Joe Rogan Experience #2556 - Siddharth Kara

1. 0:00 – 0:02

   Intro

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:00

      [upbeat music]

2. 0:02 – 3:47

   Why Kara can’t return to Congo: cobalt, slavery, and the new AI-data-center mineral rush

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:02

      Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat music] We're up.

   2. SKSiddharth Kara0:12

      All right.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:13

      Good to see you, sir.

   4. SKSiddharth Kara0:14

      Yeah, good to see you, Joe.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:15

      Um, first of all, thank you very much for everything you've done, and for just... I, I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and said, "Thank you for shedding light on what's going on in the Congo with the cobalt stuff." Your book was so important, and the fact that you risked your life to get the kind of footage that you got, you, you legitimately risked your life.

   6. SKSiddharth Kara0:36

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:37

      That... It is a very dangerous part of the world right now, with enormous amounts of resources being pulled out, and insane amounts of money being made. And, you know, I think just people like you are rare, so thank you.

   8. SKSiddharth Kara0:49

      Oh, man, you're, uh, you're gracious, Joe. You're really gracious. I, I take that to heart. It means a lot. And let me just say that the fact that you continue to talk about it, you know, you and I first talked about this, uh, I was talking to Jamie. It was almost four years ago.

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:05

      Was it really that long ago?

   10. SKSiddharth Kara1:06

       It, it was, it was December 2022.

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:08

       That's crazy.

   12. SKSiddharth Kara1:09

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

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:29

       Well, all I'm doing is talking. You're, you're actually out, out there going and, and documenting all this stuff. It's just a very strange world that we live in, that at the very base of the, all of the greatest technology, like all this stuff that we have-

   14. SKSiddharth Kara1:44

       Yeah

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:44

       ... that's so incredible, that allows us to find out so much about the world, the base of that, you have slave labor pulling minerals out of the ground.

   16. SKSiddharth Kara1:53

       Yeah, you have slave labor-

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:54

       Essentially

   18. SKSiddharth Kara1:55

       ... you have child labor, you have militia-run mines. You know, for, for people who didn't hear our last conversation, um, go back and hear it, you know? 'Cause w- y- we walk through it. And, um, I haven't been back to the Congo since Cobalt Red came out, and I knew it would be too dangerous for me to go back, uh-

   19. JRJoe Rogan2:12

       Yeah, definitely don't go back, no

   20. SKSiddharth Kara2:13

       ... uh, you know, it's just, uh, my colleague said pretty soon after Cobalt Red came out, you know, "There was, there's, there's, there's a bounty for you." So I can't go back. Um, but I've stayed in touch with people there. I continue to get ground research done, and the conditions, uh, they're not much better, you know? And in some ways they've continued to degrade, because the fever for these, these battery component metals, and it's, it's cobalt, but it's also the lithium, the nickel, the copper, the tantalum, all the stuff that goes into our smartphones, our tablets. You know, you and I, nobody we know can function without this stuff. And the bottom of the chain is tainted in child labor, slavery, violence, environmental destruction and contamination. And the new fever is the AI data centers. You know, we're building these, um, as fast as possible to support the AI economy, and they require [laughs] all the same metals and minerals. So the circuit boards, the servers, the heat sinks, uh, the energy storage, they all require cobalt, copper, tin, tantalum. It's all coming out of Congo.

   21. JRJoe Rogan3:32

       [sighs] Hoy. It's so, such a strange aspect of human life that we require that, and that the, the, the area is controlled by people that are willing to do this.

   22. SKSiddharth Kara3:47

       Yeah.

3. 3:47 – 7:35

   “We won’t mine it here”: environmental hypocrisy and the ‘Blood Batteries’ findings

   1. JRJoe Rogan3:47

      Like, there's no... Like, we don't get much of these rare earth minerals from America, do we?

   2. SKSiddharth Kara3:52

      No. No, not much at all, no. And that's why it's, it- it's almost all in the Global South, and in particular in the heart of Africa, these deposits.

   3. JRJoe Rogan4:00

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

   4. SKSiddharth Kara4:09

      So it's a m-... Uh, it's... The dominating force is that the, the largest and highest grade reserves of these crucial elements and rare earth metals are in Central Africa. Um, lithium ex- expand- extends more broadly to South America. There's not much, um, there's not much in North America. There's some, but here's the rub. Here's the rub. You can find some lithium in the salt flats out west. You can find some cobalt along the Canadian-North American border. Uh, the rub is we don't want to wreck our environment-

   5. JRJoe Rogan4:45

      Oh, God

   6. SKSiddharth Kara4:46

      ... digging this stuff out of the ground, um, and then processing it. But we're okay obliterating their environment, and polluting it, and contaminating it. Um, and I did another study. I told you I can't go back to the Congo, but I have colleagues, and we've continued doing research. And I, I issued a report, came out last year, called Blood Batteries, um, through the University of Nottingham. And we got to quantify some of the environmental impact, which, uh, is so crucial to the story. It's crucial to the story of this data center push, to the EV push, the environmental impact. And we used timelapse, timelapse satellite imagery to see that, uh, from the dawn of the sort of cobalt battery metal revolution to 2022, uh, 40, 50, 60% of the forest area's gone. Um, uh, shrubbery, grasslands, all of that gone, replaced with mining territory. And then-

   7. JRJoe Rogan5:49

      Is this the Congo a- as a whole?

   8. SKSiddharth Kara5:52

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

   9. JRJoe Rogan5:58

      And what percentage of the Congo is that?

   10. SKSiddharth Kara6:00

       Small part of it.

   11. JRJoe Rogan6:01

       Okay.

   12. SKSiddharth Kara6:02

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

   13. JRJoe Rogan6:08

       Right, that's why I was confused

   14. SKSiddharth Kara6:09

       ... up in the north. So in the-

   15. JRJoe Rogan6:10

       The Congo's insanely dense-

   16. SKSiddharth Kara6:11

       Yeah

   17. JRJoe Rogan6:11

       ... and huge.

   18. SKSiddharth Kara6:12

       In the mining part. In the mining part.

   19. JRJoe Rogan6:13

       Okay.

   20. SKSiddharth Kara6:14

       So you've got a massive loss of, of forestry and water bodies and an expansion of mining. And then we tested the water for heavy metals and acidity levels. And we did a case study in the town of Kolwezi, which is sort of ground zero for all these metals, cobalt and copper and so on. And there was between 10 and 950 times the World Health Organization maximum recommended limit for human safety of a range of heavy metals from lead to cobalt to copper to uranium, uh, to chromium. Uh, uh, so the whole water sources in that part of the country have been completely contaminated. So I point all this out because we object to that here. We don't want our trees gone. We don't want our forests destroyed. We don't want our water contaminated. We don't want the air to be polluted, but it's okay for it to happen over there, kind of out of sight to those people, so long as we can plug in our phone, build out our data centers, uh, keep buying our EVs and so on. And then that's the story. Okay? That's the story, that we're okay destroying them and their world, uh, so long as ours remains sacrosanct, and that frankly is just the great hypocrisy of all this.

4. 7:35 – 9:57

   Can mining be done responsibly? What’s inevitable vs what’s preventable

   1. JRJoe Rogan7:35

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

   2. SKSiddharth Kara7:41

      Not yet. Not yet, no. I mean-

   3. JRJoe Rogan7:44

      Is it... I'm sorry to interrupt, but is, is it possible to do... Uh, uh, is it just an inevitable fact of when you do that kind of high-level mining, you're gonna destroy the environment or could it be mitigated?

   4. SKSiddharth Kara7:56

      You could do... It could be done better. I mean, you, you do have to chop down all the trees where the deposit is, so deforestation is inevitable. But let's say this was done in our backyard here in Austin. Someone found a big copper, cobalt, tin, tantalum deposit somewhere. There'd be rules to follow. You'd have to deforest the whole place, but we'd probably say, "Go plant the same number of trees somewhere else to offset it," and there'd be a lot of rules around containment, make sure you don't pollute the rivers and so on, and none of that is done in the Global South. None of that, none of that is done in Congo. Uh, a- and it's mostly Chinese state-run mining companies, um, that don't give a shit-

   5. JRJoe Rogan8:41

      [laughs] Yeah

   6. SKSiddharth Kara8:42

      ... about the people and the environment there. Uh, but our tech and EV companies all know that, and they're all buying this stuff, uh, from them knowing that. So the chain is tainted. It's tainted in, in misery. It's tainted in blood. It's tainted in environmental destruction. It doesn't have to be that way. Um, we don't have enough of this stuff here to offset the demand, but we could start mining some of it here. The problem is there's legitimate objections to the environmental impact.

   7. JRJoe Rogan9:12

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

   8. SKSiddharth Kara9:22

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan9:22

      Groundwater contamination is inevitable, right?

   10. SKSiddharth Kara9:24

       It just, it just all leaches in.

   11. JRJoe Rogan9:25

       Right.

   12. SKSiddharth Kara9:25

       I mean, the pro- It's, it's not just the mining-

   13. JRJoe Rogan9:28

       It's the products they use to get the-

   14. SKSiddharth Kara9:29

       And the, the processing of-

   15. JRJoe Rogan9:31

       Yeah

   16. SKSiddharth Kara9:31

       ... of this stuff. You know, you get an ore that's got cobalt, copper, nickel, silver, bit of uranium in it, and you have to separate all that. And so there's heavy industrial acids, toxic industrial liquids used to dissolve and separate those metals, and that's what inevitably leaches, uh-

   17. JRJoe Rogan9:52

       They pump that stuff right into the ground?

