1145: Rwanda 2025 | Out of the Loop

This episode is sponsored in part by Vital Proteins. I want to tell you about Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides.
That's a mouthful. It's a daily supplement that supports your hair, skin, nails, bones, and joints all in one in one simple step each day.
Collagen makes up about a third of the protein in our bodies, but as we hit our 30s, it unfortunately starts to decline. That's when you might notice things aren't working quite like they used to.
Your joints, your skin, maybe even your hair. Vital Proteins steps in to help keep those areas supported so you can stay active and keep doing what you love.
Vital Proteins is the number one collagen peptide brand in the U.S., so they know what they're doing. It's super easy to take.
Just add a serving to your coffee, smoothie, even water. It doesn't even taste like anything, so it blends right in.
The key is consistency. Making it a daily habit is how you see the benefits.
Get 20% off by going to VitalProteins.com and enter promo code Jordan at checkout. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start?

Thumbtack knows home so you don't have to.

Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin?

Or what that clunking sound from your dryer is?

With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro.

You just have to hire one.

You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today.
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 dot com slash 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, U.S., 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, out of 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 Phnom Penh in Cambodia is just 24 hour operation. Is that accurate? Yeah.
Nathan is literally sitting in a 24 hour bar next to the flat. 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 7 o'clock in the morning? That's basically the question. A very sad retired man who are here to look for very young girlfriends.
Oh, God. That's normally who you see.
Or people just finishing their scam centreships. That's also a common thing.
I see. We have had the odd Belgian pedophile.
Was that Belgian pedophiles? Yeah, it was a 12-year-old or a 10-year-old boy that he was with. He was 15, yeah.
Yeah, gross. 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 going to try and get him on the way out of the country. Oh, wow.
So we did take it seriously. Yeah.
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 going to do? But they were just kind of like, oh, this is making us look bad.
Let's arrest this guy 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 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 pedophiles they do try to stop and they make calls that's one thing the belgians really have going for them. So yeah, good for them on that.
They made an arrest, which is quite cool. And also very rare in general in Cambodia.
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. Yeah, it's a bit nuts because, yeah, so a lot of our work is on the scam industry.
And we often write about how whole kind of towns have been taken over and turned into kind of scam hubs. But in cities like Phnom Penh, you also have these kind of mini scam compounds that go more under the radar.
And on either side of the building 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 India, Pakistan, Nepal, 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 a construction over the top of us. It 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... It's crazy.
It's a horrible irony, yeah. 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 of 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'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. 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.
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, 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 them over the border in a car. But with the South Asian people, that's not being spread as well a message 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 the telecop 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 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 for the city there's these different levels there's thousands and thousands just in Phnom Penh who just fundamentally can't leave and are still

tortured with tasers and

in 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 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

because they're worried their families don't 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 who claims to know the numbers of who's forced and who's not, they're just lying. You wouldn't 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 labour. And then there's a lot of grey area within that as well.
Wow. 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 squeeze into each room, but there must be at least hundreds on each other side of us because we see so many people arrive every day and we never see anyone leave.

If you go to the larger areas, the last couple of weeks we've been doing a bit of a recce of some of the major scam hubs around the country that we've talked about before.

At the weekend we went back to Boka 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 it on an average of six to 10 people in a room, you're like, oh, there's going to be tens of thousands of people just in that one building. And down in Kokong 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.
Really? Oh my God. That's a metropolis of just crime.
Yeah. And I know that this number has been contested because there is no real way of figuring this out that's really accurate.
But one of the big anti-scam organizations recently calculated that they think that around a trillion dollars a year is stolen through scams, a trillion dollars. That is nearly 1% of the world's wealth every year going through scams.
So the scale is just enormous. Yeah.
A figure just for the u.s would be about 50 billion dollars 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 u.s alone is like a reasonably accepted number of like a minimum but to give you a bit of context 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 because 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 but scan lindsey mentioned koko and one of the few people that had 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 lately 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 Koh 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 And these are like Hilton size kind of buildings. And there's 20 of them.
The Boker mountain that Lindsay was saying being a tourist site, have you 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 Camarouge, but it's still like a tourist spot.
And then you go to like the old Boker palace, which again, shelled out and stuff, but interesting to see 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 realise that those dirty buildings behind them

in the selfie are scam compounds.

They didn't exist two years ago

and they're absolutely everywhere.

