The Chaser Report - MilkRunning Out of Money

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

RIP MilkRun, the times were good when they were actually in stock. Also Charles launches a new segment: Stupidest Moments In History! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. I'm Charles. I'm Dom and Charles. Can we have not one minute but 10 minutes of silence? You're probably listening to this on Friday or soon afterwards. Today is the day when Milk Run, the service that promised to deliver you groceries within 10 minutes.

as gone break as of today. We'll talk about why, but... Let's have 10 minutes of silence. 10 minutes of silence, here it goes. Actually, it wasn't that good, wasn't it? Every I went on to it, nothing was in stock. The moment that you start thinking... Yes, that's right.

So I actually, when I had COVID, I tried a couple of times to get Milk Run to deliver me things. Because they had really weird things that you sort of want, like specialty salami and they did they had a period when they were trying to save the brand when they had this partnership with like local producers and you get nice cheeses and all that kind of stuff in theory the only thing i used them and volley and send i had all three of them going all these rapid energy services yeah was to deliver rapid antigen tests and there was a time when if you just spent your entire day as i did on them

they were the specialty cheese you could get them you can get rapid antigen tests but there's now no reason to to use them partly because of whenever you went on there, it said... It was out of stock. It was out of stock. You didn't got a message. You then got a message saying, sorry, there's a problem.

We'll have to take half an hour to deliver this or longer. Yes. Or you'd order the whole thing. And then it would just say, like it would tell you at the end of the process just as you're about to pay that half of the items are out of stock.

That was how I experienced milk run. Yeah. But also apparently their business model was such that it cost something like $40 every time they got a customer. So it was actually, the more customers they had the more money they'd lost. Yes.

Which sounds like a suboptimal way to run a business. It sounds like the chaser. It sounds like something we would do. It is true. And not only that, but they lost money on every time an existing customer, they lost about $11 every time a customer ordered something. Yes. So they're probably going to be really profitable now that they're out of business.

They're saving a lot of money. It's the path to success. Amazingly, Mike Cannon Brooks and Scott Farquhar, invested in Milk Run. Oh, great. So they're fallible. Why don't they invest in our business? We don't lose $40 every time someone laughs at a joke.

But we could. But we should. Maybe if you're listening to us, send us an invoice. Now, Charles, you've got a new segment idea for us. We can be called ACAST minus or Apple podcast minus. That's right. Subscription where we pay you to this. We pay you to subscribe to us.

Yeah, that's not a bad idea. Okay. Okay, so, well, talking of stupid ideas, we've got a new segment today. It's called Stupid Moments in History. And I actually found out about this, I don't know, a couple of days ago, we did another episode of Welcome to the Future, which was the hilarious tale of the Microsoft HoloLens, right, which is a VR-A-R headset that costs $180,000 per piece. Yeah, it's a standalone podcast, by the way, Welcome to the Future.

We'll probably put that episode in the feed. But go and check it out because it is just the most of all the stupid things we've featured over the years on Welcome to the Future. It's probably the stupidest. As I was researching that device, right, I stumbled across this other amazing stupid moment in history, which I really need to devote a whole podcast to, which is called the Millennium Challenge of 2002. Oh, right. And it's quite a famous simulated war game that the US military conducted a couple of decades ago. But before we get into the story, I think I should just set the stage, right?

Okay, so the early 2000s, right, the US military is just having to very rapidly transform itself, right? So 9-11 has just happened. So the Cold War is over. 9-11's just happened. They haven't yet invaded Afghanistan, right? So they're gearing up for war, but they're realizing, oh, war is not the same as it was back in trench warfare. Yeah, and they're all set up for a cold war in Europe against the Soviet Union, not against what was to come.

Well, yeah, like 9-11, which sort of absolutely overturned 100 years of military thinking, was funded, apparently it cost about $400,000 to fund the entire operation, right? And it caused this massive sort of thing. So it's sort of asymmetric warfare is what they're up against, right? And so to prepare for this, and to prepare all their sort of commanders and generals and sergeants and all those things. They ran a massive war game called the Millennium Challenge 2002, which wanted to simulate these sorts of asymmetrical conditions, right?

