1149: Slavery | Skeptical Sunday

1149: Slavery | Skeptical Sunday

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher Nick Pell. 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.

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Acupuncture, astrology, chemtrails, GMOs, toothpaste, diet pills, energy drinks, and more. And if you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, and I love it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, disinformation, crime, and cults and more.

That'll help new [00:01:00] listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. It's impossible to talk about American history without talking about slavery. The transatlantic slave trade is one of the most brutal episodes in American history, and the resulting American Civil War is one of the bloodiest wars in human history.

Unfortunately, however, American slavery is just one episode in a long and very disgusting story that runs from the dawn of time until today. So we wanted to take some time and give a more balanced, longer term view of slavery than just one centered on slavery in America, though that's definitely part of the story.

Now, I'll warn you in advance, this one is kind of icky slavery. Everywhere is obviously icky Slavery in America has ramifications even up to current day. So I'm asking everyone to please give us the benefit of the doubt here before you decide that we are, I don't know, horrible Nazis or whatever just for talking about this.

I know I just stepped right all over. Benefit of the doubt. Folks. Here to help me unchain the topic is writer and researcher, Nick Pell. Alright, [00:02:00] so I'm deliberately setting the bar real low so that the rest of the episode doesn't sound as bad, and we'll see if that strategy actually works out. Now Nick, I came to you with this topic because I know you'd have some unique perspectives,

Nick Pell: right?

It's time that somebody was fair to the slaves of history.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh

Nick Pell: God,

Jordan Harbinger: absolutely

Nick Pell: not what I meant. Yeah, I know. Me neither. But it was just too easy. You're right. By the way, this topic definitely needs a more balanced level-headed, and I think more to the point, historically

Jordan Harbinger: accurate review of things. You wanna make sure we're being fair to history.

Slavery's too, like you said. Got it. Okay.

Nick Pell: One of the things I really think we should discuss right off the bat is that slavery isn't a part of the past. Slavery's happening right now. And when somebody says slavery, you immediately think of the American South, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, big plantations in Virginia and South Carolina, that kind of thing.

But America didn't invent slavery, and in historical terms, antebellum slavery. The pre-Civil [00:03:00] war period of slavery in North America is just the blink of an eye. In historical terms, there's a much broader history of slavery. In fact, it's more or less the default means of organizing labor throughout human

Jordan Harbinger: history.

So when you say the default means of organizing labor, what exactly do you mean by that?

Nick Pell: So there's some hunter gatherer societies that have slavery, but virtually every human society that invents agriculture also manages to invent slavery. This is probably also a good place to start talking about what we mean when we say slavery.

So I think slavery for the purposes of this episode is actually referring to two overlapping phenomenon. First, there's chattel slavery, which is people owning other people. Not only are you working for me for free, but I can sell your kids or basically do anything I want to or with you.

Jordan Harbinger: That's, I think, typically what people mean when they talk about slavery, especially when they're coming from a Western or American perspective.

So what's the other kind of [00:04:00] slavery?

Nick Pell: It becomes really difficult to talk about modern slavery if we limit the definition to chattel slavery, because a lot of modern slavery isn't chattel slavery. It's what we call forced labor. So you're basically working what's usually a very dangerous and deeply unpleasant job in abusive working conditions and not being paid for it.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So you can't be sold or traded or your kids traded or whatever. But otherwise, it's very similar to slavery. Sounds almost like the same thing.

Nick Pell: And to be clear, there's all kinds of abuse that takes place in these forced labor environments, sexual assault, beatings, what have you.

Jordan Harbinger: So this is obviously all quite horrible.

It's an interesting distinction because when we think about slavery, the whole not getting paid part of it, it's not even remotely the most disturbing aspect of slavery, right? The wages are really low or like non-existent. Yeah. That's not what we're worried about here, folks. I.

Nick Pell: Well, I'm also worried about that, but you're correct that it's not being paid for.

Your labor as a [00:05:00] slave is the least of your worries when you're a slave,

Jordan Harbinger: right? Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. Yeah. I'm more worried about my kids are being sold from me and I'm getting physically abused or worse constantly on a daily basis and living in fear. So when you say the slavery is the main way labor's organized throughout history, why is that?

Is it just 'cause it's cheap or free? I mean, maybe it's a dumb question.

Nick Pell: So some things never change, and one of them is that you can't get something for nothing. If you want to make things happen, you need one of two things. You need muscle or fire. You have to yoke a bunch of horses together or get a bunch of dudes to work together, or you need to light something on fire and use the energy from that to power a machine.

The big change between ancient history and today is we've got way better stuff to light on fire. We've got oil, we've got coal, we've got magic rocks that boil water for us. There's less need for mus, but the ancients didn't have any of that. They had wood. And so they had to lean a lot [00:06:00] harder on muscle.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

Okay. And before people want me to do a skeptical Sunday on Magic Rocks, we're talking about nuclear power, right? You're just being facetious. Yes. Funny.

Nick Pell: Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: The whole time you're describing this, I'm thinking of the Hebrew slaves and the 10 Commandments building the pyramids, and they're just carrying all those giant Moses.

Yes, exactly right. And apparently somebody's gonna correct me on this or affirm me on this, but apparently Jews never actually built the pyramids, but whatever. Despite what it might say in the Bible, the Jews were maybe never really an ancient Egypt building the pyramids at all. Kind of a disappointment.

A lot of my Jewish friends were pretty proud of their ancestors' hand building one of the wonders of the world, myself included. Although. Man, as a Jew, I can't imagine, even if they tried, they'd be like, these people complain way too much. Get rid of 'em. We need somebody else. I can't listen to this anymore.

Nick Pell: I'm so glad that my Jewish wife can't hear any of this to react to it. Oh no. Actually, as everybody knows, the pyramids were built by aliens. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Go get the aliens. I can't listen to this guy complain anymore. Had Shep suit. He's driving me crazy. They're driving me nuts. [00:07:00] Yeah. I mean, a bunch

Nick Pell: of those ancient

Jordan Harbinger: wonders were built by slave labor.

Probably most of them kind of a downer. Takes a bit of shine off of things. But if you're right, if it's the default way of doing something and it's really grand, it probably wasn't a passion project of the leader to do himself in his spare time.

Nick Pell: Yeah. You guys are not allowed to enjoy classical architecture anymore.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, the canceled the Pyramids. Parthenon. The Acropolis all canceled. Sorry, folks.

Nick Pell: Yeah. These kinds of large scale architecture and infrastructure projects are definitely one of the bigger uses of slavery in the ancient world, which isn't to say that every. Hands that ever touched a stone that went in the Parthenon was slave labor.

'cause I, I don't have the info in front of me, but like I would be shocked if that were the case because a lot of it's highly skilled and

Jordan Harbinger: the artisans and stuff are gonna, people are gonna be like, Hey, there's documentation of artisans being paid to decorate this thing. And it's like, okay, but where did the raw, where'd the frame come from?

Well, you know

Nick Pell: who dragged the

Jordan Harbinger: marble there? Exactly.

