#2556 - Siddharth Kara

Siddharth Kara, PhD, is the author of several books, including "Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives," and, most recently, "The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery."https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250348227/thezorg/www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/beacons-of-excellence/rights-lab/our-team/siddharth-kara/index.aspx Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. 50% off your first box at https://www.thefarmersdog.com/rogan! MANSCAPED®: Get 15% off + free shipping on The Lawn Mower® Ultra Gen 6. Visit https://manscaped.com/joeroganexperience Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  We're up.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  All right.

• 0:13Joe Rogan?

  Good to see you, sir.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, good to see you, Joe.

• 0:14Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:37Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Oh, man, 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, you know, you and I first talked about this, talking to Jamie, it was almost four years ago.

• 1:05Joe Rogan?

  Wasn't really that long ago?

• 1:06Speaker 01

  It was December 2022.

• 1:08Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  So here we are, September 26th, so almost four years ago. And you continue to talk about it now and again, and I think that's meant a lot to me. It's meant a lot to people in the Congo. It's obvious this has captured your heart and you're to be commended for that conscience.

• 1:29Joe Rogan?

  Well, I'm doing this talking. You're actually out there going and documenting all this stuff. This is a very strange world that we live in, that at the very base of all 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 pulling minerals out of the ground.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have slave labor, you have child labor, you have militia-run mines, you know, for people who didn't hear our last conversation, go back and hear it, you know, because we walk through it. And 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.

• 2:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, definitely don't go back.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  You know, it's just, my colleague said, pretty soon after Cobalt Red came out, you know, "There's a bounty for you." So I can't go back. But I've stayed in touch with people there. I continue to get ground research done, and the conditions, they're not much better, you know, and in some ways, they've continued to degrade because the fever for these battery component metals, and 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.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  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. You know, we're building these 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, the energy storage, they all require cobalt, copper, tin, tantalum. It's all coming out of Congo.

• 3:35Joe Rogan?

  Hooey. It's such a strange aspect of human life that we require that and that the area is controlled by people that are willing to do this. Like, we don't get much of these rare earth minerals from America, do we?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  No, no, not much at all. No, that's why it's almost all in the global south and in particular, in the heart of Africa, these deposits.

• 4:00Joe Rogan?

  Can I ask you, is it because it's not available? There's no ore in America? Or it hasn't been mined? Like, what is, what are?

• 4:09Speaker 01

  So it's, the dominating force is that the largest and highest-grade reserves of these crucial elements and rare earth metals are in Central Africa. Lithium extends more broadly to South America. There's not much, 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. The rub is, we don't want to wreck our environment.

• 4:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Digging this stuff out of the ground and then processing it. But we're okay obliterating their environment and polluting it and contaminating it. 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," through the University of Nottingham. And we got to quantify some of the environmental impact, which is so crucial to the story. It's crucial to the story of this data center push, to the EV push, the environmental impact.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  And we use time-lapse satellite imagery to see that, from the dawn of the sort of cobalt battery metal revolution to 2022, 40, 50, 60% of the forest area is gone, shrubbery, grasslands, all of that gone, replaced with mining territory.

• 5:49Joe Rogan?

  Is this the Congo as a whole?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  So we did, yeah, this is across the copper belt, copper-cobalt region of the Congo, where the mining is taking place.

• 5:58Joe Rogan?

  And what percentage of the Congo is that?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Small part of it.

• 6:01Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  It's a small part in the southeast corner, along the Zambian border. I mean, much of the Congo is rainforest.

• 6:07Joe Rogan?

  Right, that's why I was confused.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Up in the north.

• 6:09Joe Rogan?

  The Congo is insanely dense and huge.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  In the mining part, in the mining part. So you've got a massive loss 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 Koloazee, 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.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  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 forests destroyed. We don't want our water contaminated. We don't want the air to be polluted, but 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 and their world, so long as ours remain sacrosanct. And that frankly is just the great hypocrisy of all this.

• 7:35Joe Rogan?

  Is there an alternative? Like a viable alternative to supply the world with the minerals that it needs?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Not yet, not yet, no. I mean...

• 7:44Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  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. Someone found a big copper, cobalt, tin, tantalum deposit somewhere. There'd be rules to follow. You'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.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  About the people and the environment there. But our tech and EV companies all know that and 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.

• 9:11Joe Rogan?

  This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right. JoeRogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website like an AI-enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links. Head to Squarespace.com/Rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code ROGEN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. We all have little things we do to save ourselves time, like shopping online or paying kids

• 9:56Joe Rogan?

  from the neighborhood to rake up all those leaves sitting in the front yard. Or if you're hiring, you rely on ZipRecruiter. They match you with qualified candidates as soon as you post your job. Now that's how you save time. Try it yourself for free at ZipRecruiter.com/Rogan. It's rated the number one hiring site based on G2 for a reason. Because on top of the qualified candidates, it also shows you the most interested ones first. Save time and meet great candidates sooner with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com/Rogan.

• 10:40Joe Rogan?

  That's ZipRecruiter.com/Rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. The football season is heating up and every week feels bigger with DraftKings Sportsbook, the number one sportsbook for live betting. Plus, get extra protection with early exit. Opt in and if your player leaves the game with an eligible injury in the first half, your bet is protected. No matter which game you're watching, you're always connected and in on the action with one app. New DraftKings customers, sign up with code ROGEN, spend $5 to get $150 in total bonuses within 14 days. That's code ROGEN. In partnership with DraftKings, the crown is yours.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  If you or somebody you know has a gambling problem, call 1-800-MYRESSET. 21 and over, Virginia only. Eligibility restrictions apply. $50 in non-withdrawable bonus bets issued every seven days via click to claim for 14 days. Bonus bets expire seven days after issuance. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see sportsbook.draftkings.com/promos. Limited time offer.

• 11:40Joe Rogan?

  And is it an issue with even if they mitigate all the surface area stuff and the pollution that you're still going to deal with groundwater?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:51Joe Rogan?

  Groundwater contamination is inevitable, right?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  It just all leaches in.

• 11:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not just the mining.

• 11:57Joe Rogan?

  It's the products they use to get them.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  The processing 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 acids, toxic industrial liquids used to dissolve and separate those metals. And that's what inevitably leaches.

• 12:21Joe Rogan?

  They pump that stuff right into the ground?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  It goes into the ground. And then it seeps into the groundwater, into the rivers, lakes.

• 12:26Joe Rogan?

  When did this all begin?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  So that part of the Congo, in the southeastern corner from the town of Lubumbashi to Kolo Wazi, was mined for copper going back to colonial times. And something like a quarter of the bullets used in World War I were copper from that part of the Congo. Okay? 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.

• 13:06Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  The highest grade uranium deposit known in the world at that time.

• 13:13Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the resource curse. You know, when we find treasure somewhere, it attracts the pirates to come in and loot the place. And when a place is war-torn, or colonized, or corrupt, or filled with strife, and it just chaos runs riot, so.

• 13:42Joe Rogan?

  And you can get people to work for basically nothing.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's virtually nil alternative. There's virtually nil alternative way to survive. And 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.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  And I know now roughly how many people it is. When you and I spoke in 2026.

• 14:33Joe Rogan?

  2020.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  2022, sorry. We're now in 2026. I had documented the human horror taking place, and that's what Cobalt Red is about. But 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 sample 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, and that fluctuates by season a little bit, dry season, wet season.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  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, you know? And people not only need to know that, but think hard about their own personal choices in the context of that knowledge. You know, what do I mean by that?

• 15:59Speaker 01

  I mean, do you have to upgrade your phone every year? People often ask me, what do I do? Okay, 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 and 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.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  You know, 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, and 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.

• 17:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:24Joe Rogan?

  Look, I love the technology involved in EVs. I have a Tesla, I love it. But there's also, excuse me, there's also a reality of brake dust. There's way more brake dust with those things. And that's a big part of the particulate pollution that you get in large cities.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:41Joe Rogan?

  Is brake 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 brake dust. And it's been proven that living in polluted, heavily populated cities lowers your lifespan. And it's probably one of the reasons. You're dealing with a toxic element in the atmosphere that you're breathing in every day, whether you like it or not, there's not a thing you can do about it.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's so many parts of the EV story that we don't get fully told. Brake dust is certainly one.

• 18:16Joe Rogan?

  Well, all cars give off brake dust, just to be really clear, but EVs are heavier.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  They're heavier. So you break more.

• 18:22Joe Rogan?

  You break more.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 18:25Joe Rogan?

  I think 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 brake dust on your wheels. It's a very different thing. If you have regular steel brakes, it just, for whatever reason, leaves more brake dust. I'm not sure why. We'll find out in a second. But other than that, is there any sort of novel material that can do it? Here it goes. Carbon ceramic brake systems can reduce brake wear particulate pollution substantially compared with conventional grade cast iron rotors, but they do not eliminate brake dust.

• 19:10Joe Rogan?

