Joe Rogan - He Was Kidnapped By Somali Pirates!!

boom and we're live so just to give everybody a good way to start this you have a book the book is called the desert in 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 where are 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 so I went to Somalia in the first place to write a book a very different book about Somali pirates right and I so I'm a journalist I was working in Berlin at the time and I had followed the very long trial of ten Somali pirates in Germany 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 and all sorts of ways that I thought other writers weren't getting to and I had met another journalist a documentary maker named Ashwin Ramon who also wanted to go to Somalia for his own project and so we talked about going for a long time and by the end of 2011 in the middle of the trial we all our plans came together and we wound up going in January of 2012 and we had about ten days of good research 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 and on the tenth day Ashwin flew off to Mogadishu and I went with him to the airport we saw him off and it was on the way back from the airport that truck was waiting for our car and the truck which is actually a technical so a battle wagon with a cannon in the back stopped us aim 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 oh yeah no it was about money and I think they were hoping for both of us by the way 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 yeah but for well so the first thing they asked for me was 20 million dollars but that was after the first week so that I went for a week without having a phone call home and in that period seals rescued two other hostages from another part of central Somalia including Jessica Buchanan an American and I think nine Somali guards died in that raid and they had some clan relationships as 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 in held held more importantly held onto 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 really negotiating so for some background for people that are unfamiliar with the situation in Somalia Somalia if correct me if I'm wrong that area was traditionally fishermen and yeah that's wrong it's Roque so that's actually the point to the book that's actually one level of the title the desert in the sea so that's a you you get the idea from the things that Somali pirates like to say oh look that they're just frustrated fishermen that's only part of the story and so that's a that's a very important premise in the they they there are you know fishing communities on the coast and they're being hard-hit definitely by illegal ships that come in just to just steal the fish you know but that's a problem up and down Africa and because of that problem once Somalia had no government there was no Navy Navy to defend the coastline local sort of clan leaders would send out militia boats with militiamen and hold fishing boats for you know $50,000 ransoms over 24-hour periods you know really nothing very much and they called 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 hear about it when they graduated to capturing cargo ships what I heard was that there was illegal dumping there wasn't just fish also mmm yeah yeah and that they initially called themselves the People's Coast Guard of Somalia or the voluntary Coast Guard yeah one or two pirate gangs tried to call themselves that and you know they had a point there was no one else patrolling the coast but that wasn't really what was going on no um I was captured on land first of all every other cat 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 KH eighty this is uh it's a plant that they chew mm-hmm and it has like stimulant effect yeah it's a little bit like coca leaf but I think actually it's a narcotic yeah gets you high at first and then you crash and you wake up depressed and you need more but these guys every single pirate I met was addicted and they wound up having to sit in front of these piles of cut every afternoon just to get high enough for their addiction and then like I said they would they would crash at night and then do it again 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 cot at night and then and then crashed in the morning but did you try any that stuff yeah I mean they they kept offering it to me was it like they I you know it takes like two or three stems or three or four stems 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 but I didn't want to get addicted to it so I didn't I didn't keep pushing that is it's that addictive yeah well I saw it I saw how addictive it could be with the guards 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 there's somehow 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 sometimes have fistfights in front of me and that kind of thing not all the time but yeah they would get the they would get hopped up they would just get jittery and that's it'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 there very few countries where pirates go after their name so easily yeah the the kidnapping became part of the culture that's true but pirate bosses which are not so active now off the coast 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 gun smuggling and also even people smuggling on the Horn of Africa so whatever takes that kind of equipment you know SUVs Kalashnikovs cheap food when you say people smuggling what do you mean it's a good story I found out 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 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 there's always a place in Sudan where it shifts from being willing to being unwilling well this is an issue that's been going on in Libya recently 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 this firsthand eeeh 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 when slavery was legal so in other words okay where the where the Somalis are involved up to the to the Libyan border is one story and that's the story I've covered what happens in Libya is a different story the clans and the routes that migrants take through Libya the clans they put themselves in the hands of are still