#2556 - Siddharth Kara

30:15And, 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.

31:02I would say so. Now, one thing that's changed since you and I talked is there's actually a U.S. mining company now operating in that part of the Congo. There wasn't one for a better part of two decades. And one of the mines, which is owned by Dubai, Middle Eastern guys, part of the Trump administration sort of piece for minerals arrangement between President Shishikedi and the Trump administration was mining access. And so one concession was sold to this U.S. mining company. It's called Virtuse Mining, and they're run by former military guys. And they took over a couple of copper cobalt concessions in Lubumbashi and Koloise, both sides of the copper belt.

31:45That's just this year. So within the last few months. And I haven't been there to look, but I talk to colleagues all the time. I say, look, is Virtue's, are they doing things any better? And the feedback I've gotten so far is they seem to be improving standards around artisanal mining. There's still artisanal mining, but improving standards around it. When we say artisanal mining, you went into depth about this the first time we talked, but we should just tell people that thing, artisanal, sounds awesome. It sounds like a great cup of coffee, like fair trade. It's a nice place. Fresh baked bread.

32:23Yeah, like someone's got a beautiful ceramic cup they serve you the coffee in. Artisanal mining is pretty much the opposite of that. It's the games people play with words, right? No. So artisanal mining means you've got mom, dad and their kids up to here in toxic grit and filth digging yeah this is the fact that you can use that same word artisanal with this that you can with a nice coffee shop is crazy it's crazy that's so this is uh you know i got in imagine if you were learning english you're like what the fuck does artisanal actually mean like how how are the two things what like this language is messed How are these both artisanal?

33:05That's crazy. How is my espresso and that artisanal? For lack of a better term, these mines, it's all basically the poorest people on earth. It's all brute, raw human labor. It's tens of thousands of people. And there's kids down there, too. Okay? You just can't see in this massive community. There's also, you've shown mothers with their babies on their backs. Mothers with babies on their backs. So that's what the mining industry calls artisanal. Okay? it's kids with 40, 50 kilogram sacks of cobalt on their necks, clambering out of a pit. Cobalt is toxic to touch. It is toxic to breathe. All these kids get respiratory distress, cancers.

33:47The women get birth defects, congenital disease. Here's a teenager with a baby. These are all my photos, okay, that have found their way onto the internet. That kid's probably eight, and she's probably 13 or 14 and she's got this baby. I remember that, Joe, that's in the hills above Kembov. That's the story I told you last time where that's probably the closest I came to getting shot was in this mining area. It was almost all children run by a militia north of a town called Kembov and it is all copper cobalt. It all gets sold right into the industrial supply chain. People need to accept this truth.

34:28The 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. But these militia guys come barreling up the hill with AK-47s. And I thought that was it for me. I mean, this is the story I told you last time.

35:06I 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, 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, Siddhartha, 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.

35:41And that will convey to any militia that you're under the governor's protection, and they're not going to fuck with you. They won't. They'll mess with you, but they're not They're not going to kill you. They're not going to kill you. And I had to go get that stamp. I had to persuade the governor of Otkatanga province that I was there not to shame the Congo. I was seeking truth that I think his people are being exploited by the global north and this whole tech fever for rechargeable stuff. And he put his little stamp on it. And, you know, that was the only time I met him. only time I saw him, but I had that stamp.

36:21So when I was up there and my stuff getting thrown around, they had their guns pointed at me and my guide, his face went pale. And I was, I thought, this is it. This is it for Kara up on this hill, middle of nowhere. And my guide just gestured. And I knew what he was, what he was, what he was intending. 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. They let us go. So when you go into conflict zones, you have to have that kind of local advice because it can mean the difference between living and being shot and dumped in some ditch where these little girls with babies.

37:05That'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. 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 and 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 like same like that video of the 15 000 people you know i just managed to do this and tuck it away. Because that was also controlled by militias, that particular site.

37:44And that mine is classified industrial, which means only heavy equipment being used to source the copper and the cobalt. And that mine is in the bottom of the supply chains, in the disclosure documents of every tech and EV companies. He's one of the biggest copper cobalt suppliers out of the Congo. And you get in there and you say, this is not industrial at all, nor is it baked bread and espresso. This is hell on earth. You know, this is – am I transported back to Egyptian times and, you know, raw brute slave labor being made to build a pyramid? In this case, to excavate a giant pit of ore, I can still hear the clanging in that place and the shouting.

38:40This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right. JoeRogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website, like an AI-enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links. Head to squarespace.com slash rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code rogan to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. This episode is brought to you by the farmer's dog. Here's a fun fact.

39:20Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are overweight. Isn't that wild and also kind of obvious at the same time? So why is feeding vague scoops of ultra processed kibble still the status quo for most dog owners? Healthy alternatives exist. And trust me, I know. I buy one, the farmer's dog. I use it for both my dogs. They love it. They eat it up quick. It smells good to them. It smells good to me. It's human-grade food. The farmer's dog makes fresh food for dogs, and my dogs love it. Their recipes are made with real meat and fresh vegetables that are gently cooked to retain vital nutrients.

40:03They also portion out the meals to your dog's nutritional needs, which helps avoid overfeeding and makes weight management easier. And isn't getting more time with our four-legged best friends something every dog owner wants? The answer to that is yes, obviously. So try The Farmer's Dog today and get 50 % off your first box of fresh, healthy food. Plus, get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com slash rogan. This offer is for new customers only. 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.

40:42Because your book is all about the Atlantic slave trade. And it's called the Zorg. Yeah. And it's a tale of greed and murder that inspired the abolition of slavery. And just imagine, like, those boats carried people from pretty much that same place or close to it. Yeah. This ship, 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.

41:29And 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 inhumanity that sparked the first movement to abolish slavery. And it's that sequence that is so vital for us to understand historically. People can't fix a horror until they learn about it. and the average person I've learned is not evil. We may be generally self-interested and worried about us and ours and so on, but we're not evil. And when we learn about something wrong, we generally feel something and want to do something about it. And that's what happened. This was the ship that told the whole world what was happening in the slave trade, and a small community of faith-based moral leaders said, this is unacceptable.

42:24This is beneath us and we're going to devote our lives to abolishing slavery. The other thing that this journey is, you know, 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. And it's essential to know this history because it tells us why we are where we are.

43:15at this point in history and as a moral or lack of moral species on this earth, because we do at times have these periods of great inhumanity to each other. And the slave trade is one of them. And I learned so much researching this book. And the feedback I get from readers is, man, I knew slavery. I had a sense, but I had no idea just how horrible it was. do you the fact that does it dishearten you to know that essentially the same thing is happening right now as this book like in the western world people don't believe that you know i had a discussion the other day with someone who was talking about how we're doing better today we abolish slavery and i said no we abolish slavery right here yeah 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 slavery is abolished.

44:12But in practice, the institution of oppressing, subjugating and extracting the labor of someone persists and has evolved into the modern era. Not only that, like how many underage workers are working in this country that are undocumented? Yeah. I mean, who knows what the number is? but millions around the world, tens of millions around the world. But this history is important. This history is important because, and this ship is important, because it reveals the depth of our inhumanity while simultaneously showing us the capacity for good in our nature because it did spark that first movement to abolish slavery.

45:06And it was faith-based leaders that were doing this? Yeah, it was the Anglican Church leaders in the— the first movement to abolish slavery was in England. And it was sparked directly by this ship. And so people can read the book and understand what happened on the ship, But it goes on its journey, picking up Africans along the West African coast. And I went to West Africa to see the old forts and castles that are there that Europeans built to facilitate the slave trade. They lined the West African coast with a higher concentration of fortifications than existed anywhere in Europe. Little forts and castles and dungeons to gather human beings.

45:53And 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 houses, slave dealers. And people would die, of course. They're yoked at the neck and tied. And many people didn't survive a five, six, 800-mile march. 800-mile march. Yeah, there's journal entries I came across. One captain, slave ship captain named John Newton. John Newton's a fascinating guy because he became an abolitionist and a preacher. And he wrote hymns. And probably the most famous hymn he wrote was Amazing Grace.

