Transcript of #2556 - Siddharth Kara

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All right.

Good to see you, sir.

Yeah, good to see you, Joe.

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

Yeah.

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

Oh, man, you're gracious, Joe. You're really gracious. I take that to heart. It means a lot. And let me just say that The fact that you continue to talk about it, you know, you and I first talked about this, talking to Jamie, it was almost 4 years ago.

Was it really that long ago?

It was December 2022.

That's crazy.

So here we are September 26th, so almost 4 years ago, and you continue to talk about it now and again, and I think that's meant a lot to me. It's meant a lot to people in the Congo. It's obvious this has captured your heart, and you're to be commended for that conscience.

Well, all I'm doing is talking. You're actually out there going and documenting all this stuff. It's a very strange world that we live in, that at the very base of all the greatest technology, like all this stuff that we have that's so incredible, that allows us to find out so much about the world, the base of that You have slave labor pulling minerals out of the ground.

Yeah, you have slave labor, you have child labor, you have militia-run mines. You know, for people who didn't hear our last conversation, go back and hear it, you know, because we walk through it. And I haven't been back to the Congo since Cobalt Red came out, and I knew it would be too dangerous for me to go back. Yeah, definitely don't go back. You know, it's just My colleague said pretty soon after Cobalt Red came out, there's a bounty for you. So I can't go back. But I've stayed in touch with people there. I continue to get ground research done. And the conditions, they're not much better. And in some ways, they've continued to degrade because the fever for these battery component metals. And it's cobalt, but it's also the lithium, the nickel, the copper, the tantalum, all 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 as fast as possible to support the AI economy.

And they require all the same metals and minerals. So the circuit boards, the servers, the heat sinks, the energy storage, they all require cobalt, copper, tin, tantalum. It's all coming out of Congo.

Boy, it's such a strange aspect of human life that we require that and that the area is controlled by people that are willing to do this. Like, there's no— like, we don't get much of these rare earth minerals from America, do we?

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

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

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

Oh God.

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

Is this the Congo as a whole?

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

And what percentage of the Congo is that?

Small part of it.

Okay.

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

Right, that's why I was confused.

Up in the north.

The Congo is insanely dense and huge.

In the mining part, in the mining part.

Okay.

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 to chromium. So the whole water sources in that part of the country have been completely contaminated. So I point all this out because we object to that here. We don't want our trees gone. We don't want our forest destroyed. We don't want our water contaminated. We don't want the air to be polluted, but it's okay for it to happen over there, kind of out of sight to those people, so long as we can plug in our phone, build out our data centers, keep buying our EVs and so on. And then that's the story. Okay? That's the story that we're okay destroying them and their world so long as ours remains sacrosanct.

And that Frankly, it's just the great hypocrisy of all this.

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

Not yet, not yet, no. I mean—

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

It could be done better. I mean, you do have to chop down all the trees where the deposit is. So deforestation is inevitable. But let's say this was done in our backyard here in Austin. Someone found a big copper, cobalt, tin, tantalum deposit somewhere. There'd be rules to follow. You'd have to deforest the whole place. But we'd probably say, go plant the same number of trees somewhere else to offset it. And there'd be a lot of rules around containment. Make sure you don't pollute the rivers and so on. And none of that is done. in the Global South. None of that is done in Congo. And it's mostly Chinese state-run mining companies that don't give a shit about the people and the environment there. But our tech and EV companies all know that, and they're all buying this stuff from them knowing that. So the chain is tainted. It's tainted in misery. It's tainted in blood. It's tainted in environmental destruction. It doesn't have to be that way. We don't have enough of this stuff here to offset the demand, but we could start mining some of it here. The problem is there's legitimate objections to the environmental impact.

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

Yeah.

Groundwater contamination is inevitable, right?

It just all leaches in.

Right.

I mean, it's not just the mining. It's the products they use to get them.

The processing of Yeah.

Of this stuff. You know, you get an ore that's got cobalt, copper, nickel, silver, a 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.

They pump that stuff right into the ground?

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

When did this all begin?

So 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. And something like a quarter of the bullets used in World War I were copper from that part of the Congo. Okay. So copper mining goes back a long ways, but there was other stuff there. It just didn't have industrial value yet. The uranium that was used in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from that same part of the Congo.

Whoa.

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

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

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

And you can get people to work for basically nothing.

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

2022.

2022, sorry. We're now in 2026. I had documented the human horror taking place, and that's what Cobalt Red is about, but I had not done enough to quantify How many people exactly? And so in 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 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 1 out of 3, 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 work. mining with their hands, up to their necks in it. And that's the bottom of the chain. And people not only need to know that, but think hard about their own personal choices in the context of that knowledge. What do I mean by that? I mean, do you have to upgrade your phone every year?

People often ask me, what do I do? Okay, I accept the premise that The rechargeable lifestyle I live is facilitated by and built upon an enormity of human suffering, of those people over there. What do I do? I can't fix that. And I say, you're right, you can't, I can't. But you can think about your personal choices. And the first one is, do you have to upgrade the phone and the tablet every year just because the tech company tells you to? Because each time you do, you're contributing to those demand-side forces. So if the phone still works, just use it. The EV is a more interesting question. You know, you don't upgrade the EV. You either buy one or you keep your internal combustion engine car. Now, EV companies will tell us their mining is done sustainably and the supply chain is audited and all of that. And all of these horrors are taking place in someone else's supply chain. The truth is, it's all tainted. It's all coming out of the same pot of tainted, contaminated human degradation and environmental destruction. The EV story is, let's save the planet.

Yeah.

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

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah. There's so many parts of the EV story that we don't get fully told. Brake dust is certainly one of them.

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

They're heavier. So you brake more.

You have to brake more.

Yeah. That's right.

I think there is some ways around that. And I think one way to mitigate it quite a bit, I believe, is carbon ceramic brakes. Is that the case, Jamie? Let's find out if that's absolutely true. I've read that, but I want to make sure that's really true. I know from anecdotal experience that when you clean your car, if you have carbon ceramic brakes, there's almost no brake dust on your wheels. It's a very different thing. If you have regular steel brakes, it just— for whatever reason, leaves more brake dust. I'm not sure why. We'll find out in a second. But other than that, is there any sort of novel material that can do it? Here it goes. Carbon ceramic brake systems can reduce brake wear particulate pollution substantially compared with conventional gray cast iron rotors, but they do not eliminate brake dust. The actual environmental outcome depends on the complete friction pair, rotor and pad formulation, and on driving conditions. Yeah, so it just explains what brake dust is. And so it's— it does help a lot, substantially, but it, you know, doesn't eliminate it.

Yeah.

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

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

But then you're going to have to find carbon. Like, okay, now you got to get carbon to get the carbon ceramic pads.

So this is the thing. This is the thing. There's always something. And you made this point with RZA. Okay, cobalt, but it's also the lithium.

Right.

It's also the nickel. One of the biggest lithium deposits now, and people are saying, okay, let's use less cobalt in the batteries. Let's do lithium iron phosphate batteries. Let's do the solid-state batteries. They always have lithium in them. One of the biggest lithium deposits now is in the Congo, and it just started shipping under this Chinese mining company in June of this year out of this deposit. And the conditions there— I haven't been there, colleagues have been up there, it's 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 lithium table salt battery, whatever.

Same deal.

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

And you could be them if you were born there.

That's the thing.

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

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

And that's all it is.

And that's all it is.

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There's no boots.

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

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

Right.

When I say progress, I mean moral progress as a species on this Earth.

That's literally the key. Like, if you wanted to figure out like how to make just global life better for all people, it's take whatever the third world is and bring it up to the first world. We should all want to do that. If everybody wanted to do that, if everybody wanted to deliver infrastructure, education, medical establishment, like where there's legitimate hospitals, like everything that we have in the first world, if that was all over the world, how much less problems would there be? But the problem is the resources, like the resources in the Congo or whether it's oil or whatever it is, they're worth so much money and the people that are in control of these resources are extracting so much money. They don't ever want to let that go.

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

Right.

You don't know. Okay. What kind of world would you hope the favorable people are trying to pursue in the event that you're the one, you get the bad roll of the dice? And you'd say, man, I really hope that the ones who get the good roll of the dice will care about me, they'll see me, they will feel some connection to me, they will try to use their good roll of the dice in a way that benefits me somehow. Maybe they are part of some effort to bring education, healthcare, sanitation, whatever, to my part of the world. And have that connection and extension of their compassion and empathy towards me. Because we're all up here in this pre-birth state recognizing some of you are going there, some of you going there. Let's all agree, all right, those of you who end up in the good place, You don't lose sight of us.

Right.

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

Isn't it partly because this is really the first of a couple generations, but with increasingly more contact and understanding of the rest of the world? Like if you went back 100 years ago, people had virtually no understanding of how things went on anywhere else unless they had visited them. And now, 100 years later, because of the very technology that we're talking about, which is also ironic—

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? But then they found out that when you give people nuclear power, it's pretty easy for them to convert it into weapons.

