#2556 - Siddharth Kara

Good job, 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 legitimately risked your life. Yeah. It is a very dangerous part of the world right now with enormous amounts of resources being pulled out and insane amounts of money being made. And you know, I think just people like you were rare.

So thank you. Yeah, 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's almost four years ago. Wasn't really that long ago. It was December 2022.

That's crazy. So here we are September 26, 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 you're to be commended for that conscience. Well, I'm doing this talking. You're actually out there going and documenting all this stuff.

It's a very strange world that we live in that at the very base of the all the greatest technology, like all this stuff that we have that's so incredible, that allows us to find out so much about the world. The base of that, you have slave labor pulling minerals out of the ground. Yeah, you have slave labor, you have child labor, you have militia run minds, 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.

Definitely 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 stayed in touch with people there.

I continue to get ground researched on and the conditions, they're not much better, you know, and in some ways they've continued to degrade because the fever for these battery component metals and it's cobalt, but it's also the lithium, the nickel, the copper, the tantalum, all the stuff that goes into our smartphones, our tablets, you know, you and I, nobody we know can function without this stuff. And the bottom of the chain is tainted in child labor, slavery, violence, environmental destruction and contamination. And the new fever is the AI data centers. You know, we're building these as fast as possible to support the AI economy and they require all the same metals and minerals.

So the circuit boards, the servers, the heat sinks, the energy storage, they all require cobalt, copper, tin, tantalum. It's all coming out of Congo. Oh, yeah. It's such a strange aspect of human life that we require that and that the area is controlled by people that are willing to do this.

Yeah. We don't get much of these rare earth minerals from America, do we? No, no, not much at all. No, that's why it's almost all in the global south and in particular the heart of Africa, these deposits.

Can I ask you, is it because it's not available? There's no ore in America or it hasn't been mined? What is it? So it's the dominating force is that the largest and highest grade reserves of these crucial elements and rare earth metals are in central Africa.

Lithium extends more broadly to South America. There's not much in North America. There's some, but here's the rub. Here's the rub.

You can find some lithium in the salt flats out west. You can find some cobalt along the Canadian North American border. The rub is we don't want to wreck our environment. Oh, God.

Digging the stuff out of the ground and then processing it. But we're okay obliterating their environment and polluting it and contaminating it. And I did another study. I told you I can't go back to the Congo, but I have colleagues and we've continued doing research.

And I issued a report came out last year called Blood Batteries through the University of Nottingham. And we got to quantify some of the environmental impact, which is so crucial to the story. It's crucial to the story of this data center push, to the EV push, the environmental impact. And we use time lapse satellite imagery to see that from the dawn of the sort of cobalt battery metal revolution to 2022, 40, 50, 60 percent of the forest area is gone, shrubbery, grasslands, all of that gone, replaced with mining territory.

And this is the Congo as a whole? So we did this across the copper belt, copper cobalt region of the Congo where the mining is taking place. And what percentage of the Congo is that? Small part of it.

Small part in the southeast corner along the Zambian border. I mean, much of the Congo is rainforest. Right. That's why I was confused.

So the Congo is insanely dense and huge. In the mining part. In the mining part. So you've got a massive loss of forestry and water bodies and an expansion of mining.

And then we tested the water for heavy metals and acidity levels. And we did a case study in the town of Colawesi, which is sort of ground zero for all these metals, cobalt and copper and so on. And there was between 10 and 950 times the World Health Organization maximum recommended limit for human safety of a range of heavy metals from lead to cobalt to copper to uranium to chromium. So the whole water sources in that part of the country have been completely contaminated.

So I point all this out because we object to that here. We don't want our trees gone. We don't want our forest destroyed. We don't want our water contaminated.

We don't want the air to be polluted. But it's okay for it to happen over there kind of out of sight to those people. So long as we can plug in our phone, build out our data centers, keep buying our EVs and so on. And that's the story.

Okay. That's the story that we're okay destroying them and their world. So long as ours remains sacrosanct. And that frankly is just the great hypocrisy of all this.

Is there an alternative like a viable alternative to supply the world with the minerals that it needs? Not yet. Not yet. No.

I mean, is it possible to do is it just an inevitable fact of when you do that kind of high level mining, you can destroy the environment or could it be mitigated? It could be done better. I mean, you do have to chop down all the trees where the deposit is. So deforestation is inevitable.