Nick Pell: Yeah. [00:08:00] So the main uses of slavery in the ancient world are agriculture and mining. Which brings us back to the marble thing. The mining is almost unimaginably brutal in its type of labor. And everybody who's seen Ben Hur knows about the galley slaves.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. Okay. So for those playing at home, those are the guys with the oars rowing the big boats, right? Is that what that is?

Nick Pell: Yeah. And actually most galley oarsmen were free men working for pay. Probably a share of the plunder. 'cause that's typically how sailors were. Paid in those days. It's typically how the military was paid in those days.

The exception was during times of war, Rome desperately needed every free hand it would get. Presumably they were taking a lot of these guys out of mining and agriculture to throw them on boats. Rome is good to talk about when we talk about slavery for a couple reasons. One, the average person knows a fair bit about ancient [00:09:00] Rome from movies and TV shows, and we also have a lot of data on ancient Rome that we just don't have about Samaria or Babylon or even ancient Egypt.

In ancient Rome mining was basically always Slades, especially salt mining. Mercury mining was like almost always slaves. I don't know how you get somebody to do mercury mining unless you were forcing them to do it, because it's kind of a slow death sentence. Mining in general is a slow death sentence in the angel world.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I did a show a long time ago, actually wasn't that long ago, episode 8 0 7 Sidharth Karara about how the blood of the Congo powers our lives. And essentially what he's talking about is how these kids and adults, of course mine for chemicals like cobalt coltan in mines, and it's like they're using mercury as well, so they're, the health ramifications are like horrific and they're in these swampy, disgusting environments, dying like flies, getting all kinds of [00:10:00] sicknesses and it's basically modern day slavery.

Although I think they make 10 cents a day or something like that. I don't know if that even counts. They basically have no other choice that you either starve to death or you do that and sometimes gangs are enforcing it. So yeah, this sounds absolutely nightmarish. I don't even wanna do mining if I'm getting paid for it and have a union in OSHA and everything.

It still sounds horrible, and maybe that's unique to me. I'm sure there's miners that listen to this, but I'm like, I'm not going in that little shaft and sitting down there all day. That seems terrifying.

Nick Pell: For anybody who remembers the trades versus college episode, my father has told me that the one job you could not pay him enough to do if his children were starving is going to mine.

Which, yeah, mining is unpleasant at best, right In the best conditions. Mining is deeply unpleasant in the worst conditions. It's a living hell. So a lot of these guys in ancient Rome anyway would've been convict labor. It's been incredibly gruesome death penalty. But given that the Romans crucify people, it's not really that surprising that they would work dudes to death in salt mines and mercury mines.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I guess [00:11:00] if you were giving me the choice between dying on a cross and dying an salt mine, I might actually pick the salt mine, at least at first. I don't know. So was mining the main use of slaves in ancient Rome? I guess I thought it was gladiator combat and pool boys or something. I don't know. I guess.

I need to read up. What, did you watch

Nick Pell: Spartacus this weekend or

Jordan Harbinger: something? I, I

Nick Pell: might have, I might have watched something recently. Yeah. It depends on what you mean by main use fields. Mines and mills were the biggest use of slaves and also kind of the worst, I'm gonna sound ridiculous when I say this.

There was no room for advancement.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Lack of upward mobility. Not really on my Bingo card for reasons. Slavery is bad. Uh, I've been toiling away in this mercury mind, but one day I'm gonna be a manager. I don't know. In some cases, was there a way to work your way up the corporate slavery ladder in other places or other slavery organizations?

Nick Pell: Yeah, so a lot of these guys were only enslaved because they owed a debt to somebody. So you pay off your loan, you're free, or [00:12:00] you buy yourself from your master and you're free. Or he sees you working as a towel boy or whatever. This guy's smart. I can have him do this for me instead, and it's cool. I'm not a pool attendant anymore.

I'm a valet or something. Yeah, yeah. Maybe your master just frees everybody when he dies. That was reasonably common. Maybe he just likes you. That's another thing that was reasonably common. The master just likes the guy, so we freeze him. Other than freedom, like I mentioned before, there's a ways to work your way up the ladder, so to speak, by learning valuable skills.

So like I said, one day you're. Cleaning latrines and the next day you're the master's personal valet.

Jordan Harbinger: One of those jobs is definitely shittier than the other.

Nick Pell: Yeah. So, uh, moving on from that one, we do know more about Roman slavery than many others, but it's not like they had a bureau of labor statistics, [00:13:00] so it's hard to tell exactly who did what and in what proportions. What we do know is that the majority of Roman slaves were in mines or fields, and they kind of got just work to death because every time you got tired, somebody would beat you.

City slaves and household slaves, they had better lives. These are the ones who could buy their freedom and after they bought their freedom or were freed through manumission, which is the fancy SAT word for your master, freeing you, you were kind of like. Part of the extended family. Like you didn't usually leave the, the manner or whatever you kept living with them.

Jordan Harbinger: Really? Wow. Okay. And you think your holidays are awkward. Imagine your family actually bought you from a slaver used to beat you and work you until you somehow earned your freedom. I might skip that Thanksgiving. I don't care how good the green bean casserole is, I'm leaving the manor. It just seems hard to believe like, oh, he is a member of the family now we're gonna totally treat you in a different, more respectful way.

What do I know? But it just sounds like it's a tall [00:14:00] one.

Nick Pell: I love you throwing in your little Groucho Marx jokes while we Oh yeah. Talk about slavery. The green

Jordan Harbinger: bean casserole was

Nick Pell: pure dad. Yeah. So what we need to point out, there's no way that being owned by another human being can be considered, quote unquote, not that bad.

Masters could do literally anything they wanted to their slaves and they frequently did. With that said, at a certain point in Roman history, there are some improvements in the lives slaves period. Not, oh, I got lucky and this guy's a nice guy. It's not as horrific as working in a mercury mind.

Jordan Harbinger: So what were the improvements in general,

Nick Pell: slaves could eventually sue their masters for poor treatment and the masters were punished by losing their property.

I probably should say that if I refer to somebody as somebody else's property in here, I'm doing that for ease of communication. I just don't accept that a human being could be another person's property. So bear with me. Yeah, I think we're on the same page here. You would lose your slave to another slave master, so, so it's not [00:15:00] like you got freed, you just got transferred.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Interesting. So you get beat too bad and you can sue. And then what? You become someone else's slave instead. I mean, it hardly seems like justice and this is just Rome. What about other cultures and civilizations?

Nick Pell: So the thing is, like I said before, slavery is the default method for human labor organizations throughout history.

I use Rome as an example because you spent all weekend watching Spartacus. Apparently people have seen HBO's, Rome, people have seen Gladiator. So there's a pretty decent awareness of Roman history through popular culture, even if it's not super accurate, at least we have some kind of frames of references to share in common.

The Greeks were very similar, but the Spartans, the Spartans,

Jordan Harbinger: those are the guys from the movie 300 with the amazing abs, right? For those of us who get our history exclusively from Hollywood, and now this podcast.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And that movie, surprisingly, is not the most inaccurate piece of comic book slop ever made.

Frank Miller, [00:16:00] who wrote original comic book, it's based on, was a really big fan of the Spartans. Spartans had slaves who did all their agricultural work for them. They were called helos, and they just treated them like garbage, and they were in almost constant revolt against the Spartans. So the dynamic there is quite different.

