1145: Rwanda 2025 | Out of the Loop

1145: Rwanda 2025 | Out of the Loop

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers, even the occasional organized crime figure, arms dealer, drug trafficker, or former jihadi.

And if you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation China, North Korea, crime, and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today an out of the loop episode with our friends, Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy, they were on earlier a few years ago. Cracking open these scam call centers and how many of them are actually run by human traffickers and slave labor.

So all those scam calls, scam texts you get are often by people being held against their will. And today we'll do an update on the cyber slavery thing, people being trafficked into those scam call centers. Also, the connection between cyber slavery, North Korea, Yakuza triads, and other organized crime groups, as well as scam call centers, plus an update on what the heck is going on in Rwanda and Congo.

Surprisingly, they're actually connected. In some ways, Congo and Rwanda are actually fighting over control of mineral resources with the help of Russian, US and other foreign private military companies. This, however, is an insane new level of conflict, which not only involves governments, but also involves corporations which hire armed groups to fight one another for natural resources.

Yes, it is. As crazy as it sounds. So here we go outta the loop on cyber slavery and Rwanda with Nathan, Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy. Every time I talk to you guys, it's a weird time over there. And yes, there's time zone stuff, but I just get the idea that your city penal pen in Cambodia is just 24 hour operation.

Is that accurate?

[00:02:04] Lindsey Kennedy: Yeah. Nathan is literally sitting in a 24 hour bar next to the flat

[00:02:09] Jordan Harbinger: 24 hour bar. Sounds like it could be a dangerous place, not just for you as somebody who likes to drink a little bit, but for the type of clientele that a 24 hour bar attracts. Sounds like it could go from the backpacker all the way up to who's at a bar at seven o'clock in the morning.

That's basically the question.

[00:02:29] Lindsey Kennedy: A very sad retired man who are here to look for very young girlfriends. Oh

[00:02:33] Jordan Harbinger: God.

[00:02:34] Lindsey Kennedy: That's normally who you see. All people just finishing their scam center shifts. That's also a common thing.

[00:02:39] Nathan Paul Southern: I see. We have had the odd Belgian pedophile, uh, what's that? Belgian pedophiles? Yeah. It was a 12-year-old or a 10-year-old boy.

I mean, he was with, and also 15.

[00:02:48] Lindsey Kennedy: Yeah.

[00:02:49] Nathan Paul Southern: Yeah. Gross.

[00:02:51] Lindsey Kennedy: But we tweeted about it at the time and the Belgian embassy got in touch within minutes and said, can you give us all his details and we're gonna try and get him on the way out of the country. Oh, wow. So they did take it seriously. Yeah.

[00:03:01] Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting.

That's good to hear because you think, oh, hey, there's a pedophile here. It's not in our country. Yeah, he's holding one of our passports, but what are we gonna do? But they were just kinda like, oh, this is making us look bad. Let's arrest this guy.

[00:03:14] Nathan Paul Southern: As much as we're about to really dump on the Belgians for like decades and decades of some of the most horrific abuse in the Congo, pretty much everywhere they go.

Uh, one thing they're really good at is they've got a really good global anti pedophile division and they really pursue it. That's their line. Global pedophile is they do try to stop and they make calls. That's one thing the Belgians really have going for 'em, so yeah, good for them on that. They made an arrest, which is quite cool and also very rare in general in Cambodia.

[00:03:41] Jordan Harbinger: You guys are in the thick of it. The reason that this is relevant is because you guys are not just like, oh, I've read a book about this or I've researched this. It's your neighbors are literally the people that you cover, which is somewhat uncomfortable, I would imagine.

[00:03:55] Lindsey Kennedy: Yeah, it's a bit nuts 'cause yeah, so a lot of our work is on the scam industry.

Like we often write about how whole kind of towns have been taken over and turned into kinda scam hubs. But in cities like PNO Pen, you also have these kind of mini scam compounds that go more under the radar. And on either side of the building where we live in, there are new-ish Indian restaurants that are very much fronts for scam compounds.

Upstairs you just see loads and loads of young, mostly guys every day arriving from like India, Pakistan, Nepal, like very much the Indian subcontinent, looking frightened. And then sort of getting upstairs to the dorm rooms to work for scams. And it's horrible to see for a start because some of those guys are allowed out and seem to be more middle management.

Some of them we know aren't allowed out, but from a purely practical point of view all night, sometimes we can hear them building like almost like over our building. They're like expanding and building the construction over the top of us. It's also just continually jams the internet and phone signal. So just the sheer effort of trying to write about scam centers is currently being interfered with by the building of the scam centers on either side of us, which is,

[00:05:03] Jordan Harbinger: it's crazy.

[00:05:04] Lindsey Kennedy: It's a horrible irony. Yeah.

[00:05:05] Jordan Harbinger: How many people do you think are in the buildings that are near you? Because I know last time you were on the show, we covered the scam centers because I was trying to get behind the pig butchering scam and how it works, and you had said, Hey, by the way, a lot of these people are tricked into it, trafficked into it.

It's interesting. Now, I see this is almost common knowledge. People go, oh, you know, these people are trafficked into it. Before you had told me this a couple years ago, I hadn't heard about it anywhere. I couldn't find coverage on it anywhere. So it was almost like you guys sort of broke this, and now everybody's saying, Hey, these people are trafficked, they're victims.

You see some crackdowns, but I'm curious how many people you think are working in a scam center adjacent to where you live, if you had to guess.

[00:05:46] Nathan Paul Southern: So I think there's this new wave of justification of what's happening where there was an acceptance, like you said. There was, okay, this is happening. There's huge amounts of forced labor happening around the world, and now it's become such a difficult issue to deal with.

But I think the new narrative, and it's often adopted by various embassies that are trying to smooth over relations with certain countries in the region, that actually most of these people come here willingly. I. And then that's just not true. There are people who come here willingly and there's people who very much don't.

The Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani contingent, uh, they're still an area of the world that you can recruit people directly to Cambodia and they don't know the risks. So if you're recruiting someone from Vietnam, then they know not to go to Cambodia. They know that they'd only take a tech job in Thailand and then they would cross 'em over the border in a car.

But with the, um, south Asian people, that's not being spread as well a message. So they're coming straight into the airport and we see basically the Chinese gangsters behind border control, like where they should not be taking their passports directly off them. I tell them, they tell the cops, say, man, these guys are getting trafficked.

I've been pushed back by the cops as they do it. So with these guys, I've spoken to them and they say, yeah, look, we're doing crypto that turns in online gambling scams. They admit it, they say it all. And then I say, well, who can leave? And they're like, for us, it is 50 50. The marketing guys, they're allowed to leave, but the workers are the operators.

They have different little names for them. They can't leave until they earn enough points. And then we see it throughout the city. There's these different levels. There's thousands and thousands of people just in Promp Pen who just fundamentally can't leave and are still tortured with tasers. And then the most horrific ways you can imagine.

And then there's so many people though that then get rescued or leave that have so much shame and this like horrible psychological barrier of what they've been forced to do for two years. So they see themselves as that. So they can't return home to the Philippines or to Uganda or to the Congo 'cause they're worried their family's gonna know what they do.

Then they enter it back into it willingly. But then that still is part of human trafficking because even though they enter willingly, then their freedoms are again removed. So even if you enter into criminality and your passport's taken off you and you're tased, or you're beaten, or you're tortured and you're not allowed to leave because you're not hitting numbers, then you're still forced into it.

So anyone that claims to know the numbers of who's forced and who's not, they're just lying that you would know. But a general estimate of tens and tens of thousands of people in Cambodia alone, and again in Myanmar, and a little bit less in Laos, is a fair representation of full on objective forced labor.

