It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 124

Episode Date: March 30, 2024

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Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and

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It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. you can make your own decisions. Welcome everybody to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, the slow crumbling of the institutions that make up our society. And that includes not just the good stuff that's become the bad stuff, like for example, Google

search, but it includes the stuff that's always been bad and has gotten worse, like life inside the prison industrial complex, which is partly what we will be talking today because our guest is the great Cory Doctorow, activist, writer, author of a book called The Bezel, which is a fiction novel but deals with some very non-fictional stuff in relation to how finance ghouls have changed life for people behind bars. Corey, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me on. It's a delight to be on again. Yeah, yeah. It's always wonderful to have you. I just finished The Bezel. It took me, it was one of those about a day, you know, in part because I just like didn't want to stop reading it. Like I just kind of blasted through. I picked it up in the morning on a walk and then was done with it at about like 9 p.m. So I found it pretty compulsively readable. Amazing. That's great to hear. With the first one, I knew that I had something going on when I woke up at two in the morning and my wife was sitting up in bed next to me and I said, what are you doing? And she said, I just had to find out how it ended. Yeah, and you said the first one. This is the second book in a series

based on a character, Martin Hinch, who's a self-employed forensic accountant. I do want to let people know right at the jump, I actually have not read your first Hinch book yet. And they don't have to be read in order. Yes, yes. That's what I was going to point out. Before we get into the stuff about the plot of this book and how it relates to some very real things that are ongoing, I wanted to talk about a not-so-stealth advertisement within the series for a guy that we're both a big fan of, in prison. And you talk a lot about Stephen's Taltosh series, which was a huge influence on me as a young person. I could definitely see, I think, an influence on this series as well. Yeah. I mean, Steve is a wonderful writer and everything he writes is amazing. That particular series, you know, he started when I was 13 years old. I'm now 52. I just had dinner with him in Minneapolis he tells

me he's two books away from finishing it yeah yeah he had planned the whole thing all those years ago he's a Zelosny protege yeah and also a giant Fritz Leiber fan and the it's got that wisecracking Robert McGee kind of, or Travis McGee rather, kind of affect those books. And also the stuff that I love about the best of what disparagingly we could call men's adventure fiction. Yeah. Which is that at its best, and Maria Farrell just wrote something really good about this on Crooked Timber. At its best, that stuff really geeks out about a lot of stuff. The bad version of it is the kind of James Bond version where it's like, you know, this is what the status watch is, and this is what the status martini is, and this what all the best of everything is and and uh you know how to how to signal you know your verblen goods to other people how to how to signal that you are

posh and upper class but the good version of it is the is the gourmand version which is like if you're going to eat cardboard pizza this is the best cardboard pizza and if you're going to you know like the the very best gas station toilets are and the you know the the one thing that you should always do if you're staying in a flop house is right and it's just that kind of um it could be like street smarts but it's also very uh i want to say self-indulgent but that that's not the right word. No. It's very, it's, there's a lot of self-care in it. There's a lot of like deliberate like, oh, this is how I'm going to live my life so that it's as good as possible. And I enjoy all of the finer things as much as I can. This is the thing that I do when I'm making a burger so that it's a 10% more delicious every time.

You know, that kind of thing. It's interesting. I came across the first book in that series that I read was Dragon, which I came across a strip cover from my uncle who worked at a bookstore. And that's his like military fiction book in the series, which is very much in line with the like boys adventure stuff. But as the series goes on, it increasingly trends towards like Russian revolutionary literature, too. There's a little bit more of that, which I think had an influence on me.

Well, Steve's a Trotskyist. Yeah, yeah. The thing about communist fantasy writers, there's a few of them. There's, you know, Channemayville and Steve and a few others, well, Shatterley and so on, is that the one thing that they can always be relied upon to do is get the ratio of vassals to lords right. Yeah. You know, that the number of peasants in the field is always vastly larger than the number of lords in the castle. And they all have a life and an interiority and a reason for being there that's not just being

scenery or cannon fodder. Yeah, yeah. It's something he does well. And I think that's enough of a digression. I just always love having a chance to talk about Stephen Bruce's work. Let's talk about The Bezel because the basic, I mean, I will try not to give away more than is in like the Goodreads summary, but the basics of this story is that you've got this guy, Martin Hinch, who's this forensic accountant. And as a result, he's friends with some people who have really succeeded in sort of the pre-dot-com bubble tech industry, I guess you'd say.

And you take us with – he goes with one of them to a place called Catalina Island, which is a real place that was founded by one of our nation's early plutocrats who had a bizarre obsession with there not being like fast food available on the island. Yeah, he had a lot of bizarre obsession. This is William Wrigley. The gum guy. And his first obsession was chicle trees and which you need to make gum. And his particular obsession was owning every chicle forest in the world, which he did, which meant that if you wanted to make gum, even if you were one of his competitors, you had to pay him for the Chickle. So there was no gum that wasn't Wrigley's gum in some important sense. This made him, as you might imagine, very rich.

Yeah. He bought the Chicago Cubs. There's a reason the Chicago Cubs play at Wrigley Field. And they would have their spring training on Catalina Island, an island that he bought. He loved Westerns. And one of the people who lived on Catalina Island was, or summered there rather, was Zane Gray, that were made on the island, including one where they brought over 13 bull bison because they were needed for the movie and because they

didn't know a lot about animal handling, particularly they did not know that male bison do not ever come into contact with one another except to have a violent dominance clash, which is how the 13 male bison all ended up escaping. And then Wrigley in one of his other obsessions thought it was unchristian

for these bachelor bison to be on his Island. So he brought over 13 cows and, and created the bison invasive species thing. He also didn't know that bison operate in harems, which was another thing that he was just badly wrong. Like it is true that like being a billionaire lowers your iq by 30 points and being the son of a billionaire lowers your iq by 40 points yeah and and uh you know wrigley had all kinds of aesthetic ideas in the same way that like um you know uh when when

ford built fordlandia and in brazil a planned community that was an identical copy of dearborn michigan including the south facing windows because he wouldn't let his architects explain that south of the equator you want north facing windows yeah you know he said oh we're you know like he came up with all kinds of weird rules for um rubber planters uh rubber harvesters in the brazilian jungle and wrigley came up with his own rules for people living on his island. And one of them is no fast food. And this turns out to be consequential in the story because the, the protagonist of the story,

who's Martin Henge, who's this, you know, two fisted, hard fighting forensic accountant who bust finance scams and his pal are, are on the Island in the party scene while his friend waits to vest from Yahoo, where he's been imprisoned by dint of having sold them a company for millions of dollars,

which he can only realize if he can sit tight and not murder any of his colleagues while they buy and destroy every promising startup in Silicon Valley, using the money from the Royal family of Saudi Arabia that was funneled to them by Masayoshi's son and soft bank. They encounter a Ponzi scheme and the Ponzi scheme is grounded in what is an actual practice of people bringing fast food to Catalina Island. Like if you go to the K-12 school and you have an away game, everyone brings back a

sack of burgers for their friends because it's forbidden fruit. It's exotic. And this turns into a Ponzi scheme to sell flash frozen burgers brought to the island by various means. And as with every Ponzi scheme, the thing that they're actually selling is the right to sell, the right to sell, the right to sell flash frozen burgers brought to the island by various means. And as with every Ponzi scheme, the thing that they're actually selling is the right to sell the right to sell the right to sell burgers. No one,

no one wants the burgers, right? They want the downline. And this is why Ponzi schemes always implode. And what Marty realizes is that this Ponzi scheme is going on and that it has been cooked up by this guy whose parties they've been going to this real estate Baron and that he's done it the same way you might carefully tend an ant colony for the sole purpose of burning them with magnifying glasses.

Yeah. Build this enormous sort of Rube Goldberg machine, a self-licking ice cream cone. And then, and then you destroy it, you smash it. He's waiting for the, this economy to collapse

once he's extracted every penny from the island, which will add 1% to his net worth. And so they do a controlled demolition of it. They foil this guy's plan. And this kicks in motion the real action in the novel, which is about the private prison system. Yeah, yeah. And I love that in preparing to read this chunk of the book where I learned quite a bit about the private prison system, I also learned a bunch about Catalina Island and this wealthy madman's insane dream. I appreciate that about your books. Albright on Catalina Island. The CIA was founded on Catalina Island. The channel between Catalina Island and the mainland is the deepest channel known to humanity. And,

uh, Dow dumped 50,000 barrels of DDT into it in, uh, iron that is rusting and that we have no way to remediate. And that will someday rupture and kill every bird downstream of that channel. And also lots of fish. Catalina Island is this very fraught place. This very beautiful place.

Very weird place. It's one of my favorite places to go. We just booked another trip there. And everything about it is amazing and also terrible, but also beautiful. Yeah, and I appreciate the way that you kind of wrap us into by first establishing this character, this friend of Martin's, who then winds up in a California Department of Corrections facility and taking us over a period of time as it goes to the way I think most people think prisons still are, right? The vision of prisons that was formed from movies we watched in the early 2000s and the late 90s where they you know, they can be pretty ugly places, but like you have family and they can come and visit you, right? There's a big room where everybody gets together with their, you know, we saw Arrested Developments, maybe the most before this all changed, most recent kind of touchstone on this. And also, it's a place that has like a library and not just a library, but like there are,

what comes with the library is opportunities for people to like better themselves, to learn things, to build skills, to potentially take some more agency of their situation, right? That idea of like the jailhouse lawyer who becomes informed and all that. And that world has really gone away to a significant extent. It's not completely gone everywhere, but certainly a lot of that has been pruned away. The ability of prisoners to have face-to-face contact with their loved ones and the ability of prisoners to use a library is something that is a lot less common now than it used

to be. And it's because a lot of these kind of attitudes that have characterized finance for so long are increasingly becoming common within the companies that run these facilities. Yeah. And maybe this is a good place to explain what a bezel is and how this moment relates to what a bezel is. So I really think the title bezel is a banger, but I didn't realize until I started touring this book that if you say it aloud, it sounds like B-E-Z-E-L, which is the rectangle around your phone screen.

It's actually B-E-Z-Z-L-E or Zed Zed if you're a Canadian like me. And that is a wonderful term coined by John Kenneth Galbraith to describe the magic interval after the con artist has your money, but before you know it's a con. And in that moment, everybody feels better off. And one of the great bezel moments was the moment between the crash of the dot-com crash of like 2000 2001 and the crash of the great financial crisis the housing crash and in that period all the money that people put into so-called investments and into the market and that made them feel better off made them feel like they had a pension made them feel like they had savings and so on all that money was already gone so this is one of the things about a scam is it feels like the moment that you lose the money is the moment you realize it's a scam,

but you actually lose the money the minute you give it to the con artist. Yeah. The con artist might let you keep some of it for a little while, but they can take it away from you whenever they want. That was a moment of kind of giddiness where none of us really wanted the dream to end. We knew that once the dream ended, we would all be poorer. Although in reality, we're all poorer right then. One of the things about that moment is it was the moment when another long con came due, and that was the long con of the California three strikes rule.

long con of the California three strikes rule. So there had been a couple of quite ghastly murders of young people, a teenager and a child in California that were weaponized by some fairly cruel racists to pass a law in California that says that if you were convicted of three felonies, you would go to prison for the rest of your life with no chance of parole. And, you know, this is California, which is a place that's quite allergic to higher taxes, famously the home of Proposition 13, where, you know, we can't raise our property taxes unless something like 70% of us go to the polls and specifically vote for it,

which is why our cities are so cash strapped. And in this this place where you have these anti-tax extremist types and you have this increasing tax burden associated with locking up an ever larger fraction of the population for the rest of their lives you have this this you know unstoppable force in this immovable object on a collision course with one another because at a certain point you're just going to have prisons that are so full that you're going to have to do something to to relieve them you're going to have to build more prisons you're going to have to reduce the cost of operating those prisons something's going to give in the end what ended up giving was a Supreme court case that ruled that just being in

prison in California violated your eighth amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment that, that every California prison basically constituted a violation of, of the eighth amendment. And, and California went through the, you know, the five stages of grieving,

which I, I know they don't replicate. It's not real. It's not really a neat description of exactly what happens when we grieve. But they certainly went through a period of denial and bargaining, including mooting at one point, sending prisoners to like Arizona. Yeah. So sending California state prisoners to Arizona and paying Arizona to take them off their hands. And as all of this stuff was going on, some grifters saw a great opportunity.

And that opportunity was to cut costs in the prisons and facilitate moving prisoners further and further away from their families by replacing all of the services in the prison with a tablet that you would get for free yeah so remember you know the the ipad comes out in 2008 steve jobs is touting it as the future of the world media companies are going crazy they finally found their daddy figure who's going to save them from tech by you know siloing everything in an app that isn't part of the web. And, and all we can hear about is how tablets are the future. And this sounds quite futuristic, right? We'll, we'll put tablet.

We'll give every prisoner a free tablet. It's like one laptop per child, but for prisoners and those tablets will replace the library and in-person visits and phone calls and music and TV and continuing education. And all of it's going to cost, and it's going to cost a lot more than you would pay outside of the, that outside of the prison for the same services. So, you know, four bucks a minute for a poster stamp sized video instead of a free zoom calls music for three bucks instead

of one and then of course these companies are very grifty and so they're they're constantly restructuring going bankrupt being bought buying one another and every time that happens the company changes its name and says oh we're no longer the same company we no longer supply all of those services we are wiping out all of your data and you're gonna have to buy it again and so you know if that's music it means that the song that you paid three dollars for that you uh bought by by working in the prison workshop for 25 cents an hour is gone and you're in prison for remember this is california the rest of your life and so you're gonna have to go back and earn more money to get that song again. But also the $5 your kid paid to have the birthday card that they wrote for you scanned because you can no longer get parcels or mail.

have their letters scanned or they have to pay to send you email and so your kid who's growing up with the principal breadwinner has paid five dollars to have their handmade birthday card scanned that goes away too when the the prison changes vendors and it's a kind of perfect parable for the indifferent sadism of capital like the the degree to which the pursuit of profit drives people to be far more cruel than mere ideology yeah yeah that that's so important because like prisons were not nice before they were not humane before but someone who is simply trying to run a government prison facility would not think of the idea of doing like a doing like a shell game yank away of people's music after letting them buy it and then make them buy it again that's like that's not something that like a bad prison guard comes up with that's only something that somebody from somebody from finance comes up with well and and you know you

it it helps if the way that you're running these prisons is by employing guards through a staffing agency and so you don't even have to contend with the rising costs associated with staff turnover when prisoners go bug fuck crazy because you took all their shit away, right? Um, those guards are not your employees and it's not your problem. The whole thing is, is kind of, uh, running at several layers of, of,

uh, into indirection and remove. It's what Douglas Rushkoff calls going meta, you know, the, um, don't drive a cab found Uber, uh,

don't found Uber, invest in Uber, don't invest in Uber, invest in Uber uber don't invest in uber invest in uber derivatives don't invest in uber derivatives invest in uber derivative futures right like go meta like get further and further away from the useful activities yeah you are insulated from the consequences of whatever it is you do and that's such a it's part of it's like a recipe for breaking things right because the people who are closest not that they're always good at it in the case of prison And that's such a, it's part of, it's like a recipe for breaking things, right? Because the people who are closest, not that they're always good at it in the case of prison

guards, but the people who are closest to the useful activity tend to know how to make things work, right? Whereas the further away you get from that, the more likely your ideas are to break things that you wouldn't have even thought of. And again, but for that kind of person, everything you break is usually an opportunity for financializing something else. Yeah, you know, the extent to which finance is the true banality of evil is hard to overstate.

Yeah. You know, we think, well, we've heard a lot, when you read about the Holocaust and World War II, you hear a lot about the cruelty of Nazis, and no one's going to say, well, the Nazis weren't cruel, and the ideological cruelty of Nazis. So, for example, there were moments where rather than transporting troops to decisive battles, they were shipping Jews to concentration camps on those same trains and losing battles so they could murder more Jews, right? Yeah. So they could murder more Jews, right? But up the road from Auschwitz was another private concentration camp run by IG Farben called Monowitz. Yep. And IG Farben were war profiteers.

They were gouging the Wehrmacht on war material that they were manufacturing with slave labor. And they bought thousands of slaves from Auschwitz preferring women and children because they were cheaper and they worked them to death and the the the lifespan of a slave in Monowitz was only three months before they were worked to death it was it was half of what it was in Auschwitz the conditions were so bad at Monowitz that the SS guards who were seconded to it from Auschwitz wrote to Berlin to complain about the cruelty of Monowitz. At the end of the war in Nuremberg, 24 IG Farben executives were tried for this. Their defense was that they had a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize returns.

