Joe Rogan - How Corrupt is Somalia?

do you ever anticipate yourself traveling for journalism again sure Oh travel yeah but just nothing like this yeah no I don't need to do dangerous travel anytime soon no no yeah some people just want to jump right back into the fire yeah that's not but that was not the point in the first place right what was the point what did you hope to get out of this trip to Somalia well so one one thing that I noticed while I was watching the trial in in in Hamburg was this clash between a modern liberal state which is what Germany is and so is America by the way and an archaic crime and Germany in fact is newer than the United States in the sense that its Constitution was written in 1949 when nobody was thinking about piracy so the laws against piracy are extremely lenient and in German law in a way that they're not in Spanish or American law we have laws that date back to when it was a capital crime and basically the Germans didn't know how to deal with these guys and I thought it was fascinating in the first place that this ancient crime had revived after a couple centuries of relative quiet you know and so I that tension on its own was interesting and that was worth the book because nobody was quite approaching it that way you know so that tension is still interesting and that tension is still alive so there are certainly threats to modern liberal states going on around the world so what were the trials in Berlin there was a trial in Hamburg and I was going back and forth from Berlin it was ten guys from Somalia who had tried to hijack a cargo ship that belonged to a a German ship ship company and that was based in Hamburg I think they were overpowered by the Dutch navy but the Dutch handed him over to the Germans in fact the Dutch said ok we'll do this as long as we don't have to try them because everyone knew from the outset that there was going to be a problem trying Somalis well in what way in Europe in general but especially in Germany I think is actually a law against shipping them back to Somalia because it's considered not a safe place for them for them even for them and I think that's nuts once they were convicted I think they should have been deported after they served their death so bizarre but but if they were shipped back to Somalia how would they be treated like what is the government like in Somalia man good question sanely corrupt I asked some of my parents about that it is corrupt it's a it's either corrupt or non-existent so the the government of Somalia is are focused around Mogadishu and it just doesn't have that much power and the provinces and I was in one of the one of the provinces and because the provinces don't get a whole lot of money from Mogadishu so they run their own businesses wins in some cases piracy I asked one of my guards what would happen if a pirate went and got thrown into jail in some other country and then came back and tried this you know set up friendships again with his old pirate buddies or whatever you know would he be killed would he be in in dangerous no no no problem they probably let you back in no problem yeah yeah I mean is there any sort of punishment for them when they get back to Somalia is there any penal system potentially there is yeah so that's not considered a crime there are yes it is so there there are laws on the books especially in the regions and even prisons for pirates the problem is that clan relationships are a lot more important than newly written laws and so even pirate to go to jail this was true about one boss in my case might get out again so this guy this guy who was a pirate boss in my case wound up in jail while I was still captive for one month in Mogadishu and wound up walking Wow and he was captive for piracy no I think for having weapons that the government didn't expect to see in one of his houses so something off to the side but that's a really sketchy system of bartering and payoffs and it's who you know and who you're related to and the there are other prisons for you know ranking pirates and Puntland and also in Galkayo where I was um it's a crapshoot how much time those guys are gonna spend in jail and what happened with the people in Germany they got a total of seven years I think or an average in Germans in Germany and then what happened when they were released nothing Wow yeah that's a whole separate story which I haven't even you know started started to address but as it turned out a few of them went back to some money anyway and probably want to write back into the business uh well or something else you know illicit or profitable or whatever yeah and there's a wide variety of people that they target right they target people on individual crafts they target large boats commercial vessels yep they they did all of that I mean in fact I met hostages from all of those you know from the whole range so how many hostages did you meet over the two years and eight months a total of thirty so the the crew on the fishing ship the tuna vessel was 28 and then I met to say shall we wha fishermen the two guys from the Seychelles were small-time so they were just on a small craft would it Seychelles the Seychelles is a chain of islands off Africa it's it's a country that belongs to Africa but it has a French name the the guys on the tuna vessel were from a you know relatively big ship the guys from the Seychelles were from a small private craft and I was an example of someone captured on land and these people that were from the small private craft who they try to get money from just anyone who knows them is that how they do this yeah whoever anybody they I mean of course they ask from the government but the government doesn't always pay you know the given government yeah just it's just the whole system seems so insane that they've got I mean they keep people for years and years yeah and they have just a whole collection of them or they're trying to extract money from people that know them yeah as it turns out they're not very good so pirates are in the kidnapping business but they don't always know what they're doing the the bosses I think got used to demanding a lot of money from shipping companies and finding out that if you hold a ship stubbornly for a long time you get a lot of money from the insurance company or whatever I that that calculation doesn't