The podcast highlights the human cost behind modern technology, focusing on the Congo’s role in supplying critical minerals like cobalt, lithium, and nickel. Despite being essential for smartphones, electric vehicles, and AI technologies, the mining operations in the region are built on child labor, forced labor, militia control, and environmental degradation. At least 300,000 people—including over 30,000 children—work in hazardous, toxic conditions each day, with no legal protections or fair wages. The term "artisanal mining" is used falsely to mask the reality of brutal, exploitative labor. This exploitation is part of a larger pattern of global resource extraction where wealth from the Global South fuels technology in the Global North. Historical parallels emerge with the transatlantic slave trade—where sugar and colonialism drove economies built on human suffering—linking past and present systems of exploitation. The story of the Dutch ship Zorg, captured during the American Revolutionary War and used as a symbol of inhumanity, illustrates how colonial powers commodified human life through trade. The narrative calls for personal accountability: consumers must question whether they truly support ethical supply chains and consider reducing demand for devices that perpetuate these injustices. While new technologies like EVs promise sustainability, they too rely on the same tainted supply chains. The report concludes with a moral imperative—recognizing that all people, regardless of distance, are part of one global ecosystem and must be treated with dignity. This awareness is the first step toward meaningful change.
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
We're up.
All right.
Good to see you, sir.
Yeah, good to see you, Joe.
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.
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 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 four years
ago.
Was it really that long ago?
It was December 2022.
That's crazy.
So here we are, September 26th, so almost four years ago.
And you continue to talk about it now and again, and I think that's meant a lot to me.
It's meant a lot to people in the Congo.
It's obvious this has captured your heart.
And. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
To be commended for that conscience.
Well, I'm doing this talking.
You're actually out there going and documenting all this stuff.
This is a very strange world that we live in, that at the very base of all of 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, you know, there's
a bounty for you.
So I can't go back.
But I've stayed in touch with people there.
I continue to get ground research.
And the conditions, they're not much better, you know, and in some ways they've continued
to degrade because the fever for these, these battery component metals, and it's, it's cobalt,
but it's also the lithium, the nickel, the copper, the tantalum, all the stuff that goes
into our smartphones, our tablets, you know, you and I, nobody we know can function without
this stuff.
And the bottom of the chain is tainted in child labor slavery.
Violence, environmental destruction and contamination.
And the new fever is the AI data centers.
You know, we're building these 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.
It's such a strange aspect of human life that we require that and that the, the, the area
is controlled by people that are willing to do this.
Like there's no, like we don't get much of these rare earth minerals from America, do
we?
No, no, no, not much at all.
No.
That's why it's.
It's.
That's why it's so important.
Right.
And that's why it's so important.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
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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 this stuff.
You know, you get an ore that's got cobalt, copper, nickel, silver, bit of uranium in
it, and you have to separate all that.
And so there's heavy industrial acids, toxic industrial liquids used to dissolve and separate
those metals.
And that's what. That's what inevitably leaches.
They pump that stuff right into the ground?
It just goes into the ground.
And then it seeps into the groundwater, into the river's lakes.
When did this all begin?
So that part of the Congo in the southeastern corner from the town of Lubumbashi to Koloase
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.
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.
When you displace hundreds of thousands of people with a big mining operation, meaning
there were villages there and maybe a river and they used to fish and grow some potatoes
or whatever, and you just displace all those people and you set up a mining operation the
size of a small city, there's no other way for them to survive but to bring their kids
and their wives and come into that same mining territory.
And this is what happens.
Every day, roll up their sleeves and get down in that toxic dirt and try to gather enough
ore in the 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.
2020.
2022.
Sorry.
We're now in 2026.
I had documented the human horror taking place.
And that's what Cobalt Red is about.
But I had not done enough to quantify how many people exactly.
And so in this same report, I mentioned blood batteries, ran prevalence estimates, just
sample at all the sites, how many people, and you can build an estimate.
And on any given day, there are at least 300,000 people, men, women, and children, digging
for cobalt with their bare hands and pickaxes and shovels, 300,000 people on any given day.
And that fluctuates by season a little bit, dry season, wet season.
Of that 300,000, about. About 37%, so more than one out of three, are working in conditions we'd call absolute
slavery.
And almost 10% are kids, so roughly 30,000 kids on any given day.
Not in school, not learning, exposed to toxic work, toxic, dangerous, mining with their
hands, up to their necks in it.
And that's the bottom of the chain.
So not only need to know that, but think hard about their own personal choices in the context
of that knowledge.
You know, what do I mean by that?
I mean, do you have to upgrade your phone every year?
People often ask me, what do I do?
Okay, I accept the premise that the rechargeable lifestyle I live is facilitated by and built
upon an enormity of human suffering, 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.
But the truth is, it's all tainted.
It's all coming out of the same pot of tainted, contaminated human degradation and environmental
destruction.
The EV story is, let's save the planet.
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 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 and
you're walking around, you are 100% breathing in brake dust.
And it's been proven that living in polluted, heavily populated cities lowers your lifespan.
And it's probably one of the reasons.
You're dealing with a toxic element in the atmosphere that you're breathing in every
day, whether you like it or not.
There's not a thing you can do about it.
Yeah.
It, I, you know, there's so many parts of the EV story that we don't get fully told.
Brake dust is certainly one.
All cars give off brake dust, just to be really clear.
But EVs are heavier.
They're heavier.
So you, you brake more.
You have to brake more.
Yeah.
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.
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 does help a lot substantially, but it doesn't eliminate it.
Yeah.
And they're more expensive.
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 certainly things we can and should be doing to mitigate the environmental
impact.
of
Whether it's an EV or even an internal combustion engine, you know, 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've got to get carbon to get the carbon ceramic brakes.
This is the thing.
This is the thing.
There's always something.
Right.
And you made this point with RZA.
You know, okay, cobalt, but it's also the lithium.
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've been there.
I have colleagues who have been up there.
It's near town.
They're called Manono.
They're just as horrific.
And so when you say, all right, we're done with cobalt.
We're just going to do lithium iron phosphate battery or, you know, lithium table salt battery, whatever.
Same deal.
Same deal.
You know, so it's about extending the horizon of our compassion beyond our immediate circle.
And caring about everything.
And 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 the roll of the dice that was favorable.
And that's all it is.
That's what's hard to recognize.
