00:00:15.000First of all, thank you very much for everything you've done.
00:00:18.000And 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.
00:00:30.000And the fact that you risked your life.
00:00:33.000To get the kind of footage that you got, you legitimately risked your life.
00:00:37.000It 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.
00:00:44.000And, you know, I think just people like you are rare.
00:01:34.000It's a very strange world that we live in.
00:01:38.000That at the very base of all the greatest technology, like all this stuff that we have that's so incredible that allows us to find out so much about the world, the base of that, you have slave labor pulling minerals out of the ground.
00:01:53.000Yeah, you have slave labor, you have child labor, you have militia run mines.
00:01:58.000For people who didn't hear our last conversation, go back and hear it because we walk through it.
00:02:06.000I 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.
00:02:24.000But I've stayed in touch with people there.
00:02:26.000I continue to get ground research done, 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.
00:02:40.000And 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.
00:02:48.000You know, you and I, nobody we know can function without this stuff.
00:02:52.000And the bottom of the chain is tainted in child labor, slavery, violence, environmental destruction and contamination.
00:03:03.000And the new fever is the AI data centers.
00:03:08.000You know, we're building these as fast as possible.
00:03:54.000That's why it's almost all in the global south and in particular in the heart of Africa, these deposits.
00:04:00.000Can I ask you, is it because it's not available?
00:04:03.000There's no ore in America or it hasn't been mined?
00:04:07.000Like, what is what are the dominating force is that the largest and highest grade reserves of these crucial elements and rare earth metals are in Central Africa.
00:04:23.000Lithium extends more broadly to South America.
00:06:12.000So you've got a massive loss of forestry and water bodies and an expansion of mining.
00:06:18.000And then we tested the water for heavy metals and acidity levels.
00:06:23.000And we did a case study in the town of Koloese, which is sort of ground zero for all these metals, cobalt and copper and so on.
00:06:32.000And there was between 10 and 950 times the World Health Organization maximum.
00:06:41.000Recommended limit for human safety of a range of heavy metals from lead to cobalt to copper to uranium to chromium.
00:06:51.000So, the whole water sources in that part of the country have been completely contaminated.
00:06:59.000So, I point all this out because we object to that here.
00:07:04.000We don't want our trees gone, we don't want our forests destroyed, we don't want our water contaminated, we don't want the air to be polluted.
00:07:12.000But 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.
00:09:05.000But we could start mining some of it here.
00:09:07.000The problem is there's legitimate objections to the environmental impact.
00:09:12.000And 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?
00:09:22.000Groundwater contamination is inevitable, right?
00:11:15.000Yeah, there's virtually no alternative.
00:11:16.000There's virtually no alternative way to survive, and people have to understand that too.
00:11:20.000When 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.
00:11:39.000There's no other way for them to survive but to bring their kids and their wives and come into that same mining territory.
00:11:46.000That 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.
00:11:59.000And I know now roughly how many people it is.
00:12:02.000When 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.
00:12:20.000And 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.
00:12:29.000And 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.
00:13:36.000Okay, 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.
00:13:52.000I say, you're right, you can't, I can't.
00:13:55.000But you can think about your personal choices.
00:13:57.000And the first one is, Do you have to upgrade the phone and the tablet every year just because the tech company tells you to?
00:14:05.000Because each time you do, you're contributing to those demand side forces.
00:14:08.000So if the phone still works, just use it.
00:14:12.000The EV is a more interesting question.
00:14:15.000You don't upgrade the EV, you either buy one or you keep your internal combustion engine car.
00:14:20.000Now, 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.
00:15:00.000But there's also a reality of brake dust.
00:15:04.000There's way 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.
00:15:12.000That stuff that you clean off your wheel when you go to the car wash, that stuff is in your lungs.
00:15:16.000If you live in a big city, especially like New York City, and you're walking around, you are 100% breathing in brake dust.
00:15:23.000It's been proven that living in polluted, heavily populated cities lowers your lifespan, and it's probably one of the reasons.
00:15:31.000You're dealing with a toxic element in the atmosphere that you're breathing in every day, whether you like it or not.
00:15:36.000There's not a thing you can do about it.
00:16:04.000Let's find out if that's absolutely true.
00:16:06.000I've read that, but I want to make sure that's really true.
00:16:09.000I 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.
00:16:25.000But other than that, is there any sort of novel material that can do it?
00:16:32.000Here it goes carbon ceramic brake systems can reduce brake wear particulate pollution substantially compared with conventional gray cast iron rotors.
00:17:10.000Trevor Burrus Well, there's certainly things we can and should be doing to mitigate the environmental impacts of whether it's an EV or even an internal combustion engine.
00:18:17.000And so when you say, all right, done with cobalt, we're just going to do lithium iron phosphate battery or lithium table salt battery, whatever.
