Joe Rogan Experience #2556 - Siddharth Kara – Transcript

00:01Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. >> The Joe Rogan Experience. >> TRAIN BY DAY. JOE ROGAN PODCAST BY NIGHT. All day. >> We're up. All right. >> Good to see you, sir. >> Yeah. Good to see you, Joe. >> Um, first of all, thank you very much for everything you've done and for just I I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and said, "Thank you for shedding light on what's going on in the Congo with the cobalt stuff. your

00:28book was so important and the fact that you risked your life to get the kind of footage that you got. You you legitimately risked your life. >> Yeah. >> That it is a very dangerous part of the world right now with enormous amounts of resources being pulled out and insane amounts of money being made >> and you know I think just people like you are rare. So thank you.

00:49>> Oh man, you're uh you're gracious, Joe. You're really gracious. I I take that to heart. It means a lot. And let me just say that the fact that you continue to talk about it, you know, you and I first talked about this uh talking to Jamie, it was almost 4 years ago.

01:05>> Was it really that long ago? >> It was it was December 2022. >> That's crazy. >> So here we are September 26. So almost four years ago. And um you continue to talk about it now and again. And I think that that's meant a lot to me. It's meant a lot to people in the Congo. Um, it's obvious this has captured your heart and um, it you're to be commended for that conscience.

01:29>> Well, I'm doing this talking. You're you're actually out there going and documenting all this stuff. This is a very strange world that we live in that at the very base of 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.

01:53>> Yeah. You have slave labor, you have child labor, you have militia run mines. You know, for for people who didn't hear our last conversation, um go back and hear it, you know, because we walk through it and um I haven't been back to the Congo since Cobalt Red came out and I knew it would be too dangerous for me to go back.

02:12>> Yeah, definitely don't go out. you know, it's just my colleague said pretty soon after Cobalt Red came out, you know, there was there's there's there's a bounty for you. So, I can't go back. Um, but I've stayed in touch with people there. I continued to get ground research done and the conditions uh they're not much better, you know, and in some ways they've continued to degrade because the fever for these

02:37these battery component metals and it's it's cobalt, but it's also the lithium, the nickel, the copper, the tantelum, 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

03:00destruction and contamination. And the new fever is the AI data centers. You know, we're building these um as fast as possible to support the AI economy and they require all the same metals and minerals. So the circuit boards, the servers, the heat sinks, uh

03:24the energy storage, they all require cobalt, copper, tin, tantelum, it's all coming out of Congo. [sighs] It's so such a strange aspect of human life that we require that and that the the the area is controlled by people that are willing to do this. Like there's no like we don't get much of these rare earth minerals from America, do we?

03:52>> No. No. No. Not much at all. No. That's why it's it's almost all in the global south and in particular in the heart of Africa these deposits. >> Can I ask you is it because it's not available? there's no ore in America or it hasn't been mined like what is what are >> so it's a it's the dominating force is that the the largest and highest grade

04:16reserves of these crucial elements and rare earth metals are in central Africa um lithium expend extends more broadly to South America there's not much um there's not much in North America there's some But here's the rub. Here's the rub. You can find some lithium in the salt flats out west. You can find some cobalt along the Canadian North American border. Uh the rub is we don't

04:43want to wreck our environment. >> Oh god. >> Digging the stuff out of the ground um and then processing it. But we're okay obliterating their environment and polluting it and contaminating it. Um and I did another study. I told you I can't go back to the Congo, but I have colleagues and we've continued doing research and I I issued a report came

05:08out last year called blood batteries um through the University of Nottingham and we got to quantify some of the environmental impact which uh is so crucial to the story. It's crucial to the story of this data center push to the EV push, the environmental impact.

05:28And we use time lapse time-lapse satellite imagery to see that uh from the dawn of the sort of cobalt battery metal revolution to 2022, uh 40 50 60% of the forest areas gone.

05:44Um shrubbery, grasslands, all of that gone, replaced with mining territory. And then >> is this the Congo as a whole? >> So we did. Yeah, this is across the copper belt co copper cobalt region of the Congo where the mining is taking place.

05:58>> And what percentage of the Congo is that? >> Small part of it. >> Okay. >> It's a small part in the southeast corner along the Zambian border. I mean much of the Congo is rainforest, >> right? That's why I was confused. >> Up in the north Congo is insanely dense and huge >> in the mining part. In the mining part.

06:14So 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 Kouesei, which is sort of ground zero for all these metals, cobalt and copper and so on.

06:35And there was between 10 and 950 times the World Health Organization maximum recommended limit for human safety of a range of heavy metals from lead to cobalt to copper to uranium uh to chromium. Uh so the whole water sources in that part of the country have been

07:00completely 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, uh keep buying our EVs and so on. And then that's the story. Okay,

07:26that's the story that we're okay destroying them in their world. uh so long as ours remains sacrosanked. 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?

07:41>> Not yet. Not yet. No. I mean, >> is it I'm sorry to interrupt, but is is it possible to do is it just an inevitable fact of when you do that kind of high level mining, you're going to destroy the environment, or could it be mitigated?

07:56>> It could do it could be done better. I mean, you you do have to chop down all the trees where the deposit is. So, deforestation is inevitable, but let's say this was done in our backyard here in Austin. Someone found a big copper cobalt tin tantelum deposit somewhere.

08:13There'd be rules to follow. You'd have to deforest the whole place, but we'd probably say go plant the same number of trees somewhere else to offset it. And there'd be a lot of rules around containment, make sure you don't pollute the rivers and so on. And none of that is done in the global south. None of that none of that is done in Congo. Uh and it's mostly Chinese state-run mining companies um that don't give a [ __ ]

08:42>> about the people in the environment there. But our tech and EV companies all know that and they're all buying this stuff uh from them knowing that. So the chain is tainted. It's tainted in in misery. It's tainted in blood. It's dained in environmental destruction. It doesn't have to be that way. Um, we don't have enough of this stuff here to offset the demand, but we could start mining some of it

09:07here. The problem is there's legitimate objections to the environmental impact. >> And is it an issue with even if they mitigate all the surface area stuff and the pollution [snorts] that you're still going to deal with groundwater? >> Yeah, >> groundwater contamination is inevitable, right? just all leeches in. I mean, the pro it's it's not just the mining, >> the products they use to get >> the the processing of of this stuff, you know, you get an ore

09:34>> that's got cobalt, copper, nickel, silver, bit of uranium in it, and you have to separate all that. And so there's heavy industrial acids, toxic industrial liquids used to dissolve and separate those metals. And that's what inevitably leeches.

09:52>> They pump that stuff right into the ground. It goes into the ground and then it seeps into the ground water into the rivers, lakes. >> When did this all begin? >> So the the this the that part of the Congo in the southeastern corner from the town of Lubmbashi to Kouesei was mined for copper going back to colonial times. Uh it and something like a quarter of the bullets used in World War

10:16I were copper from that part of the Congo. Okay. So it copper mining goes back a long ways, but there was other stuff there. It just didn't have industrial value yet. The uranium that was used in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from that same part of the Congo.

10:36>> Whoa. >> The high the highest grade uranium um deposit known in the world at that time. Isn't it insane that that place has like the most valuable resources on earth, but yet it's one of the poorest places on earth?