Uh, the main point I wanna make, which is why I am repeating it for a third time, is that slavery is absolutely normal. And by that I mean very common.

Jordan Harbinger: Clarify what you mean when you say that you think that slavery is normal. Try trying to avoid the inevitable hate in the comments. You're normalizing slavery.

I know what you mean, but let's really put a fine point on it.

Nick Pell: Look, I think a lot of things are normal. It's not a moral endorsement of them. Like I said before, like I don't think it's possible for a human being to own another human being. It's just, it's not possible. You can beat someone to do what you want them to do.

Like if you wanna go sell yourself to somebody, I reject the idea. That's even a thing [00:17:00] that you can do because you can't sell your feelings, you can't sell your moods, you can't sell yourself to somebody else. You can't own another person. This is not like a moral condemnation of slavery as such. It's, I just don't think that it's, here's a 50 cent SAT word.

I don't think it's like ontologically possible to own another human being. You can have a state apparatus and such that makes it so that people have to do what you tell them to where they're gonna get beat or killed or whatever. But I don't think it's possible to metaphysically own a human being the same way that I own a car or own livestock for that matter.

I just, I don't think it's possible, and I find the idea morally repugnant. But that said. We are kind of lucky that we live in one of the few times and places in history where most people are not slaves because that is the reality for most of human history.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You mentioned time, but also place 'cause I have questions about that, that are coming up soon.

Spoiler alert, there's still a lot of slavery going on. Okay. This ancient slavery, [00:18:00] the widespread slavery of the ancient world, how does that lead to the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in America? I'm not asking you to draw like a straight line. I, no, there's not a straight line between Rome 300 BC and Atlanta.

1810. Where does American slavery come from in brief and how is it different?

Nick Pell: Slavery gives way to serfdom by the end of the classical period in Europe at least. Serfdom is different from slavery in ways so subtle that it's not really. In my opinion worth calling something else. I think that it definitely fits our definition of slavery as forced labor, even if it's in some ways subtly different from chattel slavery.

But when I say slavery, like the first thing people think of is big cotton plantations in Alabama being worked by men and women kidnapped from Africa. And this is a completely different historical development.

Jordan Harbinger: In what ways, what makes the African slave or the transatlantic slave trade different or unique?[00:19:00]

Nick Pell: African slavery is different for a few reasons. The main one is that there's an entire race of people that are enslaved on the basis of being part of that race.

Jordan Harbinger: Didn't the Romans also do that though? I mean, my history is so weak, but didn't they conquer places like Gaul and they just haul all the gulls back as slaves?

Nick Pell: They did not haul all the Gauls back as slaves. They haul some of the people back. Definitely. Absolutely. They wouldn't typically go raiding back into places they'd conquered and taking those people as slaves, and they also did not have an elaborate philosophical justification for why it was okay to enslave all galls on the basis of the fact that they were, GS were, they had a pretty, actually, the Romans had a very deep respect generally for people they conquered.

The gulls are actually a really good example of it. There's all kinds of classical art that depicts Gs as these barbaric, but like physically strapping, brave, heroic [00:20:00] people.

Jordan Harbinger: Can you tell me what Gs are? Clearly this place doesn't exist anymore. What is this place now? Where do these people live?

Nick Pell: They were Celts that lived in what's now France.

Okay. Like the ancestors of the French, though, the French have a lot of German in them now. That's a whole other episode. Yeah. But yeah, when I say Gaul equals Celts living in France. Okay. American slavery isn't even like America conquered some tribe and that tribe was enslaved. It was like blacks in Africa a fair game period.

Yeah, period. They tried doing this with Native Americans when first settlers and conquerors got here, but it didn't work because it was too easy for the natives to run away. They just run away and rejoin their tribes.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure. You just go, I'm gonna go pick you some berries. I'll be right back. And you just never, yeah, that's it.

You know the land, you're not going back to that nonsense. What about the Irish? I know some people claim the Irish were slaves. I heard about that a lot when I lived in New York. There was the whole thing there, and then other people get really mad when you even suggest that white people were also enslaved 'cause it was [00:21:00] not the same thing.

The Irish thing is complicated.

Nick Pell: Jim Goad, the author, does a really good explanation of the Irish thing in his book, the Redneck Manifesto. The short version is that. Irish slaves, their tenure of slavery was typically seven years rather than their entire life. God, that's

Jordan Harbinger: such a long time. The seven years is still a long ass time to be a slave.

Especially, I don't know what years this was, but didn't people die when they were 35 back then or something?

Nick Pell: That's not as true as people think it is, because that keeps infant mortality into it. It's like if you got to the age of 12, you were probably gonna make it to about 60. Oh, okay. Is is my understanding of it.

This is an off the cuff remark, flood the comments and tell me I'm an idiot.

Jordan Harbinger: I know it's different for different races or ethnicities too. I was talking to my friend George Ling, and when he was born, I think the life expectancy for an African American man was like 43 or something crazy. But that was different because they had.

No access to healthcare, et cetera, et cetera. [00:22:00] Yeah. But, okay. Seven years, still a long ass time to be a slave, regardless of how long you live.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And there's euphemistically called indentures, and it's, eh. Yeah. They're slaves with a limited term. And yes, there's differences and the differences are significant, but there's some pretty compelling evidence that the Irish indentures were often treated worse than the African chattel slaves.

For the same reason you treat your own car better than a rental. Geez. If you were an Irish indenture, the guy that owned your indenture contract couldn't sell your kids, which I think is important. Yeah. You know, this is an important distinction. Sure. But when we're talking about kind of the day-to-day, like, yeah, they could be treated extra bad because what do I care?

I only got the guy for seven years. For some reason. People really hate the idea that there were. White slaves who were in some ways treated worse than their black counterparts. Like, I don't really know why that bothers some people, but there are people who are definitely like really invested in proving that Irish indentures weren't slaves.[00:23:00]

Yeah. I think we can say that they weren't slave slaves. And yes, there's obviously something to be said for not being able to have somebody sell your children, but their lives were terrible. Their

Jordan Harbinger: lives are absolutely terrible. Yeah. The distinction is important. There's a significant difference between being treated like a rental car for seven years and being owned, potentially sold away from your family, having your children sold off, which I can't even imagine as a parent.

It's like the most painful thing I can think of. And yeah, that distinction has to be made at at some level.

Nick Pell: No, I completely agree. I just don't understand why people are offended by the idea that yes, many Irish in dentures were treated worse on. Day-to-day basis. It's a bit of a third rail, but whatever.

People also hate hearing that all slave owners weren't just relentlessly sadistic for the sake of sadism. So a lot of what we think we know about slavery, antebellum slavery in the United States comes from one television show roots, which is fictional. For anybody who's not aware. Roots [00:24:00] is fiction. Alex Haley settled a plagiarism case over it.

That included admission that he stole sections from a work of fiction.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, but wasn't it based on realistic? I mean, I, I feel like we're veering dangerously close to, Hey, not all slave owners were bad, or something like that. I don't know if that's the take we want.

Nick Pell: A bunch of them were probably sadistic monsters who got off on treating people like garbage.

I would say most of them were, had a very different idea of human decency than you or I did. Which is maybe being unduly generous.