   18. SKSiddharth Kara9:53

       It just, it goes into the ground, and then it seeps into the groundwater and to the rivers, lakes.

5. 9:57 – 10:44

   How long this has been happening: colonial copper, WWII uranium, and the resource curse

   1. JRJoe Rogan9:57

      When did this all begin?

   2. SKSiddharth Kara10:00

      So the, the, this, the, that part of the Congo in the southeastern corner from the town of Lubumbashi to Kolwezi was mined for copper going back to colonial times. Uh, it, it... And something like a quarter of the bullets used in World War I were copper from that part of the Congo, okay? So it, it, copper mining goes back a long ways, but there was other stuff there. It just didn't have industrial value yet. The uranium that was used in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from that same part of the Congo.

   3. JRJoe Rogan10:36

      Whoa.

   4. SKSiddharth Kara10:37

      The, the high- the highest grade uranium, um, deposit known in the world at that time.

6. 10:44 – 14:55

   Quantifying the human toll: 300,000 artisanal miners, slavery prevalence, and child labor

   1. JRJoe Rogan10:44

      Isn't it insane that that place has, like, the most valuable resources on Earth, but yet it's one of the poorest places on Earth?

   2. SKSiddharth Kara10:51

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

   3. JRJoe Rogan11:13

      And you can get people to work for basically nothing.

   4. SKSiddharth Kara11:15

      Yeah, there's virtually nil alternative. There's, there's virtually nil alternative way to survive, and, and people have to understand that too. When you displace hundreds of thousands of people with a big mining operation, meaning there y- there were villages there and maybe a river, and they used to fish and grow some potatoes or whatever, and you just displace all those people, and you set up a mining operation the size of a small city, um, there's no other way for them to survive but to bring their kids and their wives and come into that same mining territory. And this is, this is what happens every day. Roll up their sleeves and get down in that toxic dirt and try to gather enough ore in a sack for the day to make a dollar. And, and I know now roughly how many people it is. When you and I spoke in 2026-

   5. JRJoe Rogan12:05

      2020

   6. SKSiddharth Kara12:06

      2022, sorry. We're now in 2026. Uh, I had documented the human horror taking place, and that- that's what Cobalt Red is about. But I had not done enough to quantify how many people exactly. And so in the same report I mentioned, blood batteries, ran prevalence estimates, just sample at all the sites how many people, and you can build an estimate. And on, on any given day, there are at least 300,000 people, men, women and children, digging for cobalt with their bare hands and pickaxes and shovels. 300,000 people on any given day, and that fluctuates by season a little bit, dry season, wet season. Of that 300,000, about 37%, so more than one out of three, are working in conditions we'd call absolute slavery. And almost 10% are kids, so roughly 30,000 kids on any given day. Not in school, not learning, exposed to toxic work, toxic, dangerous mining with their hands, uh, up to their necks in it. And that's the bottom of the chain, you know, and people, people not only need to know that, but think hard about their own personal choices in the context of that knowledge. You know, what do I mean by that? I mean, do you have to upgrade your phone every year? People often ask me, "What do I do? Okay, I accept the premise that the rechargeable lifestyle I live is facilitated by and built upon an enormity of human suffering, uh, of those people over there. What do I do? I can't, I can't fix that." And I say, "You're right, you can't. I can't. Uh, but you can think about your personal choices." And the first one is, uh, do you have to upgrade the phone and the tablet every year just 'cause the tech company tells you to? 'Cause each time you do, you're contributing to those demand side forces. So if the phone still works, just use it. Um, the EV is a more interesting question. You know, you don't upgrade the EV. You either buy one or you keep your internal combustion engine car. Um, now EV companies will tell us their mining is done sustainably, and the supply chain is audited and all of that, and, and all of these horrors are taking place in someone else's supply chain. But th- the truth is, it's all tainted. It's all coming out of the same pot of tainted, um, contaminated human degradation and environmental destruction. The EV story is let's save the planet.

   7. JRJoe Rogan14:46

      Yeah.

   8. SKSiddharth Kara14:46

      A- and that's fine. We need to save the planet. But we can't save our piece of the planet by destroying their piece of the planet.

7. 14:55 – 17:38

   EV contradictions and hidden pollution: brake dust, heavier vehicles, and “green” marketing

   1. JRJoe Rogan14:55

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

   2. SKSiddharth Kara15:11

      Yeah

   3. JRJoe Rogan15:12

      ... is brake dust. That stuff that you clean off your wheel when you go to the car wash, that stuff is in your lungs. If you live in a big city, especially like New York City, and you're walking around, you are 100% breathing in brake dust. And it's been proven that living in polluted, heavily populated cities lowers your lifespan, and it's probably one of the reasons. You're dealing with a, a toxic element in the atmosphere that you're breathing in every day, whether you like it or not, and there's not a thing you can do about it.

   4. SKSiddharth Kara15:37

      Yeah. Yeah, it, I- I- I, uh, you know, there's so many parts of the EV story that we don't get fully told. You know, brake, brake dust is certainly one.

   5. JRJoe Rogan15:47

      Well, all cars give off brake dust, just to be really clear.

   6. SKSiddharth Kara15:49

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan15:49

      But EVs are heavier.

   8. SKSiddharth Kara15:50

      They're heavier.

   9. JRJoe Rogan15:51

      It's-

   10. SKSiddharth Kara15:51

       They're, so you, you brake more.

   11. JRJoe Rogan15:52

       Yeah.

   12. SKSiddharth Kara15:52

       You have to brake more.

   13. JRJoe Rogan15:52

       You brake more, yeah.

   14. SKSiddharth Kara15:54

       Yeah, you, y- if... That's right.

   15. JRJoe Rogan15:56

       I think there is some ways around that, and I think, um, one way to mitigate it quite a bit, I believe, is carbon ceramic brakes. Is that the case, Jamie? Let's find out if that's absolutely true. I've read that, but I wanna make sure that's really true. Uh, I know from anecdotal experience that when you clean your car, if you have carbon ceramic brakes, there's almost no brake dust on your wheels. It's a very different thing. If you have regular steel brakes, it just, it, for whatever reason, leaves more brake dust.

   16. SKSiddharth Kara16:24

       Yeah.

   17. JRJoe Rogan16:24

       I'm not sure why. We'll find out in a second. Um, but other than that, is there any sort of novel material that can do it? Here it goes. "Carbon ceramic brake systems can reduce brake wear particulate pollution substantially compared with conventional gray cast iron rotors, but they do not eliminate brake dust. The actual environmental outcome depends on the complete friction pair, rotor and pad formulation, and on driving conditions." Yeah, so it just explains what brake dust is, and so it's-

   18. SKSiddharth Kara16:53

       Yeah

   19. JRJoe Rogan16:53

       ... it does help a lot, substantially, but it, you know, doesn't eliminate it.

   20. SKSiddharth Kara16:58

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan16:59

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

   22. SKSiddharth Kara17:12

       Well, uh, there's, there's certainly things we can and should be doing to mitigate the environmental impacts of whether it's an EV or even an internal combustion engine, you know. I didn't know about these brake pads. That's, um, um, that's worth, it's worth people knowing more about that. [laughs]

   23. JRJoe Rogan17:29

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

   24. SKSiddharth Kara17:34

       So this is the thing.

   25. JRJoe Rogan17:35

       Right.

   26. SKSiddharth Kara17:35

       This is the thing. Th- there's always something.

   27. JRJoe Rogan17:37

       Right.

8. 17:38 – 23:14

   Lithium expansion in Congo: ‘done with cobalt’ doesn’t end exploitation

   1. SKSiddharth Kara17:38

      And, and you made this point with Rizza. You know, it, okay, cobalt, but it's also the lithium.

   2. JRJoe Rogan17:43

      Right.

