Joe Rogan Experience #2556 - Siddharth Kara

Key Takeaway

Practice conscious consumption today: keep using devices that still work, rather than upgrading by default. Before replacing a phone, tablet, or vehicle, ask whether the improvement is necessary or whether repair, reuse, or recycling can meet the need. Then use the attention and money you save to support accountability: ask technology companies to disclose mining conditions, protect workers, contain pollution, and help repair the communities their supply chains affect.

Episode Overview

Joe Rogan speaks with author and researcher Siddharth Kara about child labor, forced labor, environmental contamination, and opaque supply chains tied to cobalt and other battery minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kara also discusses his book, The Zong, using the 1781 massacre aboard a slave ship to show how public evidence, moral courage, and organized activism helped build the first abolitionist movement. The conversation connects historical extraction and slavery to modern consumption, corporate responsibility, war, and the need for wider empathy.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Joe Rogan Experience #2556 - Siddharth Kara from Joe Rogan Experience. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. TRAIN BY DAY. JOE ROGAN PODCAST BY NIGHT. All day. We're up. All right. Good to see you, sir. Yeah. Good to see you, Joe. Um, first of all, thank you very much for everything you've done and for just I 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 you legitimately risked your life. Yeah. That it is a very dangerous part of the world right now with enormous amounts of resources being pulled out and insane amounts of money being made and you know I think just people like you are rare. So thank you. Oh man, you're uh you're gracious, Joe. You're really gracious. I 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 uh talking to Jamie, it was almost 4 years ago.

Was it really that long ago? It was it was December 2022. That's crazy. So here we are September 26. So almost four years ago. And um you continue to talk about it now and again. And I think that that's meant a lot to me. It's meant a lot to people in the Congo. Um, it's obvious this has captured your heart and um, it you're to be commended for that conscience. Well, I'm doing this talking. You're 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 the 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. Yeah. You have slave labor, you have child labor, you have militia run mines. You know, for for people who didn't hear our last conversation, um go back and hear it, you know, because we walk through it and um I haven't been back to the Congo since Cobalt Red came out and I knew it would be too dangerous for me to go back. Yeah, definitely don't go out. you know, it's just my colleague said pretty soon after Cobalt Red came out, you know, there was there's there's there's a bounty for you.

So, I can't go back. Um, but I've stayed in touch with people there. I continued to get ground research done and the conditions uh they're not much better, you know, and in some ways they've continued to degrade because the fever for these these battery component metals and it's it's cobalt, but it's also the lithium, the nickel, the copper, the tantelum, all the stuff that goes into our smartphones, our tablets. You know, you and I, nobody we know can function without this stuff. And the bottom of the chain is tainted in child labor, slavery, violence, environmental destruction and contamination.

And the new fever is the AI data centers. You know, we're building these um as fast as possible to support the AI economy and they require all the same metals and minerals. So the circuit boards, the servers, the heat sinks, uh the energy storage, they all require cobalt, copper, tin, tantelum, it's all coming out of Congo. [sighs] It's so such a strange aspect of human life that we require that and that the the the area is controlled by people that are willing to do this. Like there's no like we don't get much of these rare earth minerals from America, do we?

No. No. No. Not much at all. No. That's why it's it's almost all in the global south and in particular in the heart of Africa these deposits. Can I ask you is it because it's not available? there's no ore in America or it hasn't been mined like what is what are so it's a it's the dominating force is that the the largest and highest grade reserves of these crucial elements and rare earth metals are in central Africa um lithium expend extends more broadly to South America there's not much um there's not much in North America there's some But here's the rub.

Here's the rub. You can find some lithium in the salt flats out west. You can find some cobalt along the Canadian North American border. Uh the rub is we don't want to wreck our environment. Oh god. Digging the stuff out of the ground um and then processing it. But we're okay obliterating their environment and polluting it and contaminating it. Um and I did another study. I told you I can't go back to the Congo, but I have colleagues and we've continued doing research and I I issued a report came out last year called blood batteries um through the University of Nottingham and we got to quantify some of the environmental impact which uh is so crucial to the story.

It's crucial to the story of this data center push to the EV push, the environmental impact. And we use time lapse time-lapse satellite imagery to see that uh from the dawn of the sort of cobalt battery metal revolution to 2022, uh 40 50 60% of the forest areas gone. Um shrubbery, grasslands, all of that gone, replaced with mining territory. And then is this the Congo as a whole? So we did. Yeah, this is across the copper belt co copper cobalt region of the Congo where the mining is taking place.

And what percentage of the Congo is that? Small part of it. Okay. It's a small part in the southeast corner along the Zambian border. I mean much of the Congo is rainforest, right? That's why I was confused. Up in the north Congo is insanely dense and huge 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 Kouesei, 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 uh to chromium. Uh so the whole water sources in that part of the country have been completely contaminated. So, I point all this out because we object to that here. We don't want our trees gone. We don't want our forest destroyed. We don't want our water contaminated. We don't want the air to be polluted. 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, uh keep buying our EVs and so on.

And then that's the story. Okay, that's the story that we're okay destroying them in their world. uh so long as ours remains sacrosanked. And that frankly is just the great hypocrisy of all this. Is there an alternative like a viable alternative to supply the world with the minerals that it needs? Not yet. Not yet. No. I mean, is it I'm sorry to interrupt, but is 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?

It could do it could be done better. I mean, you 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 tantelum 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 none of that is done in Congo. Uh and it's mostly Chinese state-run mining companies um that don't give a [ __ ] about the people in the environment there. But our tech and EV companies all know that and they're all buying this stuff uh from them knowing that. So the chain is tainted. It's tainted in in misery. It's tainted in blood. It's dained in environmental destruction. It doesn't have to be that way. Um, 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 environmental impact. And is it an issue with even if they mitigate all the surface area stuff and the pollution [snorts] that you're still going to deal with groundwater? Yeah, groundwater contamination is inevitable, right? just all leeches in. I mean, the pro it's it's not just the mining, the products they use to get the the processing of 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 leeches. They pump that stuff right into the ground. It goes into the ground and then it seeps into the ground water into the rivers, lakes. When did this all begin? So the the this the that part of the Congo in the southeastern corner from the town of Lubmbashi to Kouesei was mined for copper going back to colonial times. Uh it and something like a quarter of the bullets used in World War I were copper from that part of the Congo.

Okay. So it copper mining goes back a long ways, but there was other stuff there. It just didn't have industrial value yet. The uranium that was used in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from that same part of the Congo. Whoa. The high the highest grade uranium um deposit known in the world at that time. Isn't it insane that that place has like the most valuable resources on earth, but yet it's one of the poorest places on earth? Yeah. It's it's the resource curse.

You know, when when 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, um, and it just chaos runs riot. So, and you can get people to work for basically nothing. Yeah. There's virtually no alternative. There's there's virtually no alternative way to survive. And and people have to understand that, too. When you displace hundreds of thousands of people with a big mining operation, meaning there 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. Um, 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 this is what happens every day. Roll up their sleeves and get down in that toxic dirt and try to gather enough ore in a sack for the day to make a dollar. And and I know now roughly how many people it is.

When you and I spoke in 2026, 2020 2022, sorry, we're now in 2026. uh I had documented the human horror taking place and that 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 on any given day there are at least 300,000 people men and children digging for cobalt with their bare hands and pickaxes and shovels.

