This is Karen Hunter and welcome to the hub. And the book is called The Truth About Lies. The author is here. I got the proper

pronunciation, scene is still here as well. Let me welcome to the show Asia Raden.

Welcome. Hi. Hey, Ray Din. I still messed it up. All right. Ray Din. As a

Radin. Rightin. Right. Okay.

Yeah, pretty much.

All right.

So you did a book before this book,

which is the entry point for me,

where you were talking about precious stones and jewelry and diamonds and you know I read that the diamond is not the most precious of the stones is not the most rare but yet people have died you know lost, lost hands and limbs and, you know, whole towns have been upended for the

pursuit of this thing that we all want because diamonds are a girl's best friend. Tell us the truth about that

before we get to the truth about lies.

Well, yeah, the truth about diamonds is that it was an exercise in colonialism and then the very beginning of modern advertising.

A creepy guy named Cecil Rhodes, went down to South Africa, ended up with a country named

after him, Rhodesia, which I can't believe is still, they're still calling it that,

because he was a terrible man. And he basically bullied, manipulated, stole, blackmailed, all of the other miners at the beginning of the South

African Diamond Rush until he had consolidated a significant majority of the diamond mines in South Africa.

And the last couple of huge ones he couldn't get away from a man named Oppenheimer,

so they merged and they called their company De Beers.

And they were doing all right for a little while but the

diamond rush never stopped you know how the gold rush stopped and the silver rush stopped and the silver rush

the gold the diamond rush wasn't really a rush.

It turns out they're just everywhere and we get better at mining them every year.

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