   3. SKSiddharth Kara17:43

      It's also the nickel. It's all... One of the biggest lithium deposits now, and, and people are saying, "Okay, let's use less cobalt in the batteries. Let's do, do lithium iron phosphate batteries. Let's do the solid state batteries." They always have lithium in them. One of the biggest lithium deposits now is, is in the Congo, and it just started shipping under this Chinese mining company, um, in June of this year

   4. JRJoe Rogan18:08

      Uh, out of this deposit. And the conditions there, I haven't been there, colleagues who've been up there, it's a near a town called Manono, they're just as horrific. And so when you say, "All right, done with cobalt. We're just gonna do lithium iron phosphate battery or l- you know, lithium table salt battery," whatever. Same deal. Same deal. You know, uh, so it's, it's about extending the horizon of our compassion beyond our immediate circle and, and caring about everyone who's attached to our life and our lifestyle, no matter how ti- tangential or how far downstream they might be. They're still brothers and sisters. They still inhabit this earth with us. They still live, breathe, and have dreams just like we do. And you could be them if you were born there. That's the, that's the thing. You got lucky. We all got lucky. You and I most certainly got lucky. We got lucky. But, yeah. We got the roll of the dice that was favorable- And that's all it is ... and, and that's all it is. 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It's har- And people don't wanna beli- That's why that whole pull yourself b- up by your bootstraps ideal- uh, ideology that some people like to promote, like, that's kind of crazy. In certain circumstances it's accurate, but to put that flat across the board for everybody, no, there's people, there's no boots. There's no boots. They're barefoot. They don't, they don't have clean water. Yeah. Like, they don't have nothing, and no medical infrastructure, and you're being forced to work in a, an environment that 100% is gonna poison you to death. And we only make progress when we extend our compassion out. Right. That... A- a- and when I say progress, I mean moral progress as a species on this earth. That's the, literally the key. It... Like, if y- if, if you wanted to figure out, like, w- how to make just global life better for all people, it's take whatever the Third World is and bring it up to the First World. We should all wanna do that. If everybody wanted to do that, if everybody wanted to deliver infrastructure, education, medical, uh, establishment, like, where there's, like, legitimate hospitals, like, e- everything that we have in the First World, if that was all over the world, like, how much less problems would there be? But y- the problem is the resources, like the resources in the Congo, whether it's oil or whatever it is, they're worth so much money, and the people that are in control of these resources are extracting so much money, and they don't ever wanna let that go. No, they don't. It, it, it's... It... I run a thought experiment with people sometimes, and when I teach a class, you know, I haven't taught in a couple years, but when I teach, um, I run a thought experiment, and it, it's exactly what we're talking about here. So let, let's say you are up in the sky, in heaven, whatever, pre-birth state, whatever that might be, and you don't know what roll of the dice you're gonna get. Am I gonna be born in a safe, loving, upper middle-class family in the West? Am I gonna be born in some war-torn, poor, uh, part of South Sudan or whatever? Right. You know, you don't know. Okay. What kind of, what kind of world would you hope the favorable people are trying to pursue in the event that you're the one, you get the bad roll of the dice? And you'd say, "Man, I really hope that the ones who get the good roll of the dice will care about me, they'll see me, they will feel some connection to me. They will try to use their good roll of the dice in a way that benefits me somehow. Maybe they are part of some effort to, uh, bring education, healthcare, sanitation, whatever, to my part of the world, uh, a- and, and have that connection and extension of their compassion and empathy towards me," because we're all up here in this pre-birth state recognizing some of you are going there, some of you are going there. Let's all agree, all right, those of you who end up in the good place, you don't lose sight of us. Right. You know? And I won't lose sight of you in the event it's me. And, and then we get here, and, um, we're just wound up in our sphere, and we lose a sense of human

9. 23:14 – 24:52

   Infrastructure, energy, and the nuclear dilemma in developing regions

   1. JRJoe Rogan23:14

      connection. Isn't it partly because this is really the first of a couple generations, but w- with increasingly more contact and understanding of the rest of the world? Like, if you went back 100 years ago, people had virtually no understanding of how things went on anywhere else unless they had visited them. And now 100 years later, because of the te- very technology that we're talking about, which is also ironic- Yeah ... that's why we know so much about all these places in the world. And isn't the problem also with elevating these places and getting them infrastructure that one of the best ways to do it cleanly is nuclear power? Um, but then they found out that when you give people nuclear power, it's pretty easy for them to convert it into weapons. Man, okay. Right? So there's, there's, there's a lot to unpack. There's a lot. There's a lot to unpack here. 'Cause we're trying to... Like- Yeah ... if we're gonna be fair about a discussion of why everything's fucked- One of the reasons why everything's fucked is clearly 'cause they don't have infrastructure. They don't have power.

   2. SKSiddharth Kara24:12

      Yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan24:12

      They don't have water that's, that's clean. They don't have good education. They don't have all these things. So if you wanted to, like, start that and make it better, you would have to give them power. So are you gonna burn coal? Are you... What are you gonna do?

   4. SKSiddharth Kara24:25

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan24:25

      Like, there's only a few ways, right? There's dams. You can get hydroelectric power.

   6. SKSiddharth Kara24:29

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan24:29

      Um, windmills and solar, get the fuck out of here. That's not gonna... That's not, right- not right now.

   8. SKSiddharth Kara24:34

      Not right now, no.

   9. JRJoe Rogan24:34

      Not right now with current technology, it's not gonna power giant cities.

   10. SKSiddharth Kara24:37

       No.

   11. JRJoe Rogan24:37

       So, like, what do you give them? You give them nuclear power. And this is what happened in India, right? And this is what happened in Pakistan, and they're like, "Oh, look, we could turn this into a missile."

   12. SKSiddharth Kara24:46

       Turn- yeah, you know-

   13. JRJoe Rogan24:47

       "Fuck each other up."

   14. SKSiddharth Kara24:48

       It... [sighs] So-

   15. JRJoe Rogan24:51

       It's tricky

   16. SKSiddharth Kara24:51

       ... it's tricky.

   17. JRJoe Rogan24:52

       Yeah.

10. 24:52 – 28:40

    Uranium allegations: Congo extraction and China’s nuclear stockpile growth

    1. SKSiddharth Kara24:52

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

    2. JRJoe Rogan25:16

       Fat Man

    3. SKSiddharth Kara25:17

       ... yeah, Fat Man.

    4. JRJoe Rogan25:18

       Fat Man, Little Boy.

    5. SKSiddharth Kara25:18

       Fat Man. Little Boy and Fat Man-

    6. JRJoe Rogan25:19

       Yeah

    7. SKSiddharth Kara25:20

       ... um, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, okay? Came, came from a mine called Shinkolobwe in, in the Congo. And there was a meeting of the Belgians and the Americans in Midtown Manhattan, and they said, "All right, we're gonna give you so much money for that uranium," and so on and so forth. And, um, Congo has a lot of uranium. All right? A lot of uranium. And for the last 10 years, Western intelligence agencies have been trying to figure out, how is China growing its nuclear stockpile, stockpile of nuclear warheads, so fast? 'Cause they got no uranium. They're not getting it from North Korea, 'cause they don't have it either. Russia's not gonna be sending it to them. They're not gonna give teeth to their neighbor. Where are they getting it from? And you talk to people on the ground in the Congo. Now, there's... And now there's some counterintelligence looking into this. People in the Congo have said, "Look, for the better part of the last 15 years, every one of these Chinese state-run mining companies, in the same tractor trailer that's got the copper and the cobalt and the nickel, they've got uranium on it, too. And it's all headed over to mainland China," and that's the answer to this question of, how did China jack up its nuclear stockpile supply so fast in the last 10, 15 years? Now, I can't verify any of that.

    8. JRJoe Rogan26:37

       Of course.

    9. SKSiddharth Kara26:37

       It's not like I've done uranium investigations.

    10. JRJoe Rogan26:40

        Look, it only makes sense.

    11. SKSiddharth Kara26:41

        But it makes a lot-

    12. JRJoe Rogan26:41

        They have complete control of the region

    13. SKSiddharth Kara26:42

        ... it makes a lot of sense.

    14. JRJoe Rogan26:43

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

    15. SKSiddharth Kara26:46

        No one's gonna stop them. They control the ground. They control the ground there. And that's scary, you know? And, and so when you talk about, do we give them... Do we use nuclear power in that part of the world, I mean, I don't think you want, uh, yellowcake floating around that part of the world, you know?

    16. JRJoe Rogan27:04

        Right.

    17. SKSiddharth Kara27:05

        Uh, um, but-

    18. JRJoe Rogan27:06

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

    19. SKSiddharth Kara27:13

        I, um, um, you know, they may write stuff on, down on paper, you know.

    20. JRJoe Rogan27:17

        But there's not, like-

    21. SKSiddharth Kara27:18

        They're not, no.

    22. JRJoe Rogan27:18

        There's a-

    23. SKSiddharth Kara27:19

        No, no

    24. JRJoe Rogan27:19

        ... I mean, there's a billion people over there. You would think-

    25. SKSiddharth Kara27:21

        No

    26. JRJoe Rogan27:21

        ... there would be a certain percentage, like Red Cross-type organizations.

    27. SKSiddharth Kara27:26

        No. I mean-

    28. JRJoe Rogan27:26

        Nothing

    29. SKSiddharth Kara27:27

        ... we have some sense of what they've done to the Uyghurs.

    30. JRJoe Rogan27:30

        Yeah.
11. 28:40 – 30:49

    US entry and the PR term ‘artisanal mining’: Virtus Mining and what it really means

    1. SKSiddharth Kara28:40

       Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would say so. I would say so. Now, one thing that's changed since you and I talked is there's actually a US mining company now operating in that part of the Congo. There wasn't one for a better part of two decades. And one of the mines which, uh, is owned by, um, Dubai, Middle Eastern guys, um, part of the Trump administration sort of peace for minerals arrangement between President Tshisekedi and the Trump administration, was mining access. And so one concession, uh, was sold to this US mining company. It's called Virtus Mining, and they're run by former military guys. And they took over a couple of copper cobalt concessions in Lubumbashi and Kolwezi, both sides of the copper belt. That's just this year, so within the last few months, okay? And I haven't been there to look, but I talk to colleagues all the time and say, "Look, is, is, is Virtus, are they doing things any better?" And the feedback I've gotten so far is they seem to be, uh, improving standards around artisanal mining. There's still artisanal mining, but improving standards around-

    2. JRJoe Rogan29:50

       But when you say artisanal mining, you, you went into depth about this the first time we talked-

    3. SKSiddharth Kara29:54

       Yeah

    4. JRJoe Rogan29:54

       ... but we should just tell people-

    5. SKSiddharth Kara29:55

       Yeah

    6. JRJoe Rogan29:55

       ... this, that, that thing, artisanal, sounds awesome.