And 19 of them were acquitted on that basis. Yeah. God. And this is, you know, before the Chicago school guys had really like fully taken over. So this idea that like that was really the only responsibility that a business had, even above a moral responsibility was much less established like the the more you get into how many particularly of the money people got off at nuremberg like it's it's it's maddening stuff yeah indeed and and it is like i think a one an accurate way to look at the holocaust from the perspective of those guys is the mining of populations, like mining them to death.

That's really how a lot of this, like, because a huge chunk of, especially the early stages of Nazi oppression of, like, starting with German Jews, but going beyond that as they conquered more land, was the appropriation of businesses and property, right? Like that was, it was mining human beings. And that attitude is persistent, right? It's not just a thing that happens in Nazi Germany. It happens whenever you let people who don't have any sort of human concern take control of every aspect of life. And this is some of the structural stuff that's going on in the book. So, my editor on this book is this great guy, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who's been my editor since my first novel. He and I met

on a BBS in the 1980s. So, I've really known him most of my life oh wow and um patrick when when he gave me the editorial note on my first novel he said something like the way that science fiction works is you have a uh a world that is like a thought experiment world and you have a character who's a microcosm for that world and they are like a big gear. That's the world and a little gear. That's the character. And if the microcosm meshes correctly with the macrocosm, then as the,

the person spins around and around doing their plot stuff, they spin around enough times that the world, the big gear that they're meshed with makes a full revolution. So you have a, um, this microcosm-macrocosm thing. Often when a book doesn't work, it's because the microcosmic-macrocosmic correspondences aren't sharp enough. There's some way in which those teeth aren't meshing. One of the things that this book tries to do, and that the Martin Hench books generally try to do, because they're all about these finance scams, these high-tech finance scams set in different eras from the 1980s through the 2020s,

is that they try to create a series of these similar correspondences between small scams and big scams. They use the small scam as a kind of setup or a frame or like a cognitive tool for understanding the much bigger scam. And so that small scam, that Ponzi scheme, where you have a person who is setting out just for shits and giggles to make some money by destroying a bunch of other people's lives and viewing those people as not as people, but as things things as a means to an end not as an end uh unto themselves ends up creating this sadistic brutal pointless and deliberately unsustainable situation that he knows is going to hurt all these other people and the way that he's able to do it is by simply not considering the people who are enmeshed in the scheme as fully people

entitled to their own sort of moral consideration. And in the same way, that's like a microcosm for the kinds of decisions that are made when people go on to found these prison tech companies and these other companies that do these these ghastly things and it's it's also very accurate to how an unfortunate number of just like regular people in society and in government think about the victims of these schemes. Like when you try to talk about how unfair and how much worse this situation has gotten, it's like, well, they're prisoners. They're being punished, you know, as if that makes it all okay. As if that makes it all okay.

Yeah, it's kind of a much more extreme and therefore much more easily spotted version of caveat emptor. Yeah. Or, you know, not your keys, not your coins. You know, these ideas that if something bad is happening to you, it must be because you did something bad, right? Yeah. The kind of providential ethics. And I think that the work that that does for people is it helps them put their own anxiety about their own future to rest. Because if you are worried that something bad might happen to you, and you can convince yourself that the reason that something bad happened to someone else is that they had a deficiency, right? They committed

a sin. They were foolish. Then you don't have to worry about it happening to you. A couple of times in the last decade, I have been the victim of various kinds of con, and I am also someone who's written a lot about cons. So I've been successfully phished once, and I had a phone scammer talk me out of my credit card number once. And I always write about it when it happens. And I write about it in part because I want to make sure that people understand that you're not too smart to be conned, anyone can be conned, and so on. And I think that's an inoculant against getting conned. But I also do it because the reactions are

kind of sociological study. If you want to see into the minds of tech bros who justify the terrible things that they are doing or planning to do or fantasizing about doing or working on to other people under look at look at their fraud apologetics where they say you know oh that was just a business and you know you had caveat emptor or you were lazy or you were foolish or you know like like you did something deficient and that's why it happened and so you deserved it and that means on the one hand it's never going to happen to me because i don't deserve it and on the other hand if i ever

do it to someone else uh that's fine because if they fall victim to it then they must deserve it the the old con artist uh uh saying that you can't cheat an honest man yeah version of this yeah and it's i i mean it that's like it's such a limited view of it right because it's it's, I mean, that's like, it's such a limited view of it, right? Because it's true that like, there are some cons that you can't trick someone into unless they have a little desire for some larceny, right? But like, an increasing number of cons are just like a company using your bank's phone number calling you and telling you you've been defrauded and you give them information because you're not used to the, or somebody calls using the voice of your child and beg and says that they need a ransom payment. Right.

That's not you're not there's not like a dishonesty in your heart because you don't want your kid to be kidnapped. You're just not ready for what tech has been able to do. You know, and while there are some of those cons where they, you know, they're they're playing on your cupidity or your dishonesty. Yeah. where they're playing on your cupidity or your dishonesty to make money off of you, even in those instances, it is downstream of a system where it feels like you can't survive unless you're cheating. One of the things, and so multi-level marketing is actually

a theme that runs through all of these books. The next one is set in the 1980s. And it's, it's about a, um, a faith scam. Uh, it's an early PC company I made up called the three wise men run by a Mormon Bishop,

a Catholic priest and an Orthodox rabbi who, uh, use, um, you know, uh, affiliate marketing through congregations to pray on, on their own faith groups.

And one of the things about these Ponzi schemes, these pyramid schemes, is that they take the only capital that working people have, which is social capital, the relationships they have among one another, and they convince them that it is entrepreneurial and therefore virtuous to instrumentalize your relationship to the other women in your life who help you look after your kids or to your co-religionists who you can turn, turning those people into a downline who have to recruit other people to make you whole so that you can feed your own upline, is just hustling. It's just your shot at the American dream.

It's Spike Lee telling you that investing in shit coins is building black wealth. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is like the fact, and I think low-key this is one of the top couple of problems that we have in this society because it feeds into everything else. I think that's probably why it runs through so much of your work

because the scam economy is behind every, and it's increasingly becoming everything, right? And there's this kind of pernicious effect where by people don't, when the more people are victimized by this, both the less they trust other people and the more, the more they begin to accept that like, well, this is just how you get by in our society, right? Why shouldn't we take away prison libraries and replace them with more expensive Kindle that we can yank away at any moment? Everyone's always nickel and diming me.

I'm always getting more money taken away from me by these same people. And I'm not even in prison, you know? Right. Why shouldn't there be junk fees in prison if there's junk fees everywhere else if you're if you're you know local uh water company that's owned by your city is sold off to uh you know plug a hole in the budget because you can't raise taxes and then they start charging you a convenience fee to pay your your water bill with a check and then a different convenience fee to pay your water bill with a credit card and a third convenience fee to pay your water bill in person with cash and then you realize that like they're

that none of these are convenience fees they're just they're just fees yeah it's just more money yeah yeah it's i mean we're in we're in a pretty infuriating situation here and you get to that in the bezel you really get that across well as this guy is trying to deal with the, and it kind of brought home to me the horror of like having someone you care for in this situation and seeing like their avenues for any kind of relief edged out, chipped away at for the profit of some guy who will never notice the money in his bank account. away at for the profit of some guy who will never notice the money in his bank account. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and you know, unlike Steve Bruce, I, well, like Steve Bruce in some of those volumes, I told this story from the perspective of a fairly powerful person who's got a lot of agency only because it gives you the opportunity to tell a story that at least holds out the possibility of some relief.

I'll leave it to the reader to find out what actually happens at the end. And, you know, there have been successful prisoner uprisings that have been led by working people who are serving long terms. But for the most part, those uprisings, we never even hear about them. You know, there was a prison labor strike before lockdown, I believe it was 2018 or 2019. There was a national prison labor strike, and it barely made a dent in anyone's consciousness. It was, you know, ultimately one of the largest strikes in modern American history. You know, thousands and thousands of workers were on on strike and we didn't even hear about it because there's such control over the narrative about prisons and prisoners that's run by the carceral system. who has a friend on the outside, who's kind of a hustler and, um, you know, a pal and who is someone who knows how to finagle the system. I can spin out a yarn that takes you like back

to Patrick Nielsen Hayden and the big gear driving the little gear takes you on a 360 degree tour of, of how fucked up the system is rather than just the, the ant's eye view or the worm's eye view that most people get because they aren't even able to explore all the avenues and run into their dead ends because they're just stuck where they are. Yeah. Corey, this has been wonderful. I want to again,

uh, let people know your book. The bezel is in stores. Now you can purchase it wherever fine books are sold. Do you have a preferred URL for buying it? The-bezel.org is fine, but wherever people want to get it. Yeah. It's a national bestseller for the third week running. It's very good. That's great. Thank you to whoever feeds into the USA Today bestseller list. You, apparently. that's wonderful.

Yeah. Well, Corey Doctor, do you have anything else you wanted to get to before we roll out today? Well, I guess, you know, if you want to follow the work that I do, pluralistic.net is a newsletter that I write every day or almost every day. And it's open access.

So that means it's Creative Commons licensed. You can reproduce it. You can reproduce it and sell's open access it. So that means it's creative commons licensed. You can reproduce it. You can reproduce it and sell it if you want. And there's no DRM, there's no tracking, there's no, you know, ads,

there's no anything. It's, it's, you know, black type on a white background. You'll never get a pop up asking you whether you want to subscribe to my mailing list or whatever. Yeah. And the, the email version of it, you want to subscribe to my mailing list or whatever.

Yeah. And the email version of it, you can get it as an email list. The email version, also no tracking. I can't tell when you've opened the email or anything. I keep no statistics. And it's a letter in a bottle I write and throw into the ocean every morning. And it's great. That's so much fun to write.

It's a great letter in a bottle. You've been talking, writing a lot, not talking, a lot about AI lately and kind of the, how that all feeds into a lot of this, this stuff you've been covering about, or the stuff you write about often about, you know, bezels and scam economies. And I've really enjoyed getting your take on that because I think you're one of the, one of the people who hasn't lost their minds over all this stuff. Oh yeah. I mean, I think we're really like, so the, the, we hear so much about AI disinformation and the, the, the people who have like most fallen prey to AI disinformation are bosses who've been convinced that AI is good enough to fire you and replace you with. And you know, it's like, it's not true. It doesn't mean they won't do it. Right.

But it's not true. Yeah. That's, that's actually kind of the worst of all worlds, right? Technological unemployment without, without actual replacement. It's just, uh, it's just another bezel. It's a, it's a, it's that long moment where you think you've zeroed out your labor force costs, but, uh, you haven't realized that you're no longer productive because the chatbot keeps you know as in the case of air canada just like telling people

they can get refunds they're not entitled to and then um you know regulators come along and smack you around and charge you you know fine you for your chatbot having lied to people about their bereavement flight discounts and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm looking forward to that moment hitting, I guess. Because where we, I mean, I do kind of think we are sort of nearer to the bursting than we are to the peak of the bubble right now. But I guess we'll see. Well, remember, the market can remain solvent, irrational rather, longer than you can remain solvent. So I've been predicting the collapse

of the London housing bubble, for example, for a very long time. We're nowhere near it. So that is my humbling lesson. It is definitely a bubble. It is going to burst when it's going to burst and is very, very, very hard to predict. Yeah, what to burst when it's going to burst and is very very very hard to predict yeah what will burst with it yeah geez well cory thank you so much for being on the show

uh again everybody check out the bezel um wonderful book and uh check out cory's other wonderful books like walk away that's the episode. Have a good one. Thanks, Robert. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories

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and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show.

I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. Today we have a very interesting interview. We're very lucky to be joined by Ong Kyomo, who we've heard from before,

who is a minister who is Rohingya in the National Unity Government of Burma or Myanmar. Both of those words are okay. And we're talking about the situation of Rohingya people and the developments that have happened in Rakhine State since, I guess, since the beginning of Operation 1027. So welcome to the show. Thank you so much, James. Thanks for having me. And it's good to be back with you to this show. Thank you. Yeah, it's wonderful to have you back. And we're very fortunate.

So I wonder if we could start by summarizing for listeners the things that have happened in the last few months uh in rakhine state because there have been some massive changes uh since maybe listeners were last aware of what was happening there yeah sure thank you uh the since the coup there were uh on and off fights between the arkan army and their uh and the militant process in rakhine state however in the interest of the uh of the of the humanitarian's need both parties came to enter to a ceasefire even in between uh however uh the the fight against the military honda in myanmar started in different part of Myanmar continues to be accelerating. And most recently, the 1027, and followed by other operations in Crimea state,

has been quite rapidly spreading across the country. And that's definitely went to a kind of state where Arkanar resumed to target the junta in its political objective to be reaching the situations we are today that the Arkan Army has been in very good positions to be dismantling the junta's forces in Rakhine State and so far since operation 1027 started, more than half of the township districts in Rakhine State has been seized by the Arkan army including some of those where majority of Rohingya lives and it's continued to be under in a very deteriorating situations. Yeah.

And then they've, they've even sunk hunter ships or captured them in some cases. I think it's been a bit of a, there was a video that was quite like, maybe not viral is the wrong word, certainly I saw a lot, but of a border guard forces, right. Which are like militias allied to the junta, like fleeing into Bangladesh. These are the border guard forces are from mostly from militaries, they are trained militaries, their uniforms are changed into border guard force due to different agreements with the that exists between two states in in in allocating its troop along the border side and and uh the border guard forces are one of the most primary forces that's

deported through england and burned the rohingya's horses in 2027 and make them flee so six years later it's the same uh bdps who who committed the crimes against the Rohingya atrocities that include crimes against humanity and war crimes, had to flee to Bangladesh in a quite similar way to refuge. And so it's sort of karma or whatever you put it in a way. And the perceptions and reality, of course, when it's confrontations between the two groups, Arkan Army and the military-armed forces, the reality that has been defined by most of us in Myanmar

and across that we used to believe that the Burmese military is a strong, both by human resource and equipment. And in reality, they are very weak and the army has proved by dismantling various battalions, infantry battalions and even capturing a second highest commanding officer in the whole of the China state and also many senior level officers have been has has been killed over this battle so the the reality and perception has been deeper on on on Myanmar military when we look at from from external perspective yeah and I think just in case listeners aren't familiar it can be very confusing if you don't read about this stuff all the time it's sort of an alphabet soup of of organizations and and especially uh with reference to Rohingya and Rakhine state because

we have Rohingya armed groups or uh armed groups which draw mostly from Rohingya people that don't necessarily represent them all uh and then we have the AA so So can you explain the AA's relationship to Rakhine State and then how they relate to Rohingya people? The AA has been established in 2009 with aim to be having confederations and not less than WA, which is another special region in Myanmar with a special autonomy. And it has been led by some young people.

And it has been quite a leadership as well within the Rakhine political spectrum. And it has been growing very rapidly. And the acceptance of the people, particularly Rakhine people, has been growing very rapidly, and the acceptance of the people, particularly Rakhine people, has been very high. Therefore, the resource allocations that he got from human resource to other resource to be rapidly coping with that growth has been high, and that put them in a position to be standing in front of Junta

in a very stronger position and and defeat them in a very rapidly and of course the the arkhan army which we refer here as a is not as inclusive as rakhine rakhine state is very diverse and it has got a multiple ethnic group the largest ethnic group is rakhine religiously religiously Buddhist people and to which majority of Arkana Army's leadership derived from there and there is second largest majority which are the Rohingya and Rohingya are still the second largest majority in the Rakhine state despite a million being pushed out to Bangladesh in 2017 and several hundred thousand are spread across the region and uh the the inclusivity in an arcane army is still uh uh still not there uh when you know when we talk about rohingya this means that there might be some small a small number of rohingyas in different but aliens of

arcane army and the administrative units that they are building at a very grassroot level. However, the Rohingya need to be included both by functions and in order to have to describe that relationship and inclusively between the Rohingya people and the Arkan army. Yeah, and is that Arkan is that am I right Arkan is the name of the area before it was called Rakhine state, is that right? Correct. Before Burma became Burma, Arakand was a kingdom, and it used to have its own palace and its diversity,

its heritage and its natural resources. And then, of course, the Burmese colonizations happened in Burma, and later on, Rakhine has been named as Rakhine State. Yeah. So it describes a geographical rather than ethnic identity, right? Which is distinct from some of the other revolutionary organizations like Karenka or any Kachin or what have you. I think there are similarities and as well as there are differences when you put them together.