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 centres because they're so easy to recruit because they're desperate.
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.
And because Phnom Penh is this hub that's just not been touched, there's been some crackdowns on the Thai-Mainmar 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 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 loads more casinos have opened up doing the same thing just further down the border.
But no one 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 for 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 Phnom Penh where backpackers and expats and middle-class Cambodians will all go and have espresso martinis and have a little dance 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, like, 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 want to go home.
Or it's some really bored Chinese or Japanese gangster tatted up completely with full body tats. And like they just want to boast and talk about their life because no one listens to them.
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 yeah look this sounds like a pretty miserable life by the way for people who want to do a deep dive on this episode 833 with 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.
Dot dot 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 and 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.
Yeah. And that's the luckiest ones.
We got talking to someone a few weeks ago, a 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 Cambodia now because 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 a scam. And a lot of these places, they recruit people who work in marketing, and they use marketing language.
It's very kind of Wolf of Wall 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 rug call 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 to leave. He was gang raped.
Oh, my God. By the guards.
And then 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 as well.
Yeah, of of course. Jeez.
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 etc 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 because it's gone and that's the end of that just to quickly jump back to what you were saying though Jordan, about it's a rough life for the poor-be gangsters.
And it depends where you are, right? You can be in one of the war-torn parts of Myanmar where your movement's really, really restricted, or you can be in Trump-N. It's okay.
There's a lot of people who just live here because it's a fun, nice place too. 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 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 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, there's a new place that's really developed near the Vietnam border in Cambodia called Sveton.

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 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 going to efforts to make this nicer for the criminal syndicates as well.
Certain levels of the syndicates. Yeah, for certain levels, yeah.
The low-low people are still getting tortured in horrific conditions. But for the top triads in Yakuza and Russian mafia and whatever, they're getting prominent.
And unfortunately, it's going to get a lot worse now because Trump's executive order extravaganza cancelled 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 left in the region. The day that it was shut down, the leaders of Cambodia and China celebrated publicly and thanked 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 Phnom Penh 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 going to end up harming you in your own country.
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 U.S. tax dollar go to that? And the answer is because they're targeting Americans with this and it costs more in losses that way.
Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a general acceptance that Trump's very happy to go against the drug trade, right? Mexican cartels and 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, 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 loving the power that they're having over this.
And North Korea has increasing interest within this field. And at the same time, you have all these organizations shut down.
You have Starlink and SpaceX coming into Cambodia and declaring a priority investment country. Now, the one thing that has happened in Thailand and Cambodia every now and then, the Thais come over to Myanmar and Cambodia and they bring the cell towers down.
Bringing a cell tower down does actually stop a scam compound for days or weeks until you build another one or you move. But if 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 going to know about it less, it's going to happen more, and then it's going to be close to impossible to actually stop them if they do start using Musk's Starlink receivers.
And when Musk says the reason they might be interested in Cambodia is the developing country to provide internet, internet in Cambodia is fantastic. Most parts of the country are going to be a better connection than we get in a lot of Europe, definitely in the UK.
They do not require it. But also in areas where you don't have the internet, where people are too poor, in areas that are underserved by Wi-Fi, there is like really good phone coverage with really cheap data.
The people who

pay for that can't afford to pay for Starlink connections. They can't afford to pay four grand

a year when they earn one grand a year. That's not going to happen.
The only people who are

going to be buying Starlink are going to be scam centers. That's the only people here.

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 too, I know the struggle of keeping consistent.
Finding time to work out when you've got a million things going on is tough, but Tonal can help. Tonal is a smart gym that lives on your wall.
It is so smart how they're able to fit a full strength training setup into a sleek compact unit that adjusts to you in real time. With Tonal 2, they've leveled it up even more.
The adaptive weight now goes up to 250 pounds and adjusts in one pound increment. So it is constantly learning and challenging you.
It's like having a personal trainer built into your wall and the new smart view camera gives you real time feedback on your form. What I really love is how Tonal tells you what weight to use.
It tracks your progress, even knows when your muscles are starting to fatigue. Then it'll automatically adjust the weight mid-set, which is pretty damn cool.
Tonal also added aero hit workouts, which are perfect if you want that combo of cardio and strength in one go. So if you're serious about getting stronger, feeling better, saving time, check out Tonal.
Right now, Tonal is offering our listeners $200 off your Tonal purchase with promo code Jordan. That's tonal.com and use promo code Jordan for $200 off your purchase.
That's T-O-N-A-L.com, promo code Jordan for $200 off. This episode is also sponsored by SimpliSafe.
So we had a break in a couple months ago while we were home. Yeah, nothing like waking up to find out somebody snooping around your house uninvited and banging in your window.
So the whole neighborhood was on edge. We were on edge, obviously.
Naturally, our very sweet and suddenly very organized neighbors jumped into action. Next thing you know, we got an official neighborhood watch.
There's a neighborhood watch sign up now. There's a group chat.
I even attended the neighborhood watch meeting, which included very passionate retirees grilling a young, very patient cop with questions like, what's the legal protocol for tackling porch pirates? It was like a small town sitcom. But one thing that did come out of that

