EPISODE 1670: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Siddharth Kara, author of COBALT RED, about the appalling human cost of mining cobalt in the Congo
Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, screenwriter, and activist on modern slavery. He an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health. Kara has authored three books on modern slavery: Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2009); Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia (2012); and Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective (2017), each with Columbia University Press. Kara adapted Sex Trafficking into a Hollywood film, Trafficked, which held its world premiere at the United Nations in New York. Sex Trafficking also won the prestigious Frederick Douglass book prize at Yale University for the best non-fiction book on slavery. Kara has also authored the reports: Tainted Carpets: Slavery and Child Labor in India's Hand-Made Carpet Sector (Harvard, 2014), and Tainted Garments: The Exploitation of Women and Girls in India's Home-Based Garment Sector (UC Berkeley, 2019). He is working on a fourth book about the horrors of cobalt mining in the Congo. Across twenty years of almost entirely self-funded research, Kara has traveled to more than fifty countries to document the cases of several thousand slaves of all kinds. He has mapped global human trafficking networks, explored the perilous underground of trafficked sex slaves, and traced global supply chains of numerous commodities tainted by slavery and child labor. Kara advises several UN agencies and numerous governments on anti-slavery policy and law. He has also appeared extensively in the media as an expert on modern slavery, including on CNN, the BBC, the Guardian, CNBC, National Geographic, and numerous documentary films. Previously, Kara was an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, then ran his own finance and M&A consulting firm. He holds a Law degree from England, MBA from Columbia University, and BA from Duke University.
Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.
The New Heart of Darkness: Siddharth Kara on how the (rechargable) blood of the Congo powers our lives