Chapter 1: What is the purpose of this compilation episode?
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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.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's me, James, today, and I am very lucky to be joined by Garrison. Hi, Gar. Hello. Hi. Garrison, I've summoned you here today to talk about boats, a topic that white men love. But we're not going to talk about, like, going out on the lake and... Looking for bass today. I've only done bass fishing once. It's not for me.
Do you hold up the fish for the picture? Do you do the picture? I wasn't blessed with a bass on that trip, but I did get to, it was very interesting because the guy had like a purple boat with gold flecks in it. It didn't represent who I thought he was as a person. Turned out actually he had a boat sponsorship and he was going to sell it, but it was a cool boat.
I got to drive that boat pretty, pretty fast, do some donuts and stuff. So that is another thing that calls to a part of my soul. I want to talk about private maritime security today. The reason why, of course, is that Iran is currently attacking boats in the Strait of Hormuz and elsewhere, right? Some boats were attacked in port in Basra yesterday. We're recording this on Thursday.
At the time of recording, they have attacked... Six boats. It's more likely than not that there will be more boats attacked by the time you are listening to this. It's been a really bad week for boat guys. It's been a bad year for boats in general. Oh, Venezuela. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about private maritime security.
So, like, when these boats are transiting the Strait of Hormuz, right, the United States has offered and then rescinded the offer to escort them through the Strait of Hormuz. It is very unlikely the United States is going to be able to sufficiently escort every boat that goes through the Strait of Hormuz. And this is a longstanding issue, right?
I think probably lots of listeners won't be aware of the long history of Private security on ships, right? I'm only going to talk about this in the context of the 21st century, but this goes a lot further back. It's largely a consequence of the way the law governs the ocean. It's actually the same... Wow. Sorry, daddy long legs. I don't know if there's an American word for that that I don't know.
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Chapter 2: What recent events are impacting maritime security?
I think that would be the goal at that point, right? Within the greater IHAR ecosystem, Garrison, we have so many automatic weapons. You don't listen to the, like, Belfed Machine Gun podcast? The IHAR militia.
Yeah.
It's us and Ted Cruz, and we haven't really agreed on very much other than gun ownership. Maybe we should talk about when the real reason like PMSCs took off in the 21st century was the rise in piracy of Somalia, right? Before this piracy had existed, mostly in Southeast Asia, piracy has existed for as long as people going on boats has existed, right?
But specifically piracy of Southeast Asia had before this been more of a like a smash and grab kind of situation, like turn up, take what you can, leave, right? What was distinct in this piracy that we began to see from 2008 onwards was that pirates were either trying to seize the entire cargo of a vessel, the vessel itself, or to kidnap people from the vessel and hold them for ransom.
I guess the most high-profile case was called the Maersk, Alabama. Are you familiar with this one? No. Okay, that's good, because you get to hear a story. I don't keep up with PirateNews.org.
Really? I can see you being pirate-curious. No, you're not interested in... I've always had kind of a love-hate relationship with pirates. Okay. You know, undeniably cool in some way. Also... A little bit messy.
They can be messy. Yeah, yeah. Lots of overlap between pirates and anarchism. I'm sure you've... This is true. Yeah.
Some of my same critiques there for both sides. Yeah, yeah. It can also be messy. As soon as the pirates all start wearing matching black suits, then we can talk.
I think that's inherently, like, the piracy isn't about that. Piracy is about self-expression. That's the thing. Yeah, see, well... Yeah, agree to disagree. I like a diverse pirate outfit, personally. In this case, a small vessel, right?
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Chapter 3: How does private maritime security operate in the Strait of Hormuz?
I think they had four or five... Pirates, they had like pretty basic weaponry, right? Like Kalashnikovs, I think. They boarded the Maersk, Alabama. The boat had a pirate alarm and they sounded the pirate alarm. In this, you have to struggle to repress your like 18th century mind palace, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The crew sheltered in, they had like a safe room. Yeah. They went in the safe room.
Well, they captured the captain of the ship pretty quickly. The ship didn't have any means of defending itself, other than it tried to, like, I'm not a massive boat understander, it tried to use its rudder to swamp the pirate ship as it was coming up. So, like, kind of flick it, and that didn't work. And one member of the ship's crew who hid himself
with a knife and successfully subdued and captured the leader of the pirates. And the crew then attempted to trade this person for their captain. They tied up the pirate who they had captured, attempted to trade him for their captain. The pirates...
took the leader of the pirates and then never gave the crew their captain, and then made off in a lifeboat with a large amount of cash and the captain. This resulted in a standoff. Now, the Maersk, Alabama was, I believe, a US-flagged ship. It may have been a US-Dutch ship, but it was flagged to a nation in the global north. This will become relevant later.
The United States sent two boats, which proceeded to engage in a standoff with the lifeboat for several days, where they first attempted to drop a sat phone and a mobile phone to the pirates in the lifeboat. The pirates threw those in the ocean because they thought that they were using them to communicate with the captain of the ship.
At one point, the captain who they'd held hostage ended up in the ocean, but then he got back into the lifeboat. The situation was resolved eventually by the Navy SEALs shooting all the pirates. They were based on one of the US ships and they used sniper rifles to shoot the pirates. Really? Yeah. They shot them all off the lifeboat while the captain of the ship was also in the lifeboat. Whoa.
Yeah, no. I would be shocked if there's not a film about this. I know the captain of the ship has written a book about his time being captured. But obviously like this kind of rattled the world, right? It scared a lot of people specifically in the shipping industry because this is a scary thing to happen.