And then there's a lot of gray area within that as well. Wow.

[00:08:11] Lindsey Kennedy: Well, so on each side of our building, I think there's probably about maybe six, seven floors, and I would say there's like maybe a couple of hundred people in each one of those. And then you multiply that across the city and you think how many there are.

Just in some small buildings, like we're not quite entirely sure how many people are squeezed into each room. Sure. But there must be at least hundreds on either side of us because we see so many people arrive every day, and we've never seen anyone leave. If you go to the larger areas, the last couple of weeks we've been doing a bit of a wrecky of some of the major scam hubs around the country that we've talked about before.

At the weekend, we went back to Boca Mountain, which used to be a big tourist attraction in Cambodia. It was quite almost like a religious place for a lot of Cambodian people. And they're building a new casino, which is just basically a massive scam compound quite clearly. You just count the floors sometimes, and if you're basing on an average of six to 10 people in a room, you're like, oh, there's gonna be tens of thousands of people just in that one building.

Wow. And down in Co Kong right now, you're like, oh, you can probably get, we're counting the floors. And we're like, okay, you could probably get maybe 5,000 people in that building. And then you see that they're building 20 of them in a row, and that's just again, one small strip of real estate. So yeah, a couple of years ago, there was an estimate that came out in Cambodia that said about 120,000.

It's probably a lot more than that now.

[00:09:27] Jordan Harbinger: Really? Oh my God. That's a metropolis of just crime.

[00:09:31] Lindsey Kennedy: Yeah. And I know that this number has been contested because there is no real way of figuring this out. It's really accurate. But one of the big anti-spam organizations recently calculated that they think. That around a trillion dollars a year is stolen through scams a trillion dollars.

[00:09:46] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:09:47] Lindsey Kennedy: That is nearly 1% of the world's wealth every year going in through scams. So this scale is just enormous. Yeah.

[00:09:54] Nathan Paul Southern: A generally accepted figure just for the US would be about $50 billion being stolen each year. And I'll be a big underestimate because most people don't report it. But just 50 billion just from the US alone is like a reasonably accepted number of like a minimum.

But to give you a bit of context on what some of these places look like now, okay, we have the dodgy Indian restaurants when they have cell towers that they build on the roof, which is really helpful for us to work out where something's going on. 'cause there's a huge cell tower on top of a small Indian or Chinese restaurant, so that really helps.

But then you go to some of these places and they are full cities. Nothing else is operating pot scan. Lindsay mentioned Coco and one of the few people that have been sanctions on the Cambodia side is a guy called Leon Pat. He was sanctioned last year by the US and by the uk and Lively around the world.

And what he's done is he's went hard on it since. So he owns a bunch of casinos, huge properties, thousands of people. We went back to Hong Kong since his sanctions and he's just started blowing up mountains. He is blowing up mountains everywhere so that he can build more and more scam compounds. And these are like Hilton sized kind of buildings and there's 20 of them.

The Bulker Mountain that Lindsay was saying, being a tourist site, I'd be an idea of that. It's like you drive up in a little scooter and there's monkeys and it's beautiful and there's like a haunted Catholic church where there was a massacre from the K Rouge, but it's still like a tourist spot. And then you go to like the old Boer Palace again, shelled out and stuff with like interesting sea and some shrines and things.

It's covered in mist, so it's really atmospheric anyway, but now you go up and if you look just beyond the mist, you still see all backpackers taking selfies. They don't realize that those 30 buildings behind them and the selfie are scam compounds. They didn't exist two years ago and they're absolutely everywhere.

[00:11:33] Lindsey Kennedy: There's been a huge shift in the last few months. There's been an enormous push towards recruitment from people from East Africa, especially Burundi Rwanda and the DRC. Which coincided with the conflict escalating in that region. It's really depressing because every time you start to see another explosion of war, any kind of conflict or genocide, all of this stuff, this flooding of people into scam centers because they're so easy to recruit because they're desperate,

[00:12:00] Jordan Harbinger: right?

[00:12:01] Lindsey Kennedy: It's like an early warning sign sometimes that you know how bad things are getting when you see. Who's being recruited. And this also means there's a larger francophone, French speaking population here that can target French victims around the world as well.

[00:12:13] Nathan Paul Southern: And because PNO Pen is this hub that's just not being touched, there's been like some crackdowns on time mar border.

But again, they're pretty superficial at best and there's reasons for that we could go into. But 7,000 people have been rescued and there's like maybe 200,000 people there. So it's very much a push. Now you get Chinese private military contractors have taken over the region and more loads, more casinos have opened up than the same thing just further down the border.

But no one is talking about Cambodia. No one's looking at Cambodia. So now you've got this really weird situation where I always call it like a chamber of commerce where organized crime, but we'll sit in a bar. It could be this fine 24 hour one, or it could be in the main like cocktail like district area of M pen where backpackers and expats and middle class Cambodians will all go and have a special martinis and have a little dance.

But at the same time, you start looking around, you realize the nationalities have grown a lot from what they were a few years ago, and now we start talking to people in those bars and they could be from. The Congo, they could be from Russia, Ukraine, they could be from Uganda, they could be from Vietnam, they could be from the Philippines.

And almost so much of the time we start talking and say, so what do you do? Our mates are out with us and we see the eye roll like, ah, come on. We're just trying to have a normal night and some beers and you guys are about to go into a 10 hour harrowing story like with this person's life story. Or some person that's just been rescued from a compound and doesn't wanna go home.

Or it's some really bored Chinese or Japanese gangster tatted up completely with full body tats and like, they just wanna like boast and talk about their life because no one listens to them. And actually gangsters are quite lonely, so they just want to sit there and say like, oh yeah, I work in like it.

Well actually it's crypto actually. I make this actually, I don't like people leave and they just keep talking and talking because no one's listening to them and they're lonely.

[00:13:47] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Look, this sounds like a pretty miserable life, by the way, for people who wanna do a deep dive on this episode 8 33 with.

Both of you where we talked about sourcing cyber slavery and how it all works in a deep dive level. So these gangsters are essentially tricking people into coming to work in these scam centers. They say there's a tech job in Thailand or whatever, then they trick them into coming across the border. They get trapped in these prison fake casino slash call center things where they can't leave and they have to text people and say, hi, this is Sherry.

Is this Don great dinner party last week or whatever, crypto scam. These gangsters, they live there. It seems like a pretty miserable existence, right? Because yes, you're not a cyber slave, but you still work in this prison casino and what you look forward to is going, getting drunk at night and then waking up and doing it all over again.

I mean, those people are also not living a great life if their only outlet is talking to journalists about how they rob people. No offense.

[00:14:43] Lindsey Kennedy: Yeah, and that's the luckiest ones we got talking to someone a few weeks ago, Filipino guy who had been told he had a job in a casino and. I don't think he really realized online gambling is illegal in Cambodian now.

'cause it was legal at the time in the Philippines. And only when he arrived realized he's working for this very dodgy crypto platform that didn't really sink in for a while, that it was scam. And, and a lot of these places they recruit people who you work in marketing and they use marketing language.

It's very kind of war for four Street. You replicate a real business. People feel like they're working for a real business, so they can almost like have a double think until they can't. And so for this guy, it was only really when they did the first Rockpool and said, oh, we're shutting down the crypto platform, and then we start a new one and everyone loses their money.

That he really clicked at, oh, this is just a scam. And then he hated himself, but he couldn't leave. He knew he couldn't leave. They'd made that very clear. And then when he eventually did say, look, I really can't do this anymore. I feel like a terrible person. I want Lee, he was gang raped.

[00:15:40] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God, by the

[00:15:41] Lindsey Kennedy: guards.