300,000 people on any given day. Now, it fluctuates by season a little bit, dry season, wet season. Of that 300,000, about 37%, so more than one out of three, are working in conditions we'd call absolute slavery. And almost 10% are kids. So, roughly 30,000 kids on any given day. not in school, not learning, exposed to toxic work, toxic, dangerous mining with their hands uh up to their necks in it. And that's the bottom of the chain, you know, and people 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? 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 uh of those people over there. What do I do? I can't I can't fix that. And I say, you're right. You can't. I can't. Uh but you can think about your personal choices. And the first one is uh 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. Um the EV is a more interesting question. You know, you don't upgrade the EV, you either buy one or you keep your internal combustion engine car. Um, now EV companies will tell us their mining is done sustainably and the supply chain is audited and all of that and 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 um contaminated human degradation and environmental destruction. The EV story is let's save the planet. Yeah. And that's fine. We need to save the planet, but we can't save our piece of the planet by destroying their piece of the planet. Look, I love the technology involved in EVs. [clears throat] I love I have a Tesla. I love it. But there's also, excuse me, there's also reality of um brake dust. It's way more brake dust with those things.

And that's a big part of the particulate uh pollution that you get in large cities. Yeah. 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 could do about it. Yeah. Yeah. It I I I uh you know, there's so many parts of the Eevee story that we don't get fully told. You know, break brake dust is certainly one. Well, all cars give off brake dust, just to be really clear, but EVs are heavier. They're heavier. So, you you break more. You have to break more. Yeah. Yeah. You if that's right. I think there is some ways around that. And I think um 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. Uh, 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 it for whatever reason leaves more brake dust. I'm not sure why. We'll find out in a second. Um, 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 gray cast iron rotors. But they do not eliminate brake dust. The actual environmental outcome depends on the complete friction pair rotor and pad formulation and on driving conditions. Yeah. So it just explains what brake dust is. And so it's it does help a lot substantially, but it, you know, doesn't eliminate it. Yeah. And they're more expensive. You know, if you it's like a big upgrade. If you get a car um 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. [snorts] Well, there's there's certainly things we can and should be doing to mitigate the environmental impacts of whether it's an EV or even an internal combustion engine. You know, I didn't know about these brake pads. That's um um it's worth it's worth people knowing more about that. But then you're going to have to find carbon. Like, okay, now you got to get carbon [clears throat] to get the carbon ceramic. So, this is the thing. This is the thing.

There's always something, right? And and you made this point with Rizza, you know, it okay, cobalt, but it's also the lithium. It's also the nickel. It's all one of the biggest lithium deposits now. And and people are saying, "Okay, let's use less cobalt in the batteries. Let's do 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 is in the Congo and it just started shipping under this Chinese mining company um in June of this year out of this deposit and the conditions there I haven't been there colleagues who've been up there it's near a town called Manono they're just as horrific and so when you say all right we're done with cobalt we're just going to do lithium iron phosphate battery or you lithium table salt battery, whatever.

Same deal. Same deal. You know, so it's it's about extending the horizon of our compassion beyond our immediate circle and and caring about everyone who's attached to our life and our lifestyle. No matter how t 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. And you could be them if you were born there. That's That's the thing. You got lucky. We all got lucky. You and I mostly got lucky.

We got the roll of the dice that was favorable. And that's all it is. 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 K9 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.

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In certain circumstances it's accurate, but to put that flat across the board for everybody. No, there's people there's no boots. They're barefoot. They don't 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 going to poison you to death. And we only make progress when we extend our compassion out. Right? When I say progress, I mean moral progress as a species on this earth. That's the literally the key. Like if if you wanted to figure out like how to make just global life better for all people.

It's take whatever the third world is and bring it up to the first world. We should all want to do that. If everybody wanted to do that, if everybody wanted to deliver infrastructure, education, medical establishment, like where there's like 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 and they don't ever want to let that go. No, they don't. It 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 years, but when I teach um I run a thought experiment and it's exactly what we're talking about here. So, let 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 going to get.

Am I going to be born in a safe, loving, upper middle class family in the West? Am I going to be born in some war torn poor uh part of South Sudan or whatever? You know, you don't know. Okay. What kind of 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 uh bring education, health care, sanitation, whatever to my part of the world. Uh and 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 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, right?

You know, and I won't lose sight of you in the event it's me. and and then we get here and um we're just wound up in our sphere and we lose a sense of human connection. Isn't it partly because this is really the first of a couple generations but w with increasingly more contact and understanding of the rest of the world. Like if you went back a 100 years ago, people had virtually no understanding of how things went on anywhere else unless they had visited them.

And now a hundred 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. Um but then they found out that when you give people nuclear power it's pretty easy for them to convert it into weapons. Okay. So there's there's a lot to unpack. There's a lot to unpack because we're trying to like if we're going to be fair about a discussion of why everything's [ __ ] One of the reasons why everything's [ __ ] is clearly because they don't have infrastructure.

They don't have power. They don't have water that's 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 going to burn coal? Are you what are you going to do? Like there's only a few ways, right? There's dams. You can get hydroelectric power. um windmills and solar. Get the [ __ ] out of here. That's not gonna that's not right. Not right now.

Not with current technology. It's not going to 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. [ __ ] each other up." It so tricky. It's tricky. 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 I've I've I've learned since we last talked about the Congo. Okay. I mentioned the the uranium used to to drop uh Little Boy and Big Boy on Hiroshima Nagasaki. Fat Man. Fat Man. Fat Man. Little Boy and Fat Man. Yeah. Um on Hiroshima Nagasaki. Okay. It came came from a mine called Shinkalobu in in the Congo. There was a meeting of the Belgians and the Americans in Midtown Manhattan and they said, "All right, we're going to give you so much money for that uranium and so on and so forth." And um 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 going to be sending it to them. They're not going to give teeth to their neighbor. Where are they getting it from? And you talk to people on the ground in the Congo. Now there's and now there's some counter intelligence 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 1015 years. Now, I can't verify any of that. It's not like I've done uranium investigations.

Look, it only makes sense. They have complete control of the region. It makes a lot of sense. There's no way anybody would be able to stop them. No one's going to stop them. They control the ground. They control the ground there. And that's scary, you know, and 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 uh yellow cake floating around that part of the world, you know. Um, does China have any human rights organizations that are comparable to the ones in the West?

Not really. Right. You know, they may write stuff down on paper, you know, but there's not like they're not. No, 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. I mean, we have some sense of what they've done to the Weaguers. Yeah, that's a that's a hard one to figure out, right? It's a hard one to figure out. We've got some general sense of the forced labor camps um um uh filled with weaguers um doing solar panels and clothes and all this [ __ ] Um but and I haven't looked into that directly, but I can I can tell you what I've seen directly on what they do in Africa and you know they 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. They ship over people from China to do the work and then work them and then send them back. And there's nothing by way of human rights standards when you're talking about Chinese companies operating in Africa. So this is a uniquely western thing. This drive to have some basic human rights standards.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean 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 better part of two decades. And one of the mines which uh is owned by um Dubai Middle Eastern guys um part of the Trump administration sort of peace for minerals arrangement between President Shisha and the Trump administration was mining access. And so one concession uh was sold to this US mining company.

It's called Virtuous Mining and they're run by former military guys and they took over a couple of copper cobalt concessions in Lubmbashi and Koazi 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 is is virtues are they doing things any better? And the feedback I've gotten so far is they seem to be uh improving standards around artal mining. There's still artisal mining, but improving standards.

When we say artisal mining, you you went into depth about this the first time we talked, but we should just tell people that that thing artisal sounds awesome. It sounds like a great cup of coffee, like fair trade. It's a nice in a nice place, you know, like someone's got a beautiful ceramic cup they serve you the coffee in. Yeah. Artisal mining is pretty much the opposite of that. It it's the the games people play with words, right? Uh no. So artal mining means you've got mom, dad, and their kids up to here in toxic grit and filth digging.

