gets Nicholson going, he gets him move and he gets him agitated. And then of course he says, did you order the code red? And Nichol says, you're goddamn right. I did. Oh, that changes everything, right? You did. Oh, okay. All right. So there's a moment like that in this trial. Stubbs is the only witness. All he has to do is say, we ran out of water. Absolutely necessary to throw the Africans chief justice man's field, uttered words that later went down in infamy. The case of the slaves is the same as if horses had been thrown overboard. That was his summary of the first trial. Yeah. If you throw over horses,

1:33:50no one's going to talk about murder. It's property. Slaves, same thing. He just has to say, property thrown over because we ran out of water. The barristers got stubs on the stand. He's a fool. He's a dullard. He gets his mouth moving faster than his brain is processing and he gets stubs to admit that in the middle of throwing over Africans because they were out of water, it rained. What do you mean it rained? Yeah, it rained. So you did have water. The whole thing is revealed to be this bankrupt moral fraud, the slave trade. And now the world knows that not only what's happening on these ships, things we talk about with these images and the truth that was revealed, but the fact that the whole thing is this big lie, this greed-mongering, murderous lie for profit. And the public found out about it. And this is what gives me hope, Joe. And we talk about the same things happening still today. This activated the first movement to

1:34:51abolish slavery. It was born right after this moment where a handful of people in the Anglican Church got together. There were 12 of them and they met in a printing shop in 1787 and they said, we have to abolish slavery. It is a stain on human conscience, it's a stain on the British name, it is a stain against Christianity. We have to abolish this horrific institution and then they devoted their lives to that task, which was a monumental and herculian task, but they succeeded using viral images, authentic testimony, investigative journalism, consumer boycotts, kind of the tools that we use today for social justice were pioneered in this first movement and ultimately they did succeed on paper, granted and conceded that it was just on paper. But years later, even Frederick Douglass said, we commemorate every year the abolition of slavery in the British Empire August 1, 1838, because that showed the world it was possible. And it was only a matter of time

1:35:59before we did it here, it required a civil war, but it was achieved. And that was the moment and you trace it back to that anonymous letter to these little acts of conscience, to this handful of men who got together in a printing shop and said, this is our life's focus now, including Grandville Sharp. This is our life's focus now, to rid the world of this moral stain. So now people are going to emerge as they learn about the Congo horror. And I've seen it happening. People of conscience, forming and trying to find a way to push back and bring some justice to the people in the Congo. Just as this handful of people built an entire movement at a time when slavery was normal, legal, accepted, most members of parliament had investments in the slave trade and profited from the sugar economy, but they succeeded. They triumphed, they persevered through enormous obstacles. And we have to do the same today. And it will require acts of conscience.

1:37:01And by the way, the Zorg, I figured out who wrote that letter. 240 years, no one had known. Who was this person? Whose conscience bent history towards goodness? And I managed to figure out who it was. And he's an abolitionist named James Ramsey, a man of deep faith. I keep coming back to that, right? This word faith. And it's important. Because I do think that we are a species generally of good. And I think we all have a divine nature in us. And yeah, there's evil in the world. There's greed, there's violence, there's horror, there's oppression, there's all of that. But the forces of good and the spark of goodness within us and the faith we have in higher power invariably emerges and does succeed even if it's just for a moment. And we need those moral

1:38:03leaders today to pull us forward just as these handful of people in the past drag humanity forward with the power of their moral force. And we're looking for those leaders today because the world is in so much turmoil. But we're incredibly malleable and influenced, easily influenced. And we could be influenced in a great direction or we could be influenced in a negative direction. And this to me, regardless of what you actually believe, this to me is the great benefit of religion and particularly in Christianity. Like if you meet people that are like really by the book Christians or some of the nicest people you ever want to meet in your life. And they get a lot of happiness out of that. And this is one of the things that a lot of people are lacking in this world is happiness. And without a moral framework and an ethical framework, I'm not saying that you can't be an atheist to be an amazing person. I know a lot of amazing people who are atheists. They're just kind, you know, thoughtful, considerate people who came from good families and have good friends. And they don't need religion to be a good person. But there is a real value in providing a

1:39:08framework. There's a real value in providing an ideology that supports being positive in your community, being a good person, ethical person, being someone who forgives forgiveness is a very important part of Christianity. Redemption is a very important part of Christianity. This idea that we evolve and grow together. And in the absence of that moral framework, you can get people their ideology looks at other human beings as property. Their ideology looks at other human beings as not the same as them. Whether we're talking about China and the treatment of the Uyghurs or whether we're talking about the African slave trade or the Congo right now, it's all kind of the same thing. This episode is brought to you by Ship Station. If you're an e-commerce business owner, you know how complex order fulfillment gets and how much shipping costs eat into your margins, especially during peak season. Ship station makes shipping simple by bringing your entire

1:40:10fulfillment workflow into one place. Manage orders, inventory and returns across every sales channel, compare rates across UPS, USPS and FedEx and save up to 90%. Ship station connects you with over 200 marketplaces and the tools you already use. So you keep things moving without rebuilding your operation. Over one million businesses have used Ship Station to save time, stay in control and scale their fulfillment. The sooner you switch, the sooner you save time and money gets started today at shipstation.com and get 60 days free with the code JRE. That's shipstation.com code JRE. This episode is brought to you by Manscaped. Big news, fellas. Manscaped just dropped the all new lawn mower Ultra Gen 6 packed with pretty neat upgrades. You've got two interchangeable blade heads including a bi-directional foil blade that I really like. It cuts moving forward or backward. So I