00:18:30.000So 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 tight.
00:18:47.000Tangential or how far downstream they might be.
00:19:15.000The Farmer's Dog is partnering with the United Service Organization to support military families and their dogs.
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00:19:32.000And in honor of America's 250th birthday, the Farmer's Dog is feeding 250 dogs belonging to military families, including some of these therapy dogs.
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00:20:12.000That's why that whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps ideology that some people like to promote, like, that's kind of crazy.
00:20:20.000In certain circumstances, it's accurate, but to put that flat across the board for everybody, no, there's people, there's no boots, there's barefoot, 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.
00:20:37.000And we only make progress when we extend our compassion out.
00:20:49.000If you wanted to figure out how to make this global life better for all people, it's take whatever the third world is and bring it up to the first world.1.00
00:21:01.000If everybody wanted to do that, if everybody wanted to deliver infrastructure, education, medical, Establishment, like where there's like legitimate hospitals, like everything that we have in the first world, if that was all over the world, how much less problems would there be?
00:21:16.000But the problem is the resources, like the resources in the Congo, whether it's oil or whatever it is, they're worth so much money.
00:21:23.000And the people that are in control of these resources are extracting so much money, they don't ever want to let that go.
00:21:32.000I run a thought experiment with people sometimes.
00:21:36.000I haven't taught in a couple of years, but when I teach, I run a thought experiment.
00:21:41.000And it's exactly what we're talking about here.
00:21:43.000So let's say you were up in the sky, in heaven, whatever, pre birth state, whatever that might be, and you don't know what roll of the dice you're going to get.
00:21:52.000Am I going to be born in a safe, loving, upper middle class family in the West?
00:21:59.000Am I going to be born in some war torn, poor part of South Sudan or whatever?
00:22:07.000What kind of world would you hope the favorable people are trying to pursue in the event that you're the one, you get the bad roll of the dice?
00:22:20.000And you'd say, man, I really hope that the ones who get the good roll of the dice will care about me, they'll see me, they will feel some connection to me, they will try to use their good roll of the dice in a way that benefits me somehow.
00:22:34.000Maybe they are part of some effort to bring education, healthcare, sanitation, whatever, to my part of the world.
00:22:42.000And have that connection and extension of their compassion and empathy towards me because we're all up here in this pre birth state, recognizing some of you are going there, some of you are going there.
00:22:55.000All right, those of you who end up in the good place, you don't lose sight of us.
00:23:00.000And I won't lose sight of you in the event it's me.
00:23:03.000And then we get here and we're just wound up in our sphere and we lose a sense of human connection.
00:23:14.000Isn't it partly because this is really the first of a couple generations, but with increasingly more contact and understanding of the rest of the world?
00:23:24.000Like if you went back 100 years ago, people had virtually no understanding of how things went on anywhere else unless they had visited them.
00:23:32.000Now, 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.
00:23:43.000And 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?
00:24:03.000Because 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.0.98
00:25:41.000And for the last 10 years, Western intelligence agencies have been trying to figure out how is China growing its nuclear stockpile, stockpile of nuclear warheads so fast because they got no uranium.
00:25:54.000They're not getting it from North Korea because they don't have it either.
00:25:57.000Russia's not going to be sending it to them.
00:25:59.000They're not going to give teeth to their neighbor.
00:26:03.000And you talk to people on the ground in the Congo, and now there's some counterintelligence looking into this.
00:26:09.000People in the Congo have said, look, for the better part of the last 15 years, every one of these Chinese state run mining companies in the same tractor trailer that's got the copper and the cobalt and the nickel, they've got uranium on it too.
00:26:25.000And it's all headed over to mainland China.
00:26:27.000And 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?
00:26:54.000And so when you talk about do we give them 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.0.60
00:27:06.000Does China have any human rights organizations that are comparable to the ones in the West?
00:28:43.000Now, 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.
00:28:48.000There wasn't one for a better part of two decades.
00:28:51.000And one of the mines, which is owned by Dubai, Middle Eastern guys, Part of the Trump administration sort of peace for minerals arrangement between President Shishageti and the Trump administration was mining access.
00:29:08.000And so one concession was sold to this U.S. mining company.
00:29:14.000It's called Virtus Mining, and they're run by former military guys.
00:29:17.000And they took over a couple of copper cobalt concessions in Lubumbashi and Kolowesi, both sides of the Copper Belt.
00:29:24.000That's just this year, so within the last few months, okay?
00:29:31.000To look, but I talk to colleagues all the time.
00:29:34.000I said, Look, is virtues, are they doing things any better?
00:29:38.000And the feedback I've gotten so far is they seem to be improving standards around artisanal mining.
00:29:47.000They're still artisanal mining, but improving standards around artisanal mining.
00:29:50.000When 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.
