Siddharth Kara

Joe Rogan opens by thanking Siddharth Kara for drawing attention to cobalt mining in the Congo. Rogan says Kara's book was "so important" and that Kara "legitimately" risked his life to get footage from a region where huge amounts of resources are being extracted and large amounts of money are being made. Kara notes that the two first discussed the subject almost four years earlier. Rogan sums up the core tension: at the base of the most advanced technology there is slave labor pulling minerals out of the ground.

Kara adds child labor and militia-run mines to that list. He says he has not returned to the Congo since Cobalt Red came out, because he knew it would be too dangerous. The transcript breaks off partway through his account of what a colleague told him after the book's release, so that part of the exchange is missing.

Kara's central claim is that the base of the supply chain is "tainted in child labor, slavery, violence, environmental destruction and contamination." He calls AI data centers "the new fever" and says they need the same metals as earlier consumer electronics. Circuit boards, servers, heat sinks and energy storage all need cobalt, copper, tin and tantalum, which he says are "all coming out of Congo."

Rogan asks whether the United States produces much of these minerals. Kara says it does not, and that the deposits are mostly in the global south, especially central Africa. When Rogan asks whether this is because there is no ore in America or because it has not been mined, The transcript gives Kara’s location as “the Canadian, North American border,” an unresolved geographical phrase. It does not establish a meaningful border between Canada and North America, or justify silently substituting the US–Canada border; the specific deposit location remains unconfirmed. He frames the real obstacle as a double standard: wealthy countries do not want to wreck their own environment by digging up and processing the ore, but accept that harm elsewhere.

Later Kara puts it more sharply. People in wealthy countries object to losing forests, contaminating water and polluting air, but accept those harms when they are out of sight, "so long as we can plug in our phone, build out our data centers, keep buying our EVs and so on." His verdict:

And that, frankly, is just the great hypocrisy of all this.

Kara says that although he cannot go back himself, colleagues have continued the research. Last year he published a report called Blood Batteries through the University of Nottingham. He calls the report's environmental findings crucial to understanding both the data center push and the EV push.

The study used time-lapse satellite imagery. Kara describes losses through 2022 using the sequence “40, 50, 60 percent” while mentioning forest, shrubland and grassland replaced by mining. The source does not clearly map each percentage to a land class or define a single forest-loss range; the underlying Blood Batteries table, start year and area denominator were not retrieved here. Rogan asks whether this covers the whole Congo. Kara clarifies that it covers the copper-cobalt belt, a small area in the southeast corner along the Zambian border, while much of the country is rainforest further north. He also describes losses of water bodies alongside the growth of mining.

The team also tested water for heavy metals and acidity. In a case study in Kolwezi, which Kara calls ground zero for cobalt and copper, they measured between 10 and 950 times the World Health Organization's maximum recommended limit for human safety, across a range of heavy metals including lead, cobalt, copper, uranium and chromium. From this Kara concludes that water sources in that part of the country have been "completely contaminated."

Rogan asks whether there is a viable alternative supply and whether environmental destruction is an unavoidable part of this kind of mining. Kara says there is no alternative "yet." He says the mining could be done better, but that some harm cannot be avoided: the trees over the deposit have to come down, so "deforestation is inevitable."

To show what better practice might look like, Kara imagines a large copper, cobalt, tin and tantalum deposit found near Austin. There would still be deforestation, he says, but probably with rules such as replanting the same number of trees elsewhere and strict containment to keep rivers clean. He says none of that happens in the Congo. He says the mining there is mostly run by Chinese state-run companies that "don't give a shit about the people in the environment there," and that tech and EV companies buy from them knowing this.

Kara admits the limits of his own proposal. The US does not have enough of these minerals to meet demand, though some could be mined domestically, and he concedes there are "legitimate objections" on environmental grounds. After an ad break, Rogan asks whether groundwater would still be a problem even if surface damage and pollution were controlled. Kara says groundwater contamination is inevitable. The damage comes from processing as well as digging: ore containing cobalt, copper, nickel, silver and some uranium is separated using heavy industrial acids and toxic liquids, which go into the ground and seep into groundwater, rivers and lakes.

Kara traces the region's history. The area from Lubumbashi to Kolwezi was mined for copper going back to colonial times. He says "something like a quarter of the bullets used in World War I" were made from copper from that area, a figure he gives as approximate. He also attributes uranium associated with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs to a high-grade Congolese deposit. That is his source-provenance claim; it does not establish that the two bombs used the same fissile material or distinguish uranium used directly from uranium serving as feedstock for plutonium production. No mine-to-bomb material record was verified here.

Rogan points out that one of the most resource-rich places on Earth is also one of the poorest. Kara calls this the resource curse: treasure "attracts the pirates." When a place is war-torn, colonized, corrupt or chaotic, people can be made to work for almost nothing because there is "virtually nil alternative" way to survive.

Kara explains how displacement produces this labor. Large mining operations push out hundreds of thousands of people from villages where they fished and grew crops. With no other way to survive, families, including children, come back into the mining territory to dig in toxic dirt and gather enough ore in a sack to earn about a dollar a day.

Kara says Cobalt Red, discussed in the 2022 conversation, documented the human harm but did not measure its scale. The Blood Batteries report tried to fill that gap with prevalence estimates based on sampling at mining sites.