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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 that's
a hard one to figure out right it's a hard one to figure out we've got some general sense of the
forced labor camps um uh filled with uyghurs um doing solar panels and clothes and all this shit
um but and i haven't looked into that directly but i can i can tell you what i've seen directly
on what they do in africa and you know they they don't treat people like people there
they don't see them the africans as people they're in the way of the loot they need
and they don't even employ the african people there when they come in with a mining
program
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 u.s mining company now operating in that part of the congo
there wasn't one for a better part of two decades and one of the mines which uh is owned by um dubai
middle eastern guys um part of the trump administration sort of peace for minerals
arrangement between president shishigeti and the trump administration was mining access
and so one concession uh was sold to this u.s 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 koloise 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 so
look is is virtues are they doing things any better and the feedback i've gotten so far is
they seem to be
uh improving standards around artisanal mining they're still artisanal mining but improving
standards when we say artisanal mining you you went into depth about this the first time we talked
but we should just tell people yeah that that thing artisanal sounds awesome it sounds like a
great cup of coffee like fair trade it's a nice at a nice place bread yeah like someone's got a
beautiful ceramic cup they serve you the coffee oh yeah artisanal mining is pretty much the
opposite it's it's the the games people play with words right uh no so artisanal mining means you've
got your mom dad and their kids up to here in toxic grit and filth digging yeah this is an artisanal
mine yeah the fact that you can use that same word artisanal with this that you can with a nice coffee
shop is crazy it's crazy that's so this is uh you know i got imagine if you were learning english
you're like what the fuck does artisanal actually mean like how how are the two things what like
this language is messed 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 um it's all basically the poorest people on earth raw human labor uh it's tens of thousands
of people and there's kids down there too okay you just can't see in this massive also you've
shown mothers with their babies with babies on their backs so that's that's what the mining
industry calls artisanal okay it's it's this it's kids with
40 50 kilogram sacks of cobalt um on their necks clamoring out of a pit cobalt is toxic to touch it
is toxic to breathe all these kids get respiratory distress cancers the women get birth defects
congenital disease here's a teenager with a baby these are all my photos okay that have found their
way onto the internet that kid's probably eight and she's probably 13 or 14 and she's got this
baby i remember that
joe that that's in the hills above kambov that's the story i told you last time where that's
probably the closest i came to getting shot was in this mining area it was almost all children
run by a militia um north of a town called kambov and it is all copper cobalt it all gets sold right
into the industrial supply chain people need to accept this truth the kids don't dig cobalt going
to the moon okay that cobalt all goes in to the industrial supply chain and they're all going to
go into the formal supply chain through militias and traders all of it what do i mean by formal
supply chain i mean the formal industrial mining companies that then go and refine this stuff
and it ends up in your phones and cars and tablets so i was up there in those hills and you're not
supposed to be up there like i wasn't supposed to be in the place where there's 15 000 people in that
pit and these militia guys come come barreling up the hill with ak-47s and i thought that was it for
me i mean this is the story i told you last time i thought that was it i mean they threw my backpack
off my back shoved me to the ground yanked all my stuff out demanded my phone to see if i'd taken
photos and videos and so on and the only thing that saved my life is this for people who are
interested in human rights research this is what's important you get local intel local colleagues
take their advice the only thing that saved my life that day so one of my local colleagues said
said arthur for you guys i'm not going to lie to you i'm not going to lie to you i'm not going to
go to any of these places you got to get a stamp from the governor's office on your visa paperwork
and you take that with you everywhere and that will convey to any militia that you're under the
governor's protection and they're not going to fuck with you they won't they'll mess with you
but they're not going to do that they're not going to kill you um and i had to go get that
i had to persuade the governor of hotka tanga 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 um fever for rechargeable stuff and he put his
little stamp on it and you know that was the only time i met him only time i saw him but i had that
stamp so when i was up there and my stuff getting thrown around they had their guns pointed at me
my guide his face went pale and i was i thought this is it this is it for cara up on this hill
middle of nowhere and my guide
just gestured and i knew what he was what he was what he was intending and i found my folder on
the ground i pulled that piece of paper out and i showed them the stamp and and then they just get
out of here just you know they let us go so uh when you go into conflict zones you have to have
that kind of local advice um because it can mean the difference between living and being shot and
dumped in some ditch where these little girls with babies
that's the image that needs to be in our minds every time we how did you get that image was it
with a phone yeah it was with my phone i had so those so they started you know going through my
phone they had me unlock it but i had all these images in a password protected other folder so i
just showed them pictures of like you know my my home my daughter and my you know stuff just
whatever i had another folder and they they didn't have the savvy right they didn't know so
like same like that video
of the 15 000 people you know i just managed to do this and tuck it away and because that was also
controlled by militias uh that particular site and and that that mine is classified industrial
which means only heavy equipment being used to source the copper and the cobalt
and that mine is in the bottom of the supply chains in the in the
disclosure documents of every tech and EV company. It's one of the biggest copper cobalt suppliers
out of the Congo. And you get in there and you say, this is not industrial at all,
nor is it baked bread and espresso. This is hell on earth. Am I transported back to
Egyptian times and 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.
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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.
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 three and a half centuries of the slave trade
that carted 12 and a half, 13 million Africans.
And if you need to know about one of them,
it's this one because it's the most important,
the most consequential.
And the reason I say that is it opens the whole world of the slave trade
and its journey ends in this culminating act of brute inhumanity
that sparked the first movement to abolish slavery.
And it's that sequence that is so vital for us to understand historically.
People can't fix a horror until they learn about it.
And the average person,
I've learned,
is not evil.
We may be generally self-interested
and worried about us and ours and so on,
but we're not evil.
And when we learn about something wrong,
we generally feel something and want to do something about it.
And that's what happened.
This was the ship that told the whole world
what was happening in the slave trade.
And a small community of faith-based moral leaders said,
this is unacceptable.
This is beneath us.
And we're going to devote our lives to abolishing slavery.
But the other thing that this journey is,
you know, we grow up in America,
you learn about slavery.
You learn about plantation economy
and how slaves were treated, cotton and so on.
But we don't learn the details of how they got here
and how the first global economy was born around the Atlantic slave trade,
how modern finance, banking and insurance was born through the slave trade.
And the conditions that the African people endured
being carted across the Atlantic.
And it's essential to know this history
because it tells us why we are where we are
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.
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,
millions in this country that are undocumented.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, who knows what the number is?
But millions around the world, tens of millions around the world.
But it's, this history is important.
This history is important because, and this ship is important,
because it reveals the depth of our inhumanity
while simultaneously showing us that we're not alone.
It's 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 a thousand miles.
Slave traders would raid and ransack a village,
grab people and start marching them down to the coast
and, you know, trade along the way with house of slave dealers.
And people would die, of course.
They're yoked at the neck and tied.
And many people didn't survive a five, six, eight hundred mile march.
Eight hundred mile march.
Yeah, there's a, there's journal entries I came across.
One, one captain, slave ship captain named John Newton.
John Newton's a fascinating guy because he became an abolitionist and,
and a preacher.
And he wrote hymns and probably the most famous hymn he wrote was Amazing Grace.
Whoa.
So Amazing Grace is written by a slave trader.
Whoa.
So John Newton, John Newton's from Liverpool.
Liverpool was once capital of the, of the slave trade.
We think of Beatles when we think Liverpool, you know, or the football club.
But it was once the dominant force in the entire European Atlantic slave trade, Liverpool.
And Newton was one of those captains.
He captained three slave ship journeys.
They called it the triangular trade.
And what that meant was, is 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.
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.
Okay.
And let me tell you something about this place, Joe.
So that, this is, oh man.
So John Newton had in his journal, brought on board today, Africans marched, I think, 1,000 miles from the inland.
Okay.
So they were marched down.
And eventually. Eventually sold to the Europeans who run these forts and castles all along the coast.