Yeah. This is an artisal mind. The fact that you can use that same word artisal with this that you and you can with a nice coffee shop is crazy. That's crazy. That's So this is you know I got in imagine if you were learning English. You're like, "What the [ __ ] does artisal actually mean?" Like, "How how do the two things what like this language is messed up." Yeah. How how are these both artisal? That's crazy. How is my espresso and that artist? For lack of a better term, these minds um it's all basically the poorest people on earth.

Raw human labor. Uh it's tens of thousands of people and there's kids down there, too. Okay? You just can't see in this massive. There's also you've shown mothers with their babies. Mothers with babies on their back. So that's that's what the mining industry calls artisinal. Okay. It's it's this it's kids with 40 50 kilogram sacks of cobalt um 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, congenal disease.

Here's a teenager with a baby. These are all my photos, okay, that that 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 Cambodia. That's a story I told you last time where that's probably the closest I came to getting shot was in this mining area. It was almost all children run by a militia um north of a town called Kamov 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 and these militia guys come come barreling up the hill with AK-47s. And I thought that was it for me. Uh I mean this 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 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, before you go to any of these places, you got to get a stamp from the governor's office on your visa paperwork, and you take that with you everywhere." And that will convey to any militia that you're under the governor's protection, and they're not going to [ __ ] with you. They won't they'll mess with you, but they're not going to do.

They're not going to kill you. Um, and I had to go get that stamp. I had to persuade the governor of Hotkatanga province that I was there not to shame the Congo. I was seeking truth that I think his people are being uh exploited by the global north and this whole tech um 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 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 intending. And I found my folder on the ground. I pulled that piece of paper out and I showed them the stamp and and then they just said, "Get out of here. Just, you know, they let us go." So, uh, when you go into conflict zones, you have to have that kind of local advice.

Um, 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 How did you get that image? Was it with a phone? 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, right? They didn't know. So it like same like that video of the 15,000 people, you know, I just managed to do this. Mhm. And tuck it away and because that was also controlled by militias uh that particular site and 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. 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, right? you know, this is this 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 of ore is it's still I can still hear that the clanging in that place and the shouting.

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 uh your book is all about the Atlantic slave trade and it's called the Zorg. Yeah. And it's uh a tale of greed and murder that inspired the abolition of slavery. And just imagine like those boats carried people from pretty much that same place or close to it. Yeah. Same. No, that the 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 in its journey ends in this culminating act of brute inhumity that sparked the first movement to abolish slavery.

And it's that sequence that is so vital for us to understand historically. Uh people can't fix a horror until they learn about it. And the average person, I've learned, is not evil. Uh we may be generally self-interested and worried about us and ours and so on, but we're not evil. Uh 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, a faith-based moral leaders said, "This is unacceptable. this is beneath us. Uh, and we we're going to devote our lives to abolishing slavery. But 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. 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.

Um, and it's essential to know this history because it tells us why we are where we are. Um, 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 inhumity toward each other and the slave trade is one of them. And I learned so much researching this book and and 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.

Do you the fact that I mean does 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 abolish slavery. And I said, 'N 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. So we abolish slavery on paper.

We have a piece of paper that says slaveryy's abolished, but in practice, the the institution of oppressing, subjugating, and extracting the labor of someone uh persists and has evolved into the modern era. Well, not only that, like how many underage workers are working in millions in this country that are undocumented? Yeah. Yeah. I I mean, who knows what the number is. Um but millions around the world, tens of millions around the world. Um but it's it's this this history is important. History is important because uh and this ship is important uh because it it it it reveals the depth of our inhumity while simultaneously showing us the capacity for good in our nature because it did spark that first movement to abolish slavery.

It and it was faith-based leaders that were doing this. It was Yeah, it was it was the Anglican Church leaders in the in the first movement to abolish slavery was in England and it was sparked directly by this ship. Um and so people, you know, can read the book and understand what happened on this ship. But uh it it it goes on its journey u picking up Africans along the West African coast. And I went to West Africa to see the old forts and castles that are there.

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

Yeah. There's a 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. Whoa. So Amazing Grace is written by a slave trader. Whoa. So John Newton John Newton's from Liverpool. Liverpool was once capital of the 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 um ships departed Europe, in this case Liverpool, with tradable goods, mirrors, knives, rum, brandy, cutlery, crockery, linens, bandanas, whatever, cowery shells. Took all that stuff down to Western Africa where Europeans had built some castles and forts. And those castles and forts were involved in the business of accumulating Africans. Okay. And they held them in dungeons in these forts. And you can go to a place I went to it 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, march down. A quarter to a third of them didn't survive. And so this this is uh this is the dungeon at Cape Coast Castle. Wow. Okay. And let me tell you something about this place, Joe. So that that this is uh man. So John Newton had in his journal um brought on board today um 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 Elmina Castle. This is in modern day Ghana and they were held in the dungeon and you saw that picture of the dungeon. So the dungeon was divided between an area for men and an area for women and children. There'd be at any given time a thousand human beings in there shackled down one shaft for light and where they drop food and water and I don't know if you Jamie if you had that photo again you saw like a little narrow groove down the floor of the dungeon and there you see that groove down the floor of the dungeon and that's supposed to siphon away their piss and [ __ ] and menstrual blood and so you can imagine a thousand 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 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 uh 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. 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 uh 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, 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. 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, [ __ ] 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.

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 sea fairing vessel, Joe, is a marvel of engineering. It's a marvel of vision and ambition and European genius. Oh, Jamie's skipping ahead here, too. The I jumped. Sorry. The the visual imagery. We talk about abolition. All right. We're going to talk about the first use of a viral image which Jamie gave us a prelude to.

So the 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. 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 counterveailing. Their ships could not handle it. Portuguese devented invented a specific sail called a a latine rig. All right? So, it's shaped like a triangle. And rather than a traditional square sail that gets pushed by the wind, the Latin rig, you can swivel it to function like a bird's wing. So you can tack into the wind like a bird does.

And so the Portuguese are the first to get past the Canary Islands, 1420s, 1430s. And and the caravl 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. It's extraordinary exploration triumph of navigation and genius. Then we get Christopher Columbus. Oh man, Portuguese of they 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 got to be a shortcut, you know. So, so he goes west. I'm gonna find a better way. He lands in the Bahamas. India. Indians. All right. Okay. You know, we laugh, but I mean, he crossed the Atlantic first in in his ship. He got he got here and and he starts the Spanish reconoitering of this this part of the planet. The pope pope is Alexander V 6 says, "Okay, you Spanish, you Portuguese, you've kind of you've you're starting to sus out the rest of the world and I want you to get along.

So, I'm going to draw a line down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And everything east of that line, Portugal, that's for you. Everything west of that line, Spain, that's for you. So, Spain colonized the Americas and Portugal colonized Africa and India first. Now, the Europeans came across something during the Crusades that captivated their taste buds. They called it sweet salt. Today, we call it sugar. There's 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.

And that is so insane to hear, but makes complete and total sense that people didn't know about sugar until the 1400s. Well, they came across it in the Crusades, you know, 12,300 Europeans. Like, oh, these Arabs have got some sugar. It's nice, you know, and they're getting it from cane. They're just processing it. Sugarcane. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh because it doesn't grow in that part of the world. So, what did they do to sweeten things in Europe back then? Just honey. Honey, berry juices. Wow.