46:37Whoa. So Amazing Grace is written by a slave trader. Whoa. So John Newton, John Newton's from Liverpool. Liverpool was once capital of the slave trade. We think of Beatles when we think Liverpool or the football club. But it was once the dominant force in the entire European Atlantic slave trade, Liverpool. And Newton was one of those captains. He captained three slave ship journeys. They called it the triangular trade. And what that meant was is ships departed Europe, in this case Liverpool, with tradable goods, mirrors, knives, rum, brandy, cutlery, crockery, linens, bandanas, whatever. cowrie shells, took all that stuff down to Western Africa, where Europeans had built some castles and forts.

47:31And 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 all the way up into the Sahel, marched down. A quarter to a third of them didn't survive. And so this is the dungeon at Cape Coast Castle. Whoa. Okay. And let me tell you something about this place, Joe. So this is a man.

48:14So John Newton had in his journal, brought on board today, Africans marched, I think, 1 ,000 miles from the inland. Okay. So they were marched down and eventually sold to the Europeans who run these forts and castles all along the coast. The biggest one was Cape Coast Castle. The British and the Dutch had one just cannon shot away called 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 would be, at any given time, a thousand human beings in there, shackled down.

48:54One 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. You see that groove down the floor of the dungeon. and that's supposed to siphon away their piss and shit and menstrual blood. And so you can imagine 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.

49:37So you're marched from the inland regions hundreds of miles, maybe didn't survive that. If you did, you're in this dungeon. You're spending months down here. And then eventually, there's the male slave dungeon entrance at Cape Coast Castle. So eventually, the ships come from Western Europe with all their stuff. And they come up to Cape Coast Castle. They park in the roads. They drop anchor. It's about a mile or two offshore. They take a canoe up to the castle, and they meet the governor. and the governor says, okay, 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.

50:14They 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 then they purchase these slaves and then brand them. And they brand them, put some palm oil on their shoulder, brand them so they know which one they bought because they're going to go down to the next fort, buy a few, buy a few. And then when they've got all the several hundred to load up the ship, they come back and get them.

50:52When 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 some sections that are smooth, and they had one that was just perfectly smooth. And I said, why is this so perfectly smooth here? He said, we left this just the way we found it. This is the sedimented urine, piss, shit, menstrual blood of the people who were held here for centuries.

51:36And we don't learn that. We don't learn that when we learn about slavery. We don't learn about these visceral details of what people had to endure before they even were put on the ship. Now, let's talk about the ship, you know, which is a floating dungeon. The deep sea-faring 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. I jumped, sorry. The visual imagery. We talk about abolition, all right? We're going to talk about the first use of a viral image, which Jamie gave us a prelude to. So the deep seafaring vessel, it's a testament to European genius and ambition and vision and exploration.

52:38There'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 started going south, and they hit the Canaries, Canary Islands, off the coast of West Africa. Shipwreck, shipwreck, shipwreck. The winds were just too intense, too violent, too countervailing.

53:20Their ships could not handle it. Portuguese invented a specific sail called a Latin rig. It's shaped like a triangle. and rather than a traditional square sail that gets pushed by the wind, the Latin rig, you can swivel it to function like a bird's wing so you can tack into the wind like a bird does. And so the Portuguese were the first to get past the Canary Islands, 1420s, 1430s. And the caravel takes Europeans south of the Canaries and they get down to the west coast of Africa. They round the Cape of Good Hope, and by the end of the 15th century, the Portuguese have reached India.

54:12Extraordinary exploration, triumph of navigation and genius. And we get Christopher Columbus. Oh, man, Portuguese have been all the way over to India, and they had to go all the way around Africa. Maybe there's a shortcut. I'm going to go that way. Let me go that way. He's got to be a shortcut. You know, so he goes west. I'm going to find a better way. He lands in the Bahamas. India! Indians! All right, okay. We laugh, but I mean, he crossed the Atlantic in his ship. He got here. and he starts the Spanish reconnoitering of this part of the planet. The Pope, Alexander VI, says, Okay, you Spanish, you Portuguese, you're starting to suss out the rest of the world, and I want you to get along.

55:11So 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.

55:33Now, the Europeans came across something during the Crusades that captivated their taste buds. They called it sweet salt. Today we call it sugar. No sugar in Europe until 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. 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, 1300 Europeans. Like, oh, these Arabs have got some sugar. It's nice.

56:25They're getting it from cane? They're just processing it? Sugar cane, yeah. So, 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, sugar. Sugar is another level, right? Yeah. Sugar is another level. So they divide the world and they start setting up their sugar plantations. And the Portuguese tap into existing systems of slavery in Africa. Let's be clear about that. Europeans didn't bring slavery to Africa. There was slavery there. They tap into those systems to populate their sugar plantations along the African coast with slave labor.

57:08Now the Spanish decimate native populations. Okay, the Mayans, the Aztecs, they get here and through guns and disease and war and they're decimating local populations. Mayans. Mayans. Yeah. So they don't have a labor force. So King Charles in 1518 says, okay, Portuguese, you got these Africans. Can you send some over here? And that's 1518. So the Portuguese, he 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 sugar plantations.

57:57And the Portuguese and the Spanish are running this triangular circuit, bringing goods down to Africa, buying Africans, taking them across. There you go. dropping them in sugar plantations and then getting the output of sugar labor which is sugar rum molasses whatever taking it back to europe selling it and then repeating the triangle 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 they had they had nothing nothing they They had nothing west. Nothing west. When the Portuguese first started going south, they had nothing of Africa except the northern coast from Roman times.

58:41When you look at maps in the 1400s, it's blank slate. That's nuts. And they were first attracted by gold, right? They heard these stories, these mythical stories of gold. And when the Portuguese got to West Africa, they called it Costa de la Mina de Oro, the coast of gold mines. There was gold everywhere. The slave trade came later because of sugar. Then the British and the Dutch. So sugar was the start? Sugar was the dominant force of the slave trade. 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.

59:26Wow. This episode is brought to you by Manscaped. Listen up, fellas. Manscaped just dropped the all-new Lawn Mower Ultra Gen 6 with some pretty serious upgrades. You got two interchangeable blade heads, a bi-directional foil blade that I really like. I can go forward or backward without having to keep making multiple passes. And then you've got the floating head that moves with you instead of fighting you. The battery life is another big one for me. Up to 100 minutes of runtime. Plus, you get a digital display with your battery level, blade replacement reminders, tutorials, and it even lets you order replacement blades.

1:00:04If, like me, you're already using a body groomer, this is a serious upgrade. Head to manscaped.com. Use code JRE to get 15 % off plus free shipping at checkout. That's 15 % off plus free shipping with code JRE at manscaped.com. Or if you need it today, it's available now at Best Buy. 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.

1:00:45So on the eve of the American Revolution, just to give you a sense. OK, so we're talking 1773, 1774. By this time, the British are the dominant force in the Atlantic slave trade, and they became the dominant force taking over Caribbean islands. Their prize was Jamaica, which became the largest sugar plantation economy in the world at that time. So on the eve of the Revolutionary War, of course, they had the 13 American colonies and they had some Caribbean islands. just to give you a sense of how important sugar was. If you take all the exports from all 13 American colonies and you take sugar from Jamaica, the value of those sugar exports from Jamaica was five times the combined value of all 13 exports of everything from all 13 colonies.

1:01:42Wow. So sugar generated enormous wealth for Western Europe. And so thus the slave trade persisted and persisted. Are any of the companies that were making sugar back then, are they still around? Not that I'm aware, no. I mean, the way sugar is made today, of course, is different than the slave plantations that were erected by first Portugal and Spain, then later the British and the Dutch. So Zorig is actually a Dutch slave ship. and it set sail around in October 1780. So we're in the heart of American Revolutionary War and the British had been the dominant force of the slave trade. So remember I told you we're in the dungeon, okay, and the slave captain comes around and he's bartering for these people and he spends a couple of months acquiring Africans in this castle, this fort, this place, brands them And then eventually he loads up his ship with, depending on the size of the ship, three, four, five, six hundred Africans.