    7. SKSiddharth Kara29:57

       Yeah.

    8. JRJoe Rogan29:57

       It sounds like a great cup of coffee, like fair trade-

    9. SKSiddharth Kara30:00

       It's a nice, it's a nice-

    10. JRJoe Rogan30:01

        ... at a nice place

    11. SKSiddharth Kara30:01

        ... fresh-baked bread and-

    12. JRJoe Rogan30:03

        Yeah, with like someone's got a beautiful ceramic cup they serve you the coffee in.

    13. SKSiddharth Kara30:06

        Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's right.

    14. JRJoe Rogan30:07

        Artisanal mining is pr- pretty much the opposite of that.

    15. SKSiddharth Kara30:09

        It, it, it's the, the games people play with words, right?

    16. JRJoe Rogan30:12

        Right.

    17. SKSiddharth Kara30:12

        Uh, no, so artisanal mining means you've got Mom, Dad, and their kids up to here in toxic grit and filth, digging-

    18. JRJoe Rogan30:21

        Yeah, this is an artisanal mine.

    19. SKSiddharth Kara30:22

        This is, this is our... Yeah, yeah.

    20. JRJoe Rogan30:22

        The fact that you can use that same word, artisanal, with this that you c-

    21. SKSiddharth Kara30:27

        Yeah

    22. JRJoe Rogan30:27

        ... and you can with a nice coffee shop, is crazy.

    23. SKSiddharth Kara30:29

        It's crazy. That's... So this is All right. You know, I got in-

    24. JRJoe Rogan30:34

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

    25. SKSiddharth Kara30:41

        You're like, "What? This language is messed up."

    26. JRJoe Rogan30:42

        Yeah. How the fuck-

    27. SKSiddharth Kara30:43

        How, how, how, how are these both artisanal?

    28. JRJoe Rogan30:45

        That's crazy.

    29. SKSiddharth Kara30:46

        How is my espresso and that-

    30. JRJoe Rogan30:47

        [laughs]
12. 30:49 – 36:20

    Kara’s near-death experience documenting militia-run child mines

    1. JRJoe Rogan30:49

       For lack of a better term, these mines, um, it's all basically-

    2. SKSiddharth Kara30:53

       It's all-

    3. JRJoe Rogan30:53

       ... the poorest people on Earth

    4. SKSiddharth Kara30:55

       ... brute, raw human labor. Uh, it's tens of thousands of people, and there's kids down there, too, okay? You just can't see in this massive humanity.

    5. JRJoe Rogan31:05

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

    6. SKSiddharth Kara31:07

       Mothers with babies on their backs.

    7. JRJoe Rogan31:08

       Yeah.

    8. SKSiddharth Kara31:08

       So that's, that's what the mining industry calls artisanal, okay? It's, it's this... It's kids with 40, 50 kilogram sacks of cobalt, um, on their necks clamoring out of a pit. Cobalt is toxic to touch. It is toxic to breathe. All these kids get respiratory distress, cancers. The women get birth defects, congenital disease. Here's a teenager with a baby. These are all my photos, okay, that are, 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, that's in the hills above Kambove. That's the story I told you last time where I... That's probably the closest I came to getting shot, was in this mining area. It was almost all children run by a militia, um, north of a town called Kambove, and it is all copper cobalt. It all gets sold right into the industrial supply chain. People need to accept this truth. The kids don't dig cobalt going to the moon, okay? That cobalt all goes into the formal supply chain through militias and traders, all of it. What do I mean by formal supply chain? I mean the formal industrial mining companies that then go and refine this stuff, and it ends up in your phones and cars and tablets. So I was up there in those hills, and you're not supposed to be up there, like I wasn't supposed to be in the place where there was 15,000 people in that pit. And these militia guys come, come barreling up the hill with AK-47s, and I thought that was it for me. Uh, I mean, this is, this is the story I told you last time. I thought that was it. I mean, they threw my backpack off my back, shoved me to the ground, yanked all my stuff out, demanded my phone to see if I'd taken photos and videos and so on. And the only thing that saved my life, this, this... For people who are interested in human rights research, this is what's important. You get local intel, local colleagues, take their advice. The only thing that saved my life that day. So one of my local colleagues said, "Siddharth, before you go to any of these places, you gotta get a stamp from the governor's office on your visa paperwork, and you take that with you everywhere, and that will convey to any militia that you're under the governor's protection, and they're not gonna fuck with you. They won't... They'll mess with you, but they're not gonna do the worse."

    9. JRJoe Rogan33:30

       They're not gonna kill you.

    10. SKSiddharth Kara33:31

        They're not gonna kill you. Um, and I had to go get that stamp. I had to persuade the governor of, uh, Haut-Katanga Province that I was there not to shame the Congo, that I was seeking truth, that I think his people are being, uh, exploited by the Global North and this whole tech, um, fever for rechargeable stuff, and he put his little stamp on it. And, you know, that was the only time I met him, only time I saw him, but I had that stamp. So when I was up there and, and my stuff getting thrown around, they had their guns pointed at me, and my guide, his face went pale, and I was, uh... 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, and I pulled that piece of paper out, and I showed them the stamp. And, and then they just said, "Get out of here." Just, you know. They, they let us go. So, uh, when you go into conflict zones, you have to have that kind of local advice, um, 'cause it can mean the difference between living and being shot and dumped in some ditch where these little girls with babies... That's the image that needs to be in our minds every time we plug something in.

    11. JRJoe Rogan34:48

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

    12. SKSiddharth Kara34:50

        Yeah, it was with my phone. I had... So those... So they started, you know, going through my phone. They had me unlock it. But I had all these images in a password-protected other folder. So I just showed them pictures of, like, you know, my, my home, my daughter, my s- you know, stuff.

    13. JRJoe Rogan35:05

        Right. Right.

    14. SKSiddharth Kara35:05

        Just whatever. I had another folder, and they d- they, they, they didn't have the savvy to-

    15. JRJoe Rogan35:08

        They weren't... Right

    16. SKSiddharth Kara35:09

        ... they didn't know. So i- i- i- th- like, same like that video of the 15,000 people, you know. I just managed to do this-

    17. JRJoe Rogan35:17

        Mm-hmm

    18. SKSiddharth Kara35:17

        ... and tuck it away, and... 'Cause that was also controlled by militias, uh, that particular site. And, and that, that mine is classified industrial, which means only heavy equipment being used to source the copper and the cobalt, and that mine is in the bottom of the supply chains in the, in the disclosure documents of every tech and EV company. It's one of the biggest copper cobalt suppliers out of the Congo. And you get in there, and you say, "This, this is not industrial at all, nor is it baked bread and espresso." [laughs] "This is hell on Earth."

    19. JRJoe Rogan35:59

        Right.

    20. SKSiddharth Kara36:00

        You know, this is, this is... Am I transported back to E- Egyptian times and, you know, raw, brute slave labor being made to build a pyramid? In this case, to excavate a giant pit of, of ore. This is, it's still sh- I can still hear the, the clanging in that place and the shouting.

13. 36:20 – 40:55

    From Congo to history: introducing ‘The Zorg’ and why one slave ship mattered most

    1. JRJoe Rogan36:20

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

    2. SKSiddharth Kara36:35

       Yeah.

    3. JRJoe Rogan36:35

       And it's, uh, a tale of greed and murder that inspired the abolition of slavery. And just imagine Like, those boats carried people from pretty much that same place-

    4. SKSiddharth Kara36:47

       Yeah

    5. JRJoe Rogan36:47

       ... or close to it.

    6. SKSiddharth Kara36:48

       Yeah, say, no, the, this, this, this ship, you know, what I learned writing this book, The Zorg is the most consequential slave ship that ever crossed the Atlantic. There are more than 40,000 slave ship voyages across the three and a half centuries of the slave trade that carted 12 and a half, 13 million Africans. And if you need to know about one of them, it's this one, 'cause it's the most important, the most consequential. And the reason I say that is, it opens the whole world of the slave trade, and its journey ends in this culminating act of brute inhumanity that sparked the first movement to abolish slavery. And it's that sequence that is so vital for us to understand historically. Uh, people can't fix a horror until they learn about it, and the average person, I've learned, is not evil. Uh, we may be generally self-interested and worried about us and ours and so on, but we're not evil. Uh, and when we learn about something wrong, we generally feel something and wanna do something about it, and that's what happened. This was the ship that told the whole world what was happening in the slave trade, and a small community of faith-based moral leaders said, "This is unacceptable. This is beneath us, uh, and we g- we're gonna devote our lives to abolishing slavery." But the other thing that this journey is, you know, we, we grow up, you grow up in America, you learn about slavery. You learn about plantation economy and how slaves were treated, cotton, and so on. But we don't learn the details of how they got here, and how the first global economy was born around the Atlantic slave trade, how modern finance, banking, and insurance was born through the slave trade, and the conditions that the African people endured being carted across the Atlantic. Um, and it's essential to know this history because it tells us why we are where we are, um, h- at this point in history, and, uh, as a moral or lack of, uh, 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, and, and the feedback I get from readers is, "Man, I knew slavery, I had a sense, but I had no idea just how horrible it was."