00:29:56.000It sounds like a great cup of coffee, like fair trade.
00:32:47.000I mean, they threw my backpack off my back.
00:32:50.000Shoved me to the ground, yanked all my stuff out, demanded my phone to see if I'd taken photos and videos and so on.
00:32:57.000And the only thing that saved my life, for people who are interested in human rights research, this is what's important.
00:33:04.000You get local intel, local colleagues, take their advice.
00:33:08.000The only thing that saved my life that day.
00:33:11.000So one of my local colleagues said, Siddhartha, if you go to any of these places, you've got to get a stamp from the governor's office on your visa paperwork.
00:33:19.000And you take that with you everywhere.0.99
00:33:21.000And that will convey to any militia that you're under the governor's protection and they're not going to fuck with you.0.98
00:33:28.000They won't, they'll mess with you, but they're not going to do it.0.99
00:34:26.000So 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.
00:34:45.000That's the image that needs to be in our minds every time we talk.
00:36:49.000This ship, what I learned writing this book, the Zorg is the most consequential slave ship that ever crossed the Atlantic.
00:36:59.000There 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.0.73
00:37:08.000And if you need to know about one of them, it's this one because it's the most important, the most consequential.
00:37:16.000It 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.
00:37:28.000And it's that sequence that is so vital for us to understand historically.
00:37:35.000People can't fix a horror until they learn about it.
00:37:40.000And the average person I've learned is not evil.
00:37:45.000We may be generally self interested and worried about us and ours and so on, but we're not evil.
00:37:52.000And when we learn about something wrong, we generally feel something and want to do something about it.
00:38:11.000And we're going to devote our lives to abolishing slavery.
00:38:14.000The other thing that this journey is, you know, we grow up.
00:38:18.000You grow up in America, you learn about slavery.
00:38:21.000You learn about the plantation economy and how slaves were treated, cotton, and so on.
00:38:26.000But 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.
00:38:53.000And 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.
00:39:52.000We have a piece of paper that says slavery is abolished.
00:39:56.000But in practice, the institution of oppressing, subjugating, and extracting the labor of someone persists and has evolved into the modern era.
00:40:08.000Trevor Burrus Well, not only that, like how many underage workers are working in – Millions in this country that are undocumented.
00:40:28.000This 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.
00:40:50.000Trevor Burrus And it was faith based leaders that were doing this?
00:40:53.000Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, it was the Anglican Church.
00:40:58.000Leaders in the first movement to abolish slavery was in England.
00:41:07.000People 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.
00:41:19.000I went to West Africa to see the old forts and castles that are there that Europeans built to facilitate the slave trade.
00:41:26.000They lined the West African coast with a higher concentration of fortifications. Than existed anywhere in Europe.
00:41:33.000Little forts and castles and dungeons to gather human beings.0.86
00:41:36.000And so Africans were marched from the inland regions, sometimes a thousand miles.
00:41:41.000Arab 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 of slave dealers.
00:42:52.000And what that meant was ships departed Europe, in this case, Liverpool, with tradable goods mirrors, knives, rum, brandy, cutlery, crockery, linens, bandanas, whatever, cowrie shells.
00:43:10.000Took all that stuff down to Western Africa, where Europeans had built some castles and forts.0.99
00:43:16.000And those castles and forts were involved in the business of accumulating Africans.0.95
00:43:22.000And they held them in dungeons in these forts.0.99
00:46:01.000Remember, they're covered in sewage and filth.
00:46:04.000And they cover them in palm oil to make them look healthy.
00:46:08.000And the captain will say, I'll take this one, this one, this one.
00:46:10.000His surgeon or doctor will inspect them, open their mouths, check their lymph nodes, make them cough, make sure they're not sick and unwell.
00:46:19.000And then they purchase these slaves and then brand them.
00:46:23.000And 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.
00:46:33.000And then when they've got all the Several hundred to load up the ship, they come back and get them.
00:46:37.000When I went into the dungeon at Cape Coast, it's a kind of a cobbled floor.
00:46:44.000And then I got to this one section, Joe, that was smooth.
00:46:49.000And I had managed to get a single guide from the Ministry of Museums to take me around.
00:46:55.000So before I wrote about it, I wanted to see it and experience it.
00:48:26.000There 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.
00:48:39.000And this is the early 1400s, the age of exploration.
00:50:39.000And he starts the Spanish reconnoitering of this part of the planet.0.99
00:50:46.000The Pope, Pope Alexander VI, says, okay, you Spanish, you Portuguese, you're starting to suss out the rest of the world, and I want you to get along.0.99
00:50:57.000So I'm going to draw a line down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.1.00
00:51:02.000And everything east of that line, Portugal, that's for you.0.63
00:51:05.000Everything west of that line, Spain, that's for you.
00:51:08.000So Spain colonized the Americas, and Portugal colonized Africa and India first.