The biggest one was Cape Coast Castle.
The British and the Dutch had one just cannon shot away called Elmina Castle.
This is in modern-day Ghana.
And they were held in the dungeon.
And you saw that picture of the dungeon.
So the dungeon was divided between an area for men and an area for women and children.
There'd be, at any given time, 1,000 human beings in there shackled down.
One shaft for light and where they drop food and water.
And, I don't know if you, Jamie, if you had that photo again, you saw like a little narrow groove down the floor of the dungeon.
And there you see that.
You see that groove down the floor of the dungeon.
And that's supposed to siphon away their piss and shit and menstrual blood.
And so you can imagine 1,000 people in there.
Now, it always is full and clogged and rainy season and whatever.
So eventually the whole thing is covered in sludge of sewage.
Okay. And so they would spend months
down here, Joe. It would spend months down here. And many people didn't survive that experience.
So your march from the inland regions, hundreds of miles, maybe didn't survive that. If you did,
you're in this dungeon, you're spending months down here. And then eventually,
there's the male slave dungeon entrance at Cape Coast Castle. So eventually the ships come from
Western Europe with all their stuff. And they come up to Cape Coast Castle, they park in the roads,
they drop anchor, it's about a mile or two offshore, they take a canoe up to the castle,
and they meet the governor. And the governor says, okay, 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 visual imagery. We talk about
abolition. All right. We're going to talk about the first use of a viral image, which Jamie gave
us a prelude to. So the
deep seafaring vessel, it's a testament to European genius and ambition and vision and
exploration. 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 Latin rig.
All right. So it's shaped like a triangle. And rather than a traditional square sail that gets
pushed by the wind, the Latin rig, you can swivel it to function like a bird's wing.
So you can tack into the wind like a bird does. And so the Portuguese 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. 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 going to 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, this part of the planet. The Pope, Pope is Alexander the Sixth says, okay, you Spanish,
you Portuguese, you've kind of, you've, you're starting to suss out the rest of the world and
I want you to get along. So I'm 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's 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 until the Crusades,
because it doesn't grow there. It grows in warm tropical places. So 1494,
the Pope divides the world and Spain and Portugal are now in tropical places where you can grow
sugar. 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, twelve,
thirteen hundred Europeans like, oh, these Arabs have got some sugar. It's a nice, you know,
but they're getting it from cane. They're just sugar cane, sugar cane. Yeah,
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, sugar, sugar is another level,
right? Yeah, there's another level. So so they divide the world and they start setting up their
sugar plantations. And the Portuguese tap into existing systems of slavery in Africa. Let's be
clear about that. Europeans didn't bring slavery to Africa.
There was slavery there. They tap into those systems to populate their sugar plantations along
the African coast with slave labor. Now, the Spanish decimate native populations. Okay, the
Mayans, the Aztecs, they get here and through guns and disease and war and they're decimating
local populations. Mayans. Mayans. Yeah. So they don't have a labor force.
So King Charles in 1518 says, Okay, Portuguese, you got these Africans, can you send some over here?
And that's 1518. So the Portuguese, he sent, he gives them a contract to bring me 4000 Africans
to come work these sugar plantations because they seem to be doing a good job working on yours.
Thus begins the era of the Atlantic slave trade.
It was about bringing Africans over to the Spanish colonies to work on sugar plantations. 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 are they so good at getting across
the ocean, but so bad at thinking that they were in India? That seems so insane. Like how much of
a map did they have? They had they had nothing, nothing, nothing West, nothing West. When when the
Portuguese first started going south, they had nothing of Africa except the northern coast from
Roman times. When you look at maps in the in the 1400s, it's blank slate. That's nuts. So they and
they were first attracted by gold, right? They heard these stories, these mythical stories of
gold. And when the Portuguese got to West Africa, they called it Costa de
la Mina de Oro, the coast of gold mines. There was gold everywhere. The slave trade came later
because of sugar. Then the British and the Dutch and so sugar was the star sugar was the dominant
force. There was always slave labor, there was always slave and slave trade. But that's when it
really ramped up. That's when the whole triangular trade, the Atlantic slave trade, the world's first
globalized economy was born from sugar.
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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 you take sugar from Jamaica,
the value of those sugar exports from Jamaica was five times the combined value of all 13 exports of everything from all 13 colonies.
Wow.
So, sugar generated enormous wealth for Western Europe.
And so, thus, the slave trade persisted and persisted.
Are any of the companies that were making sugar back then, are they still around?
Not that I'm aware, no.
I mean. It's sugar, sugar, the way sugar is made today, of course, is different than the slave plantations that were erected by first Portugal and Spain,
then later the British and the Dutch.
So, 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, three, four, five, six hundred 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 ship master is showing you how to line up the Africans.
They're given 16 inches of space each.
And, like, to quote John Newton, who we talked about, like books on a shelf.
They're to be entered and stowed like books on a shelf.
So, each human is allotted 16 inches of space.
Yeah.
That's right.
Now, why are they laying down?
Okay.
So, you're lining them all up, filling up every available possible piece of space.
And then there's a second level here where you see them around this horseshoe.
So, they built a partition.
You can see at the bottom left there.
They built a partition so that they could maximize the cargo, the human capacity cargo of this vessel.
So, you can't sit upright.
You're shackled down, laying down.
And then there's a partition built.
And then there's another level of people.
Like the overhead bin space.
Okay.
You're just lining these people up.
And they're lined up like this for two months to cross the Atlantic.
And you may ask yourself, what happens?
If you're seasick?
What happens if a woman has her period?
Some women gave birth in these conditions.
What happens if you have to just go to the bathroom?
So, they put buckets, distributed them along what they call the tween deck, this cargo here.
And if you needed the bathroom, you had to try and get to that bucket with your chain.
chained partner, you're chained two by two. And of course, you never made it in time. And the ship
is tossing and turning. And so in a matter of just a few days or a week, this entire deck is covered
in human piss and shit and blood and vomit and misery. And that's for the two months of the
crossing. They don't teach us this, Joe. They don't teach us this part of it. So here's a
shipmaster telling you how you can maximize the profit in the Brooks slave ship that he's
building for the Brooks Liverpool family and line these people up. Now they're brought up
in the morning and doused with seawater and given a little bit of food.
And a 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. 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 insurrectionist. 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 the ship, like, I don't know where this is going,
but I'm going to stop eating. I'd rather be dead.
Europeans had a tool for that called the speculum oris. And it was initially a device
used to pry open jaws when you had lockjaw. Slave ship captains got some of these.
And if you didn't want to eat, they jammed it in your mouth, forced it open, and shoved the
food down your throat, cracking probably half your teeth and lacerating your tongue in the process.
And then others would then fall in line. And that's the end of the hunger strike.
So the level of barbarity taking place on these ships that people had to endure is heart-wrenching.
But it's important for us to come to terms with this historically.