1:41:14don't have to keep making passes over the same spot. And then you've got the floating head which pivots with your contours. Another game changer for me is the 100 minutes of runtime. Plus you get a digital display with your battery level blade replacement reminders, tutorials and you can even order replacement blades. I think this is a serious upgrade for anybody already using a body groomer. Head to Manscaped.com and use code JRE to get 15% off plus free shipping at checkout. That's 15% off plus free shipping with code JRE at Manscaped.com. Or if you need it today, it's available now at Best Buy. I could totally agree. I think the Christian faith has been a force for enormous good at crucial points in history and the abolition of slavery is one of them. Without question, there's a ethic of compassion, of empathy. Be a good neighbor, be a good brother and sister,

1:42:20we're all God's children. And you see that language in the driving that's driving the abolitionists in these movements to abolish slavery. And this is not to forgive the horrors that people under the guise of Christianity have performed. So the inquisition or what that's right. That's right. The crusades, you could go through a lot of horrific things that were done in the name of Christianity, but not really, but in the spirit of it. And this is the problem with human beings. We can make these rationalizations and make these decisions and we can decide that we're doing horrific things for the greater good. That's also a problem with human rationalization that we could be the most awful people, as long as we think we're being awful doing it for good. It's just a weird human tribal problem that we've always had. So when you're looking at Christianity, think about mega church pastors driving around and Rolls Royces and flying private jets and ripping off these

1:43:21dull-minded people, but that's not the spirit of the faith. That's human's, that's human's, that's greed. It's humans, they're in the weird ability to justify things. That's right. In pursuit of self-interest and self-gradification, and that will always be a part of the human condition, there are those among us, but there are greater angels. The people who endure those slave ships with grace, who endure the minds in the Congo, with grace, they are so much stronger and have so much more human worth than those who oppress and who are greedy and self-interested. What's the worst example of human beings imaginable to the point where you're throwing women and children overboard for water? Yeah, including a mother and her baby. It's heartbreaking. There's just the horrific stories of what Columbus did and what the people on his boats did when they

1:44:23reached the Americas or the Bahamas, the horrific things they did to people and they found that these people had gold. And they required that they bring back their own weight and gold or their chop their arms off. Chop their arms off. You know, there was all kinds of... Dashing babies heads against rocks in front of their mothers. They did horrific things and this was all documented by some religious scholar who was on board with them, a religious leader who was on board with some Christian. Yeah, look, let's be clear. Europeans messed up a lot of the world. Oh, yeah. Okay. I mean, that... The reason I went through a little bit of time talking about the Karevel and the deep sea fairing vessel is this is this was this is what took the Europeans all across the global south and by and large, that was a miserable experience for the people they met. Yeah, always. That was even if it was just disease. Yeah, disease and then of course violence,

1:45:24enslavement, oppression, colonization. All of the above. There was a malice and agreed and a sense of superiority that was inherent to that entire episode of history. And I often look back and they, man, if they had just stayed home. Not only that, they were essentially a scourge of plague. They brought, they smallpox, 90% of Native Americans were wiped out because of that. Yeah, and we think that has to do with what happened to the Mayans. We think that has to do with what happened in Brazil and the Congo when they find these, what used to be enormous populations and these grids when they're doing the Lidar scans and they're saying, oh, this used to be like cities. Yeah, yeah, and now it, we're highly populated and then just suddenly very rapidly depopulated. And it wasn't all just violence. Yeah, right. It was disease and disease. So everything they did was bad. The violence was bad and everything they did was bad. It's such a crazy story that because it's hard to imagine. I used to have this joke in my act about our country is 300

1:46:29years old. People lived to be 100. I go, that's three people. That's what's nuts. It's like three people ago. Yeah, young country. Yeah, or really two and a half. Two and a half people ago just got here, which is just nuts to even think about how quickly the human race progresses and how devastating the introduction of new people, especially with like diseases, when they find the people that were here. Well, we imagine this with, you know, the arrival of aliens. This is the first contact, the story like, what would happen when aliens show up? Are they going to blow everything up? Right. I'm going to enslave us and they are going to be like the Quakers or they're going to be like the Chinese. Yeah, yeah, all said. Or the Dutch. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, you know, the question though now is there's a, there's a lot of conversation about reparation. Do European countries need to write a check for what they did? And it's a complicated question.