  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, you know, doesn't eliminate it.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:28Joe Rogan?

  And they're more expensive. You know, it's like a big upgrade. If you get a car, like a lot of sports cars, if you buy a Corvette, it allows you to upgrade to carbon ceramic brakes. It's very expensive. So very few people do it.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Well, 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 people knowing more about that.

• 19:59Joe Rogan?

  But then you're gonna have to find carbon. Like, okay, now you gotta get carbon to get the carbon ceramic brakes.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  So this is the thing, this is the thing. There's always something.

• 20:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  And you made this point with RZA. You know, okay, cobalt, but it's also the lithium. It's also the nickel. It's all... 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, colleagues who've been up there, it's in a town called Manono. They're just as horrific. And so when you say, all right, done with cobalt.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  We're just gonna do lithium iron phosphate battery, or lithium table salt battery, whatever.

• 20:57Joe Rogan?

  Same deal.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Same deal, you know. So it's about extending the horizon of our compassion beyond our immediate circle. And caring about everyone who's attached to our life and our lifestyle, no matter how tangential or how far downstream they might be. They're still brothers and sisters. They still inhabit this earth with us. They still live, breathe, and have dreams, just like we do.

• 21:28Joe Rogan?

  And you could be them if you were born there.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  That's the thing.

• 21:31Joe Rogan?

  You got lucky. We all got lucky. You and I most certainly got lucky.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  We got lucky. We got the roll of the dice that was favorable.

• 21:38Joe Rogan?

  And that's all it is.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  And that's all it is.

• 21:40Joe Rogan?

  That's what's hard to recognize. This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog. You know what's pretty cool? The Farmer's 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 Farmer's Dog is feeding 250 dogs belonging to military families, including some of these therapy dogs. They'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.

• 22:25Joe Rogan?

  Try The Farmer's Dog today and get 50% off your first box of fresh, healthy food. Plus, get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com/rogan. This offer is for new customers only. It's hard, people don't wanna believe, that's why that whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps ideology that some people like to promote, like, that's kind of crazy. In certain circumstances, it's accurate, but to put that flat across the board for everybody? No, there's people, there's no boots.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  There's no boots.

• 22:58Joe Rogan?

  They're barefoot, they don't have clean water, like, they don't have nothing. And no medical infrastructure, and you're being forced to work in an environment that 100% is gonna poison you to death.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  And we only make progress when we extend our compassion out.

• 23:11Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  And when I say progress, I mean moral progress as a species on this earth.

• 23:17Joe Rogan?

  That's literally the key. Like, if you wanted to figure out how to make this 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 wanna 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, they're worth so much money. And the people that are in control of these resources are extracting so much money, they don't ever wanna let that go.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  No, they don't. It's, I run a thought experiment with people sometimes, and when I teach a class, you know, I haven't taught in a couple of years, but when I teach, I run a thought experiment. And it's exactly what we're talking about here. So let's say you were up in the sky, in heaven, whatever, pre-birth state, whatever that might be, and you don't know what roll of the dice you're gonna get. Am I gonna be born in a safe, loving, upper-middle-class family in the West? Am I gonna be born in some war-torn, poor part of South Sudan or whatever? You don't know. Okay.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  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 roll of the dice? And you'd say, man, I really hope that the ones who get the good roll 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 roll of the dice in a way that benefits me somehow. Maybe they are part of some effort to bring education, healthcare, 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 are going

• 25:23Speaker 01

  there, some of you going there, let's all agree, all right, those of you who end up in the good place, you don't lose sight of us.

• 25:30Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  You know, and I won't lose sight of you in the event it's me. And then we get here, and we're just wound up in our sphere, and we lose a sense of human connection.

• 25:45Joe Rogan?

  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? Like, if you went back 100 years ago, people had virtually no understanding of how things went on anywhere else unless they had visited them. And 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. And 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? But then they found out that when you give people nuclear power, it's pretty easy for them to convert it into weapons.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Okay, so there's a lot to unpack. There's a lot to unpack.

• 26:33Joe Rogan?

  Because we're trying to, like, if we're gonna 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. So if you wanted to, like, start that and make it better, you would have to give them power. So are you gonna burn coal? Are you, what are you gonna do?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:55Joe Rogan?

  Like, there's only a few ways, right? There's dams, you can get hydroelectric power, windmills and solar, get the fuck out of here. That's not gonna, not right now.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Not right now.

• 27:04Joe Rogan?

  Now, with current technology, it's not gonna power giant cities. So like, what do you give them? You give them nuclear power. And this is what happened in India, right? And this is what happened in Pakistan, and they're like, oh, look, we could turn this into a missile. Fuck each other up.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  So...

• 27:18Joe Rogan?

  It's tricky.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  It's tricky.

• 27:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  And, you know, you talk about nukes, okay? And, you know, we're at this point in this world where there's this fever about who does and doesn't have them. And let me tell you one other thing I've learned since we last talked about the Congo, okay? I mentioned the uranium used to drop Little Boy and Big Boy on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

• 27:46Joe Rogan?

  Fat man.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, fat man, little boy. Little Boy and Fat Man.

• 27:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  On Hiroshima and Nagasaki, okay? Came from a mine called Shinkalo Bway in the Congo. And there was a meeting of the Belgians and the Americans in midtown Manhattan, and they said, oh, we're gonna give you so much money for that uranium, and so on and so forth. And Congo has a lot of uranium, all right? 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 warheads so fast, because they got no uranium. They're not getting it from North Korea, because they don't have it either. Russia's not gonna be sending it to them, they're not gonna give teeth to their neighbor. Where are they getting it from?

• 28:33Speaker 01

  And you talk to people on the ground in the Congo, and now there's 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, in the same tractor-trailer that's got the copper and the cobalt and the nickel, they've got uranium on it too. And 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.

• 29:09Joe Rogan?

  Look, it only makes sense.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  But it makes a lot...

• 29:11Joe Rogan?

  They have complete control of the region.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  It makes a lot of sense.

• 29:13Joe Rogan?

  There's no way anybody'd be able to stop them.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  No one's gonna stop them. They control the ground. They control the ground there. And that's scary, you know? 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 yellow cake floating around that part of the world, you know?

• 29:34Joe Rogan?

  Right. Does China have any human rights organizations that are comparable to the ones in the West? Not really, right?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  You know, they may write stuff down on paper, you know?

• 29:46Joe Rogan?

  But there's not like...

• 29:47Speaker 01

  They're not, no.

• 29:48Joe Rogan?

  There's a, I mean, there's a billion people over there. You would think there would be a certain percentage, like Red Cross-type organizations.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  I mean, we have some sense of what they've done to the Uighurs.

• 29:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's a, that's a hard one to figure out, right?

• 30:03Speaker 01

  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 clothes 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, you know, 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. And they don't even employ the African people there when they come in with a mining project or a construction project.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:02Joe Rogan?

  So this is a uniquely Western thing?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  This drive to have some basic human rights standards? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I would say so. I would say so. Now, one thing that's changed since you and I talked is there's actually a US 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 guys, part of the Trump administration's sort of peace for minerals arrangement between President and Chisigati and the Trump administration, was mining access. And so, one concession was sold to this US mining company. It's called Virtues Mining, and they're run by former military guys.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  And they took over a couple of copper-cobalt concessions in Lubumbashi and Kolowesi, both sides of the copper belt. That's just this year, so within the last few months, okay? And I haven't been there to look, but I talk to colleagues all the time and say, "Look, is Virtues, 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-

• 32:19Joe Rogan?

  When we say artisanal mining, you went into depth about this the first time we talked, but we should just tell people, that thing, artisanal, sounds awesome. It sounds like a great cup of coffee, like fair trade-

• 32:30Speaker 01

  It's a nice-

• 32:30Joe Rogan?

  At a nice place-

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Fresh baked bread-

• 32:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it was like someone's got a beautiful ceramic cup, they serve you the coffee in. Artisanal mining is pretty much the opposite of that.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  It's the games people play with words, right? No, so artisanal mining means you've got mom, dad, and their kids up to here in toxic grit and filth, digging-

• 32:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, this is an artisanal mine. The fact that you can use that same word, artisanal, with this, and you can with a nice coffee shop, is crazy.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  It's crazy. That's, so this is, you know, I got in-

• 33:03Joe Rogan?

  Imagine if you were learning English, you're like, "What the fuck does artisanal actually mean? Like, how are the two things, what?"

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Like, this language is messed up.

• 33:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, how the fuck-

• 33:13Speaker 01

  How is these both artisanal?

• 33:15Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  How is my espresso and that artisanal?

• 33:19Joe Rogan?

  For lack of a better term, these mines, it's all basically the poorest people on earth.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  It's all brute, 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 humanity-

• 33:34Joe Rogan?