But let's say this was done in our backyard here in Austin. Someone found a big copper cobalt tin tantalum deposit somewhere. There'd be rules to follow. You'd have to deforest the whole place.

But we probably say go plant the same number of trees somewhere else to offset it. And there'd be a lot of rules around containment. Make sure you don't pollute the rivers and so on. And none of that is done in the global south.

None of that is done in Congo. And it's mostly Chinese state-run mining companies that don't give a shit. About the people in the environment there. But our tech and EV companies all know that.

And they're all buying this stuff from them, knowing that. So the chain is tainted. It's tainted in misery. It's tainted in blood.

It's tainted in environmental destruction. It doesn't have to be that way. We don't have enough of this stuff here to offset the demand. But we could start mining some of it here.

The problem is there's legitimate objections to the environment. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it.

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So instead of hearing this lovely track, you'll hear this in seconds. Hello, intact insurance. 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.

It's just all leeches in. It's not just the mining that the processing of 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 assets, toxic industrial liquids used to dissolve and separate those metals.

And that's what inevitably leeches. They pump that stuff right into the ground? It goes into the ground. seeps into the groundwater into the rivers lakes.

When did this all begin? So that part of the Congo, in the southeastern corner, from the town of Lubumbashi to Coloese, 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. 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, 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 the most valuable resources on Earth, but yet it's one of the poorest places on Earth? It's the resource curse. 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. There's virtually a nil alternative. There's virtually a nil alternative way to survive.

And people have to understand that too. Displace hundreds of thousands of people with a big mining operation, meaning there were villages there, and maybe a river, and they used a fish, and grow some potatoes or whatever. And you just displace all those people. And you set up a mining operation the size of a small city.

There's no other way for them to survive, but to bring their kids and their wives and come into that same mining territory. And this is what happens every day. Roll up their sleeves and get down in that toxic dirt and try to gather enough ore in a sack for the day to make a dollar. And I know now roughly how many people it is.

When you and I spoke in 2026. 2026. Sorry, we're now in 2026. I had documented the human horror taking place.

And that's what Cobalt Red is about. I had not done enough to quantify how many people, exactly. And so in the same report I mentioned, blood batteries, ran prevalence estimates, just sample at all the sites, how many people, and you can build an estimate. And on any given day, there are at least 300,000 people, men, women, and children, digging for cobalt with their bare hands and pickaxes and shovels.

300,000 people on any given day, not fluctuates by season, a little bit, try season, what season. Of that 300,000, about 37%, so more than one out of three, are working in conditions we 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.

And people not only need to know that, but think hard about their own personal choices in the context of that knowledge. What do I mean by that? I mean, do you have to upgrade your phone every year? People often ask me, what do I do?

OK, 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. 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 don't upgrade the EV. 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 ordered 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. We have more brake dust with those things.

And that's a big part of the particulate pollution that you get in large cities is brake dust. That stuff that you clean off your wheel when you go to car wash, that stuff is in your lungs. If you live in a big city, especially like New York City, and you're walking around, you are 100% breathing in brake dust. And it's been proven that living in heavily populated cities lowers your lifespan.

And it's probably one of the reasons. You're dealing with a toxic element in the atmosphere that you're breathing in every day, whether you like it or not. There's not a thing you could do about it. Yeah.

I, you know, there's so many parts of the EV story that we don't get fully told. And it would break dust, it certainly would. Well, all cars give off brake dust, just to be really clear. But EVs are heavier.

They're heavier. So you get more. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

That's right. I think there are 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 it's really true. I know from anecdotal experience that when you clean your car, if you have carbon ceramic brakes, there's almost no brake dust on your wheels. It's a very different thing.

If you have regular steel brakes, it just, for whatever reason, leaves more brake dust. I'm not sure why. We'll find out in a second. But other than that, is there any sort of novel material that can do it?

Here it goes. Carbon ceramic brake systems can reduce brake where particulate pollution substantially compared with conventional great cast iron rotors, but they did 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. In the more expensive, you know, if you, it's like a big upgrade.

If you get a car, like a lot of sports cars, if you buy a Corvette, it allows you to upgrade to carbon ceramic brakes. It's very expensive. So very few people do it. Well, there's certainly things we can and should be doing to mitigate the environmental impacts of whether it's an EV or even internal combustion engine.

