Joe Rogan Experience Review podcast - JRE Review 545 – Cobalt, Comedy & Ancient Mysteries

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

🚨 The new JRE Review website is live! We've completely revamped JREREVIEW.com — your new home for the podcast, episodes, JRE reviews, and everything we're building around the show. Check it out at www.jrereview.com. This week on the Joe Rogan Experience Quick Review, we break down all three JRE guests from the week: Siddharth Kara, Yakov Smirnoff, and Tyler Engle. We get into the dark reality behind cobalt mining and the technology supply chain, Yakov Smirnoff's incredible journey from Soviet immigrant to comedy star, Ronald Reagan joke writer and relationship expert, and then head deep into the Rogan rabbit hole with Noah's Ark, ancient Egypt, the Younger Dryas, pyramids, Atlantis and lost civilizations. Three very different conversations. One quick review. About seven hours of Rogan condensed into roughly 30 minutes. Visit the new www.jrereview.com and let us know what you think!

Welcome back, everybody, to another Joe Rogan Experience Quick Review. And this week, we've got three episodes to get through. Sadath Kara, Yakov Smirnoff, and Tyler Engel. And honestly, this might be one of the strangest combinations of guests we've had in a while. We're going from child labor and cobalt mines in the Congo to Ronald Reagan's Russian joke writer giving marriage advice and then finishing up with Noah's Ark, ancient Egypt, Atlantis and the possibility that the pyramids were basically giant machines. So, standard week on Joe Rogan.

Let's get into it. First up was episode 2,556 with Saddath Kara. And if that name sounds familiar, Kara has been on Rogan before. He's the author of Cobalt Red, and his work focuses on the human cost behind cobalt and other minerals coming out of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And this one gets dark almost immediately, because Kara's basic argument is that we have created this incredible technological civilization, smartphones, electric cars, tablets, battery stores. and now enormous AI data centers. But way down at the bottom of that supply chain are people living and working in conditions that most of us would find completely unacceptable if they were happening 10 miles from our

own homes. And I think that's what makes this conversation uncomfortable because I'm sitting here with a phone. You're probably listening to this on a phone. Joe and Saddam is sitting there surrounded by computers and screens. We're all participating in this system. And Kara says the demand isn't just cobalt anymore. It's lithium, copper, nickel, tantalum, tin, all these materials that modern electronics require.

And now AI has thrown another giant log onto the fire. There's something almost absurd about that. We're talking constantly about this incredible AI future, where robots do our jobs, computers, cured diseases, and machines become more intelligent than humans. Meanwhile, somebody still has to dig the shit that makes the machines out of the ground. And according to Kara, sometimes that person is a kid.

That's quite a contrast. One of the things Kara talks about is the environmental destruction around the mining areas. He describes research conducted in the copper-cobalt region, showing major loss of vegetation around mining territory and extremely high levels of heavy metals in some water sources. And this leads to what I thought was one of the better points in the episode. We absolutely have minerals in North America. But mining them here means environmental regulations. It means containment. It means lawyers.

It means people saying, hang on a minute, you're not putting a gigantic toxic hole next to my neighborhood, which seems fairly reasonable. But when the environmental destruction happens thousands of miles away, suddenly our moral standards become considerably more flexible. And I'm not saying there's an easy answer to that, because here's the uncomfortable part. I like technology. I like my phone. I use AI. I use computers every day. I'm not recording this podcast by banging two coconuts together. So I'm as guilty as anybody of enjoying the finished product without spending much time thinking about where every piece of it came from. And that's probably the greatest value of someone like Sadav Karah going on Rogan. He makes you look at the other end of the supply chain.

One of the more disturbing things Kara says is that after Cobalt Red came out, he was warned that there was essentially a bounty on him and that returning to the Congo would be dangerous. So he hasn't gone back himself. But he says colleagues continue doing research there. And according to him, conditions have not improved dramatically. That's pretty fucking grim. Imagine writing a book exposing working conditions.