  There's also you've shown mothers with their babies on their backs-

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Mothers with babies on their backs. So that's, that's what the mining industry calls artisanal, okay? It's, it's this, it's kids with 40, 50 kilogram sacks of cobalt on their necks, clamoring out of a pit. Cobalt is 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, that are, that are 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, that's in the hills above Kambov. That's the story I told you last time, where that's probably the closest I came to getting shot, was in this mining area.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  It was almost all children, run by a militia, north of a town called Kambov, 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 it. 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. So, 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.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  And these militia guys come, 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. I mean, 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 taken photos and videos and so on. And the only thing that saved my life, this, 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, said, "Arthur, before you go to any of these places, you gotta get a stamp from the governor's office on your visa paperwork, and you take that with you everywhere.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  And that will convey to any militia that you're under the governor's protection, and they're not gonna fuck with you. They won't, they'll mess with you, but they're not gonna do the worst."

• 36:00Joe Rogan?

  They're not gonna kill you.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  They're not gonna kill you. And I had to go get that stamp. I had to persuade the governor of Otikatanga 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, you know, 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 was, I thought, "This is it. This is it for Cara up on this hill, middle of nowhere." And my guide just gestured, and I knew what he was, what he was, what he was intending.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  And I found my folder on the ground, and I pulled that piece of paper out, and I showed them the stamp. And, and then they just said, "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-

• 37:18Joe Rogan?

  How did you get that image? Was it with a phone?

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was with my phone. I had, so those, so they started, you know, 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 like, you know, my, my home, my daughter, my, you know, stuff, just whatever. I had another folder, and they, they, they didn't have the savvy to-

• 37:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  They didn't know. So, it, like, same like that video of the 15,000 people, you know? I just managed to do this and tuck it away. And, because that was also controlled by militias, that particular site. And that, 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, in the disclosure documents of every tech and EV company. It's one of the biggest copper-cobalt suppliers out of the Congo.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  And you get in there, and you say, "This, this is not industrial at all, nor is it baked bread and espresso. This is hell on earth."

• 38:28Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  You know, this is, 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? Is, it's still, I can still hear the clanging in that place and the shouting.

• 38:49Joe Rogan?

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. And with World Mental Health Day on the 10th, now's the perfect time to give it a try. In fact, don't even wait until the 10th, because all that stress you feel, it's not waiting around. So, instead of letting it build up, sign up for a therapy session and unload at any time, not just on World Mental Health Day. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks, and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance.

• 39:34Joe Rogan?

  Don't have insurance or live outside of the United States? You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com to explore your payment options. That's better, H-E-L-P.com. This episode is brought to you by Traeger. Food cooked over real wood is just on another level, and that's why Traeger is such a game changer. Their grills run on real hardwood pellets, so everything gets that legit wood-fired flavor. Whether you're grilling steaks, smoking ribs, cooking chicken, or even baking a pizza, you just set your temperature, put your food in, and let Traeger handle the rest. It's simple. If you like food that tastes like it came off a real fire without all the work, check

• 40:19Joe Rogan?

  out Traeger grills. It's the ability that people have to treat other people as if they're not people that's still shocking. You know, and that brings me to your book, because your book is all about the Atlantic slave trade, and it's called The Zorg.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:36Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, same, no, this, 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. And the reason I say that is, it opens the whole world of the slave trade, and its journey ends in this culminating act of brute inhumanity that sparked the first movement to abolish slavery.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  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. And 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.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  This is beneath us, and we, we're gonna devote our lives to abolishing slavery." The other thing that this journey is, you know, we, we grow up, you grow up in America, you learn about slavery. You learn about plantation economy and how slaves were treated, cotton and so on.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  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 towards other. And the slave trade is one of them.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:26Joe Rogan?

  Do you, the fact that, does it dishearten you to know that essentially the same thing is happening right now as this book? Like, in the Western world, people don't believe that. You know, I had a discussion the other day with someone. He was talking about how we're doing better today. We abolished slavery. And I said, no, we abolished slavery right here. But there's more slaves on earth now than there were during the time of the Atlantic slave trade.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  So we abolished 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.

• 44:11Joe Rogan?

  Well, not only that, like, how many underage workers are working in

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Millions.

• 44:17Joe Rogan?

  in this country that are undocumented?

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, who knows what the number is? But millions around the world, tens of millions around the world. But it's, this 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.

• 44:52Joe Rogan?

  And it was faith-based leaders that were doing this?

• 44:56Speaker 01

  It was, yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was the Anglican Church. Leaders in the, in the, and the first movement to abolish slavery was in England. And it was sparked directly by this ship. And so people, you know, can read the book and understand what happened on the 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 anywhere in Europe. Little forts and castles and dungeons to gather human beings.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  And so Africans were marched from the inland regions, sometimes 1,000 miles. Arab slave traders would raid and ransack a village, grab people, and start marching them down to the coast and, you know, trade along the way with house of slave dealers. And people would die, of course, they're yoked at the neck and tied, and they, many people didn't survive a five, six, 800-mile march.

• 46:03Joe Rogan?

  800-mile march?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there's journal entries I came across. One, one captain, 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."

• 46:23Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  So "Amazing Grace" is written by a slave trader.

• 46:26Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  So John Newton, John Newton's from Liverpool. Liverpool was once capital of the, of the slave trade. We think of Beatles when we think Liverpool, you know, 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, rum, brandy, cutlery, crockery, linens, bandanas, whatever, cowry shells.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  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. And 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. And Africans would be brought from hundreds of miles up, all the way up into the Sahel, marched down. A quarter to a third of them didn't survive. And so this, this is, this is the dungeon at Cape Coast Castle.

• 47:52Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Okay. And let me tell you something about this place, Joe. So that, this is, oh, 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, 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 Mina Castle. This is in 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.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  There'd be, at any given time, 1,000 human beings in there, shackled down. One shaft for light and where they'd drop food and water. And I don't know if, Jamie, if you have that photo again? You saw like a little narrow groove down the floor of the dungeon. And there you see that, you see 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 is full and clogged and rainy season, whatever, so eventually the whole thing is covered in sludge of sewage. Okay? And so they would spend months down here, Joe. They would spend months down here.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  And many people didn't survive that experience. So you're marched from the, from the inland regions hundreds of miles, didn't, 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. And they come up to Cape Coast Castle, they park in the roads, they drop anchor, it's 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, 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.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Remember, they're covered in sewage and filth, and they cover them in palm oil to make them look healthy. And the captain will say, I'll take this one, this one, this one. His surgeon or doctor will inspect them, open their mouths, check their lymph nodes, make them cough, make sure they're not sick and unwell. And, and then they purchase these slaves and then brand them. And they brand them, put 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 fort, 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 a kind of a cobbled floor.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  And 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 cobbly. And then there's, 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 held here for centuries. And we don't learn that, you know? We don't learn that when we learn about slavery.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  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, you know, which is a floating dungeon. The, the deep-seafaring vessel, Joe, is a marvel of engineering. It's a marvel of vision and ambition and European genius. Jamie's skipping ahead here, too. I jumped, sorry. The visual imagery. We, 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

• 52:12Speaker 01

  to. So the, the deep-seafaring vessel is, it's, it's a testament to European genius and ambition and vision and 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 was the early 1400s, the age of exploration. You learn about this in high school. Prince Henry the Navigator got his ships. We need to see the rest of the world. What else is out there? Maybe some riches.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  And the Portuguese, they, 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, invented a specific sail called a, a Latin rig. All right? 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 were the first to get past the Canary Islands, 1420s, 1430s.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  And, and the caravel takes Europeans south of the Canaries, and they get down to the west coast of Africa, they, they, they round the Cape of Good Hope, and, and by the end of the 15th century, the Portuguese have reached India.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Extraordinary exploration and triumph of navigation and genius. Then we get Christopher Columbus. "Oh, man, Portuguese have been all the way over to India and they had to go all the way around Africa. Maybe there's a shortcut. I'm gonna go that way. Let me go that way." It's gotta be a shortcut, you know? So he goes west. "I'm gonna 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.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  And he starts the Spanish reconnoitering of this part of the planet. The 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 gonna 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's colonized Africa and India first.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  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, because it doesn't grow there. It grows in warm tropical places. So 1494, the Pope divides the world and Spain and Portugal are now in tropical places where you can grow sugar.

• 55:53Joe Rogan?

  That is so insane to hear, but makes complete and total sense, that people didn't know about sugar until the 1400s?

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Well, they came across it in the Crusades, you know, 1200, 1300, Europeans. Like, "Oh, these Arabs have got some sugar. It's nice."

• 56:11Joe Rogan?

  And they're getting it from cane? They're just processing it?

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Sugar cane, yeah, yeah. So, because it doesn't grow in that part of the world.

• 56:20Joe Rogan?

  So what did they do to sweeten things in Europe back then? Just honey?

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Honey, berry juices.

• 56:26Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Sugar, sugar's another level, right?

• 56:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Sugar's another level. So, 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. Now, 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.

• 57:07Joe Rogan?