And that he continued to gang rape him for a year until he finally found a reason for them to let him go. And so even the threat of violence and the knowledge that it can happen for people is often enough to keep them in line right as well.

[00:15:55] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, of course. Geez. So by the way, the rug pull, for people who don't really understand what this is, this is where they create a fake crypto platform.

They trick you into putting your money in. They make it look like your money's growing, but you can't really take your money out. And then eventually when enough people are onto them or the site starts getting blocked by, who knows, whatever, certain firewalls, or there's enough negative reviews online about how it's a scam, et cetera, they just close it down and they make a new one with new branding, a new URL.

And that's the rug pull where even people who are in the middle of the scam who might think it's working, they just can't log in 'cause it's gone. And that's the end of that.

[00:16:33] Nathan Paul Southern: Just to quickly jump back to what you were saying though, John, about it's a rough life for the perb gangsters and like it depends where you are, right?

Like you can be in one of the war to parts of Myanmar where your movement's really, really restricted. Or you can be. In trumpet. It's okay. There's a lot of people who just live here 'cause it's like a fun, nice place to, but we go into these places usually when they've been cleared out briefly and see what they're like.

And you can see the massive efforts they go to like give the gangsters like a nice happy time. And that usually means the most depressing casino that you can imagine. It's like a bunch of very sad, heavily tattooed Chinese dudes just like smoking and just like gambling away everything that they've just earned upstairs.

And it's in the same room. And then they've got like barbershops, they've got bars, they've got karaoke bars, they've got. Girls and drugs on tap, and you see all of this. And then they can get their Ferrari, they can get their Rolls Royce, and this developing country is absolutely full of these cars, and they can drive up and down in them.

But yeah, eventually it just starts to feel pretty dull. You know, like, why are we doing this? But that's why some of these places now that there's a new place that's really developed near the Vietnam border in Cambodia called Streton. And there it's like these big terrifying scam compounds. But they've also recently built a lovely promenade that goes over the war just looking over Vietnam.

And now you see all the, the gangsters are coming out and their families are moving out. It's like a family posting now. So they're starting to see this as a long term investment, as a new crime type. So they want to get people in who know what they're doing and keep them for longer than six months. So some places are gonna efforts to make this nicer for the criminal syndicates as well.

[00:17:59] Lindsey Kennedy: Certain levels of the syndicates?

[00:18:01] Nathan Paul Southern: Yeah, for certain levels, yeah. The low level people are still getting tortured in horrific conditions. But for the top triads and Yakuza and Russia, Matthew, and whatever, they're getting prominent.

[00:18:10] Lindsey Kennedy: Unfortunately, it's gonna get a lot worse now because Trump's executive order extravaganza canceled funding for pretty much any form of investigation in this part of the world.

Shut down USIP, which was the biggest organization in the world that was actually trying to track and investigate and prevent these groups from growing and from targeting Americans. That organization was, he shut down, RFA and VOA. Two of the only free press newspapers that are funded by the us. And it left in the region the day that it was shut down.

The leaders of Cambodia and China celebrated publicly, and thanks Trump for shutting down the newspapers that had been criticizing them and exposing corruption in their countries, which is great, but also shut down funding for things like any form of support for trafficking victims. There have been safe houses in Pono Pen that we know have been shut down because they partially had American funding and they were shut down overnight.

So now even if you want out of a place, your options are more and more limited and it's just like a massive own goal for the US because in trying to be like, why should we fund the world's problems? We live in a world where you can't escape from the fact that those problems are coming back to bite you.

If you stop trying to stop overseas crime, it's gonna end up harming you in your own country.

[00:19:23] Jordan Harbinger: I was just going to say the counter to this that people are screaming at their iPhone right now is, why should we pay our tax money to help fund to free Filipino trafficking victims or Ugandan trafficking victims trafficked by Chinese gangsters?

Why should the US tax dollar go to that? And the answer is because they're targeting Americans with this and it costs more in losses that way.

[00:19:46] Nathan Paul Southern: Yeah, absolutely. Like I think there's a general acceptance that Trump's very happy to go against the drug trade, right? Like Mexican cartel's an organized crime that way.

Those cartels are very linked up with the same groups here in terms of money laundering now as well. It's very linked. But yeah, by just simply by cutting this stuff down internationally, people don't understand. Then you just open it up to allowing so much more pain on US citizens. Taking your pension fund, taking all of your money, all of your savings, huge capital outflow, which is ending up a lot of the time in China, ends up as a bit of a power for China as well.

And you know, Chinese espionage groups living the power that they're having over this. And North Korea has increasing interest with within this field. And at the same time, you have all these organizations shutting down. You have starlink in SpaceX coming into Cambodia and declaring a priority investment country.

Now. The one thing that has happened in Thailand to Cambodia every now and then. The ties come over to Myanmar, into Cambodia and they bring the cell towers down. Bringing the cell tower down does actually stop a scam compound for days or weeks until you build another one or you move, but you can have starlink receivers doing your internet, then you don't need to worry about anyone bringing them down.

So now we have destroyed the mediums that people are reporting on this. So Americans are gonna know about it less, it's gonna happen more, and then it's gonna be close to impossible to actually stop them if they do start using Musk's, starlink receivers. And when Musk says the reason that they might be interested in Cambodia is the developing country to provide internet.

Internet in Cambodia is fantastic. Most parts of the country, you're gonna be a better connection than we get in a lot of Europe. Definitely in the uk they do not require it.

[00:21:25] Lindsey Kennedy: But also in areas where you don't have the internet, where people are too poor in areas that are underserved by wifi, there is like really good phone coverage with really cheap data.

The people who pay for that can't afford to pay for starlink connection. They can't afford to pay four grand a year when they earn one grand a year. Like that's not gonna happen. The only people who are gonna be buying starlink are gonna be scam centers. That's the only people here.

[00:21:49] Jordan Harbinger: Slave labor and call centers.

No thank you. Slave Labor making the fine products and services that support this show now. That's something I can get behind. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Tonal Fitness is a huge priority in my life. And if it is for you two, I know the struggle of keeping consistent. Finding time to work out when you get a million things going on is tough, but Tonal can help.

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Alright, now back to Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy. It's interesting to mention North Korea because I always thought, how come North Korea is not in on this because I. There's a lot of pressure being put on Cambodia. There's pressure being put on Myanmar. The ties are going in and cutting down the cell towers.

North Korea can just build their own infrastructure, use their own internet infrastructure, or Chinese internet infrastructure, and nobody could ever go in there and rescue people, pressure people write about it. You can't live next to the scam center. I mean, they could create a special economic zone, build a hundred scam centers, and generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the regime.

And I feel bad giving them this idea, but I'm sure they have it already. And it sounds like they're already on the move.

[00:25:37] Lindsey Kennedy: They're making a lot more money, I think, out of selling the technology at the moment. They make a lot of the technology used to scam like the basic platforms, North Korea does, and they sell them mostly.

Yeah, so this is a bit of strange system like so in Japan and Korea, but the Yakus are like, which is like the kind of the largest mafi group in Japan. A huge proportion of the Yakuza are actually ethnic Korean for like historical reasons. Korean people, especially North Korean descent, were treated really badly in Japan, and one of the only sources of support and of Korean language education in Japan for a long time was provided by an organization called the Chong Run, which is a North Korean organization and they're still allowed to operate in Japan.

They provide very pro North Korean language education programs and schooling to a huge number of people in Japan. So a huge number of the Yakuza are ethnic Korean, and they also then spread into South Korea itself, which means you have basically a very powerful crime group, which contains a number of people who are loyal to North Korea, and they've been partnering more with Chinese triads as well.

We see it here all the time as there's more and more collaboration. So that was one link in. But also North Korea has been shown without a doubt now to be using quite a lot of the financial systems owned by scam company owners here who have developed their own banking systems and payment platforms.