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.

The estimate is a minimum ("at least") and varies somewhat between the dry and wet seasons. Kara reports a prevalence estimate of about 37% in conditions he calls absolute slavery and almost 10% children—roughly 30,000 on a given day—doing toxic, dangerous work rather than attending school. These are his extrapolated estimates from site sampling, not a precise daily census. The study’s sampling frame, uncertainty, definitions and denominator were not retrieved here.

Kara says people often accept that their "rechargeable lifestyle" rests on this suffering and then ask what they can do. He agrees that no individual can fix it, but argues that personal choices still affect demand. His first suggestion is to stop upgrading phones and tablets every year just because tech companies encourage it.

So if the phone still works, just use it.

He calls EVs a more interesting case, since the choice is between buying one and keeping an internal combustion car. EV companies say their mining is sustainable and audited, and that abuses happen in other companies' supply chains. Kara rejects this, saying it all comes "out of the same pot." He supports the goal of saving the planet but sets a limit on it:

But we can't save our piece of the planet by destroying their piece of the planet.

Rogan raises another EV concern: brake dust. He calls it a big part of particulate pollution in large cities and says people in places like New York are "100% breathing in break dust." He also says it has been proven that living in polluted, crowded cities shortens lifespan, and suggests brake dust is "probably one of the reasons." No source is given for either claim in the conversation. The speakers point out that all cars produce brake dust, but infer that greater EV weight requires more braking. The conversation does not compare regenerative and friction braking, tyre wear, vehicle design or driving conditions, so weight alone does not establish the net brake-particle emissions of EVs versus other cars.

Rogan suggests carbon ceramic brakes help a lot. He bases this on his own experience of finding almost no dust on his wheels, and asks producer Jamie to check. The result Jamie reads out is more qualified: carbon ceramic systems can reduce brake-wear particle pollution substantially compared with conventional gray cast iron rotors, but they do not eliminate it, and the outcome depends on the rotor and pad pairing and on driving conditions. Rogan adds that these brakes are an expensive upgrade, offered on cars such as the Corvette, so few people choose them.

Kara says brake dust was news to him and worth more attention, but he brings it back to the main theme. Carbon ceramic brakes need carbon, and "there's always something." Every proposed fix depends on another material that has to be extracted from somewhere.

Kara extends this to battery design. Proposals to cut cobalt with lithium iron phosphate or solid-state batteries still need lithium, and he says one of the biggest lithium deposits is now in the Congo. He says shipping began in “June of this year” under a Chinese mining company near Manono. The company, concession and date were not checked against project announcements; the relative year remains part of the recording-time statement. Kara says he has been there and colleagues have too, and describes conditions as "just as horrific" as in cobalt mining. His conclusion is "Same deal" whatever chemistry is used.

Kara ends this part of the interview with a moral argument rather than a technical one:

So it's about extending the horizon of our compassion beyond our immediate circle

He says everyone connected to our lifestyle, however distant, still lives, breathes and has dreams, and that "you could be them if you were born there." Rogan agrees that the difference comes down to a favorable "roll of the dice," which he says is hard to recognize. The segment then cuts to an ad.

After a sponsor segment, the conversation turns to the idea that people can simply "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." The speaker grants that it is accurate "in certain circumstances" but rejects applying it to everyone. They argue that in the places under discussion "there's no boots": no clean water, no medical infrastructure, and work in an environment that, in their words, is "100% is going to poison you to death."

From there the discussion frames moral progress as extending compassion outward. One speaker says the way to make life better for everyone is to bring the third world up to first-world standards: infrastructure, education and real hospitals. They name the obstacle directly. Resources such as those in the Congo are worth so much money that the people who control and extract them "don't ever want to let that go."

Kara describes a thought experiment he says he uses when teaching, though he notes he has not taught in a couple of years. Before birth, you do not know whether you will land in a safe, loving, upper-middle-class Western family or in a war-torn, poor part of South Sudan. He asks what you would want the fortunate to do if you got "the bad roll of the dice." His answer is that you would hope they see you, feel connected to you, and use their luck to help bring education, health care or sanitation to your part of the world. In his telling, everyone agrees to this before birth, and then once born people get "wound up in our sphere" and lose that sense of human connection.

The host offers a partial explanation for the disconnect. Roughly 100 years ago, he says, people knew almost nothing about distant places they had not visited. Only in the last couple of generations has technology given people widespread knowledge of the rest of the world, which he calls ironic given that the technology being discussed is what gives them that knowledge.

The host then raises a practical difficulty. Lifting poor regions requires power. He lists coal and hydroelectric dams and dismisses windmills and solar as unable to power giant cities "with current technology." In his view that leaves nuclear power, which can be converted into weapons, and he points to India and Pakistan as examples. He offers no figures or sources for these claims. Kara's reply is that it is "tricky."

Kara shares what he calls something he has learned since his previous appearance. He repeats that the uranium for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Little Boy and Fat Man, came from a Congolese mine the transcript renders as "Shinkalo Boe." He says the deal was struck at a meeting of Belgians and Americans in Midtown Manhattan. He adds that the Congo has a lot of uranium.