Jordan Harbinger: It's horrific, but it's almost like the Nazi thing in World War ii and it's not everyone in Germany was a Nazi and you just have to wrap your mind around this horrible thing and how like seemingly normal people can do it.

Nick Pell: I think most of 'em are probably just businessmen and businessmen wanna protect their capital and it's not my favorite way to talk about other human beings, but it's just cold reality of the situation.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it is kind of a gross way to think about it.

Nick Pell: Yeah. But it's, you have to [00:25:00] inhabit this head space a little bit to be able to wrap your head around it.

Yep. So a plantation owner saw his slaves as a potential investment capital, maybe in some cases. He weirdly viewed them as part of the family, which I don't want to lean too heavily into that, but I think it's worth mentioning. Uh, he saw the indentures as a rental. I. You take the car that you own to get the oil changed religiously, and when the little orange light goes on, you take it to the mechanic and rentals, you go, I care.

It's making a weird noise. Who cares? Drive it like I stole it. And that was how a lot of the slave masters I. Treated their Irish indentures. It's how they treated a lot of their African slaves too. I would imagine there's some evidence to suggest that they really rode the Irish indenture heart.

Jordan Harbinger: What's weird is they justify the African slavery thing and they're like, oh, there's something, whatever, biblical, or like they're different color so they're not human.

And then you get these like whiter than anyone else, white as Irish people who like go out in the sun for three minutes and turn red and it's like, [00:26:00] okay, you need a different rationale for that. And that is what I paid for their boat trip here so I can just tell them what to do for seven years. Is that kind of the idea?

Nick Pell: Part of it. And then also, I don't know to the degree to which this was related, but the Irish were not considered white. That's so weird though. They're whiter than they, they're not accurate that they were considered black, but they were not considered white. You can read stuff by Benjamin Franklin talking about Germans.

That's like the most racist thing you've ever heard in your life. And he's talking about Germans

Jordan Harbinger: so bizarre. But it just shows you the arbitrariness of all of these lines drawn in the sand. Like he's Italian, he's not white, he's Irish, he's not white, they're Jews, they're not white. And then you put a bunch of Jews into Irish and Italians in a room and you can't tell who's who no matter what.

Especially now it's like you just, you have no fricking idea unless they start speaking Italian. You just don't know.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino look like they could be cousins.

Jordan Harbinger: And these are like stereo, right? This is without, uh, the st [00:27:00] leaning into the stereotype. Okay. So, but once these people finish the seven years, then they're totally free.

Is that the idea? It's more like if they

Nick Pell: survived the seven years. Oh man. It was so common for these people to die when they were done. It was also very common for them to be like abducted at sea and forced back into in denture. Ugh. Yeah. It was nasty. Just everything about it is horrible and denture and chattel slavery are horrific and morally repugnant evil, but there are differences between them.

I also think that when we're talking about like less bad forms of slavery, it's such a weird way to try and quantify the experience of being indentured servant in colonial America.

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Now, back to skeptical Sunday. This is like one of those things where people go, Hey, the labor camps weren't [00:31:00] that bad. They weren't all being sent to the gas chambers, and you're like, do you hear yourself right now?

Nick Pell: Yeah, that's not the point I'm making. The point I'm making is that, hey, there's this other group of people who were treated very horribly.

In a way that's like

Jordan Harbinger: they were slave, these both sound awful, but I guess I don't know the difference between how these people were treated and the scale of each and all that.

Nick Pell: Ah, see the scale, is it the scale is the thing that's worth noting. The indenture, that kind of fades away pretty quickly, whereas slavery, slavery persists until there's a gigantic war over it.

I'm sure there were slaves who were treated better than indentures. I don't think the individual cases really matter that much because I the point, I think. To put a button on all this is that the point is that the entire economic and political system of the United States, particularly the South, revolved around the chattel slavery of Africans in a way that it did not [00:32:00] indenture forced labor of Irish.

You did not have big slaving expeditions into the interior of Ireland to harvest slaves, and there's a lot of reasons for that. One of them is you weren't allowed to enslave Christians, generally speaking, even heretics like the Irish Catholics. But even the idea of everybody has this idea of like slaving expeditions into the African interior, and this is not really the most accurate.

Picture of how slavery worked. The reality of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was more like you pulled up at a mixed slavers along the coast and bought what you wanted. Most of the slaves purchased by Europeans were bought from other Africans. They were not captured during European raid parties. Most of these cases, tribes would subjugate other neighboring tribes and then would sell to Europeans because it's lucrative.

It's like finding

Jordan Harbinger: gold. Yikes. This is gonna be, or is, I would assume, a [00:33:00] controversial issue. Right. The role of other African tribes in the participation of them in the transatlantic slave trade. I was just sort of settled.

Nick Pell: No, I don't think it's totally unknown, but it's not talked about that much. For the record, I don't think this makes it better or worse.

It's not suddenly okay or less bad or worse or anything because dominant African tribes were enslaving their subjugated people. Is it better or worse to enslave your neighboring tribe because they have the same skin color of you than it is to enslave someone across an ocean? Like I don't think it really matters.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm glad you said that because it almost seems like the kind of thing that like I. It's like an American History X kind of point where it's like, oh, just bought the slaves from other black people, so it's not our problem. Like it wasn't us. No, it was you, bro. I've heard this before and I was always curious about how true it was or not.

We have sources in the show notes. People can evaluate that on their own. I'm sure we're gonna get emails about this [00:34:00] from history buffs and whatnot, and I welcome those. But isn't there some sort of moral culpability on the part of the people who are buying slaves, right. The Europeans, for example, in the drug trade.

Yeah, we blame the cartels, but I also blame the gangs that are shooting and snorting and selling and killing each other. I blame them too, and I blame the end user.

Nick Pell: No, and I completely agree. If there was no market for slaves, there'd be no reason to kidnap Africans and sell them. There's no market for it.

Not trying to let anyone off work here. Okay. I'm just simply trying to highlight the difference between the myth and the reality of the situation, and I think that particularly when you're talking about culpability up the supply chain, it's Yeah, like the guy coming home with a boat full of them is to me not like off the hook because he bought them from another African what?

Like Africans have some right to sell other Africans. Yeah, no, yeah, like all of it, there's no justification for any of this. The other thing that's [00:35:00] maybe worth mentioning at this point is that during the same time period there was a bustling slave trade and European slaves on the Barbary Coast, which is basically what is now the northern coast of Algeria and Tunisia.

Even at this point in history, the trans-Atlantic slave trade is not the only kind of slavery that's going on in Africa.

Jordan Harbinger: So is it basically the same as the transatlantic slave trade but didn't reverse what's going on there?

Nick Pell: No. People do try and make some equivalency between these two. There's some pretty critical differences between the transatlantic slave trade and the barbery slave trade.

People have heard of the barbery slave trade. It, it's like this American history X thing where it's like they were enslaving white people from the south of France and Sicily and bringing them to Tunisia. And it's like these are not equivalent things.

Jordan Harbinger: How are they different? And it's funny, it would be rich to hear them say they were enslaving white people from Sicily.