They're using those to move money from some of their massive, HES, couple of weeks ago, there was the world's biggest heist when North Korea stole $1.5 billion in one day or something like,

[00:27:06] Nathan Paul Southern: yeah, from Ethereum.

[00:27:08] Lindsey Kennedy: It was a buy based crypto exchange, and they've been moving that money partly through Cambodian scam center owners like financial platform.

That's not in doubt. That's just the fact. Yeah. So like North Korea's very wide into this and it makes sense. Yeah, it's very much in their wheelhouse. So this is something else that we've been trying to screen from the rooftops, is that this industry is. Indirectly helping to fund North Korea as well, or sometimes directly funding North Korea.

[00:27:35] Jordan Harbinger: So we're funding organized crime, but also we're funding states that want to threaten with weapons and war, other countries in the region or even the United States. Yes. That is wild.

[00:27:47] Nathan Paul Southern: That money, because North Korea's very good at cyber attacks. Uh, ransomware and theft probably so much. The scams that we said, they sell a tech for that.

On that theft. The group that they gave it to, we'll just call 'em out, they're called yon. And there are a Cambodian financial platform that's been called the biggest criminal platform in history. So about 60 to $70 billion went for it last year. And we are desperately trying to get it sanctioned by the US government because that is facilitating not only North Korean movement of money, but also probably a predominant amount of US money scams coming out here.

I think in the New York Times actually just recently covered Ype. And interestingly, again, we're not sanctioning and we believe that there is maybe a link between people like Elon Musk having financial interest here that mean that we're not actually protecting, say US citizens if you just wanna make it simple.

And again, I think that kind of Elon Musk link and the Billionaire Link, like I think that is something, what they're doing abroad is not being discussed in the same level what's happening internally. And that's probably what would bring us well into the Congo is talking about those exact same billionaires and their interest there and why there is an enormous conflict right now that nobody is talking about.

But some of the America's top billionaires are getting ready to make an enormous amount of cash and also potentially collaborate with China quietly as well.

[00:28:58] Jordan Harbinger: This is quite wildly off what we had planned to talk about, but so interesting.

[00:29:02] Lindsey Kennedy: Sorry, everything leads back to scams. I'm sorry. It does. I love it.

I'm here

[00:29:06] Jordan Harbinger: for it. That's one reason why I love you guys. Uh, the show you did try to segue before, I didn't bite on it, but I have one last question before we do transition to Congo and Rwanda, which is if the yakus of the Russian mob and the Chinese triads probably among others, are all in the same industry in the same area, do they have conflicts with one another?

Because traditionally it seems like those guys wouldn't all wanna hang out and then do business in the same place.

[00:29:32] Lindsey Kennedy: I have literally walked into a bar in Cambodia and seen a Russian guy, a Ukrainian guy, and a Polish guy who all worked together to develop some of the tech platforms that they sell to Chinese triads to run these scams.

This is what's amazing is that criminal groups don't care about diplomatic ties and if you're making money, you're making money, right? Unless you're super, super nationalistic. If anything, to be honest, one of the really fascinating things about like the scam industry is that the Taiwanese Mafia is massive in this, and one of the reasons they, they managed to become so massive so quickly is because obviously China doesn't recognize Taiwan as a separate state, and they get very upset if other countries deal with the Taiwanese police, but the Taiwanese like senior police, I.

They don't wanna go through China either because they see themselves as a separate state. So what it means is Taiwan gets left out of so many discussions and so much knowledge sharing. So they can't give intelligence to other governments about Taiwanese gangsters moving into their area and starting scam centers because they're not allowed to talk to them directly without going through China.

So for a long time, Taiwan just got bigger and bigger, and these Taiwanese gangsters don't mind working with the gangsters from FJA on the Chinese mainland. They're quite happy to do that, but it's just they're governments that won't talk to each other. So often when there's like problems between governments, it actually helps these different groups to forge connections.

[00:30:58] Jordan Harbinger: So the Taiwanese government is not recognized by China and the Chinese government, and of course Taiwan, depending on their relations at the moment, usually not talking to Beijing either. So the Taiwanese mafia can grow and grow. And if let's say Cambodia says, Hey, we've got this problem with the Taiwanese Mafia, they can tell Taiwan, but Taiwan's not gonna turn around and tell China.

China's not gonna turn around and share with Taiwan. So basically, these groups have this information, black hole or this giant firewall, and they can just take advantage of that by operating with impunity.

[00:31:28] Lindsey Kennedy: I've been told by people in the know of this that sometimes when Taiwanese senior police actually want to go and talk to their colleagues in other countries and have like proper sit down meetings to talk about the threat, they have to come in on like tourist visas and meet secretly and they can't just go and have a proper meeting because that would piss off China so much that it would damage that country's diplomatic relations.

So this is how stupid the situation is, that it's all just vanity.

[00:31:55] Nathan Paul Southern: There's also like at a much bigger level, it is still usually the Chinese gangs that are the bosses of this. So if they collaborate with other groups, they are still usually the heads, not always, but predominantly. And most of those Chinese criminal bosses have some kind of relationship going back to Beijing.

And that may have been when Xi Jinping, that is big cracked down on corruption. And a lot of it was like a soft word to some of these big gangsters saying, listen, you can continue what you're doing and we're not gonna throw you in jail, but stop bringing it through China. So that may be stop peddling meth or guns through China, or don't do scams for whatever illegal activity.

So they went places that you would be accepted. So they go to Cambodia. But what they do is they can come in, come these nationalistic gangsters, the views of the Chinese Communist Party. Abroad, they start business networks where they push, like the one China policy where they promote belt and road initiative ideas.

And then a lot of these guys have such weird, convoluted relationships to the state. Sometimes they're wanted by them, sometimes they're not with China, that essentially they can act as almost as agents of the Chinese state by exerting influence when they need. So by Chinese organized crime groups. Being the top dogs across Asia and now increasingly getting involved in Latin America as well as the money laundering groups and also moving fentanyl, that creates an enormous amount of, is it soft or is it hard?

It's some kind of power for China, and that's something that as well as like a, a direct threat to the United States national security interest. But it's a hard thing to explain. These guys like Jwe who owns the Kings Romans Golden Triangle, special economics, and he's got these weird relationships with the Chinese governments.

Several people here like Dongo Chang and Cambodia, the Prince Group organization here, they all have these back and forth weird relationships with China. And the worry is that actually they're semi acting as agents of espionage, the Chinese state, which is allowing them to also do their big mafia stuff.

So they make a bunch of money and China reigns 'em in when they want, and when they want to do a little bit of pushing influence on the government, China doesn't need to do that direct. They've got guys with tattoos and guns that they can do it in these countries and step

[00:33:52] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. It's like a proxy organized crime group.

That's really interesting man. We could talk about this for hours. I remember King's Romans Casino, we talked about this a long time ago, and I did an episode on wildlife trafficking where that casino made a cameo. Our guest on episode 5 45, Rachel New, she went undercover there and was seeing people ordering, I don't know, like bear paws and pangolins and stuff at Kings Romans Casino.

I can't imagine being around all that. Alright, let's transition to the DRC. So Congo and Rwanda. Lindsay, you mentioned that these are connected because the conflict in the Congo slash Rwanda is creating more refugees and some of those refugees end up getting trafficked to scam centers in Cambodia or wherever, Burma, Myanmar, whatever.

So let's start from the top, because we haven't covered Congo at all on this show or really Rwanda on the show. What is the latest with this? Because I know that those two countries, they sort of border each other. Rwanda's invaded Congo a couple of times. I don't actually know why. What's the overview of this?