So the exercise was between two teams, right? The first team was the blue team, and it represented the US military, right? And it was against the red team, which was representing a, quote, hypothetical Middle Eastern adversity, right? So they didn't actually specify which Middle Eastern adversary this was. But given the fact that they later, like the next year they invaded Iraq, even though it had nothing to do with Afghanistan in 9-11,

it probably is a good thing that it was just like general Middle Eastern target practice, right? Yeah. It was the idea, right? Okay. They were prepared, except that they were not prepared to fight in Iraq, strangely enough. They were doing a terrible job. Anyway, so the whole idea was the blue team had to rely on all the things that the US military had. So it had technology, they had air power, they had all of the things.

The red team didn't have any of that. They were allowed to sort of use, you know, the methods of terrorism and insurgency, right? Sure. So, you know, small suicide attacks was allowed, small boats, those sorts of things, improvised bombs and stuff like that. So the idea was Battle of Brains and high-tech versus... Local knowledge and sheer determination. And the stakes for this game were fairly high. At that point, the US military budget was $396 billion, right?

So there was a lot riding on this going the way of, yeah, let's keep the high-tech business going, right? So they wanted the blue team to win, right? So just let's be clear. They didn't go into this going. try and make sure that the little Middle Eastern people win, right? Okay. So there were two commanders. The first commander was Lieutenant General William Buck Kernan, who was a career military man

with no nonsense attitude. He was the blue team's sort of incumbent US style. And he was absolute career military. He'd been the commanding general of the Joint Special Operations Command and the US Army Special Operations Command, right, whatever they are. And he was determined of it, like his whole personality was, we will win at all costs, right? The red team was represented by Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper,

a retired Marine known for unorthodox tactics and a willingness to think outside the box. And he'd actually, he was a veteran of Vietnam War, and so he'd actually seen how the other side won. And remember, they wanted the blue team to win. Yeah. Okay. I don't know whether you can see where this is going to go. The Chaser Report, now with extra whispers.

As the exercise began, almost immediately it became clear that Van Riper was not actually going to play by any of the rules that had been set down in the war game. Yeah. Just as, in fact, once you launch a massive assault on, you know, people in Afghanistan or Iraq or something like that, they don't necessarily follow the Geneva Convention. That's not a thing that they are required to do. Yes, exactly. So what he did is he just got a fleet of small fishing boats, right, like in the simulation,

and then just went out and put little small bombs on each of these boats and took out pretty much most of the US military fleet, right, in the first wave of attack, right? So instead of it just being this sort of like long game, within about half an hour, the simulation starting, Van Ryber had already sort of won the game, right? Which reminds me of a small conflict known as the Vietnam War, where America's modern technology were defeated by the Viet Cong with, you know, sharpened sticks in many cases. So, so the explosives even managed to, according to these,

they even managed to sink the aircraft carrier. There was one aircraft carrier. Did that an actual aircraft carrier? No, it was like a simulation to me. Right. Anyway, so the devastating blow to the US forces, what happened at that point was they went, okay, stop, everyone, stop, we're going to reset this game, we're going to start again, and Van Ryber, you've got to follow the rules this time, okay.

So they stopped the simulation. Van Ryber went, okay, I'll play properly. They restarted the simulation, started again, and Van Ryber immediately started using unconventional techniques and breaking all the rules again, and one again, right? Right. And it caused widespread confusion amongst all these different commands that were part of the simulation

and damaged basically every unit that was involved in this simulation, right? It was a stunning display, according to the write-up that I'm reading from, a stunning display of strategic thinking and adaptability that left many in the military established scratching their heads. It certainly, Charles, does explain why Russia is losing

and has been losing so badly in Ukraine. If only they'd realize that a massive force when taken on with unconventional and desperate tactics will often lose. In fact, in most examples, does. Apparently does seem to lose against guerrilla tactics and sort of not following the rules. That seems like a fairly clear thing here.