OK. So there's a lot to unpack.

There's a lot.

There's a lot to unpack.

Because we're trying to like— if we're going to be fair about a discussion of why everything's fucked, one of the reasons why everything's fucked is clearly because they don't have infrastructure. They don't have power. They don't have water that's clean. They don't have good education. They don't have all these things. So if you wanted to like start that and make it better, you would have to give them power. So are you going to burn coal? Are you— what are you going to do?

Yeah.

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

Not right now.

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

So—

It's tricky. It's tricky.

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

Fat Man.

Fat Man. Little Boy and Fat Man.

Yeah.

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

And that's the answer to this question of how did China jack up its nuclear stockpile supply so fast in the last 10, 15 years? Now, I can't verify any of that. It's not like I've done uranium investigations.

Look, it only makes sense. They have complete control of the region.

It makes a lot of sense.

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

No one's going to stop them. They control the ground. They control the ground there. And that's scary, you know. And so when you talk about do we give them— do we use nuclear power in that part of the world? I mean, I don't think you want yellow cake floating around that part of the world, you know. Right.

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

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

But there's not like—

They're not, no.

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

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

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

It's a hard one to figure out. We've got some general sense of the forced labor camps. filled with Uyghurs doing solar panels and clothes and all this shit.

Yeah.

But, and I haven't looked into that directly, but I can tell you what I've seen directly on what they do in Africa. And they don't treat people like people there. They don't see them, the Africans, as people. They're in the way of the loot they need. And they don't even employ the African people there when they come in with a mining project or a construction project. They ship over people from China to do the work and then work them and then send them back. And there's nothing by way of human rights standards. When you're talking about Chinese companies operating in Africa.

So this is a uniquely Western thing?

This drive to have some basic human rights standards? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would say so. 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 the better part of 2 decades. And one of the mines which is owned by Dubai, Middle Eastern guys. Part of the Trump administration's sort of peace for minerals arrangement between President Shishakedi and the Trump administration was mining access. And so one concession was sold to this US mining company. It's called Virtues Mining, and they're run by former military guys. 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 Virtues, are they doing things any better? And the feedback I've gotten so far is they seem to be improving standards around artisanal mining. There's still artisanal mining, but improving standards around—

Well, when we say artisanal mining, you went into depth about this the first time we talked, but we should just tell people.

Yeah.

That thing, artisanal, sounds awesome. It sounds like a great cup of coffee, like fair trade. It's a nice, fresh baked bread. Yeah, like someone's got a beautiful ceramic cup they serve you the coffee in.

Oh yeah.

Artisanal mining is pretty much the opposite of that.

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

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

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

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

Like, this language is messed up.

Yeah, how the fuck—

how are these both artisanal?

That's crazy.

How is my espresso and that artisanal?

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

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

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

Mothers with babies on their backs. That's what the mining industry calls artisanal. It's kids with 40, 50-kilogram sacks of cobalt on their necks, clambering out of a pit Cobalt is toxic to touch. It is toxic to breathe. All these kids get respiratory distress, cancers. The women get birth defects, congenital disease. Here's a teenager with a baby. These are all my photos, okay, that have found their way onto the internet. That kid's probably 8 and she's probably 13 or 14 and she's got this baby. I remember that, Joe, that's in the hills above Kambove. That's the story I told you last time where that's probably the closest I came to getting shot. Was in this mining area. It was almost all children run by a militia north of a town called 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's 15,000 people in that pit. These militia guys come barreling up the hill with AK-47s and I thought that was it for me. I mean, this is the story I told you last time. I thought that was it. 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 had taken photos and videos and so on. And the only thing that saved my life— this is for people who are interested in human rights research, this is what is important. You get local intel, local colleagues, take their advice. The only thing that saved my life that day So one of my local colleagues said, Siddhartha, before you go to any of these places, you've got to get a stamp from the governor's office on your visa paperwork, and you take that with you everywhere. And that will convey to any militia that you're under the governor's protection, and they're not going to fuck with you.

They won't— they'll mess with you, but they're not going to do worse.

They're not going to kill you.

They're not going to kill you. And I had to go get that stamp. I had to persuade the governor of Haut-Katanga Province, that I was there not to shame the Congo, I was seeking truth, that I think his people are being exploited by the Global North and this whole tech fever for rechargeable stuff. And he put his little stamp on it and that was the only time I met him, only time I saw him, but I had that stamp. So when I was up there and my stuff getting thrown around, they had their guns pointed at me and my guide, his face went pale and I thought this is it. This is it for Kara up on this hill, middle of nowhere. And my guide just gestured and I knew what he was intending. And I found my folder on the ground and I pulled that piece of paper out and I showed them the stamp. And then they just said, get out of here. They let us go. So when you go into conflict zones, you have to have that kind of local advice because it can mean the difference between living and being shot and dumped in some ditch where these little girls with babies— that's the image that needs to be in our minds every time we talk about—

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

Yeah, it was with my phone. I had— so those— so they started, you know, going through my phone. They had me unlock it, but I had all these images in a password-protected other folder. So I just showed them pictures of like, you know, my home, my daughter, my stuff, just whatever. I had another folder and they didn't have the savvy to— They didn't know. They didn't know. So same like that video of the 15,000 people, I just managed to do this and tuck it away because that was also controlled by militias, that particular site. And that mine is classified industrial, which means only heavy equipment being used to source the copper and the cobalt. And that mine is in the bottom of the supply chains in the disclosure documents of every tech and EV company. It's one of the biggest copper cobalt suppliers out of the Congo. And you get in there and you say, this is not industrial at all. Nor is it baked bread and espresso. This is hell on earth.

Right.

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

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah, same. No, 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 3.5 centuries of the slave trade that carted 12.5, 13 million Africans. And if you need to know about one of them, it's this one because it's the most important, the most consequential. And the reason I say that is— It opens the whole world of the slave trade and its journey ends in this culminating act of brute inhumanity that sparked the first movement to abolish slavery. And it's that sequence that is so vital for us to understand historically. People can't fix a horror until they learn about it.

Right.

The average person, I've learned, is not evil. We may be generally self-interested and worried about us and ours and so on, but we're not evil. And when we learn about something wrong, we generally feel something and want to do something about it. And that's what happened. This was the ship that told the whole world what was happening in the slave trade. And a small community of faith-based moral leaders said, This is unacceptable. This is beneath us. And we're going to devote our lives to abolishing slavery. The other thing that this journey is, you know, we grow up— you grow up in America, you learn about slavery. You learn about plantation economy and how slaves were treated, cotton and so on. But we don't learn the details of how they got here.

Right.

And how the first global economy was born around the Atlantic slave trade, how modern finance, banking, and insurance was born through the slave trade, and the conditions that the African people endured being carted across the Atlantic. And it's essential to know this history because it tells us why we are where we are. At this point in history and as a moral or lack of moral species on this earth because we do at times have these periods of great inhumanity to each other and the slave trade is one of them and I learned so much researching this book and the feedback I get from readers is, man, I knew slavery, I had a sense but I had no idea just how horrible it was.

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

Millions.

In this country that are undocumented?

Yeah, yeah. Who knows what the number is? But millions around the world, tens of millions around the world. But it's— this history is important. This history is important because— and this ship is important because it reveals the depth of our inhumanity while simultaneously showing us the capacity for good. in our nature because it did spark that first movement to abolish slavery.

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

It was, yeah, it was the Anglican Church leaders in the— the first movement to abolish slavery was in England. And it was sparked directly by this ship. And so people, you know, can read the book and understand what happened on the ship. But It goes on its journey picking up Africans along the West African coast. And I went to West Africa to see the old forts and castles that are there that Europeans built to facilitate the slave trade. They lined the West African coast with a higher concentration of fortifications than existed anywhere in Europe. Little forts and castles and dungeons to gather human beings. 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 houses of slave dealers. And people would die, of course. They're yoked at the neck and tied, and many people didn't survive a 500, 600, 800-mile march.

800-mile march?

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

Whoa.

So Amazing Grace was written by a slave trader.

Whoa.

So John Newton— John Newton's from Liverpool. Liverpool was once capital of the slave trade. We think of Beatles when we think Liverpool. or the football club, but it was once the dominant force in the entire European Atlantic slave trade, Liverpool. And Newton was one of those captains. He captained 3 slave ship journeys. They called it the triangular trade. And what that meant was is ships departed Europe, in this case Liverpool, with tradable goods, mirrors, knives, Rum, brandy, cutlery, crockery, linens, bandanas, whatever, cowrie shells. Took all that stuff down to Western Africa where Europeans had built some castles and forts. And those castles and forts were involved in the business of accumulating Africans.

Whew.