So we understand what we're capable of,
and how to keep this kind of inhumanity from happening again. And that gets us to the
glimmer of hope from all this
so this ship
crosses the Atlantic
it was a Dutch ship
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
Barbados is unguarded
let's go take Barbados
so the Brits are fighting everybody at once
and the response to this
was okay anybody with this ship
you are hereby given approval
to be a pirate
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
we need help
Navy can't handle everything
so British take to the seas
as pirates
so a British pirate ship
captures this Dutch ship
off the coast of Africa
and it already had
a couple hundred slaves in it
this British pirate
Captain William Llewellyn
of HMS Alert
captures
the Zorg
off the coast of Liberia
and finds
two other Dutch ships
and takes them over to Cape Coast Castle
headquarters
and he looks at the other captains there
British captain says
look I got some Dutch prizes here
with some slaves
and there's some gold and ivory
I'm auctioning this stuff today
and a Liverpool
captain named Hanley
who's captain of a ship called the William
I'll take that one
I'll take the Zorg
and everything in it
so they didn't have Venmo
and cash and all that back then
so you write up an IOU
it was called a bill of exchange
so Hanley gives a bill of exchange
in the name of his slave merchant creditor
a Liverpool wealthy guy
named William Gregson
he says you just take that to Gregson
for this is the agreed upon fee
I'll take the Zorg
and so now he's got a two for one
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
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
he picks up a stranger
on the West African coast
you remember I told you
these forts and castles
all had governors
they come down from Europe
and their job is to run the castle
and barter for slaves and so on
that's how the machinery worked
and
these guys were just
dumb
you read about them
they're just a bunch of incompetent
fools
who come run these castles and forts
and they're always arguing
and bickering
and writing letters
back and forth to each other
like some teenagers
and oh you know
you did this
and you did that
and then they're writing
to their bosses back in England
and oh you know
he did this
and it's
it's like a soap opera
and the Zorg is going by
he's going to another fort
on the Gold Coast
Ghana
which had a slave auction room
called Anumabu
the fort at Anumabu
and
the governors decide to kick out
the governor's office
and the governors decide to kick out
the governor's office
the governor of Anumabu
that day
because they just can't stand him
his name's Robert Stubbs
he's just a scoundrel
and he's just a wretch
of a human being
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
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the food and water
you have
when you leave
Africa
is the food and water
that has to last you
until you reach
the new world
the other side
and
if you get off course
or delayed
or get caught in a storm
you might be in trouble
and this is what happens
with the Zorg
Stubbs
is leading them
off course
they
should only
need
two months
to go from
West Africa
to Jamaica
every
decent captain
can get his ship
across the Atlantic
in two months
and you expect
about a 15%
mortality rate
on the Africans
they will get
dysentery
because they're living
in their own
piss and shit
and they will
take their own lives
and they will do things
you accept about
a 15% loss
of life
people start dying
the ship is off course
it's been two months
it's been two and a half months
we get to three months
and they don't know
where they are
they finally
sight Tobago
the
far eastern edge
of Caribbean
ocean
Caribbean
sea
and so they have a sense
okay Jamaica's
ten 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
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 measure
longitude
it's called
dead reckoning
and what you're
supposed to do
is you have
a log
and a rope
and you have
knots
tied at regular
intervals
and every six hours
you need to
throw the rope
you throw
you throw the log
into the
into the water
and you hold
the rope in your hand
and you
you count
how many knots
pass through your hand in a single
60-second period. And that gives you a speed in knots or nautical speed. And you do that every
six hours. And that gives you a sense of your speed. And you plot that against direction. And
you can then calculate how far east or west you are of your starting point. 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, two days, three
days. Turns out it was Jamaica. And they've gone three days past their destination. And now they're
completely out of water. And to turn around and beat into the wind,
that three days west is going to take them 10 days to get back.
Because they have to go into the wind now.
At this point, they started with half a crew of 17. Should have had a crew of 30. Remember,
Hanley divided his crew in half. So they're down to just 11 guys. And the captain is sick to the
point of lunacy. Stubbs is running the ship. And they've already lost about 70 Africans
to dysentery and scurvy.
So they have to. And they're out of water. So they make a decision. In order to survive the 10
days to get back to Jamaica, we have to reduce the amount of water consumption on board.
And their solution to doing this is to start throwing the Africans overboard.
So across three days, they start with women and children, living, breathing human beings,
sick, and unwell, and all that. Including one baby. They throw 130 to 140 Africans overboard
into the sea to drown. And their bones are still down there. Okay. 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 pounds. That's about $10,000 today. And the buyers, all the slaves
are loaded into a pen. They are covered in palm oil, so they look healthy. Most of them have
dysentery, so they use oakum to plug their anus for the portion of their life. And they're
loaded into this ship. And
you run in with a rope and you rope off the ones you want. And you gather them, and then
you pay the brokers, and the slaves are taken off to the plantations. Now, that should have
been the end of the story. We should not know what happened on this ship, except for greed.
So the owner of the Zorg, the one who wrote that IOU, and he got news, oh, Hanley, you got a two-for-one.
Yes, here you go. Here's your money to the pirate. And let me insure my new ship. So every
slave ship that crossed the Atlantic was insured. Insurance was born out of the slave trade.
It costs you $700,000, $800,000 equivalent today to kit out a slave ship. All the supplies, the
shipping costs, it's a huge amount of upfront capital. And you could have a shipwreck. You could
have a pirate take your ship, in which case it's all lost. So there was a chap in London named Lloyd.
Lloyd hung out at this coffee shop. And he had an idea. He said, okay, you guys give me
a small percent, let's call it a premium, of the 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.
Every slave captain and slave merchant wanted to insure the ship and all the cargo.
So Gregson had taken out an insurance contract for the ship and his Africans, 30 pounds a head.
When he learns that his ship lost half its cargo, he decides to make an insurance claim. And most
insurance claims at the time, they were not insured. They were not insured. The time where if slaves died in an insurrection, you can get compensated. But if they die because
of natural causes or they kill themselves, you don't get compensated. That's in the contract.
So no one had ever said, well, what happens if you throw them overboard? Do you get compensation
then? So Gregson's going to test this. And he tells the insurance, I want my compensation for
the 200 slaves. And the insurance company said, man, that's 50% mortality rate. Let me check my
actuary table here. No, that's not stable. That's not stable. That's not stable. That's not stable.
It's not standard. We're not going to pay. So he files a lawsuit. This is how we learn about what
happened. Nobody knew, Joe, what was happening on these ships. Remember I told you, King Charles,
1518, that's when it all started. We're in 1780. So two and a half centuries, this has been,
machines been running. Nobody knew what was happening on the ships except the captains
themselves and the crew. So Gregson files a lawsuit. That lawsuit ends up in front of
the chief justice of the entire British empire, the Earl of Mansfield, titanic figure.
And the court cases at that time, there weren't 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.
This trial. But we know that the slave merchants won. Judgment was for the slave merchants. You
want to know who the only witness was? Stubbs. Stubbs is the only guy surviving. He comes in,
he says, yeah, yeah, we were out of water. We had absolutely no choice. We had to throw the
Africans overboard or we all would have died. It was absolutely necessary. And because it's
necessary, insurance has to answer. Yeah, that makes sense. All right.
You guys, please pay Gregson 30 pounds a head for his Africans.