the same as the clans and the routes that we use during the slave trade 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 so so I suspect a lot of migrants don't quite know how bad it can get the route up until Libya is probably easier than Libya itself Olivia itself sounds like a horror show for the migrants well it's particularly it's one of those bizarre things we have a horrible dictator like Muammar Qaddafi and you say well it's probably a good thing get rid of that guy right mm-hmm but no when you get rid of them then you have this power vacuum and apparently it's a failed state now and it's gotten even worse yeah it's it's going in the direction of Somalia right now in there a couple of rival governments I think it's a little bit more stable then Somalia was after their dictator fell but it's there's similar there's a similar thing going on I it's true Gaddafi was a bad guy and but he was also a bulwark and he knew that and he used that to his advantage will work a bulwark against against migration paths I've never heard that expression bulwark a bulwark no what does that mean a road block okay um when you were there when you decided to take ten days and you 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 a Somali elder in Berlin who could offer the protection of his Klan in Somalia and he had done it with another journal journalist a german journalist and he took us out from Galkayo which is a town in central somalia out to the coast to Hobie which is a pirate and you might have heard of and pirate town actual pirate town yeah so it's all pirates well it's in it's in the control of pirates so in other words the the government that sits in Galkayo has no influence there 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 pirate sinkhole no normal Somali life is going on there but the the you know let's say the police force would be pirates yeah I mean when we got there it was pretty quiet and we didn't see much normal life and we had a very organised interview and lunch 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 left around sundown and that was it we didn't spend a whole lot of time in hope you when you were there and you you eventually got captured and taken hostage what what was the initial experience like well so when that happened with this with the technical with the truck at first my mind actually from what was going on I mean I actually was in denial for a couple of seconds I thought okay just a roadblock you know but once they captured me I thought no this is gonna be really hard on my family Jesus and they they they beat me with their guns they broke my wrist they bloodied my my scalp and they broke my glasses so that's the other thing I noticed right away it was it said I'm gonna be blind how bad are your nearsighted it's not not good and this is like initial like right away yeah oh yeah it happened in that first skirmish yeah so your your wrist was broken right away yeah because I was trying to hold the car door closed and they pounded on it with their gun barrels Wow and is it hard to talk about this no because now I've written a book I wouldn't have been able to do this before writing the book but writing the book familiarized myself with my own memories you know it made me fluent with this material but your physical state seems to shift when you discuss it like you oh maybe yeah your your your shoulders have risen short you're like yeah I mean it's a question of you know it's not pleasant I couldn't imagine yeah I mean it must have been just insane mm-hmm um so you said there was a long period of time before your your before they contacted anybody who do they contact okay so it was a week and they so I had a grant a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting I should have called them but I had all my notes stolen which means all my phone phone numbers too and so when they finally brought me up to a bluff with a little cell phone and said call somebody I said we'll bring me my notes I need to you know find the right phone number I said no just call someone so I called my mom and and that's what happened by that by that time the FBI had informed her had actually come to her door and briefed her a little on what to say on the phone so she was ready for the phone call you know she'd been sitting around for days wondering when she was gonna hear from me so but that was also true about the Pulitzer Center was also true about my colleagues that should be Ghulam line in Berlin I was also true about my family in Germany everyone had been briefed a little bit now were they waiting for a specific reason why did they wait a whole week no idea it's a really good question I kept asking for a phone call I mean I was sitting there kind of in a panic too you know what were they saying do you during this week said oh yeah okay you have a broken arm right no you're you're obviously you're in pain you can't see anymore yeah I was in a the first first they took me to a bush camp then they took me with a couple of other hostages to a prison house and yeah I'd my wrists in a sling and it just was it was painful and was it was confusing I really didn't know what was going on and then slowly they brought a doctor in to look at the wrist and then slowly they took us out into the bush and then finally they gave put me on the phone so you you got medical treatment for your wrist sort of yeah the guy said it was probably a livestock doctor but the the guy was he was a very sympathetic old older man but he said your wrist is not broken and he put a splint on it and that was it it was broken hmm not broken in half definitely correct I felt I felt bones moving around in there yeah it's been real rearranged it's been reshaped did you eventually get medical treatment when you get home oh yeah what I got home but no two years and eight months later it was it was okay five functioning right yeah it's it's set wrong but it's a functioning wrist did you get an x-ray just so you can see how weird it looks I didn't even bother Wow now when you're there once you get the initial phone call what is what is the process like after that are they there are they talking to you