Okay, so guess who was ultimately declared the winner at the end of the day. USA. Yes, the blue team. They went, look, you didn't play by the rules to Van Ryber, and they, the blue team won. They lost by default. Actually, that's a very good point.

With Vietnam, what they should do is take, I don't know, Vietnam to the ICC or something. America doesn't recognize the ICC, but if they did, and say, look, just to be clear, you didn't play by the rules of the Vietnam War. We won it. Just let the record show the U.S. undefeated, Didn't lose that war.

Never lost a war. Well, they then launched, the military was so annoyed, right? They then launched an investigation into how Van Riper had won so convincingly twice, right? Turned out this guy had somehow got leaked all the classified information from the other side about what they were planning to do. Right. Right. So that's why he, like, he knew where the boats were going to be and the aircraft carrier was going to be. So, like, he properly fucked the game.

So you can't do that. You can't do that in war. Because the US doesn't leak military information. There's no situation in war where you would, for instance, get espionage operatives to go and try and leak the plans of the opponents before. That would never happen. That would never happen. It just doesn't happen.

So that's why the Blue Team one. Anyway, so what happened was, so you probably want to know what happened to these various generals. I would assume, I would assume, Charles, based on that, massive success and capacity, to improvise and adapt to unfamiliar challenges. Van Riper was put in charge of the whole of the US military, made the joint chief and was able to thereby guarantee success in all the future conflicts by dealing with the unpredictability as it happened. But Dom, Don, you're getting confused, right, because it was the blue team that had won. And so he was presumably drummed out of the force. General William Buck Kernan, the guy of the blue team, he was appointed,

the head of the Afghanistan campaign in Afghanistan, right? Like, just literally a couple of months later, he was promoted to that. The Van Riper was, as you, yeah, was chucked out of the military. He was disgraced. So Van Riper retired from the military in disgrace. He was criticized relentlessly for years later for using unorthodox tactics and for allegedly not adhering to the rules. Which, admittedly, that's generally in the military, for what I understand,

they want you to follow the rules and the orders. The only problem is unbreakable things happen, and it's very clear the US has nobody who's able to do with this. Yeah, and then Afghanistan, well, we all know what happened in Afghanistan. Yeah. Kernan went in and, well, I mean, America won the conflict in Afghanistan. Yeah, if you follow the rules. Yes.

It was clear that America won. They were declared winners by default. The fact that the Taliban are there now. They're in control now. Yeah. But Charles, a victory is meaningless if done outside the rules. Yes. And I think it's really important to note.

And that is why the US flag flies over Kabul today because they followed the rules. And the Afghan people spontaneously endorsed them as the victors and drum the Taliban out of Afghanistan. And we've just got to let the Taliban know that next time. What we should do is throw the rule book at them. Maybe if actually maybe if the US had just barrage them. them with raw books, they might have done better in the conflict.

But the real winner was the USA people, the USA taxpayer, because, you know, back then, the military budget was $396 billion. They obviously decided that technology wasn't the way. It was more about unconventional tactics and using your brain and things. And so they just decided to spend all that money on health and education instead. Yes. Oh, presumably Van Riper was then recruited by Taliban. He did a fantastic job.

Well, it is true. He ended up as a freelancer in military strategy. I was like, because everyone wants to hire the guy who won. The guy who always wins. No, no. I'm just kidding. The US military budget is now almost double what it was back then. It is currently $753 billion.

Which buys a lot of rule books. Yeah. So it's right. So there you go. That's our first ever segment of stupid moments. in history. What do you reckon? Do you think we should ever do this segment again?

Well, I'm going to say one thing and then not follow the rules. Yeah. That's why that's the lesson. Let's never do it again next week. Okay. Our gear is from road. We're part of the Iconic class network. Catch you next week.