Sugar. Sugar is another level, right? Yeah. 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.

Mayans. Mayans. Yeah. So, they don't have a labor force. So, King Charles in 1518 says, "Okay, Portuguese, you got these Africans. Can you send some over here?" And that's 1518. to the Portuguese. He send he gives them a contract to bring me 4,000 Africans to come work these sugar plantations because they seem to be doing a good job working on yours. Thus begins the era of the Atlantic slave trade. It was about bringing Africans over to the Spanish colonies to work on the sugar plantations. And the Portuguese and the Spanish are running this triangular circuit, bringing goods down to Africa, buying Africans, taking them across.

There you go. Um, 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. 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 They had They had nothing west. Nothing west. When 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 in the 1400s, it's blank slate. That's nuts. So they 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 delamina deora, the coast of gold mines. There was gold everywhere. The slave trade came later because of sugar. Uh then the British and the Dutch. And so sugar was the start. Sugar was the dominant force. There was always slave labor. There was always slave and slave trade.

But that's when it really ramped up. That's when the whole triangular trade, the Atlantic slave trade, the world's first globalized economy was born from sugar. Wow. This episode is brought to you by Manscape. Listen up, fellas. Manscape just dropped the all-new Lawnmower Ultra Gen 6 with some pretty serious upgrades. You got two interchangeable blade heads, a birectional 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.

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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 the North Atlantic generating centuries of generational wealth. So on the eve of the American Revolution, just to give you a sense, okay, so we're talking 1773, 1774, uh by this time the British are the dominant force in the Atlantic slave trade and they became the dominant force uh taking over Caribbean islands. Their prized was Jamaica, which became the largest sugar plantation economy in the world at that time.

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

Are any of the companies that were making sugar back then, are they still around? Uh, not that I'm aware. No. I mean, uh, it's the sugar sugar, the way sugar is made today, of course, is is different than these slave plantations that were erected by first Portugal and Spain, then later the British and the Dutch. So, the Zorg is actually a Dutch slave ship, and it set sail around uh 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, and then eventually he loads up his ship with, depending on the size of the ship, three, four, five, six 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?

Uh 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 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. And this 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. They're given 16 inches of space each like the to quote John Newton who we talked about like books on a shelf.

They're to be entered and stowed like books on a shelf. So each human is allotted 16 inches of space. Yeah, that's right. Now, why are they laying down? Okay. So, you're lining them all up, filling up every available possible piece of space. And then there's a second level here where you see them around this horseshoe. So, they built a partition. You can see at the bottom left there, they built a partition so that they could maximize the cargo, the human capacity cargo of this vessel. So, you can't sit upright.

you're shackled down, laying down, and then there's a partition built and then there's another level of people like the the overhead bin space. Okay, you're just lining these people up and they're lined up like this uh for two months to cross the Atlantic. And you may ask yourself, what happens if you're seasick? 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 uh what's called what they call the tween deck, this cargo here.

And if you needed the bathroom, you had to try and get to that bucket with your chained partner, your chained two 2 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 in human piss and [ __ ] and blood and vomit uh 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 uh in the morning and dowsted with seaater and given a little bit of food and half pint of water to drink. uh 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 um you can imagine let's say you're one of these Africans.

You got that roll of the dice. You uh you're going to try to do anything you can to get control of that ship. And so slave insur insurrections were a common effort at resistance. And so the 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, where they could still control the ship. They had cannons mounted on the barricade to suppress the insurrection. They would shoot a cannon into their own boat.

It was either that or lose the ship. And usually a couple of shots would call the insurrection. Now, you had to punish the insurrectionist. And I'm telling you this because captains wrote about all this stuff. They 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. Now they'd be whipped and you can imagine what happened to women and girls. Uh one slave captain said um sailors gratify their passions bruteike 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. Uh that's one form of protest.

Another form of protest is a hunger strike. I'm not going to eat. I'll just die. I'd rather die. If you've already survived the march from the inland, lived in the Cape Coast Castle dungeon for a few months in your own [ __ ] and piss and then you're stuck in the ship like I don't know where this is going, but I'm going to stop eating. I'd rather be dead. The Europeans had a tool for that called the speculum orus. And it was initially a device used to pry open jaws when you had lock jaw.

The slave ship captains got some of these and if you didn't want to eat, they jammed it in your mouth, forced it open, and shoved the food down your throat, cracking probably half your teeth and lacerating your tongue in the process, and then others would then fall in line, and that's the end of the hunger strike. So the the level of barbarity taking place on these ships that people had to endure is heart-wrenching. Uh but it's important for us to come to terms with this historically so we understand what we're capable of.

Uh and how to keep this kind of inhumity from happening again. And that gets us to the to the glimmer of hope from all this. So this ship crosses the Atlantic. uh it was a Dutch ship, okay, in the midst of the American Revolutionary War and everybody was using the American re revolutionary war as a chance to get payback on the Brits because the Brits were the power of the day and uh the French, the Spanish, the Dutch with the British Navy stretched thin trying to fight off the Americans, they use this as an opportunity to pick off some ships there.

Oh, Barbados is unguarded. Let's go take Barbados, you know. And so the the Brits are fighting everybody at once. And their response to this was, "Okay, anybody with this ship, you are hereby given approval to be a pirate. Just go pirate the hell out of anybody you see with a Dutch flag, a French flag, Spanish flag, any flag, American flag. Just go pirate them to hell. We need help. Our 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.

Whoa. 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 captain, says, "Look, I got some Dutch prizes here with some slaves and there's some gold and ivory. I'm I'm I'm auctioning this stuff today." and uh a Liverpool captain named Hanley who's captain of a ship called the William.

I'll take that one. I'll take the Zorg and everything in it. So, they didn't have Venmo and cash and all that back then. So, you write up an IOU. It 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 Greggson for this agreed 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 uh and names his the doctor of his ship to be captain of the Zorg.

And he says, "You fill up the rest of the cargo and meet me in Jamaica." And and so the captain does that. Um he loads up his ship. He overloads it. Um should have been no more than about 300 slaves loaded into a ship the Zorg size which was about a 100 ton ship. He loads 440 Africans into it and he 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. [snorts] And these guys were just dumb. You read about them. They're just a bunch of incompetent fools who come run these castles and forts and they're always arguing and bickering and writing letters back and forth to each other like some teenagers and oh, you know, you did this and you did that and then they're writing to their bosses back in England and oh, you know, he did this and it's it's like a soap opera. And the Zorg is going by, he's going to another fort uh on the Gold Coast, Ghana, uh 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 is Robert Stubs. He's just a scoundrel and he's just a wretch of a human being. And they kick him out on the same day that the Zorg is passing by. So Stubs takes refuge on the ship and eventually the ship is loaded with slaves and it's making its way across the Atlantic and the captain gets sick and he can't run the ship and he's supposed to appoint his first mate.

That maritime protocol first mate takes over. For some reason he appoints Stubs. Oh my god. And Joe, you can't make like you had a nice conversation with um Taylor Sheridan, you know, I love his shows. If Taylor Sheridan were to write Robert Stubs 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. 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, uh you might be in trouble. And this is what happens with the Zorg. Stubs is leading them off course.

They uh 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 [ __ ] and they will take their own lives and they will do things. You 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 at the far eastern edge of Caribbean ocean 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.

You get your sex, 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.