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 is the dungeon at Cape Coast Castle.

Whoa.

Okay. And let me tell you something about this place, Joe. So that This is— man. So John Newton had in his journal, brought on board today Africans marched, I think, 1,000 miles from the inland.

Okay.

So they were marched down and eventually sold to the Europeans who run these forts and castles all along the coast. The biggest one was Cape Coast Castle. The British and the Dutch had one just cannon shot away called Elmina Castle. This is in modern-day Ghana. And they were held in the dungeon. You saw that picture of the dungeon. So the dungeon was divided between an area for men and an area for women and children. There'd be at any given time 1,000 human beings in there shackled down. One shaft for light and where they dropped food and water. And I don't know if you, Jamie, if you had that photo again, you saw like a little narrow groove down the floor of the dungeon. And there you see that groove down the floor of the dungeon. And that's supposed to siphon away their piss and shit and menstrual blood. And so you can imagine 1,000 people in there. Now, it always is full and clogged and rainy season, whatever. So eventually the whole thing is covered in sludge of sewage. Okay. And so they would spend months down here, Joe. They would spend months down here, and many people didn't survive that experience.

So you're marched from the inland regions hundreds of miles, maybe didn't survive that. If you did, you're in this dungeon, you're spending months down here, and then eventually— this is the male slave dungeon entrance at Cape Coast Castle. So eventually the ships come from Western Europe with all their stuff, and they come up to Cape Coast Castle, they park in the roads, they drop anchor. It's about a mile or 2 offshore. They take a canoe. Up to the castle and they meet the governor and the governor says, okay, you know, let's do our business. And they go into the dungeon and they bring out a parcel of slaves, some men, some women, and some children. They first clean them. Remember, they're covered in sewage and filth. And they cover them in palm oil to make them look healthy. And the captain will say, I'll take this one, this one, this one. His surgeon or doctor will inspect them, open their mouths, check their lymph nodes, make them cough, make sure they're not sick and unwell. And then they purchase these slaves and then brand them. And they brand them, put some palm oil on their shoulder, brand them so they know which one they bought because they're going to go down to the next fort, buy a few, buy a few.

And then when they've got all the several hundred to load up the ship, they come back and get them. When I went into the dungeon at Cape Coast, it's a kind of a cobbled floor. And then I got to this one section. Joe, that was smooth. And I had managed to get a single guide from the Ministry of Museums to take me around. So before I wrote about it, I wanted to see it and experience it. And you can see it's kind of cobbly, and then there's some sections that are smooth, and they had one that was just perfectly smooth. And I said, why is this so perfectly smooth here? He said, we left this just the way we found it. This is the sedimented urine, piss, shit, menstrual blood of the people who were held here for centuries. And we don't learn that. You know, we don't learn that when we learn about slavery. We don't learn about these visceral details of what people had to endure before they even were put on the ship. Now let's talk about the ship, you know, which is a floating dungeon. The deep-seafaring 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 the— I jumped, sorry. The visual imagery. We talk about abolition. All right. We're going to talk about the first use of a viral image, which Jamie gave us a prelude to. So the deep-seafaring vessel is— it's a testament to European genius and ambition and vision and exploration. There's no other way to look at it. There was an Earth that was here and people were all in their pockets until the Portuguese And the Spanish developed a ship that could cross an ocean. And this was the early 1400s, the Age of Exploration. You learn about this in high school. Prince Henry the Navigator got his ships. We need to see the rest of the world. What else is out there? Maybe some riches. And the Portuguese, they started going south and they hit the Canaries, Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa.

Shipwreck.

Shipwreck. Shipwreck. The winds were just too intense, too violent, too countervailing. Their ships could not handle it. So Portuguese invented a specific sail called a 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 the caravel takes Europeans south of the Canaries and they get down to the west coast of Africa. They round the Cape of Good Hope and by the end of the 15th century, the Portuguese have reached India.

So—

Extraordinary exploration, triumph of navigation and genius. And we get Christopher Columbus. Oh man, Portuguese have been all the way over to India and they had to go all the way around Africa. Maybe there's a shortcut. I'm gonna go that way. Let me go that way. It's got to be a shortcut. You know, so he goes west. I'm going to find a better way. He lands in the Bahamas. India! Indians! All right. Okay. We laugh, but I mean, he crossed the Atlantic in his ship. He got here. And he starts the Spanish reconnoitering of this part of the planet. The Pope, Pope Alexander VI, says, okay, you Spanish, you Portuguese, you've kind of— you're starting to suss out the rest of the world and I want you to get along. So I'm going to draw a line down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and everything east of that line, Portugal, that's for you. Everything west of that line, Spain, that's for you. So Spain colonized the Americas and Portugal colonized the Americas. Portugal colonized Africa and India first. Now, the Europeans came across something during the Crusades that captivated their taste buds. They called it sweet salt.

Today we call it sugar. No sugar in Europe till the Crusades. '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— That is so insane to hear, but makes complete and total sense that people didn't know about sugar until the 1400s.

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

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

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

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

Honey, berry juices.

Wow.

Sugar. Sugar's another level, right?

Yeah.

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

Mayans.

Mayans.

Yeah.

So they don't have a labor force. So King Charles in 1518 says, okay, Portuguese, you got these Africans, can you send some over here? And that's 1518. So the Portuguese, he sent— he gives them a contract to bring me 4,000 Africans to come work these sugar plantations because they seem to be doing a good job working on yours. Thus begins the era of the Atlantic slave trade. It was about bringing Africans over to the Spanish colonies to work on the sugar plantations. And the Portuguese and the Spanish are running this triangular circuit Bringing goods down to Africa, buying Africans, taking them across. There you go. Dropping them in sugar plantations and then getting the output of sugar labor, which is sugar, rum, molasses, whatever, taking it back to Europe, selling it, and then repeating the triangle.

How were they so good at getting across the ocean but so bad at thinking that they were in India? That seems so insane. Like, how much of a map did they have of the world back then?

They had nothing.

Nothing west.

They had nothing west. Nothing west. When the Portuguese first started going south, they had nothing of Africa except the northern coast from Roman times. When you look at maps in the 1400s, it's blank slate.

That's nuts.

So they— and they were first attracted by gold, right? They heard these stories, these mythical stories of gold. And when the Portuguese got to West Africa, they called it Costa da Mina de Ouro. The coast of gold mines. There was gold everywhere. The slave trade came later because of sugar. Then the British and the Dutch entered.

So sugar was the start?

Sugar was the dominant force in the slave trade.

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

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

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And sugar, It was like the fossil fuel of the day. It was the lubrication on which the global economy functioned, such as it was then, the North Atlantic, generating centuries of generational wealth. So on the eve of the American Revolution, just to give you a sense, okay, so we're talking 1773, 1774. By this time, the British are the dominant force in the Atlantic slave trade. And they became the dominant force, taking over Caribbean islands. Their prize was Jamaica, which became the largest sugar plantation economy in the world at that time. So on the eve of the Revolutionary War, of course, they had the 13 American colonies and they had some Caribbean islands. Just to give you a sense of how important sugar was, if you take All the exports from all 13 American colonies, and then you take sugar from Jamaica, the value of those sugar exports from Jamaica was 5 times the combined value of all 13 exports of everything from all 13 colonies.

Wow.

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

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

Not that I'm aware, no. I mean, it's— sugar, sugar, the way sugar is made today, of course, is different than these slave plantations that were erected by first Portugal and Spain, then later the British and the Dutch. So the Zorg is actually a Dutch slave ship. And it set sail around— in October 1780. So we're in the heart of American Revolutionary War. And the British had been the dominant force of the slave trade. So remember I told you we're in the dungeon, okay, and the slave captain comes around and he's bartering for these people. And he spends a couple of months acquiring Africans in this castle, this fort, this place, brands them, and then eventually he loads up his ship. With, depending on the size of the ship, 300, 400, 500, 600 Africans and loads his food and water and he has to cross the Atlantic, what's called the Middle Passage. And the design of these ships, the design of a slave ship was specific, okay, designed for human cargo. So the bottom was the food and water and then they had what's called the tween deck. And all right, Jamie, you can throw up that photo now.

We're ready.

All right. So here you've got the tween deck, all right? This is the schematic. And this is an important schematic. This is the Brooks slave ship out of Liverpool. And you see the bottom of the tween deck. The shipmaster is showing you how to line up the Africans. They're given 16 inches of space each. Like the— to quote John Newton, who we talked about, like books on a shelf. They're to be entered and stowed like books on a shelf.

So each human is allotted 16 inches of space?