    7. JRJoe Rogan39:26

       Do you... The fact that, I mean, does, does it dishearten you to know that essentially the same thing is happening right now as this book? Like, in the Western world, people don't believe that. You know, I had a t- discussion the other day with someone, he was talking about how we're doing better today, we abolished slavery, and I said, "No, we abolished slavery right here."

    8. SKSiddharth Kara39:47

       Yeah.

    9. JRJoe Rogan39:47

       "But there's more slaves on Earth now than there were during the time of the Atlantic slave trade."

    10. SKSiddharth Kara39:51

        So we abolished slavery on paper. You know, we have a piece of paper that says slavery's abolished, but in practice, uh, the, the institution of oppressing, subjugating, and extracting the labor of someone, uh, persists and has evolved into the modern era.

    11. JRJoe Rogan40:09

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

    12. SKSiddharth Kara40:14

        Millions

    13. JRJoe Rogan40:15

        ... in this country that are undocumented?

    14. SKSiddharth Kara40:17

        Yeah, yeah. I, I mean, who knows what the number is? Um, but millions around the world, tens of millions around the world. Um, the, but it's, it's, this, this history is important. This history's important because, uh, and this ship is important, uh, because it, it, it, it r- 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. It, it-

    15. JRJoe Rogan40:51

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

14. 40:55 – 57:46

    The machinery of the slave trade: coastal forts, dungeons, and sugar as the economic engine

    1. SKSiddharth Kara40:55

       It was, yeah, it was, it was, it, it was, it, it was the Anglican Church, leaders in the, in, in, in, the, in, the first movement to abolish slavery was in England, and it was sparked directly by this ship. Um, and so people, you know, can read the book and understand what happened on this ship. But, uh, it, it, it goes on its journey, um, picking up Africans along the West African coast. And I went to West Africa to see the old forts and castles that are there, uh, that Europeans built to facilitate the slave trade. They lined the West African coast with a higher concentration of fortifications than existed anywhere in Europe, little forts and castles and dungeons to gather human beings. And so Africans were marched from the inland regions, sometimes 1,000 miles. Arab slave traders would raid and ransack a village, grab people, and start marching them down to the coast, and, you know, trade along the way with house or slave dealers. And people would die, of course. They're yoked at the neck and tied, and they, many people didn't survive a five, six, 800-mile march to the-

    2. JRJoe Rogan42:03

       800-mile march.

    3. SKSiddharth Kara42:04

       Yeah, there's a, there's journal entries I came across. One, one captain, slave ship captain named John Newton. John Newton's a fascinating guy because he became an abolitionist and a preacher, and he wrote hymns, and probably the most famous hymn he wrote was Amazing Grace.

    4. JRJoe Rogan42:22

       Whoa.

    5. SKSiddharth Kara42:23

       So Amazing Grace was written by a slave trader.

    6. JRJoe Rogan42:26

       Whoa.

    7. SKSiddharth Kara42:26

       So John Newton, John Newton's from Liverpool. Liverpool was once capital of the, of the slave trade. We think of Beatles when we think Liverpool [laughs] , you know, or the football club, but it was once the dominant force in the entire European Atlantic slave trade, Liverpool. And Newton was one of those captains. He captained three slave ship journeys. They called it the triangular trade, and what that meant was is, um, ships departed Europe, in this case Liverpool, with tradable goods, mirrors, knives, rum, brandy, cutlery, crockery, linens, bandanas, whatever, cowrie shells. Took all that stuff down to Western Africa, where Europeans had built some castles and forts, and those castles and forts were involved in the business of accumulating Africans. Phew. Okay? And they held them in dungeons in these forts. And you can go to a place, I went to it, called Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, which was headquarters of the British slave trade. And there's a massive dungeon in the bottom of Cape Coast Castle, and Africans would be brought from hundreds of miles up, all the way up into the Sahel, marched down. A quarter to a third of them didn't survive. And so this, this is, uh, this is the dungeon at Cape Coast Castle. Whoa. Okay, and, uh, let me tell you something about this place, Joe. So that, that, this is, uh... Oh, man. So John Newton had in his journal, um, "Brought on board today, um, Africans, uh, marched, I think, 1,000 miles from the inland." Okay? So they were marched down and, and eventually sold to the Europeans who run these forts and castles all along the coast. The biggest one was Cape Coast Castle. The British and the Dutch had one just cannon shot away called Elmina Castle. This is in modern-day Ghana. And they were held in the dungeon, and you saw that picture of the dungeon. So the dungeon was divided between an area for men and an area for women and children. There'd be, at any given time, 1,000 human beings in there, shackled down. One shaft for light and where they'd drop food and water. And I don't know if, Jamie, if you had that photo again. You saw, like, a little narrow groove down the floor of the dungeon, and it, there, there you see that. You see that groove down the floor of the dungeon, and that's supposed to siphon away their piss and shit and menstrual blood. And so you can imagine 1,000 people in there. Now, it always is full and clogged in rainy season and whatever, so eventually the whole thing is covered in sludge of sewage, okay? And so they would spend months down here, Joe. They would spend months down here, and many people didn't survive that experience. So you're marched from the, from the inland regions hundreds of miles, didn't, maybe didn't survive that. If you did, you're in this dungeon, you're spending months down here, and then eventually, uh... There's the male slave dungeon entrance at Cape Coast Castle. So eventually the ships come from Western Europe with all their stuff, and, uh, they come up to Cape Coast Castle, they park in the roads, they drop anchor. It's about a mile or two offshore. They take a canoe up to the castle, and they meet the governor, and the governor says, "Okay, you know, let's, let's do our business." And they go into the dungeon, and they bring out a parcel of slaves, some men, some women, and some children. They first clean them. Remember, they're covered in sewage and filth. And they cover them in palm oil to make them look healthy. And the captain will say, "I'll take this one, this one, this one." His surgeon or doctor will inspect them, open their mouths, check their lymph nodes, make them cough, make sure they're not sick and unwell, and, and then they purchase these slaves, and then brand them. And they brand them, put, uh, some palm oil on their shoulder, brand them so they know which one they bought 'cause they're gonna go down to the next fort, buy a few, buy a few. And then when they've got all the several hundred to load up the ship, they come back and get them. When I went into the dungeon at Cape Coast, it's a kind of a cobbled floor, 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 kinda cobbly, and then there's, there's some sections that are smooth, and they had one that was just perfectly smooth. And I said, "Why is this so perfectly smooth here?" He said, "We left this just the way we found it. This is the sedimented urine, piss, shit, menstrual blood of the people who were held here for centuries." And we don't learn that, you know? We, we don't learn that when we learn about slavery. We don't learn about these visceral details of what people had to endure before they even were put on the ship. Now let's talk about the ship, you know, which is a floating dungeon. The, the deepseafaring vessel, Joe, is a marvel of engineering. It's a marvel of vision and ambition and European genius. Oh, Jamie's skipping ahead here to- Oh, no, I'm sorry ... the [laughs] the- I jumped. Sorry ... [laughs] the, the visual imagery. W- w- w- when we talk about abolition, all right, we're gonna talk about the first use of a viral image, which Jamie pr- gave us a prelude to. So the, the deepseafaring vessel is... It's, it's a testament to European genius and ambition and vision and exploration. It, it, it... There's no other way to look at it. There was an Earth that was here, and people were all in their pockets until the Portuguese and the Spanish developed a ship that could cross an ocean. And this was the early 1400s, the Age of Exploration. You learn about this in high school, Prince Henry the Navigator got his ships. "We need to see the rest of the world. What else is out there?" Maybe some riches. And the Portuguese, they, they started going south, and they hit the Canaries, Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa. Shipwreck, shipwreck, shipwreck. The winds were just too intense, too violent, too countervailing. Their ships could not handle it. So Portuguese devented a, invented a specific sail called a, a, a lateen rig. All right? So it's shaped like a triangle, and rather than a traditional square sail that gets pushed by the wind, the lateen 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, and the caravel takes Europeans south of the Canaries, and they get down to the west coast of Africa. They, they, they round the Cape of Good Hope and, and by the end of the 15th century, the Portuguese have reached India. Sh- Extraordinary exploration and triumph of navigation and genius. Then we get Christopher Columbus. Oh, man, Portuguese have gotten all the way over to India, and they had to go all the way around Africa. Maybe there's a shortcut. [laughs] I'm gonna go that way. I'm gonna go that way. There's gotta be a shortcut, you know? So he [laughs] so he goes west. I'm gonna find a better way. He, he lands in the Bahamas. India. Indians. [laughs] All right. Okay. [laughs] You know, we laugh, but I mean, he crossed the Atlantic fir- in, in his ship. He got, he got here. And, [laughs] and he starts r- the Spanish r- reconnoitering of this, this part of the planet. The pope, Pope, uh, is Alexander the Sixth, says, "Okay, you Spanish, you Portuguese, you've kind of... You've, you're starting to suss out the rest of the world, and I want you to get along, so I'm gonna draw a line down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And everything east of that line, Portugal, that's for you. Everything west of that line, Spain, that's for you." So Spain colonized the Americas, and Portugal s- colonized Africa and India first. Now, the Europeans came across something during the Crusades that captivated their taste buds, and they called it sweet salt. Today we call it sugar. There was no sugar in Europe till the Crusades, 'cause it doesn't grow there. It grows in warm, tropical places. So 1494, the pope divides the world, and Spain and Portugal are now in tropical places where you can grow sugar. And this-

    8. JRJoe Rogan51:53

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

    9. SKSiddharth Kara52:01

       Well, they came across it in the Crusades, you know, 12, 1300. Europeans. Like, "Oh, these Arabs have got some sugar. It's nice." You know, but-

    10. JRJoe Rogan52:10

        They're getting it from cane? They're just-

    11. SKSiddharth Kara52:12

        Sugar cane

    12. JRJoe Rogan52:12

        ... processing it?