I didn't know about these brake pads. That's worth, it's worth people knowing more about that. But then you're going to have to find carbon. Like, OK, now you've got to get carbon to get the carbon ceramic brakes.

So this is the thing. This is the thing. There's always something. And you made this point with RZA.

OK, Cobol, but it's also the lithium. It's also the nickel. One of the biggest lithium deposits now, and people are saying, OK, let's use less cobalt in the batteries. Let's do lithium iron phosphate batteries.

Let's do the salistate batteries. I 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. Colleagues have been up there. It's an air town called Manono. They're just as horrific.

And so when you say, all right, don't let Cobol. We're just going to do lithium iron phosphate battery or lithium table salt battery, whatever. Same deal. Same deal.

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

And you could be them if you were born there. That's the thing. You got lucky. We all got lucky.

You and I are most certainly not lucky. We got the role of the dice that was favorable. And that's all it is. That's what's hard to recognize.

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People don't want to believe. That's why that whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Ideology that some people like to promote. Like that's kind of crazy.

In certain circumstances, it's accurate. But to put that flat across the board for everybody. Now there's people there's no boots. There's no boots.

They don't have clean water. They don't have nothing. And no medical infrastructure. And you're being forced to work in an environment that 100% is going to poison you to death.

And we only make progress when we extend our compassion out. Right. When I say progress, I mean moral progress as a species on this earth. That's literally the key.

If you wanted to figure out how to make just global life better for all people, it's take whatever the third world is and bring it up to the first world. We should all want to do that. If everybody wanted to do that. If everybody wanted to deliver infrastructure, education, medical establishment, where there's legitimate hospitals, everything that we have in the first world, if that was all over the world, how much less problems would there be?

But the problem is the resources, the resources in the Congo, whether it's oil, or whatever it is, there were so much money. And the people that are in control of these resources are extracting so much money they don't ever want to let that go. No, they don't. I run the thought experiment with people sometimes.

And when I teach a class, I haven't talked in a couple of years. But when I teach, I run a thought experiment. It's exactly what we're talking about here. So let's say you were up in the sky in heaven, whatever.

Pre-birth state, whatever that might be. And you don't know what role of the dice you're going to get. Are you going to be born in a safe, loving, upper middle class family in the West? Am I going to be born in some war-torn, poor part of South Sudan, or whatever?

You don't know. OK. So what kind of world would you hope the favorable people are trying to pursue? In the event that you're the one, you get the bad role of the dice.

And you say, man, I really hope that the ones who get the good role of the dice will care about me. They'll see me. They will feel some connection to me. They will try to use their good role of the dice in a way that benefits me somehow.

Maybe they are part of some effort to bring education, health care, sanitation, whatever, to my part of the world, and have that connection and extension of their compassion and empathy towards me. Because we're all up here in this pre-birth state, recognizing some of you were going there. Some of you were going there. You all agree, all right, those of you who end up in the good place, you don't lose sight of us.

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

Isn't it partly because this is really the first of a couple generations with increasingly more contact and understanding of the rest of the world? Like if you went back 100 years ago, people had virtually no understanding of how things went on anywhere else unless they visited them. Now 100 years later, because of the very technology that we're talking about, which is also ironic, that's why we know so much about all these places in the world. And isn't the problem also with elevating these places and getting them infrastructure that one of the best ways to do it cleanly is nuclear power?

But then they found out that when you give people nuclear power, it's pretty easy for them to convert into weapons. OK, so there's a lot to unpack. There's a lot to unpack. Because we're trying to, like, if we're going to be fair about a discussion of why everything's fucked, one of the reasons why everything's fucked is clearly because they don't have infrastructure.

They don't have power. They don't have water that's clean. They don't have good education. They don't have all these things.

So if you wanted to start that and make it better, you would have to give them power. So are you going to burn coal? Or what are you going to do? There's only a few ways, right?

There's dams. You can get hydroelectric power, windmills and solar. Get the fuck out of here. That's not right now.

Right now, current technology is not your power giant cities. So what do you give them? You give them nuclear power. And this is what happened in India, right?

And this is what happened in Pakistan. And they're like, oh, look, we can turn this new and this old. Fucking each other up. So it's tricky.

And you talk about nukes. And we're at this point in this world where there's this fever about who doesn't, doesn't have them. And let me tell you one other thing. I've learned since we last talked about the Congo.