And the response isn't, thank you, we're going to investigate this. It's probably don't come back. Not exactly a five-star review from the local mining industry. But then the conversation moves into something even bigger. Kera connects the mineral problem to China. A large part of the processing and mining infrastructure in the region involves Chinese companies. And Kera argues that Western technology companies are still ultimately benefiting from those supply chains. There was also a more speculative part of the conversation, where Kera discusses reports he's heard,

about uranium potentially being transported alongside other minerals to China. And to his credit, he actually says he can't personally verify that. That's an important distinction. Because this is where podcast can get messy. Someone says, people on the ground are telling me this. Then Joe says, that makes sense. And three hours later, the internet turns it into Joe Rogan confirms secret Chinese uranium operation. No, he didn't. It's an allegation discussed on a podcast. There is a difference.

The other major part of this episode is Carra's new book, The Zorg, and this takes the conversation from modern exploitation back into the Atlantic slave trade. The Zong, historically the ship has usually spelled Z-O-N-G, became infamous after enslaved Africans were deliberately thrown overboard and killed during a voyage in the 18th century. Kera uses that history to make a broader point about what happens when human beings become economic units rather than people. And that's really the thread connecting the two halves of this conversation. Slavery wasn't simply about individual people evil. There was an economic machine around it. Insurance, shipping, trade, investors, commodities, governments. In Carers' argument is essentially that you have to pay attention whenever an economic

system creates enough distance between the consumer and the suffering required to produce the product. And I think that's probably the strongest idea from this episode. distance makes morality very easy. It's easy to say you would never tolerate children working in horrific mining conditions. Of course you wouldn't. But what happens when they're 5,000 miles away? And what they're mining ends up inside the phone in your pocket. That's much harder because now you don't have a cartoon villain.

You have a supply chain. And supply chains are boring. Nobody marches through the street screaming, down with process logistics. But that's often where the ugly shit hides. Toward the end, Kara talks about recycling. And I like this part because he makes the point that even if technology eventually reduces the need for newly mined cobalt,

that doesn't erase the damage that's already happened. You don't get to destroy the environment, extract everything valuable, contaminate the water and then announce, good news everybody, we recycle now. Kara argues that the companies and countries that benefited have some responsibility to help repair what was damaged. Whether you agree with exactly how that responsibility should work is another question. But morally, I understand the argument. If your prosperity came partly from somewhere else's destruction,

pretending the relationship ends when you stop needing the resource feels pretty convenient. Overall, this wasn't exactly an easy listen. It's one of those Rogan episodes where you start out checking your phone and by the end you're staring at the phone thinking, well, apparently you're evil now. But I thought Kara was compelling. And regardless of where you land on as broader conclusions,

the underlying issue of dangerous mining conditions in child labour in parts of the Congo isn't some obscure internet conspiracy. It's a real issue that's been documented for years. So definitely one of the heavier episodes of the week. Then, Yakov Smirnoff, and this episode could not possibly have been a bigger tone or shift. We go from modern slavery and environmental catastrophe, straight into what a country.

If you're younger, you might not fully appreciate how famous Yakov-Smirnoff was. He was born in the Soviet Union, immigrated to America, and became massively successful in the 1980s, doing comedy built around the cultural differences between America and the USSR. And the irony of his career is fucking incredible. The Cold War made him famous. Then the Cold War ended and apparently took his career with it. Yakov tells Joe that after the Soviet Union collapsed,

David Letterman did a top 10 list about things that would change. Number one, Yakov Smirnoff would be out of work. And Yakov thought it was funny, until about six months later, when he was basically out of work. His Vegas contracts disappeared. Atlantic City disappeared. Reno disappeared. Tahoe disappeared. Even comedy clubs weren't interested. Think about that. You've spent years hoping the Soviet Union collapses. You're an immigrant who escaped the Soviet system. You're

friends with Ronald Reagan. You're literally helping Reagan write jokes about the Russians. Then America wins the Cold War and you lose your job. That is fucking brutal. It's like being a firefighter and finally eliminating fire. Congratulations, you're unemployed. And this is where Yakov's story gets much more interesting than I expected. Because instead of just becoming the guy who spends the next 40 years complaining that Hollywood forgot about him, he reinvents himself. He ends up in Branson, Missouri. And his explanation is hilarious. He basically jokes that after his career collapsed, he needed the find somewhere that hadn't heard the Soviet Union collapse yet. So, Branson, but it actually worked. His family-friendly comedy fit the town. He eventually owned his

own theater. And then his personal life starts falling apart. His marriage ends, and Yakov becomes obsessed with a question. Why do relationships start with so much laughter and then lose it. Now this is where I initially thought, okay, we're about to get comedian marriage therapy. Dangerous territory. Because comedians are generally not the first group of people I'd approach for stable relationship advice.