[00:34:55] Lindsey Kennedy: So we were there just over a year ago. We actually went for two reasons. First of all, because we were quite curious to see whether or not there had been French speaking go centers in that region, which it turned out that we didn't really find much evidence about the time. Turns out they were being said over this way instead.

But what the other thing we were looking at is, this is probably not as familiar to this is from outside the uk, but the UK developed this incredibly controversial refugee resettlement plan called the Rwanda, the Rwanda Refugee Plan. And the idea was that the UK was gonna start sending all of its refugees to Rwanda for processing, which meant that it had to announce that Rwanda was a safe country and our government had to change like all of its own advice on Rwanda and its own policy on torture and prisons and media freedom and all this stuff.

I had to play it all down to say that Rwanda was a safe country. It was, the whole thing was ridiculous.

[00:35:46] Jordan Harbinger: Let me pause you for a second. So refugees that are going to the uk, were going to be sent to Rwanda for processing.

[00:35:54] Lindsey Kennedy: Yes, that was the plan. So,

[00:35:55] Nathan Paul Southern: wow. Yeah, so it was essentially modeled after the Australian idea of offshore refugee resettlement.

So anyone who they say came here illegally, but that's not a thing. If you arrive in your acclaim island, there's no other legal way to do it unless you're from like two countries. So the idea was that they started saying the Rwanda is a safe country. There's always been a UK government kind of closeness to Kagame in Rwanda after the genocides.

So they set up this deal. They said it was a super safe place to be. They could send refugees there and there wouldn't be a problem. The home secretary at the time, she went out once and seen this lovely housing development in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and said, look how lovely this is. This is delightful.

I want the name of the interior decorator, but the only journalists allowed to go were from these kind of selected. Government friendly, right wing rags, GB news, telegraph, daily mail. So me, Lindsay, thought we want to go out and actually understand this refugee policy from the perspective of what's happening on the ground in Rwanda.

I.

[00:36:54] Lindsey Kennedy: So, yeah, the, the big thing for us was there'd been lots of argument about the ethics of it, like the morality of it. But we were like, wherever you land on whether it's ethical, we're like, where has the money gone? Because by this point, the UK had sent about a quarter of a billion pounds to, and, and not a single person had been resettled, and there was no sign of where the money had gone.

And the money just kept being sent and kept being sent. And everyone was incredibly cagey about where their actual money was going. So we were like, okay, we wanna go there and we wanna see where this money is being spent. And the only clue that anyone had were that these homes had been built. Called Weezer where the home secretary gave this speech.

So we started there and we went to Weezer. We arrived at the same time as a couple of very nice middle class Rwandan families who were looking for a start to home. And it became very apparent very quickly that this was a housing development for start to homes for middle class families. And we were so confused and they were showing us around and we just said, I'm a little bit confused because we are from the UK and we were told that this development was gonna be homes for resettled refugees.

And the guy just went, oh my God. Like that woman, she just turned up here. They were having like a kind of like passing out ceremony for people who'd finished this construction training thing. And she rocked up as if it was, she was gonna be there for that. And then just started giving a speech.

Apparently, this is what he told us about how the UK had funded this for refugees. And she completely made it up. Completely made it up. And it was reported on by Friendly Press who'd gone with her as if it was true. And it was a complete fast, no money from the UK government had ever gone to this. They eventually admitted that no money from the UK government had ever gone to this.

Then we're like, okay, well where did the money go? Where did the money go? It wouldn't of cost anything like that kind of money to build places for refugees to be held. It wouldn't have cost anything like that. Money to process people. The UK was already gonna have to pay for all the flights for people.

We were like, where is all this money gone? Then we were told that there was a special fund that would be administered by Rwanda for development. That's where the money went. So we were like, can you give us one example? We asked so many people, can you give us one example, one single example of one project that has been paid for out of this, and no one could give us a single example.

[00:39:02] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:39:03] Lindsey Kennedy: Then we basically looked at the timeline and we realized that the M 20 threes, which is an incredibly brutal militia bin Rwanda act, it initially began years and years ago. In around 2013, it was sanctioned by most of the world. It was conducting horrific massacre in the Congo. The origins of it are that following the genocide in Rwanda, some of the people who had orchestrated that genocide.

Fled to the Congo. This group initially said that its purpose was to hunt down people who had been responsible for murders in Rwanda of the Hutu majority who'd fled to Rwanda and kill them. But it became very quickly about most people I. Left in refugee camps in the Congo. Now who are of Hutu origin are children.

So they certainly weren't alive at the time of the Randan genocide. So it very quickly became that the N 23 was sweeping through mostly refugee camps and areas where they were very valuable minds clearing everybody out, committing mass rape as a weapon of war, murdering indiscriminately, and then taking over mines because Rwanda doesn't really have any of its own like cuan mines and stuff.

[00:40:09] Jordan Harbinger: Lemme stop you for a second. 'cause I don't think people know what Coltan is or necessarily about this history. So for people who are not as familiar with the Randan genocide, so tell us briefly what that is. And then M 23, this militia decides to pursue the perpetrators of this into the Congo, but that's not exactly what worked out.

[00:40:29] Lindsey Kennedy: Yeah, so very briefly, so Rwanda borders the DRC, right, the Congo. And in the mid nineties there was a really horrific genocide where the majority ethnic group, the Hutu massacred the minority group, the tootsies. It was really horrific. Some of the people who'd been involved in committing mass murders against the tootsies fled across the border into the Congo.

So at the time, some Randan soldiers followed across and tried to hunt these people down. And then this group called the M 23 formed quite a few years later. One of their purposes, they said was to hunt down people who had never faced just what they did in Rwanda. The problem was that very quickly it became clear that this group was not pursuing any kind of moral objective.

It was storming refugee camps of ethnic hutu, people who'd been displaced by war, most of whom were kids, and had nothing to do with the genocide. And just massacring people and trying to clear them out of areas where they were valuable. Mines basically, Rwanda is a very tiny country. It recently announced that it has all these mines full of very valuable things like Coal Town and Cobalt.

Basically things that go in electric cars and batteries, things that the whole world is after. Right now it doesn't have any of these. There's absolutely no indication that it genuinely has any of these things, but what it has been doing for about 20 years is stealing a lot of this stuff from mines on the other side of the border in the DRC in Congo, bringing them across the border and then saying they come from Rwanda.

So the M 20 threes were instrumental.

[00:42:02] Jordan Harbinger: Now celebrate the fact that you are not imprisoned in a North Korean scam call center, run by Chinese triads by treating yourself to some of the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored in part by Fly Kit.

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Companies like Apple and Tesla can go and say, look, we got conflict free minerals. They're from Rwanda. But really it's mined by slave kids in the DRC that are being forced by the M 23 militia to deliver this stuff or whatever, and mine it.

[00:46:19] Lindsey Kennedy: Yeah. Or it's all been cleared off that the people who live there have all been murdered so that the M 20 threes can take over and steal it.

[00:46:26] Nathan Paul Southern: Oh my God. I give a special shout to Shar Cara and his book Cobalt Red. Which really dives into the mineral exploitation and the DRC and the huge amount of child slavery is essentially happening.

[00:46:37] Jordan Harbinger: Yes, episode 8 0 7 of this show with Sidharth Cara, if you wanna a deep dive on the blood of the Congo Powers our lives.

[00:46:45] Lindsey Kennedy: He's an amazing guy.

[00:46:46] Nathan Paul Southern: Yeah, and essentially like he'll explain it very well, but there is no such thing as ethical cobalt. The cobalt that we need inside lithium batteries to recharge. There's no such thing. Some estimates say up to 95% of it comes from the DRC, but even the stuff that doesn't, there's some in Australia, there's some in Kazakhstan.