Not that we consider those Italians whites. So depending on what time we're having this [00:36:00] conversation or if my uncles in the room, it's just like, ugh, exhausting, but Okay. How are these different then? Is it the scale mostly?

Nick Pell: The scale is a big one. I think atrocities or atrocities, I'm not really like big into saying this genocides worse that, yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: okay, I accept that,

Nick Pell: but I.

The most generous numbers say that the barbery slave trade had 1.25 million slaves. There were 10 times as many Africans that made it to the new world as slaves, and God knows how many of them died in the middle passage. There's some estimates that say half the ship would die, which I don't know, you know, wasn't the focus of the episode.

But then they had to go through what was called seasoning, which was Slave bootcamp in the Caribbean.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I am afraid to even ask what that is. Tell me what that is.

Nick Pell: I'm gonna tell you. Anyway. They were worked like extra hard and punished extra [00:37:00] hard. One alleged punishment was that they would whip pregnant women and then pour salt and pepper and wax into their wounds.

Oh my

Jordan Harbinger: God. So this is sadistic and disgusting. There's, I can't imagine the point of that. Ugh.

Nick Pell: I think there is no rational point to it. No, there

Jordan Harbinger: can't. There just can't be. That's, Ugh, gross.

Nick Pell: So I think that the scale is definitely one difference. The barbery slave trade did not have the same kind of middle passage that killed off a third, half, a 10th, whatever it is, percentage of ship.

Jordan Harbinger: I feel like when I was in the Marine Corps Reserve in college, which is a thing I should probably talk more about at some point, 'cause people keep asking me about it. There's a song, right? And it's, we mentioned Tripoli.

Nick Pell: Yeah, right. It's the Marine Corps song. Like those, the shores of Tripoli.

Jordan Harbinger: And I remember being like, I gotta look this up because Tripoli, as far as I know, is not in the United States.

So what are we talking about here? And this has something to do with it, right? Tripoli

Nick Pell: is, I believe in Libya. It is. Yeah. But yeah, the American [00:38:00] military ended the Barbary Slave Trade America, Sicily and Sweden. They fought two wars against the Barbery Pirates, Sicily.

Jordan Harbinger: You never, that's kind of like saying.

Hilton had island fought a war with America and defeated slave. Like what? I guess it was separate back then.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Sicily, huh. And as many people may or may not know, France conquered most of Northern Africa that conquered Algeria and Tunisia. Anyway,

Jordan Harbinger: so this is a good pivot to the Civil War. I keep hearing like the Civil War wasn't actually fought over slavery, and I'm like, oh, my high school education is totally inaccurate and dumb.

Now I don't know anything. How accurate is that?

Nick Pell: The Civil War was absolutely fought over slavery, but it was not fought over slavery for the reason that most people think.

Jordan Harbinger: What do you mean? Like it was fought over slavery, but not because we're such good people. We wanted slavery to end, but for some other reason, that's why I feel like you're going.

Yeah.

Nick Pell: People did not care a bit about the slaves. So the most reason weirdo Quakers and you know some people in Massachusetts,

Jordan Harbinger: right, the hippie equivalent back [00:39:00] in 1850 or whatever.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Like Henry David Thoreau and Harriet Beecher ow are like the only people who care about slaves in the 1860. Gotcha. The Civil War was the culmination of a conflict between two economic systems, agricultural slavery, and industrial free labor.

Again, like there's very few people outside of some Quakers, some radicals in Massachusetts. For the most part, who really cared about the plight of the slaves? The Civil War was not a humanitarian crusade to free the slaves. It had nothing to do with freeing the slaves until the very end, and that was just by accident.

It was so that the North could get a military advantage against the South. If you read Lincoln's papers and stuff from the later part of the war, it becomes clear to him like, we're not gonna be able to go back to the way things were. Whereas at the beginning, he's just, I don't really care. We could have slaves.

We could not have slaves. I don't care. We're preserving the union and by the end of the war, we're not gonna be able to keep having slavery because slavery is what caused the war. One of the big [00:40:00] reasons the South had trouble attracting allies and getting recognition from European powers was that they did not like slavery.

And this was particularly true of the British, the transatlantic slave trade ends because the British. Blockade the continent.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, wow. I did not know that.

Nick Pell: Yes. That was why the transatlantic slave trade ended was because the British blockade of the continent, and so you had to be a blockade runner to like get new slaves out of Africa.

Yeah. It becomes too costly,

Jordan Harbinger: too difficult.

Nick Pell: Yeah. The Civil War as a crusade to end slavery is a myth, and I think that there's a somewhat more dangerous myth about the Civil War. Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: Which

Nick Pell: is that the Civil War ended slavery in America.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. This is gonna need a little bit more unpacking for me. Once again, my high school education on this subject.

I should qualify this. I did go to college in grad school. I don't only have a high school education for those who are new to the show, but I don't know. You're, you're a lawyer with a high school education. I have a lawyer, yes. We also as a high school [00:41:00] education, but my history really does stop in high school in the nineties.

This just has to be unpacked for me because I am not following how the American Civil War didn't end slavery in the United States. Didn't the Civil War. And they were like, okay, no more of this. And then Jim Crow. That's all I know.

Nick Pell: Okay, so if we go back to the beginning of this episode, we define slavery in two ways.

The first is channel slavery and the civil war and subsequent constitutional amendments definitely ended this, except for extreme outliers that do exist and are horrific, but like they're against the law. Okay. Previously owning other human beings was enshrined in constitutional law, and it's not anymore.

It's illegal and it's considered one of the most transgressive acts that a human being can commit against human morality. But in the sense of forced labor, I think if we don't count forced labor as some kind of slavery, we can't really talk about modern day [00:42:00] slavery much at all. And I think that the distinction is important, but that we can call both slavery,

Jordan Harbinger: but okay.

Forced labor is illegal in the United States. To be clear, right? Is

Nick Pell: no, it's not. It's enshrined in the United States Constitution. Okay. I'm going to read directly from the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution. The amendment that most Americans erroneously think bans slavery, quote begins neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime.

Whereof, the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction. So prisoners are still allowed to be slaves, and that's big business in this country. There's 800,000 Americans in prison. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, I believe.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. I did not know that. I remember when I went to North Korea with this author, Neil Strauss, and he was like, we're talking about the labor camps that they have there, and we asked what [00:43:00] the. Incarceration rate was of North Korea and somebody somehow either knew it or found it, and it's 1%, which I think is about the same as the United States per capita, which is crazy 'cause we're talking about North Korea.

Yeah. Now that's different because it's North Korea, but whatever. I guess my only quip here, one of my quips so far, I should say, is that. They've been through the judicial system, regardless of what we all think about it or how the processes work. Warm up the angry emails now folks. Now is the time. These processes are fallible.

There's corruption. I get it, but it's still not just like, Hey, you get over here. You're a slave now.

Nick Pell: No, and I understand that distinction and I do think it's an important one, but there's a special carve out for this type of forced labor in the United States and it's profitable. Yeah. People

Jordan Harbinger: profit

Nick Pell: off of

Jordan Harbinger: this.

Yeah, that's messed up now that you say it like that.