00:51:17.000Now, the Europeans came across something during the Crusades that captivated their taste buds.
00:53:18.000So, the Portuguese, he gives them a contract to bring me 4,000 Africans to come work these sugar plantations because they seem to be doing a good job working on yours.0.83
00:53:29.000Thus begins the era of the Atlantic slave trade.0.87
00:53:33.000It was about bringing Africans over to the Spanish colonies to work on sugar plantations.
00:53:40.000And the Portuguese and the Spanish are running this triangular circuit, bringing goods down to Africa, buying Africans, taking them across, there you go, dropping them in sugar plantations, and then getting the output of sugar labor, which is sugar, rum, molasses, whatever, taking it back to Europe, selling it, and then repeating the triangle.0.72
00:54:03.000How were they so good at getting across the ocean but so bad at thinking that they were in India?0.89
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00:56:12.000And sugar, it was like the fossil fuel of the day.
00:56:15.000It was the lubrication on which the global economy functioned, such as it was then, the North Atlantic, generating centuries of generational wealth.
00:56:26.000So, on the eve of the American Revolution, just to give you a sense, okay, so we're talking 1773, 1774.
00:56:36.000By this time, the British are the dominant force in the Atlantic slave trade, and they became the dominant force, taking over Caribbean islands.
00:56:47.000Their prize was Jamaica, which became the largest sugar plantation economy in the world at that time.
00:56:54.000So, on the eve of the Revolutionary War, of course, they had the 13 American colonies and they had some Caribbean islands.
00:57:04.000Just to give you a sense of how important sugar was.
00:57:07.000All the exports from all 13 American colonies, and you take sugar from Jamaica.
00:57:15.000The value of those sugar exports from Jamaica was five times the combined value of all 13 exports of everything from all 13 colonies.
00:57:44.000I mean, the way sugar is made today, of course, is different than these slave plantations that were erected by first Portugal and Spain, then later the British and the Dutch.
00:57:57.000So, Zorig is actually a Dutch slave ship, and it set sail around in October 1780.
00:58:05.000So, we're in the heart of the American Revolutionary War, and the British had been the dominant force of the slave trade.
00:58:14.000So, remember, I told you we're in the dungeon, okay, and the slave captain comes around and he's bartering for these people.0.57
00:58:21.000And he spends a couple of months acquiring Africans in this castle, this fort, this place, brands them.0.76
00:58:28.000And 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.0.98
00:58:37.000And he has to cross the Atlantic, what's called the Middle Passage.0.98
00:58:41.000And the design of these ships, the design of a slave ship, was specific.0.73
00:59:56.000You'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.
01:01:13.000They don't teach us this part of it.0.83
01:01:16.000So 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.0.64
01:01:30.000Now 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.0.83
01:01:41.000The 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.1.00
01:01:57.000You're going to try to do anything you can to get control of that ship.0.68
01:02:04.000And so, slave insurrections were a common effort at resistance.
01:02:10.000And so the Europeans built a barricade down the middle of every slave ship so that if somehow the slaves managed to revolt, they would quickly get to the back, the stern side where they could still control the ship.
01:02:23.000They had cannons mounted on the barricade to suppress the insurrection.
01:02:30.000They would shoot a cannon into their own boat?
01:02:47.000And 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.
01:03:03.000This seems to quell any further effort at insurrection.
01:04:05.000If 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.1.00
01:04:14.000And then you're stuck in the ship, like, I don't know where this is going, but I'm going to stop eating.1.00
01:04:22.000The Europeans had a tool for that called the speculum aurus.
01:04:27.000And it was initially a device used to pry open jaws when you had lockjaw.0.72
01:04:34.000Slave ship captains got some of these.0.86
01:04:38.000And if you didn't want to eat, they jammed it in your mouth, forced it open, and shoved the food down your throat.0.99
01:04:45.000Cracking 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.
01:04:55.000So, the level of barbarity taking place on these ships that people had to endure is heart wrenching.
01:05:04.000But 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.
01:05:15.000And that gets us to the To the glimmer of hope from all this.
01:05:57.000And so the Brits are fighting everybody at once.
01:06:00.000And their response to this was okay, anybody with this ship, you are hereby given approval to be a pirate.0.99
01:06:07.000Just go pirate the hell out of anybody you see with a Dutch flag, a French flag, Spanish flag, any flag, American flag, just go pirate them to hell.0.98
01:06:19.000So, British take to the seas as pirates.
01:06:23.000So, a British pirate ship captures this Dutch ship off the coast of Africa.
01:06:29.000And it already had a couple hundred slaves in it.
01:06:32.000This British pirate, Captain William Llewellyn of HMS Alert.0.95
01:06:39.000Captures the Zorg off the coast of Liberia and finds two other Dutch ships and takes them over to Cape Coast Castle headquarters.
