Name: The Brutality of the Chocolate Industry, Parallels to Cobalt Mining for Phones
Uploaded: 2023-03-10T18:45:59.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Brutality of the Chocolate Industry, Parallels to Cobalt Mining for Phones' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-10. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Brutality of the Chocolate Industry, Parallels to Cobalt Mining for Phones' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-10. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- Have you ever seen like the numbers of people
that are working in chocolate,
that are working in like horrible conditions?
Have you ever heard of this?
Jamie, find out about chocolate.
Someone was telling me that chocolate in many ways,
I have to be careful about this
'cause I'm not sure if they're right.
Let's look up what it is.
But they were connecting,
we were talking about cobalt mines.
And they said have you ever looked into chocolate,
and chocolate production.
It's like, here it is.
Mars Wrigley factory fined after two workers
fall into chocolate vat.
Well, that's not it.
I think they're talking about cacao farming.
And that he was, I think he was insinuating
that they used slave labor at some of those places.
- Oh yeah, I'm sure.
I mean, that's the, God, who was I talking to, man?
God damn it, I have such a soggy brain.
- Oh man, they were talking about how they--
- Child labor and slavery in the chocolate industry.
This is it, Jesus Christ.
Okay, can you make that larger for my shitty eyes?
Chocolate is a product of the cacao bean,
which grows primarily in the tropical climates
of Western Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The cacao bean is more commonly referred to as cocoa.
So that is the term that will be used
throughout this article.
Western African countries, mostly Ghana and the Ivory Coast,
supply about 70% of the world's cocoa.
Is it coca or cocoa?
How do you say that?
- I don't know.
- 'Cause I always say cocoa, like hot cocoa.
- I don't know, cacao?
- Cacao?
- C-O-C-O-A. - C-O-C-O-A.
But it's not cacao, because the cacao bean,
and then it's coca.
- Coca, cocoa.
- The coca they grow, sorry everybody, chocolate they grow,
and harvest is sold to a majority of chocolate companies,
including the largest in the world.
In the past few decades, a handful of organizations
and journalists have exposed the widespread use
of child labor, and in some cases slavery,
on coca farms in Western Africa.
Child labor has been found on coca farms in Cameroon,
Guinea, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, although since most
of Western Africa's coca grown in Ghana and the Ivory Coast,
the majority of child labor cases have been documented
in those two countries.
- Fuck, fuck.
- Yeah.
- You just, you don't, like, the--
- It says Brazil, too, scroll up a little bit.
- You just don't think that, do you?
- No. - When you're eating a Kit Kat.
- In recent years, evidence has also surfaced
on coca farms in Brazil.
Coca workers there face many of the same abuses
as those on coca farms in Western Africa.
Fuck.
And then Latin America, too, they're saying.
- One dollar per day.
- Jesus Christ.
- One dollar per day of a Kit Kat's four days work.
- Isn't it crazy that chocolate is like love,
and there's chocolate, there's like chocolate stores,
come in and buy chocolate, chocolate, chocolate.
Like, if you walk by a chocolate store, there's,
you never say, oh, child labor.
- Oh yeah, a lot of kids died for that fucking chocolate
you're giving for your--
- A lot of little, tiny, unformed bodies
are being forced to dig holes in the ground.
- Dig holes, just getting sick.
- Carry shit.
- Getting malaria.
- Yeah, you, you, the, the, this, this is the, this,
oh God, I'm sorry, whoever told me this.
They were, they went on a tour of the Colosseums in Italy,
and the person giving the guide, giving the tour,
was talking about how, you know, the horrible shit
the Romans used to do in the Colosseums.
Like the, like the, it was just pure brutality.
And the guide says, but it's just as brutal now,
but in a different way.
And that's what she's talking about.
It's like, yeah, we don't have Colosseums
where we're like throwing Christians to lions
and laughing as they get eaten by a lion.
But we, you know, most things that you are indulging in
is just something fun.
A little bit of chocolate, your, you know,
your fucking iPhones, the cobalt, the, whatever it is,
it's just soaked in the, in misery and violence
and suffering.
Like the whole thing still is functioning.
- Interconnected.
- Interconnected, yeah.
I mean, now that being said,
what are you supposed to do about that?
Are you gonna stop eating chocolate or using your phone?
- That's what's crazy.
Like they've got us addicted particularly.