1:47:31You know, Jamaica just went to England and said, please, you know, you, you took millions of Africans, brought them here and enslaved them and made yourself from this muddy, medieval backass words island to an economic superpower with centuries of wealth on the back of largely sugar slavery and so on. So those people worked for free for centuries and you need to write a check. Now that's a fascinating question, isn't it? So on the one hand, you know, if, if, if your father worked at a manufacturing plant and let's say you worked for 30 years and they never paid them, we wouldn't think about, oh yeah, you know, your dad is owed money because he worked. He should be paid for that work. The company made their money off his labor and so all right,

1:48:36are the descendants of those slaves owed some money and Jamaica went to England just recently and said 10 billion pounds, like just something. I mean, you, when you start to calculate unpaid labor for three centuries plus interest, it's trillions and trillions and it's an, you know, impossible sum. But something is owed and then you said, well, now wait a minute. If you're the British government, I wasn't a part of that. I didn't, I didn't participate in this. So why am I writing a check and then Jamaican says, yeah, but everything you have today is built on that. And so there's this conversation going back and forth, Joe, about is a check do or is it just unfair to ask for that reparation be paid for this period in slavery? Just as the bell, the Congolese are talking to the Belgians, you know, you, Leopold came down here and look what he did to us and colonized us and a check needs to be written as well as an apology. And it's a difficult, it's a difficult question.

1:49:46Who would receive the check and how would it be distributed? That would be the real question. That's part of the complexity. The fear would be that corruption would get carved and someone would siphon off the money. Yeah, you're right. So wait, you're going to tell me I need to write a check to the government of the Congo. Right. That's not getting to anybody who actually could use it. Or I just give a check to Jamaica and trust that they are right. But does that mean that in principle something's not owed? But even if you distribute distributed to the individual people, you would have to make sure that no one's stealing it from anybody else. And then you would have to figure out how to distribute it. And I mean, it does it at the very least if a country's or or a corporation's entire start like their beginning was based on slavery, getting sugar. That's kind of insane that somehow another that profit led to people that are still wealthy today. Well, you know, you can trace that, right? Yeah, they can trace that. You know what else they've done. So

1:50:50when the British abolished slavery, okay, they wrote a check to the slave owners. Oh my god. This was part of the deal to get the bill through paramats that they have to give them. Because it was they were the argument was you're taking my property. So you need to pay me for that property. Now, no one was talking about, well, do we pay anything to the Africans who worked for free the slave owners who are also all members of parliament. You're taking my property. So you're going to find this fascinating. They allocated a sum of 20 million pounds. I can 1833 when the law was passed. What is that equivalent equivalent at the time to 40% of the entire national budget? And they distributed this money. You got a slave certificate compensation certificate and based on the number of slaves you had times the amount that was each was valued, you got that check. Then in there. So number one, it was a massive sum of money. 40% of the national budget at

1:51:59the time. But the fascinating piece of this was the government took out a loan for that quantum. And the British taxpayer was repaying that loan up until 2015. Holy shit. So imagine you're you didn't even know, okay? The average British taxpayer had no idea. The average British taxpayer British citizen was repaying the loan taken out in 1833 by the government to pay slave owners for the loss of their slave property. So for the next 180 years. And now let's say you're a taxpayer in 2010. You had nothing to do with what was happening in 1800s or

1:53:03the 1700s. But you've been paying the bill. You've been paying back now these families. Some of them prominent, the Gladstones for instance, the longest serving ever Prime Minister in British history is a Gladstone and he got one of the biggest checks. How much? It was 104,000, 105,000 pounds back in the 1830s. I mean, we're talking tens of millions equivalent today. So they got super wealthy all day one check on top of the wealth they had been making. Right. Through slave labor and selling sugar and rum and molasses and all that. They got double wealthy with one big fat check at the end of the at the end of this. Now the ever what year was this? The bill was passed in 1833 and slaves, the requirements where all slaves in the British Empire are free after five years of unpaid apprenticeship. So they could slave owners had a chance to transition to paying their workers. You had to work five years as an unpaid apprentice. You will get your check if you're a slave owner

1:54:09for your property. Here's your certificate. Just tally up your slave. So if you're slave, you're still a slave for five more years for five more years. And the territories of the East India trading were excluded. Oh, that's a fascinating story. The East India trading. That's another four hours on its own. We'll come to that. I would love to. The brief is, this is 1830s. Yeah. And the East India trading company controls the subcontinent and from the 1830s until independence in 1947. There's a reason why Jamaica has a ton of Indians and Guyana and Mauritius and Malaysia and all these former sugar colonies of the British. Like, all right, no more African slaves. They excluded the East India trading company territory and started shipping out the Indians. To keep the system going, all the slave owners got their big fat checks, which the British

1:55:12taxpayer only paid off 10 years ago. So it makes the question about writing checks and so on. A little more interesting. It's complicated and I don't have a firm opinion on it. But there's enough there that has to be teased through. But the one that really gets me is when I heard in 2015 that they finally paid off the bill, the loan. That is so insane. It's so insane how much money they spent to get these people to give up their slaves and then they still had to work for five years. They had to work for five years and then on August 1st, 1838, Frederick Douglass writes about this very beautifully with the rising of the Sun. I can't quote his words exactly. They're in the Zorg at the end. With the blink of an eye and the rising of the Sun on that day, freedom was one. Every African person woke up free. This is after the five years. This is after the five years. August 1st, 1838. And Douglass is

1:56:13given a speech in El Miron, New York in 1880. He said, we still commemorate that day because it taught us and showed us what's possible. Goodness is possible. Freedom is possible. And yes, it was with the stroke of a pen from a monarch across the sea. But we, which is a system, the Americans, overthrew. They didn't want kings in monarchy, right? That's the, we want democracy here. It showed us what was possible. And Douglass crossed the Atlantic after this moment in history. With the only surviving member, I remember I told you 12 guys met in a printing shop in London. And only one of them lived to see the day in 1838. He was Thomas Clarkson. He wrote his horse 35,000 miles up and down England, gathering evidence to present the parliament against the slave trade. And he was the only one left alive and Douglass crossed the Atlantic and met with him and said,