01:06:50.000And he looks at the other captains there, British captains, and says, Look, I got some Dutch prizes here with some slaves and there's some gold and ivory.0.93
01:10:31.000Now, the thing about crossing the Atlantic is there's no pit stops.
01:10:37.000The 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.
01:10:46.000And if you get off course or delayed or get caught in a storm, you might be in trouble.1.00
01:10:55.000And this is what happens with the Zorg.0.99
01:10:58.000Stubbs is leading them off course.1.00
01:11:01.000They should only need two months to go from West Africa to Jamaica.
01:11:08.000Every decent captain can get his ship across the Atlantic in two months.1.00
01:11:14.000And you expect about a 15% mortality rate on the Africans.1.00
01:11:17.000They will get dysentery because they're living in their own piss and shit.1.00
01:11:21.000And they will take their own lives and they will do things.1.00
01:12:52.000And what you're supposed to do is you have a log and a rope, and you have knots tied at regular intervals.
01:13:01.000And every six hours, you need to throw the rope, you throw the log into the water, and you hold the rope in your hand, and you count how many knots pass through your hand in a 60 second period.
01:13:16.000And that gives you a speed in knots or nautical speed.
01:13:21.000And 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.
01:13:32.000And you enter that in your log book because of the log you just threw in the ocean.
01:13:36.000So, this is where the terms come from.
01:14:34.000So they keep going, they keep going, they keep going, and not sighting land, not sighting land.
01:14:40.000Then on day 10, so about the right time, they sight land.
01:14:45.000Now, they have to make sure it's Jamaica, because what's right next to Jamaica to the west is an island called Hispaniola, which was half Spanish, half French, would later become Dominican Republic and Haiti.
01:14:59.000And that's enemy territory because we're in the middle of the American Revolutionary War, and we can't stop there.
01:16:17.000In order to survive the 10 days to get back to Jamaica, we have to reduce the amount of water consumption on board.0.99
01:16:25.000And their solution to doing this is to start throwing the Africans overboard.1.00
01:16:31.000So, across three days, they start with women and children, living, breathing human beings, sick and unwell and all that, including one baby.0.98
01:16:45.000They throw 130 to 140 Africans overboard into the sea to drown.
01:16:54.000And their bones are still down there, okay?
01:16:58.000And 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.
01:21:14.000And the court cases at that time, there weren't courthouses and all.
01:21:18.000It was held in the Guild Hall, the London Guild Hall.
01:21:21.000And 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.
01:22:15.000But 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?
01:22:27.000He just said they threw 130 human beings overboard to drown, and they're talking about insurance compensation, but no one's talking about murder.
01:22:35.000So, this person writes an anonymous letter to the largest newspaper in London asking this question I just saw this.
01:27:16.000All he has to do is say, we ran out of water.1.00
01:27:19.000Absolutely necessary to throw the Africans.
01:27:22.000Chief 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.
01:27:32.000That was his summary of the first trial.
01:27:34.000Yeah, if you throw over horses, no one's going to talk about murder.
01:27:49.000He 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.1.00
01:28:05.000The whole thing is revealed to be this bankrupt moral fraud, the slave trade.
01:28:12.000And now the world knows that not only what's happening on these ships, the things we talk about with these images, and the truth that was revealed.
01:28:20.000But the fact that the whole thing is this big lie, this greed mongering, murderous lie for profit.
01:28:59.000It is a stain against Christianity.1.00
01:29:02.000We have to abolish this horrific institution.0.99
01:29:04.000And then they devoted their lives to that task, which was a monumental and Herculean task.
01:29:10.000But 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.
01:29:22.000And ultimately, they did succeed on paper.
01:29:25.000Granted and conceded that it was just on paper.
01:29:28.000But 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.
01:29:44.000And it was only a matter of time before we did it here.
01:29:46.000And it required a civil war, but it was achieved.0.90
01:29:52.000And 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.
01:30:14.000People 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, and accepted.
01:30:29.000Most members of parliament had investments in the slave trade and profited from the sugar.
01:31:10.000And it's important because I do think that we are a species generally of good.
01:31:20.000And I think we all have a divine nature in us.
01:31:24.000And yeah, there's evil in the world, there's greed, there's violence, there's horror, there's oppression, there's all of that.
01:31:31.000But the forces of good and the spark of goodness within us and the faith we have in higher power invariably emerge and does succeed.
01:31:43.000Even 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.
01:31:58.000And we're looking for those leaders today because the world is in so much turmoil.
01:32:02.000But we're incredibly malleable and influenced, easily influenced.
01:32:07.000And we could be influenced in a great direction or we could be influenced in a negative direction.
01:32:12.000And this to me, Regardless of what you actually believe, this to me is the great benefit of religion and particularly in Christianity.