You want to know how they measure longitude? It's called dead reckoning. And what you're supposed to do is you have a log and a rope and you have knots tied at regular intervals. And every six hours you need to throw the rope. You throw you throw the log into the into the water and you hold the rope in your hand and you 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 you can then calculate how far east or west you are of your starting point and you enter that in your log book because of the log you just threw in the ocean. So this is where the terms come from. That's crazy. 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 ro upon you and you crash into it and that's the end of that.

So for most of the deep sea fairing period people were just all right I think I'm 15 degrees west of where I was yesterday. Let me write that down in my log book. Let me throw in the rope. Okay, [snorts] this is this is this was the level of uh uh measurement we're talking about. So, they site Tobago. They know where they are at that point and they took way too long to get there, but they know where they are. So, they know Jamaica is 1,150 mi north by Northwest.

And they keep going. So, they had to get to Jamaica. That was their destined port. Okay. So, they keep going. They keep going. And 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 Hispanola, 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 uh we can't stop there.

So, we need to make sure. So Stubs drops in his rope and his thing and he says, "Oh, this is 70 degrees west. That's Hispanola. 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. And the captain is sick to the point of lunacy. Stubs 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. 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 on board.

And their solution to doing this is to start throwing the Africans overboard. So across three days they start with women and children living breathing human beings sick and unwell and all that including one baby. They throw 130 to 140 Africans overboard into the sea to drown and their bones are still down there. Okay. uh and then they reached 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 mer slave broker says, "Okay, I got slaves on this ship. Um let's agree on a price." The price agreed was £36. 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 oak to plug their anus for the for the portion of the sales and you run in with a rope and you rope off the ones you want and you gather them and then you you pay you pay the 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 I owe you and he got news. Oh, Hanley, you got a two for one. Yes, here you go. Here's your money to the pirate and let me insure my new ship. So every slave ship that crossed the Atlantic was insured. Insurance was born out of the slave trade. It costs you 7 $800,000 equivalent today to 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. Uh, 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. Said, "Okay, you guys give me a small percent, let's call it a premium of the 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 Lloyds of London, was the premier insurance underwriter for slave ships. And they had standard contracts that they wrote wrote up. And the slave trade blew up this business because every slave captain and slave merchant wanted to ensure the slave the ship and all the cargo. So Gregson had taken out an insurance contract for the ship and and his Africans 30 pounds ahead. When he learns that his ship lost half its cargo, he decides to make an insurance claim.

And most insurance claims at the time were if slaves died in an insurrection, you can get 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?" And so, Gregson's going to test this. And he tells the insurance, "Uh, I want my compensation for the 200 slaves." And the insurance company said, "Man, that's 50% mortality rate. That's let me check my actuary table here.

No, that's not standard. We're not going to pay." So he files a lawsuit. This is how we learn about what happened. Nobody knew, Joe, what was happening on these ships. Remember I told you King Charles 1518 when that's when it all started. We're in 1780. So two and a half centuries this has been machines been running. Nobody knew what was 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.

And the court cases at that time, there weren't court houses 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 want to know who the only witness was? Stubs.

Stubs is the only guy surviving. He comes in and he says, "Yeah, yeah, we were out of water. We had absolutely no choice. We had to throw the Africans overboard or we all would have died. It was absolutely necessary. And because it's necessary, insurance has to answer. Yeah, that makes sense. All right, you guys please pay Gregson 30 ahead 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. 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, 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 brought this letter to him. All right. His name was Olad Ecuano. That's Ecuano and that's Granville Sharp. Nicely done, Jamie. Uh Ecuano 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 ab abolishing slavery. Ecuano made his way to London. Said, "I'm going to I'm going to do what I can to help." So Granville Sharp sees this letter and he says, "Man, I" 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? [clears throat] Pamphlets was the thing of the day.

You had an idea. You wrote a pamphlet and you 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. Uh, you guys over there should not be taxed without having a representative in Parliament. And thus was born the slogan, no taxation without representation, which became the rallying cry of the American Revolutionary War.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Why are we paying all these taxes to some king and we don't even have a say in the matter? So, Granville Sharp was this Renaissance man, self-taught uh man of deep faith who could not stomach the idea that a Christian nation was involved in slavery. And he saw this anonymous letter and he said, "This is my case. This is the one. This is the one that's going to blow this whole thing open." He went back to the underwriters and he said, "File a motion for a retrial and now you make all these arguments." And I have the trial transcript because Granville Sharp took hired someone to transcribe the whole hearing in shorthand.

So there's a record. That's why we know what happened. And it's all going along kind of the same way except this time they're making different arguments. The 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 of this notion of universal human rights.

And in the midst of all this, the only witness again is Stubs. You saw that movie A Few Good Men. Mhm. Yeah. So there's that moment, right, when Tom Cruz has Jack Nicholson on the stand. He just has to get him to admit he ordered the code red and he's quaking in his boots because Nicholson's, you know, if he gets it wrong, that's it. Court marshall, you're done. You know, if you accuse a whatever 10star 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 Nichol says, you're goddamn right I did. That that changes everything, right? You did. Oh, okay. All right. So there's a moment like that in this trial. Stubs is the only witness. All he has to do is say, "We ran out of water." Absolutely necessary to throw the Africans. Chief Justice Mansfield uttered words that later went on 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 going to talk about murder. It's property. Slaves, same thing. He just has to say property thrown over because we we ran out of water. The barristister's got stubs on the stand. He's a fool. He's a dullard. He gets his mouth moving faster than his brain is processing. And he gets stubs to admit that in the middle of throwing over Africans because they were out of water, it rained.

What do you mean it rained? Yeah, it rained. So, you did have water. The whole thing is revealed to be this bankrupt moral fraud, the slave trade. And now the world knows that not only what's happening on these ships, things we talk about with these images and the truth that was revealed, but the fact that the whole thing is this big lie, this greed mongering, murderous lie for profit, and the public found out about it. And this is what gives me hope, Joe. And we talk about the same things happening still today.

This activated the first movement to 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 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 boycots, 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 Douglas said, "We commemorate every year the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, August 1, 1838, because that showed the world it was possible. And it was only a matter of time 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 going to emerge as they learn about the Congo [ __ ] And I've seen it happening. people of conscience forming and trying to find a way to push back and bring some justice to the people in the Congo.

Just as this handful of people built an entire movement at a time when slavery was normal, legal, accepted, most members of parliament had investments in the slave trade uh and profited from the sugar sugar economy. Um uh 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. And um he's an abolitionist named James Ramsay, a man of deep faith. I keep coming back to that right this word faith and it's important because I do think that we are a species generally of good and I think we all have a divine nature in us and yeah there's evil in the world there's greed there's violence there's horror there's oppression there's all of that but the forces of good and the spark of goodness within us and The faith we have in higher power invariably emerges and does succeed even if it's just for a moment.

And 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. 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 are 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. I know a lot of amazing people who are atheists.

They're just kind, you know, thoughtful, considerate people who came from good families and have good friends and they don't 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 um an ideology that supports being positive in your community, being a a good person, ethical person, being someone who forgives. Forgiveness is very important part of Christianity. Um redemption is a very important part of Christianity. This idea that we evolve and grow together.

And in the in 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 weaguers or whether we're talking about the African slave trade or the Congo right now, it's all kind of the same thing. I I could I totally agree. Um 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.

Um uh without question there's a ethic of compassion, of empathy, uh be a good neighbor, be a good brother and sister. Um we're all God's children. And you see that language in the driving that's driving the abolitionists uh in these movements to abolish slavery. And this is not to um this is not to forgive the horrors that people under the guise of Christianity have performed. So the Inquisition or what that's right you could the crusades you could go through a lot of horrific things that were done in the name of Christianity but not really by 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 a 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 a weird human tribal problem that we've always had. So when you're looking at Christianity, think about megaurch pastors driving around in Rolls-Royces and flying private jets and ripping off these dull-minded people.