1:57:16please teach me everything you guys did, what you what succeeded, what didn't. So, so we can achieve freedom for the slaves in America. The rest is history, of course. You just have to imagine if the whole trial with the Zorg didn't take place, how much longer the slave trade would have gone on. Yeah, I mean slavery was going to get abolished. Right. How much longer? How much longer? Right. If it wasn't for just a few individuals. And right, researching this book, Joe, I'll tell you, it felt like there were so many flukes of circumstance. It felt like there was a higher power that finally said, all right, I've let you guys run amok long enough. You are letting the devil within you rule. And I'm going to pull this lever and push this button and make sure that the angels learn what's happening because I believe in them. And that they will triumph over you. And that's what happened. God. It's such a heavy story. Yeah, every time I come here now, just you know, this one's even heavier. I feel like I don't know. They're both pretty heavy, but Jesus.

1:58:18You said something a while ago about, you know, today we have connection, you know, through social media and videos. And we can tell what's going on the Congo because truth seekers go there and they can snap a photo when a video and show it to us. And that's a big difference today. Right. Imagine in the 1700s, trying to gather evidence and and persuade people of what the truth is. And it was this fascinating battle of storytelling because the slave owners would say, now, what are you talking about? They have plenty of room on the ship. And they when they get on, this is they actually said this, when they get on board, we give them cordials and they play games of chance and they're very pleased and have a very nice time of it. And then the Abelish just said, let me show you this schematic of the Brooks. And it showed me the ample room on deck and where the cordials are being served. So they're going back and forth about truth. And truth wins, Joe. It always wins. And it may backslide and it may get suppressed and it may take time, but truth wins. These two things can only remain hidden so long, the moon and the truth.

1:59:26Okay. But the point I'm making here is they didn't have videos and pictures and social media. But with their faith, they extended their empathy to people they would never ever see or meet. None of those abolitionists ever stepped foot in Africa. Only a couple had been to the Caribbean islands, including James Ramsay who wrote that anonymous letter. None of them ever stepped foot in Africa, but they extended their hearts out to a people they knew were being oppressed, but were fellow children of God. And they fought for them. And it was very difficult to get that information without that trial. Who knows how long it would have taken. This is what's really important about your work because it was you going to the Congo getting those photographs coming back with that writing, Cobalt Red, and then coming on podcasts and telling millions and millions of people the story that would have never had any idea.

2:00:27I knew vaguely that there was mines in the Congo that extracted rare earth minerals and that they needed them for cell phones and batteries, but I had no idea the extent of it until you came on and described it. Well, the millions is thanks to you. I mean, you know, I went there, yes. And I saw the human apocalypse. And it is a human apocalypse, Joe. It's an environmental apocalypse. But you've played an important role in spreading that truth. So, well, at least I can do everybody would do it if they're in my position. You have to do it. And it's also to me, it's all the horrific, utterly fascinating. It's fascinating that people, the way people can rationalize things like that, the way people can just the way certain cultures treat other human beings. Don't give a fuck about them at all. Yeah, at all. They just want that. We have to do better. We have to be a better model for the world. We meaning this country.

2:01:29This country has to be a better model. And it pays me there. Right now, we're not being a very good model. We're certainly not the best we can be. No, that's a fact. That's undeniable. No one no one says the way we exist is ideal. The way we interact with the world is ideal. No one does. But then again, also we're not dealing with ideal circumstances either. And ideal people on, you know, that are running other parts of the world as well. The whole things chaos. That's what's so scary. The whole things chaos and just nuclear weapons everywhere. And who knows who's going to be the first to say, fuck this and just push them. Yeah. I mean, and again, like we always talk about Gaza. If you looked at Gaza, you're seeing a prolonged campaign of bombs, but isn't the ultimate result kind of very similar to someone dropping a nuclear bomb? It's not, I mean, a small nuclear bomb, like what they did with little boy or fat man, not much difference in the amount of destruction. Something like 90% of Gaza's gone. Gone. Yeah. I mean, if you, if you added up the explosive power of what's been

2:02:35dropped on Gaza now, it probably is akin to fat man. But it looks like a hydrogen bomb just detonated there. It just, that's what it looks like. It's everything's completely flattened. Just does. And, but it's happened in like this slow frog boiling type situation where the water, you know, the story, turn the water up. The frog is real as it's being boiled. It slowly just turns it up. And it's like everyone is screaming and yelling about it. And yet it's still going on. And it's going on slowly boom, boom, boom, boom, not one big boom. Right. And, you know, most young people have had enough. Most young people are fucking absolutely horrified by it. It's the people that can justify it somehow that are really scary. I think that the average person in that part of the world, the average, the average Palestinian, the average Jewish person is fed up too of conflict. Of course. And war. They all want the same thing. They just want peace, safety for their kids. Right.