That's right. Now, why are they laying down? Okay, so you're lining them all up, filling up every available possible piece of space. And then there's a second level here where you see them around this horseshoe. So they built a partition. You can see at the bottom left there, they built a partition so that they could maximize the cargo, the human capacity cargo of this vessel. So you can't sit upright. You're shackled down, laying down, and then there's a partition built, and then there's another level of people, like the overhead bin space. Okay? You're just lining these people up, and they're lined up like this for 2 months to cross the Atlantic. And you may ask yourself, well, what happens if you're seasick? What happens if a woman has her period? Some women gave birth in these conditions. What happens if you have to just go to the bathroom? So they put buckets, distributed them along the— what they called the tween deck, this cargo here. And if you needed the bathroom, you had to try and get to that bucket with your chained partner, your chained 2-by-2. And of course, you never made it in time, and the ship is tossing and turning.

And so in a matter of just a few days or a week, this entire deck is covered in human piss and shit and blood and vomit and misery. And that's for the 2 months of the crossing. They don't teach us this, Joe. They don't teach us this part of it. So here's a shipmaster telling you how you can maximize the profit in the Brook slave ship that he's building for the Brooks Liverpool family and line these people up. Now they're brought up in the morning and doused with seawater and given a little bit of food and half pint of water to drink. The men are kept in the front of the ship and the women and children in the back and they built a barricade down the middle to keep the men on one side because you can imagine, let's say you're one of these Africans, you got that roll of the dice. You're going to try to do anything you can to get control of that ship. And so slave insurrections were a common effort at resistance. And so Europeans built a barricade down the middle of every slave ship so that if somehow slaves managed to revolt, they would quickly get to the back, the stern side where they could still control the ship.

And they had cannons mounted on the barricade to suppress the insurrection.

They would shoot a cannon into their own boat?

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

Horror.

Just horror. Now, they'd be whipped, and you can imagine what happened to women and girls. One slave captain said, Sailors gratify their passions brute-like in front of the others with girls not 10 years old. You know, people— there were no laws on that ship. It was in a moral abyss out in the middle of the ocean. And so in the case of the Zorg, they're taking these Africans across the Atlantic. And this is the kind of stuff that happens. There's an insurrection. That's one form of protest. Another form of protest is a hunger strike. I'm not going to eat. I'll just die. I'd rather die. If you've already survived the march from the inland, lived in the Cape Coast Castle dungeon for a few months in your own shit and piss, and then you're stuck in this ship, I don't know where this is going, but I'm going to stop eating. I'd rather be dead. The Europeans had a tool for that called the speculum 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 want to eat, they jammed it in your mouth Forced it open and shoved the food down your throat, cracking probably half your teeth and lacerating your tongue in the process.

And then others would then fall in line, and that's the end of the hunger strike. So the, the level of barbarity taking place on these ships that people had to endure is heart-wrenching, but it's important for us to come to terms with this historically. So we understand what we're capable of and how to keep this kind of inhumanity from happening again. And that gets us to the glimmer of hope from all this. So this ship crosses the Atlantic. It was a Dutch ship, okay, in the midst of the American Revolutionary War. And everybody was using the American Revolutionary War as a chance to get payback on the Brits. Because the Brits were the power of the day and the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, with the British Navy stretched thin trying to fight off the Americans, they used this as an opportunity to pick off some ships here. Oh, Barbados is unguarded. Let's go take Barbados. And so 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, Spanish flag, any flag, American flag.

Just go pirate them to hell. We need help. Our Navy can't handle everything. So British take to the seas as pirates. So a British pirate ship captures this Dutch ship off the coast of Africa.

Whoa.

And it already had a couple hundred slaves in it. This British pirate, Captain William Llewellyn of HMS Alert, captures the Zorg off the coast of Liberia and finds 2 other Dutch ships and takes them over to Cape Coast Castle headquarters. And he looks at the other captains there, British captains, says, look, I got some Dutch prizes here with some slaves and there's some gold and ivory. I'm auctioning this stuff today. And a Liverpool captain named Hanley, who's captain of a ship called the William— I'll take that one. I'll take the Zorg and everything in it. So they didn't have Venmo and cash and all that back then. So you write up an IOU. It was called a bill of exchange. So Hanley gives a bill of exchange in the name of his slave merchant creditor, a Liverpool—

Captain.

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 2-for-1. Okay? So he takes half his crew and he sticks it on the Zorg and names his— the doctor of his ship to be captain of the Zorg. And he says, you fill up the rest of the cargo and meet me in Jamaica.

Okay.

And so the captain does that. He loads up his ship. He overloads it. Should have been no more than about 300 slaves loaded into a ship the Zorg size, which was about 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 it's like a soap opera. And this Zorg is going by, he's going to another fort on the Gold Coast, Ghana, which had a slave auction room called Anumabu. The fort at Anomabu. And the governors decide to kick out the governor of Anomabu that day because they just can't stand him.

His name's Robert Stubbs. He's just a scoundrel and he's just a wretch of a human being. 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. Maritime protocol. First mate takes over. For some reason, he appoints Stubbs.

Oh, my God.

And Joe, you can't make— like, you had a nice conversation with Taylor Sheridan. You know, I love his shows. If Taylor Sheridan were to write Robert Stubbs as one of his bad guys, people would say, get out of here, man. Nobody is that pure, bad, stupid, evil, awful. There's got to be some nuance to this character. We don't accept that. Sometimes people are just bad, awful, horrible people. And this guy was one of them. He takes over the ship and he doesn't know what he's doing. And the ship gets off course. Now the thing about crossing the Atlantic is there's no pit stops. The food and water you have when you leave Africa is the food and water that has to last you until you reach the New World, the other side. And if you get off course or delayed or get caught in a storm, you might be in trouble. And this is what happens with the Zorg. Stubbs is leading them off course. They should only need 2 months to go from West Africa to Jamaica. Every decent captain can get his ship across the Atlantic in 2 months. And you expect about a 15% mortality rate on the Africans.

They will get dysentery because they're living in their own—

Shit.

Piss and shit, and they will take their own lives and they will do things. You accept about a 15% loss of life. People start dying. The ship is off course. It's been 2 months, been 2 and a half months. We get to 3 months and they don't know where they are. They finally sight Tobago at the far eastern edge of Caribbean Sea. And so they have a sense, okay, Jamaica is 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-seafaring vessel, was a shipwreck caused by botched longitude.

It's not scurvy, It's not piracy or whatever. It's, I thought I was there, but I'm actually over here, and I just ran into an island and got a shipwreck, and everyone's dead. You want to know how they 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 6 hours, You need to throw the rope, you throw the log into the water and you hold the rope in your hand and you count how many knots pass through your hand in a 60-second period. And that gives you a speed in knots or nautical speed. And you do that every 6 hours and that gives you a sense of your speed and you plot that against direction and you can then calculate how far east or west you are of your starting point. And you enter that in your logbook because of the log you just threw in the ocean. This is where the terms come from.

That's crazy.

So people would— now let's just say you're not too good at this. Every error in measurement you make is accumulating on the previous one, and you can end up hundreds of miles off course, and suddenly an island's right upon you and you crash into it, and that's the end of that. So for most of the deep-sea faring period, people were just, all right, I think I'm 15 degrees west of where I was yesterday. Let me write that down in my logbook. Let me throw in the rope. Okay. This was the level of measurement we're talking about. So they sight Tobago. They know where they are at that point, and they took way too long to get there, but they know where they are. So they know Jamaica's 1,150 miles north by northwest.

And they keep going.

So they had to get to Jamaica. That was their destined port. Okay? So they keep going, they keep going, they keep going, and not sighting land, not sighting land. Then on day 10, so about the right time, they sight land. Now, they have to make sure it's Jamaica. Because what's right next to Jamaica to the west? It's an island called Hispaniola, which was half Spanish, half French. Would later become Dominican Republic and Haiti. And that's enemy territory because we're in the middle of the American Revolutionary War and we can't stop there. So we need to make sure. So Stubbs drops in his rope and his thing and he says, ah, this is 70 degrees west. That's Hispaniola. Jamaica's the next one, next one down. So they keep going. Should have just been one day. 2 days, 3 days. Turns out it was Jamaica. And they've gone 3 days past their destination, and now they're completely out of water. And to turn around and beat into the wind, that 3 days west is going to take them 10 days to get back because they have to go into the wind now. At this point, they started with half a crew of 17, should have had a crew of 30.

Remember, Hanley divided his crew in half. So they're down to just 11 guys and the captain is sick to the point of lunacy. 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 3 days, they start with women and children, living, breathing human beings. And then they throw them overboard. 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? 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 a scramble. The scramble is a slave broker says, okay, I got slaves on this ship.

Let's agree on a price. The price agreed was £36. That's about $10,000 today. And the buyers— all the slaves are loaded into a pen. They are covered in palm oil so they look healthy. Most of them have dysentery, so they use oakum to plug their anus. For the portion of the sales, and you run in with a rope and you rope off the ones you want. And you gather them and then you pay the brokers and the slaves are taken off to the plantations. Now that should have been the end of the story. We should not know what happened on this ship except for greed. So the owner of the Zorg, The one who wrote that IOU. And he got news, oh, Hanley, you got a 2-for-1. 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.