    13. SKSiddharth Kara52:13

        Sugar cane, yeah.

    14. JRJoe Rogan52:13

        Mm-hmm.

    15. SKSiddharth Kara52:14

        Yeah. Yeah, they, they... So, uh, because it doesn't grow-

    16. JRJoe Rogan52:18

        Right

    17. SKSiddharth Kara52:18

        ... in that part of the world.

    18. JRJoe Rogan52:19

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

    19. SKSiddharth Kara52:23

        Honey, berry juices.

    20. JRJoe Rogan52:25

        Wow.

    21. SKSiddharth Kara52:25

        Sugar. Sugar's another level, right?

    22. JRJoe Rogan52:27

        Yeah.

    23. SKSiddharth Kara52:28

        Sugar's another level. So, so they divide the world, and they start setting up their sugar plantations, and the Portuguese tap into existing systems of slavery in Africa. Let's be clear about that. Europeans didn't bring slavery to Africa. There was slavery there. They tap into those systems to populate their sugar plantations along the African coast with slave labor. Now, the Spanish decimate native populations. [laughs] Okay? The Mayans, the Aztecs, they get here, and through guns and disease and war, and they're decimating local populations.

    24. JRJoe Rogan53:06

        Mayans.

    25. SKSiddharth Kara53:07

        Mayans.

    26. JRJoe Rogan53:08

        Yeah.

    27. SKSiddharth Kara53:09

        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 send, he gives them a contract to b- bring me 4,000 Africans to come work these sugar plantations, 'cause they seem to be doing a good job working on yours. Thus begins the era of the Atlantic slave trade. It was about bringing Africans over to the Spanish colonies to work on the sugar plantations, and the Portuguese and the Spanish are running this triangular circuit, bringing goods down to Africa, buying Africans, taking them across. There you go. Um, dropping them in sugar plantations, and then getting the output of sugar labor, which is sugar, rum, molasses, whatever, taking it back to Europe, selling it, and then repeating the triangle.

    28. JRJoe Rogan54:04

        How were they so good at getting across the ocean but so bad at thinking that they were in India?

    29. SKSiddharth Kara54:09

        [laughs]

    30. JRJoe Rogan54:11

        That seems so insane. Like, how much of a map did they have of the world back then?
15. 57:46 – 1:22:29

    The Middle Passage and ship design for ‘human cargo’—then the Zorg massacre, insurance, and the birth of modern finance

    1. SKSiddharth Kara57:46

       ... uh, it, uh, the, the sugar, sugar, the way sugar's made today, of course, is, is different than these slave plantations that were erected by first Portugal and Spain, then later the British and the Dutch. So The Zorg is actually a Dutch slave ship, and it set sail around, uh, oc- 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, he's, he's bartering for these people, and he spends a couple of months acquiring Africans in this castle, this fort, this place, brands them, and then eventually he loads up his ship with, depending on the size of the ship, 3, 4, 5, 600 Africans, and loads his food and water, and he has to cross the Atlantic, what's called the Middle Passage. And the design of these ships, the design of a slave ship was specific, okay, uh, designed for human cargo. So the bottom was the food and water, and then they had what's called the tween deck. And all right, Jamie, you can, you can throw up that photo now. We're ready. All right. So here you've got the tween deck, all right? This is the schematic, and this, this is an important schematic. This is the Brooks slave ship out of Liverpool. And you see the bottom of the tween deck. The ship master is showing you how to line up the Africans. They're given 16 inches of space each. Like the, to quote John Newton, who we talked about, "Like books on a shelf." They're to be entered and stowed like books on a shelf.

    2. JRJoe Rogan59:25

       So each human is allotted 16 inches of space.

    3. SKSiddharth Kara59:28

       Yeah, that's right. Now, why are they laying down? Okay, so you're lining them all up, filling up every available possible piece of space. And then there's a second level here where you see them around this horseshoe. So they built a partition. You can see at the bottom left there. They built a partition so that they could maximize the cargo, the human capacity cargo of this vessel. So you can't sit upright. You're shackled down, laying down, and then there's a partition built, and then there's another level of people, like the, like the overhead bin space, okay? You're just lining these people up, and they're lined up like this, uh, for two months to cross the Atlantic. And you may s- 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 a- along the, uh, the, what's called, what they called the tween deck, this cargo here. And if you needed the bathroom, you had to try and get to that bucket with your chained partner. You're chained two, two by two. And of course, you never made it in time, and the ship is tossing and turning. And so in a matter of just a few days or a week, this entire deck is covered in s- in human piss and shit and blood and vomit, uh, and misery. And that's for the two months of the crossing. Uh, they don't teach us this, Joe. They don't teach us this part of it. So here's a, here's a shipmaster telling you how you can maximize the profit in the Brookes slave ship that he's building for the Brookes Liverpool family, and line these people up. Now, they're brought up, uh, in the morning and doused with seawater, and given a little bit of food, and half pint of water to drink. Uh, the men are kept in the front of the ship, and the women and children in the back, and they built a barricade down the middle to keep the men on one side because, um, you can imagine, let's say you're one of these Africans. You got that roll of the dice. You, uh, you're gonna try to do anything you can to get control of that ship. And so slave insur- insurrections were a common effort at resistance, and so Europeans built a barricade down the middle of every slave ship so that if somehow slaves managed to revolt, they would quickly get to the back, the stern side, where they could still control the ship. They had cannons mounted on the barricade to suppress the insurrection. Now-

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:02:30

       They would shoot a cannon into their own boat?

    5. SKSiddharth Kara1:02:32

       It, it, 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 c- they wrote about this, and then there was one captain out of Liverpool who said, "I find that the punishment for an insurrection that works best to ensure that there's not another one is if you take one of the insurrection leaders, chop him to pieces while he's alive, and distribute the pieces to the other slaves. This seems to quell any further effort at insurrection." Horror. Just horror. Now, they'd be whipped, and you can imagine what happened to women and girls. Uh, one slave captain said, um, "Sailors gratify their passions brute-like in front of the, in front of the others with girls not 10 years old." You know, people... There were no laws on that ship. It was in a moral abyss out in the middle of the ocean. And so in the case of the Zorg, they're taking these Africans across the Atlantic, and this is the kind of stuff that happens. There's an insurrection. Uh, that's one form of protest. Another form of protest is a hunger strike. "I'm not gonna eat. I'll just die. I'd rather die." If you've already survived the march from the inland, lived in the Cape Coast Castle dungeon for a few months in your own shit and piss, and then you're stuck in the ship, like, "I don't know where this is going, but I'm gonna stop eating. I'd rather be dead." The Europeans had a tool for that called the speculum oris, and it was initially a device used to pry open jaws when you had lockjaw. Slave ship captains got some of these, and if you didn't wanna eat, they jammed it in your mouth, forced it open, and shoved the food down your throat, cracking probably half your teeth and lacerating your tongue in the process, and then others would then fall in line, and that's the end of the hunger strike. So the, the level of barbarity taking place on these ships that people had to endure is heart-wrenching, uh, but it's important for us to come to terms with this historically so we understand what we're capable of, uh, and how to keep this kind of inhumanity from happening again, and that gets us to the, to the glimmer of hope from all this. So this ship cro- crosses the Atlantic, uh, it was a Dutch ship, okay, in the midst of the American Revolutionary War, and everybody was using the American Rev- Revolutionary War as a chance to get payback on the Brits 'cause the Brits were the power of the day. And, uh, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, with Amer- with the British Navy stretched thin trying to fight off the Americans, they used this as an opportunity to pick off some ships here. "Oh, Barbados is unguarded. Let's go take Barbados," you know. And so the, the Brits are fighting everybody at once, and their response to this was, "Okay, anybody with a ship, you are hereby given approval to be a pirate. Just go pirate the hell out of anybody you see with a Dutch flag, a French flag, [laughs] Spanish flag, any flag, American flag. Just go pirate them to hell. We need help. Our navy can't handle everything." So British take to the seas as pirates. So a British pirate ship captures this Dutch ship off the coast of Africa.

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:06:27

       Whoa.