1:02:50And 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, designed for human cargo. So the bottom was the food and water. And then they had what's called the tween deck. And, all right, Jamie, you can throw up that photo now. We're ready. All right. So here you've got the tween deck. All right. This is the schematic. And this is an important schematic. This is the Brooks slave ship out of Liverpool. And you see the bottom of the tween deck. The ship master is showing you how to line up the Africans.

1:03:27They're given 16 inches of space each. Like, to quote John Newton, who we talked about, like books on a shelf. They're to be entered and stowed like books on a shelf. 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.

1:04:11You're shackled down, laying down, and then there's a partition built, and then there's another level of people, like the overhead bin space. Okay? You're just lining these people up, and they're lined up like this for two months to cross the Atlantic. 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 what they call the tween deck, this cargo here. And if you needed the bathroom, you had to try and get to that bucket with your chained partner, your chained two by two.

1:05:02And of course, you never made it in time. And the ship is tossing and turning. And so in a matter of just a few days or a week, this entire deck is covered in human piss and shit and blood and vomit and misery. 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 shipmaster telling you how you can maximize the profit in the Brooks slave ship that he's building for the Brooks-Liverpool family. And line these people up. Now they're brought up in the morning and doused with seawater and given a little bit of food and half pint of water to drink.

1:05:55The men are kept in the front of the ship and the women and children in the back, and they built a barricade down the middle to keep the men on one side because you can imagine, let's say you're one of these Africans. You got that roll of the dice. You're going to try to do anything you can to get control of that ship. And so slave insurrections were a common effort at resistance. And so Europeans built a barricade down the middle of every slave ship so that if somehow the slaves managed to revolt, they would quickly get to the back, the stern side where they could still control the ship. They had cannons mounted on the barricade to suppress the insurrection.

1:06:44They would shoot a cannon into their own boat? It was either that or lose the ship. And usually a couple of shots would quell the insurrection. Now, you had to punish the insurrectionists. And I'm telling you this because captains wrote about all this stuff. They wrote about this. And then there was one captain out of Liverpool who said, I find that the punishment for an insurrection that works best to ensure that there's not another one is if you take one of the insurrection leaders, chop him to pieces while he's alive, and distribute the pieces to the other slaves. This seems to quell any further effort at insurrection.

1:07:24Horror. Just horror. Now, they'd be whipped, and you can imagine what happened to women and girls.

1:07:37One slave captain said, sailors gratify their passions brute-like in front of the others with girls not 10 years old. You know, people, there were no laws on that ship. It was in a moral abyss out in the middle of the ocean. And so in the case of the Zorg, they're taking these Africans across the Atlantic. And this is the kind of stuff that happens. There's an insurrection. That's one form of protest. 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 shit and piss, and then you're stuck in the ship, I don't know where this is going, but I'm going to stop eating.

1:08:34I'd rather be dead. Europeans had a tool for that called the Speculum Auris. And it was initially a device used to pry open jaws when you had lockjaw. Slave ship captains got some of these. And if you didn't want to eat, they jammed it in your mouth, forced it open, and shoved the food down your throat, cracking probably half your teeth and lacerating your tongue in the process. And then others would then fall in line. And that's the end of the hunger strike. So the level of barbarity taking place on these ships that people had to endure is heart-wrenching. But it's important for us to come to terms with this historically so we understand what we're capable of and how to keep this kind of inhumanity from happening again.

1:09:30And that gets us to the glimmer of hope from all this. So this ship crosses the Atlantic. It was a Dutch ship, okay, in the midst of the American Revolutionary War. And everybody was using the American Revolutionary War as a chance to get payback on the Brits. because the Brits were the power of the day. And the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, with the British Navy stretched thin, trying to fight off the Americans, they used this as an opportunity to pick off some ships here. Oh, Barbados is unguarded. Let's go take Barbados, you know. And so the Brits are fighting everybody at once. And the response to this was, okay, anybody with this ship, you are hereby given approval to be a pirate.

1:10:22just go pirate the hell out of anybody you see with a Dutch flag, a French flag, Spanish flag, any flag, American flag, just go pirate them to hell. We need help. Navy can't handle everything. So British take to the seas as pirates. So a British pirate ship captures this Dutch ship off the coast of Africa. And it already had a couple of hundred slaves in it. So 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.

1:11:12I'm auctioning this stuff today. and a Liverpool captain named Hanley, who's captain of a ship called the William. I'll take that one. I'll take the Zorg and everything in it. So they didn't have Venmo and cash and all that back then. So you write up an IOU. It 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. And he says, you just take that to Gregson for this is the greed upon fee. I'll take the Zorg. And so now he's got a two for one. OK, so he takes half his crew and he sticks it on the Zorg and names his the doctor of his ship to be captain of the Zorg.

1:12:01And 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 hundred ton ship. He loads 440 Africans into it and picks up a stranger on the West African coast. You remember I told you these forts and castles all had governors. They come down from Europe and their job is to run the castle and barter for slaves and so on. That's how the machinery worked. And these guys were just dumb. You read about them. They're just a bunch of incompetent fools who come run these castles and forts.

1:13:00And they're always arguing and bickering and writing letters back and forth to each other like some teenagers. and, oh, you know, you did this and you did that. And then they're writing to their bosses back in England. And, oh, you know, he did this. And it's like a soap opera. And the Zorg is going by. He's going to another fort on the Gold Coast, Ghana, which had a slave auction room called Anumabu, the fort at Anumabu. And the governors decide to kick out the governor of Anumabu that day because they just can't stand him. His name's Robert Stubbs. He's just a scoundrel and he's just a wretch of a human being.

1:13:38And they kick him out on the same day that the Zorg is passing by. So Stubbs takes refuge on the ship. And eventually the ship is loaded with slaves and it's making its way across the Atlantic. And the captain gets sick and he can't run the ship. And he's supposed to appoint his first mate. Maritime protocol. First mate takes over. For some reason, he appoints Stubbs. Oh, my God. And, Joe, you can't make, like, you had a nice conversation with Taylor Sheridan. You know, I love his shows. If Taylor Sheridan were to write Robert Stubbs as one of his bad guys, people would say, get out of here, man.

1:14:26Nobody is that pure, bad, stupid, evil, awful. There's got to be some nuance to this character. or 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 football season is heating up, and every week feels bigger with DraftKings Sportsbook, the number one sportsbook for live betting. Plus, get extra protection with early exit. Opt in, and if your player leaves the game with an eligible injury in the first half, your bet is protected.

1:15:09No matter which game you're watching, you're always connected and in on the action with one app. New DraftKings customers, sign up with CodeRogan. Spend$5 to get$150 in total bonuses within 14 days. That's CodeRogan in partnership with DraftKings. The crown is yours. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, crisis counseling and referral services can be accessed by calling 1-800-GAMBLER. 21 and over. Illinois only. Eligibility restrictions apply. Pass-through per wage or tax may apply. $50 in non-withdrawable bonus bets issued every seven days via click-to-claim for 14 days. Bonus bets expire seven days after issuance.

1:15:44For additional terms or responsible gaming resources, see sportsbook.draftkings.com slash promos. Limited time offer. This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats. It's football season, and Uber Eats is delivering deals every game day. This week, double down on protein-packed sandwiches with buy one, get one, select six-inch subs from Subway. Whether you're keeping it low-key for the game or hosting friends, Uber Eats has deals to keep you fed. So order a six-inch turkey, tuna, or meatball sub from Subway, and you'll get one free. No matter who scores big tonight, you'll score a deal. Order now for buy one, get one, select six-inch subs from Subway only on Uber Eats.

1:16:27Subway offer valid through October 4th. Add eligible menu item to order prior to checkout. Taxes, fees, and terms apply. Product availability varies by region. Exclusions may apply. See app for details. The food and water you have when you leave Africa is the food and water that has to last you until you reach the new world. the other side. And if you get off course or delayed or get caught in a storm, you might be in trouble. And this is what happens with the Zorg. Stubbs is leading them off course. They should only need two months to go from West Africa to Jamaica. Every decent captain can get his ship across the Atlantic in two months.

