Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1149 - Michael Scott Moore
Uploaded: 2018-07-30T21:08:13.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1149 - Michael Scott Moore' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-07-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1149 - Michael Scott Moore' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-07-30. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1149 - Michael Scott Moore

very nice to meet you good to meet you oh yeah boom and we're live uh so just
to give everybody
a good way to start this you have a book the book is called the desert and the
sea
and you have one of the most disturbing and craziest stories i think i ever
read
you were kidnapped by somali pirates and you were held hostage for more than
two years
what the was that like and what does it feel like to be a free man now after
all that are you
kidding it feels great in america yeah wandering around the valley the valley
where i was born and
raised by the way were you yeah this is the first time i've been back in the
valley for a couple of
years now what what what happened and how how did it happen long story um so i
went to somalia in the
first place to write a book a very different book about somali pirates right
and funny and um i
so i'm a journalist i was working in berlin at the time and i had followed uh
the very long trial of
10 somali pirates in germany um in hamburg for about a year all of 2011 and
before that i had already
thought about going to somalia because the pirate story was interesting in all
sorts of ways that i
thought other writers weren't getting to and i had met another journalist a
documentary maker named ashwin
roman who also wanted to go to somalia for his own project and uh so we talked
about going for a long
time and by the end of 2011 um in the middle of the trial um we all our plans
came together and
and uh we wound up going in january of 2012 and we had about 10 days of good
research um we both got
pretty good material and we were in a part of somalia where other journalists
had gone so we weren't
doing something that was totally off the map you know um and uh on the 10th day
ashwin flew off to
mogadishu and um i went with him to the airport we saw him off and it was on
the way back from the
airport that um a truck was waiting for our car and the truck which was
actually a technical so a
battle wagon with a cannon in the back stopped us aimed the cannon through the
windshield overpowered
my guard and 12 guys with kalashnikovs pulled me out of the car so i was put me
in another car and
we drove off so from that moment on i was a captive jesus christ and so they
were obviously trying to
get some hostage money yeah ransom money no it was about money and i think they
were hoping for both
of us by the way um ashwin feels very lucky that he didn't get captured so they
had planned this yeah
and they were probably waiting for our car earlier in the morning it was just
ashwin's good luck that
we took a different route to the airport how much money were they asking for no
well so the first
thing they asked for me was 20 million dollars but that was after the first
week so the i went for
a week without having a phone call home um and in that period seals rescued two
other hostages from
another part of central somalia um including jessica buchanan an american and i
think nine somali guards
died in that raid and they had some clan relationship to some of the guys
holding me and so the guys
holding me were very upset and i think that's why they asked for 20 million and
held more importantly
held on to that demand for so long what they held on to it for almost a year
that specific number they
wouldn't budge yeah and so they were in negotiations yeah there were
negotiations but they were you know
phony negotiations in some sense because the somalis weren't weren't really
negotiating so for some
background for people that are unfamiliar with the situation in somalia somalia
if uh correct me if
i'm wrong that area was traditionally fishermen and yeah that's wrong it's okay
so that's actually the point
of the book that's actually one level of the title the desert and the sea so
that's a um you you get the
the idea from things that somali pirates like to say oh that they're just
frustrated fishermen uh that's
only part of the story and so that's a that's a very important premise in the
book they they um there
are you know fishing communities on the coast and they're being um hard hit
definitely by illegal ships
that come in to just steal the fish you know but that's a problem up and down
africa and because of that
problem um once somalia had no government there was no navy navy to defend the
coastline um local sort
of clan leaders would send out militia boats with militiamen and hold fishing
boats for you know fifty
thousand dollar ransoms over 24 hour periods you know really nothing very much
and they called it a
license fee and that's how you did business in somalia in the 90s we didn't
hear about that it was too
small time we started to hear about it when they graduated to capturing cargo
ships what i had heard
was that um there was illegal dumping that wasn't just fishing also yeah yeah
and that um they
initially called themselves the people's coast guard of somalia or the
voluntary coast guard yeah one or two
pirate um gangs tried to call themselves that and you know they had a point
there was no no one else
patrolling the coast but that wasn't really what was going on no no um i was
captured on land first of
all uh every other cat uh hostage i met was a fisherman a poor fisherman
captured hundreds of miles from the
somali coast so that's not protecting the coast so what role does this stuff
called cat k-h-a-t this is uh
it's a plant that they chew and it has like a stimulant effect yeah it's a
little bit like coca
leaf but i think actually it's narcotic yeah gets you high at first um and then
you crash and you wake
up depressed and you need more but these guys every single pirate i met was
addicted um and they wound up
having to sit in front of these piles of cut um every afternoon just to get
high enough uh for their