And specifically this change in the nature of piracy from taking stuff to potentially capturing people. And I believe the goal of the pirates here was to get the captain ashore where they could hide him more easily, right? In Somalia. And then it becomes an entirely different issue When you're trying to get U.S. troops into a completely different country to rescue someone.
A different landmass, yeah. Yeah. And I think it's really important to talk about the jurisdictional issues here because they are what gives the PMSCs so much leeway. I think we'll take a little break talking about jurisdiction and then we will come back. All right, we're back. So to understand private maritime security companies, you've got to understand the world of flags of convenience first.
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Chapter 4: What historical context is relevant to current maritime security issues?
I know, man. It would be a lot of tankers for us to buy if the Iranians keep, you know, they've knocked out two large vessels overnight. It seems unlikely. Donald Trump has said a lot of things, right? Not all of them are true. Even in the last few weeks, Donald Trump has said a lot of things about the Strait of Hormuz that were not true. So we will see.
But I wanted to explain some of those threats. Let's have a talk about the specific naval threat now, the IRGC Navy. All right, so let's move on to discussing what exactly this means in the current era, right?
When the United States is saying the Strait of Hormuz is open except for Iran shooting at ships and Iran is radioing ships right now and telling them that they're not allowed to enter the Strait of Hormuz and then obviously threatening them if they do. So what we will see right now in the Strait of Hormuz is this situation where Iran has a few mechanisms for attacking these ships, right?
The one that's being talked about the most are...
mines and the mines in iran has to my understanding of just straight up world war ii like sea mines have you ever played mine sweeper garrison yeah yeah yeah yeah so they look like that right they have these big contact fuses on them that is what they are right the way the the current works in a straight forward move so they can kind of circulate around okay which will make them you know you can't be like okay this area is mine that we're just gonna avoid the mines yeah
Right, like this whole Strait is mine now. And as we covered in ED on Friday, the US doesn't have a great capacity to remove those mines. But the thing which has been less discussed is that the IRGC has tons, and if they don't have, if they run out, it's very easy to make more, right, of like civilian fast boats.
Think of a little boat with a motor on the back and a belt-fed machine gun in the front, right? Like,
very easy to take those boats and swarm a large vessel right like even if that vessel has private security on board the straightforward moves 21 miles across like you could harass people if you had a jet ski yeah you have a little jet ski technical but just yeah yeah with an rpg on the back yeah yeah The most dudes rock vessel that has ever taken to the seas.
Yeah, I might have to hand it to the IRGC if they did that.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of special economic zones on medical experimentation?
And, you know, the network state is built using special economic zones. So it's really not functionally different on a lot of different levels. It's more about like who is using this special economic zone and what do they want to do with it?
Yeah.
And medical experimentation is actually a huge goal here because, you know, again, when we're talking about them getting into medical development, developing all of these biotech startups, they're facing existing monopolies in the U.S.
Chapter 6: How does venture capital influence medical development in unregulated zones?
They're also facing the FDA. The Network State book by Balaji Srinivasan, who's an Andreessen Horowitz, like, guy for life. Like, he's Andreessen Horowitz. One of the main motivations for the network state is getting to a place where you can't have any medical regulations. And so in Honduras, they've been doing that.
Chapter 7: What are the ethical concerns surrounding unregulated medical trials in Honduras?
They've been doing unregulated clinical trials. The doctors in Honduras have been organizing to try to shut this down, and they haven't been able to. And they're going to have way worse problems now because Trump just installed... A new president installed a president there who is is in support and is taking the steps to, you know, support this special economic zone called their Z.A.,
But that's one of the big reasons that they're doing it. Their medical offering is profound. They're doing clinical trials, drug development, activating clinical research sites. They're also involved in insurance software, insurance marketplaces, IVF, longevity, anti-aging, the whole thing. And this goes back to like,
When venture capital is entering a new market now, they come locked and loaded with a full platform.
Chapter 8: How is venture capital reshaping political landscapes in Latin America?
And getting more accelerated clinical trials is something that is going to move their project forward significantly. Network state is a way to accomplish that.
So these sort of nodes that they're setting up of these like network six sites are places where, you know, they've been able to sort of carve out special economic zone status that means that like the traditional sort of regulatory structure of the country simply does not apply.
Yes.
Yeah, which is very, which is in a lot of ways, and this is like a special economic zone thing in general, it's like very sort of like fascist state of exception. We're like, oh yeah, no, we've just, you know, there's like a crisis and the crisis is that we can't do like human experimentation. And so we've now created this zone where just none of the laws apply. It's like the kind of like...
evil mirror world universe version of like temporary autonomous zones, except it's like, what if we had a permanent zone of fascism where all the laws didn't apply and we could just do whatever we wanted?
A hundred percent. It's also deeply concerning because the obsession with accelerating clinical innovation, drug innovation, like whatever that is, like at some point there is a like what makes that stuff move the fastest and it's human trials and human experiments. And the more people that you can shove and the faster you can shove through medical development. And that's very concerning.
So to me, I see this as like a recipe for large scale medical abuse and disaster.
Oh, yeah.
So yeah, when you look at them doing these unregulated and unethical medical experiments and trials in Honduras, and then you see in this other part of the world, in different countries in Africa that the network see is also targeting that, you know, recently news came out about a very controversial and very unethical experiment in Guinea-Bissau to test
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