Nick Pell: Yeah. So there's some polling from these convict laborers. 64% feel unsafe at work. 70% receive no training and 76% said they'd be punished if they didn't work. [00:44:00] And to be fair, like I have friends who've done pretty serious prison time, not, I went to jail for 90 days for DUI, giant grain of salt.

Anytime inmates speak, they're not. Generally the most notoriously honest people. But my point here is it's just not true that we don't have slavery in the sense of forced labor in the United States that this was abolished. It's not. It's enshrined in the Constitution. Okay. And that's just one example. So is there

Jordan Harbinger: another, uh, example?

Yeah, the draft. Do we have the draft anymore? Do we do that? I'm old now. I don't remember. I registered for

Nick Pell: selective service when I turned

Jordan Harbinger: 18. I must have done that. Wait, maybe I got bone spurs and flat feet. No, I was, again, I was in ROTC. I was in the Marine Corps Reserves. Technically, of course I registered for the draft.

I remember that little card. And man, I don't think I know anybody who didn't do that. It was all anybody talked about when we got those things. How is the draft slavery though? I don't wanna get too far ahead of myself.

Nick Pell: I wanna turn that question on its head [00:45:00] and ask how is it not? There's this cultural touchdown of baby boomers get their draft notice and they can run away to Canada or Sweden or something like, or they can go fight in a war.

They don't wanna fight in.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I guess the argument that many would make myself maybe included is you owe some kind of service to the country during a time of emergency. Was that abused? Yeah. Vietnam. Right.

Nick Pell: I think that this kind of becomes a little clearer to our American centric audience if I use other countries to illustrate this point.

Okay. Russia has a draft. Most of the guys fighting in Ukraine right now are conscripts on both sides. I've seen so many videos of like guys who just walk around Ukraine, like grabbing dudes and throwing them into vans and making them go. I've seen

Jordan Harbinger: that. Yeah. You go to a bar and someone's like, Hey, you look like you are old enough to go sit in a trench, and it's like, oh, this is the worst day of your life, man.

So far.

Nick Pell: Yeah. I mean, is that okay with you? No, that's, this is a rhetorical you for the audience. I'm not trying to put you on the spot specifically, but like. Person listening to this, are you okay with [00:46:00] that? And if you say yes, because Ukraine has to fight the Russians, okay, but if the Russians do it, are you okay with it?

And then does it become this thing that's conditional on who you think the good guys are? And it's like the good guys aren't grabbing people off the streets and forcing them to go to war. And if your emergency is such a big deal and your war so great, presumably you wouldn't have to be threatening people with prisoner grabbing them out of bars and like forcing them to go to the front.

And this is not meant to be a specific comment on the Russo Ukraine war by any means. It's just to illustrate the point that, okay, so insert country you don't like here has a draft, is their draft. Okay?

Jordan Harbinger: Right. I do see your point. I don't know if I agree in all cases, but that's not really what we're trying to explore here.

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Now for the rest of skeptical Sunday, you hear about countries like North Korea where the guys join the military for, I wanna say 10 years, [00:49:00] and it's mandatory, but also they're not gearing up for war against the south of the United States. Supposedly they are, but when you go there, what you do is you see them working on farms for free.

Because it's just forced labor, and this is up for debate, I suppose, but it's also designed to make men closer to the states and the military than to their own families. Because if you're 18 and you go away until you're like 30, that's a long time. Many of those guys don't see their family ever during that period of time.

It depends. So you might even be 10 miles away and never see them. That's kind of how that goes. But yeah, I don't know. I don't wanna get too in the weeds on that. I think,

Nick Pell: I mean, my personal view on this kind of thing is like things don't become okay when the state does them because the state's doing them.

So if it's unethical for me to do something to you, it's unethical for the state to do the same thing to you or somebody else. So I can't go to your house and threaten to keep you in my basement if you don't go to a war of my choosing. And and right. You laugh because [00:50:00] it's ridiculous, but for some reason the state does it.

We just go, okay, it's okay now. And if that's your view of the world, I understand that my view of the world is not the same as many other people's, but that is my view of the world. Things don't become okay when the state does them versus when. Private entities do them.

Jordan Harbinger: I guess I have to agree it is forced labor, but maybe war existential crisis to the state facing genocide.

It's like the one situation where like maybe, and again I'm not saying this is my opinion 'cause I have to think about it more. Maybe this is the one time where it's actually acceptable, but now I'm saying, hey, forced labor is acceptable if you know colon right? I gotta think about this a lot. This is like a philosophical thing.

I wasn't expected to dip into service of the state. Maybe it's different than being forced to, you know, farm potatoes for Monsanto someplace. As for prison labor, I can definitely see some people arguing that since you're convicted of a crime and society has to pay to house, feed, clothe you, et cetera, that working in prison [00:51:00] is just paying your debt to society.

But that's another conversation. And also you mentioned that there's profit happening off of this. Am I getting some rebate on that then? No, the private prison system is profiting off that, so that's definitely not fair. Right. I heard about these fire brigades at this prison that I worked at in California where I did some volunteering.

They have a fire brigade and the guys like it 'cause they get to be outside all the time and all a sudden it is optional. They're not forced to do it, but also they're doing like controlled burns and stuff, so they're helping the state of California. That might be a little bit different. But then are they paid?

But then that money goes to the prison and is that a private prison? I don't know how any of that works now that you mention it. Obviously slavery still exists. In an underground sense, no matter what we think of prison labor or the draft, I kinda wanna get back to like what everybody universally agrees is slavery.

I know what's going on in North Africa. Yeah. There's

Nick Pell: open air slave markets in Libya right now. Thanks Hillary Clinton.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You're not joking. I looked this up a couple of weeks or months ago. When I was [00:52:00] thinking about this topic is for skeptical Sunday, I've seen some insane photos of slave markets in Libya.

It's worth a Google because it's really wild to see something like this happening in 2025, where it's being photographed and videotaped in 4K for the whole world to see on the internet. And you see like an Ethiopian woman bound and gagged in a room with a bunch of other people. It'll break your brain and I guess people are being sold.

I looked this up in Time Magazine and the article's a few years old, but it was like 500 bucks and that's before the last five years of inflation or whatever. And that's big money in a place with no function in government. It's probably more than people make it a month. So it seems that slavery is, it's, it's still big business in many parts of the world.

Do we know how big the business or industry is?

Nick Pell: So, as is often the case, you're gonna get different numbers for total amount and per capita. And when we're talking about per capita, that is the highest proportion of people out of the total amount of people that are enslaved. The Hall of Shame is [00:53:00] in order of most enslaved population to least North Korea.

Eritrea, uh, more attaining, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Tajikistan, and the United Arab Emirates

Jordan Harbinger: after North Korea was Eritrea, just in case people were like, I didn't hear it. So North Korea, Eritrea, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Tajikistan, and the UAE.

Nick Pell: I would make an argument that North Korea is a slave state.

I agree. I know that 10% of their population being enslaved, which is what the official numbers are. I think that the definition of slave is being a little too tightly applied and it should be closer to like 95%,

Jordan Harbinger: certainly about North Korea. I agree. They have a massive prison industrial complex whose job it is to basically slowly kill the incarcerated political prisoners and use them as labor.