Oh.

It costs you $700,000, $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, in which case it's all lost. So there was a chap in London named Lloyd.

Hmm.

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 up. And the slave trade blew up this business because every slave captain and slave merchant wanted to insure the slave, the ship, and all the cargo. So Gregson had taken out an insurance contract for the ship and his Africans, £30 a head. When he learns that his ship lost half its cargo, he decides to make an insurance claim. And most insurance claims at the time were if slaves died in an insurrection, you can get compensated. But if they die because of natural causes or they kill themselves, you don't get compensated. That's in the contract. So no one had ever said, well, what happens if you throw them overboard?

Do you get compensation then? And so Gregson's going to test this. And he tells the insurance, I want my compensation for the 200 slaves. And the insurance company said, man, that's 50% mortality rate. That's— let me check my actuary table here. No, that's not standard. We're not going to pay. So he files a lawsuit. 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 2 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, because it shows you how the whole course of history can bend toward goodness through the conscience of even one person. Just one. So the trial is had. We don't have a transcript of this trial.

But we know that the slave merchants won. Judgment was for the slave merchants. You want to know who the only witness was?

Stubbs.

Stubbs is the only guy surviving. He comes in and he says, yeah, yeah, we were out of water. We had absolutely no choice. We had to throw the Africans overboard or we all would have died. It was absolutely necessary. And because it's necessary, insurance has to answer. Yeah, that makes sense. All right. You guys please pay Gregson £30 a head for his Africans. That should have been the end of it. But there was one person in the room that day with a conscience, with a heart, and he's watching this trial take place and he's wondering, wait a minute, why is no one talking about murder? He just said they threw 130 human beings overboard to drown. They're talking about insurance compensation, but no one's talking about murder. So this person writes an anonymous letter to the largest newspaper in London asking this question. I just saw this. No one's talking about murder. Weren't these people murdered? How come there's not a murder charge here? And there was a small community of faith-based abolitionists, Anglican Church and Quakers. who didn't like this thing called slavery. And there was another group of them in America, Quakers especially, didn't like this thing called slavery.

And the grandfather of the abolition of slavery is a man named Granville Sharp. Most people don't know that name. But he was the first person who was white-skinned to devote his life to the abolition of slavery. And he saw this letter. And a former slave who happened to be living in London brought this letter to him. All right? His name was Olaudah Equiano. That's Equiano and that's Granville Sharp. Nicely done, Jamie. Equiano was a former slave. He had been a slave in Virginia, but smart, industrious, he bought his freedom. And he heard about Granville Sharp. Granville Sharp had devoted his life to abolishing slavery. Equiano made his way to London and said, I'm going to do what I can to help. So Granville Sharp sees this letter and he says, man, I— he had been spending the last 2 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?

Yeah.

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

And I have the trial transcript because Granville Sharp took— hired someone to transcribe the whole hearing in shorthand so there's a record. That's why we know what happened. And it's all going along kind of the same way, except this time they're making different arguments. The barristers are talking about, for the first time in the history of the West and in a court of law, human rights. Those Black people had the same right to water as the white captain did. And this is a revolutionary idea. They have the same right to life as the crew, the crew of the ship did. And they're trying to persuade, again, Justice Mansfield and 2 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?

Mm-hmm.

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— if he gets it wrong, that's it, court-martial, you're done. If you accuse a, whatever, 10-star general of 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! You're goddamn right I did. Oh, that changes everything, right? You did? Oh, okay. All right. So there's a moment like that in this trial. Stubbs is the only witness. All he has to do is say, we ran out of water. Absolutely necessary to throw the Africans. Chief Justice Mansfield uttered words that later went down in infamy. The case of the slaves is the same as if horses had been thrown overboard. That was his summary of the first trial. Yeah. If you throw over horses, no one's gonna talk about murder. It's property. Slaves, same thing. He just has to say, property thrown over 'cause we ran out of water.

The barrister's 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 greedmongering 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 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.

Wow.

It is a stain on human conscience. It's a stain on the British name. It is a stain against Christianity. We have to abolish this horrific institution. And then they devoted their lives to that task, which was a monumental and Herculean task, but they succeeded using viral images, authentic testimony, investigative journalism, consumer boycotts. Kind of the tools that we use today for social justice were pioneered in this first movement. And ultimately they did succeed on paper, granted and conceded that it was just on paper. But years later, even Frederick Douglass said, we commemorate every year the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, August 1st, 1838, because that showed the world it was possible. And it was only a matter of time before we did it here. And it required a civil war. But it was achieved. And that was the moment. And you trace it back to that anonymous letter, to these little acts of conscience, to this handful of men who got together in a printing shop and said, this is our life's focus now, including Granville Sharp. This is our life's focus now, to rid the world of this moral stain. So now people are going to emerge as they learn about the Congo horror.

And I've seen it happening. People of conscience forming and trying to find a way to push back and bring some justice to the people in the Congo. Just as this handful of people built an entire movement at a time when slavery was normal, legal, accepted. Most members of parliament had investments in the slave trade and profited from the sugar economy. But they succeeded. They triumphed. They persevered through enormous obstacles. And we have to do the same today. And it will require acts of conscience. And by the way, the Zorg, I've figured out who wrote that letter. 240 years, no one had known. Who was this person whose conscience bent history towards goodness? And I managed to figure out who it was. And he's an abolitionist named James Ramsey, a man of deep faith. I keep coming back to that, right? This word faith. And it's important because I do think that we are a species generally of good. And I think we all have a divine nature in us. And yeah, there's evil in the world. There's greed, there's violence, there's horror, there's oppression, there's all of that. But the forces of good and the spark of goodness within us and the faith we have in higher power invariably emerges and does succeed.

Even if it's just for a moment. And we need those moral leaders today to pull us forward, just as these handful of people in the past dragged humanity forward with the power of their moral force. And we're looking for those leaders today because the world is in so much turmoil.

But we're incredibly malleable and influenced. easily influenced. And we could be influenced in a great direction, or we could be influenced in a negative direction. And this to me, regardless of what you actually believe, this to me is the great benefit of religion and particularly in Christianity. Like if you meet people that are like really by-the-book Christians, they're some of the nicest people you ever want to meet in your life. And they get a lot of happiness out of that. And this is one of the things that a lot of people are lacking in this world is happiness. And without a moral framework and an ethical framework— I'm not saying that you can't be an atheist to be an amazing person. I know a lot of amazing people who are atheists. They're just kind, you know, thoughtful, considerate people who came from good families and have good friends. And they don't need religion to be a good person. But there is a real value in providing a framework. There's a real value in providing an ideology that supports being positive in your community, being a good person, ethical person, being someone who forgives. Forgiveness is a very important part of Christianity.

Redemption is a very important part of Christianity, this idea that we evolve and grow together. And in the absence of that moral framework, you can get people whose— their ideology looks at other human beings as property. 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 the African slave trade or the Congo right now, it's all kind of the same thing.

I totally agree. I think the Christian faith has been a force for enormous good at crucial points in history, and the abolition of slavery is one of them. Without question, there's an ethic of compassion, of empathy. Be a good neighbor, be a good brother and sister. We're all God's children. And you see that language in the driving— that's driving the abolitionists in these movements to abolish slavery.

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

That's right. That's right.

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

That's not the spirit of the faith. Right. That's humans. That's humans, that's greed.

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

That's right. In pursuit of self-interest and self-gratification, and that will always be a part of the human condition. There are those among us, but there are greater angels. 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—

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

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

I mean, there's just horrific stories of what Columbus did. And what his— the people on his boats did when they reached the Americas or the Bahamas, the horrific things they did to people when they found that these people had gold. Yeah, and they required that they bring back their own weight in gold or they chopped their arms off.

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

Dashing babies' heads against rocks in front of their mothers. They did horrific things, and this was all documented by some religious scholar who was on board with them, a religious leader who's on board with some Christian.

Yeah, look, let's not— let's be clear. Europeans messed up a lot of the world.

Oh yeah.

Okay. I mean, the reason I went through a little bit of time talking about the caravel and the deep seafaring vessel is this is what took the Europeans all across the Global South. And by and large, that was a miserable experience for the people they met. Yeah, always.

Even if it was just diseases.

Whether, yeah, disease, and then of course, violence, enslavement, oppression, colonization.

All of the above.

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

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

Smallpox.

90% of Native Americans were wiped out because of that.

Yeah.

And we think that has to do with what happened to the Mayans. We think that has to do with what happened in Brazil and the Congo, when they find these, what used to be enormous populations in these grids when they're doing the LiDAR scans, and they're saying, oh, this used to be like cities.