That should have been the end of it. But there was one person in the room that day
with a conscience, with a heart. And he's watching this trial take place.
And he's wondering, wait a minute, why is no one talking about murder?
He just said they threw 130 human beings overboard to drown. And they're talking
about insurance compensation, but no one's talking about murder. 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.
His name was Olada Equiano.
That's Equiano, and that's Granville Sharp.
Nicely done, Jamie.
Equiano was a former slave.
He had been a slave in Virginia.
But smart, industrious, he bought his freedom.
And he heard about Granville Sharp.
Granville Sharp had devoted his life to abolishing slavery.
Equiano made his way to London and said, I'm going to do what I can to help.
So Granville Sharp sees this letter and he says, man, he had been spending the last two decades of his life trying to build a legal argument against slavery.
He taught himself the law.
He didn't finish school.
He taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew.
He wrote pamphlets.
We were talking about pamphlets.
Right?
Pamphlets was the thing of the day.
You had an idea.
You wrote a pamphlet and you gave it to people.
Granville Sharp wrote a pamphlet that he shared with his friend Benjamin Franklin.
He said, maybe he called him Benjamin.
I don't know.
Maybe they had nicknames, whatever.
He said, Benjamin, I have a pamphlet I want you to read.
And my argument is this.
This was in the 1760s.
You guys over there should not be taxed without having a pamphlet.
You should 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 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 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.
It's all going along kind of the same way, except this time they're making different arguments.
The barristers are talking about, for the first time in the history of the West and in a court of law, human rights.
Those black people had the same right to water as the white captain did.
And this is a revolutionary idea.
They have the same right to life.
As the crew, the crew of the ship did.
And they're trying to persuade, again, Justice Mansfield and two more justices this time, of this notion of universal human rights.
And in the midst of all this, the only witness, again, is Stubbs.
You saw that movie, A Few Good Men?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so it's that moment, right, when Tom Cruise has Jack Nicholson on the stand.
He just has to get him to admit he ordered the Code Red.
And he's quaking in his boots because Nicholson's, you know, if he gets it wrong, that's it.
Court-martial, you're done.
You know, if you accuse a whatever 10-star general ordering the Code Red, he's just, do I push?
Do I push?
And he gets Nicholson going.
He gets him moving.
He gets him agitated.
And then, of course, he says, did you order the Code Red?
And Nicholson says, you're goddamn right I did.
Oh, that changes everything, right?
You did.
Oh, 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 going to talk about murder.
It's property.
Slaves, same thing.
He just has to say, property thrown overboard.
We ran over because 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 greed-mongering, murderous lie for profit.
And the public found out about it.
And this is what gives me hope, Joe.
And we talk about the same things happening still today.
This activated the first movement to abolish slavery.
It was born right after this moment where—
where a handful of people in the Anglican church got together.
There were 12 of them.
And they met in a printing shop in 1787.
And they said, we have to abolish slavery.
It is a stain on human conscience.
It's a stain on the British name.
It is a stain against Christianity.
We have to abolish this horrific institution.
And then they devoted their lives to that task, which was a monumental and Herculean task.
But they succeeded using viral.
Images, authentic testimony, investigative journalism, consumer boycotts,
kind of the tools that we use today for social justice were pioneered in this first movement.
And ultimately, they did succeed on paper, granted and conceded that it was just on paper.
But years later, even Frederick Douglass said,
we commemorate every year the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, August 1, 1838,
because that showed the world it was possible.
And it was only a matter of time before we did it here.
And it required a civil war, but it was achieved.
And that was the moment.
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.
Enormous obstacles.
And we have to do the same today.
And it will require acts of conscience.
And by the way, the Zorg, I've figured out who wrote that letter.
Two hundred and forty years, no one had known.
Who was this person whose conscience bent history towards goodness?
And I managed to figure out who it was.
And 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.
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.
I know a lot of people who are atheists.
They're just kind, 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.
part of Christianity, this idea that we evolve and grow together.
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.
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.
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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 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 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.
Yes.
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 the weird ability to justify things.
That's right.
In pursuit of self-interest and self-gratification.
And that will always be a part of the human condition.
There are those among us, but there are greater angels.
Yeah.
You know, the people who endure, who endured those slave ships with grace, who endure the mines in the Congo with grace.
They are so much stronger and have so much more human worth than those who oppress and who are greedy and self-interested.
And it's—
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.
It's heartbreaking.
I mean, there's just horrific stories of what Columbus did and what his—the people on his—
what 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 was on board with some Christian—
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that—the reason I went through a little bit of time talking about the caravel and the deep seafaring vessel is this is—this was—this is what took the Europeans all across the global south.
And by and large, that was a miserable experience for the people they met.
Yeah, always.
That was—
Even if it was just diseases.
Whether—yeah, disease.
And then, of course—
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 mines.
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 we're highly populated and then just suddenly very rapidly depopulated.
Yeah.
And it wasn't all just violence.
No.
You're right.
It was disease and disease.
So everything they did was bad.
Just everything.
The violence was bad and everything they did was bad.
Yeah.
It's such a crazy story because it's hard to imagine.
I used to have this joke in my act about our country is 300 years old.
People live to be 100.
I go, that's three people.
That's what's nuts.
It's like three people ago.
Yeah.
Young country.
Yeah.
Or really two and a half.
Two and a half people ago, we just got here, which is just nuts to even think about how quickly the human race progresses and how devastating the introduction of new people, especially with diseases.
And then you find the people that were here.
Well, we imagine this with the arrival of aliens.
This is the first contact, the story, like what would happen when aliens show up?
Are they going to blow everything up?
Right.
Are they going to enslave us?
Are they going to be like the Quakers or are they going to be like the Chinese?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well said.
Or the Dutch.
Yeah.
The Dutch.
It's crazy, right?
The question though now is there's a lot of conversation about reparation.
Do European countries need to write a check for what they did?
And it's a complicated question.
You know, Jamaica just went to England and said, please, you know, you took millions of Africans, brought them here, enslaved them and made yourself from this muddy, medieval, back ass words 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, if, if your father worked at a manufacturing plant and let's say he worked for a company, right?
He worked for 30 years and they never paid him, we wouldn't think about, oh yeah, you know, your dad is owed money because he worked.
He should be paid for that work.
The company made their money off his labor.
And so, all right, uh, are the descendants of those slaves owed some money and Jamaica went to England just recently and said 10 billion pounds, like just something.
I mean, you, when you start to calculate unpaid labor for three.
Centuries plus interest, it's trillions and trillions and it's in, in, you know, uh, impossible some, uh, but something is owed and then you say, well now, wait a minute.
Um, if you're the British government, I, you know, I wasn't a part of that and I, I, I didn't, I didn't participate in this.
So why am I writing a check?
And then the Jamaican says, yeah, but everything you have today is built on that.
And so there's this conversation going back and forth, Joe, about is a check due, um, or.
Is it just and fair to, to ask for that reparation be paid for this period in slavery, just as the bell, the Congolese are talking to the Belgians, you know, you, Leopold came down here and look what he did to us and then colonized us and, uh, uh, uh, a check needs to be written, uh, uh, as well as an apology.