It's mostly all owned by Chinese companies that then refine it all together. So there's no possible way for companies like Tesla or Apple to claim there's no such thing as ethical cobalt. So what's been happening for the last 10 years, quite quietly, is that Rwanda has been smuggling this over the river.

And boats are dark. They might have small amounts of mining of some materials, but cobalt tan gold is coming over from the DRC and then they're claiming it. So this happens at the same time that the UK really cleans up their image by saying that they're a safe country to do that. And at the same time that the European Union offers them 900 million euros and develop their own mining processes to extract these.

So everyone gets to pretend that it's from a safe country. That's not good chilled labor. That isn't war minerals. By actual fact, it is. We're stealing it, and Apple knows that. Tesla knows that. Everyone knows that.

[00:47:49] Lindsey Kennedy: What was so downing about? This is the M 23. They're essentially, they're terrorist militia.

And back in 2013, Rwanda at that time was enormously reliant on International eight to survive. It was rebuilding after a horrific genocide in 2013, pretty much the whole world said Rwanda denied and still occasionally does. It flips back and forward whether or not it is the M 23 or bax M 22. It pretty obviously is.

Back in 2013, the UK was one of the countries that said, we are gonna cut off all aid to you if the M 20 threes don't go away. Basically. And the M 20 threes completely disappeared. Everyone thought that they had gone

[00:48:25] Jordan Harbinger: disbanded overnight, basically,

[00:48:27] Lindsey Kennedy: pretty much overnight. The minute that the UK said

[00:48:29] Jordan Harbinger: they stopped taking new territory.

Wow.

[00:48:31] Lindsey Kennedy: Yeah. But they also went really quiet. No one heard them. And then the UK government. Internally warned itself like some departments of the UK government warned the leadership at the time in the UK that if they started working with Rwanda, if they started saying Rwanda was a safe country, that it would put them in a dangerous position because they would then be expected to say face, basically deny atrocities, and that there were risks that if Rwanda started doing stuff like this again, that they would have to take Rwanda aside.

Otherwise it would be too embarrassing, basically. So we knew this as a country that this was a risk. What we realized when we got to Rwanda and we started talking to people and we started matching up the timeline, is that at the exact moment when the UK signed this deal with Rwanda saying, we are gonna send you a ton of money to start this refugee resettlement program is the exact moment when the M 23 suddenly reappear after 10 years of silence and start massacring people again, and they shot down like a UN helicopter.

They started taking territory, and then the UK just keeps giving them money and giving them money and giving them money, giving Rwanda money, and all of a sudden the M 23 has money. And it was pretty obvious that's where all the money was going. It wasn't going anywhere else. And when we asked the UK government about this, they freaked out.

They were very careful not to actually deny anything, but they freaked out completely. When we asked the Congolese embassy in London, if they were sending money that was meant to be for the resettlement program to the M 20 threes, their apply was basically, they deserve it. Wow. Like basically the Congolese deserve it.

They didn't deny it either. So by this point, we were like, it's pretty obvious that this money is being used to conduct a genocide apart from the fact that this is obviously horrific. One of the great ironies of the situation is at that time, I think we had a backlog of about 90,000 refugees in the UK that needed processing.

Within six months, the M 23 had created a million internally displaced refugees in the DRC. Meanwhile, as we only found out when we went to Rwanda, inside Rwanda itself, they were already about 700,000 refugees still from the last war with the Congo, who had never been able to leave refugee camps and never been processed.

And they had been told by the government, the only hope of them ever leaving these internal refugee camps in Rwanda is if another country like the UK took them. And when you looked at the fine print of this ridiculous deal the UK made with Rwanda, it actually said that they could also send Congolese refugees to the uk.

Now, that entire plan was scrapped when we had a change of government. But had it gone through, in theory, I. In return for us, giving them a quarter of a billion in theory for this stupid refugee program. They never took one refugee. They could have, in theory, sent us over a million refugees that they had created using our money.

So even outside of the horrors of the war and the genocide that they were committing, the whole thing was just absolutely insane. So

[00:51:24] Nathan Paul Southern: that's what then took us from Rolanda, um, around the region. And we started looking at some other groups as well that the Rolands were funding. There's also a group called The Red to Barra that kind of operates in the DRC, but also watches the tax in Rindi.

So we went to Verdi, DRC border. We actually kinda got briefly arrested there and detained by the military and they accuses of being spies. But we got out of that and then we got to DRC and then we just seen the destruction of this conflict and it was horrific. But one of the things that really hit quite quickly was opposite of Airbnb.

There's not many places to stay in Goma.

[00:51:54] Lindsey Kennedy: There was one Airbnb.

[00:51:55] Nathan Paul Southern: One Airbnb. Oh my god. That's funny.

[00:51:57] Lindsey Kennedy: We were right it

[00:51:58] Nathan Paul Southern: in, uh, north Kiva, the most war-torn empire of the Congo. Yeah. It was opposite what was seen to be an Eastern European mercenary base. So we just see all these big white dudes walking around with Valla, AK 40 sevens, and one of them didn't have a Labrador.

[00:52:10] Jordan Harbinger: Wait, did you say Eastern European mercenary base? Yeah, exactly. What outfit is this? Is this like Wagner or something else?

[00:52:18] Lindsey Kennedy: We thought they were Wagner and everyone kept calling them the Russians. Every kind of like white foreigner, especially of Eastern European descent, like in in the Congo. Everyone just calls them the Russians,

[00:52:27] Jordan Harbinger: whether they're Russian or not.

[00:52:28] Lindsey Kennedy: So for a while we thought they were Russian.

[00:52:30] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, gotcha.

[00:52:31] Lindsey Kennedy: And then we realized quite quickly that actually they weren't Russian. They were mostly either a French Bulgarian outfit that mostly highest Bulgarian, or this Romanian guy called Russia ra. Who is very good friends with Eric Prince, who founded Blackwater famously, and he was in the French Legion.

So this is another mad European thing, right? The French Legion is basically almost like a mercenary force in France that anyone in the world can join so long as they can pass the physical, so you can go and basically fight.

[00:53:02] Jordan Harbinger: You're talking about the French Foreign Legion, right?

[00:53:04] Lindsey Kennedy: Yeah, it's absolutely insane situation.

This particular group of mercenaries, they're mostly Romanian and they claim to have been the kind of Romanian contingent of the French Foreign Legion, and that's how they started. So you had the Romanians there, you had the Bulgarians there, and then you also had Eric Prince hanging around and the UN accused him at the time we were there, of having actively tried to stir up misinformation about the UN peacekeeping forces to try and create riots that would get the UN kicked out so that he could sell his mercenary forces in in the set.

[00:53:37] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:53:37] Lindsey Kennedy: So when we were there over a year ago, we started to get really concerned that, 'cause also a lot of these guys also do have links to, but the Congo at the time had almost. Signed a bunch of contracts with the Russians because they were running out of options to push back the M 20 threes, but they really didn't wanna burn all their bridges with the US and with Europe.

And so when the full scale invasion of Ukraine began and sanctions started being put on Russian banks and stuff, they agreed basically to pull back and not use Russian help. But then they were suck because no one else was really helping them. So they're using all these different small mery groups. At the time we were like really concerned that this was gonna turn into a kind of proxy war between countries.

Exactly. After the fall of Kiva and Goma.

[00:54:22] Nathan Paul Southern: Yeah. You know, essentially there was very much a reason that these guys were reaching out to various mercenary groups. The Congolese forces couldn't fight what was essentially a very well financed, very well armed Rwanda army, which is essentially what M 20 feet was.