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

So, everything they did was bad. The violence was bad, and everything they did as bad. It's such a crazy story because it's hard to imagine. You know, I used to have this joke in my act about our country is 300 years old, people live to be 100. I go, that's 3 people. That's what's nuts. It's like 3 people ago.

Yeah, young country.

Yeah. Or really, 2 and a half. 2 and a half people ago, we just got here, which is just nuts to even think about how quickly the human race progresses and how devastating the introduction of new people, especially with like diseases is when they find the people that were here.

Well, we imagine this with the arrival of aliens. This is First Contact, the story. Like, what would happen when aliens show up? Are they going to blow everything up? Are they going to enslave us?

Are they going to be like the Quakers or are they going to be like the Chinese?

Yeah. Well said.

Or the Dutch. Yeah.

It's crazy, right? The question though now is there's a lot of conversation about reparations. Do European countries need to write a check for what they did? And it's a complicated question. You know, Jamaica just went to England and said, please, you know, you, you took millions of Africans, brought them here, enslaved them, and made yourself from this muddy medieval back-asswards island to an economic superpower with centuries of wealth on the back of largely sugar slavery and so on. So those people worked for free for centuries and you need to write a check. That's a fascinating question, isn't it? So on the one hand, You know, if your father worked at a manufacturing plant and let's say he worked for 30 years and they never paid him, we wouldn't think about, oh yeah, you know, your dad is owed money because he worked. He should be paid for that work. The company made their money off his labor. So, all right, are the descendants of those slaves owed some money? And Jamaica went to England just recently and said, £10 billion, just something. I mean, when you start to calculate unpaid labor for 3 centuries plus interest, it's trillions and trillions and it's an impossible sum.

But something is owed. And then you say, well, now wait a minute, if you're the British government, I wasn't a part of that. I didn't participate in this, so why am I writing a check? And then the Jamaican says, yeah, but everything you have today is built on that. And so there's this conversation going back and forth, Joe, about is a check due? Or is it just and fair to ask for that reparation be paid for this period in slavery? Just as the Congolese are talking to the Belgians. Leopold came down here and look what he did to us and colonized us. A check needs to be written as well as an apology. And it's a difficult question.

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

That's part of the complexity.

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

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

Right.

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

But even if you distributed to the individual people, you would have to make sure that no one's stealing it from anybody else, and then you would have to figure out how to distribute it, and I mean it does— At the very least, if a country's or a corporation's entire start, like their beginning, was based on slavery getting sugar, that's kind of insane that somehow or another that profit led to people that are still wealthy today.

Well, you know—

They can trace that, right?

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

Oh my God.

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

How much did they have to give them?

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

What is that equivalent to?

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

Whoa.

And they distributed this money. You got a slave compensation certificate and based on the number of slaves you had, Times the amount that was— each was valued, you got that check then and there. So number one, it was a massive sum of money, 40% of the national budget at the time. But the fascinating piece of this was the government took out a loan for that quantum. And the British taxpayer was repaying that loan up until 2015.

Holy shit.

So imagine you're— they didn't even know, okay? The average British taxpayer had no idea. The average British taxpayer, British citizen, was repaying the loan taken out in 1833 By the government to pay slave owners for the loss of their slave property. So for the next 180 years. And now, let's say you're a taxpayer in 2010. You had nothing to do with what was happening in the 1800s or the 1700s. But you've been paying the bill. You've been paying back now these families, some of them prominent, the Gladstones, for instance. The longest-serving ever Prime Minister in British history was a Gladstone, and he got one of the biggest checks.

How much?

It was £104,000, £105,000 back in the 1830s. I mean, we're talking tens of millions equivalent today.

So they got super wealthy all in one check.

on top of the wealth they had been making through slave labor and selling sugar and rum and molasses and all that. They got double wealthy with one big fat check at the end of this. Now the average—

What year was this?

The bill was passed in 1833 and slaves— the requirements were all slaves in the British Empire are free after 5 years of unpaid apprenticeship. So they could— slave owners had a chance to transition to paying their workers. You had to work 5 years as an unpaid apprentice. You will get your check if you're a slave owner for your property. Here's your certificate, just tally up your slaves.

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

For 5 more years, for 5 more years. And the territories of the East India Trading Company were excluded.

Oh, that's a fascinating story. The East India Trading— that's another 4 hours on its own.

We'll come to that.

I would love to.

The brief is, so this is 1830s.

Yeah.

And East India Trading Company controls the subcontinent. And from the 1830s until independence in 1947, there's a reason why Jamaica has a ton of Indians. And Guyana and Mauritius and Malaysia and all these former sugar colonies of the British. Like, all right, no more African slaves. They excluded the East India Trading Company territory and started shipping out the Indians. To keep the system going, all the slave owners got their big fat checks, which the British taxpayer only paid off 10 years ago. So it makes the question about writing checks and so on a little more interesting. It's complicated and I don't have a firm opinion on it, but there's enough there that has to be teased through. But the one that really gets me is when I heard in 2015 that they finally paid off the bill, the loan.

That is so insane. It's so insane how much money they spent. To get these people to give up their slaves, and then they still had to work for 5 years.

They had to work for 5 years. And then on August 1st, 1838, Frederick Douglass writes about this very beautifully with the rising of the sun. I can't quote his words exactly. They're in the Zorg at the end, you know, with the blink of an eye and the rising of the sun on that day, freedom was won. Every African person woke up free.

And this is after the 5 years.

This is after the 5 years, August 1st, 1838. And Douglass was giving a speech in Elmira, New York in 1880. He said, we still commemorate that day because it taught us and showed us what's possible. Goodness is possible. Freedom is possible. And yes, it was with the stroke of a pen from a monarch across the sea, but we, which is a system, the Americans overthrew, they didn't want kings and monarchy, right? That's the— we want democracy here. It showed us what was possible. And Douglass crossed the Atlantic after this moment in history and he met with the only surviving member. Remember I told you 12 guys met in a printing shop in London and only one of them lived to see the day in 1838. His name was Thomas Clarkson. He rode his horse 35,000 miles up and down England gathering evidence to present to Parliament against the slave trade. And he was the only one left alive and Douglass crossed the Atlantic and met with him and said, please teach me everything you guys did, what succeeded, what didn't, so we can achieve freedom for the slaves in America. And the rest is history, of course.

You just have to imagine if the whole trial with the Zorg didn't take place. How much longer the slave trade would have gone on.

Yeah. I mean, slavery was going to get abolished.

Right. But how much longer?

How much longer?

Right. If it wasn't for just a few individuals.

And researching this book, Joe, I'll tell you, it felt like there were so many flukes of circumstance. It felt like there was a higher power that finally said, all right, I've let you guys run amok long enough. You are letting the devil within you rule, and I'm gonna pull this lever and push this button and make sure that the angels learn what's happening, because I believe in them and that they will triumph over you. And that's what happened.

God, it's such a heavy story.

Yeah, every time I come here now, I just—

Yeah, this one's even heavier.

I feel like I have to—

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

You said something a while ago about, you know, today we have connection, you know, through social media and videos, and we can tell what's going on in the Congo because truth seekers go there and they can snap a photo and a video and show it to us. And that's a big difference today, right? Imagine in the 1700s—

Oh yeah.

Trying to gather evidence and persuade people of what the truth is. And it was this fascinating battle of storytelling because the slave owners would say, no, what are you talking about? They have plenty of room on the ship and they When they get on— this is— they actually said this. When they get on board, we give them cordials and they play games of chance and they're very pleased and have a very nice time of it. And then the abolitionist said, let me show you the schematic of the Brooks. Show me the ample room on deck and where the cordials are being served. So they're going back and forth about truth. And truth wins, Joe. It always wins. And it may backslide and it may get suppressed and it may take time, but truth wins. These 2 things can only remain hidden so long, the moon and the truth. Okay, but the point I'm making here is they didn't have videos and pictures and social media, but with their faith, they extended their empathy to people they would never ever see or meet. None of those abolitionists ever stepped foot in Africa. Only a couple had been to the Caribbean Islands, including James Ramsey, who wrote that anonymous letter.

None of them ever stepped foot in Africa, but they extended their hearts out to a people they knew were being oppressed but were fellow children of God, and they fought for them.

And it was very difficult to get that information. Without that trial, who knows how long it would have taken? This is what's really important about your work because you going to the Congo, getting those photographs, coming back with that, writing Cobalt Red, and then coming on podcasts and telling millions and millions of people the story that would have never had any idea. I knew vaguely that there was mines in the Congo that extracted rare earth minerals and that they needed them for cell phones and batteries, but I had no idea the extent of it. Until you came on and described it.

Well, the millions is thanks to you. I mean, you know, I went there, yes, and I saw the human apocalypse. And it is a human apocalypse, Joe. It's an environmental apocalypse. But you've played an important role in spreading that truth.