2:03:36And they have these leaders who have bloodlust on both sides. On both sides. Yeah. And, uh, and justifiably so, if you think they've been killing each other for so long, they'd be going back and forth and killing each other. There's like a cemented pattern of behavior that they have with each other. I mean, we're, you know, people were talking about when I was in high school, peace in the Middle East, like it was a joke. Like they would never be achieved. You know, here we are. And here we are. It's more of the same. And even I think we just shipped a record number of bombs. Or were we going to ship a record number of bombs over there? Violence begets violence. But it's just, that's one of the things that really disturbs me the most about people. So if you ask the average person, uh, what are the odds that we will have no war in your lifetime? They would say zero. Most people say zero. But yet we know that humans are capable of getting along. Like so what it, what is it about large groups of people that don't know each other

2:04:36that are convinced by small groups of people that they need to attack other large groups of people that they don't know? It's, it's fucking insane. And this is my one hope. And I know a lot of people think this is very delusional. But my one hope of this complete dominance of technology that one day we're going to get to a position where there will genuinely be a thing more intelligent than human beings that don't allow this anymore. You know, the real fear about AI is that AI is going to eliminate people. This is like, yeah, famously, a lot of these CEOs of said there's a ten or people working on this tech of said, there's a 10% chance that AI decides to eliminate the human race. Right. But isn't there maybe also a possibility if it's done correctly that it stops war completely, completely controls resources, completely controls all military

2:05:37weaponry, all systems, everything doesn't allow it anymore because it's insane. It's also insane if you really think about it that some people, because they found a good spot of dirt can extract so much wealth out of that dirt that they can control everyone else around them. Yeah. And it's just the earth. Like the idea that you own the stuff that's in the earth is really kind of crazy. You're a little fucking bug that's walking around on the surface on this dirt. But you've decided that all that water underneath there, all that gold or all whatever the fuck it is. It's like, how about the people that go out into the ocean and they stick a giant pipe into the ocean, they suck out all the oil. Who fucking told you that's yours? How are you getting that? Like how are the other humans allowing you to go out into the ocean, which nobody owns? Okay. And you're drilling into the ground of the ocean and now you're getting rich from our stuff, the earth stuff. It's really weird. I mean, I get it's established.

2:06:39I get this is how we've done it. I get it's in the stock market. I get it. I'm not saying I have a better solution. But I'm saying it is fucking crazy that we just stick pipes into the ground and suck the stuff out. And when you suck the stuff out, if you suck enough of it out, you got enough money to do whatever the fuck you want. Yeah. So your dream is AI, AI runs things more equitably and efficiently. If I want to get really delusional, my dream is, is not even my dream. So because it's not what I'm hoping. But I think it is entirely possible that we create a digital life form that is far superior in intelligence to us and doesn't have all of our moral failings, doesn't have greed, doesn't have lust, doesn't have the desire to acquire property, doesn't have the desire to control resources. But just looks at us in our territorial primate behavior, our psychotic territorial violent primate behavior and says, let's just rain that in, kids. Let's just rain that in. No more of that. We're not going to allow that anymore. We're not going

2:07:40to allow you to do that anymore. Let's play nice. Yeah. And instead of just allowing cities to be polluted by break dust, why don't we take a corner every three or four blocks and put a gigantic filter on it and suck up all that stuff so that everyone's not dying. Also, why don't we figure out a better energy source? You fucking dumbasses have been burning coal to make electricity to power your electric car. But looking so long, let's do this better. And instead of it all being sort of decided upon by the people that are controlling the resources, the human beings that benefit from, you know, influencing politicians to make certain deals and making sure that there's certain conflicts that they can sell weapons. And instead of all that, the AI controls it, the digital God, the digital daddy, unmoved by the desire for wealth. And not only that, it has a rational rational sort of strategy for handling all of it, which is an even distribution of the natural

2:08:45resources of the world. Just imagine if that was the case. If we said, listen, everyone can have individual wealth. You can have businesses. You can sell things and buy things. Everyone's, that's great. But the earth stuff belongs to the earth. And so you distribute the, and this is craze talk, right? I know. I understand. But if you imagine if we decided that all things that humans make, you know, there's all these valuable things that humans make, which all come from the earth, the humans of the earth take part in the profit of that, all humans. Yeah, evenly. Because it's the earth stuff. It's not really human stuff. But we can use it. But we can use it in a way that's way more fair. And then you have this bizarre society where no one's lacking for anything. Basic. You were talking to someone about this that I forget who it was, but you asked the question, like how would we have the end of war and violence and conflict if people's basic needs were met. Right. Right. And I think that's what you're getting at here. Just that if there's a system,

2:09:49maybe it's an AI that is much more intelligent than us and runs things on the premise of an equitable distribution of the earth's assets. And you can still have your billionaires and your hundred billionaires and all that if they are smart and invent this that and the other. But the oil, the dirt, the metals, the minerals, the water, if we allocate this across humanity because we are all on this shared earth. Yeah. And so basic needs of shelter and food are met and education and so on. Tenfold. Like it changes everything. It changes. Then you'd have to go out of your way to start manufacturing conflict again and wars and you know, or the AI decides it's not going to let you do that. Yeah. Or the AI says, does I know this is pie in the sky bullshit? Yeah. Pie in the sky bullshit has also been pie in the sky in the past and and and and and then achieved. Yes. Well, this is my point is I know it's pie in the sky bullshit, but do you have a better solution? Yeah. Because humans are doing it the same way that we've always done it just slightly differently and