  Mayans.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Mayans.

• 57:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  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 sends, he gives them a contract, "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

• 57:49Speaker 01

  to Africa, buying Africans, taking them across, there you go, dropping them in sugar plantations, and then getting the output of sugar labor, which is sugar, rum, molasses, whatever, taking it back to Europe, selling it, and then repeating the triangle.

• 58:06Joe Rogan?

  How were 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 world back then?

• 58:16Speaker 01

  They had nothing.

• 58:17Joe Rogan?

  Nothing west?

• 58:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:32Joe Rogan?

  That's nuts.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  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 Minha de Ora, the coast of gold mines. There was gold everywhere. The slave trade came later because of sugar. Then the British and the Dutch.

• 58:55Joe Rogan?

  So sugar was the start?

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Sugar was the dominant force of the slave trade.

• 59:00Joe Rogan?

  There was always slave labor. There was always slave and slave trade, but that's when it really ramped up?

• 59:05Speaker 01

  That's when the whole triangular trade, the Atlantic slave trade, the world's first globalized economy, was born from sugar.

• 59:12Joe Rogan?

  Wow. This episode is brought to you by Manscaped. Listen up, fellas. Manscaped just dropped the all-new Lawn Mower Ultra Gen 6 with some pretty serious upgrades. You've got two interchangeable blade heads, a bidirectional 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 groomer, this is a serious upgrade.

• 59:56Joe Rogan?

  Head to manscaped.com, 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.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  And sugar, it was like the fossil fuel of the day. It was the lubrication on which the global economy functioned, such as it was then in 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.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  So 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.

• 1:01:27Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  So sugar generated enormous wealth for Western Europe. And so thus, the slave trade persisted and persisted.

• 1:01:39Joe Rogan?

  Are any of the companies that were making sugar back then, are they still around?

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Not that I'm aware, no. I mean, it, the sugar, the way sugar's made today, of course, is different than these slave plantations that were erected by first Portugal and Spain, then later the British and the Dutch. So the Zorig is actually a Dutch slave ship. And it set sail around, in 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.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  And then eventually, he loads up his ship with, depending on the size of the ship, 3, 4, 5, 600 Africans. And loads his food and water and he has to cross the Atlantic, what's called the Middle Passage. And the design of these ships, the design of a slave ship was specific, okay? Designed for human cargo. The bottom was the food and water. And then they had what's called the tween deck. And, all right, Jamie, you can throw up that photo now. We're ready. All right. So here you've got the tween deck, all right? This is the schematic. This is an important schematic. This is the Brooks slave ship out of Liverpool. And you see the bottom of the tween deck. The shipmaster is showing you how to line up the Africans.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  They're given 16 inches of space each, like, to quote John Newton, who we talked about, "like books on a shelf." They're to be entered and stowed like books on a shelf.

• 1:03:26Joe Rogan?

  So each human is allotted 16 inches of space?

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  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 another 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.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  And you may ask yourself, "What happens if you're seasick?"

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  What happens if a woman has her period? Some women 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 called 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

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  piss and shit and blood and vomit and misery. And that's for the two months of the crossing. They don't teach us this, Joe. They don't teach us this part of it. So here's a, 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 pint of water to drink.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  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 roll of the dice. You're gonna try to do anything you can to get control of that ship. And so slave insurrections were a common effort at resistance. And so Europeans built a barricade down the middle of every slave ship so that if somehow the slaves managed to revolt, they would quickly get to the back, the stern side,

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  where they could still control the ship, and had cannons mounted on the barricade to suppress the insurrection.

• 1:06:29Joe Rogan?

  They would shoot a cannon into their own boat?

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  It was either that or lose the ship. And usually, a couple of shots would quell 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 there was one captain out of Liverpool who 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." Horror. Just horror.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Now, 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." You know, people... 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 Zorg, they're taking these Africans across the Atlantic. And this is the kind of stuff that happens. There's an insurrection, that's one form of protest.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Another form of protest is a hunger strike. "I'm not gonna 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, like, "I don't know where this is going, but I'm gonna 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 lockjaw. Slave ship captains got some of these.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  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, 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, to the glimmer of hope from all this. This ship crosses the Atlantic.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  It is a Dutch ship, okay, in the midst of the American Revolutionary War. And everybody was using the American Revolutionary War as a chance to get payback on the Brits. Because the Brits were the power of the day. And the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, with the British Navy stretched thin, 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, 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.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Just go pirate the hell out of anybody you see with a 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. So a British pirate ship captures this Dutch ship off the coast of Africa.

• 1:10:29Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  And it already had a couple hundred slaves in it. This British pirate, Captain William Llewellyn of HMS Alert, captures the Zorg off the coast of 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 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."

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  So, they didn't have Venmo and cash and all that back then. So you write up an IOU. It was called a bill of exchange. So Hanley gives a bill of exchange in the name of his slave merchant creditor, a Liverpool wealthy guy named William Gregson. He says, "You just take that to Gregson, for this is the greed upon 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 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, and so the captain does that.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  He loads up his ship, he overloads it. Should have been no more than about 300 slaves loaded into a ship the Zorg's size, which was about a 100-ton 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 and so on. That's how the machinery worked. And these guys were just dumb. You read about them.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  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, it's like a soap opera. And the Zorg is going by, he's going to another fort on the Gold Coast, Ghana, which had a slave auction room called Anumabu, the fort at Anumabu. And the governors decide to kick out the governor of Anumabu that day, because they just can't stand him. His name's Robert Stubbs. He's just a scoundrel, and he's just a wretch of a human being.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  And they kick him out on the same day that the Zorg is passing by. So Stubbs takes refuge on the ship. And eventually, the ship is loaded with slaves, and it's making its way across the Atlantic.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  And the captain gets sick. And he can't run the ship. And he's supposed to appoint his first mate. Maritime protocol, first mate takes over. For some reason, he appoints Stubbs.

• 1:13:54Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  And, 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.

• 1:14:37Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:15:19Joe Rogan?

  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 ROGEN. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. Part of living a healthier lifestyle means being extra careful of what you put into your body. AG1 Pro gets that. Their formula was carefully crafted with vitamins, probiotics, and superfoods your body needs, plus enhanced support for your workout and recovery, including creatine. In fact, AG1 Pro contains five grams of Creovitalis, high-quality, German-made creatine monohydrate, and that matters.

• 1:16:03Joe Rogan?

  This Creovitalis is made in Germany under tight quality control and is 99.9% pure. So you're not getting some cheap version cut with fillers. If you want a high-quality supplement made with the right stuff, AG1 Pro is a no-brainer. Go to drinkag1.com/joe. For a limited time, get a free immune support bundle, including a bottle of omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D tossed in with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro, backed by a 90-day money-back guarantee. That's drinkag1.com/joe.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  The food and water you have when you leave Africa is the food and water that has to last you until you reach the New World, the other side. And 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. And you expect about a 15% mortality rate on the Africans. They will get dysentery because they're living in their own piss and shit.

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  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 sight Tobago, the far eastern edge of Caribbean Sea. And so they have a sense, "Okay, Jamaica's 10 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.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  You get your sextant, you line it up, you can tell how many degrees north or south of the equator you are. Longitude 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 got a shipwreck, and everyone's dead."

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  You want to know how they measured 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.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  And you enter that in your logbook because of the log you just threw in the ocean. This is where the terms come from.

• 1:19:45Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  So people would, now, let's just say you're not too good at this. Every error in measurement you make is accumulating on the previous one. And you can end up hundreds of miles off course. And suddenly, an island's out upon you, and you crash into it, and that's the end of that. So for most of the deep-seafaring 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 logbook. Let me throw in the rope. Okay." This was the level of measurement we're talking about. So they sight Tobago, they know where they are at that point, and they took way too long to get there, but they know where they are.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  So they know Jamaica's 1,150 miles north by northwest.

• 1:20:35Joe Rogan?

  And they keep going.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  So they had to get to Jamaica. That was their destined port, okay? So they keep going, they keep going, they keep going, and not sighting land, not sighting 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 Hispaniola, which was half Spanish, half French, would later become Dominican Republic and 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 drops in his rope and his thing, and he says, "Oh, this is 70 degrees west.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  That's Hispaniola. 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 10 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. Remember, Hanley divided his crew in half. So they're down to just 11 guys.

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  And the captain is sick to the point of lunacy. Stubbs is running the ship, and they've already lost about 70 Africans to dysentery and scurvy. So they have, and they're out of water.

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  So they make a decision. In order to survive the 10 days to get back to Jamaica, we have to reduce the amount of water consumption onboard. 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. And their bones are still down there, okay?

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  And then they reach Jamaica 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 the scramble. The scramble is, a slave broker says, "Okay, I got slaves on this 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.