They couldn't fight it. They had to reach out for help. And these mercenary groups from Eastern Europe were happy to fill in and they were necessary. The MP keeping forces were leaving. Congolese forces couldn't fight them. So they were needed. And like when they said, they held back, I'm going Sudan, Central African Republic, and the say Hill countries have with signing over field control to Wagner because he didn't wanna lose that US relationship.

But then Randan M 23 got stronger and about six weeks ago from now, they took North Kivu. This is a part of the Congo. Yeah, so this is the kind of most war torn part of the DRC where M 23 have been operating for decades, but just in like the last year of offensive, they've now managed to take most of that province and that province now has access to a lot of the world's cobalt golds.

Also 10 various other minerals and now they don't need to sneak over the border for ferries and on the river. Now they can actually use the capsule city of the region, Goma, and they can bring it right over the land border into Rwanda. Now what this is really reminiscent of, and it's fascinating to know one's talking about it, is it's essentially exactly what happened with Russia and Ukraine in 2014 when Russia denied they were actually invading Ukraine at the Eastern part's.

Exactly what Rwanda said, and that kinda lies has continued, but everyone knows it's really them and sometimes they do accept responsibility. Now they've taken most of that problem. They've actually framed take much, much more of the country as well. And since then things have gotten incredibly more complicated.

So actually the Rwandans ended up rounding up all of these Eastern European mercenaries and there's some fascinating photos of these Romanians getting handcuffed and then sent over the border to Rwanda where they were sent back. And now the DRC government, instead of reaching out to mercenary groups like the smaller ones we're discussing, they're directly reaching out to Trump.

They're directly saying to Trump. Please come in. We will give you a deal like you want in Ukraine. We'll give you 50% of our minerals, which will work about $27 trillion if you can offer security guarantees for the Congo. And then since then, Donald Trump seems to be in consideration with it. Eric Prince has met with the president of the Congo 'cause it's likely that Trump won't want to put his own trips on the grounds, but could offer private military contractors.

Sure. And starlink, Elon Musk have already been in the DRC to discuss potential expansion there. At the same time, bill Gates and Jeff Bezos backed new AI company has already started to make arrangements in one part of the DRC to divvy up control of mines between them and the Chinese. So you essentially have this new great game, colonialism of Africa, but the actually the Chinese and the Americans are quietly collaborating and just billions will be extracted from the drc.

That's what I was gonna say

[00:57:15] Jordan Harbinger: is I'm not a very, like everything goes back to colonialism kind of guy, but this is almost new colonialism where Oh yeah, you've got a randan backed invasion that's funded by the uk. Whether the UK meant to do that or not, it sounds like they did. And then the US maybe hiring Blackwater or whatever it's called, academy, whatever they, I don't know what the name is this week.

Eric Prince's, FSG, private military contractors to go into the Congo to protect these mines alongside the Chinese who are going to then exploit the crap outta these resources in exchange for maybe pushing back the, not Russians or sometimes Russians, but sometimes French foreign legion, but sometimes whatever private military contractor is floating around in there.

So it's almost like a proxy colonialist war in the making to get these elements so that we can make AI chips basically. It

[00:58:09] Nathan Paul Southern: really, really is, and the scariest thing about it is it's not geopolitical, it's company driven. It's almost like we're talking about earlier with criminal groups dividing up countries and taking the resources.

This is essentially that. But with billion dollar companies like Eric Prince, actually since he left, Blackwater has worked directly with the Chinese government and private military contracting groups, various ones. He still have very, very close ally Trump. And what he's done is he has facilitated the safe movement of Chinese mining companies through Africa.

Now you have a situation where it may be Ari Prince is organizing security for the Congo in partnership, possibly with Chinese companies, where Elon Musk, who absolutely desperately needs the supplies inside the DRC,

[00:58:53] Lindsey Kennedy: Elon Musk, was also named directly like a spokesperson for the Congolese government when they basically sent a begging letter to the US saying, please just help us push LA 23 out.

We will, at this point, hand over access to our mines, if you will do that and help protect them. They mentioned Tesla by name as one of the companies that would benefit from this.

[00:59:14] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. Because it's a massive US company. Yeah. I'm sure when they wrote to the Chinese, they probably mentioned BYD and other Chinese companies.

Wow.

[00:59:22] Lindsey Kennedy: Exactly. But I guess what I mean is that there's no pretense anymore, that it's not just a commercial interaction.

[00:59:29] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I see. Yeah. There's no like freer people. It's, Hey, do you want some of these minerals fight these other guys who want our minerals? Oh yeah, there's people there too, but whatever.

[00:59:37] Lindsey Kennedy: Yeah, exactly.

[00:59:38] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:59:39] Lindsey Kennedy: Eric Prince, historically, FSG and FRG are slightly different. FSG was like fronted deficit group, which apparent he officially stepped down from a few years ago that was majority owned by the Chinese government. So he was basically working for the Chinese government for many years and he has advocated at various times and got in trouble for it for the US to collaborate with Wagner in Africa.

As a meme force basically to allow him to collaborate with Russian forces. He has a lot of connections with Russian forces. Musk meanwhile, obviously has a lot of connections with China, especially when it comes to production. And so what this looks like to us is that you have three empires that are obsessed with expanding their size of their empires.

Russia is literally trying to expand its territory. China's obsessed with expanding. The US has now started saying things like they're gonna invade Greenland and whatever. They're actually literally talking about expanding whether or not they're gonna do it. And you have these three neo-colonial empires basically saying, how do we carve up Africa between us?

It's like 1850 all over again. It's like, how do we carve this up between us and figure out who owns what?

[01:00:45] Nathan Paul Southern: This is so crazy and, and I think we get lost in so much of the bluster and there's so much happening domestically in the US that I understand why people can't jump into the Congo and see it is really important, but I think nowhere else represents the real dangers of what's actually happening.

Whatever your politics are, like take them away out of the US and just there is a very strong group of billionaires with different companies. They're not even making efforts to step back from anymore. Even if they're involved to the government and they are stripping apart the minerals of the DRC, like I.

This is like Leopold, east India trading company. It's indistinguishable from colonialism and I like you. I don't bring everything back to that, but this one is really hard to, the difference here is they're not talking about something that they want in the headlines. We're not talking about, we are pushing back the Russians or pushing back the Chinese, talking about quiet deals being made by billionaires who are in the government.

They're having a state department who's trying to play a bigger game of security. Actually, this is such a direct threat to the security and because it is handing billions to um, to already very powerful people, but actually divvying up these places really quietly. And like when you've also got Bill Gates and Bezos is coming outta nowhere facilitating deals for the Chinese Australians.

The Congolese can divvy up one province between them that is OG colonialism.

[01:02:04] Jordan Harbinger: It is absolutely just corporate oligarchy level colonialism. It's crazy. We are now no better or soon to be no better than Wagner in Africa, just killing people, taking over gold mines and shipping the gold back to Russia for sale to fund the war in Ukraine.

I mean, this is like the same thing, and I'm not a conspiracy guy or one of these sort of, oh my gosh. The next step is this crazy World War iii, but what's almost certainly going to happen is some sort of conflict with China and that conflict is gonna involve a lot of AI and drone warfare, and those types of things are gonna require the resources in these areas.

So we're gonna have to then pay these same. Companies and people, trillions, whatever of dollars over a certain period of time to fight each other. Not only for those resources, but so that the nation states themselves that these people are from can control more of them. So it's, it's literally like a chess piece or a, at least one of the board of chess being played that will lead up to whatever conflict we have with China.

It's so wild to think about that this oligarch game is going to essentially be a part of World War III if it

[01:03:07] Nathan Paul Southern: happens. It's almost like the shortsightedness of it all from the US because whenever this term ends, possibly in three years, possibly not. Whatever happens in the world. Like Musk, few other guys, Eric Prince, they're walking away with these enormous contracts.

