Joe Rogan - How Corrupt is Somalia?

Do you ever anticipate yourself traveling for journalism again? Sure, oh, to 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? Like, what did you hope to get out of this trip to Somalia? Well, so one thing that I noticed while I was watching the trial 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 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 did not 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. And so that tension on its own was interesting, and that was worth the book because nobody was quite approaching it that way. 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 10 guys from Somalia who tried to hijack a cargo ship that belonged to a German ship company that was based in Hamburg. I think they were overpowered by the Dutch Navy, but the Dutch handed them 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 there's 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 time. That's so bizarre. But if they were shipped back to Somalia, how would they be treated? Like what is the government like in Somalia? It must be insanely corrupt. I asked some of my parents about that. It is corrupt. It's either corrupt or nonexistent. The government of Somalia is focused around Mogadishu, and it just doesn't have that much power in the provinces. I was in one of the provinces. Because the provinces don't get a whole lot of money from Mogadishu, so they run their own businesses, 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 to set up friendships again with his old pirate buddies or whatever. Would he be killed? Would he be in danger? No, no, no problem. They'd probably let you right back in. No problem. Is there any sort of punishment for them when they get back to Somalia? Is there any penal system? Potentially there is, yeah. But that's not considered a crime. Yes, it is. 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 pirates who 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. Yeah. He was captive for piracy? 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... So it's a really sketchy system of bartering and payoffs and... That's who you know and who you're related to. And there are other prisons for low-ranking pirates in Puntland and also in Galkayo where I was. It's a crapshoot how much time those guys are going to spend in jail. And what happened with the people in Germany? They got a total of seven years, I think, or an average seven years? In Germany. In Germany? And then what happened when they were released? Nothing. Wow. Yeah. That's a whole separate story, which I haven't even started to address. But as it turned out, a few of them went back to Somalia anyway. And probably went right back into the business. Or something else, illicit or profitable or whatever. And there's a wide variety of people that they target. They target people on individual crafts. They target large boats, commercial vessels. Yep. They did all of that. I mean, in fact, I met hostages from all of those, from the whole range. So how many hostages did you meet over the two years and eight months? A total of 30. So the crew on the fishing ship, the tuna vessel, was 28. And then I met two Seychelles wah fishermen. The two guys from the Seychelles were small time. So they were just on a small craft. What is Seychelles? The Seychelles is a chain of islands off Africa. It's a country that belongs to Africa. But it has a French name. The guys on the tuna vessel were from a 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 were they trying to get money from? Just anyone who knows them? Is that how they do this? Yeah, whoever. Anybody they can. I mean, of course they ask from the government, but the government doesn't always pay. You know, the given government. Yeah. 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. They're trying to extract money from people that know them. Yeah. As it turns out, they're not very good at it. So pirates are in the kidnapping business, but they don't always know what they're doing. 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. That calculation doesn't work with human beings. So in other words, everyone else on earth who negotiates for a human being expects the person's price to go down as the time, you know, wears on. It took a while for pirates to understand that. Wow. What is it? I mean, when you're dealing with all this, like what is it like on your psyche when you're getting two years in, two and a half years in and you have some sort of light at the end of the tunnel? 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 self-destruct. It was also by then I had also deliberately given let go of having any kind of hope. So that was a second survival strategy. I had to not hope that I was going to get out because hoping was had a downside. That cycle of hope and despair was extremely damaging to my mental well-being. So after going through that cycle a few times, I'm like, I have to find a different way. One of the things that I've gotten out of travel is I think your view of the world changes when you see the way people are living in different places. 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, whether chewing this narcotic and carrying around Kalishnikovs and yelling at each other in a foreign language and watching fist fights and realizing like they don't have anything either. How much has that changed you as a human being and your, your view of human life on earth? Well, I think enormously, I mean, you're right. It expanded my range and my, my understanding of, 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 too. 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. But I resisted learning it from the guards. I, when I was there, I, I thought about it like in, in Berlin, you realize 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 Somalia, Somalia once I was a captive. So 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 and view the world and your, your ability to describe things. Yeah, I think 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 distance between one individual and another can be enormous. But in some sense, also, they're superficial distinctions. Yeah, but they're inescapable reality is so alien in comparison to someone who lives in Bel Air. Oh, absolutely. Just this, this, just that contrast between this world that you were so deeply entrenched in for two, in two years and eight months, like that has got to change the way you look at human life. Yeah, because the Gulf and wealth is so enormous. I mean, they can't imagine 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 repeat all the time, because it still baffles me that if you make more than $34,000 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 is 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 or. Did you see fancy cars? Sure. Oh, yeah. No, I was placed in fancy cars. I mean, yeah, no. So the pirates had great cell phones, expensive SUVs, weapons that they had bought, you know, from abroad and maybe a weapons bazaar in 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 might 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 you have the majority. And then you have these pirates that are essentially running through the streets in Mercedes-Benz. They're like gangsters. They're like gangsters. And that's that's actually how one Somali who had some connection to Germany described him to me. You know, he he was wandering around in Galkayo because it was his hometown in some way or his 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 SUVs. Did they really? American rap? Who knows? Who knows? There's lots of actually good African rap. Really? Oh, yeah.