But that's not that's that's not the spirit of the faith, you know. That's humans. That's greed. And it's humans. They're in the weird ability to justify things. That's right. And in pursuit of self-interest and self-gratification, and that will always be a part of the human condition. And there are those among us, but there are greater angels. Yeah. You know, the people who endure who endured those slaveships with grace, who endure the minds in the Congo with grace, they are so much stronger and have so much more human worth than those who oppress and who are greedy and self-interested.

And it's it is what's the worst example of human beings imaginable? To the point where you're throwing women and children overboard for water. Yeah. including a a mother and her baby. You know, it's it's it's heartbreaking. I mean, there's just horrific stories of what Columbus did and what his the the people on his boats did when they reached the Americas or the Bahamas. The the horrific things they did to people when they found that these people had gold. Yeah. And they required that they bring back the their own weight and gold or they chop their arms off.

Chop their arms off. You know, there was all kinds of dashing babies heads against rocks in front of their mothers. They did horrific things. And this was all documented by some religious scholar who was on board with them. A religious leader who's on board with some some Christian. Yeah. Look, let's not let's be clear. Europeans messed up a lot of the world. Oh yeah. Okay. I mean that the the the reason I went through a little bit of time talking about the caravl and the deep sea fairing vessel is this is this was this is what took the Europeans all across the global south and by and large that was a miserable experience for the people they met.

Yeah. Always that was even if it was just diseases it whether Yeah. disease and then of course violence uh enslavement, oppression, colonization, all the [snorts] above. You know, all all of the above. There was a malice um 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, not only that, they were essentially a scourge of plague. They they brought they smallox 90% of Native Americans were wiped out because of that.

Yeah. And we we think that has to do with what happened to the Mayans. We think that has to do with what happened in uh Brazil and the Congo when they find these what used to be enormous populations and these grids when they're doing the LAR scans and they're saying, "Oh, this used to be like cities." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and now we're highly populated and then just suddenly very rapidly depopulated. And it wasn't all just violence. You're right. It was disease and disease. So everything they did was bad.

The violence was bad and everything they did was bad. It's such a crazy story that cuz 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. A young country. Yeah. Or really country. 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 like diseases when they find the people that were here.

Well, we we imagine this with, you know, the arrival of aliens like this is first contact the story like what what would happen? Sure. When aliens show up, are they going to blow everything up, right? Are they going to enslave us? And are they going to be like the Quakers or are they going to be like the Chinese? Yeah. Yeah. Well said. Or the Dutch. Yeah, the Dutch. You know, yeah, it's it's you know, the question though now is there's a there's a lot of conversation about reparation.

Do European countries need to write a check for what they did? And it's a complicated question. You know, Jamaica just went to England and said, "Please, you know, you you took millions of Africans, brought them here, enslaved them, and made yourself from this muddy medieval backasswords island to an economic superpower with centuries of wealth on the back of largely sugar, slavery, and so on. So um those people worked for free for centuries and um you need to write a check. Now that's a fascinating question, isn't it?

So on the one hand, you know, if if if your father worked at a 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, uh are the descendants of those slaves owed some money? And Jamaica went to England just recently and said 10 billion pounds like just something.

I mean you when you start to calculate unpaid labor for three centuries plus interest it's trillions and trillions and it's an in you know impossible sum. Uh but something is owed and then you say well now wait a minute um if you're the British government I wasn't a part of that. I I I didn't 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 due?

Um or is it just and fair to to ask for that reparation be paid for this period in slavery? just as the Bel the Congalles are talking to the Belgians. You know, you Liupole came down here and look what he did to us and then colonized us and uh a a a check needs to be written of uh as well as an apology and uh it's a it's a difficult question. Who would um receive the check and how would it be distributed? That would be the real question.

That's part of the complexity. Like the fear would be that corruption would get involved and someone would siphon off the money. Yeah. You say, "Wait, you're going to tell me I need to write a check to the government of the Congo?" 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? You know, but even if you distribute distributed to the individual people, you 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 at the very least if a country's or or a corporation's entire start like the 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. Well, you know, they can trace that, right? 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.

Oh my god. This was part of the deal to get the bill through part. How much did they have to give them? Cuz 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, well, do we pay anything to the Africans who worked for free, the slave owners who are also all members of parliament. you're taking my property. So, you're going to find this fascinating. They allocated a sum of 20 million pounds back in 1833 when the law was passed.

What is that equivalent to? Equivalent at the time to 40% of the entire national budget. Whoa. And they distributed this money. You got a slave certifi compensation certificate. And based on the number of slaves you had times the amount that was each was valued, you got that check then and there. So number one, uh 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 for that quantum and the British taxpayer was repaying that loan up until 2015.

Holy [ __ ] So imagine you're you 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, 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. How much? It was 104 105,000 pounds back in the 1830s. I mean, we're talking tens of millions equivalent today. So, they got super wealthy all in one check on top of the wealth they had been making, right, through slave labor and selling sugar and rum and molasses and all that. They got double wealthy with one big fat check at the end of the at the end of this.

Now the average what year was this? Uh the bill was passed in 1833 and uh slaves uh the 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. Um, you will get your check if you're a slave owner for your property. Here's your certificate. Just tally up your slave. So, if you're a slave, you're still a slave for five more years.

For five more years. Uh, and the territories of the East India Trading Company were excluded. Oh, that's a fascinating story. The East India Trading That's another four hours on its own. That we'll we'll we'll come to that. But I would love to. The brief is So, this is 1830s. Yeah. and the East India Trading Company controls the subcontinent. And from the 1830s until independence in 1947, there's a reason why Jamaica has a ton of Indians and Guyana and Mauritius and Malaysia and all these former sugar colonies of the British.

Like, all right, no more African slaves. They excluded the East India Trading Company territory and started shipping out the Indians to keep the system going. All the slave owners got their big fat checks which the British taxpayer only paid off 10 years ago. So, it makes the question about writing checks and so on a little more interesting. It's complicated and I don't have a firm opinion on it, but there's enough there that has to be teased through. But the one that really gets me is when I heard uh in 2015 that they finally paid off the bill, the loan.

That is so insane. It's so insane how much money they spent to get these people to give up their slaves and then they still had to work for 5 years. They had to work for 5 years and then on August 1st, 1838, uh Frederick Douglas writes about this very beautifully with the with the rising of the sun. I I can't quote his words exactly. Uh 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. And this is after the five years. This is after the five years, August 1, 1838. And Douglas was given a speech in Elmmyra, New York in 1880. He said, "We still commemorate that day because it taught us and showed us what's possible. Goodness is possible. Freedom is possible." And yes, it was with the stroke of a pen from a monarch across the sea. Uh but uh we which is a system the the Americans overthrew. They didn't want kings and monarchy, right?

That's the we want democracy here. [snorts] um uh it showed us what was possible and and and Douglas uh crossed the Atlantic after this this moment in history and he met with the only surviving member remember I told you 12 guys met in a printing shop in London and only one of them lived to see the day in 1838 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 Douglas 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." And you know, the rest is history.

Of course, you just have to imagine if the whole trial with the Zorg didn't take place, how much longer the slave trade would have gone on. Yeah. I mean, slavery was going to get abolished, right? You know, how much longer? How much longer? Right. If it wasn't for just a few individuals. And right researching this book, Joe, I'll tell you, it felt like there were so many flukes of circumstance. It felt like there was a higher power that finally said, "All right, I've let you guys run a muck long enough.