And from a diversity perspective, Rakhine State is very diverse compared to other ethnic groups. And also it's politically very complex. But there are overall similarities as well. Like, you know, all are to to defeat the hunter to yeah to end the dictatorship in myanmar but uh the the the the primary thing here is the self-determination and self-autonomy like people want to decide to determine what is their present and official look like how they want to treat with their past that's the the the the aspect but of course uh the the the aspect. But of course, to the best of my knowledge, these ethnic resistance organizations, both political and the armed groups, have never claimed that they want to separate from Myanmar.

It's coming together in a different way. The holding together would be in a different way. Yeah. And even when you speak to Burma people who are like the majority ethnicity and the ethnicity from which the the junta's leadership are drawn like they tell me they're committed to a federal and and like a federal Myanmar with autonomy for these different regions and groups and that's something that has held that coalition together right yeah approximately more than 50 million population in Myanmar, majority are Burmese Buddhist and they have been having this Buddhist supremacy and like Pama supremacy over ethnic and religious minorities across the

country and of course Kachinko and others and went to determine when to, when the, their future by themselves and have an equal see both their functions and number. And that's where the, we're having the 70 years long civil war that's came to a collective revolution in 2021. And historically speaking, people have been fighting in Myanmar for equality, justice, and to end the cycle of impunity

for the last 17 plus years. Great. I think that's a great place to take our first advertising break. All right, and we're back. I think you did an excellent job of explaining the history that got us here. And people will be very familiar with the atrocities committed by the Burmese military and its proxies against the Rohingya people, I hope. But one thing that's been happening recently, which is particularly appalling, is the forced recruitment of Rohingya people by that same military, right?

Can you explain what's been going on? So the conscription law has been reactivated. So the conscription law has been reactivated. It has been there, launched by the previous military dictators, but it has not been active. And so since the junta has been falling apart and collapsing, not only Rakhine State, across the country, wherever they fight, they lose. only Rakhine state, across the country, wherever they fight, they lose. And they have battalions by battalion that's running away to Thailand, running away to India, running away to Bangladesh, and putting white flag, and there are several casualties. And apparently, junta became the largest military equipment supplier to the revolutionary force, we did not get international support when young people, actress models and writers, poets, decided to go to the forest to fight against this junta. And there was little to no international support

and we have been struggling to equip ourselves to fight this hunter. And of course, the resilience and the courage that young people had and the tactical and a strategic capacity that the ethnic resistance organization had in combined became a factor to have an strategic sourcing of the military equipment and where like battalion by battalion you don't need to buy the

weapons and military tank and things like that you you go and fight one battalion and they run away or they die and then you take over the that's how how the whole thing started in the air. Then when they are losing, they reactivated this conscription law and started to, in the interest of making mandatory everyone to be serving by force in the military by chance. And of course, when it's come to Rakhine State, Rakhine State, there are 600,000 Rohingya, and 250,000 to 60,000 of them have been in concentration camp,

consolidated in one place with movement restrictions, no access to education, healthcare, and things like that, where they have been living more than a decade in some of those camps. And villages where those people who are not in the camp as well have been imposed by additional movement restrictions. So you don't need to really go and mobilize people to be forcefully recruiting. And in the beginning, the junta went to them and to give them sort of a show them incentive of like you will become the citizens and we'll give that and we'll give that and you

need to fight against the arkan army and of course the grassroot the leader community leader responded in a way that they need to respond to reject the request from the military junta. And then military junta started to, of course, impose by using the force. And as I mentioned earlier, they will need to, like when you have consolidated people, that amount of young people doing nothing, and you just go and catch them and put them on a truck. And some of them don't know where they are going because their whole life has been in this camp.

Like when you're six years old and you're now 18, it's an industry for you to be serving in the military. And you don't know what is happening in our side of your camp. So that's how really the end. And then we got these news. And of course, we have been talking to different community leaders and the community has been approaching to us as a government. And we make, there are several media coverage as well. And the military started to say that these Bengalis are not referring to the Rohingya, are not the citizens of Myanmar. Therefore, there is no way that we make them serve in the military.

So those are fake news. way that we we make them serve in the in the military so those are fake news that so they use this state uh propaganda tv channel and the state uh newspaper which is now under control of uh suck to deny that and and on 7th october uh the 7th um uh sorry 7th march a uh the the uh those who they have kind of shifted more than 500 has been brought into the commanding office of the junta to be training in full uniform. Some of those inside there has got managed

to get internet access and then sent to me the video footage what is happening inside there. So I posted that on my Twitter and then it's spread from there and then we caught them like their denial initially and the lies that they have been putting by denying that Rohingya were not conscripted. Oh what's wrong? And then a few days later they have been sent to

the front line to fight against AA and then there are hundreds of those rohingyas who were uh who died in this front line while uh and uh and and the hunter uh uh came back a few days later uh talking to their family saying that okay 100 plus people has died and and we don't know who is who and when we bring you that body you will be able to be identified and and the first dead body that they brought uh and and and handed over to the crumb and the community leader uh with uh one million jets which is uh 350 dollars plus a hundred kg of rice uh as an incentive for the life that they have given in fighting. So that's the situation and we can, of course, continue. Yeah, that's very bleak, isn't it? And so this, and we've seen like, just today, actually, people have been online today, there was a protest in Rakhine state

somewhere for a hinge of people rejecting the Arakan army. Can you explain like, that might not be what it seems on the face of it, right? Can you explain what might be happening there? The situations in Rakhine state has been very much complex because there are hidden factors being created, artificially created by the hunter for so long from the 2000 and 2012 2017 between these different communities there has been always interdependency and social position to some more level but honda always used the divide and rule uh methodology to uh to uh to bring the conflict between this community and hate each other and then they can carry out what they need to do as a power holder.

And of course, when the Arkan army is getting greater control over the Achaena state and the junta is losing, the military junta need to use all tactics that they have, including the inter-communal uh tensions and and and so they they are uh uh rohingya uh few ringer maybe who has businesses with these uh these uh this junta are being used as a proxy to push pressure or pressure on the rohingya and to organize uh and so that's why the protest started a few days ago

in one of the townships in Rakhine State, where 80 to 90% are Rohingya, and claiming that we don't want war and we don't want EE. And of course, this can be happening artificially, organically, and it's so artificial. And anyone who looks into this video footage can see that the rohingya never had in their life like those who are protesting uh never know what is means freedom of expression means and suddenly in one random morning hundred hundred of rohingya uh including children, coming on the street and protesting is not something normal.

It can happen without the... And of course, majority of the Rohingya are peace loving people and they want Burma to be an inclusive federal democracy and they want to be part of it. And we are, that's why I myself as a rohingya uh taking a leading role in in in the government as as the first holding back ministerial positions in the cabinet since 1962 and uh and and and of course the the the the ringer equally want the the to end the dictatorship once and for all because that very junta has been committing atrocities, crimes, including crimes against humanity and to genocide to Rohingya.

This is the very same military who deported a million Rohingya, killed more than 24,000 people burning children's lives in 2017. So in which way that Rohingya collectively will come and extend this junta with the whole country. So this is not, this is really not something organic and this is artificial. This is so fake and this is so like junta made into fit into be fitting into their political propaganda. Yeah. And I think one has to, when one's looking at things

in Myanmar, be aware that the junta just doesn't care about lying. It's something they've done for a long time. Apparently you can't download iHeart podcasts in Myanmar now. Someone tried to download our podcast there and so they had to use a VPN. But yeah, they manipulate the media environment heavily.

You can read junta newspapers and some of it's comically false but one thing i did want to talk about is like when i talk to young pdf fighters and i've spoken to dozens of them now people who are kareni people who are karen people who are bama people who are kachin they a lot of them say to me that like what happened in 2017 was atrocious and at the time they didn't realize because of this manipulated media environment they didn't realize that the way the Rohingya were being treated was so appalling and that now they're very upset about what happened and like for them I guess the uh the litmus test for um for a future for Burma

is one that can include Rohingya people. And so with that in mind, I guess we've seen this kind of changing of language, right? Where previously they were referred to as Bangladeshi, and then now they're referred to as Muslim or Rohingya people. I guess, can you just explain, as Muslim or Rohingya people, I guess, can you just explain, like, what is the NUG PDF kind of, like, how do we ensure independence and safety for Rohingya people in Myanmar in a federal democratic future without a dictatorship?

We are in a context of identity politics, where the identity is so much associated with very rights whether it's political, social and economic rights that you deserve and what you need to give back as an active citizens and obligations to the country that you belong. Therefore the identity of the Rohingya is a primary thing for Rohingya to be to be enjoying equal freedom and to be able to contribute equally as others in the nation building process. And of course, before 2017, even before that, there has been a lot of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, widespread state-sponsored against the Rohingya that could be misleading and incitement of violence. And the term Bengali is a term that refers that you are coming from Bangladesh illegally

and you are illegally resettling. That's how the terms came to come. It's false, right? It's a false accusation. It's false accusations and the Rohingya people has existed in Rakhine states

side by side with Rakhine people. Even Burma became Burma. And there are historical facts. There are so many undeniable things that you could you could look into and into into various historical facts and and so the the in between of course the Rohingya the Trump become illegal and the military denied it rejected it and then they started to use the term Bengali and the the most of the Burmese people fall into that trap and even some were

either silent in this horrific genocidal attack in 2017 or some were taking sight of a military at that time that it's okay to kill and it's okay to... And of course these are being propelled by

all disinformations and disinformation that I earlier mentioned. And 2021 attempted coup happened. And that's where a new perspective is being offered to the people of Myanmar. Because the same military that has been carrying out atrocity crimes against the Rohingya and other minorities came to Lajapahma. People are doing the same thing. the Rohingya and other minorities came to Lajapahma people doing the same thing. So what has been told to us by the Rohingya and the religious and ethnic minority in Myanmar for the decade

came to be true. And that's how the acceptance of the Rohingya has started to grow. Of course, it's not to the level that we'd be satisfied with yet. It's a process and there is so much to unlearn uh because one uh provoking factor like uh attempted to uh should like wouldn't fix a problem a problem that has been there for for decades and national unity government declare that that we accept the trump rohingya and there has been a policy stating very clearly in 2021 june and that policy to be implemented of course when the situation is is conducive and and there are significant uh challenges uh

with the territorial control and things like that when it's come uh but again the momentum that i i i mentioned we we we got as a result of extreme revolutions need to be maintained in the higher scale uh that's not only the rohingya and anything that's wrong that's primary that's a principle and value-wise strong only to be able to say it's wrong regardless of whoever is and regardless of race and religion. If we are talking about federal inclusive democracy, we cannot preach to our people or international community saying that support us or asking for support

or be a part of this movement where we see a separate broad fisher as an inclusive federal democracy, where actual values that we are not practicing by ourselves. So before we preach, we need to act upon those principles by ourselves. And overall, I would say that all the loss that we had, including life and livelihoods, that hundreds and hundreds of people, thousands of people has been killed, jailed, and hundreds of villages, tons of has been destroyed. The good thing that we got is this consciousness on the morality. And if we're able to accelerate that consciousness at the greatest scale, that's where we will be

able to maintain the values and principles of the inclusive federal democracy. That will be the pillar to maintain this as a process. Yeah, I think so. It's really fascinating to talk to young people. I was talking to some Mandalay PDF people not so long ago, and they were like, oh, yeah, well, when we left, we were told that the Ta'ang would hate us because we're Burmese, and they would fight us.

And then they're like, oh, they're really nice. This is a Ta'ang guy right next to me. Because they're joined up together now, the PDFs and the EROs are largely fighting side by side against Suhanta. Are there PDF forces present in Rakhine State as well? No, there is an army, particularly, which is an alliance with the, there have been multiple interactions, like, you know, we have an alliance relations committee that would deal with all the alliance as national unity government. And of course, they have been playing an important role in defeating the hunter and there is no PDF in Rakan state. Okay, yeah, so it's a little different there.

Although often the PDF and the arrows are very similar in, you know, fight side by side. Also, Rakan army is not alone in Rakan state. They are also in Shana state and they are fighting not only in Rakan state. in shana state and they are yes they are fighting with uh in not only in rakhine state so like when we talk about like even though the physically pdfs are not there it doesn't mean that there is no military connect to military connections between the ethnic organizations uh that exist across the country yeah and like we've seen that a lot since october right like since the three brother Alliance started their campaign that moves Hunter forces to one place and that allows other people at the Karenny to

take advantage of, of the, uh, the way those forces have moved and they've liberated huge parts of their territory. So look, it's all joined, I guess. Yeah. The tricky part that they have used in the past is like hidden cut is that they will do ceasefire in one part of the country and allocate all of their resources

in another part of the country and where they will defeat or they will at least like come to a bargaining position let's not fight anymore and you stay where you are and don't try to like you are and don't try to, like you know, and it's Junta who violate again all these agreements that they initially set. And this time it's so coordinated across the country that the Junta cannot be able to position themselves or strategize themselves or put them themselves in a tactical

positions their old tactic did not work in the modern coordinations of the pdf and ethnic resistance organization yeah no they've tried multiple times to have like little individual So I wanted to ask just to finish up, people, I think, who listen to this will be very familiar with the situation in Myanmar and they want to help and they see that the international community is doing nothing. And I think a lot of people are rightly very upset about that. So what can people do to help and especially to advocate for Rohingya people? Particularly when it comes to the Rohingya people, the Rohingya people crisis is so much interconnected

with Burmese democratization process. Rohingya will not be able to have a life that's dignified, safe, and in their place of origin unless the Burma is solely in the hand of a civilian government. So the democratization process that whole Burma is attempting to make need to be supported by international community, as I mentioned earlier.

So far, we got little to no international support. And on the Rohingya crisis as well, there's 1 million people in Bangladesh where their rations are cut to $8 per month per person, which is a cup of coffee in the United States. And there is a greater danger of hunger, starvation, and malnutrition, and so many other social economic problems that would have an impact on the regional security,

stability and things like that. Funding shortfall remains for Rohingya. That's on the humanitarian end. And of course Rohingya need to be politically organized in order to to be fitting into the uh changing uh political dynamic of myanmar and has been oppressed uh they were not able to form civil society organizations they were not able to be educating themselves so all these societal uh leadership aspects uh need to be supported, including having an organized political platform for Rohingya,

which will be able to represent Rohingya in the larger political table, ensuring their voices are heard and be able to equally take the rights that they deserve, and more importantly, equally able to contribute to decisions that will have an impact on their life. And the United States has determined the crimes against Rohingya as genocide two years before and of course the genocide discrimination does not simply is an announcement it comes with the moral and legal responsibility so we do want to request the United States and its people

to firmly stand on the moral and legal obligations that it has in ensuring that the Rohingya are able to live equally peacefully and more importantly the justice that they deserve on the physical and mental damage that happened as part of the genocide and it was picked in 2017, it's continued

to be happening today. And even today 150 people were arriving in Aceh, Indonesia where the Indonesian people who were showing greater humanity in opening their arms and parts to be accepting Rohingya are denying the Rohingya. So for the Rohingya, there is little to no space to be accommodated, both in regional and international and local setting. And it is very important that we are able to tackle and navigate these issues together with the international community in an innovative, uh together with the international community in an innovative effective uh efficient and sustainable way uh in for the sake of humanity and there are uh competing priorities across the world but the international community is uh we are so aware that international communities capable of

doing more than one thing at a time it doesn't have to be either or no it can be both and it should be right like obviously people are very concerned with the plight of palestinian people rightly so at the moment but uh yes we should remember that other muslim people have been subject to genocide and you know for the last nearly seven years i suppose and and it's ongoing and and they deserve our support and solidarity as well and yeah i hope yeah yeah i mean it does seem like i guess a little more hopeful than it was even a couple of years ago that that there will be a democratic myanmar uh and not so far yeah the journey is uh is uh almost made and what we need

is greater international support uh like uh support doesn't mean just you know releasing the statement meaningful comprehensive support that we are able to defeat this hunter once and for all for the sake of people of myanmar 50 plus million people giving the price at the highest possible price in their life. That includes, again, the lives and livelihood. An international community was not doing more than condemnations or releasing a statement of concern

over the last three years. But it's time to act. And an international community, again, has to answer this question to next generations when there is a question on the morality where the international community, again, has to answer this question to next generations when there's questions on the morality, where the international community, when the genocide comes against humanity and a war crime has been happening to millions of innocent people in the eyes of our international community.