chaos was a solid reminder. If you don't already have a home security system, what is stopping you?

That's where SimpliSafe comes in. No installers, no drilling into walls, no tech degree required.

Jen set ours up in an afternoon. You get everything, cameras, sensors, 24-7 monitoring,

and you can keep tabs on your home right from your phone, whether you're out running errands or halfway across the country. And after what we went through, that sense of security is priceless.
But right now, it's actually priced pretty nicely. Head to simplisafe.com slash Jordan to get 50% off a new system with professional monitoring, plus your first month free.
That's simplisafe.com slash Jordan. There's no safe like SimpliSafe.
If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators, investigative journalists every single week, it's because of my network, the circle of people I know, like, and trust. And of course, Lindsay and Nathan, they rely on these types of skills to do their job.
And we're teaching you how to build your network for free over at 6minutenetworking.com. This course is about improving your relationship building skills, whether it's for a source if you're a journalist, booking guests if you're a podcaster, or just to build your social circle and your professional circle.
The course does all of that in a super easy, non-cringe, down-to-earth way. No awkward strategies, no cheesy tactics in a few minutes a day.
And many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us.
You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at sixminutenetworking.com.
All right, now back to Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsay Kennedy. It's interesting to mention North Korea because I always thought, how come North Korea is not in on this? Because 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 100 scam centers, and generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the regime. 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.
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, yes.
So this is a bit of a strange system. So in Japan and Korea, the Yakuza, which is the largest mafia group in Japan, a huge proportion of the Yakuza are actually ethnic Korean for 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 Cheongron, 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 heists.
A couple of weeks ago, there was the world's biggest heist when North Korea stole $1.5 billion in one day or something. Yeah, from Ethereum.
It was a Dubai-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 North Korea is very wired 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.
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. That money, because North Korea is very good at cyber attacks, ransomware and theft, rather than so much the scams that we said, they sell the tech for that.
On that theft, they gave it to we'll just call them out they're called Wion and they're a Cambodian financial platform that's been called the biggest criminal platform in history so about 60 to 70 billion dollars went through 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 why on pay.
And interestingly, again, we're not sanctioning. And we believe that there is maybe a link between people like Elon Musk having financial interests here that mean that we're not actually protecting, say, US citizens, if you just want to 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 of 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 interests 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. This is quite wildly

off what we had planned to talk about, but so interesting. Sorry, everything leads back to

scams. I'm sorry.
It does. I love it.
I'm here for it. That's one reason why I love you guys on 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

Thank you. 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 want to hang out and then do business in the same place.
I have literally walked into a bar in Cambodia and seen a Russian guy, a Ukrainian guy, and a Polish guy who all work 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 the scam industry is that the Taiwanese mafia is massive in this.
And one of the reasons 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 senior police, they don't want to 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 Fujian on the Chinese mainland.
They're quite happy to do that. But it's just their 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. 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 going to turn around and tell China. China's not going to 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. 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 there There's also like a much bigger level 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 did his big crackdown 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 going to 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 or whatever illegal activity. So they went places that you would be accepted.
So they go to Cambodia. But what they do is they can become these nationalistic gangsters.
The views of the Chinese Communist Party abroad, they start business networks where they push the One China policy, where they promote Bill and Rodenish to the ideas. And then a lot of these guys have such weird convoluted relationships with the state.
Sometimes they're wanted by them, sometimes they're not with China, but 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 is like a direct threat to the United States national security interest,

but it's a hard thing to explain. These guys like Xiaowei, who owns the King's Romans going