I mentioned that the uranium used to drop a little boy and big boy on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fat man. Fat man, little boy, fat man. Yeah.

On Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It came from a mine called Shinkalo Boy in the Congo. There was a meeting of the Belgians and Americans in Midtown Manhattan. He said, we're going to give you so much money for that uranium and so on and so forth.

And Congo has a lot of uranium. A lot of uranium. And for the last 10 years, Western intelligence agencies have been trying to figure out how is China growing its nuclear stockpile? That stockpile of nuclear oil is so fast, because they got no uranium.

I'm not getting it from North Korea, because they don't have it either. Russia is not going to be sending it to them. They're not going to give teeth to their neighbor. Where are they getting it from?

And you talk to people on the ground in the Congo. And now there's some counterintelligence looking into this. People in the Congo have said, look, for the better part of the last 15 years, every one of these Chinese state-run mining companies. And the same tractor trailer that's got the copper and the cobalt and the nickel.

They've got uranium on it too. And it's all headed over to mainland China. And that's the answer to this question of how did China jack up its nuclear stockpile supply so fast in the last 10, 15 years? Now, I can't verify any of that.

It's not like I've done uranium investigations. It only makes sense. They can make control of the region. It makes a lot of sense.

There's no way anyone would be able to stop them. No one's going to stop them. They control the ground. They control the ground there.

And that's scary. And so when you talk about, do we give them, do we use nuclear power in that part of the world? I mean, I don't think you want yellow cake floating around that part of the world. Does China have any human rights organizations that are comparable to the ones in the West?

Not really, right? They may write stuff on the panel paper. But there's not like, they're not. I mean, there's a billion people over there.

You would think there would be a certain percentage, like Red Cross type organizations. I mean, we have some sense of what they've done to the Uighurs. That's a hard one to figure out, right? It's a hard one to figure out.

We've got some general sense of the forced labor camps filled with Uighurs doing solar panels and loads and all this shit. And I haven't looked into that directly. But I can tell you what I've seen directly on what they do in Africa. And they don't treat people like people there.

They don't see them, the Africans, as people. They're in the way of the loot they need. And they don't even employ the African people there when they come in with a mining project or a construction project. They ship over people from China to do the work, and then work them and then send them back.

And there's nothing by way of human rights standards when you're talking about Chinese companies operating in Africa. So this is a uniquely Western thing? This drive to have some basic human rights standards? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I would say so. I would say so. Now, one thing that's changed since you and I talked is there's actually a US mining company now operating in that part of the Congo. There wasn't one for a better part of two decades.

And one of the mines, which is owned by Dubai, the Middle East and our guys, part of the Trump administration sort of piece for minerals arrangement between President Shishikati and Trump administration was mining access. And so one concession was sold to this US mining company. It's called Virtuse Mining. And they're run by former military guys.

And they took over a couple of copper cobalt concessions in Lubumbashi and Colauezi, both sides of the copper belt. That's just this year, so within the last few months. And I haven't been there to look. But I talk to colleagues all the time.

I say, look, is Virtuse, are they doing things any better? And the feedback I've gotten so far is they seem to be improving standards around artisanal mining. They're still artisanal mining. But improving standards.

Well, when we say artisanal mining, you went into depth about this the first time we talked. But we should just tell people that thing, artisanal, sounds awesome. It sounds like a great cup of coffee, like fair trade. It's a nice place.

It's a nice place. Yeah, like someone's got a beautiful ceramic coffee serving with the coffee. Artisanal mining is pretty much the opposite. The games people play with words.

No, so artisanal mining means you've got mom, dad, and their kids up to here in Toxic, Gritten, Felt, digging. Yeah, this is an artisanal mine. The fact that you can use that same word artisanal with this, that you can attend with a nice coffee shop is crazy. It's crazy.

So this is, I got an. Man, if you were learning English, what the fuck does artisanal actually mean? How are the two things? What?

This language is my style. How are these both artisanal? That's crazy. How is my espresso in that?

For lack of a better term, these mines is basically the poorest people on Earth. It's all proof, raw human labor. It's tens of thousands of people. And there's kids down there, too.

OK, you just can't see in this message. There's also you showing mothers with their babies on their back. So that's what the mining industry calls artisanal. OK, it's this kid's with 40, 50 kilograms saxicobalt 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 congenisies.