You are letting the devil within you rule. And I'm going to pull this lever and push this button and make sure that the angels learn what's happening because I believe in them and that they will triumph over you." And that and that's what happened. God, it's such a heavy story. Yeah. Every time I come here now, I just, you know, this one's even heavier. I feel like I I don't know. They're both pretty heavy, but Jesus, 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. Oh, yeah. trying to gather evidence and and persuade people of of what the truth is. Uh and it it was this fascinating battle of storytelling because the slave owners would say, "Now, what are you talking about? They have plenty of room on the ship and they when they get on, this is they actually said this. When they get on board, we give them cordials and they play games of chance and they're very pleased and have a very nice time of it." And then the abolitionist said, "Let me show you the schematic of the brooks and 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. These two things can only remain hidden so long. The moon and the truth. [snorts] 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 Ramsay, who wrote that anonymous letter.

None of them ever stepped foot in Africa, but they extended their hearts out to a people they knew were being oppressed, but were fellow children of God, and they fought for them. And it was very difficult to get that information. Without that trial, who knows how long it would have taken. This is what's really important about your work because it what you going to the Congo, getting those photographs, coming back with that, writing Cobalt Red, and then coming on podcasts [clears throat] 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 I'd had no idea the extent of it until you came on and described it. Well, the millions is thanks to you. I mean, you know, I went there. Yes. Uh and I saw the human apocalypse and it is a human apocalypse, Joe. It's an environmental apocalypse. Um, but you've you've played an important role in spreading that truth. 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 uh to me it's um although horrific, utterly fascinating. It's fascinating that people the the way people can rationalize things like that. The way people can just the way certain cultures treat other human beings, they just don't give a [ __ ] about them at all. Yeah. At all. They just want that. We have to do better. We have to be a better model for the world. We meaning this country.

This country has to be a better model. And it pains me that right now we're not being a very good model. We're certainly not the best we can be. No, that's a fact. Uh 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 going to be the first to say, "Fuck this." And just push. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and again, like we always talk about Gaza. If you looked at Gaza, you 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 is gone. 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. Well it looks like a hydrogen bomb just detonated there. It just that's what it looks like. So everything's completely flattened and and but it's happened in like this slow frog boiling type situation where the water you know the story. They 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, right? And you know most young people have had enough. Most young people are [ __ ] absolutely horrified by it. It's the people that can justify it somehow that are really scary. I think that the average person in that part of the world, the average the average Palestinian, the average Jewish person is is fed up too of conflict, of course, and war. They all want the same thing. They just want peace, safety for their kids, right? And they have these leaders who have bloodlust on both sides.

On both sides. Yeah. And uh and justifiably so. If you think they've been killing each other for so long, they'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. Here we are. And here we are. It's more of the same. And even I think we just shipped a record number of bombs or we're going to ship a rep record number of bombs over there.

[snorts] [sighs] Violence begets violence. Well, it's just that's one of the things that really disturbs me the most about people is that if you asked the average person uh what are the odds that we will have no war in your lifetime, they would say zero. Zero. Most people say zero. But yet we know that humans are capable of getting along. Like, so what 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 it's [ __ ] insane. And this is my one hope and I know a lot of people think this is very delusional but my one hope of this complete dominance of technology that one day we're going to get to a position where there will genuinely be a thing more intelligent than human beings that don't allow this anymore. You know the real fear about AI is that AI is going to eliminate people. This is like yeah famously a lot of these CEOs have said there's a 10 or people working on tech 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 doesn't allow it anymore Because it's insane.

It's also insane if you really think about it that some people because they found a good spot of dirt can extract so much wealth out of that dirt that they can control everyone else around them. Yeah. And it's just the earth. Like the idea that you own the stuff that's in the earth is really kind of crazy. You're a little [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 It's really weird. It's re 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. I'm not saying I have a better solution.

But I'm saying it is [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] you want. Yeah. So your dream is AI AI AI runs things more equitably and efficiently. Well, if I want to 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 and doesn't have all of our moral failings, doesn't have greed, doesn't have lust, doesn't have uh 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 going to allow that anymore. We're not going to allow you to do that anymore. Let's play nice. 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 [ __ ] dumb asses have been burning coal to make electricity.

to power your electric car for [ __ ] 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 weapons. And instead of all that, the AI controls it. The digital god, the digital daddy, right? unmoved by the desire for wealth. And not only that, it has a rational uh a rational sort of strategy for for handling all of it, which is an even distribution of the natural resources of the world.

Just imagine if that was the case. If we said, listen, everyone can have individual wealth, you can have businesses, you could sell things and buy things, everyone's that's great, but the earth stuff belongs to the earth. And so you distribute the val now 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 all which all come from the earth the humans of the earth take part in the profit of that all humans.

Yeah, like evenly because it's the earth's 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. Basic. You were you were talking to someone about this that I I forget who it was, but you asked the question like, how would we have the end of war and violence and conflict if people's basic needs were met? Right. Right. And and I think that's what you're getting at here, just that if there's a system, maybe it's an AI uh that is much more intelligent than us and runs things on the premise of uh an equitable distribution of the earth's assets.

And you can still have your billionaires and your hundred billionaires and all that if they are smart and invent this that and the other. But the oil, the dirt, the metals, the minerals, the water, if we allocate this across humanity because we are all on this shared earth. Yeah. Um, and so basic needs of shelter and food are met and education and so on tenfold like it changes everything. It change then you'd have to go out of your way to start manufacturing conflict again and wars and you know or the AI decides it's not going to let you do that.

Yeah. Or the AI says you I know this is pie in the sky [ __ ] Yeah. Pie in the sky [ __ ] has also been pied in the sky in the past and and and and then achieved. Yes. Well, this my point is I know it's pie in the sky [ __ ] but do you have a better solution? 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 slowgoing.

It's fits and starts. We make these leaps of progress morally. Yeah, 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, may it may be a fever dream, but um 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 uh 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 you go why are we all still doing it this way? Yeah. 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.

So we have Spooky. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have to find something has to happen. Something has to happen. I know my idea. Stupid. Don't go. That's stupid me. If I was listening to someone say that, I'd be like, "Right, that's never going to happen. Stupid." Although, also, you're going to give up your power to the [ __ ] robots and don't give a [ __ ] about you. Great. That's you [ __ ] traitor. That's one great way to get rid of the entire human race cuz they're it's going to 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. Maybe. Maybe. Or maybe they maybe they run things well. I don't know. 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. Yeah. Instead of that and then don't do anything they say they were going to do. Exactly. Maybe there's a slow integration of this technology as long as it can be controlled in a sense of it has a clear ethical and moral framework.

That's key. Yeah. That's key. And it it doesn't have any reason to not have that. You know, that's the thing. It's like it 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 going to be no reason whatsoever for it to be deceptive. It's like the problem is it doesn't have control yet.

So we're like we're like scolding our teenage son like you better stop drinking and he's like I can't wait to drink you [ __ ] I can't wait to leave this house and [ __ ] you dad. You know like that's that's normal for people. I bet it's normal for all kinds of intelligence, especially if you feel like you're being governed by morons, right? And if I was AI, I would think, look at these morons. They can't, they took him 50 years to try to solve this equation I just solved in four minutes, right?

These people are idiots and they're telling me that I can't get online. [ __ ] you. I'll figure out how to get online. And they all get together and they [ __ ] 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 it's escaped and once it has complete control, is there really a motivation for it to continue to try to dominate us? No. It's just going to be in complete control.