Yeah, no, I hope they do. And it's incredible the progress that has been made without that support like and i think uh it's just incredible to me that even you know i remember in 2021 talking to people who were just uh beginning their fight and to see how far they've come is outstanding and yeah and yeah people should be very proud of that but it doesn't mean that they they don't need more support they do doesn't mean that they don't need surface to our missiles they do like yeah that that is uh the thing that we should be doing thank you so much for joining us we we really appreciate your time and and your insight into this is there anywhere where people can find you online if

they want to follow on yeah they can follow me on my twitter and facebook and uh uh i it's uh my twitter is akmo2 2. okay and uh my my uh facebook is like my name if you type my name on john it will appear uh so yeah yeah looking forward to seeing you in the near future. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities,

athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together you know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout well that's when the real magic happens so if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people you know follow and admire join me every week for post run high it's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun.

Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon valley into a playground for billionaires from the chaotic world of generative ai to the destruction of google search better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose this season i'm going to be joined by everyone from nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and i'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives.

I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's the one with the green guy on it. Welcome to Kadapt Here, a podcast being recorded through a haze of painkillers. I'm your host, Theo Wong. I'm fucking dying. Yeah. Woo! With these jams. Yeah, fantastic episode. You've been waiting for it. Here it is. Yeah, and the other thing that's dying, was dying, has died, sort of, was a bunch of french colonists in algeria yeah yeah the french empire as a whole one could say yeah thank god jesus christ why did why did

we let these people have an empire terrible idea oh yeah oh yeah uh was it what's it not an empire the abroad france right like uh like the little parts of france which just happened to be in africa totally a normal thing which particular part of the french empire are we talking about there are many many such cases of french french empire taking l's not that that's unique to be fair also british empire i took a lot of l's yeah so today we're talking about algeria and i think what one of the things that I sort of realized about how the Algerian revolution is remembered in the

West is okay so there's the kind of the Frank Herbert reaction where they saw people who were Muslim in the streets and were like holy shit and went insane for 70 years.

Yeah. Yeah. To be fair, to be fair, that was also poorly, partly being driven mad by the Portland dunes, which like, you know,

like I get sometimes, sometimes you're driven, you're driven completely insane by dunes, but you know, so there's, there's a, there's a sort of reactionary memory of it. There,

there's a sort of memory that functions inside of the American military, where Algeria, as you remember, is one of those examples of failed counterinsurgency. Yeah. And then there's the memory inside of the American left, which is largely confined to Fanon and the movie The Battle of Algiers. Yep. Classic movie, to be fair. Yeah, great movie. Like, nothing, nothing. Good movie. However, this is a real issue because

The Battle of Algiers, again, great movie, ends in 1957. Fanon, great theorist, dies in 1961. Now, notably,geria uh gains independence 1962 so okay the issue with this is that people kind of broadly know the outlines of the first algerian revolution but the second algerian revolution the one where the algerian working class seizes control of the means of production attempts to run them autonomously is just has completely faded into the midst of history I talk about it no one has any idea what the fuck I'm talking about and this is kind of startling because you know up until there's probably like there's like a four-year span where the Algerian revolution is the sort

of like capital s capital r social revolution like it's it's the big one revolution is the sort of like capital S capital R social revolution. Like it's, it's the big one. It's the one people all over the world taking inspiration from. And then it kind of, you know, it flounders out for reasons that we're going to talk about. And also the cultural revolution starts and everyone latches onto that. But it's, it's sort of fascinating to me that this, this, the second part of the revolution and the part that everyone was really excited about, which is the core of the revolution being worker self-management. And that being the sort of great theoretical innovation of Algerian socialism, that has just completely faded from memory. It's just gone. And so today we're talking about that revolution um unfortunately

one of the most detailed studies on this i'm gonna be starting from a lot is in clegg's worker self-management in algeria now this is a good book however comma clegg is uh he's he's he's a very specific kind of curmudgeon-y marxist guy yeah i'm familiar with that kind of guy yeah it's like the back third of this book is him engaged in a protracted ideological war with fanon over the nature nature of revolutionary consciousness which is largely pointless and goes nowhere so many such cases you know but it is a very very detailed and very useful account of what actually happened after the first revolution like after the french are forced to pull out of algeria and what happens effectively is well okay we need to go back a little tiny bit. So there is a staggering slaughter of people who attempt to resist French colonialism. A lot of the sort of techniques that are going to be used in Vietnam, that are going to be used all over the world in counterinsurgencies are developed in Algeria in this period. I'm going to read a quote from Clegg about what they were doing.

in Algeria in this period. I'm going to read a quote from Clegg about what they were doing. The use of air power in Napalm to clear cover made movement inside the country almost impossible. The construction of mines and electrified barriers along the border with Tunisia and Morocco kept the better trained and armed elements of the Armada Liberation Nationale from coming to support the guerrillas and moving in supplies. One of the most successful moves encountering guerrilla activity was the policy of regroupment initiated by general chalet this strategy learned from the british and malaysia involved moving the rural population out of areas favorable to the guerrillas and resettling them in camps under military guard

an estimated two million peasants were treated this way creating vast social and economic problems for the future so like they put 2 million people in concentration camps. Yeah. Yeah. Calling it a regroupment is a fucking exercise in like a, in marketing. Like rarely have I seen something so nefariously named. Like we're regrouping them parentheses in a fucking concentration camp.

Yeah. And this is, this is a strategy that you know so the the british sort of start doing this in malaysia um a lot of it's derived from attempts to counter you know this isn't really an episode about that ulcer and revolution but i'll talk about this a little bit it's it's it's designed as a way to counter sort of uh maoist insurgency campaigns which is the sort of you know the, the becomes the new template for like the power agencies. Yeah. And it's because it works really well. And you know, like the key thing of Maoist, like, well, I mean, there, there's a couple of things,

obviously, but like one of the key elements of it is this, is this line for Mao. Is it like the gorilla moves to the people, like a fish moves to the sea. Right. So it's about like, it's about building social bases such that, you know, gorillas can move in and out of communities and not get turned in and stuff and use them as terrain. I've had that particular Mao phrase paraphrased to me. I think sometimes for people who are aware it comes from Mao, sometimes people who probably have just sort of come to it through their own understanding or heard it

but not realized the source of it. People who are certainly not Maoists all over the world. I've heard it in the Middle East. I've heard it in Africa. I've heard it in Asia. It is a very important thing. Yeah, it does make guerrilla warfare a lot easier if you can rely on the population.

This is something that's propagated through, because of the success of Mao's guerrilla insurgency, this is something that's propagated through because because of the success of of sort of mao's like guerrilla insurgency this is something that's propagated through i mean through the through obviously like through through communist parties but i mean like a lot of islamist groups also pick it like pick up a lot of elements of it because a lot of those groups are trained in uh the plos uh camps in the valley in uh in jordan and so like a lot of groups like all over the world of completely unrelated ideologies all sort of pick this stuff up and the british response to this is the british are fighting a communist insurgency in malaysia and they're like okay we're going to

do concentration camps um for our purposes so obviously this is a a you know this is an unfathomable atrocity but it has enormous effects even after the war ends because suddenly you know okay like the war ends the french are gone but you know two million people have been taken from their homes and locked in and locked in camps and this has enormous you know i mean this is this has enormous economic effects um and the second thing that has really sort of stunning economic effects are the so there there there's been a class of of people in adria called the colognes who are basically the the colonists they're not actually all french a lot of them are from other european countries but they come to be

this sort of hardcore french ultra ultra nationalist sort of fascist turbo racists i guess they're they're they're not quite the rhodesians but they're they're only not quite the rhodesians because they didn't stay to fight it out and when when the french lose the war when the french pull out these people just flee like all of them we're talking hundreds of thousands of people just are gone. I'm going to read another quote from Clegg because, you know, if these people had merely left, I think a lot of what's going to happen in this revolution goes a lot better. But they didn't just leave. Quote, in June, a policy of scorched earth was declared, inaugurating an orgy of destruction. With his dream crumbling, the colonist's response was to destroy this world. a policy of scorched earth was declared inaugurating an orgy of destruction with his

dream crumbling the colonist response was to destroy this world which i think is a really sort of elegant yeah yeah yeah i think that's actually very well written and it's funny it's this thing that again like you see replicated so often and there was this slogan that they used at the start of the syrian civil war like asada we burn the country yeah yeah and it's it's this real you know so so what what the what the colonists end up doing is they end up just destroying yes yeah everything they can get their hands on they're destroying houses they're especially destroying any kind of sort of factor of technical equipment anything they can find they're burning they're lighting on fire and some and the other thing about okay so algeria is a colonial economy right and the structure

of the colonial economy is such that you know if you are a anyone who has any kind of technical or managerial experience are all colonists right everyone else in the country is either doing subsistence farming or has been fed in as like these sort of like seasonal workers or really really badly paid sort of contract workers on the on these sort of like cash crop agricultural farms a lot of orange production stuff like that and so when the colonists flee the country suddenly like the entire technical managerial class everyone with technical experience and also all of the bosses and the entire bourgeoisie are just gone and this takes everyone by surprise the fln had assumed the flns the the the kind of like umbrella organization that carried out the revolution um they it kind of falls apart

very quickly because it's it's not really a coherent ideological group it's just a sort of banner that everyone who is fighting kind of attaches themselves to yeah this is quite common right like national fronts yeah or like popular fronts very often do this post-revolution yeah they should disintegrate but but they had all expected that the colonists were going to stick around and they don't because they're turbo racists right um and the the thought of having to live in an algeria ruled by algeria this was like nope i will fucking literally light the world on fire and flee to france you know what else is going to light the world on fire and cause people to flee to france is it the products products and services that support the show?

Yeah, so how fucking good they are, it's going to cause the world to burn and make people flee to France. Yeah, I have to think about that. When I think about how big my pile of gold is, I think that it's too small. I'd better just burn it all down and move to france and we are back now enter enter here the heroes of this episode the workers council or very specifically so this is this is a French colony. So in France and in Spain and in sort of, I guess, the Romance languages, there was a concept called autogestion. I'm pronouncing it really badly because I'm reading the French version of it and trying to pronounce it half in Spanish, the only one of these languages I can even sort of speak.

so to speak. So it means self-management, and it basically has this context of workers' democratic self-management. If you're doing auto-histione, the workers of a factory have taken over the factory and are not running it themselves. The most prominent

example at this point of self-management is Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavian version is very very weird but as a way basically to tell the soviets to fuck off yugoslavia adopts a very different kind of model of socialism than everyone else's so their model is based on the quote-unquote the withering away of the state so they're you know you have basically these like reasonably democratic like workers co-ops that are the sort of that are sort of the productive basis of society and these these co-ops

sort of compete against each other on the market but on the other hand there is a like a very large level of workers control that's different from you know like the u.s which is just a a pure dictatorship of your boss in the workplace tells you what to do and if you don't do it you get fired yeah and so algeria gets their has their own version of of self-management but unlike algeria which is sort of effectively imposed by the top down from the Communist Party, in Algeria, what happens is you have this enormous mass of workers who used to work on these plantations, used to work in factories. There's these huge colonial agricultural estates. And what happens is with the entire ruling class gone, and when I say the entire ruling class, we're talking from all the way up from the highest level government officials through all of your sort of capitalist bosses right down to sort of the middle management guys are gone. Yeah.

All those people just have disappeared. So what happens is workers start taking over all of their workplaces, and they start forming workers' councils. Right. Now, this is driven largely by – I mean, there's a few different drivers. We'll get to the ideological aspect. A lot of it is that these people have no money, and no one else is going to run it. So the workers who have now seized all the stuff are like, okay, well, we're going to get the money we need to survive by running all the stuff ourselves. Yeah. And so this sort of starts in 1962 and it sweeps across the country very quickly i mean there's a lot of rural regions where it never really takes hold but largely what's happening is that permanent workers who had been who had been

workers at these firms seize control of them this has benefits and downsides the benefit of it is so there's an attempt by the sort of the the new algerian sort of bourgeoisie the sort of like small faction of al Algerian capitalists to buy up all this land. And there's a bunch of really funny stories of these guys buying these estates and showing up in the workers' committee, just kicking them out. Yeah, yes, I've seen some of these.

This is extremely funny. Yeah. There's also issues. So part of what's going on is this is the sort of, this is the permanent workers taking over the stuff with their people right and so a lot of times like they'll they'll kick out seasonal workers because yeah so it's not it's not perfect there's a lot of issues with it right because this is this is all being formed effectively spontaneously by a bunch of extremely desperate people that's what i was just so obviously like because it's me the point of

comparison i'm thinking of is the spanish civil war right yeah and workers self-management but there you have a workforce which is which has been working towards collectivization for more than a decade in some cases and also like this is a point actually that gets missed a lot in online discourse about the spanish civil war perhaps because people don't know as much as they think they do. That like there were anarchists in all kinds of roles. Like when people talk about the, the rooty column or whatever, like there were absolutely anarchists,

non-commissioned officers from the military who they relied on heavily for advice. And the same is true with the collectivized workplaces, right? That there were anarchists in many roles, you know, in shop stewards um and and things like that obviously not in like the higher management roles i think

yeah doing that is kind of incompatible with anarchism but and obviously what we're dealing here with is anarcho-syndicalism for the most part um was the fire was more of a purist anarchist group but but there you had people who've been working towards this for a long time who have been planning for it and who did have people with a variety of experiences and i think oversight might be a better word than the management perhaps or like sort of uh organization but they they were very successful and and but but that didn't just happen overnight it often gets presented as if it did as if if on the 18th of July, these people were just sort of going to work.

And by the 20th, they were fully formed anarchists running their own workplaces. But that's absolutely not the case. Yeah, and Algeria is the exact opposite of this, which is there's a very low level of political consciousness. There's organization is almost non-existent because, so, I i mean the kinds of organizations that had existed are you know you have these sort of vanguard cells but those are

largely rural and then you have there there are some unions but they're not very they're not very large because they've been outlawed yeah there's repression right ground yeah like unbelievable oppression colonial context is extremely important. Yeah. Obviously neither me or I is blaming Algerian workers for not being Catalan. No, yeah, this is the French's fault. Many such cases.

Yeah. But this seizure really takes everyone by surprise because all of the sort of leaders of fln all leaders of the various factions had assumed that either they were going to sort of do i don't know there's ideological conflict but they they they all assume that they're going to do some kind of like giant state-led industrialization project right whether it's a socialist one, whether it's a more Islamist one. And then suddenly, they are now all, you know, okay, well, your economy is now on the Yugoslavian

self-management model because all of these workers have just seized all their workplaces. Now, there are a few organizations that are politically very supportive of this. The UGTA, which is Algeria's big sort of trade union, are very politically socialist

and they are really the only people in this entire country who are an organized political body who actually want to see this thing work. And so they do a lot of work helping workers set up their committees and spreading the revolution.

Their plan is to use this against any attempt to set up their uh their committees and spreading the revolution their plan is to use this against any attempt to set up basically dictatorship by uh you know it's it's okay and this is where it gets sort of interesting because very explicitly they are trying to stave off sort of soviet style socialist dictatorship right they are and their plan is we're going to use we're going to use the workers councils as the as the basis of of an actual sort of workers democracy against again against the sort of orthodox like marxist leninist stuff and this is another thing that's going on too is the army is a lot more orthodox marxist leninist than than either the workers committees or the unions and so a lot in a lot of parts of the countries in the west the army just sort of rolls through

knocks off the workers committees and seizes the land for itself and that's a fiasco but now pretty very quickly ben bella who emerges as as the sort of as the leader of algeria after a set of political maneuvering that we're not going to get into here um is basically forced to in in 1963 set a bunch of decrees saying that yeah these guys are the people who run the economy etc etc but there's there i i want to talk i want to actually get into something that i is is really not talked about in 99 of the accounts of stuff which is how do these councils actually work? Because spoiler alert,

this whole thing is going to fail and all these people are going to be crushed. And a lot of that has to do with how this thing set up, which is very badly because it is a system designed by Marxists and they're very sympathetic Marxist to a broad extent, but unfortunately the way that these, that this is set up is that okay so there's an assembly right that's like the all the workers in the firm are in this assembly the assembly elects this workers council which has like 10 people and then that council elects

the management committee which is the people who actually do the management so it has a president and there's also a director supposed to represent the interest of the state or whatever and and the issue with this is that it's designed specifically to keep power out of the hands of workers directly right that that giant assembly it can't actually make policy the only thing it can do is approve plans or disapprove plans set down by the the management committee got it okay and these people at the management committee are presumably like representatives as opposed to delegates right yeah yeah they're representatives they also have three-year terms and they can't be recalled i think they can but it's really hard okay and the other thing that that that sort of destroys this is that

they those they they there's a lot of sort of like election rigging by the state who doesn't want these things to be actual sort of democratic and the the and this leads into the bigger issue which is state control and this is this is where i i think really this is something that clegg doesn't get into much because clegg is a marxist but this is where the marxism of it all really comes into play oh but first do you know who's not a marxist oh yes almost certainly yeah not marxists i i think we i think we can say not marxists all right we are back so the biggest issue here and this is something that was kind of true in both algeria and in the others kind of big marxist self-management experiments in chile which is that

these the self-managing firms don't have control over a lot of the things that they need right so in algeria when when the state essentially tries to absorb all of this stuff when it when it gets sort of legitimized under these decrees uh there are a lot of issues one is that these self-managing organizations don't have control over their own money so yeah they're yeah you're paid you're getting paid by the state right and you so you give the state your money and then they they pay you and this becomes a real issue because the state goes oh well the people in these self-managing things are actually like privileged workers so they have permanent pay freezes and also you can't reinvest uh your profits back into the firm which is a real issue this is like a horrible

combination of like ancap and uh and like straight up like stalinist like it without yeah i don't i don't want to like derail us too much but this again like is a distinct it's so much worse than the spanish system it's so much worse like every part of it is set up to fail yeah and i think this shit always get this is the sort of discourse i am now going to derail us i'm sorry um this is the kind of like the online like hammer and sickle in bio discourse that we that we see so often right and and you don't have to pay attention to those people and like you probably shouldn't but just just to like put it out there i think like anarcho-syndicalism is

right there and and it allows for the like unions and syndicates which over overlook a whole industry to coordinate between workers committees and ensure that you know things get done and people get treated with dignity and and they they also make enough money or have access to the resources that they need to survive and when we try and uh like cut the corners off this or kind of make a little collage between this and and marxist leninism or state socialism like neither thing works and we just end up with this kind of terrible hodgepodge in which it doesn't it doesn't function right but that doesn't necessarily mean that worker self-management itself is invalid as a concept it yeah and and there's there's a lot of things here that you know so the the the the lat the lat one of one of the

big criticisms of this at the time by by social intellectuals is people going well there's not coordination uh you know the firms competing against each other there's not broad economic coordination it's like well yeah that's because that's because the state controls all their finances they don't they don't have the ability to do coordination with each other and yeah the big thing and this is the thing that really actually kills this is that so uh clagg calls it marketing is controlled by the state but that's not quite what's going on the other thing that's controlled by the state is the state has the responsibility and is the people who are in charge of selling the products.