Here's a teenager with a baby. These are all my photos. OK, they're found their way onto the internet. That kid's probably eight.

And she's probably 13 or 14. And she's got this baby. I remember that. Joe, that's in the hills above Campo.

That's the story I told you last time where that's probably the closest I came to get in shot. Was in this mining area. It was almost all children. Run by a militia, north of a town called Campo.

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.

OK, that cobalt all goes into the formal supply chain, through militias and traders. All of it. What do I mean by formal supply chain? I mean the formal industrial mining companies that then go and refine this stuff and ends up in your phones and cars and tablets.

So I was up there in those hills. And you're not supposed to be up there. Like I wasn't supposed to be in the place where there's 15,000 people in that pit. These militia guys come barreling up the hill with AK-47s.

And I thought that was it for me. This is the story I told you last time. I thought that was it. I mean, they threw my backpack off my back, shot me to the ground, yanked all my stuff out, demanded my phone to see if I'd taken photos and videos and so on.

And the only thing that saved my life, for people who are interested in human rights research, this is what's important. Local intel, local colleagues, take their advice. The only thing that saved my life that day. So one of my local colleagues said, I thought, before you go to any of these places, you've got to get a stamp from the governor's office on your visa paperwork.

And you take that with you everywhere. And that will convey to any militia that you're under the governor's protection. And they're not going to fuck with you. They won't mess with you, but they're not going to kill you.

They're not going to kill you. And I had to go get that stamp. I had to persuade the governor of Houtatanga province that I was there not to shame the Congo. I was seeking truth that I think his people are being exploited by the global north and this whole tech fever for rechargeable stuff.

And he put his little stamp on it. And that was the only time I met him, the only time I saw him, but I had that stamp. So when I was up there and my stuff getting thrown around, they had their guns pointed at me and my guide, his face went pale. And I thought, this is it.

This is it for Cara up on this hill in middle of nowhere. And my guide just gestured. And I knew what he was intending. And I found my folder on the ground, and I pulled that piece of paper out.

And I showed them the stamp. And then they just get out of here. They let us go. So when you go into conflict zones, you have to have that kind of local advice.

Because it can mean the difference. Between living and being shot and dumped in some ditch where these little girls with babies. That's the image that needs to be in our minds every time we talk about it. How did you get that image?

Yeah, it was with my phone. So they started 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 my home, my daughter, my stuff, whatever. I had another folder. They didn't have a side. So like saying like that video of the 15,000 people, I just managed to do this and tuck it away.

And because that was also controlled by militias. That particular site. And that mine is classified industrial, which means only heavy equipment being used to source the copper in the cobalt. And that mine is in the bottom of the supply chains in the disclosure documents of every tech and EV companies.

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.

This is, I'm actually 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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Hello, intact insurance. It's the ability that people have to treat other people as if they're not people. That's still shocking. You know, that brings me to your book.

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

Yeah, no. This ship, what I learned writing this book, the Zorg is the most consequential slave ship that ever crossed the Atlantic. There are more than 40,000 slave ship wages across the three and a half centuries of the slave trade that carted 12 and a half, 13 million Africans. And if you need to know about one of them, it's this one because it's the most important, the most consequential.

And the reason I say that is, it opens the whole world of the slave trade in its journey, ends in this culminating act of brute 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. The other thing that this journey is, 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 under age workers are working in this country that are undocumented.

Yeah, I mean, who knows what the number is? But millions around the world, tens of millions around the world. But this history is important, this history is important because, and this ship is important because it reveals the depth of our inhumanity while simultaneously showing us the capacity for good in our nature, because it did spark that first movement to abolish slavery. And it was faith-based leaders that were doing this?

It was the Anglican Church. Leaders in the first movement to abolish slavery was in England. And it was sparked directly by this ship. And so people can read the book and understand what happened on the ship.

But it goes on its journey, picking up Africans along the West African coast. And I went to West Africa to see the old forts and castles that are there, that Europeans built to facilitate the slave trade. They lined the West African coast with a higher concentration of fortifications than existed anywhere in Europe. They built forts and castles and dungeons to gather human beings.

And so Africans were marched from the inland regions, sometimes a thousand miles. Arab slave traders would raid and ransack a village, grab people and start marching them down to the coast, and trade along the way with house-to-slave dealers. And people would die, of course. They're yoked at the neck and tied.