01:32:20.000Like, 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.
01:32:29.000This is one of the things that a lot of people are lacking in this world happiness.
01:32:33.000And without a moral framework and an ethical framework, I'm not saying that you can't be an atheist to be an amazing person.
01:32:39.000I know a lot of amazing people who are atheists.
01:32:41.000They're just kind, you know, thoughtful.
01:32:44.000Considerate people who came from good families and have good friends, and they don't need religion to be a good person.
01:32:50.000But there is a real value in providing a framework.
01:32:54.000There'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.
01:33:05.000Forgiveness is a very important part of Christianity.
01:33:08.000Redemption is a very important part of Christianity, this idea that we evolve and grow together.
01:33:13.000In the absence of that moral framework, You can get people whose ideology looks at other human beings as property.
01:33:25.000Their ideology looks at other human beings as not the same as them.
01:33:30.000Whether 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.
01:34:25.000You could go through a lot of horrific things that were done in the name of Christianity, but not really in the spirit of it.0.96
01:34:32.000And this is the problem with human beings.0.53
01:34:33.000We can make these rationalizations and make these decisions, and we can decide that we're doing horrific things for the greater good.
01:34:42.000That 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.
01:34:51.000It's just a weird human tribal problem that we've always had.
01:34:56.000So when you're looking at Christianity, think about megachurch pastors driving around and Rolls Royces and flying private jets and ripping off these dull minded people, but that's not.
01:36:36.000The reason I went through a little bit of time talking about the caravel and the deep seafaring vessel is this is what took the Europeans all across the global south.
01:37:27.00090% of Native Americans were wiped out because of that.0.99
01:37:31.000And we think that has to do with what happened to the Mayans.
01:37:34.000We 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.0.95
01:38:17.000We just got here, which is just nuts to even think about how quickly the human race progresses and how devastating the introduction of new people, especially with like diseases, when they find the people that were here.
01:38:32.000Well, we imagine this with the arrival of aliens.
01:39:07.000Jamaica just went to England and said, please, you took millions of Africans, brought them here, enslaved them, and made yourself.0.58
01:39:22.000From 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.0.80
01:39:37.000So those people worked for free for centuries, and you need to write a check.0.95
01:39:44.000Now, that's a fascinating question, isn't it?
01:39:49.000So, on the one hand, you know, if If your father worked at a manufacturing plant and let's say he worked for 30 years and they never paid him, we wouldn't think about, oh, yeah, you know, your dad is owed money because he worked.
01:40:11.000The company made their money off his labor.
01:40:12.000So, all right, are the descendants of those slaves owed some money?
01:40:16.000And Jamaica went to England just recently and said, 10 billion pounds.
01:40:25.000I mean, when you start to calculate unpaid labor for three centuries plus interest, it's trillions and trillions and it's an impossible sum.
01:41:50.000But does that mean that in principle something's not owed?0.88
01:41:54.000But even if you distribute it to the individual people, you would have to make sure that no one's stealing it from anybody else.
01:42:02.000And then you would have to figure out how to distribute it.
01:42:04.000At 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.
01:45:02.000It was 104, 105,000 pounds back in the 1830s.
01:45:06.000I mean, we're talking tens of millions equivalent today.
01:45:10.000So they got super wealthy all in one check?
01:45:12.000On top of the wealth they had been making through slave labor and selling sugar and rum and molasses and all that, they got double wealthy with one big fat check at the end of this.
01:46:16.000And the East India Trading Company controls the subcontinent.
01:46:19.000And from the 1830s until independence in 1947, there's a reason why Jamaica has a ton of Indians, and Guyana and Mauritius.
01:46:34.000And Malaysia, and all these former sugar colonies of the British.0.94
01:46:40.000Like, all right, no more African slaves.
01:46:42.000They excluded the East India Trading Company territory and started shipping out the Indians.
01:46:48.000To keep the system going, all the slave owners got their big fat checks, which the British taxpayer only paid off 10 years ago.0.68
01:46:56.000So it makes the question about writing checks and so on a little more interesting.0.82
01:47:02.000It's complicated, and I don't have a firm opinion on it.
01:47:05.000There's enough there that has to be teased through, but the one that really gets me is when I heard in 2015 that they finally paid off the bill, the loan.
01:47:18.000It'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.
01:47:28.000They had to work for five years, and then on August 1st, 1838, Frederick Douglass writes about this very beautifully with the rising of the sun.
01:47:52.000This is after the five years, August 1, 1838.
01:47:54.000And Douglass was given a speech in Elmira, New York in 1880.
01:47:57.000He said, We still commemorate that day because it taught us and showed us what's possible.
01:48:05.000Goodness is possible, freedom is possible.
01:48:09.000And yes, it was with the stroke of a pen from a monarch across the sea, but we, which is a system the Americans overthrew, they didn't want kings and monarchy, right?