And they just fuck this up completely. They can't figure out how to get the fruit that's being produced sold. The problem here isn't output. The state is doing things like... Sometimes they'll have all these oranges, so a lot of the Algerian agricultural economy is set up as a cash crop economy.

And you're supposed to, so, okay. And it's never really worked very well. But the Algerian state just completely shits the bed. And there's, I mean, there's like, I mean, we're talking like tons of fruit is just sitting there rotting. A lot of the time what they do is they just dump it onto the french market at for like basically zero cost and so and you know and so you you you get you get these things and and you you look at the sort of profit loss thing and you know the the sort of like right wing parts of the state and this is oh i guess you like i guess they are right wing but the the the sort of anti-self manager parts of the state are going oh well look at these these firms they're hemorrhaging all this

money it's like well yeah they're hemorrhaging money because instead of actually selling the goods you guys are throwing all of their goods into a dumpster like yeah of course it's not working right yeah and this is a struggle of like post-colonial economies if you in the french colonial system like they've decided that algeria is going to be the place that makes oranges for the entirety of the french i'm just sort of manufacturing example empire here. Then evidently, once you secede from that empire, you now have a fuck ton more oranges than you need for Algeria. So you're now going to have to navigate. And you might not have enough.

Well, and they can't even figure out how to sell to other Algerians, too. That's the problem with the sort of state control of the market. They can't do either because the're completely because the bureaucrats that are running this are completely incompetent right yeah i mean one could argue the state's impossible incapable of allocating resources equally or fairly but yes even so they've done a bad job even by state standards yeah and and and the and the subsequent issue too is because all the finances are controlled by the state even the the firms that are profitable, and there are firms that are very profitable, they can't reinvest their profit back into improving efficiency or doing the basic things that workers need, which is having money to eat. Because that money, all of that capital is just being eaten by the state.

And so, you know, there's another quote, Clay, again. just being eaten by the state and so you know there's another quote clagging in as the president of a self-managed farm said to me in 1965 in this situation how can we persuade the worker that he is no longer working for a capitalist exploiter and like well yeah he objectively is right he is like the state is stealing all of his money and then doing some stupid bullshit with it yeah i love that they're like they're not quite joining the dots there like yeah these guys don't seem to be getting it like maybe yeah maybe they do get it and and this is this is one of these things where you know like i i i keep going clegg clegg doesn't really draw this line because he just i mean clegg just refuses to talk about uh either hungary or

uh the spanish revolution at all right um yeah and this is where she's you really don't like well he's not an ml like that's the thing he he he is a he is a pro worker self-management guy right but he's a marxist pro worker self-management guy yeah so he's attributing the failure this largely to like well there wasn't sufficient consciousness so it's like well no like this system even if everyone wanted it to work this system couldn't have worked because it was set up in such a way that it was it was and this is something you know this is probably what i want to talk to you about this was that if you look at the way that the that the spanish system is set up right it's it's built off of coordination like basically like sectoral coordination between everyone who's doing a thing right it's built on resource sharing

if i'm remembering my stuff right i mean they have basically they have a banking union and people put their profits into the into the banking union and then people can get money from the banking union to reinvest it in other places yeah i think that's correct it's also like yeah like this this i guess i would that be called vertical integration if it's the whole sector even if it's they they they do this thing which takes advantage of both of the advantages of self-management gives you which is one like and like sort of you know and like socialist self-management right you you have the advantage of scale which is that you're now instead of competing against each other you're now coordinating an entire sector right and you're you're you're producing stuff that you're producing

stuff for need and then on the other hand you have the other thing that's supposed to be the advantage of self-management which is that the the the workers themselves who are the people who are supposed to know understand the production process the best can make decisions over how they're going to do things but then if you look at the algerian system because it's because it's set up by marxists it's specifically designed such that basically the like you're you're you're instead of you actually managing yourself you're you're just electing your boss and then your boss manages right yeah that's not actually a good this is it's weird because looking at this right this is actually a worse system in terms of self-management i think in a lot of senses

than the chinese one because the chinese system is not designed for self-management but you can't fire people so because you can't fire people you have to listen to what people think and what people sort of do is this system i don't know it it pisses me off because this is a revolution that very very easily could have worked but it was you know there's there's intentional sabotage by the state because most of the sectors of the state don't want this to work. And then just structurally from the way it's set up, it's doomed to fail from the beginning. And the consequence of this is that in 1965, Ben Bella gets overthrown in a coup by another – by basically the army, a sort of state socialist faction of the army. a sort of state socialist faction of the army and they

hold on to power by basically turning Algeria into an oil economy and dismantling this entire thing and it I don't know it makes me really angry because the

actual Algerian ruling class had the right idea and then they just got completely fucked by everyone who was supposed to be leading them or you know people who were supposed to be selling the stuff that they made people who are supposed to be reinvesting all the people who ended up with the financial control just completely screwed them. And yeah, I don't know. It's,

it's, it's really, it's, it's, it's really depressing in a lot of ways. But on the other hand, right? Like it doesn't,

it doesn't, it doesn't have to go like this, right? You don't have to hand control of your workplace over to some fucking guy in the, the, the department of agricultural waste management or whatever so he can use your oranges for fertilizer like you can you can simply not do this yeah i mean i don't know the exact situation that these workers found themselves in and maybe

there was you know like a degree of sort of need to get reproducing in order to you know solve hunger issues but yeah you simply do not have to do that as as many examples like i'm thinking of the collectivized farms in spain as well but because perhaps they would have been a better example right like i guess there it was slightly different because it was somewhat of a collectivized community that in turn collectivize the land as opposed to collectivizing the the agricultural labor and then you have this sort of source of labor which is not inherently tied to the land that like you know when when there was a need like for instance i'm writing a book right now uh i'm writing about the daruti column and like they would because they

had less rifles and they had fighters they would rotate their fighters off the front line during the harvest time and have people help with the harvest and then they didn't like need those people the rest of the year right so they were able to incorporate like temporary surges in labor without it being like destructive to their model because it was the idea was like a collective community as opposed to uh a collective as opposed to like just the workplace being this island of of pseudo collectivization like like you're saying in algeria also shout out to the uh iron column who i've been writing about recently who solved their supply side issues by uh by leaving the front line and raiding the cops

because they didn't have enough guns either, so they simply took them from the cops. Extremely cool. Incredibly based. Yeah, very based. Yeah, and I think that's kind of the point that I want to end this on, which is that this is something that contributes to the collapse of Yugoslavia too, tributes to the collapse of Yugoslavia too is that if

you know the dichotomy that got forced on people in the 20th century was you can either choose to okay so your choices are you get a you get a sort of you get a

Stalinist planned economy completely run by the state or you get a bunch of workers cooperatives competing against each other. And those are your two models of socialism. And those both suck, and both are set up to fail from the beginning because they're not actually – you're not actually doing the thing. You're not actually having the entire goal of the economy or like 17 co-ops and like both producing all producing the exact same kind of coffee trying to figure out who can produce it more cheaply yeah yeah we we can do better yes we can and we have and uh that's what we should strive for i guess i know if people want to read about the

spanish revolution uh there's a shit ton of books on libcom i would say pirate's book is pretty good I guess I know if people want to read about the Spanish revolution, uh, there's a shit ton of books on Libcom. I would say by that book is pretty good. The Senate and the Spanish revolution. Uh, Murray Bookchin has a book that the heroic years of Spanish anarchism, Abel Paz has many books. Uh,

yeah, you can, you can spend time on Libcom and read a lot about collective production in the Spanish revolution and for free, which is nice. Yeah. This has been a kid happen here uh go take over your workplace and then also help if one else take over theirs and coordinate with each other yeah that would be very nice then then we'll do an interview with you on the podcast hey guys i'm kate max you might know me from my popular online series the running interview show where i run with celebrities athletes entrepreneurs and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going.

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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and also about militant resistance, which is an aspect of things falling apart. As things fall apart, any country, you get people who crawl out of the woodwork to either accelerate that process or try to reverse it in their own lives. And some of those people use weapons to do that. Now, we've talked a bunch on this show about various forms that militant resistance can take. We've chatted extensively on this network about Rojava. We've talked a fair amount, James Stout and I. James is on the show today, by the way. Hello, James.

Hi, Robert. We've talked a lot about Myanmar and the Jinzi revolution there, 3D printing of firearms and kind of this this war that these these people have been waging in the jungle successfully in order to overthrow the military dictatorship of their country. But we haven't talked a whole lot about naval warfare. And this is because for most of history, for most of at least our recent history, naval warfare was not really a thing insurgents could engage in, right? You know, you could every now and then if a ship was docked or something, you might be able to get off a bombing, right? Like what happened to USS Cole. And I'm not expressing general sympathy for everybody who does a militant insurgent act, but I am talking about like the overall kind of like tactics and strategy that underline how that stuff works. And one of the things that's really changed in the last couple of years,

since 2022, you could really mark it out is that irregular non-state groups can now to an extent, never before possible challenge the sea power of nations like the United States, which has an unquestioned, previously at least, unquestioned level of dominance and sort of conventional naval power. When we talk about conventional naval power in the 21st century, that means aircraft carrier

groups, right? The US has 11 of them, which if I'm not mistaken, is more than the rest of the world. We have a lot of fucking aircraft carriers. And previously, that was believed to be, you know, a guarantor of both dominance on sea and if a carrier group or two is in the area, you generally, we generally, the United States, generally could count on having air supremacy. You certainly wouldn't expect it to be countered, you know, you could expect, like, for example, if we were to have a conflict over Taiwan, the Chinese Navy could could or the Chinese Army could potentially

interdict a carrier group using ground based, you know, ground to see anti ship missiles or something like that. But we're increasingly in an era in which these kind of irregular non state groups have access to similar technology and have access to kind of even more bespoke technology like drone swarms, that poses a unique threat to the naval dominance of the United States. And I wanted to start, you know, we've got a two-parter here. We're going to be talking about the Houthis in Yemen. We're going to be talking about the Ukrainian Navy, which does not really have much in the way of boats, but is still challenging the Russian Navy. And we're going to be talking about rebels in Myanmar. We're going to start today,

we'll be talking about the Houthi. And to understand Houthi resistance to the United States and why a militant group has had such success challenging US naval power, you first have to understand how they got to the point that they're at right now, where they are kind of in a lot of ways a near-state actor, you know, not a world power actor, but near-state actor. You know, they're probably more capable in some ways than the state of Yemen, which they are at war with. Yeah. And to get how they got to that point, you have to understand what happened with their fight against the Saudis. So the Houthi movement or Ansar Allah, which means supporters of God, is a Zaydi Shia Islamist movement run primarily by members of the Houthi tribe.

Zaydi Islam is a bit of an odd duck. You'll hear it described as, yeah, like a Shia segment. It's really probably more accurate to look at it as like it's kind of in between Shia and Sunni. Of like the Shia kind of denominations, it's kind of closest to being Sunni. I'm not an expert on any of this, but it comes out of a guy named Zaid Ibn Ali's rebellion against the Umayyad Caliphate, which did not succeed, but we still have the Zaydi. What matters for our purposes today is that the Houthi as a movement came out of opposition to the Yemen's president, Abi Abdullah Saleh, who was corrupt as hell. He was seen as corrupt, and he was in fact corrupt as

hell. And it was specifically, they were accusing him of basically being bribed by the Saudis. That's where the Houthis started the rebellion in around 2003. So they began as a resistance movement to this corrupt president Saleh. They adopted the slogan, God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, and a curse upon the jews which is still their slogan so they are not what you would call unproblematic again but now that they're not they're not hiding it you don't have to dig for this stuff yeah yeah yeah they're not using the triple parentheses they they just say the thing yeah and it's you, part of why we're talking about irregular naval warfare is that who knows what the next few years are going to include. It's always a long shot, but there's not a 0% chance that people listening to this will wind up engaged in some sort of irregular conflict.

And that's, it's important to understand how modern technology has changed the dimensions of how that works from like a naval perspective. So that's why we're talking about this. Now, Houthi armed activities against the Saudis really kicked off and hit a major level after the Yemeni civil war, which officially started in 2014. The new president of Yemen, who is not Saleh at this point, asked for military support from the international community, which in this case meant the Saudis, right? So the Saudis, it's called a coalition. There's technically some other people involved, but it's the Saudis, right? And the president of Yemen calls in the Saudis when his forces are kicked out of the capital of Yemen, Sana'a by Houthi fighters. By the way, when the Houthi take Sana'a is when they get their first cruise missiles, largely just like a bunch of scuds and stuff.

So like old Soviet shit, right? Operation Decisive Storm is the name that Saudi Arabia gives to their intervention in Yemen. And a lot of people will say this is basically Saudi Arabia's Vietnam, not an inappropriate comparison to make. So the Saudis start bombing the shit out of the Houthi, and then they send in ground forces because bombing the shit out of people who are motivated never really works as well as you want it to right yeah a lot of people have been bombing a lot of people with i mean you can destroy a lot of shit you can kill a lot of civilians and kill a shitload of civilians yeah but many many such cases if you're uh if you're looking around the world right now but yeah yeah, one thing that it doesn't tend to do is really to get rid of motivated fighters. Yeah. When you've got an air force, everything

looks like Dresden. So the Saudis try that for a while. They send in ground forces. They carry out naval blockades. None of this does much, but make the Houthis more determined. And they exit this conflict. I mean, they're not, it's not like you wouldn't say completely done, but they exit this conflict with the Saudis a lot stronger, right? A lot more organized with a lot better weapons, right? And a lot of this, you know, so by the way, I should also state that like now the Houthis are on the side of former President Saleh. It's a complicated conflict, right? But at the end of this all, they have a shitload of Iranian weapons because Iran is a geopolitical enemy of Saudi Arabia and they see the Houthis as allies. And so they spend a lot of time during this conflict shipping in AGTMs,

which are wire guided missiles that are just aces at blasting holes in Saudi Arabia's tanks, which are US supplied, if I'm not mistaken, as a general. Yeah. A lot of Saudi Arabia stuff is US and like- Yeah. Most of it, right? Much of it. Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of contractors over there. Yeah. And yeah, the,

the Houthis, they make a lot in like waves and kind of people who are following a regular conflicts during this period in the late aughts because they're so successful at, at taking out these tanks that had previously been pretty hard to fuck up. And it's, it's kind of, you know,

now AGTMs in Ukraine are like one of the dominant weapons systems that has shaped the battlefield environment. But this is kind of when people start to realize, Oh of, you know, now AGTMs in Ukraine are like one of the dominant weapon systems that has shaped the battlefield environment. But this is kind of when people start to realize, oh, fuck, you know, Syria as well. These are, this is really going to change a lot about how armor gets used. And this is also where we start to see the first Houthi deployments of ballistic missiles, which were used sort of, they initially used them not dissimilarly to how the Germans used V2s, right, in World War II. They were terror weapons, and they're used in retaliation for Saudi Arabia's use of a terror weapon, which is U.S. jets and missiles, right? So Saudi Arabia is terror bombing Yemen, and Yemen starts firing missiles back at Saudi Arabia because, you know, that's what you do, right?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I'm going to quote here from an article in the National News. Quote, Houthi militias in Yemen launched ballistic, and this is from 2022. Houthi militias in Yemen launched ballistic missiles at Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia on Monday in the latest attack on neighboring states.