And also I mentioned earlier the military. That's [00:54:00] why it's not 1%, which I think is the percentage of population that's incarcerated. The military is all men, but they're not sitting there in a trench waiting for the south to invade. They're fricking picking rice and stuff and they're pulling plows and teams of men 'cause they don't have enough animals.

So assuming that the number's true, how does it compare to the percentage? Of the US population that was enslaved when slavery was at its peak. How does that number for these enslaved states compare to the percentage of the US population that was enslaved when we had peak slavery?

Nick Pell: The peak in terms of percentage of the population being chattel slaves in the United States is 1790, and it's about 18% of the populations.

That's a big number. The last census prior to the abolition of slavery has about 4 million slaves in a country of 31 million. So that's not quite 13%. So yeah, America loses to all of these countries 150 years ago.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Still those are staggeringly high numbers. Okay. So to your earlier [00:55:00] point, what if we count the draft during World War II or Vietnam or whatever, and then we add in prison labor?

So he is, take sort of the widest view of what you sort of said might be considered slavery. Do we have more or fewer slaves than we did in 1790?

Nick Pell: I think it's sticky when we start comparing it in this way. Like, okay, fair. It's not my argument that drafted American GIS on the beach at Normandy are the same as guys working a plantation in 1817.

I think the real apples to apples here is what percentage of the population in what is now Saudi Arabia were chattel slaves in 1860 Uhhuh. Okay. And that's obviously not data that's exists. Yeah. I can think of one guy that I know at the Meas Institute who I interviewed once who would probably be able to rattle this right off.

But if you're a serious academic, you may have access to

Jordan Harbinger: these numbers. I know. I just figured they didn't even exist. Okay. It's a fool's errand to try and make these comparisons. Who has the most slaves in the [00:56:00] world today? Total number India. 11 million. Wow. So how does India get the gold here? Obviously if it's a lot of people, what does Indian slavery look like Typically?

Nick Pell: Honestly, like the guy trying to scam your grandmother from the call center may well be a debt slave in India. He does make it a little sad when you hear it's like an additional layer of elderly people being scammed out of their life savings. Most of what goes on in India's child slavery, they have a lot of debt bondage.

That's what the call center guys or the fake call center guys might become. Semi property of the person that you owe the debt to. There's a lot of human trafficking forced begging, which is to me is a very weird use of a slave. Seems like a very economically inefficient use of a slave. And then, yeah, there's a lot of sexual slavery

Jordan Harbinger: for people who are wondering about the begging.

That's like what? Slum dog millionaire, when they burned the kid's eye with a spoon or something and then they made him go out on the street and beg. 'cause it's like, oh, he is blind. So I've done episodes on some of this kind [00:57:00] of stuff. Bruce Labu, episode 9 76. He talks about kids working in carpet or brick factories and I think Bangladesh or India or both in Pakistan under just horrific conditions.

And then those people have kids and they just keep the kids there. And basically you can never work the debt off. That's the whole idea. So who else is on the worst offenders list for slavery?

Nick Pell: China comes in second, 5.7 million. North Korea, 2.6 million. I know that a lot of the North Korean is prison labor and military.

And then China has basically has concentration camps for the Uyghurs. And again, like I think that it's worth noting that like people who live under communist regimes or, or maybe defining slavery too narrowly and letting these countries off the hook. And yeah, America comes in at number 10 with over a million slaves.

Jordan Harbinger: That is prison labor mostly.

Nick Pell: I would suspect that most of it is given that yes, the number I cited above for prison slaves was over 800,000. So if [00:58:00] you think that's not slavery for some reason, like they're paying their debt to society, like you said, you can go ahead and count America much lower. But by the way, most people re is, slaves are conscripted military, so apparently I'm not the only one who thinks the draft is slavery.

Jordan Harbinger: Eritrea, you're supposed to go to the military for three years. Numerous people who have escaped and they're like, yeah, I was in the military for 14 years. They just don't let you go and you're not doing anything military, you're just working in a mine or in a plantation growing some food and they just say, oh, three years is up.

Oh, you're not going home. We need you. And that's just kinda how it works. That's slavery. They give you a badge or something. It doesn't make it not slavery. It is a little odd how they're able to count conscripted military as slaves in Eritrea, but not in other countries. But I really think the distinction is because they are exclusively using them as essentially slaves.

There.

Nick Pell: I don't know if they're exclusively using them as slaves there, but there is a weird thing where the term's been open-ended since 1998. In theory it's supposed to be 18 months, but the average [00:59:00] term in the Etri military is six years. And there are tons of guys who say that they were enslaved. I mean, in scripted, they say they were there for over 10 years.

Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Looks like we read the same article. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think most people who are aware of what's going on in the world, they're aware that slavery exists in some form today, but they tend to not be aware of just how widespread it is. You're talking about Cambodian call centers, where they trick people who live in Thailand to go live there and they're stuck in Burma or whatever.

You get the people in the military, you get the people in Africa, you get the people in prison. So how many people total are enslaved around the planet today? Do we know?

Nick Pell: According to the International Labor Organization, it's 40 million worldwide. That's one of those numbers, like 40 million is a relatively small amount of people around the world and it's relatively small amount of labor force, but it's absolutely obscene that we have that many.

Yeah, it's definitely on the other side of an imaginary [01:00:00] line that I can't hand wave and be like, this is not a big deal to me. This is a big deal to me. Another estimate puts it at 50 million. We gotta go back and come full circle with this about what is slavery. And I think that we may want to consider that these numbers are somewhat inflated, which is not to say that I think that the real numbers are anything I'm gonna be comfortable with, but I think some of the things that are counted as slavery are, are just not,

Jordan Harbinger: look, the population of California is something like 40 million.

So if we think there are 40 million slaves on the planet, that's. Go to California. Imagine every single person there is a slave. That's absolutely incredibly huge number. Especially 'cause isn't California like the world's fifth largest economy or whatever it is. It's just like that's an insane amount of economic value held in slaves.

Alright, so now I see why you wanted to split slavery into multiple parts here, because this is, it's not so clean cut really.

Nick Pell: No, it's [01:01:00] not. And like I said, it's impossible to talk about modern slavery without including forced labor because like, I think the guys in Ario are being paid, but who cares? This is not okay.

Chattel slavery does still exist in pockets in isolation, but the main form is forced labor. So anti-slavery international gives some definitions of what constitutes modern slavery. Some of them are, they're slavery, uh, or close enough to that we can call 'em. That being owned is chattel. It's still happens.

Mm-hmm. I don't know if many parts of the world, but multiple parts of the world. Debt bondage. You know, you take on the debt that's so large, you can't ever repay it. You're bought and sold more or less and forced to work awful jobs and your children inherit your debt and thus the status after you die.

There's the forced labor that we talked about in the Etri and North Korean military human trafficking where they take your passport.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez. Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot more than we normally think of. 'cause really, I was thinking people in [01:02:00] chains, the end, and this all sounds like slavery to me. We also did that show, I mentioned the Cambodia Burma call centers.

Many of those calls receive here in the United States and elsewhere are run by people who cannot escape. That was episode 8 33, by the way. And there was actually recently a giant rescue of a bunch of these people due to pressure. So that's a huge relief. But there's so many of these places and in fact entire cities where there are just thousands of slaves working anyway.