01:48:53.000He was the only one left alive, and Douglass crossed the Atlantic and met with him and said, Please teach me everything you guys did, what succeeded, what didn't, so we can achieve freedom for the slaves in America.
01:49:07.000Trevor Burrus 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.0.99
01:49:20.000Trevor Burrus If it wasn't for just a few individuals.
01:49:22.000Trevor Burrus And researching this book, Joe, I'll tell you, it's It felt like there were so many flukes of circumstance.
01:49:29.000It felt like there was a higher power that finally said, All right, I've let you guys run amok long enough.
01:49:36.000You are letting the devil within you rule.
01:49:40.000And 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.
01:50:01.000You 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.
01:50:13.000And that's a big difference today, right?
01:50:16.000Imagine in the 1700s trying to gather evidence and persuade people of what the truth is.
01:50:25.000And it was this fascinating battle of storytelling because the slave owners would say, No, what are you talking about?
01:51:10.000But 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.
01:51:26.000None of those abolitionists ever stepped foot in Africa.
01:51:31.000Only a couple had been to the Caribbean islands, including James Ramsey, who wrote that anonymous letter.
01:51:37.000None 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.
01:51:48.000And it was very difficult to get that information.
01:51:50.000Without that trial, who knows how long it would have taken.
01:51:53.000This is what's really important about your work, because you going to the Congo, getting those photographs, coming back with that, writing cobalt red.
01:52:03.000And then coming on podcasts and telling millions and millions of people the story that would have never had any idea.
01:52:10.000I knew vaguely that there were mines in the Congo that extracted rare earth minerals and that they needed them for cell phones and batteries, but I'd had no idea the extent of it until you came on and described it.
01:52:49.000And it's also to me, it's although horrific, utterly fascinating.0.53
01:52:54.000It's fascinating that people the way people can rationalize things like that, the way people can just the way certain cultures treat other human beings, they just don't give a fuck about them at all.0.69
01:53:28.000But then again, also, we're not dealing with ideal circumstances either and ideal people that are running other parts of the world as well.
01:55:35.000I mean, people were talking about when I was in high school, peace in the Middle East like it was a joke, like that it would never be achieved.
01:55:54.000Well, 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?
01:56:09.000But yet we know that humans are capable of getting along.
01:56:13.000So, 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?0.98
01:56:32.000Of 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.
01:56:51.000The real fear about AI is that AI is going to eliminate people.
01:56:55.000This is like famously, a lot of these CEOs have said there's a 10 or people working on this tech have said there's a 10% chance that AI decides to eliminate the human race.
01:57:05.000But isn't there maybe also a Possibility if it's done correctly that it stops war completely.
01:57:14.000Completely controls resources, completely controls all military weaponry, all systems, everything.
01:57:23.000It doesn't allow it anymore because it's insane.
01:57:26.000It'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.
01:57:41.000Like the idea that you own the stuff that's in the earth is really kind of crazy.0.97
01:57:45.000You'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, how about the people that go out into the ocean and they stick a giant pipe into the ocean and they suck out all the oil?0.99
01:58:02.000Like, who fucking told you that's yours?1.00
01:58:24.000I'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.0.98
01:58:38.000So your dream is AI runs things more equitably and efficiently.
01:58:45.000If I want to get really delusional, my dream is it's not even my dream because it's not what I'm hoping.
01:58:50.000But I think it is entirely possible that we create a digital life form that is far superior in intelligence to us and doesn't have all of our moral failings, doesn't have greed, doesn't have lust, doesn't have the desire to acquire property, doesn't have the desire to control resources, but just looks at us in our territorial primate behavior, our psychotic territorial violent primate behavior, and says, Let's just rein that in, kids.
01:59:26.000And, you know, instead of just allowing cities to be polluted by brake dust, why don't we take a corner every three or four blocks and put a gigantic filter on it and suck up all that stuff so that everyone's not dying?
01:59:40.000Also, why don't we figure out a better energy source?1.00
01:59:43.000You fucking dumbasses have been burning coal to make electricity.1.00
01:59:47.000To power your electric car for so long.1.00
01:59:53.000And instead of it all being sort of decided upon by the people that are controlling the resources, the human beings that benefit from influencing politicians to make certain deals and making sure that there's certain conflicts so they can sell weapons, instead of all that, the AI controls it.
02:00:46.000But if you imagine if we decided that all things that humans make, 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.
02:01:04.000But we can use it, but we can use it in a way that's way more fair.
02:01:08.000And then you have this bizarre society where no one's lacking for anything.
02:01:14.000Aaron Powell You were talking to someone about this.
02:01:17.000I forget who it was, but you asked the question how would we have the end of war and violence and conflict if people's basic needs were met?
02:01:28.000And I think that's what you're getting at here.