Those contracts don't go anywhere, right? But the US is in a state where it is not planned. It's not planned. Its security. It's not planned for its economy. Whereas China's making plans for decades and decades and so is Russia. And we're seeing this new kind of game across the world. It's not just in Congo, a lesser extent in Myanmar where Chinese and Russians are cooperating, and the US is starting to become weirdly interested there as well, but not to compete against them.

And also in Ukraine. I mean, we were there last year and we never quite imagined this would be what we'd be talking about, but this divvying up of resources between the Russians and the Americans. And again, you just see these billion dollar companies that are making these deals. And then yeah, you're right.

What happens when the next regime comes in? The next American president, if they're on the other side, if they aren't gearing up for a conflict, do they trust the Elon Musks and the Eric Princes to be loyal

[01:04:10] Jordan Harbinger: to the us? We don't have a choice anymore. 'cause these oligarchs and these companies now control the government.

And even if they don't control the guy who's in power at the time, they are gonna have the contracts and they're gonna have the resources. We really don't have a choice. What are we gonna do? Say we decided we don't need rechargeable batteries anymore. We don't have a choice anymore.

[01:04:28] Lindsey Kennedy: This is the thing as well.

We mentioned before about the kind of shockwaves that a lot of like cuts to aid have had in this part of the world. Right? And one of the reasons that was such a shock is for a lot of people is that they had literal contracts. They had contracts that had been signed to say certain development projects would happen to have certain other people be employed for a certain amount of time.

The fact that the US government could just tear up a contract. Say, actually we decided not to honor. It was a real shock to a lot of people and it's made a lot of countries rethink whether or not they could work with the American government. Because if you could just have someone new come in in four years and tear up a contract, you can't work with them.

Russia and China, I mean Russia's its own thing, but like China might give you a really bad deal. China might tell you that you have to pay back a loan with insanely high rates, or you lose your port or you lose like your railways or whatever. But you still know what the terms and conditions are when you do it.

So at least they are consistent. And this is what's scary about this situation is that Russia and China have been doing this a long time. They are autocratic states that are in control and they have a long-term plan. So they are not going to change in any fundamental way in the next 10, 20 years. The US might be a different country in a few years.

No one knows. So the people who are making these agreements are probably going to be more likely to make them with oligarchs who are going to consistently be selfish in 10 years time and have the same goals because they are at least consistent, right? So that's not good for anyone because you can't reign them back in.

So it's not like the US is becoming stronger. It's like a handful of oligarchs in the US are gonna become stronger and that will end up superseding any form of democracy in the us. Like it's like you're basically just putting them in the same club as a bunch of autocrats. This all sounds insane to say, but that is what's happening

[01:06:08] Jordan Harbinger: a little bit, but it's actually what's happening.

Yeah, I was just gonna say something like, it does sound like we're nuts. And if you're new to the show and you're like, oh God, this Jordan Guy, he's off the deep end, man, I thought this guy was reasonable. Look at all this crap that he's letting these people sprout on the show. But you're right. It's like this is actually what is happening now.

This is not weird speculation. This is the current status.

[01:06:28] Nathan Paul Southern: I think that it is very irritating that the only way that possibly we're going to get more attention for what's happening in the Congo is by bringing it back to the colonial powers that are devastating it. And that's always been the way, right?

Like for centuries, this place has been absolutely decimated and it should be one of the richest countries in the world. I. Amazing work against Star Car has done on on our phones and on our cars. Unfortunately, we've not made an impact. We've not made a change on what we do for the likes of Congolese children.

They're are forced into the most horrific conditions. So again, the number one thing here is that conflict is tearing these people apart. For our interest in the West thing, that might make people care and just look a little bit beyond the domestic politics in the us. Like just get out of that bubble of Trump's signed the new mad executive order, or he renamed something, and we're gonna debate that and then we're gonna bring it back to some.

Culture war thing that we're all tied up in. Look a little bit beyond it and actually realize that there is nothing right now that suggests the Trump administration is interested in the security, stability and long-term economic progress of the United States. And in fact, everything points to being a clear cracy.

It points more to Russia than to any vision or idea of what United States is apparently supposed to be. And that's like the real warning here is we're handing it to billionaire Kleptocrats who have no interest in the security and stability of the United States. And we can say whether that's in the Congo or whether that's not sanctioning grips in Cambodia because you wanna set up starlink and have their own life geopolitical balance with China, or just make money for El Musk.

The issue is that oligarchs are running the most powerful country and the most powerful military in the world, and we're missing that.

[01:08:05] Jordan Harbinger: That is a lot of people share that view. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. This is fascinating. Definitely took like several left turns from what we had originally planted talking about, but I always find that super interesting and I know you're doing this live.

People are probably like, where the hell is this from? Lindsay's in a dark cage somewhere and you're adjacent to a trafficking hub at a 24 hour bar that's open at whatever hour it is now with seemingly a shitload of traffic and customers

[01:08:30] Lindsey Kennedy: hot past 1:00 AM

[01:08:32] Jordan Harbinger: SS busy. So if you ever wanna go to a place where your insomnia is not a problem, non pen seems like the place to go because you just walk outside at 3:00 AM and everything is open.

You

[01:08:42] Lindsey Kennedy: can always get a fried rice any time of night, all day.

[01:08:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Jet lag doesn't matter. Just work from 11:00 PM or whatever until five o'clock in the morning and it's no different. It's just a little bit darker outside. I. Thanks so much guys for doing this. I know it's a weird time. Cheers, Jordan. Thanks man.

[01:08:58] Lindsey Kennedy: Thanks so much, Jordan.

[01:09:01] Jordan Harbinger: Here's a preview with the 26th National Security Advisor, general HR McMaster. On the greatest threats to the United States

[01:09:09] JHS Clip: War is this continuous interaction of opposites, right? You and maybe multiple enemies and adversaries inside of a complex environment. You have to understand strategic empathy to try to view these complex competitions.

From the perspective of the other, do

[01:09:26] Jordan Harbinger: you think our divisions domestically right now are one of the greatest threats to our national security?

[01:09:30] JHS Clip: Absolutely, Jordan. They are. And you know, our average person is doing everything they can to exploit them. I mean, Russia's masterful at this. When we were attacked on nine 11, you know, Al-Qaeda.

Didn't target Democrats or Republicans. Right? Right. They targeted Americans. And I think it's time to really demand real reforms. You know? And, and if teachers unions are, are an obstacle, we've gotta tell 'em, Hey, you can't strike reform anymore and we need to demand it. The fact that we're driven apart from each other based on these divisions in our society, what social media is doing to us by driving us apart with these algorithms to show you just more and more extreme information that based on your predilections, the fact that, you know, if you are of one political persuasion, you watch one TV network and somebody of a different political persuasion watches a different one, many

[01:10:16] Jordan Harbinger: Republican senators,

[01:10:17] JHS Clip: you're creating two different realities.

We're doing this to ourselves, Jordan, we gotta stop. You know, we gotta stop it. So let's think about, let's work together to make our republic better every day. And there are some who don't want to do that. They think that, hey, you can't even empathize. You're not even allowed to empathize. It's a real tragedy

[01:10:34] Jordan Harbinger: for more including general hr, McMaster's thoughts on immigration and climate change.

Check out episode four 10 on the Jordan Harbinger Show. All things Nathan and Lindsay will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Thanks to Nathan and Lindsay for coming back on the show, especially at this weird hour from a bar near a scam call center. It's actually kind of dangerous for them to do this stuff 'cause the internet that they need is in a public ish place and they're talking about criminals who literally live and work right next to them.

So it's a little bit dodgy sometimes for them to even show up and do these shows. So props to them for doing this for us. All things Nathan and Lindsay will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

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