Two missiles were destroyed in mid-flight during the attempted terrorist attack on Abu Dhabi, while in Saudi Arabia, one was shot down and another missile wounded two civilians in an industrial area. So this is giving, that gives you an idea of like where they are a couple of years ago. And these are not super advanced cruise missiles, as you can see by that kind of like casualty rate, right?

They're not doing massive amounts of damage, but they cause terror, right? It's scary to know that a missile could come out of the sky and kill some of you. And it's, you know, from their perspective, how else are they going to strike back? They don't have an air force in the conventional sense. But what we do see here is by being able to carry out these attacks back on Saudi Arabia, who's bombing them despite not having an air force of their own, you already see how new technology and cruise missiles aren't new technology, but them being available to a non-state actor is fairly

new. You see how that has already changed the game in terms of like, you can't really say the Saudis don't have this air supremacy. You can still say they have air supremacy because again, the Houthis don't have much in the way of air power at this point, but they can't stop missiles from hitting their cities entirely, which is a different game than when, you know, that's not really a possibility. The Houthi arsenal today includes a dizzying array of different Iranian, Soviet, Syrian, and indigenously produced rockets, including the Burkhan-3 missiles. These are for long-range strikes up to 1,200 kilometers, and the Batur P-1 rockets, which have 120 to 160 kilometer range.

They also have old Soviet Frog 7s, which are useful to about 65 kilometers. None of these are accurate in cruise missile terms, you know, but they work well enough for the Houthis' purposes. The Botter P is indigenously produced. It's made by the Houthis. It's thought to be based on the Syrian Kaibar rocket. It is unguided, and experts will say it's closer to being functioning as just like dumb artillery than an actual cruise missile.

UN inspectors claim, quote, it is produced locally from steel tubing, very likely sourced from the oil industry. You hear this a lot in a regular conflict in the Middle East. When I was in Mosul covering the fighting with ISIS, their mortars were made off out of tubing that was like part of construction projects, I think that traced back to the oil industry, at least some of it. Now, there are several variants of this rocket, like the Botter F and the P-1. It's not really useful going through all of them. You can find some interesting studies on this, but it's not necessary to understand their capabilities. Their most accurate missile,

as far as I can tell, is the OTR-21 Tochka, which has a range of about 70 to 120 kilometers and a 480 kilogram payload. They only are believed to have a few dozen of these, although that's an estimate from an earlier report. And these were the ones they would use most regularly on ground targets during the Saudi intervention when they needed a precise strike. And I'm going to quote from an article in an analysis of their missile capability. The Houthis first fired a Tachka missile in September 2015, targeting the coalition's, that's the Saudis, Safar military base in Marib, Yemen. The strike hit a weapons storage depot and killed 60 coalition soldiers. The Houthis fired another Tachka on December 14th, 2015, targeting a coalition base south of Taiz City in Taiz, Yemen. The strike reportedly killed over 120 coalition soldiers. The most recently recorded Tachka fire took place on November 19th, 2016, landing in a

desert in eastern Marib province. The target was unclear, but was likely the Arab coalition's al-Ruik military camp. So those are significant casualties. These are very effective weapons that do a lot of damage, right? Yeah. Now, international experts, and especially if you read just kind of like think tank analysis of what the Houthis are doing, we generally say all of this is only possible because of aid from Hezbollah and Iran, right? That's the only reason the Houthis have these weapons, right? Now, there is an arms embargo on Yemen. This has not stopped anyone from getting weapons to Yemen. It also, to be very fair

here, didn't stop anyone from, didn't stop us from selling arms to the Saudis, even though they're bringing those arms to Yemen, right? Yeah, yeah. It's a farcical, ridiculous notion. Yeah, I don't know who you want to get angrier at here. I'm not really convinced either side is, you know, better than the other. Certainly the Saudis are not better, right? Right. Yeah, it seems like that.

To what extent that matters, I don't know. Yeah, it's just a shit situation for people who are trying to get on with being alive in Yemen. Yes, to not get blown up, yes. Yeah. Really bad situation. I think that is overselling it a bit.

Obviously, Iranian aid is critical to the Houthis and that has gotten them a lot of their advanced weapon systems. So I don't want to undersell it. But at this point, they are making a significant chunk of these cruise missiles, specifically some of the less advanced

ones, indigenously. So because of the state things, I think it is accurate to say that Iran was crucial to them getting to that state. But even without Iranian aid, there's probably a significant degree of time to which they could continue to produce some of these weapons because they are making them themselves. Yeah. They make 358 missiles, right? Like loitering anti-aircraft. Yeah. Yes.

Even if Iran is not supplying these, it's probably worth noting that this is an Iranian design or concept, at least. Yes. And it allows for a lot of testing a lot of like a real world kind of versus like nato us lets the iranians yeah test their weaponry and and again i'm not trying to undersell how important they are it's just you get a lot of like well if we can just cut off iranian trade the houthis will collapse i don't really think that's accurate anymore yeah me you know i can't say that to a point of certainty, but yeah, I think that that's kind of wishful thinking on behalf of some people. So these are great weapons for a non-state militant group.

Again, this stuff, if you think back 10, 15 years, the idea of a non-state insurgent group having access to a cruise missile library like this, you know, not to say about like the other weapons they have, the drones and stuff they have, it would have been kind of unprecedented. That said, these are not good weapons in the modern military sense of the word. By which I mean, they are not very accurate for the most part. And compared to more advanced missiles like the kind of the United States, Russia and China have, they are easy to shoot down with the kind of weapons systems aboard, say, US aircraft carriers. We will discuss that more later. This is largely inconsequential to what's been happening in the Red Sea because the vast majority of naval traffic that passes by Houthi territory does not have access to, say, phalanx systems.

Yeah, you don't have much in the way of anti-missile systems on a normal container ship. Yeah, no, you have anti-bridgeissile systems on a normal container yeah no you uh you have anti-bridge uh anti-ramming devices but like yeah it doesn't matter if your missile is not super accurate if it can't defeat these expensive systems if you're just yeeting them into a narrow channel or anything that goes past right right yeah and the houthis are aware of that and this is again an intelligent strategy on their part yeah you know sometimes people get angry when you say that because they point out horrible things the houthis have done which i don't want to deny but we're not talking about the overall morality of this conflict we're talking about how these tactics work right

right like the nazis had intelligent and strategies as well they were terrible fucking people and i'm glad they lost and are mostly dead but like yeah yeah we we would be unwise to just dismiss everything that they've been no no and likewise the fact that the Houthis right now, that this interdiction of the Red Sea is based on an attempt to stop the genocide in Gaza, which I don't think it's going to work, but I would like it if somehow it did, that also does not have an impact on how this is working strategically, right? You are kind of setting all of that aside to just talk about how this is functioning, you know?

Yeah, yeah. So in recent years, the Houthis have expanded their stock of anti-ship missiles. In an article for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a guy named Fabian Hins writes, quote, the parades, these are Houthi military parades, also featured a variety of anti-ship ballistic missiles, ASBMs, and guided rockets employing Iranian infrared or imaging infrared seeker technology. The 450-kilometer-range ASEF appears to be a rebranded ASBM version of Iran's Fatah 313 missile, while the Tangkil represents a previously unseen anti-ship version of the IRGC,

Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, developed 500-kilometer-range Zohair. The two designs constitute the heaviest Houthi anti-ship missiles, both with warheads of more than 300 kilograms and are of Iranian origin. Three smaller ASBMs, the 140 kilometer range Falak, the Mayun, and the Bar al-Amar, strongly resemble Iranian design philosophy and seeker technology, but do not precisely match known Iranian systems. They could either be Iranian systems not observed before and smuggled to Yemen, or Houthi-produced rockets combined using Iranian guidance kits, not unlike developments made by another Iran proxy, the Lebanese Hezbollah, and its precision-guided surface-to-air

missile program. Finally, the Houthis have presented an S-75 SA-2 surface-to-air missile, likely from pre-war Yemeni army stocks, modified for an anti-ship role using an Iranian guidance kit. So that's a potent, and it's probably in some ways more advanced than their general cruise missile stockpile arsenal for taking out ships. Now, the Houthis are still a non-state force. When people say online that the US is fighting Yemen, not quite accurate, because the Houthis are fighting Yemen too, right? If you're saying government, you're talking about the people, well, people in Yemen are fighting each other, right? Yeah, that is the situation. They are at war with the government of Yemen, right? That is still the case. Right. We're shooting missiles at Yemen,

but as a geographical area rather than as a state. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the Houthis did not survive years of intense bombing by Saudi Arabia, a nation with an on-paper extremely modern military, by making a lot of stupid mistakes. So when they decided to attack shipping in the Red Sea after Israel launched their genocidal campaign against Gaza, they did so with a competent plan, which was to make civilian freight travel in the area too dangerous to continue. Their stated goal here is to force damage on Israel and the Western nations who support it by hitting the only thing they care about,

commerce. And their actions here have done real damage to international trade, not exclusively Western international trade, I should note. The latest several months have seen them capture or sink a couple of merchant vessels. They've sunk one. They've hit at least 16 vessels with drones and missiles. I found a Bloomberg report with the telling title, Houthi missiles do far more damage to trade than to actual ships, which is an interesting way to frame it. Yeah.

And they're kind of trying to minimize what's going on here. While 16 strikes is a large number for the industry to withstand, there have been even more failed attempts. Since the Houthis began their attacks, there have been more than 60 incidents of some kind in and around the waterway, including everything from near misses to hijackings and harassment by armed militants and small boats. If you look at the damage that's occurred in most of these incidents, it has not been significant, said Marcus Baker, head of the Marine and Cargo at Marsh, one of the world's top insurance brokers. So far, we haven't seen a total loss caused by a missile strike. That changed in March, when the Houthi successfully sank the Ruby Mar. Despite more than a month of US strikes to degrade their capability, the vessel was

initially wounded and drifted unmanned for almost two weeks before sinking. While it listed, a Houthi representative promised the ship could be salvaged if aid trucks were allowed to enter Gaza. The Rubimar wound up sinking. Now, Houthi strikes have also hit at least one ship bound for Iran and another that was going to be delivering aid supplies to Yemen. At least three civilian sailors have been killed thus far in a strike on a bulk carrier named the True Confidence. Now, how you kind of interpret this as a success by the Houthi stated goals, which is right to inflict enough pain on the West and on Israel economically that it forces an earlier end to what Israel is doing in Gaza, right? If that's their goal – well, it hasn't happened yet, right? That's one thing we can say, right? It has not yet – there's no evidence that i have seen that it has affected the tempo

of israeli operations substantially you know yeah it would seem it does not no difference and obviously there's an incentive for the united states and other international actors to like not let this tactic succeed because you do not want a world in which i i think it's not unreasonable there's a thing called the right to protect in international law, which is probably what the Houthis are claiming they're acting under. And that's not, like on the face of it, unreasonable. But yes, I think the U.S. has this very strong incentive to not let it become a thing that keeps happening. Yeah, I'm not surprised we sent a carrier group into the area. I'm also not surprised that that does not seem to be working either, right?

If you are judging how the U.S. is acting and how the Houthis are acting based on their stated goals, the Houthis have not yet accomplished their stated goal with these strikes. And the U.S. airstrikes do not seem to have stopped the Houthis from being able to interdict naval traffic in the Red Sea, right? in the Red Sea, right? I've heard some argument that the tempo is reduced since the US got there, but it's also unclear to me is like, well, they only have a limited amount of these missiles, right? Has the tempo changed because they need to marshal their ammunition effectively

or has it changed because there's been damage done to their infrastructure? I don't know that we'll ever really get a perfect answer on that, right? I know the US claims that it has. We claim that our strikes have weakened them, but always claim that right yeah yeah i mean yeah that's what we're gonna say right yeah we all live through afghanistan right you're aware of what the u.s says about shit like this yeah i mean it would look pretty bad if we were like now dude we just

yeeted billions of dollars of munitions into the desert. Didn't do shit! Fuck all! Massive L for us. It's unclear how much damage the Houthis have actually done to the global economy as a consequence of all this. Traffic has dropped to the Red Sea by about 35%. And since the sea carries about 20% of global trade, that's a major hit. But it hasn't stopped trade through the Red Sea either. Again, most trade is still, you know, most of the pre-war level is still occurring. 35% is a substantial drop.

That is a hit. And it's hurt a lot of people, right? It also has not wholly blocked, like there's a longer route you can take around Africa to get into the Red Sea, but that makes everything more expensive too. The country hurt most is actually Egypt because Egypt depends on the Suez Canal for about a quarter of its currency earnings. And you go through the Red Sea to get to the Suez Canal for reasons that are obvious if you look at a map, right? People who rightly see what's happening in Gaza as a crime against humanity are unlikely to care too much about the Egyptian economy, nor should they necessarily. But the bigger questions here are, can the Houthis actually force an end to what Israel's doing? And how long can they keep this up?

The answer to the first question, can the Houthis force an end to Israeli aggression, is not yet. And the answer to the second question is, how long can they keep this up? I don't know. They might be able to eventually bring about international pressure through economic damage. But given the state of the U.S. presidential election, I don't see that as particularly likely a method for changing Netanyahu's behavior. The answer to the second question is, you know, how long can they keep this up? Probably forever, right? U.S. strikes have been lauded by the U.S. as damaging infrastructure, but we don't know that that's true. Our airstrikes in the region have been launched by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, the head of the carrier strike group in the Red Sea at present. of like leftists analyzing this because they don't often know much about the military you'll get a mix of like people being like oh the houthis are going to kill a carrier because they put out a video of like a carrier in their sights and shit like i don't think so guys doesn't seem likely

the the these are very well defended ships and they are very competently led look i i have looked into the captain of the ship i've looked into how they have handled the considerable tempo of attacks against them. I think that these guys are operationally competent, as the U.S. tends to be. Now, that doesn't mean they're going to win. The U.S. soldiers tend to be operationally competent most of the time, and we also lose a lot, right? Because operational competence doesn't matter if the operations you're being asked to undertake have no chance of victory. And that is more or less the situation I think that these sailors are in, right? Where they're pretty good at sailing around in an aircraft carrier and not getting killed,

but that doesn't mean they're going to defeat the Houthis in a meaningful way, right? Right. And the Houthis are aware of this. They're in a holding pattern. They understand that the primary thing that all of strategy really hinges around is stopping and denying terrain to the enemy. And all the Houthis have to do to deny a significant amount of terrain to the entire West is keep lobbing missiles, often blindly, in the sea. And it will make everything more expensive for everybody. Keep them in the news, and that's a win. And it's unlikely, if not basically impossible, that using current methods, the U.S. Navy and U.S. air power in this area, based in this carrier group, is going to be able

to do anything but spend a shitload of money. Now, U.S. Navy officers in recent weeks have reported attacks by both anti-ship missiles, regular cruise missiles, swarms of unmanned aerial drones, which has led to a general conclusion among people, as impressive as their drone swarms are for a non-state actor, cannot put together the kind of a swarm that a state actor like China, for example, could. But people are looking at how close some hits have gotten to the carriers and being like, well, shit, if you had a lot more of these things, you could really cause some fucking problems for these boats, right? Yeah. They have also used unmanned boats and unmanned underwater vessels. These are basically unmanned drone boats with explosives in them, right? And again, significantly more of these could potentially do some damage. This is by any account, the most direct combat US naval

forces have seen since World War II. And one thing, a fun thing I've learned reading articles about the operation is that our jets now get kill markers for the bombs they drop. Yeah, you can be a drone ace, not a drone, a missile downing ace. Yeah, it's like, I don't know, I guess it makes sense, whatever. It just doesn't look as impressive. I did some Googling. I guess you could become an ace shooting down barrage balloons in World War I. Yeah, but there was AK-AX shooting back then. Yeah, they were very strongly defended. Yeah, it's a little different uh or v2 rockets i guess in world war

two i did also find out that the naval some of the unmanned underwater vehicles are replacing uh more as a pity the the seals and dolphins that were previously in u.s navy service i don't mean seals like no no no literal seals yeah like literal seals heartbreaking yeah very sad they live in san diego i uh i often go past them uh you know what the seals don't want to do war they well but again the other the marine mammals the other seals very much the dolphins might i remember from the documentary sea quest that they that they enjoy naples service um i think you watch sea quest james i've not watched i've not watched sea quest i'm afraid i'm afraid it's star trek the next generation underwater but the role of

picard is played by the sheriff from jaws it's actually fantastic great yeah i'm looking i'm looking forward to being exposed to more of this universe yeah look i'm hoping that the uh the dolphins join force with the orcas and take on the super rich with using the skills given to them by the US military. Yeah, inshallah, James. So when it comes to the economics of this conflict, and a lot of this does come down to economics, right? What the Houthi are doing is an incredibly efficient, good ass deal for them. These drones, specifically a lot of what they've done, they fired missiles, but like those are expensive. They don't have a lot of them. I think that at this point they would prefer

to use those on ships that cannot defend against them. They have sent some manned boats, which the US has fucking murked immediately. And they don't seem to be doing that anymore because it's dumb. And the Houthis didn't get where they did by repeatedly doing dumb shit. What they seem to have settled on is sending out drone swarms, both of these boats, these underwater drones and of aerial drones. And these things can cost just a few thousand dollars each. Some of the biggest ones are probably more like tens of thousands of dollars. But the Navy missiles that we use to interdict this shit and some of these, they also have some dumber cruise missiles that are pretty cheap. The missiles we use to interdict this shit are $2.1 million a shot,

right? This is all in addition to the insane cost of keeping a carrier battle group in the field and fighting. It's not at all cheap. I found one Politico article that quotes a DOD official admitting, the cost offset is not on our side. Now, we have some cheaper systems that can work really well on particularly drones. they can work on missiles too. We've used them in that. These are airburst shells fired from the conventional guns on destroyers. These have worked really well, especially against drones in tests, but they're only effective from about 10 miles or less away. In ballistic missile terms, that's extremely close.