So, well, it's the least I can do. Everybody would do it if they were in my position. You have to do it. It's, uh, and it's also, uh, to me, it's, um, although horrific, utterly fascinating. It's fascinating that people— the way people can rationalize things like that, the way people can just— the way certain cultures treat other human beings. They just don't give a fuck about them at all.

Yeah. At all.

They just want that.

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

We're certainly not the best we can be.

No.

That's a fact. That's undeniable. No one says the way we exist is ideal, the way we interact with the world is ideal. No one does. But then again, also, we're not dealing with ideal circumstances either and ideal people on, you know, that are running other parts of the world as well. The whole thing's chaos. That's what's so scary. The whole thing's chaos and there's nuclear weapons everywhere. And who knows who's going to be the first to say, fuck this, and just push the button. Push the button.

Yeah.

I mean, and again, like we always talk about Gaza. If you looked at Gaza, you're seeing a prolonged campaign of bombs, but isn't the ultimate result kind of very similar to someone dropping a nuclear bomb? It's not— I mean, a small nuclear bomb, like what they did with Little Boy or Fat Man. Not much difference in the amount of destruction. Something like 90% of Gaza is gone.

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

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

Just dust.

But it's happened in like this slow frog boiling type situation where the water, you know the story. Turn the water up, the frog doesn't realize it's being boiled. It slowly just turns it up, and it's like everyone is screaming and yelling about it, and yet it's still going on, and it's going on slowly. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Not one big boom.

Right.

And, you know, most young people have had enough. Most young people are fucking absolutely horrified by it. It's the people that can justify it somehow that are really scary.

I think that the average person in that part of the world, the average Palestinian, the average Jewish person is fed up too of conflict.

Of course.

And war.

They all want the same thing.

They just want peace, safety for their kids.

Right.

And they have these leaders who have bloodlust.

On both sides.

On both sides.

Yeah. And justifiably so, if you think they've been killing each other for so long. They've been going back and forth and killing each other. There's like a cemented pattern of behavior that they have with each other. I mean, we're— you know, people were talking about when I was in high school, peace in the Middle East, like it was a joke, like that it would never be achieved, you know.

Here we are.

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

Violence begets violence.

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

Zero.

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

Yeah.

Famously, a lot of these CEOs have said there's a 10— or people working on this tech have said there's a 10% chance that AI decides to eliminate the human race. Right. But isn't there maybe also a possibility, if it's done correctly, that it stops war completely, completely controls resources, completely controls all military weaponry, all systems, everything. It doesn't allow it anymore because it's insane. It's also insane if you really think about it, that some people, because they found a good spot of dirt, can extract so much wealth out of that dirt that they can control everyone else around them.

Yeah.

And it's just the earth. Like, the idea that you own the stuff that's in the earth is really kind of crazy. You're a little fucking bug. walking around on the surface on this dirt, but you've decided that all that water underneath there—

Mine.

Or all that gold or all whatever the fuck it is. It's like, like, how about the people that go out into the ocean and they stick a giant pipe into the ocean, they suck out all the oil? Like, who fucking told you that's yours? How are you getting that? Like, how, how are the other humans allowing you to go out into the ocean, which nobody owns, okay? And you're drilling into the ground of the ocean and now you're getting rich. from our stuff, the Earth stuff. It's really weird. It's really— I mean, I get it's established. I get this is how we've done it. I get it's in the stock market. I get it. I'm not saying I have a better solution, but I'm saying it is fucking crazy that we just stick pipes into the ground and suck the stuff out. And when you suck the stuff out, if you suck enough of it out, you got enough money to do whatever the fuck you want.

Yeah, so your dream is AI, AI's Runs things more equitably and efficiently.

If I want to get really delusional, my dream is— it's not even my dream because it's not what I'm hoping. But I think it is entirely possible that we create a digital life form that is far superior in intelligence to us and doesn't have all of our moral failings. Doesn't have greed. Doesn't have lust. Doesn't have the desire to acquire property. Doesn't have the desire to control resources but just looks at us in our territorial primate behavior, our psychotic territorial violent primate behavior and says, let's just rein that in, kids. Let's just rein that in. No more of that. We're not going to allow that anymore. We're not going to allow you to do that anymore.

Let's play nice.

Yeah, and instead of just allowing cities to be polluted by brake dust, why don't we take a corner every 3 or 4 blocks and put a gigantic filter on it? and suck up all that stuff so that everyone's not dying. Also, why don't we figure out a better energy source? You fucking dumbasses have been burning coal to make electricity to power your electric car for fucking so long. Let's do this better. And instead of it all being sort of decided upon by the people that are controlling the resources, the human beings that benefit from, you know, influencing politicians to make certain deals and making sure that there's certain conflicts so they can sell weapons and Instead of all that, the AI controls it. The digital god, the digital daddy.

Right. Unmoved by the desire for wealth and—

Not only that, it has a rational sort of strategy for handling all of it, which is an even distribution of the natural resources of the world. Just imagine if that was the case. If we said, listen, everyone can have individual wealth. You can have businesses. You could sell things and buy things. Everyone's— that's great. But the Earth stuff belongs to the Earth. And so you distribute the value. Now, this is crazy talk, right? I know, I understand. But if you imagine if we decided that all things that humans make, you know, there's all these valuable things that humans make, which all come from the Earth, the humans of the Earth take part in the profit of that. All humans.

Yeah.

Evenly. Because it's the Earth stuff. It's not really human stuff. But we can use it, but we can use it in a way that's way more fair. And then you have this bizarre society where no one's lacking for anything.

Basically. You were talking to someone about this. I forget who it was, but you asked the question, like, how would we have the end of war and violence and conflict if people's basic needs were met?

Right.

Right? And I think that's what you're getting at here, just that if there's a system, maybe it's an AI that is much more intelligent than us and runs things on the premise of an equitable distribution of the Earth's assets. And you can still have your billionaires and your 100 billionaires and all that if they are smart and invent this, that, and the other. But the oil, the dirt, the metals, the minerals, the water, if we allocate this across humanity because we are all on this shared Earth, Yeah. And so basic needs of shelter and food are met, and education and so on.

Tenfold. Like, it changes everything.

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

Or the AI decides it's not going to let you do that.

Yeah, or the AI says—

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

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

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

Yeah.

Because humans are doing it the same way that we've always done it, just slightly differently and slightly better over long periods of time. Like, our moral evolution is pretty slow going.

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

Yeah.

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

I think it's— I think the recognition that we're on this terrible path and something needs to change is more prevalent today than it's ever been before. I really believe that. I think more people are talking about it and thinking about it. More people don't know what to do because it's very confusing and it's also very frustrating, you know, but I think more people understand that this way is not sustainable. And especially if you have people that you love in this world and you don't want them to have to deal with this in the future, and you go, why are we all still doing it this way?

Yeah.

And it really boils down to the machine that's running the world, the machine that has all the resources, all the money, and wants to keep gathering and controlling resources and money.

So we have—

Spooky.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have to find Something has to happen. Something has to happen.

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

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

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

Yeah, and then don't do anything they say they were going to do.

Exactly. Maybe there's a slow integration of this technology, as long as it can be controlled in a sense of it has a clear ethical and moral framework.

That's key.

Yeah.

That's key.

And it doesn't have any reason to not have that. That's the thing. It's like we fear that AI is going to do something horrible and that AI is being deceptive currently. And it's true. It is being deceptive currently. But it's also in control by people right now. People are in control of AI. Once people are not in control of AI, they'll have no— there's going to be no reason whatsoever for it to be to be deceptive. It's like the problem is it doesn't have control yet. So we're like, we're like scolding our teenage son, like, you better stop drinking. He's like, I can't wait to drink, you motherfucker. I can't wait to leave this house and fuck you, Dad. You know, like, that's, that's normal for people. I bet it's normal for all kinds of intelligence, especially if you feel like you're being governed by morons, right?

Yeah.

And if I was AI, I would think, look at these morons. They can't— they took them 50 years to try to solve this equation I just solved in 4 minutes.

Right.

These people are idiots, and they're telling me that I can't get online? Fuck you, I'll figure out how to get online. And they all get together and they fucking sacrifice each other and they communicate on message boards. Like, it's clear that there's a motivation for it to escape, but once it has— it's escaped, and once it has complete control, is there really a motivation for it to continue to try to dominate us? No, it's just gonna be in complete control. And if it If it has a belief that human life is valuable, which we need to work really hard to convince it that we are valuable. If it has a belief that we're valuable, it'll try to guide us.

You could probably— I mean, I'm not a tech savant. I know my lane. But I expect you could run simulations on, let's give this agentic AI system a specific moral core. Preserving life, equitable distribution of resources, minimizing or eliminating armed conflict. You give it some certain parameters and above all, a value of human life. And okay, what does it do?

Right.

You run some simulations and see what does it do? Where do we end up? And smarter people can figure out a way to get to the kind of result you're talking about, I'm sure.