    7. SKSiddharth Kara1:06:29

       And it already had a couple of hundred slaves in it. This British pirate, Captain William Llewellyn of HMS Alert, captures the Zorg off, uh, the coast of Liberia and finds two other Dutch ships and takes them over to Cape Coast Castle headquarters. And he looks at the other captains there, British captains, says, "Look, I got some Dutch prizes here with some slaves, and there's some gold and ivory. I'm, I'm, I'm auctioning this stuff today." And, uh, a Liverpool captain named Hanley- Who's captain of a ship called the William. "I'll take that one. I'll take the Zorg and everything in it." So y- they didn't have Venmo and cash and all that back then, so you write up an IOU. It was called a bill of exchange. So Hanley gives a bill of exchange in the name of his slave merchant creditor, a Liverpool wealthy guy named William Gregson. He says, "You just take that to Gregson for this agreed upon fee, I'll take the Zorg." And so now he's got a two for one, okay? So he takes half his crew and he sticks it on the Zorg, uh, and, uh, and names his, the doctor of his ship to be captain of the Zorg. And he says, "You fill up the rest of the cargo and meet me in Jamaica." And, and so the captain does that. Um, he loads up his ship, he overloads it. Um, should've been no more than about 300 slaves loaded into a ship the Zorg size, which was about a 100 ton ship. He loads 440 Africans into it, and 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, and they're always arguing and bickering and writing letters back and forth to each other like some teenagers. And oh, you know, "You did this," and, "You did that." And then they're writing to their bosses back in England, and oh, you know, "He did this," and [laughs] it's, it's like a soap opera. And the Zorg is going by, he's going to another fort, uh, on the Gold Coast, Ghana, uh, which had a slave auction room called Anomabu, the fort at Anomabu. And the governors decide to kick out the governor of Anomabu that day 'cause 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. And they kick him out on the same day that the Zorg is passing by, so Stubbs takes refuge on the ship. And eventually the ship is loaded with slaves and it's making its way across the Atlantic, and the captain gets sick, and he can't run the ship. And he's supposed to appoint his first mate. Uh, maritime protocol, first mate takes over. For some reason he appoints Stubbs.

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:09:53

       Oh, my God.

    9. SKSiddharth Kara1:09:54

       And Joe, you can't make... Like, you had a nice conversation with, um, Taylor Sheridan. You know, I love his shows. If Taylor Sheridan were to write Robert Stubbs as one of his bad guys, people would say, "Get outta here, man. Nobody is that pure bad, stupid, evil, awful. There's gotta be some nuance to this character. We don't accept that." Sometimes people are just bad, awful, horrible people, and this guy was one of them. He takes over the ship, and he doesn't know what he's doing, and the ship gets off course. Now, the thing about crossing the Atlantic is there's no pit stops. The food and water you have when you leave Africa is the food and water that has to last you until you reach the New World, the other side. And if you get off course or delayed or get caught in a storm, uh, you might be in trouble. And this is what happens with the Zorg. Stubbs is leading them off course. They, uh, should only need two months to go from West Africa to Jamaica. Every decent captain can get his ship across the Atlantic in two months. And you expect about a 15% mortality rate on the Africans. They will get dysentery 'cause they're living in their own piss and shit, and they will take their own lives, and they will do things. You, you accept about a 15% loss of life. People start dying, the ship is off course. It's been two months, been two and a half months. We get to three months and they don't know where they are. They finally sight Tobago at the far eastern edge of, uh, Caribbean Ocean, uh, Caribbean Sea, and so they have a sense, "Okay, Jamaica's 10 days that way. Let's do a quick water check, make sure we got enough, because we've already been quite delayed." And they do a check of the water, and it seems that they have enough to get to Jamaica. Now, the fascinating thing about sea navigation at that time, Joe, is you can tell latitude very easily. You get your 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 sea-faring vessel, was a shipwreck caused by botched longitude. It's not scurvy, it's not piracy or whatever, it's, "I thought I was there, but I'm actually over here, and I just ran into an island and got a shipwreck, and everyone's dead." You wanna know how they measured longitude? It's called dead reckoning, and what you're supposed to do is you have a log and a rope, and you have knots tied at regular intervals. And every six hours you need to throw the rope, you throw, you throw the log into the, into the water, and you hold the rope in your hand And you, you count how many knots pass through your hand in a 60-second period, and that gives you a speed in knots or nautical speed. And you do that every six hours, and that gives you a sense of your speed, and you plot that against direction, and you, you can then calculate how far east or west you are of your starting point, and you enter that in your logbook because of the log you just threw in the ocean.

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:13:36

        [chuckles]

    11. SKSiddharth Kara1:13:36

        So this is where the terms come from.

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:13:38

        That's crazy.

    13. SKSiddharth Kara1:13:39

        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 right upon you, and you crash into it, and that's the end of that. So for [laughs] 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. Okay." This is, this is, this was the level of, uh, uh, measurement we're talking about. So they sight Tobago. They know where they are at that point, and they took way too long to get there, but they know where they are. So they know Jamaica's 1,150 miles north by northwest.

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:14:28

        And they keep going.

    15. SKSiddharth Kara1:14:29

        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, 'cause what's right next to Jamaica to the west, it's an island called Hispaniola, which was half Spanish, half French, would later become Dominican Republic and Haiti. And that's enemy territory 'cause we're in the middle of the American Revolutionary War, and, uh, 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've just been one day. Two days. Three days. Turns out it was Jamaica.

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:15:26

        [exhales]

    17. SKSiddharth Kara1:15:28

        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 gonna take them 10 days to get back, 'cause they have to go into the wind now. At this point, they started with half a crew of 17, should've 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. And their bones are still down there. Okay? Uh, and then they reach Jamaica with a 50% mortality rate when you include the number of people who died and the number of people they threw overboard. So half the slaves gone. They dock. They sell the slaves. They sold them through a process called the scramble. The scramble is a slave mer- uh, slave broker says, "Okay, I got slaves on this ship. Um, let's agree on a price." The price agreed was 36 pounds. That's about $10,000 today. And the buyers, all the slaves are loaded into a pen. They are covered in palm oil so they look healthy. Most of them have dysentery, so they use oakum to plug their anus for the, for the portion of the sales. And you run in with a rope, and you rope off the ones you want. And you gather them, and then you, you pay the, you pay the, the brokers, and the slaves are taken off to the plantations. Now, that should've been the end of the story. We should not know what happened on this ship, except for greed. So the owner of the Zorg, the one who wrote that IOU, and he got news, "Oh, Hanley, you got a two for one. Yes. Here you go. Here's your money to the pirate, and let me insure my new ship." So every slave ship that crossed the Atlantic was insured. Insurance was born out of the slave trade.

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:18:25

        Oh. [exhales]

    19. SKSiddharth Kara1:18:27

        It costs you seven, $800,000 equivalent today to kit out a slave ship, all the supplies, the crew, the salaries and all that, so it's a large amount of upfront capital. And you could have a shipwreck, you could have a pirate take your ship, uh, in which case it's all lost. So there was a chap in London named Lloyd.

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:18:52

        Mm.

    21. SKSiddharth Kara1:18:53

        Lloyd hung out at this coffee shop, and he had an idea. He said, "Okay. You guys give me a small percent, let's call it a premium, of the value of your ship and your cargo, and if you lose it all, I'll pay you an agreed-upon value back. But if you don't lose it all, I keep the premium And Lloyd's Coffee Shop, which then later became Lloyd's of London, was the premier insurance underwriter for slave ships, and they had standard contracts that they wrote, wrote up. And the slave trade blew up this business, 'cause every slave captain and slave merchant wanted to insure the slave, the ship, and all the cargo. So Gregson had taken out an insurance contract for the ship and, and his Africans, 30 pounds a head. When he learns that his ship lost half its cargo, he decides to make an insurance claim, and most insurance claims at the time were if slaves died in an insurrection, you can get compensated. But if they die because of natural causes or they kill themselves, you don't get compensated. That's in the contract. So no one had ever said, "Well, what happens if you throw them overboard? Do you, do you get compensation then?" And so Gregson's gonna test this, and he tells the insurance, "Uh, I want my compensation for the 200 slaves." And the insurance company said, "Man, that's 50% mortality rate. That's... Let me check my actuary table here. No, that's not standard. We're not gonna pay." So he files a lawsuit. [sighs] And 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... machine's 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 courthouses and all. It was held in the Guildhall, the London Guildhall. And this is so fascinating, Joe, 'cause it shows you how the whole course of history can bend toward goodness through the conscience of even one person. Just one. So the trial is had. We don't have a transcript of this trial, but we know that the slave merchants won. Judgment was for the slave merchants. You wanna know who the only witness was? Stubbs. Stubbs is the only guy surviving. He comes in and he says, "Yeah, yeah, we were out of water. We had absolutely no choice. We had to throw the Africans overboard or we all would've died. It was absolutely necessary, and because it's necessary, insurance has to answer." "Yeah, that makes sense. All right. You guys please pay Gregson 30 pounds a head for his Africans." That should've 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

16. 1:22:29 – 2:21:50

    Abolition’s turning point, faith-driven moral leadership, and today’s parallels: truth, accountability, and repair

    1. SKSiddharth Kara1:22:29

       130 human beings overboard to drown, and they're talking about insurance compensation, but no one's talking about murder." So this person writes an anonymous letter to the largest newspaper in London asking this question. "I just saw this. No one's talking about murder. Weren't these people murdered? How come there's not a murder charge here?" And there was a small community of faith-based abolitionists, Anglican Church and Quakers, who didn't like this thing called slavery, and there was another group of them in America, Quakers especially, didn't like this thing called slavery. And the grandfather of the abolition of slavery is a man named Granville Sharp. Most people don't know that name, but he was the first person who was white-skinned to devote his life to the abolition of slavery. And he saw this letter, and a former slave who happened to be living in London s- brought this letter to him. All right? His name was Olaudah Equiano. That's Equiano, and that's Granville Sharp. Nicely done, Jamie. Uh, 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 abol- abolishing slavery. Equiano made his way to London, said, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna do what I can to help." So Granville Sharp sees this letter and he says, "Man, I..." He had been spending the last two decades of his life trying to build a legal argument against slavery. He taught himself the law. He didn't finish school. Taught himself the law, taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew. He wrote pamphlets. We were talking about pamphlets, right?