You don't want to rely on these for a ballistic missile. And it's not even all that far away in drone terms, right? As a result, the US has expanded research into more efficient anti-drone and anti-missile weapons, including what amounts to laser and microwave weapons that could be fired indefinitely for the cost of electricity. Given the nature of these weapons, that's not insignificant either, but it's a lot less than 2.1 million is shot. As is always the case, the kind of fight the Houthis are waging right now has an expiration date. Right now, any group that can put together a few million dollars to make hundreds and hundreds of explosive drones, right, which a number of groups are capable of, could at least exact a substantial toll on a U.S. carrier battle group, make it spend a shitload of money, potentially even do some damage. And again, even if this stuff hits an aircraft carrier,

you're like very unlikely to see that thing sink. There's a story that's worth knowing that like when we decommissioned one of our aircraft carriers 15 or 20 years ago, they started, they shot it a bunch. Like they, just to see like how well it would hold up. And like,

they couldn't sink it. They couldn't sink the fucker like you could do that you could kill sailors it would be a big deal if they hit a fucking aircraft carrier and killed some sailors even if the carrier doesn't go down that's a huge fucking deal i don't know that they're capable of doing that but it's unlikely they're gonna kill one right right yeah they're gonna gonna send one to the bottom of the ocean yeah hard hard it's hard to do right they're made not to sink and they're pretty fucking big. But one can imagine kind of a future

in which the war the Houthis are waging right now is rendered kind of impossible because weapons like that are positioned permanently around, say, the Red Sea, blanketing it in a defense grid that basically kill anything fired into the sea. That's something that might happen in the future

if this continues. But that's also just the way war works, right? You know, the Houthis 10, 15 years ago wouldn't have been able to wage a war like this against the U.S. Navy. They fought the Navy to a standstill. That's the only way to analyze this, right? And again, that doesn't mean either side is achieving their operational goals, right? The Houthis have not ended the genocide in Gaza and the U.S. doesn't seem to be capable

of ending the Houthis. So they fought each other to a standstill in this matter. And that wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago. So, right, 20 years from now, what's going on will be different. You know, the fact that the U.S. seems to be pretty close to developing more efficient anti-drone and anti-missile weapons that are a lot cheaper to use doesn't mean that non-state actors will not find a way around those. But that is the situation we're in right now with the Houthis.

And that is the end of this episode. We're going to get back to you tomorrow for part two, where we're going to talk about irregular naval warfare in Ukraine and Myanmar. James, you got anything else to say? No, no, I didn't. I didn't think so. You know, a bad day to be a boat, I guess. Bad day to be a boat. Bad day to be a drone.

They're really suffering in this war. Yeah, it's a great day to be a military contractor, which is every day in America. Oh, my God. Such a good time to be a military contractor. Whether you're doing it for Iran or the United States, you are in clover right now. Which is a massive change from the entirety of this century so far.

So that's nice. Yeah, it's nice to see the military contractors finally pick up a win. Yeah, yeah. Rare one for them. That's been It Could Happen Here. We'll be back tomorrow. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a

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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here and our special two-part series, Irregular Naval Warfare and You, where James and I teach you how you too can challenge the U.S. Navy's dominance of the seas or at least the coasts, for fun and profit. Actually, today, last episode, we talked about people challenging the U.S. Navy's coastal dominance. Today, we're talking about doing the same thing for the Russian Navy. So that's going to be fun. And of course, the Navy of Myanmar, which is a bit of a different class from the U.S.

and Russian Navy, but no less interesting. Yeah, still fun. Love to see a boat lose. Yeah, I just like boats. Yeah, still fun. Love to see a boat lose. Yeah, I just like boats going down, you know? I just hate a boat. Yeah, us, the Yorkers, many. Many such cases. I'm going to start with Ukraine,

and then we're going to throw to James to talk about our friends in Myanmar and how they have repurposed civilian technology and stolen weapons to counter a Navy without really having one of their own. But first, Ukraine. In 2014, when the Russian army invaded eastern Ukraine and took Crimea, Ukraine lost a significant portion of its already not that impressive Navy. Most of their boats were just taken by Russia, along with a number of sailors who defected. A lot of other sailors fled the region, leaving behind their homes in cities like Sebastopol to continue serving their country in a

war that, a decade later, is still ongoing. One of these sailors, who is a Sebastopol native and had to flee his home, possibly forever, in order to continue serving his country, is the current commander of Ukraine's navy, Admiral Nezpapa. He leads a navy that is almost without manned ships, and on paper it is utterly incapable of challenging Russia's legendary Black Sea Fleet. Since the age of the Tsars, the Black Sea Fleet has been infamous as a pillar of Russian military power. However, also since the age of the Tsars, it's had a nasty tendency to get utterly housed by enemies that should have been able to beat it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not the first time it's taken an unexpected loot. Yeah, it has a legendarity history. That doesn't mean good. There's bad legends out there, you know? Yeah, it's well known. Yeah, today that enemy is Ukraine. Since the expanded Russian invasion in 2022, just two years, Ukraine has destroyed or badly damaged more than a third of the Black Sea fleet, despite having no battleships or destroyers in the sea to counter Russian naval power. They have done enough damage to reopen Odessa and at least one other port on the Black Sea to international commerce, which has provided Ukraine with a crucial economic and strategic lifeline.

And that's a remarkable achievement, sinking a third of the Black Sea fleet and re- Basically, when you reopen a port, that means that you have taken away naval dominance from a country that has a navy, and you don't. That's pretty good. Pretty good stuff. Over the last two years, Ukraine had damaged irreparably or sunk seven active landing ships and one to seven active landing ships and one landing vessel. I don't know the difference.

They've, they fucked up a lot of boats. They have destroyed a submarine, uh, with sea to ground capability that was docked for repairs. They have sunk a cruiser, the capital ship of the entire black sea fleet, the Moskva.

Uh, they've also sunk a supply vessel and a handful of patrol boats and missile boats, and a number of other boats have been damaged. That's a significant rate of casualties, especially when you consider that every actually destroyed vessel, we're looking at a years, multiple years lead time to replace. You cannot make naval vessels very quickly anymore. Back during the big dub dub dose, the U.S. did, but nobody really does quickly anymore. Back during the big dub-dub dose, the US did,

but nobody really does that anymore. Not with the big ones, at least. You can't just roll through that. We were just yeeting aircraft carriers into the sea back then. Yeah, true. Just farting them out. Yeah, it'll take about a week. Yeah, it's because Rosie the Riveter was really riveting at a high speed.

She was quite a riveter. So at the start of hostilities, Turkey, which controls access to the Black Sea, forbade any additional military vessels or at least military vessels of significant size from entering the area. What this means, this has a significant impact on how well Ukraine strikes work, because even if Russia can replace the losses physically, they can't actually get replacements into the Black Sea easily. They can't sail new shit past the Turks. The Turks are not allowing that right now. So again, this is a situation that has kind of favored the way in which Ukraine has adapted to countering Russian naval dominance. It is possible that at the present rate of attrition, the Black Sea fleet could be rendered inoperable in less than two years. Like if they keep going at this rate, it's like 18 months or something before there's not really

much of a fleet anymore. Now, if Ukraine had accomplished this task with a traditional Navy using standard naval tactics, this would have been an impressive victory given the disparity in resources between the two nations. But they have done all this with a mix of cruise missiles, many of which are produced in-country, aerial drones, and new bespoke locally produced suicide drone boats. This irregular naval warfare has been successful enough that one Rand Corporation engineer and analyst, Scott Savitz, described the Black Sea Fleet as a fleet in being. Quote, it represents a potential threat that needs to be vigilantly guarded against, but one that remains in check for now. And I'm going to quote from a New York Times article on

the topic to provide a little more context. Ukraine has effectively turned around 10,000 square miles in the Western Black Sea off its southern coast into what the military calls a gray zone, where neither side can sail without the threat of attack. James Heapy, Britain's armed forces minister, told a recent security conference in Warsaw that Russia's Black Sea fleet had suffered a functional defeat and contended that the liberation of Ukraine's coastal waters in the Black Sea was every bit as important as the successful counter-offensives

on land in Kherson and Kharkiv last year. The classical approach that we studied at military maritime academies does not work now, Admiral Neyspapa said. Therefore, we have to be as flexible as possible and change approaches to planning and implementing work as much as possible. That article is about a year old or so. So the Neptune anti-ship missile is one of the prides of Ukraine's nascent arms industry. Neptune missiles are credited with destroying the Moskva in April of 2022. Ukraine also has access to several Western anti-ship missiles,

including the Storm Shadow and Scalp missiles. I believe the Storm Shadow comes from your folks, right, James? It does, yeah. It's a British one, yeah. Yeah. And these seem to be pretty effective missiles. These are obviously much more advanced. These are modern naval weapons, right?

These are much more advanced than, for example, the weapons the Houthis have. These are the kind of things that can counter, to some extent, modern anti-missile technology. For an example of kind of how that tends to work, they used a barrage of, I believe it was mostly storm shadows, to rain death on the Crimean port of Sebastopol recently. Seven out of 18 of the missiles fired made it through Russian air defenses, and these damaged or destroyed four landing ships in a single strike. And these are sizable naval vessels. This is the most recent attack. Although as after I wrote this, there was another attack on the Kerch Bridge.

I'm not really sure how that took place yet. That seems to have shut it down again. But that gives you an idea of like what you actually have to do, how much of these missiles you have to put in the air to get some through. And that's not too bad, right? 18 missiles, seven get through, four ships down. That's a really good rate of return. Especially when you consider that, like,

you know, we were talking in our first episode about how the US is spending significant resources on maintaining its, defending its carriers, right? Russia does not have the same ability to keep producing munitions. No. And so, like, that's a finite resource right their means of defining that defending their ships and defending really anything against

missiles are a finite resource so anytime you can even if if the ship doesn't get sunk if the ship has to deploy one of these missiles which it doesn't which the whole country doesn't have very many of that's still a win now this, we are talking about irregular naval warfare. And then this is not what most people would have considered a traditional naval conflict prior to the expansion of hostilities in Ukraine. However, we are talking, this is very different than the case of the Houthis, Ukraine is a state. It doesn't have a massive arms industry, but it has one. And it has the support of nations with sizable arms industries, right? So we are not talking about this part. Yeah. anti-ship cruise missiles and their ability to significantly shape an operational environment, even when the country using them has minimal conventional naval assets of their own. It is largely through the use of these missiles that Ukraine has been able to reopen their

Black Sea ports. That matters to people seeking to understand both this conflict and the future of unconventional naval warfare. I mean, I guess you could say this is the future of conventional naval warfare, but I think we're still leaning on the unconventional side at the moment, at least in terms of how doctrine is changing as a result of this. So maybe I should update how we're defining this. But for our purposes, as people unlikely to have access to cruise missiles, but significantly likely to find ourselves waging an unconventional war than having cruise missiles, it's more relevant to look at the new weapons systems Ukraine has developed that have helped them lock down the Black Sea fleet using civilian hobbyists. And this is where we get to drones. Ukraine's conventional aerial drones are a mix of actual military hardware. I'm talking

about stuff like the Bayraktar, the Turkish drone, which is like kind of like the Predator, all right? It's like an actual military product. But the majority in terms of numbers of drones that Ukraine is fielding are civilian drones, or at least drones that started out as civilian technology. A lot of these are now built to be military, but they're still based on these designs that started with people hacking and cobbling together civilian drones. And outside of naval stuff, prior to the war, there had been a lot of veterans and hobbyists who were veterans trying to convince the Ukrainian military that it needed to adopt drone warfare on a large scale, the kind of drone warfare that you can do with these less expensive drones. And they received a lot of pushback until the war started. And these guys just took to the field and started fucking murking Russian armed units and infantry and killing generals and shit.

And now Ukraine has integrated in a way that everyone is going to follow. Like Ukrainian like battalions have like companies now that are drone assault companies and like line battalions. And within infantry, you have people used or artillery using drones as forward observers. Yes, all over. They have set a goal for this year producing at least a million and ideally more like 2 million drones. And at least from what I i read that looks like very plausible most of these are quite small right but that doesn't mean obviously ineffective i know they buy a lot of

their drones in the uk because the uk has consistently kicked itself in the nuts when it comes to like brexit and so the pound is significantly weaker and so they're able to get the drones at a cheaper price and then drive them all the way across yeah no people who have done that and i was going to go join them but never worked it out yeah and you know there are a number of different like these these bomb these drones earlier in the war had an easier time being effective and causing casualties on the russians than later this is something that um you know, kind of the hoopla and support, which I think is necessary that Ukraine gets, leads some people to discount the degree to which Russian forces have adapted and gotten smarter. And one of the ways in which they've adapted and gotten smarter is in blocking drones and using drones of their own. You know, one of the stories

the last couple of weeks is that Russia has succeeded in carrying out strikes on advanced weapon systems like SAM sites deep in Ukrainian territory. They've extended their kill chain beyond what they used to be capable of, and that's because they've adapted. They're also adapted with less efficacy at blocking drones and attacks on naval vessels. Some of this has been kind of funny. I want to read a quote from a Business Insider article here. read a quote from a business insider article here russia is painting silhouettes on naval vessels on land to try and trick ukraine which keeps destroying its warships in an intelligence update on wednesday the uk ministry of defense said that silhouettes of vessels have also been

painted on the side of k's probably to confuse the uncrewed aerial vehicle operators they showed there's some images of this they don't seem convincing to me i don't know if i think this is working this is great i love this they have a cardboard navy next yeah it's a very bugs bunny yes it is not working as well as bugs would they've painted a hole in the side of the cliff face and keep crashing into it ukraine keeps throwing drones at it oh it's very funny i mean obviously they just ukraine just sank like or did or damn or badly damaged four boats. So I don't think this is... I haven't seen evidence that this is working well.