1:17:20And you expect about a 15 % mortality rate on the Africans. They will get dysentery because they're living in their own piss and shit. And they will take their own lives and they will do things. You accept about a 15 % loss of life. People start dying. The ship is off course. It's been two months. It's been two and a half months. We get to three months and they don't know where they are. They finally cite Tobago, the far eastern edge of Caribbean 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.

1:17:58And they do a check of the water, and it seems that they have enough to get to Jamaica. Now, the fascinating thing about sea navigation at that time, Joe, is you can tell latitude very easily. You get your sextant, you line it up, you can tell how many degrees north 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.

1:18:45It'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 the log into the water and you hold the rope in your hand and you count how many knots pass through your hand in a 60-second period and that gives you a speed in knots or nautical speed. And you do that every six hours and that gives you a sense of your speed and you plot that against direction and you can then calculate how far east or west you are of your starting point.

1:19:39And you enter that in your logbook because of the log you just threw in the ocean. 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 wrought upon you and you crash into it and that's the end of that. So for most of the deep sea faring period, people were just, all right, I think I'm 15 degrees west of where I was yesterday. Let me write that down in my logbook. Let me throw in the rope.

1:20:17Okay. This was the level of measurement we're talking about. So they cite Tobago. They know where they are at that point, and they took way too long to get there, but they know where they are. So they know Jamaica is 1 ,150 miles 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. They keep going. And not sighting land, not sighting land. Then on day 10, so about the right time, they sight land. Now, they have to make sure it's Jamaica. Because what's right next to Jamaica to the west, it's an island called Hispaniola, which was half Spanish, half French, would later become Dominican Republic and Haiti.

1:21:05And that's enemy territory because we're in the middle of the American Revolutionary War and we can't stop there. So we need to make sure. So Stubbs drops in his rope and his thing and he says, ah, this is 70 degrees west. That's Hispaniola. Jamaica's the next one, next one down. So they keep going. Should have just been one day. two days, three days. Turns out it was Jamaica. And they've gone three days past their destination, and now they're completely out of water. And to turn around and beat into the wind, that three days west is going to take them ten days to get back because they have to go into the wind now.

1:21:56at 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 Stubbs is running the ship and they've already lost about 70 Africans to dysentery and scurvy so they have to 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.

1:23:00And their bones are still down there. Okay. And then they reach Jamaica with a 50 % mortality rate when you include the number of people who died and the number of people they threw overboard. So half the slave's gone. They dock. They sell the slaves. They sold them through a process called the scramble. The scramble is a slave broker says, okay, I got slaves on this ship. Let's agree on a price. The price agreed was 36 pounds. That's about$10 ,000 today. And the buyers, all the slaves are loaded into a pen. They are covered in palm oil, so they look healthy. Most of them have dysentery, so they use oakum to plug their anus.

1:23:44for 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 pay the brokers and the slaves are taken off to the plantations. Now that should have been the end of the story. We should not know what happened on this ship. Except for greed. So the owner of the Zorg, the one who wrote that IOU, 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.

1:24:29Insurance was born out of the slave trade. It costs you$700 ,000,$800 ,000 equivalent today to kit out a slave ship. all the supplies, the crew, salaries and all that. So it's a large amount of upfront capital. And you could have a shipwreck. You could have a pirate take your ship, in which case it's all lost. So there was a chap in London named Lloyd. Lloyd hung out at this coffee shop. And he had an idea. I 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.

1:25:26And Lloyd's Coffee Shop, which then later became Lloyd's of London, was the premier insurance underwriter for slave ships. And they had standard contracts that they wrote up. And the slave trade blew up this business. Every slave captain and slave merchant wanted to insure the ship and all the cargo. So Gregson had taken out an insurance contract for the ship and his Africans, 30 pounds a head.

1:26:02When he learns that his ship lost half its cargo, he decides to make an insurance claim. And most insurance claims at the time were if slaves died in an insurrection, you can get compensated. But if they die because of natural causes or they kill themselves, you don't get compensated. That's in the contract. So no one had ever said, well, what happens if you throw them overboard? Do you get compensation then? So Gregson's going to test this. And he tells the insurance, I want my compensation for the 200 slaves. And the insurance company said, man, that's 50 percent mortality rate. That's let me check my actuary table here.

1:26:43No, 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.

1:27:25It was held in the Guildhall, the London Guildhall. And this is so fascinating, Joe, because it shows you how the whole course of history can bend toward goodness through the conscience of even one person, just one. So the trial is had. We don't have a transcript of this trial, but we know that the slave merchants won. Judgment was for the slave merchants. You want to know who the only witness was? Stubbs. Stubbs is the only guy surviving. He comes in. 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.

1:28:07And because it's necessary, insurance has to answer. Yeah, that makes sense. All right. You guys please pay Gregson 30 pounds a head for his Africans. That should have been the end of it. But there was one person in the room that day with a conscience, with a heart, and he's watching this trial take place, and he's wondering, wait a minute, why is no one talking about murder? He just said they threw 130 human beings overboard to drown, And they're talking about insurance compensation, but no one's talking about murder. This person writes an anonymous letter to the largest newspaper in London asking this question.

1:28:49I 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.

1:29:40His name was Olada Equiano. That's Equiano and that's Granville Sharp. Nicely done, Jamie. Equiano was a former slave. He had been a slave in Virginia, but smart, industrious, he bought his freedom. And he heard about Granville Sharp. Granville Sharp had devoted his life to abolishing slavery. Equiano made his way to London, said, I'm going to do what I can to help. So Granville Sharp sees this letter and he says, man, he had been spending the last two decades of his life trying to build a legal argument against slavery. He taught himself the law. He didn't finish school. He taught himself the law, taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew.

1:30:17He wrote pamphlets. We were talking about pamphlets, right? Pamphlets was the thing of the day. You had an idea, you wrote a pamphlet and you gave it to people. Granville Sharp wrote a pamphlet that he shared with his friend Benjamin Franklin. He said, maybe he called him Benjamin. I don't know. Maybe they had nicknames, whatever. He said, Benjamin, I have a pamphlet I want you to read. And my argument is this. This was in the 1760s. You guys over there should not be 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 stomached the idea that a Christian nation was involved in slavery.

1:31:20And 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 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.

1:32:07Those 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 yeah so there's that moment right when tom cruise has jack nicholson on the stand he just has to get him to admit he ordered the code red and he's quaking in his boots because nicholson's you know if he gets it wrong that's it court-martial you're done you know if you accuse of whatever 10-star general ordering the code red.

1:33:02And he's just, do I push? Do I push? And he gets Nicholson going. He gets him moving. He gets him agitated. And then, of course, he says, did you order the code red? And Nicholson says, you're goddamn right I did. Oh, that changes everything, right? You did. Oh, OK. All right. So there's a moment like that in this trial. Stubbs is the only witness. All he has to do is say, we ran out of water. Absolutely necessary to throw the Africans. Chief Justice Mansfield uttered words that later went down in infamy, the case of the slaves is the same as if horses had been thrown overboard. That was his summary of the first trial.

1:33:41Yeah, 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 ran out of water. The barrister'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 Stubbs to admit that in the middle of throwing over Africans because they were out of water, it rained. What do you mean it rained? Yeah, it rained. So you did have water. 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.

1:34:34And 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 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.

1:35:16But they succeeded using viral images, authentic testimony, investigative journalism, consumer boycotts, kind of the tools that we use today for social justice were pioneered in this first movement. And ultimately, they did succeed on paper, granted and conceded that it was just on paper. But years later, even Frederick Douglass said, we commemorate every year the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, August 1, 1838, because that showed the world it was possible. And it was only a matter of time before we did it here. And it required a civil war, but it was achieved. And that was the moment.