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  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 zorg, the one who wrote that IOU, 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 insure my new ship." Every slave ship that crossed the Atlantic was insured.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Insurance was born out of the slave trade. It costs you $700,000, $800,000 equivalent today to kit 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

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  value of your ship and your cargo. And if you lose it all, I'll pay you an agreed-upon 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. Because every slave captain and slave merchant wanted to insure the slave, the ship, and all the cargo.

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  So, Gregson had taken out an insurance contract for the ship and his Africans, 30 pounds a head. 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 compensated. But if they die because of natural causes, or they kill 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 gonna test this. And he tells the insurance, "I want my compensation for the 200 slaves."

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  And the insurance company says, "Man, that's 50% mortality rate, that's, let me check my actuary table here. No, that's not standard. We're not gonna pay." So, he files a lawsuit. This is how we learn about what happened. Nobody knew, Joe, what was happening on these ships. I remember I told you, King Charles, 1518, 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 happening 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.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  And court cases at that time, there weren't courthouses and 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 wanna know who the only witness was? Stubbs. Stubbs is the only guy surviving. He comes in, he says, "Yeah, yeah, we were out of water, we had absolutely no choice.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  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 a head for his Africans." That should have been the end of it. But there was one person in the room that day, with 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."

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  So, 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. Weren't these people murdered? 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 Granville Sharp. Most people don't know that name.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  But he was the first person who was white-skinned to devote his life to the abolition of slavery. And he saw this letter, and a former slave who happened to be living in London's brought this letter to him, all right? His name was Olada Equiano. That's Equiano, and that's Granville 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 Granville Sharp. Granville Sharp had devoted his life to abolishing slavery. Equiano made his way to London, said, "I'm gonna do what I can to help."

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  So, Granville 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. 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. Granville Sharp wrote a pamphlet that he shared with his friend Benjamin Franklin. He said, maybe 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

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  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, Granville Sharp was this Renaissance man, self-taught, a 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 gonna blow this whole thing open." He went back to the underwriters, and he said, "File a motion for a retrial, and now

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  you make all these arguments." And I have the trial transcript, because Granville Sharp hired someone to transcribe the whole hearing in shorthand, so there's a record. That's why we know what happened.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  And it's all going along kind of the same way. Except this time, they're making different arguments. The barristers 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 ship did. And they're trying to persuade, again, Justice Mansfield, and two more justices this time,

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  of this notion of universal human rights. And in the midst of all this, the only witness again is Stubbs. You saw that movie, A Few Good Men?

• 1:32:44Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  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 martial, you're done, you know, if you accuse a whatever 10-star general ordering the Code Red, and he's just, do I push, do I push? And he gets Nicholson going, he gets him moving, he gets him agitated, and then, of course, he says, "Did you order the Code Red?" And Nicholson says, "You're goddamn right I did." Oh, that, that, 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."

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  Chief Justice Mansfield 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, no one's gonna 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 Stubbs 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 Stubbs 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."

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  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, the 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 abolish slavery. It was born right after this, 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,

• 1:34:58Speaker 01

  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 Herculean 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

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  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 before we did it here. It required a civil war, but it was achieved." And, 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, "Our, this is our life's focus now," including Granville Sharp, "this is our life's focus now, to rid the world of this moral stain." So now people are gonna 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

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  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, 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. And by the way, the Zorg, I've 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.

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  And, um, 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.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  And, and we, we need those moral leaders today to pull us forward, just as these handful of people in the past dragged 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.

• 1:38:10Joe Rogan?

  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, they're some of the nicest people you ever want to meet in your, in your life. And they, 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, and I know a lot of amazing people who are atheists. They're just kind, you know, thoughtful, considerate people, who came from good families

• 1:38:55Joe Rogan?

  and have good friends, and they don't, they don't need religion to be a good person. But there is a real value in providing a framework, 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, when the absence of that moral framework, you can get people whose, their ideology looks at other human beings as property. Their ideology looks at other human beings as not the same as them. You know, whether we're talking about China and the treatment of the Uighurs, or whether

• 1:39:40Joe Rogan?

  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 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 longer, on average, than dogs who are overweight. Isn't that wild, and also kind of obvious at the same time? So why is feeding vague scoops of ultra-processed kibble still the status quo for most dog owners? Healthy alternatives exist, and trust me, I know. I buy one, The Farmer's Dog. I use it for both my dogs, they love it, they eat it up quick, it smells good to them, it smells good to me, it's human-grade food. The Farmer's Dog makes fresh food for dogs, and my dogs love it.

• 1:40:25Joe Rogan?

  Their recipes are made with real meat and fresh vegetables that are gently cooked to retain vital nutrients. They also portion out the meals to your dog's nutritional needs, which helps avoid overfeeding and makes weight management easier. And isn't getting more time with our four-legged best friends something every dog owner wants? The answer to that is yes, obviously. So, try The Farmer's Dog today and get 50% off your first box of fresh, healthy food. Plus, get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com/rogan. This offer is for new customers only. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. It may be hard to believe, but identity theft is the number-one crime in America.

• 1:41:10Joe Rogan?

  Right now, millions of people are dealing with stolen accounts, fraudulent loans, and the exhausting process of proving who they are to banks, creditors, and credit bureaus. LifeLock helps you fight back. They monitor your personal and financial information, alerting you when something looks suspicious, and if identity theft does happen, LifeLock has live, US-based experts who step in and fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Don't fight that battle alone, get LifeLock identity theft protection. Visit lifelock.com and save up to 30% your first year with promo code JRE.

• 1:41:52Joe Rogan?

  That's promo code JRE, or go to lifelock.com/jre for 30% off. Terms apply.

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  I, I could, I totally agree. I think, uh, 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, we're all God's children. And you see that language in the driving, that's driving the abolitionists in these movements to abolish slavery.

• 1:42:36Joe Rogan?

  And this is not to, um, this is not to forgive the horrors that people, under the guise of Christianity, have performed either. So the Inquisition, or what?

• 1:42:48Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right.

• 1:42:49Joe Rogan?

  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, and we can decide that we're doing horrific things for the greater good. That is 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 megachurch pastors driving around in Rolls Royces and flying private jets and ripping off these dull-minded people. But that's not...

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  That's not the spirit of the faith.

• 1:43:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  That's humans, that's greed.

• 1:43:36Joe Rogan?

  It's humans, their weird ability to justify things.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  That's right. In pursuit of self-interest and self-gratification. And that will always be a part of the human condition. There are those among us, but there are greater angels. You know, the people who endure, who endured those slave ships with grace, who endured the mines 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.

• 1:44:07Joe Rogan?

  What's the worst example of human beings imaginable? To the point where you're throwing women and children overboard for water?

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, including a mother and her baby. You know, it's heartbreaking.

• 1:44:20Joe Rogan?

  I mean, there's just horrific stories of what Columbus did and what the people on his boats did when they reached the Americas or the Bahamas. The horrific things they did to people when they found that these people had gold.

• 1:44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:36Joe Rogan?

  And they required that they bring back their own weight in gold or they chop their arms off?

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  Chop their arms off. You know, there was all kinds of...

• 1:44:43Joe Rogan?

  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 Christians.

• 1:44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, let's be clear. Europeans messed up a lot of the world.

• 1:44:59Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  Okay. I mean, the reason I went through a little bit of time talking about the caravel and the deep-seafaring vessel is 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.

• 1:45:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, always.

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  That was...

• 1:45:23Joe Rogan?

  Even if it's just diseases?

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, disease, and then, of course, violence, enslavement, oppression, colonization.

• 1:45:32Joe Rogan?

  All the above.

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  All of the above. There was a malice and a greed and a sense of superiority that was inherent to that entire episode of history. And I often look back and think, man, if they had just stayed home.

• 1:45:45Joe Rogan?

  Not only that, they were essentially a scourge of plague. They brought...

• 1:45:50Speaker 01

  Smallpox.

• 1:45:51Joe Rogan?

  Ninety percent of Native Americans were wiped out because of that.

• 1:45:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:56Joe Rogan?

  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 in these grids, when they're doing the LiDAR scans, and they're saying, oh, this used to be like cities.

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were highly populated, and then just suddenly, very rapidly depopulated. And it wasn't all just violence. You're right. It was disease and disease.

• 1:46:23Joe Rogan?

  So everything they did was bad. The violence was bad, and everything they did was bad. It's such a crazy story, because it's hard to imagine. You know, I used to have this joke in my act about our country is 300 years old, people live to be 100. I go, that's three people. That's what's nuts. It's like three people ago.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, a young country.

• 1:46:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, or really, two and a half. Two and a half people ago, we 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 diseases, when they find the people that were here.

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  Well, we imagine this with, you know, the arrival of aliens. This is the first contact, the story. Like, what would happen?

• 1:47:06Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  When aliens show up? Are they gonna blow everything up?

• 1:47:10Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  Are they gonna enslave us?

• 1:47:12Joe Rogan?

  Are they gonna be like the Quakers, or are they gonna be like the Chinese?

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  Well said.

• 1:47:17Joe Rogan?

