Joe Rogan recently expressed deep concern about America’s role as a global model during a conversation with human rights investigator Siddharth Kara on The Joe Rogan Experience. The podcast host’s reflection came amid a discussion about exploitation, resource extraction, and the moral obligations of wealthy nations.
“We have to do better. We have to be a better model for the world,” Siddharth stated. “We meaning, this country. And it pains me that right now we’re not being a very good model.”
Rogan agreed, saying, “We’re certainly not the best we can be. That’s a fact. That’s undeniable. No one says the way we exist is ideal. The way we interact with the world is ideal.”
He then added that the situation is complicated by the fact that the U.S. is dealing with an imperfect global landscape, where other countries and their leaders are far from ideal either.
Rogan continued, “But then again, also we’re not dealing with ideal circumstances either and ideal people on, you know, that are running other parts of the world as well. The whole thing’s chaos. That’s what’s so scary.”
The comment emerged during an extensive conversation about global inequality, supply chain ethics, and the troubling disconnect between Western consumption and the human cost of resource extraction in developing nations. Kara, author of “Cobalt Red” and “The Zorg,” has spent years documenting labor conditions in cobalt mines and researching the Atlantic slave trade.
The discussion also revealed that roughly 300,000 people, including approximately 30,000 children, work in cobalt mining operations in the Congo on any given day. More than one-third labor under conditions that qualify as absolute slavery. These workers extract materials that power the devices and vehicles marketed as progressive achievements.
Rogan pointed to the uncomfortable reality that technological progress in wealthy nations frequently depends on environmental destruction and human suffering elsewhere.
“You could be them if you were born there,” he observed, emphasizing how accidents of geography determine life outcomes. “You got lucky. We all got lucky.”
The conversation touched on how Western nations object to mining operations in their own territories due to environmental concerns, yet accept the contamination of water sources, deforestation, and pollution in countries like the Congo.