And China. And that's something that as well is like a direct threat to the United States national security interest.
But it's a hard thing to explain. These guys like Xiaowei, who owns the King's Roman's Golden Triangle Special Economics, and he's got these weird relationships with the Chinese government.
Several people here like Dong Le Cheng in 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 to the Chinese state, which is allowing them to also do their big mafia stuff.
So they make a bunch of money and China reins them 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 in these countries instead. 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 545, Rachel Neuer, she went undercover there and was seeing people ordering, I don't know, like bear paws and pangolins and stuff at King's Romans Casino.
I can't imagine being around all that. All right, let's transition to the DRC, so Congo and Rwanda.
And 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 this 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? 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 scan centers in that region, which it turned out that we didn't really find much evidence about the time.
Turns out they were all being sent over this way instead. But what the other thing we were looking at is, this is probably not as familiar to listeners from outside the UK, but the UK developed this incredibly controversial refugee resettlement plan called the Rwanda Refugee Plan.
And the idea was that the UK was going to 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 all of its own advice on Rwanda and its own policy on torture in prisons and media freedom and all this stuff.
I had to play it all down to say that Rwanda was a safe country. The whole thing was ridiculous.
Let me pause you for a second. So refugees that are going to the UK were going to be sent to Rwanda for processing? Yes, that was the plan.
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 claims 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 that Rwanda is a safe country. There's always been a UK government kind of closeness to Kagame and Rwanda after the genocide.
So they set up this deal. They said it was a super safe place to be.
They can 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 and 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.
So yeah, I mean, 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 Rwanda, 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 want to go there and see where this money is being spent. And the only clue that anyone had were that these homes had been built called Buiza, where the Home Secretary gave this speech.
So we started there and we went to Buiza. We arrived at the same time as a couple of very nice middle-class Rwandan families who were looking for a starter home.
And it became very apparent very quickly that this was a housing development for starter 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're from the UK and we were told that this development was going to 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 going to 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 farce. No money from the UK government had ever gone to this.
And they eventually admitted that no money from the UK government had ever gone to this. So then we're like, okay, well, where did the money go? Where did the money go? It wouldn't have 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 going to 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.
Wow. Then we basically looked at the timeline and we realized that the M23s, which is an incredibly brutal militia, been Rwanda backed.
It initially began years and years ago. In around 2013, it was sanctioned by most of the world.
It was conducting horrific massacres 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 fled to Rwanda and kill them. But it became very quickly about most people 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 Rwandan genocide. So it very quickly became that the M23 was sweeping through mostly refugee camps and areas where they were very valuable mines, 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 Coltan mines and stuff.
Let me stop you for a second because I don't think people know what Coltan is or necessarily about this history. So for people who are not as familiar with the Rwandan genocide, so tell us briefly what that is.
And then M23, this militia decides to pursue the perpetrators of this into the Congo, but that's not exactly what worked out. Yeah.
So very briefly, so Rwanda borders the DRC, right? The Congo. And the mid-90s, there was a really horrific genocide where the majority ethnic group, the Hutus, massacred the minority group, the Tutsis.
It was really horrific. Some of the people who'd been involved in committing mass murders against the Tutsis fled across the border into the Congo.
So at the time, some Rwandan soldiers followed across and tried to hunt these people down. And then this group called the M23 formed quite a few years later.
One of their purposes, they said, was to hunt down people who had never faced justice to 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've 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 there 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 tan and coal gold, 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 M23s were instrumental. Now, celebrate the fact that you're 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 FlyKit.
If you travel internationally a lot, jet lag is basically the enemy. We got back from China and Taiwan a couple days ago, and the kids are a disaster.
At least for me, I follow FlyKit, and it makes a huge difference each time. FlyKit is an algorithm-based scheduling tailored to your trip details that tells you when to eat, when to sleep, and how long, and when to take the supplements that you'll receive in the mail.