  Or the Dutch.

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:19Joe Rogan?

  You know?

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's...

• 1:47:21Joe Rogan?

  It's crazy, right?

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  You know, the question, though, now is, 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. You know, Jamaica just went to England and said, please, you know, you took millions of Africans, brought them here, enslaved them, and made yourself from this muddy medieval back-asswards island to an economic superpower with centuries of wealth

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  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 your father worked at a manufacturing plant, and let's say he worked for 30 years and they never paid him, 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, are the descendants of

• 1:48:43Speaker 01

  those slaves owed some money? And Jamaica went to England just recently and said 10 billion pounds, like, just something. I mean, when you start to calculate unpaid labor for three centuries plus interest, it's trillions and trillions, and it's an impossible sum. But something is owed. And then you say, well, now, wait a minute. If you're the British government, I wasn't a part of that, and I didn't participate in this, so why am I writing a check? And then the 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

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  due? Or is it just and fair to ask for that reparation be paid for this period in slavery? Just as the Congolese are talking to the Belgians, you know, Leopold came down here, and look what he did to us, and then colonized us. A check needs to be written, as well as an apology. And it's a difficult question.

• 1:49:52Joe Rogan?

  Who would receive the check, and how would it be distributed? That would be the real question.

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  That's part of the complexity.

• 1:49:58Joe Rogan?

  The fear would be that corruption would get involved, and someone would siphon off the money.

• 1:50:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, wait, you're gonna tell me I need to write a check to the government of the Congo?

• 1:50:07Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  All right, that's not getting to anybody who actually could use it. Or I just give a check to Jamaica and trust that they... All right, but does that mean that in principle something's not owed?

• 1:50:18Joe Rogan?

  But even if you distribute it to the individual people, you'd 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, at the very least, if a country's or a corporation's entire start, like their beginning, was based on slavery getting sugar, that's kind of insane that somehow or another that profit led to people that are still wealthy today.

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  Well, you know...

• 1:50:52Joe Rogan?

  You can trace that, right?

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, they can trace that. You know what else they've done? So, when the British abolished slavery, okay, they wrote a check to the slave owners.

• 1:51:01Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  This was part of the deal to get the bill through Parliament.

• 1:51:06Joe Rogan?

  How much did they have to give them?

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  Because it was, they were, the argument was, well, you're taking my property, so you need to pay me for that property. Now, no one was talking about, do we pay anything to the Africans who worked for free? The slave owners, who are also all members of Parliament, said, you're taking my property. So, you're gonna find this fascinating. They allocated a sum of 20 million pounds back in 1833, when the law was passed.

• 1:51:36Joe Rogan?

  What is that equivalent to?

• 1:51:37Speaker 01

  Equivalent, at the time, to 40% of the entire national budget.

• 1:51:42Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:51:43Speaker 01

  And they distributed this money. You got a slave compensation certificate, and based on the number of slaves you had, times the amount that each was valued, you got that check. Then and there. So, number one, it was a massive sum of money, 40% of the national budget at the time. But the fascinating piece of this was, the government took out a loan.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  For that quantum. And the British taxpayer was repaying that loan up until 2015.

• 1:52:23Joe Rogan?

  Holy shit.

• 1:52:26Speaker 01

  So imagine you're, they 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 the 1700s.

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  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 was a Gladstone, and he got one of the biggest checks.

• 1:53:24Joe Rogan?

  How much?

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  It was a hundred and four, hundred and five thousand pounds back in the 1830s. I mean, we're talking tens of millions equivalent today.

• 1:53:34Joe Rogan?

  So they got super wealthy on one check?

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  On top of the wealth they had been making.

• 1:53:39Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:53:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:53:50Joe Rogan?

  What year was this?

• 1:53:52Speaker 01

  The bill was passed in 1833 and slaves, the requirements were 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, for your property. Here's your certificate, just tally up your.

• 1:54:18Joe Rogan?

  So if you're a slave, you're still a slave?

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  For five more years, for five more years. And the territories of the East India Trading Company were excluded.

• 1:54:30Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's a fascinating story. The East India Trading, that's another four hours on its own.

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  That will, we'll come to that.

• 1:54:37Joe Rogan?

  I would love to.

• 1:54:38Speaker 01

  The brief is, so this is 1830s.

• 1:54:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  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 taxpayer only paid off 10 years ago. So it makes the question about writing checks and so on a little more interesting.

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:55:41Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:55:53Speaker 01

  They had to work for five years and then on August 1st, 1838, Frederick Douglass writes about this very beautifully with the, with the rising of the sun. I can't quote his words exactly. They're in the zorg at the end, you know, with the blink of an eye and the rising of the sun on that day, freedom was won. Every African person woke up free.

• 1:56:15Joe Rogan?

  And this is after the five years?

• 1:56:17Speaker 01

  This is after the five years, August 1, 1838. And Douglass was giving a speech in Elmira, New York in 1880. He said, "We still commemorate that day because it taught us, 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, the Americans overthrew, they didn't want kings and monarchy, right? That's the, we want democracy here. It showed us what was possible. And, and Douglass crossed the Atlantic after this, this moment in history. And he met with the only surviving member, I remember I told you 12 guys met in a printing

• 1:57:02Speaker 01

  shop in London and only one of them lived to see the day in 1838. His name was Thomas Clarkson. He rode his horse 35,000 miles up and down England, gathering evidence to present to Parliament about, against the slave trade. And he was the only one left alive and Douglass crossed the Atlantic and met with him and, and said, "Please 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.

• 1:57:30Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, slavery was gonna get abolished.

• 1:57:41Joe Rogan?

  Right. But how much longer?

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  How much longer?

• 1:57:43Joe Rogan?

  Right, if it wasn't for just a few individuals.

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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, and that's what happened.

• 1:58:14Joe Rogan?

  God. It's such a heavy story.

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, every time I come here now and just.

• 1:58:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, this one's even heavier.

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  I feel like.

• 1:58:22Joe Rogan?

  Well, I don't know, they're both pretty heavy, but Jesus.

• 1:58:25Speaker 01

  You 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 in the Congo because truth seekers go there and they can snap a photo and a video and show it to us. And that's a big difference today, right? Imagine in the 1700s.

• 1:58:41Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:42Speaker 01

  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, "No, 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 abolitionists said, "Let me show you the schematic of the brooks. Show 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.

• 1:59:25Speaker 01

  These two things can only remain hidden so long, the moon and the truth. Okay? 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 Ramsey, who wrote that anonymous letter. None of them ever stepped foot in Africa, but they extended their hearts out to a people

• 2:00:05Speaker 01

  they knew were being oppressed but were fellow children of God and they fought for them.

• 2:00:11Joe Rogan?

  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 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. I 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.

• 2:00:49Speaker 01

  Well, the millions is thanks to you. I mean, you know, I went there, yes, and I saw the human apocalypse.

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  And it is a human apocalypse, Joe. It's an environmental apocalypse. But you've played an important role in spreading that truth.

• 2:01:08Joe Rogan?

  So, well, it's the least I can do. Everybody would do it if they're in my position. You have to do it. It's, and it's also, to me, it's although 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, just don't give a fuck about them at all.

• 2:01:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:30Joe Rogan?

  At all. They just want that money.

• 2:01:32Speaker 01

  We have to do better. We have to be a better model for the world. We, meaning this country. This country has to be a better model, and it pains me that, right now, we're not being a very good model.

• 2:01:41Joe Rogan?

  We're certainly not the best we can be.

• 2:01:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:01:44Joe Rogan?

  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 thing's chaos. That's what's so scary. The whole thing's chaos, and there's nuclear weapons everywhere. And who knows who's gonna be the first to say, "Fuck this," and just, boom.

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  Push the button.

• 2:02:12Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:02:36Speaker 01

  Gone, yeah. I mean, if you, if you added up the explosive power of what's been dropped on Gaza now, it probably is akin to Fat Man.

• 2:02:46Joe Rogan?

  Well, it looks like a hydrogen bomb just detonated there. It just, that's what it looks like. It's, everything's completely flattened.

• 2:02:51Speaker 01

  Just dust.

• 2:02:52Joe Rogan?

  But it's happened in like this slow frog-boiling type situation, where the water, you know the story?

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:59Joe Rogan?

  Turn the water up, the frog doesn't realize 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.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:03:13Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:03:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:03:35Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  And war.

• 2:03:37Joe Rogan?

  They all want the same thing.

• 2:03:38Speaker 01

  They just want peace, safety for their kids.

• 2:03:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:03:41Speaker 01

  And they have these leaders who have bloodlust.

• 2:03:45Joe Rogan?

  On both sides.

• 2:03:46Speaker 01

  On both sides.

• 2:03:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And, and justifiably so, if you think they've been killing each other for so long, they've been 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, that it would never be achieved, you know?

• 2:04:06Speaker 01

  And here we are.

• 2:04:07Joe Rogan?