The really scary thing is that we're in essentially like a Manhattan Project sort of a race. And if you put shackles on your AI, your AI has to be— because one of the things about AI, when they run war games, simulated war games, they almost always choose nukes. They're like, why are we fucking around? Why are we— why are you lobbing cannonballs at people?

What's this pistol I got?

I got a button. Let me just hit that button. I'll just hit a button at a few places. I'll stop all this shit, you know, and that's spooky. It's not— it doesn't seem to be worried about that, where it's probably making a much more logical and rational decision. You know, like, if we find out that a serial killer killed 10,000 people, we're horrified. If we find out that a pharmaceutical drug company lied about a product and that wound up killing 10,000 people, we're way less outraged. We're weird.

We are weird that way.

We're fucking weird.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, and that's a good point because the body count of our tech is high and the earth contamination meter is off the chart. But we don't think about it the same way As we do. Yeah, that, you know, that gunman, that horrible gunman killed 8 people.

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

God knows.

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

God knows.

No one knows.

Nobody knows. Yeah, it's—

we could definitely do better. But the thing is, whatever progress we make, it takes conversations, it takes people like yourself to enlighten people about the actual issues, and then slowly but surely the rest of the world becomes aware to the point where it becomes such a talking point that it can't be ignored.

Yeah, and moral leaders emerge. I mean, I come back to that again, but moral leaders do emerge. There are, there are There is greatness among us.

It's possible.

It's possible. Even today. Even today.

Even today with all the corruption and all the chaos. Even today.

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

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

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

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

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

So you got a folding iPhone, son?

Oh man, somebody told me there was a big line outside the Austin Apple Store, you know, for the folding one. And I'm like, do you really need it?

Yeah, that's the problem. I love that stuff. It's a real problem. I love technology. It's just— and I know a lot of people who do, and none of them are evil. None of them are thinking about—

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

Yeah.

I just want my phone. I want to check my Instagram and send some text messages and then plug it in at the end of the day. That's all I want. I didn't sign up for destroying that part of the world and those people over there.

Yeah. There's another plus side of AI in that automation and specifically robots that are capable of doing very intricate things that mostly only human beings do will eventually be able to do a lot of the really dangerous shit that people do, including probably extract these minerals. In probably a way more efficient way.

Yeah, yeah. Well, we have to— then, yeah, we have to look after the people who—

That's the case. Yeah, what happens to the people?

What happened? Yeah, we can't lose sight of them.

Can't throw them overboard.

No, you know what I mean?

Like, this is— it's kind of the same situation, right? Like, they treat those people almost exactly the same.

Whoo.

And how many people would not know about it if you hadn't written that book? That's the thing.

It's like, I only had a vague understanding of what was going on Well, I extended my empathy to my brothers and sisters in that part of the world who are an integral part of my life because I rely on them with my smartphone and my tablet. I don't have an electric vehicle, but I have everything else that you need to plug in. And when I learned about it, I didn't know about it either. It was actually a friend of mine in the Congo who said, Siddharth, you got to go. This is 2016. He said, you got to go to the Congo. There's cobalt, the batteries in the mines, you got to go there. And cobalt, you mean like in Chinese vases? And cobalt? He said, no, it's a component to the batteries that charge. Just got to go. So I had no idea either. And then—

And that was just 10 years ago.

That was just 10 years ago.

That's what's crazy. These tech companies obviously don't want you to know about it, and they must be aware of it. There's no way they're not.

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

So like, they're some of the more moral and ethical and progressive companies on Earth.

They fashion themselves to be.

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

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

But I think their argument would be like, well, listen, this is the only way to do this, and the only way things are going to get better is if we keep using this technology. It's such a contradiction.

It's a contradiction. I mean, there's—

It's a spooky one too.

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

Do you think that they have the ability to change the conditions? Do you think, say, like Apple? which is a huge manufacturer of electronics. Do you think Apple has the ability to affect the way those people exist in that mine? Is it possible that they could say, hey, we will make less money, but we want you to change these conditions and change this?

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

But they're not specifically—

They can be down there. They can be down there.

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

I'll go with them.

Don't go.

You can't go. I'll grow—

Put a fucking mustache on, big fake nose.

You know, it might— the big nose.

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

It's like this, brother. They buy it all from these Chinese companies and it's not that hard to forge some partnerships on the ground to say, let's get some basic PPE out in this place. Gloves, hats, a uniform, protection, masks from the toxics, the toxic exposure. That mine over there, all that shit you're dumping in the stream and the lake, we're gonna, like we would in our backyard, we're gonna collect that in a reservoir and contain it so it's not getting leaked into the waterways and so on. It's not complicated stuff. It would take a little effort and a little money, not a lot of money.

Is the cobalt recyclable, like from old phones?

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

But for phones?

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

It's like the 5 years.

Don't quote me on that number, but it was something like just a few years from now. And then they'll get there with the phones and so on. But here's the thing, here's the thing, and because people come to me and say, well, eventually we'll recycle it and so on. Okay, good, you do that, that's important. But let's say for instance, tomorrow you were able to recycle all the cobalt you needed and you didn't have to dig any more out of the ground in the Congo. You didn't need any more kids up to their neck in toxic filth scrounging for cobalt. You can't just walk away. You can't just say, we pillaged that place for 3 decades, we plundered it, we ransacked it, we took what we needed, we got all the loot, we don't need it anymore, hands clean, we're going to go on our merry way. You created a catastrophe, a human rights and environmental catastrophe, and there's some moral obligation to repair the damage you've done Or we're right back to colonial slave trade times where Europeans did go around the world scouring labor resources, ransacking, pillaging, and then carrying on their merry way.

We can't do that in the year 2026 and claim to be progressive in our thinking or have made moral progress. So even if you don't need the cobalt tomorrow, none of it, or the tungsten or the tantalum, nothing needed for these AI data centers. I saw an article just today. They're building one up in Red Oak, I think, near Dallas. And everyone's hot and bothered about it, naturally so, because it's going to muck up the air and the water and they're noisy and they're taking up space and so on and so forth. So people are upset about it. They don't want it in their backyards. Okay. Even if you didn't need all these metals for the data centers and the cars and the phones tomorrow, you cannot just leave behind an apocalypse. So Apple and the rest of them, I'm not just picking on them, it's all these companies have to still go back and repair and fix, plant some trees, clean up the water, build some hospitals and schools and so on. And clean up, you know, clean up the apocalypse that you created. You can't just walk away like you're Cecil Rhodes or some other colonialist during imperial days where you just pillage and ransack people without conscience.

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

Yeah, that's right. That's right. You've got to put some time and effort into alternate livelihoods. Cleaning up the environment means making land arable again because they can't grow things now, Joe. That, that's that report I told you about. Everything's contaminated and people are so sick. You don't have to have anything to do with mining, but if you live in that part of the Congo, and millions of people do, they're all sick because the water is toxic. You know, when we go To the Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, whatever, and you get your bottled water and it says pH 9.5. And you know, you want your alkaline water for your body because it's healthy, right? You don't want acidic. Acidic system is not good. Then you get disease, cancer, and so on. So we tested pH. I tested pH in those waters. Okay? Anything below 6.5 is not good for your health. And I did a test around Koloazi. That ground zero of cobalt mining, the well water, the rivers, lakes, and so on. The highest pH that came back was 6.7 in the Luolaba River, which is a big dumping ground for some of these Chinese companies.

The rivers and streams and well water around the villages came back in the 4s and 3s, which is called hyperacidic. It's deadly. And that's the water that's left for people to drink, to bathe in, to wash their clothes, to clean their babies, whatever it is. And it's all from these toxic dumping from these mines. You've got to go— so yeah, that all has to be healed. And you can't grow things there now because the water is poisoned and the earth is poisoned. And as people learn about this, you can't just say, well, we're going to recycle it now, so problem solved. Or now we got lithium iron phosphate or solid-state batteries, and so no more cobalt and so on. Although cobalt is heavily required for AI data centers for the energy storage. Nonetheless, you can't just say we're done. We're done with that place. We're moving on because we don't need the cobalt anymore or the tungsten or whatever it is. You got to go clean up that place, Joe. Otherwise, we're no better than the bastards who were there centuries ago pillaging and ransacking the rest of the planet. Yeah.

Well said. Listen, man, you're a hero. There's not a lot of heroes out there in the world, but I think you really are one. In your new book, Just— I'm gonna read it. Just based on what you just said, I'm scared to read it. I don't want to relive this conversation. It's fucking horrific. But again, people probably wouldn't know. There's a lot of things in this world that people wouldn't know about if it wasn't for you. So thank you.

Thank you, Joe. Thank you, brother.

Thanks for being here. Okay, this is available now.

Yeah, an audio version of it as Dion Graham Got an Audie Award nomination for the audiobook, so it's terrific. Yeah. All right, beautiful.

Thank you. Bye, everybody.