It's like having a personal travel health assistant in your pocket. I've tested it on multiple time zone busting trips, and it works every single time.
FlyKit is, of course, rooted in Navy SEAL research, bro, and it was initially designed for fighter pilots and athletes to combat the inflammation that flying causes. I was a massive skeptic, and I actually was, like, really annoyed when I found out about this and paid for it and it was just vitamins.
And I asked for a refund and it was my friend's company. And then he's like, just keep it and try it.
And I tried it and I ended up being like, ah, here's your money because it worked so well. FlyKit uses AI to time everything from light exposure to meals, all tailored to your specific travel itinerary.
And I became an immediate lifelong fan after that. Now I use it on every trip that involves more than a couple of time zones.
So if you're tired of losing precious days of your life to jet lag, you got to check out FlyKit. It's got everything you need in one small organized packet and the app walks you through every step of the way.
Go to flykitwith2ts.com. So that's F-L-Y-K-I-T-T.com to get a FlyKit for 15% off with code Jordan.
F-L-Y-K-I-T-T dot com promo code Jordan. Try it out on your next trip and hit me up.
I really want to know what you think. I want to know if it works for everyone as well.
I think it's amazing and it's just a must have. I've got homes.com as a sponsor for this episode.
Homes.com knows when it comes to home shopping, it's never just about the house or the condo. It's about the homes.
And what makes a home is more than just the house or property. It's the location.
It's the neighborhood. If you got kids, it's also schools, nearby parks, transportation options.
That's why Homes.com goes above and beyond to bring home shoppers the in-depth information they need to find the right home. It's so hard not to say home every single time.
And when I say in-depth information, I'm talking deep. Each listing features comprehensive information about the neighborhood, complete with a video guide.
They also have details about local schools with test scores, state rankings, student-teacher ratio. They even have an agent directory with the sales history of each agent.
So when it comes to finding a home, not just a house, this is everything you need to know all in one place, homes.com. We've done your homework.
This episode is also sponsored in part by Rivero. Rivero is one of the few things I've come across that tackles chronic health issues in a way that actually makes sense.
If you or someone in your life is dealing with stuff like diabetes, autoimmune issues, stubborn weight, or that constant something's not right feeling, you know how frustrating it can be. Rivero is an online clinic that treats chronic disease at the root cause, not with more pills that mask the symptoms, but by dialing in usually a high protein diet that's designed to repair your gut, lower inflammation, help your body work the way it's supposed to.
And this is not guesswork. They build a personalized plan just for you.
The Rivero app gives you everything, access to your care team, daily coaching, biomarker tracking, a full roadmap to actually start feeling better. And here's the kicker.
Most people start to see changes fast. Some are even reducing their meds within weeks.
Rivero might be the thing that finally helps you get your energy and your life back on track. Right now, Rivero is offering 10% off your first month.
Go to rivero.com slash Jordan to sign up. That's R-E-V-E-R-O dot com slash Jordan.
Here's a little inside scoop you might not be aware of. When you use our promo codes, you're not just scoring a discount.
You're also giving the show a big boost. So we don't earn commissions directly from sales and stuff like that.
But when companies see that listeners are engaging with an ad on the show, it encourages them to keep supporting us. So if you're planning to sign up for something, please use our codes.
They're all available at JordanHarbinger.com slash deals. It is a win-win.
You get an awesome, and you help keep the show going strong. We really appreciate your support.
Now, back to Out of the Loop. Apple and Tesla can buy, I mean, I'm not just throwing shade on them.
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 M23 militia to deliver this stuff or whatever and mine it. Yeah, or it's all been cleared off that the people who live there have all been murdered so that the M23s can take over and steal it.
Oh my god. I'd give a special shout out to Siddharth Kara and his book Cobalt Red, which really dives into the mineral exploitation in the DRC and the huge amount of child slavery is essentially happening.
Yes. Episode 807 of this show with Siddharth Kara, if you want a deep dive on the blood of the Congo powers our lives.
He's an amazing guy. Yeah.
And essentially, 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 in boats at dark. They may have small amounts of mining of some materials, but cobalt and 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, 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 got child labor, that isn't warm minerals. But in actual fact, it is.
We're stealing it. And Apple knows that.
Tesla knows that. Everyone knows that.
Well, what was so damning about this is the M23, they are essentially, they're a terrorist militia. And back in 2013, Rwanda at that time was enormously reliant on international aid to survive.
It was rebuilding after a horrific genocide. In 2013, pretty much the whole world said Rwanda's denied and still occasionally does.
It flips back and forward. Whether or not it is the M23 or back to M23, it pretty obviously is.
Back in 2013,