  And here we are. It's more of the same, and even, I think we just shipped a record number of bombs, or we're going to ship a record number of bombs over there?

• 2:04:17Speaker 01

  Violence begets violence.

• 2:04:22Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's just, that's one of the things that really disturbs me the most about people, is that if you ask the average person, "What are the odds that we will have no war in your lifetime?" They would say zero.

• 2:04:34Speaker 01

  Zero.

• 2:04:35Joe Rogan?

  Most people say zero. But yet, we know that humans are capable of getting along. Like, so what is it about large groups of people that don't know each other, that are convinced by small groups of people, that they need to attack other large groups of people that they don't know? 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 gonna 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 gonna eliminate people.

• 2:05:18Joe Rogan?

  This is like, famously, a lot of these CEOs have said there's a 10, or people working on this tech have 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 weaponry, all systems, everything. It 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.

• 2:06:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:03Joe Rogan?

  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, or all that gold, or all, whatever the fuck it is, it's like, like, how about the people that go out into the ocean, and they stick a giant pipe into the ocean, and they suck out all the oil? Like, who fucking told you that's yours? How are you getting that? Like, how, 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. It's, I mean, I get it's established, I get this is how we've done it, I get it's in the stock market, I get it.

• 2:06:48Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:07:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, your dream is AI, AI runs things more equitably and efficiently?

• 2:07:08Joe Rogan?

  If I wanna get really delusional, my dream is, it's 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.

• 2:07:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:07:23Joe Rogan?

  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 rein that in, kids. Let's just rein that in. No more of that. We're not gonna allow that anymore. We're not gonna allow you to do that anymore."

• 2:07:48Speaker 01

  Let's play nice.

• 2:07:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and, and, you know, 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 for fucking 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, so they can sell

• 2:08:31Joe Rogan?

  weapons, and instead of all that, the AI controls it. The digital god, the digital daddy.

• 2:08:37Speaker 01

  Right. Unmoved by the desire for wealth and...

• 2:08:42Joe Rogan?

  Not only that, it has a rational, rational sort of strategy for handling all of it, which is an even distribution of the natural resources of the world. Just imagine if that was the case.

• 2:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:55Joe Rogan?

  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, no, this is crazy talk, right? I know, I understand, but if you imagine if we decided that all things that humans make, you know, there's, 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."

• 2:09:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:23Joe Rogan?

  Like, evenly. Because it's the earth stuff, it's not really human stuff. But we, 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.

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  Basically, you were, you were talking to someone about this, 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?

• 2:09:51Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:09:52Speaker 01

  Right? And I think that's what you're getting at here, just that if there's a system, maybe 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 100 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.

• 2:10:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:21Speaker 01

  And so, basic needs of shelter and food are met, and education and so on.

• 2:10:26Joe Rogan?

  Tenfold. Like, it changes everything.

• 2:10:29Speaker 01

  Then, you'd have to go out of your way to start manufacturing conflict again, and wars, and, you know?

• 2:10:35Joe Rogan?

  Or, the AI decides it's not gonna let you do that.

• 2:10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, or the AI says, you know...

• 2:10:40Joe Rogan?

  Because I know this is pie-in-the-sky bullshit.

• 2:10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, pie-in-the-sky bullshit has also been pied in the skied in the past, and, and, and then achieved.

• 2:10:48Joe Rogan?

  Yes. Well, my point is, I know it's pie-in-the-sky bullshit, but do you have a better solution?

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:54Joe Rogan?

  Because humans are doing it the same way that we've always done it, just slightly differently, and slightly better, over long periods of time. Like, our moral evolution is pretty slow-going. This episode is brought to you by Chime. And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different, and it's worth paying attention to. In a recent survey, they ranked the number-one choice for new checking accounts in America. That means, real people, millions of them, are choosing this over traditional banks. That's because banking at Chime is fee-free. No monthly fees, no overdraft fees, and thousands of fee-free ATMs. But here's the real kicker: if you get their Chime card, it gives you 5% cash back on a category you actually pick yourself.

• 2:11:39Joe Rogan?

  Your savings rate, crazy high, it's nine times the national average. They're calling it the most rewarding way to bank. Go to chime.com/rogan. Takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank, banking services, and Chime card, provided by Chime's bank partners. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for more details.

• 2:12:04Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by EA Sports FC27. Welcome to the world's game. FC27 is introducing The Grounds, where the streets meet the stadium. Connect with friends, go pro, and express yourself, on or off the pitch. Play FC27 with the ultimate edition September 18th. Learn more at EA.com. Rated E for everyone. Includes in-game purchases, including random items. The Grounds is only available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2 versions.

• 2:12:34Speaker 01

  It's fits and starts. We make these leaps of progress morally.

• 2:12:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:38Speaker 01

  We do. And, and then we backslide. And, and then we take steps forward and then we backslide. And, you know, we're on this nonsensical journey on this earth that, uh, yeah, it may be a fever dream, but, uh...

• 2:12:54Joe Rogan?

  I think it's, 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 it and thinking about it. More people don't know what to do because it's very confusing and it's also very frustrating. You know, 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?

• 2:13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:26Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:13:38Speaker 01

  We have...

• 2:13:39Joe Rogan?

  Spooky.

• 2:13:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have to find...

• 2:13:42Joe Rogan?

  Something has to happen.

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  Something has to happen.

• 2:13:43Joe Rogan?

  I know my idea is stupid. Don't go, that's stupid to me. If I was listening to someone say that, I'd be like, right. That's never gonna happen, stupid. Although, also, you're gonna give up your power to the fucking robots that don't give a shit about you? Great, that's, you fucking traitor. That's one great way to get rid of the entire human race because it's gonna decide we're problematic and irrelevant and we don't, they don't need us anymore. So, they just keep running without us. Let us, you know, go off into extinction.

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe. Or maybe they, maybe they run things well. I don't know.

• 2:14:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, or maybe, um, it eliminates government in this, the way that we're dealing with it now, where it's humans have a popularity contest to see who controls the entire government.

• 2:14:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:23Joe Rogan?

  Instead of that...

• 2:14:24Speaker 01

  And then don't do anything they say they were gonna do.

• 2:14:26Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:14:36Speaker 01

  That's key.

• 2:14:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:38Speaker 01

  That's key.

• 2:14:39Joe Rogan?

  And it doesn't have any reason to not have that. You know, that's the thing. It's like, we, 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, they'll have no, there's gonna 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.

• 2:15:21Joe Rogan?

  I bet it's normal for all kinds of intelligence, especially if you feel like you're being governed by morons, right?

• 2:15:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:28Joe Rogan?

  And if I was AI, I would think, look at these morons, they can't, they took him 50 years to try to solve this equation, I just solved it in four minutes.

• 2:15:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:15:35Joe Rogan?

  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 boards, 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 gonna 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.

• 2:16:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:16:04Joe Rogan?

  If it has a belief that we're valuable, it'll try to guide us.

• 2:16:07Speaker 01

  You could probably, I, I mean, I'm not a tech savant, you know, I know my lane. But, I, I expect you could run simulations on, let's give this agentic 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 now, okay, what does it do?

• 2:16:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:16:37Speaker 01

  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 of result you're talking about, I'm sure.

• 2:16:47Joe Rogan?

  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, 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?

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  Why are we, why are you loving cannonballs at people?

• 2:17:11Joe Rogan?

  What's this pistol? I got, I got, I got a button. Let me just hit that button. I'll just hit a button in a few places, I'll stop all this 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, we're horrified. If we find out that a pharmaceutical drug company lied about a product and that wound up killing 10,000 people, we're way less outraged. We're weird.

• 2:17:43Speaker 01

  We are weird that way.

• 2:17:44Joe Rogan?

  We're fucking weird.

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:46Joe Rogan?

  We're weird, just like we're weird with this whole cobalt and the batteries of the phone that you use to virtue signal online. It's weird. It's, it's a very, the, the reality of what it is, is not the same as the way we perceive it.

• 2:17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the, that's a good point, because the body count of our tech...

• 2:18:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:03Speaker 01

  Is high. And the earth, uh, contamination meter...

• 2:18:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:09Speaker 01

  Uh, is off the chart. Um, but, but we don't think about it the same way, uh, as we do, yeah, that, you know, that gunman, that horrible gunman killed eight people.

• 2:18:21Joe Rogan?

  Right, I mean, think about the pollution in certain parts of the world, like, when you see those rivers in India that are completely filled with bottles of water, plastic bottles? How many people die because of that? How many people die?

• 2:18:32Speaker 01

  God knows.

• 2:18:33Joe Rogan?

  God knows. How many people die because of the pollution of that water? How many people die because of just living essentially in open sewage? How many, it's...

• 2:18:40Speaker 01

  God knows.

• 2:18:41Joe Rogan?

  No one knows.

• 2:18:42Speaker 01

  Nobody knows.

• 2:18:43Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's, um, we could definitely do better. But the 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.

• 2:19:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, 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.