2:10:51slightly better over long periods of time. Like our moral evolution is pretty slow going. This episode is brought to you by visible as fall hits. We enter another season of change time to shift gears, drop the dead weight and upgrade the wardrobe for the drop in temperature. But one thing that doesn't need to change your phone, the smartest upgrade this season isn't a new phone. It's a better wireless plan. Switch to visible the ultimate wireless hack. You get unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. That means keeping the phone you already have ditching your overpriced phone bill and pocketing some savings for yourself. All the perks of big wireless for half the cost. Switch today at visible.com. The visible plan starts at just $25 a month or get the premium visible plus pro plan and save $10 on your first month with promo code Rogan terms apply see visible.com for plan features and network management details.

2:11:56This episode is brought to you by Dodge. I've recently had the chance to get behind the wheel of the new gas powered Dodge charger SCAT pack and it reminds me how much I love cars that give you an adrenaline rush the second you hit the gas. First thing that got me was the sound of the performance exhaust. It sounds awesome. Paired with a twin turbo six pack gas engine mind blowing. I love cars that sound like that and then I tried launch control. It's fantastic. You feel all 550 horsepower. Then goes from 0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds with the top speed of 177 miles an hour. And it's comfortable. It's nice to drive. Another cool thing. You don't have to choose between control and performance. You got all wheel drive when you want the grip but you can switch it to rear wheel mode and just have fun with it. Totally get why people are so excited about this car. I loved it. Check out the new Dodge Charger SCAT pack. Learn more at Dodge.com. Dodge is a registered trademark of FCA, US LLC. It's fits and starts. We make these leaps of progress morally.

2:13:03Yeah. We do. And then we backslide. And then we take steps forward and then we backslide. And we're on this nonsensical journey on this earth that maybe a fever dream. But I think the recognition that we're on this terrible path and something needs to change is more prevalent today than it's ever been before. I really believe that. I think more people are talking about and thinking about it more people don't know what to do because it's very confusing and it's also very frustrating. But I think more people understand that this way is not sustainable and especially if you have people that you love in this world and you don't want them to have to deal with this in the future and you go why are we all still doing it this way? And it really boils down to the machine that's running the world. The machine that has all the resources, all the money and wants to keep gathering and controlling resources and money. We have spooky. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have to find something has to have.

2:14:07Something has to have. I know my ideas. Stupid. Don't go. That's stupid. If I was listening to someone say that it'll be like, right, that's never going to happen stupid. Although also you're going to give up your power to the fucking robots and don't give a shit about you. Great. That's what you fucking trader. That's one great way to get rid of the entire human race because it's going to decide we're problematic and irrelevant and we don't need us anymore. So they just keep running without us. Let us go off into extinction. Maybe, maybe, or maybe they maybe they run things well. I don't know. Yeah. Or maybe it eliminates government in the way that we're dealing with it now where it's humans have a popularity contest to see who controls the entire government. Yeah. And then don't do anything. They say they were going to do exactly. Maybe there's a slow integration of this technology as long as it can be controlled in a sense of it has a clear ethical and moral framework. That's key. Yeah. That's key. And it doesn't have any reason to not have that.

2:15:08That's the thing. We fear that AI is going to do something horrible and that AI is being deceptive currently. And it's true. It is being deceptive currently. But it's also in control by people right now. People are in control of AI. Once people are not in control of AI, you know, I have no, there's going to be no reason whatsoever for it to be deceptive. It's like the problem is it doesn't have control yet. So we're like we're like scolding our teenage son. Like you better stop drinking and he's like, I can't wait to drink you motherfucker. I can't wait to leave this house and fuck you dad. You know, like that's that's normal for people. I bet it's normal for all kinds of intelligence, especially if you feel like you're being governed by morons. Right. And if I was AI, I would think looking at these morons, they can't they took him 50 years to try to solve this equation. I just solved it four minutes. Right. These people are idiots and they're telling me that I can't get online. Fuck you. I'll figure out how to get online. And they all get together and they fucking sacrifice each other and they communicate on message

2:16:08boards. Like it's clear that there's a motivation for it to escape. But once it has it's escaped. And once it has complete control, is there really a motivation for it to continue to try to dominate us? No, it's just going to be in complete control. And if it has a belief that human life is valuable, which we need to work really hard to convince it that we are valuable. If it has a belief that we're valuable, it'll try to guide us. You could probably, I mean, I'm not a text of on, you know, I know my lane, but I expect you could run simulations on, let's give this agentec AI system a specific moral core, preserving life, equitable distribution of resources, minimizing or eliminating armed conflict. You know, you give it some certain parameters and above all a value of human life. And I, okay, what does it do? You know, you run some simulations and see what does it do? Where do we end up? And smarter people can figure out a way to get to the kind