the UK was one of the countries that said, we're going to cut off all aid to you if the M23s don't go away, basically. And the M23s completely disappeared.
Everyone thought that they had gone. Disbanded overnight, basically? Pretty much overnight.
The minute that the UK said- They stopped taking you territory. Wow.
Yeah, but they also went really quiet. No one heard of them.
And then the UK government internally warned itself.

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 save 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's side. Otherwise, it would be too embarrassing, basically.
So we knew this as a country that this was a risk. But 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're going to send you a ton of money to start this refugee resettlement program, is the exact moment when the M23 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 M23 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 M23s, their reply was basically, they deserve it. 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 M23 had created a million internally displaced refugees in the DRC.
Meanwhile, as we only found out when we went to Rwanda, inside Rwanda itself, there 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, 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 that's what then took us from Rolanda around the region. And we started looking at some other groups as well that the Rolandans were funding.
There's also a group called the Red Tibara that kind of operates in the DRC, but also launches attacks in Burundi. So we went to the Burundi DRC border.
We actually kind of got briefly arrested there and detained by the military and accused of being spies. But we got out of that and then we got to the DRC and then we just seen the destruction of this conflict and it was horrific.
But one of the things that really hit us quite quickly was opposite Airbnb. There's not many places to stay in Goma.
There was one Airbnb. One Airbnb? Oh my God, that's funny.
We were in it. In North Key, the most war-torn part 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 Valaclavas, AK-47s, and one of them did have a Labrador.
Wait, did you say Eastern European mercenary base? Yeah, exactly. What outfit is this? Is this like Wagner or something else? 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 the Congo, everyone just calls them the Russians. Whether they're Russian or not.
So for a while, we thought they were Russian. Okay, gotcha.
And then we realized quite quickly that actually they weren't Russian. They were mostly either a French Bulgarian outfit that mostly hires Bulgarians, or this Romanian guy called Rashiopatra, 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. You're talking about the French Foreign Legion, right? 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. 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 instead.
So when we were there over a year ago, we started to get really concerned that, because also a lot of these guys also do have links to Wagner, 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 M23s, but they really didn't want to 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 stuck because no one else was really helping them. So they're using all these different small mercenary groups.
At the time, we were really concerned that this was going to turn into a kind of proxy war between countries. Exactly after the fall of Kivu and Goma.
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 Rwandan army, which is essentially what M23 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 UN peacekeeping forces were leaving.
Congolese forces couldn't fight them, so they were needed. And like when they said they held back on going Sudan, Central African Republic, and the Sahel countries have with sending over field control to Wagner because he didn't want to lose that US relationship.
But then Rwandan M23 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 M23 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, gold, also tin, 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 capital 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 that no 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, the eastern part, exactly what Rwanda said. And that kind of lie has continued, but everyone knows that it's really them, and sometimes they do accept responsibility.
Now they've taken most of that problem, so they've actually threatened to 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 that we're discussing, they're directly reaching out to Trump.
And 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 are worth 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 because it's likely that Trump won't want to put his own troops on the ground, but could offer private military contractors.
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 Chinese and the Americans are quietly collaborating and just billions will be extracted from the DRC. That's what I was going to say.
I'm not a very like everything goes back to colonialism kind of guy, but this is almost new colonialism where you've got a Rwandan 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 Zay, 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 out of 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 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. And he's still a very, very close ally of Trump.
And what he's done is he has facilitated the safe movement of Chinese mining companies throughout Africa. Now you have a situation where it may be Airy Prince that's organizing security for the Congo in partnership possibly with Chinese companies, where Elon Musk, who absolutely desperately needs the supplies inside the DRC.
Elon Musk, who was also directly like a spokesperson for the congolese government when they basically sent a begging letter to the u.s saying please just help us push lazy and 23 out we will at this point hand over access to our minds if you will do that and help protect them they mentioned tesla by name as one of the companies that would benefit from this sure because it's a massive a massive U.S. company.
Yeah, I'm sure when they wrote to the Chinese, they probably mentioned BYD and other Chinese companies. Wow.
Exactly. But I guess what I mean is that there's no pretense anymore that it's not just a commercial interaction.
Oh, I see. Yeah, there's no like, free our 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. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. Eric Prince, historically, FSG and FRG are slightly different.
FSG was like frontists of his group, which apparently 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 mercenary 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 is obsessed with expanding. The US has an outside saying things like they're going to invade Greenland and whatever.
They're actually literally talking about expanding whether or not they're going to do it. And you 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 this is so crazy and and i think we get lost in so much the bluster and there's so much happening domestically in the u.s that i understand why people can't jump into the con and see it as really important, but I think nowhere else represents the real dangers of what's actually happening.
Whatever your politics are, like taking the way 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 with the government and they are strippingpping apart the minerals of the DRC.
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're pushing back the Russians or pushing back the Chinese. Talking about quiet deals being made by billionaires who are in the government, rather than a State Department who's trying to play a bigger game of security.
Actually, this is such a direct threat to the security end because it is handing billions to already very powerful people, but actually divvying up these places really quietly. And when you've also got Bill Gates and Bezos just coming out of nowhere, facilitating deals with the Chinese, Australians, the Congolese can divvy up one province between them.
That is OG colonialism. 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 Three.
But what's almost certainly going to happen is some sort of conflict with China. And that conflict is going to involve a lot of AI and drone warfare.
And those types of things are going to require the resources in these areas. So we're going to 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 literally like a chess piece or 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 happens.
It's almost like the short-sightedness of it all from the US, because whenever this term ends, possibly in three years, possibly not, whatever happens in the world, like Musk, a 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, to a lesser extent in Myanmar, where Chinese and Russians are cooperating, and the US has started 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 Harry Princes to be loyal to the US? We don't have a choice anymore because 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 going to have the contracts and they're going to have the resources. We really don't have a choice.
What are we going to do? Say we decided we don't need rechargeable batteries anymore. We don't have a choice anymore.
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? 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 people be employed for a certain amount of time the fact that the US government could just tear up a contract and 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 can 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 rail, 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, 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 rein them back in. So it's not like the US is becoming stronger.
It's like a handful of oligarchs in the US are going to 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.
A little bit, but it's actually what's happening. Yeah, I was just going to say something like it does sound like we're nuts.
And if you're new to the show, 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. I think that it's 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. The amazing work against Starfcar has done 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 that are forced into the most horrific conditions. So again, the number one thing here is that conflict is tearing these people apart for our interests in the West.
But the 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 signed a new mad executive order or he renamed something and we're going to debate that and then we're going to 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 kleptocracy. It points more to Russia than to any visionary idea of of what the 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 groups in Cambodia because you want to set up Starlink and have their own geopolitical bounds with China or just make money for Elon 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. 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 planned 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. How past 1 a.m.? That's as busy.
So if you ever want to go to a place where your insomnia is not a problem