These are people whose job requires them to leave their family every weekend, sleep in hotels, drink at comedy clubs, and seek validation from strangers. Probably not the control group we're looking for. But Yakov did something pretty unusual. He actually went back to school. He studied psychology. He earned a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania

and later a doctorate from Pepperdine. So he didn't just decide one afternoon, I understand women now. He actually spent years studying relationships. His basic idea is that laughter can function almost like feedback within a relationship. As a comedian, you know immediately whether you're connecting with an audience. You say something, they laugh.

Connection established. You say something else? Nothing. Something isn't working. Yakov started thinking about relationships in a similar way. What needs are being met? What needs aren't? Why does the connection change?

He even brings magnets onto Rogan to demonstrate attraction and repulsion, which is one of those moments where you realize, this man has been performing in Branson for a very long time. He's got props. But underneath the slightly cheesy presentation, there actually is something interesting there. Long-term relationships can become incredibly transactional. Who's doing this? Who forgot that? Why didn't you take care of this? Who's getting up with the kid? Who's paying this bill? And somewhere in all that administration, two people who used to sit in restaurants laughing for three hours can turn into co-workers managing a small corporation. That's worth thinking about. Yakov also tells one of the

strangest dating stories I've heard in a while. At one point, he was apparently going on dates with three different women a day trying to find a wife. Joe immediately says, that sounds kind of crazy, which, yes. Yes, Joe, it does. But Yakov is unbelievably pragmatic about everything. Eventually, he decides to run a relationship seminar in Kiev. And Joe realizes, wait, did you basically organize a relationship seminar partly because you wanted to meet women? And Yakov's basically like, yep, that's incredible. Most guys download Tinder, Yakov Smirnoff created a an educational conference. You have to respect the work ethic. But my favorite material was probably his Ronald Reagan story. Yakov describes meeting Reagan at a dinner while he was still relatively unknown. They start trading Russian jokes. They click. And shortly afterward, Reagan's speechwriter contacts Yakov because Reagan is preparing to travel to Moscow and wants jokes for a speech. Just imagine that phone call.

You're a Soviet immigrant comedian. The president of the United States calls and essentially says, Hey, we're dealing with the Russians. You got anything? Yakov actually helped with material Reagan used while speaking in the Soviet Union. And he talks about advising Reagan on how certain jokes and messages might land culturally. That's fascinating. Because comedy sounds trivial.

until you realize humor can be diplomacy. A joke can communicate, I understand you. It lowers the fences. Yakov had something almost nobody in Reagan's circle had. He understood Soviet culture from the inside and American culture from the outside. That's a pretty unique perspective. There's also something about Yaakov himself

that I found genuinely likable. Here's a guy whose entire professional identity basically got deleted by history, and instead of spending the rest of his life bitter about it, he kept moving. Comedy, Branson, psychology, relationships, teaching, painting, new material. That's impressive, especially in entertainment,

where people can spend decades trying to recreate the exact moment when they were famous. Yakov seems to have accepted that the world changed, so he changed too. Maybe that's the real lesson of the episode. Also, the man is 85 years old, and he's still touring. So whatever they're putting in the water in Branson, apparently drink that, unless Siddhar Fara tested it, then maybe wait for the results.

And finally, episode 2,558, Tyler Engel. Okay. This is where we enter the Roganverse. Ancient civilizations. Noah's Ark. The Younger Dryas. Egypt.