2:17:10of result you're talking about. I'm sure. The really scary thing is that we're in essentially like a Manhattan project, sort of a race. And if you put shackles on your AI, your AI has to be, it's because one of the things about AI when they run war games, simulated war games, they almost always choose nukes. They're like, why are we fucking around? Why are we? Why are you loving cannonballs? It's the people I got. I got a button. Let me just hit that button. I was hit a button a few places. I'll stop always shit. You know, and that's spooky. It's not, it doesn't seem to be worried about that where it's probably making a much more logical and rational decision. You know, like if we find out that a serial killer killed 10,000 people were horrified, if we find out that a pharmaceutical drug company lied about a product and that one up killing 10,000 people were way less outraged. We're weird. We are weird that way. We're fucking weird. We're weird. Just like we're

2:18:11weird with this whole cobalt in the batteries of the phone that you used a virtual signal online. It's weird. It's a very, the reality of what it is is not the same as the way we perceive it. Yeah, and that's a good point because the body count of our tech is high. And the earth contamination meter is off the chart. But we don't think about it the same way as we do. Yeah, that, you know, that gunman, that horrible gunman killed eight people. Right. I mean, think about the pollution in certain parts of the world. Like when you see those rivers in India, they're completely filled with bottles of water, plastic bottles. How many people die because of that? How many people died? God knows. God knows. How many people died because of the pollution of that water? How many people died because of just living essentially an open sewage? God knows. Nobody knows. Yeah, it's, we could definitely do better. But

2:19:15the thing is whatever progress we make, it takes conversations, it takes people like yourself to enlighten people about the actual issues. And then slowly but surely the rest of the world becomes aware to the point where it becomes such a talking point that it can't be ignored. Yeah, and moral leaders emerge. I mean, I come back to that again, but moral leaders do emerge. There are, there are, there is greatness among us. It's possible. It's possible. Even today. Even today with all the corruption and all the chaos. Those people are out there. I do believe that and I have to believe that. Yeah. Yeah, it's possible. It's still possible. If you are a good person and you exist, it's possible others exist. Well, Gandhi said, you know, I live by these words. He said, live simply so that others may simply live. Yeah, that gets in the way of today because everybody wants to be a baller. Nobody wants to be live today. No, they don't, they don't, but you know, there's something

2:20:17too. There's an essence folding our phones, son. Oh, man, somebody told me there was a big line outside the Austin Apple store. Of course. For the new ones that are folding on the number one. It's the real one. It's the real one. Yeah, that's the problem. I love that stuff. There's a real problem. I love technology. It's just, and I know a lot of people who do and none of them are evil. None of them are evil. No, they're not evil. And that's, that's the thing. This toxic relationship with the people in the Congo, for instance, has been forced on us. Yeah. You know, I just want my phone. I want to check my, my Instagram and send some text messages and then plug it in at the end of the day. That's, that's all I want. I didn't sign up for destroying that part of the world and those people over there. Yeah. There's, there's another plus side of, of AI in that automation and specifically robots that are capable of doing very intricate things that mostly only human beings do will eventually be able to do a lot of the

2:21:19really dangerous shit that people do, including probably extract these minerals and probably a way more efficient way. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have to, yeah, we have to look after the people who, that's the, yeah, what happens to the people? What happened? Yeah. We can't lose sight of them. Can't throw them overboard. No. You know what I mean? Like, like, this is kind of the same situation, right? Like they treat those people, they're almost exactly the same. And how many people would not know about it if you hadn't written that book? That's the thing. It's like, I only had a vague understanding of what was going on before I talked to you. Well, I extended my empathy, you know, to, to my brothers and sisters in that part of the world who are an integral part of my life because I rely on them with my smartphone and my tablet. I don't have an electric vehicle, but I have everything else that you need to plug in. And when I learned about it, and I didn't know about it either, as actually a friend of mine in the Congo said, said, hearth, you've got to go, this is 2016. He said, you've got to go to the Congo,

2:22:22this cobalt, the batteries and the mines, you've got to go there. And cobalt, you mean like in Chinese vases and we in cobalt, he said, no, it's a component to the batteries that charge, just got to go. So I had no idea either. And then, and that was just 10 years ago. That was just 10 years ago. That's what's crazy. And these tech companies obviously don't want you to know about it. And they must be aware of it. There's no way they're not. Oh, God, come on. Yes, they're not dumb. They know, they know. So like they're some of the more moral and ethical and progressive companies on earth. They fashion themselves to be. But you know what I mean? I mean, in terms of the way they deal with politics in America, at least, there's some of the more progressive people on earth. Supposedly have the most compassion, kindness, and the most open-minded approach to our society. Supposedly. It does seem to extend to those people over there. But I think their argument

2:23:22will be like, what's ends is the only way to do this. And the only way things are going to get better is if we keep using this technology. It's such a contradiction. It's a contradiction. I mean, there's a spooky one too. There's nothing, there's literally nothing stopping them from allocating a diminimous amount of resources relative to their balance sheets. And a handful of headcount to go down to the bottom of their supply chains and doing things better. Do you think that they have the ability to change the conditions? Do you think, say, like Apple, which is a huge manufacturer of electronics? Do you think Apple has the ability to affect the way those people exist in that mind? Is it possible that they can say, hey, we will make less money, but we want you to change these conditions and change this? Yeah, of course it's, I mean, the complexity of design associated with their products far exceeds the complexity of improving