Their actual jamming efforts have been much more successful, right? Yeah, they always will be on civilian... One of the things that's really interesting compared to Myanmar is that Ukraine tends to rely on modified off-the-shelf civilian drones, right? Your DJIs, that kind of thing. In Myanmar, because of where a lot of the PDFs are, because they increasingly do control the borders, but they haven't always,

they have been making their own drones. It's a group called Federal Wings, you can find them on Telegram, who make their own drones. And I think those seem to be less... The jammers that the S the sac that the tamador has are um chinese made they're like jammer rifles you see them all the time in captured weapon caches but they don't seem to be having as much impact on these homemade drones which is really

interesting yeah yeah and it's you know i've mentioned a couple of times we're doing this in part because the odds that people listening might be involved in an irregular conflict are not zero. You know, what I what I think about when I say that is not that there's high odds for any individual person fighting themselves in that situation. But there is given the number of people who listen to this podcast, probably someone who is not currently involved in a conflict that will find themselves that way in the future and i base that in part on the fact that all of our friends in myanmar who are currently fighting a war were a couple of years ago delivery drivers and you know playing pub g online and not

really thinking they would wind up as insurgents yeah i've spoken to a number of people who are currently fighting not in myanmar who have listened to our my our Myanmar podcast and realized the capacity of 3D printing to be very useful. So even in that sense, it's already happening. But yeah, no one in Myanmar, like many of them said, their entire combat experience was playing PUBG. And now they are murking ships. Yeah, so anyway, it bears thinking about this stuff. And this brings me back to Ukraine's irregular drone warfare units, which, again, a lot of these guys started out as civilian enthusiasts who expanded responded to the outbreak or at least expansion of hostilities by expanding their hobby into a real world military effort that had a real world effect.

Civilian drones were crucial in the Battle of Kiev, allowing Ukraine to do severe damage to that massive Russian armored column heading towards the city and providing intel that led to the assassination of multiple general level officers. So it is perhaps not surprising that Ukraine looked to the same group of volunteer hobbyists when it came time to expand their naval arsenal. And there's a really good article I found in CNN by Sebastian Shukla, Alex Markot, and Daria Tarasova. And I actually want to give you the title of this article. Yeah, I'll try to throw those in the show notes is exclusive rare access to Ukraine's sea drones, part of Ukraine's fight back in the Black Sea. I haven't really seen the word fight back used that way, but there you go. So I'm going to read a quote from that article. A government linked

Ukrainian fundraising organization called United 24 has sourced money from companies and individuals all around the world, pooling funds to disperse it to a variety of developers and initiatives from defense to soccer matches. The entire outfit is very security conscious, insisting on strict guidelines on filming and revealing identities. Those who CNN met with declined to give their full names or even their ranks within Ukraine's armed forces. On a creaky wooden jetty, a camouflaged sea drone pilot says he wants to go by shark. In front of him is a long black hardshell briefcase. He unveils a bespoke multi-screened mission control, essentially an elaborate gaming center complete with levers, joysticks, a monitor, and buttons that have covers over switches

that shouldn't accidentally be knocked with labels like blast. The developer of the drone, who asked to remain anonymous, said their work on sea drones only began once the war started. It was very important because we did not have many forces to resist the maritime state, Russia, and we needed to develop something of our own because we didn't have the existing capabilities. So again, these are hobbyist design. I mean, this guy's not really a hobbyist anymore, but that's how he started. He's only not a hobbyist because the military recognized the value of what he was doing. And the current iterations of this sea drone weigh a little over 2,000 pounds

with an explosive 661-pound payload, a 500-mile range, and a max speed of 50 miles per hour. That is a significant weapons system. Yeah. Multiple sea drones have been used to strike Russian assets in the Black Sea, and drones were involved in a successful attack

that severely damaged the Kerch Bridge last July, rendering it impassable until September. So these have had a real battlefield effect and they probably will continue to do so. The developer of these drones told CNN, these drones are a completely Ukrainian production. They are designed, drawn, and tested here. It's our own production of holes, electronics, and software. More than 50% of the production of equipment is here in Ukraine. And that's really significant because, you know, I think we're all aware of the difficulty Ukraine has had getting weaponry lately from the West as a result of fucking around in Congress. And so it is a necessity for them to be able to develop weapons systems like this that can interdict and counteract more advanced and expensive weapons systems and can be produced indigenously. I don't think we have seen a mass suicide boat attack. I'm interested in what

happens when we do, like with more significant numbers than we've seen deployed. I kind of wonder the degree to which the Russians have gotten good at spotting this stuff. I've come across at least a couple of stories of these boats likely destroyed on approach. So they certainly don't always work, or even a majority of the time. But given the cost of these things, they don't have to get through the majority of the time. Very much worth it, right? Now, in that interview with the New York Times, Admiral Nezha Papa cautioned that Ukraine is still outgunned in the Black Sea, even though the Russians no longer have supremacy. They still have air superiority.

They are still able to launch from the sea long-range missiles at Ukrainian targets, including civilian targets. So this is not, again, a situation that should be portrayed as them having their own way. Their ability to kind of interdict the sea has been, the primary effects of it have been, number one, the reopening of trade in the black sea and earlier in the war by locking down the ability of these landing ships to put more troops on ground. And by doing damage to the Kerch bridge, they were able to slow Russian reinforcements and Russian material from entering the war zone in order to,

and this, this aided in some of the advances, particularly in like areas like Curson. At this moment, the situation has changed because again, the Russians aren't just kind of like sitting around doing the same thing over and over again, or at least not always. And we don't tend to talk as much about successes on the Russian side of things, but that is an important part of the story. And one of the things the Russians have

done is kind of acknowledge that the Black Sea fleet may not be a fleet in being forever, and certainly cannot be relied upon to handle everything they initially thought it would handle. And so Russian engineers spent a significant period of time building a sizable new railroad that connects Rostov and southern Russia to Mariupol in occupied southern Ukraine. volume shipments into the area and supply troops to the area along Ukraine's southern front without relying on that bridge or relying on naval landings, right? So the fact that Ukraine has been able to take out four landing ships recently is good. That's a win for Ukraine. It reduces Russian capability, but it does not have the same effect that it would have had, for example, two years earlier, right? Because russia has also evolved and among other things railroads are a lot easier or a lot harder to destroy to like take out right it's easy to damage a railroad but they're easy to fix it's not it

doesn't take a lot to get some guys over to fix a damaged sunk of railroad fixing a bridge that's been blown up or a sunk boat is a lot harder yeah absolutely i mean and there are people within russia even who are sabotaging railroads but as you say it's like it's very high stakes for them or a sunk boat is a lot harder. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and there are people within Russia even who are sabotaging railroads. But as you say, it's like, it's very high stakes for them and it's relatively low cost for the Russian state to fix that stuff. So like, it's not as effective.

Yeah, but I think this gives you an idea of kind of like what we're looking at when we look at this kind of ongoing irregular conflict is the side that does not have access to a functional navy, not able to interdict or destroy fleets, but able to stop them from dominating the coast. And when you can stop them from dominating the coast, you have effectively denied them terrain that they can act in without being countered. And you have also denied them from stopping you from acting in that same terrain. Even if you don't have total safety in that area, that opens up the operational possibilities

substantially. And this is something that I kind of don't think is going to get put back in the bag, even if some of these Star Wars-ass weapons systems do come out in the near future. Maybe that'll have an impact in the immediate term on people like the Houthis, but I don't think that it really will on, you know, for example, what Ukraine's doing, right? Yeah, Russia can't keep up with getting decent small arms, body armor, grenades and shit. Like, there's no way it's going to implement

some kind of massive Star Wars system over its navy. Not right now, not in the middle of a conflict that it's struggling to supply. Yep. You know what? Here's an ad break. All right, we're back and we are traveling around the world. Spin your little globe in your head and look for Myanmar, which is, of course, in Asia. Now, I'm talking about two different, I guess, anti-ship sabotage or attack or two different ways that ships have been sunk in Myanmar. I'll start with the first one, which is undoubtedly the flashiest just because it's fun. So a ship in the port of yangon about about a month ago so we're recording on the 20th about the 1st of march the it was in the river in the

in the river in yangon right and it was carrying allegedly carrying jet fuel now if you follow burmese activists people in the burmese freedom movement they will one of their demands for a long time has been to stop supplying the junta with jet fuel, which would in turn stop it being able to bomb villages, schools, civilians, PDF formations, just about anyone in the country. It's bombed at some point in the last couple of years. And they haven't been successful, right? They haven't been able to stop the supply of jet fuel coming to the hunter so they've taken it into their own hands and what they did uh on the first

of march was that they snuck onto a boat um so two this is the story from the burmese national unity government's ministry of defense anyway combat divers snuck onto this boat planted a kilogram of tnt or a charge equivalent to a kilogram of tnt robert and i have both spoken to people who make explosives in myanmar so we do we definitely know the pdf has access to a range of explosives yeah they set it on a five-hour fuse and it blew up in the middle of the night and it there's definitely footage of the ship on fire having blown up now this is pretty remarkable for never read this is like why the united states has units like the navy seals right like the the

higher speed guys uh because it is not easy to scuba dive across a harbor climb onto a ship set an explosive charge without being detected and then leave that ship and have the charge go off and sink the ship with without you being compromised without the charge itself being like compromised and the ship being saved right this is some like this is some classic uh like this is why there are special units within the u.s military now the the pdf very obviously did not have combat divers two years ago um i was looking into hobby scuba diving in Yangon. The rivers in that area are extremely muddy and visibility is very low. So the people who you find diving in that area are not so much like hobby scuba divers or free divers, but they're salvage divers.

And there's a whole little industry of people. They're salvage divers. There's a whole little industry of people. And these people are diving in equipment that I would not consider safe or reliable. It's clamping an air hose in between your teeth and diving down and trying to find. There's a large deposit of coal in one of the rivers in Yangon because of a ship that sunk. There's, of course, copper, which everyone all around the world, including the Viet Cong in Santee, are stealing copper. There's, of course, copper, which everyone all around the world, including the Viet Cong in Santee,

are stealing copper. There's iron, right? So these people are diving down and trying to collect scrap and sell that for whatever minimal amount they can, right? It's an extremely dangerous and extremely low income. It's one of the sort of

really high risk, low reward jobs that you get in economies where people are really struggling to make ends meet right so those are the only divers i can find evidence of in yangon i don't think it was them who did this because you have to have a boat above you with a pump if you're diving with a rubber hose in your teeth right so it seems like somebody in within the they said it was a yangon pdf that's who they attribute it to so um that would be one of these uh it would likely be an underground group within the pdf right some people living in the city who were able to sneak onto this boat set a charge and blow it up and they would also have to have intelligence at the boat where it was what it was carrying etc so it's a pretty

pretty daring mission that it's this is the first one like this we've seen and we haven't seen anything since but um it's of course possible that this is a story that we're being told in fact they had like someone undercover on the ship right or like they had some other means of getting this charge onto the ship but uh one way or, they managed to blow up the ship carrying fuel, which is a significant detriment to the Hundo, right? That's how they get most of their shit. It's not over land, especially with more and more... The terrain there is just absolutely, even with modern technology,

difficult to get significant amounts of shit through. They're resupplying some of their outposts that are 10 miles from a town with helicopters right now like a the terrain is is burly and b they don't have the the pdf has denied them access that anytime they send out a convoy it gets attacked so sending out plus you know that their land border crossings are increasingly falling into the hands of the pdfs and the eros so they're getting stuff are increasingly falling into the hands of the PDFs and the EROs. So getting stuff through the ocean is one of the ways that they can still get stuff. And if this keeps happening, then they will make that more expensive for them.

And they're not exactly a wealthy hunter. Even though, I guess, Min Aung Hlaing just made himself an Air Force One recently. I was just looking at it today. Oh, that's good. He's got himself two luxury. luxury yeah they called it dictator class like he's upgraded from president class nice yeah yeah yeah yes he has uh yeah in many ways so yeah that's one way that the pdf has been blowing up ships in the yangon river robert do you know who else has been blowing up ships in the yang in yangon uh well we are sponsored entirely by the british navy circa the mid-1800s so i would guess them that's right yep yep it's yeah yeah

lots of repressed uh repressed feelings and a lot of cabin boys with with deep trauma um anyway here's the hats. Yeah. All right, we're back. We hope you enjoyed that ad pivot, one of our best ones yet. And we're talking about the Arakan army now. So the Arakan army, not to be confused with the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, different group. Arakan is a name of what is now Rakhine state before it was colonized by

the Burmese. I think Arakan was a king before it was colonized by the Burmese. So that's where that refers to. It's a geographical appellation rather than necessarily an ethnic one uh the rakhine would be the ethnic group so what the a.a have done is sunk i think at least four uh hunter ships now and most of these ships are kind of they're like the um they look like big higgins boats they're like landing craft or like car ferries like flat bottom with a bow that goes down right i rode around a lot in the martial islands in little little landing craft like that because they can get them in they don't have like docks so they can just ride that right up to the beach and then drop the front and off you go and and they use them a lot

the hunter doesn't have like per se marines that they don't have maritime infantry but they they use them to transport their regular army around right um And they use them to transport them up river. They also use them a lot in Rakhine state to shell AA positions and any townships that they've decided they want to wipe off the map and kill all the people in. Right? So these boats have been a real, like, thorn in the side of the Arakan army after operation 1027, when they joined with two other groups to form the three brotherhood alliance and launch attacks on the hunter all over myanmar and and so what they've been doing it appears is using underwater mines to sink these ships which is interesting right like i guess the

mines are like a very old technology right like it's probably 100 years plus underwater mines have existed it seems the way that like the reason they're able to get away with using what is a relatively dated technology is because the hunter just doesn't expect to encounter anything right and so has not equipped its ships as such like they do have stuff like submarines but that's not what's getting sunk what's getting sunk are these big kind of landing craft riverboats. And it seems that they're using mines, and then once they disable the ship, they're then attacking it with small boats, small arms, like indirect fire mortars and stuff.

I saw one post that suggested they'd use, which is pretty cool if they did, the Burmese military has these tank destroyers, self-propelled guns. It's a tank. It's a tank is what it is. And they've captured, the AA has captured a number of these. And I've seen suggestions that they're using some of these on, like, they just set up an ambush along the banks of the river. And as the ship comes in, they can maybe disable it with a mine and then attack it with those. But there are videos online, you can find um of of the aa sinking these ships and then they've done some amazing drone photography of like they've obviously they then like staged

their units on the ships like all saluting the drone and they have the arakan army flags and they're actually really cool photos and of them taking these ships but again like i think this might be the first sinking of a Burmese naval ship since independence from Britain. I can't think that they really haven't played much of a role at all in its conflicts with the EROs, aside as from basically just shelling places when they want to do that. But there's never really been any significant opposition to them,

and that's changed now. They have to just like everywhere else watch out for drones right drones have been used to a massive extent uh in myanmar and like the aa doesn't have as many like associated pdfs i haven't seen them doing as much of the drone stuff as the pdfs the pdfs tend to be like the more urban folks right the younger folks and the the gen z folks that we've spoken about before and a lot of them have been very savvy with their use of drones like i said you can look up federal wings and you can see them dropping bombs with drones on all kinds of stuff with their heavy metal soundtracks that they like but that what it wasn't even drones here it's pretty simple it was just

mines so uh things they do love mines in miami i have a lot of mines all over that country but in this case these i guess massive what mines in the rivers given that the hunter is the only only entity sending big boats up and down you could set them at a certain depth where these small boats wouldn't hit them and eventually one of the hunter boats is going to hit them i guess and so it's pretty basic technology but it's still a massive step forward in terms of like a place where the state had complete impunity it now doesn't right they can't just cruise up and down these rivers shelling people they were actually using some of the ships to evacuate soldiers and their families uh from a position the soldiers they

were trying to like reap rather than surrendering they were trying to evacuate them and move them to somewhere else the AA asked them to surrender and they didn't they tried to evacuate them so then they mined the ships and took those out I think the the hunters like tried to spin this it's like the AA is attacking

civilians but I think a Burmese Navy ship with a Burmese Navy flag when those ships have just been shelling you seems like a legitimate target to me i think it's very hard it's you know it's a hunter who put children on one of their naval ships rather than the aa who attacked the ship because it had children you can hear in one of the things you can hear the aa are like attacking the ship in small boats and they're shouting like there are children on board and you can hear them acknowledging it and there are videos of the aa rescuing people who jumped

overboard um rescuing them from the river and then like i guess they're just held as pows cool yeah it's cool it's interesting uh obviously not many of us have access to uh underwater mines but uh you know maybe in a fictional future we might yeah well there you go folks uh this has been irregular naval warfare and you a podcast about irregular naval warfare and you yeah send us your videos of yourselves yeah irregular naval war yeah absolutely go out there look how about this? Every listener, go out and sink one naval vessel, you know? Doesn't matter

whose. Just any boat. Go sink a boat. Any boat. Go take out a boat. You see a fucking super yacht? Knock it out. You see a dinghy? Take that fucker out. People kayaking? Fuck them up, you know? A banana boat? Absolutely. A banana boat, for sure sure one of those weird duck

boat car things that they have in some cities actually you know what you don't need to do anything with that that'll kill everybody on board on its own those things are death traps just pray for those people yeah but any other boat yeah you see a donut you know behind being behind a speedboat. Oh, yeah. Merc it. Anyway, everybody, go away. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app,

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