Megalific stonework. Atlantis. Pyramids. Energy. Plasma. We are home. Tyler Engel is a musician and researcher who runs Bass Forge online. And Joe basically opens the podcast

by saying he loves Tyler's Instagram because it's an endless rabbit hole, which tells you exactly where this episode is going. The first rabbit hole is Noah's Ark, specifically the Dura-Panar formation in eastern Turkey near Mount Ararat. It's this enormous boat-shaped geological formation that's been argued over for decades, and there's renewed interest

because researchers are currently using ground-peachian, penetrating radar and other scanning techniques around the site. And importantly, they have not discovered Noah's Ark. Let's establish that before somebody clips this. There are interesting anomalies being investigated. There is a legitimate research project happening there. But there is also long-standing geological research arguing that the formation is natural. So right now, it's interesting. That's where I'm putting it. Interesting. Tyler connects this with ancient Mesopotamian flood traditions and the Sumerian figure Ziosudra who appears in an ancient flood story. And this is where I think the conversation gets fascinating, even if the arc itself turns out to be nothing. Because flood stories

show up across ancient cultures. And that doesn't necessarily mean there was one global flood covering Mount Everest. Regional catastrophic floods are enough to create stories that survive for generations. Imagine you're living 5,000 years ago. Your entire known world is maybe a few hundred miles. Then a catastrophic flood wipes everything out. As far as you're concerned, the world flooded. There isn't CNN telling you, good news, Spain is fine. Your world is. Your world is. Your world. is gone. So the idea that major floods became encoded into mythology makes complete sense to me. Where it gets tricky is trying to connect every flood story into one single event. And even Tyler acknowledges that some of these floods may have happened at completely different times. I appreciated

that because we don't know is sometimes the most intelligent answer available. From there, we're off to ancient stonework, and Tyler is obsessed with something Rogan has been obsessed with for years. How the hell did ancient people build some of this stuff? Huge blocks, extremely precise stonework, hard granite, drill marks, massive statues. And Tyler says, Graham Hancock's work was one of the things that originally pulled him into this world. The funny part is how he discovered it. He used to do high-rise window cleaning, so he's hanging off the side of skyscrapers,

listening to fingerprints of the gods. That's either the greatest possible environment for questioning civilization or the worst. You're dangling 30 stories in the air thinking, maybe the Egyptians had advanced technology. Meanwhile, I'd be thinking, maybe I should have become an accountant. but that eventually sends Tyler traveling to Egypt and examining these sites himself.

And this is where the episode starts moving from archaeology into much more speculative territory. Tyler doesn't simply think ancient builders were more sophisticated than we give them credit for. He starts entertaining the possibility that some of these structures had technological functions we've forgotten. The pyramids become part of a system involving energy, frequencies, water, chemistry, and possibly agriculture. And this is where my eyebrows starts going up. Not because ancient people were stupid. They obviously weren't. Ancient engineering is astonishing.

But there's a big leap between we don't completely understand how this was built and the pyramid was a giant electromagnetic. magnetic chemical machine. Those are not the same statement. And Rogan loves this territory. You can practically hear his brain opening 20 browser tabs. Jamie is probably sitting there thinking, oh fuck, here we go. At one point, they're discussing the geometry of the Great Pyramid, and Tyler talks about energy and radio frequencies.

Later, they get into a theory that different pyramids could have been involved in producing industrial chemicals, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, ammonia. The theory is that chemical residues and aspects of the structures point toward industrial uses rather than purely funerary ones. And again, fascinating idea, but fascinating and proven are very different things. I enjoy this stuff the same way I enjoy UFO conversations. Show me the weird shit. I want to see it. But I also want somebody in the room occasionally saying, OK, how do we actually know that? Because without that, you can connect almost anything to anything. Give Rogan, Graham Hancock and a whiteboard six hours, and they'll eventually connect the Great Pyramid to a cyber truck.

Then we arrive at Atlantis. Of course we do. Tyler argues that material. material at the Temple of Edfu in Egypt may preserve a tradition resembling Atlantis and suggests it predates Plato's famous written account. He describes imagery of beings or gods arriving by boat from another land. And Joe immediately wants to know, is this Atlantis? Which is basically Joe's archaeological safe word. Again, there's a difference between an ancient, migration or creation tradition and identifying it specifically as Atlantis. But I understand why people get obsessed with this, because underneath all the crazy theories is a legitimate and fascinating question. How much human history have we lost? A lot, almost certainly. Wood disappears.

Coastlines change. Sea levels rise. Cities get built on top of cities. cultures collapse, languages vanish, stories mutate, and archaeological discoveries regularly change our understanding of what ancient people were capable of. So I don't think curiosity about lost civilizations is crazy at all. Where you have to be careful is when curiosity turns into certainty. And I think that's actually what makes this kind of Rogan episode fun. You don't have to believe everything.