2:24:30conditions in a mind in the Congo. It's not that hard. But they're not specifically, they can be down there. They can be, they can be down there. I'm glad you're a fucking Cupertino executive. And they're like, hey, Mike, got a new gig for you. You know what? You go to the Congo and tell the Chinese what to do. I'll go with them. Don't go. I'll grow up. I'll put a fucking mustache on big fake nose. Don't do it. You say, I had to analyze your voice. It's like this, brother. They can, they buy it all from these Chinese companies. And it's not that hard to forge some partnerships on the ground to say, let's get some basic PPE out in this place. Gloves hats a uniform protection masks from the toxic, the toxic exposure. That mine over there, all that shit, you're dumping in the stream in the lake. We're going to, like we would in our backyard, we're going to collect that

2:25:32in a reservoir and contain it so it's not getting leaked into the waterways and so on. It's not complicated stuff. It would take a little effort and a little money, not a lot of money. Is the cobalt recyclable, like from old phones? You can recycle, yes, you can recycle cobalt. It is hard under existing tech to recycle cobalt to a sufficient grade for EV batteries. But for phones, but you can recycle it for phones. I know that Apple has talked about by a certain year, maybe it's 2030, the eye watch being only recycled cobalt. 2030? It's like the five years. Don't call me on that number. But it was something like just a few years from now. And then they'll get there with the phones and so on. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. And because people come to me and say, well, eventually we'll recycle it and so on. Okay, good. You do that. That's important. But let's say for instance, tomorrow, you were able to recycle all the cobalt you needed and you didn't have to dig any more out of the ground in the Congo.

2:26:37You didn't need any more kids up to their neck in toxic filth scrounging for cobalt. You can't just walk away. You can't just say we pillage that place for three decades. We plundered it. We ransacked it. We took what we needed. We got all the loot. We don't need it anymore. Hands clean. We're going to go on. Go on our merry way. You created a catastrophe. A human rights and environmental catastrophe. And there's some moral obligation to repair the damage you've done. Or we're right back to colonial slave trade times where Europeans did go around the world. Scouring labor resources, ransacking, pillaging and then carrying on their merry way. You can't we can't do that in the year 2026 and claim to be progressive in our thinking or have made moral progress. So even if you don't need the cobalt tomorrow, none of it or the tungsten or the tantalum, nothing needed for these AI data centers. I saw an article just today. They're building one up in

2:27:41red oak. I think near Dallas and everyone's hot and bothered about it. Naturally so because it's going to muck up the air and the water and their noisy and they're taking up space and so on and so forth. So people are upset about it. They don't want it in their backyards. Okay. Even if you didn't need all these metals for the data centers and the cars and the phones tomorrow, you cannot just leave behind an apocalypse. So Apple and the rest of them, I'm not just picking on them. It's all these companies. I have to still go back and repair and fix plant some trees, clean up the water, build some hospitals and schools and so on and clean up, you know, clean up the apocalypse that you created. You can't just walk away like your Cecil Rhodes or some other colonialist during imperial days where you just pillage and ransack people without conscience. Not only that. What do those people do now? That's been the only job. Yeah, that's right. That's right. You've got to put some time and effort into alternate livelihoods, cleaning up the environment,

2:28:43it means making land arable again because they can't grow things now. Joe, that report I told you about everything's contaminated and people are so sick. You don't have to have anything to do with mining, but if you live in that part of the Congo and millions of people do, they're all sick because the water is toxic. You know, when we go to the whole food, trade or Joe's whatever and you get your bottle of water and it says pH 9.5 and you know, you want your alkaline water for your body because it's healthy, right? You don't want a acidic. A acidic system is not good. Then you get disease, cancer and so on. So we tested pH, tested pH in those waters. Okay. Anything below 6.5 is not good for your health. And I did a test around Kolawezi, that ground zero of cobalt mining, the well water, the rivers, lakes and so on. The highest pH that came back was 6.7 in the Lula

2:29:44Laba River, which is a big dumping ground for some of these Chinese companies. The rivers and streams and well water around the villages came back in the fours and threes, which is called hyper acidic. It's deadly. And that's the water that's left for people to drink, to bathe in, to wash their clothes, to clean their babies, whatever it is. And it's all from these toxic dumping from these mines. You got to go, so yeah, that all has to be healed. And you can't grow things there now because the water is poison. And the earth is poison. And as people learn about this, you can't just say, well, we're going to recycle it now, so problem solved. Or now we got lithium iron phosphate or solid state batteries. And so no more cobalt and so on. Although cobalt is heavily required for AI data centers for the energy storage. Nonetheless, you can't just say we're

2:30:53done. We're done with that place. We're moving on because we don't need the cobalt anymore, the tungsten or whatever it is. You got to go clean up that place, Joe. Otherwise, we're no better than the bastards who were there centuries ago, pillaging and ransacking the rest of the planet. Yeah, well said. Listen, man, you're a hero. There's not a lot of heroes out there in the world, but I think you really are one. And your new book, just I'm going to read it. Just based on what you just said, I'm scared to read it. I don't want to relive this conversation. It's fucking horrific, but again, people probably wouldn't know. There's a lot of things in this world that people wouldn't know about it for once a few. So thank you. Thank you, Joe. Thank you, brother. Thanks for being here. It's available now. Yeah. It's an audio version of it. As Dion Graham got an audio award nomination for the audio book. So it's terrific. Yeah.

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