about what they want yeah they said okay do you have to demand twenty million dollars from your mother well I think I must have smirked or something they said it's not funny I said yes it actually it is that's not a serious demand you know but that was their opening gambit 20 million what why specifically 20 million it's a good question they the first two hostages I was held with to say shall Wafaa Sherman the ransom for them was also 20 million but that's 10 million each so maybe they were just doubling it for the American there was a time where they told you that if people showed up for you that you were gonna be killed oh sure they said that right away because by the time the phone call it happened the the raid for Jessica Buchanan and palta stet had already happened too so they even mentioned that to me and of course I had no idea what they were talking about I had no news you know so I mentioned it to my mother on the phone I said they're talking about a raid and they're saying if somebody else comes for me I'm gonna get shot dead but you know those are already the terms of a kidnapping right you know that was not a big change in my situation and my mom could tell me very little on the phone about about the rescue but she had something positive in her voice she said oh yeah the rescue and I thought that doesn't sound like the Pirates of course told me the hostage that had been killed like that doesn't sound like it went bad but it was still another month and a half or something before I found out the full story Jesus two and a half years I was 2 years and 8 months god no you ate with them you got used to them mm-hmm did you almost become friends with them I'm sure I became friends with you no half friends with it with about half the pirate guard group that was with me at at that point so I was held in other places they also placed me on a tuna ship I was placed on a ship hijacked by Somali pirates for about five months and I think I'm the only Western writer to no life on a ship like that five months yeah for the full spring and summer of 2012 Wow and then it was it was after that that I was held on land alone with the guards and that's when I got to know the guards you must have had this feeling like they're never gonna find me they're moving me around they're putting me on [ __ ] that was a problem once that especially when they put me on the ship I I felt like any progress the military had made and in finding my location would have been completely reset you know I was terribly depressed when they first put me on the ship oh I me and you were there for five months yeah but once I was on the ship I felt better because there were 28 other hostages the crew of the ship and they were great it was it's always better to have company when you're a captive yeah so the other people that were running the ship when they captured it they were there as well yeah and that was a crew of 28 guys from East Asia and Southeast Asia did they speak English only five of them so five of them were from the Philippines and we got along with them really good everyone else we had to get to know somehow and the ship they couldn't speak to each other either because they had who's a like a Tower of Babel on the ship and so they developed their own pigeon which is what sailors have done for centuries you know it was a pidgin mixture of English and Chinese and a few other words Wow yeah that was fascinating yeah I could imagine now as a writer you you had to be sort of like halfway torn like god if I get out of here what a [ __ ] story yeah yeah I knew I was you know living through interesting things and gathering good material but after at least a year or so in captivity I stopped hoping that I was gonna get out alive I mean things were going so badly as far as the negotiation was concerned that I thought this is really I'm really in deep [ __ ] now is that standard for them to hold people for that long yeah yes and no I think I was held longer than any Westerner but the men on that ship didn't get out for Anna for a total of five years just under five years they were held but they did get out eventually they did get out in 2016 Wow and I was privileged enough to go to a night B&C them there i took him by surprise Wow so you flew out to meet them well I was still living in Berlin and I was following the the case very closely and the I helped raise some money the the lawyers who were running it slow me down there and that was really nice and it was nice for the guys too because they were obviously confused it was nothing but very well-meaning but completely anonymous people around them you know and then they were they kind of came out of the terminal in Nairobi and they were still obviously still sort of a little bit confused and I tapped one of them on the shoulder and he recognized me and it was pandemonium Wow is that it was wound up on Reuters video I think it's available now how did you eventually get freed they so my mom raised her ransom she raised it with help from family and friends and also some magazines I'd worked for I had some institutions in the US and Germany and when she talked the Pirates down to 1.6 million and I got out for some reason at the very end the Pirates came down like precipitously the very end after 30 years they were holding on for like I think they went down to four or five million or something like that and then at the very end they came down to what was on offer no explanation not really except that from my point of view there were labor there was a labor unrest stirring among the guards so in other words the guards were sick and holding me Oh and so I one day told towards the very end but you know a few weeks before I got out one of the guards actually said Michael we might go on strike right she's right yeah do you need some help with that I can go on a hunger strike if you like I'm slow slow

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 3,872,763

Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, PowerfulJRE, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of

Id: EHNJrjhVe_c

Length: 23min 28sec (1408 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2018