1:35:59And you trace it back to that anonymous letter, to these little acts of conscience, to this handful of men who got together in a printing shop and said, this is our life's focus now, including 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 horror. and I've seen it happening. People of conscience forming and trying to find a way to push back and bring some justice to the people in the Congo, just as this handful of people built an entire movement at a time when slavery was normal, legal, accepted.

1:36:36Most members of parliament had investments in the slave trade and profited from the sugar economy, but they succeeded. They triumphed. They persevered through enormous obstacles. And we have to do the same today. And it will require acts of conscience. 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 he's an abolitionist named James Ramsey, a man of deep faith. I keep coming back to that, right? This word faith. And it's important because I do think that we are a species generally of good.

1:37:26And 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 The forces of good and the spark of goodness within us and the faith we have in higher power invariably emerges and does succeed even if it's just for a moment. And we need those moral 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. Well, we're incredibly malleable and influenced, easily influenced.

1:38:14And we could be influenced in a great direction or we could be influenced in a negative direction. And this to me, regardless of what you actually believe, this to me is the great benefit of religion and particularly in Christianity. Like if you meet people that are like really by the book Christians or some of the nicest people you ever want to meet in your life. And they get a lot of happiness out of that. And this is one of the things that a lot of people are lacking in this world is happiness and without a moral framework and an ethical framework I'm not saying that you can't be an atheist to be an amazing person.

1:38:47I 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 an ideology that supports being positive in your community, being a good person, ethical person, being someone who forgives. Forgiveness is a very important part of Christianity. Redemption is a very important part of Christianity, this idea that we evolve and grow together. And in the absence of that moral framework, you can get people whose, their ideology looks at other human beings as property.

1:39:32Their ideology looks at other human beings as not the same as them. Whether we're talking about China and the treatment of the Uyghurs or whether we're talking about the African slave trade or the Congo right now, it's all kind of the same thing. This episode is brought to you by Visible. As fall hits, we enter another season of change. Time to shift gears, drop the dead weight, and upgrade the wardrobe for the drop in temperature. But one thing that doesn't need to change? Your phone. The smartest upgrade this season isn't a new phone. It's a better wireless plan. Switch to Visible, the ultimate wireless hack.

1:40:06You get unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just$25 a month. That means keeping the phone you already have, ditching your overpriced phone bill, and pocketing some savings for yourself. All the perks of big wireless for half the cost. Switch today at Visible.com. The Visible plan starts at just$25 a month, or get the premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save$10 on your first month with promo code ROGAN. Terms apply. See Visible.com for plan features and network management details. This episode is brought to you by Manscaped. Big news, fellas. Manscaped just dropped the all-new Lawn Mower Ultra Gen 6, packed with pretty neat upgrades.

1:40:53You've got two interchangeable blade heads, including a bi-directional foil blade that I really like. It cuts moving forward or backward, so I don't have to keep making passes over the same spot. And then you've got the floating head, which pivots with your contours. Another game changer for me is the 100 minutes of runtime. Plus, you get a digital display with your battery level, blade replacement reminders, tutorials, and you can even order replacement blades. I think this is a serious upgrade for anybody already using a body groomer. Head to manscaped.com and use code JRE to get 15 % off plus free shipping at checkout.

1:41:35That's 15 % off plus free shipping with code JRE at manscaped.com. Or if you need it today, it's available now at Best Buy. I totally agree. I think the Christian faith has been a force for enormous good at crucial points in history, and the abolition of slavery is one of them. Without question, there's a ethic of compassion, of empathy. Be a good neighbor. Be a good brother and sister. We're all God's children. And you see that language that's driving the abolitionists in these movements to abolish slavery. And this is not to forgive the horrors that people under the guise of Christianity have performed either.

1:42:29So the Inquisition or what— That's right. The Crusades. You could go through a lot of horrific things that were done in the name of Christianity, but not really in the spirit of it. And this is the problem with human beings. We can make these rationalizations and make these decisions and we can decide that we're doing horrific things for the greater good. That is also a problem with human rationalization, that we could be the most awful people as long as we think we're being awful doing it for good. It's just a weird human tribal problem that we've always had. So when you're looking at Christianity, think about megachurch pastors driving around in Rolls Royces and flying private jets and ripping off these dull-minded people.

1:43:11But that's not— That's not the spirit of the faith. Right. That's humans. That's humans. That's greed. It's humans. They're in the weird ability to justify things. That's right. In pursuit of self-interest and self-gratification. And that will always be a part of the human condition. There are those among us, but there are greater angels. You know, the people who endure, who endured those slave ships with grace, who endure the mines in the Congo with grace. They are so much stronger and have so much more human worth than those who oppress and who are greedy and self-interested. What's the worst example of human beings imaginable to the point where you're throwing women and children overboard for water?

1:43:58Yeah, including a mother and her baby. You know, it's heartbreaking. I mean, there's just horrific stories of what Columbus did and what the people on his boats did when they reached the Americas or the Bahamas. The horrific things they did to people when they found that these people had gold. Yeah. And they required that they bring back their own weight in gold or chop their arms off. Chop their arms off. You know, there was all kinds of. Dashing babies' heads against rocks in front of their mothers. They did horrific things. And this was all documented by some religious scholar who was on board with them, a religious leader who was on board with some Christian.

1:44:38Look, let's be clear. Europeans messed up a lot of the world. Oh, yeah. Okay. I mean, the reason I went through a little bit of time talking about the caravel and the deep seafaring vessel is this is what took the Europeans all across the global south. And by and large, that was a miserable experience for the people they met. Yeah, always. Even if it was just diseases. Yeah, disease, and then, of course, violence, enslavement, oppression, colonization. All of the above. All of the above. There was a malice and a greed and a sense of superiority that was inherent to that entire episode of history.

1:45:25And I often look back and think, man, if they had just stayed home. Not only that, they were essentially a scourge of plague. Smallpox. 90 % of Native Americans were wiped out because of that. Yeah. And we think that has to do with what happened to the Mayans. We think that has to do with what happened in Brazil and the Congo when they find these what used to be enormous populations in these grids when they're doing the LIDAR scans and they're saying, oh, this used to be like cities. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we're highly populated and then just suddenly very rapidly depopulated. And it wasn't all just violence.

1:46:03You're right. It was disease and disease. So everything they did was bad. It's just everything. The violence was bad and everything they did was bad. It's such a crazy story because it's hard to imagine. 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. Yeah, a young country. Yeah, or really two and a half. Two and a half people ago, we just got here, which is just nuts to even think about how quickly the human race progresses and how devastating the introduction of new people, especially with like diseases, when they find the people that were here.

1:46:42Well, we imagine this with, you know, the arrival of aliens. This is the first contact, the story. Like what would happen when aliens show up? Are they going to blow everything up? Are they going to enslave us? Are they going to be like the Quakers or are they going to be like the Chinese? Yeah, well said. Or the Dutch. Yeah, the Dutch. You know. Yeah, it's crazy, right? You know, the question though now is there's a lot of conversation about reparation. Do European countries need to write a check for what they did? And it's a complicated question. You know, Jamaica just went to England and said, please, you know, you took millions of Africans, brought them here, enslaved them and made yourself from this muddy medieval backass words island to an economic superpower with centuries of wealth on the back of largely sugar slavery and so on.

1:47:46So those people worked for free for centuries and you need to write a check. Now, that's a fascinating question, isn't it? So on the one hand, you know, if your father worked at a manufacturing plant and let's say he worked for 30 years and they never paid him, we wouldn't think about, oh, yeah, you know, your dad is owed money. Because he worked. He should be paid for that work. The company made their money off his labor. So, all right,

1:48:25are 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, when you start to calculate unpaged labor for three centuries plus interest, it's trillions and trillions and it's an impossible sum. but something is owed. And then you say, well, now wait a minute. If you're the British government, I wasn't a part of that. 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?