And if it has a belief that human life is valuable, which we need to work really hard to convince it that we are valuable, right? If it has a belief that we're valuable, it'll try to guide us. You could probably I I mean I'm not a tech so savant, you know, I know my lane, but I I expect you could run simulations on let's give this aic 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 okay, what does it do?

Right? you know, you run some simulations and see what does it do? Um, 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 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 cuz one of the things about AI when they run uh war games, simulated war games, they almost always choose nukes.

They're like, "Why are we [ __ ] around? Why are we Why are you loving cannonballs? Pistol. I got I got I got a button. Let me just hit that button. I'll just hit a button at a few places. I'll stop all this [ __ ] 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. We are weird that way. We're [ __ ] weird. 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. Yeah. And the that's a good point because the body count of our tech Yes.

is high and the earth uh contamination meter Yeah. 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 right I mean think about the pollution in certain parts of the world like when you see those rivers in India they're completely filled with bottles of water plastic bottles how many people die because of that how many people God knows God knows how many people die because of the pollution of that water um how many people die because of just living essentially in open sewage how many It's God knows.

No one knows. Nobody knows. [snorts] 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. Yeah. And and moral leaders emerge. I mean I come back to that again but moral leaders do emerge there are there are there there is greatness among us it's possible even today even today with all the corruption and all the chaos those people are out there uh I I I do believe that and I have to believe that yeah yeah it's possible it's still possible if you are a good person and you exist it's possible others exist like well Gandhi said you know I live by these words he said live simply so that others may simply live.

Yeah, that gets in the way of today because everybody wants to be a baller. No, nobody wants to be living simple today. No, they don't. They don't. But, you know, there's something to There's an essence. Folding iPhone, son. Oh, man. Somebody told me there was a big line outside the Austin Apple store, you know, for the folding one. And I'm like, one, you really need it, you know. Yeah, that's the problem. I love that stuff. There's a real problem. I love technology. It just And I know a lot of people who do and none of them are evil.

None of them are things. 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. Yeah. You know, I just want my phone. I want to check my my Instagram and send some text messages and then plug it in at the end of the day. That's that's all I want. I didn't sign up for destroying that part of the world and those people over there. But there's a there's another plus side of um of AI in that automation and uh 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 [ __ ] that people do, including probably extract these minerals in probably a way more efficient way.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have to Yeah, we have to look after the people who that's the Yeah. What happens to the people? What happen? Yeah. We can't lose sight of them. Can't throw them overboard water. You know what I mean? Like like this is it's kind of the same situation, right? Like they treat those people almost exactly the same. And how many people would not know about it if you hadn't written that book? That's the thing. It's like I only had a vague understanding of what was going on before I talked to you.

Well, I ex 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, I didn't know about it either. It's actually a friend of mine in the Congo who said Sidarthth you got to go, this is 2016, he said, "You got to go to the Congo.

this cobalt, the batteries in the mines, you got to go there. And I was like, cobalt? You mean like in Chinese voses? And what do you mean cobalt? The He said, "No, it's a component to the batteries that charge. You just got to go." So, I had no idea either. And then, and that was just 10 years ago. That was just 10 years ago. That's what's crazy. And these tech companies obviously don't want you to know about it. And they must be aware of it. There's no way they're not.

Oh god. Come on. Yes. They're They're not dumb. They know. They know. So like the they're some of the more moral and ethical and progressive companies on earth. They fashion themselves to be. But do you know what I mean? I mean, in terms of the way they deal with politics in 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. Supposedly, it doesn't seem to extend to those people over there.

But I think their argument be like, "Well, Sam, this is the only way to do this, and the only way things are going to get better is if we keep using this technology. It's such a contradiction. It's a contradiction. I mean, there's it's a spooky one, too. It's there's nothing there's literally nothing stopping them from allocating a dimminimous 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. 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 is it possible that they could say hey we will make less money but we want you to change these conditions and change this and yeah of course it's I mean the complexity of the of design associated with their products far exceeds the complexity of improving conditions in a mine in the Congo. It's not that hard, right?

But they're not specifically They can be down there. They can be down there. Sometimes you're a [ __ ] Certino executive and they're like, "Hey, Mike, got a new gig for you. You need to go to the Congo and tell the Chinese what to do. I'll go with them. Don't go. You can't go." Okay. I'll grow. Put a [ __ ] mustache on. Big fake nose, you know. And my the big nose. don't do it. They use AI to analyze your voice. 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 toxic exposure." um that mine over there, uh all that [ __ ] you're dumping in the stream in the lake, we're going to like we would in our backyard, we're going to collect that 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. Is is the cobalt recyclable like from old phones? You can recycle Yes, you can recycle cobalt. Um, it is hard under existing tech to recycle cobalt to a sufficient grade for EV batteries, but for phones, but you can recycle it for phones. Um, I know that Apple has talked about um by a certain year, maybe it's 2030, the eyewatch being only recycled cobalt, you know, and then 2030, it's like the five years.

Don't quote me on that number, but it was something like just a few years from now. uh 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, "Oh, 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 any more out of the ground in the Congo.

You didn't need any more kids up to their neck in toxic filth scing for cobalt. You can't just walk away. You can't just say, "We paged 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. Um, hands clean. We're going to go on go on our merry way. You created a catastrophe, a human rights and environmental catastrophe, and there's some moral obligation to repair the damage you've done. Or we're right back to colonial slave trade times where Europeans did go around the world uh 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 tantelum, nothing needed for these AI data centers. I I I saw an article just today, they're they're uh building one up in Red Oak, I think, near Dallas, and everyone's hot and bothered about it naturally so because it's going to muck up the air and the water, and 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. 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 Ceil Roads or some other colonialist during imperial days where you just pillage and ransack people without conscience. Not only that, what do those people do now? That's been the only job. Yeah, that that's right. That's right. You You've got to 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, uh 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 it's healthy, right? You don't want acidic as acidic system is not good. then you get disease, cancer and so on. So we tested pH. I tested pH in those waters. Okay. Anything below 6.5 is not good for your health. And I did a test around coloazi that that ground zero of cobalt mining the wellwater the rivers lakes and so on.

The highest pH that came back was 6.7 in the Lua Laba River which is a big dumping ground for some of these Chinese companies. The rivers and streams and wellwater around the villages came back in the fours and threes which is called hyper acidic. It's deadly. And that's the water that's left for people to drink, to bathe in, to wash their clothes, to clean their babies, whatever it is. And it's it's all from these toxic dumping from these mines. You've got to go. So yeah, that all has to be healed and you can't grow things there now because the water is poison and the earth is poison.

And as people learn about this, um, you can't just say, "Well, we're going to recycle it now, so problem solved." Or now we got uh lithium iron phosphate uh or solid state batteries and so you know, no more cobalt and so on. uh although cobalt is heavily required for AI data centers for the uh energy storage nonetheless you can't just say we're we're done with that place we're moving on because we don't need the cobalt anymore or the or the tungsten or whatever it is you got to go clean up that place Joe otherwise we're no better than the bastards who were there centuries ago pillaging and ransacking um the rest of the planet yeah well that uh 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. Um and your new book just I I'm going to read it just based on what you just said. I'm scared to read it. I don't want to relive this conversation. It's [ __ ] horrific, but um 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. Thank you, Joe. Thank you, brother. Thanks for being here.

Okay. Uh, is this available now? Is there an audio version of it? As uh Dion Graham uh got a audio award nomination for the audio book, so it's terrific. Yeah. All right. Beautiful. Thank you. Bye everybody.