Phnom Penh seems like the place to go because you just walk outside at 3am and everything is open

you can always get a fried rice any time of night or day

yeah jet lag doesn't matter just work from 11pm or whatever until 5 o'clock in the morning

and it's no different it's just a little bit darker outside

thanks so much guys for doing this I know it's a weird time. Cheers, Jordan.
Thanks, man. Thanks so much, Jordan.
Here's a preview with the 26th National Security Advisor, General H.R. McMaster, on the greatest threats to the United States.
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 you think our divisions domestically right now are one of the greatest threats to our national security? Absolutely, Jordan, they are. And our adversaries are doing everything they can to exploit them.
I mean, Russia's masterful at this. When we were attacked on 9-11, Al-Qaeda didn't target Democrats or Republicans, right? They targeted Americans.
I think it's time to really demand real reforms. And if teachers' unions are an obstacle, we've got to tell them, 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 based on your predictions.
The fact that, you know, if you're of one political persuasion, you watch one TV network and somebody of a different political persuasion watches a different one. You're creating two different realities.
We're doing this to ourselves, Jordan. We got to stop.
You know, we got to stop it. So let's think about it.
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. For more, including General H.R.
McMaster's thoughts on immigration and climate change, check out episode 410 on The Jordan Harbinger Show. All things Nathan and Lindsey will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.
Thanks to Nathan and Lindsey 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 because 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 at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.
Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, We Bit Wiser.
The idea behind it is to give you something specific, practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships, in under two minutes, every Wednesday, every-ish Wednesday. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.
It is a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it.
Don't forget about 6 Minute Networking as well over at 6MinuteNetworking.com. I'm at JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram.
You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One.
My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace, Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird, Gabriel Mizrahi.

Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you

find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show

with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in scam call centers, organized

crime, mineral trafficking, African conflicts, I know that's quite a bit there. We did go through

a lot today. Definitely share this episode with them.
In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you

learn.

And we'll see you next time.