Well, chocolate would be an easier one, but phones,
we are, we are all willingly addicted to these things.
We are all checking our email and posting stuff
and you know, using it for our podcasts and you're using it.
It's a device.
It's important.
You have to have it.
- You have to have it.
- But it's all connected to cobalt mining,
which is one of the most horrific things
that's happening right now on planet earth.
And if people in the cities in America
were forced to live like that,
everyone would be up in arms.
But yet people are tweeting about letting people
through the border crisis.
We have this border problem.
We need to help these people.
They're tweeting it on a phone made by slaves.
- Yeah.
- Which is the wildest thing ever.
- It's very odd.
It's very odd.
- Rarely discussed.
- It's called, so it's ignorance.
And like this, this is in Buddhism.
There's three, like the root of suffering.
One of them is ignorance.
And ignorance is not like you're ignorant.
You're a dumb ass.
It's like, you're actively ignoring shit.
Like, you know, this is one of the nightmare weed situations
is when you've been ignoring some shit in your life.
And even though, you know, it's there,
you've just been ignoring it.
And then you get high and it's like, you can't,
I'm not gonna let you ignore this for a little bit.
- Yeah.
- And then you have the bad weed trip
because now suddenly you're like looking at a relationship
that is shitty in your life that needs to improve.
Or you're like, you're looking at like how you don't exercise
or whatever the thing is.
- Yeah.
- So you've been actively ignoring that
and thinking that it's gonna make the situation better.
Even though when you're actively ignoring something,
you feel it.
- Yeah.
- And you might not, it might not be the top of mind,
but you're like feeling it.
And it's heavy.
It's a heavy thing when you're procrastinating.
That's active ignorance.
So I think collectively, that's what we're doing here
is this active ignorance of the reality
that these things don't pop out of thin air.
- Yeah.
- That if we're gonna have this level of luxury,
some people are gonna have to suffer for it.
- But that's not necessarily true.
They don't have to, they just are.
It's not like you couldn't figure out a way
where the company profits slightly less,
the people live far better,
and phones cost reasonably close to what they cost to now.
- You, you--
- The problem, look at a company like Apple,
just the amount of money that they've generated
from devices and what percentage of it is phones?
What percentage of what they sell involves cobalt?
- I mean, most of their lithium-ion battery products.
The cobalt is like some sort of a stabilizer or something.
- No idea.
- Siddharth Kara, who wrote that book on cobalt,
who came on the podcast and had this,
it was one of the most heavy podcasts I've ever done.
'Cause you're just like, you're sitting here,
and he's exposing how these people are living,
how these 19-year-old mothers have babies on their backs,
and they're digging into these hills to get cobalt.
And the dust is coming up, and it's horrific, horrific for the terrible health
consequences.
They're being poisoned, and they're making no money, and they have no
electricity.
- Yeah, and don't forget that those cobalt mines are not even owned by Africans.
They're usually owned by, like--
- Chinese.
- Chinese.
- Yeah, and if you just imagined that instead,
those people lived in an economically thriving town,
like Detroit was when they were putting together automobiles.
Like, Detroit, at one point in time, was one of the richest cities in the
country.
Detroit was a huge hub.
There was beautiful cars everywhere.
America was making these cars, and they were selling like crazy.
The industry was booming, and then they pulled it all out.
- Yeah.
- And then the city imploded.
Like, if you went to Detroit during--
When did Detroit fall apart?
When did the auto manufacturers pull a giant chunk of their production out of
Detroit?
What year was that?
Because it's a very stark cliff economically.
It's like "Roger and Me" when he made that documentary.
- Oh, yeah, right. - 1960s.
When a building boom pushed people to the suburbs.
The population plummeted to 700,000 with the highest unemployment rate, more
than 16% in any major American city.
- Yeah.
- So it started with the building boom pushed back people into the suburbs.
But I think the big one was the automo.
So what is Detroit's downfall?
Yeah, it's "The heavily automobile-centric industrial landscape of Detroit
established in the first half of the 20th century led to rapid declines in
population and economic output after automotive decentralization."
- That means that they took their factories to other countries with fewer
regulations.
- Yes. That's exactly what they did.
It's exactly what they did.
And it makes you think, like, "Man, what did you do?"
What did you do?
Like, how much more profit?
I'm sure it's a lot of money.
- A lot. - But what did you do?