And many people didn't survive a five, six, 800 mile march. 800 mile march. Yeah, there's journal entries I came across. One captain, slave ship captain named John Newton.

John Newton's a fascinating guy because he became an abolitionist and a preacher. And he wrote hymns, and probably the most famous hymn he wrote was Amazing Grace. Whoa. So Amazing Grace is written by a slave trader.

So John Newton, John Newton's from Liverpool. Liverpool was once capital of the slave trade. We think of Beatles when we think of Liverpool, or the football club. 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, rom, brandy, cutlery, crockery, linens, bandanas, whatever, cowry 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. OK, and held them in dungeons in these forts. And you can go to a place I went to a 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. OK, and let me tell you something about this place, Joe. So this is a man.

So John Newton had in his journal, brought on board today, Africans marched, I think, 1,000 miles from the inland. So they were marched down and eventually sold to the Europeans who run these forts and castles, all along the coast. The biggest one was Cape Coast Castle, the British, and the Dutch had one just can and shot away called Elmina Castle. This is a modern day Ghana.

And they held them in the dungeon. And you saw that picture of the dungeon. 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.

Shackle down. One shaft for light and where they dropped food and water. And I don't know if you, Jamie, if you had that photo again, you saw a little narrow groove down the floor of the dungeon. And there you see that groove down the floor of the dungeon.

And that's supposed to siphon away their piss and shit and menstrual blood. And so you can imagine 1,000 people in there. Now, it always is full and clogged and rainy season, whatever. So eventually the whole thing is covered in sludge of sewage.

OK. And so they would spend months down here, Joe. They would spend months down here. And many people didn't survive that experience.

So you're marched from the inland regions hundreds of miles. Maybe didn't survive that. If you did, you're in this dungeon. You're spending months down here.

And then eventually, there's the male slave dungeon entrance, the 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 anchors about a mile or two offshore. They take a canoe up to the castle. And they meet the governor. And the governor says, OK, let's do our business.

And they go into the dungeon. And they bring out a parcel of slaves. And 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 floor and 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 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 are held here for centuries. And we don't learn that. We don't learn that when we learn about slavery. We don't learn about these visceral details of what people had to endure before they even were put on the ship.

Now let's talk about the ship, which is a floating dungeon. The deep sea fairing vessel, Joe, is a marvel of engineering. It's a marvel of vision and ambition and European genius. Jamie's skipping ahead here, too.

I jumped. The visual imagery. We talk about abolition. We're going to talk about the first use of a viral image, which Jamie gave us a prelude to.

So the deep sea fairing 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 early 1400s, the age of exploration.

You learn about this in high school, Prince Henry, the navigator, got his ship so that 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. 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. 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, 1420, 1430s. And the caraville 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 kind of your shortcut. So he goes west. I'm going to find a better way.

He lands in the Bahamas. India. Indians. All right.

OK. We laugh. But I mean, he crossed the Atlantic in his ship. He got here.

And he starts the Spanish reconnoitering of this part of the planet. The Pope, Pope, is Alexander the Six. He says, OK, you're Spanish, you're Portuguese. You're kind of starting to suss out the rest of the world.

And I want you to get along. So I'm going to draw a line down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And everything east of that line, Portugal, that's for you. Everything west of that line, Spain, that's for you.

So Spain colonized the Americas. And Portugal colonized Africa and India first. Now, the Europeans came across something during the Crusades that captivated their taste buds. And they called it sweet salt.

Today we call it sugar. No sugar in Europe till the Crusades. Because it doesn't grow there. It grows in warm, tropical places.

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.

The people didn't know about sugar until the 1400s. Well, they came across it in the Crusades. 1200 Europeans. Oh, these Arabs have got some sugar.

It's nice. But they're getting it from cane. They're just processing it. Sugar cane.

Yeah. So because it doesn't grow in that part of the world. So what do they do to sweeten things in Europe? But then just honey?

Honey, berry juices. Sugar. Sugar's another level, right? Sugar's another level.

So they divide the world and they start setting up their sugar plantations. And the Portuguese tap into existing systems of slavery in Africa. Let's be clear about that. Europeans didn't bring slavery to Africa.

There was slavery there. They tap into those systems to populate their sugar plantations along the African coast with slave labor. Now the Spanish decimate native populations, the Mayans, the Aztecs. They get here and through guns and disease and war.