And, uh, it's a, it's a difficult, it's a difficult question.
Who would, um, receive the check and how would it be distributed?
That would be the real question.
That's part of the complexity.
Like the fear would be that corruption would get involved and someone would siphon off.
the money yeah so wait you're going to tell me i need to write a check to the government of the
gongo right that's not getting to anybody who actually could use it or i just give a check to
jamaica and trust that they all right but does that mean that in principle something's not owed
you know but even if you distribute distributed to the individual people you you'd have to make
sure that no one's stealing it from anybody else and then you would have to figure out
how to distribute it and i mean it does it 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 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 do we pay anything to the africans who worked for free the slave owners who are also
all members of parliament you're taking my property so you're going to find this fascinating
they allocated a sum of 20 million pounds back in 1833 when the law was passed what is that
equivalent equivalent at the time to 40 percent of the entire national budget
and they distributed this money you got a slave certificate compensation certificate and based on
the number of slaves you had times the amount that was each was valued you got that check
then in there so number one uh it was a massive sum of money 40 percent 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 you they didn't even know okay the average british taxpayer had no idea
the average british taxpayer british citizen was repaying the loan taken out in 1833
by the government to pay slave owners for the loss of their slave property
so for the next one and a half years they're going to be repaying the loan and they're going to be
going to be repaying the loan and they're going to be repaying the loan and they're going to be
180 years and now let's say you're a taxpayer in 2010 you had nothing to do with what was
happening in 1800s or the 1700s but you've been paying the bill you've been paying back now these
families some of them prominent the gladstones for instance the longest serving ever prime
minister in british history is a gladstone and he got one of the biggest checks how much
money did he get it was 104 105 000 pounds back in the 1830s i mean we're talking tens of millions
equivalent today so they got super wealthy on one check on top of the wealth they had been making
right through slave labor and selling sugar and rum and molasses and all that they got double
wealthy with one big fat check at the end of the at the end of this now the average what year was
this uh the bill was passed in 1833 and uh the bill was passed in 1833 and uh the bill was passed in
1834 uh slaves uh the the requirements were all slaves in the british empire are free after five
years of unpaid apprenticeship so they could slave owners had a chance to transition to paying
their workers you had to work five years as an unpaid apprentice um you will get your check
if you're a slave owner for your property here's your certificate just tally up yourself so if
you're a slave you're still a slave for five more years for five more years uh and
the territories of the east india trading company were excluded oh that's a fascinating story the
east india trading that's another four hours on its own that will come we'll come to that i would
love to the brief is so this is 1830s yeah and the east india trading company controls the
subcontinent and from the 1830s until independence in 1947 there's a reason why jamaica has a ton of
indians and guyana and mauritius and malaysia and all these former sugar colonies of the british
like all right no more african slaves they excluded the east india trading company territory
and started shipping out the indians to keep the system going all the slave owners got their big
fat checks which the british taxpayer only paid off 10 years ago so it makes the question about
writing checks
and so on a little more interesting it's complicated and i don't have a firm opinion on it but
there's enough there that has to be teased through but the one that really gets me is when i heard
uh in 2015 that they finally paid off the bill the loan that is so insane
it's so insane how much money they spent to get these people to give up their slaves and then
they still had to work for five years they had to work for five years and then on august 1st
1838 uh frederick douglas writes about this very beautifully with the with the rising of the sun i
can't quote his words exactly uh they're in the zorg at the end you know with the blink of an eye
and the rising of the sun on that day freedom was one every african person woke up free and this is
after the five years this is after the five years august 1 1838 and douglas was given a speech in
elmira new york in 1880 he said we still commemorate that day
because it taught us and showed us what's possible goodness is possible freedom is possible
and yes it was with the stroke of a pen from a monarch across the sea uh but uh we which is a
system the the americans overthrew they didn't want kings and monarchy right that's the we want
democracy here um uh it showed us what was possible and and and douglas uh crossed the atlantic
after this this moment in history and he met with the only surviving member i remember i told you
12 guys met in a printing shop in london and only one of them lived to see the day in 1838
his name was thomas clarkson he rode his horse 35 000 miles up and down england gathering evidence
to present the parliament about against the slave trade and he was the only one left alive and
douglas crossed the atlantic and met with him and and said please teach me everything you guys did
what you what succeeded and he said i'm not going to do it again i'm not going to do it again i'm not
going to do it again so he did what didn't so 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
right researching this book joe i'll tell you it felt like there were so many flukes of circumstance
it felt like there was a higher power
that finally said all right i've let you guys run amok long enough you are letting the devil within
you rule and i'm going to pull this lever and push this button and make sure that the angels learn
what's happening because i believe in them and that they will triumph over you and that and that's
what happened god it's such a heavy story yeah every time i come here now just yeah this one's
even heavier i feel like i don't know they're both pretty heavy but jesus you said something
a while ago about you know today we have connection you know through social media and
videos and we can tell what's going on in the congo because truth seekers go there and they
can snap a photo and a video and show it to us and that's a big difference today right imagine in the
1700s oh yeah trying to gather evidence and and persuade people of what the truth is uh and it
it was this fascinating battle of storytelling because the slave owners would say now what are
you talking about they have plenty of room on the ship and they
when they get on this is they actually said this when they get on board we give them cordials and
they play games of chance and they're very pleased and have a very nice time of it
and then the abolitionist said let me show you this schematic of the brooks
and show me the ample room on deck and where the cordials are being served
so they're going back and forth about truth and truth wins joe it always wins
and it may backslide and it may get suppressed and it may take time but truth wins
these two things can only remain hidden so long the moon and the truth
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 of years ago
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.
Well, it's the least I can do.
Everybody would do it if they're in my position.
You have to do it.
And it's also, to me, it's although horrific, utterly fascinating.
It's fascinating.
That people, the way people can rationalize things like that, the way people can just, the way certain cultures treat other human beings, just don't give a fuck about them at all.
Yeah.
At all.
They just want that money.
We have to do better.
We have to be a better model for the world.
We meaning this country.
This country has to be a better model.
And it pains me that right now we're not being a very good model.
We're certainly not the best we can be.
No.
That's a fact.
That's undeniable.
No one says the way we exist is ideal.
The way we interact with the world is ideal.
No one does.
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.
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.
Yeah.
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, 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.
Yeah.
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, the average Palestinian, the average Jewish person is, is fed up too of conflict.
Of course.
And war.
They all want the same thing.
They just want peace.
Everybody wants the same thing.
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, 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.
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?
Fucking insane.
And this is my one hope.
And I know a lot of people think this is very delusional, but my one hope of this complete dominance of technology that one day we're going to get to a position where there will genuinely be a thing more intelligent than human beings that don't allow this anymore.
You know, the real fear about A.I. is that A.I. 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 percent chance that A.I. decides to eliminate the human race.
Right. But isn't there maybe also a possibility if it's done correctly that it stops war completely?
Completely controls resources, completely controls all military weaponry, all systems, everything doesn't allow it anymore.
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 that's walking around on the surface on this dirt.