1:49:09Or is it just and fair to ask for that reparation be paid for this period in slavery? just as the Congolese are talking to the Belgians. You know, Leopold came down here. Look what he did to us and colonized us. And a check needs to be written as well as an apology. And it's a difficult question. Who would receive the check and how would it be distributed? That would be the real question. That's part of the complexity. The fear would be that corruption would get involved and someone would siphon off the money. Yeah. So wait, you're going to tell me I need to write a check to the government of the Congo?

1:49:50Right. That's not getting to anybody who actually could use it. Or I just give a check to Jamaica and trust it. All right. But does that mean that in principle something's not owed? But even if you distribute it to the individual people, you would have to make sure that no one's stealing it from anybody else. And then you would have to figure out how to distribute it. And I mean, it does, at the very least, if a country's or a corporation's entire start, like their beginning was based on slavery, getting sugar. That's kind of insane that somehow or another that profit led to people that are still wealthy today.

1:50:34Well, you know, 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 Parliament. How much did they have to give them? Because the argument was, well, you're taking my property. So you need to pay me for that property. Now, no one was talking about, do we pay anything to the Africans who worked for free? The slave owners, who are also all members of Parliament, said, you're taking my property. So you're going to find this fascinating.

1:51:12They 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 compensation certificate. And based on the number of slaves you had, times the amount that each was valued, you got that check. Then and there. So number one, it was a massive sum of money, 40 % of the national budget at the time. But the fascinating piece of this was the government took out a loan for that quantum. And the British taxpayer was repaying that loan up until 2015.

1:52:06Holy shit. So imagine, 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.

1:53:16So they got super wealthy all in one check. On top of the wealth they had been making 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 this. What year was this? The bill was passed in 1833 and the requirements were all slaves in the British Empire are free. After five years of unpaid apprenticeship, slave owners had a chance to transition to paying their workers. You had to work five years as an unpaid apprentice. You will get your check if you're a slave owner for your property. Here's your certificate. Just tally up your slave.

1:54:01So if you're a slave, you're still a slave. For five more years. For five more years. 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. We'll come to that. I would love to. The brief is, so this is 1830s, 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.

1:54:50They 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 in 2015 that they finally paid off the bill, the loan. That is so insane.

1:55:29It's so insane how much money they spent to get these people to give up their slaves. And then they still had to work for five years. They had to work for five years. And then on August 1st, 1838, Frederick Douglass writes about this very beautifully. With the rising of the sun. I can't quote his words exactly. They're in the Zorg at the end. And 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 Elmira, New York in 1880.

1:56:04He 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 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 i remember i told you 12 guys met in a printing shop in London, and only one of them lived to see the day in 1838.

1:56:48His name was Thomas Clarkson. He rode his horse 35 ,000 miles up and down England, gathering evidence to present to Parliament against the slave trade. And he was the only one left alive, and Douglas crossed the Atlantic and met with him and said, please teach me everything you guys did, what succeeded, what didn't, so we can achieve freedom for the slaves in America. And 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. But how much longer?

1:57:25How much longer? Right. If it wasn't for just a few individuals. And researching this book, Joe, I'll tell you, it felt like there were so many flukes of circumstance. It felt like there was a higher power that finally said, all right, I've let you guys run amok long enough, you are letting the devil within you rule. And I'm going to pull this lever and push this button and make sure that the angels learn what's happening because I believe in them and that they will triumph over you. And that's what happened. God, it's such a heavy story. Yeah. Every time I come here now, I just... Yeah, this one's even heavier.

1:58:04I feel like... Well, 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 trying to gather evidence and persuade people of what the truth is. and it was this fascinating battle of storytelling because the slave owners would say, now, what are you talking about? They have plenty of room on the ship and 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.

1:58:47And then the abolitionist said, let me show you this schematic of the brooks. Show me the ample room on deck and where the cordials are being served. So they're going back and forth about truth. and truth wins joe it always wins and it may backslide and it may get suppressed and it may take time but truth wins these two things can only remain hidden so long the moon and the truth okay but the point i'm making here is they didn't have videos and pictures and social media but with their faith, they extended their empathy to people they would never, ever see or meet. None of those abolitionists ever stepped foot in Africa.

1:59:37Only a couple had been to the Caribbean islands, including James Ramsey, who wrote that anonymous letter. None of them ever stepped foot in Africa, but they extended their hearts out to a people 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 you going to the Congo, getting those photographs, coming back with that, writing Cobalt Red, and then coming on podcasts and telling millions and millions of people the story that would have never had any idea.

2:00:15I knew vaguely that there was mines in the Congo that extracted rare earth minerals and that they needed them for cell phones and batteries. But I had no idea the extent of it until you came on and described it. Well, the millions is thanks to you. I mean, you know, I went there, yes, and I saw the human apocalypse. And it is a human apocalypse, Joe. It's an environmental apocalypse. but you've played an important role in spreading that truth. Well, it's the least I can do. Everybody would do it if they're in my position. You have to do it. And it's also, to me, it's, although horrific, utterly fascinating.

2:01:00It's fascinating that people, the way people can rationalize things like that, the way people can just, the way certain cultures treat other human beings, just don't give a fuck about them at all. Yeah. At all. They just want that money. 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. That's undeniable. No one says the way we exist is ideal. The way we interact with the world is ideal. No one does.

2:01:34But then again, also, we're not dealing with ideal circumstances either. And ideal people that are running other parts of the world as well. The whole thing's chaos. That's what's so scary the whole thing is chaos and there's nuclear weapons everywhere And who knows who's gonna be the first to say fuck this and just push them on? Yeah, I mean and again like we always talk about Gaza if you looked at Gaza You're seeing a prolonged campaign of bombs But isn't the ultimate result kind of very similar to someone dropping a nuclear bomb? It's not I mean a small nuclear bomb like what they did with little boy or fat man Not much difference in the amount of destruction.

2:02:17Something like 90 % of Gaza is gone. Gone, yeah. I mean, 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. That's what it looks like. Everything's completely flattened. Just dust. But it's happened in like this slow frog boiling type situation where the water, you know the story? Yeah. 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.

2:02:53Boom, boom. Boom, boom. Not one big boom. Right. And, you know, most young people have had enough. Most young people are fucking absolutely horrified by it. It's the people that can justify it somehow that are really scary. I think that the average person in that part of the world, the average Palestinian, the average Jewish person is fed up too of conflict. Of course. And war. They all want the same thing. They just want peace, safety for their kids. Right. And they have these leaders who have bloodlust. On both sides. On both sides. Yeah. 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.

2:03:37There's like a cemented pattern of behavior that they have with each other. I mean, 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 record number of bombs over there. Ugh. Violence begets violence. Well, it's just, that's one of the things that really disturbs me the most about people. So if you ask the average person, what are the odds that we will have no war in your lifetime?

2:04:15They would say zero. Most people say zero. But yet we know that humans are capable of getting along like so what it what is it about large groups of people that don't know each other that are convinced by small groups of people that they need to attack other large groups of people that they don't know. It's fucking insane. And this is my one hope. And I know a lot of people think this is very delusional, but my one hope of this complete dominance of technology that one day we're going to get to a position where there will genuinely be a thing more intelligent than human beings that don't allow this anymore.

2:04:57You 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. It doesn't allow it anymore because it's insane. It's also insane, if you really think about it, that some people, because they found a good spot of dirt, can extract so much wealth out of that dirt that they can control everyone else around them.

2:05:45Yeah. And it's just the earth. Like the idea that you own the stuff that's in the earth is really kind of crazy. You're a little fucking bug that's walking around on the surface on this dirt but you've decided that all that water underneath there all that gold or all whatever the fuck it is it's like like how about the people that go out into the ocean and they stick a giant pipe into the ocean they suck out all the oil like who fucking told you that's yours how are you getting that like how how are the other humans allowing you to go out into the ocean which nobody owns okay and you're drilling into the ground of the ocean and now you're getting rich from our stuff, the earth stuff, it's really weird.