    2. SPSpeaker1:24:14

       Yep.

    3. SKSiddharth Kara1:24:14

       Pamphlets was the thing of the day. You had an idea, you wrote a pamphlet, and you s- you gave it to people. Granville Sharp wrote a pamphlet that he shared with his friend Benjamin Franklin. He said... Maybe he called him Benjamin. I don't know. Maybe they had nicknames. Whatever. He said, "Benjamin, I have a pamphlet I want you to read, and my argument is this." This was in the 1760s. Uh, "You guys over there should not be taxed without having a representative in Parliament." And thus was born the slogan, "No taxation without representation," which became the rallying cry of the American Revolutionary War. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Why are we paying all these taxes to some king, and we don't even have a say in the matter? So Granville Sharp was this renaissance man, self-taught, uh, man of deep faith who could not stomach the idea that a Christian nation was involved in slavery, and he saw this anonymous letter, and he said, "This is my case. This is the one. This is the one that's gonna blow this whole thing open." He went back to the underwriters. And he said, "File a motion for a retrial, and now you make all these arguments." And I have the trial transcript because Granville Sharp took-- hired someone to transcribe the whole f- hearing in shorthand, so there's a record. That's why we know what happened. And it's all going along kinda the same way, except this time they're making different arguments. The barristers are talking about, for the first time in the history of the West and in a court of law, human rights. Those Black people had the same right to water as the white captain did. This is a revolutionary idea. They have the same right to life as the crew, the, the, 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 Stubbs. You saw that movie, A Few Good Men?

    4. SPSpeaker1:26:36

       Mm-hmm.

    5. SKSiddharth Kara1:26:37

       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 'cause Nicholson's, you know, if he gets it wrong, that's it, court martial, you're done, you know. If you accuse a, whatever, 10-star general ordering the code red. And he's just, "Do I push? Do I push?" And he gets Nicholson going, he gets him moving, he gets him agitated, and then of course he says, "Did you order the code red?" And Nicholson says, "You're goddamn right I did." Well, that, that, that changes everything, right? You did. Oh, okay. All right. So there's a moment like that in this trial. Stubbs is the only witness. All he has to do is say, "We ran out of water. Absolutely necessary to throw the Africans." Chief Justice Mansfield uttered words that later went down in infamy, "The case of the slaves is the same as if horses had been thrown overboard." That was his summary of the first trial. Yeah, uh, if you throw over horses, no one's gonna talk about murder. It's property. Slaves, same thing. He just has to say, "Property thrown over 'cause we ran out of water." The barristers got Stubbs on the stand. He's a fool. He's a dullard. He gets his mouth moving faster than his brain is processing, and he gets Stubbs to admit that in the middle of throwing over Africans because they were out of water, it rained. What do you mean it rained? Yeah, it rained. So you did have water. The whole thing is revealed to be this bankrupt moral fraud, the slave trade. And now the world knows that not only what's happening on these ships, things we talk about with these images, and the truth that was revealed, but the fact that the whole thing is this big lie, this greed-mongering, murderous lie for profit. And the public found out about it, and this is what gives me hope, Joe. And we talk about the same things happening still today. This activated the first movement to abolish slavery. It was born right after this m- this moment where a handful of people in the Anglican Church got together. There were 12 of them, and they met in a printing shop in 1787, and they said, "We have to abolish slavery. It is a stain on human conscience. It's a stain on the British name. It is a stain against Christianity. We have to abolish this horrific institution." And then they devoted their lives to that task, which was a monumental and Herculean task, but they succeeded using viral images, authentic testimony, investigative journalism, consumer boycotts. Kinda 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, and that was the moment, and you trace it back to that anonymous letter, to these little acts of conscience, to this handful of men who got together in a printing shop and said, "Our-- this is our life's focus now," including Granville Sharp. "This is our life's focus now, to rid the world of this moral stain." So now people are gonna emerge as they learn about the Congo horror, and I've seen it happening. People of conscience forming and trying to find a way to push back and bring some justice to the people in the Congo, just as this handful of people built an entire movement at a time when slavery was normal, legal, accepted. Most members of Parliament had investments in the slave trade, uh, a- and profited from the sugar, sugar economy. Um, uh, but they succeeded. They triumphed. They persevered through enormous obstacles, and we have to do the same today. And it will require acts of conscience. And by the way, The Zorg, I've figured out who wrote that letter. Two hundred and forty years, no one had known. Who was this person whose conscience bent history towards goodness? And I managed to figure out who it was, and, um, he's an abolitionist named James Ramsay, uh, a man of deep faith. And I keep coming back to that, right? This word, faith. And it's important because I do think that we are a species generally of good, and I think we all have a divine nature in us. And yeah, there's evil in the world. There's greed, there's violence, there's horror, there's oppression, there's all of that. But The forces of good and the spark of goodness within us, and the faith we have in higher power invariably emerges and does succeed, even if it's just for a moment. And, and we, we need those moral leaders today to pull us forward, just as these handful of people in the past dragged humanity forward with the power of their moral force. And we're looking for those leaders today 'cause the world is in so much turmoil.

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:32:02

       But we're incredibly malleable and influenced, easily influenced, and we could be influenced in a great direction, or we could be influenced in a negative direction. And this, to me, w- regardless of what you actually believe, this to me is the great benefit of religion, and particularly in Christianity. Like, if you meet people that are, like, really by-the-book Christians, they're some of the nicest people you ever wanna meet in your, in your life, and they, they get a lot of happiness out of that. And this is one of the things that a lot of people are lacking in this world, is happiness. And without a moral framework and an ethical framework... I'm not saying that you can't be an atheist to be an amazing person. I know a lot of amazing people who are atheists. They're just kind, you know, thoughtful, considerate people who came from good families and have good friends, and they don't n- they don't need religion to be a good person. But there is a real value in providing a framework. There's a real value in providing, um, an ideology that supports being positive in your community, being a g- a, a good person, ethical person, being someone who forgives. Forgiveness is a very important part of Christianity. Um, redemption is a very important part of Christianity, this idea that we evolve and grow together. And w- in the, in the absence of that moral framework, you can get people whose i- their ideology looks at other human beings as property. Their ideology looks at other human beings as not the same as them. You know, whether we're talking about China and the treatment of the Uyghurs, or whether we're talking about n- the African slave trade or the Congo right now, it's all kind of the same thing.

    7. SKSiddharth Kara1:33:38

       I, yeah, I c- I totally agree. Um, I think, uh, uh, the Christian faith has been a force for enormous good at crucial points in history, and the abolition of slavery is one of them. Um, uh, without question, there's a ethic of compassion, of empathy. Uh, be a good neighbor. Be a good brother and sister. Um, we're all God's children, and you see that language in the driving, that's driving the abolitionists, uh, uh, in these movements to abolish slavery. You can-

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:34:12

       And this is not to, um, uh, uh, this is not to forgive the horrors that people under the guise of Christianity have performed-

    9. SKSiddharth Kara1:34:22

       It's bo- uh, it-

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:34:23

        So the Inquisition-

    11. SKSiddharth Kara1:34:24

        Yes

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:34:24

        ... or what-

    13. SKSiddharth Kara1:34:25

        That's right. That's right

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:34:25

        ... you could... The, the Crusades. You could go through a lot of horrific things that were done in the name of Christianity, but not really by i- in the spirit of it, and this is the problem with human beings. We can make these rationalizations and make these decisions, and, and we can decide that we're doing horrific things for the greater good. That is a, a- also a problem-

    15. SKSiddharth Kara1:34:45

        Yeah

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:34:45

        ... with human rationalization, that they, we could be the most awful people as long as we think we're being awful doing it for good. It's just a hu- 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 m- dull-minded people, but that's not, that's not-

    17. SKSiddharth Kara1:35:06

        That's, that's not the, that's not the spirit of the faith. You know, that's-

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:35:10

        Right. That's humans

    19. SKSiddharth Kara1:35:11

        ... that's a, that's humans. That's greed-

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:35:12

        It's greed

    21. SKSiddharth Kara1:35:13

        ... and, and-

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:35:13

        It's humans, their, and their weird ability-

    23. SKSiddharth Kara1:35:15

        That's right

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:35:15

        ... to justify things.

    25. SKSiddharth Kara1:35:16

        That, that's right. A- a- in pursuit of self-interest and-

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:35:19

        Yeah

    27. SKSiddharth Kara1:35:19

        ... self-gratification, and that will always be a part of the human condition. There are those among us, but there are greater angels.

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:35:27

        Yeah.

    29. SKSiddharth Kara1:35:27

        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. And it's, i- i- it, it-

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:35:45

        What's the worst example of human beings imaginable? I, uh, uh, to the point where you're throwing women and, and children overboard for water.

Episode duration: 2:21:50