work with human beings so in other words everyone else on earth who negotiates for a human being expects that the person's price to go down as the time you know wears on and it took a while for pirates to understand that Wow what is it I mean when you're dealing with all this like what what is it like on your psyche when you're getting two years in two and a half years in and you you have some sort of light at the end of the tunnel what what is it what does it feel like well I didn't know there was light at the end of the tunnel so two years in that's where you know it was either forgive the guards or my self-destruct it was also by then I had also deliberately given let go of having any kind of hope so that was the second survival strategy I had to I'm not hope that I was gonna get out because hoping was had a downside that cycle of hope and despair was extremely damaging to my mental well-being so the after going through that cycle a few times I'm not gonna have to find a different way one of the things that I've gotten out of travel is I think it your view of the world changes when you see the way people are living in different places you you your spectrum expands you start recognizing like oh I might be used to Southern California but this is not how they do things in Ohio this is not how they do things in Italy this is not when you go as far as being a captive in Somalia your your spectrum is massive I mean your view of the world being entrenched in that life and being with those people while they're chewing this narcotic and carrying around coalition of coughs and yelling at each other at a foreign language and watching fistfights and realizing like they don't have anything either mm-hmm what how much does that changed you as a human being and your your view of human life on earth well I think enormous Lee I mean I you're right it expanded my range and my my understanding of what other people think they obviously come from a completely different perspective in Somalia not only are they Muslim and African but they're also very isolated so Somalia as a as a rule has always been difficult to penetrate for outsiders that was true when Richard Burton was there in the 19th century - it's it's a closed culture and they have their own way of thinking and also the also the language is not related to most other languages you've heard unless you you're familiar with languages in Ethiopia did you learn any of it yeah a little bit mm-hmm but I resisted learning it from the guards when I was there I thought about it like um in in Berlin you realized that a lot of East Germans when during the Communist era were taught Russian in school and a lot of them hated it and I was not in a mood to learn Somali Somali once I was a captive mm-hmm it was similar to that I I learned a few words but I never had a good teacher and of course when I was a journalist I was relying on translators I would imagine that as a writer that spectrum the expansion of the spectrum although there's no way you would ever barter it off or bargain to have those experiences to broaden your spectrum it has to have changed the way you put pen to paper mm-hmm and view the world and your your ability to describe things yeah I think it you you realize that each individual has certain certain boundaries you know and and certain certain self definitions and those self definitions can be the the the distance between one individual and another can be enormous but in some sense also their superficial distinctions so yeah but they're inescapable reality is so alien mmm in comparison to someone who lives in Bel Air mm-hmm oh absolutely just this this is just that contrast between this world that you were so deeply entrenched in for two and two years and eight months mhm like that has got of changed the way you look at human life yeah because the gulf and wealth is so enormous I mean they can't imagine that the amount of money it takes to live in bel-air and the other way around I mean I think it's very difficult for someone in California to imagine how little you can get by on and how close to the earth some most people on the planet live yeah there's a statistic that I read once that I I repeat all the time because it still baffles me that if you make more than thirty four thousand dollars a year you're in the 1% of the world of the world yeah possibly yeah and that is probably magnified many fold in Ethiopia yeah in Ethiopia and Somalia I mean it's it's very you know in some ways although they want money all the time especially if they're criminals the money that we're used to sort of greasing our path through life around here it's just not available it's just not not part of the reality what do they do with money when they get it well it depends if if they're pirates they splash out on a fancy car or cause you see fancy cars sure oh yeah no I was placed in fancy cars I mean only ya know so the Pirates had great cellphones expensive SUVs weapons that they bought you know from abroad and maybe a weapons Bazaar Mogadishu or something like that but that's not cheap either they bragged about how the the bullets cost like a dollar each you know and one of them I might have been wearing a band of 500 bullets and the cut is expensive so lots of things cost an enormous amount of money in Somalia but if you're you know if you're a very ordinary Somali Somali you you're getting by on you know less than a dollar a day so there's the ordinary Somalis who are not criminals or not pirates at least and then that's the majority the majority and then you have these pirates that are essentially running through streets and mercedes-benz like six days they're like gangsters and that's that's actually how once Somali who had some connection to Germany described him to me he you know he he was wandering around in Gaul Kyle because it was his hometown in some way or since ancestral town and he he had met some this was before I got captured it was like they were you know they had wrapped thumping from the SUV's did there really huh American rap who knows who knows there's lots of actually good African ramp really oh yeah

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 5,967,695

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, Somlia, Somali pirates

Id: 9Dt2AruE98U

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2018