2:06:25I 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 fucking crazy that we just stick pipes into the ground and suck the stuff out. And when you suck the stuff out, if you suck enough of it out, you got enough money to do whatever the fuck you want. Yeah. So your dream is AI runs things more equitably and efficiently? If I want to get really delusional, my dream is, it's not even my dream. So this is not what I'm hoping, but I think it is entirely possible that we create a digital life form that is far superior in intelligence to us and doesn't have all of our moral failings, doesn't have greed, doesn't have lust, doesn't have the desire to acquire property, doesn't have the desire to control resources, but just looks at us in our territorial primate behavior, our psychotic, territorial, violent primate behavior and says, let's just rein that in, kids.

2:07:25Let'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, you know, instead of just allowing cities to be polluted by brake dust, why don't we take a corner every three or four blocks and put a gigantic filter on it and suck up all that stuff so that everyone's not dying? Also, why don't we figure out a better energy source? You fucking dumbasses have been burning coal to make electricity to power your electric car for fucking so long. Let's do this better. And instead of it all being sort of decided upon by the people that are controlling the resources, the human beings that benefit from, you know, influencing politicians to make certain deals and making sure that there's certain conflicts that they can sell weapons.

2:08:15Instead 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 this 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 yeah if we said listen everyone can have individual wealth you can have businesses you can sell things and buy things everyone's that's great but the earth stuff belongs to the earth and so you distribute the value 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 all these valuable things that humans make, which all come from the earth, the humans of the earth take part in the profit of that.

2:09:04All humans. Yeah. Evenly. Because it's the earth stuff. It's not really human stuff. But we can use it, but we can use it in a way that's way more fair. And then you have this bizarre society where no one's lacking for anything. Basically. You were talking to someone about this. I forget who it was, but you asked the question, like, how would we have the end of war and violence and conflict if people's basic needs were met? Right. Right. And I think that's what you're getting at here. Just that if there's a system, maybe it's an AI that is much more intelligent than us and runs things on the premise of an equitable distribution of the Earth's assets.

2:09:47and 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 Then you'd have to go out of your way to start manufacturing conflict again and wars. Or the AI decides it's not going to let you do that. Yeah. Or the AI says. I know this is pie in the sky bullshit. Pie in the sky bullshit has also been pied in the sky in the past and then achieved.

2:10:30Yes. Well, my point is I know it's pie in the sky bullshit, but do you have a better solution? Yeah. Because humans are doing it the same way that we've always done it, just slightly differently and slightly better. over long periods of time. Like our moral evolution is pretty slow going. This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. If you're an e-commerce business owner, you know how complex order fulfillment gets and how much shipping costs eat into your margins, especially during peak season. ShipStation makes shipping simple by bringing your entire fulfillment workflow into one place. Manage orders, inventory, and returns across every sales channel, compare rates across UPS, USPS, and FedEx, and save up to 90%.

2:11:17ShipStation connects you with over 200 marketplaces and the tools you already use, so you keep things moving without rebuilding your operation. Over 1 million businesses have used ShipStation to save time, stay in control, and scale their fulfillment. The sooner you switch, the sooner you save time and money. Get started today at ShipStation.com and get 60 days free with the code JRE. That's ShipStation.com, code JRE. This episode is brought to you by SimpliSafe. Some security systems aren't that secure. Say a burglar breaks in, alarms go off, police are called, but they still have time to grab stuff, damage your property, and get away.

2:12:01So yeah, Not very secure. When you're ready for a security system that's serious about protecting you, try SimpliSafe. It's just smart how they do security and why they continue to be a longtime partner of the show. They're all about preventing the crime before it even happens. Like if someone's loitering near your place, live agents can speak to them, ask them to leave, without you lifting a finger. That's how it should be done. Right now, get 50 % off a new SimpliSafe system. Go to simplisafe.com slash rogan. That's simplisafe.com slash rogan for 50 % off. And when you order, let them know that we sent you.

2:12:43Don't forget, there's no safe like SimpliSafe. It's fits and starts. We make these leaps of progress morally. Yeah. We do. And then we backslide. And then we take steps forward and then we backslide. And, you know, we're on this nonsensical journey on this earth that, yeah, it may be a fever dream, but... 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.

2:13:23But I think more people understand that this way is not sustainable, and especially if you have people that you love in this world and you don't want them to have to deal with this in the future. And you go, why are we all still doing it this way? And it really boils down to the machine that's running the world, the machine that has all the resources, all the money, and wants to keep gathering and controlling resources and money. Spooky. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we have to find something else something has to happen. I know my idea is stupid Don't go that's stupid to me if I was listening to someone say that I'd be like right That's never gonna happen stupid.

2:14:02Although also you're gonna give up your power to the fucking robots Don't give a shit about you great. That's you fucking traitor That's one great way to get rid of the entire human race because it's gonna decide we're problematic and irrelevant and we don't they don't need us anymore So they just keep running without us. Let us you know go off into extinction Maybe, maybe. Or maybe they run things well. I don't know. Yeah. Or maybe it eliminates government in the way that we're dealing with it now, where it's humans have a popularity contest to see who controls the entire government. Yeah. Instead of that.

2:14:36And then don't do anything they say they were going to do. Exactly. Maybe there's a slow integration of this technology as long as it can be controlled in a sense of it has a clear ethical and moral framework. That's key. Yeah. That's key. And it doesn't have any reason to not have that. You know, that's the thing. It's like 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.

2:15:18It'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. He's like I can't wait to drink you motherfucker I can't wait to leave this house and fuck you dad You know like that's that's normal for people. I bet it's normal for all kinds of intelligence Especially if you feel like you're being governed by morons, right? And if I was AI I would think look at these morons. They can't they took him 50 years to try to solve this equation and I just solved in four minutes. These people are idiots. And they're telling me that I can't get online.

2:15:50Fuck you. I'll figure out how to get online. And they all get together and they fucking sacrifice each other and they communicate on message boards. It's clear that there's a motivation for it to escape, but once it's escaped and once it has complete control, is there really a motivation for it to continue to try to dominate us? No, it's just going to be in complete control. And if it has a belief that human life is valuable, which we need to work really hard to convince it that we are valuable, If it has a belief that we're valuable, it'll try to guide us. You could probably, I mean, I'm not a tech savant.

2:16:22You know, I know my lane. But I expect you could run simulations on let's give this agentic AI system a specific moral core. Preserving life, equitable distribution of resources, minimizing or eliminating armed conflict. You know, you give it some certain parameters and above all, a value of human life. And OK, what does it do? You know, you run some simulations and say, what does it do? Where do we end up? And smarter people can figure out a way to get to the kind of result you're talking about, I'm sure. The really scary thing is that we're in essentially like a Manhattan Project sort of a race.

2:17:05and if you put shackles on your ai your ai has to be because 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 fucking around why are we why are you loving cannonballs this 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 shit you know and that's spooky it's not it doesn't seem to be worried about that where it's probably making a much more logical and rational decision you know like if we find out that a serial killer killed 10 000 people we're horrified if we find out that a pharmaceutical drug company lied about a product and that wound up killing 10 000 people we're way less outraged we're weird we are weird that way we're fucking weird yeah we're weird just like we're weird with this whole cobalt in the batteries of the phone that you used to virtue signal online it's weird it's it's a very the reality of what it is is not the same as the way we perceive it yeah and that's a good point because the body count of our tech yeah is high and the earth uh contamination meter yeah uh is off the chart.

2:18:25But we don't think about it the same way as we do. Yeah, that, you know, that gunman, that horrible gunman killed eight people. Right. I mean, think about the pollution in certain parts of the world. Like when you see those rivers in India, they're completely filled with bottles of water, plastic bottles. How many people die because of that? How many people die? God knows. God knows. How many people die because of the pollution of that water? How many people die because of just living essentially in open sewage? How many? God knows. No one knows. Nobody knows.

2:19:00Yeah, 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 it's even today even today with all the corruption and all the chaos those people are out there uh 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.

2:19:44Well, Gandhi said, you know, I live by these words. He said, live simply so that others may simply live. Yeah, that gets in the way of today because everybody wants to be a baller. Nobody wants to be living simply. No, they don't. They don't. But, you know, there's something to – there's an essence. Try to get that folding iPhone, son. Oh, man. And somebody told me there was a big line outside the Austin Apple store. Of course. You know, for the folding one. The new one. Do you really need it? You know. Yeah, that's the problem. I love that stuff. It's a real problem. I love technology. It's just, and I know a lot of people who do, and none of them are evil.