• 2:19:14Joe Rogan?

  It's possible.

• 2:19:15Speaker 01

  It's possible.

• 2:19:16Joe Rogan?

  Even today.

• 2:19:17Speaker 01

  Even today.

• 2:19:18Joe Rogan?

  Even today with all the corruption and all the chaos.

• 2:19:19Speaker 01

  Those people are out there. Uh, I, I do believe that, and I have to believe that.

• 2:19:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's possible. It's still possible. If you are a good person and you exist, it's possible others exist.

• 2:19:30Speaker 01

  Well, Gandhi said, you know, I live by these words. He said, "Live simply so that others may simply live."

• 2:19:38Joe Rogan?

  Hmm. Yeah, that gets in the way of today, because everybody wants to be a baller.

• 2:19:44Speaker 01

  Nobody, nobody wants to be simple today. No, they don't, they don't. But, you know, there's something to, there's an essence...

• 2:19:53Joe Rogan?

  Trying to get that folding iPhone, son.

• 2:19:54Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Somebody told me there was a big line outside the Austin Apple Store and, you know, for the...

• 2:20:01Joe Rogan?

  Of course, the new one's out. The new one.

• 2:20:03Speaker 01

  Do you really need it? You know?

• 2:20:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's the problem. I love that stuff. It'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 thinking, oh...

• 2:20:14Speaker 01

  No, they're not evil, they're not, and that's, that's the thing. This toxic relationship with the people in the Congo, for instance, has been forced on us.

• 2:20:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:24Speaker 01

  You know, I just want my phone, I wanna 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, but...

• 2:20:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, this is, this is another plus side of, um, 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 really dangerous shit that people do, including probably extract these minerals in probably a way more efficient way.

• 2:21:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, well, we have to just, yeah, we have to look after the people who...

• 2:21:04Joe Rogan?

  That's, yeah, what happens to the people.

• 2:21:06Speaker 01

  What happens, yeah. We can't lose sight of them.

• 2:21:08Joe Rogan?

  Can't throw them overboard.

• 2:21:09Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 2:21:10Joe Rogan?

  You know what I mean? Like, this is, it's kind of the same situation, right? Like, they treat those people, they're almost exactly the same. Woo! 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.

• 2:21:28Speaker 01

  Well, I, 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, it was actually a friend of mine in the Congo who said, said, "Harth, you gotta go," this is 2016, he said, "You gotta go to the Congo, this cobalt, the batteries and the mines, you gotta go there." And I'm like, cobalt? You mean like, in Chinese vases and, what do you mean cobalt? He said, "No, it's a component to the batteries that charge, just gotta go." So, I had no idea either, and then...

• 2:22:13Joe Rogan?

  And that was just 10 years ago.

• 2:22:14Speaker 01

  That was just 10 years ago.

• 2:22:15Joe Rogan?

  That's, it'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.

• 2:22:23Speaker 01

  Oh, God, come on, yes. They're, they're not dumb. They know. They know.

• 2:22:27Joe Rogan?

  So, like, there are some of the more moral and ethical and progressive companies on earth?

• 2:22:33Speaker 01

  They fashion themselves to be.

• 2:22:35Joe Rogan?

  But you know what I mean? I mean, in terms of the way they deal with politics, and in America at least, they're some of the more progressive people on earth. Supposedly have the most compassion, kindness, and the most, you know, open-minded approach to our society.

• 2:22:51Speaker 01

  Supposedly. It doesn't seem to extend to those people over there.

• 2:22:56Joe Rogan?

  But I think their argument would be like, listen, this is the only way to do this, and the only way things are gonna get better is if we keep using this technology.

• 2:23:06Joe Rogan?

  It's such a contradiction.

• 2:23:07Speaker 01

  It's a contradiction.

• 2:23:08Joe Rogan?

  It's a spooky one, too.

• 2:23:10Speaker 01

  It's, there's nothing, there's literally nothing stopping them from allocating a de minimis amount of resources relative to their balance sheets and a handful of headcount to going down to the bottom of their supply chains and doing things better.

• 2:23:30Joe Rogan?

  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 mine? Is it possible that they can say, hey, we will make less money, but we want you to change these conditions and change this?

• 2:23:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course it's possible. I mean, the complexity of, of design associated with their products far exceeds the complexity of improving conditions in a mine in the Congo. It's not that hard.

• 2:24:09Joe Rogan?

  Right, but they're not specifically mining.

• 2:24:11Speaker 01

  They can be down there.

• 2:24:13Joe Rogan?

  They can be.

• 2:24:13Speaker 01

  They can be down there.

• 2:24:14Joe Rogan?

  Imagine you're a fucking Cupertino executive and they're like, hey, Mike, got a new gig for you. You gotta go to the Congo and tell the Chinese what to do.

• 2:24:22Speaker 01

  I'll go with them.

• 2:24:23Joe Rogan?

  Ugh, don't go. You can't go.

• 2:24:26Speaker 01

  I'll grow.

• 2:24:27Joe Rogan?

  Put a fucking mustache on, big fake nose.

• 2:24:32Joe Rogan?

  Don't do it. They'll use AI to analyze your voice.

• 2:24:35Speaker 01

  It's like this, brother. They, they can, they, they buy it all from these Chinese companies and it's not that hard to, 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 toxics, the, the toxic exposure. That mine over there, all that shit you're dumping in the stream in the lake, we're gonna, like we would in our backyard, we're gonna collect that in 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.

• 2:25:17Joe Rogan?

  Is, is the cobalt recyclable, like from old phones?

• 2:25:21Speaker 01

  You can recycle, yes, you can recycle cobalt. It is hard, under existing tech, to recycle cobalt to a sufficient grade for EV batteries.

• 2:25:32Joe Rogan?

  But for phones?

• 2:25:33Speaker 01

  But you can recycle it for phones. I know that Apple has talked about, by a certain year, maybe it's 2030, the iWatch being only recycled cobalt, you know, and then.

• 2:25:45Joe Rogan?

  2030? It's like the five years.

• 2:25:47Speaker 01

  Don't, don't quote me on that number, but it was something like just a few years from now. And then, you know, they'll get there with the phones and so on. But here's the thing, here's the thing, and, and, because people come to me and say, ah, well, you know, eventually we'll recycle it and so on. Okay, good. You, 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 anymore out of the ground in the Congo. You didn't need any more kids up to their neck in toxic filth, scrounging for cobalt. You can't just walk away.

• 2:26:23Speaker 01

  You, you can't just say, we pillaged 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.

• 2:26:34Speaker 01

  Hands clean, we're gonna 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, you, 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, I saw an article just today, they're, they're building one up in Red, Red Oak, I think, near Dallas,

• 2:27:19Speaker 01

  and everyone's hot and bothered about it, naturally so, because it's gonna muck up the air and the water and they're 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.

• 2:27:39Speaker 01

  So Apple and the rest of them, I'm not just picking on them, it's all these companies, 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, the apocalypse that you created. You can't just walk away like you're Cecil Rhodes or some other colonialist during imperial days where you just pillage and ransack people without conscience.

• 2:28:05Joe Rogan?

  Not only that, what do those people do now? That's been the only job.

• 2:28:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that's right, that's right. You, you've gotta put some time and effort into alternate livelihoods, cleaning up the environment means making land arable again, because they can't grow things now, Joe. That, that's, 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 Foods, Trader Joe's, whatever, and you get your bottled water and it says pH 9.5 and, you know, you want your alkaline water for your body because it's healthy, right?

• 2:28:52Speaker 01

  You don't want acidic. 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.

• 2:29:06Speaker 01

  And I did a test around Colowesi, that, that ground zero of cobalt mining, the well water, the rivers, lakes, and so on.

• 2:29:16Speaker 01

  The highest pH that came back was 6.7 in the Luolaba 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 hyperacidic. 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, it's all from these toxic dumping, from these mines.

• 2:29:49Speaker 01

  You gotta 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 gonna recycle it now, so problem solved. Or now we got lithium iron phosphate or solid state batteries and so, you know, no more cobalt and so on, although cobalt is heavily required for AI data centers, for the energy storage.

• 2:30:26Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, you can't just say, we're, we're done. We're, we're done with that place. We're moving on because we don't need the cobalt anymore or the tungsten or whatever it is. You gotta 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.

• 2:30:46Joe Rogan?

  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, I'm gonna read it. Just based on what you just said, I'm scared to read it. I don't wanna 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 if it wasn't for you, so thank you.

• 2:31:12Speaker 01

  Thank you, Joe. Thank you, brother.

• 2:31:13Joe Rogan?

  Thanks for being here. Okay. Uh, is this available now? Is there an audio version of it?

• 2:31:18Speaker 01

  Dion Graham got a, uh, uh, Audi Award nomination for the audiobook, so it's terrific, yeah.

• 2:31:27Joe Rogan?

  All right, beautiful. Thank you. Bye, everybody.