02:01:30.000Just that if there's a system, maybe it's an AI system.
02:01:33.000That is much more intelligent than us and runs things on the premise of an equitable distribution of the earth's assets.
02:01:41.000And you can still have your billionaires and your hundred billionaires and all that if they are smart and invent this, that, and the other.
02:01:47.000But the oil, the dirt, the metals, the minerals, the water, if we allocate this across humanity, because we are all on this shared earth, and so basic needs of shelter and food are met and education and so on.
02:02:05.000Then you'd have to go out of your way to start manufacturing conflict again and wars and Or the AI decides it's not going to let you do that.
02:02:22.000Well, my point is I know it's pie in the sky bullshit, but do you have a better solution?0.99
02:02:28.000Because humans are doing it the same way that we've always done it, just slightly differently and slightly better over long periods of time.0.97
02:03:08.000I think more people are talking about it and thinking about it.
02:03:11.000More people don't know what to do because it's very confusing and it's also very frustrating.
02:03:14.000But 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.
02:03:27.000And you go, why are we all still doing it this way?
02:03:30.000And 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.
02:04:00.000That'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.1.00
02:04:17.000Or 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.
02:04:26.000To see who controls the entire government.
02:04:29.000And then don't do anything they say they were going to do.
02:04:32.000Maybe 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.
02:06:15.000But I expect you could run simulations on let's give this agentic AI system a specific moral core preserving life, equitable distribution of resources, minimizing or eliminating armed conflict.
02:06:31.000You give it certain parameters and above all, a value of human life.
02:08:54.000But the thing is, whatever progress we make, it takes conversations.
02:08:58.000It takes people like yourself to enlighten people about the actual issues.
02:09:04.000And 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.
02:10:43.000There's another plus side of AI in that automation and specifically.
02:10:48.000Robots that are capable of doing very intricate things that mostly only human beings do will eventually be able to do a lot of the really dangerous shit that people do, including probably extract these minerals in probably a way more efficient way.
02:11:28.000It's like I only had a vague understanding of what was going on before I talked to you.
02:11:31.000Well, I extended my empathy to my brothers and sisters in that part of the world who are an integral part of my life because I rely on them with my smartphone and my tablet.
02:11:46.000I don't have an electric vehicle, but I have everything else that you need to plug in.
02:11:51.000And when I learned about it, I didn't know about it either.
02:11:55.000It was actually a friend of mine in the Congo who said, Siddharth, you got to go.
02:11:58.000He said, You got to go to the Congo, this cobalt, the batteries and the mines, you got to go there.
02:12:56.000It doesn't seem to extend to those people over there.
02:13:01.000But I think their argument would be like, listen, this is the only way to do this, and the only way things are going to get better is if we keep using this technology.
02:13:14.000There'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.
02:13:33.000Do you think that they have the ability to change the conditions?
02:14:39.000They buy it all from these Chinese companies.0.97
02:14:42.000And it's not that hard to forge some partnerships on the ground to say, let's get some basic PPE out in this place.
02:14:51.000Gloves, hats, a uniform, protection masks from the toxic exposure.0.57
02:14:55.000That mine over there, all that shit you're dumping in the stream and 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.0.89
02:16:09.000But 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.0.58
02:16:19.000You didn't need any more kids up to their neck in toxic filth scrounging for cobalt.0.85
02:16:29.000You can't just say, we pillaged that place for three decades, we plundered it, we ransacked it, we took what we needed, we got all the loot, we don't need it anymore.
02:16:40.000Hands clean, we're going to go on our merry way.0.82
02:16:44.000You 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.0.94
02:17:01.000Scouring labor resources, ransacking, pillaging, and then carrying on their merry way.0.87
02:17:06.000We can't do that in the year 2026 and claim to be progressive in our thinking or have made moral progress.
02:17:12.000So 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.
02:17:22.000They'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.
02:17:38.000Even 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.
02:17:46.000So, Apple and the rest of them, I'm not just picking on them, it's all these companies have to still go back and repair and fix, plant some trees, clean up the water, build some hospitals and schools and so on, and clean up, you know, clean up the apocalypse that you created.
02:18:03.000You 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.
02:18:12.000Not only that, what do those people do now?
02:18:37.000You 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.
02:18:47.000You know, when we go to the Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, whatever, and you get your bottled water and it says pH 9.5, and you know, you want your alkaline water for your body because it's healthy, right?
02:20:02.000And you can't grow things there now because the water is poison and the earth is poison.
02:20:08.000And as people learn about this, you can't just say, well, we're going to recycle it now, so problem solved.
02:20:16.000Or now we got lithium iron phosphate or solid state batteries, and so no more cobalt and so on, although cobalt is heavily required for AI data centers for the energy storage.
02:20:32.000Nonetheless, you can't just say we're done.