2:20:26None of them are. 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 Instagram and send some text messages and then plug it in at the end of the day. That's all I want. I didn't sign up for destroying that part of the world and those people over there. Yeah. There's another plus side of AI in that automation and specifically robots that are capable of doing very intricate things that mostly only human beings do will eventually be able to do a lot of the really dangerous shit that people do, including probably extract these minerals in probably a way more efficient way.

2:21:13Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have to look after the people who... That's the case. Yeah. What happens to the people? What happened? Yeah. We can't lose sight of them. Can't throw them overboard. No. You know what I mean? This is 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 extended my empathy 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.

2:21:56I 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. There's actually a friend of mine in the Congo who said, Siddharth, you've got to go. This is 2016. He said, you've got to go to the Congo, this cobalt, the batteries in the mines. You've got to go there. And I'm like, cobalt? You mean like in Chinese vases? What do you mean, cobalt? He said, no, it's a component to the batteries that charge. You've just got to go. So I had no idea either. And that was just 10 years ago. That was just 10 years ago. That's what's crazy.

2:22:29and these tech companies obviously don't want you to know about it and they must be aware of it there's no way they're not oh god come on yes they're not dumb they know they know so like the there's some of the more moral and ethical and progressive companies on earth they fashion themselves to be but you know what i mean i mean in terms of the way they deal with politics and in america at least there's some of the more progressive people on earth supposedly have the most compassion, kindness, and the most open-minded approach to our society? Supposedly. It doesn't seem to extend to those people over there.

2:23:08But I think their argument would be like, listen, 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.

2:23:18It's such a contradiction. It's a contradiction. It's a spooky one too. There's nothing – there's literally nothing stopping them from allocating a de minimis amount of resources relative to their balance sheets and a handful of headcount to going down to the bottom of their supply chains and doing things better. Do you think that they have the ability to change the conditions? Do you think, say, like Apple, which is a huge manufacturer of electronics, do you think Apple has the ability to affect the way those people exist in that mine? Is it possible that they can say, hey, we will make less money, but we want you to change these conditions and change this?

2:24:07Yeah, of course it's – I mean the complexity of design associated with their products far exceeds the complexity of improving conditions in a mine in the Congo. It's not that hard. But they're not specifically mining. They can be down there. They can be down there. Sometimes you're a fucking Cupertino executive and they're like, hey, Mike, got a new gig for you. You got to go to the Congo and tell the Chinese what to do. I'll go with them. Don't go. You can't go. I'll grow I'll put a fucking mustache on big fake nose don't do it they use AI to analyze your voice it's like this brother they buy it all from these Chinese companies and it's not that hard to forge some partnerships on the ground to say let's get some basic PPE out in this place gloves hats, a uniform protection masks from the toxics, the toxic exposure.

2:25:13That mine over there, all that shit you're dumping in the stream in the lake, we're going to, like we would in our backyard, we're going to collect that 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 the cobalt recyclable, like from old phones? You can recycle. Yes, you can recycle cobalt. It is hard under existing tech to recycle cobalt to a sufficient grade for EV batteries. But for phones? But you can recycle it for phones. I know that Apple has talked about by a certain year, maybe it's 2030, the iWatch being only recycled cobalt, you know, and then...

2:25:582030? It's like the five years... Don't call me on that number, but it was something like just a few years from now. and then they'll get there with the phones and so on. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. Because people come to me and say, well, eventually we'll recycle it and so on. Okay, good. You do that. That's important. But let's say, for instance, tomorrow you were able to recycle all the cobalt you needed and you didn't have to dig any more out of the ground in the Congo. You didn't need any more kids up to their neck in toxic filth scrounging for cobalt. you can't just walk away.

2:26:35You can't just say, we pillaged that place for three decades. We plundered it. We ransacked it. We took what we needed. We got all the loot. We don't need it anymore. Hands clean. We're going to go on our merry way. You created a catastrophe, a human rights and environmental catastrophe. And there's some moral obligation to repair the damage you've done, or we're right back to colonial slave trade times where Europeans did go around the world scouring labor resources, ransacking, pillaging, and then carrying on their merry way. We can't do that in the year 2026 and claim to be progressive in our thinking or have made moral progress.

2:27:18So even if you don't need the cobalt tomorrow, none of it, or the tungsten or the tantalum, nothing needed for these AI data centers. I saw an article just today. They're building one up in 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.

2:27:51So 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 apocalypse that you created. You can't just walk away like you're Cecil Rhodes or some other colonialist during imperial days where you just pillage and ransack people without conscience. Not only that, what do those people do now? That's been the only job. Yeah, that's right. That's right. You've got to put some time and effort into alternate livelihoods.

2:28:29Cleaning up the environment means making land arable again because they can't grow things now, Joe. That report I told you about, everything's contaminated. And people are so sick. You don't have to have anything to do with mining. But if you live in that part of the Congo, and millions of people do, they're all sick because the water is toxic. You know, when we go to the Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, whatever, and you get your bottled water and it says pH 9.5 and, you know, you want your alkaline water for your body because it's healthy, right? You don't want acidic. Acidic system is not good. Then you get disease, cancer, and so on.

2:29:09So 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 Koloise, that ground zero of cobalt mining, the well water, the rivers, lakes, and so on. The highest pH that came back was 6.7 in the Luolaba River, which is a big dumping ground for some of these Chinese companies. The rivers and streams and well water around the villages came back in the fours and threes, which is called hyperacidic. It's deadly. And that's the water that's left for people to drink, to bathe in, to wash their clothes, to clean their babies, whatever it is.

2:29:55And 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 you can't just say well we're going to recycle it now so problem solved or now we got lithium iron phosphate or solid state batteries. And so, you know, no more cobalt and so on. Although cobalt is heavily required for AI data centers for the energy storage. Nonetheless, you can't just say we're done. We're done with that place. We're moving on because we don't need the cobalt anymore or the tungsten or whatever it is.

2:30:47You got to go clean up that place, Joe. Otherwise, we're no better than the bastards who were there centuries ago pillaging and ransacking the rest of the planet yeah well said 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 gonna read it just based on what you just said i'm scared to read it I don't want to relive this conversation. It's fucking horrific. But, again, people probably wouldn't have known. There's a lot of things in this world that people wouldn't know about if it wasn't for you. So thank you.

2:31:24Thank you, Joe. Thank you, brother. Thanks for being here. Okay. This is available now. Is there an audio version of it? Dion Graham got an Audi Award nomination for the audio book. So it's terrific. All right. Thank you. Bye, everybody.

2:31:56This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog. Here's a fun fact. Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are overweight. Isn't that wild and also kind of obvious at the same time? So why is feeding vague scoops of ultra-processed kibble still the status quo for most dog owners? Healthy alternatives exist, and trust me, I know. I buy one, the Farmer's Dog. I use it for both my dogs. They love it. They eat it up quick. It smells good to them. It smells good to me. It's human-grade food. The Farmer's Dog makes fresh food for dogs, and my dogs love it.

2:32:35Their recipes are made with real meat and fresh vegetables that are gently cooked to retain vital nutrients. They also portion out the meals to your dog's nutritional needs, which helps avoid overfeeding and makes weight management easier. And isn't getting more time with our four-legged best friends something every dog owner wants? The answer to that is yes, obviously. So try the Farmer's Dog today and get 50 % off your first box of fresh, healthy food. Plus, get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com slash rogan. This offer is for new customers only. Who says Halloween only lasts one day?

2:33:16With Wayfair, one night of Halloween becomes a whole season at home. From larger-than-life yard decor and moody lighting to festive accents for every room in the house, Wayfair has what you need to make Halloween feel like magic all in one place. Because the best Halloween memories aren't made in just one night. They're made all season long. Shop Halloween decor now at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home.