#2556 - Siddharth Kara
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. We're up. All right. Good to see you, sir. Yeah, good to see you, Joe. First of all, thank you very much for everything you've done and for just... I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and said, thank you for shedding light on what's going on in the Congo with the cobalt stuff. Your book... was so important, and the fact that you risked your life to get the kind of footage that you got, you legitimately risked your life. It is a very dangerous part of the world right now with enormous amounts of resources being pulled out and insane amounts of money being made. And, you know, I think just people like you are rare, so thank you.
Oh, man, you're gracious, Joe. You're really gracious. I take that to heart. It means a lot. And let me just say that... The fact that you continue to talk about it, you know, you and I first talked about this, talking to Jamie, it was almost four years ago.
Was it really that
long ago? It was December, 2022. That's crazy. So here we are September 26th, so almost four years ago. And you continue to talk about it now and again. And I think that 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. This is a very strange world that we live in that at the very base of all the greatest technology, like all this stuff that
we
have that's so incredible, that allows us to find out so much about the world, the base of that, you have slave labor pulling minerals out of the ground.
Yeah, you have slave labor, you have child labor, you have militia run mines, you know, for people who didn't hear our last conversation, go back and hear it, you know, because we walk through it. And I haven't been back to the Congo since Cobalt Red came out and I knew it would be too dangerous for me to go back. Definitely don't go back. My colleague said pretty soon after Cobalt Red came out, there's a bounty for you. So I can't go back. But I've stayed in touch with people there. I continue to get ground research done. And the conditions... they're not much better, 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. We're building these as fast as possible to support the AI economy. And they require all the same metals and minerals. So the circuit boards, the servers, the heat sinks, the energy storage, they all require cobalt, copper, tin, tantalum. It's all coming out of Congo.
Boy, it's such a strange aspect of human life that we require that and that the area is controlled by people that are willing to do this. We don't get much of these rare earth minerals from America, do we?
No, no, not much at all. That's why it's almost all in the global south and in particular in the heart of Africa, these deposits.
Can I ask you, is it because it's not available? There's no ore in America? Or it hasn't been mined?
So the dominating force is that the largest and highest grade reserves of these crucial elements and rare earth metals are in Central Africa. Lithium extends more broadly to South America. There's not much in North America. There's some. But here's the rub. Here's the rub. You can find some lithium in the salt flats out west. You can find some cobalt along the Canadian-North American border. The rub is we don't want to wreck our environment. Oh, God. Digging this stuff out of the ground and then processing it. but were okay obliterating their environment and polluting it and contaminating it.
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