addiction and um then like i said they would they would crash at night and then
do it again uh in my
case there were there were guards 24 hours a day which meant there was also a
shift that slept during
the day to cut at night and then and then crashed in the morning did you try
any of that stuff yeah i
mean they kept offering it to me what was it like they i you know it takes like
two or three stems or
three or four stems not not much but it changed your mood you know you could be
depressed and you'd feel
better or you could be a little bit sick and you just wouldn't feel it anymore
um but i didn't want
to get addicted to it so i didn't i didn't keep pushing that is it it's that
addictive yeah well i saw
it i saw how addictive it could be with the guards uh you know a little bit on
an afternoon didn't make
me want to keep doing it necessarily but every every now and then i did it just
for the sake of my mood yeah
that's always in the narrative this cat stuff that that they're somehow or
another unhinged because
they're on this stuff all the time yeah i mean you can get really unhinged in
the sense that
you're once you're wired on it you're easily sort of upset and and these guys
would have
would sometimes have fist fights in front of me and that kind of thing not all
the time but yeah they
would get they would get hopped up they would just get jittery and that's that's
very dangerous
with kalashnikovs lying around so their culture somehow or another has evolved
to this point where
it's insanely common to kidnap people to the point where if you if you talk
about somali pirates
they're it's very few countries where pirates go after their name so easily
yeah the they um
kidnapping became part of the culture that's true but pirate bosses which are
not so active now off
the coast um also have other businesses that they get involved in and so i've
written about this in
the meantime too they they get involved in uh gun smuggling and also even
people smuggling on the
horn of africa so um whatever takes that kind of equipment you know suvs kalashnikovs
cheap food
when you say people smuggling what do you mean um it's a good story i found out
i'm i'm the person
that proved that on the route between somalia to libya some former pirate
bosses were active in moving
people so in other words somalis who want to go to uh libya will put themselves
in the hands of some
traffickers and some of those traffickers might be ex-pirates but go there as
far as just being
transported willingly willingly at first and then um there's always a place in
sudan where it where it
shifts from being uh willing to being unwilling well this is an issue that's
been going on in libya
recently you i'm sure you saw the the most recent slave auctions that were videotaped
and put on
youtube which was the stories are awful i've heard those firsthand yeah
insanely disturbing that you're
watching a videotape of slave auctions in 2018 it's well it's more than
disturbing it's a revival of what
was going on uh when slavery was legal so in other words um okay where the
where the somalis are involved
up to the to the uh libyan border is one story and that's the story i've
covered
um what happens in libya is a different story the clans and the roots that
migrants take through libya
the clans they put themselves in the hands of um are still the same as the clans
and the roots that
were used during the slave trade um so there's a there's almost like a you know
there's a there's
a historical memory there of what what went on and it's the same thing
happening um so so i i suspect
a lot of migrants don't quite know how bad it can get uh um the route up until
libya is probably
easier than libya itself libya itself sounds like a horror show for the
migrants yeah well it's
particularly it's one of those bizarre things we have a horrible dictator like
moammar qaddafi
and you say well it's probably a good thing to get rid of that guy right but no
when you get
rid of him then you have this power vacuum and apparently it's a failed state
now and it's gotten
even worse yeah it's um it's going in the direction of somalia right now and
they're a couple of rival
governments i think it's a little bit more stable uh than somalia was after
their dictator fell but um
it's there's similar there's a similar thing going on um i it's true uh gaddafi
was a bad guy and
but he was also a bulwark and he knew that and he used that to his advantage
with work a bulwark against
against migration paths i've never heard that expression oh yeah a bulwark a
bulwark no what
does that mean a roadblock oh okay um when you were there when you decided to
take 10 days and you'd done
all this research what what did you expect when you went there and what was
different well so we we were
careful about finding security we found um a somali elder in berlin who could
uh offer the protection
of his clan in somalia and he had done it with another uh journal journalist a
german journalist
and he took us out from galkayo which is a town in central somalia out to the
coast uh to hobyo which
is a pirate town you might have heard of and pirate town an actual pirate town
yeah so it's all pirates well
it's in it's in the control of of pirates so in other words the the government
that sits
in galkayo has no influence there uh the pirates are the ones with who who can
have the say so so what
is their business like i mean when you say it's like a pirate town so the
pirates are essentially in
control but like what else is going on there if you've got pirates in control
no normal somali life is
going on there but uh the the you know let's say the police force would be
pirates whoa yeah i mean
when we got there it was pretty quiet and we didn't see much normal life and we
had a um a very
organized interview and lunch um one afternoon with a with a guy who turned out
to be a real pirate
you know that wasn't a joke and then we we left around sundown and and that was
it we didn't spend a
whole lot of time in hobyo when you were there and you uh you eventually got
captured and taken hostage
what what was the initial experience like well so when that happened with the
with the
technical with the truck at first my mind actually recoiled from what was going
on i mea