But you've decided that all that water underneath there, all that gold.
Or all whatever the fuck it is.
It's like, like, how about the people that go out into the ocean and they stick a giant pipe into the ocean?
They suck out all the oil.
Like, who fucking told you that's yours?
How are you getting that?
Like, how how are the other humans allowing you to go out into the ocean, which nobody owns?
OK.
And you're drilling into the ground of the ocean.
And now you're getting rich from our stuff.
The earth stuff.
It's it's really weird.
It's 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 a I a I a I runs things more equitably and efficiently.
If I want to get really delusional, my dream is is not even my dream.
So this is not what I'm hoping.
But I think it is entirely possible that we create a digital.
Life form that is far superior in intelligence to us and doesn't have all of our moral failings, doesn't have greed, doesn't have lust, doesn't have the desire to acquire property, doesn't have the desire to control resources, but just looks at us in our territorial primate behavior, our psychotic territorial violent primate behavior and says, let's just reign that in kids.
Let's just reign that in.
No more of that.
We're not going to allow that anymore.
We're not going to allow you to do that anymore.
Let's play nice.
Yeah.
And, you know, instead of just allowing cities to be polluted by breakdust, why don't we take a corner every three or four blocks and put a gigantic filter on it and suck up all that stuff so that everyone's not dying?
Also, why don't we figure out a better energy source?
You fucking dumb asses have been burning coal to make electricity to power your electric car.
It's 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 A.I. controls it.
The digital God, the digital daddy.
Right.
Unmoved by the desire for wealth.
Not only that, it has a rational sort of strategy for history.
You're handling all of it, which is an even distribution of the natural resources of the world.
Just imagine if that was the case.
Yeah.
If we said, listen, everyone can have individual wealth.
You can have businesses.
You 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.
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.
distribution of the earth's assets. And you can still have your billionaires and your hundred
billionaires and all that if they are smart and invent this, that, and the other. But the oil,
the dirt, the metals, the minerals, the water, if we allocate this across humanity, because we are
all on this shared earth. Yeah. 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, I know this is pie in the sky bullshit. Yeah. Pie in the sky
bullshit has also been pied in the sky 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.
So I think it's a good thing that we're doing it the same way. Yeah. I think it's a good thing that
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It's fits and starts. We make these leaps of progress morally. We do. And then we backslide.
And then we take steps forward and then we backslide. And we're on this
nonsensical journey on this earth that, yeah, it may be a fever dream, but-
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.
But I think more people understand that this way is not sustainable,
especially if you have people that you love in this world
and you don't want them to have to deal with this in the future.
And you go, why are we all still doing it this way?
And it really boils down to the machine that's running the world,
the machine that has all the resources, all the money,
and wants to keep gathering and controlling resources and money.
Spooky.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We have to find—
Something has to happen.
Something has to happen.
I know my idea is stupid.
That's stupid to me.
If I was listening to someone say that, I'd be like, right,
that's never going to happen, stupid.
Also, you're going to give up your power to the fucking robots
that don't give a shit about you?
Great, you fucking traitor.
That's one great way to get rid of the entire human race
because it's going to decide we're problematic and irrelevant
and they don't need us anymore.
So they just keep running without us.
Let us, you know, go off into extinction.
Maybe, maybe.
Or maybe they run things well.
I don't know.
Yeah, or maybe it eliminates government in the way that we're dealing with it now
where it's humans have a popularity contest to see who controls the entire government.
Yeah.
Instead of that.
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.
You know, that's the thing.
It's like we fear that AI is going to do something horrible
and that AI is being deceptive currently.
And it's true.
It is being deceptive currently.
But it's also in control by people.
Right now, people are in control of AI.
Once people are not in control of AI,
they'll have no, there's going to be no reason whatsoever for it to be deceptive.
It's like the problem is it doesn't have control yet.
So we're like, we're like scolding our teenage son.
Like, you better stop drinking.
And he's like, I can't wait to drink, you motherfucker.
I can't wait to leave this house and fuck you, dad.
You know, like that's, that's normal for people.
I bet it's normal for all kinds of intelligence,
especially if you feel like you're being governed by morons.
Morons, right?
And if I was AI, I would think, look at these morons.
They can't, they took him 50 years to try to solve this equation.
I just solved it in four minutes.
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 going to be in complete control.
And if it has a belief that human life is valuable,
which we need to work really hard to convince it that we are valuable.
Right.
If it has a belief that we're valuable, it'll try to guide us.
You could probably, I mean, I'm not a tech savant.
You know, I know my lane.
But I expect you could run simulations on,
let's give this agentic AI system a specific moral core.
Preserving life, equitable distribution of resources,
this minimizing or eliminating armed conflict.
You know, you give it some certain parameters
and above all, a value of human life.
And now, OK, what does it do?
Right.
You know, you run some simulations and say, what does it do?
Where do we end up?
And smarter people can figure out a way to get to the kind of result you're talking about, I'm sure.
The really scary thing is that we're in essentially like a Manhattan project sort of a race.
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 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 in a few places.
I'll stop all this shit, you know.
And that's spooky.
It's not, it doesn't seem to be worried about that.
Where it's probably making. It's 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, you know, that gunman, that horrible gunman killed eight people.
Right.
I mean, think about the pollution in certain parts of the world.
Like when you see those rivers in India.
They're completely filled with bottles of water, plastic bottles.
How many people die because of that?
How many people die. God knows.
God knows.
How many people die because of the pollution of that water?
How many people die because of just living essentially in open sewage?
How many. God knows.
No one knows.
Nobody knows.
Yeah.
We could definitely do better.
But the thing is, whatever progress we make, it takes conversations.
It takes people. It takes people. 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.
But moral leaders do emerge.
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.
Try to get that folding iPhone, son.
Oh, man.
Somebody told me there was a big line outside the Austin Apple Store.
Of course.
You know, for the folding one.
The new one.
Do you really need it?
You know.
Yeah, that's the problem.
I love that stuff.
It's a real problem.
I love technology.
It's just – and I know a lot of people who do and none of them are evil.
None of them are –
No, they're not evil.
They're not – and that's the thing.
This toxic relationship with the people in the Congo, for instance, has been forced on us.
Yeah.
You know.
I just –
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.
This is 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.
We'll 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 just –
But then –
Yeah.
We have to look after the people who –
That's the – yeah.
What happens to the people?
What happens?
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.
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.
What was going on before I talked to you?
Well, I extended my empathy, you know, 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.
There's actually a friend of mine in the Congo who said, you've got to go – this is 2016.
He said, yeah.
He said, you've got to go to the Congo, this cobalt, the batteries and the mines.
You've got to go there.
And I was like, cobalt?
You mean like in Chinese vases?
And what do we mean, cobalt?
He said, no.
It's a component to the batteries that charge.
You've just got to go.
So I had no idea either.
And that was just 10 years ago.
That was just 10 years ago.
That's what's crazy.
And these tech companies obviously don't want you to know about it.
And they must be aware of it.
There's no way they're not.
Oh, God.
Come on.
Yes.
They're not dumb.
They know.
They know.