What do you think about the numbers? You seem to think they're inflated. You mentioned that. I'm curious as to why.

Nick Pell: I think inflated ish. The thing about non-governmental organizations or NGOs is they have a sort of clear incentive to exaggerate problems. So like domestic servitude is generally defined in really nebulous ways.

I know there's examples of people underpaying, domestic servants who don't know anything about the law or treating them badly. And again, it's not okay. I'm not okay with that, but I don't know that that's slavery. [01:03:00] I think that underpaying people is a wage violation and not slavery. I just don't think it's the same thing as an army captain holding a gun to your head or the Cambodian loan.

Sharks are gonna kill me if I don't work in the call center. I just don't think it's the same. Another one is the laborers in Persian Gulf countries, they have to work construction for a single company. They get paid garbage. They live in terrible conditions. That gets counted as slavery a lot. Simon Lagree isn't standing behind them with a whip selling their children.

Jordan Harbinger: Simon Lagree, who, who's that?

Nick Pell: He's the, uh, cruel overseer from Uncle Tom's cabin famous abolitionist book from the 19th century

Jordan Harbinger: obscure ref. Bro, it's not,

Nick Pell: you just slept through high school

Jordan Harbinger: English. That is true. I remember my mom reading the uncle Tom's cabin when I was a kid. Odd choice, but yeah, clearly I don't remember it.

Anyway,

Nick Pell: so I think it's weird to start conflating unpleasant working conditions and scammy wages, no matter [01:04:00] how egregious the unpleasant working conditions and scammy wages may be to some kind of forced labor. And I think it enters you into this slippery slope of accepting Marxist argumentation about how guys who.

Work in auto factories and make $80,000 a

Jordan Harbinger: year slaves because they have to. I don't get behind that. If I'm having brunch with you, you're not a slave somewhere. You might feel like it sometimes, but No. You're drinking a $38 mimosa dude. Yeah. No. Why do you think that slavery still exists in the 21st century?

Haven't we move past that as a species? We have machines now. That's what I don't really understand, and I know this is gonna take a dark turn because I'm like, what can humans do that machines can't do? Come on already. And the answers that pop into your head are pretty gross. Ooh. Yeah, they are.

Nick Pell: I think we obviously haven't moved past it.

Right. I don't really subscribe to the worldview that says that the world gets morally better over time. To me, it's like we're damn lucky to be. [01:05:00] Living in this infinite decimal period of human history, where being a slave who gets worked to death in salt mine and has your children taken from you to get work to death somewhere else isn't just normal human existence.

That is what happens to most or damn near most people. And I think in an apocalyptic situation where you saw the breakdown of the rule of law, the lack of reliable energy sources to achieve certain labor tasks, I think you would see slavery come back pretty quickly. I mean, didn't Libya, which is a real world example, I'd imagine it would probably start with sexual slavery.

This is a a plot point in Cormack McCarthy's the Road, which is, yes, it's fiction, but I think he really nailed just how close we are to everyone having to worry about being a slave. I.

Jordan Harbinger: But like you said, we don't live in the road or whatever novel, so why are there still 40 or 50 million slaves in the [01:06:00] world today when we have machinery that doesn't run away?

I, I don't know. Just the only thing I can think of is really gross sexual slavery and stuff,

Nick Pell: old habits, diehard, there's a lack of rule of law in many parts of the world, and I just don't think that the western liberal view of human rights and human dignity as universal equality as people think that it is.

I don't accept that this is the default view that everybody on earth has. Like this is a very specific cultural view that all human beings are endowed with some kind of dignity and rights. This is a very specific cultural view that I just don't think most of the world share. Read about the Yugo slob wars, sexual slavery.

In particular was a widespread phenomenon. That's a really good example of what happens when a normal functioning country just completely falls apart. I was obsessed with this as a kid, which I think I've mentioned on other episodes that we've done. I'm slightly obsessed with [01:07:00] it now, still. I think that the real question is, why don't we have more slaves?

And the short answer is oil,

Jordan Harbinger: because we don't need human muscle as an energy source anymore. So people who are not just despicable are gonna go, oh, there's other ways that we can do this. More efficient ways, more powerful ways. I mean, I'd love to say, oh, you have a very grim view of humanity, but I don't know if I disagree with what you're saying either.

Nick Pell: I do have a grim view of humanity. This is what helps me to explain why 40 to 50 million people are slaves. About a quarter of them are children. Oh, why? Why to these screams to the heavens. Because you live in an imperfect world. The world tend towards chaos. Your shoes aren't gonna tie themselves. You need to work to create order outta chaos.

And the absolute easiest. Most time honored way of doing that is beating somebody until they do what you want.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I've got a buddy who comes from a wealthy Indian family, lives in America, served in the US military. He told me he doesn't like to visit home as much because they have people that work in their house that are mistreated by the rest of his family and he just [01:08:00] can't be around it.

And I've asked for examples and it's not like horrific, but it's definitely like, wow, I would never treat anyone that way. And it's, yeah, watching your sister do it is not fun. Yeah. So what can people do if they wanna help end slavery worldwide, or at least be part of seeing some of these enslaved people read?

Is there anything that we can do from the luxury of the western world here?

Nick Pell: There's tons of organizations out there who work to do just that. Charity Navigator is a good place to start your search, check out their, uh, overhead is the other thing too that I would say like that's specific to slavery. I've heard about this happening.

I don't know that it's actually true, so I'll preface it with that. But I have her told. That there are groups that like buy slaves to free them. Don't give them money. 'cause all you're doing is making a market for slaves, right? Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: I've spoken about that with Bruce Lati Bee, who I mentioned earlier. He will buy child slaves to rescue them.

And I said, aren't you just creating a secondary market? And he's like, yeah, but we are [01:09:00] also rescuing these particular people. And then we try to work with law enforcement to make sure they can't re, and I'm, it's just like such a losing battle, right? 'cause you either leave those people there working enslaved, or you buy them and they're like, all right, cool, I'm gonna take this money and buy some more slaves.

And it's like, damnit,

Nick Pell: I understand his perspective. You know what? I don't care. I just free child slave. I totally get that. But if you're looking to attack this in like a systematic way, if you see homeless people and you feel bad and you wanna help homeless people in a systematic way, what do you not do?

Give the homeless guy money. You go give money to the organization that supports homeless people. Yes. I would encourage people to think about, if you want to do something about slavery, please do not go by an 8-year-old Cambodian child. Or give money to somebody who wins. No,

Jordan Harbinger: it sounds ridiculous, but there are people who are wondering how to do just that and had many offers like sponsor this child and it's okay.

I gotta look at the organization and many of them are legit, but many of them who knows where your money's actually going or what's really happening. Anyway, fascinating subject. I hope we've freed some [01:10:00] people's minds on this subject. Thanks again to Nick for helping us dig into this, admittedly, somewhat depressing and distressing topic.

Nick, this kind of stuff seems to be your specialty man. That's why I'm Reddit's favorite. Thanks for listening, topic suggestions and all of your angry emails now to Jordan@jordanharbinger.com. Show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, discounts deals, ways to support the show all, and people to complain to about why we covered this topic all on one convenient page.

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