You're allowed to entertain an idea without marrying it. That's increasingly rare. People seem to think every idea has to immediately become part of your identity. You either believe Atlantis or you're some close-minded establishment archaeologist. No. Maybe I just want to hear about Atlantis while I'm driving. That's allowed. Tyler also talks about the younger dryers.

The period roughly 12,000 years ago associated with major climatic changes. This has become almost a recurring character on Rogan at this point. Joe has mentioned the Younger Dryas so many times. It should probably have its own chair in the studio. Today's guest, the Younger Dryas. Good to see you again, brother. But there is a legitimate reason people find that period fascinating. human societies were going through enormous changes around the end of the last ice age.

Sea levels changed dramatically over longer periods. Land that was inhabited is now underwater. In sites discovered over the last several decades have forced archaeologists to rethink simplistic versions of early human development. Where things become controversial is when those facts are used as evidence for a highly advanced lost civilization. That's a much bigger claim. And Tyler goes pretty far down that road. He talks about the possibility that later civilizations inherited knowledge from earlier cultures. He discusses ancient infrastructure, almost as if people were recovering technology rather than inventing it

from scratch. And I don't know, maybe. But this is where I need receipts, preferably, receipts carved into granite. Still, I really enjoyed the episode because Tyler is enthusiastic. He's clearly spent a huge amount of time thinking about this material, and he's willing to chase strange ideas. That doesn't mean he's right, but it makes for a good Rogan conversation. And this is exactly the type of guest where Joe is at his best. Joe's superpower isn't necessarily determining

whether every claim is true in real time, it's curiosity. He'll let someone explain the entire weird idea, and sometimes that produces nonsense. Sometimes it produces something genuinely interesting. And sometimes you start with Noah's Ark, and two hours later, you're discussing pyramid-powered agriculture. That's the gamble. So, looking at the week as a whole,

it's actually an interesting trio. Siddharv Kara asks us to look underneath modern civilization. Where do our materials come from? Who pays the human price for our technology? Yakov Smyrnav looks at relationships and reinvention. What happens when the thing that gave your life meaning disappears? And Tyler Engel looks backward, thousands of years. and ask whether our understanding of civilization itself might be incomplete.

Three completely different conversations, but weirdly, all three are about assumptions. Kara challenges the assumption that clean modern technology necessarily has a clean supply chain. Yakov challenges the assumption that losing your career means you're finished. Entiler challenges assumptions about what ancient people knew and what their structures were actually for. Now, the quality of evidence behind those challenges varies enormously. Let's be clear, documented child labor in mineral supply chains and pyramids functioning as giant energy machines are not currently sitting on the same evidentiary shelf.

But that's also part of what makes Rogan interesting. One day you're talking to someone investigating modern slavery. Two days later, you're asking whether Atlantis had plasma technology. There's not another major show that moves between subjects quite like that. If I had to pick the conversation that stuck with me most this week, it was probably Kara. Not because it was the most entertaining. It definitely wasn't, but because it's difficult to hear someone describe the bottom of the technology supply chain and then immediately go back to using all this technology without thinking about it.

Yakov was probably the biggest surprise. I expected nostalgia and Russian jokes. Instead, you get this genuinely fascinating life story about immigration, comedy, Reagan, losing everything, professionally, relationships, psychology, and reinventing yourself. And Tyler? Tyler gets the award for podcast most likely to destroy your productivity because you started Googling something. You search Noah's Ark, then Sumerian flood myths, then Derupinar, then ancient Egyptian drilling, then pyramid chemistry, then Atlantis, and suddenly,

it's three in the morning and your wife is asking why you're watching a 47-minute video about granite vases. We've all been there. So that's the week. Sadav Kara, Yakov Smyrnav, Tyler Engel, three episodes. About seven hours of Joe Rogan condensed into roughly 30 minutes. So you don't have to completely abandon your family and career to keep up with this podcast. Let me know which episode you thought was the best this week and what I missed. And as always, thanks for listening to the Joe Rogan Experience Review.

We'll see you next week.