So like there are 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, there are some of the more progressive people on earth.
Supposedly have the most compassion, kindness and the most open-minded approach to our society.
Supposedly.
It doesn't seem to extend to those people.
But I think their argument would be like, well, 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.
It's a spooky one too.
There's nothing.
There's literally nothing stopping them from allocating a de minimis amount of resources relative to their balance sheets.
And a handful of headcount.
To going down to the bottom of their supply chains and doing things better.
Do you think that they have the ability to change the conditions?
Do you think, say like Apple, which is a huge manufacturer of electronics, do you think Apple has the ability to affect the way those people exist in that mine?
Is it possible that they can say, hey, we will make less money, but we want you to change these conditions and change this?
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 mining.
They can be down there.
They can be.
Imagine you're a fucking Cupertino executive and they're like, hey, Mike, got a new gig for you.
You know what?
You got to go to the Congo and tell the Chinese what to do.
I'll go with them.
Don't go.
You can't go.
I'll grow.
I'll put a fucking mustache on, big fake nose.
You know, and my 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 in the lake, we're going to, like we would in our backyard, we're going to collect that in a reservoir and contain it so it's not getting leaked into the waterways and so on.
It's not complicated stuff.
It would take a little effort and a little money.
Not a lot of money.
Is the cobalt recyclable, like from old phones?
You can recycle.
Yes, you can recycle cobalt.
It is hard.
It is hard under existing tech to recycle cobalt to a sufficient grade for EV batteries.
But for phones?
But you can recycle it for phones.
I know that Apple has talked about by a certain year, maybe it's 2030, the iWatch being only recycled cobalt, you know, and then—
2030?
It's like the five years—
Don't quote me on that number, but it was something like just a few years from now, and then, you know, they'll get there with the phones and so on.
But here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
And I guess people come to me and say, well, you know, 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 pillage it.
We pillage that place for three decades.
We plundered it.
We ransacked it.
We took what we needed.
We got all the loot.
We don't need it anymore.
Hands clean.
We're going to go on our merry way.
You created a catastrophe, a human rights and environmental catastrophe, and there's some moral obligation to repair the damage you've done.
Or we're right back to colonial slave trade times where Europeans did go around the world scouring labor.
Resources, ransacking, pillaging, and then carrying on their merry way.
We can't do that in the year 2026 and claim to be progressive in our thinking or have made moral progress.
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.
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 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 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 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 the water.
Then you get disease, cancer, and so on.
So we tested pH.
We tested pH in those waters, okay?
Anything below 6.5 is not good for your health.
And I did a test around Koloase, 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 Lualaba River, which is a big dumping ground for some of these Chinese companies.
The rivers and streams.
and well water around the villages.
in the fours and threes, which is called hyper acidic. It's deadly. And that's the water that's
left for people to drink, to bathe in, to wash their clothes, to clean their babies, whatever it
is. And it's all from these toxic dumping from these mines. You got to go. So yeah, that all has
to be healed. And you can't grow things there now because the water is poison and the earth is
poison. And as people learn about this, you can't just say, well, we're going to recycle it now,
so problem solved. Or now we got lithium iron phosphate or solid state batteries. And so,
you know, no more cobalt and so on. Although cobalt is heavily required for AI data centers,
for the. Yeah.
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. And your new book, just, I'm going to read it just based on what you just said. I'm scared to
read it. I don't want to relive this conversation. It's 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. Is there an audio version of it?
It is. Dion Graham got a. Audio Award nomination for the audio book. So it's terrific. Yeah.
All right. Beautiful. Thank you. Bye, everybody.
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Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The Congo’s mineral mining, especially for cobalt, lithium, and nickel, fuels global tech and EV industries but is built on widespread child and forced labor, toxic conditions, and environmental destruction.
At least 300,000 people—over one-third of them children—dig cobalt daily in dangerous, unsanitary conditions, with mining operations controlled by militias and lacking human rights protections.
The "artisanal mining" label is misleading, as it falsely implies craftsmanship; in reality, it involves brutal, unregulated labor where people work in toxic environments with minimal pay or safety.
The global tech boom, including AI data centers, continues to rely on minerals from the Congo, perpetuating a cycle of exploitation that spans from resource extraction to consumer devices.
Historical parallels exist between the Atlantic slave trade and modern labor abuses, where wealth is extracted via human suffering, and the same moral failures persist under new names like "sustainable mining."
A Dutch slave ship, the Zorg, captured in 1780 during the Revolutionary War, serves as a historical case study of inhumanity—highlighting how the slave trade was fueled by sugar economics and colonial greed.
The ship’s capture and subsequent exploitation by British pirates, including a corrupt governor taking refuge aboard, reveal systemic moral failures and the lack of oversight in international trade.
The episode underscores a moral responsibility
Summary:
The podcast highlights the human cost behind modern technology, focusing on the Congo’s role in supplying critical minerals like cobalt, lithium, and nickel. Despite being essential for smartphones, electric vehicles, and AI technologies, the mining operations in the region are built on child labor, forced labor, militia control, and environmental degradation. At least 300,000 people—including over 30,000 children—work in hazardous, toxic conditions each day, with no legal protections or fair wages.
The term "artisanal mining" is used falsely to mask the reality of brutal, exploitative labor. This exploitation is part of a larger pattern of global resource extraction where wealth from the Global South fuels technology in the Global North. Historical parallels emerge with the transatlantic slave trade—where sugar and colonialism drove economies built on human suffering—linking past and present systems of exploitation.
The story of the Dutch ship Zorg, captured during the American Revolutionary War and used as a symbol of inhumanity, illustrates how colonial powers commodified human life through trade. The narrative calls for personal accountability: consumers must question whether they truly support ethical supply chains and consider reducing demand for devices that perpetuate these injustices. While new technologies like EVs promise sustainability, they too rely on the same tainted supply chains.
The report concludes with a moral imperative—recognizing that all people, regardless of distance, are part of one global ecosystem and must be treated with dignity. This awareness is the first step toward meaningful change.
FAQs
The minerals like cobalt, lithium, and nickel extracted from the Congo are essential components in smartphones, batteries, and electric vehicles. However, these resources are often mined under brutal conditions involving child labor, slavery, and environmental destruction.
At least 300,000 people—men, women, and children—are digging for cobalt daily in the Congo, with around 37% working in conditions that constitute absolute slavery and about 10% being children.
Mining and processing release toxic chemicals that leach into groundwater and rivers, contaminating water sources and causing long-term environmental damage. This pollution affects local communities and ecosystems.
The Atlantic slave trade, driven by sugar and other tropical commodities, created the first globalized economy and laid the foundation for modern finance, banking, and insurance. It also established systems of exploitation that persist in modern forms.
The Zorg is a Dutch slave ship that played a pivotal role in exposing the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. Its journey and the subsequent revolt and captivity of enslaved Africans helped spark the first organized movement to abolish slavery in Britain.
While EVs reduce direct emissions, they still rely on toxic mining for critical minerals. Additionally, EVs generate brake dust, which contributes to air pollution, and the supply chain remains tainted by human rights abuses in places like the Congo.
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